The Age of Reason

THE AGE OF REASON
1453 to 1789
Volume 2 of “AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY”
From an Orthodox Christian Point of View
Vladimir Moss
@ Copyright, Vladimir Moss, 2019. All Rights Reserved

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Romania has passed away, Romania is taken.
Even if Romania has passed away, it will flower and bear fruit again.
Pontic folk-song, on the Fall of Constantinople.
The chief gift of nature… is freedom.

Leonardo da Vinci.
As free, and not using your liberty as a cloak of maliciousness,

But as the servants of God.
I Peter 2.16.
The king is above the law, as both the author and the giver of strength thereto.
King James I of England.
At different times, in different places, Emperor and Anarchist alike may find it
convenient to appeal to Holy Writ.
Sir Edmund Leech.
We are very apt all of us to call that faith, that perhaps may be but carnal imagination.
Oliver Cromwell (1647).
[The people’s] liberty consists in having government… It is not their having a share
in government, sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are
clear different things…
King Charles I of England (1649).
We still believe and maintain that our Kings derive not their title from the people, but
from God; that to Him only they are accountable; that it belongs not to subjects either
to create or censure, but to honour and obey their sovereign, who comes to be so by a
fundamental hereditary right of succession.
King Charles II of England (1681).
Temporal and spiritual are two words brought into the world to make men see double,
and mistake their lawful sovereign… A man cannot obey two masters… Seeing there
are no men on earth whose bodies are spiritual, there can be no spiritual
commonwealth among men that are yet in the flesh.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
What is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge bishops, taking to himself a power
which has not been given him by God?… This is apostasy from God.
Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, Razzorenie.
Poor human reason, when it trusts in itself, substitutes the strangest absurdities for
the highest divine concepts.
St. John Chrysostom.
The Wars of these Times are rather to be Waged with gold than with Iron.
William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England (1694).
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[A Tory is] one that believes God, not the people, to be the origin of all civil power.
John Wesley.
He hasn’t changed, your little god on earth –

He’s still peculiar as the day you gave him birth.
He’d live a better life, at least,
If you’d not given him a glimpse of heaven’s light.
He calls it reason – which gives him the right
To be more bestial than any beast.
Goethe, Faust, Prologue in Heaven.
Monarchies conform best to human nature, and therefore constitute the most durable
form of state.
Gianbattista Vico.
Since the day a popular assembly condemned Jesus Christ to death the
Church has known that the rule of the majority can lead to any crime.
Jacques Bénigne Bossuet.
We have no government capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by

morality and religion… Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious
people.
American President John Adams.
By God’s dispensation it has fallen to me to correct both the state and the clergy; I am
to them both sovereign and patriarch; they have forgotten that in [pagan] antiquity
these [roles] were combined… I have conquered an empire, but have never been able to
conquer myself.
Tsar Peter the Great.
The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature
and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest
good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.
Diderot, Encyclopedia.
I must lie like a devil, not timidly, or only in passing, but boldly and always.
Voltaire, Letter to Thiriot.
If we can gain something by being honest, we will be it; and if we have to deceive, we
shall be cheats.
King Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Whatever I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; the best of all
casuists is the conscience… Reason deceives us only too often and we have earned all
too well the right to reject it, but conscience never deceives.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.
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I love the cause of liberty, but the madness of the multitude is but one degree better
than submission to the Tea Act.
James Allen of Philadelphia.
The State, it seems to me, is not made for religion, but religion for the State.
Abbé Guillaume Raynal (1780).
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INTRODUCTION 10
I. THE SHAKING OF THE FOUNDATIONS (1453-‐1660) 14
1. RENAISSANCE HUMANISM 15
2. THE ITALIAN CITY-STATES AND MACHIAVELLI 26
3. IDEAS OF LIBERTY 36
4. SPAIN, THE JEWS AND THE MUSLIMS 47
5. LUTHER AND THE PRINTING PRESS 53
6. LUTHER AND THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE 57
7. LUTHER ON PREDESTINATION 61
8. LUTHER ON FAITH AND WORKS 66
9. CALVINISM 74
10. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 81
11. THE SPANISH AMERICAS 88
12. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 96
13. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT AND NATURAL LAW 107
14. ELIZABETH I, THE VIRGIN QUEEN 111
15. SHAKESPEARE’S UNIVERSE 123
16. JAMES I AND THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 132
17. FRANCIS BACON AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE 138
18. THE DUTCH REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM 148
19. THE NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES 155
20. BODIN, RICHELIEU AND THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR 162
21. THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA AND INTERNATIONAL LAW 169
22. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (1) POLITICS OR RELIGION? 177
23. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (2) KING VERSUS PARLIAMENT 180
24. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (3) THE CIVIL WAR 192
25. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (4) THE KILLING OF THE KING 198
26. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (5) CROMWELL’S PROTECTORATE 207
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27. THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO ENGLAND 218
28. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (1) FILMER AND HOBBES 225
29. THE SUN KING 237
II. THE MUSCOVITE AUTOCRACY (1453-‐1660) 242
30. THE ORTHODOX UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE (1) 243
31. TRANSLATIO IMPERII 254
32. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (1) IVAN III 258
33. JUDAIZERS, NON-POSSESSORS AND THE GREAT PRINCE 264
34. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (2) IVAN IV, “THE TERRIBLE” 274
35. IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND THE OPRICHNINA 281
36. CHURCH AND STATE IN MUSCOVY 298
37. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (3) TSAR THEODORE 305
38. THE ORTHODOX UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE (2) 311
39. THE UNIA OF BREST-LITOVSK 320
40. THE TIME OF TROUBLES 327
41. THE RESURRECTION OF MUSCOVY 343
42. MUSCOVY AND UKRAINE 359
III. THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROGRAMME (1660-‐1789) 368
43. THE RESTORATION OF THE ENGLISH MONARCHY 369
44. THE NEWTONIAN REVOLUTION AND THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 379
45. THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION 387
46. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (2) JOHN LOCKE 394
47. WAR, CALVINISM AND THE JEWISH BANKERS 405
48. THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION 413
49. THE PEACE OF UTRECHT 430
50. THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 436
51. ENGLAND’S CONSERVATIVE ENLIGHTENMENT 440
52. FRANCE’S RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT 453
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53. ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM 461
54. HUME: THE IRRATIONALITY OF RATIONALISM 466
55. KANT: THE REAFFIRMATION OF WILL 477
56. HAMANN AND HERDER: THE DENIAL OF UNIVERSALISM 482
57. TWO CONCEPTS OF FREEDOM 485
58. EAST MEETS WEST: (1) INDIA 492
59. THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR AND THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 497
60. THE IDEOLOGY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 507
61. EAST MEETS WEST: (2) SAUDI ARABIA 521
62. EAST MEETS WEST: (3) JAPAN 525
63. EAST MEETS WEST: (4) CHINA 528
64. ROUSSEAU: PROPHET OF THE REVOLUTION 535
65. THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY 551
66. THE ORIGINS OF ECUMENISM 561
67. FREEMASONRY AND REVIVALISM IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 565
IV. THE ST. PETERSBURG AUTOCRACY (1660-‐1789) 571
68. THE SCHISM OF THE OLD RITUALISTS (1) 572
69. TSAR VERSUS PATRIARCH 581
70. PATRIARCH NIKON ON THE SYMPHONY OF POWERS 590
71. THE KIEVAN METROPOLIA 596
72. THE SCHISM OF THE OLD RITUALISTS (2) 603
73. PETER THE GREAT: (1) FROM HOLY RUS’ TO GREAT RUSSIA 610
74. PETER THE GREAT: (2) RUSSIA AND THE WEST 616
75. PETER THE GREAT: (3) RUSSIA THE THIRD ROME 623
76. PETER THE GREAT: (4) THE MISSIONS TO SIBERIA AND CHINA 627
77. PETER THE GREAT: (5) THE SHACKLING OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH 636
78. THE DEGRADATION OF THE RUSSIAN AUTOCRACY 651
79. TSARITSA ELIZABETH 657
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80. THE ORTHODOX UNDER THE AUSTRIAN YOKE 665
81. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (1) THE NOBILITY 676
82. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (2) THE UKRAINIANS AND POLES 681
83. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (3) THE JEWS 691
84. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (4) THE CHURCH 700
85. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (5) THE REVOLUTION 704
CONCLUSION. THE DARK HEART OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 715
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INTRODUCTION
This book represents the second volume of my series, An Essay in Universal

History. The first volume, subtitled: The Age of Faith, ended with the Fall of
Constantinople in 1453. This brought to an end the medieval world, which
was characterized, on the one hand, by the Christian Faith in its traditional,
hierarchical forms, and on the other, by monarchical modes of political
government that continued to draw inspiration and legitimacy from the
Church. In the modern world that was about to begin, both Christianity and
monarchism were on the retreat – although the retreat was accompanied by
some notable and prolonged counter-attacks. The Orthodox religio-political
outlook and civilization that we have called Christian Romanity largely
disappeared from its Mediterranean homeland: while its religious centre,
formally speaking, remained in Constantinople, in the Ecumenical
Patriarchate, its political centre moved north, to Moscow, “the Third Rome”.
From there, in what most Europeans considered to be a barbaric outpost on
the edge of civilization, the Orthodox Christian heritage of the Mediterranean
world was preserved in its original purity. And so the main theme of this
second volume in my history is the struggle between Russia and the waves of
new ideas that assaulted it from the West until 1789 – Humanism and
Rationalism, Protestantism and Catholicism, Freemasonry and Democratism...
The struggle between Russia and the West was foreordained in the very
date of her birth: the period between the baptism of Russia under St. Vladimir
in 988 and the death of his son, Yaroslav the Wise, in 1054 corresponds almost
exactly to the decline and fall of Western Orthodox civilization, culminating
in the great schism between Old Rome and Constantinople in 1054. Thus
Orthodox Russia came into being just as the Orthodox West was dying; she
appears to have been called by Divine Providence to take the place of the
West in the scheme of Universal History, and to defend the whole of
Orthodox Christendom against the western heresies.
The first major turning-point in modern western history was the

Renaissance-Reformation, which placed man at the centre of the universe and
man’s reason as the ultimate criterion of truth. It purported to free men from
the fetters of medieval scholasticism, to bring the light of reason to bear on
every aspect of human life, even the revelations of religion. It sought to raise
the common man to that potential that he would supposedly be capable of
achieving if he were not enslaved to the tyranny of popes and kings.
However, the early modern period was not a revolutionary movement in

the sense that it overthrew tradition in toto and in principle. On the contrary,
in order to correct what it saw as the distortions of the Middle Ages, it
appealed to the authority of the still more ancient past - the past of pagan
Greece and Rome in the Renaissance, and of the early, pre-Constantinian
Church in the Reformation. And as late as the English revolution of the mid-
seventeenth century both Catholics and Protestants, both Divine right
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monarchists and anti-monarchist republicans, appealed sincerely and
passionately to Holy Scripture. In other words, the early modern age was still
a believing age, a Christian age, albeit an heretical one. And in Muscovite
Russia there still existed one of the great and right-believing Christian
kingdoms.
The Enlightenment, however, the second major turning-point in post-

Orthodox western history, went a decisive step further. No authority,
whether pagan or patristic, scholastic or scriptural, was held sacred or
immune from the ravages of unfettered reason. In the face of the assault of
this new “enlightened” religion Orthodox Russia faltered, but did not fall: if,
from the time of Peter the Great, the noble class became largely westernized,
absorbing the new ideas through a cluster of Masonic lodges, the common
people remained faithful to Orthodoxy and worthy of the mercy of God. The
book ends with the creation of the first state founded on Enlightenment
principles, America, bringing us to the eve of the third major turning-point of
post-Orthodox western history, the French revolution of 1789.
The period under discussion (1453-1789) was an epoch of greatly

increasing complexity and variety in European culture. The dominant ideas of
medieval Europe had been basically two: Catholicism and Feudalism, as in
the earlier period there had been two: Orthodoxy and Autocracy. But any list
of the dominant ideas of early modern Europe must include, in addition to
these, the various ideas of economic, social, political and religious freedom,
together with perhaps the most revolutionary idea of all – the all-sufficiency
of scientific method for the finding of truth. This extreme cultural richness
and diversity explains in part why the West, under the influence of these new
libertarian ideas, did not move immediately to more democratic forms of
government, but even evolved despotic governments more powerful than any
seen in medieval times, such as the England of Elizabeth I, the Spain of Philip
II or the France of Louis XIV. The reason for this was, as K.N. Leontiev has
explained, that cultural diversity and richness require a strong autocratic
power to hold them together and give them form, as it were. “As long as there
are estates, as long as provinces are not similar, as long as education is
different in various levels of society, as long as claims are not identical, as
long as tribes and religions are not levelled in a general indifferentism, a more
or less centralized power is a necessity.”1
Archbishop Averky of Syracuse has emphasized the dual character of the

modern quest for freedom – both Christian protest and antichristian rebellion.
For him the Renaissance was “a reaction to the perverted Christianity of the
West” since the fall of the papacy in the eleventh century. But at the same
time it “was in essence a denial of Christianity and a return to the ideals of
paganism.” It proclaimed the cult of a strong, healthy, beautiful human flesh,
1
Leontiev, “Vizantizm i Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism), in Vostok, Rossia i
Slavianstvo (The East, Russia and Slavism), Moscow, 1996, p. 142
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and to the spirit of Christian humility it opposed the spirit of self-opinion,
self-reliance, and the deification of human 'reason'.
"As a protest against perverted Christianity, on the soil of the same

humanistic ideal that recognised 'reason' as the highest criterion of life, there
appeared in the West a religious movement which received the name of
'Protestantism'. Protestantism with its countless branches of all kinds of sects
not only radically distorted the whole teaching of true Christianity, but also
rejected the very dogma of the Church, placing man himself as his own
highest authority, and even going so far as to deny faith in the Divinity of
Jesus Christ, the Founder of the Church.
"Puffed-up human pride finally falls completely away from God, and
begins boldly to deny even the very existence of God, and man proclaims
himself to be as it were a god. Seized with pride, self-opinion and reliance on
his own limitless powers, possibilities and capacities, man brought up on the
ideals of the 'Renaissance' no longer sees any obligation for himself to strive
for the spiritual perfection enjoined by the Gospel, and by a natural
progression descends deeper and deeper into the abyss of spiritual fall and
moral corruption. Into the foreground there steps the service of the flesh, as a
consequence of which spiritual demands are more and more stifled,
suppressed and, finally, so as once and for all to finish with the unpleasant
voice of conscience which lives in the spirit of man, the spirit itself is declared
to be non-existent.
"In this way, there appears 'materialism' - a natural child of 'humanism', a

natural and logical development of its idea. The ideal of the full stomach,
covered by the raucous 'doctrine' going by the name of 'the ideal of social
justice', 'social righteousness', became the highest ideal of humanity which
had denied Christ. And this is understandable! The so-called 'social question'
could not have taken hold if people had remained faithful to true Christianity
incarnate in life.
"On the soil of materialism, in its turn, there naturally grew, as a strictly
logical consequence, the doctrines of 'Socialism' and 'Marxism-Communism'.
Humanism and materialism, having denied the spiritual principle in man,
proclaimed man himself to be a 'god' and legitimised human pride and
animal egoism as self-sacrificing, and came to the conclusion that savage
struggle should be made the law of human life, on the soil of the constant
conflict of interests of egoistical human beings. As a result of this so-called
'struggle for existence', stronger, cleverer, craftier people would naturally
begin to constrain and oppress the less strong, less clever and less crafty. The
law of Christ, which commands us to bear one another's burdens (Galatians
6.2), and not to please ourselves (Acts 15.29), but to love one's neighbour as
oneself (Matthew 22.39), was expelled from life. And so so-called 'social evil'
and 'social injustices' began to increase and multiply, together with the 'social
ulcers' of society. And since life was made more and more intolerable, as a
consequence of the ever-increasing egoism and violence of people towards
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each other, there was naturally some reason to think about establishing for all
a single tolerable and acceptable order of life. Hence 'Socialism', and then its
extreme expression, 'Communism', became fashionable doctrines, which
promised people deliverance from all 'social injustices' and the establishment
on earth of a peaceful and serenely paradisial life, in which everyone would
be happy and content. But these teachings determined to cure the ulcers of
human society by unsuitable means. They did not see that the evil of
contemporary life is rooted in the depths of the human soul which has fallen
away from the uniquely salvific Gospel teaching, and naively thought that it
would be enough to change the imperfect, in their opinion, structure of
political and social life for there to be immediately born on earth prosperity
for all, and life would become paradise. For this inevitable, as they affirmed,
and beneficial change, the more extreme Socialists, as, for example, the
Communists, even proposed violent measures, going so far as the shedding of
blood and the physical annihilation of people who did not agree with them.
In other words: they thought to conquer evil by evil, this evil being still more
bitter and unjust because of their cruelty and mercilessness.
"'The Great French Revolution', which shed whole rivers of human blood,
was the first of their attempts. It clearly demonstrated that men are powerless
to build their life on earth without God, and to what terrible consequences
man is drawn by his apostasy from Christ and His saving teaching."2
In this period, by comparison with the medieval period, political, military

and cultural – but not spiritual – predominance passes from the East to the
West, with the East striving to guard its Orthodox heritage from invasion by
the revolutionary libertarian ideas of the West. Sadly, with the passing of
time, this heritage becomes more and more polluted with foreign elements, at
least in the upper classes of society, so that the distinction between the truly
Christian civilization of the East and the pseudo-Christian one of the West
becomes less and less clear-cut. But the essential difference between the two
remains, and remains the main theme of this book. Sections 1 and 3 of this
book are devoted to developments in the West, and sections 2 and 4 to
developments in Russia. I have made use of a large number of authorities,
among whom I would like to make particular mention of Archpriest Lev
Lebedev, I. Solonevich, L.A. Tikhomirov, M.V. Zyzykin, C.S. Lewis, Robert
Tombs, Sir Christopher Hill, Peter Ackroyd, Richard Massie, Philip Bobbitt,
Jacques Barzun, Richard Pipes, Bernard Simms, Sir Geoffrey Hosking, Isabel
de Madariaga, Henry Kissinger and Sir Isaiah Berlin.
Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have
mercy on us! Amen.
2
Archbishop Averky (Taushev), "O Polozhenii Pravoslavnogo Khristianina v Sovremennom
Mire” (On the Situation of the Orthodox Christian in the Contemporary World), Istinnoe
Pravoslavie i Sovremennij Mir (True Orthodoxy in the Contemporary World), Jordanville, N.Y.:
Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, pp. 19-21
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I. THE SHAKING OF THE FOUNDATIONS (1453-‐1660)
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1. RENAISSANCE HUMANISM
During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, while the Orthodox
Autocracy was being transferred from the Second Rome of Constantinople to
the Third Rome of Moscow, ideas were being developed in the West that
undermined the whole Christian world-view.
The region was going through a period of great turmoil. As Robert Tombs
writes, “Geopolitical, cultural and ideological crises were shaking confidence
in the authority of established Western civilization so severely that sensible
people believed that the end of the world was nigh, or at least that God was
punishing unfaithful Christians – the 1512 Lateran Council felt obliged to
forbid preachers to touch on such subjects. Muslim forces, having captured
Constantinople, were advancing on land and sea. A devastating war was
begun in Italy in 1494 between the two greatest Christian powers, France and
the Habsburg Hoy Roman Empire. The Dominican friar Savonarola
established a theocratic dictatorship in Florence in 1495 to stamp out
corruption, but he was overthrown and burned at the stake in 1498. In 1517, a
German Augustinian friar, Martin Luther, nailed his own criticism of the
ecclesiastical authorities to a church door in Wittenburg. Popes had
repeatedly been in conflict with Church Councils and had plunged into
secular warfare and politics, and Rome itself was captured and sacked with
appalling violence by Habsburg troops in 1527. Muslim armies overran
Hungary, killing the king and slaughtering nobles and clergy, and they
reached the gates of Vienna in 1530. Arab raiders took perhaps a million
Europeans into slavery between 1530 and 1640, including some from Britain.
A century of atrocious religious conflict began, leading to persecutions, civil
wars and wars between states, culminating in the terrible Thirty Years’ War
(1618-1648). England escaped the worst: but it could not avoid the seismic
shocks, culminating in connected British civil wars, the last of the European
wars of religion, which finally ended after a Dutch intervention only in 1691.
“The intellectual roots of the upheaval, stretching back to fourteenth-

century Italy, had given little hint of danger. A new interest in Greek and
Roman antiquity, the core of what nineteenth-century historians dubbed the
Renaissance, was further stimulated by large numbers of previously
unknown texts rescued by refugee scholars from Constantinople. This
inspired fashionable classical styles of literature, art and architecture. A
fascination for Greek and Roman writings (taught by the umanisti –
‘humanists’) made traditional philosophy and culture seem musty, even
absurd: some mocked medieval theology as ‘debating how many angels could
dance on the head of a pin’…”3
3 Tombs, The English and their History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, pp. 159-160.
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Humanism is in essence the ancient idea, going back at least to Greek pre-
Socratic philosopher Protagoras, that man is the centre of the universe and the
measure of all things. “Humanism,” writes Perez Zagorin, “first originated in
Italy in the fourteenth century as an educational and cultural program aiming
at a revival and deeper knowledge of the languages, literature, and
civilization of classical antiquity. The subjects it pursued, from which its name
is derived, were the humanities, or studia humanitatis, including grammar and
rhetoric, or the arts of language, philology, history, moral philosophy, and
poetry. The humanists, those who cultivated these studies, were an
intellectual elite made up of teachers, scholars, churchmen, civic officials,
secretaries to kings and prelates, diplomats, and men of letters who were
devoted to the works of Greek and Roman writers, in which they found a
model for literary imitation and the inspiration for a fresh ideal of culture and
of living.”4
As long ago as 1082 a Council in Constantinople had forbidden the study

of the teaching of the ancient philosophers, especially Plato, except as a means
of training the mind, casting an anathema “on those who profess to be
Orthodox but shamelessly, or rather blasphemously, introduce into the
Orthodox and Catholic Church the impious dogmas of the Hellenes about
human souls, and heaven, and earth, and other creatures.”5
However, fifteenth-century Italy was far from worrying about any

Byzantine anathemas: “the impious dogmas of the Hellenes” became all the
rage… “The Renaissance,” writes Norman Davies, “did not merely refer to
the burgeoning interest in classical art and learning, for such a revival had
been gathering pace ever since the twelfth century. Nor did it involve either a
total rejection of medieval values or a sudden return to the world view of
Greece and Rome. Least of all did it involve the conscious abandonment of
Christian belief. The term renatio or ‘rebirth’ was a Latin calque for a Greek
theological term, palingenesis, used in the sense of ‘spiritual rebirth’ or
‘resurrection from the dead’. The essence of the Renaissance lay not in any
sudden rediscovery of classical civilisation but rather in the use which was
made of classical models to test the authority underlying conventional taste
and wisdom. It is incomprehensible without reference to the depths of
disrepute into which the medieval Church, the previous fount of all authority,
had fallen. In this the Renaissance was part and parcel of the same movement
which resulted in religious reforms. In the longer term, it was the first stage in
the evolution which led via the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution to
the Enlightenment. It was the spiritual force which cracked the mould of
medieval civilisation, setting in motion the long process of disintegration
which gradually gave birth to ‘modern Europe’.
4
Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 47.
5 Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin West, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press,
2007, p. 320.
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“In that process, the Christian religion was not abandoned. But the power
of the Church was gradually corralled within the religious sphere: the
influence of religion increasingly limited to the realm of private conscience.
As a result the speculations of theologians, scientists, and philosophers, the
work of artists and writers, and the policies of princes were freed from the
control of a Church with monopoly powers and ‘totalitarian’ pretensions. The
prime quality of the Renaissance has been defined as ‘independence of mind’.
Its ideal was a person who, by mastering all branches of art and thought, need
depend on no outside authority for the formation of knowledge, tastes, and
beliefs. Such a person was l’uomo universale, the ‘complete man’.
“The principal product of the new thinking lay in a growing conviction

that humanity was capable of mastering the world in which it lived. The great
Renaissance figures were filled with self-confidence. They felt that God-given
ingenuity could, and should, be used to unravel the secrets of God’s universe;
and that, by extension, man’s fate on earth could be controlled and
improved…
“Humanism is a label given to the wider intellectual movement of which

the New Learning was both precursor and catalyst. It was marked by a
fundamental shift from the theocratic or God-centred world-view of the
Middles Ages to the anthropocentric or man-centred view of the Renaissance.
In time, it diffused all branches of knowledge and art. It is credited with the
concept of human personality, created by a new emphasis on the uniqueness
and worth of individuals. It is credited with the birth of history, as the study
of the processes of change, and hence of the notion of progress; and it is
connected with the stirrings of science – that is, the principle that nothing
should be taken as true unless it can be tried and demonstrated. In religious
thought, it was a necessary precondition for the Protestant emphasis on the
individual conscience. In art, it was accompanied by a renewed interest in the
human body and in the uniqueness of human faces. In politics it gave
emphasis to the idea of the sovereign state as opposed to the community of
Christendom, and hence to the beginnings of modern nationality. The
sovereign nation-state is the collective counterpart of the autonomous human
person.
“Both in its fondness for pagan antiquity and in its insistence on the
exercise of man’s critical faculties, Renaissance humanism contradicted the
prevailing modes and assumptions of Christian practice. Notwithstanding its
intentions, traditionalists believed that it was destructive of religion, and
ought to have been restrained. Five hundred years later, when the
disintegration of Christendom was far more advanced, it has been seen by
many Christian theologians as the source of all the rot…”6
Thus the Thomist scholar Étienne Gilson defined Renaissance humanism

as the Middle Ages “not plus humanity but minus God”.
6
Norman Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 471, 479.
17
However, the contrast implicitly drawn here between a religious Middle
Ages and an irreligious early modern era needs to be heavily qualified. On
the one hand, as the Reformers were to point out with vehemence, medieval
Christianity in the West was often far from fervent or profound, being corrupt
both in doctrine and in works. And on the other hand, the Renaissance led
naturally into the era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which
was full of religious passion, moral earnestness and doctrinal enquiry.
Nevertheless, in essence one must agree with Ferdinand Braudel’s verdict

that humanism’s “acute awareness of humanity’s vast and varied potential
prepared the way, in the fullness of time, for all the revolutions of modern
times, including atheism.7… Renaissance humanism preached respect for the
greatness of the human being as an individual: it stressed personal
intelligence and ability. Virtù, in fifteenth-century Italy, meant not virtue but
glory, effectiveness, and power. Intellectually, the ideal was l’uomo universale
as described by Leon Battista Alberti – an all-rounder himself. 8 In the
7
Braudel, A History of Civilizations, London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 348-349.
8
Alberti’s biography hardly mentions him as an artist, and says nothing at all about his great
significance in the history of architecture. Jacob Burkhardt writes of him: “Of his various
gymnastic feats and exercises we read with astonishment how, with his feet together, he
could spring over a man’s head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was
heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled under him. In three
things he desired to appear faultless to others, in walking, in riding, and in speaking. He
learned music without a master, and yet his compositions were admired by professional
judges. Under the pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many
years, till exhaustion brought on a severe illness. In his twenty-fourth year, finding his
memory for words weakened, but his sense of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and
mathematics. And all the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity,
cross-examining artists, scholars and artisans of all descriptions, down to the cobblers, about
the secrets and peculiarities of their craft. Painting and modelling he performed by the way,
and especially excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was excited
by his mysterious camera obscura, in which he showed at one time the stars and the moon
rising over rocky hills, at another wide landscape without mountains and gulfs receding into
dim perspective, and with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that
which others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement which
followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine. To all this must be added his
literary works, first of all those on art, which are landmarks and authorities of the first order
for the Renaissance of form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose writings – novels
and other works – of which some have been taken for productions of antiquity; his elegies,
eclogues and humorous dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life in
four books; and even a funeral oration on his dog. His serious and witty sayings were
thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many columns long, are quoted in his
biography. And all that he had and knew he imparted, as rich natures always do, without the
least reserve, giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of his
nature has yet to be spoken of – the sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the
whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees and waving cornfields he shed tears;
handsome and dignified old men he honoured as ‘a delight of nature’, and could never look
at them enough. Perfectly formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by
nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful landscape cured him. No
wonder that those who saw him in this close and mysterious communion with the world
ascribed to him the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold a blood catastrophe in the
family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the popes years before they happened,
18
seventeenth century, with Descartes, a whole philosophical system stemmed
from Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I exist) – individual thought. The
philosophical importance thus attached to the individual coincided with the
abandonment of traditional values…”9
This heroic individualism became very attractive to later, duller

generations, as we see in the “cuckoo speech” of the 1949 film The Third Man:
“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and
bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred
years of democracy and peace – and what did they produce? The cuckoo
clock.”
“These modern men,” writes Jacob Burckhardt, “the representatives of the

culture of Italy, were born with the same religious instincts as other medieval
Europeans. But their powerful individuality made them in religion, as in
other matters, altogether subjective, and the intense charm which the
discovery of the inner and outer universe exercised upon them rendered them
markedly worldly. In the rest of Europe religion remained, till a much later
period, something given from without, and in practical life egotism and
sensuality alternated with devotion and repentance. The latter had no
spiritual competitors, as in Italy, or only to a far smaller extent.
“Further, the close and frequent relations of Italy with Byzantium and the
Mohammedan peoples had produced a dispassionate tolerance which
weakened the ethnographical conception of a privileged Christendom. And
when classical antiquity with its men and institutions became an ideal of life,
as well as the greatest of historical memories, ancient speculation and
skepticism obtained in many cases a complete mastery over the minds of
Italians.
“Since, again, the Italians were the first modern people of Europe who
gave themselves boldly to speculations on freedom and necessity, and since
they did so under violent and lawless political circumstances, to which evil
seemed often to win a splendid and lasting victory, their belief in God began
to waver, and their view of the government of the world became fatalistic.
And when their passionate natures refused to rest in the sense of uncertainty,
they made a shift to help themselves out with ancient, oriental or medieval
superstition. They took to astrology and magic.
“Finally, these intellectual giants, these representatives of the Renaissance,

show, in respect of religion, a quality which is common in youthful natures.
Distinguishing keenly between good and evil, they yet are conscious of no sin.
and to be able to read into the countenances and hearts of men. It need not be added that an
iron will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the
Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will’” (The Civilization of Renaissance Italy,
London: Penguin, 1990, pp. 102-103). (V.M.)
9
Braudel, op. cit., p. 326.
19
Every disturbance of their inward harmony they feel themselves able to make
good out of the plastic resources of their own nature, and therefore they feel
no repentance. The need of salvation thus becomes felt more and more dimly,
while the ambitions and the intellectual activity of the present either shut out
altogether every thought of a world to come, or else caused it to assume a
poetic instead of a dogmatic form…”10
This new humanist attitude to sin is explained further by Michael Allen

Gillespie: “Central to the humanist enterprise was the defence of a notion of
human dignity. In order to defend such a notion, it was necessary for
humanism to emphasize the fact that man was created in the image of God
and to minimize the effects of the Fall and original sin. These points were
crucial for most humanists but also problematic. They understood that
without a liberal reading of both matters, they would have to conclude that
the great moral heroes of antiquity, Socrates, Cicero, and Cato, had been
damned. Dante had sought to finesse this problem by putting Socrates in
limbo, but this was insufficient for most humanists who needed to believe
that morality and piety were more or less identical. If men such as Socrates
had been damned, it would be hard to avoid the nominalist conclusion that
God was indifferent or even unjust. However, if it was possible for such
virtuous men to be saved without knowing Christ, then it was hard to
understand why Christ and his sacrifice were necessary.
“Humanists employed two different strategies in their efforts to resolve

this problem. Following Paul’s account in Romans that God’s laws were
revealed through the order of nature, they argued that pagans who had led
virtuous lives according to nature had thus recognized, honoured, and
perhaps even ‘worshipped’ God even though they did not know of Christ.
This was especially true for those pagans like Socrates and Cicero who
recognized that there was only one god. Thus, the virtuous pagans could by
only some slight stretch of the imagination be counted among the elect. The
problem with such a view was that it seemed to propel one toward
Pelagianism. The second possibility… was to imagine that there was a
common origin to both Christianity and pagan thought. Such a common
origin could justify the humanists’ belief that the moral teachings of pagans
were inspired by God and thus essentially identical with the teaching of
Christ.
“The rapprochement of pagan and Christian thought was facilitated by the

work of Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444)… Among his many contributions, Bruni
greatly eased religious suspicions that the humanist reading of secular texts
corrupted piety by translating and publishing a letter from Basil, one of the
greatest Christian heroes, defending the reading of pagan poets by Christian
students. He also popularized a new notion of history, originally formulated
by Flavio Biondo (1392-1463), that divided history not according to the four
empire theory that had dominated historical thinking for almost a thousand
10
Burckhardt, op. cit., pp. 312-313.
20
years but according to the tripartite division of ancient, medieval, and
modern periods. This new understanding, which was indebted to Petrarch’s
notion of a dark age separating his time from that of the ancients, was crucial
to the development of Christian humanism, for it legitimized humanist efforts
to recover a pristine, ancient Christianity much closer to ancient moral
thought than the corrupted Christianity that had developed during the dark,
middle age…”11
Here we see how the humanist understanding of history paved the way for
the Protestants’ claim that they were resurrecting ancient Christianity,
bypassing the supposedly “dark”, early medieval Orthodox and late medieval
Catholic periods.
Humanism therefore represented a revival of paganism with Christian or

Cabalistic overtones.
It also represented a union of opposites: on the one hand, the new rational
discipline of natural philosophy, or empirical science, and on the other, the
irrationalism of magic, in the form of an obsession with occult texts such as
the Cabala and the Corpus Hermeticum.12 These occult-influenced humanists
included Marsilio Ficino and John Dee.
One of the earliest and most influential of them, writes Morris Berman, was
Pico della Mirandola in his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man. “The magus,
he said, married earth to heaven. Natural magic is the practical part of natural
science, and through the use of the cabala, which establishes links between
heaven and earth… Pico described the trance state in which, in a state of
ecstasy, the soul leaves the body and ascends to heaven… Pico, in fact,
learned the techniques from Spanish Jews, who – at least in the thirteenth
century… - had been very explicit about these techniques and their effects and
even described them in printed texts. ‘Through the intensive cult of angels
[i.e., demons],’ writes Frances Yates, ‘cabala reaches up into religious
spheres…’ In general, she adds, the cabalistic system is a ladder to God,
which one climbs by means of meditative techniques. By means of magic, she
continues, ‘man has learned hot to use the chain linking earth to heaven, and
by Cabala, he has learned to manipulate the higher chain linking the celestial
world, through the angels, to the divine Nature.’ It was the somatic
experience of the phenomenon of ascent, the very possibility of soul travel,
that for Pico constituted the true ‘dignity of man’. Pico thus spoke of man as
an operator, a controller of heaven and earth.”
Another deluded magician who was at the same time a famous scientist
was Giordano Bruno. “Born in the city of Nola, near Naples, in 1548, Bruno
became a Dominican and soon after that a teacher of a branch of magic known
as the memory art. His travels were always marked by controversy, and the
11 Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 78-79.
12 See A.C. Grayling, The Age of Genius, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, chapter 13.
21
period 1583-85 found him in England, attached to the retinue of the French
ambassador. During this period he wrote his major work, in dialogue form (as
Galileo was to do many years later), including La Cena de la ceneri (The Supper
of Ashes, or Ash Wednesday Supper), which was his defence and exposition
of the heliocentric, or Copernican, theory of the universe. In 1592 he returned
to Italy, strangely convinced that he could convert the pope to the ancient
Hermetic philosophy, which he regarded as the ‘true’ Christianity. He was
soon arrested by the Inquisition and imprisoned for eight years, during which
time his apparently heretical views were examined on a number of occasions.
On February 17, 1600, scoffing at his executioner and refusing to look at the
crucifix held up before him, Bruno was led out to the Campo dei Fiori in
Rome and burnt at the stake.
“We might get confused if we regard Bruno’s Copernicanism as strictly, or

even largely, scientific in nature. After all, would a book on heliocentricity be
called Ash Wednesday Supper? Cena, in fact, refers to the Eucharist, or the
Lord’s Supper (in Italian, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece is called Il
Cenacolo). The light in the center of the universe is hardly an optical one for
Bruno (though it could be); it is more specifically the divine light present in
every human being, and accessibly by means of magical practice; which was
(he believed) what the Mass, and the Eucharist – i.e., the miracle of
transubstantiation – originally were. The Copernican sun was for Bruno an
ancient Egyptian light, one that would dispel the present darkness of the
world. Heliocentricity – the physical fact of a sun-centered universe (or, at
least, solar system) – was thus for Bruno the astronomical confirmation of an
ancient magic, and his ill-fated trip to Italy was an attempt to get the pope to
‘see the light’, the Egyptian/Hermetic core of the original Christian religion,
from which, he asserted, the Roman Church had strayed. Hence also his
refusal to look at the cross when taken out to die: the Church was using this
symbol to deny the real (magical) content of its own religion – as the Cathars,
among other heretics, had argue repeatedly….
“Another important figure is this tradition was Tommaso Campanella,

whose career embodied changing attitude to magic and what we would today
call paranormal phenomena. Campanella was a practitioner of Ficinian magia
and, like Bruno, was committed to a magical reform of Christianity. For him,
Christ was simply a magus (albeit a very great one); and Campanella led a
revolt in Calabria in 1599 that led to his imprisonment – he spent twenty-
seven years of his life behind bars – and torture. In his book, City of the Sun,
written in prison circa 1602, he envisioned a utopian community governed by
the laws of natural magic. Although condemned as of 1603, to perpetual
imprisonment as a heretic, Campanella was in Rome in 1628, practicing
Ficinian magic, constructing a sealed room and employing talismans for Pope
Urban VIII (!), to protect him from his enemies (this was the same pope who
would condemn Galileo only five years later)… in one of his books he wrote
that there was a divine magic that had been used by Moses and the saints,
and that it enabled one to reach the higher regions, to move out beyond the
limits of the known world and out to infinity. Campanella talked of divine
22
inspiration and angelic visions, and said that God had allowed him to witness
miracles, angels, and demons.
“Like Bruno, Campanella saw heliocentricity as a return to ancient truth,

and he wrote about this in letters to Galileo.”13
We see here that the Popes both resisted the tide of magic that the
humanists brought with them, and were themselves influenced by it.
Certainly, they were guilty of going far beyond the narrow path of Christian
teaching and morality, mixing the immiscible. Thus if Bruno combined
science and magic, the Popes combined art and paganism, both in the arts
they sponsored and in their own style of life. Thus Bishop Ignatius
Brianchaninov writes: “In modern times the pagan life appeared first of all in
the bosom of papism; the pagan feelings and taste of the papists were
expressed with particular vividness in the application of the arts to the
subjects of religion, in painted and sculpted representations of the saints, in
their Church singing and music, in their religious poetry. All their schools
bear upon themselves the mark of sinful passions, especially the love of
pleasure; they have neither the feeling of simplicity, nor the feelings of purity
and spirituality. Such are their Church music and singing. Their poets, in
depicting the liberation of Jerusalem and the Lord’s Sepulchre, did not flinch
from evoking the muse; he sang of Sion in one breath with Helicon, from the
muse he passed on to the Archangel Gabriel. The infallible popes, these new
idols of Rome, present in themselves images of debauchery, tyranny, atheism
and blasphemy against all that is holy. The pagan life with its comedy and
tragedy, its dancing, its rejection of shame and decency, its fornication and
adultery and other idol-worshipping practices, was resurrected first of all in
Rome under the shadow of its gods, the popes, and thence poured out over
the whole of Europe.”14
Under Popes Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X, the Renaissance reached its
climax as a fusion of Classical Culture and Fallen Christianity. The popes
patronized some of the finest artists in history, such as Bellini, Raphael and
Michelangelo. At the same time, they tore down what remained of ancient
Christianity – for example, Constantine’s basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican –
in order to create beautiful but soulless new ones – the new cathedral of St.
Peter, which took 120 years and countless millions in pilgrims’ indulgences to
complete. Their extravagance and immorality knew no bounds.
Thus Pope Alexander VI, writes Lev Tikhomirov, “had a string of lovers. In
vain did Savanorola thunder against him. Neither the Pope, nor his ‘beautiful
Julia’ paid any attention to him. At every Church feast Julia appeared as the
lawful wife of the Pope, and when a son was born to her, the Pope
immediately recognized him, as he also recognized his other children. His son,
13
Berman, Coming to our Senses, London: Unwin, 1990, pp. 228, 225-226.
14Brianchaninov, “The concept of heresy: article 3”, Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), NN 5-6,
September – December, 2002, pp. 35-36
23
Cesare Borgia, was well-known for fratricide. The daughter of the Pope,
Lucretia, quarrelled with her husband because of her amorous relationships
with her own brothers. Of course, Alexander Borgias are not common in the
human race, but unbelief, debauchery and the exploitation of religion for
filling one’s pockets shamed the Roman Catholic hierarchy too often.
Protestantism itself arose because of the most shameless use of indulgences,
which upset whole masses of people who had any religious education. 15
The religious reaction against the neo-pagan excesses of Renaissance

humanism was led by Girolano Savonarola, the Dominican friar born in the
same year as Leonardo da Vinci and representing the polar opposite to
Leonardo’s humanism. If Renaissance humanism of the Leonardan type
represented the “broad way”, embracing every kind of experience and
knowledge without the fear of the forbidden, of sin, Savonarola tried to bring
men’s thoughts back to the narrow way that alone leads to salvation. Coming
to Florence with the (perhaps surprising) support of such typically
Renaissance figures as Pico della Mirandola and Lorenzo de Medici, the ruler
of Florence, Savonarola’s bold call for a cleansing of both Church and State
drew the respect and admiration even of the Athonite monk, St. Maximus the
Greek, who would later call for a similar repentance from the Muscovite
Great Prince.
As Simon Sebag Montefiore writes, “In florid language, Savonarola

heralded the approaching ‘end of days’ and claimed to be in direct contact
with God and the saints. He condemned the alleged tyranny of the Medicis,
and prophesied the impending doom of Florence, unless the city changed its
ways.
“Such predictions seemed altogether vindicated when the French king,

Charles VIII, invaded Florence in 1494. Lorenzo de Medici’s son and successor,
Piero, was driven out of the city, which was by then in the grip of
Savonarola’s demagoguery. With French support, a democratic republic was
now established in Florence, with Savonarola as its leading figure. In his new
role, combining political and religious power, he was determined to create a
‘Christian and religious republic’. One of the first acts of this new, wholesome
republic was to make homosexuality punishable by death.
“Savonarola intensified his criticism of the Roman curia – its corruption

personified by the notorious Borgias – and he even went so far as to attack
Pope Alexander VI’s disreputable private life. At the same time, he urged the
people of Florence to live ever more ascetic lives. The result of the latter
exhortations was the act for which the priest became most famous – the
Bonfire of the Vanities, in which personal effect, books and works of art,
15
Tikhomirov, Religioznie-filosofskie osnovy istorii (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of
History), Moscow, 1997, p. 363
24
including some by Botticelli and Michelangelo, were destroyed in a
conflagration in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria.
“Even as Savonarola reached the height of his power and influence,

domestic opposition to his rule was beginning to form. Pointing to his
pronouncements against the papacy, these domestic opponents were able to
secure the excommunication of Savonarola in May 1497. Beyond Florence,
Savonarola was opposed not only by the corrupt Borgia pope, Alexander VI,
but also by the duke of Milan – both of whom sought to overturn the king of
France’s regional ambitions.
“When French forces withdrew from the Italian peninsula in 1497,

Savonarola suddenly found himself isolated. His final undoing came in
1498,”16 when he was tortured into making an admission of guilt and then
burnt at the stake…
Although Savanarola was born, of course, into a Roman Catholic milieu, it

is hard to represent his teaching as heretical, just as it is hard to convict the
victims of the Inquisition’s autos-do-fé (“festivals of faith”) as heretics.
Nevertheless, the movements of opposition to the truly heretical and
debauched papacy of the time, instead of restoring the truth, only led to
further heresy. For, as Tikhomirov writes, “among people protesting and
striving for a true Christian life there often gradually developed heretical
thought, which is natural when one has broken from the Church… Other
Christians, without entering upon a useless open battle, departed into secret
societies, hoping to live in a pure environment and gradually prepare the
reform of Christian practice. However, departure from the Church, albeit not
open, did not fail to affect them, too. These societies could easily be joined
both by heretics and by enemies of Christianity who hid this enmity on the
grounds of a criticism of truly shocking behaviour. All these protesting
elements were willingly joined by the Jews, who found it easy gradually to
pervert the originally Christian feelings of the participants…”17
16 Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercus, 2012, pp. 182-183.

17 Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 363
25
2. THE ITALIAN CITY-STATES AND MACHIAVELLI
It was not only in their humanistic and individualist ideals that the
Renaissance Italians represented such a powerful challenge to the medieval
world-view, but also in their political organization. The Italians’ political
“organization” was a disunited mass of city-states acknowledging no political
head that challenged the medieval love of order and elicited the spread of
intellectual, political and religious anarchy throughout Western Europe. The
medieval bastions of order – the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman
Empire – had fought each other to a bitter draw that undermined the
credibility of both, opening the path for a new form of political order that, by
comparison with the earlier order, was no order at all.
Already in the thirteenth century Italy had led the way in this tendency
towards the disintegration of larger polities and the formation of small city-
states. Thus we see in Emperor Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor and King
of Sicily, as Burckhardt writes, “the first ruler of the modern type who sat
upon a throne… Frederick’s measures (especially after the year 1231) are
aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal state, at the transformation of
the people into a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance,
but profitable in the utmost degree to the exchequer…”18 Frederick set the
pattern for the completely immoral tyrants of the Renaissance period, such as
the Borgias. It was in reaction to Frederick’s excesses that one of his subjects,
Thomas Aquinas, first developed the theory of constitutional monarchy.
According to this, “the prince was to be supported by an upper house named
by himself, and a representative body elected by the people.”19
And so, as David Weinstein writes: “By the late thirteenth century the
struggle between Popes and Emperors had played itself out leaving the
communes and other Italian powers alone in the field. The collapse of
universal authority meant that for the next two hundred years Italy, the
garden of the Empire, was virtually closed to foreign invaders, and the search
for the New Rome left to the fantasies of poets and prophets. In these two
centuries the communes acquired a degree of political and administrative
sophistication unmatched anywhere in Europe. In expanding their borders as
well as the range of their competence, communes became city-states, brought
to maturity and rich variety at Milan, Venice, Verona, Genoa, Mantua,
Ferrara, Urbino, Florence, Lucca, Pisa, Siena, and many smaller places. Where
communes were weak or absent, more traditional forms prevailed, as in the
Duchy of Savoy, the Kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, with their Hispanic
dynasties, and the signories of the Romagna. But even these were affected by
the collapse of Papal and Imperial hegemony and were drawn into the new
political culture. The Italians of the Renaissance discarded feudalism (except
for its cult of nobility and chivalric violence). They revived the ancient
conception of republican citizenship and began to explore the secular nature
18 Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 20.

19 Burckhardt, op. cit., p. 22.
26
of politics and community, looking for alternatives to medieval political
theology.
“The engines that drove Renaissance states in their dealings with each
other were greed, competition, mutual distrust, and secrecy. Chauvinist,
acquisitive, fearful of each other, the communes had been aggressive from the
start. With the removal of papal and imperial restraints they entered a more
intense period of expansion, the larger, more powerful states establishing
their hegemony over the smaller and weaker. Maritime cities fought each
other for colonies and markets, with Genoa and Venice the big winners. In
relations between governments anarchy rather than order was the rule.
Paradoxically, as war became the main business of governments, the internal
trend was away from the disorderly popular regimes of the communal period
toward a sterner discipline. By the fifteenth century most of the Italian
republics had reconciled themselves to some form of oligarchic or
authoritarian rule; none were democracies. Even Florence, which celebrated
itself as the model of republican liberty, barring nobles from its chief
magistracies and filling offices by election and sortition, was run by a network
of propertied families, and in 1454 came under the domination of a single
family, the Medici. The popolo minuto who toiled in Florence's dingy
workshops and damp woollen mills were even more disenfranchised than the
tiny minority of nobles, and without the nobles' compensations of wealth,
status, and influence. Neither in domestic nor in external relations did the
Renaissance find a practical alternative to the rule of the stronger.
“In the mid-fifteenth century Italy was a geographical expression, a no-

man's land of competing and warring entities. By then many of the weaker
had been swallowed up by their more powerful neighbours. Italian political
space was now divided among a dozen or so important powers, endlessly
making and breaking alliances and waging war on each other. Five states
dominated the play: Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples, and the Papacy. They
were finding it increasingly difficult to manoeuvre without knocking into
each other, and their wars were growing longer and more costly…”20
As always, there were compensations. According to Francis Fukuyama, the

rise of the Italian city-states was the main cause of the gradual break-down of
serfdom in Western Europe, which in the year 1300 had three times the
population of Eastern Europe. “In the economic boom that had started in the
eleventh century, it had also become much more urbanized. The existence of
urban centers radiating from northern Italy up through Flanders was first and
foremost the product of political weakness and the fact that kings found it
useful to protect the independence of cities as a means of undercutting the
great territorial lords who were their rivals. Cities were also protected by
ancient feudal rights, and the urban tradition from Roman times had never
been entirely lost. Thus sheltered, the cities evolved as independent
communes that, through growing trade, developed their own resources
20 Weinstein, “Savanorola – Preacher and Patriot?”, History Today, vol. 39, November, 1989.
27
independently of the manorial economy. The existence of free cities in turn
made serfdom increasingly difficult to maintain; they were like an internal
frontier to which serfs could escape to win their freedom (hence the medieval
saying, ‘Stadtluft macht frei’ – City air makes you free). In the less densely
populated parts of Eastern Europe, by contrast, cities were smaller and served
more as administrative centers for the existing political powers, as they did in
China and the Middle East.
“The trend toward freedom in the west and unfreedom in the east was
stimulated by the disastrous population decline that occurred in the
fourteenth century as recurring waves of plague and famine struck Western
Europe harder and earlier than the east. As economic growth returned in the
fifteenth century, Western Europe saw regeneration of towns and cities,
which offered sanctuary and economic opportunities that prevented the
nobility from squeezing its own peasantry harder. Indeed, to keep labor on
the land, lords had to offer peasants greater freedom in what was becoming a
modern labor market. The centralizing monarchies of the region found they
could weaken their aristocratic rivals by protecting the rights of cities and
towns. Increased demand had to be met instead by imports of food and
precious metals from Eastern and Central Europe. But east of the Elbe, the
weakness of both independent cities and kings permitted the nobility to
develop export agriculture on the backs of their own peasantry. In the words
of the historian Jenö Szücs, ‘The regions beyond the Elbe paid, in the long run,
for the West’s recovery… The legislative omens of the ‘second serfdom’
appeared with awesome synchronicity in Brandenburg (1494), Poland (1496),
Hungary (1492 and 1498), and also in Russia (1497).’”21
We have seen that an integral part of Renaissance humanism was

individualism, which was also reflected in Italian political life, in the rise of
princely leaders of independent city-states, such as the Sforzas of Milan, the
Medicis of Florence and the Borgias of Rome, who broke the traditional bonds
of loyalty to Church and feudal lord and acted in general without any moral
restraint. The man who codified, as it were, this tendency to amoral politics
was Nicolo Machiavelli, a diplomat in the service of Florence.
Before studying Machiavelli, however, it will be worth examining the

innovations introduced by the rise of the new-style Italian city-states.
First, writes Philip Bobbit, the Italian city-states “were defined

geographically, as opposed to the usual springing dynastic inheritances of
princes”, which were scattered non-contiguously in many places depending
on feudal and dynastic marriage ties. This tendency towards geographical
cohesion still had a long way to go in Italy and its northern neighbour,
Germany. But, combined with the increasing cohesion of such contemporary
21 Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, pp. 376-377.
28
states as England, France and Spain, it constituted another important
contribution of the Italian city-states to the new political culture.
Another important innovation was banking. The city-states derived their

power mainly from a burgeoning capitalist economy based on the new
techniques of banking. Indeed, it could be argued that modern banking was
invented by the Medicis of Florence. 22
It should be noted that these two characteristics of the Italian city-state that
distinguish them from medieval polities – territorial integrity and contiguity,
and financial independence – also characterize the much more complex states
of today. For all successful states of modern times are territorially compact
(one of the exceptions, Pakistan, was forced to make its territorially non-
contiguous parts, East and West Pakistan, into two independent states) and
are able to issue their own currency (the states of the United States and the
Eurozone are not states in the full sense of the word because they do not issue
their own currencies).
The big problem for the Italian city-states was legitimacy, which had to be
founded on different principles from those that had prevailed in the Middle
Ages – that is, dynastic succession and papal blessing. As Bobbitt writes: “The
medieval world had been roughly split in two halves. In the west, there were
realms where dynastic power had devolved on princes who were hemmed in
by customary law, the autonomy of their vassals, and the local rights of towns.
These were realms where legitimacy was solid, but the power of the prince
circumscribed. In the east, in central Europe, princes were subject to the dual
universality of the pope and the emperor, both elected rulers representing
complex sets of competing interests. As cities in Italy and princely realms in
the Netherlands and parts of Germany began to assert their independence
and accumulate wealth and power, they found themselves subject to assaults
on their legitimacy, because their assertions of independence were not
endorsed by the papacy or the empire…
“The Italian solution, adopted, for example, by the pope himself, was the
princely state. The pope became a prince, and the Roman Church his state.
Western kings envied the power that this innovation was able to concentrate
in the hands of the prince…”23
However, the case of the papal princely state was a special one. The papacy
had been known as a despotic ruler of both souls and territories for hundreds
of years. Moreover, the papacy could confer legitimacy on itself…
22 Bobbitt, Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 83. “Florence had an
annual income greater than that of the king of England and the revenue of Venice and its
Terra Firma in the middle of the fifteenth century was 60 percent higher than that of France,
more than double that of England and Spain”. (Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, New
York: Penguin Press, 2008, pp. 41-47)
23 Bobbitt, op. cit., pp. 88-89.
29
More problematic was the legitimacy of the other princes. Their dynastic
claims to power were often weak. And as Renaissance humanists they were
sceptical of the power of the Pope to confer legitimacy – especially when he
was essentially just such a rapacious and secularised despot as themselves.
Ultimately, however, if the Church could not confer right, only might could
confer it – might was right in the brave new world of the Italian Renaissance.
The clearest example, again, is Florence. “Florence was effectively ruled by
the Medicis, a banking house whose head, Cosimo, was able to affect events
throughout Europe including, for example, the Wars of the Roses (through
loans to Edward IV), and to paralyze Naples and Venice by withholding
credit that would have been used to finance mercenaries. Yet the Medici ruled
by competence, not royal bloodlines, and thus always had to refresh their
legitimacy through further successful acts on behalf of Florentine society.”24
Essentially the same could be said of modern states, which do not receive
legitimacy from outside (in spite of the United Nations’ claim to confer
legitimacy) but simply by virtue of their perceived competency, their might. It
is therefore no surprise to discover that the main ideologist of Italian city
statehood, Machiavelli, should be seen as trying to justify the amoralism and
tyranny of contemporary Italian politics.
Machiaelli’s views derived from his experience. Thus in 1498 he witnessed

the execution on the grounds of heresy of Savonarola, the fiery prophet who
had denounced the immorality of the Florentines and Pope Alexander VI, the
head of the Borgia family. From this he drew the (false) conclusion: “All
armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed.”25 Again, at Pisa
Machiavelli observed how quickly hired mercenaries, the condottiere, switched
sides. And then at Sinigaglia in 1502, he had been present “when Cesare
Borgia persuaded a number of hostile condottiere to meet with him and had
them murdered once they arrived. These events confirmed for Machiavelli the
weaknesses of reliance on the condottiere and the need for a ruthless and
decisive political leader.”26
Drawing on these experiences, Machiavelli drew up his famous political

philosophy in The Prince and The Discourses. His advice for rulers, as
summarised by Bobbitt, was: “(1) Florence should have a conscripted militia:
the love of gain would inevitably corrupt the condottiere who would avoid
decisive battles to preserve his forces, betray his employers for a higher
bidder, and seize power when it became advantageous; (2) the prince had to
create institutions that would evoke loyalty from his subjects which in other
countries was provided by the feudal structure of vassalage, but which in
Italy had been lost with the collapse of medieval society; (3) legal and
24 Bobbitt, op. cit., p. 84.

25 Weinstein, op. cit.
30
strategic organization are interdependent: ‘there must be good laws where
there are good arms and where there are good arms there must be good laws’.
‘Although I have elsewhere maintained that the foundation of states is a good
military organization, yet it seems to me not superfluous to report here that
without such a military organization there can neither be good laws nor
anything else good’; (4) deceit and violence are wrong for an individual, but
justified when the prince is acting in behalf of his state; (5) permanent
embassies and sophisticated sources of intelligence must be maintained in
order to enable successful diplomacy; and (6) the tactics of the prince, in law
and in war, must be measured by a rational assessment of the contribution of
those tactics to the strategic goals of statecraft, which are governed by the
contingencies of history. All of these conclusions compel a final one: princes
must develop the princely state.
“The princely state enables the prince to rationalize his acts on the basis of
ragione di stato. He is not acting merely on his own behalf, but is compelled to
act in the service of the State…”27
The idea that the prince was permitted to do, for “reasons of state”, what
he was by no means permitted to do as an individual, was revolutionary. In
view of its importance, let us examine it more closely…
“The Prince, writes Bertrand Russell, “is concerned to discover, from

history and from contemporary events, how principalities are won, how they
are held, and how they are lost. Fifteenth-century Italy afforded a multitude
of examples, both great and small. Few rulers were legitimate; even the popes,
in many cases, secured election by corrupt means. The rules for achieving
success were not quite the same as they became when times grew more
settled, for no one was shocked by cruelties and treacheries which would
have disqualified a man in the eighteenth century or the nineteenth century.
Perhaps our age, again, can better appreciate Machiavelli, for some of the
most notable successes of our time have been achieved by methods as base as
any employed in Renaissance Italy. He would have applauded, as an artistic
connoisseur in statecraft, Hitler’s Reichstag fire, his purge of the party in 1934,
and his breach of faith after Munich.
“Caesar Borgia, son of Alexander VI, comes in for high praise. His problem
was a difficult one: first, by the death of his brother, to become the sole
beneficiary of his father’s dynastic ambition; second, conquer by force of arms,
in the name of the Pope, territories which should, after Alexander’s death,
belong to himself and not to the Papal States; third, to manipulate the College
of Cardinals so that the next Pope should be his friend. He pursued this
difficult end with great skill; from his practice, Machiavelli says, a new prince
should derive precepts. Caesar failed, it is true, but only ‘by the extraordinary
malignity of fortune’. It happened that, when his father died, he also was
dangerously ill; by the time he recovered, his enemies had organized their
31
forces, and his bitterest opponent had been elected Pope. On the day of this
election, Caesar told Machiavelli that he had provided for everything, ‘except
that he had never thought that at his father’s death he would be dying
himself’.
“Machiavelli, who was intimately acquainted with his villainies, sums up

thus: ‘Reviewing thus all the actions of the duke [Caesar], I find nothing to
blame, on the contrary, I feel bound, as I have done, to hold him as an
example to be imitated by all who by fortune and with the arms of others
have risen to power.’…
“The Prince is very explicit in repudiating received morality where the

conduct of rulers is concerned. A ruler will perish if he is always good; he
must be as cunning as a fox and as fierce as a lion. There is a chapter (XVIII)
entitled: ‘In What Way Princes Must Keep Faith’. We learn that they should
keep faith when it pays to do so, but not otherwise. A prince must on occasion
be faithless.28
“’But it is necessary to be able to disguise this character well, and to be a

great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so read to obey
present necessities, that one who deceives will always find those who allow
themselves to be deceived. I will mention only one modern instance.
Alexander VI did nothing else but deceive men, he thought of nothing else,
and found the occasion for it; no man was ever more able to give assurances,
or affirmed things with stronger oaths, and no man observed them less;
however, he always succeeded in his deceptions, as he knew well this aspect
of things. It is not necessary therefore for a prince to have all the above-named
qualities [the conventional virtues], but it is very necessary to seem to have
them.’ He goes on to say that, above all, a prince should seem to be
religious…”
“A prince who desires to maintain his position,” he wrote, “must learn to

be good or not as needs may require.” “War should be the only study of a
prince. He should look upon peace as a breathing space which… gives him
the means to execute military plans.” 29
Machiavelli’s views on religion anticipate those of Napoleon. For him,

writes Sir Isaiah Berlin, “religion… is not much more than a socially
indispensable instrument, so much utilitarian cement: the criterion of the
worth of a religion is its role as a promoter of solidarity and cohesion – he
anticipates Saint-Simon and Durkheim in stressing its crucial social
importance. The great founders of religions are among the men he most
greatly admires. Some varieties of religion (for example, Roman paganism)
are good for societies, since they make them strong or spirited; others on the
28 As Machiavelli put it: “The promise given was a necessity of the past, the word broken is a
necessity of the present”.

29
Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Lane, 1946, pp. 526-527, 528-529, 520.
32
contrary (for example, Christian meekness and unworldliness) cause decay or
disintegration. The weakening of religious ties is a part of general decadence
and corruption: there is no need for a religion to rest on truth, provided that it
is socially effective (Discourses I, 12). Hence his veneration of those who set
their societies on sound spiritual foundations – Moses, Numa, Lycurgus.
“There is no serious assumption of the existence of God and divine law;

whatever our author’s private convictions, an atheist can read Machiavelli
with perfect intellectual comfort. Nor is there piety towards authority, or
prescription – nor any interest in the role of the individual conscience, or in
any other metaphysical or theological issue. The only freedom he recognizes
is political freedom, freedom from arbitrary despotic rule, that is,
republicanism, and the freedom of one State from control by other States.”30
On the other hand, a prince should be prepared to sacrifice freedom for

stability: “He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does
not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always
the watchword of liberty…”31
A good society, according to Machiavelli, “is a society that enjoys stability,

internal harmony, security, justice, a sense of power and of splendour, like
Athens in its best days, like Sparta, like the kingdoms of David and Solomon,
like Venice as it used to be, but, above all, like the Roman Republic. ‘Truly it is
a marvellous thing to consider to what greatness Athens came in the space of
a hundred years after she freed herself from the tyranny of Pisistratus. But
above all, it is very marvellous to observe what greatness Rome came to after
she freed herself from her kings’ (Discourses, ii, 2).
“The reason for this is that there were men in these societies who knew
how to make cities great. How did they do it? By developing certain faculties
in men, of inner moral strength, magnanimity, vigour, vitality, generosity,
loyalty, above all public spirit, civic sense, dedication to the security, power,
glory, expansion of the patria. The ancients developed these qualities by all
kinds of means, among which were dazzling shows and bloodstained
sacrifices that excited men’s senses and aroused their martial prowess, and
especially by the kind of legislation and education that promoted the pagan
virtues. Power, magnificence, pride, austerity, pursuit of glory, vigour,
discipline, antiqua virtus – this is what makes States great.”32
A purely pagan ideal. And if it is to be attained, purely pagan means will

have to be applied. Christian virtues are no use here. For the Christian faith
has made men “weak”, easy prey to “wicked men”, since “they think more
about enduring their injuries than about avenging them” (Discourses, ii, 2).33
30
Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico,
1998, p. 281.
31
Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter V.
32
Berlin, op. cit., pp. 287-288.
33
Berlin, op. cit., p. 291.
33
Therefore Machiavelli “does not explicitly condemn Christian morality: he
merely points out that it is, at least in rulers (but to some degree in subjects
too), incompatible with those social ends which he thinks it is natural and
wise for men to seek. One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain
or serve a great and glorious State; but not always both at once.”34
“In other words you can opt out of the public world, but in that case he has
nothing to say to you, for it is to the public world and to the men in it that he
addresses himself. This is expressed most clearly in his notorious advice to
the victor who has to hold down a conquered province. He advises a clean
sweep: new governors, new titles, new powers and new men; he should
‘make the rich poor, the poor rich, as David did when he became king: ‘the
poor he filled with good things and the rich he sent empty away’. Besides this,
he should build new cities, overthrow those already built, change the
inhabitants from one place to another; and in short he should leave nothing in
that province untouched, and make sure that no rank or position or office or
wealth is held by anyone who does not acknowledge it as from you’
(Discourses, I, 26). He should take Philip of Macedon as his model, who ‘grew
in these ways until he became lord of Greece’.
“Now Philip’s historian informs us – Machiavelli goes on to say – that he

transferred the inhabitants from one province to another ‘as herdsmen
transfer their herds’ from one place to another. Doubtless, Machiavelli
continued, ‘these methods are very cruel, and enemies to all government not
merely Christian but human, and any man ought to avoid them and prefer to
live a private life rather than to be a king who brings such ruin on men.
Notwithstanding, a ruler who does not wish to take that first good way of
lawful government, if he wishes to maintain himself, must enter upon this
evil one. But men take certain middle ways that are very injurious; indeed,
they are unable to be altogether good or altogether bad’ (Discourses, I, 26).
“This is plain enough. There are two worlds, that of personal morality and
that of public organization. There are two ethical codes, both ultimate; not
two ‘autonomous’ regions, one of ‘ethics’, another of ‘politics’, but two (for
him) exhaustive alternatives between two conflicting systems of value. If a
man chooses the ‘first good way’, he must, presumably, give up all hope of
Athens and Rome, of a noble and glorious society in which human beings can
thrive and grow strong, proud, wise and productive; indeed, they must
abandon all hope of a tolerable life on earth: for men cannot live outside
society; they will not survive collectively if they are led by men who… are
influenced by the first, ‘private’ morality; they will not be able to realize their
minimal goals as men; they will end in a state of moral, not merely political,
degradation. But if a man chooses, as Machiavelli himself has done, the
second course, then he must suppress his private qualms, if he has any, for it
is certain that those who are too squeamish during the remaking of a society,
or even during the pursuit and maintenance of its power and glory, will go to
34
Berlin, op. cit., p. 294.
34
the wall. Whoever has chosen to make an omelette cannot do so without
breaking eggs.”35
If Machiavelli is right, then Christian political power that is both successful

and truly Christian is an impossibility. Even some modern Christian
politicians, such as Enoch Powell, have been tempted to believe that he is
right. Fortunately, however, he is wrong, because there have been many truly
Christian and successful rulers since Constantine the Great, some of whom
have even been acknowledged as saints.
But of course the criteria of success in the two cases are different: for a truly
Christian ruler success consists, not in power and glory, but in the salvation of
his people in eternity. However, for a pagan ruler of the kind Machiavelli
admires success is measured in exclusively secular terms. It is not to be
wondered at that Machiavelli has had many admirers, both philosophers such
as Nietzsche and politicians such as Lenin, in our modern, neo-pagan age…
35
Berlin, op. cit., pp. 302-303.
35
3. IDEAS OF LIBERTY
As we have seen, the Renaissance introduced what was in essence a new

religion – the worship of man, otherwise known as humanism. This soon
developed into liberal humanism, which remains the dominant religion of the
western world. Liberal humanism is the idea that man is by nature
autonomous and free and that his political and social environment should be
constructed so as to maximize his freedom.
“Today,” writes Yuval Noah Harari, “the most important humanist sect
is liberal humanism, which believes that ‘humanity’ is a quality of individual
humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct. According
to liberals, the sacred nature of humanity resides within each and every
individual Homo Sapiens. The inner core of individual humans gives meaning
to the world, and is the source for all ethical and political authority. If we
encounter an ethical or political dilemma, we should look inside and listen to
our inner voice – the voice of humanity. The chief commandments of liberal
humanism are meant to protect the liberty of this inner voice against intrusion
or harm. These commandment are collectively known as ‘human rights’.”36
Thus just as peace among men – secular peace, the Pax Romana – had been
the key ideal of the Roman Empire, and peace with God – that is, right faith
and the works of faith – the ideal of the Christian Roman Empire, so liberty, in
the sense of the full development of the potentialities of (fallen) man, has been
the goal of European civilization from the Renaissance to the present day.
The first notable modern propagandists of the religion of liberal humanism

we have already met: Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) and his disciple the Florentine
philosopher Giovanni Pico de la Mirandola (1463-94), who both went beyond
the bounds of Christian thought in their search for an ideology of freedom.
Ficino was important for having translated the recently discovered works of
Plato into Latin. Hardly less important was his translation of the first- or
second-century occult text known as the Corpus Hermeticum.
As for Pico, according to Dan Cohn-Scherbok he “was able to engage in

kabbalistic study, making use of the concept of the sefirot in his compositions.
He and other Christian humanists believed that the Zohar [the Kabbala]
contained doctrines which support the Christian faith. In this milieu Judah
Abravanel composed a Neoplatonic work which had an important impact on
Italian humanism.”37 Gillespie writes that he “was originally trained in the
scholastic tradition. He also studied with the Jewish Averroist Elea del
Medigo, and learned Hebrew and Arabic in Perugia, after developing a deep
interest in the Kabbalah. Through Ficino he came in contact with many other
non-Christian sources and like him used them in his efforts to shape a
Christianity that could accommodate the spirituality he believed was essential
36 Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage, 2011, p. 257.

37
Cohn-Shherbok, Atlas of Jewish History, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 112.
36
to human thriving. Building on Ficino’s arguments in The Christian Religion,
Pico asserted in his As Pico wrote: “O sublime generosity of God the Father!
O highest and most wonderful felicity of Man! To him it was granted to be
what he wills. The Father endowed him with all kinds of seeds and with the
germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow and
bear fruit in him.”38
Thus for Picot humans were self-creating beings who could choose their
own nature. This power for Pico is not intrinsic to human beings but is a
divine gift. Human will and freedom are not a consequence of the fact that
man is the highest of the creatures but a result of the fact that as the imago dei
man is above all creature, the creature who most fully participates in divine
being…”39 As Pico wrote: “O sublime generosity of God the Father! O highest
and most wonderful felicity of Man! To him it was granted to be what he wills.
The Father endowed him with all kinds of seeds and with the germs of every
way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow and bear fruit in
him.”40
This idea of liberty was made the foundation for a new theory of politics
whose aim was the creation of a social and political order oriented, not
towards the commandments of God and the salvation of the souls, but
towards maximum individual self-development, that is, the maximum
satisfaction of the demands of fallen human nature – an ideal that thinkers
from Aristotle to the Holy Fathers labelled as “licence” rather than “liberty”.
Of course, the Christian understanding of politics did not disappear

overnight. After all, as Harari writes, “even though liberal humanism
sanctifies humans, it does not deny the existence of God, and is, in fact,
founded on monotheist beliefs. The liberal belief in the free and sacred nature
of each individual is a direct legacy of the traditional Christian belief in free
will and eternal individual souls. Without recourse to eternal souls and a
Creator God, it becomes embarrassingly difficult for liberals to explain what
is so special about individual Sapiens.”41 Consequently, the new era was
distinguished by attempts to justify both the traditional and the revolutionary
ideas of politics on the basis of Holy Scripture.
Nevertheless, the general tendency was to disconnect politics from religion

– or, at any rate, the Christian religion – and make the humanist idea of
freedom the central ideal.
“Imagine,” writes Braudel, “that it might be possible to assemble the sum

total of our knowledge of European history from the fifth century to the
present, or perhaps to the eighteenth century, and to record it (if such a
38 Pico, Oration on the Dignity of Man.

39 Gillespie, op. cit., pp. 85-86.
40 Pico, Oration on the Dignity of Man.
41 Harari, op. cit. , pp. 257-258.
37
recording were conceivable) in an electronic memory. Imagine that the
computer was then asked to indicate the one problem which recurred most
frequently, in time and space, throughout this lengthy history. Without a
doubt, that problem is liberty, or rather liberties. The word liberty is the
operative word.
“The very fact that, in the twentieth-century conflict ideologies, the

Western world has chosen to call itself ‘the free world’, however mixed its
motives, is both fair and appropriate in view of Europe’s history during these
many centuries.
“The word liberty has to be understood in all its connotations, including

such pejorative senses as in ‘taking liberties’. All liberties, in fact, threaten
each other: one limits another, and later succumbs to a further rival. This
process has never been peaceful…”42
Of course, freedom was an important concept in antiquity, too: the Greeks

defeated the Persians, and Brutus killed Caesar, in the name of freedom. And
the revival of its importance in the Renaissance owed much to the general
revival of the ideas and values of pagan antiquity caused by the flight of
classical scholars from Byzantium to the West after the fall of Constantinople
in 1453. However, there were several other important factors that made the
idea of freedom of such importance at the beginning of the modern era.
First came a gradual increase in economic freedom. Already in the twelfth

century we see free crafts, guilds and lodges (such as the stonemasons’ lodges,
which developed into Freemasonry). These first chinks in the prison of feudal
servitude appeared in the towns of North Italy, the Netherlands and
Germany, allowing them to acquire independent or semi-independent status.
“Egoistic, vigilant and ferocious, towns were ready to defend their liberties
against the rest of the world, often with very great courage and sometimes
without any concern for the liberties of the others. Bloodthirsty wars between
cities were the forerunner of the national wars to come.”43
Now the towns were built on commerce, and commerce was built on the
commercial contract. Therefore it is not surprising that the town-dwellers’
dominant theory of politics came to be the theory of the social contract. Just as
the basic form of relationship between men in the Middle Ages had been the
feudal contract between lord and vassal, which was reflected in the medieval
feudal theory of politics (i.e. the pope is the supreme lord, and the princes are
his vassals), so the basic form of relationship between men in the early
modern period became (although not immediately and by no means
everywhere) the more egalitarian contract between buyer and seller, which
was correspondingly reflected in the more egalitarian and exchange-based
42 Braudel, op. cit., pp. 315-316.

43 Braudel, op. cit., p. 322.
38
theories of the social contract: that is, the people have entered into a contract
with their rulers whereby they buy security in exchange for obedience.
It was especially in England that the idea of political freedom emerged in

the context of attempts to define the relationship between different centres of
power within the kingdom. Thus besides the royal court there were the courts
of justice, to which both churchmen and barons resorted to settle disputes,
and the exchequer, which imposed taxes on all the estates of the land. But
churchmen and barons sought to protect themselves from the ever-increasing
demands of the king and the exchequer, whence came Magna Carta and the
first rudimentary parliaments.
W.M. Spellman writes: “Ideally, the medieval monarch was expected to

‘live on his own’ or manage the affairs of the kingdom on the basis of
revenues derived from his estates and from his traditional feudal prerogatives.
In such a context, monarchs who attempted to wrest monies from their
leading subjects without their consent, or for purposes at odds with the
priorities of the landed elite, found themselves locked in stalemate and in
some cases facing direct resistance. Developing out of the feudal compact
where the vassal’s performance of specific services was exchanged for royal
protection and the use of land, kings could not arbitrarily usurp the property
rights of their leading subjects without serious consequences. Most often in
the feudal setting the king called together his leading vassals in order to
solicit their advice and support. These unpretentious meetings, alternatively
called colloquia, concilia, conventus, curiae or tractatus, featured both fluid
membership and varied agendas. And as financial, military, economic and
administrative problems became more complex, larger and more structured
assemblies were called by the monarch.
“Formal representative assemblies emerged in most European countries –

Spain, Sicily, Hungary, England, France, the Scandinavian countries, various
German principalities – during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for a
number of related reasons, but the key involved the need for monarchs to
access sources of wealth not under their direct control as feudal lords.
Increasingly after 1000 the cost of pursuing wider military objectives grew
substantially across Europe. This was particularly true in the case of the
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century wars between England and France, where
monarchs on both sides were pressed repeatedly to find additional sources of
income.
“The word parlamentum was first coined in the thirteenth century, and by
that time it was being applied to meetings of the unelected feudal council.
Both the economic and social structures of European kingdoms were quite
unique in comparison to the other major world civilizations, where nothing
like Western parliaments ever emerged. Comparatively speaking, only in
Europe were power and wealth distributed in a fairly diffuse fashion. The
basic structure of medieval parliaments, including as they did representatives
of clergy, nobles and commoners from towns and cities, was reflective of this
39
important distribution of income and land. It was in this context that the
English king’s royal council, for example, normally composed of important
churchmen and aristocrats, expanded during the course of the thirteenth
century to include new urban elites for the purpose of gaining consent to
special taxation.”44
This development was the result, first, of the Magna Carta of 1215, and then
of the temporarily successful rebellion of Simon de Montfort against King
Henry III in 1264. Simon brought not only bishops and barons, but also
important burghers, into the king’s council. And he introduced the idea –
later abrogated – that if the king broke his contract with the leading men of
the kingdom, they could take up arms against him.
However, while the ideas of economic and political freedom flourished in

the conditions of early modern Europe, the idea of religious freedom, freedom
of conscience, was slower to catch on, in spite of the fact that William of
Ockham had argued in favour of it already early in the fourteenth century.
In attempting to understand why this was so, we must remember that, as

Bobbitt notes, “the medieval system had been a rights-based system. Each
member of that society had a particular place that determined rights,
obligations, and a well-defined role.”45 For centuries European history had
been riven by conflicts over rights: the rights of popes as opposed to the rights
of emperors, the rights of lords as opposed to the rights of vassals, the rights
of kings as opposed to the rights of barons and burghers. And the rapid
development of law, both ecclesiastical and royal, in the medieval period had
accentuated the concept of individual rights and liberties generally.
Nevertheless, the whole system of rights presupposed one society professing
one faith with one head of the church – the pope, who remained the final
court of appeal in all disputes over rights throughout the medieval period.
Therefore Catholic kings felt obliged to uphold the Catholic faith and punish
heretics. But this meant that the ideas of religious freedom, and of freedom of
the mind and conscience, were slower in developing than those of political or
economic freedom, with the result that the early modern period was a period
of great religious intolerance – not least because European society was now
divided between Catholics and Protestants, and Catholic kings had to prove
their Catholicism to the Pope, while Protestant kings, though absolved from
obligation to a transnational religious institution, still felt obliged, as believers
in a believing society, to defend the faith of their subjects.
Nevertheless, the seeds of the idea of religious freedom, too, had already
been sown, and it was given a further important impulse in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, as a result of the spirit of inquiry let loose by the
Renaissance. Moreover, when religious passions began to cool in the late
seventeenth century, the idea of religious freedom came into its own, with
44
Spellman, Monarchies, London: Reaktion Books, 2001, pp. 179-180.
45 Bobbit, op. cit., p. 87.
40
rulers changing their role from prosecutors of the national religious idea and
persecutors of its enemies to preservers of the religious peace among their
multi-confessional subjects.
However, a paradox remains: why, in an age when the idea of political

freedom was, as we have seen, flourishing, did the main form of political
organization remain the monarchy? As the Wars of the Roses came to an end
in England and France, and the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand united
Castile and Aragon in Spain, these countries developed powerful monarchies
that were little beholden to their fledgling national parliaments. States became
more concentrated territorially, which led to the growth of nationalism
around the person of the monarch.46
Why this strengthening of the monarchical principle at precisely the

moment when ideas of liberty were becoming so popular? Larry Siedentop
has an interesting theory to explain this paradox, a theory based on the fact
that trends towards egalitarianism in Europe elicited an equal and opposite
trend towards a new centre of monarchical authority: “The outstanding fact of
fifteenth-century Europe was the centralizing of authority and power by
monarchs seeking to leave feudal constraints behind and become ‘sovereigns’
properly so called. Louis XI of France, Henry VII of England and Ferdinand
and Isabella of Spain all took remarkable steps in that direction. Whey did
they have such success? How did they overcome the resistance of other
institutions? For they certainly met with resistance. In effect, there were four
institutions which might have provided a model for the political organization
of Europe: feudalism, the church, the boroughs and monarchy.
“However, after the frustration of the theocratic ambitions of Innocent IV

and Boniface VIII, neither the feudal nobility nor the cities were able to shape
the political organization of Europe. By the fourteenth century, it was clear
that feudal ‘law’ could not provide the basis for a stable political system. Its
incoherence and constant reliance on force made that impossible. Yet at the
same time the feudal nobility was strong enough to prevent anything like the
generalizing of ‘republican’ civic institutions. That was a development
improbable in any case, for the burghers of the cities lacked wider political
ambitions. In the face of the feudal nobility, burghers exhibited a sense of
inferiority. Fierce as they were if it was a question of defending their own
boroughs, they had no vision of a republican organization for society at large,
though the Netherlands was perhaps an exception.
“So there was a stand-off. Before the triumph of monarchy, however, there
was a last quasi-feudal attempt to organize Europe. It took the form of
bringing together the representatives of these different institutions with a
46
However, this feeling was still covered with a cloak of religion, as Erasmus complained:
“For in France they say God is on the French side and they can never overcome that have God
for their protector. In England and Spain the cry is: the war is not the King’s, but God’s” (in
John Adair, Puritans, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998, p. 28).
41
view to their cooperating, while retaining their original character. Thus,
awareness of centralizing pressures led to the creation of assemblies which
sought to reflect and organize the diversity of European institutions – the
Estates-General in France, the English Parliament, the Cortes of Spain and an
Imperial Diet in Germany. These assemblies were organized according to
rank, with the nobility, clergy and burghers each in their assigned place.
“But these attempts at national organization – with the signal exception of

England’s Parliament (which benefited from a stronger crown) – failed. The
assemblies were too heterogeneous. While the feudal nobles were accustomed
to exercising political will, neither the clergy nor the representatives of the
boroughs were used to direct political power, and they had little taste for it,
fearing new taxes. As a result, these assemblies failed to become effective
instruments of government.
“But these assemblies did not fail merely because of their diversity, their
clinging to traditional privileges. There was a deeper reason. It was because
the new idea of a ‘sovereign’ authority vested in monarchs projected a
different image of society, an egalitarian image which now had a popular
resonance that it had previously lacked. The appeal of royalty released and
reinforced new aspirations. Popular attitudes had changed enough to deprive
the traditional corporate model of society of its legitimacy. That is why ‘equal
subjection’ to a sovereign was perceived not as loss but as gain. So we have to
be careful when speaking of the ‘triumph’ of royalty in the fifteenth century.
For, indirectly, it was also the triumph of moral intuitions generated by the
church.
“The task of organizing Europe fell to monarchy because its way had been
prepared by the church. It was not merely that the royal ambition to acquire a
sovereign authority had been shaped by the papal revolution. At the deepest
level – the moral and intellectual level – the church had won the struggle for
the future of Europe. The church had projected the image of society as an
association of individuals, an image which unleashed the centralizing process
in Europe.
“Of course, monarchs were not disinterested exponents of an egalitarian

form of society. They rapidly came to understand how much they stood to
gain in power from the centralizing of legal authority. For them, the prospect
of subduing leading feudal magnates and controlling the church within their
realms was as important as moral considerations generated by Christian
beliefs – often far more important. Nevertheless, unintended consequences
overtook the monarchs. In the process of centralizing laws, manners and ideas
– forging a single society out of what had been separate, parochial societies –
the monarchs not only created states, but also the foundation for a ‘public’ or
‘national’ opinion. The partial emergence of national opinions in the fifteenth
century provides further evidence of the impact of the new image of society
as an association of individuals.
42
“How was this manifest? The prestige of royalty grew because royal power
became the symbol of social progress, the abolition of privilege through
‘equal subjection’. The Third Estate in France or the ‘Commons’ in England
were at times prepared to sacrifice even local self-government in order to
destroy feudal privilege. The creation of a ‘sovereign’ agency seemed far the
most important objective. This was the pattern that marked the growth of
royal power, especially in France. But across France it invested royalty with a
kind of idealism. Equal subjection to a sovereign was seen as developing at
the expense of subordinations based on ‘mere’ custom.
“It would be a mistake therefore to see only the tyrannical potential of the
growth of sovereign authorities, that royal ‘absolutism’ which came to the
fore during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For it contained the seeds
of individual liberty. By claiming a monopoly of legal authority, sovereigns
deprived many traditional attitudes and practices of legal status. What royal
commands did not positively enjoin or forbid, defined – at least potentially –
a sphere of choice and personal freedom.”47
Perhaps Siedentop exaggerates the newness of the concepts of

“sovereignty” and “equal subjection” in the fifteenth century. In the early,
pre-feudal Middle Ages, they were certainly present, and they were the more
present the more lively was the Christian faith of the people. Nevertheless, we
may agree that the web of feudal rights and obligations that arose in the later
Middle Ages had obscured these concepts in the eyes of the average peasant,
whose field of mental vision was very limited both geographically and
socially. Therefore as local feudal obligations became weaker – we may take
1349, the year of the Black Death, as critical here, because from that time social
mobility increased as labour became scarcer and more valuable, - so the sense
of solidarity between peasants of more distant villages became stronger,
together with their loyalty to, or antagonism against, higher lords, including
the king himself, whose power became increasingly felt, not only in the
administration of law, but also in the imposition of taxes and the recruitment
of soldiers to fight in national wars. Thus we find the peasants uniting to rebel
against Richard II to protest against taxes in 1381 – and uniting under Henry V
to fight the French at Agincourt in 1415.
But we may perhaps see a more general psychological law at work here.
When the bonds uniting society at a local level become weaker, and
individualist tendencies increase, so the need for a “sovereign” who will
counter these centripetal tendencies and give the people again a sense of unity
and solidarity becomes greater. In early modern Europe such a sovereign
could only be the king for the reasons that Siedentop cites. We see a more
extreme example of the same law in operation in early twentieth-century
Europe, when the atomized masses of the German and Russian people, who
had lost their faith in their previous sovereigns, attached themselves
47 Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, London: Penguin, 2015,
pp. 344-347.
43
politically, and above all emotionally, to an all-powerful leader who would
unite them and protect them against their enemies, real and fictitious. Human
nature abhors a vacuum; and when the old certainties and authorities lose
their power to command obedience, the masses will unfailingly look for other
certainties and authorities to obey – however rational, free and autonomous
they may think themselves to be…
In this connection, an early attempt to reconcile the ideas of political liberty

and monarchism was made in England, by Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–
1479).His The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy was written
in English in about 1471 but only published in 1714. Fortescue, write Ofir
Haivry and Yoram Hazony, “occupies a position in the Anglo-American
conservative tradition somewhat analogous to Locke in the later liberal
tradition: although not the founder of this tradition, he is nonetheless its first
truly outstanding expositor and the model in light of which the entire
subsequent tradition developed. It is here that any conservative should begin
his or her education in the Anglo-American tradition.
“For eight years during the Wars of the Roses, beginning in 1463, John
Fortescue lived in France with the court of the young prince Edward of
Lancaster, the ‘Red Rose’ claimant to the English throne, who had been driven
into exile by the ‘White Rose’ king Edward IV of York. Fortescue had been a
member of Parliament and for nearly two decades chief justice of the King’s
Bench, the English Supreme Court. In the exiled court, he became the nominal
chancellor of England. While in exile, Fortescue composed several treatises on
the constitution and laws of England, foremost among them a small book
entitled Praise of the Laws of England.
“Although Praise of the Laws of England is often mischaracterized as a work

on law, anyone picking it up will immediately recognize it for what it is: an
early great work of English political philosophy. Far from being a sterile
rehearsal of existing law, it is written as a dialogue between the chancellor of
England and the young prince he is educating, so that he may wisely rule his
realm. It offers a theorist’s explanation of the reasons for regarding the
English constitution as the best model of political government known to man.
(Those who have been taught that it was Montesquieu who first argued that,
of all constitutions, the English constitution is the one best suited for human
freedom will be dismayed to find that this argument is presented more clearly
by Fortescue nearly three hundred years earlier, in a work with which
Montesquieu was probably familiar.)
“According to Fortescue, the English constitution provides for what he

calls ’political and royal government,’ by which he means that English kings
do not rule by their own authority alone (i.e., ‘royal government’), but
together with the representatives of the nation in Parliament and in the courts
(i.e., ‘political government’). In other words, the powers of the English king
are limited by the traditional laws of the English nation, in the same way—as
Fortescue emphasizes—that the powers of the Jewish king in the Mosaic
44
constitution in Deuteronomy are limited by the traditional laws of the
Israelite nation. This is in contrast with the Holy Roman Empire of Fortescue’s
day, which was supposedly governed by Roman law, and therefore by the
maxim that ‘what pleases the prince has the force of law,’ and in contrast with
the kings of France, who governed absolutely. Among other things, the
English law is described as providing for the people’s representatives, rather
than the king, to determine the laws of the realm and to approve requests
from the king for taxes.
“In addition to this discussion of what later tradition would call the
separation of powers and the system of checks and balances, Fortescue also
devotes extended discussion to the guarantee of due process under law,
which he explores in his discussion of the superior protections afforded to the
individual under the English system of trial by jury. Crucially, Fortescue
consistently connects the character of a nation’s laws and their protection of
private property to economic prosperity, arguing that limited government
bolsters such prosperity, while an absolute government leads the people to
destitution and ruin. In another of his writings, The Difference between an
Absolute and a Limited Monarchy (also known as The Governance of England, c.
1471), he starkly contrasts the well-fed and healthy English population living
under their limited government with the French, whose government was
constantly confiscating their property and quartering armies in their towns—
at the residents’ expense—by unilateral order of the king. The result of such
arbitrary taxation and quartering is, as Fortescue writes, that the French
people have been ‘so impoverished and destroyed that they may hardly live. .
. . Verily, they live in the most extreme poverty and misery, and yet they
dwell in one of the most fertile parts of the world.’
“Like later conservative tradition, Fortescue does not believe that either
scripture or human reason can provide a universal law suitable for all nations.
We do find him drawing frequently on the Mosaic constitution and the
biblical ‘Four Books of Kings’ (1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings) to assist in
understanding the political order and the English constitution. Nevertheless,
Fortescue emphasizes that the laws of each realm reflect the historic
experience and character of each nation, just as the English common law is in
accord with England’s historic experience. Thus, for example, Fortescue
argues that a nation that is self-disciplined and accustomed to obeying the
laws voluntarily rather than by coercion is one that can productively
participate in the way it is governed. This, Fortescue proposes, was true of the
people of England, while the French, who were of undisciplined character,
could be governed only by the harsh and arbitrary rule of absolute royal
government. On the other hand, Fortescue also insisted, again in keeping with
biblical precedent and later conservative tradition, that this kind of national
character was not set in stone, and that such traits could be gradually
improved or worsened over time.
“Fortescue was eventually permitted to return to England, but his loyalty

to the defeated House of Lancaster meant that he never returned to power. He
45
was to play the part of chancellor of England only in his philosophical
dialogue, Praise of the Laws of England. His book, however, went on to become
one of the most influential works of political thought in history. Fortescue
wrote in the decades before the Reformation, and as a firm Catholic. But every
page of his work breathes the spirit of English nationalism—the belief that
through long centuries of experience, and thanks to a powerful ongoing
identification with Hebrew Scripture, the English had succeeded in creating a
form of government more conducive to human freedom and flourishing than
any other known to man. First printed around 1545, Fortescue’s Praise of the
Laws of England spoke in a resounding voice to that period of heightened
nationalist sentiment in which English traditions, now inextricably identified
with Protestantism, were pitted against the threat of invasion by Spanish-
Catholic forces aligned with the Holy Roman Emperor.
“This environment quickly established Fortescue as England’s first great

political theorist, paving the way for him to be read by centuries of law
students in both England and America and by educated persons wherever the
broader Anglo-American conservative tradition struck root…”
“Under the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, Fortescue’s account of the virtues of

England’s traditional institutions [became] an integral part of the self-
understanding of a politically independent English nation.” 48
48 Haivry and Hazony “What is Conservatism?” American Affairs, Summer, 2017, vol. I, no. 2.
46
4. SPAIN, THE JEWS AND THE MUSLIMS
The most important of the various kinds of freedom proclaimed at the

Renaissance was the idea of the freedom and autonomy of the mind, the belief
that the mind and reason do not need to be checked against any higher
authority. This belief is known as rationalism, and came in at least three forms:
Jewish, Catholic and Protestant. If the Middle Ages saw the flowering of
Catholic rationalism, the early Modern Age saw the flowering of Jewish and
Protestant rationalism and their gradual merging into one by the time of the
French Revolution.
The origins of Jewish rationalism may be traced to the expulsion of the

Jews from Spain in 1492. The origins of this in turn can be traced to the
Spanish re-conquest of the last outpost of Muslim Spain, Granada, in the same
year, which had brought in its train a large number of Jews who had obtained
important posts under the Moors. The Spanish conquerors were much less
tolerant of the Jews than the Moors had been. Thus in 1391, during a civil war
in Castile, both sides had accused the Jews, and hundreds, perhaps thousands,
were killed. During this period many Jews converted to Christianity to avoid
persecution. Many of these conversos – or, as they were less politely known,
marranos (“pigs”) - did well under their new rulers. One became Bishop of
Burgos; another was King Ferdinand’s treasurer; the five top administrative
posts in Aragon were occupied by them. However, these converts were
suspected by many of continuing to practise the Jewish faith in secret, which
led to riots by the “old” Christians against the “new”.
Also, it came to be thought that a Jew by race could never really become a
Christian. As Andrew Wheatcroft writes: “During the fifteenth century, the
dominant Christian states in Spain began to develop a new theory of the
infidel. In this view, Judaism and, by extension, Islam, carried a genetic taint
and thus no convert of Jewish or Muslim stock could ever carry the True Faith
purely, as could someone of ‘untainted’ Christian descent…
“This latent tendency within Hispanic society was elaborated into a body
of law from the mid fifteenth century, but emerging from below rather than
by royal decree. The first instance was in 1449, when Pero Sarmiento – the
leader of a rebellion in Toledo against royal support for Jewish converts –
issued a declaration that no one except an Old Christian of untainted blood
could ever hold public office… Over the next forty years, more and more
institutions adopted requirements that ‘purity of blood’ (limpieza de sangre)
should be a prerequisite for membership of a guild or any similar body. The
vocabulary that was used is particularly significant: the ‘Old Christians’
described themselves as the ‘pure’ (limpios); they were ‘fine Christians’, and
the assumption was that the converts were impure and coarse.” 49
49 Wheatcroft, Infidels, London: Penguin Books, 2004, pp. 104-105.
47
The Inquisition, which had originally been created to hunt down the
Cathar heretics, was re-founded by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478. In 1480 it was
called in by Queen Isabella of Castile, with the approval of her husband, King
Ferdinand of Aragon, to determine the truth of an individual’s convictions by
means of torture. The notorious Spanish Inquisition, “the first institution of
united Spain”50, while officially an ecclesiastical institution, served the desire
of the Spanish state for uniformity within its dominions so well that
“henceforth treason and heresy were virtually indistinguishable" 51 . Some
13,000 conversos were killed by the Inquisition during the first twelve years of
its existence.52 Ironically, the first inspector-general of the Inquisition in Spain,
the notorious Tomas de Torquemada (1420-98), was himself of Jewish descent
– his grandmother was a converso.53 He became the model for Dostoyevsky’s
Grand Inquisitor…
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh write: “From the outset of its creation,
the Spanish Inquisition had cast covetous eyes on Judaic wealth. It also
regarded Jews themselves with implacable antipathy, simply because they lay
outside its official legal jurisdiction. According to its original brief, the
Inquisition was authorised to deal with heretics – that is, with Christians who
had deviated from orthodox formulations of the faith. It had no powers,
however, over adherents of altogether different religions, such as Jews and
Muslims. Judaic and Islamic communities in Spain were large. In consequence,
a considerable portion of the population remained exempt from the
Inquisition’s control; and for an institution that sought to exercise total control,
such a situation was deemed intolerable.
“The Inquisition’s first step was to act against so-called ‘Judaizers’. A

converso who returned to Judaism after having embraced Christianity could
conveniently be labelled a heretic. By extension, so could anyone who
encouraged him in his heresy – and this transgression could be further
extended to include, by implication, all Jews. But the Inquisition was still
handicapped because it had to produce – or concoct – evidence for each case it
sought to prosecute; and this was not always easy to do.
“The Inquisition enthusiastically endorsed the virulent anti-Semitism

already being promulgated by a notorious preacher, Alonso de Espina, who
hated both Jews and conversos alike. Mobilising popular support behind him,
Alonso had advocated the complete extirpation of Judaism from Spain –
50 Davies, op. cit., p. 453. United, also, with the people; for “throughout the history of the
Inquisition, commentators agreed on the impressive support given to it by the people”

(Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, London: The Folio Society, 1998, p. 69). At the same
time, Torquemada went around with an armed escort numbering in the hundreds, which
implies that he had something to fear from the people…
51 Davies, op. cit., p. 453.
52 Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God, New York: Ballantine Books, 2001, p. 7. William
Winsham gives the lower figure of 3000 in the reign of Isabella (“Isabella of Castile’s Spanish
Inquisition”, All About History, p. 37).
53 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercus, 2012, p. 170.
48
either by expulsion or by extermination. Embracing Alonso’s programme, the
Inquisition embarked on its own assiduous anti-Semitic propaganda… Citing
the anti-Semitism it had thus contrived to provoke in the populace at large,
the Inquisition petitioned the Crown to adopt ‘appropriate’ measures. The
proposal to expel all Jews from Spain stemmed directly from the Inquisition
[specifically, from Torquemada]…
“King Ferdinand recognised that persecution of Jews and conversos would

inevitably have adverse economic repercussions for the country. Neither he
nor Queen Isabella, however, could resist the combined pressure of the
Inquisition and the popular sentiment it had invoked. In a letter to his most
influential nobles and courtiers, the king wrote: ‘The Holy Office of the
Inquisition, seeing how some Christians are endangered by contact and
communication with the Jews, has provided that the Jews be expelled from all
our realms and territories, and has persuaded us to give our support and
agreement to this… we do so despite the great harm to ourselves, seeking and
preferring the salvation of our souls above our own profit…’
“On 1 January 1483, the monarchs wrote to appease the Inquisition in

Andalucia, announcing that all Jews living in the region were to be expelled.
On 12 May 1486, all Jews were driven from large tracts of Aragon. But
wholesale expulsion had to be deferred for the moment because money and
other forms of support from Jews and conversos were urgently needed for the
ongoing campaign against the Muslims, pushed back into their ever-
contracting Kingdom of Granada.”54
In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella, having united Aragon and Castile by their
marriage, conquered Granada in the south to complete the reconquest of
Spain for the Cross. “With deep emotion,” writes Karen Armstrong, “the
crowd watched the Christian banner raised ceremonially upon the city walls
and, as the news broke, bells pealed triumphantly all over Europe, for
Granada was the last Muslim stronghold in [Western] Christendom. The
Crusades against Islam in the Middle East had failed, but at least the Muslims
had been flushed out of Europe. In 1499, the Muslim inhabitants of Spain
were given the option of conversion to Christianity or deportation, after
which, for a few centuries, Europe would become Muslim-free.”55
Three months after the conquest of Granada the Edict of Expulsion of the
Jews was issued. “Spanish Jewry was destroyed,” writes Armstrong. “About
70,000 Jews converted to Christianity, and stayed on to be plagued by the
Inquisition; the remaining 130,000… went into exile.”56
54
Baigent and Leigh, The Inquisition, London: Penguin Books, 2000, pp. 76-78.
55
Armstrong, The Battle for God, pp. 3-4. In 1610 all the Moors, whether converted or not, were
expelled from Spain.
56
Armstrong, op. cit., p. 7. However the Jewish Professor Norman Cantor disputes this
figure, giving the true figure as “only around forty thousand, about half the practicing Jews
left the country in 1492” (The Sacred Chain, London: Fontana, 1996, pp. 189-190). Another
Jewish professor, Montefiore (op. cit., p. 173) gives 30-80,000.
49
The Jews who were expelled – called the Sephardic Jews after their word
for Spain, “Sepharad” – spread throughout the West, especially Portugal and
Amsterdam (then in the Spanish Netherlands); a substantial minority
migrated to the Ottoman empire, to Constantinople, Smyrna and Thessalonica.
They brought with them ideas and influences that were to be of enormous
importance in the development of the West and in the eventual destruction of
its Christian character.
Many of the conversos who remained in Spain voluntarily accepted

Catholicism – for example, Teresa of Avila. “It is not an exaggeration,” writes
Cantor, “to see the role of scions of converted Jewish families as central to the
Spanish Renaissance of the early sixteenth century, as were Jews in the
modernist cultural revolution of the early twentieth century. In both cases
complete access to general culture induced an explosion of intellectual
creativity.” 57
However, there were many who both lost touch with Judaism and could
not adapt to Catholicism. “In consequence,” writes Armstrong, “they had no
real allegiance to any faith. Long before secularism, atheism, and religious
indifference became common in the rest of Europe, we find instances of these
essentially modern attitudes among the Marrano Jews of the Iberian
peninsula”.58
As Cantor writes, “a rationalist, scientific, antitraditional frame of mind,

sceptical about the core of religious culture, arose among some Marrano
families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The emergence of a post-
Christian commonwealth secular mentality can be traced to a handful of
Marrano families who found themselves caught between Judaism and
Christianity, bouncing back and forth between the two faiths and cultures,
until they became disoriented and disenchanted equally with priests and
rabbis.
“We can see this secularisation with the Spanish New Christian Fernando
de Rojas, the creator of the subversive picaresque novel (La Celestina) in the
early sixteenth century, and the forerunner of Cervantes’s critique of decaying
medieval culture. We can see it in the sceptical humanism of the French
humanist Montaigne, who was also of Marrano lineage. We can see it in the
writings of two Dutch Jews of Portuguese extraction in the third quarter of
the seventeenth century – Uriel de Costa, who condemned rabbinical Judaism
and was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam, and
Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, who turned away from the whole theistic tradition
toward a new kind of scientific naturalism and universalism and was also
excommunicated from the Jewish community.
57 Cantor, op. cit., p. 189.

58
Armstrong, op. cit., p. 15.
50
“The Marrano descendants who were buffeted about in the sixteenth
century from one religion to another became alienated from both, and turned
first to money-making in international mercantilist capitalism and then
secular, scientific rationalism. They were immensely successful in these
endeavours…”59
Of these Marrano rationalists, probably the most important was Spinoza,

who was excommunicated by the rabbis of Amsterdam in 1656. “Like many
modern people,” writes Armstrong, “Spinoza regarded religion with distaste.
Given his experience of excommunication, this was hardly surprising. He
dismissed the revealed faiths as a ‘compound of credulity and prejudices’,
and ‘a tissue of meaningless mysteries’. He had found ecstasy in the
untrammelled use of reason, not by immersing himself in the biblical text, and
as a result, he viewed Scripture in an entirely objective way [sic!]. Instead of
experiencing it as a revelation of the divine, Spinoza insisted that the Bible be
read like any other text. He was one of the first to study the Bible scientifically,
examining the historical background, the literary genres, and the question of
authorship. He also used the Bible to explore his philosophical ideas. Spinoza
was one of the first people in Europe to promote the ideal of a secular,
democratic state which would become one of the hallmarks of Western
modernity. He argued that once the priests had acquired more power than the
kings of Israel, the laws of the state became punitive and restrictive.
Originally, the kingdom of Israel had been theocratic but because, in
Spinoza’s view, God and the people were one and the same, the voice of the
people had been supreme. Once the priests seized control, the voice of God
could no longer be heard. But Spinoza was no populist. Like most pre-
modern philosophers, he was an elitist who believed the masses to be
incapable of rational thought. They would need some form of religion to give
them a modicum of enlightenment, but this religion must be reformed, based
not on so-called revealed law but on the natural principles of justice,
fraternity, and liberty…”60
In 2012, after a consultation with four scholars, the Chief Rabbi of

Amsterdam Pinchas Toledano refused to lift the herem (excommunication) on
Spinoza. “In his announcement,” writes Steven Nadler, “he noted that ‘the
fact that [Spinoza] has been buried in a non-Jewish cemetery shows clearly
that, to the last breath of his life, he was indifferent to the herem, and that he
never asked for forgiveness or did teshuva.’ Moreover, he said: ‘How on earth
can we even consider removing the herem from a person with such
preposterous ideas, where he was tearing apart the very fundaments of our
religion… The moment we rescind the herem…it would imply that we share
his heretic views.’ Toledano concluded that the leaders of the community in
59
Cantor, op. cit., pp. 192-193.
60 Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 23-24.
51
the 17th century knew exactly what they were doing, and therefore he had no
right to rescind their ruling.61
In 1605 Miguel de Cervantes published his famous novel Don Quixote. As

Miranda France notes, in the novel “compassion [is] shown towards a Muslim
character who has been first made to convert by the Inquisition, and then
expelled from Spain – as all Muslim converts were, in 1609. Last year [2015],
Spain offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled in
1492, but the offer wasn’t extended to the descendants of expelled Muslims.
Meanwhile, residents of the village Castrillo Matajudios (‘Kill Jews Camp’)
voted to change the name, but Valle de Matamoros (‘Kill Moors Valley’) has
yet to follow suit. What would Cervantes say?”62
61 Nader, “In or Out: the Spinoza Case”, The Tablet, December 8, 2015,
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/195668/in-or-out-the-spinoza-case.
62 France, “Nothing is What it Seems”, Prospect, April, 2016, p. 68.
52
5. LUTHER AND THE PRINTING PRESS
In 1517 a German monk called Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses
on the church door of Wittenberg. Thus began the second great intellectual
revolution of modern Europe after liberal humanism – the Protestant
Reformation. All the main Protestant churches were founded in the following
years: the Lutheran, the Anglican (1534), the Calvinist (1555), the Presbyterian
(1560), the Congregationalist (1582), and the Baptist (1609).
Almost all the main ideas of Protestantism had appeared centuries before,
in the Proto-Protestantism of such men as the Italian Marsilius, the
Englishman John Wycliffe and the Czech Jan Hus. But by about 1450 they had
been crushed by the resurgent power of the post-Avignon-schism papacy.
What enabled them finally to triumph and take root in the early sixteenth
century? First, the general atmosphere of intellectual freedom engendered by
liberal humanism. And secondly, the invention of the printing press.
The printing press was invented in Mainz beween 1446 and 1450 by
Johannes Gutenburg. “By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout
Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million volumes. In
the 16th century, with presses spreading further afield, their output rose
tenfold to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies. The operation of a press
became synonymous with the enterprise of printing, and lent its name to a
new branch of media, ‘the press’.”63 Luther’s tracts were written in German,
and were immediately spread far and wide through the new technology of
the printing press. Apart from their impact on theological discussion, they
gave an important impulse to the unity and self-consciousness of the German
nation. Luther’s translation of the Bible “into sharp, pungent, popular
German”64 was the most culturally influential work to come off Gutenberg’s
presses. It has been called “the central document in the evolution of the
German language”, comparable to that of the King James Bible on English.
Combined with the fine German-language hymns like Ein feste burg that
Luther created for the people, this gave the Protestants an attractiveness that
the Catholics had difficulty in matching.
Printing was also crucial to the Reformation’s success. “Cities with at least
one printing press,” writes Niall Ferguson, “were significantly more likely to
adopt Protestantism than cities without printing, but it was cities with
multiple competing printers that were most likely to turn Protestant.”65 In fact,
the invention of the press gave an enormous impetus to learning of all kinds.
Not since the great Irish monastic schools of the early Middle Ages were so
many people able to read, not only Latin, but also Greek and Hebrew as a
result of the printing revolution. Of course, this was partly the result of the
63 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press.
64 Marr, op. cit., p. 277.
65 Ferguson, The Square and the Tower, London: Penguin, 2018, p. 83.
53
emigration of many Greek scholars to the West after 1453. But printing spread
Greek scholarship further.
Robert Tombs writes: “There was a desire to re-examine the sources of

beliefs by studying original texts. In the 1430s, for example, philology had
demonstrated that the supposedly fourth-century ‘Donation of Constantine’,
which the papacy had claimed as the origin of its temporal authority, was a
forgery.
“By far the most important new text was the Bible itself. Newly acquired
knowledge of languages meant that humanist scholars could study the
recently published Greek and Hebrew originals, even finding mistakes in the
orthodox Latin ‘Vulgate’, St. Jerome’s thousand-year-old translation on which
the Western Church had based its teachings. The most famous humanist,
Erasmus of Rotterdam, in 1516 produced an edition of the Greek New
Testament with a new parallel Latin translation giving changes of wording –
significant because fundamental beliefs could hang on particular phrases,
even words. Humanists such as Erasmus66, John Colet, the dean of St. Paul’s,
and Thomas More, lawyer, member of Parliament and 1529 Chancellor, had
hoped that these intellectual advances would lead to religious reform and
renewal. But they became weapons in an assault on authority.
“Printing (from the 1430s) and cheaper paper meant that copies of ancient
texts and modern translations could be made available outside the clerical
and aristocratic elite, even to ordinary literate people – the gentry, merchants,
yeomen, artisans. Printed Bibles appeared in German in 1466, and in Italian,
Dutch, French, Spanish and Czech in the 1470s. Lay readers ceased to be
dependent on the clergy to transmit the word of God. Instead of asking what
God meant (which required experts to explain) they began to ask simply what
God said, and decide on his meaning themselves. England was well behind
on this because of strict anti-Lollard legislation.
“Late medieval Christianity, like most religions, invested enormously in

mechanisms of salvation: ceremonies, rituals, chapels, chantries, shrines, relics,
statues, pilgrimages and indulgences. This familiar, beautiful, mysterious and
yet accessible form of worship provided comfort and hope. Most people clung
to it. Most of the cultural glories of Europe derived from it, as did the power
and wealth of the Church. But it could become a squalid transaction between
man and God by which favour, forgiveness and salvation were bought by
performing a quasi-magical act, paying a fee, making a material gift to God or
a saint, or bequeathing money for posthumous prayers. Intellectual scepticism
66 The Dutch Christian humanist and Bible scholar Desiderius Erasmus was an especially
important figure. If the Reformation had proceeded along his, rather than Luther’s lines,
history might have been very different. “His slogan was Ad fontes: ‘Back to the wellsprings!’
Erasmus believed that the authentic Christian faith of the early church had been buried under
a mound of lifeless medieval theology. By stripping away these later accretions and going
back to the sources – the Bible and the Fathers of the Church – Christians would recover the
living kernel of the Gospels and experience new birth” (Armstrong, op. cit., p. 5).
54
could draw on traditional resentment of the clergy’s wealth, as in the early
example of Lollardy. ‘Jesus said, “Feed my lambs,” not “Shear my sheep”,
joked English reformers.’
“Luther’s open challenge in 1517 was a denunciation of the ‘sale’ of

indulgences, by which punishment for sin could be remitted by a cash
donation to the Church – currently, to build the magnificent basilica of St.
Peter in Rome. Luther rejected the whole system of belief on which this kind
of piety was based. Drawing on ideas of the fifth-century St. Augustine [and
the first-century St. Paul], he denied that merit or forgiveness could be gained
by anything that sinful man could do: salvation depended solely on the mercy
of God. Human beings could do nothing to deserve this mercy: God chose
them to receive it. Though this idea had always been present in Western
Christian teaching, the conclusions that Luther began to draw were that many
of the activities of the Church, including most of the sacraments, were best
useless and at worst blasphemous, and that its ruling authorities were corrupt
and oppressive, in effect perpetrating a huge confidence trick on Christians.
“Luther’s message appealed to many educated people, first of all in the

German and Swiss cities, who were already emancipating themselves
intellectually from the clergy by reading the Bible, which seemed to be the
true way to faith, godliness and salvation. Luther also appealed, as Wyclif
had done more than a century earlier, to nobles and princes for whom
bishops, abbots and the Pope were powerful and wealthy rivals. Luther and
his followers believed that religion and society needed authority, but that
Christian princes, not the Pope, would yield it. It turned out that authority
and order were not so easily preserved amid the moral and intellectual
revolution Luther had ignited. Over much of northern Europe, crowds
smashed statues in churches. In 1524, popular revolts, the so-called Peasants’
War, began to sweep across Central Europe from the Rhine to Poland.
Ancient social tensions were inflamed by religious radicalism, despite
Luther’s furious denunciation of ‘thieving murdering peasants’. Many
thousands were eventually slaughtered, tortured and executed in the biggest
ideological upheaval in Europe since before the French Revolution. No one
could doubt that religious dissension affected everything.
“Amid this European turmoil, in 1526 a young former Oxford scholar,

William Tyndale, began to print copies in Cologne of his English translation
of the New Testament from the Greek, undertaken in defiance of English law.
They were seized in a raid on his printer, but he began again in Worms, and
then again in Antwerp. Tyndale… believed that biblical interpretation did not
require clerical authority, for it was simple and unambiguous: ‘The scripture
hath but one sense, which is the literal sense’. Perhaps 16,000 copies of his
translation were smuggled into England over the next ten years (compared
with the hundreds of manuscript copies the Lollards had managed to
produce). He is supposed to have said to a critic that ‘ere many years I will
55
cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than
thou dost’. This was a truly revolutionary ambition…”67
67 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 160-162.
56
6. LUTHER AND THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE
What is the root dogma of Protestantism, more fundamental than its well-
known teachings on Holy Scripture, on faith and works, and on the Church?
We can find the answer to this question, not so much in any printed works of
the Reformers, as in their most famous historical encounter.
Luther’s printed works spread rapidly, and in 1521 he was summoned to

appear before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Imperial Diet in
Worms. “Already excommunicated by Leo X,” writes Bridget Heal, “Luther
faced condemnation by the pope’s secular counterpart, the most powerful
monarch in Christendom. Even more than the posting of the Ninety-Five
Theses, Luther’s appearance at the Rhineland city was a defining moment in
the Reformation. Luther and his companions spent ten days travelling west
from Wittenberg and were greeted enthusiastically along the way. When the
reformer arrived at Worms, 2,000 people supposedly gathered in the streets,
testimony to the public interest Luther had awoken. On April 17th, as he went
to the Diet, people climbed onto rooftops in their eagerness to see him; his
arrival was described in terms that consciously echoes the story of Christ’s
entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. Clothed in a simple black cassock, he
stood alone before the assembled might and splendour of the Empire. He was
presented with a pile of books and was asked whether they were his and
whether he would retract what he had written. He requested an adjournment
and when he appeared again the following day, he delivered an
extraordinarily courageous speech, refusing to recant and concluding that
‘unless I am convinced by the testimony of scriptures I have quoted and by
clear reason… I am bound by the scriptures and my conscience is captive to
the Word of God.’ According to the account of events published by his
supporters shortly afterwards, he added: ‘I cannot do otherwise, here I stand,
may God help me. Amen.
“The events at Worms propelled his message far beyond those concerned
with theology and the reform of the German church. His defiance of the
emperor and of the secular and ecclesiastical estates of the Empire became,
even during his own lifetime, legendary. It made him into a hero…”68
Luther’s reported words – “Here I stand, so help me God, I can do no other”

– represent the essence of his creed and of his revolutionary challenge to the
whole of Western Christendom. For by placing his individual conscience
above every authority, whether secular or ecclesiastical, he undermined all
authority, replacing it with the most individualist kind of anarchism.
Of course, he also appealed to Scripture, to the Word of God. But what was
Holy Scripture? Luther himself would judge that. “Notoriously,” writes John
Barton, “he went further than almost any Christian before or since in
concluding that certain books were not an authentic expression of the gospel,
68 Heal, “Martin Luther and the German Reformation”, History Today, March, 2017, pp. 34-35.
57
and when he translated the Bible he removed them to an appendix. The books
in question are Esther (demoted because it nowhere mentions God), Hebrews,
James and Revelation. Conversely, Luther was prepared to say which books
were the most important, the ‘truest and noblest books’: John, Romans,
Galatians, Ephesians, 1 Peter and 1 John… Thus Luther’s criticism of
authority reached even to criticism of the authority of parts of the Bible itself,
in the name of principles derived from what he took to be the Bible’s overall
drift.”69
By making every unaided individual believer the interpreter of Scripture,

he effectively undermined scriptural authority also. Scripture, the written
word of God, was only a seeming authority, a fig-leaf to hide the real
authority, the believer’s self-will. The only authority left was the naked ego…
And yet even the holy Apostle Paul, whose Epistle to the Romans was such
an important text to Luther, did not rely on his own individual conscience
and revelation alone, but checked his convictions against those of the other
apostles. As he writes: “I went up [to Jerusalem] by revelation, and
communicated to them that Gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but
privately to those who were of reputation, lest by any chance I might run, or
had run, in vain” (Galatians 2.2). For Paul knew that even he, who had
received the Gospel, not from men, but from the Lord Jesus Christ Himself,
could still err because of the sin that still dwelt in him as it dwells in all mortal
men. For the truth is given to the Church, “the pillar and ground of the Truth”
(I Timothy 3.15), whose existence and authority will survive even the gates of
hell (Matthew 16.18). But any individual member of the Church, no matter
who he is, may fall away from it and therefore from the truth. That is why St.
Paul discipline his body, “lest, when I have preached to others, I myself
should become disqualified” (I Corinthians 9.27) as a witness to the truth.
Luther’s attitude is what we may call Protestant rationalism; it was born in

the soil of Catholic rationalism, which consisted in placing the mind of one
man, the Pope, above the Catholic consciousness of the Church, the Mind of
Christ. Protestantism rejected Papism, but did not reject its underlying
principle. Thus instead of placing the mind of one man above the Church, it
placed the mind of every man, every believer, above it. As Luther himself
declared: “In matters of faith each Christian is for himself Pope and
Church.”70 And so Protestantism, as New Hieromartyr Archbishop Hilarion
(Troitsky) put it, “placed a papal tiara on every German professor and, with
its countless number of popes, completely destroyed the concept of the
Church, substituting faith with the reason of each separate personality.”71
69 Barton, A History of the Bible, London: Allen Lane, 2019, pp. 394-395.
70 Martin Luthers Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Weimar, 1885, 405, 35. Quoted by Deacon John
Whiteford in ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU, September 6, 1999.
71 Archbishop Hilarion, Christianity or the Church?, Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971,
p. 28.
58
As Frank Furedi writes, “His defiant stand, would eventually provide
legitimation for disobeying all forms of authority….
“Did Luther really hurl the legendary words – ‘Here I stand, so help me
God, I can do no other’ – at his accusers? In a sense it does not matter. Luther
did not merely assert the authority of individual conscience to justify his own
actions: he advanced a compelling case for the value of people being able to
act in accordance with the dictates of their conscience. In so doing his
argument implicitly called into question the right of external authority to
exercise power over the inner life of people.
“The distinction that Luther drew about the nature of authority

represented an important step in the conceptualisation of a new limit on its
exercise. His Treatise on Good Works (1520) asserted that ‘the power of the
temporal authority, whether it does right or wrong, cannot harm the soul’.
This idealisation of the soul and its protected status from external authority
encouraged European culture to devote greater interest in individual
conscience and eventually to endow the self with moral authority.
“In helping to free the inner person from the power of external authority,
Luther’s theology contributed to the weakening of the very concept of
external authority, including that of divine authority [my italics – V.M.] The
freeing of the inner person from the power of external authority restricted the
exercise of absolute authority in all its forms. ”72
The Russian Slavophile Ivan Vasilievich Kireyevsky compared Western

rationalism, both Catholic and Protestant, with the Orthodox love of wisdom
as follows: “The main trait distinguishing Orthodox Christianity from the
Latin confession and the Protestant teaching of the faith in their influence on
the intellectual and moral development of man consists in the fact that the
Orthodox Church strictly adheres to the boundary between Divine Revelation
and human reason, that it preserves without any change the dogmas of
Revelation as they have existed from the first days of Christianity and have
been confirmed by the Ecumenical Councils, not allowing the hand of man to
touch their holiness or allowing human reason to modify their meaning and
expression in accordance with its temporary systems. But at the same time the
Orthodox Church does not restrict reason in its natural activity and in its free
striving to search out the truths not communicated to it by Revelation; but it
does not give to any rational system or plausible view of science the status of
infallible truth, ascribing to them an identical inviolability and holiness to that
possessed by Divine Revelation.
“The Latin church, on the contrary, does not know any firm boundaries
between human reason and Divine Revelation. It ascribes to its visible head or
to a local council the right to introduce a new dogma into the number of those
revealed and confirmed by the Ecumenical Councils; to some systems of
72 Furedi, “The Invention of Individual Freedom”, History Today, April, 2017, p. 7.
59
human reason it ascribes the exceptional right of ascendancy over others, and
in this way, even if it does not directly destroy the revealed dogmas, it
changes their meaning, while it restricts human reason in the freedom of its
natural activity and limits its sacred right and duty to seek from a
rapprochement between human truths and Divine truths, natural truths and
revealed ones.
“The Protestant teachings of the faith are based on the same annihilation of
the boundary between human reason and Divine revelation, with this
difference from the Latin teaching, however, that they do not raise any human
point of view or systematic mental construction to the level of Divine
Revelation, thereby restricting the activity of reason; but, on the contrary, they
give human reason ascendancy over the Divine dogmas, changing them or
annihilating them in accordance with the personal reasoning of man…
“It is natural that the follower of the Protestant confession, recognizing

reason to be the chief foundation of truth, should in accordance with the
measure of his education more and more submit his faith itself to his personal
reasoning, until the concepts of natural reason take the place for him of all the
Traditions of Divine Revelation and the Holy Apostolic Church.
“[However,] where only pure Divine Revelation is recognized to be higher

than reason – Revelation which man cannot alter in accordance with his own
reasonings, but with which he can only bring his reasoning into agreement, -
there, naturally, the more educated a man or a people is, the more its concepts
will be penetrated with the teaching of the faith, for the truth is one and the
striving to find this oneness amidst the variety of the cognitive and
productive actions of the mind is the constant law of all development. But in
order to bring the truths of reason into agreement with the truth of Revelation
that is above reason a dual activity of reason is necessary. It is not enough to
arrange one’s rational concepts in accordance with the postulates of faith, to
choose those that agree with them and exclude those that contradict them,
and thereby purify them of all contradiction: it is also necessary to raise the
very mode of rational activity to the level at which reason can sympathise
with faith and where both spheres merge into one seamless contemplation of
the truth. Such is the aim determining the direction of the mental
development of the Orthodox Christian, and the inner consciousness of this
sought-after region of mental activity is constantly present in every
movement of his reason, the breathing of his mental life…”73
73 Kireyevsky, “Indifferentizm” (“Indifferentism”), in Razum na puti k istine (Reason on the
Path to Truth), Moscow, 2002, pp. 88-91.
60
7. LUTHER ON PREDESTINATION
What gave Luther this boldness, this extreme self-confidence in the

infallibility of his own conscience and his own reasoning? The answer lies in
another characteristic and fundamental doctrine of Protestantism,
predestination. It was their belief that they were elect and saved that gave the
Reformers the boldness – more exactly, the extreme folly – to raise their minds
above all established authority.
“Predestination,” wrote Christopher Hill, “is at the heart of Protestantism.

Luther saw that it was the only guarantee of the Covenant. ‘For if you doubt,
or disdain to know that God foreknows and wills all things, not contingently
but necessarily and immutably, how can you believe confidently, trust to and
depend upon his promises?’ Without predestination, ‘Christian faith is utterly
destroyed, and the promises of God and the whole Gospel entirely fall to the
ground for the greatest and only consolation of Christians in their adversities
is the knowing that God lies not, but does all things immutably, and that his
will cannot be resisted, changed or hindered’. Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.
Luther declared that he would not have wanted free will, even if it could have
been granted to him: only God can make salvation certain, for some it not for
all. Indeed, the whole point for Luther lies in the uniqueness of the elect. Once
touched with divine grace they are differentiated from the mass of humanity:
their consciousness of salvation will make them work consciously to glorify
God. The psychological effects of this conscious segregation of a group from
the mass is enormous.
“Calvin went a step further and boldly proclaimed that God was useless to
humanity unless he had knowable purposes which we can trust and with
which we can cooperate. ‘What avails it, in short, to know a God with whom
we have nothing to do… How can the idea of God enter your mind without
instantly giving rise to the thought that since you are his workmanship, you
are bound, by the very law of creation, to submit to his authority?’ ‘Ignorance
of Providence is the greatest of all miseries, and the knowledge of it the
highest happiness.’ Faith gives us ‘sure certainty and complete security of
mind’, of a sort that is self-evident to those who possess it and inexplicable to
those who do not.
“Men have often commented on the apparent paradox of a predestinarian

theological system producing in its adherents an emphasis on effort, on moral
energy. One explanation that has been offered is that, for the Calvinist, faith
revealed itself in works, and that therefore the only way in which an
individual could be assured of his own salvation was by scrutinizing his
behaviour carefully night and day to see where he did in fact bring forth
works worthy of salvation…
“But I am not entirely convinced that this is the sole explanation. It is

highly sophisticated. Most of the evidence for it among the preachers comes
from the later seventeenth century, when for other reasons works were being
61
emphasized once more. I believe that the resolution of the paradox is
psychologically simpler, if philosophically more complex. Salvation,
consciousness of election, consisted of the turning of the heart towards God.
A man knew that he was saved because he felt, at some stage of his life, an
inner satisfaction, a glow, which told him that he was in direct communion
with God. Cromwell was said to have died happy when assured that grace
once known could never be lost: for once he had been in a state of grace. We
are not dealing here with the mystical ecstasy of a recluse: we are dealing
rather with the conscience of the average gentleman, merchant or artisan.
What gave him consciousness of election was not the painful scrutiny of his
works, for the preachers never tired of telling him that none could keep the
commandment, that ‘we cannot cooperate with any grace of God’ unless there
is ‘a special spirit infused’. It was the sense of elation and power that justified
him and his worldly activities, that gave him self-confidence in a world of
economic uncertainty and political hostility. The elect were those who
thought they were elect, because they had an inner faith which made them
feel free, whatever their external difficulties.
“Philosophically, the argument is circular. But Calvinism did not exist

primarily as a philosophical system. It gave courage and confidence to a
group of those who believed themselves to be God’s elect. It justified them, in
this world and the next… ‘Men, who have assurance that they are to inherit
heaven, have a way of presently taking possession of the earth.’”74
Thus in order to understand Protestantism we must go beyond the

intellectual pride that it inherited from Papism and Renaissance humanism to
the emotional vacuum that it sought to fill – and filled with some success,
although the new wine it proposed to pour into the old bottles of
Christendom turned out to be distinctly vinegary. For it was not their protests
against the abuses of Papism that made Luther and Calvin such important
figures: Wycliff and Hus, Machiavelli and Erasmus and many others had been
exposing these abuses long before Luther nailed his theses to the church door
in Worms. What distinguished Luther and Calvin was that they were able to
offer hungry hearts that no longer believed in the certainties of Holy Tradition
another kind of certainty – that offered by faith in one’s individual infallibility,
and those who no longer believed in the consolations of Mother Church
another kind of consolation – that offered by predestination to salvation. All
that was necessary was to say: I believe, and the believer could be sure that he
was saved! Nor did he need the Church or the Priesthood or the Sacraments
or good works to be saved. For faith alone justifies, and all men are “priests
for ever… worthy to appear before God, to pray for others, and to teach one
another mutually the things that are of God”.75
Thus was Western thought directed along a path of ever-increasing

individualism and subjectivism. We can see this in the relationship between
74 Hill, God’s Englishman, London: Penguin, 1970, pp. 211-213.

75 Luther, On the Liberty of the Christian.
62
Luther and the French rationalist philosopher René Descartes. For Luther, the
individual reason was the criterion of all truth. For Descartes, the existence of
this disembodied, thinking mind – a mind free from the limitations of space
and time – was the first axiom of all knowledge: Cogito, ergo sum, “I think,
therefore I am”. From the existence of the thinking mind he deduced, not only
his own existence, but the existence of everything.
Of course, since this was still a believing, Christian age, Descartes

sometimes wrote as if Divine Revelation were a still higher criterion of truth.
Thus he wrote in The Principles of Philosophy: “Above all else we must impress
on our memory the overriding rule that whatever God has revealed to us
must be accepted as more certain than anything else. And although the light
of reason may, with the utmost clarity and evidence appear to suggest
something different, we must still put our entire faith in Divine authority
rather than in our own judgement.” However, the course of western
philosophy after Descartes showed that, once human reason is given a place
that is not fitting to it, it squeezes out Divine Revelation altogether.
Descartes’ Cogito was only a desiccated, secularised and intellectualised

reduction of the primary axiom of Protestant rationalism. The difference
between Luther and Descartes was the difference between theological
rationalism and philosophical rationalism: the Protestant deduced the
certainty of salvation from his personal faith and certain passages of Scripture,
while the philosopher derived the certainty of his existence from his personal
thought. The one deduction was momentous in its consequences and the
other was relatively trivial (those who take philosophy seriously are a very
small minority); the one had an emotional charge and the other had none (or
very little); but in other respects they were very similar. In this way was
philosophical rationalism born from Protestant rationalism. The philosophical
rationalism of a Descartes or a Kant was unthinkable without the religious
rationalism of a Luther. Just as Luther allowed the individual to define what
truth was, so Kant allowed the individual to define for himself what right and
wrong was through his “categorical imperative”.
L.A. Tikhomirov – writing, of course, from an Orthodox Christian

perspective - explains: “According to the Christian understanding, although
man is by nature capable of a free existence and free self-determination, he
does not have autonomy, nor does he presume to seize it (recognising that he
is in the hands of God, and subject to Him), but carries out His commands
and follows that mission which is indicated to him by God. To declare oneself
autonomous would be equivalent to falling away from obedience to God, to
breaking with Him. But if separated Christians were capable of that, it would
be almost impossible to incite Christians as a whole to do this for a thousand
reasons. Of these the most important is that, in submitting to God, the
Christian feels that he is submitting, not to some foreign principle or other,
but to that which he recognises to be the Source of his highest capabilities, his
Father… The striving for knowledge, which is so powerful in man, is set on a
firmer ground precisely when a boundary is clearly delineated between the
63
Divine world, which cannot be known by reason, and the created world,
which is accessible to experimental knowledge through the senses. In making
this delineation the Christian faith served both exact science and the spiritual
life to an identically powerful degree…
“It goes without saying that when the conviction emerged that the
autonomy of man is real in some point of his existence, this naturally
entrained with it the thought that autonomy is therefore possible and fruitful
also in other respects, and this led to the search for new spheres of autonomy
with a gradually increasing ‘liberation from God’.
“In this way the original point of ‘liberation from God’ is rationalism, a
tendency based on the supposed capacity of reason (ratio) to acquired
knowledge of the truth independently of Divine Revelation, by its own efforts.
In fact this is a mistake, but it is engendered by the huge power of human
reason and its capacity to submit everything to its criticism. And so it seems
to man that he can reject everything that is false and find everything that is
real and true. The mistake in this self-confidence of reason consists in the fact
that in fact it is not the source of the knowledge of facts, which are brought to
the attention of man, not by his reason, but by his feelings – both physical and
mystical. The real role of reason consists only in operations on the material
provided by these perceptions and feelings. If they did not exist, reason
would have no possibility of working, it would have not even a spark of
knowledge of anything. But this controlling, discursive power is so great that
it easily leads man to the illusion of thinking that the reason acquires
knowledge independently. This inclination to exaggerate the power of reason
has always lived and always will live in man, since the most difficult work of
the reason is self-control, the evaluation of the reality of its own work. This
self-control not only easily weakens in man, but is deliberately avoided by
him, because it leads him to the burdensome consciousness of the limitations
and relativity of those of his capacities which by their own character appears
to be absolute.
“To the extent that reason’s self-control reveals to him the necessity of
searching for the absolute Source of his relative capacities and in this way
leads to the search for Divine Revelation, to the same extent the weakening of
self-control leads to the false feeling of the human capacity for autonomy in
the sphere of cognitive thought.
“It goes without saying that there always have been the seeds of this
exaggeration of the powers of reason, that is, the seeds of rationalism, in the
Christian world. But historically speaking, rationalism was promoted by
Descartes. In principle his philosophy did not appear to contradict
Christianity in any way. The rationalism of Descartes did not rise up against
the truths of the faith, it did not preach any other faith. Descartes himself was
personally very religious and even supposed that by his researches he was
working for the confirmation of the truths of Christianity. In fact, of course, it
was quite the other way round. Descartes’ philosophical system proceeded
64
from the supposition that if man in seeking knowledge had no help from
anywhere, - nor, that is, from God, - he would be able to find in himself such
axiomatic bases of knowledge, on the assertion of which he could in a
mathematical way logically attain to the knowledge of all truth.
“As… V.A. Kozhevnikov points out in his study of mangodhood, ‘the

Cartesian: “I think, therefore I am” already gave a basis for godmanhood in
the sense of human self-affirmation.’ In fact, in that all-encompassing doubt,
which was permitted by Descartes before this affirmation, all knowledge that
does not depend on the reasoning subject is rejected, and it is admitted that if
a man had no help from anyone or anything, his mind would manage with its
own resources to learn the truth. ‘The isolation and self-sufficiency of the
thinking person is put as the head of the corner of the temple of philosophical
wisdom.’ With such a terminus a quo, ‘the purely subjective attainment of the
truth, remarks V. Kozhevnikov, ‘becomes the sole confirmation of existence
itself. The existent is confirmed on the basis of the conceivable, the real – on
the intellectual… The purely human, and the solely human, acquires its basis
and justification in the purely human mind. The whole evolution of the new
philosophical thinking from Descartes to Kant revolves unfolds under the
conscious or unnoticed, but irresistible attraction in this direction.’”76
“The first step of the Reformation,” writes V.A. Zhukovsky, “decided the
fate of the European world: instead of the historical abuses of ecclesiastical
power, it destroyed the spiritual… power of the Church herself; it incited the
democratic mind to rebel against her being above judgement; in allowing
revelation to be checked, it shook the faith, and with the faith everything holy.
For this holiness was substituted the pagan wisdom of the ancients; the spirit
of contradiction was born; the revolt against all authority, Divine as well as
human, began. This revolt went along two paths: on the first – the destruction
of the authority of the Church produced rationalism (the rejection of the
Divinity of Christ), whence came… atheism (the rejection of the existence of
God); and on the other – the concept of autocratic power as proceeding from
God gave way to the concept of the social contract. Thence came the concept
of the autocracy of the people, whose first step is representative democracy,
second step – democracy, and third step – socialism and communism.
Perhaps there is also a fourth and final step: the destruction of the family, and
in consequence of this the exaltation of humanity, liberated from every
obligation that might in any way limit its personal independence, to the
dignity of completely free cattle. And so two paths: on the one hand, the
autocracy of the human mind and the annihilation of the Kingdom of God; on
the other – the dominion of each and every one, and the annihilation of
society.”77
Tikhomirov, op. cit., pp. 472-474.

76
Zhukovsky, “O stikhotvorenii ‘Sviataia Rus’” (“On the Poem ‘Holy Rus’”), in V.F. Ivanov,
77
Russkaia Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra I do Nashikh Dnej (The Russian Intelligentsia and
Masonry: from Peter I to our Days), Harbin, 1934, Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 74.
65
8. LUTHER ON FAITH AND WORKS
Having established that the root of Lutheranism is simply self-will, the

exaltation of the human mind above all authority, secular and ecclesiastical,
human and Divine, let us look more closely at its teachings.
The first protest of Lutheran Protestantism was against an evil work, the
Catholic practice of indulgences, from which was derived the teaching of the
superiority of faith to works… Now the practice of indulgences was based on
the belief that “as soon as the coin in the coffer rings,/The soul from
purgatory springs”. The Reformation grew out of a reasoned protest against
this and other undoubted abuses by the Roman Catholic Church. As Jacques
Barzun writes: “The priest, instead of being a teacher, was ignorant; the monk,
instead of helping to save the world by his piety, was an idle profiteer; the
bishop, instead of supervising the care of souls in his diocese was a politician
and a businessman. One of them here or there might be pious and a scholar –
he showed that goodness was not impossible. But too often the bishop was a
boy of twelve, his influential family having provided early for his future
happiness. The system was rotten…”78
This reaction against the hypocrisy of the clergy led to the teaching that
good works – especially such hypocritical good works as those that produced
indulgences from the clergy – were not necessary for salvation. In fact, sin is
so deeply rooted in human nature that it cannot be extirpated. Nevertheless,
salvation is given to us by faith in Christ’s sacrifice, which wipes out all sin
without the necessity of good works. “Faith alone,” wrote Luther in The
Freedom of a Christian (1520), “without works, justifies, frees and saves.”
However, too many interpreted this teaching to mean that good works are
unnecessary, even vain. Since faith alone justifies the sinner, why undertake
good works such as fasting, virginity and alms-giving? And so the
Reformation became, as Jacob Burckhardt said, not the restoration of a
discipline that the Catholics had violated, but an escape from discipline…79
The Protestant escape from discipline manifested itself in three ways. First,
as we have seen, in escape from the obligation to follow the conciliar
conscience of the Church – hence the Protestant doctrine of the infallibility of
the individual conscience and the individual’s interpretation of Scripture.
Secondly, in escape from the obligation to do good works or practice
asceticism. Secondly, And thirdly, in escape from the obligation to obey not
only ecclesiastical, but also secular authorities, which we do not find in Luther
himself, but in many more radical Protestants, especially the Calvinists. Taken
together, these allow us to define the fundamental essence of Protestantism:
escape from the law, from the Church and from the State – in other words,
from all authority.
78 Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 11.
79 Burckhardt, Judgements on History.
66
Now the most basic good work of a Christian is participation in the
sacraments. While baptism was retained by the Lutherans, and some form of
Eucharistic service, the significance and centrality of these sacraments to the
Christian life was greatly diminished, and in general the very idea that matter
can be sanctified by the Spirit in the form of icons, relics, holy water, holy oil
and all the symbols and ceremonies of Catholic worship, was discarded.
The Swiss Reformer Zwingli, who greatly influenced the first Anglican
Archbishop Cranmer, rejected the belief that the Eucharist was, after
consecration, the Body and Blood of Christ, treating it as a service of
remembrance, a memorial meal, no more. Luther did believe in the Body and
Blood of Christ; but he thought that it coexisted with the bread and the wine.
So he did not believe in what the Catholics called Transubstantiation.
One might have expected that the Reformers would here encounter some
difficulties, in that if, as William Tyndale said, “The scripture hath but one
sense, which is the literal sense”, then there could be no doubt that the
Eucharist was the Body and Blood of Christ insofar Christ said as much
clearly and unambiguously in the Holy Scriptures (Matthew 26.26-28; John
6.53-56). Moreover, the whole of Church tradition for the last 1500 years had
asserted that these passages were indeed to be interpreted literally. But the
Protestants rejected the literal interpretation, thereby showing that their real
motivation was not obedience to Scripture alone, but revolution – the
overthrow of traditional Christianity.
In view of this selective, biased and inconsistent approach to Holy

Scripture, it is not to be wondered at that even the text of the Bible itself was
cut down to size by Luther’s rationalistic axe. Thus he reduced the number of
canonical books, rejecting the so-called “apocryphal” books of the Old
Testament and casting doubt on such New Testament books as the Epistle of
James. Moreover, it was from the Protestants (and Jews such as Spinoza) that
the terribly destructive so-called “Higher Criticism” of the Bible began.
Nothing was sacred for the Protestants, but only the disembodied, thinking
mind of the individual believer.
Another important work that the Protestants rejected was obedience to the
secular authorities. Again, Luther was less extreme – and less consistent - than
some other Reformers in this respect. Nevertheless, he laid the foundations
for the secular as well as the ecclesiastical revolutions that have so blighted
the history of humanity since his time.
In On the Freedom of the Christian (1520) and On Temporal Authority (1523),

Luther makes a very sharp distinction between the spiritual and the temporal,
between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. If the Christian was
free from authority in the Kingdom of God, he was by no means free in the
67
kingdom of man: “A Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject
to all [of the princes of this world]”. Nevertheless, Luther did not attach an
absolute authority to the Prince. As he wrote: “When a prince is in the wrong,
are his people bound to follow him then too? I answer, No, for it is no one’s
duty to do wrong; we ought to obey God who desires the right, rather than
men.”80
As Gabriel Dagron interprets his thought: “The Christian, being at the

same time part of the spiritual kingdom and of the temporal kingdom is at the
same time absolutely free and absolutely enslaved. If God has instituted two
kingdoms, it is because only a very small élite of true Christians participate in
His Kingdom; the great mass needs the ‘temporal sword’ and must submit to
it in accordance with the teaching of Paul (Romans 13.1: ‘there is no authority
that is not of God’) and of Peter (I Peter 2.13: ‘Submit yourselves to every
human authority’). But if the temporal princes hold their power from God
and they are often Christian, they cannot pretend to ‘govern in a Christian
manner’ and in accordance with the Gospel. ‘It is impossible for a Christian
kingdom to extend throughout the world, and even over a single country.’ No
accommodation is possible between a religion that is conceived as above all
personal and a State defined as above all repressive; and Luther is ironic
about the temporal sovereigns ‘who arrogate to themselves the right to sit on
the throne of God, to rule the consciences and the faith and to… guide the
Holy Spirit over the pews of the school’, as also about the popes or bishops
‘become temporal princes’ and pretending to be invested with a ‘power’ and
not with a simple ‘function’. This radical distinction between the temporal
and the spiritual did not, therefore, lead to the recognition of two powers,
‘since all the Christians truly belong to the ecclesiastical state’ and there is no
reason to deny Christian princes the ‘titles of priest and bishop.’“ 81
Since the Lutherans rejected the authority of the papist church, and paid no
attention to the claims of the Orthodox Church (a Lutheran delegation from
Tubingen put several questions to Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople in
1596, but were not satisfied with his answers), they were logically committed
to the thesis that the historical Church had perished, and that they were
recreating it. Apostolic succession was not necessary: since there were no true
bishops, no true successors of the apostles left, the people could take their
place.
Nevertheless, the Lutherans did not wish to break all ties with tradition,
and did not abolish bishops and priests entirely. But their ideas about them
were by no means traditional. In the last analysis, it was the democratic
assembly of believers, not the bishop standing in an unbroken chain of
succession from the apostles, who bestowed the priesthood upon the
candidates. Luther believed that both the papacy and the general councils of
80 Luther, “Secular Authority: To What Extent it Should be Obeyed”, in Englander, op. cit., p.
190.
81 Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Paris, 1996, pp 292-293.
68
the Church had failed to save it. So it was now up to the people, freed from
any higher authority than his conscience, to appoint bishops and clergy to
lead the Church: “A Christian man is a perfectly free lord, subject to none.”82
And again: “The only thing left is either to let the Church of God perish
without the Word or to allow the propriety of a church meeting to cast its
votes and choose from its own resources one or as many as are necessary and
suitable and commend and confirm these to the whole community by prayer
and the laying-on of hands. These should then be recognised and honoured as
lawful bishops and ministers of the Word, in the assured faith that God
Himself is the Author of what the common consent of the faithful has so
performed – of those, that is, who accept and confess the Gospel…”83
Luther’s ideas on authority were tested in the 1520s, when one of his early
followers, Thomas Müntzer, led a German Peasants’ War against all
authorities. Müntzer, writes Charles George, “was a learned priest and mystic
who had struggled for faith as Luther had – desperately – but found it not in
the historic Jesus, not in the revelation of words, but in the blinding visions of
immediate knowledge, and in association with an amazing group of militant
prophets in the town of Zwickau. Zwickau is on the border of Bohemia, and
there a weaver named Storch had made Tabor [the centre of early-fifteenth-
century chiliastic revolution among the Czechs of Bohemia] live again.
Müntzer began to preach in Zwickau a prophecy of millenial revolution – in
his vision, a terrible final blood-bath in which the elect of God would rise up
to destroy first the Turkish Antichrist, and then the masses of the unrighteous.
Before long he and Storch led their evangelized weavers in a revolt which
failed, and Müntzer fled to Bohemia where he searched for the embers of
Taborite chiliasm, and ended up being driven from Bohemia.
“For two years he wandered in central Germany, his delusions now settled
into doctrine” (‘The living God is sharpening his scythe in me, so that later I
can cut down the red poppies and the blue cornflowers’). In 1523 he was
invited to preach in Allstedt, and from there he created a revolutionary
organization, the League of the Elect, made up of peasants and miners. His
church became the most radical center of Christianity in Europe; for it he
created the first liturgy in German, and to it came hundreds of miners from
Mansfeld and peasants from the countryside as well as artisans from Allstedt.
“Müntzer’s revolution,” writes Charles George, “was not, like Luther’s, a

proposed reformation of men and institutions. To him Luther was a Pharisee
bound to books and Wittenberg was the center of ‘the unspiritual soft-living
flesh’. He attacked the emasculated social imagination of the reformers,
branded them tools of the rich and powerful, and when Luther wrote his
82
Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, 1520.
83Luther, On the Appointment of Ministers, 1523; translated in D. Englander et al. (eds.) Culture
and Belief in Europe 1450-1600, Oxford: Blackwells, 1990, p. 186.
69
Letter to the Princes of Saxony warning of the danger of this radical agitation,
Müntzer reacted by openly declaring social revolution to be indispensably a
part of faith in Christ: ‘The wretched flatterer is silent… about the origin of all
theft… Look, the seed-grounds of usury and theft and robbery are our lords
and princes, they take all creatures as their property… These robbers use the
Law to forbid others to rob… They oppress all people, and shear and shave
the poor plowman and everything that lives – yet if (the plowman) commits
the slightest offense, he must hang.’ Like the magnificent Hebrew prophets
from whom he took his texts, Müntzer denounced the princes to their faces
(Duke John, the Elector’s brother, came to Allstedt to hear him, and he was
summoned to Weimar to explain himself as a result of Luther’s complaint)
and left them shaken. Müntzer, with red crucifix and sword, led another
frustrated revolt in Mühlhausen, wandered to Nuremberg and the Swiss
border, preaching revolution and distributing his pamphlets, and finally was
called back to Mühlhausen as Saxony caught the fever that was agitating the
rest of Germany….
“… Frederick the Wise wrote to his brother the following: ‘Perhaps the
peasants have been given just occasion for their uprising through the
impeding the Word of God. In many ways the poor folk have been wronged
by the rulers, and now God is visiting his wrath upon us. If it be his will, the
common man will come to rule; and if it be not his will, the end will soon be
otherwise.’ Duke John wrote: ‘As princes we are ruined.’ Luther was less
passive before the will of God; although hooted out of countenance by the
groups of peasants whom he tried to command into submission to their
prince, he continued to fight the rude social rooting of the heresy he had
spawned. Müntzer presented a graphic portrait of Luther’s confrontation with
the peasants: ‘He claims the Word of God is sufficient. Doesn’t he realize that
men whose every moment is consumed in the making of a living have no time
to learn to read the Word of God? The princes bleed the people with usury
and count as their own the fish in the stream, the bird of the air, and the grass
of the field, and Dr. Liar says “Amen!” What courage has he, Dr. Pussyfoot,
the new pope of Wittenberg, Dr. Easychair, the basking sycophant? He says
there should be no rebellion because the sword has been committed by God to
the ruler, but the power of the sword belongs to the whole community. In the
good old days the people stood by when judgement was rendered lest the
ruler pervert justice, and the rulers have perverted justice.’”84
The only authority for Müntzer was the people. Matheson writes: “He
addressed his lords and masters as ‘brothers’, if, that is, they were willing to
listen to him. They are part of his general audience, on the same level as
everyone else… Everything has to come out into the open, to be witnessed by
the common people. Worship has to be intelligible, not some ‘mumbo-jumbo’
that no one could understand. The holy Gospel has to be pulled out from
under the bed where it has languished for four hundred years. Preaching and
84 George, 500 Years of Revolution: European Radicals from Hus to Lenin, Chicago, 1998, pp. 55-56,
57.
70
teaching and judgement can no longer be a hole-and-corner affair, for God
has given power and judgement to the common people. In the Eucharist, for
example, the consecration of the elements is to be ‘performed not just by one
person but by the whole gathered congregation’. He encourages popular
participation in the election of clergy. In the Peasants’ War a kind of crude
popular justice was executed ‘in the ring’. ‘Nothing without the consent of the
people’; their visible presence as audience is the guarantor of justice… The
audience of the poor is not beholden to prince or priest. Liturgies are no
longer subject to the approval of synods. A liberating Gospel, taking the lid
off corruption and exploitation, is bound to be polemical, and doomed to
meet persecution. ‘Hole-in-the-corner’ judgements by courts and universities
have to be replaced by accountability to the elect throughout the world.”85
Shockingly, Luther called on the lords, the secular authorities, to destroy

the rebellious peasants: “Wherefore, my lords, free, save, help and pity the
poor people. Stab, smite and slay, all ye that can. If you die in battle you could
never have a more blessed end, for you die obedient to God’s Word in
Romans 13, and in the service of love to free your neighbour from the bands
of hell and the devil. I implore every one who can to avoid the peasants as he
would the devil himself. I pray God will enlighten them and turn their hearts.
But if they do not turn, I wish them no happiness for evermore… Let none
think this is too hard who consider how intolerable is rebellion.”86 This led to
the massacre or exile of some 30,000 families. Such was the price Luther had
to pay for keeping the support of the princes.87 If he had relied solely on the
power of his word and the hands of the simple people, his Reformation
would have been quickly crushed by the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V, who rejected his call to rise up against the pope on behalf of “the
glorious Teutonic people”. It was the Protestant Princes of Germany that
saved Luther. In any case, if there were no sacramental, hierarchical
priesthood, and all the laity were in fact priests, the Prince as the senior
layman was bound to take the leading role in the Church. For, as Luther’s
favourite apostle in his favourite epistle says, the Prince “beareth not the
sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon
him that doeth evil” (Romans 13.4).
The problem was, however, that in relying on the power of “the godly
prince” Lutheranism tended to give him excessive power in church life.
According to Luther, writes Lev Tikhomirov, “ecclesiastical power belongs to
the same society to which State power also belongs, so that if it entrusts this
power to the Prince, it transfers to him episcopal rights, too. The Prince
becomes the possessor both of political and of ecclesiastical power. ‘In the
85 Peter Matheson, “Thomas Müntzer’s idea of an audience”, History, vol. 76, no. 247, June,
1991, pp. 192, 193.

86 Luther, Against the Thievish, Murderous Hordes of Peasants; in M.J. Cohen and John Major,
History in Quotations, London: Cassel, 2004, p. 357.

87 For the same reason Luther was compelled to condone “the bigamous marriage of Philip of
Hesse by advising the new faith’s leading patron ‘to tell a good strong lie’” (Davis, op. cit., p.
492). Müntzer had a point in calling him “Dr. Liar”!
71
Protestant state,’ writes Professor Suvorov, ‘both ecclesiastical and state
power must belong to the prince, the master of the territory (Landsherr) who is
at the same time the master of religion – Cuius est regio – ejus religio’.”88
Thus Luther wrote: “That seditious articles of doctrine should be punished

by the sword needed no further proof. For the rest, the Anabaptists hold
tenets relating to infant baptism, original sin, and inspiration, which have no
connection with the Word of God, and are indeed opposed to it . . . Secular
authorities are also bound to restrain and punish avowedly false doctrine . . .
For think what disaster would ensue if children were not baptized? . . .
Besides this the Anabaptists separate themselves from the churches . . . and
they set up a ministry and congregation of their own, which is also contrary
to the command of God. From all this it becomes clear that the secular
authorities are bound . . . to inflict corporal punishment on the offenders . . .
Also when it is a case of only upholding some spiritual tenet, such as infant
baptism, original sin, and unnecessary separation, then . . . we conclude that .
. . the stubborn sectaries must be put to death.”89
The paradoxical upshot of Luther’s teaching on Church and State, is that he

who undermined all authority, both secular and ecclesiastical, on the basis of
the ultimate authority of the individual conscience alone, ended by giving all
authority, both secular and ecclesiastical, to the Christian prince alone.
Luther and Lutheranism should also be seen in the context of the centuries-
old dispute between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, and of the rise
of German nationalism. As Bridget Healy writes, “Within the Holy Roman
Empire, humanists and early evangelicals found common ground not only in
their criticism of abuses within the Church and in their emphasis on the
importance of textual criticism and biblical scholarship, but also in their
articulation of early nationalist sentiments. The Empire was fragmented, both
politically and culturally, yet during the 15th century a sense of shared
German identity emerged, defined in opposition to Rome… Calls for the
emperor to assume responsibility for the Church echoed throughout the
period.”90 In this context, Luther’s doctrine of “the godly prince” came at just
the right time and was eagerly taken up by the German princes…
88 Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 271. We can thus see the path from Luther to Hitler. For as W.H.
Auden wrote in September 1, 1939:

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad…
89 Luther, pamphlet of 1536; in Johannes Janssen, History of the German People From the Close of
the Middle Ages, 16 volumes, translated by A.M. Christie, St. Louis: B. Herder, 1910 [orig.
1891]; Vol. X, 222-223.
90 Healy, op. cit., pp. 31-32.
72
And so, as Andrew Marr writes, “The original ‘rebel’ was now firmly on
the side of the German princes who would, in turn, shift their allegiance to
Lutheran Christianity. In Saxony, Hesse, Schleswig, Brunswick and
Brandenburg they came over. So did most of the northern towns and cities.
Though Charles V tried hard for conciliation, and planned ways to reunite his
empire, there were simply too many rulers and influential soldiers now with
Luther’s cause to make that practicable. Luther told his ally and fellow
Reformer Philipp Melanchthon that ‘agreement in doctrine is plainly
impossible, unless the pope will abolish the papacy’. Luther’s theology had
become more conservative in its social effect: he was a fierce advocate of a
husband’s rights over his wife, and hostile to easy marriages. Against suitors
he wrote: ‘If I raised a daughter with so much expense and effort, care and
trouble, diligence and work and had bet all my life, body and property on her
for so many years, should she not be better protected than a cow who has
wandered into the forest?’ He also became a bitter snit-Semite.
“In 1531 a treaty between Lutheran princes, known as the Schmalkaldic

League, made the political split irrevocable. There was then a golden pause.
The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 allowed a time of rebuilding and economic
growth, during which German culture flourished and German universities
became famous – a time when even Elizabethan English plays and actors
travelled to Germany to find fame. Yet the great divide that Luther had
wrenched open would poison the future of Europe. The Thirty Years War was
looming…”91
91
Marr, A History of the World, London: Pan, 2012.
73
9. CALVINISM
Although the Reformers shared the same root belief in the primacy of the
individual conscience or mind, almost from the beginning there were
significant differences between the most important of them – Luther, Calvin
and Zwingli - in the degree and thoroughness of their rejection of the old
ways. The most important differences were between the Lutherans and the
Calvinists. With regard to the vital question of the sources of the faith, for
example, both parties rejected Tradition and held to Sola Scriptura, although
the Calvinists had a higher opinion of the Old Testament Scripures than did
Luther. But while the Lutherans taught that a custom was godly if it was not
contrary to the Bible, the Calvinists went further and asserted that only that
which was explicitly taught by the Bible was godly. A little later, the
Anglicans, in the person of Richard Hooker, took a slightly different, but
ultimately no less rationalist line: that was godly which was in accordance
with the Bible and natural law.
Whereas Luther taught predestination to salvation, but did not mention

predestination to damnation, Calvin taught double predestination. Calvin
also differed from Luther in having greater respect for the law. As Barton
writes, “in Calvin the law makes a triumphant re-entry: the ability to keep the
law is a sure indication that one is among the saved. Hence moral striving
becomes important, almost as important, it might be said, as it had been for
medieval Catholicism, though now manifested not in pilgrimages and
indulgences, but in sobriety and probity in secular affairs. “92
Calvin was not German, but French Swiss, and his approach to Church-
State relations was consequently more consistently democratic than Luther’s.
The people, according to Calvin, are the supreme power in both Church and
State. There is thus a direct link between Calvinist Protestantism and the
Democratic Revolution.93
92Barton, op. cit., p. 399.

93“Calvin read and quoted many Holy Fathers. He admired St. John Chrysostom’s biblical
commentaries and once had resolved to translate them into French. He was a devotee of St.
Augustine, and quoted Ss. Cyprian and Athanasius and others frequently. However, his
attitude towards them was not an Orthodox one. Here are his words,
“’Certainly, Origen, Tertullian, Basil, Chrysostom and others like them would never have
spoken as they do, if they had followed what judgment God had given them. But from desire
to please the wise of the world, or at least from fear of annoying them, they mixed the earthly
with the heavenly. That was a hateful thing, totally to cast man down, and repugnant to the
common judgment of the flesh. These good persons seek a means more in conformity with
human understanding: that is to concede I know of not what to free will, and allow some
natural virtue to man; but meanwhile the purity of the doctrine is profaned.’
“Here is Calvin in all his arrogance and theological overconfidence. His accusations
against the likes of Ss. Chrysostom and Basil the Great are that they were too worldly, too
submissive to worldly powers, and not willing enough to defy merely human judgments.
“These charges are ironic in that they apply far more to Calvin himself and the Protestant
Reformers than to the Holy Fathers he attacks. Chrysostom and Basil were ascetic monks who
were other-worldly, and show Calvin as still quite fixed to the earth by comparison. Who was
the one who rejected his tonsure and married? And that a widow? Who was the one so
74
Calvin aimed at a greater independence for the Church than existed in the
Lutheran States. “The Church,” he wrote, “does not assume what is proper to
the magistrate: nor can the magistrate execute what is carried out by the
Church.”94 At the same time, it was not always easy to see where the Church
ended and the State began in Calvin’s Geneva. Thus Owen Chadwick writes:
“Where authority existed among the Protestant Churches, apart from the
personal authority of individual men of stature, it rested with the prince or
the city magistrate. Calvin believed that in organising the Church at Geneva
he must organise it in imitation of the primitive Church, and thereby reassert
the independence of the Church and the divine authority of its ministers…
[However,] the boundaries between the jurisdiction of Church and State…
were not easy to define in Geneva… The consistory [the Church authority]
gave its opinions on the bank rate, on the level of interest for war loans, on
exports and imports, on speeding the law courts, on the cost of living and the
shortage of candles. On the other hand the council [the State authority], even
during Calvin’s last years, may be found supervising the clergy and
performing other functions which logic would have allotted to the consistory.
The council was not backward in protesting against overlong sermons, or
against pastors who neglected to visit the homes of the people; they examined
the proclamations by the pastors even if the proclamations called the city to a
general fast, sanctioned the dates for days of public penitence, agreed or
refused to lend pastors to other churches, provided for the housing and
stipend of the pastors, licensed the printing of theological books.”95
irascible that he could not bear to be contradicted? Who was the one who received a large
salary from the state? Who was the one complicit in the execution of heretics? Who was the
one who died in the comfort of his own home with the approbation of the wise of Geneva,
instead of in harsh exile with the opposition of emperor? That the Holy Fathers refused to
articulate Calvin’s doctrine of predestination is hardly a sign of complicity with worldly men,
but rather a refusal to articulate what does not have the support of the Holy Scriptures and
the consensus patrum.
“…Were not the 318 Nicene Fathers bishops? Did they not believe that the Eucharist was
the very Body and Blood of Jesus Christ? Did they not celebrate the liturgy, honor
monasticism, venerate relics, make holy pilgrimage, express devotion to the Holy Theotokos
and Ever-Virgin Mary, pray for the departed, invoke the Saints, obey sacred canons, and read
Scripture in accord with the tradition? The answer, of course, to these questions is ‘Yes’.
“And so, the Reformers and their descendants have this question to answer: Why do they
demand adherence to the Trinitarian positions of the Holy Fathers while explicitly or
implicitly degrading these same Holy Fathers by their Protestant criticisms. How can
Protestant teachers be consistent in demanding adherence to the dogmas of Fathers of the
early councils when these same Fathers believed the Holy Eucharist to be the very Body and
Blood of Christ, worshipped liturgically, prayed to Saints, venerated the Mother of God,
insisted on the governance of the church by bishops, and interceded for the repose of
departed souls? Why accept the creeds of these four councils but reject their canons,
something that the Fathers of the councils themselves explicitly forbade? This dilemma
remains unsolved even for Protestants today. Protestants say they wish to preserve the
fundamental teachings of Christianity, yet denigrate the lives of those Christians who
articulated these fundamental teachings.” (Rock and Sand: An Orthodox Appraisal of the
Protestant Reformers and Their Teachings, pp. 131-134)
94 Calvin, Institutes IV.xi.3.
95 Chadwick, The Reformation, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 83, 86-87.
75
“Petty rules,” writes Jean Comby, “dictated the whole way of life of the
citizens of Geneva. Many [thousands] were condemned to death. Personal
quarrels were common. Rather more seriously, the doctrinal conflicts took a
dramatic turn when Michael Servetus was burned at the stake in 1553 for
having denied the Trinity.”96
Calvin’s radically new ideas of Church administration, writes Ian

McClelland, “could only have radical effects on men’s attitudes to the running
of the state. On a very simple level, it could be argued that what applied to
Church government should apply straightforwardly to the state’s government
on the principle of a fortiori (the greater should contain the lesser). If the
government of the community which means most to Christian people should
be governed according to the reflection and choice of its members, then why
should the government of the state, an inferior institution by comparison, not
be governed in the same way too?”97
“Reformed political theory… still thought the law served good and godly
ends. The social peace, which only obedience to duly constituted authority
could provide, was always going to be pleasing in God’s sight. What was no
longer so clear was that God intended us to obey that prince and those laws.
How could God be saying anything very clear about political obligation when
Christendom was split into two warring halves, one Catholic and one
Protestant? In these circumstances it is no surprise that thoughtful men began
to wonder whether it really was true that the laws under which they lived
were instances of a universal law as it applies to particulars. That very general
unease was sharpened by the very particular problem of what was to be done
if you remained a Catholic when your prince became a Protestant, or if you
became a Protestant and your prince remained a Catholic. The implied
covenant of the coronation stated clearly that the prince agreed to preserve
true religion, and, in an age when men felt obliged to believe that any religion
other than their own was false, the fact that your prince’s religion was not
your own showed prima facie that the original contract to preserve true
religion had been broken. It followed that a new contract could be made,
perhaps with a new prince, to preserve true religion, as in the case of John
Knox and the Scottish Covenanter movement to oust the Catholic Mary
Queen of Scots in favour of a Protestant king.”98
“In the Netherlands,” writes Bamber Gascoigne, “Calvinism became the

rallying point for opposition to the oppressive rule of Catholic Spain.
Calvinist ministers had been among the earliest leaders of a small group
which we would describe today as guerrillas or freedom fighters, from whom
there developed a national party of the northern provinces. The princely
96 Comby, How to Read Church History, London: SCM Press, 1985, vol. 2, p. 19.
97 McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, London and New York: Routledge, 1996,
p. 175.
98 McClelland, op. cit., p. 174.
76
leader of the fight for independence, William the Silent, joined the reformed
church in 1573 and during the next decade a Dutch republic gradually
emerged…
“In Scotland the Calvinists went one stage further, in a political

programme which was even more radical in its implications. At precisely the
same period as the Lutherans in Germany were establishing the principle of
cuius regio eius religio, the Scots were asserting the very opposite – that the
people had the right to choose their own religion, regardless of the will of the
monarch. In 1560 the Scottish parliament abolished papal authority and
decreed a form of Calvinism as the religion of the country. Scotland became
something unique in the Europe of the day: a land of one religion with a
monarch of another. Admittedly there were, as always, political as well as
religious causes for this state of affairs. The monarch, Mary Queen of Scots,
was an eighteen-year-old girl living abroad, and English troops were
underwriting Scottish independence for fear that Mary might deliver Scotland
into the hands of her husband, the king of France. But the notion that the
people could assert themselves against their ruler was a triumph for the ideas
of one man, John Knox. ‘God help us’, wrote the archbishop of Canterbury,
‘from such visitation as Knox has attempted in Scotland, the people to be the
orderers of things.’”99
Spellman writes: “Placing obedience to God’s law before conformity to the

will of the prince, political theorists writing within a Calvinist theological
perspective insisted that the king who violated divine ordinances was not to
be obeyed. Anti-absolutist sentiment was decisively advanced by the
emergence of these religiously motivated resistance theories. Works such as
the anonymous Vindiciae contra tyrannos and George Buchanan’s De jure regni
apud Scotos, both appearing in print in 1579, argued on behalf of religious
minorities who found themselves persecuted by their monarchs. In the midst
of the French wars of religion, the Protestant Philippe Duplessis Mornay
insisted that ‘God’s jurisdiction is immeasurable, whilst that of kings is
measured; that God’s sway is infinite, whilst that of kings is limited.’
Mornay’s Defense of Liberty against Tyrants was first published in Latin in 1579
but quickly translated into French and finally into English just one year before
the execution of King Charles I in 1649 by his Calvinist opponents.
“Mornay employed metaphors drawn from the medieval feudal tradition

in describing the proper relationship between subjects and their rulers. Since
God created heaven and earth out of nothing, he alone ‘is truly the lord
[dominus] and proprietor [proprietarius] of heaven and earth’. Earthly
monarchs, on the other hand, are ‘beneficiaries and vassals [beneficiarii &
clientes] and are bound to receive and acknowledge investiture from Him’.
Facing religious persecution at the hands of a Catholic monarch, this
spokesman for the French Protestant minority took the bold step of denying
kings any sacred or special distinction. Men do not attain royal status
99 Gascoigne, A Brief History of Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, pp. 116-117.
77
‘because they differ from others in species, and because they ought to be in
charge of these by a certain natural superiority, like shepherds with sheep’.
Instead of lording over subjects, legitimate monarchs are those who protect
the subjects in their care, both from the aggressions of individuals within the
kingdom and from hostile neighbours. In language striking in its modernity,
Mornay claimed that ‘royal dignity is not really an honour, but a burden; not
an immunity, but a function; not a dispensation, but a vocation; not license,
but public service’.”100
State power protected the Calvinists from the ferocity of the Papists in both
the England of Elizabeth I, and the France of Henry IV. And yet Calvinists
had an alarming tendency to come out against the state, splintering off into
ever more extreme movements of an apocalyptic nature that advocated
political as well as religious revolution, and were accompanied by moral
excesses directly contrary to the strait-laced image of traditional Protestantism.
The most famous example of this was the Anabaptist revolution in Münster.
Owen Chadwick writes: “At the end of 1533 the Anabaptist group at
Münster in Westphalia, under the leadership of a former Lutheran minister
Bernard Rothmann, gained control of the city council. Early in 1534 a Dutch
prophet and ex-innkeeper named John of Leyden appeared in Münster,
believing that he was called to make the city the new Jerusalem. On 9
February 1534 his party seized the city hall. By 2 March all who refused to be
baptized were banished, and it was proclaimed a city of refuge for the
oppressed. Though the Bishop of Münster collected an army and began the
siege of his city, an attempted coup within the walls was brutally suppressed,
and John of Leyden was proclaimed King of New Zion, wore vestments as his
royal robes, and held his court and throne in the market-place. Laws were
decreed to establish a community of goods, and the Old Testament was
adduced to permit polygamy. Bernard Rothmann, once a man of sense, once
the friend of Melanchthon, took nine wives.
“They now believed that they had been given the duty and the power of
exterminating the ungodly. The world would perish, and only Münster
would be saved. Rothmann issued a public incitement to world rebellion:
‘Dear brethren, arm yourselves for the battle, not only with the humble
weapons of the apostles for suffering, but also with the glorious armour of
David for vengeance… in God’s strength, and help to annihilate the ungodly.’
An ex-soldier named John of Feelen slipped out of the city, carrying copies of
this proclamation into the Netherlands, and planned sudden coups in the
Dutch cities. On a night in February 1535 a group of men and women ran
naked and unarmed through the streets of Amsterdam shouting: ‘Woe! Woe!
The wrath of God falls on this city.’ On 30 March 1535 John of Geelen with 300
Anabaptists, men and women, stormed an old monastery in Friesland,
fortified it, made sallies to conquer the province, and were only winkled out
after bombardment by heavy cannon. On the night of 10 May 1535 John of
100 Spellman, op. cit., pp. 194-195.
78
Geelen with a band of some thirty men attacked the city hall of Amsterdam
during a municipal banquet, and the burgomaster and several citizens were
killed. At last, on 25 June 1535, the gates of Münster were opened by sane
men within the walls, and the bishop’s army entered the city…”101
The Anabaptist revolution in Münster came exactly a century after the

destruction of the Taborite revolution in Bohemia, which it closely imitated.
The Taborites and Anabaptists were in effect communists, a fact which shows
that there is a blood-red thread linking the revolutionary movements of late
medieval Catholicism, early Protestantism and twentieth-century militant
atheism.
The immediate effect of the revolution in Münster, coming so soon after

the similar madness of Thomas Münzter and the Germans’ Peasant War, was
to strengthen the argument for the intervention of the strong hand of the State
to cool and control religious passions, if necessary by violent means. However,
the longer-term lesson to be drawn from it was that the Protestant
Reformation, by undermining the authority of the Church, had also, albeit
unwittingly, undermined that of the State. For even if the more moderate
Protestants (Lutherans and Anglicans) accepted and exalted the authority of
“the godly Prince”, the more extreme Protestants (Calvinists) felt no
obligation to obey any earthly authority, but rather created their own church-
cum-state communities recognising no authority except Christ’s alone. Thus
the Englishman Henry Barrow wrote: “The true planted and rightly
established Church of Christ is a company of faithful people, separated from
the unbelievers and heathen of the land, gathered in the name of Christ,
Whom they truly worship and readily obey as their only King, Priest, and
Prophet, and joined together as members of one body, ordered and governed
by such offices and laws as Christ, in His last will and testament, hath
thereunto ordained…”
The more extreme Protestants were usually persecuted by the authorities,

as the Huguenots were in 16th century France. So they felt no obligation to
obey them, and if they obeyed authorities of their own choosing, this was an
entirely voluntary, non-binding commitment. Thus the founder of the
Calvinist sect of the Congregationalists, Robert Browne, wrote in 1582: “The
Lord’s people is of the willing sorte. It is conscience, not the power of man,
that will drive us to seek the Lord’s Kingdom. Therefore it belongeth not to
the magistrate to compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a
submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties.”
Again he wrote: "True Christians unite into societies of believers which

submit, by means of a voluntary agreement with God, to the dominion of God
the Saviour, and keep the Divine law in sacred communion."
101 Chadwick, op. cit., pp. 190-191.
79
The Calvinists went under different names in different countries. In
England they were called Independents or Congregationalists or Puritans.
Each community was completely independent: in faith, in worship, in the
election of clergy. They were united by faith and friendship alone. Since the
clergy had no sacramental functions and were elected by laymen, they had no
real authority over their congregations. Thus Calvinism was already
democratism as applied to spiritual matters; and it is not surprising that the
leading democratic countries – Holland, England, Scotland, America – would
be those in which Calvinism let down the deepest roots…
80
10. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, in spite of the growth in power

of national kingdoms such as Spain, England and France, the titular secular
overlord of Western Christendom remained the Holy Roman Empire, which
claimed to be the descendant of the empire created by Charlemagne that
officially came into existence in 800. After the disintegration of the western,
French part of the empire in the ninth century, it was the eastern, German
part that inherited the mantle of empire in the tenth century under the
Ottonian dynasty. However, while the heart of the empire remained German
throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, through various complicated
dynastic alliances the empire came to include an extraordinary patchwork,
not only of German, but also of Flemish, Burgundian, Italian, Czech and other
principalities and kingdoms united in a very complicated way under an
elective monarchy.
This monarch could come from almost any nation. Thus the election of
1519 included among the candidates Kings Francis I of France, Henry VIII of
England and Charles V of Spain. Charles won, and it was the union of the
empire with the Spanish monarchy under Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand
and Isabella, that brought it to new heights of power and influence.
However, according to Joachim Whaley, “the Holy Roman Empire was not
expansionist. Indeed, it largely contracted from the late Middle Ages. The
Swiss cantons and the northern Netherlands seceded in the 16th century, and
France acquired Metz, Toul, Verdun and Alsace in 1648.
“Critical accounts of the empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries cited
these losses as signs of its inadequacy. They rarely conceded that it had made
significant contributions to the development of west-central and central
Europe, notably the creation of an enduring system of public order and law.
Successive medieval emperors experimented with internal peace decrees.
And around 1500 the empire developed a legal system that pacified the
territories and cities of German-speaking Europe. By 1519 it had a supreme
court and a regional enforcement system that ended feuding for good. That
year Charles V was obliged to sign an electoral capitulation before his
coronation, which explicitly guaranteed the rights of all Germans.”102
“Charles,” writes Bobbitt, “was born at Ghent in 1500. His father was the
Habsburg archduke of Austria, son of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor,
and of Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Charles’s mother
was the daughter of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of
Castile. Thus Charles promised to unite within one person an Austrian-
Spanish realm that included the Low Countries, to which he might add the
German emperorship and even lay fair claim to Burgundy. It was an
astonishing example of the dynastic conglomerations that were acquired
102 Whaley, BBC World Histories, N 3, April/May, 2017, p. 35.
81
through inheritance and the alliances of marriage. Such a ‘realm’, as I have
used the term, was in essence a personal union of territories. To the modern
eye some of these dynastic states seem very odd indeed, and would appear to
have little hope of survival; their various geographic components seem too
disparate in terms of culture, language, and institutions. This observation,
however, anticipates the outcome of a struggle that Charles V and his
successors had first to play out: it is only because the universalism of the
Empire and the Church was shattered during this struggle that it seems to us
that national culture, language, and local institutions are the stuff out of
which viable states must be made. Indeed it was Charles’s goal to reverse this
development and restore the unity of a Catholic Europe.
“One might say that the inheritance of Charles V created the conditions for
a perfect experiment to determine whether in fact the State could encompass
many different nations once the Reformation had so greatly sharpened the
cultural differences among the peoples under his rule.
“When Charles was crowned emperor in 1519, he had inherited not only
vast dynastic properties from his grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon and his
other grandfather, Maximilian, but also quarrels over the thrones of Naples
and Milan, respectively; plus a third dispute over the crown of Navarre from
one grandmother, Isabella, as well as a fourth dynastic claim, from his other
grandmother, over lands lost to France by her father, the Duke of Burgundy.
In all of these disputes his antagonist was the losing candidate for the
emperorship, Francis I, who had become king of France.”103
“In the tradition of Charlemagne,” writes Henry Kissinger, “at his

coronation Charles vowed to be ‘the protector and defender of the Holy
Roman Church,’ and crowds paid him obeisance as ‘Caesare’ and ‘Imperio’;
Pope Clement affirmed Charles as the temporal force for ‘seeing peace and
order re-established in Christendom.
“A Chinese or Turkish visitor to Europe at that time might well have

perceived a seemingly familiar political system: a continent presided over by
a single dynasty imbued with a sense of divine mandate. If Charles had been
able to consolidate his authority and manage an orderly succession in the vast
Habsburg territorial conglomerate, Europe would have been shaped by a
dominant central authority like the Chinese Empire of the Islamic Caliphate.
“It did not happen; nor did Charles try. In the end, he was satisfied to base
order on equilibrium. Hegemony might be his inheritance but not his
objective, as he proved when, after capturing his temporal political rival the
French King Francis I in the Battle of Pavia in 1525, he released him – freeing
France to resume a separate and adversarial foreign policy at the heart of
Europe. The French King repudiated Charles’s grand gesture by taking the
remarkable step – so at odds with the medieval concept of Christian statecraft
82
– of proposing military cooperation to the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman, who
was then invading Eastern Europe and challenging Habsburg power from the
east.
“The universality of the Church Charles sought to vindicate was not to be

had. He proved unable to prevent the new doctrine of Protestantism from
spreading through the lands that were the principal base of his power. Both
religious and political unity was fracturing. The effort to fulfil his aspirations
inherent in his office was beyond the capabilities of a single individual…”104
Nevertheless, under Charles V, the Empire attained the peak of its power.
This power was reflected in its most famous architecture, which recalled the
architecture of pagan absolutism. “The serenity and splendour of the Spanish
throne,” wrote the Catholic author Hilaire Belloc, “the magnificence of its
externals, expressed in ritual, in every detail of comportment, still more in
architecture, profoundly affected the mind of Europe: and rightly so; they
remain to-day to astonish us. I may be thought extravagant if I say that the
Escorial, that huge block of dark granite unearthly proportioned, is a parallel
to the Pyramids… At any rate there is nothing else in Europe which so
presents the eternal and the simple combined… But the Escorial is not a mere
symbol, still less a façade; it is the very soul of the imperial name. It could
only have been raised and inhabited by kings who were believed by
themselves to be, and were believed by others to be, the chief on earth.”105
Charles V was able to claim leadership of the Christian world for two main
reasons. The first was his hold on the German imperial crown. “‘God the
Creator,’ Gattinara announced in 1519, ‘has given you this grace of raising
you in dignity above all Christian kings and princes by constituting you the
greatest emperor and king who has been since the division of the empire,
which was realized in the person of Charlemagne your predecessor, and by
drawing you to the right of monarchy in order to lead back the entire world to
a single shepherd.’ Time and again, Charles and his ministers would justify
policies ‘as much on account of the Empire as on account of our kingdoms of
Spain’. Charles proved unable, however, to persuade or force enough German
princes to elect his son Philip King of the Romans, and thus his designated
successor. While Philip succeeded as King of Spain, the imperial title
devolved to the Austrian branch of the family. The Spanish Habsburgs and
the emperor continued to work closely together, all the same. One way or the
other, the German imperial crown was to be an important component of
Habsburg power in Europe…”106
104 Kissinger, op. cit., pp. 15-16.

105 Belloc, Richelieu, London: Ernest Benn, 1930, pp. 67-68.
106 Bernard Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present, London: Allen Lane,
2013, p. 17.
83
The second reason why Charles could claim leadership of the Christian
world was his role as the main secular support of the Catholic Counter-
Reformation in two major wars – against the Protestants, and against the
Turks. Thus Spaniards such as Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, played
a very important role in strengthening the Church against the Reformation.
However, from a purely political and military point of view, it was the Turks
who represented the greater threat. And there were obvious geopolitical
reasons why the Habsburgs should take the lead in protecting Christendom
against them.
There were blips in this alliance. The most notorious was Charles V’s
dreadful sacking of Rome in 1527, when Pope Clement VII had sided with the
Italian city-states in trying the rid the country of foreign influence. However,
the atrocities were blamed on Charles’ German mercenaries, who had been
whipped up by Luther’s anti-papist propaganda107; and in general the alliance
remained firm.
The Popes stirred the emperors on in their holy war against Islam. “One
might almost call it Christian jihad,” writes Sir Noel Malcolm, “were it not for
one basic difference: their [the Popes’] aim was not simply to fight infidels
because they were infidels, but to fight them because they ruled over
populations of Christians’. 108 For Mohammed had believed that
Constantinople was the centre of the world; and when Mehmet II conquered
the City in 1453 he adopted the title of the Roman Autocrats and planned to
advance westwards against the only remaining power that contested that title
with him – the Western Holy Roman Emperor (Moscow’s claim to be “the
third Rome” came soon after, but little attention was paid to it in the West).
“It was now only a matter of time,” writes Brendan Simms, “before the
Ottomans launched a fresh offensive across the Mediterranean, or into the
Balkans towards central Europe, in order to make good this claim to the
Roman Empire, to achieve world domination through control of Europe, and
to vindicate their universal mission to promote the spread of Islam. For this
reason, the fall of Constantinople provoked a panic across Christendom. Even
in far-off Denmark and Norway, King Christian I declared that ‘the grand
Turk was the beast rising out of the sea described in the Apocalypse’.
“In the early sixteenth century, the Ottoman advance resumed under
Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent [he called himself ‘the second Solomon’]. His
aim was nothing less than Universal Monarchy: an inscription above the
entrance to the Grand Mosque in Constantinople later proclaimed him
‘Conqueror of the lands of the Orient and the Occident with the help of
Almighty God and his victorious army, possessor of the Kingdoms of the
107 Matthew Kneale, “Imperial Troops Sack Rome”, World Histories, 8, February/March, 2018,
p. 36.
108 Malcolm, Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies, London: Allen Lane, 2015;
quoted by Daniel Johnson in his review of the book in Standpoint, 72, May, 2015, p. 60.
84
World’. Liaising closely with disaffected Spanish Moors and their exiled
associates along the North African coast, he struck in the Mediterranean.
After turning Algeria into an Ottoman vassal, crushing the Knight Hospitaller
garrison at Rhodes, and securing most of the Black Sea littoral, the Sultan
crashed into central Europe. In 1521, Suleiman took the great fortress of
Belgrade, and five years later he shattered the Hungarian army at the battle of
Mohacs. A huge swathe of south-eastern Europe, including nearly the entire
fertile Danube Basin, fell under Ottoman control. Hungary – whose nobles
had described themselves as the ‘shield and rampart of Christianity’ – was no
more. In his self-proclaimed capacity as ‘Distributor of Crowns to the
monarchs of the world’, Suleiman made his satellite John Zapolya ‘King’ of
Hungary. The Sultan, the Greek historian Theodore Spandounes warned,
‘was preparing an innumerable force to make war upon the Christians by
land and sea’, with ‘no other thought but to devour’ them ‘like a dragon with
his gullet wide open’. It was only with great difficulty that the Habsburgs
repulsed a Turkish assault on Vienna itself in 1529.
“In the late 1550s, Suleiman’s successors pressed forward again. By 1565,
the Turks had appeared before the strategically vital island fortress of Malta,
which they very nearly captured. In the summer of 1570, Turkish troops
landed on Cyprus, capturing the island a year later. As the Turks advanced in
the late 1550s and early 1560s, Corsair and Morisco raids on the Spanish
eastern seaboard, often penetrating far inland, mounted. At the same time, the
Ottomans pushed further into Hungary, threatening the Holy Roman Empire.
There was heavy fighting throughout the 1550s and 1560s, which resumed in
the 1590s after a long truce. It was only in 1606, with the Peace of Zaitva, that
the Ottoman threat to central Europe receded, at least for the time being.
Charles “ruled not only over Spain, Naples, the Low Countries, Austria
and Bohemia, but also a growing empire in the New World. A Spanish bishop
therefore pronounced Charles ‘by God’s grace… King of the Romans and
Emperor of the world’. A Universal Monarchy under Charles V, in which the
Habsburgs ruled over a united and once again uniformly Catholic
Christendom, seemed a realistic possibility. It was only after some thirty years
of campaigning against the Turks, France, the German princes and even
England that Charles was forced to abandon his ambition to dominate
Europe.
“Within a few decades, however, his son, Philip II of Spain, showed

himself to be every bit as formidable. He defeated the Turks at the sea battle
of Lepanto [in 1571], took control of Portugal and her overseas empire,
colonized the Philippines, greatly increased the extraction of bullion from the
New World, and was even the King-Consort of England for a while. Puffed
up by his success, Philip began to speak more and more openly about his
European and global ambitions. The back of a medal commemorating the
union of crowns with Portugal was inscribed with the words ‘Non sufficit
orbis’ – ‘the world is not enough’. A Spanish triumphal arch carried a legend
suggesting that the king was ‘lord of the world’ and ‘lord of everything in
85
east and west’. Like his father, Philip ultimately failed, worn out by the battle
against Dutch rebels in the Low Countries and winded by the disastrous
Armada expedition against England. The Habsburg ambition to control
Europe was by no means over, however. During the Thirty Years War in the
early and mid-seventeenth century, it required the combined efforts of France,
Sweden, the German princes and ultimately England to see off an Austrian-
Spanish attempt to dominate the continent….”109
Of course, the Spanish monarchy was not the only major Catholic power in
Europe. There was also the Catholic king of France, Francis I, whom one
might have expected to work together with Charles against the Protestants
and the Ottomans. But France felt threatened with encirclement by the
Habsburg domains to the north, east and south of her, and for three centuries,
until Napoleon assumed the crown of Holy Roman Emperor himself, France
worked tirelessly to weaken the empire and keep it divided.
This was not so difficult to do because in spite of its impressive façade, the
Spanish Empire had several severe weaknesses. One of these was its
bewilderingly complex constitution, especially in Germany, and the
geographical disjointedness of its various dominions. Then there were the
divisions introduced by the conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism,
on the one hand, and, a little later, absolutism and democratism, on the other.
Another major problem was the Empire’s financial state: in spite of vast
revenues in silver and gold from the New World, its continuous wars meant
that it was always in need of more money. The fact that most of its lands were
acquired through dynastic alliances meant that Charles V and Philip II could
rely only on Castile as a tax base. This produced a rebellion known as the
communero revolt, which was crushed by the military. However, this did not
solve the fiscal problem, and the State defaulted on its debts many times.
Municipal offices were sold on a grand scale; and Genoese financiers took
control of the provisioning of the armed forces.
“As in other western European countries,” writes Francis Fukuyama, “the

rule of law played an important role in limiting the authority of the Spanish
king to simply do as he pleased with property rights and communal liberties.
In Spain, the tradition of Roman law had not been extinguished as completely
as in northern Europe, and after the recovery of the Justinian code in the
eleventh century it developed a strong civil law tradition. The civil law was
seen as a codification of divine and natural law. Although the king could
make positive law the Recompilacion made clear that he was subject to
existing legal precedents and that edicts contradicting those laws had no force.
The Catholic church remained the custodian of ecclesiastical law and often
challenged royal prerogatives. Royal commands that were contrary to
109 Simms, op. cit., pp. 9-11.
86
customary rights or privileges were resisted under the rubric, ‘’Obédezcase,
pero se cumpla” (obey, but do not put into effect), which was often invoked by
the conquistadores in the New World when they received an order they
didn’t like from an imperial viceroy. Individuals who disagreed with royal
commands had the right to appeal to the Royal Council, which like its English
counterpart constituted the highest judicial authority in the land. According
to the historian I.A.A. Thompson, ‘The Council of Castile stood for legalism
and due process against arbitrariness, and for a judicialist as against an
administrative or executive mode of government, actively resisting any
recourse to extraordinary or irregular procedures and consistently defending
established rights and contractual obligation.’
“The impact of this legal tradition can be seen in the way that Spanish
kings dealt with domestic enemies and with the property rights of their
subjects. There was no Spanish counterpart of Qin Shi Huangdi or Ivan the
Terrible, who would arbitrarily execute members of their own courts together
with their entire families. Like the French kings of the period, Spanish
monarchs chipped away at property rights incessantly in their search for cash,
but they did so within the framework of existing law. Rather than arbitrarily
expropriate assets, they renegotiated interest rates and principal repayment
schedules. Rather than risk confrontation over higher levels of direct taxes,
they debased the currency and accepted a higher rate of inflation. Inflation via
loose monetary policy is in effect a tax, but one that not have to be legislated
and that tends to hurt ordinary people more than elites with real rather than
monetary assets.”110
In spite of these various problems, the Empire took a long time to die – it
could be said to have survived in one form or another until the fall of Austria-
Hungary in 1918. This witnesses to the continued potency of the idea of
Universal Monarchy among Catholic Christians. Similarly, among Protestants
there was a powerful desire to prevent or destroy such a Universal Monarchy
and replace it with Universal Anarchy...
87
11. THE SPANISH AMERICAS
The claims to universality of the Spanish-ruled Holy Roman Empire were

demonstrated above all in its conquest of most of Central and Southern
America.
In 1492 the Italian Christopher Columbus discovered America and claimed

it in the name of the Holy Roman Empire of his patrons, Ferdinand and
Isabella; he first landed on the Bahamas, thinking it was an Indonesian island.
In 1493, writes David Childs, “Columbus founded the city of La Isabella at a
poorly chosen site on the northernmost coast of Hispaniola. Five years later
the disillusioned survivors moved over to the southern shore and founded a
new and lasting capital, Santo Domingo.”111 In 1498 Columbus became the
first European to set foot in South America...
Meanwhile, John Cabot claimed Newfoundland for the English crown in

1497, Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal to India and back in 149799, and
Pedro Alvares Cabral landed in Brazil in 1500.
“The European invasion of America,” writes Andrew Marr, “was one in

which wooden ships, using the Chinese inventions of the compass and
gunpowder, Muslim navigational mathematics and European Atlantic sailing
skills, acted the part that horses and chariots played on land. It is remembered
by Europeans and their modern American cousins as ‘the discovery’ only
because the invaded peoples [“about 75-100 million” of them in North
America, “compared with 70 million in Europe”] were so militarily weak and
succumbed so quickly to disease. Also, after centuries of deforesting and
draining, mass hunting and overfishing, Europe was so obviously barren in
natural resources that the Americas seemed to many Europeans a rich, ripe,
unplucked wilderness, another paradise. Preachers, sailors, entrepreneurs
and friendly heathens announced the discovery of a land of empty forests and
friendly heathens just waiting for the bounties of proper farming, property
rights and the Gospel…”112
“The discovery of America,” according to Yuval Noah Harari, “was the

foundational event of the Scientific Revolution. It not only taught Europeans
to favour present observations over past traditions, but the desire to conquer
America also obliged Europeans to search for a new knowledge at breakneck
speed. If they really wanted to control the vast new territories, they had to
gather enormous amounts of new data about the geography, climate, fauna,
languages, cultures and history of the new continent. Christian Scriptures, old
geography books and ancient oral traditions were of little help.
111 Childs, “America by Accident”, BBC History Magazine, October, 2012, p. 53.
112 Marr, A History of the World, London: Pan, 2012, p. 253.
88
“Henceforth not only European geographers, but European scholars in
almost all other fields of knowledge began to draw maps with spaces left in
them. They began to admit that their theories were not perfect and that there
were important things that they did not know.
“The Europeans were drawn to the blank spots on the map as if they were
magnets, and promptly started filling them in. During the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, European expeditions circumnavigated Africa, explored
America, crossed the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and created a network of
bases and colonies all over the world. They established the first truly global
empires and knitted together the first global trade network. The European
imperial expeditions transformed the history of the world: from being a series
of histories of isolated peoples and cultures, it became the history of a single
integrated human society.
“These European explore-and-conquer expeditions are so familiar to us

that we tend to overlook just how extraordinary they were. Nothing like them
had ever happened before. Long-distance campaigns of conquest are not a
natural undertaking. Throughout history most human societies were so busy
with local conflicts and neighbourhood quarrels that they never considered
exploring and conquering distant lands. Most great empires extended their
control only over their immediate neighbourhood – they reached far-flung
lands simply because their neighbourhood kept expanding. Thus the Romans
conquered Etruria in order to defend Rome (c.350-300 BC). They then
conquered the Po Valley in order to defend Etruria (c.200 BC). They
subsequently conquered Provence to defend the Po Valley (c.120 BC), Gaul to
defend Provence (c.50 BC), and Britain in order to defend Gaul (c.50 BC). It
took them 400 years to get from Rome to London. In 350 BC, no Roman would
have conceived of sailing directly to Britain and conquering it….
“What made Europeans exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable

ambition to explore and conquer. Although they might have had the ability,
the Romans never attempted to conquer India or Scandinavia, the Persians
never attempted to conquer Madagascar or Spain, and the Chinese never
attempted to conquer Indonesia or Africa. Most Chinese rulers left even
nearby Japan to its own devices. There was nothing peculiar about that. The
oddity is that early modern Europeans caught a fever that drove them to sail
to distant and completely unknown lands, full of alien cultures, take one step
on to their beaches, and immediately declare, ‘I claim all these territories for
my king!’”113
In America, that was the king of Spain. And yet his dominions, according
to the papist theory, were merely as it were leased to him by the Pope, who
was recognised by all the Catholic kings as their true lord and master. Thus in
1493 the Borgia Pope Alexander VI gave the Indies to the Crown of Castile
and Leon in perpetuity. And in 1494 he arbitrated in a dispute between Spain
113 Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage, 2011, pp. 322-323, 324-325.
89
and Portugal resulting in “the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided half the
world longitudinally between them. The line ran through the two poles and
west of the Cape Verde islands off Africa, which were already Portuguese,
giving the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola, claimed by Columbus, to Spain. A
revision of the first agreement would give the Portuguese most of Brazil; later,
in 1529, the Iberian carve-up was extended to the other side of the world, with
another line being drawn through the Far East in the Treaty of Zaragoza.”114
The theory of geopolitical sovereignty was elaborated by the New World

missionary (and Jewish converso) Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote in 1552:
“The Roman pontiff, vicar of Jesus Christ, whose divine authority extends
over all the kingdoms of heaven and earth115, could justly invest the kings of
Castile and Leon with the supreme and sovereign empire and dominion over
the entire realm of the Indies, making them emperors over many kings… If
the vicar of Christ were to see that this was not advantageous for the spiritual
well-being of Christianity, he could without doubt, by the same divine
authority, annul or abolish the office of emperor of the Indies, or he could
transfer it to another place, as one Pope did when he transferred the imperial
crown from the Greeks to the Germans [at the coronation of Charlemagne in
800]. With the same authority, the Apostolic See could prohibit, under penalty
of excommunication, all other Christian kings from going to the Indies
without the permission and authorisation of the kings of Castile. If they do
the contrary, they sin mortally and incur excommunication.
“The kings of Castile and León are true princes, sovereign and universal
lords and emperors over many kings. The rights over all that great empire
and the universal jurisdiction over all the Indies belong to them by the
authority, concession and donation of the said Holy Apostolic See and thus by
divine authority. This and no other is the juridical basis upon which all their
title is founded and established…”116
Las Casas became famous for his protection of the rights of the native
Indians against the cruelties of the Spanish colonialists. In a debate at
Valladolid in 1550 he pressed the case for the full humanity of the Indians
against Sepulveda, who argued, following Aristotle, that they were so inferior
as to be intended by God to be slaves. The Indians were certainly suffering
from a despotism hardly less cruel than the pagan despotisms that had
preceded it. “The cruelty of the Spaniards [in the New World], writes Kamen,
114
Marr, op. cit., p. 259.
115 We may note that here the Pope is supposedly king even of heaven! In view of these and
similar statements, it is hard to deny that the Counter-Reformation papacy, no less than its
medieval predecessor, usurped the power of God and became, in the strict definition of the
word, idolatrous. (V.M.)
116 Las Casas, Aqui se contienen treinta proposiciones muy juridicas, Propositions XVI, XVII.
90
“was incontrovertible; it was pitiless, barbaric and never brought under
control by the colonial regime”.117
“For the subjugated natives,” writes Harari, “these colonies were hell on
earth. They were ruled with an iron fist by greedy and unscrupulous colonists
who enslaved them and set to work in mines and plantations, killing anyone
who offered the slightest resistance. Most of the native population soon died,
either because of the harsh working conditions or the virulence of the diseases
that hitch-hiked to America on the conquerors’ sailing ships. Within twenty
years, almost the entire native Caribbean population was wiped out. The
Spanish colonists began importing African slaves to fill the vacuum…”118
“From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the European conquerors

imported millions of African slaves to work the mines and plantations of
America. They chose to import slaves from Africa rather than from Europe or
East Asia due to three circumstantial factors. Firstly, Africa was closer, so it
was cheaper to import slaves from Senegal than from Vietnam.
“Secondly, in Africa there already existed a well-developed slave trade

(exporting slaves mainly to the Middle East), whereas in Europe slavery was
very rare. It was obviously far easier to buy slaves in an existing market than
to create a new one from scratch.
“Thirdly and most importantly, American plantations in places such as

Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plagued by malaria and yellow fever, which
had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial
genetic immunity to these diseases, whereas Europeans were totally
defenceless and died in droves. It was consequently wiser for a plantation
owner to invest his money in an African slave than in a European slave or
indentured labourer. Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity)
translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in
tropical climates than Europeans, they ended up as the slaves of European
masters! Due to these circumstantial factors, the burgeoning new societies of
America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans and a
subjugated caste of black Africans.”119
The Spanish conquest of what is now called Latin America was inexorable.
In 1519 Cortes with an army of 550 men conquered the Mexican empire of the
Aztecs, kidnapping the Aztec ruler Montezuma and then enlisting the captive
peoples of the empire against the Aztecs. By 1600 “a population estimated at
25 million in 1492 had been reduced to a mere one million”120; and if most of
the victims fell to European diseases such as smallpox introduced by the
conquerors rather than to war and execution, the cruelty of the so-called
117 Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: the Making of a World Power, 1492-1763, Allen Lane:
The Penguin Press, 2002.

118 Harari, op. cit., p. 326.
119 Harari, op. cit., pp. 156-157.
120 Spellman, op. cit., pp. 91-92.
91
Christians was nevertheless exceptional. Thus in 1519, Cortes and his troops
entered the Aztec city of Cholula, and killed thousands of unarmed
civilians…121
Ten years later, Francisco Pizarro with an even smaller army of 168 men
invaded the South-American empire of the Incas, defeating the Inca emperor
Atahualpa at Cajamarca n 1532. “Pizarro plagiarised Cortes. He declared
himself a peaceful emissary of the king of Spain, invited the Inca ruler,
Atahualpa, to a diplomatic interview, and then kidnapped him. Pizarro
proceeded to conquer the paralysed empire with the help of local allies. If the
subject peoples of the Inca Empire had known the fate of the inhabitants of
Mexico, they would not have thrown in their lot with the invaders. But they
did not know.”122
Niall Ferguson writes; “As the architecture of Pachacamac, Cuzco and

Machu Picchu shows to this day, the Inca emperors ruled over a substantial
and sophisticated civilization, which they called Tahuantinsuyo. For a century,
they had held sway over 14,000 square miles of Andean terrirory, with a
population we now estimate at between 5 and 10 million. Their mountainous
kingdom was held together by a network of roads, stairways and bridges,
many of which can still be used. Their agriculture, based on the cultivation of
llama wool and maize, was efficient. Theirs was a relatively wealthy society,
though they used gold and silver for ornamentation, not money, preferring to
use quipucamayoc (made of string and beads) for accounting and
administrative purposes. The ethos of Inca rule was cruelly hierarchical. A
cult of sun worship went along with human sacrifice and draconian
punishment.”123
The cruelty of the Spanish conquest of Central and South America may be
seen Divine justice for the child-sacrifice practiced over centuries by the
pagan empires. Thus on one occasion in 1487, the Aztecs sacrificed 84,000
men, women and children prisoners at the reconsecration of the Great
Pyramid of Tenochtitlan. 124 But the conquest also witnessed to the
dehumanizing effect of centuries of papal propaganda justifying the
extermination of heretics and non-Catholics. Christianity had changed
morality by teaching men to see in every man the image of God and therefore
an object of love and respect. But the “Christianity” of Roman Catholicism
turned the clock back to paganism by teaching Catholics to treat other classes
of men as in effect subhuman. And this in spite of the fact that the council at
Valladolid had concluded that the people living in the Western Hemisphere
were indeed human beings with souls…125 The Pope was like a sun-god for
the Roman Catholics to whom many thousands were brought in sacrifice
121 Montefiore, op. cit., p. 210.

122
Harari, op. cit., p. 330.
125 Kissinger, op. cit., p. 18.
92
during the Inquisition and the extremely bloody religious wars of early
modern Europe…
Cruelty was not the only vice that crossed the ocean. Greed for silver and
gold, so plentiful in the former Inca empire, corrupted the Spanish and
motivated the despotic regime they imposed on the Incas, making them into
slave-labourers in the great silver mines, such as Potosi in Bolivia. As Marr
writes, ``’The Spanish bought all manner of fabrics, foods and exotic goods
from their rivals. They exulted in the good fortune that allowed them to enjoy
a consumer, or consumption economy without increased productivity… It is
hard to imagine a more complete programme for national decline than that. In
the New World, Spain would build a dozy, already decaying empire of
aristocrats, priests and large landowners, and would never experience the jolt
into modernity that animated her [West European] rivals.”126
From the seventeenth century it was the turn of the patrimonialization of

Spain’s political system to be exported to the New World; “and it was
inevitable,” writes Fukuyama, “that institutions like venal office would be
transferred to the Americas. The basic dynamic driving this process was,
however, initiative on the part of local actors in the colonies seeking to
increase their rents and privileges, and the fact that the central government
back in Madrid was too weak and too far away to prevent them from doing
so.”127
Madrid had anticipated such a development, and had originally rewarded

the conquistadores, not with land, but with people. These grants were the
encomiendas, and were conditional and noninheritable. However, writes
Fukuyama, “the iron law of the large estate or latifundia – the rich tend to get
richer, in the absence of state intervention – applied in Latin America much as
in other agrarian societies like China and Turkey. The one-generation
encomiendas were strongly resisted by the settler class, who not surprisingly
wanted to be able to pass on their entitlements to their children and who in
the 1540s revolted against a law mandating their automatic reversion to the
Crown. Title over people enabled certain encomenderos to get rich by
commanding their labor, and they began to purchase large tracts of land.
Unlike the encomienda, land was heritable. By the late sixteenth century, the
Americas were facing a depopulation crisis of the indigenous populations;
Mexico went from 20 million to 1.6 million inhabitants in the period. This
meant that a lot of lightly populated land suddenly became available.
“This new creole elite tended to live in cities, and they exploited their land
as absentee landlords using hired labor. Customary land tenure in Latin
America was not essentially different from what existed in other tribal
126 Marr, op. cit., p.269.

127 Fukuyama, op. cit., p. 368.
93
societies, being communal and tied to extended kinship groups. The
remaining Indians were tricked into selling their lands, or else simply forced
off them. Communal lands were turned into private estates, and the
environment was dramatically changed as native crops like maize and manioc
were replaced by European cash crops. A lot of agricultural land was given
over to cattle ranching, with often devastating effects on soil fertility. The
government back in Madrid was committed to protecting the rights the
indigenous owners, but was far away and unable to control things on the
ground. Oftentimes local Spanish authorities worked hand in hand with the
new class of landowners to help them evade regulation. This was the origin of
the Latin American latifundia, the hacienda, which in later generations would
become the source of inequality and persistent civil strife.
“The concentration of land in the hands of a small elite was promoted by

the Spanish practice of mayorazgo, a system of primogeniture that prevented
large haciendas from being broken up and sold piecemeal. The seventeenth
century saw the accumulation of large landholdings, including entire towns
and villages, by wealthy individuals, who then introduced the mayorazgo to
prevent land from slipping out of family control through endless division to
children. This practice was introduced into the New World as well. The
Spanish authorities tired to limit the number of licenses for mayorazgos under
the same theory that led them to take back encomiendas. The local creole or
settler population responded by making use of the mejora, by which parents
could favour one child over another in order to maintain the power and status
of the family’s lineage.
“A class of powerful landed families emerged, but they failed to operate as

a coherent political factor. As in ancient regime France, the tax system helped
to bind individual settlers to the state and to break up the solidarity they
might have felt with any of their non-European fellow citizens. The large
numbers of single men who constituted early waves of settlers ended up
marrying or having children with indigenous women, producing a class of
mestizos. The mulatto offspring of whites and the black slaves that were
being transported to the New World in increasing numbers constituted yet
another separate caste. Against these groups, the creole offspring of Hispanic
settlers claimed tax exemptions for themselves, a status enjoyed in Spain only
by nobles and hidalgos (lower gentry). As in North America, the simple fact
of being white conferred status on people and marked them off from tribute-
paying Indians and blacks…”128
For, as Gregory Jay writes: “Before the age of exploration, group

differences were largely based on language, religion, and geography. … the
European had always reacted a bit hysterically to the differences of skin color
and facial structure between themselves and the populations encountered in
Africa, Asia, and the Americas (see, for example, Shakespeare's dramatization
of racial conflict in Othello and The Tempest). Beginning in the 1500s,
128 Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 368-369.
94
Europeans began to develop what became known as ‘scientific racism,’ the
attempt to construct a biological rather than cultural definition of race …
Whiteness, then, emerged as what we now call a ‘pan-ethnic’ category, as a
way of merging a variety of European ethnic populations into a single
‘race’.”129
129 Jay, “Who Invented White People?”
95
12. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION
The English Reformation had a less principled character, at least at the

beginning, than that on the continent of Europe. Its main product, the
Anglican Church, was conceived in adultery – King Henry VIII’s discarding
of his lawful wife, Catherine of Aragon, in 1534 - and was born in murder –
the murder of his new wife, Anne Boleyn, in 1536. 130 In the beginning,
religious motives played hardly any part in the affair. For the English people
remained strongly attached to their Catholic beliefs, cults and ceremonies.131
And Henry, too, remained Catholic in his personal beliefs and by no means
wanted to allow the anti-authoritarian views of the Protestants into his
kingdom; for, as the Scottish Calvinist John Knox was threateningly heard to
say, “Jehu killed two Kings at God’s commandment…”
But he wanted a divorce from his wife because she had not produced any
male heirs. And Henry thought he knew why: before marrying him,
Catherine had been married to Henry’s elder brother Arthur, who had died
prematurely. But Scripture declared: “Whosoever marrieth his brother’s wife
doth a thing that is unlawful, he shall be without sons or male heirs”
(Leviticus 21.20). So, he decided, he was not legally married, and was free to
marry again. Now this would not normally be a great problem. As long ago
as 1054 the Pope had “regulated” the unlawful marriage of William of
Normandy; and the wife of the French King Louis XII had been allowed to go
to a convent. But Catherine had no intention of becoming a nun. Moreover,
she had a powerful ally – her nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V,
the world’s most powerful Catholic monarch. So the Pope refused.
Henry’s solution was a kind of Catholicism without the Pope… He refused

to allow legal recourse to the Pope in the Act of Restraint of Appeals (1533),
calling England an “empire” that was therefore independent of any other,
including the Holy Roman Empire 132 ; and he declared his marriage to
Catherine void in the Act of Succession (1534). But in most other respects he
remained a Catholic. Thus in 1521 Henry had written a work against the
Lutheran theory of the sacraments, for which he received the title “Defender
of the Faith” by the Pope. Moreover, he remained at first a firm opponent of
the English Bible – which is why Tyndale had to print his translation
abroad.133 So, in spite of the strong increase in Protestant influences within the
kingdom, the English Reformation was not a real Reformation insofar as, in
130 Historians have debated extensively over who was really responsible for Anne Boleyn’s
death. I follow William Starkey in laying the principal blame at the feet of King Henry.
131 Dominic Selwood, “How a Protestant Spin Machine Hid the Truth about the English
Reformation”, History, May 23, 2014.

132 “This realm of England is an empire… governed by one supreme head and king having
the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown”.

133 In 1529 Thomas More wrote a refutation of Tyndale’s translation, calling it heretical. And
In 1535 he was burned by the imperial authorities, having been tracked down by Henry’s
agents. But in 1539 there appeared the Great Bible, the first official English Bible (John Barton,
A Hisory of the Bible, London: Allen Lane, 2019, p. 450).
96
the words of Ralf Dahrendorf, “a falling out with the Pope is not the same as a
true Reformation”.134
Nevertheless, English monarchs’ quarrels with the Pope had always had
important consequences. We think of King John’s quarrel with Pope Innocent
III, or the Anglo-Saxon Church’s quarrel with Pope Alexander II that led to
the Norman Conquest in 1066. And the consequences were certainly to be
important now, in the quarrel between King Henry and Pope Clement VII…
As Robert Tombs writes, “Cranmer [Henry’s archbishop of Canterbury]

and Cromwell [his chancellor] have usually been seen as trying to push
Henry further towards reform than he wished to go, with intervals in which
the king swung back towards conservatism. But Henry was broadly
determined to steer a middle course between tradition and reform: between
‘the usurped power of the bishop of Rome’ and radical evangelists who ‘wrest
and interpret’ the Bible ‘to subvert and overturn as well the sacraments of
Holy Church as the power and authority of princes’. Religion was too
important to be left to the clergy: the political and social order was at risk.
“This had been luridly demonstrated in the midst of Henry’s reformation.

In October 1534, France was swept by panic when posters were put up
asserting that secret groups of heretics were planning to massacre the
orthodox. Worse, in Münster, armed ‘Anabaptist’ radicals had carried out a
prototypical act of violent revolution, driving out the ‘godless’ in February
1534 and setting up a terrorist Utopia under a messianic king, with all
property in common, compulsory polygamy, all books banned save the Bible,
and the death penalty for disobedience. In June 1535, after a terrible siege, an
imperial army stormed the town and massacred the defenders; the ‘king’ was
torn apart with red-hot pincers. In England, Henry did his bit by having a
dozen Dutch Anabaptist immigrants burned.
“Henry kept a close eye on doctrine. He insisted above all on

‘transubstantiation’: that the bread and wine of the Mass were miraculously
changed into the body and blood of Christ in a mystical participation in his
sacrifice. This was the core of the idea of the Church and its priesthood as
sacred and apart, unlike the radical belief that ‘the Lord’s supper’ was a
commemoration ceremony performed by a group of believers. Henry insisted
too that salvation came from good works, and not from faith alone – he
thought it dangerous (as indeed it was) if people believed that they were
‘saved’ however they behaved. So his convictions, which were apparently
sincere, were also useful: they supported order and hierarchy and enhanced
his own status as a divinely instituted monarch. Henry saw himself as a
moderate. Those less moderate than himself – even those close to him – risked
the stake or the block.”135
134 Dahrendorf, in Jeremy Paxman, The English, London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 98.
135 Tombs, op. cit., p. 168.
97
One of those who went to the block (on July 6, 1535) was Sir Thomas More,
Lord Chancellor from 1529 until his resignation in 1532, who refused to obey
the king when his commands went against the pope. The following dialogue
with his wife has been preserved:
“O my husband,” she said to him, “do obey the command of the King as
others have done, and your life will be spared.”
“And how long, my dear wife,” he answered, “how long do you think I
shall live if I do what you ask me?”
“For at least twenty years,” she said.
“Well, if you had said twenty thousand years, that would have been
something; but it would, indeed, be a very poor thing to live even that
number of years, and run the risk of losing my God in eternity! Oh no, dear
wife, I thought you would have spoken more wisely to me than that. I will
never consent to disobey my God in that way; I promised Him over and over
again that I would serve Him faithfully all my days, and love Him with my
whole heart, and by His grace I will do it.”
Henry’s Reformation was anything but “moderate” in its effects, and could
be called such only by comparison with the much bloodier persecutions that
took place on the continent in the next 100 years. This is particularly clearly
seen in the Dissolution of the Monasteries… Such dissolutions took place in
several part of the Protestant world. For, as Niall Ferguson writes, “Two
thirds of monasteries were close in the Protestant territories of Germany, the
lands and other assets mostly appropriated by secular rulers and sold to
wealthy subjects, as also happened in England. A rising share of university
students gave up thoughts of the monastic life, turning their attention to more
worldly vocations. As has been justly observed, the Reformation had wholly
unintended consequences, in that it was ‘a religious movement that
contributed to Europe’s secularization’.”136
As for England: “Beginning in 1535, Cromwell rapidly organized

‘visitations’ and inventories of religious houses, and began to close them
down and confiscate their wealth – their land, their libraries, the jewels of
their shrines and their sacred vessels. Henry accumulated chests of gold
stored at the back of his bedchamber in Whitehall. There was vast looting,
and embezzlement: the reformers could profit from religion at least as well as
the sellers of indulgences. The cultural losses are incalculable, including art,
building and historical records. Tens of thousands of objects and works of art
great and small were melted down, torn up, painted over or smashed.
Matthew Parker, Master of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, saved ancient
documents he thought proved the ancient autonomy of the English Church,
and in doing so rescued swathes of England’s early history from oblivion.
98
Queen Anne campaigned for some of the proceeds to go to education and
poor relief. Vast sums went on building or adorning palaces (including
Richmond, Hampton Court and Nonsuch in Surrey) and on creating a navy;
or it was squandered on an expensive and futile war with France in 1544.”137
The Dissolution was not without its strictly religious aspect. As David
Starkey and Katie Greening write: “The principal motive of the Dissolution
had been fiscal. Henry VIII’s extravagance in peace and war had long since
exhausted the treasures left him by his careful father. Parliament, as usual,
was reluctant to grant taxation. To bridge the gap, the king’s new minister,
Thomas Cromwell,… persuaded Henry to re-endow the crown with the
former wealth of the monasteries. This was mere expediency. But Cromwell,
Cranmer [the Archbishop of Canterbury], and even Henry himself, were also
concerned with the principles at stake. The vast endowments of the
monasteries were justified by the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. Purgatory
was conceived of as an intermediate state between Heaven and Hell. The
passage of the souls of the dead through Purgatory – providing they had not
been irretrievably wicked in life – could be aided by the prayers and offerings
of the living. These invoked the merits of Christ, His Mother and the saints,
which were entrusted to the Church and dispensed by it – for a price. And the
price, to cut a long story short, was the endowment of the monasteries, which
paid for prayers, masses and a perpetual cycle of invocation and intercession
– and for the professional musicians who sung it.
“But where was Purgatory in the Bible? The new approaches to

Christianity, called the New Learning by contemporaries and ‘Evangelical’ by
historians, made the Bible – especially the Bible in English – the measure of all
things. And Purgatory was to be found nowhere in the Bible. Nor were
prayers, intercessions and sung masses for the dead. Instead, salvation
depended wholly on the Christian’s relationship with God and his fellow men
in this world, not the next.
“At a stroke, the Dissolution was transformed from a fiscal expedient into a
necessary step of religious reform. But how far would reform go? The great
religious changes in England had begun for the narrowest and most self-
interested of motives: Henry’s urgent desire for divorce and remarriage. But
the coincided with the great European-wide movement of religious reform
known as the Reformation. Henry’s relationship with the Reformation was an
uncertain one. He had been one of Luther’s earliest and most prominent
opponents, winning his papal title of Defender of the Faith for his anti-
Lutheran text, Assertio septem sacramentorum, and the two were never
reconciled. Cranmer’s theology, on the other hand, moved more and more
into the mainstream of European reformed thought, even going beyond
Luther towards the more thorough-going Zwingli and the other Swiss
reformers.” 138
137
Tombs, op. cit., p. 169.
138 Starkey and Greening, Music & Monarchy, London: BBC Books, 2013, pp. 16-17.
99
*
“With Henry’s death [in 1547[,” continue Starkey and Canning,

“[Cranmer’s] position was transformed. Under the old king, who prided
himself on forging a lonely middle way between the extremes of the Old and
New Learning, Cranmer had been one counsellor among many. With the
accession of Henry’s nine-year-old son Edward VI, a regency government was
set up in which Cranmer was one of the two principal voices: the king’s
maternal uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, exercised supreme
power in mattes of state, while Cranmer determined the pace and extent of
religious change.”139
At this point it was by no means certain that England would become a

Protestant country. Already in 1536, as the Dissolution of the Monasteries
undermined the material base of the old Catholicism, there was a Catholic
rebellion in the north called the Pilgrimage of Grace. Henry promised
leniency to the defeated rebels, but broke his word and slaughtered them
ruthlessly.
In 1549 Cranmer introduced a new Prayer Book in 1549 that was Zwinglian
in its Eucharistic theology, transforming the Latin Mass into a purely
commemorative service, “the Lord’s Supper”. There were widespread
protests and thousands died in clashes with government forces. Thus 900 died
on August 4, 1549 in the village of Clyst St. Mary in Cornwall. As Peter
Marshall writes, “the rebels of Devon and Cornwall mocked the new service
as a ‘Christmas game’. It reminded them of entertainments performed locally
at Yuletide in places like Ashburton, where, in carefree pre-Reformation days,
payments were made to actors from Exeter for ‘playing a Christmas game in
the church’.”140
But the Catholics were not finished yet. Edward VI died in 1553, and was
succeeded by his half-sister Mary, the wife of King Philip of Spain. A fervent
Catholic, she was determined to stamp out Calvinism. A persecution of
Calvinists got under way whose goriness was vivdlydescribed by John Foxe
in his Book of Martyrs; he called it“the third Testament of the English
Church”141. As Chadwick writes: “The steadfastness of the victims, from
Ridley and Latimer downwards, baptized the English Reformation in blood
and drove into English minds the fatal association of ecclesiastical tyranny
with the See of Rome… Five years before, the Protestant cause was identified
with church robbery, destruction, irreverence, religious anarchy. It was now
beginning to be identified with virtue, honesty, and loyal English resistance to
a half-foreign government.”142
139 Starkey and Canning, op. cit., p. 18.

140 Marshall, “The Savage Reformation”, BBC History Magazine, May, 2017, p. 30.
141 Paxman, op. cit., p. 89.
142 Chadwick, op. cit., p. 128; quoted in Paxman, op. cit., p. 91.
100
Mary restored everything that the Protestants had tried to destroy. The
Catholic Mass was again sung with all its “smells and bells” and all the old-
style musical and ceremonial splendour, and prayers for the dead and belief
in Purgatory were re-established. There was even the beginnings of a
restoration of the monasteries, so closely linked with prayers for the dead.
Westminster Abbey, for example, became a monastic community again, and
St. Edward the Confessor’s body was restored to its tomb.143
When Queen Mary died in 1558, the circle turned again. Perhaps the last
major manifestation of Catholic England took place in 1557, in the funeral of
Anne of Cleaves, Henry VIII’s penultimate wife, who had converted to
Catholicism. Mary was succeeded by her half-sister, Anne Boleyn’s daughter,
Elizabeth. As Eliot Wilson writes, “During the last months of 1558 and the
beginning of 1559, she negotiated a settlement for the Church of England that
revived most of Henry VIII’s religious changes. Catholicism as a state religion
in England became a thing of the past. The Church of England’s 39 Articles of
1563 reinforced what the interim 11 Articles of 1561 had stated, which was
that Purgatory, that doctrina Romanensium, was to be condemned. This time
the reformation of religion imposed on the long-suffering English people
would endure.
“The death of Catholic England took place, therefore, in 1558. The final
assertion of Protestant supremacy was not merely a matter for politicians and
theologians, but had profound implications for the way in which ordinary
men and women viewed this life and the next. Purgatory was not simply
abolished by the Act of 39 Articles: Parliament could do many things but it
could not tell people what to think or what to believe. But Catholic notions of
death required action as well as belief. The proscription of intercessory
prayers, of the ringing of bells on Hallowe’en and the dissolution anew of the
monasteries and chantry chapels which Mary had restored chipped away at
the foundations of Purgatory, until, eventually it withered on the vine
(though Anglican theologians and churchmen remained vigilant for signs of
Roman doctrine until well into the 17th century).
“The never-ending morality tale which Catholic dogma had offered was
replaced by a vision of death and salvation that was in some ways much
starker and more uncompromising. The afterlife for Protestants became
strikingly bipolar, with Heaven and Hell the only possible destinations.
Calvinist dogma, which was so influential in the Elizabethan Church of
England, taught that souls were predestined for one or the other, regardless of
143
It should be pointed out, however, that Edward the Confessor was an Orthodox, not a
Catholic saint, and died out of communion with the Pope! It should be also be pointed out
that the Orthodox Church rejects Purgatory. St. Mark of Ephesus, for example, spoke against
it at the council of Florence in 1438-39. However, in its prayers for the dead and general
attitude to the after-life, Orthodoxy is much closer to Catholicism than Protestantism…
101
their earthly conduct, and had been since before the creation of the world. The
intimate relationship between the living and the dead, which Catholicism had
expounded, and the interdependence which existed between them, gave way
to a more distant system of commemoration. A duty to the dead remained
and could be fulfilled by the erection of monuments and commissioning of
laudatory sermons, but these were essentially for the benefit of the living. The
dead either had no need of them, or were beyond redemption…”144
In bringing about the final death of Catholic England, Elizabeth made the
English Reformation permanent and steadied the ship of state; she introduced
a long period of peace that compared well with the increasing chaos on the
continent and lasted until the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642.
However, the price was high. For she achieved this peace-making feat by
perfecting her father’s technique of deliberate ambiguity, which from now on
became the central characteristic of Anglican religion. For “at first glance,”
writes G.W. Bernard, “Henry’s policies seem confused and uncertain; on
closer examination they are better described as deliberately ambiguous. For
Henry knew what he wanted well enough and was sufficient of a politician to
know when and how and when to compromise. He grasped that among
churchmen and, increasingly, among the educated laity, religious convictions
were polarising. If he were to win acceptance for the break with Rome and the
royal supremacy, the pope would have to be denounced, but if radical
religious changes were to be enforced, or even if they were simply to be
advocated from the pulpits, he risked provoking serious rebellions like the
Pilgrimage of Grace. For all the extravagant claims of the Act of Six Articles
that it would abolish diversity of opinions, Henry more realistically aimed at
steering a path between the extremes.”145
“Nor was the Elizabethan religious settlement [the Act of Uniformity in

1559 and the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1571] unequivocally protestant. Elizabeth
would have preferred something closer to her father’s catholicism, without
the pope and without egregious superstition… Henry VIII and Elizabeth…
saw the monarch as in control of the church, appointing bishops, determining
doctrine and liturgy, and capable even of suspending an archbishop from
exercising his power, a view perhaps symbolised by the placing of royal arms
inside parish churches. At the heart of this monarchical view of the church lay
a desire that was essentially political…; a desire for comprehensiveness, for a
church that would embrace all their subjects. Religious uniformity was
natural in itself; religious dissensions wrecked social harmony and political
peace. Continental experiences – from the peasants’ war of 1525 through the
French wars of religion to the Thirty Years’ War – reinforced English rulers’
fears of the disastrous consequences of religious divisions, and their success,
Wilson, “The Last Death of Catholic England”, History Today, January, 2018, p. 59.
144
Bernard, “The Church of England c.1529-c.1642”, History, vol. 75, no. 244, June, 1990, p.
145
185.
102
until 1642, in sparing their realm from such horrors further strengthened their
conviction of the efficacy of the policy…”146
Tombs writes: “Elizabeth had no sympathy with hardliners in either camp,

and considered ‘what they disputed about but trifles’. Heresy trials were
stopped and surviving prisoners released. She did not seek to ‘make windows
into men’s hearts’, as the philosopher-politician Francis Bacon famously put it;
and her judges were instructed that the queen wanted no ‘examination or
inquisition of their secret opinions in their consciences for matters of faith’.
Victims of over-zealous Church authorities were confident enough to appeal
to Magna Carta. But the queen did insist that people should obey the law by
at least of minimum of outward conformity, so as not to disturb ‘the common
quiet of the realm’. Given her own impatience with dogma, she could not
understand why some refused, whether traditionalists who refused to attend
church occasionally or evangelicals who refused to wear ecclesiastical
vestments. Gradually Elizabeth’s religion entered the minds and hearts of
most people, as a generation grew up which thought of the Pope as Antichrist,
the Mass as a mummery, and their Catholic past not as their own, but as
‘another country, another world’.”147
“Outward conformity” was the key to the new spirituality. Bernard

continues: “Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I and Charles I placed secular and
political considerations of order above purely ecclesiastical and theological
considerations…, from the start, from the 1530s, rulers faced limitations
because some of their subjects were papists and some of their subjects wanted
further reformation. Given the fact of religious difference, given that rulers
knew that their subjects, especially the more educated, were divided,
sometimes in response to theological debates European rather than just
national in scope, a measure of compromise and ambiguity, particularly on
points of doctrine or of local liturgical practice, was deliberately fostered.”148
“Larger cracks can be papered over than one might supposed. But in
extraordinary circumstances, if contradictions with which men have long
deliberately or unconsciously lived can no longer be accommodated or
overlooked, if a monarchical church is faced by urgent demands for
unambiguous, uncompromising decisions of divisive questions, then the
ensuing collapse can be violent. When Englishmen ultimately turned to war
in 1642, those differences of religion that the monarchical church had striven
to contain but to which it was always vulnerable proved to be the most
embittering determinant of men’s allegiance.”149
Under Elizabeth the English acquired the habit of compromise, “the

middle way”, allowing individual variations in faith that would not have
146 Bernard, op. cit., p. 187.

147 Tombs, op. cit., pp.183-184.
148 Bernard, op. cit., p. 188.
149 Bernard, op. cit., pp. 205-206.
103
been permissible in earlier ages. This habit was not unique to Anglicanism.
We find it also in the German Reformer, Kaspar Schwenkfeld, who asserted,
in Barzun’s words, that “if each soul has a unique destiny, then each man and
woman may frame his or her creed within the common Christian religion.
They deserve to have faith custom-tailored to their needs.”150 But from an
Orthodox point of view, such individualism and ability to compromise, while
useful in political situations, is extremely harmful in questions of religious
truth, where, as St. Mark of Ephesus pointed out, there can be no middle way
between truth and falsehood. The via media was imposed upon the Church
because it had been chosen by the monarch, who, for political and personal
reasons, wanted a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. It
meant that henceforth the Anglican Church represented not one faith, but an
uneasy compromise between two, with the king as the arbiter and supreme
judge over both of them.
Now “if the State, as law and authority,” writes Tikhomirov, “departs from
its connection with a definite confession, that is, comes out from under the
influence of the religious confession on religious politics, it becomes the
general judge of all confessions and submits religion to itself. All relations
between various confessions, and their rights, must evidently be decided by
the State that is outside them, being governed exclusively by its own ideas
about justice and the good of society and the State. In this connection it
obviously has the complete right and every opportunity to be repressive in all
cases in which, in its opinion, the interests of the confession contradict civil
and political interests. Thus the situation emerges in which the State can
influence the confessions, but cannot and must not be influenced by them.
Such a State is already unable to be governed in relation to the confessions by
any religious considerations, for not one of the confessions constitutes for it a
lawful authority, whereas the opinions of financiers, economists, medics,
administrators, colonels, etc. constitute its lawful consultants, so that in all
spheres of the construction of the people’s life the State will be governed by
considerations drawn precisely from these sources.
“In such an order there can be no religious freedom for anyone. Perhaps –
and this is doubtful – there can be equal rights for the confessions. But
freedom and equality of rights are not the same thing. Equality of rights can
also consist of a general lack of rights. The State can, [for example,] on the
basis of cultural and medical considerations, take measures against
circumcision and forbid fasting; to avoid disorders or on the basis of sanitary
considerations it can forbid pilgrimages to holy places or to venerate relics; on
the basis of military demands it can forbid all forms of monasticism among
Christians, Buddhists, Muslims. The services themselves can be found to be
harmful hypnotizations of the people not only in public, but also in private
prayer. In general, there are no bounds to the State’s prohibitive measures in
relation to religions if it is placed outside them, as their general judge…”151
150 Barzun, op. cit., p. 33.

151 Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 269.
104
*
The longer-term consequences of this were summed up by Christopher

Hill: “The long-term outcome of the Reformation was the opposite of that
intended by the Machiavellians who introduced it. Charles I’s Secretary of
State, the near-papist Windebanke, pointed out to the representative of the
Pope in England the historical irony of the situation. ‘Henry VIII committed
such sacrilege by profaning so many ecclesiastical benefices in order to give
their goods to those who, being so rewarded, might stand firmly for the king
in the lower house; and now the king’s greatest enemies are those who are
enriched by these benefices… O the great judgements of God!’ The overthrow
of papal authority by Henry VIII thus looks forward to the civil war and the
execution of Charles I. The royal supremacy yielded place to the sovereignty
of Parliament and then to demands for the sovereignty of the people. The
plunder of the Church by the landed ruling class stimulated the development
of capitalism in England. The attack on Church property by the rich led to a
questioning of property rights in general…”152
Thus “men learnt that church property was not sacrosanct, that traditional
ecclesiastical institutions could disappear without the world coming to an end;
that laymen could remodel not only the economic and political structures of
the Church but also its doctrine – if they possessed political power. Protestant
theology undermined the uniquely sacred character of the priest, and
elevated the self-respect of the congregation. This helped men to question a
divine right to tithes, the more so when tithes were paid to lay impropriators.
Preaching became more important than the sacraments; and so men came to
wonder what right non-preaching ministers, or absentees, had to be paid by
their congregations. It took a long time to follow out these new lines of
thought to their logical conclusions; but ultimately they led men very far
indeed. By spreading ideas of sectarian voluntarism they prepared the way
for the Revolution of 1640, and trained its more radical leaders.
“In the Revolution episcopacy was abolished, bishops’ and cathedral lands
confiscated, the payment of tithes challenged. The radicals rejected not only
Henry VIII’s episcopal hierarchy but the whole idea of a state church. ‘O the
great judgements of God!’ Windebanke had exclaimed when contemplating
the paradoxical outcome of the Henrician Reformation. Henry VIII had
denied the supremacy of the Pope; he had confiscated church property; and
he had allowed the Scriptures to be translated into English. These challenges
to the authoritarianism, to the wealth and to the propaganda monopoly of the
Church opened doors wider than was perhaps intended. A century later the
authority first of King, then of Parliament, was challenged in the name of the
people; the social justification of all private property was called into question;
and speculation about the nature of the state and the rights of the people went
152 Hill, “Social and Economic Consequences of the Henrician Revolution”, in Puritanism and
Revolution, London: Penguin books, 1958, p. 47.
105
to lengths which ultimately terrified the victorious Parliamentarians into
recalling King, House of Lords, and bishops to help them to maintain law and
order…”153
153 Hill, op. cit., pp. 56-57.
106
13. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT AND NATURAL LAW
“A religious middle way of this kind,” writes Tombs, “had become rare in
Europe, and was running against the tide. The 1550s was a time of
polarization across Europe, with the terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ for the
first time becoming current. Until then, most people saw the situation as one
of fluid schismatical and heretical turbulence within one Christian Church,
and hoped that unity might be restored, perhaps by a General Council. But
the Council of Trent, which met periodically between 1545 and 1563,
deepened the divisions by defining Catholic doctrines (on faith, scripture,
authority, the sacraments and papal supremacy) in a way that evangelicals
would never accept, and instituted a ‘Counter-Reformation’…”154
At Trent the unashamed sensuality of the Early Renaissance popes was

abandoned; a new age of discipline and asceticism began. Not that the
sensuality had really disappeared. It was simply sublimated into the sensual
“mysticism” of such “saints” as Teresa of Avila, or the art of such sculptors
employed by the Church as Michelangelo and Bernini.
The Counter-Reformation sought to re-establish the full power of the

papacy over secular rulers that the Reformation had undermined. Thus the
Council of Trent, as Gilbert Dagron writes, “tried to unite that which Luther
had tried to separate. Both in the Council and around it attempts were made
rather to bring the two powers into union with each other than to separate
them. The politics of the concordats aimed to find a difficult compromise
between religious universalism and the national churches. But the Jesuits
supported the thesis of the pope’s ‘indirect authority’ in political affairs.”155
And so, with the powerful aid of the Spanish kings, the Spanish-led Jesuit
order and the Inquisition, the papacy expanded swiftly and ruthlessly
eastwards and westwards – eastwards into Orthodox Eastern Europe, India
and the Far East, and westwards into the New World of the Americas.
The power of the popes in political affairs may have been “indirect”, but it
was undoubted - and theoretically unlimited. For as Pope Paul IV said in Cum
Ex Apostolatus Officio, while the papacy may err in the faith (his infallibility
was proclaimed only later in 1870), he still has unlimited power over all men:
"In assessing Our duty and the situation now prevailing, We have been
weighed upon by the thought that a matter of this kind [i.e. error in respect of
the Faith] is so grave and so dangerous that the Roman Pontiff, who is the
representative upon earth of God and our God and Lord Jesus Christ, who
holds the fullness of power over peoples and kingdoms, who may judge all
and be judged by none in this world, may nonetheless be contradicted if he be
found to have deviated from the Faith.”156
154 Tombs, op. cit., p. 184.

155 Dagron, Vostochnij tsezaropapizm (istoria i kritika odnoj kontseptsii) (Eastern Caesaropapism
(the history and critique of a concept)), http://portal-credo.ru/site/?act=lib&id=177.
156 Apostolic Constitution of Pope Paul IV, 15 Feb 1559 (Roman Bullarium IV, I, 354-357).
107
*
However, it was precisely at this time, the height of the Counter-

Reformation, that the idea of natural law, which had been introduced into
Catholic thought by Thomas Aquinas, began to be influential among
Catholics. Thus the Dominican Las Casas wrote: “Among the infidels who
have distant kingdoms that have never heard the tidings of Christ or received
the faith, there are true kings and princes. Their sovereignty, dignity, and
royal pre-eminence derive from natural law and the law of nations…
Therefore, with the coming of Jesus Christ to such domains, their honours,
royal pre-eminence, and so on, do not disappear either in fact or in right. The
opinion contrary to that of the preceding proposition is erroneous and most
pernicious. He who persistently defends it will fall into formal heresy…”157
In this context, it is significant that Sir Thomas More should have located
his Utopia on an imaginary island modelled, in part, on the Spanish West
Indies. In the first part of this work, More outlines the corruption of early
sixteenth century England, whose fundamental cause, in his opinion, was the
misuse of private property. In the second part he presents the opposite, an
ideal (but distinctly communist) society in which “tyranny and luxury have
been abolished, private property is unknown, and manual labour is looked
upon as the sole occupation profitable to the state.”158
But if natural law, in the interpretation of Las Casas, decreed that the
pagan kings of the Indies were true kings, in the interpretation of the Jesuit
Juan de Mariana, it was the justification for rebellion against corrupt Christian
kings. Thus for him the assassination of the French King Henry III was “an
eternal honour to France”. However, such seditious thinking could not be
tolerated; the Jesuits forced Mariana to remove this phrase from his book, and
after the assassination of Henry IV in 1610, copies of it were publicly burned
in Paris.
Mariana’s thoughts were indeed dangerous for absolute monarchs. Thus

he wrote: “How will respect for princes (and what is government without
this?) remain constant, if the people are persuaded that it is right for the
subjects to punish the sins of the rulers? The tranquillity of the
commonwealth will often be disturbed with pretended as well as real reasons.
And when a revolt takes place every sort of calamity strikes, with one section
of the populace armed against another part. If anyone does not think these
evils must be avoided by every means, he would be heartless, wanting in the
universal common-sense of mankind. Thus they argue who protect the
interests of the tyrant.
157 Las Casas, op. cit., Proposition XI.

158 John Warrington, introduction to More’s Utopia, London: Dent, 1974, p. xi.
108
“The protectors of the people have no fewer and lesser arguments.
Assuredly the republic, whence the regal power has its source, can call a king
into court, when circumstances require and, if he persists in senseless conduct,
it can strip him of his principate.
“For the commonwealth did not transfer the rights to rule into the hands of
a prince to such a degree that it has not reserved a greater power to itself; for
we see that in the matters of laying taxes and making permanent laws the
state has made the reservation that except with its consent no change can be
made. We do not here discuss how this agreement ought to be effected. But
nevertheless, only with the desire of the people are new imposts ordered and
new laws made; and, what is more, the rights to rule, though hereditary, are
settled by the agreement of the people on a successor…”159
Another Jesuit “free thinker” was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621),

who wrote in De Laicis, a treatise on civil government: “All men are equal, not
in wisdom or grace, but in the essence and nature of mankind” (Chapter
Seven). Considering the origins of political power, Bellarmine taught,
“Political power emanates from God. Government was introduced by divine
law, but the divine law has given this power to no particular man. … Men
must be governed by someone, lest they be willing to perish. It is impossible
for men to live together without someone to care for the common good.
Society must have power to protect and preserve itself. It depends upon the
consent of the multitude to constitute over itself a king, consul, or other
magistrate. … For legitimate reasons the people can change the government
to an aristocracy or a democracy or vice versa” (Chapter Six).160
De Mariana and Bellarmine were not the only Catholics to think such
heretical thoughts. It is the Spanish Jesuit priest Francisco Suarez (1548-1617),
according to Belloc, who “stands at the origin of that political theory which
has coloured all modern times. He it was who, completing the work of his
contemporary and fellow Jesuit, Bellarmine, restated in the most lucid and
conclusive fashion the fundamental doctrine that Governments derive their
authority, under God, from the community.”161
But “under God”, for Suarez, meant “under the Pope”. And so it was for
the Pope to decide if and when a prince, having derived his authority from
the people, should lose it because of his bad behaviour. Thus in his Defense of
the Faith against the Errors of the Anglican Sect (1613), Suarez writes: “In the
course of arguing that the pope possesses powers that include the right to put
a heretic king to death in order to protect the Catholic faith, Suarez offered a
novel argument: because political power arises from the sociability of man
and therefore resides originally in the people, it must be delegated to the
159 De Mariana, The King and the Education of the King, in Englander, op. cit., p. 265.
160 Matthew E. Bunson, “Bellarmine, Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence”, National
Catholic Register, July 4, 2017, http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/bellarmine-jefferson-
and-the-declaration-of-independence.
161 Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, p. 233, footnote.
109
prince by ‘human law’; if the prince turns out to be a tyrant, the pope may
assert the rights of the people. Because the source of the pope’s power is
divine and does not come from the people, this theory gives papal authority
to a certain supremacy over lay rulers.”162
Although these ideas of natural law and the popular origin of princely
authority were expressed by Catholic writers who remained loyal to the papal
supremacy over all secular rulers, they nevertheless undermined the bases of
that supremacy in the longer term – as well as those of secular monarchs such
as the Holy Roman Emperors.
110
14. ELIZABETH I, THE VIRGIN QUEEN
As we have seen, Elizabeth I’s achievement, if it really was an achievement,

was to find a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism that
preserve peace – just – until the English revolution nearly a century later.
But her immediate problem was somewhat different. As a woman, she had
to hold on to power in a society that did not believe that women should rule.
And as a woman she had to marry a man in order to produce an heir – but
without surrendering her power to her husband. This had been a major
problem also for her sister Mary, who had solved it by marrying her co-
religionist Philip of Spain, but then making sure that this powerful king did
not remain long in England. Elizabeth could not marry an Englishman
because he would necessarily be lower to her in status, and this might tempt
him to seize power from her if he did not agree – as was very possible – to be
a mere consort of her Majesty. Moreover, to marry a foreign prince more or
less equal in status would have subjected the nation to the danger of falling
under the power of foreigners. So Elizabeth chose the clever device of saying
that she would marry while remaining unattached until she had passed child-
bearing age, at which point the necessity of marriage was no longer so urgent.
She was to be “the virgin queen”, who nevertheless had a child and heir – the
nation as a whole.
For Elizabeth’s “doings”, as Anna Whitelock writes, “– the state of her

health, her actions and behavior – were the subject of international
speculation. Her private life was of public concern. Her body was held to be
one and the same as England. The stability of the state depended on the
queen’s wellbeing, chastity and fertility.”163
She pulled off this act – for it was an “act”, a pretence - with remarkable
skill and considerable success, becoming, as J.M. Roberts writes, “an
incomparable producer of the royal spectacle”. 164 . And yet, while some
theatricality was perhaps inevitable and necessary for political reasons, the
cult of the Queen, which she herself strongly encouraged, was a gross
affectation, a theatrical performance with idolatrous overtones that hid the
reality of a vain woman desperately holding on to power in the face of
powerful foreign and domestic rivals. Thus “Elizabeth's unmarried status
inspired a cult of virginity. In poetry and portraiture, she was depicted as a
virgin or a goddess or both, not as a normal woman. At first, only Elizabeth
made a virtue of her virginity: in 1559, she told the Commons, ‘And, in the
end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a
queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin’. Later on, poets
and writers took up the theme and turned it into an iconography that exalted
163 Whitelock, “Elizabeth I: The Monarch Behind the Mask”, Royal Women, BBC History
Magazine, Spring, 2016, p. 26.

164 Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon, 1992, p. 466.
111
Elizabeth. Public tributes to the Virgin by 1578 acted as a coded assertion of
opposition to the queen's marriage negotiations with the Duke of Alençon.
“Ultimately, Elizabeth would insist she was married to her kingdom and
subjects, under divine protection. In 1559, she spoke of ‘all my husbands, my
good people’.”165
Through this virginal but “multigamous” marriage, as Jonathan Bolt

writes, Elizabeth “set about unifying her people, encouraging a rhetoric in
which she was empress of a new international power of independence and
future greatness…”166
Meanwhile, the Calvinists found themselves, at the beginning of

Elizabeth’s reign, with both money (from the dissolution of the monasteries)
and national sentiment (from the fact that they had been persecuted during
the reign of “Bloody Mary”) on their side. Moreover, it was a Calvinist,
William Cecil, who was Elizabeth’s chief counsellor…
But Pope Pius V, who had so nearly seen England go Catholic under
Queen Mary, was not satisfied with this situation. It was his Bull Regnans in
Caelis (1570), together with the failed Spanish Armada he sponsored in 1588,
that finally ensured the victory of the English Reformation. For he declared:
“He that reigns in the highest, to Whom has been given all power in heaven
and earth, entrusted the government of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic
Church (outside which there is no salvation) to one man alone on the earth,
namely to Peter, the chief of the Apostles, and to Peter’s successor, the Roman
pontiff, in fullness of power. This one man He set up as chief over all nations,
and all kingdoms, to pluck up, destroy, scatter, dispose, plant and build…We
declare … Elizabeth to be a heretic and an abettor of heretics, and those that
cleave to her in the aforesaid matters to have incurred the sentence of
anathema, and to be cut off from the unity of Christ’s body.… We declare her
to be deprived of her pretended right to the aforesaid realm, and from every
dominion, dignity and privilege whatsoever. And the nobles, subjects and
peoples of the said realm, and all others who have taken an oath of any kind
to her we declare to be absolved forever from such an oath and from all dues
of dominion, fidelity and obedience… And we enjoin and forbid all… to obey
her and her admonitions, commands, and laws. All who disobey our
command we involve in the same sentence of anathema.”167
This significance of this decree lay in the fact that it immediately placed all
English Catholics who recognized the Pope’s authority into the category of
165 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England.
166 Bolt, Soul of the Age, London: Penguin, 2008, p. 21.
167 Henry Bettenson & Chris Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University
Press, third edition, 1999, pp. 267-268.
112
political traitors as well as ecclesiastical heretics. Catholics were asked under
torture whether, in the event of a Catholic invasion of England, they would be
loyal to the Queen or the Pope. If they could not place the Queen above the
Pope, they paid with their lives.
Bill Bryson writes: “Tensions between Protestants and Catholics came to a

head in 1586 when Mary, Queen of Scots, was implicated in a plot to
overthrow the Queen.” With Elizabeth’s agreement, “she was executed in
February 1587. Killing a fellow monarch, however threatening, was a grave
act, and it provoked a response. In the spring of the following year, Spain
dispatched a mighty navy to capture the English throne and replace Elizabeth.
“The greatest fleet that ‘ever swam upon the sea’, the Spanish Armada
looked invincible. In battle formation it spread over seven miles of sea and
carried ferocious firepower: 123,000 cannonballs and nearly three thousand
cannons, plus every manner of musket and small arms, divided between
thirty thousand men. The Spanish confidently expected the swiftest of
triumphs – one literally for the glory of God. Once England fell, and with the
English fleet in Spanish hands, the very real prospect arose of the whole of
Protestant Europe being toppled.
“Things didn’t go to plan, to put it mildly. England’s ships were nimbler

and sat lower in the water, making them awkward targets. They could dart
about doing damage here and there while the Spanish guns, standing on high
decks, mostly fired above them. The English ships were better commanded,
too (or so all the English history books tell us). It is only fair to note that most
of the Spanish fleet were not battleships but overloaded troop carriers,
making plump and lumbering targets. The English also enjoyed a crucial
territorial edge: they could exploit their intimate knowledge of local tides and
currents, and could dart back to the warm comfort of home ports for
refreshment and repairs. Above all they had a decisive technological
advantage: cast-iron cannons, an English invention that other nations had not
yet perfected, which fired straighter and were vastly sturdier than the Spanish
bronze guns, which were poorly bored and inaccurate and had to be allowed
to cool after every two or three rounds. Crews that failed to heed this – and in
the heat of battle it was easy to lose track – often blew themselves up. In any
case the Spanish barely trained their gun crews. Their strategy was to come
alongside and board enemy ships, capturing them in hand-to-hand combat.
“The rout was spectacular. It took the English just three weeks to pick the
opponent’s navy to pieces. In a single day the Spanish suffered eight
thousand casualties. Dismayed and confused, the tattered fleet fled up the
east coast of England and around Scotland into the Irish Sea, where fate dealt
it further cruel blows in the form of lashing gales, which wrecked at least two
dozen ships. A thousand Spanish bodies, it was recorded, washed up on Irish
beaches. Those who struggled ashore were often slaughtered for their baubles.
By the time the remnants of the Armada limped home, it had lost seventeen
113
thousand men out of the thirty thousand who had set off. England lost no
ships at all.
“The Spanish Armada changed the course of history. It induced a rush of

patriotism in England that Shakespeare exploited in his history plays (nearly
all written in the following decade), and it gave England a confidence and
power to command the sea and build a global empire, beginning almost
immediately with North America. Above all it secured Protestantism for
England. Had the Armada prevailed it would have brought with it the
Spanish Inquisition, with goodness knows what consequences for Elizabethan
England – and the young man from Warwickshire who was just about to
transform its theatre…”168
Elizabeth used her royal dignity and rhetorical skill to greatest effect
during the Spanish Armada, when, “full of princely resolution and more than
feminine courage, [she] passed like some Amazonian Empress through all her
army” at Tilbury, and uttered the famous words: “I am come… to live or die
amongst you all, and to lay down for my God and for my kingdom and for
my people, my honour and my blood even in the dust. I know I have the body
of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and
of a king of England too, and I think foul scorn that… Spain, or any prince of
Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.”
The effect was electric, and the political consequences profound. For “the
failure of the Armada,” as Tombs writes, “appeared to both sides to be a
divine judgement: ‘Fluit Jehovah et Dissipati Sunt’, proclaimed an English
celebratory medal – ‘God blew and they were scattered’. For Protestants it
vindicated their rejection of Romish superstition. For Catholics, and especially
Philip and his people, it was proof of their sinfulness and unworthiness to
fight in God’s cause: ‘Almost the entire country went into mourning,’ wrote a
Spanish friar. ‘People talked about nothing else.’ In France, Henri III felt
strong enough to have Philip’s ally, the Duc de Guise, murdered, but this
began a new round of civil war, and Henri himself was assassinated by a
Dominican friar seven months later. His successor was the Protestant leader
Henri of Navarre, as Henri IV, and despite converting to Catholicism he was
soon involved in war with Spain with England as his ally. So France became
the new focus of European conflict, diverting Spanish armies, relieving the
pressure on the Dutch and English, and perhaps saving both from future
defeat – for if the Dutch had been defeated, England would have been far
more vulnerable to another invasion…”169
Elizabeth’s prestige and power was now at its height. “She had
deliberately created an imposing image both majestic and popular, through
pictures, propaganda, lavish spectacles and progresses round the country, in
which she appeared as defender of the nation and preserver of peace…
168 Bryson, Shakespeare, London: William Collins, 2016, pp. 61-63.

169 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 193-195.
114
Parliament functioned as a connector of Crown and country, and the Church
reiterated the moral basis of government: ‘Such subjects as are disobedient or
rebellious against their princes disobey God and procure their own
damnation. Religious violence had not, unlike in much of Europe, destroyed
social and political cohesion. Elizabeth’s willingness to allow some latitude in
religious sentiment, her dislike of doctrinal meddling, and above all the
national perception that she protected the country from invasion and turmoil
gave her a unique popularity…”170
But the failure of the Armada also destroyed the English Catholics’ last
chance of political redemption. For Queen Elizabeth did not have the power
to resist her Calvinist advisers, especially the Cecils, father and son. From this
time the decatholicization of the country proceeded apace...
Amidst the religious turmoil of the time, the Tudors achieved a certain
degree of stability through exalting the sovereign to the status of supreme
judge of religious disputes. Queen Elizabeth I’s position as head of both
Church and State was necessitated, supposedly, by the constant threat of civil
war between Catholics and Calvinists. In this respect her dilemma was similar
to that of the contemporary Henry IV of France, who, as we have seen, though
a Calvinist by upbringing, converted to Catholicism in order to bring his
country’s religious wars to an end. For “Paris is worth a mass”, he said: the
important thing was that “we are all French and fellow-citizens of the same
country”. Elizabeth similarly did not want to “make windows into men’s
souls”; so long as they obeyed her and were not “extremists” in religion, she
would not pry too deeply into their beliefs. The result was a nation united
around “a Calvinist creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy.”171
Elizabeth believed in the Divine right of kings and in the supremacy of the
sovereign over all other estates of the realm, including the Church (of which
she was, thanks to her father, the “supreme governor”). Thus in her letters to
James VI of Scotland (later James I of England), she lashes out “against
Presbyterians and Jesuits alike for their separate attacks on royal authority
and power.” According to Susan Doran, Elizabeth’s views had their roots in a
Christian Platonism according to which earthly rule was a reflection of the
Divine harmony and order, and that consequently “diversity, variety,
contention and vain love of singularity, either in our ministers or in the
people, must provoke the displeasure of Almighty God.” 172
170
171
The words of William Pitt the Elder in 1760 (Barzun, op. cit., p. 33). The Arminians
separated from the Dutch Calvinists in the early seventeenth century, ascribing a greater role
to free will than was acceptable to Calvinist orthodoxy.
172
Doran, “Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of Her Letters”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,
vol. 51, no. 4.
115
It is instructive to compare the position of Elizabeth I with that of the
contemporary Moghul Emperor Akbar, whose empire included most of India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Muslim-Hindu relations were not
good. And so he adopted ecumenism to create peace: “Finding himself ruling
a multi-faith, multinational, polyglot realm, he brilliantly adapted Islam to
create a faith for all, consulting Muslims, Christians, Jews, Parsis and Hindus.
The result borrowed from all these faiths and built around Akbar’s authority,
recognised by Islam jurists as ‘infallible’. His creed was centred on the
formula: ‘There is One God and his Caliph is Akbar’.”173
Sir A.C. Lyall writes that Akbar “instituted a kind of metaphysical society,
over which he presided in person, and in which he delighted in pitting
against each other Persian mystics, Hindu pantheists, Christian missionaries
and orthodox Mohammedans. He even assumed by public edict the spiritual
headship of his empire, and declared himself the first appellate judge of
ecclesiastical questions. ‘Any opposition,’ said the edict, ‘on the part of
subjects to such orders passed by His Majesty shall involve damnation in the
world to come, and loss of religion and property in this life.’… Akbar’s
political object was to provide some common ground upon which Hindus
and Mohammedans might be brought nearer to religious unity; though it is
hardly necessary to add that no such modus vivendi has at any time been
discovered.”174
Just as Akbar tried to unite his subjects through inter-religious ecumenism,

so Elizabeth tried to unite her subjects through a kind of inter-denominational
ecumenism. For both the sovereigns had to be above the religious fray, just as
God was above all religions. After the fall of the Moghul empire, the two
forms of ecumenism would be united in the Masonic lodges of British India…
Elizabeth’s task was hardly less difficult than Akbar’s, and the attempt to
contain the pressures of conflicting religions under an absolutist monarch
collapsed within forty years of her death. However, she made a valiant
attempt, clothing and obscuring the Calvinist, and therefore anti-monarchical,
creed of the State in a purely Catholic monarchical pomp and ritualism. Thus
while the 39 articles of the Anglican Creed admitted only two sacraments,
baptism and the eucharist (the latter interpreted in a distinctly Protestant
sense), and rejected the sacrament of the priesthood, room was somehow
found for a sacramental mystique of the monarchy.
This mystique was superbly expressed by Shakespeare in Richard II:
Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord. (III, ii, 54-7)
173Montefiore, op. cit., p. 228.

174
Lyall, “India. (1) The Mogul Empire”, in The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The
Eighteenth Century, pp. 514-515.
116
and Hamlet:
There’s such a divinity doth hedge a king

That treason can but peep to what it would…(IV, v, 123-4):
As queen, Elizabeth was the capstone of the whole social order, founded
on hierarchy or the Hierarchical conception. “According to this conception,”
writes C.S. Lewis, “degrees of value are objectively present in the universe.
Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except
unformed matter has some natural inferior. The goodness, happiness and
dignity of every being consists in obeying its natural superior and ruling its
natural inferiors. When it fails in either part of the twofold task we have
disease or monstrosity in the scheme of things until the peccant being is either
destroyed or corrected. One of the other it will certainly be; for by stepping
out of its place in the system (whether it step up like a rebellious angel or
down like an uxorious husband) it has made the very nature of things its
enemy. It cannot succeed.
“Aristotle tells us that to rule and to be ruled are things according to

Nature. The soul is the natural ruler of the body, the male of the female,
reason of passion. Slavery is justified because some men are to other men as
souls are to bodies (Politics I, 5). We must not, however, suppose that the rule
of master over slave or soul over body is the only kind of rule: there are as
many kinds of rule as there are kinds of superiority or inferiority. Thus a man
should rule his slaves despotically, his children monarchically, and wife
politically; soul should be the despot of the body, but reason the
constitutional king of passion (Politics I, 5, 12). The justice or injustice of any
given instance of rule depends wholly on the nature of the parties, not in the
least on any social contract. Where the citizens are really equal then they
ought to live in a republic where all rule in turn (Politics I, 12; II, 2). If they are
not really equal then the republican form becomes unjust (Politics III, 13). The
difference between a king and a tyrant does not turn exclusively on the fact
that one rules mildly and the other harshly. A king is one who rules over his
real, natural inferiors. He who rules permanently, without successor, over his
natural equals is a tyrant – even (presumably) if he rules well. He is
inordinate (Politics III, 16, 17; IV, 10). Justice means equality for equals, and
inequality for unequals (Politics III, 9). The sort of questions we now ask –
whether democracy or dictatorship is the better constitution – would be
senseless to Aristotle. He would ask ‘Democracy for whom?’ ‘Dictatorships for
whom?’
“Aristotle was thinking mainly of civil society. The applications of the

Hierarchical conception to private, as to cosmic, life are to be sought in other
writers…
117
“The greatest statement of the Hierarchical conception in its double
reference to civil and cosmic life is, perhaps, the speech of Ulysses in
Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:
Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong –
Between whose endless jar justice resides –
Should lose their names, and so should justice too. (I, 3, 109)
Its special importance lies in its clear statement of the alternative to Hierarchy.
If you take ‘Degree’ away ‘each thing meets in mere oppugnancy,’ ‘strength’
will be lord, everything will ‘include itself in power’. In other words, the
modern idea that we can choose between Hierarchy and equality is, for
Shakespeare’s Ulysses, mere moonshine. The real alternative is tyranny: if
you will not have authority you will find yourself obeying brute force.”175
It is worth pondering why the monarchy continued to exert such a mystical

attraction in a nation that was well on the way at that time to ejecting all
mysticism from its political and ecclesiastical life. Part of the answer must lie
in the upsurge of patriotism that accompanied the defeat of the Spanish
Armada, whose focus became the virgin Queen Elizabeth. Another part must
lie in the continuing nostalgia for the past that was being destroyed, a past in
which the figure of the anointed king played such an important role.
But these psychological factors are insufficient to explain why monarchism

retains its power in England even to this day, when hereditary privilege is
despised, “authoritarianism” is a dirty word according to the fashionable
ideology of democracy, and the source of all legitimacy is seen to come from
below, not above. It is as if the English people subconsciously feel that they
have lost something vitally important, and cling to the holy corpse of
monarchy with despairing tenacity, refusing to believe that the soul has
finally departed. Monarchism appears to be something deeply rooted in the
human psyche which we attempt to destroy at our peril…
Thus C.S. Lewis wrote of the monarchy as “the channel through which all
the vital elements of citizenship - loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the
hierarchical principle, splendour, ceremony, continuity - still trickle down to
irrigate the dustbowl of modern economic Statecraft".176
175 Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, New Delhi: Atlantic, 2012, pp. 71-72.
176
Lewis, "Myth became Fact", God in the Dock: Essays on Theology, London: Fount, 1979, p. 64.
118
Again, Roger Scruton has spoken of the English monarchy as “the light
above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and
more exalted sphere. Not being elected by popular vote, the monarch cannot
be understood as representing the views only of the present generation. He or
she is born into the position, and also passes it on to a legally defined
successor. The monarch is in a real sense the voice of history, and the very
accidental [sic] way in which the office is acquired emphasises the grounds of
the monarch’s legitimacy, in the history of a place and a culture. This is not to
say that kings and queens cannot be mad, irrational, self-interested or unwise.
It is to say, rather, that they owe their authority and their influence precisely
to the fact that they speak for something other than the present desires of
present voters, something vital to the continuity and community which the
act of voting assumes. Hence, if they are heard at all, they are head as limiting
the democratic process, in just the way that it must be limited if it is to issue in
reasonable legislation. It was in such a way that the English conceived their
Queen, in the sunset days of Queen Victoria. The sovereign was an ordinary
person, transfigured by a peculiar enchantment which represented not
political power but the mysterious authority of an ancient ‘law of the land’.
When the monarch betrays that law – as, in the opinion of many, the Stuarts
betrayed it – a great social and spiritual unrest seizes the common conscience,
unrest of a kind that could never attend the misdemeanours of an elected
president, or even the betrayal of trust by a political party.” 177
Owen Chadwick writes: “Something about an English king distinguished

him from the godly prince of Germany or Sweden. While everyone agreed
that a lawful ruler was called of God, and that obedience was a Christian duty,
it would not have been so natural for a Lutheran to write that a divinity doth
hedge a king. Offspring of an ancient line, crowned with the anointing of
medieval ritual, he retained an aura of mystique which neither Renaissance
nor Reformation at once dispelled. It is curious to find the Catholic king of
France touching the scrofulous to heal them until a few years before the
French Revolution. It is much more curious to find the Protestant sovereigns
of England, from Elizabeth to James II, continuing to perform the same ritual
cures, and to note that the last reigning sovereign to touch was Queen Anne
in 1714… The supernatural aura of the anointed head was long in dying, and
must be reckoned with when judging the unusual English forms of the divine
right.”178
We must remember that the Elizabethan monarchy was not like the Anglo-
Saxon autocracy that fell in 1066, a true symphony between Church and State.
Nor was it like the Roman Catholic monarchy of late medieval times from
William the Conqueror to Henry VIII. It was a Protestant despotism that
executed the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, together with many thousands of
Catholic Irish “rebels”, carried out through burnings of books that even
obliquely hinted at the ideas of sedition or republicanism.
177
Scruton, England: An Elegy, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, p. 188.
178 Chadwick, op. cit., p. 222.
119
In the course of the sixteenth century it destroyed most of what was left of
traditional English Christian practice and belief – especially the worship of
the Body and Blood of Christ and the veneration of saints and relics, -
blasphemously placing itself at the head of both Church and State. Even the
anointing oil that the monarchs received was a fake. For how could it be
genuinely sacramental when the 39 Articles, the official statement of Anglican
belief, recognized only two sacraments, but not the sacramental priesthood,
which alone could produce the “balm” of a truly anointed king?
In spite of this, from a purely cultural point of view England reached a

truly exalted peak in the Elizabethan period. This was the age of Shakespeare
and Spenser, Byrd and Tallis. The Queen, as the pivot of the nation’s spiritual
and cultural life, and the quasi-chivalric object of the devotion of so many of
the leading men of the realm, acquired much reflected glory from these real
and undoubted achievements. However the defeat of the Armada in 1588
owed more to Divine Providence and the skill and bravery of her sailors than
her own leadership. Stinginess was a notorious trait in her: she never created
a standing army or hired mercenaries or instituted a half-decent recruiting
system (Shakespeare satirized it in Henry V). Even at the point of greatest
danger during the Armada, she showed herself unwilling to spend money on
the army. “She only half-heartedly supported a number of ineffective, poorly
resourced military campaigns in the Netherlands, France, and Ireland.”179
It was Elizabeth’s policy in Ireland that constituted her most long-term and
poisonous legacy. Rebellions were frequent, and were put down with cruelty
and heavy loss of life – during a revolt in Munster in 1582 30,000 Irishmen
were starved to death. In 1597 the Earl of Tyrone and his allies O’Donnell and
Maguire rebelled again and defeated the English at Blackwater.
“The root causes of the disaster,” writes James Shapiro, “can be traced back
as far as the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, after which
the Kings of England declared themselves Lords of Ireland. The English
presence in Ireland over the following centuries had never really displaced
the power of local Gaelic lords. Irish politics remained decentralized: clans
and their feuding chieftains- who ruled over people, not territory – remained
the dominant political force. The influence of the Old English, as the Anglo-
Norman rulers were called, didn’t extend much further than the major ports,
towns, and the area around Dublin, known as the Pale, where the English
administration was concentrated. The English made few inroads in the north
and west. Successive English kings were content to let surrogate feudal lords,
to whom lesser lords paid tribute in exchange for protection, manage things
in their absence. This often anarchic state of affairs took a turn for the worse
179 James Shapiro, 1599. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, London: Faber and Faber,
2005, chapter 7.
120
under the Tudors, when Henry VIII decided to declare himself King of
Ireland, and also, for good measure, supreme head of the Church. Hereafter
the Irish would speak English and abandon their Catholic faith. The Tudor
fantasy of imposing English religion, law, language, primogeniture, dress and
civility failed to have the desired effect. To the bewilderment of English
observers, the rude Irish clung to their strange and barbarous customs. And,
to their consternation, many of the Old English settlers had, over the course of
several centuries, gone native, adopting Irish customs and marrying into local
families, vastly complicating loyalties and alliances between Gaelic, Old
English and New English inhabitants – and unnerving those committed to
preserving a pure and unsullied Englishness.
“Elizabeth’s Irish policies were characterized by incoherence and neglect.

The Queen was too miserly to pay the huge price to subdue Ireland and too
distracted by other concerns to acknowledge the weaknesses of her colonial
policies. The impression left on the visiting French diplomat, André Hurault,
Sieur de Maisse, was that the ‘English and the Queen herself would wish
Ireland drowned in the sea, for she cannot get any profit from it, and
meanwhile the expense and trouble is very great, and she cannot put any
trust in that people’. The Elizabethan policy of appropriating huge swathes of
Irish land and inviting Englishmen to settle on these ‘plantations’ provided
local resentment. Irish rebels looked to Spain for support and rallied followers
around their threatened Catholic identity. Meanwhile, each short-lived
English viceroy – suspected back at the English court, lacking support for
ambitious reforms, bewildered by Ireland’s complex political landscape, and
often corrupt and brutal – failed in turn to establish either peace or stability.
Elizabeth’s muddled and half-hearted strategies were penny wise and pound
foolish: in the last two decades of her reign she would spend £2,000,000 and
the lives of many English conscripts in ongoing efforts to pacify Ireland.”180
Elizabeth sent her former favourite, the foolish and vainglorious Earl of
Essex, to subdue the Irish. He failed miserably, and after returning from
Ireland against her express command, “burst into the Queen’s bedchamber,
where he discovered Elizabeth ‘newly up, her hair about her face’. ‘Tis much
wondered at,’ Whyte writes with considerable understatement, ‘that he went
so boldly to her Majesty’s presence, she not being ready, and he so full of dirt
and mire, that his very face was full of it.’ No man had ever entered into her
bedchamber in her presence, had seen Elizabeth beside her famous walnut
bed, hung with cloth of silver, fringed with gold and silver lace and crowned
with ostrich plumes. For the Queen and her women-in-waiting it must have
come as an unbelievable shock. It’s next to impossible today to grasp how
great a taboo Essex had violated. This was England’s virgin Queen and her
bedchamber was sacrosanct…”181
180 Shapiro, op. cit., pp. 60-61.

181 Shapiro, op. cit., p. 300.
121
The mystique had been destroyed, the mask ripped away (almost literally –
the Queen was always heavily made up, but not when Essex entered). The
Queen composed herself, and received Essex calmly. Later, however, she
turned against him; and “from that moment, at least in England, it’s fair to say
that chivalry was dead”, for Essex was the foremost champion of the old
chivalric values in the country.182
Having been placed under house arrest, Essex rose in rebellion

immediately after watching a performance of Shakespeare’s “Deposition of
King Richard II”.183 He failed, and was beheaded… This was also the last of
the baronial revolts against monarchical power. For, “as the historian Mervyn
James has shown, the Essex rising existed at a crossroads of political rebellion
against the monarchy. The next generation would see something very
different: discontent coming from the House of Commons rather than the
earls, talk of the sovereignty of the law as opposed to that of the King.”184
But the Queen was never the same again (in spite of her motto, Semper
Eadem, “always the same”); from this time the monarchy seemed to lose its
unifying mystique, the illusion had been destroyed together with her make-
up. Indeed, “Elizabeth did not long outlive Essex. The report ran that she
‘sleepeth not so much by day as she used, neither taketh rest by night. Her
delight is to sit in the dark and sometimes with shedding tears to bewail
Essex.’ The King of Scots’ accession to the English throne in March, 1603,
carefully orchestrated by Cecil, went flawlessly, and for the first time in a
half-century England was ruled by a king – and one with sons…”185

183 Queen Elizabeth is said, probably apocryphally, to have said of herself: “I am Richard II.
Know ye not that?” (Bolt, op. cit., p. 281ff.)
184 Bolt, op. cit., p. 266.
122
15. SHAKESPEARE’S UNIVERSE
Like his contemporaries, the playwrights Christopher Marlowe, Thomas

Nashe, Thomas Kyd and Ben Jonson, writes Tombs, “Shakespeare was
formed (in his case from Stratford Grammar School onwards) by humanism,
inspired by classical literature, particularly Ovid and Virgil, and concerned
with rhetorical forms (of which ‘To be or not to be…’ a textbook example).
The stories of his plays reflect many of the cultural and political concerns of
his day, including treason, conspiracy, royal succession, war and the exotic.
But at deeper levels he is astonishingly not the product of his times, which is
an evident reason for the continuing power of his work. Most obviously, he is
not dogmatic; he displays a wide variety of cultural and religious influences,
but is not defined by the religious conflict that shaped his time – hence
continuing modern debate about his personal beliefs. He pays little respect to
social and gender hierarchy. He writes of a ‘deep England’, beyond London
and the court. Women were always important and often dominant in his
plays, and women came in large numbers to see them, scandalizing foreign
visitors. It is often said that he conceals his opinions; it seems rather that the
ideas he explores transcend the limits of contemporary politics.”186
Let us enter the debate about Shakepeare’s personal beliefs, beginning with
the religious conflict that shaped his time…
By the time Shakespeare reached his peak as a writer, England had

undergone over sixty years of profound change – the transition, in essence,
from the medieval to the modern world-view. But the transition was
incomplete; people were confused; and in Shakespeare there arose the perfect
recorder of this critical turning-point in European history. For, as Jonathan
Bate writes, “his mind and world were poised between Catholicism and
Protestantism, old feudal ways and new bourgeois ambitions, rational
thinking and visceral instinct, faith and scepticism.”187 The transition from
Catholicism to Protestantism profoundly influenced his work. For “he lived
between the two great cataclysms in English history: the break from the
universal Roman Catholic church and the execution of King Charles I.”188
The transition caused Shakespeare, like many of his fellow countrymen, to

question the basis of their beliefs; and this questioning necessitated a change
in the very literary form of his plays. “For centuries,” writes Bolt, “the staple
of English drama had been the cycles of ‘miracle’ plays, dramatizations of
biblical stories organized by the gilds of tradesmen in the major towns and
cities around the country. They were destroyed by the Protestant
Reformation… By the time he began writing plays himself, the old religious
drama was dead and buried…
186
187 Bolt, Soul of the Age, London: Penguin, 2008, p. 18.
188 Bolt, op. cit., p. 18.
123
”… The old religious drama had offered to audiences a constant reminder
that that they were under the watchful eye of God. The new Elizabethan
drama concentrated instead on people in relationship with each other and
with society.”189
It was a momentous change in the culture of Western Europe; and in this

change Shakespeare both imitated life and influenced it. Thus in Hamlet (1600),
perhaps the most famous literary work in history, Shakespeare found a new
technique – the device of the soliloquy – to express the interior conflicts and
confusions, not only of his hero, but also of the new, semi-secularized
humanity that was coming into existence.
“With Hamlet,” writes James Shapiro, “a play poised midway between a

religious past and a secular future, Shakespeare finally found a dramatically
compelling way to internalize contesting forces: the essay-like soliloquy
proved to be the perfect vehicle for Hamlet’s efforts to confront issues that,
like Brutus’, defied easy resolution. And he further complicated Hamlet’s
struggle by placing it in a large world of unresolved post-Reformation social,
religious and political conflicts, which is why the play is so often taken as the
ultimate expression of its age…
“… The soliloquies restlessly return to these conflicts, which climax in ‘To

be or not to be’: in a world that feels so ‘weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable’, is
it better to live or die? And is the fear of what awaits him in the next world
enough to offset the urge to commit suicide? Is the Ghost come from
Purgatory to warn him or should he see this visitation in a Protestant light
(for Protestants didn’t believe in Purgatory), as a devil who will exploit his
melancholy and who ‘Abuses me to damn me’ (II, ii, 603). Is revenge a human
or a divine prerogative? Is it right to kill Claudius at his prayers, even if this
means sending his shriven soul to heaven? When, if ever, is killing a tyrant
justified – and does the failure to do so invite damnation?”190
It was this last, political question that especially exercised Shakespeare, as

it did his countrymen at this time. Of course, he had touched upon the
question of the nature of political authority, its rights and limitations, in
several of the history plays of the previous decade, when he had been able,
with his usual skill, to present both sides of the argument in a convincing
manner. Henry V and Richard II are especially interesting for Orthodox
readers because of their profound exploration of the nature of sacred kingship,
and its responsibility before God and man. The parallels with the life of Tsar-
Martyr Nicholas, who like Richard, was forced to abdicate from his throne,
are numerous, as in Richard II:
Bolt, op. cit., pp. 18, 19, 20.

189
Shapiro, 1599. A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, pp.
190
337-338.
124
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed King.
As for Julius Caesar, it is probably the profoundest study of the morality of

revolution and revolutionaries in the English language.
Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida continue the themes of loyalty and betrayal,
both political and personal, that are so central to the whole of Shakespeare’s
oeuvre. We may suppose that Shakespeare was fairly conservative, even
monarchist in his political views. Thus in Troilus and Cressida we find the
famous speech on “degree”, i.e. hierarchy. Nevertheless, we may also
suppose that Shakespeare felt the tug of revolutionary tendencies and to some
extent sympathized with them. Thus there is real passion in Hamlet’s attempt
to expose the evil deeds of the false King Claudius in the “play within the
play” scene:
Ophelia. The King rises.

Hamlet. What, frighted with false fire!
Queen. How fares my lord?
Polonius. Give o'er the play.
King. Give me some light. Away!
Polonius. Lights, lights, lights!
But this was dangerous territory in Elizabethan and Jacobean England,

where the monarchy so jealously guarded its privileges. In any case, even if
he sympathized to some extent with the rebels against the monarchists,
Shakespeare was perfectly well aware where revolution ended – in hell,
where the ghost of Hamlet’s father came from. Thus Hamlet exposes the false
king - but at the same time destroys both himself and all those whom he loves.
Up to this point, in spite of the political content of his plays, Shakespeare

had managed, unlike several of his dramatist colleagues, to escape censorship
(carried out in that age by bishops) and stay out of prison. But the
Gunpowder Plot of November, 1605, when a Catholic conspiracy to blow up
the Houses of Parliament was foiled by the authorities, raised the political
temperature in the country, inducing spy-mania, paranoia and suspicions of
treason to an unparalleled degree. Shakespeare had the choice: to play safe
and not allude to recent events or the controversies surrounding them, or to
follow Hamlet’s own advice to dramatists and “hold the mirror up to nature”
and give “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”. He chose
the latter, riskier course, and the result was one of his greatest plays, Macbeth,
which was performed at court in front of King James sometime in 1606.
No less great is King Lear, Shakespeare’s Great Friday allegory, whose

imagery reflects the theme: wood, earth, blood and instruments of torture
abound. But the real victim is Lear’s Christ-like daughter Cordelia. The scene
of her sacrificial, all-forgiving death, and Lear’s repentance as a result of it, is
perhaps the most unbearably poignant in English literature.
125
If King Lear is Shakespeare’s allegory of the Crucifision, then Macbeth is his
allegory of the Descent into hell. Everything is darkness, demons, damnation,
despair. Macbeth’s final loss of all faith and hope is ferocious in the cold, cruel
clarity of its vision, as even the rhythm of the verse slows down to echo the
everlastingness of his damnation:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing…
As for the third great play of these peak years of Shakespeare’s creativity,
Antony and Cleopatra, its imagery is full of light and fire, as befits an allegory
of the Resurrection. For this play is much more than a love story. It is also a
story about how a fallen woman sheds her corrupt past and rises
incorruptible in a kind of literary Resurrection of the body, her illicit lover
Antony becoming after his death an honourable husband in her imagination,
even a type of Christ the Bridegroom:
Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me…

Husband, I come.
Now to that name my courage prove my title!
I am fire and air; my other elements
I give to baser life.
Of course, we cannot know whether Shakespeare considered his three

greatest dramas to be an allegory of the central mysteries of the Christian faith.
But the greatness of a writer does not reside in his consciousness of the depth
of his art. The test is whether he makes us respond deeply and truly. By that
criterion Shakespeare was a supremely Christian writer.
Shakespeare can be bawdy; but there is always a profound seriousness

underlying even the comedies. He delights in little spiritual epigrams which
clearly point to a man who has thought deeply about life from a definitely
religious viewpoint. Thus in his very earliest extant work, Venus and Adonis,
we see his Christian morality clearly expressed:
Love surfeits not: Lust like a glutton dies.

Love is all truth: Lust full of forged lies.
126
A deeper meditation on the same theme is found in the incomparable
Sonnet 129:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d.
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
The spiritual struggle between good and evil, angels and demons, is well
known to Shakespeare. Thus in Sonnet 144, we read:
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,

Which like two angels do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend,
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell.
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
Again, in the midst of the great, superficially pagan and sensuous drama of
Antony and Cleopatra we are given a good spiritual tip: that our prayers are not
always answered because it would not be good for us:
We, ignorant of ourselves,

Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.
Again, in Richard II we are exhorted to humility:
127
whate'er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eas'd
With being nothing.
And in Hamlet we see a heartfelt desire for passionlessness:
Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart.
Even the foolish Polonius is allowed a wise, if slightly trite aphorism:
To thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Shakespeare mocked and undermined the medieval concepts of chivalric

honour and military glory, as in Henry IV, part 1:
By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap

To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac'd moon . . .
He did the same in Hamlet:
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at stake…
Witness this army, of such mass and charge,

Led by a delicate and tender prince;
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event;
Exposing what is mortal, and unsure,
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell…
Again, there is no sharper exposure of Christian Pharisaism than we find in

Measure for Measure:
But man, proud man,

Dress'd in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—
His glassy essence—like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
128
Similar in its imagery, but still more powerful, is this passage from Macbeth:
Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking-off,
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye
That tears shall drown the wind.
Again, what profounder exposure of the hypocrisy of Christian anti-

semitism can we find than in Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to
the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter
and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we
not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance
be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and
it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
At the same time, Shylock’s greed and vengefulness is not spared, and
mercy, the crown of Christian virtues, is portrayed with consummate grace:
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
129
The deeds of mercy.
However, we cannot leave the theme of Shakespeare and Christianity

without considering the last work of his creative life, The Tempest. Like
Beethoven, who saved his greatest and most religious work to the end of his
life when he could no longer even hear, so Shakespeare left his most religious
work to the end, when Puritan censors placed a ban on any reference to God
or Christ in the theatre, which meant that the word “God” appears no longer
in Shakespeare from Antony and Cleopatra onwards.191 For just as The Winter’s
Tale is another – but much more explicit – allegory of the Resurrection, so The
Tempest is an allegory of the end of the world.
The main character of the play, who controls the whole action, is Prospero.
He is a sorcerer, which is, of course, an evil occupation for a Christian. And
yet if we judge by the fruits of his actions, he is more like God Himself than a
servant of demons. In fact, he is a type both of God the Creator and of
Shakespeare the creator (with a small ‘c’). And when he has finally brought
everything to a happy conclusion through a truly divine providence,
reuniting lovers, correcting injustice and putting evil spirits in their place, he
renounces everything:
I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
Like Prospero, Shakespeare now renounces his “so potent art” and drowns
the book of his plays in oblivion, taking early retirement. 192 What he needs
now is not human recognition, but Divine Grace, “heavenly music”.
191 James Shapiro, 1606. William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, London: Faber and Faber,
2015, p. 252. Shakespeare took the hint and “retired” a few years later – he was not alive to
witness the final closing down of the theatre by the Puritans in 1642.
192 And they would have remained such but for the heroism of the editors of the First Folio in
1623 (Bryson, op. cit., p. 154).
130
For he does not over-estimate the reality or value of his creations, whose
“fabric” is “baseless” - only God is truly creative. And so in true humility he
hands back the gift he received to the true Creator Who gave it him. But he
goes further. Not only will his art now come to an end, but the theatre itself
and the whole of present-day reality outside the theatre will come to an end.
The whole of this solid globe will disappear (the word “globe” is a pun: it
means both Shakespeare’s Globe theatre where The Tempest was staged, and
the globe in the sense of the whole world), and in retrospect will seem like
mere stagecraft and stage-props and play-acting in comparison with the
incomparably greater and eternally substantial new creation that we will
wake up to on the other side of the “sleep” that is death. Indeed, compared to
what God has in store for us in the next life, our present temporal life is but an
“insubstantial pageant”, a dream:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
It remained only for Shakespeare, a conscious Christian to the end, to ask

forgiveness of his readers and spectators if his “rough magic” had caused
anyone any harm:
Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
131
16. JAMES I AND THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS
The transition from rebellion against the Pope and his bishops in the
Reformation to rebellion against the kings and his servants in the political
revolutions was natural and inevitable. If Luther had tried to resist it, it was
nevertheless implicit in his teaching. The more consistent Calvinists were less
afraid than Luther to cross the Rubicon by ascribing all authority to the plebs.
As Jacques Barzun writes, “if a purer religion, close to the one depicted in the
gospel, was attainable by getting rid of superiors in the church, a better social
and economic life, close to the life depicted in the gospels, would follow from
getting rid of social and political superiors.”193 Now we have seen that the
first century or so of the Protestant Reformation witnessed a strengthening of
monarchical power. This had happened for different reasons in different
countries: on the continent because the Protestants had looked to the Princes
to protect them against the Catholic powers, and because the rising class of
the bourgeoisie wanted some protection against the anti-mercantile
aristocracy; in England because the king himself had initiated the break with
Rome for his own personal and political ends. However, this could not last…
Protestantism of both the Lutheran and Calvinist varieties contained within
itself the seeds of the overthrow of all authority, both religious and political; it
threatened bishops as well as Popes, kings as well as bishops. Luther’s
doctrine of the priesthood of all believers directly attacked the special
authority of bishops and priests; but indirectly it attacked the power of kings,
too, insofar as they were perceived as receiving their authority from God via
the priesthood in the sacrament of royal anointing. Calvin’s doctrine of the
elect’s absolute assurance of salvation, and of the supremacy of conscience
over law, was as much a threat to the laws of the kings as it was to the
doctrines of the bishops. Moreover, the Calvinist doctrine contained a
frightening corollary which was rarely expressed in so many words but was
about to be expressed in many actions: the conviction, namely, that just as the
elect had absolute assurance of their own salvation, they had similar
assurance of their opponents’ damnation, and could therefore dispose of them
with the ruthlessness that befitted the knowledge of their worthlessness.
Transplanted into more secular soil and into a less godly age, this belief
would justify the elimination of whole classes and peoples supposedly
doomed to extinction by the ruthless and irresistible march of history…
However, these consequences were only dimly perceived in 1603 when

King James VI of Scotland (the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been
executed by her cousin Elizabeth) became James I of England, and got
embroiled with the English parliament, not over religion, but over money...
During his long reign in Scotland, James had never encountered a body like
the English parliament: what opposition he had came from the Scottish
Puritan bishops. In 1614 he said that he was surprised ‘that my ancestors
should ever have permitted such an institution to come into existence”.194 But

194 James I, in Tombs, op. cit., p. 206.
132
he had to deal with it. For in England James needed money to support his
extravagant life-style. Only the parliamentarians could give it him. And they
refused…
They also refused his plan to unite England and Scotland into one “Great
Britain”. “When this met parliamentary and legal opposition,” writes Tombs,
“ - ‘Being English we cannot be Britaynes’ – James unilaterally introduced a
union flag and common coinage, including a twenty-two-shilling piece called
the Unite, bearing a motto from the book of Ezechiel: Faciam eos in gentem
unam (I will make them one nation).
“The Common Law, based on judicial independence and precedent, was

now marshalled against the encroachment of Roman law, used in Scotland,
which buttressed James’s absolutist pretensions. Using the history of English
law as the test of political legitimacy was an ‘all but universal pursuit of
educated men’ during the seventeenth century. The Common Law was
asserted to be purely and uniquely English.”195
The leader of the opposition to the king’s demands was Sir Edward Coke
(1552-1634), who, writes Peter Ackroyd, “had been chief justice of the
common pleas since 1605, and was an impassioned exponent of English
common law. James had no real conception of common law, having been
educated in the very different jurisprudence of Scotland. Coke believed, for
example, that both sovereign and subject were accountable to a body of
ancient law that had been conceived in practice and clarified by usage; it
represented immemorial general custom, but it was also a law of reason. This
was not, however, the king’s opinion. He had already firmly stated that ‘the
king is above the law, as both the author and the giver of strength thereto.’
From this it could be construed that the king possessed an arbitrary authority.
James alleged, for example, that he could decide cases in person. Coke
demurred: a case could only be judged in a lawcourt…”196
Coke appealed to Magna Carta is his attempt to clip the wings of royal
power. The Charter “limited the royal prerogative, insised Coke and his
supporters, and it could even strike down Acts of Parliament. The then
largely forgotten Magna Carta was, Coke declared, in its ‘great weightinesse
and weightie greatnesse,’ the very ‘foundation of all the fundamentall laws of
the realm’ and a ‘restitution of the common law’. Thus an idea of ancient
English uniqueness was identified with a tradition of law and political
freedom. Coke set out the argument in his Institutes of the Laws of England
(which began appearing in 1628) and in a series of controversial judgements,
including a decision that the king had no power to legislate by proclamation.
Similarly, Parliament’s Petition of Right (1628) asserted that imprisonment
without trial by royal order was illegitimate.”197
195 Tombs, op. cit., p. 207.

196
Ackroyd, The History of England, vol. III. Civil War, London: Macmillan, 2014, pp. 23-24.
197
133
Francis Fukuyama writes: “When James I sought to shift certain cases from
Common Law to ecclesiastical jurisdiction, Coke greatly offended him by
saying that the king did not have sufficient authority to interpret the law as he
chose. The king asserted that it was treasonable to maintain that he should be
under the law, to which Coke responded by quoting Bracton to the effect that
‘quod Rex non debet esse sub homine set sub deo et lege’ (the king should not be
under man but under God and the law). For this and other confrontations
with royal authority, Coke was eventually dismissed from his legal posts,
whereupon he joined Parliament as a leader of the anti-Royalist side.”198
The question: who has ultimate sovereignty, King or Parliament? was at

the heart of the struggle between king and parliament, not only of the English
Civil War (1642-49), but also of the first phase of the French revolution (1789-
92) and of the Russian revolution (1905-1917).
James, like his predecessor Elizabeth, believed in “degree”, hierarchy and

the order of being, and considered that “equality is the mother of confusion
and an enemy of the Unity which is the Mother of Order”.199 “The king is
above the law,” he said, “as both the author and the giver of strength thereto.”
“Kings are justly called gods,” he said to parliament in 1610, “for that they
exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will
consider the attributes of God, you shall see how they agree in the person of
the king. God hath power to create or destroy; make or unmake at His
pleasure; to give life or send death; to judge all and to be judged nor
accountable to none; to raise low things and to make high things low at His
pleasure. And the like power have kings.” 200 And so kings, having their
authority from God, and having no authority higher than themselves on earth,
can be judged only by God, and not by men. As Shakespeare puts it in
Richard II:
And shall the figure of God’s majesty,

His captain, steward, deputy elect,
Anointed, crowned, planted many years,
Be judged by subject and inferior breath?
At the same time James admitted that there was an important distinction to
be made between an autocrat, who “acknowledges himself ordained for his
people”, and a tyrant, who “thinks his people ordained for him, a prey to his
passions and inordinate appetites.” Although a king was “a little God to sit on
this throne and rule over other men”, he nevertheless had a duty to provide a
good example to his subjects.
198 Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, p. 408.
199 Harold Nicolson, Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, p. 201.
200 James I, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 419.
134
Having said that, James did not like to remind people that there were such
things as “tyrants”, kings who broke God’s law. For that might give them
ideas of rebellion… So he censored the Scriptures: “the word ‘tyrant’, used
over 400 times in the Geneva Bible, was expunged from the ‘King James’
verson”.201
But while not free in relation to God, the king was free in relation to his
subjects, according to James. Hence the title of his book, The True Law of Free
Monarchies. However, while unlimited by any power on earth, a king should
follow his own laws: “A king governing in a settled kingdom, leaves to be a
king, and degenerates into a tyrant as soon as he leaves off to rule according
to his laws. In which case the king’s conscience may speak unto him, as the
poor widow said to Philip of Macedon: either govern according to your own
law, aut ne rex sis [or you are not a king]. And though no Christian man ought
to allow rebellion of people against their prince, yet doth God never leave
kings unpunished when they transgress these limits; for in that same psalm
where God saith to kings, Vos dii estis [you are gods], he immediately
thereafter concludes, But ye shall die like men.”202
As we have seen, Shakespeare’s Macbeth was written at this time and can
be seen as almost a commentary on contemporary events and debates. For, as
Jonathan Bate writes, Macbeth “is steeped in King James’s preoccupations: the
rights of royal succession, the relationship between England and Scotland,
witchcraft, the sacred powers of the monarch, anxiety about gunpowder,
treason and plot. A deeply learned man, the king had published a treatise
explaining how monarchs were God’s regents upon the earth203 and another
arguing for the reality of witchcraft or ‘demonology’. He considered himself
something of an adept at distinguishing between true and false accusations of
witchcraft. He took a deep interest in such customs as the tradition of the
sacred power of the king’s ‘touch’ to cure subjects afflicted with the disease of
scrofula (known as ‘the king’s evil’).
“Religion and politics were joined seamlessly together. The Bible said that
rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft: if the monarch was God’s representative
upon earth, then to conspire against him was to make a pact with the
instrument of darkness – in the Gunpowder trials, Jesuits such as Father
Garnet were described as male witches. Treason was regarded as more than a
political act: it was, as one modern scholar puts it, ‘a form of possession, an
action contrary to and destructive of the very order of nature itself. The forces
of the netherworld seek for their own uncreating purposes the killing of the
legitimate king in order to restore the realm of tyranny and chaos.’
201 Tombs, op. cit., p. 207.

202 James I, in Brian Macarthur, The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches, London: Penguin, 1995,
pp. 44-45.
203 Nicolson, op. cit., p. 200. (V.M.)
135
“In this world, killing the king is the ultimate crime against nature. ‘O
horror, horror, horror’, says Macduff as he returns on stage having stared into
the heart of darkness, seen how the gashed stabs on the king’s body look like
a breach in nature. ‘Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee’: the
language here alludes to the famous passage in St. Paul about the
inexpressible wonders that God has prepared in the kingdom of heaven for
those who love Him. Macduff, by contrast, has momentarily entered the
kingdom of hell, where a drunken porter keeps the gate. ‘Confusion now hath
replication of the order of divine creation’. But the art here is that of confusion
and death: ‘Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope / The Lord’s anointed
temple and stole thence / The life o’ th’ building.’ The understanding of the
play requires close attention to be paid to such words as ‘sacrilegious’, in
which political violence is bound inextricably to articles of religious faith.
‘Treason has done his worst,’ says Macbeth in one of those moments when his
conscience is pricked. His worst, not its: Treason is not a concept but a living
thing. The devil’s disciple, he stalks the stage of politics and brings sleepless
nights through which the guilty man shakes and sweats with fear and terrible
dreams, while the guilty woman descends into insanity…”204
Great tensions produce great art: 1606, the year after the Gunpowder Plot
produced, besides Macbeth, also King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, a trilogy
unequalled in the history of literature. But while great art can mirror great
tensions, it cannot disperse them: from this time English society became
increasingly polarized. Although the unity obtained by the Virgin Queen had
been largely a clever stunt, it had worked. James, however, had a more
difficult time of it, having to unify not only Catholics and Protestants, but also
English and Scots. On the one hand, he had to keep his Catholic-at-heart
English subjects, the “recusants”, in line by spying on them, chasing up secret
Jesuits and compelling all Englishmen to swear the Oath of Allegiance and
receive communion in the Anglican church at least three times a year. On the
other hand, as a Scot, he had to persuade his radical Protestant fellow-
countrymen north of the border that he had not only a Divine right to rule,
but could play a part in the life of the official church and even appoint
bishops: as he famously put it, “no king, no bishop”.
James’ plan to unite England and Scotland into one country failed. But the
superb language of his other beloved project, the King James Version of the
Bible (1604-11), translated by a committee of Anglicans and moderate
Puritans, has had a profoundly unifying effect on the English-speaking
peoples to this day. As Bill Bryson writes, “It was the one literary production
of the age that rivaled Shakespeare’s for lasting glory – and, not incidentally,
played a more influential role in encouraging a conformity of spelling and
usage throughout Britain and its infant overseas dominions.”205
204 Bate, op. cit., pp. 346-347.

205 Bryson, op. cit., p. 133.
136
James I prided himself on being a peacemaker. Nevertheless, there was no
peace being made within the nation as his reign progressed; and he and his
son and successor, the future Charles I, increasingly gravitated towards the
political and religious “right”, while their subjects on the whole went in the
opposite direction. For, as Ackroyd writes, “this was an age of religious
polemic… On the side of the [Anglican] bishops were those generally satisfied
with the doctrnes and ceremonies of the established Church; they were
moderate; they espoused the union of Church and state. They put more trust
in communal worship than in private prayer; they acknowledge the role of
custom, experience and reason in spiritual matters. It may not have been a
fully formed faith, but it served to bind together those of unclear or flexible
belief. It also united those who simply wished to conform with their
neighbours.
“On the side of the puritans were those more concerned with the
exigencies of the private conscience. They believed in the natural depravity of
man, unless the sinner be redeemed by grace. They abhorred the practice of
confession and encouraged intensive self-discipline. They did not wish for a
sacramental priesthood but a preaching ministry; they accepted the word of
Scripture as the source of all divine truth. They took their compass from the
stirrings of providence. Men and women of a puritan tradition were utterly
obedient to God’s absolute will from which no ritual or sacrament could avert
them. This lent them zeal and energy in their attempt to purify the world or,
as one puritan theologian put it, ‘a holy violence in the performing of all
duties’. Sometimes they spoke out as the spirit moved them. It was said,
unfairly, that they loved God will all their soul and hated their neighbour
with all their heart.
“They were not at this stage, however, rival creeds; they are perhaps better
regarded as opposing tendencies within the same Church…”206
206 Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 7.
137
17. FRANCIS BACON AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE
The profession of scientist first appears in the early sixteenth century, when.
Erasmus humorously wrote of them: “Near these march the scientists,
reverenced for their beards and the fur on their gowns, who teach that they
alone are wise while the rest of mortal men flit about as shadows. How
pleasantly they dote, indeed, while they construct their numberless worlds,
and measure the sun, moon, stars, and spheres as with thumb and line. They
assign causes for lightning, winds, eclipses, and other inexplicable things,
never hesitating a whit, as if they were privy to the secrets of nature, artificer
of things, or as if they visited us fresh from the council of the gods. Yet all the
while nature is laughing grandly at them and their conjectures. For to prove
that they have good intelligence of nothing, this is a sufficient argument: they
can never explain why they disagree with each other on every subject. Thus
knowing nothing in general, they profess to know all things in particular;
though they are ignorant even of themselves, and on occasion do not see the
ditch or the stone lying across their path, because many of them are blear-
eyed or absent-minded; yet they proclaim that they perceive ideas, universals,
forms without matter, primary substances, quiddities, and ecceities – things
so tenuous, I fear, that Lynceus himself could not see them. When they
especially disdain the vulgar crowd is when they bring out their triangles,
quadrangles, circles, and mathematical pictures of the sort, lay one upon the
other, intertwine them into a maze, then deploy – and all to involve the
uninitiated in darkness. Their fraternity does not lack those who predict
future events by consulting the stars, and promise wonders even more
magical; and these lucky scientists find people to believe them.”207
However, this description mixed up what we would now call true

scientists with quacks of various kinds. The distinction began to be made at
the beginning of the next century as a result of the works of such men as
Francis Bacon and René Descartes, who first expounded the principles of
empiricism, or the scientific method.
Bacon, who was at one time Chancellor of England, has been called the
first philosopher and prophet of science, and therefore the first man with a
modern mentality – that is, a mentality marked by a scientific view of the
world. But of course he lived in a religious age, and therefore for him the
book of Nature, which scientists read, did not exclude the book of God, the
Bible, which theologians read; and God was the Author of both of them. For
“it is true,” he wrote, “that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism;
but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while
the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest
in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them,
confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and
Deity.”208
207
Erasmus, The Praise of Folly.
208 Bacon, “Atheism”, in Essays, 27.
138
However, from the seventeenth century both books – that of nature, and
that of God - were increasingly subject to a single heuristic method – what we
now call the scientific outlook, or empiricism. This is the methodology which
declares that the only reliable way of attaining non-mathematical truth is by
inferences from the evidence of the senses (mathematical truth describes the
structure of inferential and deductive reasoning). This principle, first
proclaimed by Bacon in his The Advancement of Learning (1605), rejects the
witness of non-empirical sources – for example, God or intuition or so-called
“innate ideas” – in scientific work.
The reverse process – that is, inferences about God and other non-sensory
realities from the evidence of the senses – was admitted by the early,
believing empiricists (that is, roughly until the death of Newton), but rejected
by most later ones. The transition from the early to the later empiricism is
marked by David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1747), in
which he writes: “While we argue from the course of nature and infer a
particular intelligent cause which first bestowed and still preserves order in
the universe, we embrace a principle which is still uncertain and useless. It is
uncertain because the subject lies entirely beyond the reach of human
experience. It is useless because… we can never on that basis establish any
principles of conduct and behaviour.”
In time empiricism became not only a methodological or epistemological,

but also an ontological principle, the principle, namely, that reality not only is
best discovered by empirical means, but also is, solely and exclusively, that
which can be investigated by empirical means; non-empirical “reality” simply
does not exist. Thus empiricism led to materialism. However, it was and is
possible to espouse empiricism in science and not be a materialist, but to be
religious, as is demonstrated by the many believing scientists of the time (and
all times).
In accordance with the difference in the kinds of evidence admitted, there

is a difference in the nature and structure of the authority that science (in its
more “advanced”, materialist form) and religion rely on. Science relies on the
authority of millions of observations that have been incorporated into a vast
structure of hypotheses that are taken as “proven” – although in fact no
hypothesis can ever be proved beyond every possible doubt, and science
advances by the systematic application of doubt to what are thought to be
weak points in the hypothetical structure. For, as John Donne said, “the new
philosophy [science] calls all in doubt”. 209 Religion, however, without
denying empirical evidence, admits a much wider range of things and events
as facts - not only Divine Revelation, but also immaterial entities like the soul,
immaterial states like love, and all kinds of miracles that empirical science
denies a priori.
209
Donne, The First Anniversarie (1611), quoted in Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, London:
Macmillan, 1990, p. 130.
139
Bacon compared science to the knowledge of essences that Adam had
before the fall – “the pure knowledge of nature and universality, a knowledge
by the light whereof man did give names unto other creatures in Paradise, as
they were brought to him”.210 “This light should in its very rising touch and
illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present
knowledge; and so, spreading further and further should presently disclose
and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world.”211 “God
forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern
of the world: rather may He graciously grant to us to write an apocalypse or
true vision of the footsteps of the Creator imprinted on His creatures.”212
J.M. Roberts writes that Bacon was “a visionary, glimpsing not so much
what science would discover as what it would become: a faith. ‘The true and
lawful end of the sciences’, he wrote, ‘is that human life be enriched by new
discoveries and powers.’ Through them could be achieved ‘a restitution and
reinvigorating (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power… which
he had in his first creation.’ This was ambitious indeed – nothing less than the
redemption of mankind through organised research; he was here, too, a
prophetic figure, precursor of later scientific societies and institutes.”213
Now the spirit of true religion is the spirit of the humble receiving of the
truth by revelation from God; it does not preclude active seeking for truth,
but recognizes that it will never succeed in this search if God does not help
the truth-seeker. For Wisdom “goes about seeking those worthy of her, and
She graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets them in every
thought” (Wisdom 6.16). In science, on the other hand, while here also there
are humble seekers for truth, there is also a proud Faustian spirit, a striving
for power over nature, rather than simply the simple contemplation of it, which
is incompatible with the true religious spirit. We have seen this already in
such men as Bruno. And it was not absent from Bacon, who thought that the
“pure knowledge of nature and universality” would lead to power
(“knowledge is power”, in his famous phrase) and to “the effecting of all
things possible”.214
So important was this power that no human authority, clerical or otherwise,

should be allowed to interfere with or limit it. Hence Bacon’s demand for
complete intellectual freedom for scientists 215 , whose work had to be
collegiate and collective in nature, suffering no hierarchical oversight. The
Royal Academy (1660) was a conscious attempt to incarnate Bacon’s ideal of
collegiate science.
210 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book I, 1, 3.

211
Bacon, The Interpretation of Nature, proemium.
212
Bacon, The Great Instauration, “The Plan of the Work”.
213
Roberts, The Triumph of the West, London: Phoenix Press, 1985, p. 160.
214 Bacon, New Atlantis; see Porter, op. cit., p. 17.
215 Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God, New York: Ballantine Books, 2000, p. 70.
140
*
Now Erasmus’ description of scientists, quoted above, indicates that at the

beginning true science, occultism and quackery emerged out of a common
intellectual medium, and a common striving for power over nature. As C.S.
Lewis writes, “There is something which unites magic and applied science
while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of
old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the
solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and
applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of
men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique,
are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious – such as
digging up and mutilating the dead.”216
For, as Fr. Seraphim Rose points out: “Modern science was born out of the
experiments of the Platonic alchemists, the astrologers and magicians. The
underlying spirit of the new scientific world-view was the spirit of
Faustianism, the spirit of magic, which is retained as a definite undertone of
contemporary science. The discovery, in fact, of atomic energy would have
delighted the Renaissance alchemists very much: they were looking for just
such power. The aim of modern science is power over nature. Descartes, who
formulated the mechanistic scientific world-view, said that man was to
become the master and possessor of nature. It should be noted that this is a
religious faith that takes the place of Christian faith.”217
It was the waning in the Church’s authority coincident with the

Renaissance and the Reformation that led to this explosion of interest,
especially in Protestant lands, in what Grayling calls “short ways to
knowledge” - occultism, astrology and alchemy. The alchemists, for example,
believed that gold could be created from base metals – obviously a very
useful and profitable technology, if it was true, which is why cash-strapped
rulers such as Queen Elizabeth I and scientist-magicians like John Dee were
interested in it, as were even real scientists such as Newton and Boyle. But it
was not true; and science grew in proportion as these “short cuts” to
knowledge were shown to be false.
According to Grayling, “The effective demise of the credibility of magia,

alchymia, cabala, even though credulousness in them remained (and among a
few, remains to this day), can plausibly be attributed to the failure of the
supposed ‘movement’ known as Rosicrucianism in the events led up to the
outbreak of the Thirty Years War. The Rosicrucian panic in the first quarter of
the seventeenth century was what in dramaturgical terms would be called the
crisis of occult philosophy, that is, the last great gasp of an outlook that had
overstayed its welcome in the intellectual economy of the age, and in that
216 Lewis, in Fr. Seraphim Johnson, “A Sane Family in an Insane World”,
www.trueorthodoxy.net/a_sane_family_in_an_insane_world.htm.)
217
Rose, in Monk Damascene Christensen, Not of this World: The Life and Teachings of Fr.
Seraphim Rose, Forestville, CA: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1993, p. 594.
141
final fling demonstrated its vacuity. Arguably, the interest in questions of
methodology of the two chief formulators of philosophical and scientific
method in the seventeenth century – Francis Bacon and René Descartes – was
piqued not just by the Aristotelianism they rejected, but by the confusion of
alchemy with chemistry, magic with medicine, astrology with astronomy,
mysticism with mathematics, that was getting in the way of the advance of
knowledge. What they rejected, in arguing for responsible methods of
enquiry, was the very magia, alchymia, cabala which had engrossed the
previous century’s epistemological and metaphysical imaginations.”218
By about 1625, the Catholic Church, spearheaded by the Jesuits (of whom,
Grayling claims, Descartes was an agent) had triumphed over magia, alchymia,
cabala in its last major, Rosicrucian “fling”. At the same time, however, it had
set itself against the beginnings of the scientific revolution, thereby as it were
throwing the baby out with the bath-water. For, as Grayling continues:
“Remembering that occultism was motivated by a Faustian desire to find
short cuts to knowledge and control of the mysteries of nature explains much
about the threat it posed to the view – the Church’s view – that those
mysteries are not mankind’s but God’s alone to know. From the Church’s
point of view there was no point in drawing a line between real and occult
science. Finding a way of unlocking the universe’s secrets was every
enquirer’s ambition, whatever kind of enquirer was involved – whether by
the short-cuts of occultism, or by the empirical and quantitative methods of
genuine science. The Church was against both; it did not distinguish them.”219
Having said that, we must acknowledge that modern opponents of religion

have exaggerated their case against the Catholic Church, and Christianity in
general, as if the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo overthrew not only
the old Aristotelean-Ptolemaic model of the heavens and the earth, but
religious faith in general. They did not… In this connection it is essential to
dissect the Thomist synthesis of spiritual and material knowledge that was
accepted by both Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth century into its
constituent parts. Now Thomas Aquinas, as Grayling writes, “brought
together the material and the spiritual by joining Aristotle’s science, Ptolemy’s
astronomy and Galen’s medical theories – together offering a picture of the
material aspect of man’s existence – with the Church’s teaching on the nature
and destiny of the soul.”220 But the Church’s teaching “on the nature and
destiny of the soul” did not have to be bound up with “the material aspect of
man’s existence” - there was nothing in the Holy Scriptures or the Holy
Fathers of the first millennium of Christianity that necessitated an acceptance
of Ptolemy’s astronomy. Indeed, St. Basil in his Hexaemeron shows some
contempt for all pagan speculations on the nature of the universe.221
218 Grayling, The Age of Genius, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 184.

219 Grayling, op. cit., pp. 185-186.
220 Grayling, op. cit., p. 234.
221 “Those who have written about the nature of the universe have discussed at length the
shape of the earth. If it be spherical or cylindrical. If it resemble a disc and is equally rounded
in all parts, or if it has the form of a winnowing basket and is hollow in the middle; all those
142
The Roman Catholics’ dogmatization of pagan physical speculations was a
critical mistake – rather, heresy; for by giving the pagan Aristotle, and then
his Christian follower Aquinas, a status and honour above that of the
Apostles themselves, they departed from the faith of the Apostles. By contrast,
the Orthodox Church in the East respected, and sometimes used, but never
idolized Aristotle (still less, Ptolemy).222 And, as we have seen, the Orthodox
rejected Aristotelian intrusions into theology both in the Palamite
controversies of the mid-fourteenth century and in the Council of Florence in
1438-39.
The discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo certainly overthrew Ptolemy’s

astronomy, but in no way did they overthrow the authority of the real sources
of Christian tradition – which do not include the foolish wisdom of the Popes!
Much confusion has been generated in this connection by Galileo’s trial, in
which, so it is said, a Pope who falsely believed that the earth was flat and
that the sun circled the earth persecuted Galileo, who believed on empirical
evidence that the earth circled the sun. But the truth, as Jay Wesley Richards
explains, is somewhat different. “First of all, some claim Copernicus was
persecuted, but history shows he wasn’t; in fact, he died of natural causes the
same year his ideas were published. As for Galileo, his case can’t be reduced
to a simple conflict between scientific truth and religious superstition. He
insisted the church immediately endorse his views rather than allow them to
gradually gain acceptance, he mocked the Pope, and so forth. Yes, he was
censured, but the church kept giving him his pension for the rest of his life.”
The earlier case of Bruno, continues Richards, “was very sad. He was
executed in Rome in 1600. Certainly this is a stain on church history. But
again, this was a complicated case. His Copernican views were incidental. He
defended pantheism and was actually executed for his heretical views on the
Trinity, the Incarnation, and other doctrines that had nothing to do with
Copernicanism.” 223
conjectures have been suggested by cosmographers, each one upsetting that of his
predecessor. It will not lead me to give less importance to the creation of the universe that the
servant of God Moses is silent as to shapes; he has not said that the earth is a hundred and
eighty thousand furlongs in circumference; he has not measured into what extent of air its
shadow, casting itself upon the moon, produces eclipses. He has passed over in silence, as
useless, all that is unimportant to us. Shall I then prefer foolish wisdom to the oracles of the
Holy Spirit? Shall I not rather exalt Him Who, not wishing to fill our minds with these
vanities, has regulated all the economy of Scripture in view of the edification and the making
perfect of our souls?” (Hexaemeron, Homily IX). Again, St. Antony the Great described as
“empty” the word “that seeks to determine the measure of heaven and earth, their distance
apart, and the size of the sun and stars”; for these men are motivated by “empty vainglory”
and “seek things that bring them no profit” (170 Texts on Saintly Life, 109).
222 St. John of Damascus used Aristotle’s logic extensively in his Fount of Knowledge.
223
Richards, in Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004, pp. 162-
163. “The historian William R. Shea said, ‘Galileo’s condemnation was the result of the
complex interplay of untoward political circumstances, political ambitions, and wounded
prides.’ Historical researcher Philip J. Sampson noted that Galileo himself was convinced that
the ‘major cause’ of his troubles was that he had made ‘fun of his Holiness’ – that is, Pope
143
In fact, Christian Tradition never denied a spherical earth. For the Prophet
Isaiah spoke of Him Who “sits above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40.22). The
Holy Fathers knew that the earth was round: St. Gregory of Nyssa, for
example, calls the earth “spherical” (On the Soul and the Resurrection, chapter
4), and the Venerable Bede (+735) held that the sun goes around the spherical
Earth, and that the moon and stars shine, not with their own light, but with
light reflected from the sun (The Reckoning of Time).
“The truth is,” writes David Lindberg, “that it’s almost impossible to find
an educated person after Aristotle who doubts that the Earth is a sphere.”224
Christopher Johns writes: “The misconception here is not only that

medieval people thought that the earth was flat, but that the ancient Greek
theory of a spherical earth was somehow ‘lost’ or forgotten in the Middle
Ages, and that the Church taught the alleged ‘flat earth theory’ as a matter of
dogma, until Christopher Columbus proved them wrong by sailing far into
the west without falling over the edge of the earth. The reality is that
Medieval people were well aware of the spherical shape of the earth.
Medieval art consistently depicts the earth as shaped like a sphere, a spherical
earth appears in church sermons of the period, and the earth is explicitly
described as a sphere in the writings of Dante and Chaucer. Thomas Aquinas,
in his Summa Theologica, also gives the round earth as an example of an
accepted scientific fact and a rational truth: ‘The astronomer and the physicist
both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round:
the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but
the physicist by means of matter itself’ (emphasis mine). Meanwhile, Bede the
Venerable, the Anglo-Saxon monk, would note the following in The Reckoning
of Time: ‘Not without reason is [the earth] called “the orb of the world” on the
pages of Holy Scripture and of ordinary literature. It is, in fact, set like a
sphere in the middle of the whole universe’. Stephen Jay Gould, a historian of
science, noted the following: ‘There never was a period of “flat Earth
darkness” among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have
conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of
sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the Earth's
roundness as an established fact of cosmology.”225
Urban VIII – in a 1632 treatise. As for his punishment, Alfred North Whitehead put it this
way: ‘Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in
his bed.’” (Strobel, op. cit., p. 163) As Sebastian Montefiore puts it, “his imprisonment
amounted to little more than enforced internal exile to the Tuscan hills, where he was free to
continue his work in a more muted form” (Titans in History, London: Quercius, 2012, p. 234).
224
Lindberg, in Strobel, op. cit., p. 164. Cf. Peter De Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam
Press, 1988, pp. 221-231.
225 Johns, “Misconceptions about the Middle Ages”,
https://medievalfacts.quora.com/Misconceptions-about-the-Middle-Ages?ref=fb.
144
True Religion, unlike both the false science of the pre-modern mind and the
true, but often trivial science that replaced it, does not seek power over nature,
but rather knowledge of the Creator of nature – Whose power, of course, can
only be submitted to, not exploited as Simon Magus tried to exploit it. It
opposes science only when it goes beyond its proper bounds and ceases to be
empirical in its methods, even becoming so proud and blind as to deny the
existence of God. In seeking the truly useful, salvific knowledge, True
Religion relies on no other ultimate authority than the Word of God as
communicated either directly to the Church, “the pillar and ground of the
Truth” (I Timothy 3.15), which preserves and verifies individual revelations.
Doubt has no place within the true religion, but only when one is still in the
process of seeking it, when different religious systems are still being
approached as possible truths – in other words, as hypotheses. Having
cleaved to the true religion by faith, however, - and faith is defined as the
opposite of doubt, as “the certainty of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1), - the
religious believer advances, not by doubt, but by the deepening of faith, by
ever deeper immersion in the undoubted truths of religion.
When the differences between science and religion are viewed from this
perspective, there are seen to be important differences between Catholicism
and Protestantism. From this perspective, Catholicism is more “religious”,
and Protestantism – less religious and more “scientific”. Catholicism’s view
was formulated at the Council of Trent, and was summarized as follows in a
letter by Cardinal Bellarmino: “As you are aware, the Council of Trent forbids
the interpretation of the Scriptures in a way contrary to the common opinion
of the holy Fathers”. This was correct from an Orthodox point of view, but
did not correspond to what actually was the case in the Catholic Church. For
whatever the Council of Trent may have said, the deciding voice in
Catholicism de facto was not “the consensus of the Fathers” but that of the Pope,
which often contradicted the patristic consensus. Nevertheless, the essential
point here is that for Catholics the criterion of truth was ancient in origin and
went back, in theory at any rate, to Divine Revelation as interpreted by the
Fathers. Protestantism, on the other hand, arose as a protest against, and a
doubting of, the revealed truths of the Catholic religion. From an Orthodox
point of view, some of these doubts were justified, and some not - but that is
not the essential point here. The essential point is that Protestantism arose out
of doubt rather than faith, and, like Descartes in philosophy, placed doubt at
the head of the corner of its new theology.
How? First, by doubting that there is a Church that is “the pillar and
ground of the truth”, the vessel of God’s revelation. So where is God’s
revelation to be sought? In the visions and words of individual men, the
Prophets and Apostles, the Saints and Fathers?
Yes; but – and here the corrosive power of doubt enters again – not all that
the Church has passed down about these men can be trusted, according to the
Protestants. In particular, the inspiration of the post-apostolic Saints and
Fathers is to be doubted, as is much of what we are told of the lives even of
145
the Prophets and Apostles. In fact, we can only rely on the Bible – Sola
Scriptura. Only the Bible is objective evidence; for everybody can read, analyse
and interpret it. Therefore only it corresponds to what we would call scientific
evidence.
But here’s the rub: can we be sure even of the Bible? After all, the text
comes to us from the Church, not direct from heaven. Can we be sure that
Moses wrote Genesis, or Isaiah Isaiah, or Paul Hebrews? To answer these
questions we have to analyse the text scientifically. Then we will find the real
text, the text we can really trust, the text of the real author. But suppose we
cannot find this real text? And suppose we conclude that the “real” text of the
book was written by tens of authors, spread over hundreds of years? Can we
then be sure that it is the Word of God? But if we cannot be sure that the Bible
is the Word of God, how can we be sure of anything? Thus Protestantism,
which begins with the doubting of authority, ends with the loss of truth itself.
Or rather, it ends with a scientific truth which dispenses with religious truth,
or accepts religious truth only to the extent that it is “confirmed by the
findings of science”. It ends by being a branch of the scientific endeavour of
systematic doubt, and not a species of religious faith at all.
The original error of Protestantism consisted in a false reductionist attitude

to Divine Revelation. Revelation is given to us in the Church, “the pillar and
ground of the truth”, and consists of two indivisible and mutually
interdependent parts – Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Scripture and
Tradition support each other, and are in turn supported by the Church, which
herself rests on the Rock of truth, Christ the Incarnate Truth, as witnessed to
in Scripture and Tradition. Any attempt to reduce Divine Revelation to one of
these elements, any attempt to make one element essential and the other
inessential, is doomed to end with the loss of Revelation altogether, the
dissolution of the Rock of ages into the sands of shifting, inconstant opinion,
driven hither and thither by the tides of scientific fashion.
Vladimir Trostnikov has shown that Protestant tendency towards

reductionism in fact goes back to the Catholicism of the eleventh century, just
after the Roman Church’s break with Orthodoxy, and to the nominalist
thinker Roscelin. Nominalism, which had triumphed over its philosophical
rival, universalism, by the 14th century, “gives priority to the particular over
the general, the lower over the higher”. As such, it contradicts the
Hierarchical conception, and anticipates Protestant reductionism, which
insists that the simple precedes the complex, and that the complex can always
be reduced, both logically and ontologically, to the simple. 226 Thus the
Catholic heresy of nominalism gave birth to the Protestant heresy of
reductionism, which reduced the complex spiritual process of the absorption
of God’s revelation in the Church to the unaided rationalist dissection of a
226
Trostnikov, “The Role and Place of the Baptism of Rus in the European Spiritual Process of
the Second Millenium of Christian History”, Orthodox Life, volume 39, N 3, May-June, 1989, p.
29.
146
single element in that life, the book of the Holy Scriptures. As Trostnikov
explains, the assumption that reductionism is true has led to a series of
concepts which taken together represent a summation of the contemporary
world-view: that matter consists of elementary particles which themselves do
not consist of anything; that the planets and all the larger objects of the
universe arose through the gradual condensation of simple gas; that all living
creatures arose out of inorganic matter; that the later forms of social
organization and politics arose out of earlier, simpler and less efficient ones;
that human consciousness arose from lower phenomena, drives and
archetypes; that the government of a State consists of its citizens, who must
therefore be considered to be the supreme power.
We see, then, why science, like capitalism, flourished in the Protestant

countries. Protestantism, according to Landes, “gave a big boost to literacy,
spawned dissent and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of
authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries,
instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”227
The truth is that both true science and true religion depend on authority –
that is, the reports of reliable men about what they have seen, touched and
heard (Moses during his forty days on Sinai, the Apostles in the locked room
on the eve of the Resurrection of Christ). False reports can lead to false science
no less than to false religion and superstition. Moreover, the reports on which
both religion and science are based on empirical evidence: the emptiness of a
tomb or the touch of a pierced side, on the one hand; the falling of an apple or
the bending of a ray, on the other. The question in both science and religion is:
can we rely on this evidence, is it trustworthy and authoritative? And so both
science and religion seek truth, and both rely on authority. The difference lies,
first, in the kinds of truth they seek, and secondly, in the nature of the
authority they rely on.
Thus there is no contradiction between true science and true religion. This
was understood even by the prophet of the scientific revolution, Francis
Bacon. As he wrote: “Undoubtedly a superficial tincture of philosophy
[science] may incline the mind to atheism, yet a farther knowledge brings it
back to religion; for on the threshold of philosophy, where second causes
appear to absorb the attention, some oblivion of the highest cause may ensue;
but when the mind goes deeper, and sees the dependence of causes and the
works of Providence, it will easily perceive, according to the mythology of the
poets, that the upper link of Nature’s chain is fastened to Jupiter’s
throne…”228
227
Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, p. 179.
228
Bacon, De Augmentiis, quoted in B. Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background, London:
Chatto & Windus, 1946, p. 30.
147
18. THE DUTCH REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF
CAPITALISM
The modern age began, not with the English revolution, but with a long-
drawn-out struggle between the greatest monarchical power of the age, the
Spanish Empire, and its colonial subjects in the Netherlands. In it, and in the
subsequent fall from superpower status of the Spanish empire, was fulfilled
the word of Machiavelli: “He who becomes master of a city accustomed to
freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in
rebellion it has always the watchword of liberty…”229
“In 1581,” writes Mark Almond, “the states of the Union of Utrecht
formally abjured their loyalty to [the Spanish King] Philip II. They denied his
divine right to rule. He had betrayed his trust: ‘It is well known to all that if a
prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm,
even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not
created by God for the sake of the prince but rather the prince is established
for his subjects’ sake for without them he would not be a prince. Should he
violate the laws, he is to be forsaken by his meanest subjects, and to be no
longer recognised as prince.’ These were revolutionary sentiments in the
sixteenth century, and for some time to come. Even their authors preferred to
avoid becoming a republic and looked around for an alternative monarch
who would satisfy their demands…”230
Nevertheless, the constitution of the new State “ensured that the

governments of the seven provinces remained separated from a federal
council of state at the Hague. The latter was chaired by an executive
Stadholder, whose office was generally held, together with the offices of
Captain-General and Admiral-General, by the House of Orange… Despite its
peculiar, decentralised constitution, [the Netherlands] had every reason to
regard itself as the first modern state.”231
“The Dutch Republic of the ‘United Provinces of the Netherlands’ –

misleadingly known to the English as Holland – was the wonder of
seventeenth-century Europe. It succeeded for the same reasons that its would-
be Spanish masters failed: throughout the eighty years of its painful birth, its
disposable resources were actually growing. Having resisted the greatest
military power of the day, it then became a major maritime power in its own
right. Its sturdy burgher society widely practised the virtues of prudent
management, democracy, and toleration. Its engineers, bankers, and sailors
were justly famed… The Dutch Republic rapidly became a haven for religious
dissidents, for capitalists, for philosophers, and for painters.”232
229
Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter V.
230 Almond, Revolution, London: De Agostini Editions, 1996, p. 44.
231 Davies, op. cit., pp. 538-539.
232 Davies, op. cit., pp. 538, 539.
148
On rebelling against the Spanish the seven northern provinces immediately
proclaimed religious liberty – the first State to do so. Not only all Protestant
sects, but also Jews, and even Roman Catholics were given freedom to
practise their beliefs. All strictly religious faiths were given liberty alongside
the newest and most important faith, Capitalism. As the English Catholic poet
Andrew Marvell put it in his poem, “The Character of Holland” (1653):
Hence Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew,

Staple of Sects and Mint of Schism grew;
That Bank of Conscience, where not one so strange
Opinion but finds Credit, and Exchange.
In vain for Catholicks our selves we bear;
The universal church is onely there.
The Dutch Republic was the first political creation of Calvinism. Its main
weakness was that its root was “the root of all evil” – money. Already in 1599
eight Amsterdam ships had returned from Java with a huge cargo of spices
and luxury goods, and had made a 400% profit, stimulating the English to
found the East India Company.233 From now on, commercial profit became a
driving force in Dutch society. “Holland is a country,” wrote Claude de
Saumaise, “where the demon gold is seated on a throne of cheese, and
crowned with tobacco”.234 This commercial character of the new Dutch state
was caused, writes Pieter Geyl, by the fact that it was “the urban lower
middle classes” who were mainly inspired to act against the Spaniards, while
the town oligarchies “felt themselves… the guardians of the privileges and
welfare of town and country, rather than the champions of a particularly new
religious faith. In other words, they regarded matters from a secular
standpoint, and, while the new Church had in their scheme of things its
indispensable place, they felt it incumbent on them carefully to circumscribe
this place. From one point of view… the great European movement of the
Reformation was a revolt of the lay community under the leadership of their
rulers – a revolt, that is to say, of the State against priestly influence.”235 And
so the purpose of the Dutch Republic was not so much to protect or spread
Calvinism as to protect and increase the material prosperity of its citizens.
Their attitude to the state, therefore, was that it “had better stop trying to
interfere with the serious business of making money.” 236 Although the
Calvinist-Puritans did not make money their goal, and profit-making was
encouraged only in order to be more effective in doing good, the decay of
Puritan religion tended to leave mammon in its place. As Cotton Mather said:
“Religion begat prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother.”237
233 Shapiro, 1599, p. 304.

234 De Saumaise, in Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 1987, p. 188.
235 Geyl, quoted in George, op. cit., p. 64.
237 John Adair writes, “when religion decays, what is left but worldliness? The paradoxes of
faith collapse into mere contradictions.” (op. cit., p. 267).
149
According to Niall Ferguson, Holland’s war of liberation against Spain
“was a watershed in financial as well as political history. With their
republican institutions, the United Provinces combined the advantages of the
city-state with the scale of a nation-state. They were able to finance their wars
by developing Amsterdam as the market for a whole range of new securities:
not only life and perpetual annuities, but also lottery loans (whereby
investors bought a small probability of a large return). By 1650 there were
more than 65,000 Dutch rentiers, men who had invested their capital in one or
other of these debt instruments and thereby helped finance the long Dutch
struggle to preserve their independence. As the Dutch progressed from self-
defence to imperial expansion, their debt mountain grew high indeed, from
50 million guilders in 1632 to 250 million in 1752. Yet the yield on Dutch
bonds declined steadily, to a low of just 2.5 per cent in 1747 – a sign not only
that capital was abundant in the United Provinces, but also that investors had
little fear of an outright Dutch default.
“With the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which ousted the Catholic James II
from the English throne in favour of the Dutch Protestant Prince of Orange,
these and other innovations crossed the English Channel from Amsterdam to
London…”238
“The secret of Dutch success,” writes Yuval Noah Harari, “was credit. The
Dutch burghers, who has little taste for combat on land, hired mercenary
armies to fight the Spanish for them. The Dutch themselves meanwhile took
to the sea in ever-larger fleets. Mercenary armies and cannon-brandishing
fleets cost a fortune, but the Dutch were able to finance their military
expeditions more easily than the mighty Spanish Empire because they
secured the trust of the burgeoning European financial system at a time when
the Spanish king was carelessly eroding its trust in him. Financiers extended
the Dutch enough credit to set up armies and fleets, and these armies and
fleets gave the Dutch control of world trade routes, which in turn yielded
handsome profits. The profits allowed the Dutch to repay the loans, which
strengthened the trust of the financiers. Amsterdam was fast becoming not
only one of the most important ports of Europe, but also the continent’s
financial Mecca.
“How exactly did the Dutch win the trust of the financial system? Firstly,
they were sticklers about repaying their loans on time and in full, making the
extension of credit less risky for lenders. Secondly, their country’s judicial
system enjoyed independence and protected private rights – in particular
private property rights. Capital trickles away from dictatorial states that fail
to defend private individuals and their property. Instead, it flows into states
upholding the rule of law and private property…
238 Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, New York: Penguin Press, 2008, pp. 74-75.
150
“It was the Dutch merchants – not the Dutch state – who built the Dutch
Empire. The king of Spain kept on trying to finance and maintain his
conquests by raising unpopular taxes from a disgruntled populace. The Dutch
merchants financed conquest by getting loans, and increasing also by selling
shares in their companies that entitled their holders to receive a portion of the
company’s profits. Cautious investors who would never have thought twice
before extending credit to the Dutch government, happily invested fortunes
in the Dutch joint-stock companies that were the mainstay of the new empire.
“If you thought a company was going to make a big profit but it had
already sold all its shares, you could buy some from people who owned them,
probably for a higher price than they originally paid. If you bought shares
and later discovered that the company was in dire straits, you could try to
unload your stock for a lower price. The resulting trade in company shares
led to the establishment in most major European cities of stock exchanges,
places where the shares of companies were traded.
“The most famous Dutch joint-stock company, the Vereenigde Oostindische

Compagnie, or VOC for short, was chartered in 1602, just as the Dutch were
throwing off Spanish rule and the boom of Spanish artillery could still be
heard not far from Amsterdam’s ramparts. VOC used the money it raised
from selling shares to build ships, send them to Asia, and bring back Chinese,
Indian and Indonesian goods. It also financed military actions taken by
company ships against competitors and pirates. Eventually VOC money
financed the conquest of Indonesia.
“Indonesia is the world’s biggest archipelago. Its thousands upon

thousands of islands were ruled in the early seventeenth century by hundreds
of kingdoms, principalities, sultanate and tribes. When VOC merchants first
arrived in Indonesia in 1603, their aims were strictly commercial. However, in
order to secure their commercial interests and maximise the profits of the
shareholders, VOC merchants began to fight against local potentates who
charged inflated tariffs, as well as against European competitors. VOC armed
its merchant ships with cannons; it recruited European, Japanese, Indian and
Indonesian mercenaries; and it built forts and conducted full-scale battles and
sieges. This enterprise may sound a little strange to us, but in the early
modern age it was common for private companies to hire not only soldiers,
but also generals and admirals, cannons and ships, and even entire off-the-
shelf armies. The international community took this for granted and didn’t
raise an eyebrow when a private company established an empire.
“Island after island fell to VOC mercenaries and a large part of Indonesia
became a VOC colony.239 VOC ruled Indonesia for close to 200 years. Only in
1800 did the Dutch state assume control of Indonesia, making a Dutch
239 The decisive moment was the capture and burning down of Djakarta in 1619. The native
residents were expelled. The new town that arose on the spot was renamed Batavia; it
reverted to its ancient name of Djakarta in the twentieth century. (V.M.)
151
national colony for the following 150 years. Today some people warn that
twenty-first-century corporations are accumulating too much power. Early
modern history shows just how far that can go if businesses are allowed to
pursue their self-interest unchecked.
“While VOC operated in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch West Indies
Company, or WIC, plied the Atlantic. In order to control trade on the
important Hudson River, WIC build a settlement called New Amsterdam on
an island at the river’s mouth. The colony was threatened by Indians and
repeatedly attacked by the British, who eventually captured it in 1664. The
British changed its name to New York. The remains of the wall built by WIC
to defend its colony against Indians and British are today paved over by the
world’s most famous street – Wall Street…”240
Was there a link between republicanism and Calvinism, on the one hand,
and financial innovation and wealth-creation, on the other? Of course, an
absolutist government is not necessarily opposed to the interests of capital; it
may allow the capitalists to enrich themselves, while retaining political power
for itself. But it would clearly be safer to install from the beginning a
constitutional monarchy in which the real sovereign would be, not the
monarch, but a capitalist landowning oligarchy meeting in parliament that
could never threaten to deprive any oligarch of his land.
Thus, as Ian Buruma writes, “there is a link between business interests – or

at least the freedom to trade – and liberal, even democratic, politics. Money
tends to even things out, is egalitarian and blind to race or creed. As Voltaire
said about the London stock exchange: Muslims, Christians and Jews trade as
equals, and bankrupts are the only infidels. Trade can flourish if property is
protected by laws. That means protection from the state, as well as from other
individuals.”241
A direct link between Capitalism and Calvinism was posited by the

Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc: “If we ask what it was in Calvin’s doctrine,
apart from the opportunities of its moment and its effect against the clergy,
which gave it so much power, the answer is, I think, that it provided an awful
object of worship and that it appealed at the same time to a powerful human
appetite which Catholicism opposes. The novel object of worship was an
Implacable God: the appetite was the love of money…
“A Philosophy which denied good works and derided abnegation let it

loose in all its violence.”242
240 Harari, Homo Sapiens, pp. 355-356, 358-360.

241 Buruma, “China and Liberty”, Prospect, May, 2000, p. 37.
242 Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, pp. 126, 127.
152
This thesis was developed by Max Weber; he saw a direct link between
Protestantism and those habits that are conducive to capitalism. Weber’s
theory, writes Landes, postulates “that Protestantism – more specifically, its
Calvinist branches – promoted the rise of modern capitalism… not by easing
or abolishing those aspects of the Roman faith that had deterred or hindered
free economic activity (the prohibition of usury, for example); nor by
encouraging, let alone inventing, the pursuit of wealth; but by defining and
sanctioning an ethic of everyday behavior that conduced to business success.
“Calvinistic Protestantism, said Weber, did this initially by affirming the

doctrine of predestination. This held that one could not gain salvation by faith
or deeds; that question had been decided for everyone from the beginning of
time, and nothing could alter one’s fate.
“Such a belief could easily have encouraged a fatalistic attitude. If behavior

and faith make no difference, why not live it up? Why be good? Because,
according to Calvinism, goodness was a plausible sign of election. Anyone
could be chosen, but it was only reasonable to suppose that most of those
chosen would show by their character and ways the quality of their souls and
the nature of their destiny. This implicit reassurance was a powerful incentive
to proper thoughts and behavior. As the Englishwoman Elizabeth Walker
wrote her grandson in 1689, alluding to one of the less important but more
important signs of grace, ‘All cleanly people are not good, but there are few
good people but are cleanly.’ And while hard belief in predestination did not
last more than a generation or two (it is not the kind of dogma that has lasting
appeal), it was eventually converted into a secular code of behavior: hard
work, honesty, seriousness, the thrifty use of money and time (both lent us by
God). ‘Time is short,’ admonished the Puritan divine Richard Baxter (1615-
1691), ‘and work is long’.
“All of these values help business and capital accumulation, but Weber
stressed that the good Calvinist did not aim at riches. (He might easily believe,
however, that honest riches are a sign of divine favor.) Europe did not have to
wait for the Protestant Reformation to find people who wanted to be rich.
Weber’s point is that Protestantism produced a new kind of businessman, a
different kind of person, one who aimed to live and work a certain way. It
was the way that mattered, and riches were at best a by-product.
“A good Calvinist would say, that was what was wrong with Spain: easy
riches, unearned wealth. Compare the Protestant and Catholic attitudes
towards gambling in the early modern period. Both condemned it, but
Catholics condemned it because one might (would) lose, and no responsible
person would jeopardize his well-being and that of others in that manner. The
Protestants, on the other hand, condemned it because one might win, and that
would be bad for character. It was only much later that the Protestant ethic
153
degenerated into a set of maxims for material success and smug, smarmy
sermons on the virtues of wealth…”243
We have already noted the links between Capitalism, Calvinism and

Judaism. The Jews expelled by the Spanish in 1492 had found a safe refuge in
Calvinist Amsterdam, where they prospered exceedingly. And this was no
accident.
For, as Norman Cantor notes, “the Calvinists were close readers of the Old
Testament and taught a bleak image of a wrathful, judging, and omniscient
and omnipotent God that accorded well with Jewish tradition. Calvinist
societies were sympathetic to market capitalism as a sign of God’s grace
working in the world.
“There was a millenial fervor among the latter-day Calvinists, a sense of

the coming end of time. These qualities did not necessarily lead to a more
favorable attitude toward the Jews; theoretically it could have gone the other
way. But shaped by a Calvinist elite that favored an ethic of hard work,
rational application of communal standards to individual behavior, and
postponed gratification, a comity of attitude emerged in the early seventeenth
century between the ruling capitalist oligarchy in Amsterdam and the
rabbinical-capitalist oligarchy that controlled power in the Jewish community.
Not only did the Jews of Amsterdam prosper, but Calvinist England
readmitted them in 1653, for the first time officially since the 1290s…
“Everywhere that Calvinism spread after 1600 – Holland, England,

Scotland, and overseas to the United States, English-speaking parts of Canada,
and South Africa (a Dutch colony until 1815, and British thereafter) – the Jews
prospered in business. In the nineteenth century they were given the
opportunity to enter the learned professions. The Calvinists were too
Christian to regard the Jews as fully their equals. But they showed the Jews
more than tolerance; they accorded them dignified respect. This was because
of Calvinist inclination to the Old Testament literary text in its covenant
theology; because the Calvinists and the Jews agreed that business success
was a blessing from God and a sign of the worth of the entrepreneur in God’s
eyes; and because both religious groups admired the patriarchal family, hard
work, social intelligence, rational calculations, and puritanical postponed
gratification.”244
243 Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, pp. 174-176.
244 Cantor, The Sacred Chain, London: Fontana, 1996, pp. 198-199.
154
19. THE NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES
The earliest English colony in America was Virginia, founded in 1607 by

the Virginia Company in Jamestown. Unlike the Puritan colonies of New
England, which were founded a little later, it recognized the Anglican Church
as its state religion. The Virginians were almost wiped out by disease and
famine in 1609-10, but its founder, Captain John Smith, and the other
survivors kept going through digging roots, catching fish - and cannibalism.
The fact that the English settlers’ first contact with the native Indians involved
not only killing them, but also eating their flesh, was an ominous sign of the
future…
The colony of Virginia was based, as David Reynolds writes, on two

important precedents which distinguished the English-speaking colonies
from those planted by France and Spain:
“The first was private ownership of land. To encourage migration to what

was fast becoming notorious as a death trap, the Company started a
‘headright’ system. Anyone who paid his own passage across the Atlantic
received fifty acres of land in Virginia. Not surprisingly, settlers with private
property proved more enterprising than mere company employees.245
“Equally important was an annual assembly, comprising the governor, his

appointed council and a House of Burgesses elected by local freemen, which
the Company established in 1619. The assembly survived the takeover of
Virginia by the Crown [in 1624], and increased its powers in the 1630s at a
time when, back in England, Charles I was trying to suppress the rights of
Parliament. The right to vote was generally restricted to men owning at least
fifty acres – not exactly democracy but still a generous franchise by
contemporary English standards. Underpinning this was a network of county
courts, which were really agents of local government, handling tax-gathering,
land deeds and highways, as well as police and justice.”246
“And it is difficult to overemphasise the fact,” writes Bragg, “that they

came with the Bible in English and lived every hour of their days by that Bible.
For the word of God in English, their predecessors – as we saw with Wycliffe
and Tyndale – had suffered exile, persecution, torture and death. They went
to America to find a better place. They wanted to stay English and they
sought a true England in which to plant their courageously and obstinately
English Bible. They were not going to yield its language to anyone…”247
245 “In terms of the European ‘competition’,” writes Melvyn Bragg, “the English Protestants
were to score heavily because they came primarily not to plunder, which had been the gleeful
purpose of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French and the Dutch, nor even to trade; but to
settle and build a new world with God’s law and above all following God’s word. They came
to stay” (The Adventure of English, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, p. 156).
246 David Reynolds, America: Empire of Liberty, London: Penguin, 2010, op. cit., p. 26.
247 Bragg, op. cit., p. 156.
155
*
In 1620 a group of 102 English Puritans, disturbed by James I’s persecution

of non-Anglican Christians, set out from Plymouth in a ship called The
Mayflower to start a new life in what is now the state of Massachusetts. Half of
the pilgrims, as they were called, “died of starvation in the first winter. Recent
evidence from an archaeological dig indicates the highly religious community
even resorted to cannibalism. They may have eaten a 14-year-old girl. Come
springtime, those who pulled through only survived thanks to the kindness of
Native Americans. [In particular, they were helped by a Native American
called Squanto who had been kidnapped by English sailors fifteen years
before and had learned English in London before managing to escape on a
returning boat.] The story of that kindness, expressed as a meal of
thanksgiving shared between strangers, is the source of Thanksgiving
today.”248
However, it was a later expedition under John Winthrop in 1630 to Salem

and Cape Ann that made the first well-established settlements in New
England. By 1640 another two hundred ships had brought another fifteen
thousand settlers to New England.
The Puritan experiment that created the United States of America was
made possible by the great distance of the new colonies from the English king,
and by the system whereby “a number of immigrants were given the right to
form a political society under the patronage of the motherland and allowed to
govern themselves in any way not contrary to her laws.”249 The experiment
was carried out in a new world, where neither the weight of historical
institutions, such as feudalism and the official Church, nor great differences in
wealth or limitations of space, nor the pressure of external enemies (the
Indians were not formidable adversaries), hindered the development of a
society that was unique in the degree of its democratism and egalitarianism –
and religiosity.
The United States was founded on strictly religious principles, the

principles of Calvinism. As John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts in the
1630s and 1640s said on board the ship that was to take him to the New
World, they were going to build “a city upon a hill”, “a bullwarke against the
kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuites labour to reare up in all places of the
worlde.”250 Its founders, fleeing persecution at the hands of the Anglican State
Church in England, found in New England almost ideal conditions in which
to put their doctrine of “theocratic democratism” into practice.
248 Nick Hubble, “Why Thanksgiving Happened in the First Place”, Capital & Conflict, May 9,
2018.
249 De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York: Fontana, 1968, p. 45.
250 Winthrop, in Reynolds, op. cit., p. 32.
156
These conditions were described by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French
aristocrat who came to America in 1831, in his famous work, Democracy in
America:-
“There was a strong family likeness between all the English colonies as
they came to birth. All, from the beginning, seemed destined to let freedom
grow, not the aristocratic freedom of their motherland, but a middle-class and
democratic freedom of which the world’s history had not previously
provided a complete example…
“All the immigrants who came to settle on the shores of New England
belonged to the well-to-do classes at home. From the start, when they came
together on American soil, they presented the unusual phenomenon of a
society in which there were no great lords, no common people, and, one may
almost say, no rich or poor. In proportion to their numbers, these men had a
greater share of accomplishments than could be found in any European
nation now. All, perhaps without a single exception, had received a fairly
advanced education, and several had made a European reputation by their
talents and their knowledge. The other colonies [including the southern
English colonies such as Virginia] had been founded by unattached
adventurers, whereas the immigrants to New England brought with them
wonderful elements of order and morality; they came with their wives and
children to the wilds. But what distinguished them from all others was the
very aim of their enterprise. No necessity forced them to leave their country;
they gave up a desirable social position and assured means of livelihood; nor
was their object in going to the New World to better their position or
accumulate wealth; they tore themselves away from home comforts in
obedience to a purely intellectual craving; in facing the inevitable sufferings
of exile they hoped for the triumph of an idea.
“The immigrants, or as they so well called themselves, the Pilgrims,

belonged to that English sect whose austere principles had led them to be
called Puritans. Puritanism was not just a religious doctrine; in many respects
it shared the most democratic and republican theories. That was the element
which had aroused its most dangerous adversaries. Persecuted by the home
government, and with strict principles offended by the everyday ways of the
society in which they lived, the Puritans sought a land so barbarous and
neglected by the world that there at last they might be able to live in their
own way and pray to God in freedom.”251
This founding ideology, according to De Tocqueville, was the product “of

two perfectly distinct elements which elsewhere have often been at war with
one another but which in America it was somehow possible to incorporate
with each other, forming a marvellous combination. I mean the Spirit of
Religion and the Spirit of Freedom.”
251 De Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 37, 40.
157
“Puritanism,” noted de Tocqueville, “was almost as much a political theory
as a religious doctrine. No sooner had the immigrants landed on that
inhospitable coast described by Nathaniel Morton than they made it their first
care to organise themselves as a society. They immediately passed an act
which stated: ’We whose names are underwritten … having undertaken for
the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and the honour of
our king and country a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts
of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of
God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil
body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the
ends aforesaid: and by virtue hereof, do enact, constitute, and frame such just
and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers, from time to time,
as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the
colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.’”252
This act of 1620 was the nearest incarnation, before or since, of the idea of
the social contract that later became such a dominant political idea in the
democratic development of the English-speaking countries.
And yet democracy as we understand the term now was far from the aim
of its founders. Thus John Winthrop thought that his colony was “a mixed
Aristocracy”: “If we should change from a mixt Aristocratie to a meere
Democratie: first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: there was no
such government in Israel”. True enough: Israel from the time of Saul was a
Monarchy! “He also claimed that ‘a Democratie is, amongst most Civill
nations, accounted the meanest & worst of all forms of Government’, adding
that ‘Historyes doe recorde that it hath been allwayes of least continuance &
fullest of troubles”.253 But in 1648, at a synod in Cambridge, Mass., the settlers
defined their society as one of mixed Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy:
“This Government of the church is a mixed Government…. In respect of
Christ, the Head and King of the church, and the Sovereign power residing in
Him, and exercised by Him, it is a Monarchy. In respect of the body, or
Brotherhood of the church, and power granted unto them, it resembles a
Democracy. In respect of the Presbytery (i.e. the Elders) and power committed
to them, it is an Aristocracy” (X, 3).”254 No place, then, for an earthly king…
When it came to Biblical analogies – which, of course, were vitally

important for the Puritans, - the most influential, from both a moral and a
political point of view, was undoubtedly the theocratic structure of Israelite
society under Moses. Thus in 1650 the little state of Connecticut drew up a
code of laws, which begins: “If any man after legal conviction shall have or
worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death.”
252 Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 43-44.

253 Winthrop, in Reynolds, op. cit., p. 33.
254 Eric Jay, The Church, London: SPCK, 1977, p. 214.
158
“There follow,” writes De Tocqueville, “ten or twelve provisions of the
same sort taken word for word from Deuteronomy, Exodus, or Leviticus.
Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, and rape are punished by death; a son who
outrages his parents is subject to the same penalty. Thus the legislation of a
rough, half-civilised people was transported into the midst of an educated
society with gentle mores; as a result the death penalty has never been more
frequently prescribed by the laws or more seldom carried out.
“The framers of these penal codes were especially concerned with the
maintenance of good behaviour and sound mores in society, so they
constantly invaded the sphere of conscience, and there was hardly a sin not
subject to the magistrate’s censure. The reader will have noticed the severity
of the penalties for adultery and rape. Simple intercourse between unmarried
persons was likewise harshly repressed. The judge had discretion to impose a
fine or a whipping or to order the offenders to marry. If the records of the old
courts of New Haven are to be trusted, prosecutions of this sort were not
uncommon; under the date May 1, 1660, we find a sentence imposing a fine
and reprimand on a girl accused of uttering some indiscreet words and letting
herself be kissed. The code of 1650 is full of preventive regulations. Idleness
and drunkenness are severely punished. Innkeepers may give each customer
only a certain quantity of wine; simple lying, if it could do harm, is subject to
a fine or a whipping… In 1649 an association was solemnly formed in Boston
to check the worldly luxury of long hair…”255
As regards the federal structure of the United States, this again was
modelled on Mosaic Israel. Thus, as A.P. Lopukhin writes: "On examining the
structure of the Mosaic State, one is involuntarily struck by its similarity to
the organisation of the state structure in the United States of Northern
America." "The tribes in their administrative independence correspond
exactly to the states, each of which is a democratic republic." The Senate and
Congress "correspond exactly to the two higher groups of representatives in
the Mosaic State - the 12 and 70 elders." "After settling in Palestine, the
Israelites first (in the time of the Judges) established a union republic, in
which the independence of the separate tribes was carried through to the
extent of independent states."256
In the imagination of the Pilgrim Fathers, their colonization of America

was like Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land. Just as the Canaanites had
to be driven out from the Promised Land, so did the Red Indians from
America. Thus one New England meeting agreed: 1. The earth is the Lord’s
and the fullness thereof. Voted. 2. The Lord may give the earth or any part of it
to His chosen people. Voted. 3. We are His chosen people. Voted.257
255 Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 47-49.

256 Lopukhin, A.P. Zakonodatel'stvo Moisea (The Legislation of Moses). Saint Petersburg, 1888,
p. 233; quoted in Alexeyev, N.N. “Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhii” (“Christianity and the Idea
of the Monarchy”), Put' (The Way), N 6, January, 1927, p. 557.
257 J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West, London: Phoenix Press, 1985, p. 149.
159
*
Meanwhile, English and French colonization of the Caribbean was

beginning. As A.C. Grayling writes, “A band of shipwrecked English sailors
had been washed up on the pleasant shores of Bermuda in 1609, and when
their reports of the place reached England a decision to colonise the island
was taken, and a group of settlers arrived in 1612. This was the first English
post in the Caribbean whose largest islands – Cuba, Hispaniola and San
Salvador – had already been in Spanish hands for a century.
“Thirty years later disputes over religious matters within the Bermudan
colony prompted a number of the colonists to leave and plant themselves in
the Bahamas, then uninhabited because the Spanish had long since
transported all the native inhabitants (the Arawaks) into slavery in the mines
of Hispaniola.
“Before this, however, the fact that there were uncolonised islands in the
Caribbean set off a race between the English and French to take as many of
them as they could. The English occupied St. Kitts in 1623, Barbados in 1627,
and by 1636 they were in possession of Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat.
Meanwhile the French succeeded in getting a toe on another shore of St. Kitts
in 1627 and they occupied Dominica in 1632 and Guadeloupe in 1635.
“The process of colonising the islands was cumulative; having a port on

one island served as a base for establishing occupancy of the next on the list.
More than that, it provided a means of capturing some of the existing Spanish
possessions; in 1655 England took Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1664
France wrested half of Hispaniola from them, the half now known as Haiti.
“The Spanish had sought to mind gold in their Caribbean possessions, but
the islands yielded relatively little of the stuff in comparison with the
immense wealth extractable from Mexico and Peru, so the islands became
staging posts for their galleons rather than centres of economic activity
themselves. In the English and French possession matters were different; the
settlers engaged in agriculture, starting with tobacco but soon diversifying
into the highly lucrative sugar business. Because the original populations had
been wiped out by labouring as slaves (and by European illnesses from they
had no immunity), African slaves were required; by the mid-seventeenth
century Jamaica was the largest slave market in the West Indies.
“With several major powers grabbing at opportunities in the region, it is no

surprise that it quickly became a theatre of almost constant war. It had been a
focus of piracy for many decades already; English pirates had preyed on the
big Spanish bullion galleons with the sanction of the English government
since Elizabethan times. The Caribbean quarrels went on until the Napoleonic
Wars a century and a half later, but they paid for themselves, as did the less
frequent quarrels in the East, because both the West and East Indies offered
160
lucrative resources for the English, Dutch and French nations whose sailors
and merchants took their opportunities there…”258
258 Grayling, The Age of Genius. The Seventeenth Century & The Birth of the Modern Mind,
London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 55-56.
161
20. BODIN, RICHELIEU AND THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR
The conflict between Spain and France over the future of Germany and the
Empire dominated European politics until the middle of the seventeenth
century. In the course of it, the innovative Italian city-states were eclipsed (in
1527 Charles V sacked Rome), and the smaller, but more compact absolutism
of France finally triumphed over that of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire,
destroying for the time being the ideal of the multi-national empire, and
bringing to the fore the nation-states of France, England, Sweden and Holland.
Also destroyed was the ideal of a united Catholic Europe…
In the midst of this huge series of conflicts there were two settlements: the
first at Augsburg in 1555, and the second at Westphalia in 1648, which
determined how multi-confessional states in the empire should be governed.
“Augsburg,” writes Bobbitt, “is an historic agreement because it provided

that rulers were to determine the religious denomination of their respective
states (the constitutional principle of cuius regio eius religio), matching
Lutheran princes with Lutheran subjects and Catholic rulers with Catholic
peoples. According to this principle, the decisions of the ruler as to which
sectarian preference to adopt were binding also upon his subjects with the
concession that dissatisfied persons were welcome to emigrate to more
congenial states… Augsburg… attached to the State an attribute – religious
affiliation – hitherto associated with a human being, the prince.”259 Still more
important, the principle of cuius regio eius religio “implied a ‘theory of
sovereignty by the states of Europe that permitted no distinction in law
between a Catholic and a Protestant country’ [Wilbur Jordan].” Moreover,
“Adam Watson has observed that although at the time of the Peace of
Augsburg, ‘the principle of cuius regio eius religio applied formally only to the
Holy Roman Empire, … the practice quickly extended throughout the
Christian commonwealth of Europe. It carried, as a corollary, another
principle which rulers readily acknowledged and proclaimed though they did
not always scrupulously observe it: non-interference by one state in the affairs
of another’.”260
However, this settlement could not work, for it failed to provide a method
of conflict resolution if the prince of a territory changed his religion. Thus it
gave reasons for, rather than averted civil war and the persecution of the
religious minorities within each state. It was a terrible, bloody period; the
Wars of Religion that broke out in France after 1562 may have claimed as
many as four million people.261 Usually these involved Catholics persecuting
Protestants, such as Spanish Catholics persecuting Dutch Calvinists or French
Catholics persecuting French Huguenots (which culminated in the St.
Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 that so rejoiced the heart of the Pope).
259 Bobbitt, op. cit., pp. 105, 106.

260 Bobbitt, op. cit., pp. 487, 488.
261 Peter Marshall, “The Savage Reformation”, BBC History Magazine, May, 2017, p. 30.
162
There were partial resolutions, as when King Henry IV of France issued his
Edict of Nantes (1598), granting religious freedom to all the citizens of France.
But the real solution, some thought, could lie only in an absolute king. By the
word “absolute” was meant a king absolved from all higher loyalties, who
could impose his peace – and his religion - on the warring sides…
The problems of keeping the nation-state together when it is being torn

apart by religious passions was discussed by an early apologist of absolutism,
Jean Bodin. In 1576 he wrote that “in addition to the counsellors of tyranny
[e.g. Machiavelli], there are others… who are no less dangerous and are
maybe even more so. These are the ones who under the pretext of the people’s
liberties cause subjects to rebel against their natural princes, and thereby open
the way to factious anarchy which is worse than tyranny ever was.”262 Bodin
believed that an absolute monarchy was necessary in France to balance the
claims of the nobles and the Huguenots in the interests of the state as a whole.
He allowed only one check on monarchy – the Estates General, an assembly
representing clergy, nobles and commoners which met irregularly to vote
new taxes and of which he was the secretary in 1576. Ironically, it was the
Estates General that brought down the monarchy in 1789…
Richard Bourke writes: “In his most famous work, the Six Books of the
Commonwealth, which originally appeared in French in 1576, Bodin presented
a definition of sovereignty. He claimed that it was ‘the absolute and perpetual
power of a commonwealth, which the Latins call maiestas [majesty]’. Later in
his text, Body made clear that the Romans had yet other terms for sovereigny,
summum imperium (ultimate authority) being conspicuous among them. Yet,
while the Romans, like the Greeks and the Hebrews had a conception of
supreme authority, Bodin believed that they had not fully understood its
implications. Above all, it could not be shared among competing powers in
the commonwealth.”263
“Bodin,” writes McClelland, “is probably the first important political

thinker to offer what is recognisably a modern theory of sovereignty, and in
essence this theory is very simple: a well-ordered state needs an absolute and
legitimate sovereign centre. Bodin’s motives for saying that are much more
intelligible than his arguments. We can see that the France of the sixteenth
century civil wars, those wars being based on differences of religious opinion,
needed a strengthening of the monarchy if France was to survive as a political
community. By harking back to Aristotelian precedents, Bodin took the theory
of sovereignty out of Divine Right theology and tied it to a view of what a
political community needed in its own best interest. Bodin is impeccably
classical in his recognition that states are typically destroyed by faction, and
the fact that these factions are religious factions does not alter this truth at
all…
262 Bodin, Six Books on the Republic, in Bobbitt, op. cit., p. 102.
263 Bourke, “Power and the People”, History Today, September, 2016, pp. 4-5.
163
“Bodin’s defence of sovereignty is really a defence of rule against faction.
He defends the division of Christendom’s individual kingdoms into
Protestant and Catholic as an accomplished fact. The problem is then how it
can ever be that a realm divided into contending religious factions, each of
which would coerce the other if it could…
“For all his Aristotelianism, Bodin recognises that the ancient city-state
cannot be identified with the sixteenth-century realm of France. That is why
the state’s law must be supreme over other potentially competing systems of
law, whether law means manners, morals, customs, or the law which defines
minority or local privilege… Sovereignty is absolute and undivided. All
surviving law-bound corporations – religious bodies, municipalities,
commercial companies and guilds – owe their rights and privileges to the
sovereign. It follows, therefore, that estates and parliaments exist only to
advise the sovereign, and it also follows that the sovereign cannot be bound
to take their advice…
“Bodin was anti-feudal where competing jurisdictions got in the way of the
exercise of sovereignty. Far from thinking that the king’s position was at the
head of a hierarchy whose justification was the hierarchy itself, Bodin looked
at the matter from the top down, and attempted to show that all subordinate
authorities derived from the supreme sovereign.”264
The same tendency to place the interests of the (absolutist) nation-state

above those of the faith is discernible in the architect of France’s rise to pre-
eminence in Europe, Cardinal Richelieu. What would have been more natural
than for a powerful and sincerely believing Catholic Churchman such as
Richelieu to work, in concert with the great Catholic Habsburg Empire, for
the triumph of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in Europe? But that would
have meant subordinating the interests of the French monarchy to those of the
Habsburgs. And this Richelieu was not prepared to do.
For “he had no zeal,” writes Hilaire Belloc, “such as had so many men of
his time, for the triumph of Catholicism; he did not consider Europe as a
battlefield between tradition and revolution in doctrine and philosophy. He
considered the conflict between them mainly as one by the right manipulation
of which the interests of the French monarchy might be advanced. It is
probable that he hardly understood, he certainly never yielded to, the
instinctive feeling [of] all around him – that unless French policy were whole-
heartedly Catholic in that critical moment 1620-40, Europe would never be
reunited. He presumably thought the ultimate reunion of Europe, that is, the
ultimate triumph of Catholicism, certain, and would not, to accelerate it,
sacrifice one detail of his policy. He abandoned, and at last combated, the
effort to restore Catholicism throughout Europe. He devoted himself to the
264
McClelland, op. cit., pp. 281-282, 283, 284.
164
consolidation and aggrandisement of the nation he governed. Hence
toleration at home and alliance with Protestantism abroad against the
Catholic Powers. Hence his nickname of ‘the Cardinal of the Huguenots’.
Hence the worship by those who accept the new religion of Nationalism and
have forgotten, or think impossible, the idea of [Roman Catholic]
Christendom.”265
Richelieu’s revolutionary concept of statecraft first made itself felt during

the last and bloodiest phase in the Wars of Religion - the Thirty Years’ War
(1618-1648)…
Kissinger writes: “With an imperial succession looming and the Catholic

King of Bohemia, the Habsburg Ferdinand, emerging as the most plausible
candidate, the Protestant Bohemian nobility attempted an act of ‘regime
change’, offering their crown – and its decisive electoral vote – to a Protestant
German prince, an outcome in which the Holy Roman Empire would have
ceased to be a Catholic institution. Imperial forces moved to crush the
Bohemian rebellion and then pressed their advantage against Protestantism
generally, triggering a war that devastated Central Europe. (The Protestant
princes were generally located in the north of Germany, including the then
relatively insignificant Prussia; the Catholic heartland was the south of
Germany and Austria.)
“In theory, the Emperor’s fellow Catholic sovereigns were obliged to unite
in opposition to the new heresies. Yet faced with a choice between spiritual
unity and strategic advantage, more than a few chose the latter. Foremost
among them was France.
“In a period of general upheaval, a country that maintains domestic

authority is in a position to exploit chaos in neighboring states for larger
international objectives. A cadre of sophisticated and ruthless French
ministers saw their opportunity and moved decisively. The Kingdom of
France began the process by giving itself a new governance. In feudal systems,
authority was personal; governance reflected the ruler’s will but was also
circumscribed by tradition, limiting the resources available for a country’s
national or international actions. France’s chief minister from 1624 to 1642,
Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu, was the first statesman to
overcome these limitations…
“When Richelieu conducted the policies of his country, Machiavelli’s

treatises on statesmanship circulated. It is not known whether Richelieu was
familiar with these texts on the politics of power. He surely practiced their
essential principles. Richelieu developed a radical approach to international
order. He invented the idea that the state was an abstract and permanent
entity existing in its own right. Its requirements were not determined by the
ruler’s personality, family interests, or the universal demands of religion. Its
265
Belloc, Richelieu, pp. 83-84.
165
lodestar was the national interest following calculable principles – what later
came to be known as raison d’état. Hence it should be the basic unit of
international relations.
“Richelieu commandeered the incipient state as an instrument of high

policy. He centralized authority in Paris, created so-called intendants or
professional stewards to project the government’s authority into every district
of the kingdom, brought efficiency to the gathering of taxes, and decisively
challenged traditional local authorities of the old nobility. Royal power would
continue to be exercised by the King as the symbol of the sovereign stat and
an expression of the national interest.
“Richelieu saw the turmoil in Central Europe not as a call to arms to

defend the Church but as a means to check imperial Habsburg pre-eminence.
Though France’s King had been styled as the Rex Catholicissimus, or the ‘Most
Catholic King’, since the fourteenth century, France moved – at first
unobtrusively, then openly – to support the Protestant coalition (of Sweden,
Prussia, and the North German princes) on the basis of cold national-interest
calculations.
“To outraged complaints that, as a cardinal, he owed a duty to the

universal and eternal Catholic Church – which would imply an alignment
against the rebellious Protestant princes of Northern and Central Europe –
Richelieu cited his duties as a minister to a temporal, yet vulnerable, political
entity. Salvation might be his personal objective, but as a statesman he was
responsible for a political entity that did not have an eternal soul to be
redeemed. ‘Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,’ he said. ‘The state has
no immortality, its salvation is now or never.’
“The fragmentation of Central Europe was perceived by Richelieu as a

political and military necessity. The basic threat to France was strategic, not
metaphysical or religious: a united Central Europe would be in a position to
dominate the rest of the Continent. Hence it was in France’s national interest
to prevent the consolidation of Central Europe: ‘If the [Protestant] party is
entirely ruined, the brunt of the power of the House of Austria will fall on
France.’ France, by supporting a plethora of small state in Central Europe and
weakening Austria, achieved its strategic objective.
“Richelieu’s design would endure through vast upheavals. For two and a
half centuries – from the emergence of Richelieu in 1624 to Bismarck’s
proclamation of the German Empire in 1871 – the aim of keeping Central
Europe (more or less the territory of contemporary Germany, Austria, and
northern Italy) divided remained the guiding principle of French foreign
policy. For as long as this concept served as the essence of the European order,
France was preeminent on the Continent. When it collapsed, so did France’s
dominant role…”266
166
Thus just as the idea of natural law preached by the Jesuits Las Casas and
De Mariana, Suarez and Bellarmine, was the worm in the apple of the
theology of Catholic Absolutism, so the nationalism so successfully practised
by Cardinal Richelieu was the blow that finally put paid to the politics of
Catholic Absolutism. Already the attempts by Francis I to limit the power of
the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the middle of the sixteenth century
had injured Catholic unity in the vital first stage of the struggle with
Protestantism. Now, when Catholicism had reorganized itself at the Council
of Trent and was back on the offensive in Germany especially, it was
Richelieu’s anti-Catholic diplomacy (he was always more loyal to his king
that to his pope), driving a nationalist wedge into the united internationalist
offensive of the Habsburg Catholic monarchs against the Protestant princes,
that guaranteed the survival of German Protestantism. As the Pope said on
hearing of his death: “If there be a God, then Cardinal de Richelieu will have
much to answer for. If there be none, why, he lived a successful life…”267
“In the year of the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648,” writes A.C. Grayling,
“Paris and indeed the whole of France was in turmoil because of the Fronde, a
civil insurrection against the government of the infant King Louis XIV and his
chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. It was prompted by burden of taxes that
had been raised to pay for the military expenses of France’s participation in
the Thirty Years War and war with Spain. The Fronde was a dangerous affair,
because the aristocracy sided with the parlements (especially of Paris) in
defending the feudal liberties of the latter, which meant in effect that the
country had rise against the Crown, in what was a straightforward rebellion.
Cardinal Mazarin, a much hated figure, triggered the uprising by arresting
the leaders of the parlement of Paris when they refused to pay a new tax. Their
arrest brought the citizens of Paris on to the streets; there were barricades,
and as turmoil spread through the country it became increasingly violent,
turning into a civil war. The troubles continued until the early months of 1653,
making nearly five years of unrest and uncertainty in all.
The sequence of events constituting the Fronde (the word means ‘sling’;
the frondeurs used slings to hurl stones as did the Old Testament’s David)
need not be recounted; the important point is its outcome, namely, an
eventual victory for the monarchy in the person of Louis XIV, and his
determination – highly successful as it proved – to assert absolute rule over
France.
“In this respect France and the way it was governed in the second half of
the seventeenth century represents a step backward, moving against the
[liberal] current… that was running elsewhere, notably in England. The
absolute monarchy of Louis XIV brought great prestige and power to France;
267
Belloc, Richelieu, p. 304.
167
it became the leading country in succession to Spain, by then much enfeebled,
and it so far impressed its culture and language on the world that all the
ruling classes of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals spoke French, and
French remained the language of international diplomacy into our own
era...”268
268 Grayling, The Age of Genius, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 277-278.
168
21. THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA AND INTERNATIONAL LAW
“By conservative estimates,” writes Michael Allen Gillespie, the religious

wars “claimed the lives of 10 percent of the population in England, 15 percent
in France, 30 percent in Germany, and more than 50 percent in Bohemia. By
comparison, European dead in World War II exceeded 10 percent of the
population only in Germany and the USSR. Within our experience only the
Holocaust and the killing fields of Cambodia can begin to rival the levels of
destruction that characterized the Wars of Religion.”269
The Westphalian settlement, concluded in 1648 at the end of the Thirty

Years’ War (and of the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and Holland),
reflected the European peoples’ psychological exhaustion with religious
conflict. Rarely has a war cost so much while achieving so little in terms of a
clear outcome or constructive results. As C.V. Wedgwood put it, at the end of
the war people at last “grasped the futility of putting their beliefs of the mind
to the judgement of the sword. Instead, they rejected religion as an object to
fight form and found others.”270 Or, as Stephen Winder writes, “The fighting
had burned out the religious impulse that had begun it.”271
According to the Peace of Westphalia that officially ended the war in 1648,
each state could now choose to be officially Catholic, Lutheran or Calvinist.
“The Peace of Westphalia established the precedent of peaces established
by diplomatic congress, and a new system of political order in central Europe,
later called Westphalian sovereignty, based upon the concept of co-
existing sovereign states. Inter-state aggression was to be held in check by
a balance of power. A norm was established against interference in another
state's domestic affairs. As European influence spread across the globe, these
Westphalian principles, especially the concept of sovereign states, became
central to international law and to the prevailing world order.”272
“The exhausted participants,” writes Henry Kissinger, “met to define a set

of arrangements that would stanch the bloodletting. Religious unity had
fractured with the survival and spread of Protestantism273; political diversity
was inherent in the number of autonomous political units that had fought to a
draw. So it was that in Europe the conditions of the contemporary world were
approximated: a multiplicity of political units, none powerful enough to
defeat all others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and internal
practices, in search of neutral rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate
conflict.
269 Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity, University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 130.
Gillespie forgets the vast numbers killed in the Soviet Union by the Bolsheviks before the
Second World War.
270 Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War, London, 1938, p. 506.
271 Winder, Danubia, London: Picador, 2013, p. 161.
272 “Peace of Westphalia”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia.
273
“Fiaaiparity”, writes Ferguson, “was one of its defining traits” (op. cit., p. 88). (V.M.).
169
“The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not
a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining
from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s
ambitions through a general equilibrium of power. No single claim to truth or
universal rule had prevailed in Europe’s contests…”274
There were, of course, other concepts of order in the world at that time – the
Russian, the Chinese, the Islamic. Even the North American was not identical
with the Westphalian system. But, as Henry Kissinger writes, “of all these
concepts of order, Westphalian principles are, at this writing, the sole
generally recognized basis of what exists of a world order. The Westphalian
system spread around the world as the framework for a state-based
international order spanning multiple civilizations and regions because, as the
European nations expanded, they carried the blueprint of their international
order with them. While they often neglected to apply concepts of sovereignty
to the colonies and colonized peoples, when these peoples began to demand
their independence, they did so in the name of Westphalian concepts. The
principles of national independence, sovereign statehood, national interest,
and noninterference proved effective arguments against the colonizers
themselves during the struggles for independence and protection for their
newly formed states afterward…
“The Peace of Westphalia became a turning point in the history of nations

because the elements it set in place were as uncomplicated as they were
sweeping. The state, not the empire, dynasty, or religious confession, was
affirmed as the building block of European order. The concept of state
sovereignty was established. The right of each signatory to choose its own
domestic structure and religious orientation free from intervention was
affirmed, while novel clauses ensured that minority sects could practice their
faith in peace and be free from the prospect of forced conversion. Beyond the
immediate demands of the moment, the principles of a system of
‘international relations’ were taking shape, motivated by the common desire
to avoid a recurrence of total war on the Continent. Diplomatic exchanges,
including the stationing of resident representatives in the capitals of fellow
states (practice followed before then generally only by the Venetians), were
designed to regulate relations and promote the arts of peace. The parties
envisioned future conferences and consultations on the Westphalian model as
forums for settling dispute before they led to conflict. International law,
developed by traveling scholar advisors such as Hugo de Groot (Grotius)
during the war, was treated as an expandable body of agreed doctrine aimed
at the cultivation of harmony, with the Westphalian treaties themselves at its
heart.
“The genius of the system, and the reason it spread across the world, was
that its provisions were procedural, not substantive. If a state would accept
these basic requirements, it could be recognized as an international citizen
274
Kissinger, World Order, London: Penguin, 2015, p. 3.
170
able to maintain its own culture, politics, religion, and internal policies,
shielded by the international system from outside intervention. The ideal of
imperial or religious unity – the operating premise of Europe’s and mot other
regions’ historic orders – had implied that in theory only one center of power
could be full legitimate. The Westphalian concept took multiplicity as its
starting point and drew a variety of multiple societies, each accepted as a
reality, into a common search for order. By the mid-twentieth century, this
international system was in place in every continent; it remains the
scaffolding of international order such as it now exists…
“The Peace of Westphalia did not mandate a specific arrangement of

alliances or a permanent European political structure. With the end of the
universal Church as the ultimate source of authority, and the weakening of
the Holy Roman Emperor, the ordering concept for Europe became the
balance of power – which, by definition, involves ideological neutrality and
adjustment to evolving circumstances. The nineteenth-century British
statesman Lord Palmerston expressed its basic principle as follows: ‘We have
no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal
and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow…”275
The most important immediate consequence of the Peace was the

degradation of the power of the Holy Roman Empire. “It would now be
possible,” writes Bobbitt, “to speak of the interests of the Empire as deriving
from the electors, princes, and free cities represented in the Diet. All princes
were confirmed in their ‘territorial superiority in matters ecclesiastical as well
as political’. All princes gained the right to conclude treaties with foreign
powers. Thus did the Reformation destroy the universal lay structure [of the
Empire], just as the Renaissance had destroyed the universal Church…
“The Peace of Westphalia ‘is null, void, invalid, damnable, reprobate, inane,
empty of meaning and effect for all time,’ declared Pope Innocent X, reflecting
a shrewd and percipient assessment of the implications of the treaty for a
universalist Catholic Europe. Rather than an imperial, hierarchical states
system that might operate in tandem with a pan-European Reconquista, the
Peace created a system based on absolutist sovereignty predicated on the
legal equality of states.”276
The pope had said the same about Magna Carta over 430 years before – and
with even less practical result. He was of course being consistent with his own
principles when he rejected a world order that placed all states on a
theoretically equal basis and had no place for the concept of one universal
truth. But when he rejected the Peace of Westphalia, he was simply ignored,
even by the Catholic princes. For the treaty itself bound all its signatories to
ignore any ecclesiastical objections to it, making it perhaps the first purely
secular treaty in European history and ushering in a new age of secularism.
275 Kissinger, op. cit., pp. 6-7, 26-27, 30.

171
*
In conformity with Westphalian principles, the Dutch Arminian Hugo

Grotius (1583-1645) took political thought not only beyond the categories of
medieval Catholic thought, but even beyond religion altogether. Grotius first
came to prominence by providing, in his De Antiquitate (1610), a justification
for the Dutch War of Independence against Spain. Grotius wanted to find a
way of regulating wars in accordance with principles that would be
universally accepted. For, as he wrote in 1625, “I saw prevailing throughout
the Christian world a license in making war of which even barbarous nations
would have been ashamed; recourse was had to arms for slight reasons, or for
no reason; and when arms were once taken up, all reverence for divine and
human law was thrown away, just as if men were thenceforth authorized to
commit all crimes without restraint.”277
Grotius wrote a popular religious work, On the Truth of the Christian

Religion. However, in On the Law of War and Peace, he let slip a phrase that
pointed the way to a theory of international law and human rights that was
completely independent of Christianity: “Even the will of an omnipotent
Being,” he wrote, “cannot change or abrogate” natural law, which “would
maintain its objective validity even if we should assume the impossible, that
there is no God or that He does not care for human affairs” (Prolegomena XI).
According to Grotius, therefore, natural law is the most objective truth, more
objective, if that were possible, even than the existence of God or God’s care
for the world. That being the case, theoretically if natural law says that
something is right, whereas God says it is wrong, we should stick to natural
law. Of course, if natural law derives ultimately from God, there will never by
any such conflict between Divine and natural law. But Grotius appears here
to envisage the possibility of a world with natural law but without God.
What, then, is the “Grotian view” on international law? According to

Bobbitt, this is generally taken to mean “the assertion on the part of the
individual state to serve the interests of the society of states as a whole. A
weaker version of this simply asserts that there are such interests; a stronger
version claims that only such interests can justify certain activities of the State,
such as war. Thus the Grotian view is to be distinguished from the Hobbesian
view that international society can have no legal rules because there is no
sovereign to organize and maintain the collaboration among states that might
replace the constant struggle of each state against every other state. Although
the Grotian society of states is perhaps anarchic, it does not exist in a naked
state of nature. The rationale for the Grotian view is that there exists a great
society of all mankind – humani generis societas – and all human institutions
are governed by the rules of that society. Thus the Grotian perspective is also
quite different from the Kantian view that perpetual peace can only be
achieved through the construction of supra-state institutions.
277 Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, in Bobbitt, op. cit., p. 517.
172
“Six corollaries follow from the Grotian view: that natural law is a source
(though not the only source) of the rules that govern states (because man is a
creature of nature, and all his activities are governed thereby); that
international society is universal and not merely limited to Christendom or
the European state system; that individuals and non-state actors can have a
role in the application of the rules of international law; that the universal
traits shared by all mankind can give rise to cooperative requirements, and
these requirements can be a source of justice; that supra-state institutions are
not necessary for the rule of law to be applied to states; and that, being a
source of law, the individual person is a bearer of rights. Taken together, this
infrastructure of ideas provides a surprisingly modern and surprisingly
accurate description of international law as it actually is – universal yet
pluralistic, occasionally the source of cooperation, functioning in the absence
of a universal sovereign but difficult to enforce and rarely functioning very
authoritatively, a discipline that embraces not only the relations between
states, but also the human rights of individuals…”278
We may contrast Grotius’ attempt to found political theory on abstract,

rationalist and universalist principles with the much more conservative,
tradition-based approach of his contemporary, John Selden (1584–1654), the
English parliamentarian and opponent of Stuart absolutism. “In the
generation that bore the full brunt of the new absolutist ideas,” write Haivry
and Hazony, “it was John Selden who stood above all others. The most
important common lawyer of his generation, he was also a formidable
political philosopher and polymath who knew more than twenty languages.
Selden became a prominent leader in Parliament, where he joined the older
Coke in a series of clashes with the king. In this period, Parliament denied the
king’s right to imprison Englishmen without showing cause, to impose taxes
and forced loans without the approval of Parliament, to quarter soldiers in
private homes, and to wield martial law in order to circumvent the laws of the
land.
“In 1628, Selden played a leading role in drafting and passing an act of
Parliament called the Petition of Right, which sought to restore and safeguard
‘the divers rights and liberties of the subjects’ that had been known under the
traditional English constitution. Among other things, it asserted that ‘your
subjects have inherited this freedom, that they should not be compelled to
contribute to any tax . . . not set by common consent in Parliament’; that ‘no
freeman may be taken or imprisoned or be disseized of his freehold or
liberties, or his free customs . . . but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by
the law of the land’; and that no man ‘should be put out of his land or
tenements, nor taken, nor imprisoned, nor disinherited nor put to death
without being brought to answer by due process of law.’
173
“In the Petition of Right, then, we find the famous principle of ‘no taxation
without representation,’ as well as versions of the rights enumerated in the
Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments of the American Bill of
Rights—all declared to be ancient constitutional English freedoms and
unanimously approved by Parliament, before Locke was even born. Although
not mentioned in the Petition explicitly, freedom of speech had likewise been
reaffirmed by Coke as ‘an ancient custom of Parliament’ in the 1590s and was
the subject of the so-called Protestation of 1621 that landed Coke, then seventy
years old, in the Tower of London for nine months.
“In other words, Coke, Eliot, and Selden risked everything to defend the
same liberties that we ourselves hold dear in the face of an increasingly
authoritarian regime. (In fact, John Eliot was soon to die in the king’s prison.)
But they did not do so in the name of liberal doctrines of universal reason,
natural rights, or ‘self-evident’ truths. These they explicitly rejected because
they were conservatives, not liberals. Let’s try to understand this.
“Selden saw himself as an heir to Fortescue and, in fact, was involved in

republishing the Praise for the Laws of England in 1616. His own much more
extensive theoretical defense of English national traditions appeared in the
form of short historical treatises on English law, as well as in a series of
massive works (begun while Selden was imprisoned on ill-defined sedition
charges for his activities in the 1628–29 Parliament) examining political theory
and law in conversation with classical rabbinic Judaism. The most famous of
these was his monumental Natural and National Law (1640). In these works,
Selden sought to defend conservative traditions, including the English one,
not only against the absolutist doctrines of the Stuarts but also against the
claims of a universalist rationalism, according to which men could simply
consult their own reason, which was the same for everyone, to determine the
best constitution for mankind. This rationalist view had begun to collect
adherents in England among followers of the great Dutch political theorist
Hugo Grotius, whose On the Law of War and Peace (1625) suggested that it
might be possible to do away with the traditional constitutions of nations by
relying only on the rationality of the individual.
“Then as now, conservatives could not understand how such a reliance on

alleged universal reason could be remotely workable, and Selden’s Natural
and National Law includes an extended attack on such theories in its first pages.
There Selden argues that, everywhere in history, ‘unrestricted use of pure and
simple reason’ has led to conclusions that are ‘intrinsically inconsistent and
dissimilar among men.’ If we were to create government on the basis of pure
reason alone, this would not only lead to the eventual dissolution of
government but to widespread confusion, dissension, and perpetual
instability as one government is changed for another that appears more
reasonable at a given moment. Indeed, following Fortescue, Selden rejects the
idea that a universally applicable system of rights is even possible. As he
writes in an earlier work, what ‘may be most convenient or just in one state
may be as unjust and inconvenient in another, and yet both excellently as well
174
framed as governed.’ With regard to those who believe that their reasoning
has produced the universal truths that should be evident to all men, he
shrewdly warns that custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are
taken in [by this] to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based
solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of
mankind.
“Selden responds to the claims of universal reason by arguing for a

position that can be called historical empiricism. On this view, our reasoning in
political and legal matters should be based upon inherited national tradition.
This permits the statesman or jurist to overcome the small stock of
observation and experience that individuals are able to accumulate during
their own lifetimes (‘that kind of ignorant infancy, which our short lives alone
allow us’) and to take advantage of ‘the many ages of former experience and
observation,’ which permit us to ‘accumulate years to us, as if we had lived
even from the beginning of time.’ In other words, by consulting the
accumulated experience of the past, we overcome the inherent weakness of
individual judgement, bringing to bear the many lifetimes of observation by
our forebears, who wrestled with similar questions under diverse conditions.
“This is not to say that Selden is willing to accept the prescription of the
past blindly. He pours scorn on those who embrace errors originating in the
distant past, which, he says, have often been accepted as true by entire
communities and ‘adopted without protest, and loaded onto the shoulders of
posterity like so much baggage.’ Recalling the biblical Jeremiah’s insistence on
an empirical study of the paths of old (Jeremiah 6:16), Selden argues that the
correct method is that ‘all roads must be carefully examined. We must ask
about the ancient paths, and only what is truly the best may be chosen.’ But
for Selden, the instrument for such examination and selection is not the wild
guesswork of individual speculation concerning various hypothetical
possibilities. In the life of a nation, the inherited tradition of legal opinions
and legislation preserves a multiplicity of perspectives from different times
and circumstances, as well as the consequences for the nation when the law
has been interpreted one way or another. Looking back upon these varied and
changing positions within the tradition, and considering their real-life results,
one can distinguish the true precepts of the law from the false turns that have
been taken in the past. As Selden explains: ‘The way to find out the Truth is
by others’ mistakings: For if I [wish] to go to such [and such] a place, and
[some]one had gone before me on the right-hand [side], and he was out,
[while] another had gone on the left-hand, and he was out, this would direct
me to keep the middle way that peradventure would bring me to the place I
desired to go.’
“Selden thus turns, much as the Hebrew Bible does, to a form of

pragmatism to explain what is meant when statesmen and jurists speak
of truth. The laws develop through a process of trial and error over
generations, as we come to understand how peace and prosperity (‘what is
truly best,’ “the place I desired to go’) arise from one turn rather than another.
175
“Selden recognizes that, in making these selections from the traditions of
the past, we tacitly rely upon a higher criterion for selection, a natural law
established by God, which prescribes ‘what is truly best’ for mankind in the
most elementary terms. In his Natural and National Law, Selden explains that
this natural law has been discovered over long generations since the biblical
times and has come down to us in various versions. Of these, the most reliable
is that of the Talmud, which describes the seven laws of the children of Noah
prohibiting murder, theft, sexual perversity, cruelty to beasts, idolatry and
defaming God, and requiring courts of law to enforce justice. The experience
of thousands of years has taught us that these laws frame the peace and
prosperity that is the end of all nations, and that they are the unseen root from
which the diverse laws of all the nations ultimately derive.
“Nonetheless, Selden emphasizes that no nation can govern itself by

directly appealing to such fundamental law, because ‘diverse nations, as
diverse men, have their diverse collections and inferences, and so make their
diverse laws to grow to what they are, out of one and the same root.’ Each
nation thus builds its own unique effort to implement the natural law
according to an understanding based on its own unique experience and
conditions. It is thus wise to respect the different laws found among nations,
both those that appear right to us and those that appear mistaken, for
different perspectives may each have something to contribute to our pursuit
of the truth. (Selden’s treatment of the plurality of human knowledge is cited
by Milton as a basis for his defense of freedom of speech in Areopagitica.)
“Selden thus offers us a picture of a philosophical parliamentarian or jurist.

He must constantly maintain the strength and stability of the inherited
national edifice as a whole—but also recognize the need to make repairs and
improvements where these are needed. In doing so, he seeks to gradually
approach, by trial and error, the best that is possible for each nation.”279
279Haivry and Hazony, “What is Conservatism?”, American Affairs, Summer, 2017, vol. I, no. 2,
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/what-is-conservatism/
176
22. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (1) POLITICS OR RELIGION?
The English revolution was, together with the French revolution of 1789
and the Russian revolution of 1917, the most important event of modern
European history. Like the later revolutions, if not to the same degree, it tried
to overthrow the Church and the monarchy. Like them, too, it elicited a very
broad range of arguments on the fundamental questions of the origin and
nature of the State and its relationship to the Church and people.
In the English revolution, the pros and cons of all the major forms of
government - with the single exception of the Orthodox symphony of powers,
which, however, received a powerful contemporary advocate in the person of
Patriarch Nikon of Moscow – were exhaustively discussed, often by men of
undoubted, if not always well-balanced genius such as the poet and
pamphleteer John Milton.
Ann Hughes writes: “At least one in 10 – or perhaps as many as one in five
– men in England and Wales fought in the Civil War. It has been calculated
that loss of life, in proportion to the national population of the time, was
greater than in the First World War. Perhaps 85,000 people, mostly men but
also women camp followers, died in combat. Up to 130,000 people were killed
indirectly, primarily as a result of disease spread by troops.”280
The English revolution was a “revolution” not only in the sense that it
overthrew the powers that be, but also in the older sense of a cyclical
movement. For it brought things back to the status quo ante formally, if not
essentially. Thus from 1642 to 1688, England underwent successively: an
Anglican monarchy, a Calvinist parliamentocracy, the beginnings of a
communist revolution, a military dictatorship, the restoration of the Anglican
monarchy, a Catholic absolute monarchy, and the second restoration of the
Anglican (now constitutional) monarchy under new (Dutch) leadership.
Was the English revolution essentially religious or political? The French

Prime Minister in a less religious age, According to Niall Ferguson, “the
aristocratic ‘junto’ aspired not so much to religious revolution, but to
rendering the English king little more than a Venetian doge, subordinate to
their oligarchy.”281
Again, François Guizot, wrote: “Taking everything together, the English

revolution was essentially political; it was brought about in the midst of a
religious people and in a religious age; religious thoughts and passions were
its instruments; but its chief design and definite aim were political, were
devoted to liberty, and the abolition of all absolute power.”282
280 Hughes, in “The Great Misconceptions of the Civil War”, BBC History Magazine, May, 2015,
p. 36.
281 Ferguson, op. cit., p. 89.
282 Guizot, History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1847, 1997, p. 217.
177
Cromwell constantly used religious language. And John Milton used
similarly religious language to clothe his revolutionary message: “Why else
was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of Zion should
be sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe?
Now once again, by all concurrence of signs and the general instinct of holy
and devout men, God is decreeing to begin some new and great reformation
in his Church, even to the reforming of the Reformation itself. What does He,
then, but reveal Himself to His servants, and (as His manner is) first to His
Englishmen?”283
However, the use of religious language does not mean that the motivation
of the parliamentarians was primarily religious. Rachel Foxley writes: “In a
speech from 1655 when looking back at the war, Cromwell said: ‘Religion was
not the thing at the first contested for, but God brought it to that issue at last
and gave it to us by way of redundancy, and at last it proved that which is
most dear to us.’ Historians have often dismissed this as a mistake or
hindsight on Cromwell’s part, but I think he was quite serious: it was God,
not people, who had the power to bring religious reform out of civil war. The
godly could not set out to fight a war of religion.
“So parliamentarians and Puritans like Cromwell were quite careful to

avoid saying that religion could be a justification for war. Instead, they
justified their war by saying they were fighting for a set of liberties protected
by law and that Charles I, in their view, had been attacking. They didn’t think
it was legitimate to fight for religion with the sword because religion could
only be fought for with spiritual weapons. But they did think it legitimate to
take up arms against a ruler who was breaking the law of the land. Along
with political liberties and rights, this also included religion because the
English Reformation had been established through parliamentary
statute…”284
Having said all that, and while agreeing that the main protagonists were
locked in a struggle for political power, we should not underestimate the
religious element, which was clearly the main motivation behind the Scottish
Covenanters in 1639 and remained powerful right until the Glorious
Revolution of 1688. Nor, in the last analysis, can we fully disentangle the
political ideas of the age from the religious ideas. Indeed, insofar as it was a
Calvinist revolution it was both religious and political; for, as we have seen,
Calvinism represented a rebellion against all traditional authority, both
ecclesiastical and secular.285
283 Milton, To the Lords and Commons of England, 1644.

284 Foxley, in “The Great Misconceptions of the Civil War”, BBC History Magazine, May, 2015,
p. 38.
285 Some of the leading revolutionaries, such as John Milton, were also Arians. See C.S. Lewis,
Preface to Paradise Lost, New Delhi: Atlantic, 2012, pp. 82-83.
178
Tombs puts it well when he declares that in that age “politics was a branch
of theology rather as twenty-first-century politics is a branch of economics”.286
And so we can agree with his judgement that the Civil War “was the last in
the series of European wars of religion. England was not a revolutionary
society: there was no class war, and the two sides were not socio-
economically defined. Parliament and the Crown were not pursuing a
centuries-old constitutional struggle of liberty against tyranny,”287 but rather
working out the consequences of the new concepts of authority in Church and
State injected into the European consciousness by the Protestant
Reformation…
286
287 Tombs, op. cit., p. 273.
179
23. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (2) KING VERSUS
PARLIAMENT
“The whole of Europe,” writes Sir Christopher Hill, “faced a crisis in the
mid-seventeenth century, which expressed itself in a series of breakdowns,
revolts and civil wars. The sixteenth century had seen the opening up of
America and of new trade routes to the Far East; a sudden growth of
population all over Europe, and a monetary inflation which was also all-
European. These phenomena are related (both as effect and as cause) to the
rise of capitalist relations within feudal society and a consequent regrouping
of social classes. Governments tried in different ways to limit, control or profit
by these changes, and with varying results. The republic of the United
Provinces, where a burgher oligarchy had taken power during the sixteenth-
century revolt against Spain, was best adapted to weather the crisis and
enjoyed its greatest prosperity in the seventeenth century. But with a
population of only some 2-2½ millions and meagre natural resources, its
predominance could not last once its larger rivals had won through to a more
appropriate political organization. Germany and Italy failed to establish
national states based on a single national market during this period, and
slipped behind in the race: so too did Spain, where the power of landed
interests and the church counteracted the flying start which the conquest of
South America appeared to have given. In France, after a series of convulsions
in the first half of the century, national unity was secured under the monarchy
with the acquiescence of the commercial classes, who accepted a recognized
but subordinate place in the country’s power structure. Only in England was
a decisive break-through made in the seventeenth century, which ensured
that henceforth governments would give great weight to commercial
considerations. Decisions made during the century enabled England to
become the first industrialized imperialist great power, and ensured that it
should be ruled by a representative assembly. Within the seventeenth century
the decisive decades are those between 1640 and 1660.”288
These were, of course, the decades of the English Revolution… Hill goes on
to describe the principal background phenomena that must be taken account
of when considering the causes of the revolution. “First, there are the political
and constitutional problems, arising mainly from the relationship between the
executive and the men of property who regarded themselves as the natural
rulers of the counties and cities. In the course of the sixteenth century the
great feudal lords had been disarmed and tamed, the church had lost its
international connections, much of its property and many of its immunities.
The residuary legatees were the crown, and the gentry and merchant
oligarchies who ran local affairs. So long as there was any danger of revolt by
over-mighty subjects, or of peasant revolt, or of foreign-supported Catholic
revolt, the alliance between crown and ‘natural rulers’, though tacit, was firm.
There was no need to define it, especially during the last half of the century
when the sovereigns of England were successively a minor and two women.
288 Hill, God’s Englishman, London: Penguin, 1970, pp. 13-14.
180
But before Oliver [Cromwell] had reached his tenth year all these things had
changed. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, the failure of Essex’s
rebellion in 1601, of Gunpowder Plot in 1605 and of the Midlands peasant
rising in 1607, the peaceful and uneventful succession of James I on
Elizabeth’s death in 1603, all these showed the stability of protestant England.
It was now possible to fall out over the distribution of authority between the
victors.
“In James’s reign Parliament, representing the men of property, was quite
clearly arrogating more power to itself – over taxation, over commercial
policy, over foreign policy – and asserting its own ‘liberties’, its independent
status in the constitution. James I, an experienced and successful King of
Scotland for thirty-six years, retaliated by enunciating the theory of Divine
Right of Kings and stressing the royal prerogative, the independent power of
the executive. Elizabeth also had probably believed in the Divine Right of
Queens, but she had been too prudent to thrust her views down her subjects’
throats. James proved more circumspect in practice than in theory, and
genuinely sought compromise with his powerful subjects. But his son Charles
I was less wise. By arbitrary arrest and imprisonment he enforced his claim to
tax without Parliamentary consent; he tried to rule without Parliament by a
quite novel use of the prerogative courts as executive organs to enforce
government policy. Elizabeth, Professor Elton tells us, had always shown
‘reluctance to assert the central authority against local interests’. The first two
Stuarts interfered increasingly with these interests, and in the 1630s there was
a concerted campaign to drive local government, to force unpopular
government policies on the sheriffs, deputy-lieutenants and justices of the
peace who were used to being little sovereigns in their own areas. In the 1620s
billeting of troops and the use of martial law had seemed to be a preparation
for military rule, over-riding the authority of justices of the peace; in the
thirties Sir Thomas Wentworth was believed to be building up an army in
Ireland with which to subdue England and Scotland. Thanks to control of the
judges Charles seemed likely to establish Ship Money as an annual tax, over
which Parliament had no control. He seemed on the way to establishing an
absolute monarchy of the continental type.”289
Let us look at this factor more closely… The first parliament of Charles I’s
reign – in the spring of 1626 – saw the same conflicts that had disfigured his
father’s relationship with Parliament, only in a sharper form. The main issue
again was money: Charles, like his father, thought that he had only to ask for
it in order to receive it by his Divine right as monarch. Parliament, however,
wanted details on know how the money was going to be spent, and also
wanted the removal of the king’s corrupt favourite, the Duke of Buckingham.
Charles would have none of it. “Remember,” he said, “that parliaments are
altogether in my power for their calling, sitting, and dissolution; therefore, as
I find their fruits good or evil, they are to continue, or not to be.”
289 Hill, op. cit., pp. 14-16.
181
The issues were remarkably similar to those that divided Tsar Nicholas II
and the Russian Duma some three hundred years later: the same need for
money to wage an international war (World War I instead of the Thirty Years’
War), the same argument over where supreme power lay (the Duma instead
of Parliament), the same scandal over the power of a royal favourite (Rasputin
instead of Buckingham and Stafford), and the same outcome for both
favourite and king (murder).
“These political and constitutional quarrels,” continues Hill, “concealed, or

were mingled with, deeper issues. Disputes over customs and impositions in
James’s reign raised the questions of whether the King alone or the King in
Parliament should control commercial policy. Disputes over foreign policy
included questions affecting Anglo-Dutch rivalry for the trade of the world,
British imperial policy in India, North America and the West Indies. On all
these questions the governments of the first two Stuarts gave little satisfaction
to commercial interests (which included many gentlemen investors). Indeed,
they seemed by their passivity in the Thirty Years’ War (due to shortage of
money, itself the result of the tax-payers’ lack of confidence), by Charles I’s
provocation of protestant Scotland and his concessions to papists in Ireland,
to be endangering England’s national security and independence.
Government regulation and control of the economy contradicted the views of
those who thought that freer trade and industrial production would
maximize output as well as enriching the producers. The military basis of
feudalism had vanished, but fiscal feudalism remained. If a tenant-in-chief of
the crown – and this category included most great landowners – died before
his heir had reached the age of 21, the latter became a ward of the crown. The
management of the ward’s estates, and the right to arrange his marriage, were
taken over by the Court of Wards; often the wardship would be handed on to
a courtier, who made what profit he could from the estate during the minority,
and no doubt married the heir or heiress to some needy relative of his own. A
minority might thus gravely impale the family estate. Under James and
Charles revenue from the Court of Wards rose rapidly. In 1610 Parliament
had tried to buy the abolition of this court and the feudal tenures of landlords:
the theme will recur.
“The problem of agricultural production was crucial. England’s population

was growing [from 2.2 million in 1500 to 5.5 million in the 1630s], and it was
increasingly concentrated in urban or rural industrial centres, which were not
self-sufficient. If this population was to be fed, a vast increase in production
was necessary. In the sixteenth century starvation had been the inevitable
consequence of a series of bad harvests, the worst of which occurred just
before Oliver was born, from 1593 to 1597. More food could be produced if
the vast areas reserved as royal forests were thrown open to cultivation: if
commons and waste lands were ploughed up; if fens and marshes were
drained. But each of these three solutions posed problems which were social
as well as technical: who was to control and profit by the extension of
cultivation? Smaller occupiers, squatters, cottagers and all those with
common rights would lose valuable perquisites if forests, fens and commons
182
were enclosed and taken into private ownership: the right to pasture their
own beasts, to hunt game, to gather fuel. For exactly this reason Francis Bacon
advised James I to retain control over royal wastes and commons, as potential
sources of wealth if they were enclosed and improved. Throughout the first
half of the century enclosing landlords fought cottagers and squatters
claiming rights in commons and fens; the crown fought those who
encroached on royal forests. The government sporadically fined enclosures,
but did little to protect the victims of enclosure: it was itself an enclosing
landlord.
“The interregnum [1649-1660] saw a widespread movement against

enclosure and for the rights of copyholders, which in 1649-50 culminated in
the Digger or True Leveller movement. The Diggers demanded that all crown
lands and forests, all commons and wastes, should be cultivated by the poor
in communal ownership, and that buying and selling land should be
forbidden by law. ‘Do not all strive to enjoy the land?’ asked their leader
Gerrard Winstanley. ‘The gentry strive for land, the clergy strive for land, the
common people strive for land, and buying and selling ‘is an art whereby
people endeavour to cheat one another of the land’. The expansion of food
production waited on solution of the questions of landownership, of common
rights, of security of tenure for copyholdiers, and a host of connected
problems…”290
Finally, there was the religious question. This had both a domestic and an
international aspect. The domestic aspect related to the power of the bishops
of the Anglican church. ”Many protestants had hoped that just as Henry
VIII’s breach with Rome had been followed by more radical changes in
Edward VI’s reign, so the accession of Elizabeth would lead to a resumption
of the policy of continuous reformation. They were disappointed, and a
stalemate ensued. So long as England’s national independence was in the
balance the government needed Puritan support against papist enemies at
home and abroad, and Puritans had no wish to overthrow Elizabeth to the
advantage of Mary Queen of Scots and Spain. But the victories of the 1590s
and succession of James I brought questions of church government to a head.
The bishops went over to the offensive against their critics, and harried
sectaries out of the land. Through the High Commission the independent
authority of the episcopal hierarchy grew, and Parliament and common
lawyers alike wished to control it. Especially under William Laud,
Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633, but in effective control of ecclesiastical
affairs from 1628, the claims of the clergy were extended. Church courts were
used impartially against members of the gentry and professions as well as
against lower-class sectaries. But the independence of thought, the dissidence
of dissent, which was rooted in a century of Bible-reading, could not so easily
be crushed. Already some Baptists were suggesting the possibility of
tolerating more than one brand of religious worship in a state.
290 Hill, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
183
“As Winstanley suggested, ecclesiastical questions were also in part
economic. The Laudian attempt to increase tithe payments (which had
declined in real value during the inflationary century before 1640) would in
effect have meant increased taxation of the laity without Parliament’s consent.
Laud’s expressed desire to recover impropriated tithes for the church
threatened the property rights of all who had succeeded to the estates of the
dissolved monasteries. Laud’s attempt to suppress lecturers similarly
challenged the right of richer members of congregations, and of town
corporations, to have the kind of preaching they liked if they were prepared
to pay for it. As society was progressively commercialized and as the
common-law courts adapted themselves to the needs of this business society,
so the jurisdiction of church courts, backed up by the power of the High
Commission, was more and more resented. Their excommunications, their
prohibition of labour on saints’ days, their enforcement of tithe claims, their
putting men on oath to incriminate themselves or their neighbours – all these
were increasingly out of tune with the wishes of the educated, propertied
laity, who were also critical of ecclesiastical control of education and the
censorship. The Laudians rejected the Calvinist doctrine of predestination,
and doubted whether the Pope was Antichrist. This ‘Arminian’ theology, and
the Laudian attempt to elevate the power and social status of the clergy,
seemed to many protestants to be abandoning basic tenets of the
reformation.”291
As regards the Arminian question, the bishops, as Peter Ackroyd writes,

“had debated the controversy between the puritan members of the Church
and those who were already known as ‘Arminians’. These latter were the
clergy who believed in the primacy of order and ritual in the customary
ceremonies; they preached against predestination and in favour of the
sacraments, and had already earned the condemnation of the Calvinists at the
Synod of Dort [in Holland, in 1618]... Some of them were dismissed as mere
papists under another name, but in fact they were as much estranged from
the Catholic communion as they were from the puritan congregation; they
wished for a purified national Church, and their most significant supporter
was already William Laud, a prominent bishop now in royal favour. The
English Arminians in turn became known as ‘Laudians’, with one of their
central precepts concerning ‘the beauty of holiness’ by which they meant
genuflections and bowings as well as painted images. There was even room to
be made for an incense pot.
“The Arminians had been in an equivocal position during the previous

reign because of James’s residual Calvinist sympathies and his unwillingness
to countenance doctrinal controversy. His son was made of sterner, or more
unbending, material. In the weeks after James’s death, Bishop Laud prepared
for the new king a list of senior churchmen, with the letters ‘O’ or ‘P’
appended to their names; ‘O’ meant orthodox and ‘P’ signalled a puritan. So
the lines were drawn.
291
Hill, op. cit., pp. 18-19.
184
“The powerful bias towards ‘adoration’, with all the ritual and formality it
implied, was deeply congenial to the young king who had already brought
order and ceremony to his court; just as he delighted in masques, so he
wished for a religion of splendour and mystery. Charles had in any case a
deep aversion to puritanism in all of its forms, which he associated with
disobedience and the dreadful notion of ‘popularity’; he thought of cobblers
and tailors and sharp-tongued dogmatists. Above all else he wanted a well-
ordered and disciplined Church, maintaining undeviating policies as well as
uniform customs, with the bishops as its principal representatives. It was to
be a bulwark in his defence of national stability. Laud himself used to quote
the phrase ‘stare super antiquas vias’ – it was important to stand upon ancient
ways.
“With a sermon delivered in the summer of 1626, Laud aimed a direct hit
against the puritans by claiming that the Calvinists were essentially anti-
authoritarian and therefore anti-monarchical. In the following year George
Abbot was deprived of his powers as archbishop of Canterbury and replaced
by a commission of anti-Calvinist bishops. When one Calvinist bishop,
Davenant of Salisbury, delivered a sermon in which he defended the doctrine
of predestination, he was summoned before the privy council; after the
prelate had kissed the king’s hand, Charles informed him that ‘he would not
have this high priest meddled withal or debated, either the one way or the
other, because it was too high for the people’s understanding’. After 1628 no
Calvinist preachers were allowed to stand at Paul’s Cross, the centre for
London sermons…
“Yet the Calvinists, and the puritans, did not go gently into the dark. The
victory of the Laudian cause in the king’s counsels, more than anything else,
stirred the enmity between opposing religious camps that defined the last
years of his reign. It should be added, however, that these doctrinal
discontents wafted over the heads of most parish clergy and their
congregations who attended church as a matter of habit and took a simple
attitude towards the gospels and the commandments…”292
The religious question also had an international aspect. As a Calvinist king,

James I had felt obliged to join the Protestant International in the Thirty Years’
War in support of his sister, Elizabeth Stuart, the “White Queen” of Bohemia;
and this is certainly what most of the people wanted. But parliament,
distrustful of his prodigal habits, did not give him the money he needed to
make an effective intervention in Europe. Moreover, his heart was not really
in the war because he wanted his son Charles to marry the Spanish infanta (he
allowed him to go with the Duke of Buckingham to woo her in Madrid), and,
later, the French Henrietta Maria – both Catholics...
292 Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 121-123.
185
Charles eventually married Henrietta Maria. But she refused to attend
what she considered to be his heretical coronation service in February, 1626.
The new king, who did not have his father’s peacemaker’s skills, found
himself at odds not only with his people but even with his queen from the
very beginning of his reign (although she rallied to his side later)…
At the beginning of Charles’ reign, writes Hill, “England was at war with
Spain in alliance with France. In 1627, because Buckingham [the favourite of
both James I and Charles I] had quarrelled with the French court in another of
his disastrous wooing expeditions, England was at war with both France and
Spain. These military undertakings were uniformly unsuccessful. They did
nothing to help German Protestantism, which by 1628 was in grave danger of
extinction. In that year England helped the Catholic king of France to deprive
his protestant subjects of the privileges which Queen Elizabeth had helped
them to win in the Edict of Nantes (1598). When Buckingham was
assassinated in 1628 England’s international reputation was at its nadir. The
assassin, Felton, was the most popular man in England.
“In other ways unity between King and Parliament was broken. Parliament
refused to vote taxes for this impossible foreign policy, and Charles resorted
to forced loans. In 1627 five knights refused to pay, and were imprisoned.
When Parliament met in 1628 the Petition of Right declared both
unparliamentary taxation and arbitrary imprisonment illegal…”293
The quarrel between King and Parliament came to a head in 1629, when
Parliament, now increasingly self-confident and assertive, demanded that the
King renounce his ancient right to the important revenues from Tonnage and
Poundage. The Speaker, John Finch, even declared that anyone who paid
Tonnage and Poundage was a traitor to the country. This left the King, who
had continued to levy these taxes, no choice but to prorogue parliament…
For several years there was relative calm. But then “in the spring of 1637 a
new Service Book for Scotland was published by the king. It applied much of
the English Book of Common Prayer and abolished most of John Knox’s Book
of Common Order. It was in effect another English imposition, bearing all the
marks of the intervention of Archbishop Laud. It was first read in public at St
Giles, recently become the cathedral church of Edinburgh. The dean ascended
the pulpit, but when he began to recite the words of the new book, shouts of
abuse came from the women of the congregation. ‘The Mass is entered among
us!’ ‘Baal is in the church!’ The bishop of Edinburgh then stepped forward to
calm the angry women and begged them to desist from profaning ‘holy
ground’. This was not a phrase to be used in front of a puritan assembly, and
further abuse was screamed against him; he was denounced as ‘fox, wolf,
belly god’. One of the women hurled her stool at him which, missing its target,
sailed perilously close to the head of the dean.
293
Hill, op. cit., pp. 28-29.
186
“The magistrates were then called to clear the church but the women, once
ejected, surrounded the building; its great doors were pummelled and stones
were flung at its windows as the unhappy ceremony proceeded to its end.
Cries could be heard of ‘a pope, a pape, anti-Christ, stone him, pull him
down!’ When the bishop came out, the women shouted ‘get the thrapple out
of him’ or cut his windpipe; he barely escaped with his life. This was not a
spontaneous combination of irate worshippers, however, but a carefully
organized assault on the Service Book; certain nonconformist gentry and
clergy had been planning the event for approximately three months, even
though the scale of the riot became known as ‘Stony Sunday’…”294
There was much sympathy for the Scots among the English Puritans. But
Charles came down hard on the opponents both of his religious and of his
fiscal measures. In 1637 John Hampden was brought before the court of the
exchequer for refusing to pay his portion of “ship money”.
“At the beginning of the year twelve senior judges had declared that, in the
face of danger to the nation, the king had a perfect right to order his subjects
to finance the preparation of a fleet; in addition they declared that, in the
event of refusal, the king was entitled to use compulsion. Leopold von Ranke
believed that ‘the judges could not have delivered a more important decision;
it is one of the great events of English history’. The royal prerogative had
become the foundation and cornerstone of government. Simonds D’Ewes
wrote that if indeed it could be exacted lawfully, ‘the king, upon the like
pretence, might gather the same sum ten, twelve, or a hundred times
redoubled, and so to infinite proportions to any one shire, when and as often
as he pleased; and so no man was, in conclusion, worth anything.’ It was a
powerful argument, to be tested in the trial of John Hampden…
“The judges deliberated and eventually gave a decision in favour of the

king, seven against five. It was the smallest of all possible majorities for the
king. Nevertheless the words of the chief justice in his support were repeated
throughout the country. Finch declared that ‘acts of parliament to take away
his royal power in the defence of the kingdom are void’. Or, as another judge
put it, ‘rex est lex’ – the king is the law. The ancient rights of Englishmen were
of no importance, and the declarations of Magna Carta or the ‘petition of right’
were inconsequential. Neither law nor the parliament could bind the king’s
power. Clarendon, in his History of the Rebellion, states that ‘undoubtedly my
Lord Finch’s speech made ship-money much more abhorred and formidable
than all the commandments by the council table and all the distresses taken
by the sheriffs of England’…
“In the middle of the trial, on 9 February 1638, the king issued a
proclamation in Scotland in which he stated that ‘we find our royal authority
much impaired’ and declared that all protests against the new prayer book
would be deemed treasonable… He did not want to become as powerless as
187
the doge of Venice and he informed his representative in Scotland, the
marquis of Hamilton, that he was ‘resolved to hazard my life rather than
suffer authority to be condemned’…
“In response the commissioners in Edinburgh, representing the petitioners,

drew up a national covenant in which the precepts of the Kirk were re-
established. Among its declarations was one that the innovations of the
prayer book ‘do sensibly tend to the re-establishing of the popish religion and
tyranny, and to the subversion and ruin of the true reformed religion and of
our liberties, laws and estates’… The elect were now bound to God in solemn
contract, as the Israelites once had been, with a clear moral obligation to fulfil
His commands… The national covenant was carried in triumph through the
streets, accompanied by crowds of women and children who alternately
cheered and wept…
“…. The English dissenters, already excited and agitated by the trial of
John Hampden, welcomed the defiant action of the Scots; many of them
hoped that the Scottish example might be followed closer to home. The most
impassioned denunciations of the king’s policy could be read in the verses
and broadsides distributed in the streets of London…
“When the general assembly of the Church of Scotland met in Glasgow

Cathedral towards the end of November, the bishops were charged with
violating the boundaries of their proper authority. The marquis of Hamilton
attended in the name of the king, and he reported to his master that ‘my soul
was never sadder than to see such a sight; not one gown amongst the whole
company, many swords but many more daggers – most of them having left
their guns and pistols in their lodgings’. The voting of course went against the
orders and wishes of the king. Hamilton thereupon declared the assembly
dissolved but, after he had left the church, the delegates voted to continue
their debate. They also passed a resolution declaring that the Kirk was
independent of the civil power, in effect stripping Charles of any religious
supremacy he had previously claimed.
“For the next three weeks the delegates revised the whole form of the
Scottish faith that had recently been imposed upon them. The new liturgy was
abolished. The bishops were excommunicated. The king’s writ no longer ran
in Scotland…”295
“The Bishops’ War” as it was called began in 1639 as the Scottish army
advanced to Kelso on the Border, while Charles sent an army to Berwick.
Jonathan Healey writes that the king “ordered Hamilton to face the
Covenanters down, but they were ready and committed. So much so that
even Hamilton’s own mother fought for them, raising a cavalry troop and,
allegedly, threatening to shoot her own son.”296
295
Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 175-179.
296 Healey, “What Sparked the Civil War?” BBC History Magazine, August, 2018, p. 24.
188
In 1640 the king was defeated at Newburn, and a truce was signed. But
Charles still believed he could defeat the Scots. So, desperate for men and
money to continue the war, he turned to parliament. But a group of Puritan
nobles led by the Earls of Warwick and Essex and Lords Saye and Brooks
used the opportunity to organize a conspiracy against him.
“They were driven,” writes John Adamson, “by a complex amalgam of

motives partly religious, provoked by hatred of the ‘popish’ innovations
Charles and his bishops had introduced into the church; partly legal, moved
by alarm at the King’s erosion of his subjects’ traditional rights of property
and what they believed to be his disdain for the rule of law; partly also a
matter of noble honour, outraged by the King’s indifference to the advice of
the ‘ancient nobility’ and his promotion of social parvenus. By the summer of
1640, however, they were united by one common ambition: the desire to
topple the existing regime and to redefine permanently the powers of the
Crown. To achieve this, the conspirators had entered into direct negotiations
with the rebel leadership in Scotland, and were preparing themselves, if
necessary, to fight what they believed would be a short and decisive civil
war.”297
Faced by traitors from within and without, the king was forced to back
down and allow the reconvening of Parliament – it became known as the
“Long Parliament” - on November 3, 1640 that was dominated by his enemies.
“Within a matter of months, they had usurped many of the key functions of
government which, hitherto, would have been the business of the Privy
Council. Perhaps most importantly, in September, they won control of the
new treaty negotiations that were to redefine a new ‘Union’ between England
and Scotland, and over the following 11 months, they worked with the very
same Scots with whom they had conspired during the summer to redraft the
constitution of both British kingdoms.”298
On May 5, 1641, on the pretence that a papist uprising was afoot - there
was no such rising in England, but in Ireland a real uprising was taking place,
by the Catholics against the Protestants, and in the name of the king, - “a new
bill was passed allowing parliament to remain in session until it voted for its
own dissolution. It has been said that this was the moment that reform turned
into revolution; it deprived the monarch of his right to govern.
“The Lords themselves had directed that an armed force should take
command of the Tower, thus divesting the king of responsibility for military
affairs. It was another blow to his authority.”299
297 Adamson, “Rising of the Rebel Lords”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 7 (7), July, 2006, p. 14.
298 Adamson, op. cit., p. 15.
299 Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 212, 213.
189
On May 12, the king’s faithful minister, the Earl of Stafford, at the demand
of both houses of parliament and a mob of 12,000 shouting “Justice! Justice!”,
was executed on Tower Hill “in front of what was said to be the largest
multitude ever gathered in England. Crowds of 200,000 people watched his
progress [to the block] in an atmosphere of carnival and rejoicing.” On his last
journey, Stafford asked the blessing of Archbishop Laud, who was looking on
the scene from a house in which he was confined – “but the cleric [who was to
be executed himself a few years later] fell into a dead faint…”300
However, some now began to think again about parliament’s increasingly

radical demands. ‘The radicals,” writes Healy, “tried to abolish bishops, and
this lost the support of those who loved church tradition. They attempted to
control appointments to the Privy Council, but this shocked constitutional
conservatives. When parliament bypassed legal process and executed Thomas
Wentworth, one of Charles’s leading administrators, simply by passing a
statue declaring him guilty, it offended those who respected due process.
When the opposition leader John Pym used the London crowd to pressure
parliament, it seemed to conservatives like they were handing power to a
rabble, even if it was often literate tradespeople who made up much of that
crowd.
“By later 1641, parliament had become dangerously fractured. It was

possible to talk of two sides, and in the street politics of the capital, these had
started to be nicknamed Roundheads and Cavaliers. In November, an attempt
by the opposition to collate their grievances into a ‘Grand Remonstrance’ had
passed the Commons only by 159 votes to 148. There were two sides in the
house and two sides in the country.
“Ireland was the match that lit the powder. Since early Tudor times,
Ireland had been exploited by England. From the late 16th century, England
had pursued a policy of plantation whereby Irish lands were given over to
settlers. Unde James VI and I, the plantations were accelerated, with
thousands of Protestant families from England and Scotland brought over
and settled in Ulster.
“Nonetheless, anger at Anglo-Scottish colonisation could be tempered by

effective rule. Partly through conciliation and partly through military force,
Thomas Wentworth (he called his policy ‘thorough’) had managed to hold
Ireland’s government together. He had even raised an army in Ireland that
Charles hoped to use against the Scottish Covenanters.
“By October 1641, though, Wentworth was dead, and his army had been
disbanded. The success of the Scots, meanwhile, encouraged aggrieved Irish
to believe they too could win better treatment by rising in force. When the
rebellion came, it was swift and it was bloody. A plot to seize Dublin Castle
failed, but settlers in Ulster were cast off their land, and many were murdered.
300
Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 213, 214.
190
“Lurid reports of atrocities – some true, some fictional – filtered back to
England, encouraged by a rabid London press. The effect was like a bolt of
lightning. Now an army would have to be raised, although neither side
trusted the other to lead it.
“The winter of 1641-42 brought a climactic power struggle. Charles tried to

gain control of London by putting a Thomas Lunsford, a hardline royalist
ultra, in charge of the Tower. Paper ‘libels’ spread around the City alleging
that Lunsford was a baby-eating cannibal. He was so vociferously opposed
that the king had to back down and remove his man. Council elections,
meanwhile, brought a radical clique to power in the City.
“The coup de grace happened on 4 January. Charles, realising his grip on

his capital was slipping, decided to make a desperate move against
parliament. He would strike against five leaders of the opposition in the
Commons and one in the Lords. It was like a retrospective of Charles’s
leading critics, from Denzil Holles, who had held the speaker in his chair back
in 1629, to John Hampden, the Buckinghamshire gentleman who had opposed
Ship Money, to Charles’s nemesis in the Commons, John Pym.
“Setting out from his palace with a gang of armed Cavaliers, Charles
marched down Whitehall and into the Commons. It was a terrifying, dramatic
scene : an attempted coup by the king against his parliament. But the men had
gone. ‘I have seen the birds have flown,’ said Charles, and they had.
Forewarned, they had hastened away down the river, and slipped into the
knotted lanes of the city.
“Charles spent the next few days at Whitehall. The city at this gates
threatened to snap at any moment. On 10 January he and his family stole
away into the cold winter night. The slide to war had begun…”301
301 Healey, op. cit., pp. 26-27.
191
24. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (3) THE CIVIL WAR
In June 1642, John Pym – “King Pym”, as he was - known demanded that
the king accept a list of religious reforms demanded by parliament and
exclude the “popish” peers from the House of Lords. “His principal officers
should be appointed only with the approval of parliament, and all important
matters of state must be debated there. The document became in the words of
one parliamentarian, Edmund Ludlow, ‘the principal foundation of the
ensuing war’. Ludlow said that the question came to this: ‘whether the king
should govern as a god by his will and the nation be governed by force like
beasts; or whether the people should be governed by laws made by
themselves, and live under a government derived from their own consent’.
“The king of course rejected the demands out of hand with the words
‘nolumus leges Angliae mutari’ – we do not wish the laws of England to be
changed. He said that acceptance of parliamentary demands would ensure
that he became ‘but the outside, but the picture, but the sign, of a king’. The
propositions were ‘a mockery’ and ‘a scorn’.”302
Unable to resolve the conflict by peaceful means, the parties took to the
sword… On July 12, 1642 the Earl of Essex was placed in charge of a
parliamentary army, and a “committee of safety” (ancestor of the KGB, which
means “Committee of State Safety”) was set up to organize soldiers,
weaponry and supplies. The king was not far behind. On August 22, he
marched into Nottingham and unfurled a banner which read: “Give Caesar
his due”. But what was Caesar’s according to the king encroached on what
was God’s according to his opponents…
And so the scene was set for the English revolution - “that grand crisis of
morals, religion and government”, as Coleridge called it303, or, as Charles
George calls it, “the first major breech in Absolute Monarchy and the
spawning of the first major, secular, egalitarian and liberal culture in the
modern world”.304
The country was split down the middle; even families were divided. Most
of the peers, landowners and gentry were royalist, as were the Roman
Catholics and Anglicans. Parliament dominated the south-east and London,
and were allied with the Scots, while the king, based in Oxford, dominated
the north and south-west. Although parliament won, the war demonstrated
the continuing power of monarchism. For, as the Earl of Manchester said: “If
we beat the king ninety and nine times, yet he is king still, and so will his
posterity be after him” – a true prophecy insofar as Charles I, beheaded in
1649, was succeeded by his son, Charles II, in 1660…
302
Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 243.
303 Coleridge, Table Talk, 9 November, 1833.
304 George, 500 Years of Revolution: European Radicals from Hus to Lenin, Chicago, 1998, p. viii.
192
“Countrywide,” writes Robert Tombs, “the royalists maintained military
superiority during the first part of the war, despite Parliament’s possession of
London and the south-east, with their vast reserves of men and money.
Cromwell famously put this down to the royalists being ‘gentlemen’s son’,
compared with Parliament’s ‘broken-down tapsters’. The difference was
rather more substantial. The royalists had greater popular support and better
military leadership, and adopted modern methods, including Swedish-style
cavalry and the latest artillery-proof fortifications. Charles appointed able
commanders with Continental experience, including this nephew, the twenty-
three-year-old Prince Rupert, son of the Elector Palatine, already a veteran of
the Thirty Years’ War. The royalists took Bristol, England’s second port, in
July 1943, cleared the south-west, and consolidated control of the north.
Fighting in Ireland was interrupted in September 1643 by a truce between the
rebel Catholic Confederation and King Charles’s Lord Lieutenant, the
Marquess of Ormonde, which raised the prospect, terrifying parliamentarians,
that a royalist and ‘papist’ Irish army might cross over into England, as
indeed some of it did. Parliament ordered the killing of all Irish prisoners.
“In desperation, Parliament appealed to the ruling Scottish Convention for

help, offering in return to make England and Ireland Presbyterian. In
September 1643, Parliament and the Convention drew up a Solemn League
and Covenant to resist ‘the bloody plots… of the enemies of God’ and
eliminate ‘Popery, prelacy… superstition, heresy, schism, profaneness, and
whatsoever shall be found to be contrary to sound doctrine and the power of
godliness. ‘ This brought the two countries closer than ever to union, and a
Committee of Both Kingdoms was established as a joint authority. In January
1644, 21,500 Scots marched into England again under Leslie (now Earl of
Leven). This was the largest army of the whole Civil War. Its intervention
prevented a probable royalist victory and a compromise peace.
“The Scots reversed the military balance in the north of England. Charles
sent an army under Rupert to restore the situation. Rupert, with some 17,000
men to the allies’ 27,000, manoeuvred successfully to force them to raise the
siege of York. The two sides met on 2 July 1644 at nearby Marston Moor. As
fighting had not started by early evening, the royalists relaxed. Seeing them
preparing their supper, the allies launched a surprise attack at seven o’clock.
Although the royalists recovered and drove back some of the attackers, they
were in the end overwhelmed by the combination of stubborn Scottish
infantry and disciplined East Anglian cavalry commanded by Cromwell.
Over 6,000 died in probably the biggest battle ever fought on English soil. A
jubilant Cromwell wrote that ‘God made them as stubble to our swords’.
Parliament took control of northern England…
“Parliament offered peace terms in November 1644, but these included the
‘utter abolishing’ of bishops and cathedrals, imposition of Scottish-style
Presbyterianism, waging war in Ireland and Europe, savage measures against
Catholics (including taking away their children – and possibly those of the
king himself), permanently banning stage plays, and imposing a blacklist of
193
royalists whom the king could not pardon. When these terms were rejected,
Parliament took decisive steps early in 1645 to intensify the war. An Act of
Attainder condemned the imprisoned Archbishop Laud, the hated symbol of
‘popery’, for whom a retroactive definition of treason was invented. ‘Is this
the liberty that we promised to maintain with our blood?’ exclaimed Essex.
Laud was beheaded on 10 January.
“The natural selection of war had produced a new officer corps, led by a
new lord-general, Sir Thomas Fairfax, aged thirty-two, the son of a Yorkshire
peer, and in his spare time a collector of art, church historian, and translator
of poetry and philosophy. He had served with the Swedish army, the most
efficient in Europe, and three of his brothers had been killed on the continent.
A Self-Denying Ordinance (April 1645) removed members of Parliament from
military command. At the same time a ‘New Model Army’ of 22,000 men was
formed under central, not local, control, directly paid by Parliament, and
excluding foreign mercenaries – ‘there was not one man but of our owne
Nation’. The infantry included royalist prisoners and impressed men from the
south of England, who were quick to desert. But the cavalry, the decisive
weapon, were volunteers from existing parliamentary forces, mainly the sons
of yeomen and craftsmen. These ‘Ironsides’ were better paid, better armed
and equipped and uniformed in red coats. Oliver Cromwell, an MP, was
given command notwithstanding the Self-Denying Ordinance. Parliament
was creating a professional standing army, more detached from civil society
and accountability. It was an ideological force, officially described as ‘a rod of
iron in Christ’s hand to dash his enemies in pieces’. Harsh discipline knocked
it into shape, including humiliating and painful penalties for drunkenness
and fornication: blasphemers had their tongues pierced with a hot iron. They
could be equally brutal towards royalist prisoners. Conformity was reinforced
by preaching and collective prayer – ‘no oaths nor cursing, no drunkenness
nor quarrelling, but love, unanimity,’ wrote one observer. They developed an
ideological and psychological ruthlessness; for these men, backsliders and the
lukewarm, even if a majority in Parliament or the nation, must not prevail
against the will of God, who manifested his favour by granting victory.
“Victory indeed came quickly. On 14 June 1645 at Naseby in

Northamptonshire, about 13,500 troops of the New Model Army under
Fairfax and Cromwell decisively defeated 9,000 royalists under Rupert and
Charles in person…”305
The revolutionary aspect of the New Model Army was that the soldiers
were chosen on a meritocratic basis, not on the basis of rank or nobility, and
were paid on a regular basis as professionals. Thus the professionalization of
war, which made it increasingly deadly, was one of the first products of the
revolution. The trend would continue in the French and Russian revolutions.
305 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 230-233.
194
“The king,” continues Tombs, “having gradually run out of options
following Naseby, arrived unexpectedly at the headquarters of the Scottish
army at Southwell, in Nottinghamshire, on 5 May 1646. It soon became clear
that the defeated monarch was in a surprisingly strong political position. The
parliamentary coalition was divided and increasingly unpopular, and a large
element of it wanted to negotiate with Charles. So did its Scottish allies.
Public opinion was increasingly royalist, associating the king with peace and
a return to normality. Crowds turned out to cheer him, and many people
came to be ‘touched’ for the ‘King’s Evil’, scrofula – a quasi-religious
ceremony copied from the French monarchs306 and, like all faith healing,
sometimes effective. In February 1647 Parliament paid the Scots army to go
home. Charles was handed over to an English officer, and comfortably
interned in Leicestershire. Over the next two years, he fatally overplayed his
hand. The capture at Naseby of his correspondence and its subsequent
publication showed him as duplicitous, as his behaviour confirmed. He was
convinced of his own rightness, and saw no reason to deal frankly under
duress with rebels. He thought he could play off the factions among his
enemies; if not, he was prepared for martyrdom.
“The factionalism of the parliamentary side was real enough. The religious
gulf had widened, and had become entangled with struggles over power.
Alliance with the Scots had required Parliament to make the English Church
Presbyterian. This would have been an authoritarian system, rough on heresy
and schism, requiring everyone to be a member of their parish church, and
giving religious and hence much social and political power to committees of
clergy and godly elders. To those fearing religious anarchy and social
breakdown, this came to have attractions, at least as a lesser evil, and so
Presbyterianism went from being seen as a means of subversion to being an
ark of stability and authority. In contrast, ‘Independents’ claimed the right to
organize their own godly congregations outside a state Presbyterian Church.
They demanded liberty of conscience for unorthodox beliefs – sects such as
Brownites, Baptists, Congregationalists and even Quakers, whose strange
beliefs and shocking behaviour meant that they were feared and detested by
more orthodox Puritans. The sects allowed anyone to preach – not only
educated and licensed clergy. All this alarmed a society that took it for
granted that law, order and community could not only based on common
religious belief and discipline. It therefore seemed possible that Presbyterian
parliamentarians and royalists might come together in agreement.
“Independency has many followers in the army. Godly soldiers came to

see their own companies or regiments as religious brotherhoods, and the
army as a collection of congregations. They were tolerant of exotic religious
beliefs among their comrades, and liked spontaneous preaching and
prophesying. We would get some of the flavour by imagining ‘Bible Belt’
emotionalism backed by the ruthlessness of a revolutionary militia.
306 However, there was a good Anglo-Saxon precedent in King Edward the Confessor, who
had the power of healing (see Anonymous’ Vita Edwardi Regis). (V.M.)
195
“The New Model Army itself was a focus of financial and legal controversy.
Its heavy cost, whether met through taxation or by direct exactions by troops
on civilians, caused mounting resentment – ‘For the king, and no plunder,’
shouted rioters. The army was coming to be hated, even by its own side. A
petition from Essex lamented being ‘eaten up, enslaved and destroyed by an
army raised for their defence’. Disbanding most of the army was the obvious
solution. But many soldiers resisted being simply turned loose, especially as
they were owed large arrears of pay - £3m in all, equal to more than three
years of prewar state income. Many were fearful of being sent to Ireland, from
where most soldiers never returned. Many too were preoccupied by the
question of indemnity from prosecution. England had long been a litigious
society, and, amazingly, officers and soldiers found themselves being sued by
royalists for trespass, theft, burglary, assault or wrongful imprisonment for
military actions taken during the war, and they faced ruin, imprisonment or
worse from hostile juries and judges. One regiment feared that ‘we should be
hanged like dogs’ without a parliamentary law of indemnity. Finally, the
army did not want its wartime sacrifices thrown away by a Parliament and a
public backsliding towards royalism. These grievances turned the army into a
political actor, debating and presenting collective demands, and eventually
claiming the right of ultimate decision.
“Amid this political imbroglio, the king appeared to be a key figure and a
potentially decisive ally. Cornet Joyce took a force of cavalry in June 1647 to
secure him and prevent his being used by Parliament. He was taken to the
army’s headquarters at Newmarket, and greeted by cheering crowds strewing
green branches in his path. In July 1647 army commanders offered Charles a
relatively conciliatory settlement, the ‘Heads of the Proposals’, which
included tolerance for Anglicans moderate treatment for royalists, biennial
parliaments, a redistribution of seats, and some popular reforms, including
abolition of excise, monopolies and imprisonment for debt. The army and
government were to be controlled by Parliament, but only for ten years, after
which the Crown would resume authority. Charles made a conciliatory reply,
accepting many of the army’s proposals and promising to meet their arrears
of pay. But many important matters were unresolved, and finally Charles
spurned the deal, believing he could bargain for better terms: ‘You will fall to
ruin if I do not sustain you.’ The army marched on London, lodging Charles
nearby at Hampton Court…
“Charles slipped away from Hampton Court by night on 11 November

1647. His first thought was to make for France, but he ended up on the Isle of
Wight, where he was politely interned at Carisbrook Castle. There he was
able to negotiate an alliance with important politicians in Ireland and with the
Scots, who were promised a Presbyterian Church in England for a period, and
a complete union of the two kingdoms. His escape from Hampton Court
triggered royalist uprisings in several parts of England. The army leaders held
an emotional three-day fast and prayer meeting in Windsor. All agreed to
fight back, confident ‘in the name of the Lord only, that we should destroy
196
them’, and resolving to ‘call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account
for that blood he had shed.’
“There was fighting in London, Ken, south Wales, the north and East
Anglia in a ‘second civil war’. The most important struggle took place at
Colchester, held by 4,000 royalists commanded by the Earl of Norwich. Its
siege tied down a large part of the parliamentary army. This left the rest of the
country vulnerable, and handfuls of royalists captured Berwick, Carlisle and
Pontefract (where they held out for five months – long after Charles had been
beheaded). A Scottish army invaded in July 1648, though they made
themselves unpopular by plundering. Cromwell crushed them at Preston on
17 August, and marched into Scotland to force the removal of royalist
sympathizers from the Edinburgh government. Colchester withstood a
hopeless siege for eleven weeks, but surrendered after learning the news of
Preston – flown in by the besiegers with a kite. The 300 royalist officers were
given no guarantee of their safety, and two were executed…
“Charles himself was to pay the price. Many in the army wanted him dead.
They realized he could never be trusted to accept the system they wanted to
impose. He was too popular, too slippery, and had support in all three
kingdoms. But he might be even more dangerous dead, so some influential
officers and the vast majority of MPs opposed regicide, and began another
series of negotiations. After another long prayer meeting at Windsor in
November, the army commanders – ‘ never more politically dangerous than
when they were wrestling with the Almighty’ – decided to bring Parliament
to heel. On 6 December 1648 the Palace of Westminster was occupied by
Colonel Pride’s troops, who arrested forty-one Ps and confined them, singing
psalms, in a nearby alehouse. ‘Pride’s Purge’ reduced the House to a ‘Rump’
of about 150 members acceptable to the army. They now asserted their right
to try the king, because ‘the people’, and hence the English House of
Commons, ‘have the supreme power in this nation’ – a revolutionary step,
and one unacceptable to the Scots. To objections that to try a king would be
unconstitutional, Cromwell retorted, ‘I tell you, we will cut off his head with
the crown upon it…’”307
307
Tombs, op. cit., pp. 235-238.
197
25. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (4) THE KILLING OF THE
KING
“Pride’s Purge” was truly prideful and undoubtedly a purge – a purge of

elected MPs in order to impose the will of a military dictator on a frightened
remnant, the rump of the fledgling English democracy. The resultant “Rump
Parliament” consisted of about 300 members – and even their will was not
allowed to interfere with the will of the proto-Leninist Cromwell. For of these
300 only 59 signed King Charles’ death warrant. The decision, therefore, was
hardly that of “we, the People”: it was the will, essentially, of one man. But if
Cromwell’s purging of the English parliament in 1648 looks forward to
Lenin’s dismissal of the Russian Constituent Assembly in 1918, his insistence
on Charles being condemned in a judicial or quasi-judicial manner was more
English than Soviet. For it was the most beloved axiom of English politics that
nobody was above the law – not the king, not even Cromwell. And we must
presume that it was this insistence on “due process” that earned Cromwell
the otherwise mystifying decision of the English nation to place his statue in
front of the parliament whose freedom he so crudely violated in 1648…
Nor was Cromwell technically an anti-monarchist. As Christopher Hill

writes, “he was no republican: his enemies described him as ‘king-ridden’.
Early in 1648 Cromwell and his friends annoyed the republican Ludlow by
refusing to commit themselves to a preference for monarchy, aristocracy or
democracy: ‘Any of them might be good in themselves, or for us, according as
providence should direct us.’ The farthest Oliver would go was to say that a
republic might be desirable but not feasible – and one suspects that he only
said that to please Ludlow. As late as 12 January 1649 Cromwell opposed a
motion to abolish the House of Lords, with the highly characteristic argument
that it would be madness at a time when unity was so essential. Political
practice was always more important to him than constitutional theory. He
subsequently justified the abolition of King and Lords not on any ground of
political principle but ‘because they did not perform their trust’.”308
“Charles was tried by a special High Court of army officers and MPs. Peers
and judges had refused to participate, as did about half of those first nominate.
The trial began on a freezing 20 January 1649 in Westminster Hall…”309
Traditionally, since Magna Carta, it had been the aristocrats who reined in
tyrannical kings; and when King Charles was brought to trial the parallel with
Magna Carta was uppermost in his judges’ minds. Thus the court’s first
meeting was held in the Painted Chamber at the Palace of Westminster where
the nobles traditionally put on their robes. But in 1649, unlike 1215, the
aristocrats sitting in in the House of Lords had to be wary of more
revolutionary rivals sitting in the House of Commons.
308 Hill, God’s Englishman, London: Penguin, 1970, p. 195.

309 Tombs, op. cit., p. 240.
198
For, as Sean Kelsey writes, “In the course of proceedings, John Bradshaw,
Lord President of the High Court of Justice, recalled the ‘Barons’ Wars’, ’when
the nobility of the land did stand up for the liberty and property of the subject
and would not suffer the kings that did invade to play the tyrant freely…
But… if they [the peers] do forbear to do their duty now and are not so
mindful of their own honour and the kingdom’s good as the barons of
England of old were, certainly the Commons of England will not be so
unmindful of what is for their preservation and for their safety.’”310
Moreover, even further to the left than the Commons was the Army,
seething as it was with radical sectarianism. So in the English revolution for
the first time we see that phenomenon that is so familiar to us from
contemporary democracies: the “leftists” fearing those even more radical than
themselves more than their official, “rightist” opponents. For the
Parliamentarians in 1649 were already a “rump”, purged by the army radicals;
and this rump knew that if they did not do what the army wanted, they
would be swept away…
The execution of Charles I was the first ideologically motivated and

judicially executed regicide in history. Before then, kings had been killed in
abundance, and many Popes since Gregory VII had presumed to depose
kings. But Charles I was not deposed by any Pope, nor was he the victim of a
simple coup: he was charged with treason against the State by his subjects.
Treason by a king rather than against him?! An unheard of idea! As

Christopher Hill writes: “high treason was a personal offence, a breach of
personal loyalty to the King: the idea that the King himself might be a traitor
to the realm was novel”311 - to say the least…
The king himself articulated the paradoxicality of the revolution during his
trial, declaring: “A King cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth.”
As a supposedly Shakespearean verse put it:
For to the king God hath his office lent

Of dread of justice, power and command,
Hath bid him rule and willed you to obey;
And to add ampler majesty to this,
He hath not only lent the king his figure,
His throne and sword, but given him his own name,
Calls him a god on earth. What do you, then,
Rising ‘gainst him that God himself installs
But rise ‘gainst God?312
310 Kelsey, “The Trial of Charles I: A New Perspective”, History Today, vol. 49 (1), January,
1999, p. 37.
311 Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 172.
312 Sir Thomas More, in John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare, Cambridge University
Press, 1967, p. 92.
199
The Earl of Northumberland declared concerning the passing of an
“ordinance” to try the king for treason: “Not one in twenty people in England
are yet satisfied whether the king did levy war against the Houses first, or the
Houses first against him; and besides, if the King did levy war first, we have
no law extant that can be produced to make it treason in him to do so; and, for
us, my Lords, to declare treason by an Ordinance when the matter of fact is
not yet proved, nor any law to bring to judge it by, seems very unreasonable.”
Trevor Royle comments: “Just as there had been doubts about the legality
of trying a monarch in Mary [Queen of Scots]’s case, so did the same
arguments re-emerge in the House of Lords some sixty-two years later, and
the ordinance was duly rejected. Under normal circumstances the Commons
could not have proceeded further, but the times were out of joint and a streak
of ruthlessness appeared in public affairs; on 4 January, using language that
presaged the birth of the United States of America a century later, the Rump
passed three further resolutions stating the legality of its position: ‘That the
people are, under God, the original of all just power: that the Commons of
England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the
people, have the supreme power in this nation; that whatsoever is enacted or
declared for law by the Commons in Parliament assembled, hath the force of
law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the
consent and concurrence of King or House of Peers be not had thereunto.’ The
resolution showed England what politics would be like without a king and
without the checks and balances provided by the upper house. Two days later,
on 6 January, the ordinance became law as an act of parliament and the way
was open to begin the legal proceedings against the king.”313
Charles refused to recognize the legality of the court. For “if they can do
this to me [regicide], which of you is safe?” “For if a power without law may
make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know
what subject can be sure of his life, or of anything that he calls his own.” As
for the people, “truly I desire their liberty and freedom, as much as anybody
whomsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty consists in having
government… It is not their having a share in government, sir, that is nothing
pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clear different things…”
Charles presented his case well. For, as Leanda de Lisle writes, “A brave,
resilient and principled king, Charles’s fate had all the elements of classical
Greek tragedy. His ruin followed not from wickedness, but from ordinary
human flaws and misjudgements. For all the hate that he engendered, he
inspired great loyalty and he died loved – in a way that his son, the cynical,
merry Charles II, would never be.”314 He believed that through his death – he
was beheaded in front of Westminster Hall - he went, as he put it, “from a
corruptible to an incorruptible crown”, and did so with great courage and
dignity.
313 Royle, Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1638-1660, London: Abacus, 2004, p. 491.
314 De Lisle, in History Revealed, 52, February, 2018, p. 87.
200
“He was beheaded,” writes Tombs, “by a heavily disguised executioner,
and as the axe fell, soon after two o’clock [on 30 January, 1649[, there was an
anguished groan from the watching crowd, who were hustled away by the
cavalry. His body was exposed ‘for many days to the public view’ in
Whitehall, ‘that all men might know that he was not alive’. Charles was more
successful as a martyr than a monarch. Even the parliamentarian poet
Andrew Marvell thought that ‘he nothing common did or mean.’ A collection
of his speeches and thoughts, the Eikon Basilike, published on the very day of
his execution, rapidly went through thirty-six editions – far more than any
Leveller writings…”315
Since the Levellers were a sect with whom Cromwell and other army
Independents tried to form an alliance, and formed a kind of left-wing
opposition to Cromwell within his own power-base, let us look more closely
at their thought. Led by John Lilburne, a “born again” puritan from the gentry,
the Levellers “were so called,” write Taylor Downing and Maggie Millman,
“because they insisted that since all men were equal before God so should
they be equal before the law. They were never a political party in the modern
sense, but they put forward a number of Leveller programmes. On the basis
of these programmes, the Levellers gained support and allies, particularly in
London where most of their activities were centred. They were able to raise
thousands of signatures for their petitions and thousands turned out for their
demonstrations; their support ranged from religious radicals to craftsmen,
small masters and shopkeepers. In the same tradition as many religious
radicals, they appealed for freedom of religious belief. In pamphlets and
petitions they demanded liberty of conscience, the disestablishment of the
Church and the abolition of compulsory tithes. As time went on, their outlook
became more secular with demands for legal reforms and for equal
application of the laws, the end of imprisonment for debt, the abolition of
trade monopolies and the end of press censorship. They appealed to many
people who had expected and hoped that the end of the war [the first Civil
War, ending in 1646] would herald a new order but instead were faced with
high taxes, economic depression and a Parliament which abused its powers.
“The truly revolutionary programme of the Levellers emerged from their

attack on the unrepresentativeness of England’s constitution. They looked
back to the period when the Norman conquerors had imposed their
tyrannical laws on the people of England and looked forward to a new order
in which the sovereignty of the people was central and when representative
institutions were democratically elected.”316
315 Tombs, op. cit., p. 241.

316 Downing and Millman, Civil War, London: Parkgate books, 1991, p. 109.
201
“The Levellers wanted limited government – Lilburne extolled Magna
Carta – with power decentralized and taxation low. But the army needed
central authority to be strong and taxation high – anathema to the Levellers.
For a time, soldiers and Levellers found common ground in blaming their
troubles on parliamentary corruption.”317
Another revolutionary sect was the Diggers, who acquired their name for
the following reason. “In April 1649,” write Downing and Millman, “a group
of poor men and women collected on the common on St. George’s Hill in
Surrey and began to dig up the land and form a squatter community. Led by
the charismatic Gerrard Winstanley their actions symbolized the assumption
of ownership of common land. Winstanley believed in universal salvation
and in what we would now call communist theories, that all property should
be held in common. His visions of common ownership, rather than private
property, also extended to equality between the sexes. Drawing on a theory of
natural rights, Winstanley also quoted the Bible to support his arguments.
Rejecting the traditional teachings of the Church, his was a visionary form of
spirituality.318
“The introductory letter to The New Law of Righteousness, the tract in which
Wistanley announced his communist programme, was dated four days before
the execution of Charles I. A fortnight before the digging started the Act of 17
March 1649 abolished kingship; two months later (19 May) another Act
declared England to be a commonwealth and free state. Anything seemed
possible, including the Second Coming of Jesus Christ…”319
“The Digger colony on St. George’s Hill was not unique; there were others
in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire, as
well as in other parts of the country. The Diggers or ‘True Levellers’ produced
specific demands that confiscated Church, Crown and Royalists’ lands be
turned over to the poor. Set out in The Law of Freedom, Winstanley challenged
existing property relations in the name of true Christian freedom and put
forward his hopes for a communist Utopia. Earlier he had written: ‘they had
resolved to work and eat together, making the earth a common treasury, doth
join hands with Christ to lift up the creation from bondage, and restores all
things from the curse.’ Almost inevitably, the Digger colonies failed, some
harassed by local residents, others by local justices. However, their ideas lay
in their ideas and their actions…”
Every revolution has its antinomian, anarchist element. In the English

revolution this element was represented above all by the Diggers. But there
still other anarchists, such as the Ranters…
317 Tombs, op. cit., p. 238.

318 Thus among Winstanley’s “revelations” “was one, That the earth shall be made a common
Treasury of livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons; and I had a voice within me
declare it all abroad, which I did obey…” (Watch Word to the City of London). (V.M.)
319 Hill, op. cit., pp. 273-274.
202
As Ackroyd writes, the Ranters “believed that to the pure all things were
pure; Laurence Clarkson, ‘the Captain of the Rant’, professed that ‘sin had its
conception only in imagination’. They might swear, drink, smoke and have
sex with impunity. No worldly magistrate could touch them.”320
“The Ranters pushed toleration to the limit. In no way a sect nor an

organized congregation, this loose group of individuals provoked fear and
hostility quite out of proportion to their numbers. As individuals they were
undeniably provocative; taking their belief in the individual’s personal
relationship with God to its extreme, they broke with all traditions and moral
constraints. By the standards of their day they appeared sexually and socially
immoral….
“Mainstream Protestantism was, however, to face its biggest challenge

from the Quakers. The Quakers of the seventeenth century had little in
common with the Friends of today, known for their pacifism and quietism.
The Quakers originated in the north of England and found adherents among
farmers and artisans as well as the poor. Like the Diggers, they believed in
universal salvation and the notion of Christ within the individual. Their
success in evangelising is proved by the numbers of converts: in 1652 they
numbered about 500, by 1657 there were perhaps 50,000. Their leaders were
often flamboyant and aggressive in their beliefs; Quakers also demanded
religious freedom alongside calls for social reforms. They were to be found
disrupting services in the ‘steeplehouses’, their name for parish churches.
They refused to pay tithes and challenged the authority of local magistrates.
Their belief in equality of all men in the sight of God led them to eschew
traditional forms of deference; they refused ‘hat-honour’, the removing of
hats in front of figures of authority…”321
“The Fifth Monarchists,” writes Tombs, “led by Major-Generals Overton

and Harrison but mainly drawn from the London labourers, servants and
journeymen, wanted the adoption of the Law of Moses in preparation for the
Fifth Universal Monarchy. This, foretold by the prophet Daniel, they expected
to begin in 1656, inaugurating the thousand-year rule of the saints
(themselves).”322
“The Fifth Monarchists,” writes Professor Bernard Capp, “were a sect that
emerged in the early 1650s, convinced that the Civil War was part of God’s
design to bring about a kingdom of heaven on earth. Their name came from
the Old Testament Book of Daniel, whose vision of four great beasts was
widely understood to signify four great kingdoms that would be swept away
and replaced by a golden age on Earth. This group believed that Cromwell’s
parliament had failed to advance God’s plan, and that it was therefore now
up to them to help establish the new order by overturning a worldly regime.

321 Downing and Millman, op. cit., pp. 119-121, 125.
322 Tombs, op. cit., p. 242.
203
“[Thomas] Venner’s plebeian followers represented the most militant wing
of the movement. Their unique attempt at an uprising in 1657 had been foiled
by Cromwell’s spy agency. They saw the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 as a
disastrous obstacle to Christ’s kingdom, and responded by launching a
second and bloody uprising in 1661. It created widespread alarm, and had the
effect of hardening government attitudes to all Nonconformists.
“In its aftermath, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers

were rounded up and imprisoned. Venner’s rising was therefore a factor in
prompting the harsh laws against Nonconformists, the so-called ‘Clarendon
Code’, that resulted in the imprisonment of thousands, including John
Bunyan, over the following twenty-five years.”323
“The Fifth Monarchy men and women were actively preparing the reign of
Christ and His saints that was destined to supersede the four monarchies of
the ancient world; the reign of Jesus would begin in 1694. They would clap
hands and jump around, calling out: ‘Appear! Appear! Appear!’; they would
be joined by travelling fiddlers and ballad-singers until they were in an
emotional heat.
“The Muggletonians also had apocalyptic and millenarian tendencies.

They believed that the soul died with the body and would be raised with it at
the time of judgement, and that God paid no attention to any earthly activities.
They also asserted that heaven was 6 miles above the earth and that God was
between 5 and 6 feet in height…”324
The Muggletonians were founded by the London “prophet” Ludowick

Muggleton. They “also awaited the end of the world; the last surviving
member of the sect is said to have died in 1979…”325 They had that suspicion
of the law and lawyers that ran through all the revolutionary sects. Thus
“Muggleton accepted that ‘the poor… can have no law at all, although his
cause be ever so just, no judge will hear him, nor no lawyer will give him any
counsel, except he hath monies in his hand; nor no judge will do the poor any
justice, except he go in the way of the law, and that the poor cannot do’. ‘So
that if the birthright of the poor be ever so great or just, it must be lost for
want of monies to fee lawyers’. Although ‘the government of this world hath
brought a necessity of the use of lawyers’, none of the saints should enter that
profession. Lawyers will be condemned to hell in the last judgement. The
169th Song in Divine Songs of the Muggletonians rejoiced that lawyers ‘are
damned without mercy to all eternity’ – a sentence which Milton reserved for
bishops…”326
323 Capp, “The Fifth Monarchists believed it was up to them to establish a new order”, History
Today, January, 2018, p. 9.

325
326 Hill, Liberty against the Law, London: Penguin, 1997, pp. 266-267.
204
As we can see, the main motivation of the radical sectarians was religious
utopianism and apocalypticism, reinforcing that link between religious
apocalypticism and political radicalism that we first saw among the Hussites.
They must be sharply distinguished from the Parliamentarians, who were
men of property who “associated liberty exclusively with property or
Parliament”327. For the poor, on the other hand, who joined the sects, the law
was the enemy; for “radical Puritan theology converges with politics in
opposition to law”328.
This antinomianism was the real novelty of the English revolution, the
anarchical and proletarian ground bass which threatened to drown out the
less radical, more middle-class disputes between the royalists and
parliamentarians.
However, since the proletarian and sectarian revolution was not destined
to come to pass in England, let us return to those “middle-class disputes”...
John Milton tried to justify the revolution in theological terms.329 (Engels

called him “the first defender of regicide”.) He began, in his Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates, with a firm rejection of the Divine Right of Kings. “It is lawful
and hath been held so through all ages for anyone who has the power to call
to account a Tyrant or wicked King, and after due conviction to depose and
put him to death.” Charles I was to be identified with the Antichrist, and in
overthrowing him the English people had chosen God as their King.
Moreover, it was now the duty of the English to spread their revolution
overseas (Cromwell had begun the process in Scotland and Ireland in 1649-
51), for the saints in England had been “the first to overcome those European
kings which receive their power not from God but from the Beast”.330
“No man who knows aught,” wrote Milton, “can be so stupid as to deny
that all men naturally were born free”. Kings and magistrates are but
“deputies and commissioners of the people”. “To take away from the people
the right of choosing government takes away all liberty”. Milton attributed
the dominance of bishops and kings to the Norman Conquest, and he
bewailed men’s readiness “with the fair words and promises of an old
exasperated foe… to be stroked and tamed again into the wonted and well-
pleasing state of their true Norman villeinage.”331
327 Hill, Liberty against the Law, p. 325.

328 Hill, Liberty against the Law, p. 216.
329 For, as Sir Edmund Leach writes, “at different times, in different places, Emperor and
Anarchist alike may find it convenient to appeal to Holy Writ” (“Melchisedech and the
Emperor: Icons of Subversion and Orthodoxy”, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Society,
1972, p. 6).
330 Milton, in Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 167.
331 Milton, in Hill, op. cit., pp. 100, 101, 169.
205
Had the Norman conquerors finally been conquered in the revolution? By
no means: absolutism had indeed been introduced into England by the
Normans, but Normans and Saxons had long since been merged into a single
nation of the English, and the revolution in no way restored the faith and
customs of Anglo-Saxon England. This historical argument was simply a
cloak for that root cause of all revolutions – pride, the pride that Milton
himself had so convincingly portrayed in Satan in Paradise Lost (262-263):
To reign is worth ambition though in hell:

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven…
And just as Satan is no democrat, so the English revolutionaries – like their

followers Robespierre in 1793 or Lenin in 1917 – had no intention of giving
the rule to the demos. Of course, they thought, the “inconstant, irrational and
image-doting rabble”, could not have the rule. The better part – i.e. the gentry,
people like Milton himself, like Cromwell – must act on their behalf.
But the problem was: how could the better part stop the worser part from
taking over? For, as history was to show in 1789 and again in 1917, the
revolution never stops half way: once legitimacy has been taken from the
King by the Lords, it does not remain with them, but has to pass on to the
Commons, and from the Commons to the people. And to the lowest of the
people at that; for, as Denzill Holles, once a leading opponent of the king,
wrote already in 1649: “The meanest of men, the basest and vilest of the
nation, the lowest of the people have got power into their hands; trampled
upon the crown; baffled and misused the Parliament; violated the laws;
destroyed or suppressed the nobility and gentry of the kingdom…”332
And then there was a further problem, one raised by Filmer in his
argument against Milton, that even if we accept that “the sounder, the better
and the uprighter part have the power of the people… how shall we know, or
who shall judge, who they can be?” But Milton brushed this problem aside…
This was the problem that would haunt all those, in every succeeding
generation, who rejected hereditary monarchy: if not the king, then who will
rule, and how can we be sure that they really are “the better and the uprighter
part”?... 333
Indeed, is it not much more likely that a man who comes to power by
violence and intrigue is likely to be much worse – and more tyrannical – that
the one who receives the throne, without violence, but by hereditary right,
and having been trained for the role throughout his preceding life?
332 Holles, in Almond, op. cit., p. 51.

333 Quoted in Hill, op. cit., p. 169.
206
26. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (5) CROMWELL’S
PROTECTORATE
The problems facing Cromwell after he had killed the king were ironically
very similar to those that had faced King Charles: rebellion from without
(Ireland and Scotland) and within. Both the Irish and the Scots proclaimed
Charles II as their king. For his father had been king of three kingdoms, not
only of England, but also of Ireland and Scotland…
Cromwell dealt with the external threat efficiently if cruelly. Thus his
slaughter of 3500 soldier, clergy and civilians in Drogheda in Ireland is
remembered by Irish Catholics to this day. “Ireland was by far the worst
sufferer in the British civil wars, its population falling between 1649 and 1653
by perhaps 20 per cent – many times the loss in England.”334
As for the Scots, “Throughout the 1640s,” writes John Morrill, “the Scots
had been calling for a union [with the English] because they believed that
there could be no future for Scotland except in a defined federal relationship.
The English parliament resisted for two main reasons. It was determined not
to let Scotland impose strict separation of church and state and clerical
supremacy. And it did not wish to allow the Scottish parliament to have any
kind of veto over policies in England.
“In return for Scottish support during the wars, parliament had promised
federal union and a united church. But when parliament abolished the
monarchy in England and Ireland after the execution of Charles I in 1649, it
told the Scots they were an independent nation free to go their own way. The
Scots refused to accept this and voted to fight to install Charles II as king of
England, Scotland and Ireland. They recalled him from Holland in June, 1650,
and then crowned him at Scone in January, 1651. He now led an army of
12,000 Scots into England, which was defeated by Cromwell at Worcester [in
1651].
The English, writes Morrill, now “had to make a choice: they could either
withdraw or they could occupy Scotland to prevent constant attacks on
England. Eventually, they decided to quell the threat by uniting England and
Scotland. It was a reluctant conquest. There may have been no great
enthusiasm for union; but it was deemed necessary.”335 Scotland now came
under the rule of the Englishman General Monck. Ironically in view of the
major role the Scottish covenanters played in starting the Civil War that
deposed Charles I, it was Monck, the governor of Scotland, who, after the
death of Cromwell in 1658-59, played the major role in negotiating the
accession of Charles II to the throne of England…
334Tombs, op. cit., p. 244.

335
Morrill, in “The Great Misconceptions of the Civil War”, BBC History Magazine, May, 2015,
p. 39.
207
But it was the English rebels that really troubled Cromwell…
He had been a libertarian by comparison with the Presbyterian mainstream.

But this “liberty” seemed to be getting out of hand when the Koran rolled off
the printing presses in May, 1649… Moreover, “political, as well as religious
radicals, were in the ascendant. John Lilburne, one of the levellers who had
helped to promote agitation in the New Model Army, had turned against the
new administration. In ‘England’s New Chains Discovered’ he lambasted
Cromwell and the army grandees for dishonesty and hypocrisy; he accused
them of being ‘mere politicians’ who wished to aggrandize themselves while
they pretended ‘a waiting upon providence, that under the colour of religion
they might deceive the more securely’. A pamphlet, ‘The Hunting of the
Foxes’, complained that ‘you shall scarce speak to Cromwell but he will lay
his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record. He will weep,
howl and repent, even while he does smite you under the fifth rib.’
“Cromwell was incensed at the pamphlet and was overheard saying at a

meeting of the council of state, ‘I tell you, sir, you have no other way to deal
with these men but to break them in pieces… if you do not break them, they
will break you.’ By the end of March Lilburne and his senior colleagues had
been placed in the Tower on the charge of treason. The levellers, however,
were popular among Londoners for speaking home truths about the
condition of the country. When thousands of women flocked to Westminster
Hall to protest against Lilburne’s imprisonment the soldiers told them to ‘go
home and wash your dishes’; whereupon they replied that ‘we have neither
dishes nor meat left’. When in May a group of soldiers rose in mutiny for the
cause of Lilburne, Cromwell and Fairfax suppressed them; three of their
officers were shot. As Cromwell said on another occasion, ‘Be not offended at
the manner of God’s working; perhaps no other way was left.’
“Assaults also came from the opposite side with royalist pamphlets and
newsletters mourning ‘the bloody murder and heavy loss of our gracious king’
and proclaiming that ‘the king-choppers are as active in mischief as such
thieves and murderers need to be’. The authorities were now awake to the
mischief of free speech, and in the summer of the year the Rump Parliament
passed a Treason Act that declared it high treason to state that the
‘government is tyrannical, usurped or unlawful, or that the Commons in
parliament assembled are not the supreme authority of this nation’. There
was to be no egalitarian or libertarian revolution. At the same time the council
of state prepared ‘An Act against Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and
Pamphlets’ that was designed to prohibit any pamphlets, papers or books
issued by ‘the malignant party’. A resolution was also passed by the Rump
that any preacher who mentioned Charles Stuart or his son would be deemed
a ‘delinquent’.”336
208
*
The problem for Cromwell after returning from his triumphant wars in
Scotland and Ireland in 1651 was not only that not everyone obeyed the
Rump Parliament, but also that the Rump, in spite of its purged condition,
was “in no way inclined to obey his orders with the same promptness as the
soldiers of the New Model Army. Those parliamentarians who were members
of the council of state were in most respects still conscientious and diligent,
yet others were not so easily inspired by Cromwell’s zeal or vision.
“Cromwell had argued for an immediate dissolution of parliament,

making way for a fresh legislature that might deal with the problems
attendant upon victory [over Scotland and Ireland]. Yet the members
prevaricated and debated, finally agreeing to dissolve their assembly at a date
not later than November 1654. They gave themselves another three years of
procrastination. The army was by now thoroughly disillusioned with those
members who seemed intent upon thwarting or delaying necessary
legislation. The most committed soldiers believed them to be time-servers or
worse, uninterested in the cause of ‘the people of God’.
“In truth the Rump was essentially a conservative body, while the army
inherently favoured radical solutions; there was bound to be conflict between
them. Yet Cromwell himself was not so certain of his course; he wished for
godly reformation of the commonwealth but he also felt obliged, at this stage,
to proceed by constitutional methods. He did not want to impose what was
known as a ‘sword government’. Another possibility was also full of peril. In
the current state of opinion it was possible that, unless fresh elections were
carefully managed, a royalist majority might be returned; this could not be
permitted.”337
Cromwell was now faced with the same dilemma that faces all leaders who
come to power on the back of the revolution: that while they seize power by
destroying the previously legitimate power, they eventually need to recreate
some kind of legitimacy in order to retain power. Might had triumphed over
right; but now might wanted to be perceived as not only mighty, but also as
right. But that was impossible; for his government was indeed a “sword
government”, and, as the Lord said (Cromwell must have known this), “all
who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matthew 26.52).
Earlier, just after his victory over the King at Naseby in 1645, he had
declared: “God hath put the sword in the Parliament’s hands, - for the terror
of evil-doers, and the praise of them that do well. If any plead exemption
from that, - he knows not the Gospel”. But when anarchy threatened, and
Parliament failed him, Cromwell found an exemption to the Gospel:
“Necessity hath no law,” he said to the dismissed representatives of the
337
209
people. And as he gazed on King Charles’s body shortly after his execution he
murmured: ‘Cruel necessity”…
Napoleon adopted a similar rationale when he dismissed the Directory and

the elected deputies in 1799. 338 As did Lenin when he dismissed the
Constituent Assembly in 1918. “Necessity” in one age becomes the
“revolutionary morality” of the next – that is, the suspension of all morality.
And so on April 20, 1653 “Cromwell came into the chamber of the House
of Commons, dressed in plain black, and took his seat; he had left a file of
musketeers at the door of the chamber and in the lobby. He took off his hat
and rose to his feet. He first commended the Commons for their early efforts
at reform but then reproached them for their subsequent delays and
obfuscations; he roamed down the middle of the chamber and signalled
various individual members as ‘whoremaster’ and ‘drunkard’ and ‘juggler’.
He declared more than once that ‘it is you that have forced me to do this, for I
have sought the Lord night and day that he would rather slay me than put me
upon the doing of this work’. He spoke, according to one observer, ‘with so
much passion and discomposure of mind as if he had been distracted’; he
shouted, and kicked the floor with his foot.
“In conclusion he called out, ‘You are no parliament. I will put an end to
your sitting.’ He then called for the musketeers and pointed to the
parliamentary mace lying on the table. ‘What shall be done with this bauble?
Here. Take it away.’ He said later that he had not planned or premeditated his
intervention and that ‘the spirit was so upon him, that he was overruled by it;
and he consulted not with flesh and blood at all’. This is perhaps too
convenient an explanation to be altogether true. He had dissolved a
parliament that, in one form or another, had endured for almost thirteen years.
The Long Parliament, of which the Rump was the final appendage, had
witnessed Charles I’s attempt to seize five of its members and then the whole
course of the civil wars; it had seen some of its members purged and driven
away. It was not a ruin, but a ruin of that ruin. It ended in ignominy,
unwanted and unlamented. Cromwell remarked later that, at its dissolution,
not even a dog barked. On the following day a large placard was placed upon
the door of the chamber. ‘This House to be let, unfurnished.’”339
Such was the inglorious, indeed farcical end of the first parliament that
wielded supreme power in England – only four years after it had executed the
previous supreme ruler, King Charles I.
338 As Guizot wrote, Cromwell “was successively a Danton and a Buonaparte” (The History of
Civilization in Europe, p. 221).

210
In spite of speculation about the replacement of Parliament by one-man
rule of some kind, Cromwell was not yet ready for such a drastic step, which
would have alienated many of his fellow Army officers. So a new Parliament,
selected by Cromwell and his Council of Officers, came into being.
“It was nicknamed ‘Barebone’s Parliament’ after Praise-God Barebone (or

Barbon), one of its members. Optimists hoped that it would be the prelude to
the Second Coming. Cromwell expected the Assembly to ‘usher in things God
hath promised’. It could hardly fail to disappoint. In fact, it was not wholly
different from earlier parliaments, being largely made up of gentry, JPs and
lawyers.”340.
Barebones failed. “The members of the new assembly were zealous and
busy, but they were perhaps not worldly enough to judge the consequences of
their decisions. They determined to abolish the court of chancery, for example
and drastically to simplify the law; some in fact demanded the abolition of the
common law, to be substituted by the code of Moses. They voted to abolish
tithes, a proposal that might have eventually led to the disestablishment of
the Church and the violation of all rights of property. The alarm and horror of
the nation soon became manifest, and Cromwell realized that it was time to
end an experiment that had lasted for just five months. He is reported to have
said that he was more troubled now by fools than knaves. A parliament of
saints had gone to excess…”341
“The conservatives in 1653 were upset by the radicals’ reforming

programme. They felt, or claimed to feel, that property was in danger. The
Presbyterians, a royalist correspondent stated, were alienated by Barebone’s
attack on tithes, which could lead to an attack on all property [i.e. not just that
of the Church], ‘especially since elected Parliaments, the bulwark of property,
is taken away’. The French ambassador reported in November moves for a
rapprochement between Presbyterians and Independents against their radical
enemies and to re-assert the old forms of government.
“Cromwell came to think of the Barebones Parliament as ‘a story of my

own weakness and folly’. Though he spoke in favour of law reform in his
initial speech to the assembly, he was not prepared for the abolition of
Chancery or of ecclesiastical patronage and tithes. Since Barebones proposed
at the same time that higher Army officers should serve for a whole year
without pay, most of the latter were easily persuaded that the dangerous
assembly must be got rid of. On 12 December the conservatives got up early,
and after speeches denouncing the Parliament for ‘endeavouring to take away
their properties by taking away the law, to overthrow the ministry by taking
away tithes and settling nothing in their rooms’, they voted an end to their
340 Tombs, op. cit., p. 247. “Sixty of the members (nearly half) either had been or were to be
members of elected Parliaments, and most of them were of respectable standing” (Hill, God’s
Englishman, p. 134).
211
meeting. Then they marched off to the Lord General, to whom they
surrendered the authority they had received from him five months before.
“As usual, we do not know whether Cromwell planned the coup: he

denied it. But he was certainly prepared to accept and act upon it. Within
three days a new constitution, the Instrument of Government, had been
accepted: it had been under discussion by the officers for a month or so. On
the next day, 16 December, Oliver Cromwell was proclaimed Lord Protector.
In a public ceremony he took an oath to rule ‘upon such a basis and
foundation as by the blessing of God might be lasting, secure property, and
answer those great ends of religion and liberty so long contended for’. In his
speech after taking the oath Oliver reiterated his determination so to govern
that ‘the gospel might flourish in its full splendour and purity, and the people
enjoy their just rights and prosperity’. ‘Ministry and property were like to be
destroyed,’ Oliver reminded his officers in February 1657. ‘Who would have
said anything was their own if they had gone on?’”342
What irony! Barely five years after the king had been executed for his
supposed threat to the rights and the property of Englishmen, one-man-rule
had been restored to protect the same rights and property – this time from the
extreme left (the Levellers in the army).
`’To the radicals Oliver was now the finally lost leader. Liliburne, Wildman,
Sexby and other Levellers turned to negotiation with the royalists rather than
accept the new regime. Baptists like Henry Jessey and John Rogers, George
Fox and the Quakers, never forgave Cromwell for failing to carry out his
alleged promises to abolish tithes. The Fifth Monarchist Vavasor Powell
greeted the Protectorate by asking his congregation whether the Lord would
have ‘Oliver Cromwell or Jesus Christ to reign over us?’ A few months earlier
the two had not seemed to be rivals…”343
Cromwell “was accused of sacrificing the public good to ambition and was
denounced as a ‘dissembling perjured villain’ Biblical insults were hurled t
him as the ‘Old Dragon’, the ‘Little Horn’, the ‘Man of Sin’, and the ‘Vile
Person’ of Daniel 11.21. As the pulpit set up by Blackfriars one preacher,
Christopher Feake, proclaimed that ‘he has deceived the Lord’s people’, he
added that ‘he will not reign long, he will end worse than the last Protector
did, that crooked tyrant Richard [III]. Tell him I said it.’ Feake was brought
before the council and placed in custody. The governor of Chester Castle,
Robert Duckenfield, put it a little more delicately when he wrote to Cromwell
that ‘I believe the root and tree of piety is alive in your lordship, though the
leaves thereof, through abundance of temptations and flatteries, seem to me
to be withered much of late’.
342 Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 137-138.

343
Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 139, 140.
212
“In a sense the revolution was now over, with all attempts at radical
reform at an end. Cromwell instituted a reign of quiet in which men of
property might feel safe; he inaugurated a gentry republic…”344
For all his authoritarian tendencies, and despite being now “Lord
Protector”, Cromwell was not yet ready to dispense with Parliament entirely;
and the Instrument of Government retained a unicameral Parliament. The
relationship was uneasy. Thus when he convened a new Parliament in
September, 1654, “Cromwell addressed the new assembly in the Painted
Chamber of Westminster Palace; he sat in the chair of state while the members
were seated on benches ranged against the walls. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told them,
‘you are met here on the greatest occasion that, I believe, England ever saw.’
He then proceeded to speak for three hours on the various manifestations of
God’s providence in an oration that veered from messianic enthusiasm to
scriptural exposition. He had called parliament, but ‘my calling be from God’.
He was thus reiterating, in his own fashion, the divine right of kings. He was
above parliament. Yet he came to them not as a master but as a fellow servant.
Now was a time for ‘healing and settling’.
“Yet the new parliament was by no means a compliant body. For some
days its members had debated, without reaching any conclusion, whether
they should give the protectorate their support. On 12 September they found
the doors of their chamber closed against them, and they were asked once
more to assemble in the Painted Chamber where the Protector wished to
address them. He chided them for neglecting the interest of the state, ‘so little
valued and much slighted’, and he would not allow them to proceed any
further unless and until they had signed an oath to agree to ‘the form of
government now settled’. All members had to accept the condition that ‘the
persons elected shall not have power to alter the government as it is hereby
settled in one single person and a Parliament’. ‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘I am
sorry, and I could be sorry to the death that there is cause for this. But there is
cause…’
“Some member protested and refused to sign, but the majority of them
either agreed or at least submitted. Cromwell still did not attempt to guide
the debates, but he became increasingly alarmed at their nature. He is
reported to have said in this period that he ‘would rather keep sheep under a
hedge than have to do with the government of men’. Sheep were at least
obedient. The members voted to restrict the power of the Protector to veto
legislation; they also decided that their decisions were more authoritative
than those of the council of state. They believed, in other words, that
parliament should still be paramount in the nation. That was not necessarily
Cromwell’s view. From day to day they debated every clause of the
‘Instrument of Government’, with the evident wish to replace it with a
213
constitution of their own. On 3 January 1655 they voted to reaffirm the limits
to religious toleration; two days later they decided to reduce army pay, thus
striking at Cromwell’s natural constituency. On 20 January they began to
discuss the formation of a militia under parliamentary control.
“Two days later, Cromwell called a halt. He lambasted them for wasting
time in frivolous and unnecessary discourse when they should have been
considering practical measures for the general reformation of the nation. He
told them that ‘I do not know what you have been doing. I do not know
whether you have been alive or dead.’ He considered that it was not fit for the
common welfare and the public good to allow them to continue; and so,
farewell. The first protectorate parliament was dissolved. The larger problem,
however, was not addressed. Could a representative parliament eve co-exist
with what was essentially a military dictatorship.”345
Indeed, that was precisely what it was: a military dictatorship. Cromwell

and his Army had simply taken the place of King Charles and his court; and
his arguments with Parliament were more or less the same as those of the
king with Parliament – except that Cromwell, unlike Charles, usually got his
way. Moreover, his power was much wider and more obtrusive than the
king’s, with Major-Generals ruling the provinces instead of the “natural
leaders” of the country as the parliamentarians saw it.
But the people were unhappy, not least with the Major-Generals. So
Cromwell decided quietly to drop them and proceed to the last act of what
was now becoming a farce, if not a tragedy. Early in 1657 a member of
Parliament put forward a motion that Cromwell should “take upon him the
government according to the ancient constitution” – in other words, become
king. After a long debate, at the end of March the members formally offered
him the crown. Cromwell dithered for a long time. Finally, the opposition of
his army colleagues forced him to give up the idea.
“The only way forward was by means of compromise. Even if Cromwell

would not be king, he could accept the other constitutional measures
recommended by parliament; in particular it seemed just, and necessary, to
re-establish the House of Lords as a check upon the legislature. On 25 May the
‘humble petition’ was presented again with Cromwell named as chief
magistrate and Lord Protector, an appointment which he accepted as ‘one of
the greatest tasks that ever was laid upon the back of a human creature’. On
26 June 1657, Oliver Cromwell was draped in purple and in ermine for the
ceremony of installation in Westminster Hall; upon the table before his throne
rested the sword of state and a sceptre of solid gold. The blast of trumpets
announced his reign. His office was not declared to be hereditary but he had
been given the power to name his successor; it was generally believed that
345
214
this would be one of his sons. So began the second protectorate, which was
now a restored monarchy in all but name.”346
The king is dead (Charles)! Long live the king (Oliver)!
And yet Cromwell died very soon, in 1658, and it was a third king, Charles
II, that finally emerged triumphant. “Twenty months after Oliver Cromwell’s
death Charles II sat once more on his father’s throne. The intervening period
had shown that no settlement was possible until the Army was disbanded.
Richard Cromwell lacked the prestige with the soldiers necessary if he was to
prolong his father’s balancing trick; but after his fall no Army leader proved
capable of restoring the old radical alliance, and nothing but social revolution
could have thwarted the ‘natural rulers’’ determination to get rid of military
rule. Taxes could be collected only by force: the men of property refused to
advance money to any government they did not control. The foreign situation
helped to make Charles’s restoration technically unconditional: there was a
general fear that the peace of November 1659 which ended 24 years of war
between France and Spain would be followed by an alliance of the two
countries to restore the Stuarts…”347
Frederic Harrison, a nineteenth-century admirer of Cromwell, exaggerates

only a little when he writes: “Apart from its dictatorial character, the
Protector’s government was efficient, just, moderate, and wise. Opposed as he
was by lawyers, he made some of the best judges England ever had. Justice
and law opened a new era. The services were raised to their highest efficiency.
Trade and commerce revived under his fostering care. Education was
reorganised; the Universities reformed; Durham founded. It is an opponent
who says: ‘All England over, these were Halcyon days.’ Men of learning of all
opinions were encouraged and befriended. ‘If there was a man in England,’
says Neal, ‘who excelled in any faculty or science, the Protector would find
him out, and reward him according to his merit.’ It was the Protector’s
brother-in-law, Warden of Wadham College, who there gathered together the
group which ultimately founded the Royal Society.
“Noble were the efforts of the Protector to impress his own spirit of
toleration {!] on the intolerance of his age; and stoutly he contended with
Parliaments and Council for Quakers, Jews, Anabaptists, Socinians, and even
crazy blasphemers. He effectively protected the Quakers; he admitted the
Jews after an expulsion of three [nearer four] centuries; and he satisfied [the
French Cardinal] Mazarin that he had given to Catholics all the protection
that he dared. In his bearing towards his personal opponents, he was a model
of magnanimity and self-control. Inexorable where public duty required
346
347 Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 245.
215
punishment, neither desertion, treachery, obloquy, nor ingratitude ever could
stir him to vindictive measures…”348
And yet, of course, this is only half the story – and not the most important
half. For on the one hand, it is true, his firm but (generally) just rule as
protector restored order to his country, held it back from a truly radical
revolution, and laid the foundations for its future greatness. But on the other,
he gave the revolution, with all its enormously destructive, truly apocalyptic
consequences, its decisive break-through in Europe and the world…
For we must remember that the Antichrist himself, according to tradition,

will come at a time of chaos and bring much-needed peace and prosperity
before introducing the most thoroughly anti-christian government in history.
In this light, Cromwell must be recognized to be a forerunner of the Antichrist.
For the good he did was essentially secular in nature and ultimately
constituted a subtle and profound spiritual deception. He introduced much-
needed peace and prosperity (if you ignore the losses of the Civil War and
unless you were a Catholic Irishman). But he also broke the back of Old
England; after the period of his reign there was no going back to the concepts
of true faith, Christian monarchy and faithfulness to tradition that, however
perverted and corrupted, still linked England to its Orthodox past.
Cromwell is one of the most important and contradictory figures of history.

As Hill writes, “for good and for evil, Oliver Cromwell presided over the
great decisions which determined the future course of English and world
history. [The battles of] Marston Moor, Naseby, Preston, Worcester – and
regicide – ensured that England was to be ruled by Parliaments and not by
absolute kings: and this remains true despite the Protector’s personal failure
to get on with his Parliaments. Cromwell foreshadows the great commoners
who were to rise by merit to rule England in the eighteenth century. The man
who in the 1630s fought the Huntingdon oligarchy and the government of
Charles which backed it up ultimately made England safe for its ‘natural
rulers’, despite his own unsuccessful attempt to coerce them through the
Major-Generals. The man whose first Parliamentary speech was against the
‘popery’ of the Arminian bishops and their protégés, who collaborated with
Londoners to get evangelical preaching in his locality (and who besought
Scottish Presbyterians ‘in the bowels of Christ’ to think it possible they might
be mistaken) ensured that England should never again be ruled by high-
flying bishops or persecuting presbyteries, that it should be a relatively
tolerant country, and that the ‘natural rulers’ should control the church both
centrally and locally. The man who almost emigrated to New England in
despair of Old England lived to set his country on the path of empire, of
economic aggression, of naval war. He ruthlessly broke the resistance not
only of the backward-looking royalists but also of those radicals whose
programme for extending the franchise would have ended the exclusive
political sway of Cromwell’s class, whose agrarian programme would have
348 Harrison, Oliver Cromwell, 1892, pp. 216-217.
216
undermined that class’s economic power, and whose religious programme
would have left no national church to control – even though half at least of
Oliver sympathized with the last demand. The dreams of a Milton, a
Winstanley, a George Fox, a Bunyan, were not realized, nor indeed were
those of Oliver himself: ‘Would that we were all saints’. The sons of Zeruiah
proved too strong for the ideals which had animated the New Model Army. If
Cromwell had not shot down the Levellers, someone else would no doubt
have done it. But in fact it was Oliver who did: it is part of his historical
achievement.
“The British Empire, the colonial wars which built it up, the slave trade
based on Oliver’s conquest of Jamaica, the plunder of India resulting from his
restitution and backing of the East India Company, the exploitation of Ireland;
a free market, free from government interference and from government
protection of the poor; Parliamentary government, the local supremacy of JPs,
the Union of England and Scotland; religious toleration, the nonconformist
conscience, relative freedom of the press, an attitude favourable to science; a
country of landlords, capitalist farmers and agricultural labourers, the only
country in Europe with no peasantry: none of these would have come about
in quite the same way without the English Revolution, without Oliver
Cromwell.
“If we see this revolution as a turning point in English history comparable

with the French and Russian Revolutions in the history of their countries, then
we can agree with those historians who see Cromwell in his Revolution
combining the roles of Robespierre and Napoleon, or Lenin and Stalin, in
theirs. Oliver was no conscious revolutionary like Robespierre or Lenin: the
achievements of the English Revolution were not the result of his deliberate
design. But it would not have astonished Oliver or his contemporaries to be
told that the consequences of men’s actions were not always those which the
protagonists intended…”349
Even such a wise and Orthodox writer as Metropolitan Anastasy

(Gribanovsky) of New York admits that he did much to restrain the evil he
had himself unleashed: “[The English revolution] bore within itself as an
embryo all the typically destructive traits of subsequent revolutions; but the
religious sources of this movement, the iron hand of Oliver Cromwell, and the
immemorial good sense of the English people, restrained this stormy element,
preventing it from achieving its full growth. Thenceforth, however, the social
spirit of Europe has been infected with the bacterium of revolution…”350
Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 253-254.

349
Metropolitan Anastasy, “The Dark Visage of Revolution”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVII, N 5,
350
September-October, 1996, p. 10.
217
27. THE RETURN OF THE JEWS TO ENGLAND
The Jews have influenced modern Europe through three major channels:
economic, religious and political… Economically, the Jews played a decisive
part in the development of capitalism in Europe, and in the breaking down of
the Christian beliefs, especially concerning usury, that hindered its full
emergence. In the religious sphere, Cabbalistic Judaism greatly influenced a
whole series of heretical sects and magical practices that flooded Western
Europe from the time of the Templars. From the beginning of the eighteenth
century these sects and practices began to converge into the movement
known as Freemasonry. Politically, from the second half of the eighteenth
century the Jews began to harness the economic power they wielded through
the banks, and the religious power they wielded through the masonic lodges,
to assist that vast phenomenon which we shall simply call the Revolution.
Capitalism on the grand scale is the product of avarice, the love of money,
which St. Paul called “the root of all kinds of evil” (I Timothy 6.10). Of course,
avarice was not invented by the Jews or the modern capitalists, but has been a
trait of fallen man since the beginning. However, in most historical societies,
while many men might dream of great wealth, only very few could have a
realistic hope of acquiring it. Or rather, those few who had great wealth did
not acquire it so much as inherit it. For they were the sons of the great
landowning aristocratic families. Most ordinary people, on the other hand,
were born as peasants. A peasant might dream of wealth, but his bondage to
his landowning master and the necessity of spending all his time tilling the
soil and bringing in the harvest, condemned his dreams to remain no more
than that - dreams. This was especially the case in the feudal society of the
medieval West – and indeed in almost all societies before the sixteenth
century, insofar as almost all societies were based on a rural economy.
However, the growth of towns in the Renaissance, and especially the growth
of capitalism and banking, made a certain measure of wealth a real possibility
for a rapidly increasing proportion of the population. And it was the Jews
who very quickly came to dominate the burgeoning capitalism of the West.
The reason for this was that the Talmud has a specific economic doctrine that
favours the most ruthless kind of capitalist exploitation.
According to Oleg Platonov, the Talmud “teaches the Jew to consider the
property of all non-Jews as ‘gefker’, which means free, belonging to no one.
‘The property of all non-Jews has the same significance as if it had been found
in the desert: it belongs to the first who seizes it’. In the Talmud there is a
decree according to which open theft and stealing are forbidden, but anything
can be acquired by deceit or cunning…
“From this it follows that all the resources and wealth of the non-Jews must
belong to representatives of the ‘chosen people’. ‘According to the Talmud,’
wrote the Russian historian S.S. Gromeka, “God gave all the peoples into the
hands of the Jews” (Baba-Katta, 38); “the whole of Israel are children of kings;
those who offend a Jew offend God himself” (Sikhab 67, 1) and “are subject to
218
execution, as for lèse-majesté” (Sanhedrin 58, 2); pious people of other nations,
who are counted worthy of participating in the kingdom of the Messiah, will
take the role of slaves to the Jews’ (Sanhedrin 91, 21, 1051). From this point of
view, … all the property in the world belongs to the Jews, and the Christians
who possess it are only temporary, ‘unlawful’ possessors, usurpers, and this
property will be confiscated by the Jews from them sooner or later. When the
Jews are exalted above all the other peoples, God will hand over all the
nations to the Jews for final extermination.’
“The historian of Judaism I. Lyutostansky cites examples from the ancient

editions of the Talmud, which teaches the Jews that it is pleasing to God that
they appropriate the property of the goyim. In particular, he expounds the
teaching of Samuel that deceiving a goy is not a sin…
“Rabbi Moses said: ‘If a goy makes a mistake in counting, then the Jew,
noticing this, must say that he knows nothing about it.’ Rabbi Brentz says: ‘If
some Jews, after exhausting themselves by running around all week to
deceive Christians in various places, come together at the Sabbath and boast
of their deceptions to each other, they say: “We must take the hearts out of the
goyim and kill even the best of them.” – of course, if they succeed in doing
this.’ Rabbi Moses teaches: ‘Jews sin when they return lost things to apostates
and pagans, or anyone who doesn’t reverence the Sabbath.’…
“To attain the final goal laid down in the Talmud for Jews – to become
masters of the property of the goyim – one of the best means, in the opinion of
the rabbis, is usury. According to the Talmud, ‘God ordered that money be
lent to the goyim, but only on interest; consequently, instead of helping them
in this way, we must harm them, even if they can be useful for us.’ The tract
Baba Metsiya insists on the necessity of lending money on interest and
advises Jews to teach their children to lend money on interest, ‘so that they
can from childhood taste the sweetness of usury and learn to use it in good
time.’”351
Now the Old Testament forbids the lending of money for interest to
brothers, but allows it to strangers (Exodus 22.25; Leviticus 25.36;
Deuteronomy 23.24). This provided the Jews’ practice of usury with a certain
justification according to the letter of the law. However, as the above
quotations make clear, the Talmud exploited the letter of the law to make it a
justification for outright exploitation of the Christians and Muslims.
Johnson, while admitting that some Talmudic texts encouraged

exploitation of Gentiles, nevertheless argues that the Jews had no choice: “A
midrash on the Deuteronomy text [about usury], probably written by the
nationalistic Rabbi Akiva, seemed to say that Jews were obliged to charge
interest to foreigners. The fourteenth-century French Jew Levi ben Gershom
agreed: it was a positive commandment to burden the gentile with interest
351
Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow, pp. 144-145, 147.
219
‘because one should not benefit an idolater… and cause him as much damage
as possible without deviating from righteousness’; others took this line. But
the most common justification was economic necessity:
“’If we nowadays allow interest to be taken from non-Jews it is because

there is no end of the yoke and the burden kings and ministers impose upon
us, and everything we take is the minimum for our subsistence; and anyhow
we are condemned to live in the midst of the nations and cannot earn our
living in any other manner except by money dealings with them; therefore the
taking of interest is not to be prohibited.’
“This was the most dangerous argument of all because financial

oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked,
and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to gentiles, the
unpopularity – and so, of course, the pressure – would increase. Thus the
Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the
Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those
who practised it were excommunicated. But the Christians also imposed the
harshest financial burdens on the Jews. The Jews reacted by engaging in the
one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and
so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending. Rabbi Joseph
Colon, who knew both France and Italy in the second half of the fifteenth
century, wrote that the Jews of both countries hardly engaged in any other
profession..."352
Whichever was the original cause – the Talmud’s encouragement of usury,

or the Christians’ financial restrictions on the Jews – the fact was that it was
through usury that the Jews came to dominate the Christians economically.
“Therefore,” writes Platonov, “already in the Middle Ages the Jews, using the
Christians’ prejudice against profit, the amassing of wealth and usury, seized
many of the most important positions in the trade and industry of Europe.
Practising trade and usury and exploiting the simple people, they amassed
huge wealth, which allowed them to become the richest stratum of medieval
society. The main object of the trade of Jewish merchants was slave-trading.
Slaves were acquired mainly in the Slavic lands 353 , whence they were
exported to Spain and the countries of the East. On the borders between the
Germanic and Slavic lands, in Meysen, Magdeburg and Prague, Jewish
settlements were formed, which were constantly occupied in the slave trade.
In Spain Jewish merchants organized hunts for Andalusian girls, selling them
into slavery into the harems of the East. The slave markets of the Crimea were
served, as a rule, by Jews. With the opening of America and the penetration
into the depths of Africa it was precisely the Jews who became suppliers of
black slaves to the New World.
352
Johnson, History of the Jews, p. 174.
353
Hence the English word “slave”, and the French “esclave”, come from “Slav”. (V.M.)
220
“From commercial operations, the Jews passed to financial ones, to
mortgages and usury, often all of these at once. Already from the 15th century
very large Jewish fortunes were being formed. We can judge how big their
resources were from the fact that in Spain merchants kept almost a whole
army of mercenaries who protected their dubious operations – 25,000
horsemen and 20,000 infantry.
“’The great universal historical event,’ wrote the Jewish historian V.

Zombardt, author of the book The Jews and Economic Life, ‘was the expulsion of
the Jews from Spain and Portugal (1492 and 1497). It must not be forgotten
that on the very day that Columbus sailed from Palos to discover America
(August 3, 1492), 300,000 Jews were expelled to Navarra, France, Portugal and
the East354, and that in the years in which Vasco da Gama was discovering the
sea route to East India, the Jews were also being expelled from other parts of
the Pyrenean peninsula.’ According to Zombardt’s calculations, already in the
15th century the Jews constituted one third of the numbers of the world’s
bourgeoisie and capitalists.
“In the 16th to 18th centuries the centre of Jewish economics became
Amsterdam, which the Jews called ‘the new, great Jerusalem’… In Holland,
the Jews became key figures in government finance. The significance of the
Jewish financial world in this country went beyond its borders, for during the
17th and 18th centuries it was the main reservoir out of which all monarchs
drew when they needed money…”355
The Jews of Amsterdam were also important culturally as encouraging free

thinking in relation to religious and philosophical questions. The key figure
here, as John Barton writes, was Baruch Spinoza, who was born in the
Netherlands of Portuguese Jewish (Sephardic) stock in 1632. “He lived much
of his life in Amsterdam, where he was eventually expelled from the
synagogue for his unorthodox beliefs. He is generally regarded as one of the
first rationalists of the period, and thus a founding father of the European
Enlightenment. Where study of the Bible is concerned, he was a crucial figure
in casting doubt on the reality of Biblical miracles, which he thought to be
either fictitious or descriptions of natural processes, and in opening up
questions about the authorship of biblical books. He notoriously suggested
that the Pentateuch was written not by Moses but by Ezra…
“… On miracles, Spinoza was certainly sceptical in a way that anticipated

the attacks on the notion by David Hume (1711-76). He thought that biblical
stories of miraculous events were either records of visions and dreams, or else
were susceptible of a naturalistic explanation.”356
354 These figures are considered vastly exaggerated by Cantor, op. cit., p. 189 (V.M.)
355 Platonov, op. cit., pp. 148-149, 154.
356 Barton, A History of the Bible, London: Allen Lane, 2019, p. 409.
221
The migration of the Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal to Holland
and England marked the beginning both of the ascent of these latter states to
the status of world powers, and of the decline of Spain and Portugal. For, as
R.H. Tawney writes: “Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasure house
of the east and the west. But it was neither Portugal with her tiny population,
and her empire that was little more than a line of forts and factories 10,000
miles long, nor Spain, for centuries an army on the march and now staggering
beneath the responsibilities of her vast and scattered empire, devout to the
point of fanaticism, and with an incapacity for economic affairs which seemed
almost inspired, which reaped the material harvest of the empires into which
they had stepped, the one by patient toil, the other by luck. Gathering spoils
which they could not retain, and amassing wealth which slipped through
their fingers, they were little more than the political agents of minds more
astute and characters better versed in the arts of peace… The economic capital
of the new civilization was Antwerp… its typical figure, the paymaster of
princes, was the international financier”357 – that is, the Jew.
And when the Jews began to move from Antwerp to London, whence they
had been banished in 1290, the economic leadership of the world moved to
England…
Thus in September, 1653 Menasseh Ben Israel came to London from

Amsterdam to plead the case for Jewish readmission to England. At that time,
writes Rabbi Jeremy Gordon, “England was in the grip of Messianic
excitement. Cromwell had opened Parliament that July with the
announcement that ‘this may be the door to usher in the things that God has
promised… You are at the edge of the promises and prophecies.’
“Ben Israel lost no time stoking the messianic fervour for his own purposes.
In ‘A Humble Addresse to the Lord Protector’ he notes: ‘The opinion of many
Christians and mine doe concurre herin, in that we both believe the restoring
time of our Nation into their Native Country is very near at hand; I believing
that this restauration cannot be before the words of Daniel be first
accomplished, And when the dispersion of the Holy people shall be
completed in all places, then shall all these things be completed. Signifying
therewith, that all be fulfilled, the People of God must be first dispersed into
all places of the World. Now we know how our Nation is spread all about,
and hath its seat and dwellings in the most flourishing Kingdomes of the
World except only this considerable and mighty Island [Britain]. And
therefore this remains onely in my judgements before the MESSIA come.’
“It is fascinating to observe Ben Israel’s theological partnering with the

Puritans. He is tempting Christians to let Jews into Britain in order to bring
the second coming of Jesus! The ‘Addresse’ is a masterful work of flattery,
357
Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926, 1937, p. 78; in M.J. Cohen and John Major,
History in Quotations, London: Cassel, 2004, p. 323.
222
requestiong a ‘free and publick Synagogue’ in order that Jews may, ‘sue also
for a blessing upon this [British] Nation and People of England for receiving
us into their bosoms and comforting Sion in her distresse.’ But it also
reminded Cromwell that no ruler, ‘hath ever afflicted [the Jews] who hath not
been, by some ominous Exit, most heavily punished of God Almighty; as is
manifest from the Histories of the Kings; Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezer & others.’
“Ben Israel also marshals less spiritual arguments, devoting several pages
to a survey of the profitability of ‘The Nation of Jewes’ in a range of states that
have seen fit to let in Jews. This might have been particularly interesting to
Cromwell, seeking to find ways to keep Britain ahead of the Dutch economy.
“Suitably inspired, Cromwell called a conference of merchants and

clergymen but didn’t get the support he was looking for. Admitting the Jews
would be a blasphemy, some claimed. Others spread rumours of child
murder… There were also fears, if re-admission were formalised, that ‘every
Vagabond Jew may purchase the Liberties and Immunities of free-born
Englishmen’.
“Not everyone, and least of all the guilds, were anxious to see the Jews’
economic nous and power in competition with the existing British mercantile
classes. Perhaps in the face of such opposition, Cromwell disbanded the
conference before it could report.”358
The Venetian ambassador to England, Giovanni Sagredo describes these

events as follows: “A Jew came from Antwerp and… when introduced to his
highness [Oliver Cromwell] he began not only to kiss but to press his hands
and touch… his whole body with the most exact care. When asked why he
behaved so, he replied that he had come from Antwerp solely to see if his
highness was of flesh and blood, since his superhuman deeds indicated that
he was more than a man… The Protector ordered [i.e. set up] a congregation
of divines, who discussed in the presence of himself and his council whether a
Christian country could receive the Jews. Opinions were very divided. Some
thought they might be received under various restrictions and very strict
obligations. Others, including some of the leading ministers of the laws,
maintained that under no circumstances and in no manner could they receive
the Jewish sect in a Christian kingdom without very grave sin. After long
disputes and late at night the meeting dissolved without any conclusion…”359
Eventually, in 1656, the Jews got their way. Their success, continues
Gordon, “owes its origin to the imprisonment of a converso merchant, Antonio
Rodrigues Robles, on the charge of being a papist. Robles was threatened with
sequestration of his assets and escaped punishment only when he claimed
358
Gordon, “Flaw of Return”, The Jewish Chronicle, March 31, 2006, Weekly Review, p. 38;
Christopher Hale, “Oliver Cromwell and the Readmission of the Jews”, BBC History Magazine,
vol. 7, no. 11, pp. 44-47.
359 Sagredo, in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 184.
223
that, rather than being a papist, he was Jewish. Cromwell intervened, Robles
escaped punishment and, as the historian Heinrich Graetz remarked, Jews
‘made no mistake over the significance of this ruling, [and threw] off the mask
of Christianity.’
“It was, in Cromwell’s England, far safer to be an avowed Jew than a

closeted pseudo-Puritan who might harbour papist tendencies.360 Devoid of
constitutional upheaval, legislation or fanfare, the Jews got on with the day-
to-day business of establishing a community on this ‘considerable and mighty
Island’.”361
Jewish influence now increased on the political and religious, no less than
the economic life of England. Eliane Glaser writes: “In 1653… the radical Fifth
Monarchist preacher John Rogers suggested a plan to model the new
parliament on the Sanhedrin. Rogers, like other members of the millenarian
sect, believed that this would hasten Christ’s coming, and the idea appeared
in the manifesto of the Fifth Monarchy rebels in 1657. In fact the use of the
Jewish court as a template for the English religious and political constitution
is one of the most startling aspects of Christian discourse in the 17th century.
“In 1653, the legal scholar John Selden wrote a lengthy tract on the
Sanhedrin; and Selden’s Jewish ideas greatly influenced John Milton. Utopian
visions of the English constitution, such as James Harrington’s The
Commonwealth of Oceana (1656) and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1656), contain
numerous references to ancient Israel. The Sanhedrin was at the centre of
debates about the place of religious minorities and the relationship between
religious and civil law, because Christian commentaries could never agree on
whether the Sanhedrin had arbitrated in secular as well as sacred affairs…”362
The position of the Jews in England was confirmed and consolidated a

generation later, when William of Orange became king of England. William
led an anti-French coalition from 1672 to 1702 which, as Johnson notes, “was
financed and provisioned by a group of Dutch Sephardic Jews operating
chiefly from the Hague.”363 They were led by Samuel Oppenheimer.364
360 Another reason for this, as R.A. York points out, is that “quite a strong philo-semitic
tendency was developing in English Puritanism at this time. Puritanism encouraged the
return to the text of the Bible, in particular to the Old Testament. This in turn encouraged
greater interest in the study of Hebrew and the Jews themselves.
“Part of the reason for this interest was proselytising. The Jews had long been resistant to
Christianity, but they might be more attracted to a purer, more Judaic form…” (Letters,
History Today, vol. 50 (12), December, 2000, p. 61) (V.M.)
361 Gordon, op. cit., p. 38.
362 Glaser, “Napoleon’s Jews: A Law unto Themselves”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 8, no. 8,
August, 2007, p. 37.

363
Johnson, A History of the Jews, p. 281.
364
Johnson, op. cit., pp. 256-258.
224
28. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (1) FILMER AND HOBBES
Within a week of the execution of King Charles in 1649, Eikon Basilike (“The
Royal Icon”) was published by the royalists, being supposedly the work of
Charles himself. This enormously popular defence of the monarchy was
countered by the revolutionaries with the argument that the king was not an
icon or likeness of God, so veneration of the king was idolatry, so it was right
to kill the king. “Every King is an image of God,” wrote N.O. Brown. “Thou
shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Revolutionary republicanism
seeks to abolish effigy and show.”365
Milton, too, came out against Eikon Basilike with his Eikonoklastes, in which
the destruction of the icon of the king was seen as the logical consequence of
the earlier iconoclasm of the English Reformation. For, as Hill explains: “An
ikon was an image. Images of saints and martyrs had been cleared out of
English churches at the Reformation, on the ground that the common people
had worshipped them. Protestantism, and especially Calvinism, was austerely
monotheistic, and encouraged lay believers to reject any form of idolatry. This
‘desacralisation of the universe’ in the long run was its main contribution to
the rise of modern science.”366
What we may call the “iconic” justification of monarchy goes back to

Eusebius’ Life of Constantine in the fourth century. But the theory of the Divine
Right of kings, which was affirmed by all the Stuart kings of England in the
seventeenth century, as well as by King Louis XIV of France, more usually
argued simply that the king is not accountable to men. Thus Louis XIV’s
ideologist, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, in his Politics Taken from the Word of
Scripture (1679), after quoting Proverbs 8.15-16 and Romans 13.1-2 and from
the lives of Kings David and Solomon, wrote: “It appears from all this that the
person of the king is sacred, and that to attack him in any way is sacrilege.
God has the kings anointed by the prophets with the holy unction in like
manner as has his bishops and altars anointed… Kings should be guarded as
holy things, and whosoever neglects to protect them is worthy of death… The
royal power is absolute… The prince need render account of his acts to no
one.”
This thesis is “a logical inference,” writes Barzun, “from sovereignty itself:

the ultimate source of law cannot be charged with making a wrong law or
giving a wrong command. Modern democracies follow the same logic when
they give their lawmakers immunity for anything said or done in the exercise
of their duty; they are members of the sovereign power. Constitutions, it is
true, limit law-making; but the sovereign people can change the constitution.
There is no appeal against the acts of the sovereign unless the sovereign
allows, as when it is provided that citizens can sue the state.
365 Brown, Love’s Body, in Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, London: Faber &
Faber, 1997, p. 171.

366 Quoted in Hill, op. cit., pp. 173-174.
225
“Of course, the monarch can do wrong in another sense – in a couple of
senses. He can add up a sum and get a wrong total and he can commit a
wrongful act morally speaking – cheating at cards or killing his brother. To
make clear this distinction between sovereign and human being, theorists
developed quite early the doctrine that ‘the king has two bodies’; as a man he
is fallible, as king he is not. Similarly in elective governments, a distinction is
made between the civil servant acting in his official capacity and as a private
citizen…”367
Nevertheless, the distinction between the two “bodies” of the king, while
comprehensible in theory, is difficult to establish in practice. What if the king
goes mad and decides that he wants to murder all his subjects? Or compel all
of them to accept Islam? In practice, no king is absolutely absolutist. This is a
problem that all absolutist theories of government encounter…
“The intriguing contraction in Bossuet’s account,” writes A.C. Grayling, “it

that although the king is absolute in power, there is a limit: if he misuses his
authority he violates God’s law, and if he violates God’s law, does he not
thereby forfeit the right to rule? Can the Church oblige him to abdicate in
such a case? Can the people – all the estates of the people: nobility, clergy,
general populace – resist him? The question was intriguing because of a
parallel consideration: in Church doctrine it is laid down that once a priest
has been ordained it does not matter what sins he commits, he can still
administer the sacraments because the powers conferred on him exist
independently of him. Does this apply also to kings? Louis XIV embodies an
answer to these questions, in regarding his right to rule as inalienable. This
was the the majority view among Protestant theologians, however, which was
a source of trouble for rulers who subscribed to their views.”368
An important aspect of royalist thinking was what may be called the

patriarchal theory of royal authority. James I argued that just as God is the
Father of mankind, “so the style of Pater patriae was ever, and is commonly
applied to Kings.”369 As such, the King does not merely represent his people:
he embodies them – which is why in his edicts he says We, not I.370
As Ashton writes, “the patriarchal theory of royal authority was to prove a

powerful argument both against the idea that government originated in a
political contract between ruler and ruled and against the far more influential
notion that representative government and the limitations which it placed on
the royal exercise of power were immemorial features of the constitution….
367 Barzun, op. cit., pp. 250-251.

369 James I, in Ashton, The English Civil War, p. 7.
226
“Just as kings were little Gods, so were fathers little monarchs. He who
does not honour the king, maintained Thomas Jordan, cannot truly honour
his own parents, as the fifth commandment bids him. So, in his speech on the
scaffold in February, 1649, the royalist Lord Capel affirmed ‘very confidently
that I do die here… for obeying that fifth commandment given by God
himself.’… ‘For this subordination of children is the foundation of all regal
authority, by the ordination of God himself.’”371
For when man is defined in Genesis as being in the image of God, he is told
to have dominion over the whole earth and everything in it. In other words,
he is to be a king in the image of God’s Kingship. And if man as a species is
king of the earth, every father in particular is king of his family, and every
political leader is king of his tribe or nation. Kingship and hierarchy are part
of the nature of things…
The best-known exponent of the patriarchal theory was Sir Robert Filmer,
whose Patriarchia or The Natural Power of Kings was written under Cromwell
and published in 1680, during the reign of Charles II. His thinking was based
on the idea that Adam was the first father and king of the whole human race,
and that “the Right of exercising government” was first bestowed by God on
him and then through him on his descendants. “He believed,” writes J.R.
Western, “that God had given the sovereignty of the world to Adam and that
it had passed by hereditary descent, through the sons of Noah and the heads
of the nations into which mankind was divided at the Confusion of Tongues,
to all the modern rulers of the world. Adam was the father of all mankind and
so all other men were bound to obey him: this plenary power has passed to
his successors.”372
The problem with this view, according to John Locke in his First Treatise of
Civil Government (1681), as interpreted by McClelland, is that “the book of
Genesis does not actually say that God gave the world to Adam to rule; Adam
is never referred to as king.” However, contrary to Locke, God does say to
Adam that he is to have “dominion over… every living thing that moves upon
the earth” (Genesis 1.28). Moreover, the right to rule is clearly given by God to
at least some of the descendants of Adam, such as Noah, Abraham and David.
But “Locke then goes on to say: suppose we concede, for which there is no
biblical evidence, that Adam really was king by God’s appointment. That still
leaves the awkward fact that Genesis makes no mention of the kingly rights of
the sons of Adam; there is simply no reference to the right of hereditary
succession. Locke then goes on to say: suppose we concede both Adam’s title
to kingship and the title of the sons of Adam, for neither of which there is
biblical evidence, how does that help kings now to establish their titles by
Divine Right? Despite the biblical concern with genealogy, the line of Adam’s
371 Ashton, op. cit., pp. 7, 8.

372 Western, Monarchy and Revolution, London: Blandford Press, 1972, p. 8.
227
posterity has become hopelessly scrambled. How can any king at the present
time seriously claim that he is in the line of direct descent from Adam?…
Because the genealogy since Adam is scrambled, it is perfectly possible that
all the present kings are usurpers, or all the kings except one. Perhaps
somewhere the real, direct descendant of Adam is alive and living in
obscurity, cheated of his birth-right to universal monarchy by those
pretending to call themselves kings in the present world.”373
This objection is very weak. The real point of the patriarchal theory is that
just as the headship of the father in a family is natural, and therefore Divine in
origin, so the headship of a society or nation by a single man, who derives it
by right of succession from his father, is natural and Divinely instituted. And
all kings, just as all men in general, come from Adam, the father of the whole
human race. “That which is natural to man exists by Divine right,” writes
Filmer; and “kingship is natural to man. Therefore kingship exists by Divine
right.” The people, on the other hand, “are not born free by nature” and
“there never was any such thing as an independent multitude, who at first
had a natural right to a community [of goods]”.
As Harold Nicolson writes: “‘This conceit of original freedom’, as [Filmer]

said, was ‘the only ground’ on which thinkers from ‘the heathen philosophers’
down to Hobbes had built the idea that governments were created by the
deliberate choice of free men. He believed on the contrary, as an early
opponent put it, that ‘the rise and right of government’ was natural and
native, not voluntary and conventional’. Subjects therefore could not have a
right to overturn a government because the original bargain had not been
kept. There were absurdities and dangers in the opposing view. ‘Was a
general meeting of a whole kingdom ever known for the election of a Prince?
Was there any example of it ever found in the world?’ Some sort of majority
decision, or the assumption that a few men are allowed to decide for the rest,
are in fact the only ways in which government by the people can be supposed
to have been either initiated or carried on. But both are as inconsistent as
monarchy with the idea that men are naturally free. ‘If it be true that men are
by nature free-born and not to be governed without their own consents and
that self-preservation is to be regarded in the first place, it is not lawful for
any government but self-government to be in the world… To pretend that a
major part, or the silent consent of any part, may be interpreted to bind the
whole people, is both unreasonable and unnatural; it is against all reason for
men to bind others, where it is against nature for men to bind themselves.
Men that boast so much of natural freedom are not willing to consider how
contradictory and destructive the power of a major part is to the natural
liberty of the whole people.’ The claims of representative assemblies to
embody the will of the people are attacked on these lines, in a manner
recalling Rousseau. Filmer also points out that large assemblies cannot really
373 McClelland, op. cit., p. 232. Rousseau also pointed out, in The Social Contract, that since
every man is equally a descendant of Adam, it was not clear which descendants of Adam
were to exercise lordship over others.
228
do business and so assemblies delegate power to a few of their number:
‘hereby it comes to pass that public debates which are imagined to be referred
to a general assembly of a kingdom, are contracted into a particular or private
assembly’. In short, ‘Those governments that seem to be popular are kinds of
petty monarchies’ and ‘It is a false and improper speech to say that a whole
multitude, senate, council, or any multitude whatsoever doth govern where
the major part only rules; because many of the multitude that are so
assembled… are governed against and contrary to their wills.’”374
In one respect Oliver Cromwell performed an extraordinary service for all

subsequent generations: by attempting, and completely failing, to make
himself a secular king in place of the anointed king whom he had killed, while
hypocritically claiming that he was not restoring one-man rule, he showed
both that legitimate and sacred monarchism is a permanent and ineradicable
striving of the human spirit, which no revolution can completely extirpate,
and that a true monarchy should never be confused with the deceiving
pretences of a revolutionary usurper…
Cromwell’s hypocrisy had undermined the theological approach to, and

justification for, politics, sundering the two spheres. It fell to Thomas Hobbes’
Leviathan (1651) to develop a justification of Cromwell’s amoral approach to
politics, building on the amoralism of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513). Almost
all contemporary theorists, whether monarchist or revolutionary, agreed that
all power was from God and was legitimate only if sanctioned by God,
differing only in their estimate of which power, the king’s or the people’s, was
the final arbiter of conflicts. But Hobbes derived his theory of sovereignty
from reason and “the principles of Nature only”, from a social contract
between men in which God had no part.
Hobbes initial axiom was what he called the State of Nature, which, he
believed, was WAR, a state devoid of civilization in which every man’s hand
was raised against his neighbour, and in which the life of man was “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Some kinds of animals, such as bees and ants,
live sociably with each other. But this is not the case of men, because of their
various destructive passions. And so “the agreement of these creatures is
natural; that of men, is by covenant only, which is artificial: and therefore it is
no wonder if there be somewhat else required, besides covenant, to make
their agreement constant and lasting which is a common power, to keep them
in awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit.
“The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend
them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and
thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their own industry, and by the
fruits of the earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; that is,
374 Nicolson, op. cit., pp. 9-10.
229
to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of
men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will:
which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear
their person; … and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and
their judgements, to his judgement. This is more than consent, or concord; it is
the real unity of them all, in one and the same person, made by covenant of
every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to
every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this man,
or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to
him, and authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so
united in one person, is called a COMMONWEALTH, in Latin CIVITAS. This
is the generation of that LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of
that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and
defence.”
The State was therefore a Leviathan, “a monster composed of men” headed

by a sovereign, personal or collective, whose power was created by a social
contract. As a result, his power was unlimited. For, as Roger Scruton explains,
“since the sovereign would be the creation of the contract, he could not also
be party to it: he stands above the social contract, and can therefore disregard
its terms, provided he enforces them against all others. That is why, Hobbes
thought, it was so difficult to specify the obligations of the sovereign, and
comparatively easy to specify the obligations of the citizen.”375 Here, then, we
find the Divine Right of Kings in secular garb… But with the vital
qualification that the “king” need not be a single man, but could be many
men, or even a whole people. Nevertheless, even if the whole people could be
the State, this did not limit the absolute power of the State over each one of
them.
“The state’s function,” write John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge,

“was to wield power: its legitimacy lay in its effectiveness, its opinions
defined the truth, and its orders represented justice.
“It is not hard to see why Europe’s monarchs welcomed that idea. But
Leviathan also featured a subversive dash of liberalism. Hobbes was the first
political theorist to base his argument on the principle of a social contract. He
had no time for the divine right of kings or dynastic succession: his Leviathan
could take the form of a parliament, and its essence lay in the nation-state
rather than in family-owned territories. The central actors in Hobbes’ world
were rational individuals trying to balance their desire for self-promotion and
their fear of self-destruction. They gave up some rights in order to secure the
more important goal of self-preservation. The state was ultimately made for
(and of) subjects, rather than the subjects for the state: the original frontispiece
of Leviathan shows a mighty king constructed out of thousands of tiny men.”
375 Scruton, Modern Philosophy, London: Arrow Books, 1997, p. 415.
230
“This mixture of firm control with a touch of liberalism helps explain why
Europe’s nation-states surged ahead. Beginning in the sixteenth century,
across the continent, monarchs established monopolies of power within their
own borders, progressively subordinating rival centers of authority, including
the princes of the church. Kings promoted powerful bureaucrats, such as
Cardinal Richelieu in France and the Count-Duke of Olivares in Spain, who
expanded the reach of the central government and built efficient tax-gathering
machines. This shift allowed Europe to escape from the problem that had
doomed Indian civilization to impotence: a state that was so weak that society
constantly dissolved into petty principalities that inevitably fell prey to more
powerful invaders. Yet Europe also avoided the problem that had plagued the
Chinese state: too much centralized control over too vast a region. Even
Europe’s most imposing monarchs were far less powerful than the Chinese
emperor, whose enormous bureaucracy faced no opposition from China’s
landed aristocracy or its urban middle classes and thus fell prey to self-
satisfied decadence…”376
However, in spite of Hobbes’ “subversive dash of liberalism”, his system

effectively destroyed the liberty of the individual once the state was formed.
For the burden of that liberty was too great for men to bear. For, as
McClelland explains, interpreting Hobbes: “if everyone has that same equal
and unlimited liberty to do as he pleases in pursuit of the literally selfish end
of self-preservation, then without law every man is a menace to every other
man. Far from being an original endowment for which men should be
grateful, the unlimited liberty of the Right of Nature is a millstone round
men’s necks, of which they would be wise to unburden themselves at the first
opportunity.”377 And they did, by giving up their rights to the sovereign.
Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was to say something similar…
The lack of accountability of the sovereign is regrettable, but a necessity;

and “necessity”, as Cromwell said, “hath no law…”
In any case, the sovereign’s will is the law, so it makes no sense to accuse
the sovereign of acting unlawfully. “It follows from this that a Sovereign may
never justly be put to death by his subjects because they would be punishing
the Sovereign for their own act, and no principle of jurisprudence could ever
conceivably justify punishing another for what one did oneself.”378
Hobbes wanted to ban such books as John of Salisbury’s Politicus, which

justified the killing of tyrants: “From the reading, I say, of such books, men
have undertaken to kill their Kings, because the Greek and Latine writers, in
their books, and discourses of Policy, make it lawfull, and laudable, for any
376 John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, “The State of the State”, Foreign Affairs, July-
August, 2014, pp. 121-122.

231
man so to do; provided before he do it, to call him Tyrant. For they say not
Regicide, that is the killing of a King, but Tyrannicide, that is, killing of a Tyrant
is lawfull… I cannot imagine, how anything can be more prejudiciall to a
Monarchy, than the allowing of such books to be publickely read.”
Hobbes defined liberty negatively, as the absence of impediments to

motion. Subjects are free when the laws do not interfere with them, allowing
them some liberty of action. However, liberty is not a right, and subjects have
no right to rebel for any reason except self-preservation (for that is the very
purpose of the social contract). Thus subjects have the right to refuse military
service. And they have the right to refuse to obey a sovereign who cannot
protect them against their enemies.379
Hobbes’s Leviathan is particularly interesting for its argument that without

a worldwide, fully-fledged super-state, as opposed to an alliance or
association of states, there is no way to prevent war. As McClelland writes,
“Leviathan contains a very clear explanation of why supra-national
organisations like the League of Nations or the UN are bound to fail in their
avowed purpose of keeping the international peace, or even in their intention
to provide some measure of international co-operation which is different from
traditional alliances between states for traditional foreign policy ends. For
Hobbes, there is no peace without law, and there can be no law without a
Sovereign whose command law is. Hobbes is absolutely insistent that
individuals in the State of Nature cannot make law by agreement; all they can
do by contract is to choose a Sovereign. What applies to individuals in the
State of Nature also applies to sovereigns in their State of Nature in relation to
each other. The only way there could be a guarantee of international peace
would be if all the sovereigns of the earth, or an overwhelming majority of
them, were voluntarily to give up the right of national self-defence to some
kind of super-sovereign whose word would be law to all the nations of the
earth. This the various nations of the earth have been notoriously reluctant to
do. They have tried to make international law by agreement, but that has
never stopped war. They have tried to make international law by agreement,
but that has never stopped war. Hobbes could have told them why: covenants
without the sword are but breath, without any power to bind a man at all. No
all-powerful international Sovereign, then no international peace.”380
This argument holds, whatever the international Sovereign. For Hobbes

thinks “that the sovereignty which is exercised by a Sovereign is the same
sovereignty, no matter how that sovereignty is in fact constituted. The
sovereignty which is exercised by a Sovereign people, as at ancient Athens or
republican Rome, does not change its nature as sovereignty just because it is
democratic. Democratic sovereignty properly understood would have the
same attributes as the sovereignty of an absolute monarch.”381
379 Russell, op. cit., p. 575.

232
We have noted above the difference between the views of Hobbes and the
most famous of early modern theorists of international law, Hugo Grotius.
“Grotius believed,” writes Bobbitt, that the common interest between states,
“which was the basis for law, arose from the inherent sociability of man.
Nowadays we might say that human beings only become complete in
association with one another [a view that goes back to Aristotle’s Politics], that
every associational society has a constitution, and thus the nature of man
gives rise to law. Men seek law naturally, as roses turn themselves to the sun,
because law permits and enhances their development. Other philosophers,
notably Thomas Hobbes, believed that man’s inherent nature was for power
and that the role of law was to prevent the savage competition to which man’s
nature would otherwise lead him. Thus men seek law to compensate for their
natures, as wolves submit to the pack rather than starve singly. Either
approach supported the legitimacy of the individual kingly state, but there
were profound differences between these two views regarding the law of the
society of such states. There being no sovereign [of the society of states],
Hobbes denied that an international law could exist; by contrast, Grotius
denied that there had to be a supreme sovereign for there to be a law of the
society of kingly states or sovereigns, and he implied that kingly states could
only achieve complete legitimacy as part of a society of sovereigns to whom
they owed certain duties.
“It is often said that Hobbes and later Spinoza extrapolated from the life of
the individual human being to that of the State. If the natural condition of
men was one of endless war, then the superimposition of an absolute ruler,
the sovereign State – Leviathan – did not terminate the state of nature, but
merely transferred it to another plane. States are enemies by nature.
Agreements to cooperate will be preserved only so long as fear of the
consequences of breaking agreements binds the parties. Grotius, by contrast,
extrapolated from the lives of persons in a society to that of states in a society.
The natural condition of a society is one of potential cooperation – no man is
an island sufficient unto himself. Not fear but aspiration binds states to their
agreements…”382
Another argument against Hobbes’ theory of international relations is that

even a worldwide superstate may not prevent war for the simple reason that
it could fall apart. Recently, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed
this fatal flaw in Hobbes’ argument by saying that if the present-day
European Union were to fall apart because of the economic crisis in the
Eurozone, it might lead to war between the constituent countries. And since
the main justification for the creation of the European Union in the 1950s,
according to the Eurocrats, was to prevent another war between France and
Germany, this could not be allowed to happen…
233
Nevertheless, there is a permanent truth in Hobbes’ theory of international
relations that has particular relevance to the modern arguments about the
sovereignty of, for example, member-states of the European Union or the
United Nations. This is that sovereignty is an absolute, not a relative concept.
This truth can be clearly seen if we compare the political sovereignty of states
to the free will of individual human beings. A person either has free will or he
does not. His will may be weak, it may be constrained by external
circumstances or illness; but as long as the person is a person in his sound
mind he must be acknowledged to have free will. In the same way, a state –
be it monarchical, aristocratic or democratic – either has sovereignty or it does
not. Its sovereignty can be constrained or weakened by political infighting or
external enemies or other circumstances beyond its control; but it cannot be
“pooled” or diluted as long as it remains a state worthy of the name. The
proof that a state is sovereign is its ability to wage wars; for the act of waging
war is the act of enforcing a command upon another state or of saying “no” to
another’s state’s command.
Since sovereignty, according to Hobbes, is absolute, there cannot be two

sovereign powers within a single society. In particular, there cannot be a truly
independent Church. And so the Church must submit to Leviathan, “our
mortal god”. For a nation cannot serve two masters, says Hobbes (using,
ironically, the words of the Head of the Church asserting the absolute
sovereignty of the Kingdom of God): either it will cleave to the one and
despise the other, or vice-versa. One cannot serve God and Mammon, and
Hobbes plumped for Mammon...383
Jean Bethke Elshtain writes that Hobbes makes two main points
concerning the Church: “first, that the church cannot be extraterritorial; there
is no universal Christian oikumene, for to acknowledge such would be to sneak
in Rome and the pope as universal pastor. The sovereign, instead, can
command obedience to scripture and order the religion of his own people.
Second, given Hobbes’s obsession with ‘where is sovereignty?’ ecclesiastical
power is strictly limited to teaching. The sovereign, however, judges what
doctrines are fit to teach insofar as they are conducive to civic peace and order.
The sovereign, whether he be Christian or an infidel, is head of the
Church.”384
However, Hobbes’ argument can be turned on its head. We may agree

with him that the initial State of Fallen Nature is WAR – war between God
and man, between man and man, and within each individual man, as the
fallen passions of pride, envy, anger, greed and lust tear him apart. Again we
agree that the State exists in order to provide some protection for citizens
against each other, against citizens of other states, and against their own
passions, although the State’s power is only a restraining power that does not
383 A.L. Smith, “English Political Philosophy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”,
The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The Eighteenth Century, 1909, pp. 786-787.
384 Elshtain, Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, New York: Basic Books, 2009, p. 112.
234
and cannot cure the fundamental causes of war among men. And again we
agree that within a given nation there can be only one truly sovereign
power… But that power must be the Church, not the State; for only the
Church can introduce true and lasting peace, since it is the Kingdom of Christ,
Who is our Peace (Ephesians 2.14). This is not to say that the State must
become a Hierocracy, or priests politicians – that is strictly forbidden by the
Law of God (Apostolic Canon 81). Rather, God has decreed that the State
should be independent of the Priesthood in its everyday decision-making, but
subject to God in its spirit and fundamental aims and principles. In giving the
state taxes and military service and obeying the laws, we give to Caesar what
is Caesar’s. But we do so only in obedience to God and the Church. And if the
two obediences contradict each other, our obedience goes to the one and only
true sovereign, God…
That in extreme circumstances the lawgiver must be disobeyed for the sake
of obedience to God, was asserted by the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
who was killed by the Gestapo for his opposition to Hitler. Reversing the
Machiavellian and Cromwellian use of “necessity” to justify lawgivers’
occasional lawlessness, he writes: “In the course of historical life there comes
a point where the exact observance of the formal law of a state, of a
commercial undertaking, of a family, or for that matter of a scientific
discovery, suddenly finds itself in violent conflict with the ineluctable
necessities of the lives of men; at this point responsible and pertinent action
leaves behind it the domain of principles and convention, the domain of the
normal and regular, and is confronted by the extraordinary situation which
no law can control. It was for this situation that Machiavelli in his political
theory coined the term necessita… There can be no doubt that such necessities
exist; to deny their existence is to abandon the attempt to act in accordance
with reality. But it is equally certain that these necessities cannot be governed
by any law or themselves constitute a law. They appeal directly to the free
responsibility of the agent, a responsibility which is bounded by no law…”385
Except God’s law, that is. But the particularity of Hobbes’ Leviathan –
which, we may recall, may be an individual or a collective – is that it is bound
by no law, human or Divine. Indeed, as Smith writes, “even Henry VIII is a
pale shadow beside the spiritual supremacy in which the Leviathan is
enthroned. There are only two positions in history which rise to this height;
the position of a Caliph, the vice-regent of Allah, with the book on his knees
that contains all law as well as all religion and all morals; and the position of
the Greek πολις where heresy was treason, where the State gods and no other
gods were the citizens’ gods, and the citizen must accept the State’s standard
of virtue.” 386
385 Bonhoeffer, Ethics, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995, p. 235; in Elshtain, op. cit., pp.
116-117.
386 Smith, op. cit., p. 789.
235
“Leviathan,” writes Ackroyd, “created a sensation at the time, and it has
been said that is inspired universal horror. The Commons proposed to burn
the book, and one suggested that Hobbes himself should be tied to the
stake.”387
In fact, because of the book’s implicit totalitarianism, and the author’s

personal atheism, it was burned at Oxford in 1683. However, it was admired
on the continent, where Louis XIV of France was creating the most totalitarian
state in European history thus far... No doubt today’s atheist internationalists
will one day pick its ashes out of the fire as a useful argument that furthers
their ultimate aim of the creation of a worldwide totalitarian state…
236
29. THE SUN KING
If the liberalism of Northern Europe and North America was the wave of
the future, and would in time conquer almost the whole world, nevertheless
the seventeenth century was, in political and cultural terms, the century of
absolutism. But the development of absolutism was different in different
countries. If we compare the English monarchy in the 16th, 17th and 18th
centuries with the French one in the same period, we see a striking contrast.
In England a powerful monarchy becomes steadily stronger, defeating the
most powerful despotism of the day in the Spanish Armada, only to be
gradually overcome by the wealthier classes and reduced, finally, to the
position of symbolic head of an essentially aristocratic society. The vital
changes here were the rejection of the papacy and the dissolution of the
monasteries, which caused both the temporary increase in the monarchy’s
power and its longer-term descent into impotence, especially after Charles I’s
loss of the power of taxation. In France, on the other hand, the reverse took
place: a weak monarchy besieged by a semi-independent nobility within, and
the united Hapsburg domains of Germany, Italy and Spain from without,
gradually recovered to reach a pinnacle of fame and power under the sun
king, Louis XIV. The vital factors here were: (i) the retention of the Divine
Right of kings388, (ii) the retention of Catholicism as the official religion, (iii)
the monarchy’s retention, in accordance with its Concordat with the Vatican,
of control of the Church’s appointments and lands, and (iv), last but not least,
the monarchy’s retention of the power of general taxation – although its venal
and unjust use of it contributed greatly to the regime’s ultimate fall in 1789.389
England and France consolidated their internal unity, but in different ways.
In England, the monarchy adopted the Anglican middle ground. In France, on
the other hand, the monarchy took the Catholic side (Paris, as Henry IV said
when he converted to Catholicism, was worth a mass), from which it did not
waver until the revolution of 1789. In England, the Protestant aristocracy first
persecuted and then tolerated the diminished and tamed Catholic minority;
but the latter’s eventual absorption within the State left a permanent
traditionalist stamp on the English national character. In France, on the other
hand, while the Catholic monarchy first tolerated and then expelled the
Protestant (Huguenot) minority, the latter’s cultural heritage left a permanent
rationalist stamp on the French national character.
The French King Louis XIV, the longest reigning monarch in European
history (1643-1715), succeeded where the English King Charles I failed, in
imposing an ideally absolutist, Divine-right rule over his people. And this in
spite of the fact that anti-monarchism had already planted deep roots in the
European consciousness. What was the secret – and the cost – of his success?
388
Thus in France in 1614 the bourgeois order in the Estates General made the Divine Right of
Kings Article I of their petition. See Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the
Present, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 248.
389 Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, chapter 23.
237
The fruit of the absolutist theories of Machiavelli, Bodin and Hobbes, and
of the nationalist politics of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, the reign of
Louis XIV was that of a true despot in that, like every despot, he tried to gain
control of the Church and the State simultaneously. And again like every
despot, his favoured method of rule was war – civil war and international war.
His reign began with a series of civil wars against the nobility, the law courts
and the people between 1648 and 1653 that is called the Fronde. It was waged
amidst an international war with Spain that had begun in 1638. Louis’ early
victories in war defined the absolutist nature of the rest of his reign.
“Louis XIV’s position,” writes A.C. Grayling, “was ultimately strengthened

by the Fronde not least because of his sense of outrage at having been
subjected to profound indignities by it [we recall the almost contemporary
Peter the Great’s similar experience]; he and his mother, Anne of Austria, had
experienced hunger, fear and cold while in hiding during the worst of the
uprising. As soon as he could he established his court at Versailles, away from
the Parisian mob, and he weakened the aristocracy by making it waste its
time, energy and money in pointless attendance at Court. He also diluted the
aristocracy by creating thousands of new nobles, much to the old nobles’
disdain. In the event, his doing so only provided extra food for Madame
Guillotine during the Terror which followed the Revolution of 1789, itself the
long-term consequence of the absolutism that Louis practised.”390
“The position of the French nobility,” writes Jasper Ridley, “had greatly
changed during the previous hundred years. In the sixteenth century the
great noble houses of Guise and Bourbon, with their power bases in eastern
and south-west France, had torn the kingdom apart by thirty years of civil
war; and the fighting between the nobility and the State had started up again
in the days of the Fronde, when Louis XIV was a child. But when he came of
age, and established his absolute royal authority, he destroyed the political
power of the nobles by bribing them to renounce it. He encouraged them to
come to his court at Versailles, to hold honorific and well-paid sinecure offices
– to carve for the King at dinner, or to attend his petit levée when he dressed
in the morning, and hand him his shirt, his coat and his wig. He hoped that
when the nobles were not engaged in these duties at court, they would be
staying in their great mansions in Paris. He wished to prevent them as far as
possible from living on their lands in the country, where they could enrol
their tenants in a private army and begin a new civil war.
“The King governed France through middle-class civil servants, who were
mostly lawyers. The provincial Parlements had limited powers, most of which
were judicial rather than legislative; but the King could veto all their decrees.
The government was administered by the intendants, who had absolute
authority in their districts, and were subject only to the directives of their
superiors, the surintendants, who were themselves subject only to the King’s
238
Council, where the King presided in person, and might either accept or reject
the advice given to him by his councillors.
“The nobles had the privilege of having their seigneurial courts in which
they exercised a civil and a criminal jurisdiction over their tenants; but the
presiding judges in the seigneurial courts were the same middle-class lawyers
who presided in the King’s courts, which could on appeal override the
decisions of the seigneurial courts.”391
As for the lower nobility, their energies were channelled into army service,
in accordance with their medieval conception of themselves as the warrior
class. War was a constant feature of Louis’ reign, together with the crippling
burden of taxation that war entails. But this did not disturb the nobility, who
paid no taxes…
The other major estate of the land that needed to be controlled for real
despotism to be established was the Church. A parish priest of St. Sulpice said
that Louis “was so absolute that he passed above all the laws to do his will.
The priests and nobility were oppressed; the parlements had no more power.
The clergy were shamefully servile in doing the king’s will.”392
Here Louis had two aims. The first was to make the Catholic Church in
France a national, Gallican Church under his dominion, and not the Pope’s.
(This, it will be recalled, is what William the Conqueror had tried to do with
the English Church after 1066). His second was to destroy the protected state
within the state that the Edict of Nantes (1594) had created for the Protestant
Huguenots. In this way he would have “one faith, one king, one law”.
“For thirty years,” writes Norman Davies, “Louis was a true Gallican –
packing the French bishoprics with the relatives of his ministers, authorising
the Declaration of the Four Articles (1682), and provoking in 1687-8 an open
rupture with the Papacy. The Four Articles, the purest formulation of Gallican
doctrine, were ordered to be taught in all the seminaries and faculties of
France:
1. The authority of the Holy See is limited to spiritual matters.

2. The decisions of Church Councils are superior to those of the Pope.
3. Gallican customs are independent of Rome.
4. The Pope is not infallible, except by consent of the universal Church.
But then, distressed by his isolation from the Catholic powers, Louis turned
tail. In 1693 he retracted the Four Articles, and for the rest of his life gave
unstinting support to the ultramontane [extreme papist] faction…
391
Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p. 62.
392 M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 467.
239
“In his policy towards the Protestants, Louis passed from passive
discrimination through petty harassment to violent persecution… [In 1685]
the King revoked the edict of toleration. Bishop Bossuet awarded him the
epithet of the ‘New Constantine’. Up to a million of France’s most worthy
citizens were forced to submit or to flee amidst a veritable reign of terror…”393
Nevertheless, write Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, “through the

ensuing vicissitudes of French history, ‘Gallicanism’, with its adherence to
‘Conciliar’ authority, was to characterise the Church in France. By its very
nature, it was potentially inimical to the Papacy. Pursued to its logical
conclusion, ‘Gallicanism’ would effectively demote the Pope to what he had
originally been – merely the Bishop of Rome, one among numerous bishops,
enjoying some kind of nominal or symbolic leadership, but not any actual
primacy or power. In short, the Church was decentralised.
“The opposing position, which advocated the Pope’s supremacy over

bishops and councils, became known as ‘Ultramontane’, because it regarded
authority as residing with the Papacy in Rome, ‘on the other side of the
mountains’ from France…”394
Absolutism reached its height under Louis XIV. As long as Cardinal

Mazarin was at the helm, his power was not total. But after Mazarin’s death
in 1681, Louis said that he would be his own Prime Minister, taking all power
into his own hands. However, as a future Prime Minister of France, François
Guizot, wrote: “By the very fact that this government had no other principle
than absolute power, and reposed upon no other base than this, its decline
became sudden and well merited. What France, under Louis XIV, essentially
wanted, was political institutions and forces, independent, subsisting of
themselves, and, in a word, capable of spontaneous action… The ancient
French institutions, if they merited that name, no longer existed: Louis XIV
completed their ruin. He took no care to endeavour to replace them by new
institutions; they would have cramped him, and he did not choose to be
cramped. All that appeared conspicuous at that period was will, and the
action of central power. The government of Louis XIV was a great fact, a fact
powerful and splendid, but without roots… No system can exist except by
means of institutions. When absolute power has endured, it has been
supported by true institutions, sometimes by the division of society into
strongly distinct castes, sometimes by a system of religious institutions.
Under the reign of Louis XIV institutions were wanting to power as well as to
liberty… Thus we see the government helping on its own decay. It was not
Louis XIV alone who was becoming aged and weak at the end of his reign: it
was the whole absolute power. Pure monarchy was as much worn out in 1712
as was the monarch himself: and the evil was so much the more grave, as
Louis XIV had abolished political morals as well as political institutions…”395
393 Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 620, 621.

394 Baigent and Leigh, The Inquisition, London: Penguin, 1999, p. 195.
395
Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin, 1847, 1997, pp. 140-141.
240
“Controlled, disciplined, sensuous, haughty, mysterious, magisterial and
visionary, pious and debauched, Louis created the new Palace of Versailles
and with it a complex court hierarchy and ritual designed to remove the
nobles from their feudal ambitions and regional power centres and
concentrate their interests in the person of the king. Versailles itself was
designed not only to house the king, court and entire nobility, but also to
represent Louis himself: ‘I am Versailles,’ he said, just as ‘l’état, c’est moi,’. The
nobility competed for a glance, a word with the king: once when the king
asked a noble when his baby was due, the nobleman answered, ‘Whenever
your Majesty wishes it’.”396
The difference between Orthodox autocracy (as in contemporary Muscovy)

and Catholic absolutism of the French kind is that while the former welcomes
the existence of independent institutions, such as the Church, and institutions
with limited powers of self-government, such as provincial councils or guilds,
the latter distrusts all other power bases and tries to destroy them. The result
is that, as the absolutism weakens (as weaken it must), institutions spring up
to fill the power vacuum which are necessarily opposed to the absolutist
power and try to weaken it further, leading to revolution. The art of true
monarchical government consists, not in ruling without support from other
institutions, but in ruling simultaneously with their support and with their
full and voluntary submission to the monarchy. Moreover, the supremacy of
the monarchy must be recognised de jure, and not merely de facto. When the
majority of the people ceases to believe that their monarch has the right to
rule them, or when he believes that his right to rule is limited by nothing
except his own will, then his regime is doomed, whatever the external
trappings of its power.
Having gained control over the nobles, Louis proceeded to wage war for
the rest of his reign. For, as Philip Bobbitt writes, “once Louis was secure from
internal challenges,… he began to make war on the settlements of Westphalia
in order that he might become the arbiter of Europe… Louis’s domination of
Europe was largely based on the fact that by 1666 he was able to maintain a
force of almost 100,000 men, which he would soon triple. This, however,
would have been fruitless without the centralized civilian structure put into
place during this period by Louis’s ministers.”397 So unremitting was the
aggression of Louis against neighbouring states that he must be considered
the forerunner of Napoleon and Hitler. (Napoleon considered him “the only
King of France worthy of the name”). As his most determined opponent, the
Dutch King William, said, Louis’ aim in Europe was to establish “a universal
monarchy and a universal religion”.398

397 Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 123.
398 Quoted in Robert Massie, Peter the Great, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 193.
241

II. THE MUSCOVITE AUTOCRACY (1453-‐1660)
242
30. THE ORTHODOX UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE (1)
“On Tuesday, 29 May, 1453,” writes Sir Steven Runciman, “an old story
was ended. The last heir of Constantine the Great lay dead on the battlefield;
and an infidel Sultan had entered in triumph into the city which Constantine
had founded to be the capital of the Christian Empire. There was no longer an
Emperor reigning in the Sacred Palace to symbolize to the Faithful of the East
the majesty and authority of Almighty God. The Church of Constantinople,
for more than a thousand years the partner of the Orthodox State, became the
Church of a subject people, dependent on the whims of a Muslim master. Its
operation, its outlook and its whole way of life had abruptly to be changed.
“It was a fundamental change; and yet it was not quite s complete as it
might seem at first sight. For centuries past the historic Patriarchates of the
East, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, had been, but for brief interludes,
under the political sway of Muslim authorities. Ever since the Turks had first
occupied parts of Asia Minor in the eleventh century congregations belonging
to the Patriarchate of Constantinople had been living under Muslim rule. In
recent decades the rapid spread of the Ottoman Empire, in Europe as well as
in Asia, had added to their number, till by 1453 the majority of the Patriarch’s
flock dwelt in the Sultan’s dominion. There were also many Greek islands
which had been for some time under Latin masters and which were to remain
under them for some time to come. Though the Genoese were to lose the
greater part of their Greek colonies immediately after 1453, they retained the
island of Chios till 1566. The Venetians held fortresses in the Peloponnese and
a number of Aegean islands till well into the sixteenth century; they held
Crete till 1669 and Tinos till 1715. Cyprus, still an independent kingdom at the
time of the fall of Constantinople, was in Venetian hands from 1487 to 1570.
The Italian Duchy of the Archipelago lasted till 1500, when the Turks imposed
a Jewish vassal Duke. The Knight of St. John held Rhodes till 1522. The Ionian
islands off the west coast of Greece never passed under Turkish rule. They
remained in Venetian hands until the end of the eighteenth century, when
they were taken over by the French and then passed to the British, who ceded
them to the Kingdom of Greece in 1864. Thus there were a few provinces
where the Patriarch’s authority could not always be implemented.
Nevertheless, from the narrow viewpoint of ecclesiastical control and
discipline the Patriarchate gained from the conquest because the vast bulk of
its territory was reunited under one lay power.
“But the lay power was infidel. So long as the Christian Empire lasted on at
Constantinople, Church and State were still integrated there in one holy
realm. The Emperor might in fact be politically feeble, but in theory he was
still the transcendent head of the Christian Oecumene, the representative of
God before the people and the people before God. Now the Church was
divorced from the State. It became an association of second-class citizens.
Here again, as the only association that these second-class citizens were
permitted to organize, its powers of discipline over its congregations were
enhanced. But it lacked the ultimate sanction of freedom.
243
“The Conquering Sultan was well aware of the problems that faced the
Church; and he was not hostile to its well-being. He had been a truculent
enemy until Constantinople was conquered; and the conquest had been
achieved by bloodthirsty and destructive violence. But, having conquered, he
was not ungenerous. He had Greek blood in his veins. He was well read and
deeply interested in Greek learning. He was proud to see himself as the heir
of the Caesars and was ready to shoulder the religious responsibilities of his
predecessors, so far as his own religion permitted. As a pious Muslim he
could not allow the Christians any part in the higher council of his Empire.
But he wished them to enjoy peace and prosperity and to be content with his
government and an asset to it.
“His first duty to the Christians was to establish the new pattern for their
administration. His solution followed lines traditional in Muslim dominions.
Muslim rulers had long treated religious minorities within their dominions as
millets, or nations, allowing them to govern their own affairs according to
their own laws and customs, and making the religious head of the sect
responsible for its administration and its good behaviour towards the
paramount power. This was the manner according to which the Christians in
the Caliphate had been ruled, amongst them the congregations of the Eastern
Orthodox Patriarchates. The system was now extended to include the
Orthodox Patriarchate of Constantinople. For practical purposes it had
already been followed in the districts of the Patriarchate that were within the
Turkish dominions. Where their lay officials had been ejected or had fled the
Christians had naturally looked to their hierarchs to negotiate with the
conquerors on their behalf; and it was the hierarchs who had carried out the
day-to-day administration of their flocks as best they could. But hitherto for
them, as also for the Orthodox Patriarchs of the East, there had been in
Constantinople an Orthodox Emperor to whom they owed ultimate allegiance
and whose duty it was to protect them, even if they could no longer
administer them. In recent years the protection that he was able to provide, in
his impotent and impoverished state, had been merely nominal; but
nevertheless it gave them prestige; it raised them above the heretic Churches,
such as the Copts and the Jacobites, who had no lay protector and were
entirely the servants of the Muslim monarch. But now, with the Emperor
gone, even this nominal protection disappeared. The Orthodox were reduced
to the state of the heretic Churches, in theory at least. In practice they were
better off; for they formed the largest, the richest and the best-educated
Christian community in the Sultan’s dominions; and Sultan Mehmet with his
sense of history was inclined to pay them special attention.
“The Sultan was well aware, also, that the Greeks would be of value to his
Empire. The Turks would provide him with his governors and his soldiers;
but they were no adept at commerce or industry; few of them were good
seamen; and even in the countryside they tended to prefer a pastoral to an
agricultural life. For the economy of the Empire the co-operation of the
Greeks was essential. The Sultan saw no reason why they should not live
244
within his dominions in amity with the Turks, so long as their own rights
were assured and so long as they realized that he was their overlord.
“If the Greek milet was to be organized, the first task was to provide it with
a head. Sultan Mehmet knew well of the difficulties that the attempt to force
union with Rome had produced in the Greek Church; and, after the conquest,
he soon satisfied himself that the average Greek considered the Patriarchal
throne to be vacant. The Patriarch Gregory Mammas was held to have
abdicated when he fled to Italy in 1451. A new Patriarch must be found. After
making some inquiries Mehmet decided that he should be George Scholarius,
now known as the monk Gennadius. Gennadius was not only the most
eminent scholar living in Constantinople at the time of the conquest. He was
everywhere respected for his unflinching probity; and he had been the leader
of the anti-Unionist, anti-Western party within the Church. He could be relied
upon not to intrigue with the West. Within a month of the conquest the Sultan
sent officials to bring Gennadius to his presence. He could not at first be
found. Eventually it was discovered that he had been taken prisoner at the
time of the fall of the city and had passed into the possession of a rich Turk of
Adrianople, who was deeply impressed by his learning and was treating him
with honours seldom accorded to a slave. He was redeemed from his buyer
and was conveyed honourably to Constantinople and led before the Sultan.
Mehmet persuaded him to accept the Patriarchal throne; and together they
worked out the terms for the constitution to be granted to the Orthodox. The
main lines were probably arranged before the Sultan left the conquered city
for Adrianople at the end of June, though six months elapsed before
Gennadius actually assumed the Patriarchate.
“The enthronization took place in January 1454, when the Sultan returned
to Constantinople. Mehmet was determined to play in so far as his religion
permitted the role played in the past by the Christian Emperor. We know
nothing about the necessary meeting of the Holy Synod; but presumably it
was formed by such metropolitans as could be gathered together and it was
their task to declare the Patriarchate vacant and, on the Sultan’s
recommendation, to elect Gennadius to fill it. Then, on 6 January, Gennadius
was received in audience by the Sultan, who handed him the insignia of his
office, the robes, the pastoral staff and the pectoral cross. The original cross
was lost. Whether Gregory Mammas had taken it with him when he fled to
Rome or whether it disappeared during the sack of the city is unknown. So
Mehmet himself presented a new cross, made of silver-gilt. As he invested the
Patriarch he uttered the formula: ‘Be Patriarch, with good fortune, and be
assured of our friendship, keeping all the privileges that the Patriarchs before
you enjoyed.’ As Santa Sophia had already been converted into a mosque,
Gennadius was led to the Church of the Holy Apostles. There the
Metropolitan of Heraclea, whose traditional duty it was to consecrate,
performed the rite of consecration and enthronization. The Patriarch then
emerged and, mounted on a magnificent horse which the Sultan had
presented to him, rode in procession round the city before returning to take
245
up his residence in the precincts of the Holy Apostles. He had also received
from the Sultan a handsome gift of gold.
“It is unlikely that the new constitution was ever written down. The
general lines along which a Christian milet in Muslim territory was
administered were well enough known not to need a general restatement. The
Imperial berat which gave the Sultan’s approval of every appointment to
episcopal office usually stated the duties of the incumbent, following the
traditional customs. We only hear of two specific documents issued by the
Conquering Sultan. According to the historian Phrantzes, who was at that
time a captive of the Turks and was in a position to know about it, Mehmet
handed to Gennadius a firman which he had signed, giving to the Patriarch
personal inviolability, exemption from paying taxes, freedom of movement,
security from deposition, and the right to transmit these privileges to his
successors. There is no reason for doubting this. It is indeed probable that the
Sultan would give to the Patriarch some written guarantee about his position.
It should, however, be noted that the freedom from deposition was not held
to interfere with the traditional right of the Holy Synod to depose a Patriarch
if his election was held to have been uncanonical or if he were demonstrably
unfitted for the office. Patriarchal chroniclers writing nearly a century later
claimed that the Sultan had signed another document in which he promised
that the customs of the Church with regard to marriage and burial should be
legally sanctioned, that Easter should be celebrated as a feast and the
Christians should have freedom of movement during the three Easter feast-
days, and that no more churches should be converted into mosques.
Unfortunately, when the last point was disregarded by later Sultans, the
Church authorities could not produce the document, which they said, no
doubt correctly, had been destroyed in a fire at the Patriarchate. But, as we
shall see, they were able to produce evidence to substantiate their claim.
“Whatever might have been written down, it was generally accepted that
the Patriarch, in conjunction with the Holy Synod, had complete control over
the whole ecclesiastical organization, the bishops and all churches and
monasteries and their possessions. Though the Sultan’s government had to
confirm episcopal appointments, no bishop could be appointed or dismissed
except on the recommendation of the Patriarch and the Holy Synod. The
Patriarchal law-courts alone had penal jurisdiction over the clergy; the
Turkish authorities could not arrest or judge anyone of episcopal rank
without the permission of the Patriarch. He also, in conjunction with the Holy
Synod, had control over all matters of dogma. His control was almost as
complete over the Orthodox laity. He was the Ethnarch, the ruler of the milet
[or milet-bashi}. The Patriarchal courts had full jurisdiction over all affairs
concerning the Orthodox which had a religious connotation, that is,
marriages, divorce, the guardianship of minors, and testaments and
successions. They were entitled to try any commercial case if both disputants
were Orthodox. Though the Christian laity were heavily taxed, the clergy
were free from paying the taxes, though on occasions they might of their own
consent agree to pay special taxes; and it was difficult for the Sultan to exert
246
pressure to secure this consent. The Patriarch could tax the Orthodox on his
own authority to raise money for the needs of the Church. Complaints against
the Patriarch could only be heard by the Holy Synod, and only if it agreed
unanimously to listen to them. The Patriarch could call in the Turkish
authorities to see that his wishes were carried out by his flock. In return for all
this, the Patriarch was responsible for the orderly and loyal behaviour of his
flock towards the ruling authorities and for ensuring that the taxes of the
head-man of the local commune, who was responsible for keeping the
registers. But, if there was any difficulty over the collection, the Government
could ask the Church to punish recalcitrant with a sentence of
excommunication.
“The Patriarchal courts administered justice according to the canon law of

the Byzantines and according to Byzantine civil and customary law.
Customary law grew rapidly in volume, owing to changed circumstances for
which the codified law did not allow, and which varied from place to place.
In civil cases the judgement was in the nature of an arbitration award. If either
party were dissatisfied with it he could have recourse to Turkish courts; and if
either party insisted, the case could be brought before the Turkish courts in
the first instance. This was seldom done, as the Turkish courts were slow,
expensive and often corrupt, and heard cases according to Koranic law. The
Patriarchal courts were considered to be remarkably free from corruption,
though rich Greeks on whose financial support the Church depended could
undoubtedly exercise some influence. A feature of the courts was that a
statement taken on oath counted as valid evidence; and so seriously were
oaths regarded that this was seldom abused. Criminal offences, such as
treason, murder, theft or riot, were reserved to the Turkish courts, unless the
accused was a priest…399
“In theory, the structure of the Great Church, as the Greeks called the
Patriarchal organization, even though the Great Church itself, Saint Sophia,
was no longer a Christian temple, was not altered by the conquest. The
Patriarch was still officially elected by the Holy Synod consisting of the
metropolitans, and the election was confirmed by the lay suzerain. As in
Byzantine times the lay suzerain almost invariably indicated the candidate
whom he wished to be elected; and the old custom of submitting three names
to him, which had fallen into disuse in late Byzantine times, was formally
abolished. But the increased administrative duties of the Patriarchate
inevitably led to changes. The Holy Synod had originally consisted of the
metropolitans alone, though the high officials of the Patriarchate seem
sometimes to have attended its meetings. Soon after the conquest they were
officially added to it; and there was a general enhancement of the
constitutional importance of the Synod. The Patriarch became little more than
399 “In effect,” writes Norman Russell, “the patriarch was a minister for Christian affairs in the
Ottoman scheme of things, invested with just sufficient power to ensure that the people paid
the taxes to the Ottoman government. By the end of the eighteenth century it is estimated that
he governed approximately one quarter of the population of the empire, some thirteen
million Orthodox” (“Neomartyrs of the Greek Church”, Sobornost’, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 37). (V.M.)
247
its president. In theory this was a reaffirmation of the democratic principles of
the Church. In practice it that, while a strong and popular Patriarch would
meet with no difficulties, Patriarchal authority could always be undermined.
Turkish officials, without seeming openly to interfere in the internal affairs of
the Church, could exercise what influence they desired through intrigues with
individual members of the Synod…”400
This weakness in the new system, and the increased influence of laymen
recruited to help the Patriarch with his increased administrative burden, soon
made themselves felt.
As Hieromonk Elia writes, “the Church’s higher administration became

caught up in a degrading system of corruption and simony. Involved as they
were in worldly affairs and matters political, the bishops fell a prey to
ambition and financial greed. Each new Patriarch required a berat from the
Sultan before he could assume office, and for this document he was obliged to
pay heavily. The Patriarch recovered his expenses from the episcopate, by
exacting a fee from each bishop before instituting him in his diocese; the
bishops in turn taxed the parish clergy, and the clergy taxed their flocks. What
was once said of the Papacy was certainly true of the Ecumenical Patriarchate
under the Turks: everything was for sale. When there were several candidates
for the Patriarchal throne, the Turks virtually sold it to the highest bidder; and
they were quick to see that it was in their financial interests to change the
Patriarch as frequently as possible, so as to multiply occasions for selling the
berat. Patriarchs were removed and reinstated with kaleidoscopic rapidity.”401
The only Christians who could pay these bribes were the Phanariots, loyal
Greek Christian officials, rich merchants who had risen to power in the
sixteenth century in Constantinople, who called themselves the “Archontes”
of the Greek nation, and who were called by others “Phanariots” because they
came from the Phanar, the Christian quarter of Constantinople where the
Patriarchate was based.
As Runciman writes, “they obtained for their sons positions in the

Patriarchal court; and one by one the high offices of the Great Church passed
into lay hands. Their members did not enter the Church itself. That was
considered to be beneath their dignity. The bishops and the Patriarch himself
continued to be drawn mainly from bright boys of humbler classes who had
risen through intelligence and merit. But by the end of the seventeenth
century the Phanariot families, as they were usually called, dominated the
central organization of the Church. They could not control it completely.
Occasionally, as in the case of Patriarch Cyril V, they would be overridden by
public opinion. But the Patriarchate could not do without them; for they were
400 Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp. 165-173.
401 Ware, op. cit., pp. 89-90.
248
in a position both to pay its debts and to intrigue in its favour at the Sublime
Porte…
“While they sought to increase their riches and through their riches to
obtain influence at first the Patriarch’s and then the Sultan’s courts, they
dreamed that the influence might ultimately be used to recreate the Empire of
Byzantium…”402
The most famous of the Phanariots was Alexander Mavrocardato, who

became Grand Dragoman of the Ottoman Empire at the age of thirty-one,
remaining in that post for twenty-five years, “with a brief interval early in
1684, when he was cast into prison as one of the scapegoats for the Turkish
failue before Vienna. His mother, who joined him in prison, died soon after
their release, in August 1684. Alexander was soon reinstated. In 1688 he led
an Ottoman embassy to Vienna. In 1698 a still higher post was created for
him. He became Exaporite, Minister of the Secrets, Private Secretary to the
Sultan, with the title of Prince and Illustrious Highness. In 1698 he was the
chief Turkish delegate at the peace conference of Carlowitz, where the
Habsburg Emperor gave him the title of Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.
He died in 1709, honoured and immensely rich. His career had opened up
new vistas for Greeks of ambition.
“Though none of the later Phanariots quite measured up to Alexander

Mavrocordato’s stature, he set the pattern for them. He was remarkably
intelligent and highly educated, and always eager to maintain intellectual
contacts with the West. The Jesuits believed him to be a secret Catholic; but
his actions scarcely confirmed their belief. He took an active part in the affairs
of the Orthodox Church, fighting for its rights. As Grand Dragoman he
secured a relaxation of the rules restricting the building of new churches, and
he arranged for the transference of many of the Holy Places at Jerusalem from
Latin to Greek ownership, in co-operation with the great Patriarch Dositheus
of Jerusalem. But he was far from fanatical. He gave strict orders to the Greeks
at Jerusalem that they were to welcome and aid Christians of all sects who
visited the shrines under their care; and he seems to have believed that it
might be possible to reunite the Churches of Christendom on a new
philosophical basis, resting on the foundation of the unity of the old Graeco-
Roman world. His attitude revealed his Jesuit training. He was a philosopher
and an intellectual, eager to be an up-to-date European, with little sympathy
with the old apophatic tradition of Orthodoxy. He did much in practice for
his Church; but the school of thought that he represented was to add to its
problems…”403
“Above all,” continues Runciman, “the Phanariots needed the support of

the Church in the pursuit of their ultimate political aim. It was no mean aim.
The Megali Idea, the Great Idea of the Greeks, can be traced back to days
402 Runciman, op. cit., pp. 362, 363.

403 Runciman, op. cit., pp. 368-369.
249
before the Turkish Conquest. It was the idea of the Imperial destiny of the
Greek people. Michael VIII Palaeologus expressed it in the speech that he
made when he heard that his troops had recaptured Constantinople from the
Latins; though he called the Greeks the Romaioi. In later Paleologan times the
word Hellene reappeared, but with the conscious intention of connecting
Byzantine imperialism with the culture and traditions of ancient Greece. With
the spread of the Renaissance a respect for the old Greek civilization had
become general. It was natural that the Greeks, in the midst of their political
disasters, should wish to benefit from it. They might be slaves now to the
Turks, but they were of the great race that had civilized Europe. It must be
their destiny to rise again. The Phanariots tried to combine the nationalistic
force of Hellenism in a passionate if illogical alliance with the oecumenical
traditions of Byzantium and the Orthodox Church. They worked for a
restored Byzantium, a New Rome that should be Greek, a new centre of
Greek civilization that should embrace the Orthodox world. The spirit behind
the Great Idea was a mixture of neo-Byzantinism and an acute sense of race.
But, with the trend of the modern world the nationalism began to dominate
the oecumenicity. George Scholarius Gennadius had, perhaps unconsciously,
foreseen the danger when he answered a question about his nationality by
saying that he would not call himself a Hellene though he was a Hellene by
race, nor a Byzantine though he had been born at Byzantium, but, rather, a
Christian, that is, an Orthodox. For, if the Orthodox Church was to retain its
spiritual force, it must remain oecumenical. It must not become a purely
Greek Church….”404
The question of Greek domination over the other Balkan Orthodox was
indeed a major potential source of conflict. And yet a major advantage of the
milet system for the Orthodox lay in the possibility it provided of making the
different Orthodox peoples more united. For the main cause of the conflicts
between the Balkan Orthodox nations, - the imperialist nationalism of the
Byzantine State, on the one hand, and the anti-imperialist nationalism of the
Slavic States, on the other – had been removed. No nation could now
encroach on the sovereignty of any other nation, since they were all equally
the miserable subjects of the Sultan. In theory, at any rate, this communion in
suffering should have brought the Christians closer together.
But in one important respect the Sultan had preserved the status quo of
Greek superiority, and in this way sown the seeds of future conflicts... “The
Muslims,” writes Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), “drew no distinction
between religion and politics: from their point of view, if Christianity was to
be recognized as an independent religious faith, it was necessary for
Christians to be organized as an independent political unit, an Empire within
the Empire. The ecclesiastical structure was taken over in toto as an
instrument of secular administration. The bishops became government
officials, the Patriarch was not only the spiritual head of the Greek Orthodox
404
Runciman, op. cit., pp. 378-379.
250
Church, but the civil head of the Greek nation – the ethnarch or millet-
bashi.”405
An outward symbol of this change in the status of the Patriarch was his
wearing a crown in the Divine services. Hieromonk Elia writes: “Until
Ottoman times,… bishops did not wear crowns, or anything else upon their
heads in church. When there was no longer an Emperor, the Patriarch began
to wear a crown, and the ‘sakkos’, an imperial garment, indicating that he was
now head of the millet or nation.”406 So the non-Greek Orthodox were again
under a Greek ruler who wore a crown, even if he in turn was ruled by the
Sultan! And they knew that if the Sultan were removed, then the Greek
Patriarch would again be in charge… The fact that the Orthodox of all nations
were now one nation in law could have been seen as a message from God:
“You – Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians – are one nation in My eyes.
Cease your quarrelling, therefore, and love each other.” But if that was the
message, it was not heeded…
The Ottoman Conquest was cruel and humiliating for the Orthodox.
Besides losing their independence and their greatest churches (Hagia Sophia
was turned into a mosque), there was the threat of gradual islamization. For,
although the Ottomans formally allowed freedom of Christian worship, in
practice they suppressed it in various ways: in the greater taxes that the
Christians had to pay, in the ban on missionary work, in the forcible
enrolment and conversion of Christian young men, especially in Bosnia, into
the military force of the Janissaries, and in the enslavement of Christian
young women into the sultan’s harem.
Nevertheless, there were advantages for the Balkan Orthodox Christians.

First, the temptation to betray the faith to the Pope in order protect the State
from the Sultan was removed; this allowed the Church under the anti-uniate
Patriarch Gennadius to renounce the unia with Rome and return to
Orthodoxy very soon after the Conquest. Moreover, Ottoman rule continued
to give the Christians of the Balkans some protection against the inroads of
western, mainly Jesuit, missionaries.
The Protestant approach was more direct. In the sixteenth century a group
of Lutheran theologians tried to open up a dialogue on the faith with
Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople. As Fr. Georges Florovsky writes, “the
initiative in the correspondence was taken by the Protestants. Stephen
Gerlach, a young Lutheran theologian from Tübingen, was going in 1573 to
Constantinople for a prolonged stay, as a chaplain to the new Imperial
ambassador in Turkey, Baron David Ungnad con Sonnegk. He was carrying
with him two private letters for the Patriarch, from Martin Crusius and Jacob
405 Ware, The Orthodox Church, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 89.
406 Elia, “[paradosis] Re: Bareheaded”, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com, May 9, 2006.
251
Andreae, chancellor of Tübingen University. It might seem that Crusius had
originally no ecclesiastical concerns: he was interested rather in getting some
information on the present state of the Greek Church and nation, under the
Turkish rule. But that was rather a diplomatic disguise. Probably from the
very beginning Gerlach had some other commission as well. In any case, even
in the first letters the unity and fellowship of faith had already been
mentioned. In any case, only a few months late, a new letter was dispatched
from Tübingen, under the joint signature of Crusius and Andreae, to which a
copy of the Augsburg Confession in Greek had been appended. Gerlach was
directed to submit it to the Patriarch for his consideration and comment. A
hope was expressed that the Patriarch might see that there was a basic
agreement in doctrine, in spite of a certain divergence in some rites, since the
Protestants were not making any innovations, but kept loyally the sacred
legacy of the Primitive Church, as it had been formulated, on the scriptural
basis, by the Seven ecumenical Councils. At Constantinople Gerlach
established personal contacts with various dignitaries of the Church and had
several interviews with the Patriarch himself. Finally he succeeded in
obtaining not only a polite acknowledgement, but a proper theological reply.
It was very friendly, but rather disappointing. The Patriarch suggested that
the Lutherans should join the Orthodox Church and unconditionally accept
her tradition teaching. The Lutherans persisted in their convictions. The
correspondence went on for some years and then broke off. In his last reply to
Tübingen the Patriarch simply declined any further discussion”407
Nevertheless, as Ottoman power declined in the seventeenth century, the

heretical missionaries began to make inroads among the Orthodox. There was
some intercommunion between Orthodox and Catholics on the Greek islands,
and one of the Ecumenical patriarchs, Cyril Lucaris, even succumbed to
Protestantism. Fortunately, however, the Ottomans allowed the Orthodox
hierarchs in different areas to assemble together and condemn the heresies.
Thus “one of the most important Orthodox Christian Synods and Synodal
Statements of the past 4 centuries, the Synod of Jerusalem (sometimes called
the Synod of Bethlehem) was held in 1672, under the presidency of the
renowned and learned Patriarch of Jerusalem, Dositheus. It condemns both
the heresies of Papism ('Roman Catholicism') and Protestantism; but, also in
the condemnations it does not neglect to present the positive Confession of
the Orthodox Christian Faith on vital issues such as the Holy Mysteries,
Prayer for the Dead, and many other important points.
“The Council was partially called to rebuke the heresies that had
emanated, sadly, from the See of Constantinople, which had fallen previously
under the sway of the heretical Patriarch, Cyril (Lucaris). Although some
have disputed the authenticity of the statements attributed to Cyril, the
Council's condemnations stand, nevertheless.
407 Florovsky, “Patriarch Jeremiah II and the Lutheran Divines”, in Christianity and Culture,
Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Company, 1974, p. 145.
252
“Patriarch Dositheus, having been consecrated to the hierarchical order at a
relatively young age (at the age of 23 years, which is far below the canonical
age of ordination even for Deacon), there seemed few other options for the
degeneration that Orthodox Christian Faithful and Clergy were being
dragged into at this period. Few seminaries and theological schools of any
note were in operation in these areas. Clergy and Faithful were apostatizing
in a stream to the Papist Eastern Unia, and few seemed to be able to stem the
tide. Into this situation the young Patriarch Dositheus came, and, with his
great learning and piety, prevented the loss of countless more souls to
apostasy.
“His work culminated in the Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem. He also

composed his famous Three Tomes (On Faith, On Hope and On Love), where he
rebuked the Papist heresies and others, as well as completing his famous
Twelve Book of the History of the Patriarch of Jerusalem.”408
The Orthodox were comforted in their sorrows by a continuing miracle

that demonstrated the truth of their faith as against that of infidels and
heretics – the Descent of the Holy Fire in Jerusalem every Great Saturday. In
1579, writes Protopresbyter James Thornton, “it happened that, by a
subterfuge, the Turks who then controlled Jerusalem, allowed representatives
of the Armenian Monophysites to conduct the ceremony, something that had
never occurred before, while the Greek Orthodox Patriarch and the people of
the Orthodox Faith remained outside. The Armenian Patriarch entered the
church in the usual manner, and began to pray. Nothing happened, no light
or fire appeared. The Armenian Patriarch began to weep, and redoubled his
prayers. Again, nothing happened. Many minutes passed, and then a half
hour – still nothing! Then, out of a clear blue sky without a trace of a cloud, a
mighty thunderclap was heard and a stone column outside of the church, next
to where the Greek Orthodox Patriarch stood, cracked open, and from the
opening there burst a flam: the Holy Fire. (The cracked column, outside the
entrance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, remains in place even today.)
The Patriarch lit his candle and passed the flames on to the Faithful, who
cried, ‘Thou art our one God, Jesus Christ: one of our True Faith, that of the
Orthodox Christians!’”
A Turkish emir called Touman “witnessed this astonishing event and was
dumbfounded. Never before had he seen anything like it. As a consequence,
he resolved to convert at once to Orthodox Christianity, an act for which,
under Turkish law, he face death. His former co-religionists beheaded him on
the spot…”409
Hieromonk Enoch, Facebook.

408
Thornton, Pious Kings and Right-Believing Queens, Belmont, Mass.: Institute of Byzantine
409
and Modern Greek Studies, 2013, p. 405.
253
31. TRANSLATIO IMPERII
“It is interesting to note,” writes Alexander Dvorkin, “how long the

peoples did not want to part with the myth of the Empire, to become the
centre of which became the dream of practically every European state both in
the East and in the West, from Bulgaria to Castilia. In the course of the 13th-
14th centuries the canonists of many countries independently of each other
developed the principle of the translatio imperii (translation of the empire). The
process touched Russia a little later – in the 15th century, in the form of the
theory of the Third Rome, which Moscow became...”410
As we have seen, after the fall of the New Rome of Constantinople in 1453,
there were two other major contenders for the title of Holy Roman Emperor:
the Muslim Sultan, and the Spanish King. The idea of the universal empire
survived into the modern period because it was necessary – necessary for each
of the major religions and civilizations – the Orthodox, the Roman Catholic
and the Muslim. It was necessary for Islam because, as Sultan Mehmet II said
to the Italian city-states: “You are 20 states… you are in disagreement among
yourselves… There must be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty
in the world.”411 It was necessary for Roman Catholicism because it affirmed
the existence of only one Church, the Roman Catholic, and only one empire,
the Holy Roman Empire. It was necessary for Orthodoxy because the quasi-
universal empires of Islam in the East and the Papacy in the West were
preparing to divide up the Orthodox lands between them, while the Orthodox
themselves showed little unity amongst themselves. It was also necessary for
the Orthodox because they had to learn the lesson that the Serbian Prince
Lazar had taught his people: Samo Slogo Srbina Spasava, “Only Unity Saves the
Serbs”; and while that unity had to be religious and spiritual first of all, it also
needed the support of political unity. It was necessary for the Papists because
they needed to protect themselves against the Ottomans and destroy the
contagion of Protestantism. And it was necessary for the Muslims because
they needed to hide their own disunities and proclaim their power and
superiority over “the people of the Book”.
There was another important question that presented itself to the Orthodox
after the fall of Byzantium: Did not the prophecies link the fall of Rome with
the coming of the Antichrist? If so, then the only way to avoid his coming was
to revive the empire.
Or perhaps the empire was not yet dead…
One possibility was that the Ottoman empire could be construed as a

continuation of Rome. After all, there had been pagans and heretics and
persecutors of the Church on the throne, so why not a Muslim? Unlikely as it
410 Dvorkin, Ocherki po istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (Sketches on the History of the
Universal Orthodox Church), Nizhni-Novgorod, 2006, p. 716.

411 Mehmet, II, in Henry Kissinger, World Order, London: Penguin, 2015, p. 5.
254
may sound, some Greeks embraced the idea of Istanbul being Rome, and the
Sultan – the Roman emperor. Thus in 1466 the Cretan historian George
Trapezuntios said to the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmet II: "Nobody
doubts that you are the Roman emperor. He who is the lawful ruler in the
capital of the empire and in Constantinople is the emperor, while
Constantinople is the capital of the Roman empire. And he who remains as
emperor of the Romans is also the emperor of the whole world."412
Certainly, the Ottoman sultans were powerful enough to claim the title.
“Their empire did not have the great eastward sweep of the Abbasid
Caliphate, but it had succeeded in spreading Islam into hitherto Christian
territory – not only the old Byzantine realms on either side of the Black Sea
Straits, but also Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary. Belgrade had fallen to the
Ottomans in 1521, Buda in 1541. Ottoman naval power had also brought
Rhodes to its knees (1522). Vienna might have survived (as did Malta) but,
having also extended Ottoman rule from Baghdad to Basra, from Van in the
Caucasus to Aden at the mouth of the Red Sea, and along the Barbary coast
from Algiers to Tripoli, Suleiman the Magnificent (1520-66) could… claim: ‘I
am the Sultan of Sultans, the Sovereign of Sovereigns, the distributor of
crowns to the monarchs of the globe, the shadow of God upon Earth…’… A
law-maker and a gifted poet, Suleiman combined religious power, political
power and economic power (including the setting of prices).”413
However, it was precisely his combination of all political and religious

power – the definition of despotism - that prevented the Sultan from being a
true Autocrat or Basileus. As for the other vital criterion – Christianity - there
could be no deception here: the Ottoman Sultans made no pretence at being
Orthodox (which even the heretical Byzantine emperors did), and they had no
genuine “symphony of powers” with the Orthodox Church (even if they
treated it better than some of the emperors). Therefore at most they could be
considered analogous in authority to the pagan emperors of Old Rome,
legitimate authorities to whom obedience was due (as long as, and to the
degree that, they did not compel Christians to commit impiety), but no more.
So had the clock been turned back? Had the Christian Roman Empire
returned to its pre-Christian, pre-Constantinian origins? No, the clock of
Christian history never goes back. The world could never be the same again
after Constantine and the Christian empire of New Rome, which had so
profoundly changed the consciousness of all the peoples of Europe. So if the
Antichrist had not yet come, there was only one alternative: the one, true
empire had indeed been translated somewhere - but not unlawfully, to some
heretical capital such as Aachen or Old Rome, but lawfully, to some Orthodox
nation capable of bringing forth the fruits of the Kingdom.
412 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin, London: Phoenix, 2001, p.
215.
413 Niall Ferguson, Civilization, London: Penguin, 2012, pp. 52, 53.
255
That nation had to be one that was independent of the Ottomans, or that
could re-establish its independence. The last remaining Free Greeks showed
little sign of being able to do this. The last Byzantine outpost of Morea in the
Peloponnese fell in 1461, and in the same year the Comnenian “empire” of
Trebizond on the south coast of the Black Sea also fell, after a siege of forty-
two days.414 Georgia, Serbia and Bulgaria were already under the Muslim
yoke.
Another possibility was the land we now call Romania, which then
comprised the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. These lands, writes
Runciman, “were inhabited by an indigenous race speaking a Latin language
with Illyrian forms and Slavonic intrusions, with a Church that was Slavonic-
speaking and had earlier been under the Serbian Church but now depended
upon Constantinople. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century the
reigning princes of both Principalities, who succeeded one another with
startling rapidity, had been connected by birth, often illegitimate, or by
marriage to the family Bassarabia, which gave its name to Bessarabia.”415
Wallachia had accepted Turkish overlordship in the fourteenth century,

but after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Prince Vlad “the Impaler” of
Wallachia conducted a courageous, albeit famously cruel, rearguard action
against the Ottomans north of the Danube.416 According to Catherine Curzon,
during his reign Vlad impaled at least 20,000 people (Romanians as well as
Turks), beheaded 5000, burned alive 10,000, nailed 10 turbans to their
wearers’ head and boiled alive and cannibalized 1 person.417
Stronger still was the resistance of the northern Romanian principality of

Moldavia, under its great Prince Stephen (1457-1504), who was Prince Vlad’s
cousin and conquered his Principality of Wallachia. On coming to the throne,
Stephen had taken St. Daniel the Hesychast to be his counsellor. He “often
visited his cell, confessed his sins, asked him for a profitable word, and did
nothing without his prayer and blessing. The Saint encouraged him and
exhorted him to defend the country and Christianity against the pagans. Saint
Daniel assured him that if he would build a church to the glory of Christ after
each battle, he would be victorious in all his wars.
“Stephen the Great obeyed him and defended the Church of Christ and the
Moldavian land with great courage for nearly half a century after the fall of
Byzantium. He won forty-seven battles and built forty-eight churches. Thus
Saint Daniel the Hesychast was shown to be a great defender of Romanian
Orthodoxy and the spiritual founder of those monasteries that were built at
his exhortation…
414 Neal Ascherson, Black Sea, London: Vintage, 1996, pp. 180-181.
415 Runciman, op. cit., p. 365.
416 M.J. Trow, Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Dracula, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003.
417 Curzon, “The Real Dracula. Vlad the Impaler”, All About History, p. 44.
256
“After Stephen the Great lost the battle of Razboieni in the summer of 1476,
he went to the cell of his good spiritual father, Saint Daniel the Hesychast, at
Voroneţ. Then, when ‘Stephen Voda knocked on the hesychast’s door for him
to open it, the hesychast replied that Stephen Voda should wait outside until
he had finished praying. And after the hesychast had finished praying, he
called Stephen Voda into his cell. And Stephen Voda confessed to him. And
Stephen Voda asked the hesychast what he should do now, since he was no
longer able to fight the Turks. Should the country surrender to the Turks or
not? And the hesychast told him not to surrender it, for he would win the
war; but that after saving the country he should build a monastery there in
the name of Saint George.’
“Believing Saint Daniel’s prophecy that he would defeat the Turks, the
Prince of Moldavia took his prayer and blessing and immediately assembled
the army and drove the Turks from the country. Thus the Saint helped deliver
Moldavia and the Christian countries from enslavement to the infidels by his
ardent prayers to God.”418
St. Stephen’s successors, however, were not able to continue his resistance
to the Ottomans. “They submitted voluntarily to the Sultan and were
permitted to reign on autonomously as his vassals. The two provinces were
divided again, under princes of the dynasty who were nominally elected by
the boyars, the heads of the local noble families, and whose elections were
subject to the Sultan’s confirmation. Vassals though they were, the Princes of
Wallachia and Moldavia were the only lay Christian rulers left within the
sphere of the old Byzantine world. They saw themselves as being in some
way the heirs of the Byzantine Caesars. Some of the more ambitious even took
the title of Basileus; and all of them modeled their courts on the lines of the old
Imperial court.”419
418 Archimandrite Ioanichie Balan, Romanian Patericon, Forestville, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska
Brotherhood, volume I, 1996, pp. 189, 191. So free from vainglory was Stephan that after his
victory over the Turks at Vasilui on January 10, 1475, he forbade any celebrations but
instituted a 40-day fast, insisting that the glory should be given to God alone.
419
Runciman, op. cit., p. 365.
257
32. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (1) IVAN III
But it was not Romania that was destined to be the Third Rome: the
honour - and cross - of being the protector and restorer of the fortunes of all
the Orthodox Christians fell to a nation far to the north – Russia…
The idea that the Orthodox Empire could be translated to the forests of the
north was a bold one. St. Constantine’s moving the capital of the empire from
Old Rome to New Rome had also been bold - but that step, though radical
and fraught with enormous consequences, had not involved going beyond the
bounds of the existing empire, and had been undertaken by the legitimate
emperor himself. The Serbs and Bulgarians had each in their time sought to
capture New Rome and make it the capital of a Slavic-Greek kingdom – but
this, again, had not involved moving the empire itself, as opposed to
changing its dominant nation. The Frankish idea of the translatio imperii from
New Rome to Aachen had involved both changing the dominant nation and
taking the capital beyond the bounds of the existing empire – and had been
rejected by the Greeks as heretical, largely on the grounds that it involved
setting up a second, rival empire, where there could only be one true one.
Let us remind ourselves of the eschatological idea on which the idea of the
translatio imperii rested. According to this, Rome in its various successions and
reincarnations will exist to the end of the world – or at least, to the time of the
Antichrist. As Michael Nazarov writes: “This conviction is often reflected in
the patristic tradition (it was shared by Saints: Hippolytus of Rome, John
Chrysostom, Blessed Theodoret, Blessed Jerome, Cyril of Jerusalem and
others). On this basis Elder Philotheus wrote: ‘the Roman [Romejskoe]
kingdom is indestructible, for the Lord was enrolled into the Roman
[Rimskuiu] power’ (that is, he was enrolled among the inhabitants at the
census in the time of the Emperor Augustus). Here Philotheus distinguishes
between the indestructible ‘Roman kingdom’, whose successor was now Rus’,
and Roman power, which had gone into the past.”420
In fact the only real candidate for the role of leadership in the Orthodox
world was Muscovite Russia. (Moscow was not the only Russian principality
in the middle of the fifteenth century, but after its conquest of Novgorod in
1487 it had no real rivals. But more on this below.) Only the Russians could be
that “third God-chosen people” of the prophecy.421 Only they were able to re-
express the Christian ideal of the symphony of powers on a stronger, more
420Nazarov, Taina Rossii (The Mystery of Russia), Moscow, 1999, p. 538.

421
An 8th or 9th century Greek prophecy found in St. Sabbas’ monastery in Jerusalem,
declares: "The sceptre of the Orthodox kingdom will fall from the weakening hands of the
Byzantine emperors, since they will not have proved able to achieve the symphony of Church
and State. Therefore the Lord in His Providence will send a third God-chosen people to take
the place of the chosen, but spiritually decrepit people of the Greeks.” (Archbishop Seraphim,
“Sud’by Rossii” (“The Destinies of Russia”), Pravoslavnij Vestnik (Orthodox Messenger), N 87,
January-February, 1996, pp. 6-7; translated in Fr. Andrew Phillips, Orthodox Christianity and
the Old English Church, English Orthodox Trust, 1996)
258
popular base – as a symphony, in effect, of three powers – Church, State and
People - rather than two. For the Russians had the advantage over the
Romans and the Greeks that they were converted to the faith as a single
people, with their existing social organization intact, and not, as in Rome, as
an amalgam of different peoples whose indigenous social structures had
already been smashed by the pagan imperial power. Thus whereas in Rome,
as Lev Tikhomirov writes, “the Christians did not constitute a social body”,
and “their only organization was the Church”422, in the sense that it was not
whole peoples or classes but individuals from many different peoples and
classes that joined the Church, in Russia the whole of the richly layered and
variegated, but at the same time socially and politically coherent society came
to the Church at one time and was baptized together. Moreover, Russia
remained a nation-state with a predominantly Russian or Russian-Ukrainian-
Belorussian population throughout its extraordinary expansion from the core
principality of Muscovy, whose territory in 1462 was 24,000 square
kilometres, to the multi-national empire of Petersburg Russia, whose territory
in 1914 was 13.5 million square kilometres.423
As we have seen, the Russians retained their loyalty to the Byzantine

Church and Empire until the very last moment – that is, until both emperor
and patriarch betrayed the Orthodox faith at the Council of Florence in 1438-
39. Even after this betrayal, the Russians did not immediately break their
canonical dependence on the patriarch. And even after the election of St.
Jonah to the metropolitanate, the Great Prince’s letter to the patriarch shows
great restraint and humility, speaking only of a “disagreement” between the
two Churches. He stressed that St. Jonah had received the metropolitanate
without asking the blessing of the patriarch, but in accordance with the
canons, only out of extreme necessity. The patriarch’s blessing would again be
asked once they were assured that he adhered to “the ancient piety”.
Since the Russian Great Prince was now the only independent Orthodox
ruler424, and was supported by an independent Church, he had a better claim
than any other to inherit the throne of the Roman Emperors and therefore call
himself “Tsar” (from “Caesar”, the equivalent of the Greek “Basileus”).425
422 Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg,
1992, p. 164.
423 Dominic Lieven, Empire, London: John Murray, 2000, pp. 262, 278.
424 With the exception of Georgia, which later entered the Russian empire. The metropolitan
of Georgia had been among the very few, with St. Mark of Ephesus, who refused to sign the
unia in Florence. Romania, as we have seen, was also independent for a time, but soon came
under the suzerainty of the Ottomans. Technically, even Moscow was not completely
independent until 1480, when it stopped paying tribute to the Tatars.
425 “The primary sense of imperium is ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’, with no connotation of overseas
territories, or oppressed indigenous peoples. Though ambitious monarchs, of course, aspired

to as extensive an imperium as possible, the main point about being an emperor was that you
did not have to take orders from anybody.” (Alan MacColl, “King Arthur and the Making of
an English Britain”, History Today, volume 49 (3), March, 1999, p. 11).
259
The title had been floated already before the fall of Constantinople: in 1447-
48 Simeon of Suzdal had called Great Prince Basil Vasilievich “faithful and
Christ-loving and truly Orthodox… White Tsar”.426 And St. Jonah wrote to
Prince Alexander of Kiev that Basil was imitating his “ancestors” – the holy
Emperor Constantine and the Great-Prince Vladimir.427
The Russian Great Princes’ claim was further strengthened by the marriage
of Ivan III to the last surviving heir of the Palaeologan line, Sophia, in 1472.
Sophia was born in 1455, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine
XI. She was brought up in Rome as a Catholic under the guardianship of the
Pope. Ekaterina Astafieva writes: “The negotiations [between Moscow and
Rome] went on for three years, and finally in 1472 Sophia with her dowry
were sent to Muscovy. On the way feasts were laid out in her honour in
various towns. In front of the carriage there went a representative of the Pope
with a big Catholic cross. The pontifex was hoping that the Greek princess
would bring Catholicism with her to Rus’.
“But the Papacy’s plans were not destined to be fulfilled: the news of this
stirred up a veritable scandal in Moscow. Metropolitan Philip declared that he
would immediately leave the city if the Catholic cross were brought into the
capital. To avoid conflicts, Ivan III sent his ambassador to meet the carriage
fifteen versts from Moscow. He, without hesitating long, forcibly removed the
cross from the papal priest. Finally the foreign bride arrived in the city,
accepted the Orthodox faith and on November 22 was married in the
Dormition cathedral.”428
It was on the basis of this marriage that the Venetian Senate accorded Ivan
the imperial title.429 Ivan himself indicated that in marrying Sophia he had
united Muscovite Russia with Byzantium by uniting two coats of arms – the
two-headed eagle of Byzantium with the image of St. George impaling the
dragon. From now on the two-headed eagle became the Russian coat of arms
with the image of St. George in the centre of it, as it were in its breast.430
In 1492, Metropolitan Zosimus of Moscow wrote: “The Emperor

Constantine built a New Rome, Tsarigrad; but the sovereign and autocrat
(samoderzhets) of All the Russias, Ivan Vassilievich, the new Constantine, has
laid the foundation for a new city of Constantine, Moscow.”431 Then, in 1498
426 Simeon of Suzdal, in Fomin S. & Fomina T., Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before
the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, p. 242.
427 Fr. John Meyendorff, “Was there an Encounter between East and West at Florence?” Rome,
Constantinople, Moscow, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, p. 108.

428 Astafieva, “Prikliuchenia vizantijskoj printsessy v Moskovii” (The adventures of a
Byzantine Princess in Muscovy), Diletant, October, 2016.

429 Meyendorff, op. cit., pp. 109-110.
430 Archpriest Lev Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1997, p. 44.
431 Quoted in Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press,
1968, p. 323. Ya.S. Lourié writes: “The idea of ‘Moscow – the new city of Constantine’ was put
forward by Zosimus, who was linked with the heretical movement [of the Judaizers] at the
end of the 15th century; Zosimus boldly referred the New Testament prophecy, ‘the first shall
260
Ivan had himself crowned by Metropolitan Simon as “Tsar, Grand Prince and
Autocrat of All the Russias”. “In the coronation ceremony, which was a rough
copy of the Byzantine, the metropolitan charged the Tsar ‘to care for all souls
and for all Orthodox Christendom’. The title of Tsar had now become the
official title and brought with it the implication that the Russian monarch
was, before God, the head of the Orthodox, that is, of the true Christian
world.”432
However, there were problems associated with the assumption of this title
at this time – that is, in the fifteenth century. First, there were other Russian
princes with claims to be “the new Constantine”, “the saviour of Orthodoxy”
– “for instance,” writes Fr. John Meyendorff, “the prince Boris of Tver, who
had also sent a representative to the council [of Florence] and now, after
rejecting the Latin faith, was said by one polemicist to deserve an imperial
diadem. Furthermore, in Novgorod, under Archbishop Gennadius (1484-
1509), there appeared a curious Russian variation on the Donation of
Constantine, the Legend of the White Cowl. According to the Legend, the
white cowl (klobuk; Gr. επικαλιµαυκον) was donated by Constantine the
Great to pope Sylvester following his baptism; the last Orthodox pope,
foreseeing Rome’s fall into heresy, sent the cowl for safe-keeping to patriarch
Philotheus of Constantinople, who eventually (also foreseeing the betrayal of
Florence), sent the precious relic to the archbishop of Novgorod. Thus, not
only Moscow, but also Tver and Novgorod, were somehow claiming to be the
heirs of ‘Rome’, the center of the true Christian faith…”433
This problem would resolve itself as Moscow gradually absorbed the other
Russian princedoms. More serious, however, was a second problem
associated with the fact that the Muscovite Russian Church was now not the
only Russian Church. In 1451 the uniate Patriarch Gregory Mammas of
Constantinople had fled to Rome, where he consecrated Gregory Bolgarin as
metropolitan of Kiev in opposition to St. Jonah. This was justified by the
Latins not only on the grounds that there was no communion between
themselves and the Orthodox of Muscovy, - the Pope had called St. Jonah “the
schismatic monk Jonah, son of iniquity”, - but also because a large part of the
Russian population was now living within the domain of King Casimir of
Poland-Lithuania, who was a Roman Catholic. Thus the fall of the Greek
Church into uniatism led directly to a schism in the Orthodox Russian
Church, which had the consequence that the Russian Great Prince could not
count on the obedience even of all the Russian people – hardly a strong
position from which to be proclaimed emperor of all the Orthodox Christians!
be last, and the last first’ to the Greeks and the Russians…” (“Perepiska Groznogo s
Kurbskim v Obschestvennoj Mysli Drevnej Rusi” (“The Correspondence of the Terrible one
with Kurbsky in the Political Thought of Ancient Rus’”), in Ya.S. Lourié and Yu.D. Rykov,
Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem Kurbskim (The Correspondence of the Terrible one with
Andrew Kurbsky), Moscow: “Nauka”, 1993, p. 230).
432 Runciman, op. cit., pp. 323-324.
433 Meyendorff, “Was There Ever a ‘Third Rome’? Remarks on the Byzantine Legacy in
Russia”, in Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, p. 135.
261
Thirdly, and still more fundamentally, after the death of St. Jonah (who still
retained the title of metropolitan of Kiev) in 1461, the Muscovite metropolia
was formally declared to be schismatic by Constantinople. The Muscovites’
old excuse for not returning into obedience to Constantinople – the latter’s
departure from “the ancient piety” of Orthodoxy into uniatism, - no longer
held water since the enthronement of St. Gennadius Scholarius, a disciple to
St. Mark of Ephesus, to the see of the former imperial City. Moreover, in 1466
Gregory Bolgarin also returned to Orthodoxy, whereupon he was recognized
as the sole canonical Russian metropolitan by Constantinople. This created a
major problem, because in the consciousness of the Russian people the
blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch was required for such a major step as the
assumption of the role of Orthodox emperor by the Russian Great Prince –
which was out of the question so long as the Russians were in schism from
the Greeks… However, the Muscovites felt, with some reason, that it made no
sense to subject their own free Russian Church living under a free, Orthodox
and increasingly powerful sovereign to a metropolitan living under a hostile
Roman Catholic king and a patriarch living under a hostile Muslim sultan!
Lack of recognition by the Second Rome was not the only obstacle that the
Russian Great Princes had to overcome before they could truly call
themselves the rulers of the Third Rome. They had to reunite, first, all the
Russian lands under their own dominion, and then, if possible, all the lands of
the Orthodox East. This point can be better appreciated if it is remembered
that when the Emperor Constantine transferred the capital of the empire from
Old Rome to the New Rome of Constantinople, he was already the
undisputed ruler of the whole of the Roman Empire, in which the great
majority of Orthodox Christians lived. Ivan III, by contrast, ruled none of the
traditional territories of the Roman empire, and not even “the mother of
Russian cities”, Kiev – although he claimed, by virtue of his descent from the
Rurikids, to be the prince of “all Rus”.
Thus it was the long reign of Great Prince Ivan III (1462-1505) that really
laid the foundations both of the kingdom of Muscovy and of the empire of
Moscow the Third Rome. By freeing himself from the suzerainty of the Tatars
in the East, and by conquering Novgorod and encroaching on the lands of
Lithuania in the West, Ivan had established the real independence of his
kingdom. But Kiev and Polotsk – in what is now Ukraine and Belarus –
remained under the suzerainty of the Catholic Grand Duke Casimir of
Lithuania. And this could not be allowed to continue, because it undermined
Moscow’s claims to be the heirs of the Great Princes of Kiev and rulers of “all
Rus”, keeping many millions of Orthodox Russians under a heterodox yoke.
So the kingdom was bound to continuing expanding…
The gathering of all the Russian lands into a single national kingdom
involved three major stages: (i) the uniting of the free Russian princedoms like
262
Tver and Novgorod under Moscow, (ii) the final liberation of the Eastern and
Southern Russian lands from the Tatar-Mongol-Turkish yoke, and (iii) the
liberation of the Western Russian lands from the Catholic yoke of Poland-
Lithuania.
Steady progress in achieving the first stage was made in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries until the “The Time of Troubles”, which shook the Russian
State to its foundation. Progress was resumed after the enthronement of the
first Romanov tsar in 1613… The second and third aims, that of the gathering
of the Russian lands was finally accomplished in 1915, when Tsar Nicholas II
reconquered Galicia from the Catholic Austrians…
The final task, which belonged not so much to the national kingdom of
Muscovy as to Moscow the Third Rome, was the gathering of the Orthodox
lands, including the Greek and Semitic lands of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Muscovite State first turned its attention seriously to this aim under the
Grecophile Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nikon. At this moment,
however, the Muscovite autocracy suffered its most severe crisis and was
transformed into the “Orthodox absolutism” of Peter the Great, whose ideal
was rather the First Rome of the Augusti...
During the reigns of Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II, with their wars to
protect the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans, the idea of Moscow the Third
Rome was revived, and Orthodox Christians again began to see this as the
role that Divine Providence had entrusted to Russia.434 The wars waged by
Russia for the liberation of Bulgaria in 1877-78 and Serbia in 1914-17 can be
seen as prefiguring the full realization of that role. But then came the
revolution, which destroyed the ideal just as it was on the point of being
realized through the Russian defeat of the Ottoman empire and the recapture
of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
434 See N. Ulyanov, "Kompleks Filofea" (“The Philotheus Complex”), Voprosy Filosofii
(Questions of Philosophy), 1994, N 4, pp. 152-162.
263
33. JUDAIZERS, NON-POSSESSORS AND THE GREAT PRINCE
Russia had known no serious outbreak of heresy since her baptism by St.
Vladimir. However, towards the end of the fourteenth century there appeared
the heresy of the Judaizers, when "the whole Russian Church," as
Nechvolodov writes, "had at her head a Judaizer, and the immediate
entourage of the sovereign… were also Judaizers."435
The roots of the heresy, writes a publication of the Moscow Patriarchate,

"go deeper than is usually imagined. The part played by national elements in
the heresy, which exploded like epidemics onto medieval Europe, has not yet
been sufficiently clarified. The acts of the inquisition demonstrate that most of
the sects were Judeo-Christian in character with a more or less pronounced
Manichaean colouring. The flourishing of the Albigensian heresy in France
has been directly linked by historians with the rise of Jewish influence in that
country. The heresy of the Templars, 'the knights of the Temple', who were
condemned in 1314, was linked with esoterical Judaism and blasphemy
against Christ...
"Judaizers were also known in the Orthodox East. In Salonica in the first
third of the 14th century 'there existed a heretical Judaizing society in the
heart of the Greek population' which had an influence on 'the Bulgarian
Judaizers of the 40s and 50s of the same century'. In 1354 a debate took place
in Gallipoli between the famous theologian and hierarch of the Eastern
Church Gregory Palamas, on the one hand, and the Turks and the Chionians,
i.e the Judaizers, on the other. In 1360 a council meeting in Trnovo, the then
capital of the Bulgarian patriarchate, condemned both the opponents of
Hesychasm (the Barlaamites) and those who philosophise from the Jewish
heresies.
"The successes of the heresy in Russia could be attributed to the same cause
as its success in France in the 14th century. Jews streamed into the young state
of the Ottomans from the whole of Western Europe. Thereafter they were able
to penetrate without hindrance into the Genoan colonies of the Crimea and
the Azov sea, and into the region of what had been Khazaria, where the
Jewish sect of the Karaites had a large influence; for they had many adherents
in the Crimea and Lithuania and were closely linked with Palestine. As the
inscriptions on the Jewish cemetery of Chuft-Kale show, colonies of Karaites
existed in the Crimea from the 2nd to the 18th centuries. The Karaites were
brought to Lithuania by Prince Vitovt, the hero of the battle of Grunwald
(1410) and great-grandfather of Ivan III Vasilievich. From there they spread
throughout Western Russia.
"... One has to admit that the beginning of the polemic between the
Orthodox and the heretics was made, not in Byzantium, but in Russia.
435 Nechvolodov, A. L'Empereur Nicolas II et les Juifs (The Emperor Nicholas II and the Jews),
Paris, 1924, p. 183.
264
Besides, the polemic began... in the time of Metropolitan Peter (+1326), the
founder of the Muscovite ecclesiastical centre. In the life of St. Peter it is
mentioned among his other exploits for the good of the Russian Church that
he 'overcame the heretic Seit in debate and anathematised him.’ The
hypothesis concerning the Karaite origin of the 'Judaizers' allows us to see in
Seit a Karaite preacher.
"... The heresy did not disappear but smouldered under a facade of church
life in certain circles of the Orthodox urban population, and the Russian
church, under the leadership of her hierarchs, raised herself to an unceasing
battle with the false teachings. The landmarks of this battle were:
Metropolitan Peter's victory over Seit in debate (between 1312 and 1326), the
unmasking and condemnation of the strigolniki in Novgorod in the time of
Metropolitan Alexis (1370s), the overcoming of this heresy in the time of
Metropolitan Photius (+1431), and of the heresy of the Judaizers - in the time
of Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod (+1505) and St. Joseph of Volotsk
(+1515).
"'From the time of the holy Prince Vladimir, the Baptizer of Rus', who
rejected the solicitations of the Khazar Rabbis, wrote St. Joseph of Volotsk, 'the
great Russian land has for 500 years remained in the Orthodox Faith, until the
enemy of salvation, the devil, introduced the foul Jew to Great Novgorod. On
St. Michael's day, 1470, there arrived from Kiev in the suite of Prince Michael
Olelkovich, who had been invited by the veche [the Novgorodian parliament],
'the Jew Scharia' and 'Zachariah, prince of Taman. Later the Lithuanian Rabbis
Joseph Smoilo Skaryavei and Moses Khanush also arrived.
"The heresy began to spread quickly. However, 'in the strict sense of the
word this was not merely heresy, but complete apostasy from the Christian
faith and the acceptance of the Jewish faith. Using the weaknesses of certain
clerics, Scharia and his assistants began to instill distrust of the Church
hierarchy into the faint-hearted, inclining them to rebellion against spiritual
authority, tempting them with 'self-rule', the personal choice of each person in
the spheres of faith and salvation, inciting the deceived to renounce their
Mother-Church, blaspheme against the holy icons and reject veneration of the
saints - the foundations of popular morality - and, finally, to a complete
denial of the saving Sacraments and dogmas of Orthodoxy concerning the
Holy Trinity and the Incarnation. So they went so far as to conduct a Jewish
war against God and the substitution of Christ the Saviour by the false
messiah and antichrist.
"The false teaching spread in secret. Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod

first heard about the heresy in 1487; four members of a secret society, while
abusing each other in a drunken frenzy, revealed the existence of the heresy
in front of some Orthodox. The zealous archpastor quickly conducted an
investigation and with sorrow became convinced that not only Novgorod, but
also the very capital of Russian Orthodoxy, Moscow, was threatened. In
September 1487 he sent Metropolitan Gerontius in Moscow the records of the
265
whole investigation in the original. Igumen Joseph (Sanin) of the Dormition
monastery of Volotsk, who had an unassailable reputation in Russian society
at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries, also spoke out
against the heresy.
"But the battle with the heresy turned out to be no simple matter, for the
heretics had enlisted the support of powerful people in Moscow. Great Prince
Ivan III, who had been deceived by the Judaizers, invited them to Moscow,
and made the two leading heretics protopriests - one in the Dormition, and
the other in the Archangels cathedrals in the Kremlin. Some of those close to
the Tsar, such as Theodore Kurytsyn, who headed the government, and
whose brother became the heretics' leader, were co-opted into the heresy. The
Great Prince's bride, Helen Voloshanka, was converted to Judaism. In 1483 a
correspondence between Ivan III and the heresiarch Scharia himself was
established through diplomatic channels between Moscow and Bakhchisarai.
Finally, the heretic Zosimus was raised to the see of the great hierarchs of
Moscow Peter, Alexis and Jonah."436
Eventually, the Great Prince returned to the truth, and at Councils he

convened in 1503 and 1505 the heresy was crushed… The Councils were
notable for their decreeing capital punishment for the leading heretics.437
The immediate result of the Judaizing heresy was a major increase in the
Great Prince’s power and in the Church’s reliance on the State. For
churchmen now saw in the monarchical power the major bulwark against
heresy, more important even than the metropolitanate, which, for the second
time in little more than fifty years (the first time was at the council of
Florence) had betrayed Orthodoxy. 438 Thus Archbishop Gennadius of
Novgorod wrote to Bishop Niphon of Suzdal: “You go to the Metropolitan
and ask him to intercede with his majesty the Great Prince, that he cleanse the
Church of God from heresy”. Again, St. Joseph of Volokolamsk, who had
played the major part in crushing the heresy, wrote: “The Tsar is by nature
like all men, but in power he is similar to the Supreme God. And just as God
wishes to save all people, so the Tsar must preserve everything that is subject
to his power from all harm, both spiritual and bodily”.439
436 Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov' (The Russian Orthodox Church), Publication of the Moscow
Patriarchate, 1988, pp. 25-26.

437 “Ivan Maximov, Mikhail Konoplev and Ivan Volk were burnt in Moscow, while Nekras
Rukavov was executed in Novgorod after his tongue had been cut off. The spiritual
inquisitors also insisted on the burning of the Yuriev Archimandrite Kassian, while the
destiny of Theodore Kuritsyn is not known by us for certain” (Taras
Repin, “Zhidovstvuiuschie: sud’ba pervoj oppozitsii na Rusi” (The Judaizers: the destiny of
Russia’s first opposition), Russkaia Semerka, http://russian7.ru/2014/09/zhidovstvuyushhie-
sudba-pervojj-oppozic.
438 However, the tsar, too, had not been without blame. Once he summoned St. Joseph and
said to him: Forgive me, Father. I knew about the Novgorodian heretics, but thought that
they were mainly occupied in astrology.” “Is it for me to forgive you?” asked the saint. “No,
father, please, forgive me!” said the tsar (Lebedev, op. cit., p. 50). (V.M.)
439 St. Joseph, Prosvetitel’ (The Enlightener), Word 16.
266
According to St. Joseph, as M.V. Zyzykin interprets him, the defence of the
truth “is placed on the tsar alone, for in his eyes it is in the monarchical power
that the will of God is reflected; he is God’s deputy. The tsar is not only the
servant of God, chosen by God and placed by Him on his throne, but he is
also the representative of God, immeasurably exalted above [ordinary]
people: he is like them only in accordance with his human nature, but in his
power he is like God. From the point of view of the aim, the manifestations of
monarchical power are analogous to those of Divine power. Just as the All-
Highest wishes that all men be saved, so the tsar must keep those entrusted to
his care from spiritual and bodily harm. For his fulfilment and non-fulfilment
of his duty the tsar is responsible only before God. His power cannot be
placed beside any other power on earth. And Joseph applies the words of
Chrysostom to the tsars: ‘Hear, O kings and princes, your dominion is given
you from God, you are the servants of God; it is for this reason that He placed
you as pastor and guard over His people to protect His flock unharmed from
wolves…’ The tsar must revenge Christ on the heretics, otherwise he will
have to give an account at the terrible judgement. He must send them to
prison or tortures and submit them to death. Heretical agreements are for
Joseph worse than robbery and theft, than murder or fornication or adultery.
Those who pretended to repent of their Judaism after the Council of 1490
deceived many, and the tsar was responsible for that before God. The spread
and fall of heresy is the cause of the fall and destruction of a great kingdom; it
is analogous to state disturbances and coups. ‘The great kingdoms of the
Armenians, Ethiopians and Romans, who fell away from the Catholic and
Apostolic Church and from the Orthodox Christian faith perished evilly
because of the negligence of the Orthodox kings and hierarchs of those times,
and these kings and hierarchs will be condemned at the terrible judgement of
Christ for this negligence.’ In 1511 Joseph persuaded Basil III to apply his
power against the heretics in the same way that he had previously spoken
with the father against the Novgorod Judaizers, so that they should not
destroy the whole of Orthodox Christianity. It was on the soil of the struggle
with heresy that the duty of the Russian Great Prince to defend the faith was
revealed. If in Byzantium the kings’ encroachment on the teaching authority
of the Church stands to the fore, in Rus’ we encounter first of all the striving
to ascribe to the tsar Archpastoral rights in the realisation of Christianity in
life.
“Joseph gave a very broad interpretation to the range of the tsar’s rights,
extending them to all spheres of life, to everything ecclesiastical and monastic.
He did not think twice about bringing Archbishop Serapion of Novgorod to
trial before the tsar for banning him for leaving his jurisdiction, although the
tsar had permitted it.440 For Joseph the tsar’s power was unlimited already by
440 At the very moment that Joseph passed into eternal life, Serapion stood up and said to
those around him: “Our brother Joseph has died. May God forgive him: such things happen
even with righteous people” (Moskovskij Paterik (The Moscow Patericon), Moscow: “Stolitsa”,
1991, p. 46). (V.M.)
267
virtue of its origin alone. For him the tsar was not only the head of the state,
but also the supreme protector of the Church. He had, besides, a leadership
role in relation to all ecclesiastical institutions; not one side of ecclesiastical life
was exempt from it; the circle of his concerns included Church rites and
Church discipline, and the whole ecclesiastical-juridical order. The tsar
establishes the rules of ecclesiastical order and entrusts to bishops and nobles
the task of seeing to their fulfilment, threatening the disobedient with
hierarchical bans and punishments. One can have resort to the tsar’s court,
according to Joseph, against all ecclesiastics and monastics. This theory would
have been the exact restoration of ancient caesaropapism in Russian colours if
Joseph had not limited the king in principle by the observance of the Church
canons. In this exaltation of the tsar we see a reflection of the Byzantine theory
of the 14th century, which, while recognizing the priority of the canon over
the law, nevertheless exalted the emperor to the first place even in Church
affairs.”441
St. Joseph was far from ascribing absolute power to the tsar, as is evident
from the following: “The holy apostles speak as follows about kings and
hierarchs who do not care for, and worry about, their subjects: a
dishonourable king who does not care for his subjects is not a king, but a
torturer; while an evil bishop who does not care for his flock is not a pastor,
but a wolf.”442 “Such a tsar, because of his guile, our Lord Jesus Christ did not
all a king, but a fox (Luke 13.32)… And you must not obey such a tsar or
prince, who will lead you into impiety or guile, even if they torture you or
threaten you with death.”443
However, his theory of Church-State relations lays great responsibility on

the tsar as the representative of God on earth, and less emphasis on the
bishop’s duty to reprove an erring tsar.444
441 Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon (Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw, 1931, part I, pp. 153-154. Hieromonk
Ioann (Kologrivov) writes: “Although Joseph considered the power of the Church to be
higher than that of the sovereign in theory, in practice he extended the latter over the Church
also. For him the Tsar was the head both of the State and of the Church – the supreme
preserver and defender of the faith and the Church. The sovereign’s concern for the Church
was revealed particularly in the fact that he was always “Christ’s avenger on the heretics.
Lack of zeal for the good of the Church constituted, in the eyes of Joseph, one of the most
serious crimes the sovereign could be guilty of, and it brought the wrath of God upon the
whole country. In the single person of the sovereign Joseph thereby united both spiritual and
secular power. He, and not Peter the Great, must be considered to be the founder of “State
Orthodoxy” in Russia. A little later Ivan the Terrible, basing himself on the teaching of the
abbot of Volokolamsk, acquired the opportunity to declare that the Tsar was “called to save
the souls of his subjects”. (Ocherki po Istorii Russkoj Sviatosti (Sketches on the History of
Russian Sanctity), Brussels, 1961, p. 204).
442 St. Joseph, Prosvetitel’ (The Enlightener), Word 16.
443 St. Joseph, Poslanie Ikonopistsu (Letter to an Iconographer), Moscow, 1994, p. 287.
444 For, according to Mikhail Suslov, “In medieval Russia, the idea of the divine basis of
earthly rule and the character of the tsar’s supremacy as the ‘living image’ of its sacred
prototype became established (Andreeva 2007: 193). This is the same idea as the medieval
concept of ‘the two bodies of the king,’ as in the following: ‘The Christian ruler became the
christomimetes — literally the “actor” or “impersonator” of Christ — who on the terrestrial
268
An attempt to restore the balance was made at the Council of 1503, in
which the debate on the Judaizers led naturally to the problem of the
monasteries’ landed estates; for one of the reasons for the popularity of the
heretics was the perceived justice of their criticisms of monasticism, and in
particular of the wealth of the monasteries. St. Joseph defended this wealth,
claiming that it was necessary in order to support the poor and the Great
Prince and the education of the clergy – and there can be no doubt that the
role of the monasteries in these matters was very important. However, Monk-
Prince Bassian and St. Nilus of Sora, preached the monastic ideal of non-
possessiveness. The Josephites’ or “Possessors’” views prevailed at the
Council; but the argument has continued to this day…
“The Non-Possessors,” writes Runciman, “derived their tradition from

Mount Athos, not from the Athos of rich monasteries with wide mainland
estates and with splendid churches and refectories and well-stocked libraries,
but from the sterner Athos of the ascetes and eremites, of the Hesychasts and
Arsenites. Their spiritual ancestor was Gregory of Sinai, who had left the
Holy Mountain because it was too sociable, preferring to live a life of greater
solitude in the Balkan hills. Gregory’s leading pupil had been the Bulgarian
Euthymius, an erudite scholar who had become the last Patriarch of Trnovo,
but who had used his authority to enforce poverty and asceticism on the
Bulgarian Church. After the Turks occupied Bulgaria many of his disciples
migrated to Russia, bringing with them not only a knowledge of Greek
mystical and hesychastic literature but also a close connection between the
ascetic elements on Mount Athos and the Russian Church. The tradition that
they introduced was akin to that of the Arsenites of Byzantium and the old
tradition which had always opposed state control. Its first great exponent in
Russia was Nil, Abbot of Sora…”445
St. Nilus and his disciples wanted the dissolution of the vast land holdings
not only because they contradicted the monastic vows, but also because this
would liberate the clergy, as Zyzykin writes, “from dependence on the secular
government and would raise the Hierarchy to the position of being the
completely independent religious-moral power of the people, before which
the despotic tendencies of the tsars would bow.”446 The debate between the
Possessors and Non-Possessors was therefore also a debate about the
relationship between the Church and the State; and insofar as the Non-
Possessors favoured greater independence for the Church, they also argued
that the Church, and not the State, should punish the Judaizer heretics –
which would mean less severe sentences for them in accordance with the
stage presented the living image of the two-natured God” (Kantorowicz 1997 [1957]: 47).
According to Iosif Volotsky’s interpretation, ‘Thetsar in his nature is like unto all mankind,
while in his rule he is like the most high God’ (quoted in Andreeva 2007: 201).” (“The
Genealogy of the Idea of Monarchy in the Post-Soviet Political Discourse of the Russian
Orthodox Church”, State, Religion and Church ( 2 0 1 6 ) 3 ( 1 ), p. 38.
446 Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 151.
269
Orthodox tradition of non-violence in the treatment of heretics. They failed in
their aim447; but their stand was remembered in subsequent generations…
The non-possessors showed a quite different attitude to the tsar’s power.

“They drew attention to the conditions under which the tsar’s will in the
administration of the kingdom could be considered as the expression of the
will of God. They drew attention not only to the necessity of counsellors to
make up the inevitable deficiencies of limited human nature, but also to the
necessity of ‘spiritual correctness’. Thus Prince Bassian did not exalt the
personality of the tsar like Joseph. He did not compare the tsar to God, he did
not liken him to the Highest King, but dwelt on the faults inherent in the
bearers of royal power which caused misfortunes to the State.”448
The boldness of St. Nilus and Monk Bassian in relation to the secular
powers was firmly in the tradition, not only of the fourth-century Fathers, but
also of the early Trans-Volga monks, such as St. Cyril of Beloozersk. Thus in
1427 St. Cyril wrote to Prince Andrew of Mozhaisk that he “should abstain
from drunkenness and give alms according to your means; for, my lord, you
are unable to fast and are lax in praying, and thus, alms, in their place, will
make up for your deficiency”. He even gave political advice to Grand Prince
Basil I: “We have heard, my lord great prince, that there is trouble between
you and your friends, the princes of Suzdal. You, my lord, insist on your right
and they on theirs; for this reason great bloodshed in inflicted on Christians.
But consider closely, my lord, what are their rightful claims against you, and
then humbly make concessions; and insofar as you are right toward them for
that stand firm, my lord, as justice says. And if they begin to ask pardon, my
lord, you should, my lord, grant them what they deserve, for I have heard,
my lord, that until today they have been oppressed by you and that is, my
lord, why they went to war. And you, my lord, for God’s sake show your love
and grace that they should not perish in error amid the Tatar realms and
should not die there. For, my lord, no kingdom or principality, nor any other
power can rescue us from God’s impartial judgement.”449
447 Perhaps not coincidentally, the triumph of the Possessors coincided with a growth of
violence against monks. Sergius Bolshakoff writes that “with the growth of monastic wealth,
the attitude of the peasants towards the monks changes. The monks are now considered
exploiters and hated as slave-owners. The appearance of a hermit often suggested the
possible foundation of a new monastery with the reduction to serfdom of the neighboring
peasants. St. Adrian of Andrushov was murdered in 1549 by peasants suspicious of his
intentions. Likewise Adrian of Poshekhon was murdered in 1550, Agapetus Markushevsky in
1572, Simon Volomsky in 1613 and Job Ushelsky in 1628, all of them for the same reason.
Others, like St. Nilus Stolbensky, Arsenius Komelsky and Diodore Yuriegorsky barely
escaped violent death.” (Russian Mystics, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980, p. 54)
449 St Cyril, quoted in Fedotov, The Russian Mind, Harvard University Press, volume II, 1966,
pp. 168, 255.
270
After the death of St. Nilus in 1508, the tradition of the Non-Possessors was
revived in Russia by an Athonite monk - St. Maximus the Greek.450 He was
sent, writes Runciman, “by the Patriarch Theoleptus I to Russia in response to
Vassily III’s request for a skilled librarian. Maximus, whose original name
was Michael Trivolis, had been born in Epirus, at Arta, in 1480. During his
travels through France and Italy in search of education he had arrived in
Florence when it was under the influence of Savonarola, whom he greatly
admired and in whose memory he joined the Dominican Order. But he was
not happy in Renaissance Italy. After a short time he returned to Greece and
settled on Athos, where he occupied himself principally with the libraries of
the Holy Mountain. When he came to Russia the Tsar employed him not only
to build up libraries for the Russian Church but also to translate Greek
religious works into Slavonic.”451
St. Maximus “complained that among the pastors of his time there was ‘no
Samuel’, ‘a Priest of the Most High who stood up boldly in opposition to the
criminal Saul’, that there were ‘no zealots like Elijah and Elisha who were not
ashamed in the face of the most lawlessly violent kings of Samaria; there is no
Ambrose the wonderful, the Hierarch of God, who did not fear the loftiness of
the kingdom of Theodosius the Great; no Basil the Great, whose most wise
teachings caused the persecutor Valens to fear; no Great John of the golden
tongue, who reproached the money-loving usurer Empress Eudocia’. In
accordance with Byzantine conceptions, Maximus the Greek looked on the
priesthood and the kingdom as the two greatest gifts given by the most High
Divine Goodness to man, as two powers on whose agreement in action
depended the happiness of mankind. Among the duties laid upon the
representatives of the Church, he mentioned that they must by their most
wise advice and stratagems of every kind… always correct the royal sceptres
for the better, so that they should be alien to any fawning before secular
power and should exert a restraining, moderating influence upon it. Maximus
spoke of the superiority of the spiritual power over the secular…”452
St. Maximus was in favour as long as Metropolitan Barlaam, a follower of

St. Nilus of Sora, was in power. But when Barlaam was uncanonically
removed by the Great Prince Basil III and replaced by Metropolitan Daniel, a
disciple of St. Joseph of Volotsk, his woes began… For a while the Great
Prince continued to protect him, even when he rebuked the vices of the
nobility, the clergy and the people and supported the position of the non-
possessors against the metropolitan. However, his enemies found the excuse
they were looking for when the Great Prince, with the blessing of
Metropolitan Daniel, put away his wife Solomonia for her barrenness and
married Elena Glinskaya (Solomonia was forcibly tonsured in Suzdal and was
later canonized under her monastic name of Sophia). St. Maximus
450 One important difference between St. Maximus and the non-possessors should be
mentioned: St. Maximus had been in favour of the execution of the Judaizing heretics,
whereas St. Nilus and his disciples had been against it.
271
immediately rebuked the Great Prince. He wrote him an extensive work:
Instructive chapters for right-believing rulers, which began as follows: “O most
devout Tsar, he is honoured as a true ruler who seeks to establish the life of
his subjects in righteousness and justice, and endeavours always to overcome
the lusts and dumb passions of his soul. For he who is overcome by them is
not the living image of the Heavenly Master, but only an anthropomorphic
likeness of dumb nature.”453
The saint was to suffer many years in prison because of his boldness. But
he had admirers and supporters both within and outside Russia. Thus
Patriarch Mark of Jerusalem, wrote prophetically to the Great Prince: “If you
do this wicked thing, you will have an evil son. Your estate will become prey
to terrors and tears. Rivers of blood will flow; the heads of the mighty will
fall; your cities will be devoured by flames.”454 The prophecy was fulfilled
with exactitude in the reign of his son, Ivan IV, better known as “the
Terrible”…
Ivan’s childhood was very troubled. As Nicholas Riasanovsky writes, he

“was only three years old in 1533 when his father, Basil III, died, leaving the
government of Russia to his wife… and the boyar duma. The new regent
acted in a haughty and arbitrary manner, disregarding the boyars and relying
first on her uncle, the experienced Prince Michael Glinsky, and after his death
on her lover, the youthful Prince Telepnev-Obolensky. In 1538 she died
suddenly, possibly of poison. Boyar rule – if this phrase can be used to
characterize the strife and misrule which ensued – followed her demise…
“All evidence suggests that Ivan IV was a sensitive, intelligent, and

precocious boy. He learned to read early and read everything that he could
find, especially Muscovite Church literature. He became of necessity painfully
aware of the struggle and intrigues around him and also of the ambivalence
of his own position. The same boyars who formally paid obeisance to him as
autocrat and treated him with utmost respect on ceremonial occasions,
neglected, insulted, and injured him in private life. In fact, they deprived him
at will of his favourite servants and companions and ran the palace, as well as
Russia, as they pleased. Bitterness and cruelty, expressed, for instance, in his
torture of animals, became fundamental traits of the young ruler’s
character.”455
In the opinion of some, Ivan’s later cruelties can be explained, at least in

part, by mental illness induced by the extreme insecurity of his upbringing…
After his release from prison St. Maximus continued his bold preaching.
Thus he refused to bless a pilgrimage of Tsar Ivan, saying that he should look
453 “Our Father among the Saints Maxim the Greek”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XIII, N 1, January-
February, 1991, p. 11.

454 Francis Carr, Ivan the Terrible, London: David & Charles, 1981, pp. 61-62.
455 Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 143-144, 145.
272
after the widows and orphans of those killed at Kazan instead. And he
threatened that if he did not, his newborn son Demetrius would die. Ivan
ignored his advice, and Demetrius died…
V.M. Lourié dates the beginning of the fall of the Russian Church into
“Sergianism”, that is, captivity to the State, to the time of Metropolitan Daniel
and Great Prince Basil: “Still earlier they should have excommunicated – not
even Ivan IV, but his father Basil III for his adulterous ‘marriage’, which gave
Russia Ivan the Terrible. Then we wouldn’t have had Peter I. That’s what they
did in such cases in Byzantium…”456
However, it should be noted that St. Maximus never broke communion

with Daniel. Moreover, as we have seen and will see in more detail later,
caesaropapism was by no means the rule in the Russian Church, even in the
reign of Ivan the Terrible. This episode must therefore be considered
unfortunate, but not “the beginning of the end”…
456 Lourié, “Sergianstvo: parasinagoga, pereshedshaia v raskol” (“Sergianism: a

parasynagogue turning into a schism”),
http://web.referent.ru/nvc/forum/0/co/BC415C9E/179.
273
34. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (2) IVAN IV, “THE
TERRIBLE”
It was in the reign of Ivan the Terrible that the closely related issues of the
schism between the Russian and the Greek Churches, on the one hand, and
the status – imperial or otherwise – of the Russian kingdom came to a head.
The ecclesiastical issue was resolved within Ivan’s lifetime. However, the
question of the status of his kingdom was not fully resolved until 1589…
The theme of Moscow the Third Rome had become steadily more
important with time. For the first time, in the reign of Basil III, Elder
Philotheus of Pskov expressed the idea of Moscow the Third Rome in its full
splendour: “I would like to say a few words about the existing Orthodox
empire of our most illustrious, exalted ruler. He is the only emperor on all the
earth over the Christians, the governor of the holy, divine throne of the holy,
ecumenical, apostolic Church which in place of the Churches of Rome and
Constantinople is in the city of Moscow, protected by God, in the holy and
glorious Dormition church of the most pure Mother of God. It alone shines
over the whole earth more radiantly than the sun. For know well, those who
love Christ and those who love God, that all Christian empires will perish and
give way to the one kingdom of our ruler, in accord with the books of the
prophet [Daniel 7.14], which is the Russian empire. For two Romes have
fallen, but the third stands, and there will never be a fourth…”457
Again, in 1540 Elder Philotheus wrote to Tsar Ivan, who was not yet of age,
that the “woman clothed with the sun” of Revelation chapter 12 was the
Church, which fled from the Old Rome to the New Rome of Constantinople,
and thence, after the fall of Constantinople, to the third Rome “in the new,
great Russia”. And the master of the third Rome, in both its political and
ecclesiastical spheres, was the tsar: “Alone on earth the Orthodox, great
Russian tsar steers the Church of Christ as Noah in the ark was saved from
the flood, and he establishes the Orthodox faith.”
This rhetoric was all very fine, but it meant little if the Russian tsar was not
in communion with the first see of Orthodoxy. Nor was it only the Greeks of
Constantinople who felt this incongruity. St. Maximus the Greek and
Metropolitan Joasaph of Moscow (1539-42), non-possessors both, tried
unsuccessfully to bridge the gap between Moscow and Constantinople, and
were both imprisoned for their pains, dying in the same year.
However, in 1546 the Ecumenical Patriarchate thought up a cunning

stratagem that finally, some years later, achieved the desired effect…458
457 Philotheus, Letter against the Astronomers and the Latins, quoted in Wil van den Bercken,
Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999.

458 V.M. Lourié, “Prekraschenie moskovskogo tserkovnogo raskola 1467-1560 godov: final
istorii v dokumentakh”.
274
In June of that year, a Council of over 50 bishops enthroned the new
patriarch, Dionysius II, and sent an epistle to the tsar announcing the fact. In
the same epistle they did two things that were meant to be seen together. On
the one hand, an appeal was made to release St. Maximus the Greek. And on
the other, the tsar himself was addressed as “tsar and great prince”. And this
even before Ivan was formally anointed and crowned with the Cap of
Monomakh by Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow on January 16, 1547!459 In
diplomatic language the Ecumenical Patriarch was saying: we are willing to
recognize you as tsar, if you return the Muscovite Church into submission to
us. And as a sign of your good intent, release St. Maximus…460
Now the word “tsar” in Russian was roughly equivalent to the word
“basileus” in Greek, but it was not equivalent to “emperor of the Romans”. It
was a term that had been accorded, grudgingly, to both Charlemagne and the
tsar of Bulgaria, as indicating that they were independent and lawful
Christian sovereigns; but it fell short of according its bearer the dignity of the
ruler and protector of all Orthodox Christians. In his crowning by
Metropolitan Macarius, the tsar’s genealogy had been read, going back
(supposedly) to the Emperor Augustus, which implied that he was the
successor of the Roman emperors. The patriarch did not respond to this hint,
however; nor was it really plausible to do so insofar as the Ecumenical
Patriarch was meant to be in “symphony” with the Roman emperor as his
secular partner, whereas his real secular “partner” was not Ivan the Terrible,
but the Ottoman Sultan! Nevertheless, the limited recognition that the tsar
was being offered constituted an important step forward in the Russian tsars’
campaign for recognition in the Orthodox world, and would be something
that the tsar would not want to reject out of hand.
459 “In the 1520s,” writes Serhii Plokhy, “Muscovite intellectuals produced a new genealogical
tract, the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir, which associated the rulers in the Kremlin, the former
grand princes of Vladimir, with Emperor Augustus, the founder of the Roman Empire. The
link was established through a legendary personality called Prus, allegedly the brother of
Augustus. Thus the founder of the Roman Empire and the rulers of Moscow had the same
forefather. But how were the grand princes of Vladimir (and later Moscow) related to Prus?
The solution proposed by the Muscovite authors was quite simple: the missing link was
another legendary [sic] figure, Prince Rurik, the founder of the Kyivan ruling clan. According
to the Rus’ chronicles, Rurik had come from the north, the part of the world allegedly
assigned by Augustus to Prus.
“Should that lineage be found wanting, the authors provided another connection to Rome
with a much more solid historical foundation. It led to the eternal city through Byzantium.
The princes of Vladimir and Moscow were heirs of Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir) Monomakh,
the twelfth-century ruler of Kyiv who had received his name through his mother, a relative of
the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomachos, who in turn was related to Augustus. One
way or another, all roads of the Muscovite imagination led to Roma. According to the Tale,
Constantine had passed on his emperor’s regalia to Volodymyr, and they had subsequently
been inherited by the princes of Moscow. Among them was Monomakh’s Cap, an Eastern
equivalent of an emperor’s crown. It was in fact a fourteenth-century gold filigree skullcap
from Central Asia, possibly a gift from the khan of the Golden Horde, intended to symbolize
the vassal status of the Muscovite princes. The Mongol gift was now reimagined as a symbol
of imperial power” (Lost Kingdom, London: Allen Lane, 2017, pp. 14-15).
460
Lourié, op. cit.
275
The next step in the tsarist campaign was the Stoglav council of 1551, whose
decisions were framed in the form of 100 answers to questions posed to the
Russian tsar. In general, the council was concerned with uprooting corruption
in various aspects of church life. Its Russocentric, even nationalist character
was emphasized by its decision to the effect that, in all cases where Russian
Church ritual differed from Greek, the Russian version was correct. “This
unilateral decision shocked many of the Orthodox. The monks of Athos
protested and the Russian monks there regarded the decisions of the synod as
invalid.”461
It is in the context of this Russocentrism that we must understand the

Council’s citation of Canon 9 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which
ascribed to the Ecumenical Patriarch the final instance in judging internal
church quarrels, and of the Emperor Justinian’s Novella 6 on the “symphony”
between Church and State. As Lourié has argued, these citations in no way
implied that the Russian Church was not fully autocephalous. The implication
was rather that while the Ecumenical Patriarch was accorded all the power
granted him by the holy canons, his “partner”, with whom he should remain
in harmony, was the Russian tsar…462
In 1557 the tsar sent Archimandrite Theodorit to Constantinople with the

purpose of receiving the patriarch’s blessing to crown Ivan with the full
ceremonial accorded to the Byzantine emperors. The reply was not everything
that the tsar was hoping for: the patriarch’s blessing was obtained – but only
on the tsar’s earlier crowning by Metropolitan Macarius. This constituted,
however, only a de facto rather than a de jure recognition; it could not be
otherwise, since Macarius was still formally a schismatic in the Greeks’ eyes.
In 1561 the tsar finally received a fuller, less ambiguous response to his
request in the form of an account of a conciliar decision of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate dating to December, 1560. But the conciliar decision’s reasoning
was unexpectedly roundabout, even devious. First, there was no mention of
Ivan’s descent from Augustus, but only from Anna, the Byzantine princess
who married St. Vladimir the Saint. In other words, Ivan’s pretensions to be
“emperor of the Romans” were rejected: he was the lawful “God-crowned”
ruler or emperor only of Russia…
Secondly, Ivan is said to have sought to be crowned by the patriarch

because his crowning by Macarius “has no validity, since not only does a
Metropolitan not have the right to crown, but not even every Patriarch, but
only the two Patriarchs: the Roman and Constantinopolitan”. In actual fact,
Ivan had made no request for a repetition of the coronation. But the patriarch
then proposes a way out of the impasse which he himself has created: he says
that he himself, in the conciliar decision of December, 1560, has joined his
own hand to the crowning carried out by Macarius in 1547, thereby making it
461 Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press, 1968, p. 329.
462
Lourié, op. cit.
276
valid “in hindsight”, as it were. And that is why Ivan’s coronation is in fact
“God-crowned”.
Another important feature of the conciliar decision is that Macarius is

called “metropolitan of Moscow and the whole of Great Russia”, a much
more precise designation than the previous “metropolitan of Russia”, and
implying that Macarius was a fully canonical metropolitan having a territorial
jurisdiction distinct from that of the metropolitan of Kiev.
Moreover, in another (non-conciliar) gramota, the patriarch suggests that

while it might be rational to carry out a second crowning of Ivan by the
patriarch insofar as the first one was invalid, it would be “useful and salutary”
to consider this as already done, insofar as Metropolitan Macarius is the
“catholic patriarchal exarch” able to carry out all hierarchical acts without
hindrance, and what he did in 1547 was mystically carried out also by the
patriarch.
“And so,” concludes Lourié, “the abolition of the Muscovite autocephaly

was achieved, while no recognition of the Moscow tsar as emperor of the
Romans was given in exchange. The Moscow authorities could not dispute
this, since the rejection of the autocephaly was now bound up with the
recognition of the tsar’s coronation.”463
Ivan did not only seek recognition as ruler of the Third Rome: he also
worked out an ideology and programme for the Third Rome, which was
partly his own work 464 , and partly the work of advisors such as Ivan
Semenovich Peresvetov, a minor nobleman from Lithuania who had served in
the Ottoman empire.
At the base of this programme there lay the concept of Moscow as the last
defender of the true faith. Ya.S. Lourié writes: “The idea that Russia was the
only country in the world that had kept the true faith was very majestic, but
also very responsible. If the truth was concentrated with us, and the whole of
the surrounding world had spiritually ‘collapsed’, then in constructing their
State the Russians had to go along a completely individual path, and rely on
the experience of others only to a very limited degree – and rely on it as
negative experience.
“… Turning to the history of the fall of Constantinople and the victory of

Mehmet the Sultan over the Greeks, Peresvetov explained these events in
terms of the ‘meekness’ of the Greek Emperor Constantine: ‘It is not possible
to be an emperor without being threatening; as a horse without a bridle, so is
463
Lourié, op. cit.
464M.V. Zyzykin, Tsarskaia Vlast’ (Royal Power), Sophia, 1924;
http://www.russia-talk.org/cd-history/zyzykin.htm, pp. 17-96.
277
an empire without threatenings’.465 And he foretold to the young tsar: ‘You
are a threatening and wise sovereign; you will bring the sinful to repentance
and install justice and truth in your kingdom.’ It is important to note that
‘justice’ in this programme was no less important than ‘threatening’; the
‘meekness’ of the Greek Emperor consisted in the fact that he ceded power to
the ‘nobles’, and they had enslaved the people.”466
“Peresvetov,” writes Sir Geoffrey Hosking, “was almost certainly right.

The Ottomans owed the creation of their empire at least in large part to
reforms which weakened the native Turkish nobles who had previously
formed the backbone of its tribal confederacies. Those nobles had been
supplanted at the Ottoman court by Christian youths recruited from the
Balkans and converted to Islam under the devshirme system. They furnished
both the Janissaries, the elite corps of the army, and the principal civilian
advisors. The Sultan required all his military and governmental leaders,
whatever their provenance, to accept the status of his personal slaves, in order
to separate them forcibly from their kinship loyalties. The conquered city of
Constantinople was used for the same purpose: to give his new elite a power
base remote from the native grazing lands of the Turkish nobles.
“Such a system had obvious attractions for a Muscovite ruler also building
an empire on vulnerable territories on the frontier between Christianity and
Islam, and also struggling to free himself from aristocratic clans. Peresvetov
did not go as far as his Ottoman model, and refrained from recommending
slavery; but he did propose that the army should be recruited and trained by
the state and paid for directly out of the treasury. This would ensure that
individual regiments could not become instruments of baronial feuding. He
favoured a service nobility promoted on the basis of merit and achievement,
but he did not envisage serfdom as a means of providing them with their
livelihood: in so far as he considered the matter at all, he assumed they would
be salaried out of tax revenues.
“Peresvetov’s importance was that he offered a vision of a state able to

mobilize the resources of its peoples and lands equitably and efficiently. He
was one of the first European theorists of monarchical absolutism resting on
the rule of law. He believed that a consistent law code should be published,
and that its provisions should be guided by the concept of pravda (which in
Russian means both truth and justice): it would be the task of the ‘wise and
465 It should be remembered that the word groznij, which is translated “terrible” in the title
“Ivan the Terrible”, should better be translated as “threatening” or “awesome”. And so Ivan
IV was “Ivan the Threatening”, a title that sounded much less terrible to Russian ears. Francis
Fukuyama (The Origin of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, p. 392) is wrong in supposing
that groznij can be translated as “the Great”. (V.M.)
466 Ya.S. Lourié, “Perepiska Groznogo s Kurbskim v Obschestvennoj Mysli Drevnej Rusi”
(“The Correspondence of the Terrible one with Kurbsky in the Political Thought of Ancient
Rus’”), in Ya.S. Lourié and Yu.D. Rykov, Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem Kurbskim (The
Correspondence of the Terrible one with Andrew Kurbsky), Моscow: “Nauka”, 1993, pp. 230-
231.
278
severe monarch’ to discern and uphold this principle, without favour to the
privileged and powerful.
“In the early years of his reign we can see Ivan endeavouring to implement,
in his own way, some of Peresvetov’s ideas, especially where they would
enhance the strength and efficiency of the monarchy. At the same time he was
trying to reach out beyond the fractious boyars and courtiers to make contact
with the local elites of town and countryside and bind them into a more
cohesive system of rule. Together with his Chosen Council, an ad hoc
grouping of boyars, clergymen and service nobles personally chosen by him,
he tried to make a start towards removing the ‘sovereign’s affairs’ (gosudarevo
delo) from the private whims of the boyars and their agents, and bringing
them under the control of himself in alliance with the ‘land’ (zemlia).”467
As Francis Fukuyama explains: “The power of the Muscovite state was

built around the middle service class, made up of cavalrymen who were paid
not in cash but in grants of land known as pomest’ia. Each pomest’ia was
supported by the labor of five or six peasant household. Since land was so
abundant, control over people was more important than control over land.
The cavalry did not constitute a standing army but were called into service by
the prince and had to return home to their lands after the end of the
campaigning season. The similarities between the Russian pomest’ia and the
Ottoman timar are striking and likely not accidental, since the Russians came
increasingly into contact with the Turks in this period. Like the Ottoman
sipahis, the core of the Russian army was made up of a class of what would
elsewhere in Europe be labelled lower gentry, soldiers who were dependant
on the state for access to land and resources. The Russian cavalry army even
resembled the Ottoman cavalry in their relatively light equipment and
dependence on manoeuver, both differing substantially from the heavily
armed knight of Western Europe. The Moscow regime’s motive for building
this kind of army was similar to that of the Ottomans. It created a military
organization dependent on it alone for status, which nevertheless did not
have to be paid in cash. This force could be used to offset the power of the
princes and boyars who held their own land and resources…”468
The tsar started putting this programme into effect in the decade 1547-1556,
when he convened his Zemskie Sobory, or “Land Councils”. This was also the
decade of his great victories over the Tatars of Kazan and Astrakhan, when
the State began to spread from Europe into Asia, and change from a racially
fairly homogeneous state into a multi-national empire, “the Third Rome”.
The famous cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed – originally dedicated to the
Protecting Veil of the Virgin – was built to celebrate the conquest of Kazan. As
Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) pointed out in 1909, “this event was
great precisely because with it there began the gradual ascendancy of
467 Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, London: Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 48-49.
468 Fukuyama, op. cit., pp. 389-391.
279
Christianity over Islam, which had already subjected the Eastern Churches
and before that time had not yet been subdued by the Muscovite kingdom.
Having now destroyed the wasps’ nest of the Tatar God-fighting tribe, our
forefathers understood that this event defined with all clarity the great calling
of the Russian land gradually to unite at the foot of the Cross of Christ all the
eastern peoples and all the eastern cultures under the leadership of the White
Tsar. The great ascetics of piety Gurias, Barsonuphius and Herman were
immediately sent to Kazan together with church valuables. There they built
churches and monasteries and by the light of their inspired teaching and
angelic holiness drew crowds upon crowds of various foreigners to holy
baptism. The Russians understood that now – not in separate rivulets, but in a
single broad wave – the life and faith of the Trans-Volgan region and Siberia
would pour into the sea of the Church, and that the work of St. Stephen of
Perm and the preachers of God in the first centuries that were like him would
continue without hindrance. And then our ancestors decided, on the one hand,
to cast off from themselves every shadow of exaltation in the glorious victory
and conquest, and to ascribe all this to Divine Providence, and on the other
hand to seal their radiant hope that Moscow, which was then ready to
proclaim itself the Third and last Rome, would have to become the mediator
of the coming universal and free union of people in the glorification of the
Divine Redeemer. The tsar and people carried out their decision by building a
beautiful cathedral on Red square, which has justly been recognized as the
eighth wonder of the world. The pious inspiration of the Russian masters
exceeded all expectation and amazed the beholders. Before them stands a
church building whose parts represent a complete diversity, from the ground
to the higher crosses, but which as a whole constitutes a wonderful unity – a
single elegant wreath – a wreath to the glory of Christ that shone forth in the
victory of the Russians over the Hagarenes [Muslims]. Many cupolas crown
this church: there is a Mauritanian cupola, an Indian cupola, there are
Byzantine elements, there are Chinese elements, while in the middle above
them all there rises a Russian cupola uniting the whole building.
“The thought behind this work of genius is clear: Holy Rus’ must unite all
the eastern peoples and be their leader to heaven. This thought is a task
recognized by our ancestors and given by God to our people; it has long
become a leading principle of their state administration, both inwardly and
outwardly: the reigns of the last Ruriks and the first Romanovs were marked
by the grace-filled enlightenment of the Muslims and pagans of the North and
East, the support of the ancient Christians of the East and South and the
defense of the Russian Christians of the West, oppressed by heretics. Rus’
expanded and became stronger and broader, like the wings of an eagle; in the
eyes of her sons the Russian cross on Basil the Blessed shone ever more
brightly; her impious enemies in the South and West trembled; the hands of
tenslaved Christians – Greeks, Serbs and Arabs - were raised imploringly to
her; at various times Moscow saw within her walls all four eastern patriarchs
and heard the liturgy in her churches in many languages…”469
469 Khrapovitsky, in Archbishop Nicon (Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie Blazhennejshago Antonia,
280
35. IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND THE OPRICHNINA
In Russia, unlike most West European countries, the Great Prince or Tsar
was not seen as simply the most powerful member of the noble class, but as
standing above all the classes, including the nobility. Therefore the lower
classes as often as not looked to the Great Prince or Tsar to protect them from
the nobility, and often intervened to raise him to power or protect him from
attempted coups by the nobility. There are many examples of this in Russian
history, from Andrew of Bogolyubovo to the Time of Troubles to the
Decembrist conspiracy in 1825. Thus Pokrovsky wrote of the failed
Decembrist conspiracy: “The autocracy was saved by the Russian peasant in a
guard’s uniform.”470
And in fact the tsars, when allowed to rule with truly autocratic authority,
were much better for the peasants than the nobles, passing laws that
surpassed contemporary European practice in their humaneness. Thus
Solonevich points out that in Ivan’s Sudebnik, “the administration did not
have the right to arrest a man without presenting him to the representatives
of the local self-government…, otherwise the latter on the demand of the
relatives could free the arrested man and exact from the representative of the
administration a corresponding fine ‘for dishonour’. But guarantees of
security for person and possessions were not restricted to the habeas corpus
act. Klyuchevsky writes about ‘the old right of the ruled to complain to the
highest authority against the lawless acts of the subject rulers’.”471
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that sixteenth-century Russia was in

many ways a less free State than in the 11th or 14th centuries. The reason lay
in the task imposed by Divine Providence on Russia of defending the last
independent outpost of Orthodoxy in the world, which required, in view of
the threat posed by Counter-Reformation Catholicism, an ever-increasing
centralization and militarization of society, and therefore great sacrifices from
all classes of the population.
This included the boyars, of course. Probably some wanted to rebel against
the tsar. But the boyar class a whole did not want to abolish the autocracy.
For, as Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes, “Russia without the Tsar was
inconceivable to it; the Tsar was even necessary to it (otherwise the princes
would simple have fought against each other, as in the time of the appanage
wars). The boyar opposition attained a relative independence, as it were
autonomy, and, of course, it was not against ruling the Tsars, but this could
never be fully realized because of the inevitable and constant quarrels within
the princely boyar or court opposition itself, which consisted of various
Mitropolita Kievskago i Galitskago (Biography of his Beatitude Anthony, Metropolitan of Kiev

and Galich), New York, 1971, volume 1, pp. 14-15.
470 Pokrovsky, in Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia (Popular Monarchy), Minsk, 1998, p. 331.
471 Solonevich, op. cit., p. 340.
281
groupings around the most powerful families, which were doomed to an
absence of unity because of the love of power and avarice of each of them.
One can say that the princely-courtly opposition from time immemorial tried
to weaken (and did weaken, did shake!) the Autocracy, while at the same
time unfailingly wanting to preserve it! A shaky and inconsistent position.”472
The freest class was the clergy. As we have seen, Ivan respected the Church,
and did not in general try to impose his will on her. And yet he liked to
emphasize that the Church had no business interfering in affairs of State,
constantly bringing the argument round to the quasi-absolute power of the
tsar – and the insubordination of the boyars: “Remember, when God
delivered the Jews from slavery, did he place above them a priest or many
rulers? No, he placed above them a single tsar – Moses, while the affairs of the
priesthood he ordered should be conducted, not by him, but by his brother
Aaron, forbidding Aaron to be occupied with worldly matters. But when
Aaron occupied himself with worldly affairs, he drew the people away from
God. Do you see that it is not fitting for priests to do the work of tsars! Also,
when Dathan and Abiron wanted to seize power, remember how they were
punished for this by their destruction, to which destruction they led many
sons of Israel? You, boyars, are worthy of the same!”473
The lower classes – that is, the peasants, shopkeepers and artisans, who
paid taxes and services to the tsar and his servitors - were increasingly
chained to the land that they worked. For in the century 1550-1650, the tsars
gradually enserfed them in order to prevent them from simply disappearing
into the woods or fleeing to the steppes in the south. They were not
technically slaves (slaves at any rate have the privilege of not paying taxes);
but a combination of political and economic factors (e.g. peasant indebtedness
to landlords, landlords’ liability for collecting peasants’ taxes, the enormous
demand for manpower as the state’s territory expanded) bonded them to the
land; and the hereditary nature of social status in Muscovite Russia meant
that they had little hope of rising up the social ladder.
However, it was the boyars who lost most from the increasing power of the
tsar. In medieval Russia, they had been theoretically free to join other princes;
but by the 1550s there were no independent Russian Orthodox princes
outside Moscow. 474 Moreover, they now held their lands, or votchiny, on
condition they served the Great Prince, otherwise they became theoretically
forfeit.
Now the boyars traditionally served in the army or the administration. But
472 Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 392.

473 Ivan IV, Sochinenia (Works), St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000, p. 49.
474 One of the last to be absorbed by Moscow was Pskov, in 1509. The chronicler, mourning
over his native city of Pskov, wrote that “the glory of the Pskovian land perished because of
their self-will and refusal to submit to each other, for their evil slanders and evil ways, for
shouting at veches. They were not able to rule their own homes, but wanted to rule the city”.
As Lebedev rightly remarks: “A good denunciation of democracy!” (op. cit., p. 61).
282
the administration, being historically simply an extension of the prince’s
private domain, was completely controlled by him. Moreover, his patrimony
was greatly increased by his conquest of Novgorod in 1478, his appropriation
of all the land of the local aristocratic and merchant elites, and, especially, by
his conquest of the vast lands of the former Kazan and Astrakhan khanates in
the 1550s and 1560s. This further weakened the power of the boyars.
Nevertheless, the boyars with their clannish rivalries and habits of freedom
were still a potential problem. For Ivan, their independent power was
incompatible with his conception of the Russian autocracy. As he wrote to the
rebellious boyar, Prince Kurbsky in 1564: “What can one say of the godless
peoples? There, you know, the kings do not have control of their kingdoms,
but rule as is indicated to them by their subjects. But from the beginning it is
the Russian autocrats who have controlled their own state, and not their
boyars and grandees!”475
Ivan was not in the least swayed by the ideology of democracy, being, as
he wrote, “humble Ioann, Tsar and Great Prince of All Russia, by God’s will,
and not by the multi-mutinous will of man…” On another occasion he wrote
to King Sigismund Augustus of Poland, whose power was severely limited by
his nobles, that the autocratic power of the Russian tsars was “not like your
pitiful kingdom. For nobody gives orders to the great Sovereigns, while your
Pans [nobles] tell you what they want”.
Kurbsky defended the boyars on the grounds of their personal valour; they
were “the best of the mighty ones of Israel”. In reply, Ivan pointed out that
personal qualities do not help if there are no correct “structures”: “As a tree
cannot flower if its roots dry up, so here: if there are no good structures in the
kingdom, courage will not be revealed in war. But you, without paying
attention to structures, are glorified only with courage.” The idea that there
can be more than one power in the land is Manichaeism, according to Ivan;
for the Manichaeans taught that “Christ possesses only the heavens, while the
earth is ruled independently by men, and the nether regions by the devil. But
I believe that Christ possesses all: the heavens, the earth and the nether
regions, and everything in the heavens, on the earth and in the nether regions
subsists by His will, the counsel of the Father and the consent of the Holy
Spirit.” And since the tsar is anointed of God, he rules in God’s place, and can
concede no part of what is in fact God’s power to anyone else.
Although Ivan’s criticism of democracy is penetrating, his own political

views made his rule closer to the despotism of the Tatar khans (whose yoke
had been thrown off not that long ago) than to the symphony of powers
between Church and State that was the Byzantine and Orthodox ideal. This
distortion in thinking soon led to deviancy in action…
475 Ivan IV, op. cit., p. 40.
283
In view of the fearsome reputation Ivan IV has acquired because of the
cruelties of the second half of his reign, it is worth reminding ourselves of the
great achievements of the first half. He vastly increased the territory of his
kingdom, neutralizing the Tatar threat and bringing Kazan and the whole of
the Volga region under Orthodox control; he tried to open his kingdom to
trade with the West, especially the England of Elizabeth I (to whom he
proposed marriage); he began the exploration and conquest of Siberia; he
strengthened the army and local administration; he introduced the Zemskie
Sobory, “Councils of the Land”, in which he sought the advice of different
classes of the people; he subdued the boyars who had nearly destroyed the
monarchy in his childhood; he rejected Jesuit attempts to bring Russia into
communion with Rome; he convened Church Councils that condemned
heresies (e.g. the Arianism of Bashkin) and removed many abuses in
ecclesiastical and monastic life. Even the Tsar’s fiercest critic, Prince Andrew
Kurbsky, had to admit that he had formerly been “radiant in Orthodoxy”.
As Nicholas Riasanovsky writes, in 1551 Ivan “presented to the [Stoglav,

“Hundred Chapters”] Church council his new legal code, the Sudebnik of 1550,
and the local government reform, and received its approval. Both measures
became law. The institution of a novel scheme of local government deserves
special attention as one of the more daring attempts in Russian history to
resolve this perennially difficult problem. The new system aimed at the
elimination of corruption and oppression on the part of centrally appointed
officials by means of popular participation in local affairs. Various localities
had already received permission to elect their own judicial authorities to deal,
drastically if need be, with crime. Now, in areas whose population
guaranteed a certain amount of dues to the treasury, other locally elected
officials replaced the centrally appointed governors. And even where the
governors remained, the people could elect assessors to check closely on their
activities and, indeed, impeach them when necessary…”476
Nevertheless, Ivan’s respect for the Church prevented him – at this stage,
in the first half of his reign - from becoming an absolutist ruler in the sense
that he admitted no power higher than his own. This is illustrated by his
relations with the Ecumenical Patriarchate outlined in the last chapter, which
show his reverent attitude to that institution. It is also illustrated by his
behaviour in the Stoglav Council, which was conducted by the Tsar putting
forward questions to which the hierarchy replied. The hierarchy was quite
happy to support the tsar in extirpating certain abuses within the Church, but
when the tsar raised the question of the sequestration of Church lands for the
sake of the strengthening of the State, the hierarchs showed their
independence and refused. The tsar sufficiently respected their independence
to yield to their will on this matter, and in general the sixteenth-century
Councils were true images of sobornost’ (conciliarity, the opposite of tyranny).
476 Riasanovsky, op. cit., p. 146.
284
As Metropolitan Macarius (Bulgakov) writes: “At most of the Councils
there were present, besides the hierarchs, the superiors of the monasteries –
archimandrites, igumens, builders, also protopriests, priests, monks and the
lower clergy generally. Often his Majesty himself was present, sometimes
with his children, brothers and all the boyars… It goes without saying that the
right to vote at the Councils belonged first of all to the metropolitan and the
other hierarchs… But it was offered to other clergy present at the Councils to
express their opinions. Their voice could even have a dominant significance at
the Council, as, for example, the voice of St. Joseph of Volokolamsk at the
Councils of 1503-1504… The conciliar decisions and decrees were signed only
by the hierarchs, others – by lower clergy: archimandrites and igumens. And
they were confirmed by the agreement of his Majesty…”477
Things began to go wrong for the tsar from 1558, when he began a
campaign against the Livonian Knights that was to prove both expensive and
unsuccessful. Then, in 1560, his beloved first wife, Anastasia, died – murdered,
as he suspected.478 Now Ivan turned vengefully against the boyars…
First, he designated the boyars’ lands as oprichnina, that is, his personal
realm (the word “oprichnina” means “separateness” 479 ), and founded the
oprichniki, a kind of secret police body sworn to obey him alone, who invaded
the boyars’ lands, killing, raping and pillaging at will and terrorizing and
torturing thousands of people, and were rewarded with the expropriated
lands of the men they had murdered.
Ivan justified his cruelties against the boyars on scriptural grounds: “See
and understand: he who resists the power resists God; and he who resists
God is called an apostate, and that is the worst sin. You know, this is said of
every power, even of a power acquired by blood and war. But remember
what was said above, that we have not seized the throne from anyone. He
who resists such a power resists God even more!”480 His power, he said, came
not from the people, but from God, by succession from the first Russian
autocrat, St. Vladimir. So he was answerable, not to the people, but to God.
And the people, being “not godless”, recognized this. Kurbsky, however, by
his rebellion against the tsar had “destroyed his soul”. But many simple
477 Metropolitan Macarius, Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi (A History of the Russian Church), Moscow,
1996, vol. 4, part 2, pp. 91, 93.

478 In fact, modern science has established the astonishing fact that Tsar Ivan, his mother,
Great Princess Helena, his first wife Tsaritsa Anastasia, his daughter Maria, his son Ivan and
his other son Tsar Theodore were all poisoned with mercury (V. Manyagin, Apologia Groznogo
Tsaria (An Apology for the Awesome Tsar), St. Petersburg, 2004, pp. 101-124). However, as
Simon Sebag Montefiore points out, this does not necessarily mean that they were murdered.
Other sixteenth-century bodies were found to have dangerous levels of mercury. But
“mercury was often used as a medicine” (The Romanovs, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2017, p. 16).
479
Montefiore, op. cit., p. 16.
285
people, submitting humbly to the tsar’s unjust decrees, and to the apostolic
command: “Servants be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the
good and gentle, but also to the forward” (I Peter 2.18), received the crown of
life in an innocent death. There was no organized mass movement against his
power in the Russian land. Even when he expressed a desire to resign his
power, the people completely sincerely begged him to return.481
Although the tsar failed to justify his cruelty, he was not completely wrong
in his estimate of the people’s attitudes. The fact that they revered and obeyed
him as the anointed of God did not blind them to the fact that many of his
deeds were evil. On the contrary, as V.O. Kliuchevsky writes, “the Tsar’s
arbitrary rule, his groundless executions, bannings, and confiscations, gave
rise to murmurs against him not only among the upper classes, but among the
common people as well; ‘misery and hatred of the Tsar’ were widespread.”482
But by obeying him in his capacity as the anointed of God, they believed that
they were doing God’s will, while by patiently enduring his demonic assaults
on them they believed that they received the forgiveness of their sins and
thereby escaped the torments of hell, so far exceeding the worst torments that
any earthly ruler could subject them to.
As Heidenstein said: “They consider all those who depart from them in
matters of the faith to be barbarians... In accordance with the resolutions of
their religion, they consider faithfulness to the sovereign to be as obligatory as
faithfulness to God. They exalt with praises those who have fulfilled their
vow to their prince to their last breath, and say that their souls, on parting
from their bodies, immediately go to heaven.” For according to Orthodox
teaching, even if a ruler is unjust or cruel, he must be obeyed as long as he
provides that freedom from anarchy, that minimum of law and order, that is
the definition of God-established political authority (Romans 13.1-6). Thus St.
Irenaeus of Lyons writes: “Some rulers are given by God with a view to the
improvement and benefit of their subjects and the preservation of justice;
others are given with a view to producing fear, punishment and reproof; yet
others are given with a view to displaying mockery, insult and pride – in each
case in accordance with the deserts of the subjects.”483 Again, St. Isidore of
Pelusium writes that the evil ruler “has been allowed to spew out this evil,
like Pharaoh, and, in such an instance, to carry out extreme punishment or to
chastize those for whom great cruelty is required, as when the king of
Babylon chastized the Jews.”484
481 See Peter Budzilovich, “O vozmozhnosti vosstanovlenia monarkhii v Rossii” (“On the
Possibility of the Restoration of the Monarchy in Russia”), Russkoe Vozrozhdenie (Russian

Regeneration), 1986, № 34, http://www.russia.talk.com/monarchy.htm.
482 Kliuchevsky, A Course in Russian History. The Seventeenth Century, Armonk NY: M.E.
Sharpe, 1994, p. 56.

483 St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, v, 24, 3; translated in Maurice Wiles & Mark Santer,
Documents in Early Christian Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 226.

484 St. Isidore, Letter 6, quoted in Selected Letters of Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, Liberty, TN:
St. John of Kronstadt Press, 1989, p. 36.
286
But there is line beyond which an evil ruler ceases to be a ruler and
becomes an anti-ruler, who should not be obeyed. Thus the Jews were
commanded by God through the Prophet Jeremiah to submit to the king of
Babylon, evil though he was; whereas they were commanded through
another prophet, Moses, to resist and flee from the Egyptian Pharaoh. For in
the one case the authority, though evil, was still an authority, which it was
beneficial to obey; whereas in the other case the authority was in fact an anti-
authority, obedience to which would have taken the people further away
from God.
The Orthodox tradition of obedience to legitimate authorities goes together

with the tradition of protest against unrighteousness. And in this respect
there was truth in Prince Kurbsky’s lament over the state of Russia in Ivan’s
reign: “The authority which comes from God devises unprecedented pains of
death for the virtuous. The clergy – we will not judge them, far be that from
us, but bewail their wretchedness – are ashamed to bear witness to God
before the tsar; rather they endorse the sin. They do not make themselves
advocates of widows and orphans, the poor, the oppressed and the prisoners,
but grab villages and churches and riches for themselves. Where is Elijah,
who was concerned for the blood of Naboth and confronted the king? Where
are the host of prophets who gave the unjust kings proof of their guilt? Who
speaks now without being embarrassed by the words of Holy Scripture and
gives his soul as a ransom for his brothers? I do not know one. Who will
extinguish the fire that is blazing in our land? No-one. Really, our hope is still
only with God…”485
St. Philip was the one man who, together with the fools-for-Christ Basil the
Blessed and Nicholas Salos, did oppose the unrighteousness of the tsar. His
ideas about the nature of tsarist power did not differ substantially from those
of his predecessors, and especially St. Joseph of Volotsk. The tsar was
complete master in his kingdom, and deserved the obedience of all, including
churchmen, as long as he confessed the Orthodox faith. But he was bound by
the ecclesiastical canons when acting in the ecclesiastical sphere.
However, it was not clear, according to this Josephite theory, to what

extent the tsar was also bound in the personal, moral sphere and could rightly
be rebuked by the metropolitan for personal sins. St. Philip was notable for
his combination, as it were, of the theories of St. Joseph with the practice of
Saints Nilus and Maximus, recognizing the supremacy of the tsar while
rebuking him for his personal sins. For this boldness he was killed…
As a young man he was deeply struck on hearing the words of the Saviour:
“No man can serve two masters”, and resolved to become a monk, which he
485 Kurbsky, letter to Monk Vassian of the Pskov Caves monastery; translated in Wil van den
Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, pp. 157-158.
287
did on the island monastery of Solovki in the Far North. 486 Later, as
metropolitan, at the height of the terror, he would put those words into
practice, saying to the Tsar: “Sovereign, I cannot obey your command more
than that of God.”487
And again he said: “Ruling tsar, you have been vested by God with the
highest rank, and for that reasons you should honour God above all. But the
sceptre of earthly power was given to so that you should foster justice among
men and rule over them lawfully. By nature you are like every man, as by
power you are like God. It is fitting for you, as a mortal, not to become
arrogant, and as the image of God, not to become angry, for only he can justly
be called a ruler who has control over himself and does not work for his
shameful passions, but conquers them with the aid of his mind. Was it ever
heard that the pious emperors disturbed their own dominion? Not only
among your ancestors, but also among those of other races, nothing of the sort
has ever been heard.”488
When the tsar angrily asked what business he had interfering in royal
affairs, Philip replied: “By the grace of God, the election of the Holy Synod
and your will, I am a pastor of the Church of Christ. You and I must care for
the piety and peace of the Orthodox Christian kingdom.”
And when the tsar ordered him to keep silence, Philip replied: “Silence is
not fitting now; it would increase sin and destruction. If we carry out the will
of men, what answer will we have on the day of Christ’s Coming? The Lord
said: ‘Love one another. Greater love hath no man than that a man should lay
down his life for his friends. If you abide in My love, you will be My disciples
indeed.’”
And again he said: “Throughout the world, transgressors who ask for
clemency find it with the authorities, but in Russia there is not even clemency
for the innocent and the righteous… Fear the judgement of God, your Majesty.
How many innocent people are suffering! We, sovereign, offer to God the
bloodless Sacrifice, while behind the altar the innocent blood of Christians is
flowing! Robberies and murders are being carried out in the name of the
Tsar…. What is our faith for? I do not sorrow for those who, in shedding their
innocent blood, have been counted worthy of the lot of the saints; I suffer for
your wretched soul: although you are honoured as the image of God,
nevertheless, you are a man made of dust, and the Lord will require
everything at your hands”.
However, even if the tsar had agreed that his victims were martyrs, he
would not have considered this a reason for the people not obeying him. As
486 “Sviatoj Filipp Mitropolit” (“The Holy Metropolitan Philip”), in Troitsky Paterik (Trinity
Patericon), Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, 1896; reprinted in Nadezhda, 14, Frankfurt: Possev-
Verlag, 1988, p. 66.
487 Van den Bercken, op. cit., p. 153.
488 Zhitia Russkikh Sviatykh (Lives of the Russian Saints), Таtaev, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 695, 696.
288
he wrote to Kurbsky: “If you are just and pious, why do you not permit
yourself to accept suffering from me, your stubborn master, and so inherit the
crown of life?…”489
Betrayed by his fellow-hierarchs at a council of 1568, Philip was about to

resign the metropolitanate, and said to the tsar: “It is better to die as an
innocent martyr than to tolerate horrors and lawlessnesses silently in the rank
of metropolitan. I leave you my metropolitan’s staff and mantia. But you all,
hierarchs and servers of the altar, feed the flock of Christ faithfully; prepare to
give your reply and fear the Heavenly King more than the earthly…”
The tsar refused to accept his resignation, and cast him into prison. After
having escaped the appetite of a hungry bear that had been sent to devour
him, on December 23, 1569 the holy metropolitan was suffocated to death by
the tsar’s servant after his refusal to bless his expedition against Novgorod.
Metropolitan Philip saved the honour of the Russian episcopate in Ivan’s
reign as Metropolitan Arsenius of Rostov was to save it in the reign of
Catherine the Great…
It was after killing Metropolitan Philip that Ivan embarked on his most
famous crime (if we exclude his murder of his own son) – his killing of the
archbishop and 1500 nobles of Novgorod in 1570. In recent years, supporters
of the canonization of Ivan in Russia have tended to minimize the significance
of this slaughter, and to justify it as a necessary measure to preserve the state
against sedition. However, the foremost expert on the reign of Ivan, R.G.
Skrynnikov, has cited data that decisively refutes this argument.
Skrynnikov’s edition of the Synodicon of Those Disgraced by Ivan the Terrible

reveals a list of thousands of names of those executed by Ivan, mainly in the
period 1567-1570, that the tsar sent to the monasteries for commemoration.
“All the lists of the period 1567- 1570 are inextricably linked with each other,
since the court ‘cases’ of this period were parts of a single political process,
the ‘case’ of the betrayal of the Staritskys, which lasted for several years, from
1567 to 1570. The ‘case’ was begun in the autumn of 1567 after the return of
the Tsar from the Latvian expedition. In the course of it the boyars Fyodorov
(1568) and Staritsky (1569) were executed, Novgorod was devastated (1570)
and the leaders of the land offices in Moscow were killed (1570). ‘The
Staritsky Case’ was the most important political trial in the reign of the
Terrible one. The materials of this trial were preserved in the tsarist archives
until the time of the composition of the Synodicon in relatively good order. On
the basis of these materials the main part of the tsarist Synodicon was
composed. This part comprises nine tenths of the whole volume of the
Synodicon. In it are written about 3200 people disgraced by the tsar out of a
combined total of about 3300 people…
“Among the victims of the Novgorod devastation, about one fifth (455
289
people) were called by their names in the tsarist Synodicon. In the main these
were representatives of the higher classes: landowners and officials (250-260
people) and the members of their families (140 people). The people indicated
in the Synodicon without names (1725) were mainly from the lower classes.”490
These figures indicate that Ivan’s terror was by no means exclusively

directed against the boyars. Moreover, the fact that such large numbers could
not have been given a fair trial in the period indicated, and the extraordinary
cruelty of the methods employed 491 , show that this was not justified
repression against a rebellion, but the manifestation of demonic
psychopathology. By the end of his reign the boyars’ economic power had
been in part destroyed, and a new class, the dvoriane, had taken their place.
This term originally denoted domestic servitors, both freemen and slaves,
who were employed by the appanage princes to administer their estates. Ivan
now gave them titles previously reserved for the boyars, and lands in various
parts of the country. However, these lands were pomestia, not votchiny – that is,
they were not hereditary possessions and remained the legal property of the
tsar, and could be taken back by him if he was dissatisfied with the servitors.
Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: “As the harsh internal repression took its
toll on Russia’s people, Ivan’s fortunes went into steep decline. During the
1570s the Tartars of the Crimean khanate devastated large tracts of Russia
with seeming impunity – even managing to set fire to Moscow on one
occasion. At the same time the tsar’s attempts at westward expansion across
the Baltic Sea succeeded only in embroiling the country in the Livonian War
against a coalition that included Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Lithuania.
The conflict dragged on for almost a quarter of a century, with little tangible
gain. And all the while the oprichniki continued to engage in their wild bouts
of killing and destruction; their area of operation, once the richest region of
Russia, was reduced to one of the poorest and most unstable.
“In 1581 Ivan turned his destructive rage against his own family. Having
previously assaulted his pregnant daughter-in-law, he got into an argument
with his son and heir, also called Ivan, and killed him in a fit of blind rage. It
was only after Ivan the Terrible’s own death – possibly from poisoning – that
Russia was finally put out of its long agony…”492
If Tsar Ivan had died in 1560, before the period of his terrible cruelties, he
may well have gone down in history as one of the greatest of the Orthodox
kings. His tragedy was that he lived too long…
Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) has written: “The reign of Ivan the Terrible is
490 Skrynnikov, Tsarstvo Terrora (The Kingdom of Terror), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp. 17, 104.
491 “ribs were torn out, people burnt alive, impaled, beheaded, disemboweled, their genitals
cut off” (Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercius, 2012, p. 222).
290
divided by historians, following his contemporaries, into two periods. The
first period (1547-1560) is evaluated positively by everyone. After his
coronation and acceptance of the title of Tsar, and after his repentance for his
aimless youth by subjecting his life to the rules of Orthodoxy piety, Ioann IV
appears as an exemplary Christian Sovereign.
“He convened the first Zemskie Sobory in the 1550s, kept counsel with the
best men of the Russian Land, united the nation’s forces, improved the
interior administration, economy, justice system and army. Together with
Metropolitan Macarius he also presided at Church Councils, which
introduced order into Church life. Under the influence of his spiritual father,
Protopriest Sylvester, he repented deeply for the sins of his youth, and lived
in the fear of God and in the Church, building a pious family together with
his wife Anastasia Romanova. The enlivening of piety and the consolidation
of the people also brought external successes to the Russian state in this
period. By the good will of God the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan were
crushed, and the Crimean khanate was pacified for the time being. The whole
of the Volga region from Kazan to the Caspian and a part of the Northern
Caucasus went to Moscow. Under the blows of the Russian armies the
Livonian Order in the Baltic was crushed. A positive estimate of this period
does not elicit disagreement among historians.
“The second period begins after the expulsion of his spiritual father,
Protopriest Sylvester and close friends of the Tsar, who were united into the
‘Chosen Assembly’ (the Adashevs, Prince Kurbsky and others). This period
finally becomes well established by 1564, with the proclamation of the
oprichnina. After the oprichnina’s great terror (1564-1572), the system of
government created in this period, albeit in a ‘weakly flowing regime’,
continued right to the death of the Terrible one in March, 1584. The negative
consequences of this period completely blot out the attainments of the first
period. All historians also agree on this. Let us note the main results of this
period:
“1. The liquidation of elementary justice and legality, mass repressions

without trial or investigation of the suspects, and also of their relatives and
house servants, of whole cities. The encouragement of denunciations created a
whole system of mass terror and intimidation of people.
“2. The destruction of national unity through an artificial division of the

country into two parts (the zemshchina and the oprichnina, then the system of
‘the Sovereign’s Court’) and the stirring up of enmity between them.
“3. The destruction of the popular economy by means of the oprichnina’s

depradations and the instilling of terror, the mass flight of people from Russia
to Lithuania and to the borderlands. A great devastation of the central
provinces of Russia, a sharp decline in the population (according to
Skrynnikov’s data, from 8 to 5 million).
291
“4. Massive repressions against the servants of the Church who spoke out
against the oprichnina or those suspected of it, beginning with the killing of
Metropolitan Philip and individual bishops (of Novgorod and Tver), and
continuing with the executions of prominent church-servers (St. Cornelius of
Pechersk), and ending with the massive slaughter of the clergy in certain
cities (Novgorod, Tver, Torzhok, Volochek) and the expoliation of the
churches.
“5. As a consequence of the internal ravaging of the state – external defeats,

both military and diplomatic: the complete loss of the conquests in Lithuania
and the outlet to the Baltic sea, the loss of possessions in the Caucasus,
international isolation, incapacity to defend even Moscow from the incursions
of the Crimean Tatars.
“All historians agree that the Terrible one left Russia after his death in an
extremely sorry state: an economically ruined and devastated country, with
its population reduced by one-and-a-half times, frightened and demoralized.
But this does not exhaust the woes caused to Russia by the Terrible one.
Perhaps the most tragic consequences of his reign consisted in the fact that he
to a great extent prepared the ground for the Time of Troubles, which
exploded 17 years after his death and placed the Russian state on the edge of
complete annihilation. This was expressed concretely in the following.
“1. A dynastic crisis – the destruction by the Terrible one of his closest
relatives, the representatives of the Moscow house of the Riuriks. First of all
this concerned the assassination of his cousin, Prince Vladimir Andreevich
Staritsky with his mother, wife and children, and also with almost all his
servants and many people close to him (in 1569). This was not execution
following an investigation and trial, but precisely the repression of innocent
people (some were poisoned, others were suffocated with smoke), carried out
only out of suspicion and arbitrariness. Then it is necessary to note the killing
of his son Ivan, the heir to the throne….
“Thus Ivan the Terrible undoubtedly hewed down the dynasty with his
own hands, destroying his son, grandson and cousin with all his house, and
thereby prepared a dynastic crisis, which made itself sharply felt during the
Time of Troubles.
“2. The oprichnina and the consequent politics of ‘the Sovereign’s Court’
greatly reduced the aristocracy and service class. Under the axe of repressions
there fell the best people morally speaking, those who were honourable,
principled and independent in their judgements and behaviour, who were
distinguished by their abilities, and for that reason were seen as potentially
dangerous. In their place intriguers, careerists and informants were promoted,
unprincipled and dishonourable time-servers. It was the Terrible one who
nourished such people in his nearest entourage, people like Boris Godunov,
Basil Shuisky, Bogdan Belsky, Ivan Mstislavsky and other leaders in the Time
of Troubles, who were sufficiently clever to indulge in behind-the-scenes
292
intrigues and ‘under the carpet struggle’, but who absolutely did not want to
serve God and the fatherland, and for that reason were incapable of uniting
the national forces and earning the trust of the people.
“The moral rottenness of the boyars, their class and personal desires and
their unscrupulousness are counted by historians as among the main causes
of the Troubles. But the Moscow boyars had not always been like that. On the
contrary, the Moscow boyars nourished by Kalita worked together with him
to gather the Russian lands, perished in the ranks of the army of Demetrius
Donskoj on Kulikovo polje, saved Basil the Dark in the troubles caused by
Shemyaka, went on the expeditions of Ivan III and Basil III. It was the Terrible
one who carried out a general purge in the ranks of the aristocracy, and the
results of this purge could not fail to be felt in the Troubles.
“3. The Terrible one’s repressions against honourable servers of the Church,
especially against Metropolitan Philip, weakened the Russian Church,
drowned in its representatives the voice of truth and a moral evaluation of
what was happening. After the holy hierarch Philip, none of the Moscow
metropolitans dared to intercede for the persecuted. ‘Sucking up’ to
unrighteousness on the part of the hierarchs of course lowered their authority
in the eyes of the people, which gave the pretenders the opportunity to
introduce their undermining propaganda more successfully in the people.
“We should note here that the defenders of the Terrible one deny his
involvement in the killing of Metropolitan Philip in a rather naïve way: no
written order, they say, has been discovered. Of course, the first hierarch of
the Russian Church, who was beloved by the people for his righteous life, was
not the kind of person whom even the Terrible tsar would dare to execute just
like that on the square. But many of the Terrible one’s victims were destroyed
by him by means of secret assassinations (as, for example, the family of the
same Vladimir Andreyevich). It is reliably known that the holy hierarch
Philip reproved the Terrible one for his cruelties not only in private, but also,
finally, in public, and that the latter began to look for false witnesses against
him. By means of bribes, threats and deceit he succeeded in involving Abbot
Paisius of Solovki (a disciple of St. Philip) and some of the hierarchs in this.
Materials have been preserved relating to this ‘Council of 1568, the most
shameful in the history of the Russian Church’ (in the expression of Professor
Kartashev), which condemned its own chief hierarch. The majority of the
bishops did not decide to support the slanderers, but they also feared to
defend the holy hierarch – and simply kept silent. During the Liturgy the
oprichniki on the tsar’s orders seized the holy confessor, tore off his vestments,
beat him up and took him away to prison. At the same time almost all the
numerous relatives of St. Philip, the Kolychev boyars, were killed. They cast
the amputated head of the hierarch’s favourite nephew into his cell. A year
later, the legendary Maliuta came to the imprisoned Philip in the Otroch
monastery, and the holy hierarch just died suddenly in his arms – the
contemporary lovers of the oprichnina force us to believe in this fairy-tale!
293
“Detailed material on this subject was collected in the book of Professor
Fedotov, The Holy Hierarch Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow. Those descendants
who lived nearest to those times also well remembered who was the main
perpetrator of the death of St. Philip. For that reason Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich
transferred the relics of the hieromartyr to Moscow, and wrote a penitent
letter to him as if he were alive, asking forgiveness for the sin of his
predecessor Ivan the Terrible (in imitation of the Emperor Theodosius the
Younger, who repented for the sin of his mother, the Empress Eudoxia,
against St. John Chrysostom). Therefore the apologists of the Terrible one, in
denying his guilt against St. Philip, simply reject the tradition of the whole
Russian Church as established in documents.
“Besides St. Philip, on the orders of the Terrible during the devastation of
Novgorod, one of those who envied and slandered St. Philip, Archbishop
Pimen was killed. And if contemporary ‘oprichniki’ consider it to the credit of
the Terrible one that he dealt with the false witnesses in the affair of the holy
hierarch, then let them remember that a timely ‘clean-up’ of witnesses and
agents who have done their work is a common phenomenon in the course of
large-scale repressions. Only it is not a work of God. The unknown author of
The Tale of the Devastation of Novgorod tells us that on the orders of the Terrible
one up to three hundred abbots, hieromonks, priests and deacons in
Novgorod itself and its environs, monasteries and villages were killed.
Several tens of Church servers were killed in each of the cities of Tver,
Torzhok, Volokolamsk and other places. One can argue about the accuracy of
the numbers of victims cited, but one cannot doubt that the clergy slaughtered
during the reign of the Terrible one numbered at least in the tens, but more
likely in the hundreds. There is every reason to speak about a persecution of
the clergy and the Church on the part of the Terrible one. The holy hierarch
Philip and St. Cornelius of Pskov-Pechersk493 are only the leaders of a whole
host of hieromartyrs, passion-bearers and confessors of that time. It is those
whose glorification it is worth thinking about!
“4. Finally, the Terrible one’s epoch shook the moral supports of the simple
people, and undermined its healthy consciousness of right. Open theft and
reprisals without trial or investigation, carried out in the name of the
Sovereign on any one who was suspect, gave a very bad example, unleashing
the base passions of envy, revenge and baseness. Participation in
denunciations and cooperation in false witnesses involved very many in the
sins of the oprichnina. Constant refined tortures and public executions taught
493 “In the ancient manuscripts of the Trinity-Sergiev Lavra it was written that Igumen
Cornelius came out from the monastery gates with a cross to meet the Tsar. Ivan the Terrible,
angered by a false slander, beheaded him with his own hands, but then immediately
repented of his deed, and carried the body to the monastery. The pathway made scarlet by
the blood of St Cornelius, along which the Tsar carried his body to the Dormition church,
became known as the “Bloody Path.” Evidence of the Tsar’s repentance was the generous
recompense he made to the Pskov Caves monastery after the death of St Cornelius. The name
of the igumen Cornelius was inscribed in the Tsar’s Synodikon.” (Holy Cross Monastery)
(V.M.)
294
people cruelty and inured them to compassion and mercy. Everyday animal
fear for one’s life, a striving to survive at any cost, albeit at the cost of
righteousness and conscience, at the cost of the good of one’s neighbours,
turned those who survived into pitiful slaves, ready for any baseness. The
enmity stirred up between the zemshchina and the oprichnina, between ‘the
Sovereign’s people’ and ‘the rebels’, undermined the feeling of popular unity
among Russian people, sowing resentment and mistrust. The incitement of
hatred for the boyars, who were identified with traitors, kindled class war. Let
us add to this that the reign of the Terrible one, having laid waste to the
country, tore many people away from their roots, deprived them of their
house and land and turned them into thieves, into what Marxist language
would call ‘declassified elements’. Robbed and embittered against the whole
world, they were corrupted into robber bands and filled up the Cossack gangs
on the border-lands of Russia. These were ready-made reserves for the armies
of any pretenders and rebels.
“And so, if we compare all this with the Leninist teaching on the
preparation of revolution, we see a striking resemblance. The Terrible one
truly did everything in order that ‘the uppers could not, and lowers would
not’ live in a human way. The ground for civil war and the great Trouble had
thus been fully prepared…”494
It has been argued that the victims of Ivan’s rule prefigure the Christian
victims of Lenin and Stalin, while the oprichnina looks forward to Stalin’s
Russia, the NKVD-KGB, dekulakization and the great terror of the 1930s.
Indeed, it is tempting to see in Stalin’s terror simply the application of Ivan
the Terrible’s methods on a grander scale. This theory is supported by the fact
that Stalin called Ivan “my teacher”, and instructed Eisenstein, in his film,
Ivan the Terrible, to emphasize the moral that cruelty is sometimes necessary to
protect the State from its internal enemies.
Michael Cherniavksy has pointed to the tension, and ultimate

incompatibility, between two images of the kingship in the reign of Ivan the
Terrible: that of the basileus and that of the khan. “If the image of the basileus
stood for the Orthodox and pious ruler, leading his Christian people towards
salvation, then the image of the khan was perhaps preserved in the idea of the
Russian ruler as the conqueror of Russia and of its people, responsible to no
one. If the basileus signified the holy tsar, the ‘most gentle’ (tishaishii) tsar in
spiritual union with his flock, then the khan, perhaps, stood for the absolutist
secularised state, arbitrary through its separation from its subjects.”495
494 Alferov, “Monarkhia i Khristianskoe Soznanie” (“The Monarchy and Christian
Consciousness”), http://catacomb.org.ua/rubr10/R10_11.htm, pp. 8-13. See also Georgij

Korobyn, “Traktovka lichnosti Ioanna Groznogo v knige mitr. Ioanna (Snycheva),
‘Samoderzhavie Dukha’” (The Interpretation of the Personality of Ivan the Terrible in the
Book of Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev), ‘The Autocracy of the Spirit’),
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print_page&pid=1389.
495 Cherniavsky, “Khan or basileus: an aspect of Russian medieval political theory”, Journal of
the History of Ideas, 10, No. 4, October-December, 1950, p. 476; quoted in Hosking, op. cit., p. 7.
295
While we have asserted that Ivan was a truly Orthodox ruler, it must be
admitted that that judgement could be disputed. Thus although he showed
great skill in defending Orthodoxy before emissaries from the Vatican, at the
very end of his life, he destroyed even his reputation as a defender of
Orthodoxy by encroaching on Church lands and delving into astrology.496
Moreover, his theory of government contained absolutist elements which
were closer to the theories of Protestant Reformers such as Luther and
contemporary Protestant monarchs such as Elizabeth I of England than to
Orthodoxy.497
In fact, the nineteenth-century Slavophile Ivan Kireyevsky went so far as to

call him a heretic, and attributed to his heretical view of Church-State
relations all the woes of the later part of his reign: “The terrible one acted in a
restrictive manner because he was a heretic; this is proved… by his striving to
place Byzantinism [i.e. the absolutist ideas of some Byzantines] in a position
of equal dignity with Orthodoxy. From this there came the oprichnina as a
striving towards state heresy and ecclesiastical power. And that this concept
of the limits or, more correctly, the lack of limits of his power and of its lack of
connection with the people was not Christian, but heretical is witnessed
publicly to this day by the holy relics of Metropolitan Philip.”498
If there was indeed something of eastern absolutism as well as purely

Orthodox autocracy in Ivan’s rule, then this would be a partial explanation,
not only the cruelties of his own reign, but also why, only a few years after his
death, Russia descended into civil war and the Time of Troubles, rebelling
against the anointed Tsars Boris Godunov and Vasili Shuisky. For eastern
absolutism, unlike Orthodox autocracy, is a system that can command the
fear and obedience, but not the love of the people, and is therefore unstable in
essence. If the people refrained from rising against Ivan out of respect for his
anointed status, thirty years later it was a different matter, when the faith and
morals of the people, undermined in part by the bad example of their rulers,
was less strong to withstand temptation.
Absolutist tyranny does need to be resisted – but not out of considerations

of democracy or the rights of man, but simply out of considerations of
Christian love and justice. An Orthodox tsar has no authority higher than
himself in the secular sphere. And yet the Gospel is higher than everybody,
496 Lebedev has even suggested that that the half-military, half-monastic nature of Ivan’s
oprichnina was modelled on the Templars, and that the terrible change in his appearance that
took place after his return to Moscow from Alexandrov in 1564 was the result of “a terrible
inner upheaval”, his initiation into a satanic, masonic-like sect (op. cit., p. 97).
497 See Hierodeacon James (Tislenko), “Nekotorie zamechania na knigu V.G. Manyagina
‘Apologia Groznogo Tsaria’” (Some Remarks on the Book of V.G. Manyagin, ‘An Apology for
the Awesome Tsar’), Pravoslavnaia Moskva, NN 13 -14 (295-296), July, 2003; in Manyagin, op.
cit., pp. 228-242.
498 Kireevsky, “Pis’mo k A.I. Koshelevu” (“Letter to A.I. Koshelev”), Razum na puti k istine
(Reason on the Way to Truth), St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 107.
296
and will judge everybody on the Day of Judgement; and in reminding Ivan of
this both St. Philip and Kurbsky were doing both him and the State a true
service by their non-violent resistance to evil…
Ivan rejected this service to his own detriment. It is difficult to avoid the
conclusion, therefore, that Ivan the Terrible was indeed terrible in his impiety.
Indeed, Lebedev calls the latter part of his reign “not a struggle with rebellion,
but the affirmation of his permission to do everything. So we are concerned
here not with the affirmation of the Orthodox Autocracy of the Russian Tsars,
but with a prefiguring of the authority of the Antichrist…”499
499 Lebedev, op. cit., p. 90. This judgement is confirmed by the end of Ivan’s life, according to
Yevgeny Anisimov. For his body even before death began to rot and give out a terrible smell.
Thus “the Lord did not allow the Terrible one to escape hell: at the last minute they tried to
tonsure him into monasticism – at that time they considered this a reliable method of saving
the soul. But no! They laid the monastic vestments on the already stiffening corpse of the evil-
doer.“ (Live Journal, http://ugroza-
77.livejournal.com/379339.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social)
297
36. CHURCH AND STATE IN MUSCOVY
Since Byzantium fell, according to the prophecy, because there was no true
“symphony” between Church and State, but rather the subordination of
strictly ecclesiastical interests to those of the State, it is necessary to examine
Church-State relations in Muscovy. And here, too, unfortunately, we find that,
while the Church remained formally an independent institution throughout
the period from 15th to the 17th centuries, the general trend was for
increasing integration of the Church into the State, and subordination of the
interests of the Church to those of the State. This subordination reached a first
peak during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, who murdered Metropolitan Philip
of Moscow, and a second during the reign of Alexis Mikhailovich, who
secured the unlawful deposition of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow. In between
there were periods of greater ecclesiastical independence. But the general
pattern was the one noted by Archbishop Mark (Arndt) in relation to
preaching: “Quite a few Russian metropolitans in the 15th and 16th centuries
were condemned to silence by the clearly expressed bans on preaching by the
tsars”.500
In order to understand this process better, we need to compare the periods

before and after the fall of Constantinople. A.P. Dobroklonsky writes: “The
previously established link between the Church and the State became still
stronger from the 13th to the 16th centuries. You constantly encounter facts
that indicate the influence of the former on the latter and vice-versa. But in the
history of their mutual relations the increasing dominance of the State over
the Church is noticeable. Before the State was only organized and brought
together under the tutelage of the Church. But now it passes from the
anarchic life of the principalities to the concentration of power around the
Muscovite throne in the north and around the Polish throne in the south-west
of Russia. And at the same time it not only removes from itself the tutelage of
the Church, but places her in subjection to itself. This goes in tandem with the
exaltation of the secular power. Therefore between the beginning of the given
period, when there still existed independent principalities, and the
metropolitan acted as the centre unifying Russians amidst their scatteredness,
and the end [of the period], when the principalities ceased to exist and the
Muscovite sovereign and the Polish king were exalted to autocratic status, a
large difference in the relationship of the secular power to the ecclesiastical
power and ecclesiastical life is noticeable.
“The influence of the secular power on ecclesiastical life is expressed in the

given period in the most varied activities in all branches of ecclesiastical life.
The princes in the north of Russia cared for the instalment of Christianity in
the newly-acquired regions and for the Christian enlightenment of the newly
500
Arndt, “Mitropolit Moskovskij Filaret (Drozdov) i ego mesto v kontekste russkoj
propovedi” (Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow and his place in the context of
Russian preaching), in Vladimir Tsurikov (ed.), Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow 1782-1867,
Jordanville; The Variable Press, 2003, p. 82.
298
converted. But in the south the Polish king, under the influence of the
Catholic party, tried to weaken the power of Orthodox Christianity and help
Catholic propaganda. The Russian princes themselves built churches and
monasteries, opened dioceses, defined their boundaries, gave money for the
upkeep of sees and churches, themselves influenced the election of clergy,
and in the course of time even chose the highest representatives of
ecclesiastical power on their own. In the south of Russia this became one of
the rights of the king, but in the north at the end of the 15th century and
during the 16th it was practised so frequently that it became a normal
phenomenon. The secular authorities deposed hierarchs in the same arbitrary
manner in which they had elevated them: the Polish king even ascribed
judgement over them to himself, as his right. In the inner life of the Church
the influence of the secular authorities was no less. It issued decrees defining
the rights of the clergy, the character of ecclesiastical administration and
courts;… it interfered in the administration of monasteries…; it ascribed to
itself the right of court of highest appeal in doubtful cases of local arbitration;
it checked the monasteries’ accounts; it sometimes confiscated monastic
property; it often convened councils, where it pointed out ecclesiastical
deficiencies and suggested that the hierarchs remove them; it confirmed with
its own seals important decisions of the metropolitan; it accepted reports from
the bishops on ecclesiastical issues; it investigated heresies, and itself
sometimes fought with heretics (for example, at the Council of 1503); it itself
sometimes entered into negotiations with the Patriarch of Constantinople on
the needs of the Church (for example, the letters of Basil Vasilievich in the
case of the election of Jonah); it even sometimes of itself abolished
ecclesiastical deficiencies (for example, Ioann IV wrote decrees to the Cyrillo-
Beloozersk monastery against the disorders that were taking place there);
finally it itself imposed various restrictions on the hierarchs of the Church,
even in their private way of life, for example, interfering in their selection of
assistants in the administration of houses and dioceses. It is difficult to say
where the pressure of the central secular authorities on Church life was
stronger – in the south, or in the north of Russia; but there is no doubt that the
local officials restricted it more, and the abuses were greater as a result of the
interference of the secular authorities in Church life, in the south of Russia.
The decrees often issued by the princes and kings concerning the inviolability
of Church administration and courts were for the most part voices crying in
the wilderness: in the south of Russia the regional officials did not obey them,
and the kings themselves did not observe them strictly; while in the north, if
the former feared to violate them, the Great Princes themselves often got
round them.
“In such a situation the ecclesiastical authorities were more and more
subsumed under the power of the secular authorities and acted on their
initiative; it manifested comparatively greater independence either at the
beginning of the period, when the secular authorities were not so strong, or at
the end, when the sovereigns were still underage or not yet firmly established
in power. Correspondingly, the level of the influence of the ecclesiastical
authorities on the course of secular affairs varied at different times. Under the
299
system of the principalities and veches the bishops blessed and ‘installed’ the
princes on their thrones; it was with their blessing that the princes issued
letters patent, they were invited to be present at the writing of their spiritual
wills, they were given tutelage over underage children; they were sent by
them to conduct negotiations on the inheritance and the dividing up of lands
and in general for mutual explanations; they were often ambassadors in the
drawing up of peace treaties, and advisors and reprovers of the prince…
Among the bishops the bishop of Novgorod had, as before, a particular
significance. His name was placed above the name not only of the posadnik
but also of the prince… When the system of principalities fell, and there were
no longer any appanage princes, the bishops in the cities occupied a leading
position. For that reason one can see their names at the head of the conspiracy
when this or that town rose up against the Muscovite sovereign with the aim
of recovering their independence. For example, Theophilus of Novgorod
entered into negotiations with Casimir [of Poland] under Ioann III, and
Barsanuphius of Smolensk – with Sigismund [of Poland] under Basil III. But
for that very reason the Moscow princes dealt with the bishops as if they were
representatives of the city – they exiled them and imprisoned them, as, for
example, with the above-mentioned Barsanuphius and Theophilus. For the
same reason, finally, if the metropolitans wanted to enlist the help of some
city for the Muscovite prince or suppress a rebellion there, they sometimes
acted through the local bishop and the clergy subject to him. The role played
in political affairs by bishops was sometimes taken upon themselves by
archimandrites, abbots and city priests both on their own initiative and on the
orders of the prince or bishop. With the ending of the principality system, and
the subjection of the cities to the Muscovite Great Prince and the introduction
everywhere of definite civil forms, the bishops lost their political significance.
Only in council did they boldly express their opinions, and that only if the
prince gave them leave, or if it was to please the Great Prince. Thus, for
example, at the ‘Hundred Chapters’ Council they expressed themselves in
favour of the sudebnik of Ioann IV, and in 1447, in an accusatory letter to
Demetrius Yuryevich Shemyak, they expressed themselves in favour of the
new order of succession that was being installed in Moscow. The cases when
the bishops dared on their own to give political advice to the Great Prince
without knowing how the latter would take it, were exceptional: the bishops
were afraid to do this and presented their opinions to the metropolitan. An
exception was Bishop Bassian Rylo of Rostov’s reproaching Great Prince
Ioann III for his cowardice in the struggle with Khan Ahmed; but it should be
noted that Bassian was the prince’s spiritual father and was respected by him.
The metropolitan’s sphere of political activities was much broader. He was
the head of the Russian Church and for that reason could extend her influence
over all spheres; he was closer to the Great Prince and for that reason could
more easily influence the very heart of civil life. The metropolitans interfered
into the principalities’ quarrels and by all means tried to stop them. For
example, when in 1270 the citizens of Novgorod expelled Prince Yaroslav
Yaroslavich and sent their army against him, Metropolitan Cyril III sent them
a letter in which among other things he said: ‘God entrusted with the
archiepiscopate in the Russian land, and you must listen to God and to me
300
and not shed blood; I can vouch that Yaroslav has cast aside all ill will; but if
you kiss the cross against him, I will take upon myself the penance for your
breaking of your vows and will answer for this before God’. The
Novgorodians followed his advice and were reconciled with the prince. When
Boris took Nizhny Novgorod from his brother Demetrius of Suzdal,
Metropolitan Alexis sent St. Sergius of Radonezh to Nizhny Novgorod to
persuade Boris to make concessions to his brother, and there he closed all the
churches and stopped the services. The metropolitan then deprived Bishop
Alexis, who had been supporting Boris, of the Nizhny region that belonged to
him (1365). Boris had to humble himself. When in 1328 the citizens of Pskov
hid amongst themselves Prince Alexander Mikhailovich of Tver, who was
being summoned to the Horde, and did not want to give him up,
Metropolitan Theognostus ‘sent a curse and excommunication’ on Prince
Alexander and the Pskovians, so that they had to give way. The metropolitan
acted in this way in the given case because he was afraid that the wrath of the
Khan would fall on the whole of Russia because of Prince Alexander’s non-
appearance at the Horde, and in this way he obliquely protected the
prosperity of Russia. But we know of a case when the metropolitan acted
directly for this purpose. When Berdibek, who had killed his father Chanibek,
became the Khan of the Horde, he demanded fresh tribute from all the
Russian princes and began to prepare for war against them. At the request of
the Great Prince Metropolitan Alexis set off for the Horde, calmed the wrath
of the Khan and diverted the woes that were expected for Russia (1357).
When the Muscovite princes had to fight with the Tatars, the metropolitans
would try and persuade the appanage princes to set about this task. Thus, for
example, Metropolitan Jonah sent a decree with Bishop Gerontius of Kolomna
to Prince Ivan Andreyevich of Mozhaisk; but he also called on Prince Boris
Alexandrovich of Tver to help through the local Bishop Elias. The
metropolitan would intercede for defeated princes, and this how they
regarded him. The metropolitans did still more in the interests of the
Muscovite Great Prince. They supported him in his struggles with his
enemies, and tried to draw all the Russian regions towards Moscow. They
were exhorted to this by the prince himself, and as well as by their own
interests, since the secular unity of Russia contributed to the great subjection
of the dioceses to the power of the metropolitan of Moscow. In 1364
Metropolitan Alexis was a mediator in securing a treaty between Great Prince
Dmetrius Ivanovich and his cousin Vladimir Andreyevich; several years later
the same metropolitan excommunicated Prince Svyatoslav of Smolensk and
other princes for breaking their oaths in going with the army of Olgerd [of
Lithuania] against Demetrius Ivanovich. Metropolitan Photius himself
travelled to Galich in order to try and persuade Prince Yury Dimitrievich of
Zvenigorod to be reconciled with his new, Prince Basil Vasilyevich of Moscow;
but when he refused to give in, the metropolitan departed, blessing neither
him nor the city. Finally he attained his aim. Yury caught up with him on the
road and promised not to lay hands on his nephew (1425). While Basil
Vasilyevich was prince, Metropolitan Jonah took a lively participation in his
struggle with Demetrius Vasilyevich Shemyaka. In his encyclical letter (1448)
the holy hierarch tried to persuade all the sons of Russia to recognise Prince
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Basil as the lawful Great Prince, and not to support Demetrius, whose
supporters he exhorted to submit to the Great Prince and cease the bloodshed,
threatening them in the opposite case with the closure of the churches in their
country. The next year the metropolitan even travelled with the Great Prince
to Kostroma and by his personal exhortations persuaded Shemyaka to
conclude peace. But the reconciliation turned out to be insincere; several
months later Shemyaka rose up again in Galich and, defeated by the prince,
established himself in Novgorod. Jonah several times sent his messengers and
missives there, trying to persuade the Novgorodians not to keep Prince
Demetrius amongst themselves and not to proceed with him to the shedding
of blood. He also tried to persuade Archbishop Euthymius to act, if he could,
on Demetrius, incline him to give way, but if did not succeed, to have no
communion with him as with a person excommunicated from the Church
(1452-1453)…. In helping the Muscovite Great Prince to be exalted above the
other princes, the metropolitans took part in the internal political affairs of the
Moscow Great Princedom. Sometimes this participation was made evident
only in the blessing of the metropolitan, sometimes in advice, instruction and
rebukes, but sometimes also in external activity. The metropolitan by his
blessing strengthened the agreements of the Great Prince, while by his
signature and seal he witnessed the spiritual wills of the prince. The princes
asked for his blessing in important civil affairs: we often find ‘in accordance
with the blessing of our metropolitan’ in important princely documents – not
only at the beginning, but also at the end. For example, even such a tsar as
Ioann IV, who could not stand the interference of others in his affairs and
their influence on him, nevertheless secured the blessing of the metropolitan
and the council when he published his sudebnik (1549 and 1551) or when he
was wavering about war with Poland (1551). The metropolitans were
counsellors of the Great Prince. This was directly expressed by many princes.
For example, Simeon Ivanovich in his will to his brothers commanded them
to ‘obey’ Metropolitan Alexis as a father; Basil Vasilyevich in one of his letters
to the Patriarch of Constantinople declares that the prince had to talk things
over with the metropolitan about civil – sometimes secret - matters also. After
the terrible Moscow fire of 1547 Ioann IV publicly addressed Metropolitan
Macarius with these words: ‘I beseech you, holy Vladyko, be my helper and
champion in love’. There are very many cases when the metropolitans really
were the counsellors and helpers of the Great Prince. Metropolitan Alexis,
who had been entrusted by the dying Prince Simeon with the direction of his
young brothers, was the chief director of Ivan Ivanovich and after him – of
Demetrius Ivanovich; and while the latter was underage he stood at the head
of the Boyar Duma. Although Metropolitan Gerontius did not have a great
influence on civil affairs, he nevertheless counselled Great Prince Ioann III.
Thus when, in 1480, Ahmed moved into the confines of Russia, and the Great
Prince, at the instigation of some of the boyars, was ready to remove himself
to some safe place, the metropolitan with Archbishop Bassian of Rostov and
the clergy applied all their efforts to arouse the prince to open warfare with
the Tatars. He did in fact set out with his army and positioned it where he
302
considered fitting; but then he returned to Moscow. The metropolitan and
Bassian met him there with reproaches, suggesting that he was a coward.501
But when he set off for the battle, the metropolitan blessed him; but on
hearing that the Great Prince was ready to conclude peace with Ahmed, he
sent him an epistle in the name of the whole of the clergy in which he tried to
persuade the prince to enter into a decisive battle with the Tatars and invoked
the blessing of God on the endeavour. During the struggle of Ioann III with
Novgorod, Metropolitan Gerontius was on the side of the prince and agreed
to send a new archbishop to Novgorod in the place of Theophilus. Finally, he
also sent epistles to Vyatka, exhorting the inhabitants to submit to the Great
Prince and not to devastate his inherited estates. Metropolitan Daniel enjoyed
the unflagging favour of Basil Ivanovich, although the latter was bought at
the price of concessions on the part of the metropolitan; and when he was
dying, Basil Ivanovich even ‘ordered’ his young son and heir, Ivan IV to
Metropolitan Daniel - i.e., entrusted him to his care. The latter immediately on
the death of his benefactor led the boyars and the members of the royal family
to swear allegiance to the new sovereign and the regent, his mother Helena. A
short time later he blessed Ioann to ascend the princely throne and, while his
mother was alive, took part in the affairs of external and internal politics: he
frequented the Duma, blessed the war against Lithuania, and mediated in the
reconciliation between Ioann IV and his uncle Andrew Ivanovich. But after
the death of Helena, when war broke out between the Belskys and the
Shuiskys, the metropolitan, standing on the side of the former, on their fall
had to abandon his see. It was taken by Metropolitan Joasaph (1539). He
supported the Belskys and, together with Ivan Belsky, was for a time the
person closest to the tsar and his ‘first counsellor’. His concern was to bring
peace to the fatherland. But soon, in 1542, the Shuiskys again gained the
upper hand and the Belskys fell: Joasaph was imprisoned. Metropolitan
Macarius was elected. He had a great influence on State life and the tsar
himself; this influence continued, in spite of the severity and capriciousness of
the tsar, throughout Macarius’ life. The tsar ran to him when he had to defend
Vorontsov from the Shuiskys, who wanted to kill him; he asked his advice
and discussed the question of his entering into marriage with him for a long
time; he opened his soul before him and gave a vow to correct himself after
the fire (1547); in the period that followed he asked for his help and direction.
Only [the priest] Sylvester and Adashev could rival him for a time in their
influence on the tsar. When he set out on his expedition to Kazan, the tsar
asked for the prayers and blessing of the metropolitan; during the expedition
501
“Let me remind the reader of the situation in 1480. A military alliance had been formed
between Poland and the Horde against Moscow, which yet again illustrates the theory of ‘the
defence of Europe’ [by Moscow from the Tatars]. The Tatar Khan Ahmed, counting on this
alliance, moved towards Moscow, but not from the East, as he usually did, but to meet his
ally at the headwaters of the Oka. Ivan III waited for the enemy on the traditional routes of
the Tatars to Moscow, and when Ahmed turned up on the Ugra, Tsar Ivan III, after standing
opposite the Tatar camp for a long time, returned to Moscow.
“Moscow met him exceptionally rudely. Bishop Bassian of Rostov called him a ‘deserter’,
the plebs was angry, and the Great Prince literally could find no way through: he was pushed
in the street and his beard was pulled, and this was the first officially autocratic sovereign of
Moscow…” (Solonevich, op. cit., p. 313) (V.M.)
303
he corresponded with him several times; and he attributed the success of the
expedition to the prayers of the metropolitan. During his departure from the
capital, the tsar left the State and his family in the care of Macarius: ‘You, my
father, to the extent God gives you, must take care for the supervision of all
the affairs of the kingdom, while you must instruct our brother and the
boyars who remain here in everything; also show spiritual care for my wife,
the Tsaritsa Anastasia’, said the tsar to the metropolitan on leaving Moscow.
Knowing the influence that the metropolitan had on the tsar, the Lithuanian
landowners often turned to the intercession of Metropolitan Macarius to get
what they wanted; and Russians who were in disgrace with the tsar usually
turned to him with their pleas, obtaining the tsar’s reprieve ‘for the sake of
my father Metropolitan Macarius’. His influence on the tsar was so powerful
that he restrained him from those excesses that he began to commit later. [But]
with the death of Macarius there as it were came to an end the time when the
metropolitans could interfere in the secular administration. Ioann IV himself
began to declare that the clergy headed by the metropolitan were sheltering
those boyars who were guilty of treason by their intercession, and that ‘it is
not fitting for priests to take upon themselves the affairs of the tsar’. With the
establishment of the oprichnina in 1565, the tsar declared the clergy together
with the boyars to be in disgrace because they were sheltering the boyars who
were worthy of death. It is understandable that the position of the
metropolitan was restricted by this; every advice of his concerning secular
affairs might appear to be an encroachment on his power to the suspicious
tsar. For that reason Metropolitan Athanasius had to look on the beginning of
the oprichnina’s activities in silence; for some reason Herman, who had been
elected in his place, was removed before he could be installed. For that reason,
too, Philip II on his instalment in the metropolitan’s see received from the tsar,
among other things, the demand that he ‘not interfere in the oprichnina and
the tsar’s everyday life at home’, and, when he did so, he was subjected to
imprisonment and a martyric end. For the same reason, finally, Cyril IV and
Anthony were not only silent witnesses of the deeds of the Terrible one, but
also his ‘indulgers’, in Kurbsky’s expression. It would have been possible for
Metropolitan Dionysius to influence the course of civil affairs under Tsar
Theodore, and he tried, but he could do nothing against the powerful upstart
Boris Godunov…”502
502
Dobroklonsky, Rukovodstvo po istorii russkoj tserkvi (A Guide to the History of the Russian
Church), Moscow, 2001, pp. 149-155.
304
37. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (3) TSAR THEODORE
“After the horrors of the reign of Ivan IV,” writes Lebedev, “a complete
contrast is represented by the soft, kind rule of his son, Theodore Ivanovich.
In Russia there suddenly came as it were complete silence… However, the
silence of the reign of Theodore Ivanovich was external and deceptive; it
could more accurately be called merely a lull before a new storm. For that
which had taken place during the oprichnina could not simply disappear: it
was bound to have the most terrible consequences.”503
But this lull contained some very important events. One was the crowning
of Theodore according to the full Byzantine rite, followed by his communion
in both kinds in the altar. This further enhanced the status of the Russian
State, which now, as in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, was closely linked to the
status of the Church of Moscow…
As Dobroklonsky writes, “the Moscow metropolitan see stood very tall. Its
riches and the riches of the Moscow State stimulated the Eastern Patriarchs –
not excluding the Patriarch of Constantinople himself – to appeal to it for
alms. The boundaries of the Moscow metropolitanate were broader than the
restricted boundaries of any of the Eastern Patriarchates (if we exclude from
the Constantinopolitan the Russian metropolitan see, which was part of it);
the court of the Moscow metropolitan was just as great as that of the
sovereign. The Moscow metropolitan was freer in the manifestation of his
ecclesiastical rights than the Patriarchs of the East, who were restricted at
every step. Under the protection of the Orthodox sovereigns the metropolitan
see in Moscow stood more firmly and securely than the Constantinopolitan
Patriarchate, which had become a plaything in the hands of the sultan or
vizier. The power of the Moscow metropolitan was in reality not a whit less
than that of the patriarchate: he ruled the bishops, called himself their ‘father,
pastor, comforter and head, under the power and in the will of whom they
are the Vladykas of the whole Russian land’. Already in the 15th century,
with the agreement of the Constantinopolitan Patriarch, he had been elected
in Rus’ without the knowledge or blessing of the Patriarch; the Russian
metropolia had already ceased hierarchical relations with the patriarchal see.
If there remained any dependence of the Moscow metropolitan on the
patriarch, it was only nominal, since the Russian metropolia was still counted
as belonging to the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate…”504
Not only was the Moscow metropolia a de facto patriarchate already: its
exaltation would simultaneously raise the status of the Russian Autocracy,
whose prosperity was vital for the survival, not only of Russian Orthodoxy,
but of Greek, Balkan, Middle Eastern and Georgian Orthodoxy, too.
503 Lebedev, op. cit., p. 105.

504 Dobroklonsky, op. cit., pp. 280-281.
305
In 1586 talks began with Patriarch Joachim of Antioch, who had arrived in
Moscow. He promised to discuss the question of the status of the Russian
Church with his fellow patriarchs. In 1588, the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah
II (Trallas) came to Moscow on an alms-raising trip.505 Then he went on an
important tour of the beleaguered Orthodox in the Western Russian lands,
ordaining bishops and blessing the lay brotherhoods.
It was the desperate situation of the Orthodox in Western Russia who were
being persecuted by the Jesuits that made the exaltation of the Muscovite see
particularly timely.
In 1582 the Pope had introduced the Gregorian calendar, whose aim was to
divide the Orthodox liturgically506 and, more generally, to show the global
power of the Pope. Thus Pavel Kuzenkov writes: “The calendar reform of
Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 was politically motivated. By the end of the
sixteenth century, when Protestant sentiments had spread across Europe, the
popes were trying to prove that they were still able to control global processes
related to all of humanity. The Roman Catholic Church was in a deep crisis
that was mainly triggered by criticism from scientists. Criticizing papism, the
Protestants relied on scientific methods. But papism suddenly took over the
initiative. Closer relations between the Church and the state were established
505 See A.V. Kartashev, Ocherki po Istorii Russkoj Tserkvi (Sketches in the History of the Russian
Church), Paris: YMCA Press, 1959, pp. 10-46, Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Rossijskoj Tserkvi (A
History of the Russian Church), 1988, pp. 152-156, Dobroklonsky, op. cit., pp. 282-285; and the
life of St. Job, first patriarch of Moscow, in Moskovskij Paterik (The Moscow Patericon),
Moscow: Stolitsa, 1991, pp. 110-113.
506 It also divided Catholics and Protestants. James Shapiro writes: "Shakespeare came of age
when time itself was out of joint: the Western calendar, fixed by Julius Caesar in 46 BC (a
meddling with nature deemed tyrannical by some of his fellow Romans), had by the late
sixteenth century drifted ten days off the celestial cycle. Something had to be done. In 1577
Pope Gregory XIII proposed skipping ten days and in 1582 Catholic Europe acted upon his
recommendations: it was agreed that the day after 4 October would 15 October. [Queen]
Elizabeth was ready to go along with this sensible change, but her bishops baulked, unwilling
to follow the lead of the Pope on this issue or any other. Other Protestant countries also
opposed the change and, as a result, began to keep different time. By 1599 Easter was
celebrated a full five weeks apart in Catholic and Protestant lands.
"There's an odd moment in 'Julius Caesar' when Brutus, on the eve of Caesar's
assassination, unsure of the date, asks his servant Lucius: 'Is not tomorrow, boy, the first of
March?' (II, i, 40) and tells him to check 'the calendar' and let him know. Virtually all modern
editions silently correct Brutus' 'blunder' (how could such an intelligent man be so wrong
about the date?), changing his question to: 'Is not tomorrow, boy, the ides of March?'
Elizabethans, though, would have smiled knowingly at Brutus' confusion in being off by a
couple of weeks - as well as at his blindness to the significance of the day that would resound
through history. They also knew, watching the events in the play that culminate in the ides of
March, that virtually all the political upheaval their own nation had experienced since the
Reformation - from the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, to the Cornish Rebellion of 1549, to the
Northern Rebellion of 1569, coincided with or had roots in feasts and holidays. As recently as
1596 the planners of the abortive Oxfordshire Rising had agreed that their armed
insurrection, in which they would cut down gentlemen and head 'with all speed towards
London' to foment a national rising, would begin shortly after Queen Elizabeth's Accession
Day, 17 November. 'Is this a holiday?' was a question that touched a deep cultural nerve..."
(1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, London: Faber & Faber, 2005, pp. 169-170)
306
in the Catholic world: Universities and academies were opened, and the
status of scientists rose significantly. Natural sciences appeared in the
foreground, though it was not to last. In the following century, according to
tradition, Galileo Galilei tried to justify himself before the Inquisition,
whispering: “And yet it moves.” And in the sixteenth century the popes were
favorably disposed towards the Copernican heliocentric system (by the way,
Copernicus was Doctor of Canon Law). And the calendar reform was based
on the work of eminent astronomers. The invention of the new Gregorian
calendar became an important symbol of the alliance between the Roman
Catholic Church and science. And its adoption all over the world was visible
evidence of the power of the papal authority.
“And if the new calendar had been adopted in the Protestant countries
during the reign of Peter I, then Russia would surely have changed over to it
as well. But Great Britain didn’t adopt it until 1752, and Sweden not until 1753.
And the calendar issue seemed to have been forgotten in Russia after that.
Though there is evidence that Catherine II decided to adopt ‘the new style’,
the turbulent French Revolution and the burning of Moscow by Napoleon
slowed down the process of rapprochement between Russia and the West for
a long time. The question of the unification of the calendar was raised again
under Nicholas II.”507
The papist intrigues had their effect: in 1596 the Orthodox hierarchs in the
West Russian land signed the unia of Brest-Litovsk with the Roman Catholics.
It was now obvious that Divine Providence had singled out the Church and
State in Muscovy, which remained faithful to Orthodoxy, rather than the
Church and State in Poland-Lithuania, which had apostasized to Catholicism,
as the centre and stronghold of Russian Orthodoxy as a whole, and this
needed to be emphasized in the eyes of all the Orthodox.
Patriarch Jeremiah understood this. So first, in 1583, he convened a Pan-

Orthodox Council of the Eastern Patriarchs that anathematized the Gregorian
calendar. The seventh point of the Council declared: “That whosoever does
not follow the customs of the Church as the Seven Holy Ecumenical Councils
decreed, and the Menologion which they well decreed that we should follow,
but in opposition to all this wishes to follow the new Paschalion and
Menologion of the atheist astronomers of the Pope, and wishes to overturn
and destroy the dogmas and customs of the Church which have been handed
down by the Fathers, let him be anathema and outside the Church of Christ
and the assembly of the faithful…”
Then, in January, 1589 Patriarch Jeremiah and Tsar Theodore Ivanovich

presided over a “Holy Synod of the Great Russian Empire and of the Greek
Empire” which sanctioned the creation of an autocephalous Russian
Kuzenkov and Pushchaev, “The Rudiments of an Ultra-Ecumenical Project, or Why

507
Constantinople Needed to Introduce the New Calendar”, Pravoslavie.ru, February 20, 2019.
307
patriarchate, a decision published in a gramota by the tsar in May of the same
year. The act was confirmed in a highly unusual manner: the new Russian
patriarch, Job, was given a second (or even a third) consecration by Patriarch
Jeremiah.508
The decision was confirmed by two Pan-Orthodox Councils in

Constantinople in 1590 and 1593, which also confirmed the anathema on the
Gregorian calendar. 509 In the 1593 Council the Russian Church was also
assigned the fifth place among the patriarchates. As Dan Mureşan has argued,
these two last acts were closely linked. Up to this period, Rome, though in
heresy, was considered still belong to the pentarchy of patriarchs, without
whose combined presence no Ecumenical Council could be convened. But the
introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582 had so appalled the Orthodox
that the pretense of a pentarchy including Rome was finally abandoned. So
the Council of 1590 was called “ecumenical”, although it was convened
without Rome, and the Russian Church took the place of Rome, thereby
recreating the pentarchy to reflect present realities.
In agreeing to the tsar’s request for a patriarchate of Moscow, Patriarch

Jeremiah showed that he understood that in having a Patriarch at his side, the
status of the Tsar, too, would be exalted: “In truth, pious tsar, the Holy Spirit
dwells in you, and this thought is from God, and will be realized by you. For
the Old Rome fell to the Apollinarian heresy, and the Second Rome,
Constantinople, is in the possession of the grandsons of the Hagarenes, the
godless Turks: but your great Russian kingdom, the Third Rome, has
exceeded all in piety. And all the pious kingdoms have been gathered into
508 Mureşan, “Rome hérétique? Sur les décisions des conciles de Moscou et de Constantinople
(1589, 1590 et 1593”,
file://localhost/Users/anthonymoss/Documents/Rome%20he%CC%81re%CC%81tique%20
%20%20Sur%20les%20de%CC%81cisions%20des%20conciles%20de%20Moscou%20et%20de
%20Constantinople%20(1589,%201590%20et%201593).html.
V.M. Lourié writes: “The case of the raising to the patriarchy of Job, who was already
Metropolitan of Moscow by that time, was strangely dual. The first Episcopal consecration
was carried out on Job already in 1581, when he became Bishop of Kolomna, and the second
in 1587, when he was raised to the rank of Metropolitan of Moscow. Now, with his raising to
the rank of Patriarch of Moscow, a third Episcopal ordination was carried out on him
(Uspensky, 1998).” This uncanonical custom appears to have originated with Patriarch
Philotheus of Constantinople, when he transferred St. Alexis from Vladimir to Moscow
(http://hgr.livejournal.com/1099886.html, June 1, 2006).
509 Metropolitan Cyprian of Orope, “’The Sigillion’ of 1583 Against ‘the Calendar Innovation
of the Latins’: Myth or Reality?”, May 13, 2011, Monastery of SS. Cyprian and Justina, Fili,
Attica. This article confirms the truth of the anathematizations of the Grigorian calendar in
the sixteenth century while at the same time exposing a forgery by a Russian monk of St.
Panteleimon’s monastery in 1858 known as the “Sigillion”.
On September 29, 1998, the True Orthodox (Old Calendar) Church of Greece under
Archbishop Chrysostomos (Kiousis) of Athens confirmed these decisions, and declared
“eternal memory” to the three signatories and all the signatories of the Councils, which
“condemned the calendar innovation and severed from the Body of the Church those who
accepted it”
(https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6v2ynA_4iwNM25OUDlFUDdZYXM/view).
308
your kingdom, and you alone under the heavens are named the Christian tsar
throughout the inhabited earth for all Christians.”510
The Patriarch’s language here is reminiscent of that of the famous

prophecy of Elder Philotheus of Pskov in 1511. In particular, the Patriarch
follows the elder in ascribing the fall of Old Rome to “the Apollinarian
heresy”. Now the Apollinarian heresy rarely, if ever, figures in lists of the
western heresies. And yet the patriarch here indicates that it is the heresy as a
result of which the First Rome fell. Some have understood it to mean the Latin
practice of using wafers (unleavened bread) in the Eucharist. For the
Orthodox criticised this practice as seeming to imply that Christian had no
human soul (symbolized by leaven), as was the teaching of Apollinarius. As
Patriarch Peter of Antioch said at the time of the schism between Rome and
the East in the eleventh century: “Whoever partakes of wafers unwittingly
runs the risk of falling into the heresy of Apollinarius. For the latter dared to
say that the Son and Word of God received only a soul-less and mindless
Body from the Holy Virgin, saying that the Godhead took the place of the
mind and soul.”511 Another interpretation suggests another parallel between
Papism and Apollinarianism: just as the Divine Logos replaces the human
mind in the heretical Apollinarian Christology, so a quasi-Divine, infallible
Pope replaces the fully human, and therefore at all times fallible episcopate in
the heretical papist ecclesiology. The root heresy of the West therefore
consists in the unlawful exaltation of the mind of the Pope over the other
minds of the Church, both clerical and lay, and its quasi-deification to a level
equal to that of Christ Himself. From this root heresy proceed all the heresies
of the West.
Thus the Filioque with its implicit demotion of the Holy Spirit to a level
below that of the Father and the Son becomes necessary insofar as the Holy
Spirit as the Spirit of truth Who constantly leads the Church into all truth has
now become unnecessary - the Divine Mind of the Pope is quite capable of
fulfilling His function. Similarly, the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit
on the Holy Gifts, is also unnecessary - if Christ, the Great High Priest,
sanctified the Holy Gifts by His word alone, then His Divine Vicar on earth is
surely able to do the same without invoking any other Divinity, especially a
merely subordinate one such as the Holy Spirit.
The exaltation of the Russian Church and State to patriarchal and “Third
Rome” status respectively shows that, not only in her own eyes, but in the
eyes of the whole Orthodox world, Russia was now the chief bastion of the
Truth of Christ against the heresies of the West. Russia had been born as a
510 Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 156. This thought was echoed by the patriarch of Alexandria,
who wrote to the “most Orthodox” tsar in 1592: “The four patriarchates of the Orthodox
speak of your rule as that of another, new Constantine the Great… and say that if there were
no help from your rule, then Orthodoxy would be in extreme danger.” (van den Bercken, op.
cit., p. 160).
511 Peter, cited (with some alterations) in Mahlon Smith III, And Taking Bread: The Development
of the Azyme Controversy, Paris: Beauchesne, 1978, p. 58, note 80.
309
Christian state just as the West was falling away from grace into papism in
the eleventh century. Now, in the sixteenth century, as Western papism
received a bastard child in the Protestant Reformation, and a second wind in
the Counter-Reformation, Russia was ready to take up leadership of the
struggle against both heresies as a fully mature Orthodox nation.
However, as we have seen, at the Pan-Orthodox Council convened by

Jeremiah on his return to Constantinople, the Eastern Patriarchs, while
confirming the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate, made it only the
fifth in seniority, after the four Greek patriarchates. This meant that the
relationship between Church and State in the Third Rome still did not quite
correspond to that between Church and State in the Second Rome. For
whereas in the latter the Emperor’s partner was the first see in Orthodoxy (at
least after the fall of the papacy), the Emperor’s partner in the Third Rome
was only number five in the list of patriarchs. Nevertheless, this was probably
in accordance with Divine Providence; for in the decades that immediately
followed the prestige of the “Third Rome” was severely dented when the
Poles briefly conquered Moscow during the “Time of Troubles”, necessitating
the continued supervision of the Western and Southern Russian Orthodox by
Constantinople. And by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Russian
patriarchate was abolished by Peter the Great and replaced – with the
blessing of the Eastern Patriarchs – by a “Holy Governing Synod”.
On the other hand, the elevation of the head of the Russian Church to the
rank of patriarchate was to prove beneficial now, in the early seventeenth
century, when the Autocracy in Russia was shaken to its foundations and the
patriarchs took the place of the tsars as the leaders of the Russian nation. We
witness a similar phenomenon in 1917, when the restoration of the Russian
patriarchate to some degree compensated for the fall of the tsardom. In both
cases, the patriarchate both filled the gap left by the fall of the state (up to a
point), and kept alive the ideals of true Orthodox statehood, waiting for the
time when it could restore political power into the hands of the anointed
tsars.
310
38. THE ORTHODOX UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE (2)
The Serbs had always seen themselves as the western outpost of

Orthodoxy. As such, they suffered not only from eastern invaders, such as the
Turks, but also from western heretics, such as the Austrians and Hungarians.
The last remnants of Serbian independence against the Turks, centered on
Smederovo, disappeared in 1459512, and Bosnia fell in 1463.
“The king of Bosnia, Stephen Tomašević, was besieged by the army of the
Ottoman ruler Mehmet II in the fortress of Kljuć. Eventually the King
surrendered under agreement of safe conduct. But once in Mehmet’s hands
Stephen and his entourage were killed and the surviving Bosnian nobility
made into galley-slaves. The Ottoman view was that the entire Bosnian ruling
class had lost its function and should be liquidated – Bosnia’s new role as a
small eyelet (province) in the Ottoman Empire was permanent and final. The
safe conduct had been offered to a king, but now he had become a mere
subject and could be disposed of at will…”513
Things were no better in other regions. “The devastation was terrible.

According to early Turkish sources, during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries there were ten to fourteen active places of Christian worship left in
Kosovo and Metohija.”514
Of particular significance in the history of Serbia under the Turkish yoke

was the burning of the body of St. Sava, which had been placed in the
monastery of Mileshevo.
“Mileshevo was plundered and destroyed,” writes Bishop Nikolai

Velimirovich, “but happily not destroyed. The sarcophagus with Sava’s
incorruptible body was not removed or desecrated for one hundred and fifty
years after the Turkish conquest. Ever since Sava’s body was laid in it, and for
over two hundred years of Serbian freedom and independence, Mileshevo
had been a place of pilgrimages, equal to Zhicha and Studenica. It had been
endowed and adorned by the Bans of Bosnia, the Princes of Herzegovina, the
Zhupans of the seacoast and kings and tsars of Serbia. The petty lords wanted
to make themselves great, and the great would make themselves still greater
if they had some connection with Sava’s tomb or Sava’s name. So Tvrtko I
chose Mileshevo in which to be crowned King of Bosnia at the tomb of St.
Sava in 1277, although he was a protector of the Bogomils. Prince Stjepan
512 According to Dr. Miodrag M. Petrović, there was no independent Bosnian Church,
although there were Orthodox Christians served by clergy of the Serbian Church. The so-
called “Bosnian Church” was not an organization with an ecclesiastical territory and
jurisdiction, but a completely secular institution, a diplomatic, advisory, arbitration and
intermediary body at the courts of Bosnian rulers. (“Kudugers-Bogomils in Byzantine and
Serbian sources and the ‘Bosnian Church’”, Belgrade, 1998, pp. 90-97)
513 Simon Winder, Danubia, London: Picador, 2013, p. 7.
514 “Orthodox Kosovo”, Saint Herman Calendar 2009, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska
Brotherhood.
311
Kossacha, an open Bogomil, adopted the title ‘Duke of St. Sava’. Of course,
the Orthodox rulers competed even more eagerly with each other to do
something remarkable for that sanctuary in which the sacred body was
preserved. In those bright days of freedom, Mileshevo was a true center of
lofty piety, education and educational activity. For Sava’s spirit ruled there
and gave an example of strenuous labor and many accomplishments.
“In the dark days of Turkish tyranny, however, Mileshevo became to the
Christian people a place of retreat, of deep repentance and of heavenly
consolation. It was at the mercy of the Muslims and yet, strange as it may
seem, it was for a long time protected by the Muslims themselves and the
Serbs who were converted by force to Islam. The Muslims also witnessed
innumerable miracles at the tomb of Saint Sava. A large village of Muslim
converts, Hissarjik, close to the monastery, surpassed all others in their
devotion to and protection of Mileshevo. Some of the daring European
travellers who came to Serbia under the Osmanlis saw in Mileshevo the
sarcophagus of Saint Sava ‘heaped with the gifts given by the Muslims’. Some
of them mentioned that even Roman Catholics from Dalmatia and Jews made
pilgrimages to the tomb of the saint.
“This situation lasted until the end of the sixteenth century. But in that
century the Osmanli Turks became exasperated because of the ceaseless
revolts and insurrections of the Serbs. The Serbs had never reconciled
themselves to their cruel fate under the Turkish yoke, Guerillas from forests
inside the country on the one hand, and refugees from Srem, Slavonia and
Banat, on the other, constantly disturbed the Ottoman government. The Turks
thought the trouble makers and revolutionaries had been inspired by the
ancient Serbian monasteries. The cult and veneration of Saint Sava was then
as great as ever before, and even greater on account of increasingly
accumulated wonders.
“Facing the growing danger of frequent insurrection, the Turkish sultans of

that time were imprudent enough to use means contrary to wisdom. Instead
of dousing fire by water, they intensified it by wood and straw. They sent
more and more petty tyrants to suppress the revolts by torture, destruction
and bloodshed.
“At the beginning of the year 1595, a change took place on the throne in
Istanbul. The new sultan, Mohammed III, son of a weak father, cruelly
ordered Sinan Pasha to quell the Serbian revolts forever by any means. This
ruthless pasha was informed that the Serbian monasteries were inspirational
centers for the revolts against the Turks. He was informed that Mileshevo was
a place of pilgrimage, a new Kaba, even for Muslims, and that many of them
had been converted to the Christian faith because of the healing of their sick
relations, and other wonders at the tomb of Saint Sava. Sinan Pasha at once
ordered that Sava’s body be taken to Belgrade and burnt.
312
“A certain Ahmed beg Ochuse was assigned the commission to carry out
the pasha’s order. This brutal servant of the brutal lord, true to his nature, did
it in a brutal way. He first placed a military cordon around the monastery of
Mileshevo. Then he forced the monks to take the wooden coffin with the body
of the saint out of the sarcophagus. The coffin was put on horses which were
led by the monks themselves, because the Turks were afraid to touch it. And
so the melancholy procession started. On the way the sobbing and crying
monks were beaten and every Serbian man or women met on the way was
killed or taken along, lest they should inform the outlaws in the forests. So in
this way the procession swelled considerably by the time it reached Belgrade.
“In the outskirts of the city of Belgrade, at a place called Vrachar, a pyre
was made. On that pyre the wooden coffin containing the sacred boy was
laid. On April 27, 1595, Saint Sava’s body was burnt to ashes. An unusually
big flame soared heavenward, illuminated the city in the night and was seen
from over the Danube River. And while the Turks were celebrating with
satisfaction, and the enslaved Serbs in Belgrade were weeping and praying,
the free Serbs beyond the Danube and the guerrillas on the mountains
presented their swords in homage to their saint.
“So Sinan Pasha destroyed the body of Saint Sava, but increased his glory
and influence. The triumph was only passing because it destroyed a cage
from which the dove had fled long ago. The joy of the Turks was of short
duration, for as the flame subsided, a sudden fear seized them, and they ran
to their homes and shut the doors behind them. In Vrachar a few monks on
their knees watched the fire from afar, waiting to take a handful of sacred
ashes back to Mileshevo…”515
In the seventeenth century, the persecution against the Serbs intensified.

Such great pillars of Orthodoxy as St. Basil of Ostrog (+1671) had to struggle
against both the Jesuits and the Turks…
Meanwhile, the Serbs of Kosovo and Metohija had a further scourge in the
shape of the Albanians, who gradually came down from the mountains and
settled in the plain, and were then given significant positions of power
because of their conversion to Islam.
Now the Albanians had not always been enemies of the Serbs. Many of
them had fought for Tsar Dushan, and some for St. Lazar at Kosovo. At the
time of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, the Albanians were fighting on
the Christian side under their famous ruler Skanderbeg. Jason Tomes writes:
“Born Gjergj Kastrioti around 1405, the legendary patriot was taken as a
tribute child to be reared as a Muslim and trained for the Ottoman army. He
515 Velimirovich, The Life of St. Sava, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989, pp.
157-160.
313
covered himself with glory fighting for the Turks, and to his Islamic name
Iskandar was added the honorific title bey (or beg). The Sultan appointed him
Governor of Kruja, but in 1443 he mutinied, reverted to Catholicism, and
declared himself ruler of Albania. Allied with Hungarians and Venetians,
Skanderbeg resisted the Turks for twenty-five years, and his victories against
tremendous odds won him an enduring place in European history. But, as so
often with a military genius, his legacy proved unsustainable. Skanderbeg
died of fever in 1468, and independence was lost within a decade …”516
Mark Mazower writes: “Albania was perhaps a special case from the point
of view of religion. ‘We Albanians have quite peculiar ideas,’ one notable told
Edith Durham. ‘We will profess any form of religion which leaves us free to
carry a gun. Therefore the majority of us are Moslems.’”517
Srdja Trifković writes: “Wealth and material position were important

factors affecting the decision of conquered peoples to convert to Islam. This
contributed to the new stratification of the society under Ottoman rule, and a
new power balance among national groups. The balance was shifting, and as
far as the Albanians and Serbs were concerned, it was shifting drastically in
favour of the Albanians, to the detriment of good relations between them. The
emergence of a significant number of Islamized Albanians holding high
Ottoman posts was reflected in Kosovo and Metohija. Albanians started
appearing as officials and tax collectors in local administration, replacing
Turks as the pillar of Ottoman authority. Local Serbs, who remained
Christians, and Albanians, who were eager to convert, being divided by
language and culture, and subsequently by religion, gradually became
members of two fundamentally opposed social and political groups.
“The Albanians’ readiness to come to terms with the conquerors gave them
the upper hand. This was the beginning of a tragic division, of separate roads.
The former became the rulers and the latter the ruled.
“The latent Serbian-Albanian conflict came into the open during the Holy
League’s war against the Ottoman Empire (1683-1690). Many Serbs joined the
Habsburg troops as a separate Christian militia. The Albanians – with the
exception of the gallant Roman Catholic Klimenti (Kelmendi) tribe – reacted
in accordance with their recently acquired Islamic identity and took the side
of the sultan’s army against the Christians.”518
In 1683 a combined Austrian and Polish army raised the Ottoman siege of
Vienna. The Austrians then took control of southern Hungary and
Transylvania. They advanced as far east as Kosovo, but then retreated,
leaving the Serbs who had taken their side at the mercy of the vengeful Turks.
516
Tomes, King Zog: Self-Made Monarch of Albania, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2007, p. 10.
517 Mazower, The Balkans, London: Phoenix, 2000, p. 73.
518 Trifković, “Kosovo: The Score Squaring the Circle in the Balkans”, in Kosovo and Metohija:
arguments in favour of its future within Serbia, Geopolitika, 2006, pp. 34-35.
314
The Serbs then decided on a bold move. Under the leadership of Patriarch
Arsenije III of Peć, they “abandoned their farms and villages to trek north,
then crossed the Danube with the retreating Austrians into Habsburg-ruled
Hungary. In what was thereafter called Vojvodina, from the Slavonic for
‘duchy’, the emperor gave the Serbs [in 1690] a charter to establish their own
community. The Habsburgs used these exiles as the first line of defence
against Ottoman incursions.”519
According to Noel Malcolm, the document that the Austrian Emperor

Leopold I issued to Patriarch Arsenije was not in fact “inviting the Patriarch
to bring his people to Hungary; on the contrary, it was urging him and his
people to rise up against the Ottomans, so that Austrian rule could be
extended all the way to ‘Albania’. For that purpose, it guaranteed (as Marsigli
had suggested) that Habsburg dominion over their territory would not
infringe their religious freedom or their right to elect their own vojvods. The
original manuscript of this document was endorsed: ‘An exhortation to the
Patriarch of the Rascians, to rouse his people to rebel against the Turks’; and a
key passage in the text said: ‘Do not desert your hearths, or the cultivation of
your fields.’ Some nineteenth-century historians of a romantic Serbian
persuasion dealt with this passage in a wonderfully economical way: instead
of printing the correct text, which says non deserite (do not desert), they simply
omitted the ‘non’.
“In the summer of 1690, however, all such plans for reconquest were
abandoned. The Ottomans, under their competent Grand Vizier, had built up
their forces, and the military tide had definitely turned. A massive Ottoman
army advanced on Niš and besieged it; it surrendered on 6 September. The
Imperial garrison was allowed to leave, but a large number of ‘Rascian’
soldiers (400 in one account, 4000 in another) were taken out and killed. In the
last week of September, Belgrade was under siege; it held out for just twelve
days, before an Ottoman shell hit the fort’s main powder-store on the night of
8 October, blowing the whole citadel to smithereens.
“By September Belgrade had become the natural destination of a large

number of refugees. One modern historian estimates that there were 40,000
there; many of these would have come from the Niš region, and the region
between Niš and Belgrade – areas which had been under Austrian
administration for a whole year. But among them also would have been some
of the people who had fled from the Prishtina-Trepça area of Kosovo. Their
Patriarch had reached Belgrade much earlier in the year. In June he had
gathered a large assembly of Serbian religious and secular leaders there, to
discuss further negotiations with the Emperor over the question of religious
autonomy in the areas still under Austrian control…
519 Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 239.
315
“How – and exactly when – the Serb refugees escaped into Hungary is not
clear… The conditions most of them had to live in, as they camped out in the
central Hungarian region in the winter, were atrocious. Before the end of the
year Patriarch Arsenije sent a petition to the Emperor Leopold begging for
assistance for these people; he also gave an explicit estimate of their numbers.’
There have come to Esztergom, Komárom and Buda men with their wives
and children, completely destitute and bare, coming to a total of more than
30,000 souls.’ Much later, in 1706, Arsenije made another estimate in a letter to
Leopold’s successor: he said he had come to Hungary with ‘more than 40,000
souls’.”520
Arsenije created a metropolitanate at Karlovtsy, while a new Patriarch was

appointed at Peć. Meanwhile, the Church of Montenegro remained
independent. So there were now three Serbian Churches…
All the Orthodox countries continued to suffer from Islamic persecution in

this period. Very often, Ottoman repression was exercised indirectly, through
the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Thus “in the Balkans, the Patriarchate of
Constantinople effectively annexed the territory of the Patriarchate of
Tarnovo in 1393 and, some centuries later and also by decree of the sultan, the
Serbian Patriarchate of Peć in 1766 and the autocephalous Archbishopric of
Ochrid in 1767. Throughout the region, the Patriarchate of Constantinople,
backed by the powerful Phanariot merchant families who in what is now
modern Romania managed to establish their own dynasties of client-rulers,
replaced local upper clergies with ethnic Greeks who rarely had much in the
way of spiritual concern for their flocks. This had no small role in fostering
the ethnic and nationalist movements that gave shape to the modern Balkans.
As Sir Steven Runciman describes it, ‘The price paid by the Orthodox Church
for its subjugation to its Phanariot benefactors was heavy. First, it meant that
the Church was run more and more in the interests of the Greek people and
not of Orthodoxy as a whole. […] The policy [of imposing Greek hierarchs
and clergy on the churches of the Balkans] defeated its own ends. It caused so
much resentment that when the time came neither the Serbs nor the
Bulgarians would cooperate in any Greek-directed move towards
independence; and even the Roumanians held back. None of them had any
wish to substitute Greek for Turkish political rule, having experienced Greek
religious rule.’ [The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge University Press,
1968, pp. 379-380].
“A similar process happened in the Middle East. In Antioch, the

Patriarchate of Constantinople constantly used its position at the Ottoman
court to exploit crises until, during the Melkite Schism of 1724, it finally
managed to have complete control over the selection of patriarchs and began
a process of replacing the local hierarchy with Greeks. As Robert Haddad
520 Malcolm, Kosovo, London: Papermac Books, 1998, pp. 158-160, 161.
316
explains, ‘During the two centuries before Constantinople’s assumption of
direct control there was scarcely a patriarchal reign free of ill-advised Greek
influence.’
“From the inception of Ottoman rule in Syria the ecumenical patriarch was
established as the sole channel of communication between the Antiochian
patriarchate and the Ottoman central government and, subject only to the
latter’s discretion, the final arbiter of its civil and ecclesiastical affairs. Had the
enormous power wielded by the ecumenical see as a department of the
Ottoman central administration been intelligently and decently employed in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the effect on the Melkites [i.e., the
Orthodox] of Syria might have been salutary. But, for reasons which cannot
detain us here, the Great Church in this period was not characterized by a
particularly high degree of either integrity or stability. And until Greek
prelates designated by Constantinople assumed, in the course of the
eighteenth century, direct control over the Syrian see, the Greek Church
played something resembling the role of well-paid but dishonest broker
between contending factions at Antioch.’ [Syrian Christians in Muslim
Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970, pp. 26-27]”521
In the Danu bian Principalities, meanwhile, rebellion was seething against

the Ottoman Empire. In 1711 Prince Demetrius Cantemir of Moldavia had
taken the side of Peter the Great in his war with the Turks. But Peter lost, and
Demetrius had to flee into exile in Russia.
In Wallachia, Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu (1688 to 1714) was martyred

for refusing to convert to Islam. For “on 15 August 1714, the Feast of the
Dormition, … he and his four sons and his advisor Ianache were brought
before Sultan Ahmed III of Turkey. Diplomatic representatives of Austria,
Russia, France and England were also present. After all of his fortune has
been seized, in exchange for the life of his family he was asked to renounce
the Orthodox Christian faith. He reportedly said: ‘Behold, all my fortunes and
all I had, I have lost! Let us not lose our souls. Be brave and manly, my
beloved! Ignore death. Look at how much Christ, our Savior, has endured for
us and with what shameful death he died. Firmly believe in this and do not
move, nor leave your faith for this life and this world.’ After this, his four
sons, Constantin, Ștefan, Radu and Matei and advisor Ianache were beheaded
in front of their father.”522
It was not only princes who suffered… From the day of his consecration,
St. Anthimus the Georgian, Metropolitan of Wallachia, fought tirelessly for
the liberation of Wallachia from all foreign oppressors. On the day he was
ordained he addressed his flock: “You have defended the Christian Faith in
521 “The Pseudomorphosis of Ottoman Ecclesiology, Orthodox Synaxis,

https://orthodoxsynaxis.org/2019/03/18/the-pseudomorphosis-of-ottoman-
ecclesiology/?fbclid=IwAR13zZ6smhF0nQq8SvmuTzuHKv-
17C2JGc44Md0b93QRveTsFZU7oiq2p68
522 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_Br%C3%A2ncoveanu.
317
purity and without fault. Nevertheless, you are surrounded and tightly
bound by the violence of other nations. You endure countless deprivations
and tribulations from those who dominate this world.... Though I am
unworthy and am indeed younger than many of you—like David, I am the
youngest among my brothers— the Lord God has anointed me to be your
shepherd. Thus I will share in your future trials and griefs and partake in the
lot that God has appointed for you.”
His words were prophetic: In 1714, as we have seen, the Turks executed the
Wallachian prince Constantine Brâncoveanu, and in 1716 they executed
Stefan Cantacuzino (1714-1716), the last native prince of Wallachia.
During this time, Anthimus gathered around him a group of loyal boyar
patriots determined to liberate their country from Turkish and Phanariot
domination. But Nicholas Mavrokordatos [the Phanariot appointed to rule the
Principalities in the Sultan’s name] became suspicious, and he ordered
Anthimus to resign as metropolitan. When Anthimus failed to do so, he filed
a complaint with Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople. Then a council of
bishops, which did not include a single Romanian clergyman, condemned the
“conspirator and instigator of revolutionary activity” to anathema and
excommunication and declared him unworthy to be called a monk.
But Nicholas Mavrokordatos was still unsatisfied and claimed that to deny
Anthimus the title of Metropolitan of Hungro-Wallachia was insufficient
punishment. He ordered Anthimus to be exiled far from Wallachia, to St.
Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai. Metropolitan Anthimus, beloved of the
Romanian people, was escorted out of the city at night since the conspirators
feared the reaction of the people. However, Anthimus never reached Mount
Sinai. On September 14, 1716, a band of Turkish soldiers stabbed him to death,
and cast his butchered remains into the river…
This rebelliousness of the Romanians, as Runciman writes, “frightened the

Sultan and played into the hands of the Phanariots who wished to govern the
Principalities from Constantinople. The Phanar disliked any sort of
Roumanian separation. It wished to keep the Ottoman Empire intact until the
whole could be transferred to the Greeks of Constantinople. Its influence at
the Sublime Porte secured the establishment of a new policy. Henceforward
Phanariots from Constantinople should govern the Principalities. This had
been the aim of the great Exaporite [Alexander Mavrocardato]. Shortly before
his death he had obtained the Moldavian throne for his oldest son, Nicholas,
whose wife, Cassandra Cantacuzena, had Bassaraba blood. Nicholas had been
displaced soon afterwards by Cantemir; but in 1710 he was appointed to the
Wallachian throne and proved his loyaty to the Sultan by spending two years
in captivity in an Austrian prison. The Porte was impressed. It decided to
entrust the thrones to the Mavrocordato clan and their kinsmen the Ghikas
and the Rakovitzas.”523
318
*
We must also not forget the repressive policies of the other great Muslim
power, Shiite Persia, on Orthodox Georgia. Thus: “In the wilderness of David-
Garejeli in Georgia, there were twelve monasteries in which many monks
practiced and lived the ascetical life for centuries. In 1615 A.D., the great king
of Persia, Shah Abbas I, attacked Georgia, devastated it and beheaded many
Christians. Once while hunting early in the morning on the Feast of the
Resurrection, Shah Abbas noticed many lights in the mountains. They were
the monks from the twelve monasteries in procession around the Church of
the Resurrection with lighted tapers in hand. When the Shah discovered that
they were monks, he asked in amazement: ‘Has not all of Georgia been given
over to the sword?’ He then ordered his solders to immediately go and
behead all the monks. At that moment an angel of God appeared to Abbot
Arsenius and informed him of impending death. Arsenius informed his
brethren. They all received Communion of the All-Pure Mysteries and
prepared themselves for death. Suddenly, the assailants arrived and hacked
to pieces, first of all, the abbot, who came before the others and, after that, all
the rest. They all suffered honorably and were crowned with incorruptible
wreaths in the year 1615 A.D. Thus, ended the history of these famous
monasteries which, for more than a thousand years, served as the spiritual
hearth of enlightenment for the Georgians. Only two of the monasteries exist
today: St. David and St. John the Forerunner. The Georgian Emperor Arcil
gathered the relics of the monks and honorably interred them. Even today,
these relics emit a sweet-smelling Chrism (oil) and heal the sick.”524
524 St. Dionysius the Areopagite monastery, Facebook.
319
39. THE UNIA OF BREST-LITOVSK
The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 with the aim of buttressing the
Counter-Reformation papacy, and was soon waging war, not only against
Protestantism, but also against Orthodoxy. The Orthodox peasants of what is
now Belorussia and Western Ukraine were severely persecuted both by their
Polish-Lithuanian landlords and by the Jesuits, who were vigorously trying to
convert them to Roman Catholicism. The Jesuits' methods ranged from crude
force in the West Russian lands to the subtler weapon of education further
south: rich Greek families already liked to send their sons to Venice or Padua,
and in 1577 the College of Saint Athanasius was founded in Rome for the
higher education of Greek boys, which was followed by the setting up of
Jesuit schools in the Ottoman lands, in Pera, Thessalonica, Smyrna, Athens
and Chalcis. These methods soon produced results: in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries several Constantinopolitan and Antiochian patriarchs
apostasized to Rome, while the Ecumenical Patriarch Cyril I Lucaris was a
Calvinist…
With the bishops so often wavering in faith or bound by political pressures,

it was often left to the lower clergy or the laypeople to take up the banner of
Orthodoxy. Thus the unia was fought by hieromonks, such as St. Job of
Pochaev and St. Athanasius of Brest, who was tortured to death by the Jesuits,
lay theologians such as the Chiot Eustratios Argenti 525 , aristocratic
landowners such as Prince Constantine Constantinovich Ostrozhsky, and lay
brotherhoods defending Orthodoxy against the unia in Lvov and Vilnius.
“At the end of the 16th century,” writes Protopriest Peter Smirnov, “the so-
called Lithuanian unia took place, or the union of the Orthodox Christians
living in the south-western dioceses in separation from the Moscow
Patriarchate, with the Roman Catholic Church.
“The reasons for this event, which was so sad for the Orthodox Church and
so wretched for the whole of the south-western region were: the lack of
stability in the position and administration of the separated dioceses; the
intrigues on the part of the Latins and in particular the Jesuits; the betrayal of
Orthodoxy by certain bishops who were at that time administering the south-
western part of the Russian Church.
“With the separation of the south-western dioceses under the authority of

a special metropolitan, the question arose: to whom were they to be
hierarchically subject? Against the will of the initiators of the separation, the
south-western metropolia was subjected to the power of the Patriarch of
Constantinople, and the patriarchs, in view of the dangers presented by the
Latins, intensified their supervision over the separated dioceses.”526
Ware, Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule, Oxford, 1964.
525
Smirnov, Istoria Khristianskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (A History of the Orthodox Christian

526
Church), Moscow: Krutitskoe podvorye, 2000, pp. 203-204.
320
The formerly Russian lands from Kiev westwards were largely deprived of
political protection until a part of the Ukraine came under the dominion of
Moscow in 1654 as a result of the victories of Bogdan Chmielnicki and his
Cossack armies. Until then they were persecuted by the Poles and the Jews.
“In such a situation,” continues Smirnov, “the Jesuits appeared in the

south-western dioceses and with their usual skill and persistence used all the
favourable circumstances to further their ends, that is, to spread the power of
the Roman pope. They took into their hands control of the schools, and
instilled in the children of the Russian boyars a disgust for the Orthodox
clergy and the Russian faith, which they called ‘kholop’ (that is, the faith of
the simple people). The fruits of this education were not slow to manifest
themselves. The majority of the Russian boyars and princes went over to
Latinism. To counter the influence of the Jesuits in many cities brotherhoods
were founded. These received important rights from the Eastern Patriarchs.
Thus, for example, the Lvov brotherhood had the right to rebuke the bishops
themselves for incorrect thinking, and even expel them from the Church. New
difficulties appeared, which were skilfully exploited by the Jesuits. They
armed the bishops against the brotherhoods and against the patriarchs (the
slaves of the Sultans), pointed out the excellent situation of the Catholic
bishops, many of whom had seats in the senate, and honours and wealth and
power. The Polish government helped the Jesuits in every way, and at their
direction offered episcopal sees to such people as might later turn out to be
their obedient instruments. Such in particular were Cyril Terletsky, Bishop of
Lutsk, and Hypatius Potsey, Bishop of Vladimir-in-Volhynia....
“The immediate excuse for the unia was provided by the following
circumstance. Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople, during his journey
through the south of Russia to Moscow to establish the patriarch, defrocked
the Kievan Metropolitan Onesiphorus for bigamy, and appointed in his place
Michael Ragoza, and commanded him to convene a council, by his return, to
discuss another bigamist who had been accused of many crimes, Cyril
Terletsky. Michael Ragoza was a kind person, but weak in character, he did
not convene a council which would have inflicted unnecessary delays and
expenses on the patriarch. The Patriarch, summoned out of Russia by his own
affairs, sent letters of attorney to Ragoza and Bishop Meletius of Vladimir (in
Volhynia) for the trial of Teretsky. Both these letters were seized by Cyril, and
the affair continued to be dragged out. Meanwhile, Meletius died, and Cyril
Terletsky succeeded in presenting the Vladimir see to his friend, Hypatius
Potsey. Fearing the appointment of a new trial on himself from the patriarch,
Cyril hastened to act in favour of the unia, and made an ally for himself in
Hypatius, who was indebted to him.
321
“In 1593 they openly suggested the unia to the other south-western bishops
in order to liberate themselves from the power of the patriarch and the
interference of laymen in Church administration…”527
Now the Russian bishops wanted to secure for themselves a certain degree
of autonomy, and the retention of the eastern rite in the Divine services.
Differences in rites had been allowed by the decrees of the council of Florence
in 1439. “However,” as V.M. Lourié writes, “after the Council of Trent (1545-
1563), the Roman Catholic church was not interested in giving anyone the
right of administrative autonomy. Therefore we must call it a diplomatic
victory for the Orthodox supporters of the unia that they succeeded in
convincing the Roman curia of the necessity of establishing in Poland-
Lithuania a parallel Catholic hierarchy of the Greek rite, which would be
independent of the local Latin bishops. In 1595 the diplomatic efforts of the
bishops were directed, on the one hand, to securing the future uniate
organization at as high a degree of autonomy as possible, and one the other,
to convincing the Orthodox aristocracy to accept the unia. Among the nobles
the main opponent of the unia was Prince Constantine Ostrozhsky. By the
summer of 1595 such a sharp conflict had been lit between the bishops and
the laity that Patriarch Jeremiah Tranos of Constantinople turned directly to
the laity, passing by the bishops. The patriarch sent to Jassy (Romania) his
exarch Nicephorus, who convened a council of six bishops, including the
metropolitans of Moldavia-Wallachia (Romania) and Ugro-Wallachia
(Hungary). On August 17, 1595 this council issued a decree in which it
addressed ‘the nobles and simple people’ who were ‘under the power of the
Polish king’, telling them not to submit to their local bishops. But the latter
were told immediately to present penitential acts to the patriarch, otherwise
they would be stripped of their rank, while the laymen would receive the
right to put forward their own candidates to the Episcopal sees that had
become vacant (Welykyj, 1970, 120-121, document n 69). The bishops found
themselves to be not only on the verge of being deprived of their rank, but
also under threat of excommunication from the Church. It goes without
saying that as private individuals they would not have been able to influence
the decision of the question of the unia with Rome.
“The publication of this act could not be hidden from the Roman curia, and
therefore the bishops found themselves in a situation in which their position
at the negotiations with Rome was severely shaken. It was necessary to act
without delay and agree now even to almost any conditions. And so two of
the West Russian bishops set off for Rome as fully-empowered
representatives of the whole of the episcopate of the Kievan metropolia. The
upshot of their stay in Rome from November, 1595 to March, 1596 was the
acceptance of the conditions of the future unia without any guarantees of
equality between the Catholic churches of different rites – the Latin and
Greek. The unia was established by the will of the Roman Pope, and not at all
as the result of negotiations of the two sides. The Russian bishops were not
527 Smirnov, op. cit., pp. 205-207, 208.
322
even accepted as a ‘side’. The future uniate church had to accept not only the
decrees of the council of Florence but also those of the council of Trent.
Moreover, it had to be ready for any changes, including changes in rites, that
the Pope might introduce. The only right that the bishops succeeded in
preserving was the right of a local council to elect the Metropolitan of Kiev.
However, this had to be followed by the confirmation of the Roman Pope.
“Prince Ostrozhsky, in his turn, actively opposed the unia. A significant

part of the Orthodox nobility took his side. Prince Ostrozhsky and his
supporters succeeded in creating a schism in the pro-uniate party: two
bishops separated from the others, refusing to support the unia. Their
renunciation of their former position is explained by the fact that they were in
a state of significantly greater dependence on the local magnates than on the
king. It is of note that Gedeon Balaban, Bishop of Lvov, who was the first to
begin preparing his diocese for the unia, was one of these two bishops. Prince
Ostrozhsky invited Exarch Nicephorus to Poland-Lithuania.
“In October, 1595 [recte: 1596] two councils were opened simultaneously in
Brest. One of them took place with the participation of five bishops and
proclaimed the unia with Rome. The other was presided over by Exarch
Nicephorus. This council excommunicated the uniates, which became the
beginning of the Orthodox resistance to the unia.
“Soon Nicephorus was accused of spying for Turkey and was put in prison
under guard. He died in prison in 1598 or 1599. The role of the spiritual leader
of the Orthodox resistance passed to Ivan of Vishna…”528
Smirnov writes: “The whole affair was carried through, as was the custom
of the Jesuits, with various forgeries and deceptions. Thus, for example, they
took the signatures of the two bishops on white blanks, supposedly in case
there would be unforeseen petitions before the king on behalf of the
Orthodox, and meanwhile on these blanks they wrote a petition for the unia.
Potsej and Terletsky made such concessions to the Pope in Rome as they had
not been authorised to make even by the bishops who thought like them.
Terletsky and Potsej had hardly returned from Rome before these forgeries
were exposed, which elicited strong indignation against them on the part of
some bishops (Gideon of Lvov and Michael of Peremysl) the Orthodox
princes (Prince Ostrozhsky) and others…
“From this time, there began persecutions against the Orthodox. The uniate
bishops removed the Orthodox priests and put uniates in their place. The
Orthodox brotherhoods were declared to be mutinous assemblies, and those
faithful to Orthodoxy were deprived of posts and oppressed in trade and
crafts. The peasants were subjected to all kinds of indignities by their Catholic
landlords. The [Orthodox] churches were forcibly turned into uniate ones or
528 Lourié, “Brestskaia unia i RPTsZ: istoricheskie paralleli” (The Brest Unia and ROCOR:
historical parallels), http://hgr.livejournal.com/1099549.html.
323
were leased out to Jews. The leaseholder had the keys to the church and
extracted taxes for every service and need. Many of the Orthodox fled from
these restrictions to the Cossacks in the steppes, who rose up in defence of the
Orthodox faith under the leadership of Nalivaiki. But the Poles overcame
them and Nalivaiki was burned to death in a brazen bull. When a fresh
rebellion broke out under Taras. But, happily for the Orthodox, their wrathful
persecutor Sigismund III died. His successor, Vladislav IV, gave the Orthodox
Church privileges, with the help of which she strengthened herself for the
coming struggle with the uniates and Catholics...
“However, although Vladislav was well-disposed towards the Orthodox,

the Poles did not obey him and continued to oppress them. The Cossacks
several times took up arms, and when they fell into captivity to the Poles, the
latter subjected them to terrible tortures. Some were stretched on the wheel,
others had their arms and legs broken, others were pierced with spikes and
placed on the rack. Children were burned on iron grills before the eyes of
their fathers and mothers.”529
Oleg Platonov writes: “All the persecutions against the Orthodox in the
West Russian lands were carried out by the Jews and the Catholics together.
Having given the Russian churches into the hands of the Jews who were close
to them in spirit, the Polish aristocracy laughingly watched as the defilement
of Christian holy things was carried out by the Jews. The Catholic priests and
uniates even incited the Jews to do this, calculating in this way to turn the
Russians away from Orthodoxy.
“As Archbishop Philaret recounts: ‘Those churches whose parishioners

could by converted to the unia by no kind of violence were leased to the Jews:
the keys of the churches and bell-towers passed into their hands. If it was
necessary to carry out a Church need, then one had to go and trade with the
Jew, for whom gold was an idol and the faith of Christ the object of spiteful
mockery and profanation. One had to pay up to five talers for each liturgy,
and the same for baptism and burial. The uniate received paschal bread
wherever and however he wanted it, while the Orthodox could not bake it
himself or buy it in any other way than from a Jew at Jewish rates. The Jews
would make a mark with coal on the prosphoras bought for commemorating
the living or the dead. Only then could it be accepted for the altar.’”530
Especially notorious as a persecutor of the Orthodox was the uniate Bishop

Joasaph Kuntsevich of Polotsk. Lev Sapega, the head of the Great Principality
of Lithuania, wrote to Kuntsevich on the Polish king’s behalf: “I admit, that I,
too, was concerned about the cause of the Unia and that it would be
imprudent to abandon it. But it had never occurred to me that your Eminence
would implement it using such violent measures… You say that you are ‘free
to drown the infidels [i.e. the Orthodox], to chop their heads off’, etc. Not so!
529 Smirnov, op. cit., pp. 205-207, 208.

530 Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow, 1998, p. 224.
324
The Lord’s commandment expresses a strict prohibition to all, which concerns
you also. When you violated human consciences, closed churches so that
people should perish like infidels without divine services, without Christian
rites and sacraments; when you abused the King’s favours and privileges –
you managed without us. But when there is a need to suppress seditions
caused by your excesses you want us to cover up for you… As to the dangers
that threaten your life, one may say that everyone is the cause of his own
misfortune. Stop making trouble, do not subject us to the general hatred of the
people and you yourself to obvious danger and general criticism…
Everywhere one hears people grumbling that you do not have any worthy
priests, but only blind ones… Your ignorant priests are the bane of the
people… But tell me, your Eminence, whom did you win over, whom did you
attract through your severity?… It will turn out that in Polotsk itself you have
lost even those who until now were obedient to you. You have turned sheep
into goats, you have plunged the state into danger, and maybe all of us
Catholics – into ruin… It has been rumoured that they (the Orthodox) would
rather be under the infidel Turk than endure such violence… You yourself are
the cause of their rebellion. Instead of joy, your notorious Unia has brought us
only troubles and discords and has become so loathsome that we would
rather be without it!’”531
On May 22, 1620, locals gathered at the Trinity monastery near Polotsk to
express their indignation at Kuntsevich’s cruelty. “These people suffered a
terrible fate: an armed crowed of uniates surrounded the monastery and set it
on fire. As the fire was raging and destroying the monastery and burning
alive everyone within its walls, Joasaphat Kuntsevich was performing on a
nearby hill a thanksgiving service accompanied by the cries of the victims of
the fire…”532 In 1623 Kuntsevich was killed by the people of Vitebsk. In 1867
Pope Pius IX “glorified” him, and in 1963 Pope Paul VI translated his relics to
the Vatican. Pope John-Paul II lauded him as a “hieromartyr”…
In 1620, writes Archpriest Andrei Tkachev, “Patriarch Theophan of

Jerusalem arrived and renewed the lawful hierarchy, ordaining new bishops.
He was immediately accused of being an agent... of whom? Istanbul! And
only under the protection of the Cossacks was he able to stay alive and leave
the borders of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.”533
This was indeed a difficult time for the Orthodox in Western Ukraine.
“Here is what Metropolitan Isaiah Kopinsky wrote in 1632 to the Moscow
Patriarch: ‘There are no pious princes, noble dignitaries have disappeared,
everyone has left from Eastern Orthodoxy to the West, and one can hardly
find a man among the poor and inglorious who have remained pious in the
Orthodox faith.’ It was precisely those ‘poor and inglorious’—the peasants,
craftsmen, merchants, and clergy—who were faced with the struggle against
531 L. Perepiolkina, Ecumenism – A Path to Perdition, St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 227-228.
532 Perepiolkina, op. cit., p. 228.
533 Tkachev, “Ukraine: Then and Now”, Orthodox Christianity, pravolavie.ru, March 21, 2019.
325
the Jesuit influence, which was particularly active in those times. St. Job of the
Pochaev Monastery became the strong spiritual backbone, the symbol of this
struggle.
“The saint lived during difficult times for Russia, when on its western
borders the Orthodox people of Volhynia and Galicia were subjected to cruel
ecclesiastical and political oppression from the Polish-Lithuanian magnates.
St. Job witnessed the Brest Unia and the implacable Catholic invasion that
followed it, as well as the growth of Protestant influence. As the abbot of the
monastery he had enormous spiritual authority, and he used all of his
resources to strengthen Orthodoxy, to struggle with the heterodox and heretic
influences on the people’s consciousness.”534
Somewhat further to the north, in Lithuania and Belorussia, another hero

of the faith was St. Athanasius of Brest, who was sent by the Mother of God to
the Polish Sejm in order to rebuke them for their cruelty to the Orthodox. In
1648 he was captured, tortured and killed by the Jesuits.
The Unia has continued to be a snare for the Orthodox to the present day.
In the period of the Turkish yoke, the Antiochian patriarchate proved to be
especially vulnerable to uniate propaganda.535 Some uneducated Orthodox
Christians were snared by the pretence of Orthodoxy, which consisted in
preserving all the external forms of the Orthodox rite while “slipping in” the
commemoration of the Pope.
534 Stanislav Minakov, “The Iron Stance of St. Job of Pochaev”, Orthodox Christianity,
November 20, 2018.

535 See the Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1722:
http://oode.info/english/biblia/unia1/B1.htm.
326
40. THE TIME OF TROUBLES
The Brest unia made a strong autocracy in Moscow more essential than
ever. Under Patriarch Job (1589-1605), the patriarchate had become an
important player in State affairs. The bishops “together with the tsar and the
boyars came together in a Zemsky Sobor in the dining room of the State palace
and there reviewed the matters reported to them by the secretary. The
patriarch began to play an especially important role after the death of
Theodore Ivanovich (1598). The tsar died without children, and the throne
was vacant. Naturally, the patriarch became head of the fatherland for a time
and had to care for State affairs. In the election of the future tsar his choice
rested on Boris Godunov, who had protected him, and he did much to aid his
ascension on the throne…”536
However, Boris Godunov had been a member of the dreaded oprichnina

from his youth, and had married the daughter of the murderer of St. Philip of
Moscow, Maliuta Skouratov.537 He therefore represented that part of Russian
society that had profited from the cruelty and lawlessness of Ivan the Terrible.
Moreover, although he was the first Russian tsar to be crowned and anointed
by a full patriarch (on September 1, 1598), and there was no serious resistance
to his ascending the throne, he acted from the beginning as if not quite sure of
his position, or as if seeking some confirmation of his position from the lower
ranks of society. This was perhaps because he was not a direct descendant of
the Rurik dynasty (he was brother-in-law of Tsar Theodore), perhaps because
(according to the Chronograph of 1617) the dying Tsar Theodore had pointed
to his mother’s nephew, Theodore Nikitich Romanov, the future patriarch, as
his successor, perhaps because Godunov had some dark crime on his
conscience…
In any case, Boris decided upon an unprecedented act. He interrupted the

liturgy of the coronation, as Stephen Graham writes, “to proclaim the equality
of man. It was a striking interruption of the ceremony. The Cathedral of the
Assumption was packed with a mixed assembly such as never could have
found place at the coronation of a tsar of the blood royal. There were many
nobles there, but cheek by jowl with them merchants, shopkeepers, even
beggars. Boris suddenly took the arm of the holy Patriarch in his and
declaimed in a loud voice: ‘Oh, holy father Patriarch Job, I call God to witness
that during my reign there shall be neither poor man nor beggar in my realm,
but I will share all with my fellows, even to the last rag that I wear.’ And he
ran his fingers over the jewelled vestments that he wore. There was an
Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 312.

536
Lebedev, op. cit., p. 105. However, Ian Grey writes that “Boris managed somehow to keep
537
himself apart from the Tsar’s savageries and, at the same time, to remain in favour. He was
not given to outbursts of anger or to violence, but was generally courteous and mild in
manner. He impressed his contemporaries by his humanity and concern for the weak.
Moreover, he was courageous and even dared to try to restrain the dreaded Tsar.” (“Boris
Godunov, Tsar of Russia”, History Today, Vol. 22 Issue 1 January 1972)
327
unprecedented scene in the cathedral, almost a revolutionary tableau when
the common people massed within the precincts broke the disciplined majesty
of the scene to applaud the speaker.”538
What could have been Boris’ motive? Perhaps, as Ian Grey writes, he
wanted to court the people so as to gain their support for his election: “He
had told the Patriarch that he would not accept the throne. On being informed
of his election, he declined to acknowledge the decision. Without doubt he
wanted to be Tsar. He had courted popularity; he was ambitious, and he
knew that he was more experienced and able than the other candidates. At
the same time, he was aware of the opposition that he would meet among the
princes and boyars. They would try to impose restrictions on his powers as
autocrat and to ensure that, following practice in Poland-Lithuania, the
Muscovite throne was no longer hereditary. Evidently he had decided to
accept election only on the acclamation of the people as a whole and on the
understanding that he would be the founder of a new dynasty…”539
How different was this pseudo-democratism from the self-confidence of

Ivan the Terrible: “I perform my kingly task and consider no man higher than
myself… The Russian autocrats have from the beginning had possession of all
the kingdoms, and not the boyars and grandees.”540 And again, this time to
the (elected) king of Poland: “We, humble Ivan, tsar and great prince of all
Rus’, by the will of God, and not by the stormy will of man….”541
In fact, Ivan the Terrible’s attitude to his own power, at any rate in the first
part of his reign, was much closer to the attitude of the Russian people as a
whole than was Boris Godunov’s. For, as St. John Maximovich writes, “the
Russian sovereigns were never tsars by the will of the people, but always
remained Autocrats by the Mercy of God. They were sovereigns in
accordance with the dispensation of God, and not according to the
‘multimutinous’ will of man.”542
Tsar Boris had some notable achievements. For example, he sent some
Cossack adventurers to capture the khanate of Sibr, opening up Siberia to
Russian penetration. But he felt insecure, and began to act like a tyrant,
sending his spies everywhere. The people now paid more heed to the
rumours that he had murdered the Tsarevich Dmitri, the Terrible one’s
youngest son, in 1591. The Tsar now began to fear the ambitions of Theodore
(Fyodor) Nikitich Romanov, eldest nephew of Tsarina Anastasia and the
nearest claimant to the throne.
538 Graham, Boris Godunof, London: Ernest Benn, 1933, p. 116.

539 Grey, op. cit.
540 Ivan IV, quoted in Archbishop Seraphim, Russkaia Ideologia, St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 64.
541 Ivan IV, quoted in Archbishop Seraphim, op. cit., p. 65.
542 St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozhdenie zakona o prestolonasledii v Rossii (The Origin of the
Law of Succession in Russia), Podolsk, 1994; in “Nasledstvennost’ ili Vybory?” (“Heredity or

Elections?”), Svecha Pokaiania (Candle of Repentance), N 4, February, 2000, p. 12.
328
“In 1600,” writes Sebasian Sebag Montefiore, “Godunov pounced on
Fyodor and his four brothers, who were accused of treason and sorcery; their
servants testified under torture to their practice of witchcraft and stashes of
‘poisonous herbs’. Tsar Boris burned down one of their palaces, confiscated
their estates and exiled them to the Arctic. To ensure that Fyodor Romanov
could never be tsar, he was forced to take holy orders, under a new priestly
name Filaret, while his wife became Nun Martha. Michael [his son] was sent
to live with his aunt, the wife of his uncle Alexander Romanov, in the remote
village of Belozersk. He remained there for fifteen frightening months before
he and his aunt were allowed to move to a Romanov estate fifty miles from
Moscow. Three of the five Romanov brothers were liquidated or died
mysteriously. ‘Tsar Boris got rid of us all,’ Filaret remembered later. ‘He had
me tonsured, killed three of my brothers, ordering them strangled. I now only
had one brother Ivan left.’ Godunov could not kill all the Romanovs, with
their special connections to the Rurikid tsars, not after the murky demise of
Tsarevich Dmitri. The vanishing of royal children at the hands of power-
hungry relatives has a fitting way of destroying the very power they seek.
“The whispering campaign percolated through the land and convinced

many that the real Rurikid heir, Tsarevich Dmitri, had been raised in Poland
and was now ready to claim his throne; this unleashed the mayhem that
became known as the Time of Troubles.”543
And then came news that a young man claiming to be the Tsarevich was
marching at the head of a Polish army into Russia. If this man was truly
Dmitri, then Boris was, of course, innocent of his murder. But paradoxically
this only made his position more insecure; for in the eyes of the people the
hereditary principle was higher than any other – an illegitimate but living son
of Ivan the Terrible was more legitimate for them than Boris, even though he
was an intelligent and experienced ruler, the right-hand man of two previous
tsars, and fully supported by the Patriarch, who anathematized the false
Dimitri and all those who followed him. However, support for Boris
collapsed, and in 1605 he died, after which Dimitri, who had promised the
Pope to convert Russia to Catholicism, swept to power in Moscow.
How was such sedition against their tsar possible in a people that had
patiently put up with the terrible Ivan? Solonevich points to the importance
that the Russian people attached to the legitimacy of their tsars, in sharp
contrast to the apparent lack of concern for legitimacy which he claims to find
among the Byzantines. “Thus in Byzantium out of 109 reigning emperors 74
ascended onto the throne by means of regicide. This apparently disturbed no
one. In Russia in the 14th century Prince Demetrius Shemyaka tried to act on
the Byzantine model and overthrow Great Prince Basil Vasilyevich – and
suffered a complete defeat. The Church cursed Shemyaka, the boyars turned
away from him, the masses did not follow him: the Byzantine methods turned
out to be unprofitable. Something of this sort took place with Boris Godunov.
329
The dynasty of the Terrible had disappeared, and Boris Godunov turned out
to be his nearest relative. Neither the lawfulness of his election to the
kingdom, nor his exceptional abilities as a statesman, can be doubted… With
Boris Godunov everything, in essence, was in order, except for one thing: the
shade of Tsarevich Dimitri.”544
This is an exaggeration: there were many things wrong with the reign of
Boris Godunov, especially his encouragement of western heretics545, and his
introduction of mutual spying and denunciation. Moreover, it did not help
that he was not a Riurik by blood… However, there is no doubt that it was
Boris’s murder of the Tsarevich Dimitri, the lawful heir to the throne, that
especially excited the people to rebel. For “who in Byzantium would have
worried about the fate of a child killed twenty years earlier? There might
created right, and might washed away sin. In Rus’ right created might, and
sin remained sin.”546 Although these words exaggerate the contrast between
Byzantium and Rus’, the point concerning the importance of legitimacy in
Muscovy is well taken. “As regards who had to be tsar,” writes St. John
Maximovich, “a tsar could hold his own on the throne only if the principle of
legitimacy was observed, that is, the elected person was the nearest heir of his
predecessor. The legitimate Sovereign was the basis of the state’s prosperity
and was demanded by the spirit of the Russian people.”547
The people were never sure of the legitimacy of Boris Godunov. However,
even if these doubts could excuse their rebellion against Boris (which is
doubtful), it did not excuse the cruel murder of his son, Tsar Theodore
Borisovich, still less their recognition of a series of usurpers in the next
decade. The lawless character of these rebellions has been compared, not
without justice, to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917...548
The first pretender who claimed to be the Tsarevich Dmitri was a

defrocked monk called Grishka Otrepev. However, he did not last long: in
May, 1606, Prince Vasili Shuisky led a successful rebellion against him,
executed him and expelled the false patriarch Ignatius. He then called on
Patriarch Job to come out of his enforced retirement, but he refused by reason
of his blindness and old age.549
544 Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia (The People’s Monarchy), Minsk, 1998, p. 81. Grey goes
further: “Boris had acted honestly and humanely. He had pursued sound policies with some
success. Unlike nearly all of his predecessors, he had shown genuine concern for the welfare
of his people, but their strong support for him had changed into a wholesale betrayal.
Suddenly the country was engulfed in anarchy in the tragic period known in Russian history
as the ‘Time of Troubles’.” (op. cit.)
545 The cellarer of the Holy Trinity Monastery, Abraham Palitsyn, said that he was “a good
pander to the heresies of the Armenians and Latins” (in Lebedev, op. cit.).
547 St. John Maximovich, op. cit., p. 13.
548 Bishop Dionysius (Alferov), “Smuta” (Troubles),
http://catacomb.org.ua/modlues.php?=Pages&go=print_page&pid=642.
549 According to Archpriest Lev Lebedev, Patriarch Job’s blindness and expulsion from his see
were his punishment for lying during the Council of 1598 that Ivan the Terrible had
330
*
Another Patriarch was required; the choice fell on Metropolitan Hermogen

of Kazan, who anointed Vasili to the kingdom… “The accession of Vasili
Shuisky,” writes the famous historian V.O. Kliuchevsky, “is epoch making in
Russia’s political history. On mounting the throne he limited his autocratic
power, and in an official document sent to all the provinces he defined the
limitations that he swore, kissing the cross, to observe faithfully…
“The statement was very limited in scope. The obligations undertaken by

Tsar Vasili were solely intended to guarantee his subjects’ personal and
financial security from arbitrary action by the sovereign, and had no direct
bearing upon the constitution. They did not change or even define more
closely the relations between the Tsar and the chief governmental institutions,
or their respective competence and significance. The power of the Tsar was
limited by the Boyars’ Council as before, but this limitation was binding on
him solely in judicial cases, in dealing with particular individuals.
“The origin of the sworn statement, however, is more complex than its
content. Behind the scenes it had a history of its own. The chronicler records
that as soon as Shuisky was proclaimed Tsar, he went to the Dormition
Cathedral and announced there, as had never been done in the Muscovite
state before, ‘I kiss the cross and swear to the whole country not to do any hurt
to anyone without the Sobor’s consent.’ The boyars and men of other ranks
advised the Tsar that ‘he must not take such an oath, for that was not the
custom in Muscovy, but he would not listen to anyone.’
“Vasili Shuisky’s action evidently seemed to the boyars a revolutionary

prank. The Tsar was offering to share his sovereign judicial functions not with
the Boyars’ Council, which had always helped the tsars to dispense justice
and administer public affairs, but with the Zemsky Sobor, a recent institution
occasionally called together to discuss some special problem in the life of the
state. Shuisky’s actions seemed to the boyars a whim, an unheard-of novelty,
an attempt to replace the Council by the Sobor, to shift the political center of
gravity from the aristocracy to the people’s representatives. The Tsar who had
been afraid to consult the Sobor on his claim to the throne was now venturing
to ask its advice in ruling the country!
“But Shuisky knew what he was doing. On the eve of the rising against the
Pretender [Dmitri] he [had] promised his fellow conspirators to rule ‘by
general agreement’. Thrust upon the country by a clique of great nobles, he
was a party man, a ‘boyars’ tsar’, bound to depend upon them. He naturally
sought support among the people for his irregular stardom, and hoped to find
“ordered” that Boris Godunov be crowned in the case of the death of his son Theodore, and
for lying again in covering up Boris’ guilt in the murder of the Tsarevich Demetrius (op. cit.,
p. 112).
331
in the Sobor a counterbalance to the Boyars’ Council. Promising on oath to the
whole country not to punish anyone without the consent of the Sobor, he
reckoned to escape the Boyars’ tutelage, to become the people’s Tsar, and to
limit his power by an institution unaccustomed to that role – that is, to
exercise his power unhampered.
“In its published form the sworn statement was the result of a compromise
between the sovereign and the boyars. According to the preliminary
unpublished agreement, the Tsar shared his power with them in all matters of
legislation, administration, and jurisdiction. Having won the case for their
Council versus the Sobor, the boyars did not insist on publishing all the
concessions they had compelled the Tsar to make. Indeed, it would have been
unwise of them to publicize how thoroughly they had plucked their old cock.
The sworn statement emphasized only the significance of the Boyars’ Council
as the Tsar’s collaborators in the supreme court. That was all the foremost
boyars wanted at the time. As a ruling class they had shared power with the
sovereigns throughout the sixteenth century, but individual members of it
had suffered a great deal from the tsars’ tyranny under Ivan the Terrible and
Boris Godunov. Now the boyars hastened to seize the opportunity of
abolishing this tyranny and safeguarding private persons – that is, themselves
– against the recurrence of past troubles by compelling the Tsar to let the
Boyars’ Council take part in political judicial trials. They were confident that
administrative power would remain in their hands as before, on the strength
of custom.
“In spite of all its deficiencies, Tsar Vasili’s sworn statement was a new,
hitherto unheard-of thing in Muscovite constitutional practice. It was the first
attempt to establish a political system in which the power of the sovereign
was formally limited. A new element was introduced that completely altered
the nature and meaning of that power. Not only did Tsar Vasili limit his
autocracy, but he confirmed this limitation on oath, showing that he was a
‘sworn-in’, as well as an elected one. The oath by its very nature negated the
personal power of the tsars based on the old appanage system idea of the
sovereign as the owner of the country. The master of the house does not
swear allegiance to his servants and tenants.
“At the same time Tsar Vasili renounced three prerogatives in which the
personal power of the tsars found its clearest expression. These were (1) ‘ban
without cause’, the tsar’s disfavor without sufficient reason and solely at his
discretion, (2) confiscation of property belonging to the criminal’s family and
relatives innocent of the crime (abrogation of this right did away with the
ancient practice of making the clan collectively responsible for a political
offense), (3) special trial, accompanied by torture, on mere denunciation,
without confronting the accused with the informers, without the presence of
witnesses and the introduction of evidence, and other procedures normally
required by law. These prerogatives were an essential part of the Muscovites’
tsars; power. As Ivan III put it, ‘I shall give my realm to whomever I like’.
And his grandson, Ivan IV, said, ‘We are free to show favor to our servants
332
and are free to put them to death’. By swearing to renounce these privileges,
Vasili Shuisky became a constitutional sovereign governing his country in
accordance with law, instead of being master over slaves…”550
However, the choice set before the Russian people at this time was not as
simple as that between an absolutist tyranny of the kind conducted by Ivan
the Terrible and a proto-constitutional monarchy of the kind put forward by
Vasili Shuisky. There was also the third, traditionally Orthodox choice: of an
autocracy that was genuinely sovereign in its own, political sphere, but which
was limited morally and dogmatically by the Orthodox Church. Ivan the
Terrible had created a tyranny by abolishing the influence of the Church and
killing her first-hierarch. Vasili Shuisky had surrendered his sovereignty,
formally to the people but in reality to the boyars. It was now up to the
Church, in the person of its new first hierarch, St. Hermogen, to lead the
country in re-establishing a truly Orthodox autocracy whose rule was
sovereign but not unlimited, being limited by the Gospel of the Lord Jesus
Christ and the counsel of His Church…
“Wonderful is the Providence of God,” writes Archpriest Lev Lebedev, “in

bringing [Hermogen] to the summit of ecclesiastical power at this terrible
Time of Troubles… In 1579 he had been ordained to the priesthood in the St.
Nicholas Gostinodvordsky church in Kazan. And in the same year a great
miracle had taken place, the discovery of the Kazan icon of the Most Holy
Theotokos. This was linked with a great fall in the faith of Christ in the new
land, the mocking of the Orthodox by the Muslims for failures in harvest, fires
and other woes. A certain girl, the daughter of a rifleman, through a vision in
sleep discovered on the place of their burned-down house an icon of the
Mother of God. Nobody knew when or by whom it had been placed in the
ground. The icon began to work wonders and manifest many signs of special
grace. The whole of Kazan ran to it as to a source of salvation and intercession
from woes. The priest Hermogen was a witness of all this. He immediately
wrote down everything that had taken place in connection with the
wonderworking icon and with great fervour composed a narrative about it.
The glory of the Kazan icon quickly spread through Russia, many copies were
made from it, and some of these also became wonderworking. The Theotokos
was called “the fervent defender of the Christian race” in this icon of Kazan. It
was precisely this icon and Hermogen who had come to love it that the Lord
decreed should deliver Moscow and Russia from the chaos of the Time of
Troubles and the hands of the enemies. By the Providence of the Theotokos
Hermogen was in 1589 appointed Metropolitan of Kazan for his righteous life,
and in 1606 he became Patriarch of all Rus’.
550 Kliuchevsky, A Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth Century, Armonk, NY: M.E.
Sharpe, 1994, pp. 35, 36-38.
333
“As his first work it was necessary for him to correct the wavering of the
people in relation to the false Dmitri and free them from the oath (curse) they
had given. A special strict fast was declared, after which, on February 20,
1607, public repentance began in the Dormition cathedral of the Kremlin.
Patriarch Job repented of having hidden from the people the fact that the
Tsarevich Dmitri had been killed ‘by the plotting of Boris’ and called
everyone to repentance. Nun Martha [the mother of the Tsarevich Dmitri]
repented that out of fear she had recognized the Imposter to be her son. The
Muscovites wept and repented of having sworn to Boris Godunov and Grisha
Otrepev. Two Patriarchs – Job and Hermogen – absolved everyone with a
special prayer-declaration, which was read aloud by the archdeacon.
“However, by this time it was already the question of another Imposter –

false Dmitri the second. He was an obvious adventurer. And knowing about
this, Rome and certain people in Poland again supported him! The legend
was as follows: ‘Tsar’ Dmitri had not been killed in Moscow, but had
managed to flee (‘he was miraculously saved’ for the second time!). And
again Cossack detachments from Little Russia, the Don and Ukraine attached
themselves to him. Again quite a few Russian people believed the lie, for they
very much wanted to have a ‘real’, ‘born’ Tsar, as they put it at that time, who
in the eyes of many could only be a direct descendant of Ivan IV. Marina
Mnishek [wife of the first false Dmitri] ‘recognized’ her lawful husband in the
second false Dmitri. However, her spiritual father, a Jesuit, considered it
necessary to marry her to the new Imposter; the Jesuit knew that he was not
the same who had been killed in Moscow, but another false Dmitri… Certain
secret instructions from Rome to those close to the new Imposter have been
preserved. Essentially they come down to ordering them gradually but
steadily to bring about the unia of the Russian Church with the Roman
Church, and her submission to the Pope. In 1608 the second false Dmitri
entered Russia and soon came near to Moscow, encamping at Tushino. For
that reason he was then called ‘the Tushino thief’. ‘Thief’ in those days mean a
state criminal... Marinka gave birth to a son from the second false Dmitri. The
people immediately called the little child ‘the thieflet’. Moscow closed its
gates. Only very few troops still remained for the defence of the city. A great
wavering of hearts and minds arose. Some princes and boyars ran from
Moscow to the ‘thief’ in Tushino and back again. Not having the strength to
wage a major war, Tsar Vasili Shuisky asked the Swedish King Carl IX to help
him. In this he made a great mistake… Carl of Sweden and Sigismund of
Poland were at that time warring for the throne of Sweden. By calling on the
Swedes for help, Shuisky was placing Russia in the position of a military
opponent of Poland, which she used, seeing the Troubles in the Russian Land,
to declare war on Russia. Now the Polish king’s army under a ‘lawful’ pretext
entered the Muscovite Kingdom. The Imposter was not needed by the Poles
and was discarded by them. Sigismund besieged Smolensk, while a powerful
army under Zholevsky went up to Moscow. The boyars who were not content
334
with Shuisky… forced him to abdicate in July, 1610.”551, and then to become a
monk.
The Zemsky Sobor of 1613 called this act “a common sin of the land,
committed out of the envy of the devil”. 552 But whom would they now place
as Tsar? This depended to a large extent on the boyars.
Lebedev continues: “O Great Russian princes and boyars! How much you
tried from early times to seize power in the State! Now there is no lawful Tsar,
now, it would seem, you have received the fullness of power. Now is the time
for you to show yourselves, to show what you are capable of! And you have
shown it…
“A terrible difference of opinions began amidst the government, which

consisted of seven boyars and was called the ‘semiboyarschina’. Patriarch
Hermogen immediately suggested calling to the kingdom the 14-year-old
‘Misha Romanov’, as he called him. But they didn’t listen to the Patriarch.
They discussed Poland’s suggestion of placing the son of King Sigismund,
Vladislav, on the Muscovite Throne. The majority of boyars agreed. The gates
of Moscow were opened to the Poles and they occupied Chinatown and the
Kremlin with their garrison. But at the same time a huge Polish army
besieged the monastery of St. Sergius, ‘the Abbot of the Russian Land’, the
Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, but after a 16-month siege they were not able to take
it! Patriarch Germogen was ready to agree to having the crown-prince
Vladislav, but under certain conditions. Vladislav would be immediately,
near Smolensk, baptised into the Orthodox Faith. He would take for a wife
only a virgin of the Orthodox Confession. The Poles would leave Russia, and
all the Russia apostates who had become Catholic or uniates would be
executed. There would never be any negotiations between Moscow and Rome
about the faith. An embassy was sent from near Smolensk to Sigismund for
negotiations about the succession to the Throne. The spiritual head of the
embassy was Metropolitan Philaret Nikitich Romanov of Rostov, who had
been taken out of exile and then consecrated to the episcopate under Tsar
Vasili Shuisky. But at the same time Patriarch Hermogen did not cease to
exhort the Tushintsy who were still with the thief near Moscow, calling on
them to be converted, repent and cease destroying the Fatherland.
“However, it turned out that Sigismund himself wanted to be on the

Throne of Moscow… But this was a secret. The majority of the boyars agreed
to accept even that, referring to the fact that the Poles were already in
Moscow, while the Russians had no army with which to defend the country
from Poland. A declaration was composed in which it was said that the
Muscovite government ‘would be given to the will of the king’. The members
of the government signed it. It was necessary that Patriarch Hermogen should
also give his signature. At this point Prince Michael Saltykov came to him.
551 Lebedev, op. cit.

552 Fomin & Fomina, op. cit.. vol. I, p. 255. (V.M.)
335
The head of the Russian Church replied: ‘No! I will put my signature to a
declaration that the king should give his son to the Muscovite state, and
withdraw all the king’s men from Moscow, that Vladislav should abandon
the Latin heresy, and accept the Greek faith… But neither I nor the other
(ecclesiastical) authorities will write that we should all rely on the king’s will
and that our ambassadors should be placed in the will of the king, and I order
you not to do it. It is clear that with such a declaration we would have to kiss
the cross to the king himself.’ Saltykov took hold of a knife and moved
towards the Patriarch. He made the sign of the cross over Saltykov and said: ‘I
do not fear your knife, I protect myself from it by the power of the Cross of
Christ. But may you be cursed from our humility both in this age and in the
age to come!’”553
On February 4, 1610 Saltykov and his comrades concluded an agreement

with King Sigismund. Sir Geoffrey Hosking calls it a Russian Magna Carta –
but one doomed to failure because of the opposition of the Church: “They
presented King Sigismund with a set of conditions on which they were
prepared to accept his son Wladyslaw as Tsar. The first was that the Orthodox
faith should remain inviolate. Then came stipulations on the rights of
individual estates, for example, not to be punished or to have property
confiscated without trial before a properly constituted court, not to be
demoted from a high chin [rank] without clear and demonstrable fault. The
document implied a state structure in which supreme authority would be
shared with a combined boyar assembly and zemskii sobor (duma boiar i vseia
zemli), in agreement with which questions of taxes, salaries of service people
and the bestowal of patrimonial and service estates would be decided. Such a
document might have laid for the basis for a constitutional Muscovite
monarchy in personal union with Poland.”554
When the document was brought to the Poles at Smolensk, where there
was a Russian embassy led by Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov, then, “on not
seeing the signature of the Patriarch on the document, the ambassadors
replied to our boyars that the declaration was unlawful. They objected: ‘The
Patriarch must not interfere in affairs of the land’. The ambassadors said:
‘From the beginning affairs were conducted as follows in our Russian State: if
great affairs of State or of the land are begun, then our majesties summoned a
council of patriarchs, metropolitans and archbishops and conferred with
them. Without their advice nothing was decreed. And our majesties revere
the patriarchs with great honour… And before them were the metropolitans.
Now we are without majesties, and the patriarch is our leader (that is – the
main person in the absence of the Tsar). It is now unfitting to confer upon
such a great matter without the patriarch… It is now impossible for us to act
without patriarchal declarations, and only with those of the boyars…’
553 Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 118-121.

554 Hosking, op. cit., p. 60.
336
“The agreement with Sigismund and the transfer of the Muscovite
Kingdom into his power did not take place… That is what such a mere ‘detail’
as a signature sometimes means – or rather, in the given case, the absence of a
signature!
“This gave a spiritual and lawful basis (in prevision of fresh boyar
betrayals) for the Russian cities to begin corresponding with each other with
the aim of deciding how to save Moscow and the Fatherland. In this
correspondence the name of Patriarch Hermogen was often mentioned, for he
was ‘straight as a real pastor, who lays down his life for the Christian Faith’.
The inhabitants of Yaroslavl wrote to the citizens of Kazan: ‘Hermogen has
stood up for the Faith and Orthodoxy, and has ordered all of us to stand to
the end. If he had not done this wondrous deed, everything would have
perished.’ And truly Russia, which so recently had been on the point of taking
Poland at the desire of the Poles, was now a hair’s-breadth away from
becoming the dominion of Poland (and who knows for how long a time!).
Meanwhile Patriarch Hermogen began himself to write to all the cities, calling
on Russia to rise up to free herself. The letter-declarations stirred up the
people, they had great power. The Poles demanded that he write to the cities
and call on them not to go to Moscow to liberate it from those who had seized
it. At this point Michael Saltykov again came to Hermogen. ‘I will write,’
replied the Patriarch, ‘… but only on condition that you and the traitors with
you and the people of the king leave Moscow… I see the mocking of the true
faith by heretics and by you traitors, and the destruction of the holy Churches
of God and I cannot bear to hear the Latin chanting in Moscow’. Hermogen
was imprisoned in the Chudov monastery and they began to starve him to
death. But the voice of the Church did not fall silent. The brothers of the
Trinity-St. Sergius monastery headed by Archimandrite Dionysius also began
to send their appeals to the cities to unite in defence of the Fatherland. The
people’s levies moved towards Moscow. The first meeting turned out to be
unstable. Quite a few predatory Cossacks took part in it, for example the
cossacks of Ataman Zarutsky. Quarrels and disputes, sometimes bloody ones,
took place between the levies. Lyapunov, the leader of the Ryazan forces, was
killed. This levy looted the population more than it warred with the Poles.
Everything changed when the second levy, created through the efforts of
Nizhni-Novgorod merchant Cosmas Minin Sukhorukov and Prince
Demetrius Pozharsky, moved towards the capital. As we know, Minin, when
stirring up the people to make sacrifices for the levy, called on them, if
necessary, to sell their wives and children and mortgage their properties, but
to liberate the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Dormition of the
All-Holy Theotokos, where there was the Vladimir icon and the relics of the
great Russian Holy Hierarchs (that is, he was talking about the Dormition
cathedral of the Kremlin!) That, it seems, was the precious thing that was dear
to the inhabitants of Nizhni, Ryazan, Yaroslavl, Kazan and the other cities of
Russia and for the sake of which they were ready to sell their wives and lay
down their lives! That means that the Dormition cathedral was at that time
that which we could call as it were the geographical centre of patriotism of
Russia!
337
“On the advice of Patriarch Hermogen, the holy Kazan icon of the Mother
of God was taken into the levy of Minin and Pozharsky.
“In the autumn of 1612 the second levy was already near Moscow. But it
did not succeed in striking through to the capital. Their strength was ebbing
away. Then the levies laid upon themselves a strict three-day fast and began
earnestly to pray to the Heavenly Queen before her Kazan icon. At this time
Bishop Arsenius, a Greek by birth, who was living in a monastery in the
Kremlin, and who had come to us in 1588 with Patriarch Jeremiah, after
fervent prayer saw in a subtle sleep St. Sergius. The abbot of the Russian Land
told Arsenius that ‘by the prayers of the Theotokos judgement on our
Fatherland has been turned to mercy, and tomorrow Moscow will be in the
hands of the levy and Russia will be saved!’ News of this vision of Arsenius
was immediately passed to the army of Pozharsky, which enormously
encouraged them. They advanced to a decisive attack and on October 22, 1612
took control of a part of Moscow and Chinatown. Street fighting in which the
inhabitants took part began. In the fire and smoke it was difficult to
distinguish friend from foe. On October 27 the smoke began to disperse. The
Poles surrendered….
“Patriarch Hermogen did not live to see this radiant day. On February 17,
1612 he had died from hunger in the Chudov monastery. In 1912 he was
numbered among the saints, and his relics reside to this day in the Dormition
cathedral of the Kremlin.
“Thus at the end of 1612 the Time of Troubles came to an end. Although
detachments of Poles, Swedes, robbers and Cossacks continued to wander
around Russia. After the death of the second false Dmitri Marina Mnishek got
together with Zarutsky, who still tried to fight, but was defeated. Marinka
died in prison… But the decisive victory was won then, in 1612!”555
In the Time of Troubles the best representatives of the Russian people, in

the persons of the holy Patriarchs Job and Hermogen, stood courageously for
those Tsars who had been lawfully anointed by the Church and remained
loyal to the Orthodox faith, regardless of their personal virtues or vices.
Conversely, they refused to recognize (even at the cost of their sees and their
lives) the pretenders to the tsardom or foreign interlopers who did not satisfy
these conditions – again, regardless of their personal qualities. Most of the
Russian clergy accepted the first false Dmitri. But “in relation to the second
false Dmitri,” writes Lebedev, they “conducted themselves more
courageously. Bishops Galaction of Suzdal and Joseph of Kolomna suffered
for their non-acceptance of the usurper. Archbishop Theoctistus of Tver
received a martyric death in Tushino. Dressed only in a shirt, the bare-footed
555 Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 121-123.
338
Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov, the future patriarch, was brought by the
Poles into the camp of the usurper, where he remained in captivity. Seeing
such terrible events, Bishop Gennadius of Pskov ‘died of sorrow…’”556
There were other champions of the faith: the monks of Holy Trinity – St.
Sergius Lavra, who heroically resisted a long Polish siege, and the hermits St.
Galaction of Vologda and Irinarchus of Rostov, who were both martyred by
the Latins. Thus in the life of the latter we read: “Once there came into the
elder’s cell a Polish noble, Pan Mikulinsky with other Pans. ‘In whom do you
believe?’ he asked. ‘I believe in the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the
Holy Spirit!’ ‘And what earthly king do you have?’ The elder replied in a loud
voice: ‘I have the Russian Tsar Vasili Ioannovich [Shuisky]. I live in Russia, I
have a Russian tsar – I have nobody else!’ One of the Pans said: ‘You, elder,
are a traitor; you believe neither in our king, nor in [the second false]
Demetrius!’ The elder replied: ‘I do not fear your sword, which is corruptible,
and I will not betray my faith in the Russian Tsar. If you cut me off for that,
then I will suffer it with joy. I have a little blood in me for you, but my Living
God has a sword which will cut you off invisibly, without flesh or blood, and
He will send your souls into eternal torment!’ And Pan Mikulinsky was
amazed at the great faith of the elder…”557
There is a marked contrast between the two principles: the Russian

Orthodox Autocracy and the Polish Elective Monarchy. We have seen what
the Russian Autocracy was, and its essential independence of all other forces
except the Church. But Poland, since its union with Lithuania, as Montefiore
writes, “was an awkward union of two separate realms, a constitutional
contradiction with two governments and one parliament, which was elected
by the entire nobility and in which every delegate had a veto. This parliament,
the Sejm, chose its kings, leaving royal elections open to foreign machinations.
Poland’s idiosyncratic rules, overmighty magnates and widespread bribery
often left the country languishing in anarchic limbo.”558 The history of the 17th
and 18th centuries was to show the superiority of the Russian system. Thus
while Russia went from strength to strength, finally liberating all the Russian
lands from the oppressive tyranny of the Poles, Poland grew weaker under its
powerless elective monarchy. Finally, by the end of the eighteenth century it
had ceased to exist as an independent State, being divided up three ways
between Prussia, Austria and Russia…
At the beginning of February, 1613, a Zemsky Sobor was assembled in

Moscow in order to elect a Tsar. In accordance with pious tradition, it began
with a three-day fast and prayer to invoke God’s blessing on the assembly.
“At the first conciliar session,” writes Hieromartyr Nikon, Archbishop of
Vologda, “it was unanimously decided: ’not to elect anyone of other foreign
faiths, but to elect our own native Russian’. They began to elect their own;
556 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia (Patriarchal Moscow), Moscow, 1995, p. 14.

557 The Life of St. Irinarchus, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
339
some pointed to one boyar, others to another… A certain nobleman from
Galich presented a written opinion that the closest of all to the previous tsars
by blood was Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov: he should be elected Tsar. They
remembered that the reposed Patriarch had mentioned this name. An ataman
from the Don gave the same opinion. And Mikhail Fyodorovich was
proclaimed Tsar. But not all the elected delegates had yet arrived in Moscow,
nor any of the most eminent boyars, and the matter was put off for another
two weeks. Finally, they all assembled on February 21, on the Sunday of
Orthodoxy, and by a common vote confirmed this choice. Then Archbishop
Theodoritus of Ryazan, the cellarer Abraham Palitsyn of the Holy Trinity
Monastery and the boyar Morozov came out onto the place of the skull and
asked the people who were filling Red Square: ‘Who do you want for Tsar?’
And the people unanimously exclaimed: ‘Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov!’
And the Council appointed Archbishop Theodoritus, Abraham Palitsyn, three
archimandrites and several notable boyars to go to the newly elected Tsar to
ask him to please come to the capital city of Moscow to his Tsarist throne.”559
The adolescent boy and his mother, Schema-Nun Martha were living in the
Ipatiev monastery in Kostroma, on the Volga. Arriving there from Moscow,
the delegation had great difficulty in persuading the mother to agree to her
son’s enthronement. She at first refused, pointing to the fickleness of the
Muscovites, the devastation of the kingdom, the youth of her son, the fact that
his father was in captivity, her own fears of revenge… Finally, she relented,
and, falling before the Feodorovskaia icon, she said: “May thy will be done, O
Heavenly Queen! Into thy hands I deliver my son. Guide him on the path of
righteousness for his sake and the sake of the Fatherland!”
In recognition of the fact that it was largely the nation’s betrayal of

legitimate autocratic authority that had led to the Time of Troubles, the Sobor
swore eternal loyalty to Michael Romanov and his descendants, promising to
sacrifice themselves body and soul in his service against external enemies,
“Poles, Germans and the Crimeans”. Moreover, they called a curse upon
themselves if they should ever break this oath. In February, 1917 the people of
Russia broke their oath to the House of Romanov by their betrayal of Tsar-
Martyr Nicholas II. The curse duly fell upon them in the form of the horrors
of Soviet power…
“The outcome,” writes Lebedev, “suggested that Russians identified

themselves with strong authority, backed by the Orthodox Church and
unrestrained by any charter or covenant, such as might prove divisive and set
one social group against another… The zemlia had for the first time
constituted itself as a reality, based on elective local government institutions,
and had chosen a new master…”560
559 Archbishop Nicon, “Dostoslavnoe Trekhsotletie” (“A worthy 300-hundred-year

anniversary”), in Mech Oboiudoostrij, 1913 (The Double-Edged Sword, 1913), St. Petersburg,
1995, pp. 25-26.
560 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, pp. 63, 64.
340
For, as Pozharsky said in 1612, “we know that unless we possess a
monarch we can neither fight our common enemies – Poles, Lithuanians,
Germans, nor our own brigands, who threaten the State with further
bloodshed. Without a monarch how can we maintain relations with foreign
states, or preserve the stability and strength of our country?”561
“The Time of Troubles,” writes Lebedev, “illuminated the profound basis

of the interrelationship of ecclesiastical and royal power. This problem was
reflected, as if in magnifying glass, in the above-mentioned quarrels of the
Russian ambassadors with regard to the absence of Patriarch Hermogen’s
signature on the document of the capitulation of Russia. It turns out that both
the Russian hierarchs and the best statesmen understood the relationship of
the tsar and the patriarch in a truly Christian, communal sense. In the one
great Orthodox society of Russia there are two leaders: a spiritual (the
patriarch) and a secular (the tsar). They are both responsible for all that takes
place in society, but each in his own way: the tsar first of all for civil affairs
(although he can also take a very active and honourable part in ecclesiastical
affairs when that is necessary), while the patriarch is first of all responsible for
ecclesiastical, spiritual affairs (although he can also, when necessary, take a
most active part in state affairs). The tsars take counsel with the patriarchs,
the patriarchs – with the tsars in all the most important questions.
Traditionally the patriarch is an obligatory member of the boyars’ Duma
(government). If there is no tsar, then the most important worldly affairs are
decided only with the blessing of the patriarch. If in the affair of the
establishment of the patriarchate in Russia it was the royal power that was
basically active, in the Time of Troubles the royal power itself and the whole
of Russia were saved by none other than the Russian patriarchs! Thus the
troubles very distinctly demonstrated that the Russian ecclesiastical
authorities were not, and did not think of themselves as being, a 'legally
obedient’ arm of the State power, as some (A.V. Kartashev) would have it. It
can remain and did remain in agreement with the State power in those affairs
in which this was possible from an ecclesiastical point of view, and to the
extent that this was possible.
“In this question it was important that neither side should try to seize for
itself the prerogatives of the other side, that is, should not be a usurper, for
usurpation can be understood not only in the narrow sense, but also in the
broad sense of the general striving to become that which you are not by law,
to assume for yourself those functions which do not belong to you by right. It
is amazing that in those days there was no precise juridical, written law
(‘right’) concerning the competence and mutual relations of the royal and
ecclesiastical powers. Relations were defined by the spiritual logic of things
and age-old tradition…”562
561 Pozharsky, in Arsène de Goulévitch, Czarism and Revolution, Hawthorne, Ca.: Omni
Publications, 1962, p. 34.

562 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, op. cit., pp. 18-19.
341
And so, with the enthronement of the first Romanov tsar, Muscovy was
established on the twin pillars of the Orthodox Faith and the Dynastic
Principle. The requirement of Orthodoxy had been passed down from the
Byzantines. Hereditary Succession was not a requirement in Rome or
Byzantium (which is one reason why so many Byzantine emperors were
assassinated); but in Russia, as in some Western Orthodox autocracies (for
example, the Anglo-Saxon), it had always been felt to be a necessity.
Both pillars had been shaken during the Time of Troubles, after the death
of the last Riurik tsar. But Orthodoxy had been restored above all by the holy
Patriarchs Job and Hermogen refusing to recognize a Catholic tsar, and then
by the national army of liberation driving out the Poles. And the Hereditary
Principle, already tacitly accepted if mistakenly applied by the people when
they followed the false Dmitri, had been affirmed by all the estates of the
nation at the Zemsky Sobor in 1613.
342
41. THE RESURRECTION OF MUSCOVY
Thus began the rule of the Romanov dynasty, which lasted until 1917,
whose last tsar, Nicholas II, was murdered in a house of the same name -
Ipatiev. The whole of Russian history from Riurik to Nicholas II (862-1917)
was the history of only two, interrelated dynasties – the Riuriks and the
Romanovs. Only in the Time of Troubles (1598-1612) was that dynastic
continuity briefly interrupted. This continuity of the hereditary principle in
Russian history has no parallel in world history with the possible exception of
the very different case of China.
And yet the Troubles themselves cannot be understood if we do not take

into account the continuing importance of the hereditary principle in the
Russian mind in that period. According to V.O. Kliuchevsky, the soil for the
Time of Troubles “was prepared by the harassed state of the people’s minds,
by a general state of discontent with the reign of Ivan the Terrible – discontent
that increased under Boris Godunov. The end of the dynasty and the
subsequent attempt to revive it in the persons of the pretenders provided a
stimulus for the Troubles. Their basic causes were, first, the people’s view of
the old dynasty’s relation to the Muscovite state and consequently their
difficulty in grasping the idea of an elected tsar, and secondly – the political
structure of the state, which created social discord by its heavy demands on
the people and an inequitable distribution of state dues. The first cause gave
rise to the need of reviving the extinct ruling line, and thus furthered the
pretenders’ success; the second transformed a dynastic squabble into social
and political anarchy.”563
The Russian people understood the state to be the personal property of the
tsar and of his blood descendants. They could not conceive of a non-
hereditary tsar, a legitimate ruler who was not the heir by blood of the
previous tsar; hence the confusion when the last Riurik tsar, Theodore, died
without issue. Boris Godunov was related to the Riuriks by marriage – but
may have killed the Tsarevich Dmitri. So he, in the end, was rejected by the
people. Tsar Vasili Shuisky was not a Riurik, but was “the boyars’ tsar”. So
he, too, was not acceptable. The pretenders were followed because they
claimed to be the Tsarevich, but their claims were of course false. The tsar had
to be a “born tsar”. Only Michael Romanov fitted that role because his family
was related to the Riuriks through Ivan IV’s first wife, Anastasia Romanova.
And so in almost all his proclamations Michael called himself the grandson of
Ivan the Terrible. During his coronation Michael declared that “Russia had
suffered terrible trials in the fifteen years since the death of the last rightful
tsar, his cousin Fyodor, son of Ivan the Terrible. Now Russians must restore
peace and order…”564
563 Kliuchevsky, A Course in Russian History: The Seventeenth Century, Armonk, NY: M.E.
Sharpe, 1994, p. 60.

564 Montefiore, The Romanovs, p. 26.
343
*
Since the hereditary principle is commonly considered to be irrational

insofar as it supposedly places the government of the State “at the mercy of
chance”, it will be worth examining its significance in Russian Orthodox
statehood more closely.
Some points need emphasizing. First, the hereditary principle was upheld
by a still deeper principle, namely, that the tsar had to be Orthodox. The
second False Dmitri and the Polish King Sigismund’s son Vladislav were both
rejected by St. Hermogen, Patriarch of Moscow, because they were Catholics.
“It is quite impossible,” said the Muscovite envoys, “that the sovereign
should be one faith, and his subjects of another. You yourselves would not
tolerate your kings being of another faith.”565
Secondly, after electing the first Romanov tsar, the people retained no right
to depose him or any of his successors. On the contrary, they elected a
hereditary dynasty, and specifically bound themselves by an oath to be loyal
to that dynasty forever. Hence the peculiar horror and accursedness of their
rejection of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917…
It follows that the hereditary tsar’s rule is inviolable, the only possible
exception being in the case that tsar becomes a heretic. As Metropolitan
Philaret of Moscow writes: “A government that is not fenced about by an
inviolability that is venerated religiously by the whole people cannot act with
the whole fullness of power or that freedom of zeal that is necessary for the
construction and preservation of the public good and security. How can it
develop its whole strength in its most beneficial direction, when its power
constantly finds itself in an insecure position, struggling with other powers
that cut short its actions in as many different directions as are the opinions,
prejudices and passions more or less dominant in society? How can it
surrender itself to the full force of its zeal, when it must of necessity divide its
attentions between care for the prosperity of society and anxiety about its
own security? But if the government is so lacking in firmness, then the State is
also lacking in firmness. Such a State is like a city built on a volcanic
mountain: what significance does its hard earth have when under it is hidden
a power that can at any minute turn everything into ruins? Subjects who do
not recognize the inviolability of rulers are incited by the hope of licence to
achieve licence and predominance, and between the horrors of anarchy and
oppression they cannot establish in themselves that obedient freedom which
is the focus and soul of public life.”566
565
Ivan Ilyin, “O Monarkhii i Republikanstve” (On Monarchy and Republicanism), Sobrannie
Sochinenia (Collected Works), Moscow, 1994, vol. 4, p. 493.
566 Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia (Works), 1848, vol. 2, p. 134; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’
(Orthodox Life), 49, N 9 (573), September, 1997, p. 6.
344
Thirdly, while the Zemsky Sobor of 1613 was an election, it was by no means
a democratic election, but rather a recognition of God’s election of a ruler on the
model of the Israelites’ election of Jephtha (Judges 11.11). For, as Fr. Lev
Lebedev writes: “Tsars are not elected! And a Council, even a Zemsky Sobor,
cannot be the source of his power. The kingdom is a calling of God, the
Council can determine who is the lawful Tsar and summon him.”567 As the
gramota issued by the Sobor declared: Michael had been chosen “not by the
unanimity of men, nor in order to please men, but by the righteous judgement
of God.”568
Again, as Ivan Solonevich writes, “when, after the Time of Troubles, the
question was raised concerning the restoration of the monarchy, there was no
hint of an ‘election to the kingdom’. There was a ‘search’ for people who had
the greatest hereditary right to the throne. And not an ‘election’ of the more
worthy. There were not, and could not be, any ‘merits’ in the young Michael
Fyodorovich. But since only the hereditary principle affords the advantage of
absolutely indisputability, it was on this that the ‘election’ was based.”569
St. John Maximovich writes: “It was almost impossible to elect some
person as tsar for his qualities; everyone evaluated the candidates from his
own point of view….
“What drew the hearts of all to Michael Romanov? He had neither

experience of statecraft, nor had he done any service to the state. He was not
distinguished by the state wisdom of Boris Godunov or by the eminence of
his race, as was Basil Shuisky. He was sixteen years old, and ‘Misha
Romanov’, as he was generally known, had not yet managed to show his
worth in anything. But why did the Russian people rest on him, and why
with his crowning did all the quarrels and disturbances regarding the royal
throne come to an end? The Russian people longed for a lawful, ‘native’
Sovereign, and was convinced that without him there could be no order or
peace in Russia. When Boris Godunov and Prince Basil Shuisky were elected,
although they had, to a certain degree, rights to the throne through their
kinship with the previous tsars, they were not elected by reason of their
exclusive rights, but their personalities were taken into account. There was no
strict lawful succession in their case. This explained the success of the
pretenders. However, it was almost impossible to elect someone as tsar for his
qualities. Everyone evaluated the candidates from their point of view.
However, the absence of a definite law which would have provided an heir in
the case of the cutting off of the line of the Great Princes and Tsars of Moscow
made it necessary for the people itself to indicate who they wanted as tsar.
The descendants of the appanage princes, although they came from the same
race as that of the Moscow Tsars (and never forgot that), were in the eyes of
567 Lebedev, Velikorossia, St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 126.

568 Text in Michael Nazarov, Kto Naslednik Rossijskogo Prestola? (Who is the Heir of the Russian
Throne?), Moscow, 1996 p. 89.
569 Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia (Popular Monarchy), Minsk, 1998, pp. 82-83.
345
the people simple noblemen, ‘serfs’ of the Moscow sovereigns; their distant
kinship with the royal line had already lost its significance. Moreover, it was
difficult to establish precisely which of the descendants of St. Vladimir on the
male side had the most grounds for being recognized as the closest heir to the
defunct royal line. In such circumstances all united in the suggestion that the
extinct Royal branch should be continued by the closest relative of the last
‘native’, lawful Tsar. The closest relatives of Tsar Theodore Ioannovich were
his cousins on his mother’s side: Theodore, in monasticism Philaret, and Ivan
Nikitich Romanov, both of whom had sons. In that case the throne had to
pass to Theodore, as the eldest, but his monasticism and the rank of
Metropolitan of Rostov was an obstacle to this. His heir was his only son
Michael. Thus the question was no longer about the election of a Tsar, but
about the recognition that a definite person had the rights to the throne. The
Russian people, tormented by the time of troubles and the lawlessness,
welcomed this decision, since it saw that order could be restored only by a
lawful ‘native’ Tsar. The people remembered the services of the Romanovs to
their homeland, their sufferings for it, the meek Tsaritsa Anastasia Romanova,
the firmness of Philaret Nikitich. All this still more strongly attracted the
hearts of the people to the announced tsar. But these qualities were possessed
also by some other statesmen and sorrowers for Rus’. And this was not the
reason for the election of Tsar Michael Romanov, but the fact that in him Rus’
saw their most lawful and native Sovereign.
“In the acts on the election to the kingdom of Michael Fyodorovich, the
idea that he was ascending the throne by virtue of his election by the people
was carefully avoided, and it was pointed out that the new Tsar was the elect
of God, the direct descendant of the last lawful Sovereign.”570
Fourthly, the tsar is above the law. As Solonevich writes: “The

fundamental idea of the Russian monarchy was most vividly and clearly
expressed by A.S. Pushkin just before the end of his life: ‘There must be one
person standing higher than everybody, higher even than the law.’ In this
formulation, ‘one man’, Man is placed in very big letters above the law. This
formulation is completely unacceptable for the Roman-European cast of
mind, for which the law is everything: dura lex, sed lex. The Russian mind
places, man, mankind, the soul higher than the law, giving to the law only
that place which it should occupy: the place occupied by traffic rules. Of
course, with corresponding punishments for driving on the left side. Man is
not for the sabbath, but the sabbath for man. It is not that man is for the
fulfilment of the law, but the law is for the preservation of man…
“The whole history of humanity is filled with the struggle of tribes, people,
nations, classes, estates, groups, parties, religions and whatever you like. It’s
almost as Hobbes put it: ‘War by everyone against everyone’. How are we to
find a neutral point of support in this struggle? An arbiter standing above the
570 St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozhdenie zakona o prestolonasledii v Rossii (The Origin of the
Law of Succession in Russia), Podolsk, 1994, pp. 13, 43-45.
346
tribes, nations, peoples, classes, estates, etc.? Uniting the people, classes and
religions into a common whole? Submitting the interests of the part to the
interests of the whole? And placing moral principles above egoism, which is
always characteristic of every group of people pushed forward the summit of
public life?”571
But if the tsar is above the law, how can he not be a tyrant, insofar as, in the
famous words of Lord Acton, “power corrupts, and absolute power
absolutely corrupts”?
In order to answer this question we must remember, first, that as we have

seen, the tsar’s power is not absolute insofar as he is limited by the law of God
and Orthodoxy.
Secondly, it is not only tsars, but rulers of all kinds that are subject to the
temptations of power. Indeed, these temptations may even be worse with
democratic rulers; for whereas the tsar stands above all factional interests, an
elected president necessarily represents the interests only of his party at the
expense of the country as a whole. “Western thought,” writes Solonevich,
“sways from the dictatorship of capitalism to the dictatorship of the
proletariat, but no representative of this thought has even so much as thought
of ‘the dictatorship of conscience’.”572
“The distinguishing characteristic of Russian monarchy, which was given

to it at its birth, consists in the fact that the Russian monarchy expressed the
will not of the most powerful, but the will of the whole nation, religiously
given shape by Orthodoxy and politically given shape by the Empire. The will
of the nation, religiously given shape by Orthodoxy will be ‘the dictatorship
of conscience’ Only in this way can we explain the possibility of the manifesto
of February 19, 1861 [when Tsar Alexander II freed the peasants]: ‘the
dictatorship of conscience’ was able overcome the opposition of the ruling
class, and the ruling class proved powerless. We must always have this
distinction in mind: the Russian monarchy is the expression of the will, that is:
the conscience, of the nation, not the will of the capitalists, which both French
Napoleons expressed, or the will of the aristocracy, which all the other
monarchies of Europe expressed: the Russian monarchy is the closest
approximation to the ideal of monarchy in general. This ideal was never
attained by the Russian monarchy – for the well-known reason that no ideal is
realizable in our life. In the history of the Russian monarchy, as in the whole
of our world, there were periods of decline, of deviation, of failure, but there
were also periods of recovery such as world history has never known.”573
Now State power, which, like power in the family or the tribe, always
includes in itself an element of coercion, “is constructed in three ways: by
571 Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 84, 85.

572 Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 85-86.
347
inheritance, by election and by seizure: monarchy, republic, dictatorship. In
practice all of these change places: the man who seizes power becomes a
hereditary monarch (Napoleon I), the elected president becomes the same
(Napoleon III), or tries to become it (Oliver Cromwell). The elected
‘chancellor’, Hitler, becomes a seizer of power. But in general these are
nevertheless exceptions.
“Both a republic and a dictatorship presuppose a struggle for power –

democratic in the first case and necessarily bloody in the second: Stalin –
Trotsky, Mussolini-Matteotti, Hitler-Röhm. In a republic, as a rule, the
struggle is unbloody. However, even an unbloody struggle is not completely
without cost. Aristide Briand, who became French Prime Minister several
times, admitted that 95% of his strength was spent on the struggle for power
and only five percent on the work of power. And even this five percent was
exceptionally short-lived.
“Election and seizure are, so to speak, rationalist methods. Hereditary

power is, strictly speaking, the power of chance, indisputable if only because
the chance of birth is completely indisputable. You can recognize or not
recognize the principle of monarchy in general. But no one can deny the
existence of the positive law presenting the right of inheriting the throne to
the first son of the reigning monarch. Having recourse to a somewhat crude
comparison, this is something like an ace in cards… An ace is an ace. No
election, no merit, and consequently no quarrel. Power passes without quarrel
and pain: the king is dead, long live the king!”574
We may interrupt Solonevich’s argument here to qualify his use of the

word “chance”. The fact that a man inherits the throne only because he is the
firstborn of his father may be “by chance” from a human point of view. But
from the Divine point of view it is election. For, as Bishop Ignaty
Brianchaninov writes: “There is no blind chance! God rules the world, and
everything that takes place in heaven and beneath the heavens takes place
according to the judgement of the All-wise and All-powerful God.” 575
Moreover, as Bishop Ignaty also writes, “in blessed Russia, according to the
spirit of the pious people, the Tsar and the fatherland constitute one whole, as
in a family the parents and their children constitute one whole.”576 This being
so, it was only natural that the law of succession should be hereditary.
Solonevich continues: “The human individual, born by chance as heir to

the throne, is placed in circumstances which guarantee him the best possible
professional preparation from a technical point of view. His Majesty Emperor
Nicholas Alexandrovich was probably one of the most educated people of his
time. The best professors of Russia taught him both law and strategy and

575 Brianchaninov, “Sud’by Bozhii” (The Judgements of God), Polnoe Sobranie Tvorenij
(Complete Collection of Works), volume II, Moscow, 2001, p. 72.
576 Brianchaninov, Pis’ma (Letters), Moscow, 2000, p. 781.
348
history and literature. He spoke with complete freedom in three foreign
languages. His knowledge was not one-sided… and was, if one can so express
it, living knowledge…
“The Russian tsar was in charge of everything and was obliged to know
everything - it goes without saying, as far as humanly possible. He was a
‘specialist’ in that sphere which excludes all specialization. This was a
specialism standing above all the specialisms of the world and embracing
them all. That is, the general volume of erudition of the Russian monarch had
in mind that which every philosophy has in mind: the concentration in one
point of the whole sum of human knowledge. However, with this colossal
qualification, that ‘the sum of knowledge’ of the Russian tsars grew in a
seamless manner from the living practice of the past and was checked against
the living practice of the present. True, that is how almost all philosophy is
checked – for example, with Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler – but, fortunately
for humanity, such checking takes place comparatively rarely….
“The heir to the Throne, later the possessor of the Throne, is placed in such
conditions under which temptations are reduced… to a minimum. He is
given everything he needs beforehand. At his birth he receives an order,
which he, of course, did not manage to earn, and the temptation of vainglory
is liquidated in embryo. He is absolutely provided for materially – the
temptation of avarice is liquidated in embryo. He is the only one having the
Right – and so competition falls away, together with everything linked with
it. Everything is organized in such a way that the personal destiny of the
individual should be welded together into one whole with the destiny of the
nation. Everything that a person would want to have for himself is already
given him. And the person automatically merges with the general good.
“One could say that all this is possessed also by a dictator of the type of
Napoleon, Stalin or Hitler. But this would be less than half true: everything
that the dictator has he conquered, and all this he must constantly defend –
both against competitors and against the nation. The dictator is forced to
prove every day that it is precisely he who is the most brilliant, great, greatest
and inimitable, for if not he, but someone else, is not the most brilliant, then it
is obvious that that other person has the right to power…
“We can, of course, quarrel over the principle of ‘chance’ itself. A banal,
rationalist, pitifully scientific point of view is usually formulated thus: the
chance of birth may produce a defective man. But we, we will elect the best…
Of course, ‘the chance of birth’ can produce a defective man. We have
examples of this: Tsar Theodore Ivanovich. Nothing terrible happened. For
the monarchy ‘is not the arbitrariness of a single man’, but ‘a system of
institutions’, - a system can operate temporarily even without a ‘man’. But
simple statistics show that the chances of such ‘chance’ events occurring are
very small. The chance of ‘a genius on the throne’ appearing is still smaller.
349
“I proceed from the axiom that a genius in politics is worse than the
plague. For a genius is a person who thinks up something that is new in
principle. In thinking up something that is new in principle, he invades the
organic life of the country and cripples it, as it was crippled by Napoleon,
Stalin and Hitler…
“The power of the tsar is the power of the average, averagely clever man
over two hundred million average, averagely clever people… V. Klyuchevsky
said with some perplexity that the first Muscovite princes, the first gatherers
of the Russian land, were completely average people: - and yet, look, they
gathered the Russian land. This is quite simple: average people have acted in
the interests of average people and the line of the nation has coincided with
the line of power. So the average people of the Novgorodian army went over
to the side of the average people of Moscow, while the average people of the
USSR are running away in all directions from the genius of Stalin.”577
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow expressed the superiority of the

hereditary over the elective principle as follows: “What conflict does election
for public posts produce in other peoples! With what conflict, and sometimes
also with what alarm do they attain the legalization of the right of public
election! Then there begins the struggle, sometimes dying down and
sometimes rising up again, sometimes for the extension and sometimes for
the restriction of this right. The incorrect extension of the right of social
election is followed by its incorrect use. It would be difficult to believe it if we
did not read in foreign newspapers that elective votes are sold; that sympathy
or lack of sympathy for those seeking election is expressed not only by votes
for and votes against, but also by sticks and stones, as if a man can be born
from a beast, and rational business out of the fury of the passions; that
ignorant people make the choice between those in whom wisdom of state is
envisaged, lawless people participate in the election of future lawgivers,
peasants and craftsmen discuss and vote, not about who could best keep
order in the village or the society of craftsmen, but about who is capable of
administering the State.
“Thanks be to God! It is not so in our fatherland. Autocratic power,

established on the age-old law of heredity, which once, at a time of
impoverished heredity, was renewed and strengthened on its former basis by
a pure and rational election, stands in inviolable firmness and acts with calm
majesty. Its subjects do not think of striving for the right of election to public
posts in the assurance that the authorities care for the common good and
know through whom and how to construct it.”578
“God, in accordance with the image of His heavenly single rule, has
established a tsar on earth; in accordance with the image of His almighty
Solonevich, op. cit. , pp. 87-88, 89-90, 91-92.

577
Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia (Works), 1861, vol. 3, pp. 322-323; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’
578
350
power, He has established an autocratic tsar; in accordance with the image of
His everlasting Kingdom, which continues from age to age, He has
established a hereditary tsar.”579
An elected president is installed by the will of man, and can be said to be

installed by the will of God only indirectly, by permission. By contrast, the
determination of who will be born as the heir to the throne is completely
beyond the power of man, and so entirely within the power of God. The
hereditary principle therefore ensures that the tsar will indeed be elected –
but by God, not by man.
Now, with Orthodoxy and the hereditary principle restored, the Muscovite
state entered on a period of slow but steady growth… However, the State was
still too weak, at the beginning of the new dynasty, to take on all the
responsibilities of a fully autocratic tsar. So the Church stepped into the
breach on a temporary basis. Thus the first Romanov tsar, Michael
Fyodorovich, had his own natural father, Philaret Nikitich, as his Patriarch,
and ruled the State together with him. This unusual relationship, in which
both took the title “Great Sovereign”, was profoundly significant in the
context of the times. It was “unique,” according to Lebedev, “not only for
Russian history, but also for the universal history of the Church, when a
natural father and son become the two heads of a single Orthodox power!”580
“The letters of the tsar and patriarch show how father and son addressed
each other formally. ‘We pray Almighty God that we shall see your holy fair
and angelic face and kiss your Holiness’s head and bow down to do
obeisance,’ wrote Michael. Filaret went through the motions of advising –
‘And how will you, Sovereign, command on the Crimean business?’ – but
then he answered his own question: ‘To me, the Sovereign, I think that…’
They received ambassadors sitting side by side on identical thrones,
sometimes diplomatically playing different roles. ‘Don’t declare it is written
by me,’ Filaret instructed Michael in one case.”581
Patriarch Philaret’s firm hand was essential in holding the still deeply
shaken State together. The sixteenth century had seen the power of the tsar, in
the person of Ivan the Terrible, leaning dangerously towards absolutism,
tyranny and caesaropapism in practice, if not in theory. However, the Time of
Troubles had demonstrated how critically the Orthodox Autocracy depended
on the legitimizing and sanctifying power of the Church. In disobedience to
her, the people had broken their oath of allegiance to the legitimate tsar and
plunged the country into anarchy. But in penitent obedience to her, they had
579 Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia (Works), 1877, vol. 3, p. 442; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’

580 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, p. 20.
351
succeeded in finally driving out the invaders. The election of the tsar’s father
to the patriarchal see both implicitly acknowledged this debt of the Autocracy
and People to the Church, and indicated that while the Autocracy was now
re-established in all its former power and inviolability, the tsar being
answerable to God alone for his actions in the political sphere, nevertheless he
received his sanction and sanctification from the Church in the person of the
Patriarch, who was as superior to him in his sphere, the sphere of the Spirit,
as a father is to his son, and who, as the Zemsky Sobor of 1619 put it, “for this
reason [i.e. because he was father of the tsar] is to be a helper and builder for
the kingdom, a defender for widows and intercessor for the wronged.”582
As Dobroklonsky writes: “The Time of Troubles had shaken the structure

of the State in Russia, weakening discipline and unleashing arbitrariness; the
material situation of the country demanded improvements that could not be
put off. On ascending the throne, Michael Fyodorovich was still too young,
inexperienced and indecisive to correct the shattered State order. Having
become accustomed to self-will, the boyars were not able to renounce it even
now: ‘They took no account of the tsar, they did not fear him,’ says the
chronicler, ‘as long as he was a child… They divided up the whole land in
accordance with their will.’ In the census that took place after the devastation
of Moscow many injustices had been permitted in taxing the people, so that it
was difficult for some and easy for others. The boyars became ‘violators’,
oppressing the weak; the Boyar Duma contained unworthy men, inclined to
intrigues against each other rather than State matters and interests. In the
opinion of some historians, the boyars even restricted the autocracy of the
tsar, and the whole administration of the State depended on them. A
powerful will and an experienced man was necessary to annihilate the evil.
Such could be for the young sovereign his father, Patriarch Philaret, in whom
circumstances had created a strong character, and to whom age and former
participation in State affairs had given knowledge of the boyar set and the
whole of Russian life and experience in administration. Finally, the woes of
the fatherland had generated a burning patriotism in him. In reality, Philaret
became the adviser and right hand of the Tsar. The Tsar himself, in his decree
to the voyevodas of July 3, 1619 informing them of the return of his father
from Poland, put it as follows: ‘We, the great sovereign, having taken counsel
with our father and intercessor with God, will learn how to care for the
Muscovite State so as to correct everything in it in the best manner.’ The
chroniclers call Philaret ‘the most statesmanlike patriarch’, noting that ‘he was
in control of all the governmental and military affairs’ and that ‘the tsar and
patriarch administered everything together’. Philaret was in fact as much a
statesman as a churchman. This is indicated by the title he used: ‘the great
sovereign and most holy Patriarch Philaret Nikitich’. All important State
decrees and provisions were made with his blessing and counsel. When the
tsar and patriarch were separated they corresponded with each other, taking
counsel with each other in State affairs. Their names figured next to each
other on decrees… Some decrees on State affairs were published by the
352
patriarch alone; and he rescinded some of the resolutions made by his son.
Subjects wrote their petitions not only to the tsar, but at the same time to the
patriarch; the boyars often assembled in the corridors before his cross palace
to discuss State affairs; they presented various reports to him as well as to the
tsar. The patriarch usually took part in receptions of foreign ambassadors
sitting on the right hand of the tsar; both were given gifts and special
documents; if for some reason the patriarch was not present at this reception,
the ambassadors would officially present themselves in the patriarchal palace
and with the same ceremonies as to the tsar. The influence of the patriarch on
the tsar was so complete and powerful that there was no place for any
influence of the boyars who surrounded the throne.”583
“Yet Filaret’s purpose,” writes Montefiore, “the Romanov mission, was to

mobilize Russia. He ‘administered everything concerning tsardom and army,’
and he saw his most urgent task as preparing for vengeance against Poland.
Tax collecting was reformed; the Church was disciplined and its lands co-
opted by the dynasty, laying the foundations for its wealth. The landowners
were given greater control over their serfs in return for their readiness to
fight. As border clashes with Poland intensified, Filaret knew that his Polish
and Swedish enemies were technically far ahead of Russia, but with Europe
now being ravaged by the Thirty Years’ War, experienced mercenaries were
plentiful and he hired English and Scottish officers to modernize the army.”584
The Church’s recovery was reflected in the more frequent convening of

Church Councils. If we exclude the false council of 1666-67 (about which more
below), these were genuinely free of interference from the State, and the tsar
was sometimes forced to submit to them against his will. Thus a Church
Council in 1621 decreed that the proposed Catholic bridegroom for the Tsar’s
daughter would have to be baptized first, and that in general all Catholics and
uniates joining the Orthodox Church, and all Orthodox who had been
baptized incorrectly, without full immersion, would have to be baptized.
The bond between Tsar and People was maintained throughout the
administration. The central administrative institutions were: (a) the Prikazi, or
Ministries, over each of which the Tsar appointed a boyar with a staff of
secretaries (dyaki), (b) the Boyar Duma, an essentially aristocratic institution,
which, however, was broadened into the more widely representative (c)
Councils of the Land (Zemskie Sobory) for particularly important matters, in
which representatives of all classes of the people were included. This
constituted a much wider consultative base than prevailed in contemporary
Western European states.
Again, the institution of Councils of the Land (first introduced by Ivan the
Terrible) owed much to the experience of the Time of Troubles; for, as
Kliuchevsky writes, “The calamities of the Time of Troubles brought together
583 Dobroklonksy, op. cit., pp. 323-324.

353
the last resources of the Russian community for the restoration of order in the
state. The representative assembly was created by this enforced social
unanimity and helped to sustain it. Popular representation in Russia came
into being not in order to limit authority, but to find and strengthen it, and
therein lay its difference from representation in western Europe.”585
Thus in the reign of Tsar Michael Fyodorovich all the most important
matters were decided by Councils, which, like the first Council of 1613, were
Councils “of the whole land”; such Councils continued to be convened until
1689.
For "in what was this autocratic power of the Tsar strong?” asks
Hieromartyr Andronicus, Archbishop of Perm. “In the fact that it was based
on the conscience and on the Law of God, and was supported by its closeness
to the land, by the council of the people. The princely entourage, the boyars’
Duma, the Zemsky Sobor - that is what preserved the power of the Tsars in its
fullness, not allowing anyone to seize or divert it. The people of proven
experience and honesty came from the regions filled with an identical care for
the construction of the Russian land. They raised to the Tsar the voice and
counsel of the people concerning how and what to build in the country. And
it remained for the Tsar to learn from all the voices, to bring everything
together for the benefit of all and to command the rigorous fulfilment for the
common good of the people of that for which he would answer before the
Omniscient God and his own conscience.”586
The Tsars always appreciated the significance of a direct link with the
people over the heads of the bureaucracy. In 1550 Ivan the Terrible had
created a personal office to deal with petitions called the Chelobitnij Prikaz,
and this lasted until Peter the Great. It disappeared under the eighteenth
century Tsars, but was revived by Tsar Paul at the end of the century…
To the local administration, writes Tikhomirov, “voyevodas were sent, but

besides them there existed numerous publicly elected authorities. The
voyevodas’ competence was complex and broad. The voyevoda, as
representative of the tsar, had to look at absolutely everything: so that all the
tsar’s affairs were intact, so that there should be guardians everywhere; to
take great care that in the town and the uyezd there should be no fights,
thievery, murder, fighting, burglary, bootlegging, debauchery; whoever was
declared to have committed such crimes was to be taken and, after
investigation, punished. The voyevoda was the judge also in all civil matters.
The voyevoda was in charge generally of all branches of the tsar’s
administration, but his power was not absolute, and he practised it together
with representatives of society’s self-administration… According to the tsar’s
Kliuchevsky, op. cit., p. 127.

585
Archbishop Andronicus, O Tserkvi Rossii (On the Church of Russia), Fryazino, 1997, pp.
586
132-133.
354
code of laws, none of the administrators appointed for the cities and volosts
could judge any matter without society’s representatives…
“Finally, the whole people had the broadest right of appeal to his Majesty
in all matters in general. ‘The government,’ notes Soloviev, ‘was not deaf to
petitions. If some mir [village commune] asked for an elected official instead
of the crown’s, the government willingly agreed. They petitioned that the city
bailiff… should be retired and a new one elected by the mir: his Majesty
ordered the election, etc. All in all, the system of the administrative
authorities of Muscovy was distinguished by a multitude of technical
imperfections, by the chance nature of the establishment of institutions, by
their lack of specialisation, etc. But this system of administration possessed
one valuable quality: the broad admittance of aristocratic and democratic
elements, their use as communal forces under the supremacy of the tsar’s
power, with the general right of petition to the tsar. This gave the supreme
power a wide base of information and brought it closer to the life of all the
estates, and there settled in all the Russias a deep conviction in the reality of a
supreme power directing and managing everything.”587
In practice, however, things did not always measure up to this standard.

Thus Riasanovsky writes that the voevodas, the tsar’s representatives in the
provinces, sometimes abused their positions. Their posts were known as
“kormlenia, that is, feedings”, and “were considered personal awards as well
as public acts. The officials exercised virtually full powers and at the same
time enriched themselves at the expense of the people.”588 Kliuchevsky puts it
still more bluntly: “Voevodas either exceeded their powers or did nothing at
all…”589
By the middle of the century, and in spite of its defeats at the hands of the
Poles and Swedes, the prestige of the Muscovite monarchy among the
Orthodox was reaching its height. Even the Greeks were looking to it to
deliver them from the Turkish yoke and take over the throne of the Byzantine
Emperors. Thus in 1645, during the coronation of Tsar Alexei, Patriarch
Joseph for the first time read the “Prayer of Philaret” on the enthronement of
the Russian Tsar over the whole oikoumene. And in 1649 Patriarch Paisius of
Jerusalem wrote to the tsar: “May the All-Holy Trinity multiply you more
than all the tsars, and count you worthy to grasp the most lofty throne of the
great King Constantine, your forefather, and liberate the peoples of the pious
and Orthodox Christians from impious hands. May you be a new Moses, may
you liberate us from captivity just as he liberated the sons of Israel from the
hands of Pharaoh.”590
587 Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’, pp. 270-271, 272.

589 Kliuchevsky, op. cit., p. 161.
590 Quoted in Sergius Fomin, Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia before the Second
Coming), Sergiev Posad: Holy Trinity – St. Sergius monastery, first edition, 1993, p. 20. Under
Alexis Mikhailovich, writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “the principle of the ‘ministry’ (prikaz)
did not cease to take precedence over the principle of the ‘land’ (zemskij): instead of the
355
As V.M. Lourié writes: “At that time hopes in Greece for a miraculous re-
establishment of Constantinople before the end of the world [based on the
prophecies of Leo the Wise and others], were somewhat strengthened, if not
squeezed out, by hopes on Russia. Anastasius Gordius (1654-1729), the author
of what later became an authoritative historical-eschatological interpretation
of the Apocalypse (1717-23) called the Russian Empire the guardian of the
faith to the very coming of the Messiah. The hopes of the Greeks for liberation
from the Turks that were linked with Russia, which had become traditional
already from the time of St. Maximus the Greek (1470-1555), also found their
place in the interpretations of the Apocalypse. Until the middle of the 19th
century itself – until the Greeks, on a wave of pan-European nationalism
thought up their ‘Great Idea’ – Russia would take the place of Byzantium in
their eschatological hopes, as being the last Christian Empire. They
considered the Russian Empire to be their own, and the Russian Tsar Nicholas
(not their Lutheran King Otto) as their own, to the great astonishment and
annoyance of European travellers.”591
Tragically, however, it was at precisely this time, when Russia seemed

ready to take the place of the Christian Roman Empire in the eyes of all the
Orthodox, that the Russian autocracy and Church suffered a simultaneous
attack from two sides from which it never fully recovered. From the right
came the attack of the “Old Ritualists” or “Old Believers”, as they came to be
called, who expressed the schismatic and nationalist idea that the only true
Orthodoxy was Russian Orthodoxy. From the left came the attack of the
westernizing Russian aristocracy and the Greek pseudo-hierarchs of the
council of 1666-67, who succeeded in removing the champion of the
traditional Orthodox symphony of powers, Patriarch Nikon of Moscow.
The fact that these attacks were able to cause such long-term damage
proves that the Russian autocracy was not in such a flourishing condition as it
appeared to many of its contemporaries…
All of the first three Romanov tsars came to power when they were in their
teens. This inevitably meant that the power of the tsars was weaker and that,
in spite of the good influence of powerful patriarchs such as Philaret and
Nikon, some of that power devolved to the boyars. This fact, combined with
the continuing greed of the boyars and the general instability that continued
to reverberate from the Time of Troubles, caused frequent uprisings among
the people during the reign of the second Romanov tsar, Alexei Mikhailovich.
healthy forces of local government, there was a badly organized bureaucracy – and that for
three hundred years to come. The reign of Alexis Mikhailovich is full of rebellions: protests of
the people against the voevodas and the central ministries…”(Le ‘Problème Russe’ à la fin du
xxe siècle (The ‘Russian Problem’ at the End of the 20th Century), Paris: Fayard, 1994, p. 13)
591 Lourié, “O Vozmozhnosti Kontsa Sveta v Odnoj Otdel’no Vzyatoj Strane” (“On the
Possibility of the End of the World in One Separate Country”), pp. 1-2 (MS).
356
The most serious of these took place in June, 1648 in Moscow. “The June
riots,” write Kliuchevsky, “were a rebellion of the common people against the
strong. ‘The rabble rose against the boyars,’ began plundering their houses
and those of the gentry and government clerks, and attacked the most hated
of the high officials.
“The lesson had a considerable effect. The court was greatly alarmed. Steps
were taken to mollify the Muscovite soldiery and the mob. At the Tsar’s
command the streltsy [musketeers] were treated to drinks. For several days
the Tsar’s father-in-law entertained delegates from the taxpaying population
of the capital in his home. The Tsar himself, during a church procession,
addressed the people with a speech that sounded like an apology, and with
tears in his eyes ‘begged the rabble’ to spare his dear friend and relative
Morozov. Promises were lavishly given. The rulers began to fear the
community. Rumors went about that the Tsar had become gracious and was
driving the strong men out of his realm, that they were being stoned and
beaten. Under the old dynasty Moscow had never experienced such stormy
manifestations of popular resentment against the ruling classes, had never
seen such a rapid transition from contempt for the people to pandering to
them or heard such unseemly speeches about the Tsar as spread through the
city after the riots. ‘The Tsar is a fool. He does what the boyars Morozov and
Miloslavsky tell him. They are the real masters, and the Tsar himself knows it,
but he says nothing. The devil has robbed him of his wits.’
“It was not the Moscow riot of June 1648, soon reenacted in other towns,
that prompted the idea of compiling the new law code – there were other
reasons for this – but it caused the government to invite representatives of the
people to take part in the work. The Zemsky Sobor, called for September 1 of
the same year to hear and confirm the new code, was regarded by the
government as a means of pacifying the people. We may well believe
Patriarch Nikon, who wrote, as though it were a matter of common
knowledge, that the Zemsky Sobor was summoned ‘out of fear of the common
people and of civil strife, and not for the cause of truth’. There is no doubt
that although the riots were not the original reason for undertaking the work
of codification, they affected the course of it. The government’s alarm
interfered with the work.”592
We may compare Tsar Alexei’s law code, or Ulozhenie, with the Emperor
Justinian’s similar and much more famous work of codification, the Corpus
juris civilis, also compiled during a period of civil unrest (the Nika riots). Just
as Justinian’s code preceded the expansion of his empire to the West (the code
was immediately introduced into reconquered Italy), so Alexei’s code
preceded the expansion of his empire to the west and the south. The Ulozhenie
was the first systematization of law in Russian history. It combined Church
canons with laws of the Byzantine emperors, the laws of Russian tsars and
592 Kliuchevsky, op. cit., pp. 142-143.
357
great princes and completely new laws. An impressive and necessary work, it
was published in 1649 with two print runs of 1200 copies each.
However, the subsequent history of Tsar Alexei’s reign elicits the reflection:
the internal stability and justice of a state cannot be guaranteed by laws,
however many and just they may be, if the minds of the people are still ruled
by passion…
Now the Ulozhenie laid great emphasis on the defence of the Orthodox
Faith, and on the rights of the Patriarch and the clergy. Thus in the first article,
strict punishments up to and including the death penalty were prescribed for
heresy, and articles 27 to 89 of chapter 10 were devoted to various
punishments for offending the clergy, while no special sanctions were
prescribed for offending the tsar.593 And yet by the end of the reign the
Patriarch had been deposed, the Church humbled, and the power of the Tsar
exalted, a development that was continued and magnified, with enormous
consequences for Russia, by Tsar Alexei’s son, Peter the Great…
This turn-round began with a controversial section of the Ulozhenie itself,

the establishment of the so-called Monastyrskij Prikaz, a purely secular
institution that administered disputes between clergy and laity, and also suits
involving monasteries, monks and parish clergy. Patriarch Nikon tried hard
to get it abolished, but failed. Eventually, in 1675, after Nikon’s fall, it was
abolished, but, as Fr. Alexis Nikolin writes, “the interference of the state in
church life steadily increased. The property privileges of church institutions
and the clergy were gradually limited or completely removed. Gradually state
obligations were extended to ecclesiastical estates…”594
Of particular significance in this respect was article 42 of chapter 17 of the

Ulozhenie, which forbade the giving or sale of estates to the Church. This
article “did not deprive the spiritual authorities and monasteries of the right
to own property, but only stopped any increase in their possessions. Chapter
19 already contained norms that presupposed or even directly prescribed
such deprivations. Article 1 of this chapter established the requisitioning of
church estates in Moscow and near Moscow. On the face of it, this seemed to
be a violation of the decrees of the Laws of St. Vladimir and Yaroslav, the 49th
canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council and the 12th canon of the Seventh
Ecumenical Council.”595
593 Fr. Alexei Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo (The Church and the State), Moscow: Sretensky
monastery, 1997, pp. 70-71.

594 Nikolin, op. cit., p. 73.
595
Nikolin, op. cit., p. 73.
358
42. MUSCOVY AND UKRAINE
Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich also became involved in external wars, especially

in Ukraine… “During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,” writes Sir
Geoffrey Hosking, “with the greater physical security afforded by the Polish-
Lithuanian state, Ukraine became [Muscovy’s] grain belt. The landed nobility
gained in both privilege and material wealth, while imposing an every more
debilitating serfdom on the peasants. The Lithuanian Statute of 1529, together
with the Magdeburg Law in the cities, provided some guarantees of
citizenship for all non-serfs and, although often in practice ignored, it
inculcated a stronger legal awareness in Ukraine than was prevalent in
Muscovy.
“Polish culture proved highly attractive to many Ukrainian landowners,

especially since those who converted to Catholicism received the full rights of
the szlachta (Polish nobility) to enserf the peasants and to participate as
citizens in the political life of the Commonwealth. With the coming of the
counter-reformation, the Polish king encouraged the expansion of a network
of Jesuit colleges, which brought with them the latest in European culture and
thinking, while a new Greek Catholic (or Uniate) Church was created,
Orthodox in ritual, but administratively in union with Rome, which took over
all Orthodox parishes. Originally conceived as an attempt to begin the
reunification of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the Uniate Church became in
effect an instrument of Polonization.
“Where the ill-defined borders of the joint Commonwealth faded into the
steppe, however, Catholicism and high culture made but few and feeble
inroads. There the Cossack community of the lower Dnieper continued its
steppe way of life, hunting, fishing, raiding across the sea into the Ottoman
Empire, and striking up temporary alliances with Muscovy or Poland for the
defence of its frontiers. The Cossacks’ headquarters, the Sech’, on an island
below the Dnieper rapids, was almost impregnable and guaranteed their
dogged self-rule as well as their privileges, notably their exemption from
taxation, which were registered by the Polish Crown.
“By the mid-seventeenth century, the Polish king and szlachta, tiring of the
anarchy on their borders and jealous of the Cossacks’ privileges, attempted
forcefully to subjugate the Dnieper community and incorporate it fully into
the Commonwealth. The attempt provoked a rebellion in defence of Cossack
self-rule: its leader, Hetman Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, sought the protection of
the Muscovite tsar.
“[Under the Treaty of Pereiaslavl (1654)], the Cossacks pledged the Tsar
‘eternal loyalty, while he in turn confirmed the Cossack Host in its privileges,
including its own law and administration, the right to elect its own Hetman
and to receive foreign envoys not hostile to the Tsar. He also guaranteed the
Ukrainian nobility, church and cities their traditional rights. Under these
359
arrangements the alliance was concluded and Poland was driven out of left-
bank [i.e. Eastern] Ukraine and Kiev…
“Left-bank Ukraine became the site of a new state, the Ukrainian

Hetmanate, which preserved a degree of autonomy, as well as its own culture,
well into the eighteenth century. The representatives of nobles, clergymen
and burghers were given their place alongside Cossacks in the General
Council which elected the Hetman. An institutional foundation was thus laid
for the Cossacks to create the framework of a Ukrainian nation-state in
alliance with Russia…”596
An important factor in this situation was the Ashkenazi Jews, whom

persecutions in Western Europe had gradually pushed further east, into
Poland.
Norman Cantor writes: “The Polish king and nobility held vast lands and
ruled millions of newly enserfed [Russian] peasants and could make varied
use of the Jews. Hence the Jews were welcomed into Poland in the sixteenth
century from Germany and Western Europe. Even Jews exiled from Spain in
1492 and those tired of the ghettos of northern Italy under the oppressive eye
of the papacy found their way to Poland. Its green, fruitful, and
underpopulated land seemed wonderful to the Jews. By the end of the
sixteenth century Poland was being hailed as the new golden land of the
Jews…”597
Ivan the Terrible banned the entry of Jewish merchants into Moscow. This
“Russian barrier to further eastern penetration”, writes Paul Johnson, “led to
intensive Jewish settlement in Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine… By 1575,
while the total population [of Poland] had risen to seven million, the number
of Jews had jumped to 150,000, and thereafter the rise was still more rapid. In
1503 the Polish monarchy appointed Rabbi Jacob Polak ‘Rabbi of Poland’, and
the emergence of a chief rabbinate, backed by the crown, the first allowed
since the end of the exilarchate. From 1551 the chief rabbi was elected by the
Jews themselves. This was, to be sure, oligarchic rather than democratic rule.
The rabbinate had wide powers over law and finances, appointing judges and
a great variety of other officials… The royal purpose in devolving power on
the Jews was, of course, self-interested. There was a great deal of Polish
hostility to the Jews. In Cracow, for instance, where the local merchant class
was strong, Jews were usually kept out. The kings found out they could make
money out of the Jews by selling to certain cities and towns, such as Warsaw,
the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. But they could make even more by
allowing Jewish communities to grow up, and milking them. The rabbinate
and local Jewish councils were primarily tax-raising agencies. Only 30 per
cent of what they raised went on welfare and official salaries; all the rest was
handed over to the crown in return for protection.
596 Hosking, op. cit., pp. 23-25.

597 Cantor, The Secret Chain, London: Fontana, 1996, p. 182.
360
“The association of the rabbinate with communal finance and so with the
business affairs of those who had to provide it led the eastern or Ashkenazi
Jews to go even further than the early-sixteenth-century Italians in giving
halakhic approval to new methods of credit-finance. Polish Jews operating
near the frontiers of civilization [!] had links with Jewish family firms in the
Netherlands and Germany. A new kind of credit instrument, the mamram,
emerged and got rabbinical approval. In 1607 Jewish communities in Poland
and Lithuania were also authorized to use heter iskah, an inter-Jewish
borrowing system which allowed one Jew to finance another in return for a
percentage. This rationalization of the law eventually led even conservative
authorities, like the famous Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, to
sanction lending at interest.
“With easy access to credit, Jewish pioneer settlers played a leading part in
developing eastern Poland, the interior of Lithuania, and the Ukraine,
especially from the 1560s onwards. The population of Western Europe was
expanding fast. It needed to import growing quantities of grain. Ambitious
Polish landowners, anxious to meet the need, went into partnership with
Jewish entrepreneurs to create new wheat-growing areas to supply the
market, take the grain down-river to the Baltic ports, and then ship it west.
The Polish magnates – Radziwills, Sovieskis, Zamojskis, Ostrogskis,
Lubomirskis – owned or conquered the land. The ports were run by German
Lutherans. The Dutch Calvinists owned most of the ships. But the Jews did
the rest. They not only managed the estates but in some cases held the deeds
as pledges in return for working capital. Sometimes they leased the estates
themselves. They ran the tolls. They built and ran mills and distilleries. They
owned the river boats, taking out the wheat and bringing back in return wine,
cloth and luxury goods, which they sold in their shops. They were in soap,
glazing, tanning and furs. They created entire villages and townships
(shtetls), where they lived in the centre, while peasants (Catholics in Poland
and Lithuania, Orthodox in the Ukraine) occupied the suburbs.
“Before 1569 [recte: 1596] when the Union of Brest-Litovsk made the Polish
settlement of the Ukraine possible, there were only twenty-four Jewish
settlements there with 4,000 inhabitants; by 1648 there were 115, with a
numbered population of 51,325, the total being much greater.598 Most of these
places were owned by Polish nobles, absentee-landlords, the Jews acting as
middlemen and intermediaries with the peasants – a role fraught with future
danger. Often Jews were effectively the magnates too. At the end of the
sixteenth century Israel of Zloczew, for instance, leased an entire region of
hundreds of square miles from a consortium of nobles to whom he paid the
598 “Yu. Hessen writes that under the first false Demetrius (1605-06) the Jews appeared in
Moscow ‘in comparatively large numbers’, as did other foreigners. But after the end of the
Time of Troubles it was declared that the second false Demetrius (‘the thief of Tushino’) was
‘Jewish by race’” (A.I. Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti Let Vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together),
Moscow, 2001, vol. 1, p. 23). (V.M.)
361
enormous sum of 4,500 zlotys. He sub-let tolls, taverns and mills to his poorer
relatives. Jews from all over Europe arrived to take part in this colonizing
process. In many settlements they constituted the majority of the inhabitants,
so that for the first time outside Palestine they dominated the local culture.
But they were important at every level of society and administration. They
farmed the taxes and the customs. They advised government. And every
Polish magnate had a Jewish counsellor in his castle, keeping the books,
writing letters, running the economic show…
“In 1648-49, the Jews of south-eastern Poland and the Ukraine were struck
by catastrophe. This episode was of great importance in Jewish history for
several reasons… The Thirty Years War had put growing pressure on the
food-exporting resources of Poland. It was because of their Polish networks
that Jewish contractors to the various armies had been so successful in
supplying them. But the chief beneficiaries had been the Polish landlords; and
the chief losers had been the Polish and Ukrainian peasants, who had seen an
ever-increasing proportion of the crops they raised marketed and sold at huge
profit to the ravenous armies. Under the Arenda system, whereby the Polish
nobility leased not only land but all fixed assets such as mills, breweries,
distilleries, inns and tolls to Jews, in return for fixed payments, the Jews had
flourished and their population had grown rapidly. But the system was
inherently unstable and unjust. The landlords, absentee and often spendthrift,
put continual pressure on the Jews by raising the price each time a lease was
renewed; the Jews in turn put pressure on the peasants….
“The Ukrainian peasants finally rose in the late spring of 1648, led by …
Bogdan Chmielnicki, with the help of Dnieper Cossack and Tartars from the
Crimea. His rising was fundamentally aimed at Polish rule and the Catholic
church, and many Polish nobles and clergy were among the victims. But the
principal animus was directed against Jews, with whom peasants had the
most contact, and when it came to the point the Poles always abandoned their
Jewish allies to save themselves. Thousands of Jews from villages and shtetls
scrambled for safety to the big fortified towns, which turned into death-traps
for them. At Tulchin the Polish troops handed over the Jews to the Cossacks
in exchange for their own lives599; at Tarnopol, the garrison refused to let the
Jews in at all. At Bar, the fortress fell and all the Jews were massacred. There
was another fierce slaughter at Narol. At Nemirov, the Cossacks got into the
fortress by dressing as Poles, ‘and they killed about 6,000 souls in the town’,
according to the Jewish chronicle; ‘they drowned several hundreds in the
water and by all kinds of cruel torments’. In the synagogue they used the
ritual knives to kill Jews, then burned the building down, tore up the sacred
books, and trampled them underfoot, and used the leather covers for
sandals.”600
599 At Tulchin the Cossacks said to the Poles: “We will spare you as long as you pay a ransom,
then we will leave. But we will not have mercy on the Jews for any money. They are our
accursed enemies; they have insulted our faith, and we have sworn to destroy their tribe.
Expel them from the city and be in agreement with us” (Platonov, op. cit., p. 228).
600 Johnson, A History of the Jews, pp. 250-252, 258-260.
362
Cantor writes that “the Ukrainians had a right to resent the Jews, if not to
kill them. The Jews were the immediate instrument of the Ukrainians’
subjection and degradation. The Halakic rabbis never considered the Jewish
role in oppression of the Ukrainian peasants in relation to the Hebrew
prophets’ ideas of social justice. Isaiah and Amos were dead texts from the
past in rabbinical mentality.
“Or perhaps the Jews were so moved by racist contempt for the Ukrainian
and Polish peasantry as to regard them as subhuman and unworthy of
consideration under biblical categories of justice and humanity…”601
The Moscow tsars were hesitant about getting involved in the complicated
politics of the Ukraine. It was not that they did not want to help their fellow
Orthodox who were being persecuted by heretics and Jews. Besides, helping
them accorded with their policy of the gradual gathering of the former
Russian lands under their rule. But they did not know how to handle the
Cossacks, who were anarchical, fickle in their loyalties and divided amongst
themselves. Moreover, they feared another war with the Poles, who had
defeated them near Smolensk in 1634…
Another important factor was the Muscovites’ distrust of Ukrainian

Orthodoxy, which had become to fall under Catholic influence in the Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth. Particularly suspect to some people was the
Metropolitan of Kiev since 1633, Peter Mohyla, the son of the ruler of
Moldavia, who, as Serhii Plokhy writes, “worked hard to reform Ukrainian
and Belarussian Orthodoxy. He began with the education of the clergy. In
1632, he merged two existing schools for Orthodox youth, establishing a
Kyivan college – the first Western-type educational institution in Ukraine,
modeled in structure and curriculum on the Jesuit colleges of the era. The
Catholic reform, launched by Rome at the Council of Trent (1545-1563),
became the inspiration and model for Mohyla’s reform of the Orthodox
Church of the Commonwealth.
“Catholic influences were apparent in the new metropolitan’s liturgical

innovations and in his Confession of Faith – an Eastern Orthodox catechism
that the Orthodox had lacked. An Orthodox catechism was compiled in the
1640s by a circle of intellectuals working under Mohyla’s supervision and
approved by the Kyivan church council. In 1643, it was approved by the
Eastern patriarchs. The confession that Mohyla and his learned circle
composed became an official exposition of the dogmas and articles of the
Orthodox faith throughout the Orthodox world, with the notable exception of
Muscovy.
601 Cantor, op. cit., p. 184.
363
`’The rise of Kyiv as a center of Orthodox learning took place at a time
when Muscovy and its church were in almost complete isolation, oblivious to
the challenges that faced their fellow Orthodox abroad. But the desire of the
young Tsar Aleksei to reform his church changed the attitude of the
Muscovite state to Kyiv and its teachings. Nowhere was this more evident
than in the sphere of publishing. In 1649, Moscow printers published a Brief
Compendium of Teachings on the Articles of Faith, based on Peter Mohyla’s
Orthodox Confession of Faith. Muscovite Orthodoxy was rejoining the rest of
the Orthodox world, now defined by the theological teachings of Kyiv.”602
Although this last statement is an exaggeration, Ukrainian influence would

soon have an impact on the rise of the Old Ritualist schism, as we shall see…
Peter Mohyla was not the only Orthodox hierarch in this period who was
accused of submitting to Catholic influences. Thus in relation to the Catholic
teaching on purgatory, Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) writes: “During the
‘Babylonian captivity’ of Orthodox theology in the 17th and 18th centuries,
there were Greeks and Russians who, while avoiding the actual word
‘purgatory’ and any reference to purgatorial fire, otherwise adopted a
position more or less identical with the Latin view, including the notions of
penal, expiatory suffering after death and of satisfaction or satispassio. Gabriel
Severus, Peter Mogila, Patriarch Dositheos of Jerusalem and Elias Minetti are
notable cases in point. But they are not representative of the Orthodox
tradition as a whole. Even at the height of the Latin influence in the Middle
East, there were always others, such as Patriarch Meletios Pigas of
Alexandria, who strongly objected to such ideas…”603
In 1649 Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks appealed for support against the
Catholic Poles to Tsar Alexei, using Patriarch Paisius of Jerusalem as a
mediator. However, the Tsar was cautious. “It was explained to the
confessionally minded patriarch that the tsar could not do as Khmelnytsky
requested because, as a Christian ruler, he was bound by the peace treaty
concluded with the Commonwealth in 1634. He could take the Cossacks
under his protection only if they secured their own liberation. Otherwise, he
could allow them to resettle to Muscovy if they were persecuted by the Poles
because of their Orthodox faith. The tsar seemed to be caught in a religious
dilemma – whether to violate the oath he had given to a fellow Christian – but
not Orthodox – ruler, or to protect his fellow Orthodox Christians. For the
next four years, he would stay out of the Ukrainian conflict. Muscovy was not
prepared to make war on a country that had defeated it more than once in
recent decades and had even managed to place a garrison in Moscow itself.
602
Plokhy, Lost Kingdom, London: Allen Lane, 2017, p. 31.
Ware, “’One Body in Christ’: Death and the Communion of Saints”, Sobornost’, 1981, vol. 3,
603
no. 2, pp. 183-184.
364
“Muscovy began preparing for war with the Commonwealth in the spring
of 1651, when the tsar realized that the Commonwealth was too weak to
effectively suppress the Cossack uprising. It was then that Muscovite
diplomats began preparing the ground for a breach with the Commonwealth,
casting themselves as protectors of the Polish king’s Orthodox subjects. They
claimed that Khmelnytsky had risen in protest against religious persecution,
as the Poles had forced the Cossacks to ‘accept their Roman faith, sealed
godly churches, and imposed the Union [of Brest-Litovsk] on the Orthodox
churches, and oppressed them in every way.’ The final decision to go to war
with the king was made in the Assembly of the Land, which met in Moscow
in a number of sessions between June and October 1653. The delegates
concluded that the tsar was free to take the Cossacks and their lands under
his high hand (protection) for the sake of ‘the Orthodox Christian Faith and
the holy Churches of God’
“An embassy was sent to Khmelnytsky to break the news. Muscovy was
entering the war on the side of the Cossacks. The embassy’s path through
Ukrainian territory was marked by religious processions and church services
celebrating the newfound unity of the two Orthodox peoples. As a Cossack
officers’ council convened by Khmelnytsky in the town of Pereiaslav east of
Kyiv, the hetman presented three alternatives: go back under the rule of the
Catholic king; recognize the suzerainty of the Muslim sultan, who ruled over
the Crimea and was interested in extending his authority northward; or
accept the protectorate of the Orthodox tsar. He called on his officers to accept
protection from a ruler ‘of the same worship of the Greek rite, of the same
faith’. The gathering supported the hetman, shouting that they wanted the
‘eastern Orthodox tsar’.
“The Orthodox alliance had been born…”604
The tsar was at first successful. As Kliuchevsky writes, “a large tract of

Russian territory was wrested from Poland and restored to its hereditary
owner, the Tsar of Muscovy. After the conquest of White Russia and
Lithuania, the Tsar’s title was immediately revised, and he was styled ‘the
autocrat of Great and Little and White Russia, of Lithuania, Volhynia, and
Podolia’. But in Moscow they understood very little about relations between
the different social groups in the Ukraine and took little notice of them, as
being of no importance. The Moscow boyars wondered why Ataman
Vyhovsky’s envoys spoke with such contempt about the Zaporozhye
Cossacks as gamblers and drunkards, while all the Cossack population,
including the ataman, was called ‘the host of Zaporozhye’. They questioned
the envoys with interest, asking them whether the former atamans lived in
towns or at Zaporozhye, and from what ranks they were elected, and where
Bohdan Khmelnitsky himself came from. Evidently the Muscovite
government, having annexed the Ukraine, found that it knew nothing
whatever about its internal relations. In consequence, the Ukrainian question,
604
Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 33-34.
365
so crookedly presented by both sides, impeded and defeated Moscow’s
foreign policy for years to come, entangled Muscovy in the hopeless
Ukrainian squabbles, split its forces in the struggle against Poland, compelled
it to renounce Lithuania and White Russia with Volhynia and Podolia, and
barely permitted it to keep Ukrainian lands east of the Dnieper, with Kiev on
the opposite bank. After these losses Moscow could apply to itself Bohdan
Khmelnitsky’s words when he reproached it, weeping, for not having helped
him in time: ‘It was not this that I wanted, and this isn’t the way things should
have happened.’
“The Ukrainian question directly or indirectly complicated Moscow’s

foreign policy. Tsar Alexei began the war with Poland for the Ukraine in 1654,
and soon gained the whole of White Russia and a considerable part of
Lithuania with the towns of Vilna, Kovno, and Grodno. While Muscovy was
annexing Poland’s eastern provinces, another enemy, the Swedish King
Charles X, attacked the country from the north and, moving as quickly as the
Russians, occupied all Great and Little Poland with Cracow and Warsaw,
drove out King Jan Casimir, and proclaimed himself king of Poland. Finally
he tried to rob Tsar Alexei of Lithuania. Thus the two enemies who had been
attacking Poland from different sides collided and quarreled over the booty.
Tsar Alexei recalled Ivan IV’s idea about the shores of the Baltic and Livonia,
when the war with Poland was interrupted in 1656 by war with Sweden. The
forgotten idea of expanding the Muscovite territory to its natural boundary,
the Baltic Sea, came to the fore again. The question remained as far from
solution as ever. The Russians did not succeed in taking Riga, and the Tsar
soon stopped military operations and finally made peace with Sweden in
1661, giving back all he had gained from it. The war proved fruitless and
indeed harmful to Muscovy, because it gave Poland a chance to recover from
the Swedish onslaught; but it did something to prevent the union of the two
states under the same king. They were equally hostile to Muscovy but
constantly weakened their own powers by opposing each other.”605
We may interrupt Kliuchevsky’s narrative to ask: why, under both Ivan the
Terrible and Tsar Alexei, were Muscovite attempts to reach the Baltic
unsuccessful? And we may suggest the following answer: that, unlike White
Russia or the Ukraine, the Baltic peoples were neither Orthodox nor part of
the ancient patrimony of Kievan Rus’; that is, they had never been part of
what in today’s parlance would be called “the Russian world”. Therefore they
were in effect wars of aggression – and it is a striking feature of Russian
history how rarely Russia won aggressive as opposed to defensive wars, or
wars in defence of Orthodox Christianity…
“Bohdan was nearing his end, but once more he stood in the way of both
his friends and his enemies, of both the state he had betrayed and the one he
had sworn to serve. Alarmed by the rapprochement between Russia and
Poland, he made an agreement with King Charles X of Sweden and the
605 Kliuchevsky, op. cit., pp. 127-128.
366
Transylvanian Prince Rakoczy to divide Poland among the three of them. A
true representative of the Cossacks, who were accustomed to serve any
number of customers, Bohdan had been a servant or an ally or sometimes a
traitor to all the neighboring sovereigns – the King of Poland, the Tsar of
Muscovy, the Khan of the Crimea, the Sultan, the ruler of Moldavia, and the
Prince of Transylvania. Finally he hatched out a plan to be an independent
prince of the Ukraine under Charles X, who wanted to be king both of
Sweden and of Poland. It was these intrigues of the dying Bohdan that made
Tsar Alexei end the war with Sweden as best he could.
“Ukraine was also responsible for involving Moscow for the first time in
direct conflict with Turkey. After Bohdan’s death there began an open
struggle between the Cossack elders and the rank and file. His successor,
Ataman Vyhovsky, went over to the Polish king, and together with the Tatars
destroyed Tsar Alexei’s best army at Konotop. The Poles, encouraged by this,
and freed from the Swedes with Moscow’s help, refused to give Muscovy any
of its war gains. There began a second war with Poland, bringing with it two
military disasters to Muscovy: Prince Khovansky’s defeat in White Russia and
Sheremetev’s capitulation at Chudnovo in Volhynia because of the Cossacks’
treachery. Lithuania and White Russia were lost. Vyhovsky’s successors,
Bohdan’s two sons, Iuri and Teteria, proved to be traitors. Ukraine split into
two hostile halves. The area east of the Dnieper belonged to Muscovy, and the
area west of the Dnieper belonged to Poland. The King had seized almost the
whole of Ukraine.
“Both warring states became completely exhausted. Moscow had no

money left to pay its soldiers, and issued copper coinage at the value of silver,
which caused a riot in 1661. Great Poland, under the leadership of
Lubomirski, rebelled against its king. Muscovy and Poland seemed prepared
to drain each other to the last drop of blood. They were saved by their
common enemy, Ataman Doroshenko, who surrendered himself and Ukraine
west of the Dnieper to the Sultan in 1666. Menaced by a formidable enemy,
Poland and Muscovy concluded an armistice at Andrusovo in 1667, and that
put an end to the war. Moscow retained the Smolensk and Seversk regions
and the eastern Ukraine with Kiev. It now occupied an extended front line
along the Dnieper from its upper reaches down to Zaporozhye, which, true to
its historical character, remained a halfway house, serving both Poland and
Muscovy…”606
606
Kliuchevsky, op. cit., pp. 128- 130.
367

III. THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROGRAMME (1660-‐1789)
368
43. THE RESTORATION OF THE ENGLISH MONARCHY
The English revolution gradually ran out of steam. It was not only that a
nation as convivial and traditionalist as the English could not live forever
without Christmas revels and the “smells and bells” of traditional religion.
“As the millenium failed to arrive,” writes Sir Christopher Hill, “and taxation
was not reduced, as division and feuds rent the revolutionaries, so the image
of his sacred majesty loomed larger over the quarrelsome, unsatisfactory
scene… The mass of ordinary people came to long for a return to ‘normality’,
to the known, the familiar, the traditional. Victims of scrofula who could
afford it went abroad to be touched by the king [Charles II] over the water:
after 1660 he was back, sacred and symbolic. Eikonoklastes was burnt by the
common hangman together with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates… The
men of property in 1659-60 longed for ‘a king with plenty of holy oil about
him’…”607
And yet the king’s legitimacy was a secondary consideration for the men of
property. Their first priority was that he should suppress the radicals,
preserve order and let them make money in peace. A Divine Right ruler was
not suitable because he might choose to touch their financial interests, as
Charles I had done. A constitutional ruler was the answer – that is, a ruler
who would rule within limitations imposed by the men of property and
drawn up in a constitution.
Now Charles II was not, of course, a constitutional monarch de jure, nor

did he believe in constitutionalism personally. He admired the absolutism of
his cousin, Louis XIV, he allowed the cult of his father, Charles the martyr,
and he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. For, as he said to the French
ambassador, “no other creed matches so well the absolute dignity of kings”.608
Nevertheless, in spite of himself, he did provide the necessary transition to

a constitutional monarchy that the landowning aristocrats wanted because he
did their will in most things. He did this partly because his years of
wandering as a fugitive in Europe and England (including even hiding in a
famous oak from his pursuers) had taught him caution and a flexibility and
capacity for compromise that his father had lacked. And partly because he
saw that the country had changed irrevocably in the last twenty years, and
that any attempt to turn the clock back to 1640 would simply result in another
civil war with a similar outcome to the last one. For, as Hill writes, “the
seventeenth was the decisive century in English history”609; and the vital
changes in that decisive century had been made by Oliver Cromwell and the
English Parliament, not by the Stuart kings.
607 Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 181.

608 Robert Tombs, The English and their History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, p. 255.
609 Hill, God’s Englishman, London: Penguin, 1970, p. 13.
369
Since he would have to make political compromises, it was only
understandable that Charles should think he could make spiritual and moral
compromises, too. And so, as Robert Tombs writes, Charles “did not take
religion too seriously – he was more or less Catholic, the clearest repudiation
of Puritanism – and was indulgent to others as to himself: ‘God will never
damn a man for allowing himself a little pleasure’ (which in his case included
fathering at least fourteen illegitimate children). All this – which outraged
Puritans – was politics as well as personality: he wanted to defuse religious
conflict by favouring an inclusive Church of England, with tolerance for law-
abiding Dissenters and a lessening of petty moral persecution…
Notwithstanding inevitable disillusionment, few restorations have been so
successful as what Daniel Defoe called ‘his lazy, long, lascivious reign’.
“In August 1660 Charles pushed through an Act of General Pardon,

Indemnity and Oblivion, which recognized changes in ownership of land and
gave an amnesty covering the Civil War and republican period. Excluded
were surviving regicides: nine were executed, and efforts made to hunt down
the rest. Pepys went to see General Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered –
‘he looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition.’ John Evelyn
‘met their quarters mangld & cut & reeking as they were brought from the
Gallows in baskets’. Otherwise revenge was symbolic. Cromwell’s body was
dug up, hanged and beheaded (the head, by a long and circuitous route, is
now somewhere in the chapel of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge). There
was no attempt to turn the clock back far: Charles I’s anti-absolutist
concessions of 1641 were kept; confiscated royal lands were left with their
new owners; former parliamentarians stayed in office – they made up nearly
half of Charles’s Privy Council and formed the majority of JPs. This, said
disgruntled loyalists, was indemnity for the king’s enemies, and oblivion for
his friends. True, but safer and wiser than the attitude of the French Bourbons
restored after the Revolution, who ‘had learned nothing and forgotten
nothing’.
“However, the king’s friends were not willing to let go of everything: they
would not let the detested Roundheads continue to run their parishes and
towns. A series of statutes – an Act of Uniformity (1662), imposing the use of
the Book of Common Prayer; a Corporations Act (1661), which excluded
religious dissenters from town government; a Test Act (1672), requiring all
public employees to take public oaths of allegiance and Anglican orthodoxy;
and the Conventicles Act (1664), banning private Nonconformist worship.
Thus, non-Anglicans were forced to conform to the Church of England or give
up public office. About 1,000 ministers (one in six) gave up their livings, and
about 2,000 clergy and teachers were ejected. Charles’s attempts to
circumvent this legislation were blocked. Intended to restore unity, these acts
on the contrary created a permanent religious schism in England, the long-
term legacy of the Civil War. Disillusioned by the failure of the godly
revolution, Dissenters went underground and turned inwards. This was the
atmosphere in which John Bunyan, imprisoned for illegal preaching, wrote
The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), one of the greatest and most popular works of
370
Puritan piety – a work not of revolution but of individual salvation and
stubborn righteousness. There was no attempt to silence Dissenters politically,
however – they had the same right to vote and sit in Parliament. Some leading
Anglicans were moving away from rigidity and compulsion towards what
opponents called ‘Latitudinarianism’ – a more tolerant and rational religion.
Even in oppressed Ireland and divided Scotland there were signs of greater
tolerance, for which the king deserves some credit…”610
And yet it is debatable how creditworthy “the merry monarch” really was.
The Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London of 1666 could be
interpreted as signs of God’s wrath… Moreover, the king was by no means
universally popular.
As Hill writes, “Within a few years not only Bristol Baptists were looking
back nostalgically to ‘those halcyon days of prosperity, liberty and peace…
those Oliverian days of liberty’. An unsentimental civil servant like Samuel
Pepys, soon to be accused of papist leanings, recorded in July 1667 that:
‘Everybody do now-a-days reflect upon Oliver and commend him, what
brave things he did and made all the neighbour princes fear him.’ Cromwell’s
former ambassador in France, Lockhart, whom Charles II also employed,
‘found he had nothing of that regard that was paid him in Cromwell’s time’.
George Downing made a similar remark about the attitude of the Dutch to
him, and the Ambassador of the Netherlands in 1672 told Charles II to his face
that of course his country treated him differently from the Protector, for
‘Cromwell was a great man, who made himself feared by land and by sea’.
The common people were muttering similar things. ‘Was not Oliver’s name
dreadful to neighbour nations?’…
“And if we look on another 20 years, it becomes clear that the reigns of

Charles II and James II were only an interlude. In 1660 the old order had not
been restored: neither prerogative courts nor the Court of Wards nor feudal
tenures. Royal interference in economic affairs did not return, nor (despite
James II’s attempts) royal interference with control of their localities by the
‘natural rulers’. After 1688 the policies of the 1650s were picked up again. The
revolution of 1688 itself was so easily successful because James II remembered
all too clearly that he had a joint in his neck. The lesson of January 1649 for the
kings of Europe did not need repeating for another 144 years. The follies of
James, and William III’s own semi-legitimate claim to royalist loyalty, meant
that the Liberator did not need to retain the large army which brought him to
power: a settlement very like that which Oliver sought in vain was arrived at,
with a strong executive but ultimate control by Parliament and the taxpayers.
Parliament became again a permanent part of the constitution. Taxes could
not be levied without the approval of the representatives of the men of
property in the House of Commons; they could not be anticipated without the
goodwill of bankers and the moneyed interest. All attempts to build up an
independent executive, with its own judicial system or subservient judges,
610 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 251-253.
371
strong enough to coerce the ‘natural rulers’ had failed – Laud’s and James II’s
no less than the Major-Generals’. In 1649 and again in 1653 London juries
acquitted John Lilburne against all the authority of the central government: in
1656 the republican Bradshaw demanded trial by a jury of ‘men of value’, and
Cromwell, ‘seeming to slight that’, spoke against juries. By the end of the
century juries were no longer accountable to the government for their verdicts;
judges had become independent of the crown, dependent on Parliament.
There was to be no administrative law in England, no more torture. The
gentry and town oligarchies henceforth dominated local government,
Parliamentary elections and juries.
“For James I customs had been one of many sources of revenue: by the end
of the century customs dues were raised or lowered in the interests of the
national economic policy which the commercial classes now dictated. At the
restoration the Navigation Act had been re-enacted, and the power of the East
India Company confirmed: imperial trade, and especially re-exports, were
expanding rapidly. Sprat in 1667 could assume as a truism learnt in the
preceding twenty years that ‘the English greatness will never be supported or
increased… by any other wars but those at sea’. But it was only after 1688 that
governments came to assume that ‘trade must be the principal interest of
England’…
“Parliament now determined foreign policy, and used the newly mobilized
financial resources of the country, through an aggressive use of sea power, to
protect and expand the trade of a unified empire. England itself had by then
been united under the dominance of the London market; separate courts no
longer governed Wales and the North, ‘canonization’ was no longer a danger.
William III’s political and economic subjugation of Ireland was thoroughly
Cromwellian: the Union with Scotland in 1707 was on the same lines as that
of 1652-60. By the end of the century industrial freedom had been won,
monopolies had been overthrown, government interference with the market,
including the labour market, had ended. The anti-Dutch policy was
sponsored by the Stuart Kings, who had their own reasons for disliking the
Dutch republic. The policy of colonial expansion into the western hemisphere,
first against Spain, then against France, enjoyed more support among the
gentry, and gradually won over a majority in the House of Commons as
Dutch and Spanish power declined and French increased. After 1688 there
was no opposition between the two policies, for the Netherlands had been
effectively subordinated to England, and all the power of the English state
could be concentrated on the battle with France for the Spanish empire and
the trade of the world. The two foreign policies fused as the landed and
moneyed interests fused. England emerged from the seventeenth-century
crisis geared to the new world of capitalism and colonial empire.”611
611 Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 245-248.
372
Hill writes: “In his essay Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates,
Francis Bacon had prophetically written: ‘The wealth of both Indies seems in
great part an accessory to the command of the seas.’ English strategy after the
Revolution was based on a conscious use of sea power on a world scale that
was new in execution if not in conception. In 1649-50 Ireland was kept free
from foreign intervention, and Blake blockaded Prince Rupert’s fleet in
Kinsale. In March 1650 Blake followed Rupert to Portugal and shut him up in
the Tagus for six months, finally capturing or destroying most of his ships. In
September 1652 Blake’s victory over a French fleet ensured the Spanish
capture of Dunkirk. In 1654-5 – performing the unique feat of keeping at sea
throughout the winter – the English admiral frustrated French designs on
Naples, and brought Portugal to accept a virtual English protectorate. The
forcing of treaties on Tetuan and Tunis introduced a new type of gunboat
diplomacy, of which the next three centuries were to see a great deal. In 1656-
7 Spain was effectively blockaded. The English navy cleaned up privateering,
from Algiers to Dunkirk, in a way that no other power could: Blake in the
Mediterranean, Penn in the Caribbean, Goodson in the Baltic, were
phenomena hitherto unknown, presaging Britain’s future. English merchants
were now protected in the Mediterranean and Baltic in a way that would have
been quite impossible for early Stuart governments…”612
The foundations of the British Empire had indeed been laid – on the sea.
And it is significant that they were laid during Cromwell’s Protectorate, when
men of property and commerce were in control of the country for the first
time. However, the English had a rival, another Calvinist and mercantile
nation: the Dutch, who were more advanced then they both in the practice of
capitalism and in seamanship. The war between the Dutch and the English in
the 1660s may be called the first purely trade war in history. It was a direct
result of the creation of modern capitalism by the Dutch, and its eager
imitation by the English. For its causes were not the traditional ones of
dynastic rivalry or religion, nor even of piracy in the simple sense: it was
rather a question of which global corporation would become dominant in this
or that part of the world – or throughout the whole world.
For, as Peter Ackroyd writes, “When parliament resumed once more in the
spring of 1664 one of its first measures was a declaration or ‘trade resolution’
against the Dutch, complaining that ‘the subjects of the United Provinces’ had
invaded the king’s rights in India, Africa and elsewhere by attacking English
merchants and had committed ‘damages, affronts and injuries’ closer to home.
It was believed that the Dutch wished to establish a trade monopoly
throughout the known world, which was as dangerous as the ‘universal
monarchy’ sought by Louis XIV.
“The republic was therefore seen as a threat to English ships and to English
commerce, but of course its very existence as a republic could be interpreted
as an essential menace to the kingdom of England. The religion of the enemy
612 Hill, God’s Englishman, p. 161.
373
was Calvinist in temper, and it was feared that the Dutch would support the
cause of their co-religionists in England; they could thereby sow dissension
against the king and the national faith. The ‘trade resolution’ was an aspect of
the Anglican royalism asserted both by Lords and Commons. The fervour of
the Commons, in particular, was matched by their actions. They agreed to
raise the unprecedented sum of £2.5 million to assist the king in his
persecution of hostilities.
“The formal declaration of war came, in February 1665, after months of

preparation. The cause seems to have been largely popular, as far as such
matters can be ascertained, particularly among those merchants and
speculators who would benefit from the embarrassment of Dutch trade; one
of these was the king’s brother, James, duke of York. He led the Royal Africa
Company that specialized in the business of slavery, and he invested in other
commercial ventures. The conflict has therefore been described as the first
purely commercial war in English history. As one hemp merchant, Captain
Cocke, put it, ‘the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must
go down’.”613
The war went badly for the English. “Overseas trade had been seriously set
back by the war on the high sea, and the Baltic trade shrunk away almost to
nothing; woollen manufacture, the staple of England’s exports, was similarly
depressed. A war fought for trade had become a war fatal to trade.”614
Then came two great disasters: the Great Plague of 1665, which killed
about 100,000 Londoners, and then, after another defeat at the hands of the
Dutch, the Great Fire of London of 1666, which destroyed five-sixths of the
city. Was the cause God’s wrath on the inordinate commercial ambitions of
the English, and especially on their slave-trading? Or on their sexual morals,
which had markedly deteriorated since the restoration of the monarchy? Or
on the beginnings of religious indifferentism or ecumenism in the form of
Latitudinarianism, with its connotations of “the broad way”…
What cannot be denied is that Charles’ reign, while to be welcomed as

restoring the monarchical principle and restraining the revolutionary passions,
saw a lamentable decline in religion. Such a decline is often to be observed in
history at times of increased wealth and prosperity. And the Laodicean, docile,
materialistic Anglicanism that came to dominate England’s religious life for
the next three centuries and more was in sharp contrast with the more vibrant
(although still, of course, heretical) Anglicanism of the earlier period. Quarrels
between the Protestant (Anglican) parliament and the Catholic-leaning
monarchy continued in imitation of the similar quarrels in the reign of
Charles I; but in spite of much talk of “popish plots”, there was no real threat
of civil war…
613 Ackroyd, The History of England. Vol. III. Civil War, London: Macmillan, 2014, pp. 391-392.
614
374
“The Anglican Church was now supreme under the leadership of the cleric
who in 1663 was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury; Gilbert Burnet
wrote of Archbishop Sheldon that ‘he seemed not to have a deep sense of
religion, if any at all, and spoke of it most commonly as of an engine of
government and a matter of policy’. The bishops, for example, had been
returned to their seats in the House of Lords where they could exert a strong
influence upon national legislation; yet it was also true that parliament, and
not the Church, had taken control of the nature and direction of the national
religion.”615
In any case, after a failed peace conference at Breda in 1667, the Dutch
resumed their winning ways. In June, “they launched a raid into the Thames
estuary; they broke the defences of the harbour at Chatham and proceeded to
burn four ships before towing away the largest ship of the fleet, the Royal
Charles, and returning with it undamaged…
“As a result, England lost much of the West Indies to France and the
invaluable island of nutmeg, Run, part of Indonesia, to the Dutch. In return,
however, it retained New Netherlands; this was the colonial province of the
Netherlands that included the future states of New York, New Jersey,
Delaware and Connecticut…”616
The Third Anglo-Dutch war of 1672-74 was as unsuccessful for the English
as the Second had been, and so parliament forced the king to end it. Logic, as
well as commercial considerations, now dictated that the English and the
Dutch should join forces against the rising Catholic power of France under
Louis XIV. This is what eventually happened in the Glorious Revolution of
1688, which “ended the 17th century conflict by placing William of Orange on
the English throne as co-ruler with his wife Mary [the niece of Charles II].
This proved to be a pyrrhic victory for the Dutch cause. William's main
concern had been getting the English on the same side as the Dutch in their
competition against France. After becoming King of England, he granted
many privileges to the Royal Navy in order to ensure their loyalty and
cooperation. William ordered that any Anglo-Dutch fleet be under English
command, with the Dutch navy having 60% of the strength of the English.”617
The Anglo-Dutch wars had important consequences for the development

of science and technology. “In England,” writes Grayling, “carpentry,
shipbuilding, the manufacture of canvas, nails, pitch, the protection and
management of oak woodlands, and much besides, already established in the
previous century, now advanced by bounds. A long list of services and
industries flourished in specific response to the needs of the navy that
England maintained from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, under the
management of Robert Blake during the Commonwealth and Samuel Pepys

617 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Dutch_Wars
375
after the Restoration. By the closing decade of the century, when the Dutch
fleet was put under Royal Navy command by William III, the British navy
was the largest in the world.”618
The end of war was, as usual, good for commerce. A sign of the times was
the rapid increase in coffee-shops. The first was opened in 1652, by 1660 there
were 63 in London, but the real increase came after the war. Charles II
considered them hotbeds of sedition, and so ordered their closure in
December, 1675. But the order was unpopular, so he rescinded the order –
which said as much about the decline of royal power as of the popularity of
coffee-drinking.619
The excise returns after the war “rose markedly in such staple items as beer,
ale, tea and coffee, which in turn indicates a sharp rise in consumption. The
increase in revenue had a significant effect upon royal income, too, which
began to rise. Contemporary reports also suggest that the ‘middling classes’
were now indulging their taste for imported ‘luxuries’ and that the labouring
poor were purchasing such items as knitted stockings, earthenware dishes
and brass pots. The ‘commercial revolution’ of the eighteenth century had its
origins three or four decades earlier. The successful colonization of portions of
North America and of the West Indies, undertaken in the reigns of the early
Stuart kings and under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, now found its
fruit in the ever-increasing rate of trade. By 1685 the English had the largest
merchant fleet in the world, and their vessels were filled with the
merchandise of sugar, tobacco and cotton on their way to the great emporium
of London.
“Other evidence supports this picture of material advantage. By 1672, for

example, stagecoaches ran between London and all the principal towns of the
kingdom; it was reported that ‘every little town within twenty miles of
London swarms with them’. The ubiquity of the stagecoach is the harbinger of
the reforms of transport in the next century, with the further development of
turnpike roads and canals; the country was slowly quickening its pace while
at the same time finding its unity.
“It is now a commonplace of economic history that the ‘agricultural

revolution’ of the eighteenth century in face began in the middle of the
seventeenth century. The introduction of new crops, and the steady spread of
‘enclosures’ designed to achieve cohesion and efficiency of farming land,
were already changing the landscape of England. The abundance of grain, for
example, was such that in 1670 cereal farmers were allowed to export their
crop without any regard to its price in the domestic market.”620

619 Joseph Maria Casals, “Coffee Brews Trouble in London”, National Geographic History,
March/ April, 2018, p. 11.
620
376
*
The last years of Charles’ reign were marked by a sharp conflict with
Parliament over his right to appoint his successor. The Earl of Shaftesbury, a
Presbyterian, led the movement to stop King Charles’ brother and appointed
heir, the Catholic James II, from coming to the throne.
As Tombs writes, “Two Exclusion Bills were presented to Parliament, one

in May 1679, another in October 1680. This prolonged ‘Exclusion Crisis’ of
1679-81 helped to define English political culture: the derogatory terms ‘Whig’
and ‘Tory’ (from whiggamore, Scottish Presbyterian rebels, and tóraigh, Irish
Catholic rebels) were now applied to the king’s opponents and supporters.
Some of their fundamental ideas were taking shape – for the Whigs, theories
about resistance: for the Tories, about legitimacy. In Scotland, an archbishop
was lynched by a psalm-singing mob. Charles repeatedly dissolved or
prorogued Parliament. He told the French ambassador that ‘his one and only
interest was to subsist’. The French, however, were also funding the crypto-
republican opposition to give themselves leverage over Charles.
“Few could have missed the sense that the 1640s were being replayed, and
hardly anyone wanted another civil war. It became increasingly clear that
Oates’s ‘Popish Plot’, the catalyst of the crisis, was an invention. Parliament
was summoned to Oxford in 1681, away from the London mob, and MPs
arrived with armed bodyguards. The public began to rally to the king. The
French ambassador, Paul Barillon, who was flirting with the Whigs, reported
a dramatic scene when on 28 March 1681, as the Lords were assembling,
Shaftesbury handed Charles a letter urging him to make his illegitimate but
Protestant son James, Duke of Monmouth, his heir. The king publicly
responded: ‘My Lords, let there be no self-delusion. I will never yield, and
will not let myself be intimidated. Men become ordinarily more timid as they
grow old; as for me, I shall be… bolder and firmer, and I will not stain my life
and reputation in the little time that, perhaps, remains for me to live. I do not
fear the dangers and calamities which people try to frighten me with. I have
the law and reason on my side. God men will be with me.’ The Oxford
crowds shouted, ‘Let the king live, and the Devil hang up all Roundheads’.
Charles appealed publicly for loyalty: ‘We cannot but remember that Religion,
Liberty and property were all lost and gone when monarchy was shaken off.’
Shaftesbury fled abroad in 1682, Locke drafted a Treatise of Government
asserting the right to resist monarchs – a ‘scenario of civil war’ which later
became a Whig sacred text. In the ‘Rye House Plot’ in 1683, republicans
planned to assassinate Charles and James as they returned from Newmarket
races. In another half-baked conspiracy, the Earl of Essex (son of the Civil War
commander), Lord William Russell (heir of the Earl of Bedford) and Algernon
Sidney (son of the Earl of Leicester) planned to seize the king, take power
with Scottish support, subjugate Ireland, and go to war with Holland. When
they were caught, Essex committed suicide and the other two were executed.
Algernon Sidney declared on the scaffold that he was willing to die for ‘the
Good Old Cause’ – a name that stuck. He was long revered as a Whig martyr.
377
“Moderates, however, denounced Whig designs: ‘more wicked’, said one
MP, ‘than their malice could invent to accuse the papists of’. There was a
grass-roots backlash against Whigs and Dissenters. So when Charles died
suddenly on 6 February 1685, aged fifty-five, his brother’s succession was
assured. Charles has been much criticized, but one modern historian pays him
a tribute that few British rulers could claim: ‘He was a king under whom most
people in the three kingdoms were happy to live.’ In the long run, the
monarchy won the Civil War. But the great divide had not been healed…”621
Moreover, the final impression we derive from Charles’ reign is one of

Babylonian luxury and corruption, a kind of Belshazzar’s feast before the
curtain final came down on traditional monarchy in England. “An entry from
Evelyn’s diaries conveys the mood and atmosphere of the triumphant court
with its ‘inexpressible luxury, and prophanesse, gaming and all dissolution,
and as if it were total forgetfulness of God’. The king was ‘sitting and toying
with his concubines’, among them the duchess of Portsmouth, with a ‘French
boy singing love-songs, in that glorious gallery, whilst about twenty of the
great courtiers and other dissolute persons were at a large table, a bank of at
least two thousand in gold before them’…”622
621 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 257-258.

622
378
44. THE NEWTONIAN REVOLUTION AND THE BIRTH OF
MODERNITY
“The Royal Society,” writes Ackroyd, “may be deemed the jewel of Charles
II’s reign. At the end of November 1660, a group of physicians and natural
scientists announced the formation of a ‘college for the promoting of physic-
mathematical experimental learning’; they were in part inspired by Francis
Bacon’s vision of ‘Solomon’s House’ in The New Atlantis, and they shared
Bacon’s passion for experimental and inductive science. They were men of a
practical and pragmatic temper, with a concomitant interest in agriculture as
well as navigation, manufactures as well as medicine. All questions of politics
or religion were excluded from the deliberations of the Fellows, and indeed
their pursuit of practical enquiry was in part designed to quell the
‘enthusiasm’ and to quieten the spiritual debates that had helped to foment
the late civil wars. They met each week, at Gresham College in Bishopsgate,
where papers were read on the latest invention or experiment. It was in their
company that Sir Isaac Newton first propounded his revolutionary theories of
light.
“The last four decades of the seventeenth century in fact witnessed an

extraordinary growth in scientific experiment to the extent that, in 1667, the
historian of the Royal Society, Thomas Sprat, could already celebrate the fact
that ‘an universal zeal towards the advancement of such designs has not only
overspread our court and universities, but the shops of our mechanicks, the
fields of our gentlemen, the cottages of our farmers, and the ships of our
merchants’.
“An inquiring and inventive temper was now more widely shared,
whereby the whole field of human knowledge became the subject of
speculation. The Fellows of the Royal Society debated a method of producing
wind by means of falling water; they explored the sting of a bee and the feet
of flies; they were shown a baroscope that measured changes in the pressure
of the air and a hygroscope for detecting water in the atmosphere; they set up
an enquiry into the state of English agriculture and surveyed the methods of
tin-mining in Cornwall. They conducted experiments on steam, on ventilation,
on gases and on magnetism, thermometers, pumps and perpetual motion
machines were brought before them. The origins of the industrial and
agricultural ‘revolutions’, conventionally located in the eighteenth century,
are to be found in the previous age. In the seventeenth century, providentially
blessed by the genius of Francis Bacon at its beginning, we find a general
desire for what Sprat described as ‘the true knowledge of things’.”623
Why at that time? Ackroyd hints that the scientific revolution was partly a
reaction to the “enthusiasm” of the preceding religious and political
revolutions. Perhaps…
623 Ackroyd, op. cit., pp.404-405.
379
Another hypothesis is that the killing of the king in 1649 broke a certain
psychological barrier; it was a kind of “liberation”, as Melvyn Bragg writes,
that let loose a great wave of scientific inquiry. “After all, if you could kill a
king, one who had ruled by Divine Right, the representative of God on earth,
then all things were possible. The new knowledge suggested by Francis Bacon
and spurred by many thinkers in Europe burst out in force in the seventeenth
century, with the language to service it and the confidence to overthrow the
old order and argue for the new. Most of all, it set out to discover by
experiments the secrets of that other great book – Nature.”624
A striking fact about these early trail-blazers was that they did not divide
religion and science into hermetically sealed compartments in accordance
with the modern scientistic world-view, Though Newton was perhaps the
greatest scientist of all time, he was, in Michael White’s words, “interested in
a synthesis of all knowledge and was a devout seeker of some form of unified
theory of the principles of the universe. Along with many intellectuals before
him, Newton believed that this synthesis – the fabled prisca sapientia – had
once been in the possession of mankind.”625 “Newton saw God as the direct
cause of gravity. And he said of space that it was ‘as it were, God’s sensorium’
– seeing space as the realm of divine ideas.”626
Of course, there was a large element of hubris in this programme, a hubris

that Newton shared, vaingloriously giving himself the pseudonym “’Jeova
Sanctus Unus’ – One Holy God – based upon an anagram of the Latinised
version of his name, Isaacus Neuutonus”. 627 However, the pride of the
programme is not the point here. The important point is that the greatest
scientist in history refused to see religious truth as sharply segregated from
scientific truth, still less that religious truth needed to be “verified” by science.
So far was Newton from segregating the two that he spent – to the
puzzlement of his admirers ever since - many years studying alchemy and the
Holy Scriptures. For “they who search after the Philosophers’ Stone,” he
wrote, “[are] by their own rules obliged to strict & religious life. That study [is]
fruitful of experiments.”628 Indeed, so assiduous was he in his search for the
Philosophers’ Stone that Keynes considered him to have been not so much the
first of the men of the Age of Reason as the last of the magicians…
“A strict and religious life” “fruitful of experiments”?! Considering that no

one was more fruitful in scientific experimentation and theorizing than
Newton, one might have expected many modern scientists to have followed
his advice. But they have not, because, while admiring his science, they have
rejected his philosophy of science, preferring instead their own atheist,
reductionist scientific outlook.
624
Bragg, “Interrogating Nature – to reveal God’s Way?”, Oxford Today, vol. 23, no 3, 2010, p.
18.
625 White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, London: Fourth Estate, 1998, p. 106.
626 Bragg, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
627
White, op. cit., p. 140.
628
380
Although many of his religious ideas were heretical, Newton at least did
not share in the dominant heresy of early eighteenth century England, Deism.
Thus he did not believe that God had created the universe and then simply
allowed it to continue working according to the laws of nature without any
further intervention from Himself. He believed that God periodically
intervened in the workings of nature. For, as his disciple Samuel Clarke wrote
to Leibniz, “the notion of the world’s being a great machine, going on without
the interposition of God, as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a
clock-maker, is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends… to exclude
providence and God’s government in reality out of the world.”629 Newton’s
philosophy of science was based on the fact that, as Maynard Keynes said,
“He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty”.630 If the
Almighty set the cryptogram, then only one who was pleasing to the
Almighty could be expected to understand it. Hence “his belief that the
emotional and spiritual state of the individual experimenter was involved
intimately with the success or failure of the experiment.”631 And hence his
quoting of Hermes Trismegistus: “I had this art and science by the sole
inspiration of God who has vouchsafed to reveal it to his servant. Who gives
those that know how to use their reason the means of knowing the truth, but
is never the cause that any man follows error & falsehood.”632
Now if the universe is a cryptogram written by God, there should be no

conflict between the universe and the prophetic writings of the Old and New
Testaments. And so Newton set about studying the Holy Scriptures,
especially Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation. “He reasoned that because God’s
work and God’s word came from the same Creator, then Nature and
Scripture were also one and the same. Scripture was a communicable
manifestation or interpretation of Nature, and as such could be viewed as a
blueprint for life – a key to all meaning.”633 In accordance with this principle,
Newton set about interpreting the prophecies, concluding, for example, that
the plan of the Temple of Solomon (Ezekiel 40-48) was a paradigm for the
entire future of the world.634 Again, A.C. Grayling cites his interpretation of
the Book of Revelation that led him to believe that the end of the world would
not come before 2060…635
Now Newton’s interpretation of the Scriptures can hardly be called

traditional or patristic; he paid little attention to St. Peter’s warning that “no
prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation” (II Peter 1.20).
Evidently he was less inspired as an interpreter of Scripture than as a scientist,
629
Clarke, in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 371.
630
White, op. cit., p. 122
631
632
633 White, op. cit., p. 155.
634 White, op. cit., pp. 157, 158.
381
and we know that he was far from Orthodox in his theology.636 However, it is
not as a religious thinker that his example is important, but as showing that
great science, far from being incompatible with religious “fundamentalism”
(Newton believed in the literal truth of the Creation story, rejecting the idea
that living creatures came into being by chance) and the belief that the true
science comes from Divine inspiration, may actually be nourished by it.
This is one of the reasons, argues John Darwin, why such advanced pagan
societies as Ming China, which had a tradition of empirical research and
technical inventiveness, nevertheless failed before the onslaught of Christian
Europe. In China, he writes, “for reasons that historians have debated at
length, the tradition of scientific experimentation had faded away, perhaps as
early as 1400. Part of the reason may lie in the striking absence in Confucian
thought of the ‘celestial lawgiver’ – a god who had prescribed the laws of
nature. In Europe, belief in such a providential figure, and the quest for ‘his’
purposes and grand design, had been a (perhaps the) central motive for
scientific inquiry. But the fundamental assumption that the universe was
governed by a coherent system of physical laws that could be verified
empirically was lacking in China…”637
So the incentive to scientific research was present in Europe largely thanks

to the Christian faith. As C.S. Lewis writes: “Professor Whitehead points out
that centuries of belief in a God who combined ‘the personal energy of
Jehovah’ with ‘the rationality of a Greek philosopher’ first produced that firm
expectation of systematic order which rendered possible the birth of modern
science. Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they
expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator…”638
However, after Newton’s death, theistic, Newtonian science began to give

way to atheism. The critical step was to make scientific reasoning and the
scientific method the measure of all things. Scientific doubt would now no
longer be simply one tool among others to probe the mysteries of God’s
universe: it would be the tool used to “demonstrate” that the universe is
neither mysterious, nor God’s…
636
He was probably an Arian and certainly a Unitarian, a fact which he carefully concealed
until he was dying. As Karen Armstrong writes, in his treatise entitled The Philosophical
Origins of Gentile Theology, he “argued that Noah had founded a superstition-free religion in
which there were no revealed scriptures, no mysteries, but only a Deity which could be
known through the rational contemplation of the natural world. Later generations had
corrupted this pure faith; the spurious doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity had been
added to the creed by unscrupulous theologians in the fourth century. Indeed, the Book of
Revelation had prophesied the rise of Trinitarianism – ‘this strange religion of ye West’, ‘the
cult of three equal gods’ – as the abomination of desolation” (The Battle for God, New York:
Ballantine Books, 2000, p. 69).
637 Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise & Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000, London: Penguin
Books, 2008, pp. 198-200.

638
Lewis, Miracles, London: Fount, 1998, p. 110.
382
And so in the eighteenth century, writes Gabriel Simonov, “science in
Western Europe after Newton moved quickly forward. Under the influence of
the encyclopaedists, rationalism rose up against Descartes, replacing innate
ideas with empiricism and clarity of thought with reliability of facts.
“Relying on the successes of scientific determinism, some thinkers and

scientists dared to foretell that in the future science would be able to explain
everything, and then it would be in a position to foresee everything. From
there it was one step not only to criticism of the book of Genesis and the Bible
in general, but also to the rejection of God. This step was taken by the major
French mathematician and physicist Laplace (1749-1827), who in a
conversation with Napoleon Bonaparte, on whom he exerted influence,
said: ’Citizen First Consul, the hypothesis of God is not necessary for me.’”639
Science’s tendency towards atheism is a fruit of its derivation from the Tree
of knowledge, tasting of which led to the fall of man. It is a method of
reasoning carried out by fallen men with fallen faculties and with strictly
limited and earthly aims. It gives a superficial knowledge of the fallen world,
but cannot give real knowledge of the unfallen world, neither the world of
unfallen spirits nor the world that is beyond the grave. It is of limited use for
limited men – that is, men who use only their fallen faculties; and when the
true light of knowledge comes - as we see it come in the lives of the saints, the
truly enlightened ones - it ceases to have any use at all.
The holy Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, who had a thorough training in

physics, mathematics and engineering, writes: “You ask what is my opinion
of the human sciences? After the fall men began to need clothing and
numerous other things that accompany our earthly wanderings; in a word,
they began to need material development, the striving for which has become
the distinguishing feature of our age. The sciences are the fruit of our fall, the
production of our damaged fallen reason. Scholarship is the acquisition and
retention of impressions and knowledge that have been stored up by men
during the time of the life of the fallen world. Scholarship is a lamp by which
‘the gloom of darkness is guarded to the ages’. The Redeemer returned to
men that lamp which was given to them at creation by the Creator, of which
they were deprived because of their sinfulness. This lamp is the Holy Spirit,
He is the Spirit of Truth, who teaches every truth, searches out the deep
things of God, opens and explains mysteries, and also bestows material
knowledge when that is necessary for the spiritual benefit of man. Scholarship
is not properly speaking wisdom, but an opinion about wisdom. The
knowledge of the Truth that was revealed to men by the Lord, access to which
is only by faith, which is inaccessible for the fallen mind of man, is replaced in
scholarship by guesses and presuppositions. The wisdom of this world, in
which many pagans and atheists occupy honoured positions, is directly
639
Simonov, “’Shestodnev’ i Nauka” (The Six Days and Science), Vestnik Russkogo
Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian Movement), 176, II-III, 1997, p. 119.
383
contrary according to its very origins with spiritual, Divine wisdom: it is
impossible to be a follower of the one and the other at the same time; one
must unfailingly be renounced. The fallen man is ‘falsehood’, and from his
reasonings ‘science falsely so-called’ is composed, that form and collection of
false concepts and knowledge that has only the appearance of reason, but is in
essence vacillation, madness, the raving of the mind infected with the deadly
plague of sin and the fall. This infirmity of the mind is revealed in special
fullness in the philosophical sciences.”640 And again he writes: “The holy faith
at which the materialists laughed and laugh, is so subtle and exalted that it
can be attained and taught only by spiritual reason. The reason of the world is
opposed to it and rejects it. But when for some material necessity it finds it
necessary and tolerates it, then it understands it falsely and interprets it
wrongly; because the blindness ascribed by it to faith is its own
characteristic.”641
The scientific revolution was probably, with the rise of capitalism, the
decisive factor causing the birth of modernity and the gradual demise of the
old, religious world-view. For it seemed to banish the need for God, not only
as a First Cause, but also as a censor on knowledge and action. And if Newton
himself remained a believer, his successors would abandon his beliefs.
“In fact,” writes the atheist historian Yuval Noah Harari, “God is present
even in the Newton myth. Newton himself is God. When biotechnology,
nanotechnology and the other forms of science ripen, Homo Sapiens will attain
divine powers and come full circle back to the Tree of Knowledge… Scientists
will upgrade us into gods…
“Until modern times, most cultures believed that humans played a part in
some great cosmic plan. The plan was devised by the omnipotent gods or by
the eternal laws of nature, and humankind could not change it. The cosmic
plan gave meaning to human life, but also restricted human power. Humans
were much like actors on a stage. The script gave meaning to their every word,
tear and gesture – but place strict limits on their performance. Hamlet cannot
murder Claudius in Act I, or leave Denmark and go to an ashram in India.
Shakespeare won’t allow it. Similarly, human cannot live for ever, they cannot
escape all diseases, and they cannot do as they please. It’s not in the script.
“In exchange on giving up power, premodern humans believed that their

lives gained meaning. It really mattered whether they fought bravely on the
battlefield, whether they supported the lawful king, whether they ate
forbidden foods for breakfast or whether had an affair with the next-door
neighbour. This of course created some inconveniences, but it gave humans
psychological protection against disasters. If something terrible happened –
640 Bishop Ignatius, Sochinenia (Works), volume 4, letter N 45.

641 Bishop Ignatius, Sochinenia (Works), volume 4, letter N 61.
384
such as war, plague or drought – people consoled themselves that ‘We all
play a role in some great cosmic drama devised by the gods or by the laws of
nature. We are not privy to the script, but we can rest assured that everything
happens for a purpose. Even this terrible war, plague and drought have their
place in the proper scheme of things. Furthermore, we can count on the
playwright that the story surely has a good and meaningful ending. So even
the war, plague and drought will work out for the best – if not here and now,
then in the afterlife.’
“Modern culture rejects this belief in a great cosmic plan. We are not actors
in any larger-than-life drama. Life has no script, no playwright, no director,
no producer – and no meaning. To the best of our scientific understanding,
the universe is a blind and purposeless process, full of sound and fury but
signifying nothing. During our infinitesimally brief stay on our tiny speck of a
planet, we fret and strut this way and that, and then are heard of no more.
“Since there is no script, and since humans fulfill no role in any great
drama. Terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or
give meaning to our suffering. There won’t be a happy ending, or a bad
ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after another. The
modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause…”642
So far, in Harari’s exposition, the religious world-view has the edge over
the modern. For since suffering was inevitable, the key to happiness was how
to cope with suffering – and only religion had that key. However, science held
the promise of annihilating suffering, if not immediately or in our lifetime, at
any rate in the long term. And to the extent that science fulfilled that promise,
the modern world-view became more alluring. For a while the two world-
views might be held simultaneously; but as the claims of science became
greater and more all-encompassing, so God, Providence, the after-life and
eternal rewards and punishment for good and evil in the after-life became less
convincing concepts.
And so, continues Harari, if things “just happen, without any binding
script or purpose, then humans too are not confined to any predetermined
role. We can do anything we want – provided we can find a way. We are
constrained by nothing except our own ignorance. Plagues and droughts have
no cosmic meaning – but we can eradicate them. Wars are not a necessary evil
on the way to a better future – but we can make peace. No paradise awaits us
after death – but we can create paradise here on earth and live in it for ever, if
we just manage to overcome some technical difficulties.
“If we invest money in research, then scientific breakthroughs will

accelerate technological progress. New technologies will fuel economic
growth, and a growing economy will dedicate even more money to research.
With each passing decade we will enjoy more food, faster vehicles and better
642 Harari, Homo Deus, London: Vintage, 2017, pp. 114, 233-235.
385
medicines. One day our knowledge will be so vast and our technology so
advanced that we shall distil the elixir of eternal youth, the elixir of true
happiness, and any other drug we might possibly desire – and no god will
stop us.
“The modern deal thus offers humans an enormous temptation, coupled

with a colossal threat. Omnipotence is in front of us, almost within our reach,
but below us yawns the abyss of complete nothingness. On the practical level
modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid
of meaning. Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is
ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time,
it is plagued by more existential angst than any other previous culture…”643
For “what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his
own soul?” (Mark 8.36).
643 Harari, op. cit., pp. 235-236.
386
45. THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION
Not only in England, with the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II,
but also in other European and Asian countries there was something of a
recovery of traditional Christian forms of government in the seventeenth
century. In Russia, the autocracy recovered from the Time of Troubles.
Monarchs still ruled in most western countries, even in formally Calvinist
countries such as Holland. And despotisms still ruled in Persia, India and
China. In Western Europe, the emergence of relatively homogeneous nation-
states, with their need for a unifying symbol and centre of political power,
saved monarchism for the time being. Even Germany and Italy, though not
unified states, retained feudal, absolutist structures in their constituent parts.
At the same time the acid of anti-monarchism did not cease to eat away at
the foundations of states. While the English Revolution did not succeed in
finally abolishing the monarchy, it undoubtedly weakened it (Charles II was
much more cautious in his treatment of Roundheads and Dissenters than his
father had been) – and it weakened absolutist France, too, by scattering the
seeds of liberalism there. In Russia, meanwhile, the Old Ritualists with their
anti-monarchism and “theocratic democratism” bore striking resemblances to
the contemporary self-governing communities of the American Puritans…
A critical point was reached in the years 1685-88, as Catholic absolutism

and religious intolerance staged a defiant come-back. In 1685 Louis XIV of
France repealed the Edict of Nantes, which had given toleration to the
Protestants. As a result, between 250,000 and 900,000 French Huguenots
(Protestants) fled to England, the Netherlands and Prussia.644 In the same year
Charles II of England, a fervent admirer and secret ally of Louis, died, having
been converted to Catholicism on his deathbed; he was succeeded by his
brother, James II, a Catholic, who approved of the Edict.
Charles, write David Starkey and Katie Greening, “had been acutely aware
of the rumblings of anti-Catholic sentiment in England, and he had
prophesied that his younger brother, James, would last no longer than three
years on the throne. But James II acceded surprisingly smoothly: there were
no riots in the streets, no rebellions or resistance…
“[However,] James II was a man on a mission: inspired by the successes of

his Catholic ancestor Mary Tudor, he was determined to convert the nation
back to what he considered to be the ‘true faith’. Moreover, he felt that his
ambition was bolstered by divine right; an open Catholic had acceded to the
throne in a nation with an inbred hostility to Catholicism – what clearer sign
could there be from God that He supported the Catholic cause!...
“As James made conspicuous moves to ease the burdens on English

Catholics – opening monastic houses, filling official positions with popish
644 Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2018, p. 146.
387
candidates – he became increasingly unpopular. In 1688 he issued a
‘Declaration of Indulgence’ which proposed universal religious toleration,
arguing that it was a guarantee of economic prosperity, as opposed to
persecution, which spoiled trade, depopulated countries and discouraged
strangers’; and, in the process, suspended the ban on Catholics from holding
public office. On 27 April of that year, James ordered that the clergy read the
Declaration from their pulpits; seven prominent bishops refused, amid a
wave of public sympathy and popular demonstrations of support for their
cause…”645
The critical event that appears to have sparked the revolution was the birth
of a son to King James and his wife, Mary of Modena. This meant that the
lawful heir to the throne was a Catholic… Seven leading Whig
parliamentarians acted quickly; they secretly invited the Protestant Dutch
King (or “Stadtholder”) William of Orange to rule over them together with his
wife, James’ Protestant daughter Mary – but on their terms. 646 William
accepted these terms, since he needed English arms and money in his struggle
against French absolutism. And so the revolution of 1688 took place: favoured
by the winds as William of Normandy had been in 1066, the Dutch William
landed in the west at Brixham in Devon in November, 1688, encountering no
opposition to his 500 ships and 20,000 men. 647 When the two armies
eventually met, James fled, abandoning his men and casting the Great Seal of
the realm into the Thames. Then William and Mary were crowned as equal
monarchs in a constitutional monarchy. Before the coronation, in accordance
with the terms agreed beforehand, they were read a Declaration of Rights that
guaranteed the rights of Protestants, banned a Catholic monarchy, and gave
parliament sovereign power.
“A Convention Parliament met in January 1689. It was composed of 319

Whigs and 232 Tories. What divided them now was how to define and justify
what had happened. Whigs saw James as being deposed after breaking his
‘contract’ with the people. 648 Tories wanted to preserve the principle of
monarchy as God-given, permanent and governed by lawful succession:
James was ‘incapacitated’, and Willem and Mary were regents. But Willem
threatened to go home unless he was made king, and so he was, as co-
sovereign with his Stuart wife, Mary. A Whig-Tory compromise emerged.
James was declared both to have ‘broken the original contract between king
and people’ and also to have ‘abdicated’ and left the throne ‘vacant’. By
leaving the country he had enabled divisive political questions to be fudged.
645 Starkey and Greening, Music & Monarchy, London: BBC Books, 2013, pp. 187, 188, 190.
646 The letter was written in the cellar of Ladye Place, Hurley. Cf. Lucy Worsley, “How
Glorious was the Glorious Revolution?” BBC History Magazine, January, 2017, p. 26.
647 This region was well-chosen as the launch-pad of the invasion because the West Country
had been the power-base of the Duke of Monmouth, who had unsuccessfully rebelled against
James II in 1685, and many still sympathized with a rebellion against James. (Anna Keary,
“The Righteous Royal Rebel, BBC History Magazine, July, 2016, p. 50).
648 “Whigs” and Tories” are abusive terms for Irish outlaws and Scottish drovers respectively
(Jenkins, op. cit., p. 147). (V.M.)
388
It could therefore be agreed that what had happened was that the existing
constitution, which James had tried to destroy, had been preserved, not
overthrown. These events, now often downplayed or forgotten, were long
extolled as the ‘Glorious Revolution’, which almost without bloodshed in
England, ended monarchical absolutism, established the primacy of
Parliament, and preserved the Protestant religion.”649
‘The events of 1688-89,” writes Edward Vallance, “became the cornerstone

of the Whig interpretation of English history. According to this tradition, the
members of the Convention parliaments who voted the crown to William and
Mary were not constitutional innovators, but defenders of England’s ‘ancient
constitution’ (the body of fundamental laws which were held to guarantee the
rights and liberties of the English) from the absolutist designs of James.
“In the words of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France
(1790), the revolutionaries ‘regenerated the deficient part of the old
constitution through the parts which were not impaired’. In contrast to the
violence and terror engulfing revolutionary France at the time Burke was
writing, this earlier English revolution was ‘glorious’ because it was carried
out by parliament. Above all, 1688-89 was to be celebrated because it was,
according to the Whig interpretation, a bloodless revolution…”650
By any normal standards, however, the “Glorious Revolution” was

anything but glorious. A legitimate king, who, whatever his faults, could
hardly be called a cruel tyrant, - it was he, not William, who issued the
“Declaration of Indulgence” proclaiming universal religious toleration - was
overthrown by a group of rebels who entered into a treasonable conspiracy
with a foreign power. The fact that they were parliamentarians is beside the
point – or makes their treachery worse. A revolution can be justified only on
the grounds that it overthrew a false faith and instals the true one. But true
religious zeal was a rarity now in the British Isles. And in any case
Protestantism was not the true faith…
Lord Macaulay in his History of England (1848) saw this “glorious” and
“bloodless” revolution as the key event making possible both Britain’s ascent
to the status of a great power and her avoidance of the bloody revolutions
that took place in nineteenth-century Europe; it was in effect the foundation-
stone of the British empire… Tombs agrees: “The 1688 revolution,” he writes,
“was not only domestic in its aims and importance: it also reoriented foreign
policy, committed England to play a crucial part in European affairs, and, as
is clear in retrospect, set it on the path to world power. The first act of William
of Orange, even before he became king, was to dispatch troops to the
Continent to fight the French. While he lived, England was in a personal
union with Ireland and Scotland, but more importantly with the Dutch
Tombs, op. cit. pp. 262-263.

649
Vallance, “A Not So Bloodless Revolution”, The Life and Times of the Stuarts, BBC History
650
Magazine, pp. 98-100.
389
Republic. After Anne’s death, England was linked with Hanover. So for the
first time since the 1450s it became a continental power, ‘its horizons…
delineated by two German rivers, the Elbe and the Weser’. Within a single
lifetime, what had been a poor, weak, unstable and declining kingdom, well
below Sweden in military terms, made itself a global empire. Its political
institutions, archaic, eccentric and seemingly doomed before 1688, were now
compared favourably with those of the ancient world. The English language,
hitherto known only in the islands and a scattering of outposts, and English
culture and manners, hitherto considered strange and provincial, grew
fashionable even in Paris and Versailles. Voltaire promised his friends ‘to
acquaint you with the character of this strange people… fond of their liberty,
learned, witty, despising life and death, a nation of philosophers.’ England –
London above all – became a global bazaar, insatiably sucking in and spewing
out goods, money, ideas, words and people. It thus played an increasing part
in the economic, demographic, social and political transformation of the
world, in ways that were unplanned, largely uncontrollable and in many
ways cataclysmic – a process in which England, both subject and object,
master and slave, was itself transformed.651
Would it have been different if the Stuarts had returned to power?

Perhaps… But James II’s invasion of Ireland was defeated by William on the
Boyne in 1690 – and the English masses rejected Catholicism. As for the Scots,
when the Scottish clan of Macdonald was dilatory in showing allegiance to
the new king, they were massacred at Glencoe. The last show of Scottish
resistance was the invasion of England by James’ son, Bonnie Prince Charlie,
in 1745… But he failed: dull Germans, not Romantic Scots, were destined to
rule the island…
“In the 1690s,” writes Bernard Simms, “the English, partly drawing on
imported Dutch ideas, established the strongest and most ‘modern’ state in
Europe. A funded national debt was created, supported by the new Bank of
England (1694) and a sophisticated stock and money market. An East India
company was established as a semi-state body. Underpinning it all was a
broad political consensus in favour of parliamentary government, and
resisting tyranny at home and abroad. The Triennial Act of 1694 stipulated
that parliamentary elections were to take place very three years, and the
abandonment of censorship allowed political and commercial matters to be
discussed freely inside and outside parliament… William III and his
parliaments were able to raise the staggering sums needed to fight Louis, and
managed to fund a huge proportion of the war, at least a third, out of long-
term loans rather than income. Englishmen thus lived not only in the freest
European state, but also the strongest in relation to its size and population.”652
651Tombs, op. cit., pp. 334-335.

652Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present, London: Allen Lane, 2013, p.
62.
390
England’s success was based above all on her navy. At the beginning of the
1690s the English navy had suffered two defeats at the hands of the French.
This engendered much soul-searching; and in 1694 the newly created Bank of
England borrowed a vast sum of money (at 8% interest) that was poured into
the huge industrial effort required to build a modern navy. Wood from
England’s forests, iron from her coal-fields, food from all over the country,
and above all sailors, tough and highly disciplined, were produced to build,
man and victual the ships that, already in the early 1700s were defeating the
French and the Spanish, and by the annus mirabilis of 1759 had established
Britain (for now England was united with Scotland to become Great Britain)
as the world’s first global superpower, ruling the waves and controlling all
the world’s major trade routes.
Why did Britain become such a successful state, triumphing eventually

over states with greater resources and much bigger populations such as
France and Spain? The usual explanation attributes her success to the rejection
of absolutism. Thus whereas France and Spain were unwieldy, corrupt
absolutist monarchies, England by 1689 had developed a powerful Parliament,
whose members, held together by a common commitment to local
government, the Common Law and Protestantism, were able to limit the
power of the king and make him accountable to them.
However, it is not immediately obvious why making the king accountable

to a group of extremely rich landowners should have made the difference.
After all, other states, such as Hungary and Poland, also muzzled their
monarchy – but were much less successful than Britain. This accountability
factor, writes Francis Fukuyama, “is not sufficient to explain why the English
Parliament was strong enough to force the monarchy into a constitutional
settlement. The Hungarian nobility represented to the diet what was also very
powerful and well organized. Like the English barons at Runnymede, the
lesser Hungarian nobility forced their monarch into a constitutional
compromise in the thirteenth century, the Golden Bull, and in subsequent
years kept the central state on a very short lease. After the death of Matyas
Hunyadi in 1490, the noble estate reversed the centralizing reforms that the
monarchy had put into place in the previous generation and returned power
to themselves.
“But the Hungarian noble estate did not use their power to strengthen the
country as a whole; rather, they sought to lower taxes on themselves and
guard their own narrow privileges at the expense of the country’s ability to
defend itself. In England, by contrast, the constitutional settlement coming
out of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689 vastly strengthened the state, to
the point that it became, over the next century, the dominant power in Europe.
So if the English Parliament was strong enough to constrain a predatory
monarch, we need to ask why that Parliament did not itself evolve into a rent-
seeking coalition and turn against itself like the Hungarian Diet.
391
“There are at least two reasons why accountable government in England
did not degenerate into rapacious oligarchy. The first has to do with
England’s social structure compared to that of Hungary. While the groups
represented in the English Parliament were an oligarchy, they sat at the top of
a society that was much more mobile and open to non-elites than was
Hungary’s. In Hungary, the gentry had been absorbed into a narrow
aristocracy, whereas in England they represented a large and cohesive social
group, more powerful in certain ways than the aristocracy. England, unlike
Hungary, had a tradition of grassroots political participation in the form of
the hundred and county courts and other institutions of local governance.
English lords were accustomed to sitting in assemblies on equal terms with
their vassals and tenants to decide issues of common interest. Hungary,
furthermore, had no equivalent of the English yeomanry, relatively
prosperous farmers who owned their own land and could participate in local
political life. And cities in Hungary were strictly controlled by the noble estate
and did not generate a rich and powerful bourgeoisie the way that English
ones did.
“Second, despite English traditions of individual liberty, the centralized

English state was both powerful and well regarded through much of the
society. It was one of the first states to develop a uniform system of justice, it
protected property rights, and it acquired substantial naval capabilities in its
struggles with various Continental powers. The English experiment with
republican government after the beheading of Charles I in 1649 and the
establishment of Cromwell’s Protectorate was not a happy one. The regicide
itself seemed, even to the supporters of Parliament, an unjust and illegal act.
The English Civil War witnessed the same sort of progressive radicalization
experienced later during the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese revolutions. The
more extreme anti-Royalist groups like the Levellers and the Diggers seemed
to want not just political accountability but also a much broader social
revolution, which frightened the property-owning classes represented in
Parliament. It was thus with a great deal of relief that the monarchy was
restored in 1660 with the accession of Charles II. After the Restoration, the
issues of political accountability reappeared under the Catholic James II,
whose machinations again aroused suspicions and opposition from
Parliament and ultimately led to the Glorious Revolution. But this time
around, no one wanted to dismantle the monarchy or the state; they only
wanted a king who would be accountable to them. They got one in William of
Orange.
“Ideas were again important. By the late seventeenth century, thinkers like
Hobbes and Locke had broken free of concepts of a feudal social order based
on classes and estates, and argued in favour of a social contract between state
and citizen. Hobbes argued in Leviathan that human beings are fundamentally
equal both in their passions and in their ability to inflict violence on one
another, and that they have rights merely by virtue of the fact that they are
human beings. Locke accepted these premises as well and attacked the notion
that legitimate rule could arise from anything other than consent of the
392
governed. One could overthrow a king, but only in the name of the principle
of consent. Rights, according to these early liberals, were abstract and
universal, and could not be legitimately appropriated by powerful
individuals. Hungary had succumbed to the Turks and the Austrians long
before ideas like these could spread there.
“There is one simple lesson to be drawn from this comparison. Political

liberty – that is, the ability of societies to rule themselves – does not depend
only on the degree to which a society can mobilize opposition to centralized
power and impose constitutional constraints on the state. It must also have a
state that is strong enough to act when action is require. Accountability does
not run in just one direction, from the state to the society. If the government
cannot act cohesively, if there is no broader sense of public purpose, then one
will not have laid the basis for true political liberty. In contrast to Hungary
after the death of Matyas Hunyadi, the English state after 1689 remained
strong and cohesive, with a Parliament willing to tax itself and make sacrifices
in the prolonged foreign struggles of the eighteenth century. A political
system that is all checks and balances is potentially no more successful than
one with no checks, because governments periodically need strong and
decisive action. The stability of an accountable political system thus rests on a
broad balance of power between the state and its underlying society.”653
“Consent” would be a better term than “balance of power” here. As has

been argued, and will continue to be argued in this series, there can be no
equality of power between the government and the governed, and ultimately,
if it is not the king who holds sway over the people, then it is the people who
holds sway over the king – they are the ultimate sovereign. That is why
English political history continued to develop in the direction of increasing
power to the people until we can no longer speak of a “balance” today.
Nevertheless, this much is true: no sovereign power, whether a king or an

oligarchy or a parliament, can act effectively without the consent of the people,
without their acceptance of the sovereign’s legitimacy and obedience to him.
This does not necessarily entail constitutionalism or democracy: a king can be
a hereditary autocrat and still rule effectively for the benefit of the people as a
whole so long as the people see his rule as legitimate. When the sovereign is
perceived, whether justly or unjustly, to have lost that legitimacy, and is no
longer obeyed, then he can continue to rule only by violence and oppression,
whose end, sooner or later, is revolution and the overthrow of the state…
393
46. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (2) JOHN LOCKE
John Locke, we will recall, was the secretary of the Presbyterian Earl of
Shaftesbury who opposed King Charles II in the “Exclusion Crisis” of 1679-81.
This explains the main aim of his work, which was to justify the limitation of
monarchical power that the Glorious Revolution achieved. Thus he set out to
prove that in the years leading to the revolution, King James II had broken
some kind of agreement with the people, and so had been rightly overthrown,
whereas the man who overthrew him and succeeded him, William III, was
abiding by its terms and so should be obeyed. Locke retained Hobbes’ idea
that the state had been founded in the beginning by a social contract. But he
reworked it so as to bring the monarch within rather than above the contract,
making parliament the real sovereign, and bringing God back into the picture,
if only for decency’s sake…
“If Louis XIV,” writes A.C. Grayling, “is the paradigm of an absolute
monarch, the political philosophy of Locke is the period’s most significant
theoretical rejection of absolutism. Locke was not a maker of the bloodless
middle-class revolution of 1688, but rather its explainer and justifier. He
wrote to describe the principles exemplified by the event, and to support
them. That is why his writings proved of such importance for the political
upheavals in North America and France a century after his time.
“Locke was both physician and secretary to Lord Shaftesbury, opponent of

James II and proponent of the idea of a new constitutional settlement. Being
in opposition to the Crown was dangerous, and necessitated a period of exile
in the Netherlands for Shaftesbury and Locke both before and during James
II’s reign. This direct involvement at the heart of events that resulted in
England becoming a constitutional monarchy informed all of Locke’s political
writings. It is no surprise therefore that he is quoted, and at considerable
length, in the documents of the American and French revolutions. To the
philosophes of the French Enlightenment he was a hero..”654
Like Hobbes, Locke began his argument by positing an original State of

Nature in which all men were equal and free. But, unlike Hobbes, he
considered that this original state was not one of total anarchy and vicious
egoism, but rather of social cohesion, with men “living together according to
reason, without a common superior on earth”. “Though this (State of Nature)
be a state of liberty,” he wrote, “yet it is not a state of licence.”655 For, in
addition to the State of Nature, Locke also posited a “Law of Nature” inspired
by “the infinitely wise Maker” and identifiable with “reason”, which
instructed men not to infringe on the freedom of other men. Thus “the state of
654Grayling, op. cit., pp. 279-280.

655Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government. Locke’s criticism of Hobbes was later echoed by
the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, who asked: had not the author of Leviathan “forgot to mention
Kindness, Friendship, Sociableness, Love of Company and Converse, Natural affection, or
anything of this kind?” (in Roy Porter, Enlightenment, London: Penguin Books, p. 160).
394
nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason,
which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all
equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health,
liberty, or possessions.”656
In the State of Nature every man owns the land he tills and the product of
that labour: “Though the earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all
Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any
Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we
may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that
Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and
joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.”657
The critical words here are “property” and “possessions”. For Locke’s second
aim, after the justification of the overthrow of James II and enthronement of
William III, was to make sure that the constitutional monarchy was in the
hands of the men of property, the aristocratic landowning class. And so those
who signed the original social contract, in his view, were not all the men of
the kingdom, but only those who had substantial property and therefore the
right to vote for members of parliament in elections. For “the great and chief
end of men uniting into commonwealths is the preservation of their
property.”658
The Natural Rights are based on God’s own word. For, writes J.S.
McClelland, interpreting Locke, He “means us to live at his pleasure, not
another’s, therefore no-one may kill me (except in self-defence, which
includes war); God commands me to labour in order to sustain and live my
life, therefore I have the right to the liberty to do so; and God must mean what
I take out of mere nature to be mine, therefore a natural right to property
originates in the command to labour: the land I plough, and its fruits are mine.
Man, being made in God’s image and therefore endowed with natural reason,
could easily work out that this was so, and they have Holy Writ to help them.
“Men’s natural reason also tells them two other very important things.
First, it tells each man that all other men have the same rights as he. All rights
have duties attached to them (a right without a corresponding duty, or set of
duties, is a privilege, not a right, a sinecure for instance, which carries with it
the right to a salary without the duty to work for it). Rational men are capable
of working this out for themselves, and they easily recognise that claiming
Natural Rights requires that they respect the exercise of those same rights in
others, and it is this reciprocity which makes the State of Nature social. If
everybody recognises naturally that Natural Rights are universal or they
cease to be natural, then plainly this implies that men could live together
without government. That is what Locke really means when he says that the
State of Nature is a state of liberty, not licence.
656 Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, chapter 2, section 6.

658 Locke, in Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, p. 651.
395
“However, the State of Nature is still the state of fallen man. Sinful men,
alas, will sometimes invade the Natural Rights of others. From this it follows
that men have another Natural Right, the right of judgement (and
punishment) when they think their Natural Rights have been violated by
others. This right is not a substantive right, a right to something; rather it is an
energising right, or a right which gives life to the other Natural Rights. Rights
are useless unless there is a right to judge when rights have been violated, and
so the right to judgement completes the package of Natural Rights.”659
The purpose of the state is to protect Natural Rights. It follows that

“society is natural while the state is artificial. Human nature being composed
as it is of certain Natural Rights which rational men recognise that they and
others possess, society arises spontaneously. It follows that, because society is
prior to the state, both logically and as a matter of history, it is up to society to
decide what the state shall be like, and not the state which shall decided what
society shall be like. This insistence [on] the separation of society from the
state, and a society’s priority over the state, was to become the bedrock of the
doctrine which came to be known as liberalism. Put another way, Locke
thinks that what the state is like is a matter (within limits) of rational
reflection and choice, but society is a given about which men have no choice.
Society is what God meant it to be, capitalist and naturally harmonious,
except that in the real world societies tend to become a bit ragged at the edges.
Offences against Natural and positive law, murder, theft, fraud and riot for
instance, happen from time to time, and men need the special agency of the
state to cope with them.”660
The social contract consists in men giving up “to the state their right to
judgement when their Natural Rights have been violated. Of course, a
Natural Right being God’s gift, part of what it is to be a human being, it is
impossible to alienate it completely. At the moment of contract, Locke’s men
give up the absolute minimum for the maximum gain: they entrust the state
with their right to judgement on the condition that the state uses the right to
judge when Natural Rights have been violated in order to allow men to enjoy
their other Natural Rights, to life, liberty and property, more abundantly.
“…. Men are capable of making a collective agreement with their rulers in
the State of Nature, either in the very beginning or in some future, imaginable
emergency when government has collapsed. In Locke’s account of the matter
it is easy to see when and why government would in fact collapse: when it
violates, or is seen to violate, enough [of] men’s Natural Rights for them
justifiably to rebel by taking back to themselves the right of judgement
because government has betrayed its trust and misused it. Men therefore have
a right of rebellion, and perhaps even a moral duty to rebel, if government
begins to frustrate God’s purpose for the world. The moment for rebellion

396
happens when enough men are prepared to repudiate their contract with
their rulers and fall back on the original contract of society. In all events, the
Lockean Sovereign is party to the contract to set up government. The king is
king on terms.”661
Locke was scornful of Hobbes’ idea that despotism was necessary to

preserve peace. To think that men should seek a peaceful life by surrendering
all their power (and property) to an absolute sovereign, he wrote, “is to think
that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be
done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be
devoured by Lions.”662 Therefore government should not be concentrated in
the hands of one man or institution; it should be composed of a legislative
power – parliament, elected every few years by the property-owning people,
and an executive power – the monarchy. The executive and legislative powers,
according to Locke, must be kept separate, as a check on each other, to
prevent the abuse of power.
Locke’s disciple Montesquieu developed this idea in his famous Spirit of the
Laws: “Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is
apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go… To prevent this
abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a
check to power. A government may be so constituted, as no man shall be
compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to
abstain from things which the law permits.”663 Thus in order to preserve
liberty, said Montesquieu, it is necessary to separate and balance the three
arms of government, the executive, the legislative and the judicial.664
The monarchy is necessary because only such a power can make laws valid
and effective. But the king is not above the laws passed by parliament, and is
to that extent subject to parliament. If the king transgresses the laws by, for
example, failing to summon the legislators at the proper times, or by setting
up “his own arbitrary authority in place of the laws”, then he can be resisted
by force. As A.L. Smith writes, “Locke put government in its proper position
as a trustee for the ends for which society exists; now a trustee has great
discretionary powers and great freedom from interference, but is also held
strictly accountable, and under a properly drawn deed nothing is simpler
than the appointment of new trustees. For after all, the ultimate trust remains
in the people, in Locke’s words; and this is the sovereign people, the

662 Locke, Two Treatises on Government; in David Held, Models of Democracy, Oxford: Polity
Press, 1987, p. 51.
663 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws; in Held, op. cit., p. 57.
664 However, as Held writes, “a fundamental difficulty lay at the very heart of his conception
of liberty. Liberty, he wrote, ‘is the right of doing whatever the law permits’. People are free
to pursue their activities within the framework of the law. But if freedom is defined in direct
relation to the law, there is no possibility of arguing coherently that freedom might depend
on altering the law or that the law itself might under certain circumstances articulate
tyranny” (op. cit., pp. 59-60).
397
irrevocable depository of all powers.” 665 Even the legislative power of
parliament could rule only by “promulgating standing laws” and not
“extemporary arbitrary decrees”.
This would appear to allow the people to rebel not only against the king,
but also against parliament. The problem is: where to draw the line? When is
the use of force against the government just and lawful?
This vital question has never received a satisfactory answer in western

political theory. Locke’s answer was: when “estates, liberties, lives are in
danger, and perhaps religion too”. For “the end of government is the good of
mankind, and which is best for mankind, that the people should always
exposed to the boundless will of tyranny or that the rulers should be
sometimes liable to be opposed? Upon the forfeiture of their rulers, [power]
reverts to the society and the people have a right to act as supreme and place
it in a new form or new hands, as they think good.”666
In other words, if the people feel that their Natural Rights have been
violated by king or parliament, then in theory they should be able to declare
the contract broken and take power back from their representatives – by force,
if need be. For “the Community may be said in this respect to be always the
Supreme Power”.667 Thus if the prince seeks to “enslave, or destroy them”, the
people are entitled to “appeal to heaven”. But “since Heaven does not make
explicit pronouncements,” writes Russell, “this means, in effect, that a
decision can only be reached by fighting, since it is assumed that Heaven will
give the victory to the better cause.”668
However, the experience of the English revolution and Locke’s own

conservative instincts led him to countenance revolution only in extreme
cases. Otherwise the right to rebel would “lay a perpetual foundation for
disorder”. “Great mistakes in the ruling part… will be born by the People
without muting or murmur”, and recourse would be had to force only after “a
long train of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices”.669 In general, therefore,
Locke’s system represents an uneasy compromise between older, religious
ways of thinking and the new rationalism. On the one hand, he wanted the
authority that an established church and an anointed king gives in order to
protect property and prevent the revolution that had so nearly destroyed
665 Smith, “English Political Philosophy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, The
Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The Eighteenth Century, 1909, p. 809.
666 Locke, An Essay concerning the true, original, extent, and end of Civil Government (1690).
668 Russell, op. cit., pp. 662-663.
669 Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, treatise 2, chapter 14, section 168. “’Overturning
the constitution and frame of any just government’ is ‘the greatest crime a man is capable of’,
but ‘either ruler or subject’ who forcibly invades ‘the rights of either prince or people’ is
guilty of it. ‘Whosoever uses force without right, as everyone does in society who does it
without law, puts himself into a state of war with those against whom he so uses it… every
one has a right to defend himself and to resist the aggressor.’” (J.R. Western, Monarchy and
Revolution, London: Blandford Press, 1972, p. 25)
398
everything a generation before. On the other hand, he wanted to give the
people the right to overthrow a tyrant. But it is clearly the secular interests of
his class, rather than religious feeling, that motivates his thinking. And it was
those secular interests that triumphed in the end. By the time William and
Mary had died, in 1714, and the German Hanoverian dynasty was in its place,
the character of the English monarchy had been changed for good, if not for
the better. England was a constitutional monarchy ruled by king and
parliament together, but with the landed aristocracy firmly in charge.
Locke’s political philosophy was more revolutionary than is generally

realized. Its radical nature consisted not so much in its burial of the Stuart
idea of absolute monarchy, as in the idea of universal rights as something that
preceded and overrode local traditions and rights formed over centuries. This
went against the traditional, particularist nature of English conservatism
defended, as Ofir Haivry and Yoram Hazony write, “by leading Whig
intellectuals in works from William Atwood’s Fundamental Constitution of the
English Government (1690) to Josiah Tucker’s A Treatise of Civil
Government (1781), which strongly opposed both absolutism and Lockean
theories of universal rights. This is the view upon which men like Blackstone,
Burke, Washington, and Hamilton were educated. Not only in England but in
British America, lawyers were trained in the common law by studying
Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England (1628–44) and Hale’s History of the
Common Law of England (1713). In both, the law of the land was understood to
be the traditional English constitution and common law, amended as needed
for local purposes.
“Because Locke is today recognized as the decisive figure in the liberal

tradition, it is worth looking more carefully at why his political theory was so
troubling for conservatives. We have described the Anglo-American
conservative tradition as subscribing to a historical empiricism, which
proposes that political knowledge is gained by examining the long history of
the customary laws of a given nation and the consequences when these laws
have been altered in one direction or another. Conservatives understand that
a jurist must exercise reason and judgment, of course. But this reasoning is
about how best to adapt traditional law to present circumstances, making
such changes as are needed for the betterment of the state and of the public,
while preserving as much as possible the overall frame of the law. To this we
have opposed a standpoint that can be called rationalist. Rationalists have a
different view of the role of reason in political thought, and in fact a different
understanding of what reason itself is. Rather than arguing from the historical
experience of nations, they set out by asserting general axioms that they
believe to be true of all human beings, and that they suppose will be accepted
by all human beings examining them with their native rational abilities. From
these they deduce the appropriate constitution or laws for all men.
399
“Locke is known philosophically as an empiricist. But his reputation in this
regard is based largely on his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689),
which is an influential exercise in empirical psychology. His Second Treatise of
Government is not, however, a similar effort to bring an empirical standpoint
to the theory of the state. Instead, it begins with a series of axioms that are
without any evident connection to what can be known from the historical and
empirical study of the state. Among other things, Locke asserts that, (1) prior
to the establishment of government, men exist in a ‘state of nature,’ in which
(2) ‘all men are naturally in a state of perfect freedom,’ as well as in (3) a ‘state
of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of
one over another.’ Moreover, (4) this state of nature ‘has a law of nature to
govern it’; and (5) this law of nature is, as it happens, nothing other than
human ‘reason’ itself, which ‘teaches all mankind, who will but consult it.’ It
is this universal reason, the same among all mankind, that leads them to (6)
terminate the state of nature, ‘agreeing together mutually to enter into . . . one
body politic’ by an act of free consent. From these six axioms, Locke then
proceeds to deduce the proper character of the political order for all nations
on earth.
“Three important things should be noticed about this set of axioms. The
first is that the elements of Locke’s political theory are not known from
experience. The ‘perfect freedom’ and ‘perfect equality’ that define the state of
nature are ideal forms whose relationship with empirical reality is entirely
unclear. Nor can the identity of natural law with reason, or the assertion that
the law dictated by reason ‘teaches all mankind,’ or the establishment of the
state by means of purely consensual social contract, be known empirically. All
of these things are stipulated as when setting out a mathematical system.
“The second thing to notice is that there is no reason to think that any of
Locke’s axioms are in fact true. Faced with this mass of unverifiable assertions,
empiricist political theorists such as Hume, Smith, and Burke rejected all of
Locke’s axioms and sought to rebuild political philosophy on the basis of
things that can be known from history and from an examination of actual
human societies and governments.
“Third, Locke’s theory not only dispenses with the historical and empirical
basis for the state, it also implies that such inquiries are, if not entirely
unnecessary, then of secondary importance. If there exists a form of reason
that is accessible to ‘all mankind, who will but consult it,’ and that reveals to
all the universal laws of nature governing the political realm, then there will
be little need for the historically and empirically grounded reasoning of men
such as Fortescue, Coke, and Selden. All men, if they will just gather together
and consult with their own reason, can design a government that will be
better than anything that ‘the many ages of experience and observation’
produced in England. On this view, the Anglo-American conservative
tradition—far from having brought into being the freest and best constitution
ever known to mankind—is in fact shot through with unwarranted prejudice
and an obstacle to a better life for all. Locke’s theory thus pronounces, in other
400
words, the end of Anglo-American conservatism, and the end of the
traditional constitution that conservatives still held to be among the most
precious things on earth.”670
“In all its forms,” writes Roger Scruton, “the social contract enshrines a
fundamental liberal principle, namely, that, deep down, our obligations are
self-created and self-imposed. I cannot be bound by the law, or legitimately
constrained by the sovereign, if I never chose to be under the obligation to
obey. Legitimacy is conferred by the citizen, and not by the sovereign, still
less by the sovereign’s usurping ancestors. If we cannot discover a contract to
be bound by the law, then the law is not binding.”671
However, as Hegel pointed out, this original premise, that “our obligations
are self-created and self-imposed”, is false. We do not choose the family we
are born in, or the state to which we belong, and yet have obligations to both.
Of course, we can rebel against such obligations; the son can choose to say
that he owes nothing to his father. And yet he would not even exist without
his father; and without his father’s upbringing he would not even be capable
of making choices. Thus we are “hereditary bondsmen”, to use Byron’s
phrase. In this sense we live in a cycle of freedom and necessity: the free
choices of our ancestors limit our own freedom, while our choices limit those
of our children. The idea of a social contract entered into in a single
generation is therefore not only a historical myth; it is also a dangerous myth.
It is a myth that distorts the very nature of society, which cannot be conceived
as existing except over several generations.
But if society exists over several generations, all generations should be

taken into account in drawing up the contract. Why should only one
generation’s interests be respected? For, as Scruton continues, interpreting the
thought of Edmund Burke, “the social contract prejudices the interests of
those who are not alive to take part in it: the dead and the unborn. Yet they
too have a claim, maybe an indefinite claim, on the resources and institutions
over which the living so selfishly contend. To imagine society as a contract
among its living members, is to offer no rights to those who go before and
after. But when we neglect those absent souls, we neglect everything that
endows law with its authority, and which guarantees our own survival. We
should therefore see the social order as a partnership, in which the dead and
the unborn are included with the living.”672
670 Haivry and Hazony, “What is Conservatism?”, American Affairs, Summer,2017, vol. I, no. 2.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/05/what-is-conservatism/
671 Scruton, op. cit., p. 416. As Andrzej Walicki writes: “The argument that society was
founded on reason and self-interest could of course be used to sanction rebellion against any
forms of social relations that could not prove their rationality or utility.” (A History of Russian
Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, p. 39)
672 Scruton, op. cit., p. 417.
401
“Every people,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “is, first of all, a certain historical
whole, a long row of consecutive generations, living over hundreds or
thousands of years in a common life handed down by inheritance. In this
form a people, a nation, is a certain socially organic phenomenon with more
or less clearly expressed laws of inner development… But political intriguers
and the democratic tendency does not look at a people in this form, as a
historical, socially organic phenomenon, but simply in the form of a sum of
the individual inhabitants of the country. This is the second point of view,
which looks on a nation as a simple association of people united into a state
because they wanted that, living according to laws which they like, and
arbitrarily changing the laws of their life together when it occurs to them.”673
As Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow writes: “It is obligatory, say the wise

men of this world, to submit to social authorities on the basis of a social
contract, by which people were united into society, by a general agreement
founding government and submission to it for the general good. If they think
that it is impossible to found society otherwise than on a social contract, - then
why is it that the societies of the bees and ants are not founded on it? And is it
not right that those who break open honeycombs and destroy ant-hills should
be entrusted with finding in them… a charter of bees and ants? And until
such a thing is done, nothing prevents us from thinking that bees and ants
create their societies, not by contract, but by nature, by an idea of community
implanted in their nature, which the Creator of the world willed to be realised
even at the lowest level of His creatures. What if an example of the creation of
a human society by nature were found? What, then, is the use of the fantasy
of a social contract? No one can argue against the fact that the original form of
society is the society of the family. Thus does not the child obey the mother,
and the mother have power over the child, not because they have contracted
between themselves that she should feed him at the breast, and that he should
shout as little as possible when he is swaddled? What if the mother should
suggest too harsh conditions to the child? Will not the inventors of the social
contract tell him to go to another mother and make a contract with her about
his upbringing? The application of the social contract in this case is as fitting
as it is fitting in other cases for every person, from the child to the old man,
from the first to the last. Every human contract can have force only when it is
entered into with consciousness and good will. Are there many people in
society who have heard of the social contract? And of those few who have
heard of it, are there many who have a clear conception of it? Ask, I will not
say the simple citizen, but the wise man of contracts: when and how did he
enter into the social contract? When he was an adult? But who defined this
time? And was he outside society before he became an adult? By means of
birth? This is excellent. I like this thought, and I congratulate every Russian
that he was able – I don’t know whether it was from his parents or from
Russia herself, - to agree that he be born in powerful Russia… The only thing
that we must worry about is that neither he who was born nor his parents
673 Tikhomirov, “Demokratia liberal’naia i sotsial’naia” (“Liberal and Social Democracy”), in
Kritika Demokratia (A Critique of Democracy), Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 122.
402
thought about this contract in their time, and so does not referring to it mean
fabricating it? And consequently is not better, as well as simpler, both in
submission and in other relationships towards society, to study the rights and
obligations of a real birth instead of an invented contract – that pipe-dream of
social life, which, being recounted at the wrong time, has produced and
continues to produce material woes for human society. ‘Transgressors have
told me fables, but they are not like Thy law, O Lord’ (Psalm 118.85).”674
In spite of these contradictions, social contract theory has remained the

dominant model of society in Anglo-Saxon countries to this day. Thus
probably the most influential contemporary work of political philosophy,
John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, is in essence a variation on Lockean social
contract theory with one or two original twists. One of these is the idea that
people enter into the social contract from a so-called “original position” in
which they are covered with a “veil of ignorance”. That is, the people “are
denied knowledge of everything which makes them who they are: their class,
skills, age, gender, sexuality, religious views and conceptions of the good life.
Rawls argues that the principles which these people would choose to regulate
their relations with one another are definitive of justice… The veil of
ignorance is meant to ensure that our views on justice are not distorted by our
own interests. 'If a man knew that he was wealthy, he might find it rational to
advance the principle that various taxes for welfare measures be counted
unjust; if he knew that he was poor, he would most likely propose the
contrary principle…’”675
This theory escapes the objection that people entering into a social contract
are simply choosing their self-interest by completely abstracting from the real
man with his concrete desires, interests and beliefs. Thus not only is the
original social contract a historical myth in the strictest sense of the word: the
“conception of the good” of those who enter into it is not allowed to intrude
into political life in any way.
As Scruton notes, Rawls’s social contract aims to remove “from the legal
order all reference to the sources of division and conflict between human
groups, so as to create a society in which no question can arise that does not
have a solution acceptable to everyone. If religion, culture, sex, race, and even
‘conceptions of the good’ have all been relegated to the private sphere, and set
outside the scope of jurisdiction, then the resulting public law will be an
effective instrument for the government of a multicultural society, forbidding
citizens to make exceptions in favour of their preferred group, sex, culture,
faith, or lifestyle…. This simply reinforces the status of the theory as the
theology of a post-religious society.”676
674 Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia (Works), Moscow, 1877, vol. 3, pp. 448, 449; reprinted in
Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), 49, N 9 (573), September, 1997, pp. 3-4.
675 Ben Rogers, “Portrait: John Rawls”, Prospect, June, 1999, p. 51
676 Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest, London: ISI Books, 2002, pp. 10-11.
403
Locke had argued that religion was a private matter, and that people
should be made as far as possible to mind their own business; but he drew the
line at Catholics and atheists. Rawls goes further in making the State
completely value-free (or value-less) – and Catholics and atheists are equally
welcome! Thus the theory, while not explicitly anti-religious, actually leads, in
its modern variants, to the purest secularism: the original social contract must
be postulated to be between irreligious people and to lead to a state that is
strictly irreligious, relegating religion entirely to the private sphere.
But such a state will be accepted only by a society for which religion has
ceased to be the primary focus of life, and has become merely one “interest”
or “need” among many others. Such a society was England after the Glorious
Revolution. And such a society has the whole of the West become since then
insofar as the Glorious Revolution has become the model for “democratic”
regime-change throughout the world, while its attendant theories of the social
contract and human rights have become the dominant orthodoxy in all states
that aspire to become part of the “international community”.
We come to the perhaps shocking conclusion that the “glorious” and

“bloodless” revolution of 1688, together with its attendant theory of the social
contract, was built on crypto-atheist foundations that logically lead, in the
fullness of time, to the purest atheism. It follows that for a truly religious
believer – whether he be Christian, Hindu, Jewish or Muslim – for whom the
truth of his faith is the first value, and who longs, as every truly religious
believer must long, for the triumph of his faith throughout society and the
spread of its influence into every social and political institution, social
contract theory is unacceptable. He cannot sign up to such a “contract”
(assuming, for the sake of argument, that such a thing exists). And if he is
forced to sign, and even if he is coerced or re-educated into renouncing his
faith, he will at best be an unenthusiastic, inwardly grumbling citizen and at
worst a potential revolutionary. Therefore if we accept that religious belief is a
permanent feature of human society, we must also accept that social contract
theory and the liberal theory of government can never be a stable, long-term
foundation for that society – although it may well be a temporary restraint on,
and container of, civil war in a religiously divided nation…
But only a temporary restraint. For, as we see in the West (particularly

America) today, and as Phillip Blond writes, quoting John Milbank and
Adrian Pabst: “’The triumph of liberalism today more and more brings
about the “war of all against all.”’ Liberalism brings about the very thing, a
universal civil war, from which it initially promised deliverance. It also
brings about what has never existed before, but what it claims was there in
the beginning: an isolated individual abstracted from all social ties and
duties.”677
677 Blond, “Politics after Liberalism”, First Things First, December, 2017.
404
47. WAR, CALVINISM AND THE JEWISH BANKERS
“In the seventeenth century,” writes Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “the court Jew
came to play a crucial role in state affairs. Each royal or princely court had its
own Jewish auxiliary. Throughout the country court Jews administered
finances, provisioned armies, raised money, provided textiles and precious
stones to the court… Such court Jews stood at the pinnacle of the social scale,
forming an elite class.”678
Thus the Jews became influential in Germany, in spite of Luther’s strong

opposition to Judaism. And banking at the Viennese court was dominated by
Jews - during the Austrian wars against France and then Turkey, Samuel
Oppenheimer became the Imperial War Purveyor to the Austrians… Thus, as
David Vital writes, “by 1694 the Austrian state debt to Oppenheimer alone
amounted to no less than 3 million florins. At his death, by Emmanuel’s
estimate, it had reached double that figure.”679 In France, meanwhile, under
Louis XIV and XV the leading position in the financial world was occupied by
the Jewish banker Samuel Bernard, about whose help to France
contemporaries said that ‘his whole merit consisted in the fact that he
supported the State, as a string supports that which hangs on it.’”680
It was not only in the West that Jewish money ruled. In the sixteenth
century, a French diplomat who lived in Constantinople under Suleyman the
Magnificent, Nicolas de Nicolay, wrote: “They now have in their hands the
most and greatest traffic of merchandise and ready money that is conducted
in all the Levant. The shops and stalls best stocked with all the varieties of
goods which can be found in Constantinople are those of the Jews. They also
have among them very excellent practitioners of all the arts and manufactures,
especially the Marranos not long since banished and expelled from Spain and
Portugal who to the great detriment and injury of Christianity have taught the
Turks several inventions, artifices and machines of war such as how to make
artillery, arquebuses, gunpower, cannon-balls and other arms.”681
Protected by the Ottoman Turks from the attacks of the Christians, the
Constantinopolitan Jews intrigued against the West European States. Thus
Joseph Nasi, a banker and entrepreneur, through contacts in Western Europe
was able, according to Philip Mansel, “to maintain an international network
which helped him obtain revenge on Spain and France. It is possible that,
from the banks of the Bosphorus, he encouraged the revolt of the Netherlands
against Philip II of Spain. An envoy from the rebel leader, the Prince of
Orange, came to see him in 1569…”682
678
Cohn-Sherbok, Atlas of Jewish History, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 115.
679
Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 14.
680
Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow, 1998, p. 155.
681
De Nicolay, in Philip Mansel, Constantinople, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 124.
682
Mansel, op. cit., p. 126.
405
In fact, the Jews served all sides in the Gentile wars…
But there was a price to be paid… In the 18th century the Jewish banker
Jean Lo (Levi) founded a huge “Mississippi company” in Paris, which gave
him monopoly rights to trade with China, India, the islands of the southern
seas, Canada and all the colonies of France in America, and which
“guaranteed” dividends of 120% a year to investors. However, the paper he
issued was founded on nothing, the company collapsed, “millions of
Frenchmen were ruined and for many years the finances of the country were
hopelessly disordered. At the same time many representatives of the Jewish
community of Paris amassed huge fortunes on this misery.”683
However, the really significant developments took place in England, where

the need to finance wars became particularly pressing… Robert Tombs writes:
“William had invaded England to bring it into the alliance fighting against
Louis XIV’s France, thought to be aiming at ‘universal monarchy’. Louis
retaliated by giving troops to aid James to recover his throne. Thus began a
‘Second Hundred Years’ War’, a titanic struggle to break French power that
ended only in 1815 at Waterloo… During those 127 years, England fought in
five of the eight bloodiest wars in world history: the Nine Years War (1688-97),
the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13), the Seven Years’ War (1755-63),
and finally the French Revolutionary (1792-1802) and Napoleonic Wars (1803-
15). And in addition to these was the American War of Independence (1775-
83), less lethal, but extremely expensive. War created new institutions, new
relationships, new demands, new powers, new ambitions, new dangers and
new priorities, which crowded out the concerns with religious ritual and
royal prerogative that had dominated previous decades. Thus war
transformed England and Britain…
“Whatever the political alliances or concessions required to maximise the

unity and commitment of England in that struggle, they would be made.
Hence, religious toleration was necessary to maintain a broad anti-French
coalition, and William insisted on it. He accepted a Bill of Rights (1689), which
enshrined right of petition, free debate in Parliament, freedom of election, trial
by jury, the right to bear arms and frequency of Parliament, and it forbade
extra-legal royal action. A Mutiny Act (1689) made the existence of the army
dependent on parliamentary consent. A Triennial Act (1694) required general
elections every three years. In short, once again, but now more explicitly than
ever, the Crown was made subject to law, and its powers, still extensive, were
defined by agreement with the nation. This time, there was no going back on
the deal, which sketched out a constitution for England. Parliament had
placed itself at the centre of the state. But what made these changes effective
was Parliament’s ancient control of taxation. The pressing need created by
war to have a parliament that would sanction ever-increasing taxation and
debt changed it from a periodic event, called when the king needed it, to a
permanent institution, which has met year since 1689…
683
Platonov, op. cit., p. 153.
406
“War required a bigger and more professional army, the origins of which
went back to the New Model Army of the Civil War. Would it be maintained
in peacetime or disbanded? This was a matter of great political and
ideological significance. Politically, because with memories of civil war still
fresh the control of military force seemed crucial. Ideologically, because the
right and duty to bear arms was a defining part of free citizenship - as well as
being cheaper. But the length and intensity of war after 1689 means that the
old idea that English freedom meant a society defended by its armed citizens
and a monarch with no significant armed force became both unpopular and
impractical. Hence, one of the characteristic vulnerabilities of the English state,
its military weakness, disappeared. However, army service was widely
shunned, and so England early became a country that relied on professional
soldiers for serious fighting.
“Lack of money had been England’s other great weakness since the reign
of Elizabeth, and it had caused recurring crises for the Stuarts. After the
Glorious Revolution taxes spiralled, with parliamentary approval. By the end
of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, tax as a proportion of national
income had nearly tripled since 1688…
“Taxation, however, was not enough to meet wartime spending:

governments had to borrow more than ever before. Public debt went from
£31m in the 1680s to £100m in 1760, paying not only for Britain’s navy and
army, but contributing to those of its allies too. This required a sophisticated
financial system, by which short-term liabilities – in effect, IOUs from
government departments – could be replaced by long-term, low-interest
bonds. During the 1690s, ministers, MPs and businessmen studied the
methods of the Dutch and the Venetians, Europe’s most sophisticated
financiers. Experiments and mistakes were made with lotteries and life
annuities. In 1694, William Paterson, a Scot, and Michael Godfrey, an
Englishman, won approval from Parliament for a Bank of England modelled
on the Bank of Amsterdam, an event of truly historic importance…
Immediately, in 1695, the Bank proved its worth by saving the government’s
credit from collapsing, and kept it afloat until peace came two years
later…”684
The foundation of the Bank of England was indeed of historic importance;

for it both underwrote Britain’s rise to the position of most powerful country
in the world, and put the finances of England back into the hands of the Jews
for the first time since King Edward I had expelled them in 1290. N.
Bogoliubov writes: “With the help of the agent William Paterson [the king]
succeeded in persuading the British Treasury to borrow 1.25 million British
pounds from Jewish bankers. This strengthened his position. Insofar as the
state debt had already, even without this, attained improbable heights, the
government could do nothing but agree to the conditions presented:
684 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 306-307, 308-309, 309-310.
407
“1. The name of the creditor will remain in secret: he is allowed to found
‘The Bank of England’ (a Central Bank).
“2. The directors of the above-mentioned bank are given the right to
establish the gold support of paper money.
“3. They are given the right to give credits to the extent of ten pounds in
paper money to every pound kept in gold.
“4. They are given the right to accumulate a national debt and collect the
necessary sum by means of direct taxation of the people.
“Thus there appeared the first private central bank – ‘the Bank of England’.
By means of these operations banking procedures were able to produce a 50%
profit on the Bank’s capital deposits at 5%. It was the English people who had
to pay for this. The creditors were not concerned that the debt should be paid,
since in conditions of indebtedness they were able to exert influence also on
the political processes in the country. The national debt of England rose from
£1,250,000 in 1694 to £16,000,000 in 1698…”685
Massive indebtedness is usually considered a weakness. But it has been

argued that it was precisely England’s credibility as a borrower that ensured
her success. Thus Niall Ferguson writes: “In a seminal article published in
1989, North and Weingast argued that the real significance of the Glorious
Revolution lay in the credibility that it gave the English state as a sovereign
borrower. From 1689, Parliament controlled and improved taxation, audited
royal expenditure, protected private property rights and effectively
prohibited debt default. This arrangement, they argued, was ‘self-enforcing’,
not least because property owners were overwhelmingly the class represented
in Parliament. As a result, the English state was able to borrow money on a
scale that had previously been impossible because of the sovereign’s habit of
defaulting or arbitrarily taxing or expropriating. The late seventeenth and
early eighteenth century thus inaugurated a period of rapid accumulation of
public debt without any rise in borrowing costs – rather the reverse.
“This was in fact a benign development. Not only did it enable England to
become Great Britain and, indeed, the British Empire, by giving the English
state unrivalled financial resources for making – and winning – war. By
accustoming the wealthy to investment in paper securities, it also paved the
way for a financial revolution that would channel English savings into
everything from canals to railways, commerce to colonization, ironworks to
textile mills. Though the national debt grew enormously in the course of
685
Bogoliubov, in Begunov, Yu.K. Stepanov, A.D, Dushenov, K.Yu., Taina Bezzakonia (The
Mystery of Iniquity), St. Petersburg, 2002, pp. 381-382
408
England’s many wars with France, reaching a peak of more than 260 per cent
of GDP in the decade after 1815, this leverage earned a handsome return,
because on the other side of the balance sheet, acquired largely with a debt-
financed navy, was a global empire. Moreover, in the century after Waterloo,
the debt was successfully reduced with a combination of sustained growth
and primary budget surpluses. There was no default. There was no inflation.
And Britannia bestrode the globe…”686
“Parliament,” says Tombs, “underpinned credit. In contrast with absolutist

states, its guarantee made defaults unlikely (many MPs were bondholders),
and the Commons publicly voted taxation earmarked for interest payments.
By 1715 fully half of the revenue went to servicing what became a permanent
National Debt. There were crises and panics about unsustainable debt levels.
But ‘as long as land lasts and beer is drunk’, declared the long-serving the
Duke of Newcastle, England would never default. Realizing this, domestic
and foreign savers became eager to lend, keeping interest rates law. As
confidence grew, the rate of interest fell from 14 percent in 1693 to 3 percent in
1731, meaning, of course, that Britain could borrow nearly five times as much
money for the same outlay of interest, and so outspend its bigger and richer
enemy France. The combination of the House of Commons and the City of
London funded Britain’s rise to world power.
“But war brought new political controversies too. The rapid wartime
growth of what has been termed the ‘fiscal-military state’ altered the
relationship of citizens and government. The state became increasingly
intrusive and expensive. It also employed more people and created a larger
number of beneficiaries, including ‘new men’ such as bankers, lenders,
contractors and bureaucrats, usually Whigs, who were both serving and
profiting from its activities. Parliament, by placing itself at the centre of
decision, was less clearly the defender of the citizen against the demands of
the state: it was itself the demander, with many of its members benefiting
personally from salaries, jobs, pensions and contracts.
“There emerged new political alignments. In the 1690s a loose ‘Country

Party’ was set up by Whigs led by the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (the theorist of
politeness). Its ideas attracted many Tories. They claimed to be ‘Patriots’,
standing for the interests of the ‘country’ against the selfishness of the ‘court’
and the political and financial oligarchy. It found a fashionable ideology
ready made, and which remained potent throughout the century – ‘Roman’ or
‘civic human’ ideas, derived from the prestigious writings of ancient patriots.
Civic humanists thought politics should be the disinterested activity of a
virtuous elite upholding the public good and combating corruption – for it
was corruption, not the royal prerogative, that they now saw as threatening
freedom: ‘What the French government does by despotism, the English
government does by corruption’. This was not a democratic creed: indeed,
they feared democracy would facilitate corruption. The Country Party also
686 Ferguson, The Great Degeneration, London: Penguin, 2014, pp. 38-39.
409
appealed potentially to all who simply resented every-higher taxes. War on
the Continent seemed to many a cynical way of keeping the money flowing.
Thus emerged a powerful but eclectic Patriot rhetoric, willing to lump
together Roman republicanism, Magna Carta and Locke’s contract theory. It
came to permeate English political debate and was exported to American and
France. Whenever we call for honest politics or high-minded leadership to
combat self-interest, corruption and the self-absorption of ‘Westminster’ or
‘Washington’, we are echoing these ideas…”687
The increased power of the Jews in England naturally aroused suspicion

and opposition. However, in 1732, as Paul Johnson writes, “a judgement gave
Jews, in effect, legal protection against generic libels which might endanger
life. Hence… England became the first place in which it was possible for a
modern Jewish community to emerge”.688
Indeed, when the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa expelled the Jews from
Prague in 1744, the British government intervened, “with the Secretary of
State, Lord Harrington, condemning the expulsions to her ambassador as
‘detrimental and prejudicial to the true interest of the common cause’ against
France. These pleas initially fell on deaf ears, but Maria Theresa soon relented
and the Jews ultimately returned home…”689
“By the end of the eighteenth century,” writes David Vital, “the Jews of
England had little to complain of…”690
Paul Johnson explains Jewish success as follows: “The dynamic impulse to

national economies, especially in England and the Netherlands, and later in
North America and Germany, was provided not only by Calvinists, but by
Lutherans, Catholics from north Italy and, not least, by Jews.
“What these moving communities shared was not theology but an

unwillingness to live under the state regimentation of religious and moral
ideas at the behest of the clerical establishments. All of them repudiated
clerical hierarchies, favouring religious government by the congregation and
the private conscience. In all these respects the Jews were the most
characteristic of the various denominations of emigrants…
“Capitalism, at all its stages of development, has advanced by rationalizing

and so improving the chaos of existing methods. The Jews could do this
because, while intensely conservative (as a rule) within their own narrow and
isolated world, they had no share in or emotional commitment to society as a
whole and so could watch its old traditions, methods and institutions being
687 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 310-311.

688
Johnson, History of the Jews, London: Pimlico, p. 278.
689 Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, p. 101.
690
Vital, op. cit., p. 39.
410
demolished without a pang – could, indeed, play a leading role in the process
of destruction. They were thus natural capitalist entrepreneurs…
“It was the unconscious collective instinct of the Jews both to

depersonalize finance and to rationalize the general economic process. Any
property known to be Jewish, or clearly identifiable as such, was always at
risk in medieval and early modern times, especially in the Mediterranean,
which was then the chief international trading area. As the Spanish navy and
the Knights of Malta treated Jewish-chartered ships and goods as legitimate
booty, fictitious Christian names were used in the paperwork of international
transactions, including marine insurance. These developed into impersonal
formulae. As well as developing letters of credit, the Jews invented bearer-
bonds, another impersonal way of moving money. For an underprivileged
community whose property was always under threat, and who might be
forced to move at short notice, the emergence of reliable, impersonal paper
money, whether bills of exchange or, above all, valid banknotes, was an
enormous blessing.
“Hence the whole thrust of Jewish activity in the early modern period was
to refine these devices and bring them into universal use. They strongly
supported the emergence of the institutions which promoted paper values:
the central banks, led by the Bank of England (1694) with its statutory right to
issue notes, and the stock exchanges…
“In general, financial innovations which Jews pioneered in the eighteenth

century, and which aroused much criticism then, became acceptable in the
nineteenth.
“…Jews were in the vanguard in stressing the importance of the selling

function… [and] were among the leaders in display, advertising and
promotion…
“They aimed for the widest possible market. They appreciated the
importance of economies of scale…
“Above all, Jews were more inclined than others in commerce to accept
that businesses flourished by serving consumer interests rather than guild
interests. The customer was always right. The market was the final judge.
These axioms were not necessarily coined by Jews or exclusively observed by
Jews, but Jews were quicker than most to apply them.
“Finally, Jews were exceptionally adept at gathering and making use of

commercial intelligence. As the market became the dominant factor in all
kinds of trading, and as it expanded into a series of global systems, news
became of prime importance. This was perhaps the biggest single factor in
Jewish trading and financial success…”691
691
Johnson, op. cit., pp. 245-246, 247, 283, 285, 286.
411
Thus, as Hannah Arendt writes, with the rise of capitalism, “Jewish
banking capital became international. It was united by means of cross-
marriages, and a truly international caste arose,” the consciousness of which
engendered “a feeling of power and pride”.692 After centuries of exile, the
Jews were back at the heart of the Gentile world…
692
Arendt, “On Totalitarianism”, in Mikhail Nazarov, Tajna Rossii (The Mystery of Russia),
Moscow: “Russkaia idea”, 1999, p. 394
412
48. THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION
Even the fiercest of ancient despotisms of the past went through phases of
religious toleration – for example, the Roman empire in the late third century.
In the early sixteenth century, in the wake of the resurrection of the old pagan
ideas of the dignity of man, the pagan idea of religious toleration also revived.
We say “pagan”, because the justification adduced for religious toleration was
not truly Christian, but what we would now call ecumenist and pragmatic: a
belief that religious differences are not worth fighting and dying over.
We find the idea well expressed in Sir Thomas More’s fantasy-manifesto,

Utopia: the Best State of the Commonwealth (1516). Paradoxically, More was a
man of faith who died for his loyalty to Catholic teaching at the hands of King
Henry VIII. But he was also a humanist; and in Utopia King Utopus has
introduced a social system characterized by common ownership of property
and religious toleration, with no official church or religion. “King Utopus,
even at the first beginning hearing that the inhabitants of the land were before
his coming thither at continual dissension and strife among themselves for
their religions, perceiving also that this common dissension (whiles every
several sect took several parts in fighting for his country) was the only
occasion of his conquest over them all, as soon as he had gotten the victory,
first of all made a decree that it should be lawful for every man to favour and
follow what religion he would, and that he might do the best he could to
bring other to his opinion, so that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly, and
soberly, without hasty and contentious rebuking and inveighing against
others. If he could not by fair and gentle speech induce them unto his opinion,
yet he should use no kind of violence, and refrain from displeasant and
seditious words. To him that would vehemently and fervently in this cause
strive and contend was decreed banishment or bondage.
“This law did King Utopus make, not only for the maintenance of peace,
which he saw through continual contention and mortal hatred utterly
extinguished, but also because he thought this decree should make for the
furtherance of religion… Furthermore, though there be one religion which
alone is true, and all other vain and superstitious, yet did he well foresee (so
that the matter were handled with reason and sober modesty) that the truth of
its own power would at the last issue out and come to light. But if contention
and debate in that behalf should continually be used, as the worst men be
most obstinate and stubborn and in their evil opinion most constant, he
perceived that then the best and holiest religion would be trodden underfoot
and destroyed by most vain superstitions, even as good corn is by thorns and
weeds overgrown and choked.”693
More seems to be hovering here between two contrary propositions: that

free debate will ultimately lead to the triumph of truth (“the truth of its own
power would at the last issue out and come to light”), and that this freedom
693 More, Utopia, book II, pp. 119-120.
413
will used by the worst men for the triumph of heresy (“then the best and
holiest religion would be trodden underfoot”). For nearly two hundred years,
it would be the second that would be believed by the majority of men.
This humanist attitude would not survive the appearance of Protestantism

and the religious wars that followed. But it revived as the era of the wars of
religion was coming to an end. Of course, some relaxation of religious
persecution was only to be expected, when in Germany, for example, as a
result of the Thirty Years War, between a third and a half of the population
lay dead.694 No society can continue to take such losses without disappearing
altogether. Believers on both sides of the conflict were exhausted. They
longed for a rest from religious passions and the opportunity to rebuild their
shattered economies in peace. It was as a result of this cooling of religious
passions, and rekindling of commercial ones, that the idea of religious
toleration was reborn. Thus the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 acknowledged
that “subjects whose religion differs from that of their prince are to have equal
rights with his other subjects” (V. 35).695 This was a landmark in political
history. The goal was no longer unanimity, but unity under the sovereign, an
agreement to “live and let live” so long as the power of the sovereign was not
contested.
And yet the idea of religious toleration had not yet penetrated the popular
consciousness. Calvinism was not an inherently tolerant creed, insofar as “the
Calvinist dogma of predestination,” as Roy Porter points out, “had bred
‘enthusiasm’, that awesome, irresistible and unfalsifiable conviction of
personal infallibility”.696 As late as 1646 Thomas Edwards wrote: “Religious
toleration is the greatest of all evils; it will bring in first scepticism in doctrine
and looseness of life, then atheism”.697 As we have seen, the Puritan colonies
of New England, in spite of their love of freedom, abhorred religious
toleration….
Paradoxically, it was the English Revolution and the triumph of Cromwell,

who killed the king and forcibly suppressed Parliament four times, that
finally pushed the idea of toleration into the forefront of political debate. For,
as Winstanley wrote in The Law of Freedom (1651), Cromwell “became the
main stickler for liberty of conscience without any limitation. This toleration
became his masterpiece in politics; for it procured him a party that stuck close
in all cases of necessity.” Cromwell’s supporter, Milton, produced a whole
tract, Areopagitica (1646) in favour of freedom of speech and the abolition of
censorship. “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put
to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” Besides, “how”, he asked
694 Davies, op. cit., p. 568.

695 Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., p. 241.
696 Porter, Enlightenment, London: Penguin books, 2000, p. 50.
697 Edwards, in Porter, op. cit., p. 105.
414
ironically, “shall the licensers themselves be confided in, unless we can confer
upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the Land, the
grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?”698
As Peter Ackroyd writes, Milton “railed against those with closed minds,
of which the Presbyterians were the largest number. Censorship and licensing
would be ‘the stop of truth’. The people of England would suffer from the
change, when ‘dull ease and cessation of our knowledge’ would inevitably
lead to ‘obedient conformity’ or to ‘rigid external formality’…
“What did the censors and opponents of freedom have to fear? ‘He that can
apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and
yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is
the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary,
but slinks out of the race, there that immortal garland is to be run for, not
without dust and heat.’…
“He writes of London as a beacon of that cause. ‘Behold now this vast City,
a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompassed and surrounded
by His protection… Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism we wrong
the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God
hath stirred up in this City.’”699
It was noble-sounding ideal, but it did not survive the reality of

Cromwell’s rule, as we have seen. For, as Jacques Barzun writes, “Cromwell’s
toleration was of course not complete – nobody’s has ever been or ought to be:
the most tolerant mind cannot tolerate cruelty, the most liberal state punishes
incitement to riot or treason. To all but the Catholic minority in England, the
church of Rome was intolerable.”700
Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), published during Cromwell’s Protectorate, seems

to provide a powerful argument for intolerance – indeed, the most complete
tyranny of the State over the religious beliefs of its citizens. For religious truth,
according to Hobbes, was nothing other than that which the sovereign ruler
declared it to be: “An opinion publicly appointed to be taught cannot be
heresy; nor the Sovereign Princes that authorise them heretics.”701 Being in
favour of the absolute power of the sovereign, Hobbes was fiercely opposed
to the other major power in traditional societies, religion, which he relegated
to an instrument of government; so that the power of censorship passed, in
his theory, entirely from the Church to the State. His strong views on the
necessity of obeying the ruler in all circumstances relegated religious faith to a
698 Milton, Areopagitica.

700 Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present, New York: Perennial, 2000, p.
276.
701 Hobbes, Leviathan; in Christopher Hill, “Thomas Hobbes and the Revolution in Political
Thought”, Puritanism and Revolution, London: Penguin books, 1958, p. 277.
415
private sphere that was not allowed to impinge on public life. However,
Hobbes was not opposed to dissent so long as it did not lead to anarchy, “for
such truth as opposeth no man’s profit nor pleasure, is to all men
welcome.” 702 In fact, he did not believe in objective Truth, but only in
“appetites and aversions, hopes and fears”, and in the power of human
reason to regulate them towards the desired end of public tranquillity. He
was not anti-religious so much as a-religious… But it cannot be denied that
his position is one of secularist caesaropapism. And in the hands of atheist
rulers, his arguments could be used to justify the suppression of all religion.
It was John Locke, according to Porter, who became the real “high priest of
toleration”. “In an essay of 1667, which spelt out the key principles expressed
in his later Letters on Toleration, Locke denied the prince’s right to enforce
religious orthodoxy, reasoning that the ‘trust, power and authority’ of the
civil magistrate were vested in him solely to secure ‘the good preservation
and peace of men in that society’. Hence princely powers extended solely to
externals, not to faith, which was a matter of conscience. Any state
intervention in faith was ‘meddling’.
“To elucidate the limits of those civil powers, Locke divided religious
opinions and actions into three. First, there were speculative views and modes
of divine worship. These had ‘an absolute and universal right to toleration’,
since they did not affect society, being either private or God’s business alone.
Second, there were those – beliefs about marriage and divorce, for instance –
which impinged upon others and hence were of public concern. These ‘have a
title also to toleration, but only so far as they do not tend to the disturbance of
the State’. The magistrate might thus prohibit publication of such convictions
if they would disturb the public good, but no one ought to be forced to
forswear his opinion, for coercion bred hypocrisy. Third, there were actions
good or bad in themselves. Respecting these, Locke held that civil rulers
should have ‘nothing to do with the good of men’s soul or their concernments
in another life’ – it was for God to reward virtue and punish vice, and the
magistrate’s job simply to keep the peace. Applying such principles to
contemporary realities, Locke advocated toleration, but with limits: Papists
should not be tolerated, because their beliefs were ‘absolutely destructive of
all governments except the Pope’s’; nor should atheists, since any oaths they
took would be in bad faith.
“As a radical Whig in political exile in the Dutch republic, Locke wrote the
first Letter on Toleration, which was published, initially in Latin, in 1689.
Echoing the 1667 arguments, this denied that Christianity could be furthered
by force. Christ was the Prince of Peace, his gospel was love, his means
persuasion; persecution could not save souls. Civil and ecclesiastical
government had contrary ends; the magistrate’s business lay in securing life,
liberty and possessions, whereas faith was about the salvation of souls. A
church should be a voluntary society, like a ‘club for claret’; it should be shorn
702 Hobbes, Leviathan; in Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, p. 283.
416
of all sacerdotal pretensions. While Locke’s views were contested – Bishop
Stillingfleet, for example, deemed them a ‘Trojan Horse’ – they nevertheless
won favour in an age inclined, or resigned, to freedom of thought and
expression in general.”703 “Since you are pleased to enquire,” wrote Locke,
“what are my thoughts about the mutual toleration of Christians in their
different professions of religion, I must needs answer you freely, that I esteem
that toleration to be the chief characteristical mark of the true church.”704
Smith develops Locke’s idea as follows: “Religion is a man’s private

concern, his belief is part of himself, and he is the sole judge of the means to
his own salvation. Persecution only creates hypocrites, while free opinion is
the best guarantee of truth. Most ceremonies are indifferent; Christianity is
simple; it is only theologians who have encrusted it with dogma.
Sacerdotalism, ritual, orthodoxy, do not constitute Christianity if they are
divorced from charity. Our attempts to express the truth of religion must
always be imperfect and relative, and cannot amount to certainty… Church
and State can be united if the Church is made broad enough and simple
enough, and the State accepts the Christian basis. Thus religion and morality
might be reunited, sectarianism would disappear with sacerdotalism; the
Church would become the nation organised for goodness…”705
The idea that tolerance is the chief characteristic of the True Church would
have amazed the Holy Fathers, but has become the chief dogma of
Anglicanism… Ironically, however, it was the Catholic King James II, who
first bestowed freedom of religion on Catholics, Anglicans and Non-
Conformists in his Declaration of Indulgence (1688), declaring: “We cannot but
heartily wish, as it will easily be believed, that all the people of our dominions
were members of the Catholic Church; yet we humbly thank Almighty God, it
is and has of long time been our constant sense and opinion (which upon
divers occasions we have declared) that conscience ought not to be
constrained nor people forced in matters of mere religion: it has ever been
directly contrary to our inclination, as we think it is to the interest of
government, which it destroys by spoiling trade, depopulating countries, and
discouraging strangers, and finally, that it never obtained the end for which it
was employed…”706
The generosity shown by James to non-Catholics was not reciprocated by

his Protestant successors, who, through the Toleration Act (1689) and
Declaration of Indulgence (1690), re-imposed restrictions on the Catholics while
removing them from the Protestants. And Locke’s Letter on Toleration,
published in the same year as the Toleration Act, did not extend its argument
for toleration to atheists and Catholics. As Jean Bethke Elshtain interprets his
thought: “Atheists are untrustworthy because they do not take an oath on the
703 Porter, op. cit., pp. 106-197.

704 Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration.
705 Smith, op. cit., p. 813.
706 Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., p. 342.
417
Bible, not believing in Divine action; and they deny the divine origin of
fundamental truths necessary to underwrite decent government. Catholics are
(or may be) civically unreliable because of their allegiance to an external
power.”707
The justification given for this far-from-universal tolerance was purely

secular: “Some ease to scrupulous consciences in the exercise of religion” was
to be granted, since this “united their Majesties’ Protestant subjects in interest
and affection…” In other words, tolerance was necessary in order to avoid the
possibility of civil war between the Anglicans and the Non-Conformist
Protestants. From now on, “though laws against blasphemy, obscenity and
seditious libel remained on the statute book, and offensive publications could
still be presented before the courts, the situation was light years away from
that obtaining in France, Spain or almost anywhere else in ancien régime
Europe.”708
The more religious justifications of tolerance offered in, for example,

More’s Utopia or Milton’s Areopagitica, were no longer in fashion. In the
modern age that was beginning, religious tolerance was advocated, not
because it ensured the eventual triumph of the true religion, but because it
prevented war. And war, of course, “spoiled trade”…
“To enlightened minds,” writes Porter, “the past was a nightmare of

barbarism and bigotry: fanaticism had precipitated bloody civil war and the
axing of Charles Stuart, that man of blood, in 1649. Enlightened opinion
repudiated old militancy for modern civility. But how could people adjust to
each other? Sectarianism, that sword of the saints which had divided brother
from brother, must cease; rudeness had to yield to refinement. Voltaire saw
this happening before his very eyes in England’s ‘free and peaceful
assemblies’: ‘Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more
venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations
meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the
Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and
give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian
confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s
word. And all are satisfied’. [Letters concerning the English Nation]. This
passage squares with the enlightened belief that commerce would unite those
whom creeds rent asunder. Moreover, by depicting men content, and content
to be content – differing, but agreeing to differ – the philosophe pointed
towards a rethinking of the summum bonum, a shift from God-fearingness to
a selfhood more psychologically oriented. The Enlightenment thus translated
the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be
happy?’”709
707 Elshtain, Sovereignty, New York: Basic Books, 2008, p. 121.

708 Porter, op. cit., p. 31.
709 Porter, op. cit., pp. 21-22.
418
For “the so-called Toleration Act of 1689 had an eye first and foremost to
practical politics, and did not grant toleration. Officially an ‘Act for
Exempting their Majesties’ Protestant Subjects, Dissenting from the Church of
England, from the Penalties of Certain Laws’, it stated that Trinitarian
Protestant Nonconformists who swore the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance
and accepted thirty-six of the Thirty-nine Articles [the official confession of
the Anglican Church] could obtain licences as ministers or teachers. Catholics
and non-Christians did not enjoy the rights of public worship under the Act –
and non-Trinitarians were left subject to the old penal laws. Unitarians,
indeed, were further singled out by the Blasphemy Act of 1697, which made it
an offence to ‘deny any one of the persons in the holy Trinity to be God’.
There was no official Toleration Act for them until 1813, and in Scotland the
death penalty could still be imposed – as it was in 1697 – for denying the
Trinity.
“Scope for prosecution remained. Ecclesiastical courts still had the power
of imprisoning for atheism, blasphemy and heresy (maximum term: six
months). Occasional indictments continued under the common law, and
Parliament could order books to be burned. Even so, patriots justly
proclaimed that England was, alongside the United Provinces, the first nation
to have embraced religious toleration – a fact that became a matter of national
pride. ‘My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects;
and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, how like a king I
looked,’ remarked Defoe’s castaway hero, Robinson Crusoe; ‘we had but
three subjects, and they were of different religions. My man Friday was a
pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist: however, I allowed
liberty of conscience throughout my dominions’.
“Two developments made toleration a fait accompli: the lapse of the

Licensing Act in 1695, and the fact that England had already been sliced up
into sects. It was, quipped Voltaire, a nation of many faiths but only one sauce,
a recipe for confessional tranquillity if culinary tedium: ‘If there were only
one religion in England, there would be danger of despotism, if there were
only two they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they
live in peace’ [Letters concerning the English Nation].”710
The lapsing of the Licensing Act ended pre-publication censorship. This

was, writes Tombs, “in contrast to France, which had 120 full-time censors.
William III favoured legal toleration of Dissenting sects, both because he
himself had been in English terms a Dissenter, and more importantly because
he wanted domestic harmony to further the war against France. The bishops
discovered to their chagrin that they no longer in practice had the power to
prosecute heretics – on one occasion, Queen Anne kept deliberately losing the
paperwork. Moderates were appointed to vacant sees. Though blasphemy
remained a crime, the need for trial by jury meant that prosecution of
dissident views was chancy, and magistrates were usually unenthusiastic. So
419
lax were controls that one Jacobite parson operated a printing press inside the
King’s Bench Prison. As Locke put it, toleration ‘has now at last been
established by law in our country. Not perhaps so wide in scope as might be
wished for… Still, it is something to have progressed so far…’
“This is not to say that complete domestic harmony broke out. The
Glorious Revolution was far from initiating the smooth consensus that ‘Whig
history’ later celebrated. Religious antagonisms shaped political and cultural
links throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. But they rarely caused
violence, at least not in England. The struggle was waged with words – on
paper, in Parliament, in pulpits, sometimes in the law courts, and in clubs and
coffee houses. Moreover, there are many signs of a deliberate rejection of
extremism – ‘enthusiasm’, ‘fanaticism’, ‘hypocrisy’, ‘superstition’ – whether
‘Popish’ or ‘Puritan’. It became common to praise the virtues of moderation,
sincerity and rationality, so that differences of opinion would not (as one
Anglican woman put it) ‘dissolve and deface the Laws of Charity and
Humane Society’. All parties claimed to practise politeness, plain speech,
moderation and sincerity. Dislike of intellectual extremism, and distaste for
verbal violence, even within the adversarial party system, has remained
powerful in English political discourse ever since.
“The philosopher of politeness was a Whig intellectual, the 3rd Earl of

Shaftesbury, whose widely read Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times (1711) asserted that human beings had an innate ‘sense of right and
wrong’, that ‘affection’ for society and people was part of human nature, and
that our own ‘happiness and welfare’ depended on working for ‘the general
good’. Shaftesbury believed that virtue was manifested in ‘good breeding’,
which meant being incapable of ‘a rude or brutal action’. He thought that
‘good humour is not only the best security against enthusiasm, but the best
foundation of piety and true religion’, which would leave aside theological
disputation in favour of ‘plain honest morals’.”711
In order to evaluate this new culture of toleration and politeness, so

different from the unruliness and “enthusiasm” for which the English had
been known up to this point, we must remember that the new culture was
largely a middle-class affair: the peasants remained closer to the old
unruliness and “enthusiasm”. For “throughout the eighteenth century, and
into the first decade of the nineteenth, there was a rumbustious, mostly male,
counter-culture which deliberately flouted the rules of politeness.”712 This was
manifested particularly in the hymn-singing Methodist movement, which
attracted country people from the remoter country areas of the British Isles
and the colonies.
711 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 284-285.

712
420
The “enthusiasm” of the lower classes was rejected also by the upper
classes. As the Duchess of Buckingham said of the Methodist George
Whitefield: “His doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with
impertinence and disrespect towards his superiors. It is monstrous to be told
that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the
earth…”713
Monstrous indeed! Polite society did not like to be reminded of its

sinfulness. Fortunately for these polite and tolerant gentlemen and
gentlewomen, the official Anglican Church was obligingly sympathetic to
their sensitivities, and, unlike the Methodists and other Nonconformist sects,
did not probe too deeply into their souls. And that is precisely why, as H.M.V.
Temperley wrote: “The earlier half of the eighteenth century in England is an
age of materialism, a period of dim ideals, of expiring hopes… We can
recognise in English institutions, in English ideals, in the English philosophy
of this age, the same practical materialism, the same hard rationalism, the
same unreasonable self-complacency. Reason dominated alike the intellect,
the will, and the passions; politics were self-interested, poetry didactic,
philosophy critical and objective… Even the most abstract of thinkers and the
most unworldly of clerics have a mundane and secular stamp upon them.”714
But this profound cultural change was noted and approved by the greatest
minds of the age, as by the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume.
“Our ancestors,” he wrote in 1748, “a few centuries ago, were sunk into the
most abject superstitions, last century they were enflamed with the most
furious enthusiasm, and are now settled into the most cool indifference with
regard to religious matters, that is to be found in any nation of the world…”715
A depressing picture; and yet it was precisely in this dull, snobbish, self-
satisfied – but oh so tolerant! - England of the early 18th century that the
foundations of the modern world were laid, and in particular its deadly and
determined opposition to the true faith…
America followed a similar path to Britain in terms of religious toleration.
The early Americans were extremely religious. Moreover, in the beginning

their religiosity went with an extreme religious intolerance. Thus in 1645
Thomas Shepard of Newtown said to Hugh Peter of Salem (where the famous
witches’ trial took place): “Toleration of all upon pretence of conscience – I
thank God my soul abhors it. The godly in former times never fought for the
liberty of consciences by pleading for liberty for all.”716 “Most of the Bay
713 Gascoigne, op. cit., p. 168.

714 Temperley, “The Age of Walpole and the Pelhams”, The Cambridge Modern History,
Cambridge University Press, 1934, vol. VI: The Eighteenth Century, pp. 76, 77.
715 Hume, “Of National Characters”.
716 Shepard, in Barzun, op. cit., p. 278.
421
colonists agreed with the sixteenth-century French theologian Theodore Beza
that full liberty of religion was ‘a most diabolical doctrine because it means
that every one should be left to go to hell in his own way’.”717
Rhode Island, founded by refugees fleeing from intolerant Massachusetts,

was the first State to proclaim religious freedom, under the leadership of
Roger Williams in 1636. Its early code of laws defined it as a place “where all
men may walk as their consciences persuade them, every man in the name of
his God”. As a consequence, the State was described by its opponents as “the
sink into which all the rest of the colonies empty their heretics”, “the
receptacle of all sorts of riff-raff people, and nothing else than the sewer or
latrina of New England”.718 Hardly coincidentally, Rhode Island was the first
State to renounce allegiance to the king in 1776. As Patrick Henry wrote in
1776: “It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation
was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, people of other faiths have been
afforded freedom of worship here.”
Rhode Island was followed by Connecticut in 1636 and Pennsylvania in

1682. These colonies became sanctuaries for persecuted religious minorities
fleeing more authoritarian States such as Massachusetts. Again, Maryland
was designed as a refuge for Roman Catholics persecuted elsewhere. New
York was even more tolerant: it accommodated a small population of Jews.
“In fact, New York had a synagogue before it had a purpose-built Anglican
church.”719
Pennsylvania was conceived by William Penn as a refuge first of all for

Quakers, but then for all persecuted people. The basic laws he wrote for
residence in Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, “allowed freedom of
worship to all ‘who confess and acknowledge the one almighty and eternal
God to be the creator, upholder, and ruler of the world, and that hold
themselves in conscience to olive peaceably and justly in civil society.’ The
right to vote and to hold office were open to ‘such as profess faith in Jesus
Christ, and that are not convinced of ill fame or unsober and dishonest
conversation, and that are of one and twenty years at least.’ Penn never
thought to say here that, of course, he was referring only to men: female
politicians and votes for women were totally outside even his worldview.”720
This move from intolerance to toleration in America was based on practical

necessity. For uniformity was not a practical possibility in a nation that
combined the Puritanism of New England with the Anglicanism of Virginia,
the Roman Catholicism of Maryland with the Quakerism of Pennsylvania. So
717 Reynolds, op. cit., p. 34.

718 Bamber Gascoigne, A Brief History of Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, p. 154.
719
Reynolds, op. cit., p. 39.
422
a broad measure of tolerance, and a strict separation of Church and State,
became a necessity if the country was not to fall apart along confessional lines.
This attitude was not influenced by religious indifference or incipient

atheism, as later in Europe. For, as K.N. Leontiev writes: “The people who left
Old England and laid the foundations of the States of America were all
extremely religious people who did not want to make any concessions with
regard to their burning personal faith and had not submitted to the State
Church of Episcopal Anglicanism, not out of progressive indifference, but out
of godliness.
“The Catholics, Puritans, Quakers, all were agreed about one thing – that
there should be mutual tolerance, not out of coldness, but out of necessity.
And so the State created by them for the reconciliation of all these burning
religious extremes found its centre of gravity outside religion. Tolerance was
imposed by circumstances, there was no inner indifferentism.”721
Now in the eighteenth century in Europe the notion of toleration had

undergone a subtle but important change, the change from toleration as “a
utilitarian expedient to avoid destructive strife” to toleration as “an intrinsic
value”722, that is, indifferentism. It became a dogma of the Enlightenment that a
ruler could not impose his religion on his subjects.723 Certain rulers, such as
721
Leontiev, “Vizantizm i Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism”), in Vostok, Rossia i
Slavianstvo (The East, Russia and Slavism), Moscow, 1996, p. 124
722
Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico, 1998, p. 581.
An example of toleration as a utilitarian expedient is provided by England’s attitude to
Roman Catholics before the twentieth century. As Joseph Sobran writes: “For centuries
England tolerated Roman Catholics, who were regarded as heretics owing their chief loyalty
to a foreign power (the papacy). But Roman Catholics were also barred from public offices,
universities, and other positions of influence. Toleration wasn’t considered a virtue: it was
only a policy, based on the assumption that ideally there should be no Roman Catholics in
England. The policy was to allow Roman Catholicism to exist (in private), while discouraging
people from embracing it” (The Wanderer, July 1, 1999). In the twentieth century, however,
toleration of Catholics has been seen as a positive virtue, and the only remnant of the old,
utilitarian attitude is the ban on a Roman Catholic becoming king or queen of England.
723
According to Enlightenment philosophers, “physical matter in identical circumstances
would always behave in the same way: all stones dropped from a great height fall to the
ground. What applied to the physical world applied to the human world too. All human
beings in human circumstances other than their own would act in very different ways. How
human beings conducted themselves was not accidental, but the accident of birth into
particular societies at particular moments in those societies’ development determined what
kinds of people they would eventually turn out to be. The implications of this view were
clear: if you were born in Persia, instead of France, you would have been a Muslim, not a
Catholic; if you had been born poor and brought up in bad company you would probably
end up a thief; if you had been born a Protestant in northern Europe, rather than a Catholic in
southern Europe, then you would be tolerant and love liberty, whereas southerners tended to
be intolerant and to put up with autocratic government. If what human beings were like was
the necessary effect of the circumstances they were born to, then nobody had a right to be too
censorious about anybody else. A certain toleration of other ways of doing things, and a
certain moderation in the criticism of social and political habits, customs and institutions,
seemed the natural corollary of the materialistic view of mankind” (McClelland, op. cit., p.
297).
423
Frederick the Great, took religious toleration to the point of almost complete
indifference.
This important cultural and religious change came to America after her
revolution. Thus “fter the Revolution,” writes Armstrong, “when the newly
independent states drew up their constitutions, God was mentioned in them
only in the most perfunctory manner. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson
disestablished the Anglican church in Virginia; his bill declared that coercion
in matters of faith was ‘sinfull and tyrannical’, that truth would prevail if
people were allowed their own opinions, and that there should be a ‘wall of
separation’ between religion and politics. The bill was supported by the
Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians of Virginia, who resented the
privileged position of the Church of England in the state. Later the other
states followed Virginia’s lead, and disestablished their own churches,
Massachusetts being the last one to do so, in 1833. In 1787, when the federal
Constitution was drafted at the Philadelphia Convention, God was not
mentioned at all, and in the Bill of Rights (1789), the First Amendment of the
Constitution formally separated religion from the state: ‘Congress shall make
no laws respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free
exercise thereof’.724 Henceforth faith would be a private and voluntary affair
in the United States. This was a revolutionary step and has been hailed as one
of the great achievements of the Age of Reason. The thinking behind it was
indeed inspired by the tolerant philosophy of the Enlightenment, but the
Founding Fathers were also moved by more pragmatic considerations. They
knew that the federal Constitution was essential to preserve the unity of the
states, but they also realized that if the federal government established any
single one of the Protestant denominations and made it the official faith of the
United States, the Constitution would not be approved. Congregationalist
Massachusetts, for example, would never ratify a Constitution that
established the Anglican Church. This was also the reason why Article VI,
Section 3, of the Constitution abolished religious tests for office in the federal
government… The new nation could not base its identity on any one sectarian
option and retain the loyalty of all its subjects. The needs of the modern state
demanded that it be tolerant and, therefore, secular.”725
The First Amendment to the Constitution “was affirmed in 1791, a time

when Britain still barred Catholics, Nonconformists and Jews from political
office. In 1797 the United States government signed a treaty with the Muslim
state of Tripoli containing this striking statement: ‘As the government of the
United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian
Religion… it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or
tranquillity of Musselmen.’”726
724 It went on: “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people
peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

725
Armstrong, op. cit., p. 85.
726 Reynolds, op. cit., p. xxiii.
424
This was a sad fall from the Christian Ideals of the Founding Fathers…
Nevertheless, the religious toleration of America has been a precious boon for
the immigrants from many countries and of many faiths who fleeing
persecution. The assumption underlying it was well expressed thus: “If… the
attitude of the law both civil and criminal towards all religions depends
fundamentally on the safety of the State and not on the doctrines or
metaphysics of those who profess them, it is not necessary to consider
whether or why any given body was relieved by the law at one time or
frowned on at another, or to analyse creeds and tenets, Christian and
other.”727
However, the idea that the safety of the State is completely independent of
the religion (or lack of it) confessed by its citizens is false. The history of the
people of God demonstrates that their prosperity depended crucially on their
fulfilling of the commandments of God. For, as Solomon says: “Righteousness
exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14.34). The idea
that the religion of a State has no bearing on its prosperity could occur only to
a person who has not studied history or believes in a Deist God Who created
the world but does not interfere in its history thereafter.
Also false is the idea that anyone worshipping “according to the dictates of
his own conscience” is for that reason alone worthy of protection.
“Conscience” very often refers, not to the real voice of God speaking in the
soul of man, but any voice, however demonic, that a man thinks or pretends is
the voice of God. It is therefore inherently dangerous to consider a religion
worthy of protection, not because it is objectively true, but because the
believers are sincere in their beliefs, whether these are in fact true or false,
profitable to society or profoundly harmful to it. False religion is always
harmful, both for its adherents, and for those right-believers who are tempted
away from the right path by them. We would never accept the argument that
a poison can be sold freely so long as its traders sincerely believe it to be
harmless or because the traders “are accountable to God alone” for the harm
they cause. And the spiritual poison of heresy is far more harmful than
material poison, in that it leads, not simply to the temporal dissolution of the
body, but to the eternal damnation of the soul. Of course, it is another
question how a false religion is to be combatted. Crude forms of persecution
are often counter-productive in that they strengthen the fanaticism of the
persecuted. Persuasion and education that respects the freewill of the heretic
is without question the best means of combatting false belief. The free will of
the heretic is not violated, and he is able to come freely, by the free exercise of
his reasoning power, to a knowledge of the truth.
However, what about those who are too young to reason for themselves or
for some other reason unable to exercise their reasoning powers? Should they
not be protected from the influence of heretics? If allowed to live in a truly
727
Bowman v. Secular Society, Litd. (1917) A.C. 406. Quoted in Huntingdon Cairns (ed.), The
Limits of Art, Washington D.C.: Pantheon Books, 1948, p. 1353.
425
Christian atmosphere, these weak members of society may become stronger
in faith and have less need of the protection of the State. But while they are
still weak, the influence of heretics, if unchecked, could well lead them astray.
It is a generally accepted principle that the young and the weak, who are not
yet fully independent spiritually, are entitled to the protection of the State
against those who would exploit their weakness to their destruction. So in
cases where the heretic is himself stubbornly impenitent, and is leading others
astray, physical forms of oppression may be justified. The spiritually strong
may refuse to offer physical resistance to religious evil, choosing instead the
path of voluntary martyrdom. But the spiritually weak cannot choose this
path, and must be protected from the evil, if necessary by physical means.
Indeed, one could argue that the government that does not protect the weak
in this way is itself persecuting them, laying them open to the most evil and
destructive influences.
For, as Sir Thomas More’s King Utopus understood, “the worst men be
most obstinate and stubborn and in their evil opinion most constant”, so that
without some restraint on them “the best and holiest religion would be
trodden underfoot by most vain superstitions, even as good corn is by thorns
and weeds overgrown and choked.”728
Lev Tikhomirov writes: “Man is a bodily being. Moral ‘persuasion’ is

inseparable from moral ‘coercion’, and in certain cases also from physical
‘violence’. If one says: ‘Act through moral persuasion, but do not dare to
resort to physical violence’, this is either absurdity or hypocrisy. Every
conviction sooner or later unfailingly finds its expression in forms of physical
action for the simple reason that man is not [only] spirit and lives in a
physical form. All our acts represent a union of spiritual and physical acts. If a
man does something, it is unfailingly accompanied by physical actions. This
relates both to good and to evil. One can oppose evil sometimes by moral
persuasions, but at other times it is impossible to resist it otherwise than
physically, and then ‘resistance’ and ‘violence’ are morally obligatory.”729
Moreover, the State needs religion even more than religion needs the State.
For “the legislative mind cannot fail to value the religious spirit of a people in
view of the unbreakable bond between religion and morality…
“State order and the energetic pursuit of the aims of the public good are
attained by a good organisation of the governmental mechanism, by the
establishment of rational laws, and by a series of measures of observation,
coercion, punishment, encouragement, etc. But however well worked-out the
laws may be, and however perfected may be the governmental mechanism,
courts and administration, this still will not lead to the attainment of the good
ends of the state if citizens do not strive on their own initiative to live in
728
More, Utopia, book II, pp. 119-120.
729
Tikhomirov, “O Smysle Vojny” (“On the Meaning of War”), in Khristianstvo i Politika
(Christianity and Politics), Moscow: GUP “Oblizdat”, 1999, pp. 206-207.
426
accordance with justice and their own moral duty. A living, self-dependent
feeling of moral duty in the souls of citizens is the foundation of the public
good: when this is present, the very oversights of the law and the authorities
do not become particularly fatal, for the citizens will not hurry to exploit the
possibility of abuse, and by their own self-dependent moral acts will
significantly correct the evil permitted by the imperfection of the law or the
governmental mechanism. On the contrary, however, in the absence of a self-
dependent striving of the citizens to act in accordance with righteousness,
there will be no question of the State keeping track of everyone, and there will
be nobody to keeping an eye on them, for the State’s agents themselves, as
products of society, will always have the same character and the same level of
morality as exists in the people.
“Thus a living moral feeling constitutes the foundation for the success of
the State’s actions. But the State does not of itself have the means to generate
this feeling that is necessary to it. The State can take measures that the moral
feeling should not be undermined by the spread of immoral teachings or the
demoralising spectacle of vice triumphant, etc. By a firm insistence on the
fulfilment of the prescribed norms of life and by the systematic punishment of
crime the State can ‘drill’ the citizens, make the observance of righteousness
into a habit. But all this has a useful significance only if the moral feeling is
somehow ‘generated’ in souls, that is, when the ‘material’ by which the
mechanical measures can operate already exists.
“Whence is this necessary material to be taken? By what is the moral

feeling ‘generated’?
“… In itself, by its very nature, the moral feeling is not social, but
religious…
“The moral feeling of man is the demand that his feelings and actions
should be in harmony with a ‘higher’ power of the world’s life… Man wishes
to be in union with this higher power, leaving aside all calculations of benefit
or non-benefit. Out of all that life can give him, he finds the greatest joy in the
consciousness of his union with the very foundation of the world’s powers…
“Man impresses his idea of what is the main, highest world power, and his
striving to be in harmony with it, in all spheres of his creativity, including
Statehood.
“Therefore the State has all the more to protect and support everything in
which the very generation of the moral feeling takes place.
“In the vast majority of cases – this is a general fact of history – people
themselves directly link the source of their moral feeling with the Divinity. It
is precisely in God that they see that higher power, harmony with which
constitutes their morality. Morality flows from religion, religion interprets
and confirms morality.
427
“Besides, it is a general historical fact that people unite into special
societies in order to live together in accordance with their religious-moral
tasks. These religious organisations interweave with social and political
organisations, but they are never completely merged with them, even in the
most theocratic States. In the Christian world this collective religious life is
carried out, as we know, in the Church…
“In this way the demand to preserve and develop social morality naturally
leads the State to a union with the Church. In trying to help the Church make
society as moral as possible, the State aims to use in its own work that moral
capital which it [the Church] builds up in people….
“Autonomous morality, on the contrary, is founded on the premise that the

innate moral feeling guides man by itself. We do not know from where this
feeling, this ‘altruism’, comes from, but it rules our moral acts just as the force
of gravity rules the movement of the heavenly lights. The religious principle,
qua impulse, is quite unnecessary. To clarify what must and what must not be
done, we need only enlightenment, knowledge of the needs of man and
society, an understanding of the solidarity of human interests, etc.
“From this point of view, the work of the State in the development of
morality comes down to the development of the school and the multiplication
of other means of the development of enlightenment, perhaps with the
teaching of ‘courses of morality’….
“The tendency to substitute the school for the Church is now [in 1903] very
strong, and in general the State and the law of contemporary countries have
to all practical purposes already done much for the triumph of the idea of
autonomous morality in place of religious morality….
“’Autonomous’ morality leads to an endless diversity of moral rules, and

to the disappearance of any generally accepted line of behaviour.
“Moreover, the right of the person to have his ‘autonomous’ morality

annihilates the possibility of public moral discipline. Whatever foulness a
man may have committed, he can always declare that according to ‘his’
morality this act is permissible or even very lofty. Society has no criterion by
which to reproach the lie contained in such a declaration. It can kill such a
person, but it cannot morally judge him or despise him. But this ‘moral’
condemnation is society’s most powerful weapon for the education of the
person, beginning from childhood and throughout almost the whole course of
a man’s life…
“All in all, therefore, the autonomy of morality leads to moral chaos, in

which neither law nor custom nor public opinion are possible – that is, no
social or political discipline in general…
428
“Even leaving aside plain debauchery, which unbridles predatory instincts
and similar phenomena, developing autonomy under its all-permissive
protection, and taking into consideration only chosen natures that are truly
endowed with a subtle moral feeling, we nevertheless find in them an
extremely harmful, fruitlessly revolutionary type of character, an element that
is forever striving to destroy social-political forms, but which is satisfied with
no new constructions. In the cultured world we have already been observing
such a picture for more than one hundred years now…"730
And yet the autonomy of morality from religion was never preached by
America’s Founding Fathers. Thus John Adams, the second president and
also chairman of the American Bible Society, said in an address to military
leaders: “We have no government armed with the power capable of
contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion.
Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly
inadequate to the government of any other.”
Again, his son, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president and also chairman
of the American Bible Society, said on July 4, 1821: “The highest glory of the
American revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the
principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” As
Supreme Court justice Joseph Story (1779–1845) put it in his
famous Commentaries on the Constitution (3 vols., 1833), “It yet remains a
problem to be solved in human affairs, whether any free government can be
permanent, where the public worship of God, and the support of religion,
constitute no part of the policy or duty of the state in any assignable shape.”
The great tragedy of modern America is that this “indissoluble bond”

between civil government and the principle of Christianity has now been
broken. “Freedom” has been taken to such extremes of licence that it has
ceased to signify a positive virtue. We are reminded that the Statue of Liberty
at the entrance to New York harbour looks almost exactly like antique statues
of Hecate, the goddess of the underworld…
730
Tikhomirov, “Gosudarstvennost’ i religia” (“Statehood and Religion”), in Khristianstvo i
Politika (Christianity and Politics), op. cit., pp. 37, 38-39, 40-41, 42.
429
49. THE PEACE OF UTRECHT
“The beginning of the 18th century,” writes Paul Lay, “saw the reordering
of three composite monarchies: Britain, Austria and Spain. The first of these,
which took place in 1707, saw the English come to an arrangement with the
Scots – they already shared a monarch – which preserved Scottish law and
religion, established a parliamentary union and prosecuted economic
integration. Four years later, the Austrians guaranteed the Hungarian
constitution in exchange for Habsburg succession. Spain’s reordering took
longer and was more complicated. The Nueva Planta – which began in the
same year as the Anglo-Scottish union and was completed four years after the
Austrian – bore down on Aragon, was more lenient towards the Catalans
(despite or perhaps because of their recent rebellion), and abolished customs
barriers.”731
These largely peaceful and relatively small-scale unions were in contrast

with the larger-scale and more violent attempt at the unification of Western
Europe made by the Sun King, Louis XIV. His bid for hegemony in defiance
of the Westphalian system of international relations began with the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701-13). “In 1700,” as Simon Sebag Montefiore writes,
“the Spanish King Carlos II died, leaving the Spanish empire to Louis XIV’s
grandson Philipp of Anjou, a succession that, if accepted, would give the Sun
King virtual dominion over not only much of Europe but of the Americas too.
It was a step too far for Louis who – after decades of triumph and
magnificence – was old, arrogant, and perhaps exhausted. Certainly France
was over-extended. Louis was faced with a difficult choice but ultimately he
accepted the inheritance and his grandson became king of Spain. In 1702
William III of England along with his native Holland, the Habsburg emperor
and others put together another Grand Alliance against Louis, His ambitions
and absolutist Catholic vision cost France dear. As Louis aged, as his heirs
died, as France suffered poverty and hunger, his armies were humiliated by
the outstanding commanders the duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene of
Savoy in a trans-European conflict known as the War of the Spanish
Succession. Louis lived too long: he saw France defeated and the deaths of his
sons and grandsons. French invincibility was broken…”732
The defeat of France in the War of the Spanish Succession was indeed one
of the most important – and bloody – in history. Thus “at Malplaquet (1709),
in the Spanish Netherlands, the death toll was comparable with the terrible
first day of the Somme in 1916, and it shocked all sides.”733 The result was a
reordering of international politics on a relatively stable balance-of-power
basis that lasted until the next, and still greater cataclysm of the Napoleonic
Wars a century later.
731 Lay, “Europe’s Inner Tensions”, History Today, January, 2018, p. 3.

732 Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercus, 2012, pp. 258-259.
733 Tombs, op. cit., p. 336.
430
In 1713 Louis signed the Treaty of Utrecht. The eleven bilateral treaties
constituting the Treaty were the result of general exhaustion rather than the
decisive victory of one side or the other. Their main task was to rebalance the
power of France, still the most powerful state in Europe, and Habsburg
Austria. Britain gained Gibraltar, Minorca and Newfoundland, together with
a lucrative thirty-year monopoly on trading African slaves with the Spanish
colonies.734
From now on, there were three kinds of state in Western Europe: old-style
absolutism, represented by Spain, in which Church and feudalism still
exerted their old power; new-style absolutism, represented by France, in
which the Church and feudalism, while still strong, were increasingly subject
to the law of the king; and constitutional monarchy, represented by Britain
and Holland, in which the king, while still strong, was increasingly subject to
the law of parliament and, behind parliament, to mammon.
Utrecht, writes Philip Bobbitt, “is the first European treaty that explicitly
establishes a balance of power as the objective of the treaty regime. The letters
patent that accompanied Article VI of the treaty between England, France,
and the king of Spain whose dynastic rights were being set aside
acknowledged the ‘Maxim of securing for ever the universal Good and Quiet
of Europe, by an equal weight of Power, so that many being united in one, the
Balance of the Equality desired, might not turn to the Advantage of one, and
the Danger and Hazard of the Rest’.
“This treaty permitted adjustments at the margin, but not the wholesale
annexation of a national state; inhabitants now cared whether they were
French, German, or Austrian. More importantly, securing the territorial state
system had now become an important diplomatic objective; after Utrecht, the
recognition of any state required its assurance to an international society that
the system generally was not thereby jeopardized. That meant that ‘hereditary
right and the endorsement of the constituent local authorities were no longer
sufficient by themselves to secure sovereignty over a territory’.”735
Utrecht “subordinated the traditional criteria of inheritance and

hierarchical allegiance (religious or political). In their place was a unity of
strategic approach – a judgement by the society of states as to what was an
appropriate strategic goal and what constitutional forms were legitimate. This
is how it looked to Voltaire, writing in about 1750: ‘For some time now it has
been possible to consider Christian Europe, give or take Russia [a significant
exception!] as “une espèce de grande république” – a sort of great commonwealth
– partitioned into several states, some monarchic, the others mixed, some
aristocratic, others popular, but all dealing with one another; all having the
same principles of public and political law unknown in the other parts of the
world. Because of these principles the European [states] never enslave their
734 Jenkins, op. cit, p. 153.

735 Bobbit, The Shield of Achilles, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 129.
431
prisoners, they respect the ambassadors of their enemies, they jointly
acknowledge the pre-eminence and various rights of [legitimate rulers], and
above all they agree on the wise policy of maintaining an equal balance of
power between themselves so far as they can, conducting continuous
negotiations even in times of war, and exchanging resident ambassadors or
less honourable spies, who can warn all the courts of Europe of the designs of
any one, give the alarm at the same time and protect the weaker…’”736
The Peace of Utrecht represents a point of multilateral equilibrium, when

the dominance of the continent by the empires of Philip V and Louis XIV was
declining, and that of Napoleon was still to come. At this time, writes Stella
Ghervas, “we find that there existed already a common agreement in the Law
of Nations that no single power should ever extend a universal monarchy
(hence, a continental empire) over Europe. Preventing such a thing from
occurring was precisely the purpose of the balance of power, the principle of
multilateral equilibrium included in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713…”737
The consensus created by Utrecht constitutes the first recognizably modern

system of international relations. Democracy was not yet part of the
consensus, as it is now, but all agreed that states were no longer the scattered
dynastic possessions of kings or princes, but should be relatively compact and
territorial. Moreover, the territorial state then emerging almost everywhere
“was characterized by a shift from the monarch-as-embodiment of
sovereignty”, in the manner of Louis XIV’s l’état, c’est moi, “to the monarch as
minister of sovereignty”738, in the manner of modern constitutional monarchy.
Bobbitt continues: “In his correspondence during the treaty process, [the
British Foreign Secretary] Bolingbroke repeatedly referred to negotiations
about the ‘système des affaires de l’Europe’ and to a ‘system for a future
settlement of Europe’. In fact, in the eighth of his ‘Letters on History’, which
deals with Utrecht, he writes that the object of the congress was to achieve a
‘constitution of Europe’…
“…. The language of this new consensus was reflected in four striking
contrasts with the idiom it superseded.
“First, the language of ‘interests’ replaced that of ‘rights’. ‘Rights’ were

something that kings might assert against each other; ‘interests’ were
something that states might have in common. Whereas the Westphalian
monarchs had been concerned to establish the rights of the kingly states – the
legal status of dynastic descent; the absolute right of the king over the subjects,
including especially control over the religious liberties of the persons within
his realm; and the perfect sovereignty of each kingly state unfettered by any
736
Bobbitt, op. cit., p. 131.
737 Ghervas, “Antidotes to Empire: From the Congress System to the European Union”, in
John W. Boyer and Berthold Molden (eds.), Eutropes: The Paradox of European Empire, Paris and
Chicago: Cahiers Parisiens, vol. 7, 2014, p. 52.
432
external authority – the society of territorial states was concerned instead with
the mutual relationships among states, specifically with maintaining a balance
of power within that society itself. At one point Bolingbroke observed
explicitly that ‘enough has been said concerning right, which was in truth
little regarded by any of the parties concerned… in the whole course of the
proceedings. Particular interests alone were regarded.’
“Second, aggrandizement – so integral to the structure of the kingly state –

was replaced by the goal of secure ‘barriers’ to such a degree that claims for
new accessions were universally clothed in the language of defensive barriers.
Aggrandizement per se was frowned up and even regarded as illegitimate.
“Third, the word state underwent a change. A ‘state’ became the name of a
territory, not a people, as would occur later when state-nations began to
appear, not a dynastic house, as was the case at Westphalia…
“Fourth, whereas the kingly state had seen a balance of power as little
more than a temptation for hegemonic ambition to upset, the territorial states
viewed the balance of power as the fundamental structure of the
constitutional system itself…
“Territorial states are so named owing to their preoccupation with the

territory of the state. As part of the Treaty of Utrecht, the first agreements
were introduced fixing customs duties levied at the state frontier and
diminishing the role of internal customs duties. The ‘most favoured nation’
clause makes its appearance at Utrecht. This attentiveness to commercial
matters – the peace was accompanied by an extensive series of commercial
treaties among the signatories – is also characteristic of the territorial states.
Rather than focusing on the communities and towns that defined the
boundaries of the kingly state, the territorial state attempts to fix a frontier
boundary, a line, that marks the jurisdiction of the state. These boundaries are
crucial if bartering is to take place, and dynastic rights to be ignored, in
maintaining the balance of power, so we may say that for this reason also the
territorialism of the eighteenth century state favoured a system of perfecting
the balance of power among states – but why did these states seek such a
system in the first place?
“The territorial state aggrandizes itself by means of peace because peace is

the most propitious climate for the growth of commerce…”739
Here we come to the nub of the matter. The medieval system, imperfect
though it was, had restrained both religious sectarianism and the growth of
laissez-faire capitalism. In the early modern period this restraint was removed,
leading to savage wars of religion and absolutism (the two usually went
together). Then, towards the end of the seventeenth century, as religious
passions cooled, and the ambitions of the greatest despots such as Louis XIV
739 Bobbitt, op. cit., pp. 522-523, 527.
433
were checked, a new passion came to the fore in the minds of the propertied
classes – laissez-faire capitalism, whose rise was aided by the reinvention of
paper money (it had previously been invented in China), by the introduction
of private banking on a larger scale, and by the invention of the stock market.
The latter produced the first massive financial speculations, such as the South
Sea Bubble in England and the Mississippi Company in France. The most
important men now, as Jonathan Swift noted in 1710, were “quite different
from any that were ever known before the Revolution [of 1688]; consisting of
those… whose whole fortunes lie in funds and stocks; so that power, which…
used to follow land, is now gone over into money…”740
Since one cannot serve both God and mammon, this trend inevitably
meant that religion weakened. Already in 1668 in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras
we can see a revulsion from the methods of the wars of religion:
Such as do build their faith upon

The holy text of pike and gun
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery…
As if religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
And the rise of another, no less pernicious tendency:
What makes all doctrines plain and clear?

About two hundred poundes a year.
And that which was true before
Proved false again? Two hundred more…
The leader of this brave new world of commerce and balance-of-power

politics was England. Her revolution had removed the last vestiges of
feudalism and absolutism, and she had now had a banking system and a
powerful fleet with which to trade with the world and interfere in continental
Europe. And she interfered to limit the power of potential European
hegemons – first Louis XIV, later Napoleon and the Tsars and Kaisers.
Britain now, as Norman Davies writes, “emerged as the foremost maritime

power, as the leading diplomatic broker, and as the principal opponent of
French supremacy...” 741 The word now is “Britain” rather than England,
because England and Scotland, as we have seen, had become a single state.
The immediate reason for the Union was a failed Scottish colonial venture in
New Caledonia. English cash was needed to prevent the ruin of the Scottish
finances… But there were other reasons, the most important of which was
that they were both fighting the same enemy, Catholic France, and the war
effort “required ever greater coordination north and south. It made no sense

741
Norman Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, p. 625.
434
at all to have two separate commercial and colonial policies, for example.
Whig elites on both sides of the border agreed that whatever their differences,
the containment of Louis XIV came first. So, in 1707, they concluded an Act of
Union, in which Scotland received generous representation at Westminster,
and retained its legal and educational system, but gave up its separate foreign
and security policy. And as the Union was made in order to prosecute the war,
so did the war make the Union. The common cause against popery and
Universal Monarchy welded together the two halves more efficiently than
bribery, intimidation or crude commercial advantage ever could have
done.”742
The Union was soon producing important intellectual and cultural fruits;
for it would be English and Scottish thinkers, from Locke and Newton to
Hume and Adam Smith, who gave to this new world the first sketch of that
new philosophy of life known as the Enlightenment…
742 Bernard Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, London: Allen Lane, 2013, p. 71.
435
50. THE RISE OF PRUSSIA
It might have been hoped that after the terrible bloodletting of Louis XIV’s
wars, and the Treaty of Utrecht, there would be no more outbursts of
absolutist madness. After all, even Louis himself, as he lay dying in 1715,
appeared to have learned the folly of absolutism. “Aged seventy-six and
tormented by the misery he felt he had inflicted on his country, he advised his
bemused great-grandson and heir, the five-year-old Louis XV, ‘Above all,
remain at peace with your neighbours. I loved war too much. Do not follow
me in that, or in overspending.’ Repentance was too late. At the king’s funeral,
the bishop pronounced the pointed banality, Mes frères, Dieu seul est grand, My
brothers, God alone in great…”743
However, another power was on the rise in the early eighteenth century,
which, while not as bloodthirsty as Louis XIV’s France and not yet as
powerful, was no less militaristic - Prussia. Prussia, writes Simon Jenkins,
“had emerged from the Thirty Years’ War as a kingdom in three parts,
distinct from Germany and lying to the east of the Elbe. These were East
Prussia, based on the Teutonic knights’ former colony in Poland, the German
province of Pomerania or West Prussia, and the dukedom of Brandenburg
with its capital in Berlin. East Prussia still retained serfdom under it Junker
nobility and sported the Iron Cross of their founding fathers. To sophisticated
Germans, Prussians were a tribe beyond the pale, with a history and fighting
tradition alien to the gentle patchwork of autonomous Germany.
“In 1713 the Hohenzollern Frederick William of Brandenburg (1713-40),

grandson of the Great Elector of the Thirty Years War, had become elector
and then king of Prussia. He was cut of classic Teutonic cloth, a stern
Calvinist and a meticulous bureaucrat. His civil service manual ran to
seventy-five chapters, and his army was the best drilled and best equipped in
Europe. But hi attitude towards his effete son, also Frederick, was terrifying.
The boy was awoken each morning by a cannon, and was given a regiment of
children on which to practise military command. To his father’s horror,
Frederick emerged a homosexual, which the king tried to correct, allegedly by
forcing him to watch the beheading of his best friend.
“The boy survived such ordeals to emerge as Frederick II, later ‘the Great’
(1740-86). He built himself a palace at Potsdam outside Berlin in the manner
of Versailles, calling it Sansouci, Without Care. He founded a new Academy
of Arts in Berlin and commanded that French be its language rather than
‘barbarous German’. Frederick played music [Bach on the flute] and wrote
poetry, corresponding with the French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778),
whom he said had ‘the lovableness and mischievousness of a monkey’.
Voltaire admired and flattered him – until they fell out when Frederick
inherited his father’s addiction to war.
743
Jenkins, op. cit., p. 14.
436
“Frederick proved to be an authoritarian and a militarist. He viewed his
people as ‘a troop of stags in the great lord’s park, with no other function than
to stock and restock the enclosure’. He told Voltaire that ‘three-quarters of
mankind are made for slavery to the most absurd fanaticism’. He doubled the
size of his army until it consumed over eighty per cent of the Prussian budget,
built on the Junker tradition of an inherited class, with soldier recruited on a
cantonal basis. Frederick remarked that ‘friends and relations who fight
together do not lightly let each other down’. Soon the French had a saying:
“Prussia is not a nation that has an army but an army that has a nation’…’744
Henry Kissinger writes: “Where Louis had fought wars to translate power
into hegemony, Prussia’s Frederick II went to war to transmute latent
weakness into great power status. Sitting on the harsh North German plain
and extending from the Vistula across Germany, Prussia cultivated discipline
and public service to substitute for the larger population and greater
resources of better-endowed countries. Split into two non-contiguous pieces,
it jutted precariously into the Austrian, Swedish, Russian, and Polish spheres
of influence. It was relatively sparsely populated; its strength was the
discipline with which it marshalled its limited resources. Its greatest assets
were civic-mindedness, an efficient bureaucracy, and a well-trained army…
“… Frederick saw his personal authority as absolute but his policies as

limited rigidly by the principles of raison d’état Richelieu had put forward a
century earlier. ‘Rulers are the slaves of their resources,’ his credo held, ‘the
interest of the State is their law, and this law may not be infringed.’
Courageous and cosmopolitan (Frederick spoke and wrote French and
composed sentimental French poetry even on military campaigns, subtitling
one of his literary efforts ‘Pas trop mal pour la veille d’une grande bataille’),
he embodied the new era of Enlightenment governance by benevolent
despotism, which was legitimized by its effectiveness, not ideology.
“Frederick concluded that great-power status required territorial

contiguity for Prussia, hence expansion. There was no need for any other
political or moral justification. ‘The superiority of our troops, the promptitude
with which we can set them in motion, in a word the clear advantage we have
over our neighbors’ was all the justification Frederick required to seize the
wealthy and traditionally Austrian province of Silesia in 1740. Treating the
issue as geopolitical, not a legal or moral one, Frederick aligned himself with
France (which saw in Prussia a counter to Austria) and retained Silesia in the
peace settlement of 1742, nearly doubling Prussia’s territory and population.
“In the process, Frederick brought war back to the European system, which
had been at peace since 1713 when the Treaty of Utrecht had put an end to the
ambition of Louis XIV. The challenge to the established balance of power
caused the Westphalian system to begin to function. The price for being
admitted as a new member to the European order turned out to be seven
744 Jenkins, op. cit., pp. 159-160.
437
years of near-disastrous battle. Now the alliances were reversed, as
Frederick’s previous allies sought to quash his operations and their rivals
tried to harness Prussia’s disciplined fighting force for their own aims. Russia,
remote and mysterious, for the first time entered a contest over the European
balance of power. At the edge of defeat, with Russian armies at the gates of
Berlin, Frederick was saved by the sudden death of Czarina Elizabeth. The
new Czar [Peter III], a long-time admirer of Frederick, withdrew from the war.
(Hitler, besieged in encircled Berlin in April 1945, waited for an event
comparable to the so-called Miracle of the House of Brandenburg and was
told by Joseph Goebbels that it had happened when President Franklin D.
Roosevelt died.
“The Holy Roman Emperor had become a façade; no rival claimant to

universal authority had arisen. Almost all rulers asserted that they ruled by
divine right – a claim not challenged by any major power – but they accepted
that God had similarly endowed many other monarchs. Wars were therefore
fought for limited territorial objectives, not to overthrow existing
governments and institutions, nor to impose a new system of relations
between states. Tradition prevented rules from conscripting their subjects and
severely constrained their ability to raise taxes. The impact of wars on civilian
populations was in no way comparable to the horrors of the Thirty Years’
War or what technology and ideology would produce two centuries later. In
the eighteenth century, the balance of power operated as a theatre in which
‘lives and values were put on display, amid splendour, polish, gallantry, and
shows of utter self-assurance’. The exercise of that power was constrained by
the recognition that the system would not tolerate hegemonic aspirations.
“International orders that have been the most stable have had the
advantage of uniform perceptions. The statesmen who operated the
eighteenth-century European order were aristocrats who interpreted
intangibles like honor and duty in the same way and agreed on fundamentals.
They represented a single elite society that spoke the same language (French),
frequented the same salons, and pursued romantic liaisons in each other’s
capitals. National interests of course varied, but in a world where a foreign
minister could serve a monarch of another nationality (every Russian foreign
minister until 1820 was recruited abroad), or when a territory could change its
national affiliation as the result of a marriage pact or a fortuitous inheritance,
a sense of overarching common purpose was inherent. Power calculations in
the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a
shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct.
“This consensus was not only a matter of decorum; it reflected the moral
convictions of a common European outlook… New triumphs in science and
philosophy began to displace the fracturing European certainties of tradition
and faith. The swift advance of the mind on multiple fronts – physics,
chemistry, astronomy, history, archaeology, cartography, rationality –
bolstered a new spirit of secular illumination auguring that the revelation of
all nature’s hidden mechanisms was only a question of time. ‘The true system
438
of the world has been recognized, developed, and perfected,’ wrote the
brilliant French polymath Jean Le Rond d’Alembert in 1759, embodying the
spirit of the age…”745
745
Kissinger, World Order, London: Penguin, 2015, pp. 37-38.
439
51. ENGLAND’S CONSERVATIVE ENLIGHTENMENT
In 1706 Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, wrote to a

comrade in the Netherlands: “There is a mighty Light which spreads its self
over the world especially in those two free Nations of England and Holland;
on whom the Affairs of Europe now turn; and if Heaven sends us soon a
peace suitable to the great Socrates we have had, it is impossible but Letters
and Knowledge must advance in greater Proportion than ever… I am far from
thinking that the cause of Theisme will lose anything by fair Dispute. I can
never… wish better for it when I wish the Establishment of an entire
Philosophical Liberty.”746
This quotation combines many of the characteristic themes of the

Enlightenment: the image of light itself; the optimism, the belief that
knowledge and education will sweep all before it; the belief in free speech,
which, it was felt then, would not damage faith; above all, the belief in liberty.
And indeed, with the English Enlightenment there came a tolerance that went
far beyond the bounds of what had been considered tolerable in the past.
Thus Catholicism was still banned, because that was considered a political
threat; but the Earl of Shaftesbury was allowed “to print his scandalous view
that religion should be optional and atheism considered a possible form of
belief”...747
“The Enlightenment was not a crusade,” writes Mark Goldie, “but a tone of
voice, a sensibility.”748 Nevertheless, underlying the sensibility there was an
Enlightenment world-view, which can be summarised as follows: “All men
are by nature equal; all have the same natural rights to strive after happiness,
to self-preservation, to the free control of their persons and property, to resist
oppression, to hold and express whatever opinions they please. The people is
sovereign; it cannot alienate its sovereignty; and every government not
established by the free consent of the community is a usurpation. The title-
deeds of man’s rights, as Sieyès said, are not lost. They are preserved in his
reason. Reason is infallible and omnipotent. It can discover truth and compel
conviction. Rightly consulted, it will reveal to us that code of nature which
should be recognised and enforced by the civil law. No evil enactment which
violates natural law is valid. Nature meant man to be virtuous and happy. He
is vicious and miserable, because he transgresses her laws and despises her
teaching.
“The essence of these doctrines is that man should reject every institution
and creed which cannot approve itself to pure reason, the reason of the
individual. It is true that if reason is to be thus trusted it must be unclouded
by prejudice and superstition. These are at once the cause and effect of the
defective and mischievous social, political and religious institutions, which
746 Shaftesbury, in Porter, op. cit., p. 3.

747 Jacques Barzun, op. cit., p. 361.
748 Goldie, “Priesthood and the Birth of Whiggism”, quoted in Porter, op. cit., p. xxi.
440
have perverted man’s nature, inflamed his passions, and distorted his
judgement. Therefore to overthrow prejudice and superstition should be the
first effort of those who would restore to man his natural rights.”749
The English Enlightenment rested especially on the achievements of Sir

Isaac Newton, whose Principia astonished the world, and whose Opticks, by
explicating the nature of light, provided the Enlightenment thinkers with the
perfect image of their programme of intellectual enlightenment.
As Alexander Pope put it,
Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay Hid from Sight;

God said, ‘Let Newton be!’, and all was Light.
Voltaire so admired Newton that he called his mistress “Venus-Newton”.

Newtonian physics appeared to promise the unlocking of all Nature’s secrets
by the use of reason alone – although it must be remembered that Newton
believed in revelation as well as reason and wrote many commentaries on the
Scriptures.
Roy Porter writes: “Newton was the god who put English science on the
map, an intellectual colossus, flanked by Bacon and Locke.
Let Newton, Pure Intelligence, whom God

To mortals lent to trace His boundless works
From laws sublimely simple, speak thy fame
In all philosophy.
Sang James Thomson in his ‘Ode on the Death of Sir Isaac Newton’ (1727).
Wordsworth was later more Romantic:
Newton with his prism and silent face,

… a mind for ever,
Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.
‘Newton’ the icon proved crucial to the British Enlightenment, universally

praised except by a few obdurate outsiders, notably William Blake, who
detested him and all his works.
“What was crucial about Newton – apart from the fact that, so far as his
supporters were concerned, he was a Briton blessed with omniscience – was
that he put forward a vision of Nature which, whilst revolutionary, reinforced
latitudinarian Christianity. For all but a few diehards, Newtonianism was an
invincible weapon against atheism, upholding no mere First Cause but an
actively intervening personal Creator who continually sustained Nature and,
749 F.F. Willert, “Philosophy and the Revolution”, The Cambridge Modern History, Cambridge
University Press, vol. VIII: The French Revolution, 1934, pp. 2-3.
441
once in a while, applied a rectifying touch. Like Locke, furthermore, the
public Newton radiated intellectual humility. Repudiating the a priori
speculations of Descartes and later rationalists, he preferred empiricism: he
would ‘frame no hypotheses’ (hypotheses non fingo), and neither would he pry
into God’s secrets. Thus, while he had elucidated the law of gravity, he did
not pretend to divine its causes. Not least, in best enlightened fashion,
Newtonian science set plain facts above mystifying metaphysics. In
Newtonianism, British scientific culture found its enduring rhetoric: humble,
empirical, co-operative, pious, useful. ‘I don’t know what I may seem to the
world, but, as to myself,’ he recalled, in his supreme soundbite, ‘I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in
now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’….
“The affinities between the Newtonian cosmos and the post-1688 polity
were played up. In the year after the master’s death, his disciple J.T.
Desaguliers produced an explicit application of physics to politics in The
Newtonian System of the World: The Best Model of Government, an Allegorical
Poem (1728), where the British monarchy was celebrated as the guarantor of
liberty and rights: ‘attracting is now as universal in the political, as the
philosophical world’.
What made the Planets in such Order move,

He said, was Harmony and mutual Love.
God himself was commended as a kind of constitutional monarch:
His Pow’r, coerc’ed by Laws, still leaves them free,

Directs but not Destroys their Liberty.
The Principia thus provided an atomic exploratory model not just for Nature
but for society too (freely moving individuals governed by law)…
“This enthronement of the mechanical philosophy, the key paradigm

switch of the ‘scientific revolution’, in turn sanctioned the new assertions of
man’s rights over Nature so salient to enlightened thought… No longer alive
or occult but rather composed of largely inert matter, Nature could be
weighted, measured – and mastered. The mechanical philosophy fostered
belief that man was permitted, indeed duty-bound, to apply himself to
Nature for (in Bacon’s words) the ‘glory of God and the relief of man’s estate’.
Since Nature was not, after all, sacred or ‘ensouled’, there could be nothing
impious about utilizing and dominating it. The progressiveness of science
thus became pivotal to enlightened propaganda. The world was now well-lit,
as bright as light itself.”750
750 Porter, op. cit., pp. 135-136, 137, 138, 142.
442
But the light in question was a light that cast much of reality into the shade.
For “with the Newtonian mechanistic synthesis,” writes Philip Sherrard, “…
the world-picture, with man in it, is flattened and neutralized, stripped of all
sacred or spiritual qualities, of all hierarchical differentiation, and spread out
before the human observer like a blank chart on which nothing can be
registered except what is capable of being measured.”751
Locke’s philosophy also began with a tabula rasa, the mind of man before
empirical sensations have been imprinted upon it. The development of the
mind then depends on the movement and association and ordering of
sensations and the concepts that arise from them, rather like the atoms of
Newton’s universe. And the laws of physical motion and attraction
correspond to the laws of mental inference and deduction, the product of the
true deus ex machina of the Newtonian-Lockean universe – Reason. Locke’s
political and psychological treatises promised that all the problems of human
existence could be amicably settled by reason rather than revelation, and
reasonableness rather than passion. Traditional religion was not to be
discarded, but purified of irrational elements, placed on a firmer, more
rational foundation; for, as Benjamin Whichcote said, with Locke’s agreement,
“there is nothing so intrinsically rational as religion”.752 Hence the title of
another of Locke’s works: The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), in which
only one key dogma was proclaimed as necessary: that Jesus was the Messiah,
proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom. Reason, for Locke, was “the candle
of the Lord”, “a natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of light, and
Fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth
which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties”.753 Armed with
reason, and even without Christ, one can know what is the just life lived in
accordance with natural law.
“Locke,” writes Roy Porter, “had no truck with the fideist line that reason
and faith were at odds; for the latter was properly ‘nothing but a firm assent
of the mind: which… cannot be accorded to anything but upon good reason’.
Gullibility was not piety. To accept a book, for instance, as revelation without
checking out the author was gross superstition – how could it honour God to
suppose that faith overrode reason, for was not reason no less God-given?
“In a typically enlightened move, Locke restricted the kinds of truths

which God might reveal: revelation could not be admitted contrary to reason,
and ‘faith can never convince us of anything that contradicts our knowledge’.
Yet there remained matters on which hard facts were unobtainable, as, for
instance, Heaven or the resurrection of the dead: ‘being beyond the discovery
or reason’, such issues were ‘purely matters for faith’.
751 Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1987, p. 69.
752 Whichcote, in Porter, op. cit., p. 99.
753 Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, book IV, chapter 19.
443
“In short, Locke raised no objections to revealed truth as such, but whether
something ‘be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge – it was the
constant court of appeal. The credo, quia impossibile est of the early Church
fathers might seem the acme of devotion, but it ‘would prove a very ill rule
for men to choose their opinions or religion by’. Unless false prophets were
strenuously avoided, the mind would fall prey to ‘enthusiasm’, that eruption
of the ‘ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain’. Doubtless, God might
speak directly to holy men, but Locke feared the exploitation of popular
credulity, and urged extreme caution.”754
Lockean rationalism led to Deism, which sought to confine God’s activity

in the world to the original act of creation. Thus the Deists’ understanding of
God was closely modelled on the English monarchy: “’God is a monarch’,
opined Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘yet not an arbitrary but a limited monarch’:
His power was limited by His reason”.755 All history since the creation could
be understood by reason alone without recourse to Divine Revelation or
Divine intervention.
Thus in 1730 Matthew Tyndal published his Christianity as Old as the

Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature. In it he declared:
“If nothing but Reasoning can improve Reason, and no Book can improve my
Reason in any Point, but as it gives me convincing Proofs of its
Reasonableness; a Revelation, that will not suffer us to judge of its Dictates by
our Reason, is so far from improving Reason, that it forbids the Use of it…
Understanding… can only be improv’d by studying the Nature and Reason of
things: ‘I applied my Heart’ (says the wisest of Men) ‘to know, and to search,
and to seek out Wisdom and the Reason of Things’ (Ecclesiastes 7.25)…”
Of course, the word “Reason” has a long and honourable history in

Christian theology; Christ Himself is the Logos, and “Logos” can be
translated by “Reason”. But what the Deists were proposing was no God-
enlightened use of human reason. Reason for them was something divorced
from Revelation and therefore from Christ; it was something purely
ratiocinative, rationalist, not the grace-filled, revelation-oriented reason of the
Christian theologians. “Reason is for the philosopher what Grace is for the
Christian”, wrote Diderot.756
It followed from this Deistic concept of God and Divine Providence that all
the complicated theological speculation and argument of earlier centuries was
as superfluous as revelation itself. The calm, lucid religion of nature practised
by philosopher-scientists would replace the arid, tortured religion of the
theologians. And such a religion, as well as being simpler, would be much

756 Diderot, in Stephen J. Lee, Aspects of European History, 1494-1789, London & New York:
Routledge, 1994, p. 252.
444
more joyful that the old. No more need to worry about sin, or the wrath of
God, or hell. No more odium theologicum, just gaudium naturale.
As Porter writes, “rejecting the bogeyman of a vengeful Jehovah blasting

wicked sinners, enlightened divines instated a more optimistic (pelagian)
theology, proclaiming the benevolence of the Supreme Being and man’s
capacity to fulfil his duties through his God-given faculties, the chief of these
being reason, that candle of the Lord.”757
This Deist, man-centred view of the universe was sometimes seen as being
summed up in Alexander Pope’s verse:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,

The proper study of mankind is man.758
However, Pope, a Roman Catholic and therefore a member of a persecuted

minority, also expressed a scepticism about the limits of human knowledge
that provided a necessary counter-balance to the prevailing optimism:
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err.759
But for the Deists this was too sceptical; they believed in this world with its
delightfully harmonious laws, reflecting a wise, benevolent Creator and
completely comprehensible to the human mind. Not for them the traditional
awareness of the Fall. They knew nothing of the pessimism of Rousseau:
“How blind are we in the midst of so much enlightenment!”760 For them,
religion had to be happy and reasonable. “’Religion is a cheerful thing,’ Lord
Halifax explained to his daughter. And Lord Shaftesbury enlarged: ‘Good
Humour is not only the best Security against Enthusiasm: Good Humour is
also the best Foundation of Piety and True Religion.’ For the proof of that
religion, you had only to look about you. It was perfectly evident to anyone
standing in the grounds of any English stately home that a discriminating
gentleman had created them: how much more overwhelming evidence of that
even greater Gentleman above, who had so recently revealed to Sir Isaac
Newton that his Estate too was run along rational lines…”761

758 Pope, An Essay on Man, ii, 1-2 (1733).
759 Pope, An Essay on Man, ii, 3-10.
760 Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert (1758).
445
Porter writes: “The Ancients taught: ‘be virtuous’, and Christianity: ‘have
faith’; but the Moderns proclaimed: ‘be happy’. Replacing the holiness
preached by the Church, the great ideal of the modern world has been
happiness, and it was the thinkers of the 18th century who first insisted upon
that value shift.
Oh Happiness! Our being’s end and aim!

Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! Whate’er thy name…
sang poet Alexander Pope. ‘Happiness is the only thing of real value in
existence’, proclaimed the essayist Soame Jenyns. ‘Pleasure is now the
principal remaining part of your education,’ Lord Chesterfield instructed his
son.
“And if phrases like ‘pleasure-loving’ always hinted at the unacceptable

face of hedonism, it would be hard to deny that the quest for happiness –
indeed the right to happiness – became a commonplace of Enlightenment
thinking, even before it was codified into Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian
‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ definition. That formula was itself
a variant upon phrases earlier developed by the moral philosopher Francis
Hutcheson, and by the Unitarian polymath, Joseph Priestley, who deemed
that ‘the good and happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the
members of any state, is the great standard by which everything related to
that state must finally be determined.’
“The quest for happiness became central to enlightened thinking

throughout Europe, and it would be foolish to imply that British thinkers had
any monopoly of the idea. Nevertheless, it was a notion which found many of
its earliest champions in this country. ‘I will faithfully pursue that happiness I
propose to myself,’… had insisted at the end of the 17th century. And English
thinkers were to the fore in justifying happiness as a goal….
“What changes of mind made hedonism acceptable to the Enlightenment?

In part, a new turn in theology itself. By 1700 rational Anglicanism was
picturing God as the benign Architect of a well-designed universe. The Earth
was a law-governed habitat meant for mankind’s use; man could garner the
fruits of the soil, tame the animals and quarry the crust. Paralleling this new
Christian optimism ran lines of moral philosophy and aesthetics espoused by
the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and his admirer, Francis Hutcheson. Scorning
gravity and the grave, Shaftesbury’s rhapsodies to the pleasures of virtue
pointed the way for those who would champion the virtues of pleasure.
“Early Enlightenment philosophers like Locke gave ethics a new basis in

psychology. It was emphasized that, contrary to Augustinian rigour, human
nature was not hopelessly depraved; rather the passions were naturally
benign – and in any case pleasure was to be derived from ‘sympathy’ with
them. Virtue was, in short, part and parcel of a true psychology of pleasure
446
and was its own reward. Good taste and good morals fused in an aesthetic of
virtue.
“Like Nature at large, man became viewed as a machine made up of parts,

open to scientific study through the techniques of a ‘moral anatomy’ which
would unveil psychological no less than physical laws of motion. Building on
such natural scientific postulates, thinkers championed individualism and the
right to self-improvement. It became common, as in Bernard Mandeville’s
Fable of the Bees, to represent society as a hive made up of individuals, each
pulsating with needs, desires and drives which hopefully would work for the
best: private vices, public benefits. ‘The wants of the mind are infinite,’
asserted the property developer and physician Nicholas Barbon, expressing
views which pointed towards Adam Smith’s celebration of ‘the uniform,
constant and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition’. ‘Self
love’, asserted Joseph Tucker, Dean of Gloucester Cathedral, ‘is the great
Mover in human Nature’.”762
Garnished with a touch of German moral earnestness, this English concept

of Enlightenment was well summed up by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in
the words: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-induced
immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding
without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-induced if its cause is
not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without
the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude!
Have courage to use your own understanding!”763
The English Enlightenment, while theologically and philosophically radical,

was politically conservative. For the revolution – “glorious” and “bloodless” -
had already taken place in England, and by 1700 the essential freedoms,
especially the freedom of the press, which the Enlightenment thinkers so
valued, had already been won. “In these circumstances,” writes Porter,
“enlightened ideologies were to assume a unique inflection in England: one
less concerned to lambast the status quo than to vindicate it against
adversaries left and right, high and low. Poachers were turning gamekeepers;
implacable critics of princes now became something more like apologists for
them; those who had held that power corrupted now found themselves, with
the advent of political stabilisation, praising the Whig regime as the bulwark
of Protestant liberties….
“… the ‘conservative enlightenment’ was thus a holding operation,

rationalizing the post-1688 settlement, pathologizing its enemies and dangling
seductive prospects of future security and prosperity. The Enlightenment
became established and the established became enlightened.”764
762 Porter, “Architects of Happiness”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 1, N 8, December, 2000, pp.
15-16.
763 Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784, in Hans Reiss (ed.),
Kant’s Political Writings, 1970, p. 54).

764 Porter, The Enlightenment, pp. 31, 32.
447
*
They also became rich. Hardly coincidentally, England’s conservative

Enlightenment emphasizing the materialist values of happiness, prosperity
and pleasure coincided with what has been called the “proto-Industrial
revolution”. As Tombs writes: “Although England had always been one of the
world’s most prosperous countries, for centuries richer than many developing
countries in the twentieth century, by the eighteenth century it was one of the
very richest, with a growing urban, manufacturing and service sector
exceeded only by Holland. Its income per capita in 1760 was slightly above
that of India in 2000. Its workers’ wages held up, while other countries, such
as once world-leading Italy, were inexorably impoverished by rising
populations. Although China and India were the world’s main exporters of
manufactured goods – cotton, silk, porcelain – and Asia had long enjoyed
sophisticated commercial systems, average living standards were much lower
than in England.
“Then came something new, first seen in Holland and England in the late
1600s. People whose basic needs were fulfilled developed ever-increasing
appetites for comfort, novelty and pleasure; and these appetites generated a
widespread eagerness to earn more money to gratify them. This is probably
connected with the slackening of religious conflict, the growth of ‘politeness’,
and the appearance of exotic imports from Asia and the Americas. People
began acquiring more, and new types of goods, They abandoned the uniform,
unchanging, hard-wearing items that had satisfied most people since time
immemorial – solid wood, rough leather, pewter, thick woollens. Household
furniture was upgraded: in came wardrobes, comfortable chairs, clocks,
mirrors, earthenware, even china. Old items were replaced with newer, more
fashionable ones.
“There was a revolution in the clothing of ordinary people: in came white

linen undergarments, white stockings, colourful outer clothes, ribbons, men’s
wigs, women’s silk hats, neckerchiefs, silver buckles. The aim was to be neat,
clean, modern and respectable, but not ‘flashy’ – the look of Enlightenment
England. Regional styles of dress disappeared. People were not aping their
betters, but showing they were as good as anyone. Young men and
apprentices worked and spent – and sometimes stole – to look what they
called ‘right’, ‘knowing’ and ‘genteel’… Clothing was the spearhead of the
Industrial Revolution, because it began the mass consumption of machine-
made goods. Cotton, adopted first by women for its brightness and cleanness,
became the leading sector of industrialization. Buying goods became a form
of enjoyment and self-invention. This was not a dour Protestant work ethic of
thrift and saving, but a romantic work ethic based on self-expression,
ambition and enjoyment – ‘daydreams of desire’. Fashion and novelty were
the aims; and hence the appetite for goods was insatiable.
448
“People began to consume more and more things that were merely
pleasurable – and novel pleasures at that: tobacco, tea, sugar, coffee, fresh
white bread, convenience foods and alcohol. Harvest labourers in 1750s
Hertfordshire were being fed not just beer, mutton and carrots, but tea, coffee,
biscuits, chocolate, sago and rum. Many of these new pleasures had a social
aspect – smoking, drinking, showing off new clothes – and this meant having
more money to spend in taverns, gin shops, coffee houses and pleasure
gardens, all characteristics of eighteenth-century society.
“These new pleasures began to supplement and even replace, the old
unchanging pleasures of Merrie England: eating a lot, drinking a lot of beer,
and taking plenty of time off (more leisure was taken before 1600 than would
be taken again until the later twentieth century). Spending more required
people to work longer and differently. People took fewer days off (facilitated
by the Commonwealth’s abolition of saints’ days, not reversed at the
Restoration). More married women took jobs. Working hours began a steady
rise until they reached heights probably unprecedented in world history, on
average 65-70 hours a week, compared with 40-50 hours in the developing
world today.
“New habits of consumption reached not only the ‘middling sort’, but
trickled down to the poor, who acquired more goods than would have been
available to a prosperous yeoman a century earlier: ownership of saucepans,
dishes, clocks, pictures, mirrors, curtains, lamps, and tea and coffee utensils at
least doubled between 1670 and 1730. Watches, usually in silver cases – a new
fashion item – become general among English working men in the second half
of the century. They were a coveted means of display, with ribbons and seals
dangling from the breeches pocket. They were also (as they could be pawned)
an investment. By the 1790s there were an estimated 800,000 silver and
400,000 gold watches in England.
“What is termed proto-industry (rural, household-based production for

non-local markets) supplied these new appetites to get and spend. This
‘industrial revolution’ was powered more by perspiration than technological
inspiration. Similar appetites fuelled the Asian ‘Tiger economies’ in the late
twentieth century, where meat, televisions, jeans, motor-cycles and mobile
phones played the role of tea and sugar, watches, cotton clothes and crockery
in providing incentives to earn and consume.
“Women played a leading part in these changes, for girls and married
women had unusual economic and social autonomy. After the Black Death
(again), when higher wages and social mobility increased socio-economic
freedom, there developed in north-west Europe a characteristic marriage
pattern. It had, and still has, profound cultural and social effects. In contrast
to other continents (where marriage was and still is universal, young and
arranged, where new couples lives within an extended family and where
young women occupy an extremely subordinate position) English women
had more choice of partner and married much later, often their late twenties.
449
The Poor Law may have lessened the need to have lots of children, as parents
were not solely dependent on their children in old age. Moreover, English law,
though it made married women subordinate to their husbands, recognized
single women as independent of their male relatives. Late marriage gave
young people several years of earning, spending and relative independence,
often away from home. Among the consequences were rising premarital
conceptions (from 15 to 40 percent over the eighteenth century) and
illegitimacy (from 1 to 5 percent of births – nearly 1960s levels). In all, over
half of first-born children were conceived out of wedlock, though usually
with marriage the expected, if not obligatory, consequence. Marriage and
reproduction were responsive to economic opportunity: couples married
when they could afford it, and set up households independent of parents and
in-laws. Wives’ and husbands’ roles were increasingly similar and equal, with
women often heads of families and owners of businesses. Family members
were more willing and able to seek a variety of work – it was rare for fathers,
mothers and children to work together in the same occupations. By the time
of the Napoleonic Wars, two-thirds of married women were earning wages in
such trades as retailing, lace-making, brewing and spinning – a much higher
proportion than in most of the world today. Often it was the new earnings of
young people and married women which enabled individuals and
households to acquire new luxuries…”765
As so often in history, movements of ideas in one direction are often

accompanied (or followed, at a short distance) by movements in the opposite
direction. So it was in eighteenth-century England. The main tendency of the
English Enlightenment, as we have seen, was towards universalism, science,
materialism and a liberalism that tended to undermine faith in God, king and
country.
Another trait of the period was cosmopolitanism. Thus the monarchy, from
the time of George I, was German; the language of the court was French; the
main artistic models and influences in music and architecture were Italian.
Specifically English traditions in the arts (which had reached a high level in
the previous century under the architect Sir Christopher Wren and the great
composer Henry Purcell) fell into decay.
However, the crushing victories of the Duke of Marlborough over the

French in the War of the Spanish Succession, followed, a half-century later, by
the still greater triumphs over the French in the Seven Years War (which laid
the foundations of the British Empire), stimulated a not unnatural feeling of
patriotic pride in the English, together with the feeling that the English were
in some sense God’s people with a mission to bring faith and civilization to
other peoples beyond the ocean. This revived patriotism and religiosity
required artistic expression and confirmation. And providentially it received
765 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 371-373.
450
it by the arrival on English shores of the greatest and most popular composer
ever to grace them – Georg Friedrich Handel.
Handel was, of course, a German by birth, who came to England originally

in the service of a very German employer, King George I; and his early
compositions were by no means English in style or inspiration. Thus he made
his reputation with Italian-style operas such as Rinaldo (1711), and imported
large numbers of Italian and German singers and musicians into London to
perform his works. However, in 1727 Handel applied for, and received,
British citizenship; and in October of that year, at the coronation of King
George II, he embarked on a new and extraordinarily successful career as the
English composer par excellence by composing, for unprecedentedly vast vocal
and orchestral resources, four coronation anthems in the English language.
“English Protestantism” write David Starkey and Katie Greening, “ – with

its single-minded emphasis on the pure, unadulterated word of God – had
historically been a great enemy of music. But Handel responded more
imaginatively than any Englishman to the power and poetry of the English of
the King James Bible and Prayer Book, to create a new musical language. In
the coronation anthems he put the new language at the service of the
Hanoverian monarchy, and the anthems were an instant hit – in particular
‘Zadok the Priest’, which remains the most celebrated and most frequently
played of the four… The text it uses is a biblical passage describing the
anointing of King Solomon, which has been used at coronations since Anglo-
Saxon times [and to the present day]…”766
So at a time of unprecedented change in a secular and modernist direction,

England through the genius of Handel and his English-speaking religious
oratorios received a conservative, traditionalist stimulus that placed a
permanent seal on the English soul – at least until the beginning of the reign
of Queen Elizabeth II. If “Zadok the Priest” harked back to Anglo-Saxon times,
when England was Orthodox, and reinforced the innate monarchism of the
English, his most famous composition, the glorious oratorio The Messiah
(1741), has probably done more than any other single piece of art or literature
to preserve the remnants of Christian faith in the English-speaking peoples
worldwide. Mozart re-orchestrated the work, but insisted that any alteration
to Handel’s score should not be interpreted as an effort to improve the music.
No less was the praise from Ludwig Van Beethoven, who said of Handel's
works: "Go to him to learn how to achieve great effects, by such simple
means."767
And so, at the very moment that England was plunging herself into the
darkness of the all-too-human “Enlightenment”, God in His great mercy
766Starkey and Greening, Music & Monarchy, London: BBC Books, 2013, p. 244.
767 “Handel: Fifteen Facts about the Great Composer”,
http://www.classicfm.com/composers/handel/guides/handel-facts-composer/
451
reminded us through Handel’s works that there is another, true and Divine
Enlightenment which no darkness can ever quench.
In 1745, the Stuart pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, unsuccessfully

invaded England from Scotland. To stir up patriotic resistance to the invader,
the native English composer Thomas Arne, Handel’s only real rival,
composed “God save the king!”, which became the national anthem of several
countries.768 Not to be outdone in patriotic zeal, in the next year Handel
composed Judas Maccabaeus. “At each performance,” write Starkey and
Greening, the audience “were given a booklet containing all the words so they
could read along to the singing. Thus they would also have understood the
obvious parallels between the Israelites and the modern English nation: these
were a nationalistic people who regarded themselves under the special
protection of God, and the ‘just wars’ Israelites waged with their enemies
would have immediately chimed with English audiences…
“In the years that followed, Handel would write a series of oratorios that
would each present a new instalment of the ancient story of God’s chosen
people – the story of ancient Israel. But it was also the story of God’s new
chosen people in a new Holy Land named Great Britain. The idea of a
divinely ordained monarchy no longer held sway in Hanoverian England:
instead, it had been replaced by the idea of a ‘divinely ordained’ nation.
Oratorio was the soundtrack for this new ideology, combining religious zeal
with a strident national pride…”769
768
Starkey and Greening, op. cit., pp. 258-259.
769 Starkey and Greening, op. cit., pp. 272, 273.
452
52. FRANCE’S RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT
The French Enlightenment was very different from the English one. The
French had not yet beheaded their king; and their Protestants and
intellectuals were not free. Therefore the ideas of the English Enlightenment,
popularized for a French audience by Voltaire in his Letters on the English and
Elements of Newton’s Physics, and by Montesquieu in his The Spirit of the Laws,
acquired an altogether sharper, more revolutionary edge. The tolerant English
empiricism became the French cult of reason, a fiercely intolerant revolt
against all revealed religion. For, as Sir Isaiah Berlin writes, the French
philosophes were perceived to be “the first organised adversaries of dogmatism,
traditionalism, religion, superstition, ignorance, oppression.”770
Reason for the French philosophes, as for the English thinkers, was
something down-to-earth and utilitarian – “not man’s mind as such,” writes
Gerald Cragg, “but the way in which his rational faculties could be used to
achieve certain specific ends. Descartes had relied on deduction; Newton had
used inductive analysis in penetrating to the great secret of nature’s
marvellous laws, and the spirit and method of Newtonian physics ruled the
eighteenth century. Nature was invested with unparalleled authority, and it
was assumed that natural law ruled every area into which the mind of man
could penetrate. Nature was the test of truth. Man’s ideas and his institutions
were judged by their conformity with those laws which, said Voltaire, ‘nature
reveals at all times, to all men’. The principles which Newton had found in
the physical universe could surely be applied in every field of inquiry. The
age was enchanted with the orderly and rational structure of nature; by an
easy transition that the reasonable and the natural must be synonymous.
Nature was everywhere supreme, and virtue, truth, and reason were her
‘adorable daughters’. The effect of this approach was apparent in every
sphere. In France history, politics, and economics became a kind of ‘social
physics’. The new outlook can be seen in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws;
thenceforth the study of man’s institutions became a prolongation of natural
science. The emphasis fell increasingly on the practical consequences of
knowledge: man is endowed with reason, said Voltaire, ‘not that he may
penetrate the divine essence but that he may live well in this world’.”771
As important as Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws was Claude Helvétius’

On the Spirit (1758). “It is known”, writes Richard Pipes, “that Helvétius
studied intensely the philosophical writings of Locke and was deeply affected
by them. He accepted as proven Locke’s contention that all ideas were the
product of sensations and all knowledge the result of man’s ability, through
reflection on sensory data, to grasp the differences and similarities that are the
basis of thought. He denied as categorically as did Locke man’s ability to
direct thinking or the actions resulting from it: for Helvétius, his biographer
[Keim] says, ‘a philosophical treatise on liberty [was] a treatise on effects
770 Berlin, “My Intellectual Path”, in The Power of Ideas, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, p. 4.
771 Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, London: Penguin, 1970, pp. 235-236.
453
without a cause.’ Moral notions derived exclusively from man’s experience
with the sensations of pain and pleasure. People thus were neither ‘good’ nor
‘bad’: they merely acted, involuntarily and mechanically, in their self-interest,
which dictated the avoidance of pain and the enhancement of pleasure.
“Up to this point Helvétius said nothing that had not been said previously
by Locke and his French followers. But then he made a startling leap from
philosophy into politics. From the premise that all knowledge and all values
were by-products of sensory experience he drew the inference that by
controlling the data that the senses fed to the mind – that is, by appropriately
shaping man’s environment – it was possible to determine what he thought
and how he behaved. Since, according to Locke, the formulation of idea was
wholly involuntary and entirely shaped by physical sensations, it followed
that if man were subjected to impressions that made for virtue, he could be
made virtuous through no act of his own will.
“This idea provides the key to the creation of perfectly virtuous human
beings – required are only appropriate external influences. Helvétius called
the process of educating man ‘education’, by which he meant much more than
formal schooling. When he wrote ‘l’éducation peut tout’ – ‘education can do
anything’ – he meant by education everything that surrounds man and affects
his thinking, everything which furnishes his mind with sensations and
generates ideas. First and foremost, it meant legislation: ‘It is… only by good
laws that we can form virtuous men’. From which it followed that morality
and legislation were ‘one and the same science’. In the concluding chapter of
L’Esprit, Helvétius spoke of the desirability of reforming society through
legislation for the purpose of making men ‘virtuous’.
“This is one of the most revolutionary ideas in the history of political

thought: by extrapolation from an esoteric theory of knowledge, a new
political theory is born with the most momentous practical implications. Its
central thesis holds that the task of politics is to make men ‘virtuous’, and that
the means to that end is the manipulation of man’s social and political
environment, to be accomplished mainly by means of legislation, that is, by
the state. Helvétius elevates the legislator to the status of the supreme
moralist. He must have been aware of the implications of his theory for he
spoke of the ‘art of forming man’ as intimately connected with the ‘form of
government’. Man no longer is God’s creation: he is his own product. Society,
too, is a ‘product’ rather than a given or ‘datum’. Good government not only
ensures ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ (a formula which
Helvétius seems to have devised), but it literally refashions man. The logic of
Helvétius’s ideas inexorably leads to the conclusion that in the course of
learning about human nature man ‘acquires an unlimited power of
transforming and reshaping man’. This unprecedented proposition
constitutes the premise of both liberal and radical ideologies of modern times.
It provides the theoretical justification for using politics to create a ‘new
order’…
454
“Helvétius’s theory can be applied in two ways. One may interpret it to
mean that the change in man’s social and political environment ought to be
accomplished peacefully and gradually, through the reform of institutions
and enlightenment. One can also conclude from it that this end is best
attained by a violent destruction of the existing order.
“Which approach – the evolutionary or revolutionary – prevails seems to

be in large measure determined by a country’s political system and the
opportunities it provides for intellectuals to participate in public life.
“In societies which make it possible through democratic institutions and

freedom of speech to influence policy, intellectuals are likely to follow the
more moderate alternative. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England
and the United States, intellectuals were deeply involved in political life. The
men who shaped the American republic and those who led Victorian England
along the path of reform were men of affairs with deep intellectual interests:
of some of them it would be difficult to say whether they were philosophers
engaged in statesmanship or statesmen whose true vocation was philosophy.
Even the pragmatists among them kept their minds open to the ideas of the
age. This interplay of ideas and politics lent political life in Anglo-Saxon
countries their well-known spirit of compromise. Here the intellectuals had
no need to withdraw and form an isolated caste. They acted on public opinion,
which, through democratic institutions, sooner or later affected legislation.
“In England and, through England, in the United States, the ideas of
Helvétius gained popularity mainly from the writings of Jeremy Bentham and
the utilitarians. It was to Helvétius that Bentham owed the ideas that morality
and legislation were ‘one and the same science’, that man could attain virtue
only through ‘good laws’, and that, consequently, legislation had a
‘pedagogic’ function. On these foundations, Bentham constructed his theory
of philosophical radicalism, which greatly affected the movement for
parliamentary reform and liberal economics. The preoccupation of modern
Anglo-Saxon countries with legislation as a device for human betterment is
directly traceable to Bentham, and, through him, to Helvétius. In the
speculations of Bentham and the English liberals, there was no place for
violence: the transformation of man and society was to be accomplished
entirely by laws and enlightenment. But even under this reform-minded
theory lay the tacit premise that man could and ought to be remade. This
premise links liberalism and radicalism and helps explain why, for all their
rejection of the violent methods employed by revolutionaries, when forced to
choose they throw their lot in with the revolutionaries. For what separates
liberals from the extreme left is disagreement over the means employed,
whereas they differ from the right in the fundamental perception of what man
is and what society ought to be…”772
772 Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 1899-1919, London: Collins Harvill, 1990. pp. 125-126, 128.
455
There were some real abuses – for example, judicial torture – that the
Enlightenment philosophers rightly opposed. In general, however, the French
philosophers were more radical and less reasonable than they seemed at first.
Thus on the one hand, Voltaire said, “I am not an atheist, nor a

superstitious person; I stand for common sense and the golden mean”. “I
believe in God, not the God of the mystics and the theologians, but the God of
nature, the great geometrician, the architect of the universe, the prime mover,
unalterable, transcendental, everlasting.” 773 So far, so English. But on the
other hand Voltaire was also the anti-religious zealot who said: “Écrazez
l’infâme” – that is, “Destroy the infamy” – of Christianity. As he wrote to
Frederick the Great: “Your majesty will do the human race an eternal service
in extirpating this infamous superstition, I do not say among the rabble, who
are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say
among the well-bred, among those who wish to think.”774
Let us take the quintessentially Enlightenment project of the Encylopédie,

written in twenty-eight volumes by Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis
Diderot between 1751 and 1772. Its aim was to collect and systematize all
knowledge attained to that time, all, as Diderot wrote, with a “zeal for the
best interests of the human race”. All very fine and incontestable. And when
Diderot went on to write that “the good of the people must be the great
purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors
are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is
liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual,” no English
Enlightenment thinker would have disagreed with him too seriously. But it
was a different matter when he declared that the aim of philosophy was “to
enlarge and liberate God”! No Englishman, however free-thinking would
have supposed that not only man, but even God was in chains, and was just
waiting to be liberated and “enlarged” by the French philosophers!
And so, in keeping with their aim of “liberating” God, the philosophers set
about undermining the foundations of Christianity. They denied original sin
and attacked the Church. Voltaire wrote to Frederick the Great that the
Catholic church in France was “the most ridiculous, absurd and bloodthirsty
that ever infected the world”.775 But the reaction of the Catholic Church in
France was firmer than might have been expected. Thus Archbishop
Beaumont of Paris wrote: “In order to appeal to all classes and characters,
Disbelief has in our time adopted a light, pleasant, frivolous style, with the
aim of diverting the imagination, seducing the mind, and corrupting the heart.
It puts on an air of profundity and sublimity and professes to rise to the first
principles of knowledge so as to throw off a yoke it considers shameful to
mankind and to the Deity itself. Now it declaims with fury against religious
zeal yet preaches toleration for all; now it offers a brew of serious ideas with
773 Cragg, op. cit., pp. 239, 237.

774 Voltaire, in Cragg, op. cit., p. 241.
775 Jenkins, op. cit., p. 162.
456
badinage, of pure moral advice with obscenities, of great truths with great
errors, of faith with blasphemy. In a word, it undertakes to reconcile Jesus
Christ with Belial.”776
“The Jesuits,” writes Jenkins, “succeeded in having the Encyclopédie banned

by Rome, and some of the contributors went to jail. But such was the mood in
Paris that this proved counter-productive. A campaign began for the Jesuits’
suppression, fuelled by a widespread resentment at their privileges and
power. It was successful. In 1759 Jesuits were expelled from Portugal, then
from France, Austria and even Spain. Eventually, in 1773, the Pope decided he
had no option but to suppress the entire order. It had become unpopular even
within the church. The cardinals in Rome descended on the Jesuits’
headquarters, carted off its art collection and drank its cellars dry. The order’s
leaders were imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo, for no crime worse than
running out of friends. The order was restored in 1814…”777
But why would the Popes remove what had been perhaps the greatest
defenders of papism? The answer may lie in the fact that, rich, powerful and
well-educated, the Jesuits were a threat to all despotic rulers – of whom the
Pope, of course was one. And so “Benedict XIV (1740-58), whose moderation
won him the unusual accolade of praise from Voltaire, initiated an inquiry
into their affairs. They were accused of running large-scale money-making
operations, also of adopting native cults to win converts at any price.778 In
1759 they were banished from Portugal, in 1764 from France, and in 1767 from
Spain and Naples. Clement XIII (1758-69) stood by the Society with the words
Sint ut sunt, aut non sint (may they be as they are, or cease to be). But Clement
XIV (1769-74), who was elected under the shadow of a formal demand by the
Catholic powers for abolition, finally acquiesced. The brief Dominus ac
Redemptor noster of 16 August 1773 abolished the Society of Jesus, on the
grounds that it was no longer pursuing its founder’s objectives. It took effect
in all European countries except for Russia.”779
The downfall of the Jesuit order, that fierce persecutor of Orthodoxy,

would appear to be something to be welcomed. And indeed it was for those
who were being persecuted. But Jesuitism was about to be replaced by
something still more destructive of Orthodoxy: the French revolution. And in
relation to the revolution the Jesuits constituted a restraining power, whose
abolition undoubtedly brought the revolution closer. This illustrates a
principle that we find throughout modern history: that that which is the
primary evil in one era may become a restraining power against the primary
776 Archbishop Beaumont, in Barzun, op. cit., p. 368.

777 Jenkins, op. cit., p. 162.
778
This refers to their toleration of the cult of ancestors during their missionary work in
China. The Pope eventually banned this toleration, which led to the collapse of the mission.
(V.M.)
778
And Prussia. According to Montefiore, “The atheist Frederick [the Great]’s religious
tolerance extended to welcoming the Jesuits to Prussia” (Titans in History, p. 281).
779 Davies, op. cit., pp. 593-594.
457
evil of the succeeding era. This explains what may otherwise seem
inexplicable in the behaviour of some Orthodox rulers. Thus the toleration of,
and even support given by Tsars Paul I and Nicholas I to Catholicism and
Jesuitism, is explained by the fact that these institutions, inimical though they
were to Orthodoxy, nevertheless opposed the greater evil of the revolution…
The next target of the philosophers was the State. The Enlightenment’s
political creed was summed up by Barzun as follows: “Divine right is a
dogma without basis; government grew out of nature itself, from reasonable
motives and for the good of the people; certain fundamental rights cannot be
abolished, including property and the right of revolution”.780 However, the
philosophers did not at first attack the State so fiercely, hoping that their own
programme would be implemented by the “enlightened despots” of the time.
Moreover, until Rousseau’s theory of the General Will appeared, the
philosophers were wary of the destructive impact a direct attack on the State
could have. They preferred Montesquieu’s idea of a “free” state in which the
executive, legislative and judicial branches of government exercised restraint
on each other – an idea that became very influential in the Anglo-Saxon world.
781
What, then, was their constructive programme? With what did they plan to
replace the Church and State? Surprisingly, perhaps, there were very few
planned utopias in this period. It was simply assumed that with the passing
of prejudice, and the spread of enlightenment, a golden age would ensue
automatically. So there was great emphasis on the future, but not in the form
of blueprints of a future society, but rather in the form of rhapsodies on the
theme of how posterity, seeing the world changed through education and
reason and law (“Legislation will accomplish everything”, said Helvétius),
would praise the enlightened men of the present generation. “God had been
dethroned as judge, and posterity was exalted in its stead. It would be more
than a time of fulfilment; it would provide the true vindication of the
aspirations and endeavours of all enlightened men. ‘Posterity,’ wrote Diderot,
‘is for the philosopher what the other world is for the religious man.’”782
Thus the Age of Reason created its own mythology of the Golden Age.
Only it was to be in the future, not in the past. And in this world, not the next.
“The Golden Age, so fam’d by Men of Yore, shall soon be counted fabulous
no more”, said Tom Paine. And “the Golden Age of Humanity is not behind
us”, said Saint Simon; “it lies ahead, in the perfection of the social order”.
Indeed, wrote Condorcet, “no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of
the human race. The perfectibility of man is absolutely infinite.” And so,
780 Barzun, op. cit., pp. 364-365.

781 In chapter 6 of The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu “defined the freedom of states by the
relationship between three powers, legislative, executive and judicial. If all are in the same
hands, the State is a despotism; if one of them is independent, it is a ‘moderate’ state; if all are
separate, it is a free state” (in Robert and Isabelle Toms, That Sweet Enemy, London: Pimlico,
2007, p. 62).
782 Cragg, op. cit., p. 245.
458
writes Fr. Michael Azkoul, “if the Enlightenment repudiated ‘supernatural,
other-worldly, organized Christianity’, “it believed in its own brave new
world. The ‘great book of Nature’ had recorded the means by which it was to
be achieved. Professor Carl Becker shows in his Heavenly City of the Eighteenth
Century Philosophers that nature was in fact not ‘the great book’ for them, but
Augustine’s City of God torn down and rebuilt with ‘up-to-date’ materials.’
For example, Eden was replaced with ‘the golden age of Greek mythology,’
the love of God with the love of humanity, the saving work of Christ with the
creative genius of great men, grace with the goodness of man, immortality by
posterity or the veneration of future generations… The vision of the
Enlightenment, as Becker affirms, was a secular copy, a distorted copy, of
Christianity…”783
We see here a continuation of that chiliastic, Utopian trend of thought that

is already evident in the pseudo-scientific utopias of Thomas More’s Utopia
(1516), Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1601), and Francis Bacon’s The
New Atlantis. The Renaissance utopias contain astonishingly modern visions
of society – but secular, this-worldly visions. Thus Jacques Barzun writes: “To
make existence better, which for these three Humanists means not more godly,
but happier, each drives at a main goal. More wants justice through
democratic equality; Bacon wants progress through scientific research;
Campanello wants permanent peace, health, and plenty through rational
thought, brotherly love, and eugenics. All agree on a principle that the West
adopted late: everybody must work.” 784 The eighteenth-century
Enlightenment did not add anything essentially new to this: paradise is to be
achieved by reason, science, eugenics, education and work…
The problem for all secular utopias is how to control the fallen nature of
man. From the Christian point of view there is only one solution: the
acceptance of the Grace and Truth that is in Christ, which alone can tame and
transform the passions. But the Utopians thought differently: “The great
argument used to sustain right conduct is: ‘Live according to Nature. Nature
is never wrong and we err by forgetting it.’ Nature here replaces God’s
commandments, but although Nature is His handiwork, His commandments
are a good deal cleaner than Her dictates…”785
However, Nature needed some assistance – from an authoritarian, even

communistic State. And so, as Robert Service writes, “More could not imagine
that the common man, still less the common woman, might independently
attain the perfection of society without orders from above. Campanella’s tract
depicted a society which instituted universal fairness by means of gross
intrusion into private life. More and Campanella advocated thorough
indoctrination of their people…”786
783 Azkoul, Anti-Christianity and the New Atheism, Montreal: Monastery Press, 1984, p. 26.
784 Barzun, op. cit., pp. 119-120.
786 Service, Comrades, London: Pan Books, 2007, p. 15.
459
The kinship between the Renaissance and Enlightenment utopias, on the
one hand, and those of twentieth-century socialism, on the other, was pointed
out by Fr. Sergius Bulgakov: “Parallel with the religious individualism of the
Reformation a neo-pagan individualism became stronger. It magnified the
natural, unregenerated man. According to this viewpoint, man is good and
beautiful by nature, which beauty is distorted only by external conditions; it is
enough to restore the natural condition of man, and everything will be
attained. Here is the root of the various natural law theories, and also of the
newest teachings on progress and the supreme power of external reforms
alone to resolve the human tragedy, and consequently of the most recent
humanism and socialism. The external, superficial closeness of religious and
pagan individualism does not remove their deep inner difference, and for that
reason we observe in recent history not only a parallel development, but also
a struggle between these two tendencies. A strengthening of the themes of
humanistic individualism in the history of thought characterizes the epoch of
the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ (Aufklärung) in the 17th, 18th and partly the 19th
centuries. The Enlightenment drew more radical negative conclusions from
the postulates of humanism: in the sphere of religion, by means of Deism, it
came to scepticism and atheism; in the sphere of philosophy, through
rationalism and empiricism – to positivism and materialism; in the sphere of
morality, through ‘natural’ morality – to utilitarianism and hedonism.
Materialist socialism can also be seen as the latest and ripest fruit of the
Enlightenment…”787
787 Bulgakov, “Geroizm i Podvizhnichestvo” (Heroism and Asceticism), in Vekhi (Signposts),
Moscow, 1909, p. 34.
460
53. ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM
Let us turn now to the phenomenon of “enlightened despotism”, in which

the ideals of the Enlightenment appeared to work together with traditional
forms of government. The combination of the words “enlightened” and
“despotism” is paradoxical, for the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, as we
have seen, was anti-authoritarian. And yet at precisely this time there came to
power in continental Europe a series of rulers who were infected with the cult
of reason and democratism, on the one hand, but who ruled as despots, on the
other.
Enlightened despotism was made possible because the official Churches –

still the main “check” on government - had grown weak. In earlier times, even
the most despotic of rulers had made concessions to the power of the Church.
For example, Louis XIV’s rejection of Gallicanism and revocation of the Edict
of Nantes giving protection to the Huguenots (1685) was elicited by his need
to retain the support of the still-powerful Papacy. In France, the Catholic
Church, if not the Papacy as such, continued to be strong, which is one reason
why the struggle between the old and the new ideas and régimes was so
intense there, spilling over into the revolution of 1789. In other continental
countries, however, despotic rulers did not have to take such account of
ecclesiastical opposition to their ideas. Their success was furthered by the
demise of their main rivals, the Jesuits. Like the Jews, the Jesuits were a kind
of state within the state. In Paraguay they created a hierocratic society under
their control among the Indians.788
Having removed the priests who would be kings, the kings could now rule
without any priestly limitations on their power. Perhaps the first to begin this
trend was the adolescent King Charles XII of Sweden, who demonstrated that
he was king whatever the Church might do or not do about it. Thus at his
coronation in 1697, writes Robert Massie, Charles “refused to be crowned as
previous kings had been: by having someone else place the crown on his head.
Instead, he declared that, as he had been born to the crown and not elected to
it, the actual act of coronation was irrelevant. The statesmen of Sweden, both
liberal and conservative, and even his own grandmother were aghast. Charles
was put under intense pressure, but he did not give way on the essential
point. He agreed only to allow himself to be consecrated by an archbishop, in
order to accede to the Biblical injunction that a monarch be the Lord’s
Anointed, but he insisted that the entire ceremony be called a consecration,
not a coronation. Fifteen-year-old Charles rode to the church with his crown
already on his head.
“Those who looked for omens found many in the ceremony… The King
slipped while mounting his horse with his crown on his head; the crown fell
off and was caught by a chamberlain before it hit the ground. During the
788 See I.R. Shafarevich, Sotsializm kak iavlenie mirovoj istorii (Socialism as a Phenomenon of
World History), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 194-204.
461
service, the archbishop dropped the horn of anointing oil. Charles refused to
give the traditional royal oath and then, in the moment of climax, he placed
the crown on his own head…”789
Charles was not an enlightened despot. But his successor, Gustavus

Adolphus III, was. And consequently, in 1792 he was killed by nobles
“outraged at a programme of democratic despotism… [which] made the
popular gestures constantly being pressed upon Louis XVI by his secret
advisers seem tame.”790
In neighbouring Germany the princes, being in effect also first ministers of

their Churches791, were more influenced by the French Enlightenment. Thus
Frederick of Prussia dispensed with any religious sanction for his rule and
took the Enlightenment philosophers for his guides. “I was born too soon,” he
said, “but I have seen Voltaire…”792
How could despotism co-exist with the caustic anti-authoritarianism of

Voltaire and the other philosophes? It was a question of means and ends. If the
aims of the philosophes were “democratic” in the sense that they wished the
abolition of “superstition” and increased happiness for everybody through
education, the best – indeed the only – means to that end at that time was the
enlightened despot.
But there is no question that they preferred republicanism to despotism,

enlightened or otherwise. Thus Voltaire said: “The most tolerable government
of all is no doubt a republic, because it brings men closest to natural equality.”
And yet, he added wisely, “there has never been a perfect government
because men have passions”.
Indeed; and it was that insight, and the realization that republican or
democratic government often stimulated those passions to the detriment of
the people, which led even the more liberal governments to seek checks on
democratism. Thus even in Britain “the parliamentary system was under
increasing scrutiny. Ministers, or their spokesmen, argued that frequent
elections gave ‘a handle to the cabals and intrigues of foreign princes’, and
encouraged playing fast and loose with allies. For this reason, in mid-1716 the
government pushed through the Septennial Act, which increased the interval
between general elections from three to seven years.”793
789 Massie, Peter the Great, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 314.

790 William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1990, p.
314.
791 As in Portugal, where “John V (r. 1706-50), known as ‘The Faithful’, was a priest-king, one
of whose sons by an abbess became Inquisitor-General” (Davies, op. cit., p. 638).

792 Voltaire, in Davies, op. cit., p. 648. He also gave refuge to Rousseau. But Voltaire fell out
with Frederick after he called him a miser and a tyrant and a “likeable whore”. Frederick
called Voltaire a “monkey” (Montefiore, Titans in History, pp. 276-277).
793 Simms, op. cit., p. 91.
462
It was not only the philosophes who looked to the enlightened despots: as
Eric Hobsbawn writes, “the middle and educated classes and those
committed to progress often looked to the powerful central apparatus of an
‘enlightened’ monarchy to realize their hopes. A prince needed a middle class
and its ideas to modernize his state; a weak middle class needed a prince to
batter down the resistance of entrenched aristocratic and clerical interests to
progress.”794 So the philosophes went to the kings – Voltaire to Frederick of
Prussia, Diderot to Catherine of Russia – and tried to make them into
philosopher-kings, as Plato had once tried with Dionysius of Syracuse. And
the kings were flattered to think of themselves in this light.
But neither the kings nor their philosopher advisers ever aimed to create
democratic republics, as opposed to more efficient monarchies. The
philosophers, writes Porter, “never made their prime demand the
maximisation of personal freedom and the reciprocal attenuation of the state,
in the manner of later English laissez-faire liberalism. For one thing, a strong
executive would be needed to maintain the freedom of subjects against the
encroachments of the Church and the privileges of the nobles. Physiocrats
such as Quesnay championed an economic policy of free trade, but
recognised that only a determined, dirigiste administration would prove
capable of upholding market freedoms against encroached vested interests.
No continental thinkers were attracted to the ideal of the ‘nightwatchman’
state so beloved of the English radicals…
“It was the thinkers of Germanic and Central Europe above all who looked
to powerful, ‘enlightened’ rulers to preside over a ‘well-policed’ state. By this
was meant a regime in which an efficient, professional career bureaucracy
comprehensively regulated civic life, trade, occupations, morals and health,
often down to quite minute details.”795
Cragg writes: “Certain characteristics were common to all the enlightened

despotisms, but each of the continental countries had its own particular
pattern of development. By the middle of the century, Frederick the Great had
achieved a pre-eminent position, and his brilliance as a military leader had
fixed the eyes of Europe on his kingdom. Prussia appeared to be the supreme
example of the benefits of absolute rule. But appearances were deceptive.
Frederick had indeed brought the civil service to a high degree of efficiency
and had organized the life of the country in a way congenial to a military
martinet. Though he was anxious to improve the peasants’ lot, he could not
translate his theories into facts. His reign resulted in an actual increase of
serfdom. His rule rested on assumptions that were already obsolete long
before the advent of the French Revolution. It is true that by illiberal means he
achieved certain liberal ends. He abolished torture; he promoted education; in
the fields of politics and economics he applied the principles of the
Enlightenment. He had no sympathy with Christianity and little patience
794 Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, London: Abacus, 1977, p. 36.
463
with its devotees. He regarded the service of the state as an adequate
substitute for Christian faith and life. He advocated toleration on the ground
that all religious beliefs were equally absurd…”796
Thus toleration for all faiths, so long as they accepted “the service of the
state” as the supreme cult. Such a religion perfectly suited Frederick, who,
like Napoleon after him, could only understand religion in terms of its
usefulness to the State. But was this really an adequate substitute for
Christianity? Why should the people serve the state? For material gain? But
Frederick gave them only war and serfdom…
In any case, man cannot live by bread alone, and states cannot survive
through the provision of material benefits alone. The people need a faith that
justifies the state and the dominion of some men over others. Christianity
provided such a justification as long as the people believed in it, and as long
as the ruler could make himself out to be “the defender of the faith”. But if
neither the people nor the ruler believe in Christianity, what can take its place?
One alternative is the deification of the nation or state itself, and this was the
path Frederick’s successors took. But between Frederick’s enlightened
despotism and the Prussian nationalism of the nineteenth century there was a
logical and chronological gap. That gap was filled by the teaching of Kant and
Herder and Rousseau, the French revolution and Napoleon…
We have said that the philosophes like Voltaire and Diderot were happy to
work with the enlightened despots. However, this was a purely transitional
phase, a tactical ploy that could not last long. For the principles of the
philosophes, carried to their logical conclusion, led to the destruction of all
monarchies. This was clearest in the case of Rousseau, as we shall see; but
even in Diderot, the friend of Catherine the Great, we find the following: “The
arbitrary government of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His
virtues are the most dangerous and the most surely seductive: they insensibly
accustom a people to love, respect and serve his successor, however wicked
or stupid he might be. He takes away from the people the right of deliberating,
of willing or not willing, of opposing even its own will when it ordains the
good. However, this right of opposition, mad though it is, is sacred… What is
it that characterises the despot? Is it kindness or ill-will? Not at all: these two
notions enter not at all into the definition. It is the extent of the authority he
arrogates to himself, not its application. One of the greatest evils that could
befall a nation would be two or three reigns by a just, gentle, enlightened, but
arbitrary power: the peoples would be led by happiness to complete
forgetfulness of their privileges, to the most perfect slavery…”797
“The right of opposition, mad though it is, is sacred”… Here we find the
true voice of the revolution, which welcomes madness, horror, misery,
bloodshed on an unprecedented scale, so long as it is the expression of the
796 Cragg, op. cit., p. 218.

797 Diderot, Refutation of Helvétius, ed. Garnier, p. 610.
464
right of opposition, that is, of satanic rebelliousness. And that madness, that
irrationality, that satanism, it must not be forgotten, was begotten in the Age
of Reason, the age of sophisticated, elegant courtiers speaking the voice of
sweet reason and universal happiness…
465
54. HUME: THE IRRATIONALITY OF RATIONALISM
At the core of the Enlightenment, writes A.C. Grayling, is “the idea that the
methods and concepts of science should be applied in all domains of enquiry,
as far as is consistent with the subject matter in question. Newton was enough
of a scientist, despite his occult interests and hopes, to close his Optics
(published in 1704) with the words, ‘if natural philosophy in all its parts, by
pursuing this Method [i.e. scientific method], shall at length be perfected, the
bounds of moral philosophy will also be enlarged’. By ‘moral philosophy’ he
meant, as his contemporaries meant likewise, all of ethics, politics, economics,
psychology and history. This makes the Enlightenment what it was: an
extension of the scientific approach to wider domains of interest. It is the idea
that underlies the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. Its consequences
include among them the major political revolutions of the eighteenth century.
Writing in the mid-eighteenth century David Hume [1711-1776] noted that
there had been ‘a sudden and sensible change in the opinions of men within
these last fifty years, by the progress of learning and liberty’. At the time he
wrote these words they were more true of England than most other parts of
Europe, and of the British colonies in North America; but they were true
enough everywhere to be an important part of the explanation for the great
revolution that transformed politics and society in those colonies and Frane,
and eventually large parts of the world…”798
Hume more than anyone contributed to this vast expansion of the

Enlightenment project. For “all of ethics, politics, economics, psychology and
history” came within the purview of his, and his Scottish countryman Adam
Smith’s, purview, not to mention theology and philosophy. But his unique
merit and importance was that he revealed the flimsy foundations of the
whole project by a process of reductio ad absurdum.
David Hume (11711-1776), writes Sir Alistair MacFarlane, “is usually

represented as completing an ‘empiricist’ movement started by John Locke
(1632-1704) and continued by George Berkeley (1685-1753), but their
approaches were very different. Locke made a valiant attempt to establish
that all knowledge derived from experience. He regarded the mind as a ‘blank
slate’ on which experience somehow inscribed knowledge. To articulate this
idea, Locke differentiated between the primary qualities of objects, such as their
solidity, shape and extension, and their secondary qualities, such as colour,
taste, or other sensations they induce. Berkeley went further, claiming that
there was no need to invoke the existence of matter at all, only experiences
and the minds that perceived them. Finally Hume, the supreme sceptic,
argued that we had no more warrant for believing in minds continuing
through time than for believing in the existence of matter. From this
intellectual ferment and upheaval, modern philosophy began to emerge via
the work of Immanuel Kant…”799
798 Grayling, The Age of Genius, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 259-260.
799 MacFarlane, “David Hume (1711-1776)”, Philosophy Now, 119, April/May, 2017, p. 38.
466
Hume was unique among the rationalist philosophers of the eighteenth-
century in claiming to prove, by the method of “experimental philosophy”, or
reductionism, the irrationality of reason itself – that is, considered on its own
and without any other support. His conclusion was that in real life reason is
always buttressed and supplemented by faith. But then he went on to try and
“demonstrate” that faith – faith not only in God, but in any enduring,
objective reality – is itself irrational…
Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature was written in 1739-40, shortly after he

had had a nervous breakdown. It was subtitled ‘An Attempt to Introduce the
Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects’. This indicated the
final end of the Enlightenment Programme: to subdue absolutely everything,
even religion and morality, to the “experimental method”.
Hume first disposes of the idea of substance. Since our idea of the external
world is derived entirely from impressions of sensation, and since we can
never derive from sensation alone the idea of an object existing independently
of our sensations, such an idea does not really exist at all. Instead, “the idea of
a substance… is nothing but a collection of simple ideas that are united by the
imagination and have a particular name assigned to them, by which we are
able to recall, either to ourselves or others, that collection.”800
Following the same reasoning, Hume also disposes of the idea of the soul
or self. There is no sense-impression which corresponds to the idea of a
permanently existing self. For “self or person is not any one impression, but
that to which our several impressions and ides are supposed to have a
reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must
continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives; since self
is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and
invariable… and consequently there is no such idea.”801
The most famous example of Hume’s method of reductive method is his

analysis of causation. When we say that A causes B, the word “causes” does
not correspond to any impression of sensation. All that we actually see is that
events of the class A are constantly followed by events of the class B. This
constant conjunction of A and B predisposes the mind, on seeing A, to think
of B. Thus a cause in nature “is an object precedent and contiguous to another,
and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the
idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of
the other.”802
800 Hume, in Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, New York: Image Books, 1964,
volume 5, part II, p. 74.

801 Copleston, op. cit., p. 106.
467
Russell has analysed Hume’s teaching into two parts: “(1) When we say ‘A
caused B’, all that we have a right to say is that, in part experience, A and B
have frequently appeared together or in rapid succession, and no instance has
been observed of A not followed or accompanied by B. (2) However many
instances we may have observed of the conjunction of A and B, that give no
reason for expecting them to be conjoined on a future occasion, though it is a
cause of this expectation, i.e. it has been frequently observed to be conjoined
with such an expectation. These two parts of the doctrine may be stated as
follows: (1) in causation there is no indefinable relation except conjunction or
succession; (2) induction by simple enumeration is not a valid argument…
“If the first half of Hume’s doctrine is admitted, the rejection of induction
makes all expectation as to the future irrational, even the expectation that we
shall continue to feel expectations. I do not mean merely that our expectations
may be mistaken; that, in any case, must be admitted. I mean that, taking even
our firmest expectations, such as that the sun will rise to-morrow, there is not
a shadow of a reason for supposing them more likely to be verified than
not…”803
Thus empiricism is shown to be irrational. As Copleston writes, “the

uniformity of nature is not demonstrable by reason. It is the object of belief
rather than of intuition or demonstration.”804 We cannot help having such
beliefs; for “whatever may be the reader’s opinion at this present moment,..
an hour hence he will be persuaded there is both an external and internal
world.”805. However, such belief cannot be justified by reason; for it “is more
properly an act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures.”806
Hume’s attitude to belief in God was predictably agnostic, if not strictly

atheistic. We cannot say that God is the cause of nature because we have
never seen a constant conjunction of God, on the one hand, and nature, on the
other. Also, “I much doubt,” he says, “that a cause can be known only by its
effect.”807 At most, Hume concedes, “the cause or causes of order in the
universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.”808
In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779,

Hume wrote: “For aught we know a priori, matter may contain the source, or
spring, of order originally, within itself, as well as the mind does.” As Edward
Skidelsky points out, “This is the seed from which the various 19th-century
theories of evolution – of which Darwin’s is only the most famous – spring…
After Hume, it is only a matter of time before agnosticism reigns supreme.
The perseverance of belief is attributed to mere ignorance or else to a wilful

805 Russell, op. cit.., p. 697.
806 Russell, op. cit.., p. 697.
468
‘sacrifice of the intellect’. Unbelievers, on the other hand, are congratulated
for their disinterested pursuit of truth ‘wherever it may lead’.”809
Morality is disposed of as thoroughly as the idea of God. “Reason alone

can never be a motive to any action of the will”; it “can never oppose passion
in the direction of the will”. For “‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the
destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.”810 And “the
life of a man is of no greater important to the universe than that of an
oyster.”811
Reason can oppose a passion only by directing the mind to other passions
tending in the opposite direction. For “it is from the prospect of pain or
pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object.”812 Hume’s
conclusion is that “reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”813
Nor is this necessarily a bad thing, according to Hume… “In delineating

the workings of propensities integral to human existence, Hume noted that
Christian theologians and Platonists alike had condemned the appetites, the
former deploring them as sinful, the latter demanding their mastery by reason.
For Hume, by contrast, feelings were the true springs of such vital social traits
as the love of family, attachment to property and the desire for reputation.
Pilloried passions like pride were the very cement of society. Dubbing its
denigrators ‘monkish’, Hume defended pride when well regulated; indeed,
magnanimity, that quality attributed to all the greatest heroes, was ‘either
nothing but a steady and well-establish’d pride and self-esteem, or partakes
largely of that passion’. Besides, ‘hearty pride’ was essential to society, whose
hierarchy of ranks, fixed by ‘our birth, fortune, employments, talents or
reputation’, had to be maintained if it were to function smoothly. A person
needed pride to acquit himself well in his station – indiscriminate humility
would reduce social life to chaos. Much that had traditionally been reproved
as egoistically immoral he reinstated as beneficial.”814
Hume’s essential idea was that, in Edwin Burt’s words, “Reason is a

subjective faculty which has no necessary relation with the ‘facts’ we seek to
know. It is limited to tracing the relations of our ideas, which themselves are
already twice removed from ‘reality’. And our senses are equally subjective,
for they can never know the ‘thing in itself’, but only an image of it which has
in it no element of necessity and certainty – ‘the contrary of every matter of
fact is still possible’.815
809 Skidelsky, “England’s doubt”, Prospect, July, 1999, p. 34.

810 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book II, section 3.
811 Hume, Of Suicide.
815 Burt, The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, pp. 593-594; in Rose, op. cit., p. 319.
469
Hume’s significance lies in his rational demonstration of the impotence of
reason, of the fact that it can prove the existence of nothing – not only of God,
Providence and the immortal soul, but even of material objects and causality,
the bedrock of empirical explanation. But a dead-end for rationalism can only
mean an opening for irrationalism. If reason can only serve passion rather
than rule it, then the last moral barrier to the overturning of all traditional
values is removed. And indeed, in Paris, where Hume was fêted much more
than in his native Scotland, the revolution against eighteenth-century
rationalism was only a few years away.
Hume’s hard-headed empiricism extended also to his historical writing

and his political philosophy, which at least had the virtue of exposing the
weak foundations on which the Whig version of history and the Lockean
theory of the social contract were based.
In his History of England (1757), writes Tombs, “Hume wanted to efface the
dangerous Whig-Tory ‘party rage’, which celebrated conflict and was not in
his view a basis for rational and peaceful politics. He went about this
principally by demolishing every Whig shibboleth with grim relish. Saying
that he would ‘hasten thro’ the obscure and uninteresting period’ of Anglo-
Saxon England, he dismissed it as ‘extremely aristocratical’, oppressive and
violent. There was no ‘Norman Yoke’: the Conquest had been beneficial,
teaching the ‘rude’ Saxons ‘the rudiments of science and cultivation’. The
medieval struggles of parliaments were the work of a ‘narrow aristocracy’
and gave no benefit to the people; and Magna Carta brought ‘no innovation in
the political or public law of the country’. Anyway, freedom was not born in
England: ‘Both the privileges of the peers and the liberty of the commons’
were copied from France…
“Liberty, said Hume, came not from resistance to the Crown, as the Whigs
maintained, but from its growing power: ‘It required the authority almost
absolute of the sovereign… to pull down those disorderly and licentious
tyrants [the barons] who were equally enemies to peace and to freedom.’ The
Tudors (as he was the first to call them) had laid the foundations of a civilized
absolute monarchy, for Hume the best form of government then available. In
the Civil War, the royalists had been right to defend legal authority, on which
true liberty depended. The ideas of Pym and Hampden were ‘full of the
lowest and most vulgar hypocrisy’. ‘Cromwel’ [sic] had taken power by ‘fraud
and violence’. The Puritans ‘talked perpetually of seeking the Lord, yet still
pursued their own purposes; and have left a memorable lesson to posterity,
how delusive, how destructive that principle is by which they were animated.’
True liberty, he insisted, was not ancient but modern, a result especially of the
growth of commerce and towns. It was not, therefore, an ancient Teutonic
inheritance.
470
“Hume’s boasted impartiality amounted to being scathing about everyone.
But while claiming to be a ‘sceptical Whig’, he trampled on the Whigs with
particular gusto: their ‘pretended respect for antiquity’ was only to ‘cover
their turbulent spirit and their private ambition’. Observing the political
agitation of the 1760s, he wrote that the English ‘roar Liberty, tho’ they have
apparently more liberty than any people in the World; a great deal more than
they deserve’. History should teach them to be grateful for what they had,
which was not the product of heroic struggle, but of ‘a great measure of
accident with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight’.
“Hume claimed that he had been ‘assailed by one cry of reproach,

disapprobation, and even devastation’. Yet his book rapidly became the
biggest-selling book of history to date, and it made him ‘not merely
independent, but opulent’ – a reflection of most people’s anti-Roundhead
sentiments. Hume was indeed detested by Whigs, who accused him of being
a Jacobite; he was even attacked in Parliament by Pitt the Elder. He retorted
that ‘I have the impudence to pretend that I am of no party’; but it is hard to
imagine a more effective Tory history than one that ascribes liberty to the
power of the Crown…”816
As for the theory of the social contract, for Hume there never was any such
thing as a “state of nature” – “men are necessarily born in a family-society at
least.”817 The initial bonds between men are not contractual, but sexual and
parental: “Natural appetite draws members of the two sexes together and
preserves their union until a new bond arises, their common concern for their
offspring. 'In a little time, custom and habit operating on the tender minds of
the children makes them sensible of the advantages which they reap from
society, as well as fashions them by degrees for it, by rubbing off those rough
corners and untoward affections which prevent their coalition.’ The family,
therefore (or, more accurately, the natural appetite between the sexes), is ‘the
first and original principle of human society’. The transition to a wider society
is effected principally by the felt need for stabilizing the possession of external
goods.”818
Men could continue living in primitive societies like those of the American
Indians without the formal structure of government if it were not that
quarrels over property led to the need for the administration of justice. “The
state of society without government is one of the most natural states of men,
and must subsist with the conjunction of many families, and long after the
first generation. Nothing but an increase of riches and possessions could
oblige men to quit it.”819
816 Tombs, op. cit., pp.265-266.

471
Later, quarrels between tribes lead to the emergence of war leaders. Then,
during the peace, the war leader continues to lead. And so an ad hoc
arrangement dictated by necessity and the need to survive would generate a
permanent government. This is a gradual, organic process propelled by
“necessity, inclination and habit” rather than an explicit, rational agreement.
Indeed, not only are governments not formed on the basis of consent:
“’almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains
any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or
conquest or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary
subjection of the people… The face of the earth is continually changing, by the
increase of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great
empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration
of tribes. Is there anything discernible in all these events but force and
violence? Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much
talked of?’ Even when elections take the place of force, what does it amount to?
It may be election by a few powerful and influential men. Or it may take the
form of popular sedition, the people following a ringleader who owes his
advancement to his own impudence or to the momentary caprice of the
crowd, most of whom have little of no knowledge of him and his capacities.
In neither case is there a real rational agreement by the people.”820
English political liberalism, we may recall, arose from the need to justify
the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Protestant William of Orange
usurped the throne. William’s rule was tacitly consented to as being more in
accord with natural law and reason than the despotism of James II, who was
deemed to have broken some kind of contract with his citizens. But Hume
undermines both the contractual and the rational elements in this justification,
reducing the whole duty of allegiance to naked self-interest. In this way he is
closer to Hobbes than to Locke – and to Marx than to J.S. Mills….
“Granted that there is a duty of political allegiance, it is obviously idle to

look for its foundation in popular consent and in promises if there is little or
no evidence that popular consent was ever asked or given. As for Locke’s idea
of tacit consent, ‘it may be answered that such an implied consent can only
have place where a man imagines that the matter depends on his choice’. But
anyone who is born under an established government thinks that he owes
allegiance to the sovereign by the very fact that he is by birth a citizen of the
political society in question. And to suggest with Locke that every man is free
to leave the society to which he belongs by birth is unreal. ‘Can we seriously
say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when
he knows no foreign language or manners and lives from day to day by the
small wages which he acquires?’
820 Copleston, op. cit., pp. 150-151.
472
“The obligation of allegiance to civil government, therefore, ‘is not derived
from any promise of the subjects’. Even if promises were made at some time
in the remote past, the present duty of allegiance cannot rest on them. ‘It
being certain that there is a moral obligation to submit to government,
because everyone thinks so, it must be as certain that this obligation arises not
from a promise, since no one whose judgement has not been led astray by too
strict adherence to a system of philosophy has ever yet dreamt of ascribing it
to that origin.’ The real foundation of the duty of allegiance is utility or
interest.
‘This interest I find to consist in the security and protection which we can
enjoy in political society, and which we can never attain when perfectly free
and independent.’ This holds good both of natural and of moral obligation. ‘It
is evident that, if government were totally useless, it never could have a place,
and that the sole foundation of the duty of allegiance is the advantage which
it procures to society by preserving peace and order among mankind.’
Similarly, in the essay Of the Original Contract Hume observes: ‘If the reason
be asked of that obedience which we are bound to pay to government, I
readily answer, Because society could not otherwise subsist; and this answer
is clear and intelligible to all mankind.’
“The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this view is that when the
advantage ceases, the obligation to allegiance ceases. ‘As interest, therefore, is
the immediate sanction of government, the one can have no longer being than
the other; and whenever the civil magistrate carries his oppression so far as to
render his authority perfectly intolerable, we are no longer bound to submit
to it. The cause ceases; the effect must also cease.’ It is obvious, however, that
the evils and dangers attending rebellion are such that it can be legitimately
attempted only in cases of real tyranny and oppression and when the
advantages of acting in this way are judged to outweigh the disadvantages.
“But to whom is allegiance due? In other words, whom are we to regard as

legitimate rulers? Originally, Hume thought or inclined to think, government
was established by voluntary convention. ‘The same promise, then, which
binds them (the subjects) to obedience, ties them down to a particular person
and makes him the object of their allegiance.’ But once government has been
established and allegiance no longer rests upon a promise but upon
advantage or utility, we cannot have recourse to the original promise to
determine who is the legitimate ruler. The fact that some tribe in remote times
voluntarily subjected itself to a leader is no guide to determining whether
William of Orange or James II is the legitimate monarch.
“One foundation of legitimate authority is long possession of the sovereign

power: ‘I mean, long possession in any form of government, or succession of
princes’. Generally speaking, there are no governments or royal houses which
do not owe the origin of their power to usurpation or rebellion and whose
original title to authority was not ‘worse than doubtful and uncertain’. In this
case ‘time alone gives solidity to their right and, operating gradually on the
473
minds of men, reconciles them to any authority and makes it seem just and
reasonable’. The second source of public authority is present possession,
which can legitimize the possession of power even when there is no question
of its having been acquired a long time ago. ‘Right to authority is nothing but
the constant possession of authority, maintained by the laws of society and
the interests of mankind.’ A third source of legitimate political authority is the
right of conquest. As fourth and fifth sources can be added the right of
succession and positive laws, when the legislature establishes a certain form
of government. When all these titles to authority are found together, we have
the surest sign of legitimate sovereignty, unless the public good clearly
demands a change. But if, says Hume, we consider the actual course of
history, we shall soon learn to treat lightly all disputes about the rights of
princes. We cannot decide all disputes in accordance with fixed, general rules.
Speaking of this matter in the essay Of the Original Contract, Hume remarks
that ‘though an appeal to general opinion may justly, in the speculative
sciences of metaphysics, natural philosophy or astronomy, be deemed unfair
and inconclusive, yet in all questions with regard to morals, as well as
criticism, there is really no other standard by which any controversy can ever
be decided. To say, for example, with Locke that absolute government is not
really civil government at all is pointless if absolute government is in fact
accepted as a recognized political institution. Again, it is useless to dispute
whether the succession of the Prince of Orange to the throne was legitimate or
not. It may not have been legitimate at the time. And Locke, who wished to
justify the revolution of 1688, could not possibly do so on his theory of
legitimate government being founded on the consent of the subjects. For the
people of England were not asked for their opinion. But in point of fact
William of Orange was accepted, and the doubts about the legitimacy of his
accession are nullified by the fact that his successors have been accepted. It
may perhaps seem to be an unreasonable way of thinking, but ‘princes often
seem to acquire a right from their successors as well as from their
ancestors.’”821
Thus just as Hume had argued that there was no rational reason for
believing in the existence of objects, or causative forces, or the soul, or God, or
morality, so he argued that there was no rational reason for believing that a
given government was legitimate. Or rather, governments are legitimate for
no other reason than that they survive, whether by force or the acquiescence
of public opinion. Legitimacy, according to Hume, is a matter of what the
people, whether individually or collectively, consider to be in their self-
interest. But since there is no objective way of measuring self-interest, it
comes down in the end to a matter of taste, of feeling. And since there is no
arguing about tastes, there is also by implication no arguing with a
revolutionary who wishes to destroy society to its foundations…
No traditional believer can accept Hume’s philosophy; but his fearless

exposure of the false foundations of Western thought is invaluable…
821 Copleston, op. cit., pp. 151-153.
474
*
“What Hume called the ‘science of man’,” writes Tombs, “could involve
turning seventeenth-century vices – self-interest, acquisitiveness and
pleasure-seeking – into eighteenth century virtues.” He was anticipated in
this thought by “the Dutch-born Bernard Mandeville”, who “wrote a
scandalous Table of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714), in which the
hive prospered because of the ambition, greed and even dishonesty of its
occupants:
Thus every part was full of Vice,

Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.
Mandeville outraged moralists. Yet there was a growing tendency to

recognize material gain as legitimate, and individual happiness and pleasure
as proper objects of life.”822
This idea was particularly developed by the second great light of the
Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith, whose economic theory was composed
in the same spirit as Hume’s philosophical and political theories, and
complemented them neatly. According to Smith, the prime mover in
economics was and should be self-love, which was a “hidden hand” that led
everyone to better themselves and each other. “It is not from the benevolence
of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from
their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity
but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of
their advantages.”823 And again: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher,
the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to
their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their
self-love… [The individual] is in this as in any other cases, led by an invisible
hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention… I have never
known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It
is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few
words need to be employed in dissuading them from it.”824
So the common interest is best served by everyone being made free to

pursue his own self-interest with as little interference as possible. The
“hidden hand” – the economists’ equivalent of Divine Providence – would see
to it that greed and selfishness would be rewarded as unerringly in this life as
unacquisitiveness and selflessness, according to the old dispensation, was
held to be in the next. Here we see the doctrine of laissez-faire economics that
has become one of the corner-stones of the modern world-view.
822 Tombs, op. cit., p. 292.

823 Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations, Book 1, chapter 2.
824 Smith, in Robert Harvey, Global Disorder, London: Robinson, 2003, p. 392.
475
“The success of the free market,” explains the former British Chancellor of
the Exchequer (i.e. economics minister) Nigel Lawson, “is, in a sense,
Darwinism: a matter of survival of the fittest, as rival systems have been
tested to destruction. And the most fundamental reason why this is so is that
the most basic fact of economic life, as indeed, of all other dimensions of life,
is that we are all fallible.
“We all make mistakes, and always will. Markets make mistakes, and so
do governments. Businessmen and bankers make mistakes, and so do
politicians and bureaucrats. Thus any attempt to construct a system which
will eliminate mistakes is doomed to failure. All we can sensibly do is put in
place a system in which mistakes are soonest recognised and most rapidly
corrected. That means, in practice, the liberal market economy.
“By contrast, experience shows that, whatever the political system, it is

governments that find it hardest to own up to mistakes, still less to correct
them. And this is supported by another fact of life. We are all subject to self-
interest. But whereas, as Adam Smith explained, the market economy is the
means by which self-interest produces public benefit, this is less clear in the
case of bureaucratic self-interest…”825
This argument is in favour of laissez-faire capitalism is interesting but

unconvincing. It is often linked to a similar argument in favour of democracy:
just as democracy, it is said, is the best political system because it allows for
the possibility of removing bad governments and thereby avoiding despotism,
so laissez-capitalism allows for the possibility of correcting bad economic
decisions and thereby avoiding bankruptcy and poverty. The problem is: it is
a false argument. For democracies can and do vote in despotisms – as in
Russia in 1917 and Germany in 1933. And laissez-faire economics, especially
in its corporatist varieties and on the soil of subject colonial peoples (for
example, British India), can and do devastate whole populations – with little
or no possibility of correcting the “mistake”, since death brings an end to all
possibility of correction…
Is this not another example of the ultimate irrationality of rationalism? For

is it not the height of irrationality to think that the completely unfettered
expression of self-interest and avarice will lead in the end to a land flowing
with milk and honey for all? Self-interest can never be transformed into its
opposite; the fall cannot be manipulated by any hand, visible or invisible, into
paradisal innocence and perfection; it has to be eradicated from the root
through the true enlightenment of the true religion…
825 Lawson, “The Brexit Crinege – Mrs. T. would say ‘No!’”, Standpoint, February, 2018, pp.
21-22.
476
55. KANT: THE REAFFIRMATION OF WILL
Hume’s demonstration of the irrationality of rationalism had one very

important result: it aroused the greatest philosopher of the eighteenth century,
Immanuel Kant, from what he called his “dogmatic slumbers”. Kant sought to
re-establish some of the beliefs that Hume’s thorough-going scepticism had
undermined.
To that end, he determined to subject “pure reason itself to critical

investigation”, answering the question: “what and how much can
understanding and reason know, apart from all experience?” 826 He
established that empirical reason can indeed know certain things, but that the
use of reason itself presupposes the existence of other things which transcend
reason. Thus “I think” must accompany all our experiences if they are to be
qualified as ours, so that there must be what Kant calls a “transcendental
unity of apperception” which unifies experience while being at the same time
beyond it. And so, apart from the “phenomenal” realm of nature, which the
mind can understand only by imposing upon it the categories of substance,
causality and mutual interaction, there is also the “noumenal” realm of spirit
and freedom, which transcends nature and causality. “There is thus a being
above the world, namely the spirit of man”.827
Man himself is noumenally free while being at the same time empirically
(phenomenally) determined. His spirit is not a substance in the empirical
sense, nor subject to the empirical causal nexus. But it is the seat of that which
is greatest and truly rational in man, indeed the whole world: his sense of
duty, his will to do good. Hence the famous words: “It is impossible to
conceive of anything in the world, or indeed out of it, which can be called
good without qualification, save only a good will.”828 A good will acts neither
out of some psychological sympathy or passion pushing it from behind, nor
in order to attain some end or goal in front of it. It acts out of a pure duty, in
answer to a “categorical imperative”. The criterion of whether an act is truly
good and moral in this sense is the following: I am never to act otherwise than so
that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law, in other words,
that every other rational being in the same circumstances should make the
same decision. An important corollary of this criterion is that all men should
be treated, not as means, but as ends. Indeed, it is from the existence of a
“kingdom of ends”, of men who ideally treat each other as rational beings and
ends in themselves, that Kant derives, if not the existence of God and
immortality, at any rate the possibility and reasonableness of their existence:
for a kingdom of ends encourages belief in a rational being who legislates for
all other rational beings while not having any limitations on his will, and who,
in the life to come, brings virtue its due reward in happiness…
826 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, first edition, XVII.

827 Kant, Opus Posthumum, XXI.
828 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals.
477
In this way, Kant seeks to restore faith in those objects of belief – God, the
soul and immortality – which Hume’s scepticism tended to undermine. We
may also see in his idea of the individual will acting in such a way that his
maxim should become a universal law an attempt to give a rational basis to
Rousseau’s essentially irrational idea of the general will. But from our point of
view it is his arguments in favour of man’s freedom that are particularly
important…
We have seen how the whole development of western thought from the
Renaissance onwards centres on the idea of freedom, of human autonomy
and especially the autonomy of human reason. However, this development
has led, by the second half of the eighteenth century, to a most paradoxical
dead-end: to the conclusion that man, being a part of nature, is not free, but
determined, and that the exercise of human reason is based on the most
irrational leap of blind faith in substance and causality, without which we
could not be assured of the existence of anything external to our own mind –
which is in any case just a bundle of sensations. Kant, by a supreme exercise
of that same free reasoning faculty, stanches the flow of irrationalism. But at a
price: the price of making man a schizoid creature living on a razor blade
between the noumenal and phenomenal realms. Yes, he says, man is a part of
nature and determined, otherwise the science of man and the whole
Enlightenment project would be impossible (and Kant remains an
Enlightenment figure to the end). And yes, he says, man is free and uncaused,
otherwise Christianity and morality would be impossible (and Kant remains a
devout Lutheran to the end). But the balance and synthesis he achieves
between the two is hard to express and difficult to maintain. And succeeding
generations preferred to go in one direction or the other: some down the
Enlightenment path of seeking a Utopia on earth through science and rational
social organisation, and others down the Romantic path of irrational,
unfettered self-expression in both the private and the public spheres.
Thus “in his moral philosophy,” writes Berlin, Kant lifted “the lid of a
Pandora’s box, which released tendencies which he was among the first, with
perfect honesty and consistency, to disown and condemn. He maintained, as
every German schoolboy used to know, that the moral worth of an act
depended on its being freely chosen by the agent; that if a man acted under
the influence of causes which he could not and did not control, whether
external, such as physical compulsion, or internal, such as instincts or desires
or passions, then the act, whatever its consequences, whether they were good
or bad, advantageous or harmful to men, had no moral value, for the act had
not been freely chosen, but was simply the effect of mechanical causes, an
event in nature, no more capable of being judged in ethical terms than the
behaviour of a an animal or plant. If the determinism that reigns in nature –
on which, indeed, the whole of natural science is based – determines the acts
of a human agent, he is not truly an agent, for to act is to be capable of free
choice between alternatives; and free will must in that case be an illusion.
Kant is certain that freedom of the will is not illusory but real. Hence the
immense emphasis that he places on human autonomy – on the capacity for
478
free commitment to rationally chosen ends. The self, Kant tells us, must be
‘raised above natural necessity’, for if men are ruled by the same laws as those
which govern the material world ‘freedom cannot be saved’, and without
freedom there is no morality.
“Kant insists over and over again that what distinguishes man is his moral
autonomy as against his physical heteronomy – for his body is governed by
natural laws, not issuing from his own inner self. No doubt this doctrine owes
a great deal to Rousseau, for whom all dignity, all pride rest upon
independence. To be manipulated is to be enslaved. A world in which one
man depends upon the favour of another is a world of masters and slaves, of
bullying and condescension and patronage at one end, and obsequiousness,
servility, duplicity and patronage at the other. But whereas Rousseau
supposes that only dependence on other men is degrading, for no one resents
the laws of nature, only ill will, the Germans went further. For Kant, total
dependence on non-human nature – heteronomy – was incompatible with
choice, freedom, morality. This exhibits a new attitude to nature, or at least
the revival of an ancient [supposedly] Christian antagonism to it. The thinkers
of the Enlightenment and their predecessors in the Renaissance (save for
isolated antinomian mystics) tended to look upon nature as divine harmony,
or as a great organic or artistic unity, or as an exquisite mechanism created by
the divine watchmaker, or else as uncreated and eternal, but always as a
model from which men depart at their cost. The principal need of man is to
understand the external world and himself and the place that he occupies in
the scheme of things: if he grasps this, he will not seek after goals
incompatible with the needs of his nature, goals which he can follow only
through some mistaken conception of what he is in himself, or of his relations
to other men or the external world….
“Man is subject to the same kind of causal laws as animals and plants and
the inanimate world, physical and biological laws, and in the case of men
psychological and economic too, established by observation and experiment,
measurement and verification. Such notions as the immortal soul, a personal
God, freedom of the will, are for them metaphysical fictions and illusions. But
they are not so for Kant.
“The German revolt against France and French materialism has social as
well as intellectual roots. Germany in the first half of the eighteenth century,
and for more than a century before, even before the devastation of the Thirty
Years War, had little share in the great renaissance of the West – her cultural
achievement after the Reformation is not comparable to that of the Italians in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Spain and England in the age of
Shakespeare and Cervantes, of the Low Countries in the seventeenth century,
least of all of France, the France of poets, soldiers, statesmen, thinkers, which
in the seventeenth century dominated Europe both culturally and politically,
with only England and Holland as her rivals. What had the provincial
German courts and cities, what had even Imperial Vienna, to offer?
479
“This sense of relative backwardness, of being an object of patronage or
scorn to the French with their overweening sense of national and cultural
superiority, created a sense of collective humiliation, later to turn into
indignation and hostility, that sprang from wounded pride. The German
reaction at first is to imitate French models, then to turn against them. Let the
vain but godless French cultivate their ephemeral world, their material gains,
their pursuit of glory, luxury, ostentation, the witty trivial chatter of the
salons of Paris and the subservient court of Versailles. What is the worth of
the philosophy of atheists or smooth, worldly abbés who do not begin to
understand the true nature, the real purpose of men, their inner life, man’s
deepest concerns – his relation to the soul within him, to his brothers, above
all to God – the deep, the agonising questions of man’s being and vocation?
Inward-looking German pietists abandoned French and Latin, turned to their
native tongue, and spoke with scorn and horror of the glittering generalities
of French civilisation, the blasphemous epigrams of Voltaire and his imitators.
Still more contemptible were the feeble imitators of French culture, the
caricature of French customs and taste in the little German principalities.
German men of letters rebelled violently against the social oppression and
stifling atmosphere of German society, of the despotic and often stupid and
cruel German princes and princelings and their officials, who crushed or
degraded the humbly born, particularly the most honest and gifted men
among them, in the three hundred courts and governments into which
Germany was then divided.
“This surge of indignation formed the heart of the movement that, after the
name of a play by one of its members, was called Sturm und Drang. Their
plays were filled with cries of despair or savage indignation, titanic
explosions of rage or hatred, vast destructive passions, unimaginable crimes
which dwarf the scenes of violence even in Elizabethan drama; they celebrate
passion, individuality, strength, genius, self-expression at whatever cost,
against whatever odds, and usually end in blood and crime, their only form of
protest against a grotesque and odious social order. Hence all these violent
heroes – the Kraftmenschen, Kraftschreiber, Kraftkersl, Kraftknaben – who
march hysterically through the pages of Klinger, Schubart, Leisewitz, Lenz,
Heinse and even the gentle Carl Philipp Moritz; until life began to imitate art,
and the Swiss adventurer Christoph Kaufmann, a self-proclaimed follower of
Christ and Rousseau, who so impressed Herder, Goethe, Hamann, Wieland,
Lavater, swept through the German lands with a band of unkempt followers,
denouncing polite culture, and celebrating anarchic freedom, transported by
wild and mystical public exaltation of the flesh and the spirit.
“Kant abhorred this kind of disordered imagination, and, still more,

emotional exhibitionism and barbarous conduct. Although he too denounced
the mechanistic psychology of the French Encyclopaedists as destructive of
morality, his notion of the will is that of reason in action. He saves himself
from subjectivism, and indeed irrationalism, by insisting that the will is truly
free only so far as it wills the dictates of reason, which generate general rules
binding on all rational men. It is when the concept of reason becomes obscure
480
(and Kant never succeeded in formulating convincingly what this signified in
practice), and only the independent will remains man’s unique possession
whereby he is distinguished from nature, that the new doctrine becomes
infected by the ‘stürmerisch’ mood. In Kant’s disciple, the dramatist and poet
Schiller, the notion of freedom begins to move beyond the bounds of reason.
Freedom is the central concept of Schiller’s early works. He speaks of ‘the
legislator himself, the God within us’, of ‘high, demonic freedom’, ‘the pure
demon within the man’. Man is most sublime when he resists the pressure of
nature, when he exhibits ‘moral independence of natural laws in a condition
of emotional stress’. It is will, not reason – certainly not feeling, which he
shares with animals – that raises him above nature, and the very disharmony
which may arise between nature and the tragic hero is not entirely to be
deplored, for it awakens man’s of his independence.”829
Thus to the thesis of the godless worship of reason was opposed the
antithesis of the demonic worship of will. Dissatisfied with the dry
soullessness of the Enlightenment, western man would not go back to the
sources of his civilization in Orthodoxy, but forward to – the Revolution, and
the hellish torments of the Romantic hero. For, as Francisco Goya said, “the
sleep of Reason engenders monsters”…
829
Berlin, “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London:
Pimlico, 1998, pp. 561-564.
481
56. HAMANN AND HERDER: THE DENIAL OF UNIVERSALISM
“Nowhere was German amour propre more deeply wounded,” continues

Berlin, “than in East Prussia, still semi-feudal and deeply traditionalist;
nowhere was there deeper resentment of the policy of modernisation which
Frederick the Great conducted by importing French officials who treated his
simple and backward subjects with impatience and open disdain. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the most gifted and sensitive sons of this province,
Hamman, Herder, and Kant too, are particularly vehement in opposing the
levelling activities of these morally blind imposers of alien methods on a
pious, inward-looking culture.”830
Hamann and Herder were the first thinkers explicitly to attack the whole
Enlightenment enterprise. This attack was perhaps the first sign of that great
cleavage within western culture that was to take the place of the
Catholic/Protestant cleavage: the cleavage between the classical, rationalist
and universalist spirit of the Latin lands, and the romantic, irrational and
particularist spirit of the Germanic lands. (England with its dual Roman and
Germanic inheritance stood somewhere in the middle).
“Hamann,” writes Berlin, “was brought up as a pietist, a member of the

most introspective and self-absorbed of all the Lutheran sects, intent upon the
direct communion of the individual soul with God, bitterly anti-rationalist,
liable to emotional excess, preoccupied with the stern demands of moral
obligation and the need for severe self-discipline. The attempt of Frederick the
Great in the middle years of the eighteenth century to introduce French
culture and a degree of rationalisation, economic and social as well as military,
into East Prussia, the most backward of his provinces, provoked a peculiarly
violent reaction in this pious, semi-feudal, traditional Protestant society
(which also gave birth to Herder and Kant). Hamann began as a disciple of
the Enlightenment, but, after a profound spiritual crisis, turned against it, and
published a series of polemical attacks written in a highly idiosyncratic,
perversely allusive, contorted, deliberately obscure style, as remote as he
could make it from the, to him, detestable elegance, clarity and smooth
superficiality of the bland and arrogant French dictators of taste and thought.
Hamann’s theses rested on the conviction that all truth is particular, never
general: that reason is impotent to demonstrate the existence of anything and
is an instrument only for conveniently classifying and arranging data in
patterns to which nothing in reality corresponds; that to understand is to be
communicated with, by men or by God. The universe for him, as for the older
German mystical tradition, is itself a kind of language. Things and plants and
animals are themselves symbols with which God communicates with his
creatures. Everything rests on faith; faith is as basic an organ of acquaintance
with reality as the senses. To read the Bible is to hear the voice of God, who
speaks in a language which he has given man the grace to understand. Some
men are endowed with the gift of understanding his ways, of looking at the
830
Berlin, “The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will”, op. cit. p. 566.
482
universe, which is his book no less than the revelations of the Bible and the
fathers and saints of the Church. Only love – for a person or an object – can
reveal the true nature of anything. It is not possible to love formulae, general
propositions, laws, the abstractions of science, the vast system of concepts and
categories – symbols too general to be close to reality – with which the French
lumières have blinded themselves to the real experiences which only direct
acquaintance, especially by the senses, provides.
“Hamann glories in the fact that Hume had successfully destroyed the
rationalist claim that there is an a priori route to reality, insisting that all
knowledge and belief ultimately rest on acquaintance with the date of direct
perception. Hume rightly supposes that he could not eat an egg or drink a
glass of water if he did not believe in their existence; the date of belief – what
Hamann prefers to call faith – rest on grounds and require evidence as little as
taste or any other sensation. True knowledge is direct perception of
individual entities, and concepts are never, no matter how specific they may
be, wholly adequate to the fullness of the individual experience. ‘Individuum
est ineffabile’, wrote Goethe to Lavater in the spirit of Hamann, whom Goethe
profoundly admired. The sciences may be of use in practical matters; but no
concatenation of concepts will give an understanding of a man, of a work of
art, of what is conveyed by gestures, symbols, verbal and non-verbal, of the
style, the spiritual essence, of a human being, a movement, a culture; nor for
that matter of the Deity, which speaks to one everywhere if only one has ears
to hear and eyes to see.“831
Following up on these insights, Herder “believed that to understand

anything was to understand it in its individuality and development, and that
this required the capacity of Einfühling (‘feeling into’) the outlook, the
individual character of an artistic tradition, a literature, a social organisation,
a people, a culture, a period of history. To understand the actions of
individuals, we must understand the ‘organic’ structure of the society in
terms of which alone the minds and activities and habits of its members can
be understood. Like Vico, he believed that to understand a religion, or a work
of art, or a national character, one must ‘enter into’ the unique conditions of
its life… To grade the merits of cultural wholes, of the legacy of entire
traditions, by applying a collection of dogmatic rules claiming universal
validity, enunciated by the Parisian arbiters of taste, is vanity and blindness.
Every culture has its own unique Schwerpunkt (‘centre of gravity’), and unless
we grasp it we cannot understand its character or value…”832
As he wrote in Auch eine Philosophie: “How unspeakably difficult it is to

convey the particular quality of an individual human being and how
impossible it is to say precisely what distinguishes an individual, his way of
feeling and living; how different and how individual [anders und eigen]
831
Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico,
1998, p. 248-
832
Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment”, op. cit., pp. 253-254.
483
everything becomes once his eyes see it, once his soul grasps it, his heart feels
it. How much depth there is in the character of a single people, which, no
matter how often observed, and gazed at with curiosity and wonder,
nevertheless escapes the word which attempts to capture it, and, even with
the word to catch it, is seldom so recognizable as to be universally understood
and felt. If this is so, what happens when one tries to master an entire ocean of
peoples, times, cultures, countries with one glance, one sentiment, by means
of one single word!”833
This admirable sensitivity to the unique and unrepeatable was

undoubtedly a needed corrective to the over-generalising and over-
rationalising approach of the French philosophes. And in general Herder’s
emphasis on warm, subjective feeling and the intuition of quality - “Heart!
Warmth! Blood! Humanity! Life!” “I feel! I am!”834 – was a needed corrective
to the whole rationalist emphasis on cold clarity, objectivity and the
measurement of quantity that had come to dominate western thought since
Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. From now on, owing in part to Herder,
western thought would become more sensitive to the aesthetically intuited, as
opposed to the scientifically analysed aspects of reality, to organic, living,
historical wholes as well as to inorganic, dead, ahistorical parts.
Nevertheless, Herder was as unbalanced in his way as the philosophes

were in theirs. This is particularly evident in his relativism, his idea that every
nation and culture was not only unique, but also incommensurable – that is, it
could not be measured by universal standards of truth and falsehood, right
and wrong. As he wrote: “Not one man, country, people, national history, or
State, is like another. Hence the True, the Beautiful, the Good in them are not
similar either.”835
If Herder has been unjustly accused of being an ancestor of German fascist

nationalism, he cannot so easily be absolved of being one of the fathers of the
modern denial of universal truths and values that has so eaten into and
corroded modern western civilization.
833
Herder, in Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment”, in The Proper Study of Man, London:
Pimlico, 1998, p. 405.
834
Herder, in Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment”, op. cit., p. 388.
835
Herder, in Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment”, op. cit., p. 429.
484
57. TWO CONCEPTS OF FREEDOM
We have noted Pipes’ important observation that liberals and

revolutionaries differ only with regard to means, not ends, and that whether a
state develops along the peaceful, liberal path or the violent, revolutionary
one depends on the degree to which intellectuals gain access to the levers of
power. However, the two traditions also differ, according to Sir Isaiah Berlin,
in their concepts of freedom. The English liberal tradition, which emerged in
part as the continuance of, and in part as a reaction against, the English
revolution, defined freedom in a negative way, as freedom from certain
restraints on, and violence to, the individual. Thus “liberty,” writes Locke, “is
to be free from restraint and violence from others”.836
But this freedom from restraint, paradoxically, was to be attained only by

submitting to restraint in the form of law: “Where there is no law, there is no
freedom.”837 But since right laws can be framed only through the use of
reason, man’s freedom “is grounded on his having reason, which is able to
instruct him in that law he is to govern himself by and make him know how
far he is left to the freedom of his own will.”838 The necessity for reason
implies at least a minimal degree of tolerance, for reason cannot operate in a
climate of compulsion.
This tradition, summed up in the four words: freedom, law, reason and
tolerance, dominated the first half of the eighteenth-century, and continues to
dominate political thinking in the Anglo-Saxon countries to this day.
However, from the time of Rousseau another, positive definition of

freedom gained currency – the freedom to do what you like and be what you
want. This concept of freedom scorned every notion of restraint as foreign to
the very idea of liberty; it emphasised lawlessness (freedom from law) as
opposed to law, emotion as opposed to reason, the people as a single mystical
organism having one will as opposed to the people as individuals having
many wills. And even when it admitted the need for laws, it vehemently
rejected the idea of the superiority of the lawgiver; for, as Demoulins put it,
“My motto is that of every honourable man – no superior”.
The transition between the two concepts of liberty can be seen in the
following passage from Rousseau, which begins with an “English”, negative,
law-abiding definition of liberty, but goes on to a revolutionary definition
which recognizes laws only insofar as they are an expression of “natural law”,
i.e. the general will of the people: “Liberty consists less in doing one’s will
than in not being submitted to the will of others… There is no liberty without
laws, nor where there is someone above the laws: even in the state of nature
man is free only by virtue of the natural law which commands everyone. A
836 Locke, Second Treatise on Government, 57.

837 Locke, op. cit., 57.
838 Locke, op. cit., 63.
485
free people obeys, but does not serve; it has leaders, but not masters; it obeys
the laws, but it obeys only the laws, and it is by dint of the laws that it does
not obey men… A people is free, whatever form its government may have,
when he who governs there is not a man, but an organ of the law.”839
The difference between the concepts of freedom, freedom from and

freedom to, was illuminatingly explored in a famous essay by Sir Isaiah Berlin
entitled Two Concepts of Freedom… Concerning negative freedom, freedom
from, Berlin writes: “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no
human being interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is
simply the area within which a man can do what he wants. If I am prevented
by other persons from doing what I want I am to that degree unfree; and if the
area within which I can do what I want is contracted by other men beyond a
certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.
Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say
that I am unable to jump more than 10 feet in the air, or cannot read because I
am blind, or cannot understand the darker pages of Hegel, it would be
eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies
the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I
wish to act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented
from attaining your goal by human beings. Mere incapacity to attain your
goal is not lack of political freedom… ‘The nature of things does not madden
us, only ill will does’, said Rousseau. The criterion of oppression is the part
that I believe to be played by other human beings, directly or indirectly, in
frustrating my wishes. By being free in this sense I mean not being interfered
with by others. The wider the area of non-interference the wider my freedom.
“This is certainly what the classical English political philosophers meant

when they used this word.840 They disagreed about how wide the area could
or should be. They supposed that it could not, as things were, be unlimited,
because if it were, it would entail a state in which all men could boundlessly
interfere with all other men; and this kind of ‘natural’ freedom would lead to
social chaos in which men’s minimum needs would not be satisfied; or else
the liberties of the weak would be suppressed by the strong. Because they
perceived that human purposes and activities do not automatically harmonize
with one another; and, because (whatever their official doctrines) they put
high value on other goals, such as justice, or happiness, or security, or varying
degrees of equality, they were prepared to curtail freedom in the interests of
other values and, indeed, of freedom itself. For, without this, it was
839Rousseau, Letters written from the Mountain, 1764, Oeuvres, vol. III, ed. Gallimard, p. 841.
840“All his life,” writes Berlin’s biographer, Michael Ignatieff, “he attributed to Englishness
nearly all the propositional content of his liberalism: ‘that decent respect for others and the
toleration of dissent is better than pride and a sense of national mission; that liberty may be
incompatible with, and better than, too much efficiency; that pluralism and untidiness are, to
those who value freedom, better than the rigorous imposition of all-embracing systems, no
matter how rational and disinterested, better than the rule of majorities against which there is
no appeal’. All of this, he insisted, was ‘deeply and uniquely English’ (A Life of Isaiah Berlin, p.
36).
486
impossible to create the kind of association that they thought desirable.
Consequently, it is assumed by these thinkers that the area of men’s free
action must be limited by law. But equally it is assumed, especially by such
libertarians as Locke and Mill in England, and Constant and Tocqueville in
France, that there ought to exist a certain minimum area of personal freedom
which must on no account be violated, for if it is overstepped, the individual
will find himself in an area too narrow for even that minimum development
of his natural faculties which alone makes it possible to pursue, and even to
conceive, the various ends which men hold good or right or sacred. It follows
that a frontier must be drawn between the area of private life and that of
public authority. Where it is to be drawn is a matter of argument, indeed of
haggling. Men are largely interdependent, and no man’s activity is so
completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others in any way.
‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’; the liberty of some must
depend on the restraints of others. Still, a practical compromise has to be
found.
“Philosophers with an optimistic view of human nature, and a belief in the

possibility of harmonizing human interests, such as Locke or Adam Smith
and, in some moods, Mill, believed that social harmony and progress were
compatible with reserving a large area for private life over which neither the
state nor any other authority must be allowed to trespass. Hobbes, and those
who agreed with him, especially conservative or reactionary thinkers, argued
that if men were to be prevented from destroying one another, and making
social life a jungle or a wilderness, greater safeguards must be instituted to
keep them in their places, and wished correspondingly to increase the area of
centralized control, and decrease that of the individual. But both sides agreed
that some portion of human existence must remain independent of the sphere
of social control. To invade that preserve, however small, would be despotism.
The most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy, Benjamin
Constant, who had not forgotten the Jacobin dictatorship, declared that at the
very least the liberty of religion, opinion, expression, property, must be
guaranteed against arbitrary invasion. Jefferson, Burke, Paine, Mill, compiled
different catalogues of individual liberties, but the argument for keeping at
authority at bay is always substantially the same. We must preserve a
minimum area of personal freedom if we are not to ‘degrade or deny our
nature’. We cannot remain absolutely free, and must give up some of our
liberty to preserve the rest. But total self-surrender is self-defeating. What
then must the minimum be? That which a man cannot give up without
offending against the essence of his human nature. What is this essence? What
are the standards which it entails? This has been, and perhaps always will be,
a matter of infinite debate. But whatever the principle in terms of which the
area of non-interference is to be drawn, whether it is that of natural law or
natural rights, or of utility or the pronouncements of a categorical imperative,
or the sanctity of the social contract, or any other concept with which men
have sought to clarify and justify their convictions, liberty in this sense means
liberty from; absence of interference beyond the shifting, but always
recognizable, frontier. ‘The only freedom which deserves the name is that of
487
pursuing our own good in our own way’, said the most celebrated of its
champions. If this is so, is compulsion ever justified? Mill had no doubt that it
was. Since justice demands that all individuals be entitled to a minimum of
freedom, all other individuals were of necessity to be restrained, if need be by
force, from depriving anyone of it. Indeed, the whole function of law was the
prevention of just such collisions: the state was reduced to what Lassalle
contemptuously described as the functions of a nightwatchman or traffic
policeman.”841
Berlin goes on to make the important observation that “liberty in this sense
is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the
absence of self-government. Liberty in this sense is principally concerned with
the area of control, not with its source. Just as a democracy may, in fact,
deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have
in some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a liberal-
minded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal freedom.
The despot who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty may be unjust, or
encourage the wildest inequalities, care little for order, or virtue, or
knowledge; but provided that he does not curb their liberty, or at least curb`s
it less than many other régimes, he meets with Mill’s specification.842 Freedom
in this sense is not, at any rate logically, connected with democracy or self-
government. Self-government may, on the whole, provide a better guarantee
of the preservation of civil liberties than other régimes, and has been
defended as such by libertarians. But there is no necessary connexion between
individual liberty and democratic rule. The answer to the question ‘Who
governs me?’ is logically distinct from the question ‘How far does
government interfere with me?’ It is in this difference that the great contrast
between the two concepts of negative and positive liberty, in the end, consists.
For the ‘positive’ sense of liberty comes to light if we try to answer the
question, not ‘What am I free to do or be?’, but ‘By whom am I ruled?’ or
‘Who is to say what I am, and what I am not, to be or do?’ The connexion
between democracy and individual liberty is a good deal more tenuous than
it seemed to many advocates of both. The desire to be governed by myself, or
at any rate to participate in the process by which my life is to be controlled,
may be as deep as that of a free area for action, and perhaps historically older.
But it is not a desire for the same thing. So different is it, indeed, as to have
led in the end to the great clash of ideologies that dominates our world. For it
is this – the ‘positive’ conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to
– which the adherents of the ‘negative’ notion represent as being, at times, no
better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny.”843
841 Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958, pp. 7-11.
842 Indeed, it is arguable that in the Prussia of Frederick the Great or in the Austria of Josef II,
men of imagination, originality, and creative genius, and, indeed, minorities of all kinds, were
less persecuted and felt the pressure, both of institutions and customs, less heavy upon them
than in many an earlier or later democracy. (Berlin’s note)
843 Berlin, Two Concepts, pp. 14-16.
488
Berlin now passes from the “negative” to the “positive” concept of liberty,
freedom to: “The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish
on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and
decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish
to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a
subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes which
are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to
be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, self-
directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a
thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of
conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. This is at least
part of what I mean when I say that I am rational, and that it is my reason that
distinguishes me as a human being from the rest of the world. I wish, above
all, to be conscious of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing
responsibility for his choices and able to explain them by reference to his own
ideas and purposes. I feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and
enslaved to the degree that I am made to realize that it is not.
“The freedom which consists in being one’s own master, and the freedom
which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men,
may, on the face of it, seem concepts at no great logical distance from each
other – no more than negative and positive ways of saying the same thing. Yet
the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom developed in divergent
directions until, in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other.
“One way of making this clear is in terms of the independent momentum

which the metaphor of self-mastery acquired. ‘I am my own master’; ‘I am
slave to no man’; but may I not (as, for instance, T.H. Green is always saying)
be a slave to nature? Or to my own ‘unbridled’ passions? Are these not so
many species of the identical genus ‘slave’ – some political or legal, others
moral or spiritual? Have not men had the experience of liberating themselves
from spiritual slavery, or slavery to nature, and do they not in the course of it
become aware, on the one hand, of a self which dominates, and, on the other,
of something in them which is brought to heel? This dominant self is then
variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which
calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my ‘real’, or
‘ideal’, or ‘autonomous’ self, or with my self ‘at its best’; which is then
contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature,
the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my ‘empirical’ or ‘heteronomous’ self,
swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if
it is ever to rise to the full height of its ‘real’ nature. Presently the two natures
may be represented as something wider than the individual (as the term is
normally understood), as a social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an
element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the
living and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being
the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’, single will upon
its recalcitrant ‘members’, achieves its own, and, therefore, their, ‘higher’
freedom. The perils of using organic metaphors to justify the coercion of some
489
men by others in order to raise them to a ‘higher’ level of freedom have often
been pointed out. But what gives such plausibility as it has to this kind of
language is that we recognize that it is possible, and at times justifiable, to
coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health)
which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue, but do
not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders it easy for me
to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in their, not my,
interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly need better than they
know it themselves. What, at most, this entails is that they would not resist
me if they were rational, and as wise as I, and understood their interests as I
do. But I may go on to claim a good deal more than this. I may declare that
they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they consciously
resist, because there exists within them an occult entity – their latent rational
will, or their ‘true’ purpose – and that this entity, although it is belied by all
that they overtly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self, of which the poor
empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little; and that this self
in space and time is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into
account. Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes
or men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf,
of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of
man (happiness, fulfilment of duty, wisdom, a just society, self-fulfilment)
must be identical with his freedom – the free choice of his ‘true’, albeit
submerged and inarticulate, self.
“This paradox has often been exposed. It is one thing to say that I know
what is good for X, while he himself does not; and even to ignore his wishes
for its – and his – sake; and a very different one to say that he has eo ipso
chosen it, not indeed consciously, not as he seems in everyday life, but in his
role as a rational self which his empirical self may not know – the ‘real’ self
which discerns the good, and cannot help choosing it once it is revealed. This
monstrous impersonation, which consists in equating what X would choose if
he were something he is not, or at least is not yet, with what X actually seeks
and chooses, is at the heart of all political theories of self-realization. It is one
thing to say that I may be coerced for my own good which I am too blind to
see: and another that if it is my good, I am not being coerced, for I have willed
it, whether I know this or not, and am freed even while my poor earthly body
and foolish mind bitterly reject it, and struggle against those who seek to
impose it, with the greatest desperation.
“This magical transformation, or sleight of hand (for which William James

so justly mocked the Hegelians), can no doubt be perpetrated just as easily
with the ‘negative’ concept of freedom, where the self that should not be
interfered with is no longer the individual with his actual wishes and needs as
they are normally conceived, but the ‘real’ man within, identified with the
pursuit of some ideal purpose not dreamed of by his empirical self. And, as in
the case of the ‘positively’ free self, this entity may be inflated into some
super-personal entity – a state, a class, a nation, or the march of history itself,
regarded as a more ‘real’ subject of attributes than the empirical self. But the
490
‘positive’ conception of freedom as self-mastery, with its suggestion of a man
divided against himself, lends itself more easily to this splitting of personality
into two: the transcendent, dominant controller, and the empirical bundle of
desires and passions to be disciplined and brought to heel. This demonstrates
(if demonstration of so obvious a truth is needed) that the conception of
freedom directly derives from the view that is taken of what constitutes a self,
a person, a man. Enough manipulation with the definitions of man, and
freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes. Recent
history has made it only too clear that the issue is not merely academic..."844
844 Berlin, op. cit., pp. 17-19.
491
58. EAST MEETS WEST: (1) INDIA
The British East India Company purchased its first small stretch of land in
Madras in 1639, as a centre for the export of Indian textiles. “The secretary of
the East India Company,” writes Tombs, “told MPs in 1767, ‘We don’t want
conquest and power. It is commercial interest only we look for.’ Europeans
built fortified trading posts – the British at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras; the
French at Pondicherry and Chandernagore; the Portuguese at Goa; the Danes
at Tranquebar. Some grew into major ports, bigger than any town in the
American colonies. Calcutta was founded in 1690 by John Charnock, an agent
of the East India Company who went out to India during the Cromwellian
period, and showed his mettle by marrying an Indian widow, whom,
according to tradition, he had snatched from her husband’s funeral pyre.
Calcutta had about 120,000 people by 1760 – only a few hundred of them
British – when New York had a mere 18,000. The support of the Indian
merchant and administrative classes in these booming ports, closely involved
in trade with Britain, was important in establishing British power.
“The European role in India was transformed by the conflict between

France and Britain in Europe. Despite attempts to maintain profitable
neutrality the two East India Companies clashed. The local context is
important. The Mughal Empire had originated in the 1520s with Muslim
invaders from Central Asia, who conquered most of the subcontinent by the
following century: this was their period of splendor, that of the Taj Mahal (c.
1650) and the Great Mosque in Delhi (1656). Dynastic conflicts, religious and
regional rebellions, and defeats inflicted by the Marathas (Hindu peasant
warriors) and the Persians, who sacked Delhi in 1739, fragmented the empire
into regional power centres, often ruled by former Mughal officials (such as
‘nawabs’ – governors). European temporaries – and earlier British historians
of empire – portrayed India in the grip of aggressive warlords, with peace
eventually brought by British hegemony. The picture is mixed. More recent
accounts present some post-Mughal powers as making viable efforts at state-
building, and the Europeans as adding to the chaos.
“The French raised local military forces – it was never difficult to recruit in
India. They found that they could recoup some of their costs, and make huge
private profits for their officials, by hiring troops out to Indian rulers, who
became valuable allies in the Franco-British struggle. The British followed
suit…”845
In 1756, there began the Seven Years War that pitted Britain and Prussia
against France and Austria in several theatres of war. It began badly for the
British: the ally of the French, the Nawab of Bengal, captured Calcutta. At the
same time, in south India, “the Irish Jacobite General Lally, commanding
French forces, promised to ‘exterminate all the English in India’.”846
845
846
492
The British Prime Minister, William Pitt the Elder, then made the bold
decision to withdraw all British troops from Germany, strip the homeland of
its defences “and send ships and men to North America, the Caribbean and
India. In 1759 there were 32 battalions of redcoats in America, and only 6 in
Germany; while of France’s 395 battalions, only 12 were in America and 4 in
India.
“After four years of largely fruitless effort, 1759 was to be the Year of
Victories, all snatched from the jaws of disaster. At Minden (Hanover)in
August the small force of six British battalions helped to rout the French,
apparently after advancing by mistake. At Quebec in September, the young
and neurotic General James Wolfe (‘Young is he?’ said George II. ‘Then I hope
he will bite some of my other generals’) captured the town by a death-or-
glory attack up steep cliffs, and was killed at the moment of victory. The
French prepared a knock-out blow: to invade weakly defended England. But
in November, in one of the most audacious naval actions in history, the
British fleet under Admiral Sir Edward Hawke, in the midst of a storm,
chased the French into Quiberon Bay, Brittany, and sank or drove aground
the core of the French navy. It was ‘akin to a Miracle,’ wrote Hawke, ‘that half
our ships was not ashore in the pursuite of the Enemy, upon their own coast.’
Had that happened, England would have been open to invasion, and history
might have taken a very different path. As it was, Quiberon Bay ended
France’s last hope of victory.
“The British had gained the upper hand in India, too, defeating the Nawab
of Bengal at the historical battle of Plessey in 1757 thanks to the daring and
guile of a Company clerk turned soldier, Robert Clive. Madras withstood a
French siege (its garrison church had prudently been built with a bomb-proof
roof) and its army took the main French base at Pondicherry. Finally, after
Spainhad belatedly entered the war on the side of France in 1762, the British
grabbed the rich colonial prizes of Havana and Manila – the latter by a scratch
force from Madras of Indians, British, Germans and French prisoners, excited
by the prospect of loot…”847
With their main rivals defeated, the British could proceed with their
military-commercial conquest of India. “By 1761 the East India Company had
2,000 European and 23,000 Indian soldiers. Europeans thus became involved
in Indian politics, despite the caution of shareholders in London, concerned
for their dividends, and ministers of the Crown, keen to limit their
commitments. There grew up a symbiotic relationship of alliance, commerce,
bribery, and debt involving Indian rulers and merchants, Company traders,
and British and Indian soldiers. Some Indian rulers had agents and lobbyists
in London, and wealthy Company officials gained peerages or bought seats in
the Commons. The established Mughal way of paying for military support
was by making grants of land with the taxation revenue they commanded,
847
493
and hence Europeans became involved in tax collection and territorial rule. In
1765 the Company received from the Mughal emperor the right to collect the
taxes (the ‘diwani’) of his richest province, Bengal: about £2m per year, equal
to one quarter of the domestic revenue of the British Crown. This became the
Company’s main single source of income, and also a means of subsidizing
British war costs outside India. Bengal – with a population of about 20 million
people, far more than Britain and the American colonies combined – was the
first place in which Company officials exercised quasi-sovereign authority.
For mixed reasons of patriotism, security, personal profit and idealism, they
seized the opportunity to found a territorial empire that had neither been
envisaged nor desired in London…”848
While, according to Yuval Noah Harari, “Imperialists claimed that their

empires were not vast enterprises of exploitation but rather altruistic projects
conducted for the sake of the non-European races – in Rudyard Kipling’s
words, ‘the White Man’s burden’…, the facts often belied this myth. The
British conquered Bengal, the richest province of India, in 1764. The new
rulers were interested in little except enriching themselves. They adopted a
disastrous economic policy that a few years later led to the outbreak of the
Great Bengal Famine. It began in 1769, reached catastrophic levels in 1770,
and lasted until 1775. About 10 million Bengalis, a third of the province’s
population died in the calamity…”849
“A Commons select committee concluded that ‘the laws of society, the

laws of nature, have been enormously violated. Oppression in every shape
had ground the faces of the poor defenceless natives.’ Samuel Johnson
declared that the discovery of the sea-route from Europe to India had been
‘disastrous to mankind’. John Wesley anticipated divine vengeance for ‘such
merciless cruelty’. But despite a strong sense of guilt and disquiet about India
– which to some extent continued throughout Britain’s two-century
involvement – most commentators felt there was no turning back. Even
though Company rule was, as various critics put it, ‘a detestable tyranny’, if
Indian trade were lost ‘national bankruptcy’ would ensue, and France would
be handed ‘the empire of the sea’ and ‘universal monarchy’. Power in India, if
too valuable to relinquish, had to be made more accountable. Then, perhaps,
it might become a benevolent autocracy legitimized by good government –
essentially, the hope that prevailed until independence in 1947.”850
In any case, divine vengeance was coming. A few years later, during the
American War of Independence, the French organized “a formidable alliance
of Indian states, including the powerful Maratha Confederation and Haider
Ali, the indomitable ruler of Mysore in southern India. The Company’s
Bombay army was forced to surrender to the Maratha in 1779, and its Madras
army was bloodily defeated by Haider Ali in 1780 – the worst setback ever
848 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 340-341.

849 Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage, 2011, pp. 336-337.
850
494
suffered by the British in India. In Bengal, the ruler of Benares, a former ally,
massacred a party of Company troops and forced the governor-general,
Warren Hastings, to flee for his life…”851
Hastings was the most pro-Indian and popular governor-general in the

history of British India, having a profound effect on British rule in India even
after his retirement in 1784. Thus “during the final quarter of the 18th century,
many of the Company's senior administrators realised that, in order to govern
Indian society, it was essential that they learn its various religious, social, and
legal customs and precedents. The importance of such knowledge to the
colonial government was clearly in Hastings's mind when, in 1784, he
remarked: ‘Every application of knowledge and especially such as is obtained
in social communication with people, over whom we exercise dominion,
founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state ... It attracts and
conciliates distant affections, it lessens the weight of the chain by which the
natives are held in subjection and it imprints on the hearts of our countrymen
the sense of obligation and benevolence... Every instance which brings their
real character will impress us with more generous sense of feeling for their
natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own... But
such instances can only be gained in their writings; and these will survive
when British domination in India shall have long ceased to exist, and when
the sources which once yielded of wealth and power are lost to
remembrance.’”852
As Zareer Masani writes, “Hastings intended to revive, as far as possible,

the decayed Mughal administration and to avoid measures ‘which the
original constitution of the Mogul Empire hath not before established and
adopted and thereby rendered familiar to the people.’
“Hastings was keen to confine European institutions and personnel to the

bounds of Calcutta, the Company’s Bengal capital, and to leave the collection
of revenues and administration of justice to Indian intermediaries. He
believed that European administrators were more prone to abuses of power.
‘There is a fierceness,’ he warned, ‘in the European manners, especially
among the lower sort, which is incompatible with the gentle temper of the
Bengalese,’ whereas ‘native oppression was less truculent, more easily
punished, more familiar to the people and in every way preferable to the
corrupt tyranny of overbearing Englishmen.’”853
In spite of some serious errors of judgement, Hastings showed him

unusually free from racial prejudice for the British rulers of the time. In 1813
he wrote: “Among the natives of India, there are men of as strong intellect, as
sound integrity and honourable feelings, as any of this Kingdom. I regret that
they are not sufficiently noticed, sufficiently employed nor respected… Be it
851 Tombs, op. cit. pp. 357-358.

852 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Hastings
853 Masani, “The Battle of Hastings”, History Today, November, 2017, p. 68.
495
your Lordship’s care… to lessen this distance… and by your example make it
the fashion among our countrymen to treat them with courtesy and as
participators in the same equal rights of society.”854
854 Hastings, in Manani, op. cit., p. 75. Another enlightened British colonial governor was
Frederick North, fifth earl of Guilford, who as governor of the Ionian islands in Western
Greece founded the first modern Greek university, the Ionian Academy, and was secretly
baptized in 1792 in the Orthodox Church with the name Demetrios.
496
59. THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR AND THE AMERICAN WAR OF
INDEPENDENCE
The roots of the American War of Independence lie in the European Seven
Years’ War.
“By the 1750s.” writes Jenkins, “Europe was bursting with too many egos
for its own stability. In 1756, eight years after the War of the Austrian
Succession, Frederick of Prussia made another unprovoked invasion, this time
of the adjacent territory of Saxony, to add to Silesia. This antagonized his two
most powerful neighbours, Austria and Russia. Like the biblical dog
returning to its vomit, the continental powers again lined up for the battle.
With territory rather than succession an issue, France this time allied with
Russia, Austria and Spain, to confront the upstart Prussia. Britain’s new
leader, William Pitt (1756-61 and 1766-8) sided with Prussia, though only to
the extent of paying subsidies to its army. His purpose, like Walpole’s, was
opportunistic, to use a European war to gain territory overseas. He was later
to boast that his strategy was ‘to win Canada on the banks of the Elbe’.
“Frederick, though outgunned, outnumbered and often defeated, kept his

army in the field, determined to hold on to Saxony. In 1757 he won a notable
victory over Austria and France at the Battle of Rossbach, but despite such
successes his resources were exhausted. Prussia’s economy was devastated,
reverting almost to Thirty Years War conditions. As much as a third of its
population was estimated to have perished through starvation. Frederick had
overreached himself, but he had marked his country as a player on the
European stage.
“Pitt sent troops to the continent, notably to protect Hanover, which led to
a great victory at Minden in 1759, but his focus was on the conquest of
France’s colonies and the defeat of its fleet. In America in 1758 the French
were driven from the Ohio valley, where they had threatened Britain’s New
England colonies from the rear. A year later, General Wolfe seized the French
fortress of Quebec, a key defeat for the French (though not their language) in
North America. Like Nelson at Trafalgar, Wolfe earned personal glory by
falling in the heat of battle. He died with Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard on his lips.
“In India, Robert Clive had similar success against the French through the
agency of the private East India Company, and through tactical alliances with
local rulers or ‘princely states’. By 1759, the annus mirabilis of the burgeoning
British empire, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were all gathered into British
hands. After the Americas, India was the most splendid of Europe’s overseas
conquests, for almost two centuries regarded as the jewel in the British crown.
“These gains were recognized in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. In Europe, the
war was declared a draw. Saxony retained its independence but Austria did
497
not regain Silesia. The treaty was more significant overseas. It distributed the
new lands of the Americas between the European powers. Spain regained
Cuba but gave Florida to Britain. France lost everything east of the
Mississippi, but regained sugar-rich Martinique and Guadeloupe. British
colonies and trading posts sprouted everywhere, served by its untrammelled
navy. The imperialist Victorian historian John Robert Seeley remarked that
Britain seemed ‘to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of
absence of mind’.
“Pride came before a fall. An empire acquired almost incidentally would

soon shrink through stupidity…”855
The British colonies in North America, writes Tombs, [though] of growing

significance because of their swelling population, were less spectacular
sources of wealth [than India or the West Indies]: societies of small towns and
agricultural villages, they were mainly purchasers of manufactured goods
from furniture to hair powder, and suppliers of commodities such as tobacco,
rice, furs and indigo. But they were different from other colonies in being
generally seen as extensions of Britain. There is no sign that they were
growing apart from the mother country – indeed there was increasing
integration as colonists imported ideas and fashions as well as goods…”856
But “filthy lucre” has a tendency to break up the closest of unions… Now
as we have seen, North America had been a major theatre in the Seven Years’
War between Britain and France; George Washington first came to
prominence fightin on the British side. This had been expensive, and the
British wanted to limit the amount they spent to defend the colonists, or at
any recoup some of their expenses through taxation. The first attempt to levy
direct taxes was the Stamp Act of 1765, which aroused considerable
opposition both in America and in Britain. Through the efforts of men such as
Edmund Burke it was repealed. But the argument continued, and in 1766 the
British Parliament passed a Declaratory Act “stating that Parliament did have
the right in principle to legislate for America, even if it prudently refrained in
practice”.857
The basic right insisted on by the Americans was: “no taxation without
representation”. But “Samuel Johnson contested this argument in a
pugnacious and widely read pamphlet, The Patriot (1774): ‘He that accepts
protection stipulates obedience. We have always protected the Americans; we
may, therefore, subject them to government,’ and Parliament had the right to
impose taxes ‘on part of the community for the benefit of the whole’.”858 In
855 Jenkins, op. cit., pp. 164-166.

856 Tombs, op. cit., p. 340.
857
858
498
accordance with this reasoning, the British affirmed, as David Reynolds
writes, that “the British Parliament had full authority to make laws ‘to bind
the colonies and people of America in all cases whatsoever’. So the
underlying issue became clear: Britain wanted more revenue from America to
pay for defence [of the Americans against the French and the Indians], and
claimed that she had the right to enforce such a tax, whereas the colonists
claimed that this could be raised only with the consent of their
legislatures.” 859 And so in the last analysis the American revolution was
elicited by the mother nation, Britain, trying “to make the vast new empire
pay for itself, provoking a backlash to defend popular rights. In 1776 the
Declaration of Independence summed up those rights, purporting to show
how they had been undermined by the British Crown, and justified the
creation of a new government in order to preserve them.”860
Niall Ferguson writes: “The war [of Independence] is at the very heart of
Americans’ conception of themselves: the idea of a struggle for liberty against
an evil empire is the country’s creation myth. But it is the great paradox of the
American Revolution… that the ones who revolted against British rule were
the best-off of all Britain’s colonial subjects. There is good reason to think that,
by the 1770s, New Englanders were about the wealthiest people in the world.
Per capita income was at least equal to that in the United Kingdom and was
far more evenly distributed. The New Englanders had bigger farms, bigger
families and better education than the Old Englanders back home. And,
crucially, they paid far less tax. In 1763 the average Briton paid 26 shillings a
year in taxes. The equivalent figure for a Massachusetts taxpayer was just one
shilling. To say that being British subjects had been good for these people
would be an understatement. And yet it was they, not the indentured
labourers of Virginia or the slaves of Jamaica, who first threw off the yoke of
imperial authority.”861
“Successive governments,” writes Tombs, “were understandably eager to

extricate themselves from the American morass without losing face. Most
colonists too had had enough. A new Prime Minister, Lord North, appointed
in 1770, had the seemingly clever idea of abolishing existing duties, leaving
only a light duty on tea from India to maintain the principle of Parliament’s
taxation powers, but actually making tea cheaper. Such a duty would be
difficult for the Patriots [opponents of the British Crown] to oppose, and the
income would help pay colonial governors, making them less dependent on
the local taxes voted by their assemblies. But the crisis had gone beyond such
political finesse. A range of public grievances and private interests – not
always very avowable, such as smuggling and land speculation – had pushed
influential colonial Patriots to the point of rebellion. At the same time, public
859 Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 59.

861
Ferguson, Empire: How Britain made the Modern World, London: Penguin, 2004, pp. 84, 85.
499
opinion in England was growing impatient with what seemed selfish,
unreasonable and lawless demands. So when in December 1773 a group of
Patriots (including tea smugglers) threw a shipload of tea into these in the
‘Boston Tea Party’, it was seen as a moment of truth: ‘whether we will govern
America’ North told the Commons, ‘or whether we will bid adieu to it’.
London ordered the closure of the port of Boston as a punishment, and it
abolished many Massachusetts political rights, believing that moderate
colonial opinion would rally or at least acquiesce.
“At least as serious – though far less remembered by history – was the
Quebec Act (1774), which placed that new colony, with vast territories in the
west, in the hands of a royal governor without an elected assembly. This
placed a barrier in the way of the western expansion of the existing colonies,
which they regarded as their right of conquest. If further proof of London’s
sinister aims were needed, the Act gave legal recognition and financial
endowment to Catholicism, the religion of the overwhelming majority of the
French-speaking population. This was a necessary step towards acquiring
their loyalty, but to colonial Patriots it amounted to ‘popery and slavery’.
Consequently, ‘every tie of allegiance is broke by the Quebec Act,’ declared
the Patriot Arthur Lee, and it set the colonies on the path of outright rebellion.
A Continental Congress of delegates from Patriot communities met in
Philadelphia in September to coordinate resistance. In England, the Whigs
were equally outraged. Moreover, there were many on both sides of the
Atlantic who, whatever their political sympathies, feared sending ‘armed
legions of Englishmen… to cut the throats of Englishmen.’ Chatham and Burke
appealed for conciliation. The latter proposed a looser and more diverse
empire ‘of many states’: ‘We must govern America, according to [its true]
nature… and not according to our own imaginations; not according to
abstract theories… the temper and character which prevail in our colonies, are,
I am afraid, unalterable by any human act… An Englishman is the unfittest
person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.’ The North
government offered compromise. Leading colonial politicians were reluctant
to break with the mother country, on whose protection they ultimately relied.
Benjamin Franklin, for example, hoped that another war with France and
Spain would reunite the empire. A Second Continental Congress in 1775 still
denied any intention of ‘separating from Great Britain and establishing
independent states’. But Patriot hotbeds, especially in New England, no long
sought compromise, and shooting began at Lexington, Massachusetts, in
April 1775, followd by a pitched battle at Bunker Hill, outside Boston, in June.
In August the Crown issued a Proclamation of Rebellion. The colonists
hesitated until the following July before responding with a ringing
Declaration of Independence…”862
At first the British did quite well, but in 1778 France entered the war on the
American side, and the next year Spain joined the anti-British coalition,
launching an attack on Gibraltar, while Holland extended the war to the
862 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 351-353.
500
Indies. A civil war between Englishmen had suddenly turned into a world
war of Britain versus the rest in which the British had no allies except the
American Loyalists. This was a moment of supreme danger for the British
Empire, and when a huge Franco–Spanish fleet of 104 ships entered the
Channel aiming for Portsmouth, the threat was hardly less than in 1588. With
the British fleet retreating, and a French invasion force waiting in Normandy,
“the third attempt in forty years this time actually arrived in sight of the
Devon coast, on 14 August 1779. England was saved by a combination of
Franco-Spanish incompetence, cold feet and disease, ‘a terrible plague that
disarms our ships’, without the Royal Navy firing a shot, and they returned
forlornly to France in September with 8,000 sailors sick or dying. So many
corpses had been thrown into the sea that the people of Cornwall and Devon
were said to be refusing to eat fish…”863
“Britain mobilized its peoples and resources more than in any previous
war for what seemed a struggle to survive as a great power and a prosperous
society. As George III emphasized to his ministers, ‘We can never exist as a
great or powerful nation after we have lost or renounced the sovereignty of
America,’ for ‘the West Indies must follow them’, and ‘Ireland would soon
follow the same plan,’ and finally ‘this island would be reduced to itself, and
would soon be a poor island indeed’. So the navy was increased from a
peacetime strength of 16,000 men to 100,000 by 1782; 250,000 men were in the
regular army or the militia, many of them Irish and Scots, plus 60,000
Protestant Irish volunteers… Taxes rose by 30 percent, and by the end of the
war absorbed 23 percent of national income – more than in any previous war
or in any other belligerent country. This was bound to cause socio-economic
and political discontent, whether from those who opposed the war or
impatient that it was not being won. A Whig ‘Association Movement’ began
to press for parliamentary reforms, and the most radical elements began to
speak of annual general elections, manhood suffrage, a secret ballot and
payment of MPs.
“… Large numbers [of Irishmen] had joined volunteer defence units, and
this gave Dublin leverage over London. Concessions were made to Irish
demands for greater commercial equality with Britain. An Irish Relief Act
(1778) and a (British) Catholic Relief Act (1778) reduced legal disabilities
against Catholics, with the support of Anglican bishops. Irish Catholic
notables declared that ‘two millions of loyal, faithful and affectionate’
Catholics were ready to serve the king – a manpower bonus that would
buttress British world power for nearly 150 years. The British government
was forced to acquiesce in a gradual assertion of greater autonomy between
1780 ad 1762 by the Irish parliament, known as ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ after
the brilliant orator and tactician Henry Grattan, who masterminded its
strategy.
863
501
“A pro-American and anti-popery backlash ensued, supported by
prominent Dissenters, including John Wesley and Richard Prince. ‘Shall these
[Catholic] vermine bask in the sun shine of court favour, while the honest
amiable Dissenter is stigmatized as an enemy to the King and the Country?’
asked a pamphleteer. George III was caricatured as a monk. There were riots
in Scotland. A Protestant Association was formed, strongest in Newcastle and
London. The agitation culminated in the most destructive outburst of
collective violence in modern British history. On 6 June 1780 a strongly pro-
American Whig MP, Lord George Gordon – whose stepfather was from New
York, who had spent several years there, and who had resigned his naval
commission in protest against the ‘mad, cruel and accursed American war’ –
presented a petition to Parliament backed by a large crowd dressed, on
Gordon’s instructions, ‘in their Sabbath days cloaths’ and led by a man in a
kilt and two bagpipers. The petition demanded repeal of the Catholic Relief
Act. The palace of Westminster was invaded, Whig leaders cheered, and
ministers, bishops and judges were jostled and de-wigged. Five days of
rioting ensued in London and some provincial towns…
“… The city authorities refused to act, through either fear or political

sympathy. Without their sanction – the law required a magistrate to read the
Riot Act to the crowd, after which they had an hour to disperse – troops could
not be used… After five days of mayhem, … the king in person ordered the
army to act, saying that at least one magistrate in the kingdom would do his
duty [and read the Riot Act]. Soldiers patrolled the streets with orders to fire
on groups that refused to disperse, and about 450 people were kllled or
wounded. Whigs denounced the king’s action, Fox declaring that he would
‘much rather be governed by a mob than a standing army.’ Eventually, 160
rioters were put on trial, and 22 men and 4 women, most aged between
seventeen and twenty-five, hanged near the scene of their actions. Gordon
himself, charged with high treason, was acquitted.
“… What the riots above all show is the continuing potency, especially in
London, of militant religious Dissent galvanized by the American Revolution
and which would remain the core of English political radicalism for
generations. But because they had temporarily been so uncontrollable, the
Gordon Riots seem to have ended the old tradition by which a degree of
rioting had been condoned by opposition politicians as justifiable and
tactically useful, as in the Wilkesite agitation,. Now, John Wilkes personally
took part in the defence of the Bank, and Whig politicians mostly disavowed
the rioters. In future, political campaigning would be more polite and
disciplined – as in the campaign against slavery.
“Otherwise, the political and military situation seemed to be stabilizing in

1780. North won a snap general election. There was no prospect of the French
and Spanish trying another invasion. The Spanish navy was occupied in an
epic siege of Gibraltar, which continued on and off for nearly four years. In
America, English, Loyalist, Scottish, Native American and German troops
advanced through the southern colonies. The Dissenting minister Richard
502
Parr lamented ’the common expectation… that America will soon be ours
agan.’ Washington’s army was plagued by desertions and mutinies, and
infiltrated by Loyalist agents. Wrote one congressman in 1780: ‘We are pretty
near the end of our tether.’ As the British war minister, Lord George Germain,
saw it optimistically in December: ‘So very contemptible is the rebel force in
all parts, and so vast is our superiority, that no resistance on their part is to be
apprehended… and it is a pleasing… reflection… that the American levies in
the King’s service are more in number than the whole of the enlisted troops in
the service of the Congress.’ So the likelihood arose again of a negotiated
compromise. Some politicians had long considered abandoning New England
– ‘not only no advantage but a considerable detriment’ – and making
‘Hudson’s River the barrier of our empire’. North assured Parliament in
January 1781 that there was the prospect of ‘a just and an honourable
peace.’”864
The tide was turned by the intervention of the old enemy – France…
“France had provided money to pay for 15,000 American troops, and a French
army of 5,000 men under the Comte de Rochambeau had been sitting in
Rhode Island for months. In 1781 Versailles acted decisively. In March its
Atlantic fleet was dispatched first to the West Indies, the main prize, and then,
after failing to capture Jamaica, in July it sailed north to Virginia, to join up
with Rochambeau and Washington. Fatally, the Royal Navy, intent on
protecting the sugar islands, failed to stop them, and so the French navy and
army were able to trap a small British force under General Cornwallis at
Yorktown. Rochambeau’s army besieged it, seconded by Washington’s men
and local militia. On 19 October, with many men sick or wounded and
ammunition nearly exhausted, the British surrendered. They marched out
playing a popular tune, ‘The World Turned Upside Down’.
“Yorktown was a fairly minor affair by the standards of European wars.

Yet the choice of music was not inappropriate, for the psychological blow was
severe: ‘O God! It is all over,’ exclaimed North. An MP wrote that ‘every Body
seems really sick of carrying on ye American war’. A motion calling for peace
was passed in the Commons. North insisted on resigning, for which George
III, eager to fight on, never forgave him. The opposition Whig Rockingham
returned to office in March 1782 and began to withdraw troops from North
America, urging commanders to try to ‘captivate [American] hearts’. The
French fleet set sail for Jamaica to deliver the coup de grâce. The British fleet
hastened westward to fight the only great battle it has ever fought outside
European waters, and the only time the main fleet had been so far from home
until it sailed to fight Japan in later 1944 and Argentina in 1982. The Battle of
the Saints, in the Caribbean, on 9-10 April 1782, tilted the global advantage n
Britain’s favour, as the French and their allies ran out of money, men, ships an
confidence. Admirals Rodney and Hood smashed the French fleet, using new
tactics to break the enemy line. Rodney boasted to London, ‘You may now
despise all your enemies’. The Spanish failed to take Gibraltar in their final
864
Tombs, op. cit., pp. 358- 361.
503
great assault in September, and the French, who had been hoping to to effect
another revolution in India, arrived with too little and too later: there was to
be no Yorktown in Asia…
“Some ministers wanted to do a deal with the Americans, and turn on

France, Spain and Holland. But Rockingham and his successor, the Irish
magnate Lord Shelburne, were eager to end the war, against the express will
of the king…
“Peace negotiations were dominated by Shelburne. He had long

sympathized with the American Patriots, and wanted to safeguard trade and
political influence by a generous settlement. The French envoy was
astonished at how ‘the English are buying peace… their concessions with
regard to boundaries, fisheries and loyalists exceed anything I would have
believed possible.’ Britain gave full independence to all the thirteen colonies
involved in the rebellion, ceded to them all the territory south of the Great
Lakes, and returned Florida to Spain. 865 The Americans jumped at this,
abandoning their allies – the preliminary peace agreement was signed
without the French even being informed. Shelburne was little concerned
about the Loyalists and the freed slaves, who at best were packed off to other
colonies. The Native American Allies he regarded with distaste, abandoning
them to the new Republic, which ‘knew best how to tame their savage
natures’. This has been called ‘a sentence of death for their civilization’.
Shelburne’s terms were attacked in Parliament, and he was forced out of
office in April 1783. But Parliament could do nothing about a treaty that had
already been signed, other than punish the government, and in September the
treaties of Versailles and Paris were ratified.
“American independence was a hammer blow to British prestige, and a

triumph for France. The Habsburg emperor wrote England off as now ‘a
second-class power, comparable with Sweden and Denmark’. The French
intervention had prevented the British from keeping much more of America
than Canada and the West Indies. France, Spain and Holland had seized
command of the seas for a crucial period, hampering British operations
against the rebels and preventing the deployment of reinforcements. The fate
of America was largely decided in the West Indies, which had first call on
British troops and ships. Despite the legend of lumbering Redcoats being
defeated by straight-shooting frontiersmen, there is little doubt that the
Crown forces, including many Americans – among them the native and the
enslaved – could have defeated the half-hearted ‘Roundheads’ had Britain not
also been fighting a world war.
865
Article 1 of the Treaty read: “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States,
viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,
Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with
them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the
government, property, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof." (V.M.)
504
“This, however, is not how we remember it. As in so much of our history,
the Whig version, in both its English and American variants, has prevailed,
and we have generally accepted the idealized vision of the American
Revolution as a noble struggle for freedom and democracy. Here indeed is a
case of history being written by the victors. America’s flattering foundation
myth is itself of immense historic importance. It drew on Enlightenment ideas,
particularly those of Locke and Montesquieu, to give a universal significance
to the traditional rhetoric of ‘free-born Englishmen’, and so provided Europe
with a new vista of optimism. We can see the difference if we compare the
United States and Canada: the latter, however admirable, has never excited
the world with the promise of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’…”866
Paradoxically, if we look at the history of the American War of

Independence in a wider and longer perspective, the conclusions to be drawn
are almost the precise opposite of what they seemed to be to contemporaries.
First, the war was not between democrats and tyrants for the simple reason
that Britain was not a real monarchy but a Parliamentocracy in which the
king’s desire to continue the war in 1781-2 was deliberately and openly
ignored, with the result that already before the end the king ruled neither
Britain nor America. Nor were the American colonies model democracies –
the decision to rebel was taken by small assemblies against the manifest will
of large minorities of the population. In effect, this was a war between two
groups of oligarchs of the same race and a very similar culture, class and
world-view; the differences between them were smaller than those between
the Royalists and the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War, and largely
came down to a quarrel over money.
Secondly, so little divided the antagonists that apart from the war of 1812-
14 (when the British burned down the White House), Britain and the United
States have remained friends and allies ever since, to their immense mutual
benefit and the benefit of that common civilization which they jointly
represented and advanced throughout the world. Oscar Wilde’s quip that
Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language only
emphasizes how much they do indeed have in common. Indeed, the British-
American “special relationship”, although a little tattered in recent years, may
be described as the most powerful and successful international alliance in
history.
Thirdly, if we consider the war in its wider, global dimension, then we

have to conclude that the victory of France in America was a truly pyrrhic one.
For France’s support of the American revolutionaries was to prove fatal for a
state more absolutist than Britain and therefore more vulnerable to the
propaganda of revolution. For, as Marc Almond writes, “French assistance to
866
505
the rebel Americans helped to bankrupt the royal regime in France and create
the conditions for revolution in 1789.”867
Fourthly, France’s victory in America was perhaps the decisive event that
guaranteed the victory, not of France, but of Britain, in that long-drawn-out,
titanic struggle that began in 1700 with the War of the Spanish Succession
continued with the Seven Years war (1759-63) and ended in 1815 on the
bloody field of Waterloo. For if Britain had won the war of 1776-83 in America,
there is little doubt that this would only have been a respite, and that when
Britain found herself again at war with France in 1802, the Americans would
have renewed their struggle for independence, placing an extra and probably
intolerable burden on her resources. The British David eventually defeated
the French Goliath – thanks to the fact that they had made their peace with
the other giant behind their backs, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean…
867
Almond, Revolution, London: De Agostino, 1996, p. 69.
506
60. THE IDEOLOGY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The American revolution developed no radically new ideas. Thus Jacques

Barzun writes: “No new Idea entailing a shift in forms of power – the mark of
revolutions – was proclaimed. The 28 offences that King George was accused
of had long been familiar in England. The language of the Declaration is that
of protest against abuses of power, not of proposals for recasting the
government on new principles.”868
At the same time, it was important for the development of political thought,
because, just as Hume took the principles of Lockean liberalism, made them
self-consistent and thereby showed their absurdity, so the American
revolutionaries took the principles of the English “Glorious Revolution” of
1688, applied them more generally and in a Rousseauist spirit, and thereby
showed that Lockean liberalism was dangerously open-ended, tending to its
own destruction. More precisely, the revolution showed that if parliament
placed limits on the king in the name of the people and natural law, there was
no reason why limits should not also be placed on parliament in turn by other
estates of the realm, even colonials, in the name of the same principles. Thus
the American revolution showed, as Barbara Tuchman has put it, that
“parliamentary supremacy”, no less than monarchy, “was vulnerable to riot,
agitation and boycott…”869
Moreover, in principle the process of rebellion could go on forever; for

there were always people who did not feel they belonged to this people, and
therefore felt the right to rebel against it. Thus Noam Chomsky points out that
many American loyalists fled to Canada “because they didn’t like the
doctrinaire, kind of fanatic environment that took hold in the colonies. The
percentage of colonists who fled in the American Revolution was actually
about 4 percent, it was probably higher than the percentage of Vietnamese
who fled Vietnam after the Vietnam War. And remember, they were fleeing
from one of the richest places in the world – these were boat-people who fled
in terror from Boston Harbor in the middle of winter to Nova Scotia, where
they died in the snow trying to get away from all of these crazies here. The
numbers are supposed to have been in the neighbourhood of maybe a
hundred thousand out of a total population of about two and a half million –
so it was a substantial part of the population. And among them were people
from groups who knew they were going to get it in the neck if the colonists
won – blacks and Native Americans, for example. And they were right: in the
case of the Native Americans, it was genocide; in the case of the blacks, it was
slavery.”870
“And that,” writes Adam Zamoyski, “still left a considerable proportion of

the population out of sympathy with the state of affairs in 1783. The
868
Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 397.
869 Tuchman, The March of Folly, London: Michael Joseph, 1984, p. 166.
870 Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, London: Vintage, 2003, p. 102
507
unassimilated communities of Germans, Swiss, Dutch and Finns, and the
religious settlements of Quakers, Shakers, Dunkers, Mennonites,
Schwenkenfelders and others carried on as before – oblivious to government
and resistant to national inclusion. The settlers of what later became Kentucky
and Tennessee debated the possibility of switching to Spanish sovereignty. In
1784 the western counties of North Carolina attempted to go their own way.
Three years later the Wyoming Valley tried to secede from Pennsylvania.
There was opposition, rioting and even revolt against the Congress, just as
there had been against Westminster. One reason was that the tax burden had
increased dramatically. In the last years of British rule, the colonies enjoyed
lower taxation than any people in the Western world except for the Poles. By
the late 1780s the Massachusetts per capita tax burden of one shilling had
gone up to eighteen shillings; the rise in Virginia was from five pence to ten
shillings. And it is worth remembering that tax was what had sparked off the
revolution in the first place…”871
However, all this was not foreseen when Thomas Jefferson presented a
doctrine of “self-evident” natural rights known as the Declaration of
Independence to the Second Continental Congress in 1776: “We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the
consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...”
Norman Stone writes: “’The pursuit of happiness’, in the foundation

charter of the United States, has always struck foreigners as funny. That is a
misunderstanding of the original, which was just a polite way of saying
‘money’.”872 Indeed, when he was ambassador in Paris, Jefferson was asked
why he had substituted “happiness” for the traditional Lockean emphasis on
“property”, he replied that since the secure possession of property was an
important condition of happiness, there was no real contradiction. However,
this was the first time in history that “the pursuit of happiness” had been
taken to be one of the purposes of the State, and the failure to achieve this end
as a justification for revolution.
“This was not, of course,” writes J.S. McClelland, “to say that it was
government’s business to regulate the details of people’s lives to make sure
that they were cheerful, but it did mean that a very exact sense emerged of
government’s duty to provide those conditions in which rational men could
pursue happiness, that is further their own interests, without being hindered
unnecessarily either by government or by their fellow men. This was more
radical than it sounds, because in eighteenth-century political thought it
meant that government’s capacity to promote the happiness of its subjects,
871 Zamoyski, Holy Madness, p. 38.

872 Stone, The Atlantic and its Enemies, London: Penguin, 2011, pp. 298-299.
508
however negatively, was connected with the vital question of the legitimacy
of government. No political theory ever invented, and no actual government
since the Flood, had ever had as its proclaimed intention the idea of making
men miserable. All governments more or less claim that they have their
subjects’ happiness at heart, but most governments have not based their
claims to be entitled to rule directly on their happiness-creating function. The
reason why governments do not typically base their claim to rule on their
capacity to increase happiness is obvious enough, because to do so would be
to invite their subjects to judge whether their governments are competent or
not. Indeed, it could be argued that most of the justifications for forms of rule
which have been on offer since Plato are all careful to distinguish between
questions about legitimacy and questions about happiness…”873
Mark Almond writes: “The Declaration, approved by congress on 4 July

1776 and signed by its members on 2 August, was greeted with incredulity by
the British. The British Gentleman’s Magazine for September, 1776 ridiculed the
idea of equality: ‘We hold, they say, these truths to be self-evident: That all
men are created equal. In what are they created equal? Is it in size, strength,
understanding, figure, civil or moral accomplishments, or situation of life?”874
The British had a point: the equality of men is far from self-evident from a
humanist point of view. In fact, the only real justification for it is religious:
that all men are made in the image of God, and that Christ died for all men
equally. But, having been the leaders in political thought, the British were
now behind the times. Rousseau had preached the general will and the
nobility of the common man, and it was now the Americans with their “We,
the People” Declaration who were more in tune with the latest political ideas.
In any case, was it not a British philosopher, John Locke, who had spoken
of an original state of human equality, and had even looked across the
Atlantic to the primitive societies there for its incarnation, saying: “In the
beginning all the world was America”? And were not the Americans simply
applying the same principle in opposing parliament as the English had in
opposing King James II nearly a century before?875 However, while Locke had
invoked the sovereign power of the people in order to place limits on the king,
he never dreamed that any but the landowning gentry, should qualify as “the
people” and do the limiting. But the Americans claimed that “the people”
included even unrepresented colonials, and that “the will of the people” had a
wider meaning than “the will of parliament”. The uncomfortable fact for the
British was that, however little basis the doctrine of equality had in empirical
fact, it was in the air of public debate, while the Americans’ feeling that they
should be treated equally, that is, on equal terms with Britons of similar
wealth and breeding, was a powerful force that brooked no resistance…
873
McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, Routledge: London, 1996, pp. 354-355.
874
Almond, op. cit., p. 59.
875
Thus Edmund Burke “considered the Americans as standing at that time and in that
controversy, as England did to King James II in 1688” (Almond, op. cit., p. 63). Cf. Russell
Kirk, “A Revolution not Made but Prevented”, The Intelligent Conservative, August, 2012.
509
Paradoxically, it was an Englishman, Thomas Paine, who made the most
important single contribution to the separation of the American colonies from
the British crown. His revolutionary pamphlets, Common Sense (1776) and The
American Crisis (1776-83) were probably, to that time, the most widely read
works ever to appear in the English language after the Bible. And among the
most influential; for as John Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of
Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain”…876
Although, as we have seen, the American revolution produced no radically

new ideas in political philosophy, it did mark a leftist shift in political
thinking in the Anglo-American world that was to have profound
implications for the future. “Historians disagree,” writes Norman Cantor, “on
whether the French doctrines of republicanism and the universal rights of
man played an important role in shaping the ideas of the American
Revolution of 1776, the Constitution of 1787, and the Bill of Rights (the first
ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution), or whether the American political
culture was a direct offshoot of English law and politics. However derived,
the American idea was that of a ‘New Order of the World’ in which the
privileges, discriminations, and prejudices of Europe were to be superseded
(so said the American Revolution of 1776) by a new era of freedom in human
history. This does sound like English common law filtered through the prism
of French ideological enthusiasm.”877
Ofir Haivry and Yoram Hazony write: “When the American English, as
Burke called them, rebelled against the British monarch, there were already
two distinct political theories expressed among the rebels, and the opposition
between these two camps only grew with time.
“First, there were those who admired the English constitution that they
had inherited and studied. Believing they had been deprived of their rights
under the English constitution, their aim was to regain these rights.
Identifying themselves with the tradition of Coke and Selden, they hoped to
achieve a victory against royal absolutism comparable to what their English
forefathers had achieved in the Petition of Right and Bill of Rights. To
individuals of this type, the word revolution still had its older meaning,
invoking something that ‘revolves’ and would, through their efforts, return to
its rightful place—in effect, a restoration. Alexander Hamilton was probably
the best-known exponent of this kind of conservative politics, telling the
assembled delegates to the constitutional convention of 1787, for example,
that ‘I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever
produced.’878 Or, as John Dickinson told the convention: ‘Experience must be
876 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine.
877 Cantor, The Sacred Chain, London: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 239.
878 He went on to say: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The
first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people… The people are turbulent
510
our only guide. Reason may mislead us. It was not reason that discovered the
singular and admirable mechanism of the English constitution…. Accidents
probably produced these discoveries, and experience has given a sanction to
them.’ And it is evident that they were quietly supported behind the scenes
by other adherents of this view, among them the president of the convention,
General George Washington.
“Second, there were true revolutionaries, liberal followers of Locke such as

Jefferson, who detested England and believed—just as the French followers of
Rousseau believed—that the dictates of universal reason made the true rights
of man evident to all. For them, the traditional English constitution was not
the source of their freedoms but rather something to be swept away before the
rights dictated by universal reason. And indeed, during the French
Revolution, Jefferson and his supporters embraced it as a purer version of
what the Americans had started. As he wrote in a notorious letter in 1793
justifying the revolution in France: ‘The liberty of the whole earth was
depending on the issue of the contest. . . . [R]ather than it should have failed, I
would have seen half the earth desolated.’
“The tension between these conservative and liberal camps finds rather
dramatic expression in America’s founding documents: The Declaration of
Independence, drafted by Jefferson in 1776, is famous for resorting, in its
preamble, to the Lockean doctrine of universal rights as ‘self-evident’ before
the light of reason. Similarly, the Articles of Confederation, negotiated the
following year as the constitution of the new United States of America,
embody a radical break with the traditional English constitution. These
Articles asserted the existence of thirteen independent states, at the same time
establishing a weak representative assembly over them without even the
power of taxation, and requiring assent by nine of thirteen states to enact
policy. The Articles likewise made no attempt at all to balance the powers of
this assembly, effectively an executive, with separate legislative or judicial
branches of government.
“The Articles of Confederation came close to destroying the United States.

After a decade of disorder in both foreign and economic affairs, the Articles
were replaced by the Constitution, drafted at a convention initiated by
Hamilton and James Madison, and presided over by a watchful Washington,
while Jefferson was away in France. Anyone comparing the Constitution that
emerged with the earlier Articles of Confederation immediately recognizes
that what took place at this convention was a reprise of the Glorious
Revolution of 1689. Despite being adapted to the American context, the
document that the convention produced proposed a restoration of the
fundamental forms of the English constitution: a strong president, designated
by an electoral college (in place of the hereditary monarchy); the president
and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a
distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the
second… Nothing but a permanent body can check the impudence of democracy.” (V.M.)
511
balanced in strikingly English fashion by a powerful bicameral legislature
with the power of taxation and legislation; the division of the legislature
between a quasi-aristocratic, appointed Senate and a popularly elected House;
and an independent judiciary. Even the American Bill of Rights of 1789 is
modelled upon the Petition of Right and the English Bill of Rights, largely
elaborating the same rights that had been described by Coke and Selden and
their followers, and breathing not a word anywhere about universal reason or
universal rights.”879
That was just as well in the year of the French Revolution… For, as
Hamilton wrote in the first of The Federalist Papers, “A dangerous ambition
more often lurks behind the specious zeal for the rights of the people than
under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of
government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much
more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of
those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest
number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people,
commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”
Thus while instituting a strong executive power, the delegates were also
motivated by a fear of despotism and distrust of big government; they wanted
a government which would interfere as little as possible in the private lives of
the citizens. Thus the 9th and 10th Amendments reserved spheres not
explicitly given to the central government to the States and the People.880
James Madison said: “Wherever the real power in government lies, there is
the danger of oppression. In our government the real power lies in the
majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be
apprehended, not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its
constituents, but from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of
the major number of the constituents. This is a truth of great importance, but
not yet sufficiently attended to…”881
However, if the Constitution of 1787 should be considered a defeat for

Jefferson, he had many victories ahead. Jefferson, as we have seen, drew
inspiration from the French revolution; and his drive to “rekindle the old
spirit of 1776” was unquenchable. Thus he believed that a rebellion every
twenty years or so was necessary to stop the arteries of freedom from
becoming sclerotic. As he wrote in 1787: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed
from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural
879 Haivry and Hazony, “What is Conservatism?” American Affairs, Summer, 2017, vol. I, no. 2.
880 Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Tenth Amendment; ‘The
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the
States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.”
881 Madison, in James M. Rafferty, Prophetic Insights into the New World Order, Malo, WA: Light
Bearers Ministry, 1992, p. 73.
512
manure.”882 And to James Madison he wrote in the same year: “A little
rebellion now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political
world as storms in the physical… It is a medicine for the sound health of
government...”883
This recipe for permanent revolution was taken up by none other than
Abraham Lincoln in 1861: “This country, with its institutions, belongs to the
people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing
government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or
their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it…”884
There is a rich irony in the fact that the State which after 1917 became the
main bulwark of ordered government against the revolution should have
been the most revolutionary State prior to 1789…
These different understandings of democracy were reflected in different

views on the two most important issues of the day: the relative powers of the
central government and the states, and slavery. With regard to the first issue,
the champions of a strong central government, the federalists, believed that
such a government was necessary – subject to the 9th and 10th Amendments
being observed - in order to preserve the gains of the revolution, to guarantee
taxation income, and to preserve law and order. As George Washington put it:
“Let then the reins of government be braced and held with a steady hand, and
every violation of the Constitution be reprehended. If defective, let it be
amended, but not suffered to be trampled on whilst it has an existence.”885
Not surprisingly, many of the anti-federalists thought that Washington

was putting the central government in the place of the British monarch, and
with similar tyrannical powers. As Joseph J. Ellis writes, they were haunted
by “the ideological fear, so effective as a weapon against the taxes imposed by
Parliament and decrees of George III, that once arbitrary power was
acknowledged to reside elsewhere [than in the states], all liberty was lost.
And at a primal level it suggested the unconscious fear of being completely
consumed, eaten alive.”886
One potential danger of American democracy – as of every revolution that

acts in the name of freedom - was that demands for equal rights on the part of
any number of truly or supposedly oppressed minorities - permanent
revolution in the name of equality – were theoretically endless, and could
lead in the end to complete anarchy, which in its turn would lead to the
imposition of old-style Cromwellian dictatorship. This was foreseen by
Benjamin Franklin. He supported the constitution of 1787 “with all its faults –
882 Jefferson, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 510.

883 Jefferson, in Almond, op. cit., p. 69.
884 Lincoln, in Almond, op. cit., p. 69.
885 Washington, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 509.
886 Ellis, Founding Brothers, New York: Vintage Books, 2002, p. 59. See also Simon Collinson,
“President or King?”, History Today, vol. 50 (11), November, 2000, pp. 12-13.
513
if they are such – because I think a general government necessary for us, and
there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if
well administered”. But this good administration, he believed, could only go
on for a few years, after which it “can only end in despotism, as other forms
have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need
despotic government, being incapable of any other…”887
The Constitution included elements that were familiar from Montesquieu,

such as the separation of the powers of the executive (the President), the
legislature (the two houses of Congress) and the judiciary (the Supreme
Court). However, the Americans went a significant step further in granting
individual citizens the right to bear arms in defence of their rights. Such an
innovation was perhaps possible only in America, whose distance from her
most powerful rivals, a decentralised system of semi-sovereign states and
ever-expanding frontiers made strong central government less essential, and
gave unparalleled freedom to the individualist farmer-settlers.
With regard to slavery, it must be remembered that slavery had been part
of the social fabric in the South since the beginning. There is no doubt,
however, that conditions for black slaves were harsh, harsher than in New
Spain. According to the Virginia slave code of 1705 all servants imported into
the State “who were not Christians in their native country… shall be
accounted and be slaves, and such be here bought and sold notwithstanding a
conversion to Christianity afterwards…” Whites could not marry blacks or
those of mixed race. And if a master killed a slave in the course of correcting
him, “he shall be free of all punishment… as if such accident had never
happened”. Slaves were vital for the economy because many of them came
from the so-called Rice Coast, present-day Ghana, where they had learned
how to separate rice grains from their husks – a skill vital in making rice
cultivation a success in the South. Free white workers were less skilled and
more expensive. That was the main reason – apart from simple racism – why
the slave-owners resisted emancipation so fiercely, and why there were
periodic slave uprisings. An attempt to create a new colony without slavery
was made in Georgia in 1732, but it failed; and in 1752 Georgia became a
crown colony, and thereafter a plantation society like South Carolina…888
The Declaration of Independence famously declared that it was “not

possible that one man should have property in person of another”. However,
as Ellis writes, “removing slavery was not like removing British officials or
revising constitutions. In isolated pockets of New York and New Jersey, and
more panoramically in the entire region south of the Potomac, slavery was
woven into the fabric of American society in ways that defied appeals to logic
and morality. It also enjoyed the protection of one of the Revolution’s most
potent legacies, the right to dispose of one’s property without arbitrary
887 Franklin, in Brian Macarthur, The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches, London: Penguin, 1995,
p. 101.
888 Reynolds, op. cit., pp. 28-31.
514
interference from others, especially when the others resided far away or
claimed the authority of some distant government. There were, to be sure,
radical implications latent in the ‘principles of ‘76’ capable of challenging
privileged appeals to property rights, but the secret of their success lay in
their latency – that is, the gradual and surreptitious ways they revealed their
egalitarian implications over the course of the nineteenth century. If slavery’s
cancerous growth was to be arrested and the dangerous malignancy removed,
it demanded immediate surgery. The radical implications of the revolutionary
legacy were no help at all so long as they remained only implications.
“The depth and apparent intractability of the problem became much

clearer during the debates surrounding the drafting and ratification of the
Constitution. Although the final draft of the document was conspicuously
silent on slavery, the subject itself haunted the closed-door debates. No less a
source than Madison believed that slavery was the central cause of the most
elemental division in the Constitutional Convention: ‘the States were divided
into different interests not by their difference of size,’ Madison observed, ‘but
principally from their having or not having slaves… It did not lie between the
large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.’
“The delegates from New England and most of the Middle Atlantic states
drew directly on the inspirational rhetoric of the revolutionary legacy to
argue that slavery was inherently incompatible with the republican values on
which the American Republic had been based. They wanted an immediate
end to the slave trade, an explicit statement prohibiting the expansion of
slavery into the western territories as a condition for admission into the union,
and the adoption of a national plan for gradual emancipation analogous to
those state plans already adopted in the North…
“The southern position might more accurately be described as ‘deep

southern’, since it did not include Virginia. Its major advocates were South
Carolina and Georgia, and the chief burden for making the case in the
Constitutional Convention fell almost entirely on the South Carolina
delegation. The underlying assumption of this position was most openly
acknowledged by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina – namely,
that ‘South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves’. What those from
the Deep South wanted was open-ended access to African imports to stock
their plantations. They also wanted equivalently open access to western lands,
meaning no federal legislation restricting the property rights of slave
owners…
“Neither side got what it wanted at Philadelphia in 1787. The Constitution

contained no provision that committed the newly created federal government
to a policy of gradual emancipation, or in any clear sense placed slavery on
the road to ultimate extinction. On the other hand, the Constitution contained
no provisions that specifically sanctioned slavery as a permanent and
protected institution south of the Potomac or anywhere else. The
distinguishing feature of the document when it came to slavery was its
515
evasiveness. It was neither a ‘contract with abolition’ nor a ‘covenant with
death’, but rather a prudent exercise in ambiguity. The circumlocutions
required to place a chronological limit on the slave trade or to count slaves as
three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House, all
without ever using the forbidden word, capture the intentionally elusive
ethos of the Constitution. The underlying reason for this calculated
orchestration of non-commitment was obvious: Any clear resolution of the
slavery question one way or the other rendered ratification of the Constitution
virtually impossible…”889
Several of the Founding Fathers themselves owned slaves. Jefferson owned

200, only seven of whom he ever freed. 890 But this did not prevent him from
moving to include a clause condemning George III for the slave trade. But the
delegates from South Carolina and Georgia succeeded in having it deleted.
George Washington also owned slaves. But this was not the primary
reason why he was silent about slavery when he came to make his retirement
address in 1796. “His silence on the slavery question was strategic, believing
as he did that slavery was a cancer on the body politic of America that could
not at present be removed without killing the patient…”891
And with reason; for by 1790 the slave population was 700,000, up from
about 500,000 in 1776. This, and the threat that South Carolina and Georgia
would secede from the Union if slavery were outlawed, made it clear that
abolition was impractical as politics (but not on a personal level – Washington
decreed in his will that all his slaves should be freed after his wife’s death). …
Nevertheless, the revolutionary demand for equality in general could not

fail to arouse great expectations in the black population. Thus in 1776
Benjamin Franklin admitted “that our struggle has loosened the bonds of
government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that
schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their
guardians, and negroes grew more insolent to their masters…”892
“The irony is,” writes Ferguson, “that having won their independence in
the name of liberty, the American colonists went on to perpetuate slavery in
the southern states. As Samuel Johnson acidly asked in his anti-American
pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny: ‘How is it that the loudest YELPS for liberty
come from the drivers of Negroes?’ By contrast, within a few decades of
having lost the American colonies, the British abolished first the slave trade
and then slavery itself throughout their Empire. Indeed, as early as 1775 the
British Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had offered emancipation to
slaves who rallied to the British cause. This was not entirely opportunistic:
889 Ellis, op. cit., pp. 91-92, 93.

890
Ferguson, op. cit., p. 100.
891 Ellis, op. cit., p. 158.
892
Almond, op. cit., p. 63.
516
Lord Mansfield’s famous judgement in Somersett’s case had pronounced
slavery illegal in England three years before. From the point of view of most
African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at
least a generation. Although slavery was gradually abolished in northern
states like Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island, it
remained firmly entrenched in the South, where most slaves lived.
“Nor was independence good news for the native Americans. During the
Seven Years War the British government had shown itself anxious to
conciliate the Indian tribes, if only to try to lure them away from their alliance
with the French. Treaties had been signed which established the Appalachian
mountains as the limit of British settlement, leaving the land west of it,
including the Ohio Valley, to the Indians. Admittedly, these treaties were not
strictly adhered to when peace came, sparking the war known as Pontiac’s
Uprising in 1763. But the fact remains that the distant imperial authority in
London was more inclined to recognize the rights of the native Americans
than the land-hungry colonists on the spot.”893
In the climactic year of 1776, writes Andrew Marr, Thomas Jefferson wrote
“that he favoured pushing the war into the heart of the Indian lands: ‘But I
would not stop there. I would never cease pursuing them while one of them
remained on this side of the Mississippi. We would never cease pursuing
them with war while one remained on the face of the earth.’”894
In fact, Bernard Simms has argued that it was differences over what to do
with the peoples west of the Appalachians that caused the revolution. After
Pontiac’s Indian revolt had “exposed colonial defence structures”, the British
“moved swiftly to put imperial defence on a stable footing. First, in October
1763 it issued a proclamation that there should be no settlement west of the
Appalachians. This measure was designed to conciliate the Indians living
there; to allay Franco-Spanish fears of untrammelled British colonial
expansion; and to reduce the perimeter to be defended by the already
overstretched crown forces…”895
For, as Sir Winston Churchill wrote: “Vast territories had fallen to the
Crown on the conclusion of the Seven Years War. From the Canadian border
to the Gulf of Mexico the entire hinterland of the American colonies became
British soil, and the parcelling out of these new lands led to further trouble
with the colonists. Many of them, like George Washington, had formed
companies to buy these frontier tracts from the Indians, but a royal
proclamation [of 1763] restrained any purchasing and prohibited their
settlement. Washington, among others, ignored the ban and wrote to his land
agent ordering him ‘to secure some of the most valuable lands in the King’s
part [on the Ohio], which I think may be accomplished after a while,
893 Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 100-101.

895 Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, London: Allen Lane, 2013, p. 121.
517
notwithstanding the proclamation that restrains it at present, and prohibits
the settling of them at all; for I can never look upon that proclamation in any other
light (but this I must say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet
the minds of the Indians.’ (italics – WSC). This attempt by the British
government to regulate the new lands caused much discontent among the
planters, particularly in the Middle and Southern colonies.”896
The colonists “expected to be awarded the Ohio Valley as the fruit of their
struggles. No man or ministry, they felt, should set limits to the march of an
empire. An ‘expansionist’ lobby now began to make its presence felt in the
colonial assemblies of North America. They articulated a vision not just of
territorial growth but of greatness: a single unified British geopolitical space
on the continent, from sea to shining sea, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf
of Mexico. Imperialist aggrandizement was thus part of the American project
well before independence. It was in fact the reason why the Revolution took
place…”897
Besides, English liberalism, there was another influence on the political

thought of the Americans – the Native Indians, and in particular the
Confederacy of Iroquois Five Nations.
G.K. Ballatore writes: “It is not widely known that the advice originally
came from the Mohawk Chief Canassatego, who, in the early 1740s, told
Franklin to unify the colonies, counselling: “’Our wise forefathers established
union between the Five Nations. This has made us formidable; this has given
us great weight and authority with our neighbouring nations. We are a
powerful confederacy, and by your observing the same methods our wise
forefathers have taken you will acquire such strength and power. Therefore,
whatever befalls you, never fall out with one another.
“’Arguably, federalism has been the United States’ foremost political

contribution. The pattern of states within a nation held together not by
clannishness or geography but by shared values mimics the structure of the
Iroquois Confederacy. Since most of the colonies had more contact and trade
with the Indians than they did with one another, the Iroquois preference for
local government made sense.
“The Iroquois Confederacy was the only living, breathing democracy the
founders had witnessed when the time came to declare independence and,
later, cobble together the Constitution when the Articles of Confederation
were found wanting. Although Franklin and Jefferson were acquainted with
the ideas of Locke and Rousseau, there were no current examples in Europe of
democracy in action. In contrast, colonists imagined that the American
896 Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, London, 1957, volume III, pp. 151-152.
897 Simms, op. cit., p. 123.
518
Indians lived in a perfect state of nature and were somehow descended from
the Ancient Romans. As early as 1580, Michel de Montaigne wrote admiringly
of the natives of the New World in his essay, On Cannibals… Later, in the late
1600s, the first colonial historian of the Indians, Cadwallader Colden, wrote
that without ‘Men of experience among the Five Nations to advise and direct
them on all emergencies of importance’, the British colonies would be sunk.
Colden even attributed French dominance in early colonial America to their
ties with the Five Nations.
“By the mid-1700s, this sense of respect and curiosity filtered down to the
Founding Fathers, many of whom studied Colden’s work. During this time,
Franklin, Conrad Weiser, Thomas Paine, William Johnson, James Madison
and John Adams all visited the Iroquois for extended periods to study their
government and organisation. The Indians’ proximity to the eastern colonies
enabled these frequent visits. Adams even included a survey of Iroquois
government in his Defence of the Constitution of the United States, published on
the eve of the Constitutional Convention, in which he favourably compared
the unicameral governing body of the United States to that of the Five Nations.
“The colonists’ first attempt to organise as a cohesive state at the Albany

Conference in 1754, where representatives from each of the colonies attended,
as well as many Iroquois Indians, including the Mohawk chief Canassatego,
Franklin named the organising body the Great Council, after the Grand
Council of the Iroquois. In the Iroquois tradition, the Grand Council does not
interfere with local tribal matters. Each tribe has its own ‘constitution’ that
governs the laws of their land, independent of the other tribes. In addition,
they convene regularly with the other tribes to discuss matters that affect all
of them, especially the decision to wage war. Otherwise, each tribe’s and each
individual’s autonomy is recognised and respected as long as it does not hurt
another. Franklin greatly admired this system of government and chastised
the other colonists when they failed to cohere:
“’It would be a very strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should
be capable of forming a scheme for such an Union and be able to execute it in
such a manner, as that it has subsisted Ages, and appears indissoluble, and
yet a like Union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies.
“The notion of personal freedom and liberty also descended from the
Iroquois and, most notably, from the Mohawks, who had the most contact
with the British colonists. Many colonists, in keeping with Montaigne, saw the
Indian way of life as a ‘recapitulation of Eden’. When the founders tried to
capture this in the laws of the New World, they aimed at describing a way of
life akin to a state of nature as they observed in the Indians. Hence, Jefferson
replaced the right of property that was safeguarded in European constitutions
with the right to happiness.
“While the Magna Carta also treated the question of inalienable rights (in a
more limited way), the last thing Jefferson and other founders wanted was an
519
imitation of the world from which they had escaped. They did not want to go
back to the European way of life, but to form a new society that was neither
civilised nor savage…”898
898 Ballatore, “America’s First Nation”, History Today, April, 2017, pp. 51-52.
520
61. EAST MEETS WEST: (2) SAUDI ARABIA
While Christians were becoming more tolerant of “Musselmen”, the

reverse was not the case. In 1689, the same year in which the Toleration Act
was passed in England, the Turks were defeated outside the walls of Vienna.
This important battle on the one hand removed a great threat to Christian
civilization, but on the other hand engendered a new one. For many Muslims
“blamed Ottoman reverses on a lack of true piety, and the emergence of
religious heresies right in the heart of the Dar al Islam itself. The answer, these
critics argued, was more Islam. For this reason the eighteenth century central
Arabian preacher Muhammed ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703-92) called for an
Islamic reformation, a return to the uncorrupted principles of medieval Islam.
By the end of the century he had joined forces with the local tribal chief
Muhammed ibn Saud, and raised most of the Arabian peninsula in revolt
against the Ottomans. The religious radicalization of the Arab world, in other
words, began in central Europe, before the walls of Vienna…”899
The West first heard of Wahhabism in 1761, through a Göttingen

mathematics student, Carsten Niebuhr. “Visiting Basra in southern Iraq, he
met a local Arabian ruler, Muhammad Ibn Saud, and learned of a new Islamic
sect promoted by Sheikh Ibn al-Wahhabi. Niebuhr’s report is by far the
earliest reference to Wahhabism…”900
We see the first impact of Wahhabism on the western world in 1785, when
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were informed by Tripoli’s envoy to
London that “all nations which did not acknowledge the authority of the
Koran ‘were sinners, [and] that it was their right and duty to make war upon
whoever they could find and to make slaves of all they could take as
prisoners…’”901
Wahhabism became the official faith of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s under
King Abd-al Aziz, who then began to export it as a kind of “cultural
revolution” throughout the Muslim world.
However, as Alastair Crooke writes, “this ‘cultural revolution’ was no

docile reformism. It was a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab's Jacobin-like
hatred for the putrescence and deviationism that he perceived all about him --
hence his call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.
“The American author and journalist, Steven Coll, has written how this
austere and censorious disciple of the 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah,
Abd al-Wahhab, despised ‘the decorous, arty, tobacco smoking, hashish
imbibing, drum pounding Egyptian and Ottoman nobility who travelled
across Arabia to pray at Mecca.’
899 Simms, op. cit., p. 92.

900 Mark Ronan, “The Great Expedition”, History Today, June, 2017, p. 75.
901
Simms, op. cit., p. 136.
521
“In Abd al-Wahhab's view, these were not Muslims; they were imposters
masquerading as Muslims. Nor, indeed, did he find the behavior of local
Bedouin Arabs much better. They aggravated Abd al-Wahhab by their
honoring of saints, by their erecting of tombstones, and their "superstition"
(e.g. revering graves or places that were deemed particularly imbued with the
divine).
“All this behavior, Abd al-Wahhab denounced as bida -- forbidden by God.

Like Taymiyyah before him, Abd al-Wahhab believed that the period of the
Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the
"best of times"), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate (this,
essentially, is Salafism).
“Taymiyyah had declared war on Shi'ism, Sufism and Greek philosophy.

He spoke out, too against visiting the grave of the prophet and the celebration
of his birthday, declaring that all such behavior represented mere imitation of
the Christian worship of Jesus as God (i.e. idolatry). Abd al-Wahhab
assimilated all this earlier teaching, stating that "any doubt or hesitation" on
the part of a believer in respect to his or her acknowledging this particular
interpretation of Islam should ‘deprive a man of immunity of his property
and his life’.
“One of the main tenets of Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine has become the key
idea of takfir. Under the takfiri doctrine, Abd al-Wahhab and his followers
could deem fellow Muslims infidels should they engage in activities that in
any way could be said to encroach on the sovereignty of the absolute
Authority (that is, the King). Abd al-Wahhab denounced all Muslims who
honored the dead, saints, or angels. He held that such sentiments detracted
from the complete subservience one must feel towards God, and only God.
Wahhabi Islam thus bans any prayer to saints and dead loved ones,
pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, religious festivals celebrating
saints, the honoring of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and even
prohibits the use of gravestones when burying the dead.
"’Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives
and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote.’
“Abd al-Wahhab demanded conformity -- a conformity that was to be

demonstrated in physical and tangible ways. He argued that all Muslims
must individually pledge their allegiance to a single Muslim leader (a Caliph,
if there were one). Those who would not conform to this view should be
killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated,
he wrote. The list of apostates meriting death included the Shiite, Sufis and
other Muslim denominations, whom Abd al-Wahhab did not consider to be
Muslim at all…
“Abd al-Wahhab's advocacy of these ultra radical views inevitably led to
522
his expulsion from his own town -- and in 1741, after some wanderings, he
found refuge under the protection of Ibn Saud and his tribe. What Ibn Saud
perceived in Abd al-Wahhab's novel teaching was the means to overturn Arab
tradition and convention. It was a path to seizing power.
“’Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom
they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear.’
“Ibn Saud's clan, seizing on Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine, now could do what
they always did, which was raiding neighboring villages and robbing them of
their possessions. Only now they were doing it not within the ambit of Arab
tradition, but rather under the banner of jihad. Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab
also reintroduced the idea of martyrdom in the name of jihad, as it granted
those martyred immediate entry into paradise.
“In the beginning, they conquered a few local communities and imposed
their rule over them. (The conquered inhabitants were given a limited choice:
conversion to Wahhabism or death.) By 1790, the Alliance controlled most of
the Arabian Peninsula and repeatedly raided Medina, Syria and Iraq.
“Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom
they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the Allies
attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of
Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed,
including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet
Muhammad.
“A British official, Lieutenant Francis Warden, observing the situation at

the time, wrote: ‘They pillaged the whole of it [Karbala], and plundered the
Tomb of Hussein... slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of
peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants...’
“Osman Ibn Bishr Najdi, the historian of the first Saudi state, wrote that
Ibn Saud committed a massacre in Karbala in 1801. He proudly documented
that massacre saying, ‘we took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people
(as slaves), then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not
apologize for that and say: 'And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.’
“In 1803, Abdul Aziz then entered the Holy City of Mecca, which
surrendered under the impact of terror and panic (the same fate was to befall
Medina, too). Abd al-Wahhab's followers demolished historical monuments
and all the tombs and shrines in their midst. By the end, they had destroyed
centuries of Islamic architecture near the Grand Mosque.
“But in November of 1803, a Shiite assassin killed King Abdul Aziz (taking
revenge for the massacre at Karbala). His son, Saud bin Abd al Aziz,
succeeded him and continued the conquest of Arabia. Ottoman rulers,
however, could no longer just sit back and watch as their empire was
523
devoured piece by piece. In 1812, the Ottoman army, composed of Egyptians,
pushed the Alliance out from Medina, Jeddah and Mecca. In 1814, Saud bin
Abd al Aziz died of fever. His unfortunate son Abdullah bin Saud, however,
was taken by the Ottomans to Istanbul, where he was gruesomely executed (a
visitor to Istanbul reported seeing him having been humiliated in the streets
of Istanbul for three days, then hanged and beheaded, his severed head fired
from a canon, and his heart cut out and impaled on his body).
“In 1815, Wahhabi forces were crushed by the Egyptians (acting on the
Ottomans’ behalf) in a decisive battle. In 1818, the Ottomans captured and
destroyed the Wahhabi capital of Dariyah. The first Saudi state was no more.
The few remaining Wahhabis withdrew into the desert to regroup, and there
they remained, quiescent for most of the 19th century…”902
902 Crooke, “You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of Wahhabism in
Saudi Arabia”, The World Post, October 6, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-

crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html
524
62. EAST MEETS WEST: (3) JAPAN
In the midst of the enormous changes taking place in the West in the early
modern period, it is important to remember that ancient and great
civilizations of the Far East were continuing to flourish largely unaffected.
The Chinese “Middle Kingdom” always considered itself to be at the apex of
humanity, to which all other kingdoms owed tribute. The Japanese had a
similar conception.
Henry Kissinger writes: “Japan for centuries existed at the fringe of the
Chinese world, borrowing heavily from Sinic religion and culture. But unlike
most societies in the Chinese cultural sphere, it transformed the borrowed
forms into Japanese patterns and never conflated them with a hierarchical
obligation to China. Japan’s resilient position was at times a source of
consternation for the Chinese court. Other Asian peoples accepted the
premises and protocol of the tribute system – a symbolic subordination to the
Chinese Emperor by which Chinese protocol ordered the universe – labelling
their trade as ‘tribute’ to gain access to Chinese markets. They respected (at
least in their exchanges with the Chinese court) the Confucian concept of
international order as a familial hierarchy with China as the patriarch. Japan
was geographically close enough to understand this vocabulary intimately
and generally made tacit allowance for the Chinese world order as a regional
reality. In quest of trade or cultural exchange, Japanese missions followed
etiquette close enough to established forms that Chinese officials could
interpret it as evidence of Japan’s aspiration to membership in a common
hierarchy. Yet in a region carefully attuned to the gradations of status implied
in minute protocol decisions – such as the single word used to refer to a ruler,
the mode in which a formal letter was delivered, or the style of calendar date
on a formal document – Japan consistently refused to take up a formal role in
the Sinocentric tribute system. It hovered at the edge of the Chinese
hierarchical world order, periodically insisting on its equality and, at some
points, its own superiority.
“At the apex of Japanese society and its own view of world order stood the
Japanese Emperor, a figure conceived, like the Chinese Emperor, as the Son of
Heaven, an intermediary between the human and the divine. This title –
insistently displayed on Japanese diplomatic dispatches to the Chinese court –
was a direct challenge to the cosmology of the Chinese world order, which
posited China’s Emperor as the single pinnacle of human hierarchy. In
addition to this status (which carried a transcendent import above and
beyond what would have been claimed by any Holy Roman Emperor in
Europe), Japan’s traditional political philosophy posited another distinction,
that Japanese emperors were deities descended from the Sun Goddess, who
gave birth to the first Emperor and endowed his successors with an eternal
right to rule. According to the fourteenth-century ‘Records of the Legitimate
Succession of the Divine Sovereigns:
525
“’Japan is the divine country. The heavenly ancestor it was who first laid
its foundations, and the Sun Goddess left her descendants to reign over it
forever and ever. This is true only of our country, and nothing similar may be
found in foreign lands. That is why it is called the divine country.’”903
Nevertheless, from the twelfth century, while the emperor reigned, the
real ruler was the shogun – that is, the most powerful warrior lord. Thus W.H.
Spellman writes: "During the Kamakura period (1192-1333) when the
Minamoto clan dominated the scene from their military base on the Kanto
plain, the Japanese emperor was no more than a symbolic figurehead
performing ceremonial and religious functions while banditry and general
lawlessness became the norm throughout the islands; even Buddhist
monasteries employed armed bands for protection in a strife-torn society. By
the eleventh century, private rights had clearly superseded public obligations
and localism usurped the prerogatives of central authority. For the next 800
years, Japanese monarchs reigned but did not rule. The fact that outright
usurpation of the throne did not occur, however, is testimony to the strength
of the royal claim to hereditary priestly leadership within the island kingdom.
Indeed, unlike the Chinese model, where usurpation was interpreted as the
legitimate transfer of the Mandate of Heaven to a more worthy leader, in
Japan belief in the divine descent of the emperor and the importance of
unbroken succession guaranteed the survival of the monarchy throughout the
difficult medieval centuries."904
Kissinger continues: “Japan’s insular position allowed it wide latitude

about whether to participate in international affairs at all. For many
centuries, it remained on the outer boundaries of Asian affairs, cultivating
its military traditions through internal contests and admitting foreign trade
and culture at its discretion. At the close of the seventeenth century, Japan
attempted to recast its role with an abruptness and sweep of ambition that
its neighbors at first dismissed as implausible. The result was one of Asia’s
major military conflicts – whose regional legacies remain the subject of vivid
remembrance and dispute and whose lessons, if heeded, might have
changed America’s conduct in the twentieth-century Korean War.
“In 1590, the warrior Toyotomi Hideyoshi – having bested his rivals,
unified Japan, and brought more than a century of civil conflict to an close –
announced a grander vision: he would raise the world’s largest army, march
it up the Korean Peninsula, conquer China, and subdue the world. He
dispatched a letter to the Korean King announcing his intent to ‘proceed to
the country of the Great Ming and compel the people there to adopt our
customs and manners’ and inviting his assistance. After the King demurred
and warned him against the endeavor (citing an ‘inseparable relationship
between the Middle Kingdom and our kingdom’ and the Confucian
principle that ‘to invade another state is an act of which men of culture and

904 Spellman, Monarchies, London: Reaktion Press, 2001, p. 59.
526
intellectual attainments should feel ashamed’), Hideyoshi launched an
invasion of 160,000 men and roughly seven hundred ships. This massive
force overwhelmed initial defences and at first marched swiftly up the
peninsula. Its progress slowed as Korea’s Admiral Yi Sun-sin organized a
determined naval resistance, harrying Hideyoshi’s supply lines and
deflecting the invading armies to battles along the coast. When Japanese
forces reached Pyongyang, near the narrow northern neck of the peninsula
(and now North Korea’s capital), China intervened in force, unwilling to
allow its tribute state to be overrun. A Chinese expeditionary army
estimated between 40,000 and 100,000 strong crossed the Yalu River and
pushed Japanese forces back as far as Seoul. After five years of inconclusive
negotiations and devastating combat, Hideyoshi died, the invasion force
withdrew, and the status quo ante was restored. Those who argue that
history never repeats itself should ponder the comparability of China’s
resistance to Hideyoshi’s enterprise with that encountered by America in the
Korean War nearly four hundred years later.
“On the failure of this venture, Japan changed course, turning to ever-
increasing isolation. Under the ‘locked country’ policy lasting over two
centuries, Japan all but absented itself from participating in any world order.
Comprehensive state-to-state relations on conditions of strict diplomatic
equality existed only with Korea. Chinese traders were permitted to operate
in select locations, though no official Sino-Japanese relations existed because
no protocol could be worked out that satisfied both sides’ amour proper.
Foreign trade with European countries was restricted to a few specified
coastal cities; by 1673, all but the Dutch had been expelled, and they were
confined to a single artificial island off the port of Nagasaki…”905
There was another reason for the ‘locked country’ policy. Japan had
allowed Portuguese Jesuits to convert about 500,000 Japanese, including
many samurai. But the Christians proved themselves less than completely
obedient to the authorities. In 1614-15 they rebelled unsuccessfully in the
epic siege of Osaka castle. And in 1637 there was a major uprising of thirty
thousand peasants, most of them Christians, on the island of Kyushu. “The
revolt,” writes Andrew Marr, “was as much about taxation and hunger as
about religion, and ended after another epic siege, during which the
peasants and rebel samurai held off an army vastly greater than their own.
The Togukawa were only able to suppress them with the help of ships
belonging to [Protestant] Christians, the Dutch…
“Christianity was outlawed, though many Japanese Christians would die

rather than renounce their new faith.
“Foreigners were finally expelled. When the Portuguese came back in

1640 to protest, their mission was wiped out…”906
905
Kissinger, op. cit., pp. 182-184.
527
63. EAST MEETS WEST: (4) CHINA
The Chinese followed a similar course to Japan’s in her initial expansion

towards the West followed by withdrawal and self-isolation.
In the Middle Ages, China had suffered from a foreign Mongol dynasty
(the Yuan) and a massive population loss of more than 60 million as a result
of the Black Death. However, towards the end of the fourteenth century the
Ming emperors restored the unity of the Chinese world, and led the country
on a remarkable course of economic development and expansion. As John
Darwin writes: “Around 1400, it might have seemed to any well-informed
observer that China’s pre-eminence in the Old World was not only secure but
likely to grow stronger. Under Ming rule, China’s subordination to the
Mongols and their imperial ambitions all across Eurasia had been definitively
broken. Ming government reinforced the authority of the emperor over his
provincial officials. The use of eunuchs at the imperial court was designed to
strengthen the emperor against the intrigues of his scholar-gentry advisers (as
well as protect the virtue of his concubines). Great efforts were made to
improve the agrarian economy and its waterway network. Then, between
1405 and 1431, the emperors dispatched the eunuch admiral Cheng-ho on
seven remarkable voyages into the Indian Ocean to assert China’s maritime
power. Commanding fleets carrying over twenty thousand men, Cheng-ho
cruised as far as Jeddah in the Red Sea and the East African coast, and made
China’s presence felt in Sri Lanka, whose recalcitrant ruler was carried off to
Peking. Before the Europeans had gained the navigational know-how needed
to find their way into the South Atlantic (and back) China was poised to
assert its maritime supremacy in the eastern seas.”907
But then mysteriously the Ming Empire retreated within itself. The Great
Wall was completed, the great voyages westwards stopped, and contacts with
other cultures were cut short. “The greatest puzzle in Chinese history is why
the extraordinary dynamism that had created the largest and richest
commercial economy in the world seemed to dribble away after 1400. China’s
lead in technical ingenuity and in the social innovations required for a market
economy was lost. It was not China that accelerated towards, and through, an
industrial revolution, but the West…”908
And yet, even as late as 1750, it was not at all clear why the West should
have taken the lead over China in industry, rather than the other way round.
“Kiangnan (the Yangtze delta) was a great manufacturing region, producing
cotton cloth for ‘export’ to the rest of China. With a dense population (a
thousand people to the square mile) of over 30 million, numerous cities, and a
thick web of water communications connecting it with the middle and upper
Yangtze (a colossal hinterland), as well as the rest of China (via the Grand
907
Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise & Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000, London: Penguin, 2008,
pp. 43-44.
908
Darwin, op. cit., pp. 44-45.
528
Canal), Kiangnan was comparable to Europe’s commercial heartland. A
powerful case can be made that as a market economy it was as wealthy and
productive as North West Europe. Textile production was similar, while the
consumption of items like sugar and tea may well have been higher.
Technical ingenuity was widespread. Moreover, China benefited from laws
that made buying and selling land easier than in Europe, and from a labour
market in which serfdom had practically vanished (unlike in Europe). In an
orderly, well-regulated society, with low levels of taxation and a state that
actively promoted better practice (usually in agriculture), there seemed no
obvious reason why material progress along Adam Smith’s lines (what
economists call ‘Smithian growth’) should not continue indefinitely, on a scale
comparable with Europe…
“The question becomes: why did Kiangnan (and China) fail to match the
economic expansion of Europe, and check the emergence of a Europe-centred
world economy? The best answer we have is that it could not surmount the
classic constraints of pre-industrial growth. By the late eighteenth century it
faced steeply rising costs for food, fuel and raw materials. Increasing
population and expanding output competed for the produce of a more or less
fixed land area. The demand for food throttled the increase in raw cotton
production. Raw cotton prices probably doubled in the Yangtze delta between
1750 and 1800. The demand for fuel (in the form of wood) brought
deforestation and a degraded environment. The escape route from this trap
existed in theory, Kiangnan should have drawn its supplies from further
away. It should have cut the costs of production by mechanization, enlarging
its market and thus its source of supply. It should have turned to coal to meet
the need for fuel. In practice there was little chance for change along such
lines. It faced competition from many inland centres where food and raw
materials were cheaper, and which could also exploit China’s well-developed
system of waterway transport. The very perfection of China’s commercial
economy allowed new producers to enter the market with comparative ease
at the same technological level. Under these conditions, mechanization – even
if technologically practical – might have been stymied at birth. And, though
China had coal, it was far from Kiangnan and could not be transported there
cheaply. Thus, for China as a whole, both the incentive and the means to take
the industrial ‘high road’ were meagre or absent.
“The most developed parts of Europe did not face these constraints…”909
According to Niall Ferguson, another important reason for China’s

backwardness was financial. “For one thing, the unitary character of the
Empire precluded that fiscal competition which proved such a driver of
financial innovation in Renaissance Europe and subsequently. For another,
the ease with which the Empire could finance its deficits by printing money
discouraged the emergence of European-style capital markets. Coinage, too,
was more readily available than in Europe because of China’s trade surplus
909
Darwin, op. cit., pp. 192, 193-194.
529
with the West. In short, the Middle Kingdom had far fewer incentives to
develop commercial bills, bonds and equities...”910
But these economic factors, though important, were not the decisive ones.
Still more important were cultural and institutional factors, and in particular
the changes induced in European thinking by the Renaissance, the
Reformation and the Enlightenment. Chinese Confucianism emphasised
order and hierarchy, and was therefore directly contrary to the Western
emphasis on freedom, individualism and innovation. In accordance with this
general difference, Ferguson argues that Early Modern Europe had six “killer
apps”, as he calls them, that gave her a vital edge over the Oriental empires:
competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society and the work
ethic.911
But probably more important than any of these was Europe’s sheer,
overweening self-confidence or pride. Of course, the Orientals were not
renowned for their humility, either. But the Westerners were exceptional in
the aggressiveness with which they displayed their arrogance. And they had
a kind of missionary zeal to export their civilization that the Chinese never
had.
Darwin continues: “It was in this period that Europeans first advanced the
claim that their civilization and culture were superior to all others – not
theologically (that was old hat) but intellectually and materially. Whether this
claim was true need not detain us. Much more important was the Europeans’
willingness to act as if it were. This was shown in their eagerness to collect
and categorize the knowledge they gleaned from other parts of the world. It
was revealed in the confidence with which they fitted this knowledge into a
structure of thought with themselves at the centre. The intellectual annexation
of non-European Eurasia preceded the imposition of a physical dominance. It
was expressed in the ambition by the end of our period (earlier if we include
the French invasion of Egypt) to ‘remake’ parts of Afro-Asia as the ‘New
World’ had been ‘made’. And it ultimately rested on the extraordinary
conviction that Europe alone could progress through history, leaving the rest
of the world in a ‘stationary state’ awaiting Europe’s Promethean touch….
“In China between the 1750s and 1820s there was to be no great change in
cultural direction, no drastic reappraisal of China’s place in the larger world,
certainly no repudiation of the cultural past. Nor was there any obvious
reason why there should have been. This was a wealthy, successful and
sophisticated gentry society. The Chi’ien-lung (Qianlong) reign (1735-1796)
was one of political stability, prosperity and (in China proper) peace. In the
slogan of the day, it was the ‘Flourishing Age’. Their conquests in Inner Asia,
the final victory over the turbulent steppe, crowned the Ch’ing’s achievement
in pacifying, reunifying, consolidating and securing the Chinese realm. The
910 Ferguson, Civilization, London: Penguin, 2012, p. 286.

911 Ferguson, op. cit., p. 12.
530
perpetual threat of dynastic collapse in the face of barbarian attack – the great
constant in China’s long history as a unified state – had been lifted at last:
confirmation, were it needed, of China’s cultural and technological
superiority where it mattered most. It was, after all, a triumph which, in
geographical scale and geopolitical importance (if not economic value)
matched Europe’s in America.
“There were of course social and cultural stresses. Military failures against
Burma and Vietnam; symptoms of growing bureaucratic corruption; popular
millenarian uprisings like the White Lotus movement: all hinted as the onset
of dynastic decline, the gradual decay of the ‘mandate of heaven’ on which
dynastic legitimacy was thought to depend. But the Confucian tradition
remained immensely strong. Its central assumption was that social welfare
was maximized under the rule of scholar-bureaucrats steeped in the
paternalist and hierarchical teachings of K’ung-fu-tzu. The Confucian
synthesis, with its Taoist elements (which taught the need for material
simplicity and harmony with the natural world), faced no significant
intellectual challenge. Religion in China played a role quite different from that
of its counterpart in Europe. While ‘pure’ Taoism had some intellectual
influence, and its mystical beliefs attracted a popular following, it had no
public status, and was regarded with suspicion by the Confucian bureaucracy.
Salvationist beliefs were officially frowned upon. Buddhism was followed
mainly in Tibet and Mongolia. The emperors were careful to show it respect,
as a concession to the Buddhist elites co-opted into their system of overrule.
In China proper it was marginalized. Buddhist monks, like Taoist priests,
were seen as disruptive and troublesome.
“The scholar-bureaucracy, and the educated gentry class from which it was
drawn, thus faced no competition from an organized priesthood. No
challenge was made from within the social elite by the devotees of religious
enthusiasm. Nor was the bureaucrats’ classical learning threatened by new
forms of ‘scientific’ knowledge. For reasons that historians have debated at
length, the tradition of scientific experimentation had faded away, perhaps as
early as 1400. Part of the reason may lie in the striking absence in Confucian
thought of the ‘celestial lawgiver’ – a god who had prescribed the laws of
nature. In Europe, belief in such a providential figure, and the quest for ‘his’
purposes and grand design, had been a (perhaps the) central motive for
scientific inquiry. But the fundamental assumption that the universe was
governed by a coherent system of physical laws that could be verified
empirically was lacking in China. Even the scholarly kaozheng movement in
the eighteenth century, which stressed the importance of collecting empirical
data across a range of scientific and technical fields, rejected ‘the notion of a
lawful, uniform and mathematically predictable universe’. It should be seen
instead as part of the long tradition of critique and commentary upon
‘classical’ knowledge, not an attack upon its assumptions…”912
912
531
This is an important insight. We have seen how the scientific revolution,
which had such an important impact on the Enlightenment, was pioneered by
highly religious scientists, like Newton, who believed that in describing the
laws of nature they were uncovering a little of the Mind of God. This
assumption proceeded from the fundamental Christian belief that man is
made in the image of God, and that his logical and reasoning powers are also
in the image of the “Logos”, or Word and Wisdom of God. However, this
assumption was lacking in Chinese thought, which stunted experimentation
and scientific research. And this fact, combined with economic factors that we
have mentioned, meant that China stagnated while Europe moved forward...
However, this is not enough to explain the sheer aggressiveness of the

European expansion into the rest of the world, which was so destructive that
the traditional societies of the East had the choice: either to become part of
that expansion and that civilization, or be destroyed by it. Thus Japan chose to
join – and prospered. China, however, resisted, which led to the collapse of
her imperial system at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Why was this new expansion of Christianity so much more violent and
harmful than previous such periods? The answer lies in the fact that the
Enlightenment, and, before it, Renaissance humanism and Protestant
rationalism, had introduced a kind of virus into European Christianity that in
fact turned it into anti-Christianity. Yes, the Christian belief in the One
Creator of heaven and earth was the vital stimulus to modern science. But the
“reasonable rationalism” of Christian scientists like Newton, who believed in
revelation as well as reason, and in humbling the human mind before the
Original Mind, was undermined by the “irrational rationalism” of the
philosophers, who subjected everything to corrosive doubt, raising their own
feeble reason above the whole of reality, and thereby undermining not only
Christianity but even the possibility of any kind of truly rational thought. We
have seen where this irrational rationalism led in the case of the philosophy of
David Hume, and with what difficulty Immanuel Kant constructed a very
limited breakwater against its ravages. It is not surprising that it should also
have ravaged other traditional societies such as the Chinese, destroying, as
Darwin writes, “the scholastic monopoly of ‘classical’ knowledge that
remained so immensely powerful in Islamic and Confucian culture.”913
Another reason why Europe’s impact on the traditional societies of the East
was so destructive lay in the fact that the Europeans had acquired the habit of
destroying in North and South America. “It was in the Americas that the
Europeans discovered their capacity to impose radical change upon other
societies – through enslavement, expropriation, conversion, migration and
economic exploitation. It was there that they saw the devastating effects that
one culture or people could have on another – an impact without parallel
elsewhere in Eurasia. It was there, above all, that they found peoples who
were living in what seemed an earlier age, following modes of life that,
913
Darwin, op. cit., p. 208.
532
conjecture suggested, might once have prevailed in Europe. ‘In the beginning,’
said Locke, ‘all the world was America’. The result was a great backward
extension of the historical past (far beyond the limits of biblical creation) and
a new mode of speculative inquiry into the stages through which European
society must have passed to reach its contemporary form.
”America revolutionized the European sense of time. It encouraged

Europeans to devise a historical framework into which they could fit the
states and peoples of the rest of the world. It helped to promote a conjectural
history of progress in which Europe had reached the highest stage. In the later
eighteenth century this sense of Europe’s premier place in a global order was
reinforced by three hugely influential ideas. The first was the virtue of
commerce as a civilizing agent, on which Hume and the writers of the
Scottish Enlightenment insisted. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith
pressed the case for commercial freedom as the surest route to material
progress, and the idea of unfettered trade as a means to global harmony was
taken up by Immanuel Kant in his Perpetual Peace (1798). It was a short step to
argue (like the Victorian free-traders) that Europe should lead the rest of the
world into universal free trade, and to see the world itself as a vast single
market. The second was the extraordinary confidence displayed by
Enlightenment thinkers that human institutions and even human behaviour
could be reconstructed along ‘rational’ lines. No one carried this further than
the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, whose utilitarian calculus (the
greatest happiness for the greatest number) supplied a measure against which
laws and institutions anywhere in the world could be tested. Armed with the
calculus, the enlightened legislator (from Europe) could frame better laws
than benighted locals mired in superstition and antiquated prejudices. To his
follower James Mill, the history of India revealed that ‘the manners,
institutions and attainments of the Hindus have been stationary for many
years’ (since about 300 BC he suggested), a savage indictment he extended to
China. Europe’s Promethean touch offered the only hope for a resumption of
progress. The third proposition was just as startling. It was the growing
conviction by the end of the century that there rested on the Christian
societies of Europe an urgent obligation to carry their gospel throughout the
world. What was especially significant was the force of this evangelizing urge
in Protestant Britain, the richest and strongest of the European maritime states,
and by 1815 the dominant sea power throughout Southern Asia.
“The second half of the eighteenth century thus saw the crystallization of a
new and remarkable view of Europe’s place in the world. The sense of the
limits and peculiarities of European civilization characteristic of the Age of
Equilibrium had been replaced by a conviction that Europe’s beliefs and
institutions had a universal validity. This confident claim drew strength from
the expansion of dominion, trade and influence, strikingly symbolized in the
conquest of India. It rested on the conviction that European thought had
explained the stages of history, and that European science could provide –
systematically – all the data that were needed to understand the globe as a
533
whole. The vital ingredients for a new mentality of global preponderance had
now been assembled…”914
914
534
64. ROUSSEAU: PROPHET OF THE REVOLUTION
One of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment was Jean-Jacques

Rousseau (1712-1778), a man who also prefigured the Romantic Counter-
Enlightenment. On the one hand, he was a social contract theorist, a man of
reason and science. On the other hand, he was a prophet of the Romantic Will
in its collective, national form – what he called the General Will.
We have seen that while the French Enlightenment philosophers were

admirers of English liberalism, they still believed in relatively unfettered state
power concentrated in the person of the monarch. That way, they believed,
the light of reason and reasonableness would spread most effectively
downward and outward to the rest of the population. Thus their outlook was
still essentially aristocratic; for all their love of freedom, they still believed in
restraint and good manners, hierarchy and privilege. Perhaps their Catholic
education had something to do with it. Certainly, however much they railed
against the despotism of the Catholic Church, they were still deeply imbued
with the Catholic ideals of order and hierarchy.
However, Rousseau was different; he believed in power coming from

below rather than above. Perhaps his Swiss Calvinist upbringing had
something to do with that; for, as he wrote, “I was born a citizen of a free
State, and a member of the Sovereign [i.e. the Conseil Général] of Geneva,
which was considered sovereign by some”.915 Certainly, the mutual hatred
between Voltaire and Rousseau reflected to some degree the differences
between the (lapsed) Catholic and the (lapsed) Calvinist, between the city fop
and the peasant countryman 916 , between the civilized reformer and the
uncouth revolutionary.
Rousseau set out to inquire “if, in the civil order, there can be any sure and
legitimate rule of administration”.917 He quickly rejected Filmer’s patriarchal
justification of monarchy based on the institution of the family: “The most
ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even
so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for
their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved.
The children, released from the obedience they owed, and the father released
from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they
remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the
family itself is then maintained only by convention… The family then may be
called the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father,
and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate
their liberty only to their own advantage.”918
915 Rousseau, J.J. The Social Contract, book I, introduction; in The Social Contract and Discourses,
London: Penguin, 1993, p. 181.

917 Rousseau, op. cit., I, introduction, p. 181.
918 Rousseau, op. cit., I, 2, p. 182.
535
This argument is not convincing. First, a child is neither free at birth, nor
equal to his father. Secondly, the bond between the father and the son
continues to be natural and indissoluble even after the child has grown up.919
Next, Rousseau disposes of the argument that might is right. “To yield to
force is an act of necessity, not of will – at the most, an act of prudence. In
what sense can it be a duty?… What kind of right is that which perishes when
force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we
ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so…
Obey the powers that be. If this means yield to force, it is a good precept, but
superfluous: I can answer for its never being violated. All power comes from
God, I admit; but so does all sickness: does that mean that we are forbidden to
call in the doctor?… Let us then admit that force does not create right, and
that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.
“Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no
right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate
authority among men.”920
Here we find the social contract. But Rousseau quickly disposes of the form
of contract proposed by Hobbes, namely, that men originally contracted to
alienate their liberty to a king. This is an illegitimate argument, says Rousseau,
because: (a) it is madness for a whole people to place itself in slavery to a king,
“and madness creates no right”; (b) the only possible advantage would be a
certain tranquillity, “but tranquillity is found also in dungeons; but is that
enough to make them desirable” 921; and (c) “if each man could alienate
himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born men and free.”
In any case, “to renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender

the rights of humanity and even its duties… Such a renunciation is
incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to
remove all morality from his acts… so, from whatever aspect we regard the
question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being illegitimate,
but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right
contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally
919 Rousseau has another, more facetious argument against Filmer: “I have said nothing of
King Adam, or Emperor Noah, father of the three great monarchs who shared out the
universe, like the children of Saturn, whom some scholars have recognized in them. I trust to
getting thanks for my moderation; for, being a direct descendant of one of these princes,
perhaps of the eldest branch, how do I know that a verification of titles might not leave me
the legitimate king of the human race? In any case, there can be no doubt that Adam was
sovereign of the world, as Robinson Crusoe was of his island, as long as he was its only
inhabitant; and this empire had the advantage that the monarch, safe on his throne, had no
rebellions, wars, or conspirators to fear” (op. cit., I, 2, pp. 183-184).
920 Rousseau, op. cit., I, 3, 4; pp. 184, 185.
921 By contrast, the French Prime Minister after the Restoration, François Guizot, placed “the
great tranquillity” at the core of his vision of the good society. See George L. Mosse, The
Culture of Western Europe, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1988, p. 144.
536
foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: ‘I make with you a
convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep
it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.’”922
We may interrupt Rousseau at this point to note that his concept of

freedom, being “positive” rather than “negative”, led to very different
consequences from that of the English empiricists or French philosophes.
Freedom was for Rousseau, as for Kant, the categorical imperative, and the
foundation of all morality. “Both Rousseau and Kant,” writes Norman
Hampson, “aspired to regenerate humanity by the free action of the self-
disciplined individual conscience”. Rousseau’s concept of freedom “rested,
not on any logical demonstration, but on each man’s immediate recognition of
the moral imperative of his own conscience. ‘I hear much argument against
man’s freedom and I despise such sophistry. One of these arguers [Helvétius?]
can prove to me as much as he likes that I am not free; inner feeling, more
powerful than all his arguments, refutes them all the time.’”923
Rousseau’s conscience was to him both Pope and Church: “Whatever I feel
to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; the best of all casuists is
the conscience… Reason deceives us only too often and we have earned all
too well the right to reject it, but conscience never deceives… Conscience,
conscience, divine instinct, immortal and heavenly voice, sure guide to men
who, ignorant and blinkered, are still intelligent and free; infallible judge of
good and ill who shapes men in the image of God, it is you who form the
excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions; without you, I feel
nothing within that raises me above the beasts, nothing but the melancholy
privilege of straying from error to error, relying on an understanding without
rule and a reason without principle.”924
Now conscience, according to Rousseau, was likely to be stifled by too

much education and sophistication. So he went back to the idea of the state of
nature as expounded in Hobbes and Locke, but invested it with the optimistic,
revolutionary spirit of the Levellers and Diggers. Whereas Hobbes and Locke
considered the state of nature as an anarchic condition which civilization as
founded on the social contract transcended and immeasurably improved on,
for Rousseau the state of nature was “the noble savage”, who, as the term
implied, had many good qualities.925 Indeed, man in the original state of
nature was in many ways better and happier than man as civilized through
the social contract. In particular, he was freer and more equal. It was the
922 Rousseau, op. cit., I, 4; pp. 186, 189.

923 Hampson, The First European Revolution, 1776-1815, London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, pp.
181, 32.
924 Rousseau, in Hampson, op. cit., pp. 32, 34.
925 The term “noble savage” first appears in 1672 in John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada
(Act 1, scene 1):

I am as free as Nature first made man
‘Ere the base Laws of servitude began
When wild in woods the noble Savage ran.
537
institutions of civilization that destroyed man’s original innocence and
freedom. As Rousseau famously thundered: “Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains!”926
This idea did not stand the test of experience. “Among those who believed
in Rousseau’s ideas,” writes Fr. Alexey Young, “was the French painter
Gaughin (1848-1903). So intent was his commitment that he abandoned his
family and went to Tahiti to find Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’. But, to his great
dismay, he discovered that Rousseau’s conception was an illusion. ‘Primitive’
man could be just as cruel, immoral and heartless as men under the influence
of the civilized world. Seeing this, Gaughin was driven to despair…”927
Since man is born free, according to Rousseau, and his conscience is

infallible, the common man is fully equal as a moral agent to his educated
social superiors and should be entrusted with full political power. Thus the
social contract should be rewritten to keep sovereignty with the ruled rather
than the rulers. For Hobbes, the people had transferred sovereignty
irrevocably to their rulers; for Locke, the transfer was more conditional, but
revocable only in exceptional circumstances. For Rousseau, sovereignty was
never really transferred from the people.
Rousseau rejected the idea that the people could have “representatives”
who exerted sovereignty in their name. “Sovereignty cannot be represented,
for the same reason that it cannot be alienated… the people’s deputies are not,
and could not be, its representatives; they are merely its agents; and they
cannot decide anything finally. Any law which the people has not ratified in
person is void; it is not law at all. The English people believes itself to be free;
it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of
Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is
nothing.”928 Thus representative government is “elective autocracy”.
Essentially Rousseau wanted to abolish the distinction between rulers and

ruled, to give everyone power through direct democracy. The citizen can
exercise this power only if he himself makes every decision affecting himself.
But the participation of all the citizens in every decision is possible only in a
small city-state like Classical Athens, not in modern states. Thus Rousseau
represents a more mystical version of the direct democratism of the Greek
philosophers, echoing Aristotle’s Politics: “If liberty and equality, as is thought
by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained
when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.” But the
emphasis now is on equality rather than liberty…
Now there was a modern state that seemed to promise the kind of mystical,
direct democracy that Rousseau pined for – Corsica, which in 1755 threw off
926 Rousseau, op. cit., I, 1; p. 181.

927 Young, The Great Divide, Richfield Springs, N.Y.: Nikodemos, 1989, p. 21.
928 Rousseau, op. cit., III, 15; p. 266.
538
the centuries-old yoke of Genoa and created its own constitution. “In Corsica,”
writes Adam Zamoyski, “Rousseau believed he had found a society untainted
by the original sin of civilization. In his Project de constitution pour la Corse,
written in 1765, he suggested ways of keeping it so. ‘I do not want to give you
artificial and systematic laws, invented by man; only to bring you back under
the unique laws of nature and order, which command to the heart and do not
tyrannize the free will,’ he cajoled them. But the enterprise demanded an act
of will, summed up in the oath to be taken simultaneously by the whole
nation: ‘In the name of Almighty God and on the Holy Gospels, by this
irrevocable and sacred oath I unite myself in body, in goods, in will and in my
whole potential to the Corsican Nation, in such a way that I myself and
everything that belongs to me shall belong to it without redemption. I swear
to live and to die for it, to observe all its laws and to obey its legitimate rulers
and magistrates in everything that is in conformity with the law.’”929
Now one of the problems of democracy lies in the transition from the
multiple wills of the individual citizens to the single will of the state: how was
this transition to be effected without violating the will of the individual?
Rousseau recognised this problem: “The problem is to find a form of
association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the
person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself
with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This is the
fundamental problem of which the social contract provides the solution.”930
This is a major, indeed insuperable problem for most liberal theorists

insofar as they recognize that individuals have different interests and wills. So
any single decision expressing the collective will of the state will inevitably be
in the interests of some and not of others. For Rousseau, however, it is less of
a problem insofar as he holds a more optimistic view of human nature. For
him, since each individual has an infallible conscience, if he finds and
expresses that infallible conscience, his will will be found to coincide with the
will of every other individual. This general will will then express the will of
every citizen individually while being common to all. “Each of us comes
together to place his person and all his power under the supreme direction of
the general will, and we in a body admit each member as an indivisible part
of the whole. This act of association produces a moral and collective entity…
As for the associates, they all take on the name of the people when they
participate in the sovereign authority, and call themselves specifically citizens
and subjects when they are placed under the laws of the State.”931
On which Voltaire commented: “All that is wrong. I am certainly not

prepared to hand myself over to my fellow-citizens unreservedly. I am not
going to give them the power to kill me and rob me by majority vote…”
929 Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, pp. 22-23.

930 Rousseau, op. cit., I, 6, p. 191.
931 Rousseau, op. cit., I, 6.
539
The transition from Voltaire to Rousseau, from the worship of the
individual will to the collective, or general will of mankind, is also the
transition from liberal humanism to socialist humanism. As Yuval Noah Harari
writes, “Socialists believe that ‘humanity’ is collective rather than
individualistic. They hold as sacred not the inner voice of each individual, but
the species Homo Sapiens as a whole. Whereas liberal humanism seeks as
much freedom as possible for individual humans, socialist humanism seeks
equality between all humans. According to socialists, inequality is the worst
blasphemy against the sanctity of humanity, because it privileges qualities of
humans over their universal essence. For example, when the rich are
privileged over the poor, it means that we value money more than the
universal essence of all humans, which is the same for rich and poor alike.”932
Rousseau’s general will, being a kind of universal essence, is not the will of
the majority; for that will is by definition not the will of the minority, and the
general will must embrace all. Nor, more surprisingly, is it the will of all
when all agree; for the will of all is sometimes wrong, whereas the general
will is always right. “The general will is always upright and always tends to
the public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the
people always have the same rectitude. Our will is always for our own good,
but we do not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is
often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.
There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general
will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes
private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills:
but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one
another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences.”933
The general will is a mysterious entity which reveals itself in certain special
conditions: “If, when the people, being furnished with adequate information,
held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another,
the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will,
and the decision would always be good.”934 In other words, when the self-
interest of each citizen is allowed to express itself in an unforced manner,
without external pressures, a certain highest common denominator of self-
interest, what Russell calls “the largest collective satisfaction of self-interest
possible to the community”935, reveals itself.
Thus the general will is the wholly infallible revealed truth and morality of the
secular religion of the revolution.
932 Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Mankind, London: Vintage, 2011, p. 258.
933 Rousseau, op. cit., II, 3, p. 203.
934 Rousseau, op. cit., II, 3, p. 203.
540
What are the conditions for the appearance of the general will? The
fundamental condition is true equality among the citizenry, especially
economic equality. For where there is no equality, the self-interest of some
carries greater weight than the self-interest of others. This is another major
difference between Rousseau and the English and French liberals. They did
not seek to destroy property and privilege, but only to prevent despotism;
whereas he is a much more thorough-going egalitarian.
This first condition is linked to a second condition, which is the absence of

“partial associations” or parties. For the wills of partial associations, which
come together as expressing some common economic or class interest, conflict
with the will of the community as a whole. For “when intrigues arise, and
partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association, the will
of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members, while
it remains particular in relation to the State: it may then be said that there are
no longer as many votes as there are men, but only as many as there are
associations. The differences become less numerous and give a less general
result. Lastly, when one of these associations is so great as to prevail over all
the rest, the result is no longer a sum of small differences, but a single
difference; in this case there is no longer a general will, and the opinion which
prevails is purely particular. It is therefore essential, if the general will is to be
able to make itself known, that there should be no partial society in the state
and that each citizen should express only his own opinion.” 936 A third
condition (here Rousseau harks back again to Athens) is that the citizen body
should consist only of men. For women, according to Rousseau, are swayed
by “immoderate passions” and require men to protect and guide them.
Such a system appears at first sight libertarian and egalitarian (except in

regard to women). Unfortunately, however, the other side of its coin is that
when the general will has been revealed – and in practice this means when
the will of the majority has been determined, for “the votes of the greatest
number always bind the rest”, – there is no room for dissent. For in joining
the social contract, each associate alienates himself, “together with all his
rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself
absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has
any interest in making them burdensome to others. Moreover, the alienation
being without reserve, the unions is as perfect as it can be, and no associate
has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as
there would be no common superior to decided between them and the public,
each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of
nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become
inoperative or tyrannical. Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives
himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over which he does not acquire
936 Rousseau, op. cit., II, 3, pp. 203-204.
541
the same right as he yields over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything
he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has…”937
“In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it
tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that
whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the
whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be
free…”938
Forced to be free – here the totalitarian potentialities of Rousseau’s concept of

positive freedom become painfully clear. Thus of all the eighteenth-century
philosophers, Rousseau is the real prophet of the revolution. The others,
especially Voltaire, paved the way for it, but it was Rousseau who gave it its
justification, its metaphysical, quasi-mystical first principle.
But the most striking characteristic of this principle, considering it was

proclaimed in “the Age of Reason”, was its irrationality. For the general will
was not to be deduced or induced by any logical or empirical reasoning, nor
identified with any specific empirical phenomenon or phenomena. It was not
the concrete will of any particular man, or collection of men, but a quasi-
mystical entity that welled up within a particular society and propelled it
towards truth and righteousness.
This accorded with the anti-rational, passionate nature of the whole of

Rousseau’s life and work. As Hume said of him: “He has only felt during the
whole course of his life.”939 Thus while the other philosophers of the Age of
Reason believed, or did not believe, in God or the soul or the Divine Right of
kings, because they had reasons for their belief or unbelief, for Rousseau, on
the other hand, religion was just a feeling; and as befitted the prophet of the
coming Age of Unreason, he believed or disbelieved for no reason whatsoever.
So religious belief, or the lack of it, was not something that could be
objectively established or argued about.
True, in his ideal political structure, Rousseau insisted that his subjects
should believe in a “civil religion” that combined belief in “the existence of an
omnipotent, benevolent divinity that foresees and provides; the life to come;
the happiness of the just; the punishment of sinners; the sanctity of the social
contract and the law”. 940 If any citizen accepted these beliefs, but then
“behaved as if he did not believe in them”, the punishment was death.941
However, the only article of this faith he argued for was the social contract…
For, As Barzun writes: “Rousseau reminds the reader that two-thirds of
mankind are neither Christians nor Jews, nor Mohammedans, from which it
937 Rousseau, op. cit., I, 6; pp. 191-192.

938 Rousseau, op. cit., I, 7; p. 195. More gently put, the people must be trained “to bear with
docility the yoke of public happiness”.
940 Rousseau, op. cit., p. 286; quoted in Gascoigne, op. cit., p. 214.
542
follows that God cannot be the exclusive possession of any sect or people; all
their ideas as to His demands and His judgements are imaginings. He asks
only that we love Him and pursue the good. All else we know nothing about.
That there should be quarrels and bloodshed about what we can never know
is the greatest impiety.”942
Superficially, this irrationalist attitude seems like that of Pascal, who said:
“The heart has its reasons, of which reason is ignorant”. But Pascal, while
pointing to the limits of reason, did not abandon reason; he sought the truth
with every fibre of his being. Rousseau, on the other hand, in both his life and
his work, appeared quite deliberately to abandon reason and surrender
himself to irrational forces. In these forces he saw freedom and nobility, while
others saw only slavery to the basest instincts. The revolution would soon
allow the world to judge the truth for itself...
Eighteenth-century ideas about society, wrote L.A. Tikhomirov, though

pagan and materialist in essence, can nevertheless not be understood except
in the context of the Christian society that Western Europe still was – or, more
precisely, “a Christian society, but one that has renounced Christ”, to use
Aksakov’s phrase. This is especially true of the idea of the general will. Thus
“in the very concept of the 18th century about society there is a clearly
materialised reminiscence of the Church. From the Church was copied the
idea of society as a certain collectivity defined exclusively by the spiritual
nature of man. The cosmopolitanism of the new society, its mysterious
people’s will, which as it were saturates it completely, which in some
incomprehensible way rules all while remaining infallible in all its private
mistakes, - all these are echoes of the Christian Church. They are in all points
‘the Kingdom that is not of this world’, which is squeezed into, without being
contained in, the bounds precisely of ‘this world’…
“Contemporary society, torn apart by this basic contradiction, is not

conscious of it intellectually and even denies it. The materialist understanding
of life is so strongly rooted that people for the most part are simply incapable
of seriously paying attention to the action of the spiritual element. ‘What
contradiction is here?’ they say. ‘In truth, the valuable element of Christianity
is constituted by its moral concepts and its lofty conception of personality.
And it is this that the new era has held onto. It has cast out only the outdated,
mystical element of Christianity. Isn’t that natural? Isn’t that how all progress
comes about in the world, holding on to everything valuable from the past
and throwing out the unnecessary old rags?’ In this, however, the present age
is mistaken. It doesn’t understand that it is impossible to throw out the
mystical principles from Christianity without thereby destroying the social
significance of the personality created by it. Historically Christian moral
concepts have to the highest degree exerted a positive influence on earthly,
543
social life. However this takes place only when the Christian remains
completely a Christian, that is, when he lives not for this earthly life, and does
not seek the realisation of his ideals in this life, does not put his soul into it. It
turns out completely differently if the Christian remains without guidance by
Divine authority, without a spiritual life on earth and without this spiritual
activity of his having its final ends beyond the grave. Then he remains with
infinite demands before an extremely finite world, which is unable to satisfy
them. He remains without discipline, because he knows nothing in the world
higher than his own personality, and he bows before nothing if for him there
is no God. He is not capable of venerating society as a material phenomenon,
nor bow down even before a majority of personalities like his, because from
their sum there still emerges no personality more lofty than his own. The lot
and social role of such a person is extremely unhappy and harmful. He is
either an eternal denier of real social life, or he will seek to satisfy his strivings
for infinity in infinite pleasures, infinite love of honour, in a striving for the
grandiose which so characterises the sick 18th and 19th centuries. The
Christian without God is completely reminiscent of Satan. Not in vain did the
image of unrestrained pride so seduce the poets of the 18th century. We all –
believers or non-believers in God – are so created by Him, so incapable of
ripping out of ourselves the Divine fire planted by Him, that we involuntarily
love this spiritual, immeasurably lofty personality. But let us look with the
cold attention of reason. If we need only to construct well our earthly, social
life, if nothing else exists, then why call those qualities and strivings lofty and
elevated which from an earthly point of view are only fantastic, unhealthy,
having nothing in common with earthly reality? These are the qualities of an
abnormal person. He is useful, they will say, for his eternal disquietude, his
striving for something different, something other than that which is. But this
striving would be useful only if his ideals were basically real. But the
disquietude of the Christian deprived of God knocks the world out of the
status quo only in order to drag it every time towards the materially
impossible.
“They err who see in the 18th and 19th centuries the regeneration of
ancient ideas of the State. The pagan was practical. His ideals were not
complicated by Christian strivings for the absolute. His society could develop
calmly. But the lot of a society that is Christian in its moral type of personality,
but has renounced Christ in the application of its moral forces, according to
the just expression of A.S. Aksakov, will be reduced to eternal revolution.
“This is what the 18th century’s attempt to create a new society also came
to. Philosophy succeeded in postulating an ideal of society such as a
personality forged by eighteen centuries of Christian influence could agree to
bow down to. But what was this society? A pure mirage. It was constructed
not on the real laws and foundations of social life, but on fictions logically
deduced from the spiritual nature of man. Immediately they tried to construct
such a society, it turned out that the undertaking was senseless. True, they
did succeed in destroying the old historical order and creating a new one. But
how? It turned out that this new society lives and is maintained in existence
544
only because it does not realise its illusory bases, but acts in spite of them and
only reproduces in a new form the bases of the old society.
“It is worth comparing the factual foundations of the liberal-democratic

order with those which are ascribed to it by its political philosophy. The most
complete contradiction!
“Rousseau, of course, was fantasising when he spoke of the people’s will as

supposedly one and always wants only the good and never goes wrong. But
one must not forget that he was not speaking of that people’s will which our
deputies, voters and journalists talk about. Rousseau himself grew up in a
republic and he did not fall into such traps. He carefully qualified himself,
saying that ‘there is often a difference between the will of all (volonté de tous)
and the general will (volonté générale).
“Rousseau sincerely despised the will of all, on which our liberal

democratism is raised. Order and administration are perfect, he taught, only
when they are defined by the general will, and not by the egoistic, easily
frightened and bribed will of all. For the creation of the new, perfect society it
is necessary to attain the discovery and activity precisely of the general will.
“But how are we to attain to it? Here Rousseau is again in radical

contradiction with the practice of his disciples. He demands first of all the
annihilation of private circles and parties. ‘For the correct expression of the
general will it is necessary that there should be no private societies in the State
and that every citizen should express only his own personal opinion’ (n’opine
que d’après lui). Only in this case does one receive a certain sediment of general
will from the multitude of individual deviations and the conversation always
turns out well. With the appearance of parties everything is confused, and the
citizen no longer expresses his own will, but the will of a given circle. When
such individual interests begin to be felt and ‘small societies (circles, parties)
begin to exert influence on the large (the State), the general will is no longer
expressed by the will of all’. Rousseau therefore demands the annihilation of
parties or at least their numerical weakening. As the most extreme condition,
already unquestionably necessary, it is necessary that there should exist no
party which would be noticeably stronger than the rest. If even this is not
attained, if ‘one of these associations (parties) is so great as to dominate all the
others, then the general will no longer exists and the only opinion that is
realisable is the individual opinion.’
“In other words, democracy, the rule of the people’s will, no longer exists.
“Just as decisively and insistently does Rousseau demonstrate that the

people’s will is not expressed by any representation. As a sincere and logical
democrat, he simply hates representation, he cannot denounce it enough.
When the citizens are corrupted, he says, they establish a standing army so as
to enslave society, and they appoint representatives so as to betray it.
545
“He also reasons about representative rule in the section on the death of
the political organism. Neither the people’s autocracy, he says, nor the
people’s will can be either handed over or represented by the very nature of
things.
“It is not difficult to imagine what Rousseau would have said about our
republics and constitutional monarchies, about the whole order of liberal
democratism, which is maintained in existence exclusively by that which its
prophet cursed. This order is wholly based on representation, it is
unquestionably unthinkable without parties, and, finally, the administration
of the country is based unfailingly on the dominance of one or another party
in parliament. When there is no such dominance, administration is ready to
come to a stop and it is necessary to dissolve parliament in the hope that the
country will give the kind of representation in which, in the terminology of
Rousseau, there exists no people’s will, but only ‘individual opinion’.
“And this political system, as the height of logicality, is consecrated by the

all-supporting fiction of the people’s will!…”
Thus Rousseauism is not democratic in the usual sense. “Properly speaking,

the principle of the people’s will requires direct rule by the people. Even on
this condition the principle would not produce any good results. In
Switzerland there is the right of appeal to the people’s vote (referendum) and
the presentation of the basic laws for confirmation to the direct vote of the
people. No useful results proceed from this for the reasonableness of the law;
moreover, the practice of such luxury of democratism is possible only in very
unusual circumstances. In essence this is a system of ‘self-indulgence’, and
not a serious resource of legislative construction.
“But the most important question is: what is this ‘people’s will’? Where,
and in what, does it really exist? The people firmly wants one thing: that
things should go well. A people with a history, which constitutes something
united in distinction from its neighbours, which has not yet been shattered
into insuperably hostile groups, has another will; that affairs in the country
should go in a familiar spirit to which it is historically accustomed and which
it trusts.
“And then in the innumerable individual cases from the solution of which
the government is formed, the people has no will except in extreme cases –
such as war or peace or the handing over of its salvation to such-and-such a
popular person…. But in the everyday questions of government there is no
people’s will. How can I have a will in relation to that of which I have no
comprehension? In every question a few think well, a few think something,
and 99 out a hundred – exactly nothing. Ivan has some understanding of one
question, but Theodore not, while on another Theodore has some ideas, but
Ivan not. But in each case there is the huge majority that understands nothing
and has no other will except that everything should go well.
546
“It is from this majority that they demand that it should express its own
opinion and its own will! But, you know, it’s simply comical, and besides
harmful. Let us suppose that there are a hundred people who understand the
given question, and several million who do not. To demand a decision from
the majority means only to drown the hundred knowing voices in the
hundreds of thousands who have no thoughts on the matter!
“The people, they say, can listen to those who know; after all, it wants the
best for itself. Of course. But the people who are knowledgeable are, in the
first place, occupied with their work, which is precisely why they are familiar
with the question; secondly, they by no means exercise their capabilities in
oratory or the technique of agitation. In connection with the art of stultifying
the crowd, flattering it, threatening it, attracting it – this disastrous, poisonous
art of agitation – people will always be beaten down by those who have
specially devoted themselves to political intrigue. And people are specially
chosen to be intriguers, they are suitable for this trade because of their innate
capabilities; they then exercise their capabilities; and then finally they are
shaped into a party… But how is the man of action to fight against them? This
is quite impossible, and in fact the people that is placed in this situation
always goes, not for those who know, but for those who are skilled in political
intrigue. It plays a most stupid role and cannot get out of it, even if they are
completely aware of their stupid situation. I, for example, completely
understand the role of the political intriguer and despise it, but if they were to
force me to give my vote for measures which I am personally unable to weigh
up myself, then of course I have not the slightest doubt that I would be fooled,
and crafty people would shield me from the people who know and are
honourable.
“Such is the reality of the people’s will. It is a toy of crafty people even if
we have unmediated rule by the people. But unmediated rule by the people is
practically impossible. It is impossible to collect, and it is impossible to turn
the whole people into legislators. Somebody has to sow the bread and work in
the factories. Finally, everyone has his own private life, which is dearer to him
than politics. In generally, one has to resort to representation.
“Theoretically this is senseless. One can hand over one’s right as a citizen.
But one cannot hand over one’s will. After all, I’m handing it over for future
time, for future decisions, on questions that have not yet arisen. Therefore in
choosing a deputy, I give him the right to express that will of mine that I do
not yet myself know. Electing representatives would have a realisable
meaning only if I were to hand over my right as a citizen, that is, if I simply
said that I entrust the given person to carry out my political affairs and that I
will not quarrel with or contradict whatever he does lawfully until the end of
his term of office. But such a handing over of the very right of the people’s
autocracy is the idea of Caesarism, and not parliamentarism…
“…A parliamentary deputy is obliged to express another person’s will. For

a man with his own ideas this is not at all enticing, quite the opposite. He will
547
enter a Constitutive Assembly, but not a parliament. He will rather remain at
his own work and with his own ideas… Generally speaking, for a person who
is able to make his own way in something more useful, the significance of
being a deputy is not enticing. Moreover, it requires such external capacities
as most of the best people do not have. Glibness of speech, pushiness, a
capacity for intrigue, superficial convictions. Such are the people elected for
the trade of representation…943
“In general, in laying claim to the deputyship, I must join some party. I will
be pushed forward not by the people, but by the party. I will be obliged to it
for everything, I will depend on it, I will have to take it into account. The
people is – for him who is being elected – the last thing to worry about. It has
to be incited to give its vote, but it is not at all necessary to learn what its vote
is. The election campaign is a hunt for votes, but in no way a poll of the
people. Hares are not asked whether they want to land up on the table, they
are caught; their own desires are interesting only in order to clarify how
precisely they can best be caught. That is exactly how interested they are in
the people during elections.
“And so the candidacies are put forward. Noise, fuss, walls plastered with
proclamations and names, journeys, conferences, false rumours, mutual
slanders, loud words, avaricious promises, promises that are consciously false,
bribes, etc. The people goes crazy: before it knew little, now it cannot make
out anything at all. The greatest art of this hunt does not consist in a
preliminary preparation of the people, but in some concluding surprise,
which will snatch away votes at the last minute without giving time to think
again. Finally the triumphant moment has arrived, the votes have been
collected and counted, the ‘will of the people’ ‘has said its word’, and the
representatives of the nation gather in the Palais Bourbon.
“What happens then? During the elections they still had to reckon with the
voters. But having received the votes and gathered in the palace, the
representatives of the people can completely forget about it right until the
approach of the following elections. During this period they live exclusively
their own party’s life, developing all the qualities of cliquishness. The deputy,
who in theory represents the will of the voters, has real obligations only in
relation to his party… “944
For, as Benjamin Disraeli said: “Damn your principles. Stick to your

party…”
943 Cf. Madame Germaine de Stael: “In a democratic state, one must be continually on guard
against the desire for popularity. It leads to aping the behaviour of the worst. And soon
people come to think that it is of no use – indeed, it is dangerous – to show too plain a
superiority over the multitude which one wants to win over” (On Literature and Society (1800),
in Barzun, op. cit., p. 451). (V.M.)
944 Tikhomirov, “Demokratia liberal’naia i sotsial’naia” (“Liberal and Social Democracy”), in
Kritika Demokratii (A Critique of Democracy), Moscow: Moskva, 1997, pp. 116-119, 165-170.
548
*
Let us return to Rousseau’s root idea, which was also his most original, most
dangerous and ultimately most influential idea: the idea of the supremacy of
intuition, inner feeling, over all reason and every external authority,
outlasting even the concept of the General Will. Harari sees the idea of the
autonomy of inner feeling as the essence of the modern, twenty-first century
world view; it is Rousseau’s conscience that supplies modern humanity with
the meaning it appeared to have lost with the collapse of traditional religion.
“For centuries humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate
source of meaning, and that our free will is therefore the highest authority of
all. Instead of waiting for some external entity to tell us what’s what, we can
rely on our own feelings and desires. From infancy we are bombarded with a
barrage of humanist slogans counselling us: ‘Listen to yourself, be true to
yourself, trust yourself, follow your heart, do what feels good.’ Jean-Jacques
Rousseau summed it all up in his novel Émile, the eighteenth-century bible of
feeling. Rousseau held that, when looking for life’s rules of conduct, he found
them ‘in the depths of my heart, traced by nature in characters which nothing
can efface. I need only consult myself with regard to what I wish to do; what I
feel to be good is good, what I feel to be bad is bad.’
“Accordingly, when a modern woman wants to understand the meaning of

an affair she is having, she is far less prone to blindly accept the judgements
of a priest or an ancient book. Instead, she will carefully examine her feelings.
If her feelings aren’t very clear, she will call a good friend, meet for coffee and
pour her heart out. If things are still vague, she will go to her therapist, and
tell him all about it. Theoretically, the modern therapist occupies the same
place as the medieval priest, and it is an overworked cliché to compare the
two professions. Yet in practice a huge chasm separates them. The therapist
does not possess a holy book that defines good and evil. When the woman
finishes her story, it is highly unlikely that the therapist will burst out: ‘You
wicked woman! You have committed a terrible sin!’ It is equally unlikely that
he will say, ‘Wonderful! Good for you!’ Instead, no matter what the woman
may have done and said, the therapist is most likely to ask in a caring voice,
‘Well, how do you feel about what happened?’
“True, the therapist’s bookshelf sags under the weight of Freud’s and
Jung’s writings and the 1,000-pages-long Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM). Yet these are not holy scriptures. The DSM diagnoses
the ailments of life, not the meaning of life. Most psychologists believe that
only human feelings are authorised to determine the true meaning of human
actions. Hence no matter what the therapist thinks about his patient’s affair,
and matter what Freud, Jung and the DSM think about affairs in general, the
therapist should not force his views on the patient. Instead, he should help
her examine the most secret chambers of her heart. There and only there will
she find the answers. Whereas medieval priests had a hotline to God and
could distinguish for us between good and evil, modern therapists merely
help us get in touch with our own inner feelings.
549
“This partly explains the changing fortunes of the institution of marriage.
In the Middle Ages marriage was considered a sacrament ordained by God,
and God also authorised a father to marry off his children according to his
wishes and interests. An extra-marital affair was consequently a brazen
rebellion against both divine and parental authority. It was a mortal sin, no
matter what the lovers felt and thought about it. Today people marry for love,
and it is their personal feelings that give value to this bond. Hence, if the very
same feelings that once drove you into the arms of one man now drive you
into the arms of another, what’s wrong with that? If an extramarital affair
provides an outlet for emotional and sexual desires that are not satisfied by
your spouse of twenty years, and if your new love is kind, passionate and
sensitive to your needs – why not enjoy it?
“But wait a minute, you might say. We cannot ignore the feelings of the
other interested parties. The woman and her lover might feel wonderful in
each other’s arms, but if their respective spouses find out, everybody will
probably feel awful for quite some time. And if it leads to divorce, their
children might carry the emotional scars for decades. Even if the affair is
never discovered, concealing it could involve a lot of tension, and may lead to
growing feelings of alienation and resentment.
“The most interesting discussions in humanist ethics concern situations

like extramarital affairs, when human feelings collide. What happens when
the same action causes one person to feel good and another to feel bad? How
do we weigh these feelings against each other? Do the good feelings of the
two lovers outweigh the bad feelings of the spouses and their children?
“It doesn’t matter what you think about this particular question. It is far
more important to understand the kind of arguments both sides employ.
Modern people have differing ideas about extramarital affairs, but no matter
what their stance, they tend to justify it in the name of human feeling rather
than in the name of holy scriptures and divine commandments. Humanism
has taught us that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad.
Murder is wrong not because some god once said, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Rather,
murder is wrong because it causes terrible suffering to the victim, to his
family members, and to his friends and acquaintances. Theft is wrong not
because some ancient text says, ‘Though shalt not steal’. Rather, theft is wrong
because when you lose your property, you feel bad about it. And if an action
does not cause anyone to feel bad, there can be nothing wrong with it…”945
In this way did Rousseau’s idea about the supremacy of inner feelings
destroy traditional morality, just as his idea about the General Will destroy
the traditional understanding of political power. It remains only to see how
this great prophet of modernity and forerunner of the Antichrist scored his
first posthumous victory – in the French Revolution…
945 Harari, Homo Deus, London: Vintage, 2017, pp. 261-264.
550
65. THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY
By the time of the death of Rousseau in 1774 all the essential elements of
the antichristian system that was about to burst upon the world with
unparalleled savagery had already appeared in embryonic form. And by the
time the American revolution had defeated the British in 1781 it was clear that
the world could be turned upside down. However, the old despotic order still
reigned in Europe; and with rulers such as Frederick the Great in Prussia and
Catherine the Great in Russia turning in practice against the Enlightenment
ideas they embraced in theory it was clear that the “mystery of iniquity”
needed a new stimulus to recover its momentum and propel it towards its
goal. That stimulus came in the form of an element that was already well
known to European history, but which only now began to acquire a dominant
position in politics - Jewish power. One major channel of Jewish influence, as
we have seen, was finance; a second was Freemasonry, which because of its
close links with Jewry is often called “Judaeo-Masonry”.
The main targets of the Masons were: the hierarchical principle, respect for
tradition, the Church and the Monarchy. The Masons did not originate the
attack on these – the roots of anti-authoritarianism in both Church and State
go back at least to the eleventh-century Papacy. What they did was to use an
already existing sceptical and rationalist climate of opinion to intensify and
give direction to the revolutionary movement, “the mystery of iniquity”.
Since belief in the existence of a Masonic conspiracy against civilization is

often taken as evidence of madness, or at any rate of political incorrectness, it
is necessary to assert from the beginning that, as L.A. Tikhomirov rightly says,
“it is strange to attribute to the Masons the whole complexity of the evolution
of human societies. One must not have the idea that people lived happily and
in a healthy state, but then the Masonic organization appeared and corrupted
them all. It is necessary to know the laws of the development of societies,
which would be such as they are if the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem
had never taken place. In general the study of Masonry can be fruitful only on
condition that it is conducted scientifically. Only such a study is capable of
clarifying the true level of influence of this or that secret society on the
evolution of peoples and states.”946
While Tikhomirov has no doubts about the existence of the Judaeo-

Masonic conspiracy, he nevertheless insists that the blame for the destruction
of modern society lies “most of all not on some premeditatedly evil influence
of the Masons or whatever other organisation, but on the false direction of our
own constructive activities.”947 For “there has never been a man or a society
946 Tikhomirov, “K voprosu o masonakh” (“Towards the Question on the Masons”),
Khristianstvo i Politika (Christianity and Politics), in Kritika Demokratii (A Criticism of

Democracy), Moscow, 1997 pp. 330-331.
947 Tikhomirov, “V chem nasha opasnost?” (“In What does the Danger to Us Consist?”),
Khristianstvo i Politika (Christianity and Politics), op. cit., p. 333.
551
which has not been corrupted through his or its own free will.”948 In other
words, the Masons would have no power over society if society had not
voluntarily abandoned its own defensive principles and institutions.
As Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes: “In evaluating the role of the Jewish
core of World Masonry, two extremes are possible: the complete denial of any
Judaeo-Masonic secret plot and secret leadership of world processes, and the
extreme exaggeration of the degree and size of this leadership (when it seems
that ‘they’ are everywhere and everything is ruled by ‘them’)… In fact, it is all
not like that. The life of the world, even the development of its scientific-
technical and industrial civilization is a very weird and changeable
combination of elemental, ungovernable processes and planned, governable
processes. In the final analysis everything is truly ruled by the Providence of
God, but in such a way that the free will of man is not abolished. For that
reason in their successful moments it can seem, and seems, to the Judaeo-
Masons, who really are striving for ever greater subjection of the processes of
global life to themselves, that to an ever greater degree it is by their own,
human powers that everything is achieved…” 949
Some have seen the origins of Freemasonry as far back as the Babylonian
Exile, when the Pharisees were forced to use what came to be called Masonic
symbols, gestures and handshakes in order to communicate with each other.
Since there is next to no hard evidence for this, we shall not discuss it, nor any
of the other theories of the very early origins of Freemasonry…
According to Masonic theory, “Free”, “Speculative” or “Symbolic”

Masonry began when the meeting-places, or lodges, of the “Operative”
Masons, the stonemasons who built the medieval cathedrals, gradually began
to decline in importance with the decline in their craft, and they were joined
by intellectuals who used the lodges for their own intellectual, and often
heretical or occult, activities. One of the first modern “speculative” Masons
was the English antiquarian and astrologer, Elias Ashmole, who was initiated
in 1646 and died in 1692.950 Another early Mason was Sir Christopher Wren.
Christopher Hodapp, a Mason, writes: “The Great London Fire had destroyed
much of the city [of London] in 1666, and rebuilding it took decades.
Freemason Christopher Wren had designed an astonishing number of the
new buildings, and construction projects were everywhere. One of the biggest
was the rebuilding of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It started in 1673 and took almost
40 years to complete. Operative Masons came from all over England to work
on the project, and many joined the Lodge of St. Paul. By 1710, the great
cathedral was complete, and many lodges disbanded as Masons returned to
their hometowns. By 1715, there were just four London city lodges left.”951
948 Tikhomirov, “Bor’ba s Masonstvom” (“The Struggle with Masonry”), in Khristianstvo i
Politika (Christianity and Politics), p. 336.

950 Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p. 22; G. Toppin, “Starred First”,
Oxford Today, vol. 12, N 1, Michaelmas term, 1999, pp. 32-34.

951 Hodapp, Freemasons for Dummies, Indianapolis: Wiley, 2005, pp. 30-31.
552
Even at this very early stage, Masonry aroused suspicion. Thus in 1698 a
certain Mr. Winter circulated a leaflet in London warning “all godly people in
the City of London of the Mischiefs and Evils practised in the Sight of God by
those called Freed Masons… For this devilish Sect of Men are Meeters in
secret which swear against all without their Following. They are the Anti
Christ which was to come, leading Men from fear of God.”952
The traditional official birthday of Masonry is July 24, 1717, when the four
remaining London lodges met in a pub in St. Paul’s churchyard and created a
Great Lodge as their ruling centre.953 The first grandmaster was a nobleman,
and the leaders of English Masonry to the present day have tended to be
members of the royal family. Consonant with this royal connection, there was
nothing revolutionary in a political sense in early English Masonry. Thus
when Dr. James Anderson, a Presbyterian minister and master of Lodge
number 17 of London, drew up the Constitutions of Masonry in 1723, great
emphasis was laid on the Masons’ loyalty to King and country: “A mason is a
peaceable subject to the civil powers, wherever he resides or works, and is
never to be concerned in plots and conspiracies against the peace and welfare
of the nation. If a brother should be a rebel against the state, he is not to be
countenanced in his rebellion, however he may be pitied as an unhappy man;
and if convicted of not other crime, though the brotherhood must and ought
to dismiss his rebellion, and give no umbrage or ground of political jealousy
to the government for the time being; they cannot expel him from the lodge,
and his relation to it remains indefeasible.”954
The Masons, writes O.F. Soloviev, called themselves “men of good will,
peace-lovers, builders of the future just construction of society and at the
same time patriots of their own fatherlands, law-abiding subjects and citizens,
as is emphasized in all the constitutional documents. They went towards the
highest ideals not through the preaching of abstract truths, but by serving
their own peoples. They did not wall themselves off by an invisible wall from
their compatriots, but completely shared their destiny with all their woes and
sufferings. They were distinguished by a striving to help those around them,
to draw a middle line between extremes and introduce at any rate a little
humanism into the bonds of war that have been inevitable up to now.”955
That was the theory. But in the order’s secrecy, in the religiosity of its three
degrees, and in its subversive political influence, a great danger to the powers
that be was discerned; and in 1736 Pope Clement XII anathematized it.
Moreover, “it was gradually revealed that the ritual humility of Symbolical
952 Ridley, op. cit., p. 32.

953 The original lodges were numbers 1 to 4. However, in Scotland, the Kilwinning Lodge,
which called itself “the Mother Lodge of Scotland” and claimed to go back to 1140, rejected
the claims of the English Grand Lodge and called itself Lodge no. 0 (Hodapp, op. cit., p. 26).
955 O.F. Soloviev, Masonstvo v Mirovoj Politike XX Veka (Masonry in World Politics in the 20th
Century), Moscow, 1998, p. 15.
553
Masonry had ceased to satisfy the leaders of the ‘obediences’, scions of the
ruling dynasties and nobility, who strove to elaborate the inner decoration of
the lodges and especially the rituals. The desired basis for reform was found
in the specially transformed legend of the fate of the knightly order of the
Templars, whose leader de Molay and his fellows had perished on the
gallows in Paris in 1517 in accordance with the inquisitors’ false [?]
accusations of terrible heresies. The Templars began to be portrayed as the
immediate forerunners of the ‘free Masons’, which required the introduction
of several higher degrees into their order, to signify the special merits and
great knowledge of individually chosen adepts. One of the initiators of the
reform, the Scottish nobleman A. Ramsay, declared in 1737: ‘Our forefathers
the crusaders wanted to unite into one brotherhood the subjects of all states’,
so as in time to create ‘a new people, which, representing many nations,
would unite them in the bonds of virtue and science’. After the introduction
of several higher degrees with luxurious rituals, a series of associations
formed several systems, including the highly centralized system ‘of strict
observance’ with rigorous discipline for its adepts, that was significantly
developed in the German lands, in Russia and in Sweden.”956
And so, within twenty years of its official birthday, Masonry had
developed from a talking-shop for liberal intellectuals into a new religion
tracing its roots to the Templars and beyond. This reinforced suspicions about
its antichristian nature. At this point, however, the noble membership of the
order proved useful. The Masons were saved from persecution by their
success in recruiting members from the aristocracy, whose names were
immediately published to show how “respectable” Masonry was. Moreover, a
ban was placed on political discussions in the English lodges. For Anderson’s
Constitutions stipulated that “a Mason is a peaceable subject to the Civil
956 Soloviev, op. cit., p. 17. Thus Piers Paul Read writes: “Andrew Ramsay, a Scottish Jacobite
exiled in France who was Chancellor of the French Grand Lodge in the 1730s, claimed that
the first FreeMasons had been stoneMasons in the crusader states who had learned the secret
rituals and gained the special wisdom of the ancient world. Ramsay made no specific claim
for the Templars, probably because he did not wish to antagonise his host, the King of France;
but in Germany another Scottish exile, George Frederick Johnson, concocted a myth that
transformed ‘the Templars… from their ostensible status of unlearned and fanatical soldier-
monks to that of enlightened and wise knightly seers, who had used their sojourn in the East
to recover its profoundest secrets, and to emancipate themselves from medieval Catholic
credulity’.
“According to the German FreeMasons, the Grand Masters of the Order had learned the
secrets and acquired the treasure of the Jewish Essenes which were handed down from one to
the other. James of Molay [the last Grand Master of the Order], on the night of his execution,
had sent the Count of Beaulieu to the crypt of the Temple Church in Paris to recover this
treasure which included the seven-branched candelabra seized by the Emperor Titus, the
crown of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and a shroud. It is undisputed that in evidence given at
the trial of the Templars, a sergeant, John of Châlons, maintained that Gérard of Villiers, the
Preceptor of France, had been tipped off about his imminent arrest and so had escaped on
eighteen galleys with the Templars’ treasure. If this were so, what happened to this treasure?
George Frederick Johnson said that it had been taken to Scotland, one of his followers
specifying the Isle of Mull.” (The Templars, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, pp. 303-304)
554
Power, wherever he resides or works, and is never to be concern’d in Plots
and Conspiracies against the Peace and Welfare of the Nation.”
But if English Masonry by and large respected this ban, this was certainly
not to be the case with its daughter lodges in Europe and America. Thus St.
Andrew’s lodge in Boston became “a hotbed of sedition” at the time of the
American revolution.957 Moreover, the Constitutions clearly witnessed both to
Masonry’s revolutionary potential and to its religious nature. Its religiosity is
particularly obvious when in one and the same breath they both disclaim any
interest in religion and then claim to profess “the best [religion] that ever was,
or will or can be… the true primitive, catholic and universal religion agreed to
be so in all times and ages.”958
What is this religion? In some formulations it is like the Deism that was
becoming fashionable in England, in which God, “the Great Architect of the
Universe”, is seen as creating and activating the laws of nature, and then
playing no further part in history. In others it is closer to Pantheism. Thus the
Constitutions declare: “[Masons are]… oblig’d… to that religion in which all
men agree, leaving their particular opinions to themselves; that is to be good
men and true, or men of honour and honesty, by whatever denominations or
persuasion they may be distinguished; whereby Masonry becomes the centre
of union, and the means of consolidating true friendship among persons that
have remained at a perpetual distance. .. The religion we profess… is the best
that ever was, or will or can be…, for it is the law of Nature, which is the law
of God, for God is nature. It is to love God above all things and our neighbour
as our self; this is the true, primitive, catholic and universal religion agreed to
be so in all times and ages.”959
“God is nature…” This is clearly pantheism, and no amount of Christian

terminology can disguise the fact.
But this Masonic god, as revealed in one of the degrees of initiation, is also
personal; he is “Jah-Bul-On”, a mixture of Jehovah, Baal and the Canaanite
god On.
Moreover, closer examination reveals Masonry in its developed form to be

a kind of Manichaean dualism. There are two gods, Christ and Satan, of
whom the one, Christ, is hated, and the other, Satan, is adored. As the famous
American Mason, Albert Pike, wrote: “To the crowd we must say: we worship
a God, but it is the God one adores without superstition. To you, Sovereign
Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the brethren
of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: all of us initiates of the high degrees
should maintain the Masonic religion in the purity of the Luciferian doctrine.
If Lucifer were not God, would Adonai, the God of the Christians, whose
957 Ferguson, op. cit, p. 113.

555
deeds prove his cruelty, perfidy and hatred of man, his barbarism and
repulsion for science, would Adonai and his priests calumniate him? Yes,
Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonai is also God… religious philosophy
in its purity and youth consists in the belief in Lucifer, the equal of
Adonai.”960
“We have the testimony of Copin Albancelli, whom we can in no way

suspect of making up things, when he declares positively that he had genuine
documents about this in his hands. I, he says, had the opportunity several
years ago to find a proof that there exist certain Masonic societies which are
satanic societies, not in the sense that the devil used to come personally to
preside at their meetings, as that charlatan Leo Taxil says, but in the sense that
their members confess the cult of Satan. They adore Lucifer as being
supposedly the true God and are inspired by an irreconcilable hatred against
the Christian God.’ They even have a special formula casting ‘curses’ on Him
and proclaiming the glory of and love for Lucifer…”961
To what extent is the term “Judaeo-Masonry” appropriate? When we

examine the rites and religious practices of Masonry, and especially of its
higher degrees, a strongly Jewish element is immediately apparent. As an
example, let us take the Masonic practice of wearing aprons. Michael
Hoffman, following John L. Brooke, writes: “The Babylonian Talmud claims
that the forbidden tree in the Garden, from which Adam ate was a fig: ‘Rabbi
Nehemiah holds that the tree of which Adam ate was the fig tree ‘ (BT
Berakoth 40a). The Kabbalah teaches that the leaves of this fig tree conveyed
powers of sorcery and magic (Zohar 1:56b Bereshit). Consequently, in the
rabbinic mind, the aprons worn by Adam and Eve, being made from the
leaves of the fig tree, were garments that gave the wearers magic powers.
These aprons made from fig leaves had the power to give the bearer to enjoy
‘the fruits of the world-to-come’ (BT Bava Metzia 114b). It is with this rabbinic
understanding that Freemasons and Mormons wear these aprons in their own
rituals.”962
Moreover, there is a significant personal input of Jewry into Masonry,

especially at the highest levels. For the three symbolical degrees of Masonry
are supplemented by thirty higher levels, which in turn are crowned by what
has been called “invisible Masonry”. And “all this impenetrably dark power
is crowned, according to the conviction and affirmation of [the former Mason
and investigator of Masonry] Copin Albancelli, by still another level: the
Jewish centre, which pursues the aims of the universal lordship of Israel and
960 Pike, in A.C. de la Rive, La Femme et l’Enfant dans la Franc-Maçonnerie Universelle (The
Woman and the Child in Universal Freemasonry), p. 588.

961 Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations
of History), Moscow, 1997, p. 448.

962 Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, Independent History and Research, 2008, p. 198.
556
holds in its hands both visible Masonry with its 33 degrees and the invisible
degrees of invisible Masonry or ‘Illuminism’…”963
“It is true, of course,” writes Bernard Lazare, “that there were Jews
connected with Freemasonry from its birth, students of the Kabbala, as is
shown by certain rites which survive. It is very probable, too, that in the years
preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution, they entered in greater
numbers than ever into the councils of the secret societies, becoming indeed
themselves the founders of secret associations. There were Jews in the circle
around Weishaupt, and a Jew of Portuguese origin, Martinez de Pasquales,
established numerous groups of Illuminati in France and gathered around
him a large number of disciples whom he instructed in the doctrines of re-
integration. The lodges which Martinez founded were mystic in character,
whereas the other orders of Freemasonry were, on the whole, rationalistic in
their teachings…. There would be little difficulty in showing how these two
tendencies worked in harmony; how Cazotte, Cagliostro, Martinez, Saint-
Martin, the Comte de Saint Germain and Eckartshausen were practically in
alliance with the Encyclopaedists and Jacobins, and how both, in spite of their
seeming hostility, succeeded in arriving at the same end, the undermining,
namely, of Christianity.
“This, too, then, would tend to show that though the Jews might very well
have been active participants in the agitation carried on by the secret societies,
it was not because they were the founders of such associations, but merely
because the doctrines of the secret societies agreed so well with their own.”964
Thus Freemasonry was not controlled by the Jews, according to Lazare.

Nevertheless, Judaism and Masonry had a great deal in common: Anti-
Christianity, a taste for a Kabbalistic type of mysticism, revolutionary politics
and many members of Jewish blood.
But this is only the beginning. It is when one enters into the details of the
rites, especially the rites of the higher degrees, that the resemblances become
really striking. “The connections are more intimate,” wrote a Parisian Jewish
review, “than one would imagine. Judaism should maintain a lively and
profound sympathy for Freemasonry in general, and no matter concerning
this powerful institution should be a question of indifference to it…
“The spirit of Freemasonry is that of Judaism in its most fundamental

beliefs; its ideas are Judaic, its language is Judaic, its very organisation, almost,
is Judaic. Whenever I approach the sanctuary where the Masonic order
accomplishes its works, I hear the name of Solomon ringing everywhere, and
echoes of Israel. Those symbolic columns are the columns of the Temple
where each Hiram’s workmen received their wages; they enshrine his revered
name. The whole Masonic tradition takes me back to that great epoch when
963
Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 443.
964 Lazare, Antisemitisme (Antisemitism), pp. 308-309; De Poncins, op. cit., pp. 71-72.
557
the Jewish monarch, fulfilling David’s promises, raised up to the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a religious monument worthy of the creator of
Heaven and earth – a tradition symbolised by powerful images which have
spread outside the limits of Palestine to the whole world, but which still bear
the indelible imprint of their origin.
“That Temple which must be built, since the sanctuary in Jerusalem has
perished, the secret edifice at which all Masons on earth labour with one mind,
with a word of command and secret rallying-points – it is the moral sanctuary,
the divine asylum wherein all men who have been reconciled will re-unite
one day in holy and fraternal Agapes; it is the social order which shall no
longer know fratricidal wars, nor castes, nor pariahs, and where the human
race will recognise and proclaim anew its original oneness. That is the work
on which every initiate pledges his devotion and undertakes to lay his stone,
a sublime work which has been carried on for centuries.”965
This talk of universal fraternity in the rebuilding of the Temple is

deception. If there is fraternity, it is a Jewish fraternity. “As for the final result
of the messianic revolution,” writes Batault, “it will always be the same: God
will overthrow the nations and the kings and will cause Israel and her king to
triumph; the nations will be converted to Judaism and will obey the Law or
else they will be destroyed and the Jews will be the masters of the world. The
Jews’ international dream is to unite the world with the Jewish law, under the
direction and domination of the priestly people – a general form… of
imperialism…”966
The main aim of Freemasonry, as of Judaism, is to rebuild the Temple of

Solomon. And this alone should be enough to warn us of its Antichristianity,
insofar the Lord decreed that “not one stone [of it] shall be left upon another
that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24.2). Moreover, every attempt to
rebuild it has been destroyed by the Lord, as happened when Julian the
Apostate tried to rebuild it in the fourth century.
The rites of Freemasonry themselves declare that the secret aim of the
rebuilding of the Temple is to undo the work of Christ on the Cross. Thus the
18th or Rosicrucian Degree967 speaks of the ninth hour of the day as “the hour
when the Veil of the Temple was rent in twain and darkness overspread the
earth, when the true Light departed from us, the Altar was thrown down, the
Blazing Star was eclipsed, the Cubic Stone poured forth Blood and Water, the
Word was lost, and despair and tribulation sat heavily upon us. It goes on to
exhort the Masons: “Since Masonry has experienced such dire calamities it is
our duty, Princes, by renewed labours, to retrieve our loss.”
965
La Vérité Israélite (The Israelite Truth), 1861, vol. 5, p. 74; De Poncins, op. cit., pp. 75-76.
966
G. Batault, Le Problème Juif (The Jewish Problem); De Poncins, op. cit., pp. 77-78.
967
Rosicrucianism was founded as a separate order in Masonry in 1757 in Frankfurt, and
counted among its leading adepts the charlatans Saint-Germain and Caliostro.
558
The Reverend Walter Hannah justly comments: “For any Christian to
declare that Masonry experienced ‘a dire calamity’ at the Crucifixion, or that
Masons suffered a ‘loss’ at the triumphant death of our Saviour on the Cross
which the Excellent and Perfect Princes of the Rose Croix of Heredom can by
their own labour ‘retrieve’ seems not only heretical but actually blasphemous.
The only interpretation which makes sense of this passage would appear to be
that it is not the death of our Lord which is mourned, but the defeat of
Satan.”968 Indeed, for “the eclipse of the Blazing Star” can only mean the
defeat of Satan, while the Cubic Stone pouring forth Blood and Water can
only mean the triumph of Christ on the Cross - Christ, Who is “the Stone that
the builders rejected” which became “the chief Corner-Stone” of the New
Testament Church (Matthew 21.42), having been rejected as “the wrong shape”
by the leaders of Old Israel. As the Apostle Peter said to the Sanhedrin: “This
[Christ] is the Stone which was rejected by you builders [Jews, Masons],
which has become the chief Corner-Stone” (Acts 4.11). Any Temple which
does not have Christ as the chief Corner-Stone is an abomination to God and
will be destroyed by Him just as the Old Testament Temple was destroyed;
for “whoever falls on this Stone will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it
will grind him to power” (Matthew 21.44). It is in the same Rosicrucian
Degree that initiates are told to walk over the Cross of Christ…969
And so Masonry is revealed as a web of deceit whose outer layers are

liberalism, scientism, and rationalism; whose inner layers are the overthrow
of the existing world order in both Church and State; and whose innermost
sanctum is the most explicit Antichristianity, the worship of Satan.
That Antichristianity is Jewish in origin, but with a significant admixture of

Canaanite paganism. We see this is the name of the “Supreme Architect”
whom Masons worship: Jah-Bul-On. As we have seen, “Jah” clearly refers to
Jehovah, but “Bul” and “On” refer to Canaanite idolatry. “Bul” is “Baal”,
while the word “On”, sometimes false identified with the Egyptian Osiris, can
actually be found in Hosea 4.15: “Judah, do not go up to Gilgal, and do not go
up to the House of On”. Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus comments on this
passage: “’On’ is the name of the idol in Bethel; it does not mean ‘eternal’ –
that is, living – as some commentators imagined; instead, it is a Hebrew word,
not Greek. The other Hebrew-speaking translators clearly informed us of this:
Aquila and Theodotion rendered it ‘useless house’, and Symmachus ‘house of
iniquity’.”970
So the Masonic god is in fact a blasphemous mixture of the name of the

True God and the names of his greatest enemies…
968
Hannah, Darkness Visible, London: Augustine Press, 1952, p. 203.
969
H.T. F. Rhodes, The Satanic Mass, London: Jarrolds, 1968, p. 219-220.
970 Theodoret, Commentaries on the Prophets, volume 3: commentary on the Twelve Prophets,
Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006, p. 50.
559
The first power in the West clearly to see the threat of Masonry to both
Church and State was the Vatican – which, of course, had little influence in
America. Catholicism made no radical distinction between English and
French Masonry. In 1738 Masonry of all kinds was condemned by Pope
Clement XII, in 1751 - by Benedict XIV, in 1821 – by Pius VII, in 1825 – by Leo
XII, in 1829 – by Pius VIII, in 1832 and 1839 – by Gregory XVI, in 1846, 1864,
1865, 1873 and 1876 – by Pius IX, and in 1884 – by Leo XIII. The latter’s bull,
Humanum Genus, declared of the Freemasons: “Their ultimate aim is to uproot
completely the whole religious and political order of the world… This will
mean that the foundation and the laws of the new structure of society will be
drawn from pure Naturalism.”971
The Popes were right. And yet they were powerless to stem the tide of
naturalism and unbelief that was sweeping Europe on the eve of the French
Revolution. Nor could the revolution planned by the Grand Orient of Paris be
prevented by the Vatican, for the simple reason that the Vatican had started
the whole long process of apostasy herself: from Papism to Humanism to
Protestantism, from Deism to the Enlightenment and Freemasonry, and on
into the still more bloody and blasphemous future – it had all begun in Rome,
when the first heretical Popes broke away from the Orthodox Church and the
Byzantine Autocracy. The Papacy was therefore compromised; and if
deliverance from the rapid growth of Masonry was to come it could only
come from the Orthodox Church and that Autocracy that now stood in the
place of Byzantium – the Third Rome of Russia…
971
Count Leon de Poncins, Freemasonry and the Vatican, London: Britons Publishing Company,
1968, p. 31. The bull went on: “In the sphere of politics, the Naturalists lay down that all men
have the same rights and that all are equal and alike in every respect; that everyone is by
nature free and independent; that no one has the right to exercise authority over another; that
it is an act of violence to demand of men obedience to any authority not emanating from
themselves. All power is, therefore, in the free people. Those who exercise authority do so
either by the mandate or the permission of the people, so that, when the popular will
changes, rulers of States may lawfully be deposed even against their will. The source of all
rights and civic duties is held to reside either in the multitude or in the ruling power in the
State, provided that it has been constituted according to the new principles. They hold also
that the State should not acknowledge God and that, out of the various forms of religion,
there is no reason why one should be preferred to another. According to them, all should be
on the same level…”
560
66. THE ORIGINS OF ECUMENISM
Of course, the Masons did not advertise their Satanism. Instead, they
attached themselves to the contemporary Zeitgeist, which was indifferentism,
or what we would now call ecumenism. As religious passions cooled in Europe
after the end of the religious wars, the Masons took the lead in preaching
religious tolerance.
Ecumenism has deep roots in European paganism. In a sense the Roman

Empire was ecumenist, since it embraced all religions so long as they did not
constitute a threat to the worship of the State. Thus in the year 384,
Symmachus, the pagan leader of the Roman Senate, wrote to the Emperor
Theodosius the Great, appealing to him to be tolerant towards the pagans
because, as he said, many paths led to God… He chose the wrong emperor to
appeal to, because St. Theodosius was the most anti-ecumenist of Christians.
An excellent definition of the folly of ecumenism as understood by the

Romans was given by St. Leo the Great in the fifth century: "Rome..., though it
ruled almost all nations, was enthralled by the errors of them all, and seemed
to itself to have fostered religion greatly, because it rejected no falsehood.” It
was only the Christians and the Jews who did not accept the Roman thesis
that all religions are to be respected. They asserted, by contrast, that “all the
gods of the pagans are demons” (Psalm 95.5).
The origins of ecumenism go back to Asia Minor in the second century, to

Apelles, a disciple of the heretic Marcion. As the Athonite Elder Augustine
writes: “Apelles, the head of the numerous sect, venerable both for his life and
for his age, wanted to undertake the pacification and unification of all the
shoots of the heretic Marcion under a single rule and authority. With this aim
he exerted all his powers to come into contact with all the leaders of the sects,
but had to admit that it was impossible to persuade each sect to abandon its
unreasonable dogmatic teaching and accept that of another. Having come
away from his attempts at mediation with no fruit, he decided a bridge had to
be built, a way of living together peaceably, or a mutual tolerance of each
other, with a single variety of ‘faith’…
“Starting from this point of view, he established an atheist dogma of unity,

which has been called, after him, ‘the atheist dogma of Apelles’, with the
notorious slogan: ‘… We don’t have to examine the matter thoroughly,
everyone can remain in his faith; for those who hope on the Crucified One,’ he
declared, ‘will be saved so long as they are found to have good works.’ Or, to
put it more simply: ‘it is not at all necessary to examine the matter – the
differences between us – but everyone should retain his convictions, because,’
he declared, ‘those who hope on the Crucified One will be saved so long as
they are found to practise good works!… ‘ It would be superfluous to explain
that this atheist dogma of Apelles was first formulated by the heretic Marcion
himself (whom St. Polycarp, the disciple of the Apostle John, called ‘the first-
born of Satan’) and is entirely alien to the Christians. We Christians love the
561
heterodox and we long for a real and holy union with them – when they
become sober and believe in an Orthodox manner in our Lord Jesus Christ,
abandoning their heretical and mistaken beliefs and ‘their distorted image of
Christ’ (see Eusebius, History, bk. 5, 13-15; Dositheus of Jerusalem,
Dodecabiblon, bk. 2, chapter 13, para. 3).”972
Apelles’ dogma was condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council, but

reappeared at a later date. Thus the twelfth-century Arab philosopher and
doctor Avveroes pleaded for a kind of union between Christians, Jews,
Muslims and pagans that was avidly discussed in western scholastic circles.973
Again, the variant of Apelleanism known as uniatism – that is, the union
between Roman Catholicism and other religions – appeared after the schism
of 1054. As Elder Augustine explains: “After the canonical cutting off of the
Latins from the Church as a whole in 1054, that is, after their definitive schism
and anathematisation, there was also the acceptance, or rather the application,
of the atheist dogma of Apelles. The Catholic (=Orthodox) Church of Christ
condemned the heresies of the Nestorians, Monophysites and Monothelites in
the (Third, Fourth and Sixth) Ecumenical Councils. It anathematised the
heretics and their heretical teachings and declared those who remained in the
above-mentioned heresies to be excommunicate. The apostate ‘church’ of
Rome took no account of the decisions of these Ecumenical Councils, but
received into communion the unrepentant and condemned Nestorian,
Monophysite and Monothelite heretics without any formality, with only the
recognition of the Pope as Monarch of the Church. And not only the heretics,
but also many others after this, were received into communion with only the
recognition of the Monarchy of the blood-stained beast that presided in it.”974
However, Apelleanism in its modern, ecumenist variety is a product of the

Protestant Reformation. The Protestants rejected the idea of the Church as
“the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy 3.15) and vaunted the power
of the individual mind to find the truth independently of any Church. This
led to a proliferation of Protestant sects, which in turn led to attempts to
achieve unity by agreeing on a minimum truth, which in turn led to the idea
that all faiths are true “in their own way”. Thus the Anglican Settlement of the
mid-sixteenth century was a kind of Protestant Unia. The Anglican Church
was allowed to retain some of the outward trappings of Catholicism, but
without its central pivot, the papacy, which was replaced by obedience to the
secular monarch as head of the Church. Being a politically motivated
compromise from the beginning, Anglicanism has always been partial to ever
more comprehensive schemes of inter-Church and inter-faith union, and
972
Monk Augustine, “To atheon dogma tou Oikoumenismou Prodromou tou Antikhristou”,
Agios Agathangelos Esphigmenites, 121, September-October, 1990, pp. 33-34, 1
973 Monk Augustine, “To atheon dogma tou Oikoumenismou Prodromou tou Antikhristou”,
Agios Agathangelos Esphigmenites, 120, July-August, 1990, pp. 21-21.

Agios Agathangelos Esphigmenites, 120, July-August, 1990, pp. 21-22.
562
many leaders of the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century were
Anglicans.975
In 1614 there appeared the first modern ecumenist, George Kalixtos, a man
famous, according to Elder Augustine, “for the breadth of his knowledge and
his ‘eirenic’ spirit in tackling various questions, including ecclesiastical ones.
Propelled by this spirit, he declared that there was no need of, nor did he even
seek, the union of the various Churches… Nevertheless, he did demand their
mutual recognition and the retaining of reciprocal ‘love’ through the
reciprocal tolerance of the manifold differences of each ‘Church’…”976
As religious passions cooled round Europe at the end of the Thirty Years
War, the Freemasons took the lead in preaching religious tolerance and
indifference. The ecumenism of Masonry was linked to the crisis of faith in
the Anglican church in the early eighteenth century, and in particular to the
loss of faith in the unique truth and saving power of Christianity.
Thus “in 1717,” wrote William Palmer, “a controversy arose on occasion of

the writings of Hoadly, bishop of Bangor, in which he maintained that it was
needless to believe in any particular creed, or to be united to any particular
Church; and that sincerity, or our own persuasion of the correctness of our
opinions (whether well or ill founded) is sufficient. These doctrines were
evidently calculated to subvert the necessity of believing the articles of the
Christian faith, and to justify all classes of schismatics or separatists from the
Church. The convocation deemed these opinions so mischievous, that a
committee was appointed to select propositions from Hoadly’s books, and to
procure their censure; but before his trial could take place, the convocation
was prorogued by an arbitrary exercise of the royal authority…”977
Hardly coincidentally, 1717, the year in which Hoadly’s heretical views

were published, was the same year in which the Grand Lodge of England was
founded. And we find a very similar doctrine enshrined in Dr. Anderson’s
Constitutions: “Let a man’s religion or mode of worship be what it may, he is
not excluded from the order, provided he believe in the glorious architect of
heaven and earth.” In accordance with this principle, Jews were admitted to
the Masonic lodges as early as 1724.978
But English Masonry went further than English ecumenism in positing that
underlying all religions there was a “true, primitive, universal religion”, a
religion “in which all men agree”: “A Mason is obliged, by his tenure, to obey
the moral Law; and if he rightly understands the Art, he will never be a
stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious Libertine. But though in ancient Times
975 V. Moss, “Ecucommunism”, Living Orthodoxy, September-October, 1989, vol. XI, N 5, pp.
13-18.
Agios Agathangelos Esphigmenites, 121, September-October, 1990, pp. 33-34.

977 Palmer, A Compendious Ecclesiastical History, New York: Stanford & Swords, 1850, p. 165.
563
Masons were charged in every Country to be of the Religion of that Country
or Nation, whatever it was, yet, ‘tis now thought more expedient only to
oblige them to that Religion in which all men agree, leaving their particular
Opinions to themselves; that is to be good Men and true, or Men of Honour
and Honesty, but whatever Denominations or Persuasions they may be
distinguish’d; whereby Masonry becomes the Centre of Union and the Means
of Conciliating true Friendships among Persons that must have remained at a
perpetual Distance.”
A new and extremely deceptive concept was here introduced into the
bloodstream of European thought: “that Religion in which all men agree”.
There is no such thing… Even if we exclude the “stupid Atheists” and
“irreligious Libertines” (of whom there are very many), we still find men
disagreeing radically about the most fundamental doctrines: whether God is
one, or one-in-three, or more than three, whether He is to be identified with
nature or distinguished from it, whether He is evolving or unchanging,
whether or not He became incarnate in Jesus Christ, whether or not He spoke
to Mohammed, whether or not He is coming to judge the world, etc. Upon the
answers to these questions depend our whole concept of right and wrong, of
what it is “to be good Men and true”. Far from there being unanimity among
“religious” people about this, there is bound to be most radical disagreement...
A critical role in the development of ecumenism was played by Rousseau,

who insisted that men should believe in a “civil religion” that combined belief
in “the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent divinity that foresees and
provides; the life to come; the happiness of the just; the punishment of
sinners; the sanctity of the social contract and the law”.979 If any citizen
accepted these beliefs, but then “behaved as if he did not believe in them”, the
punishment was death. As Jacques Barzun writes: “Rousseau reminds the
reader that two-thirds of mankind are neither Christians nor Jews, nor
Mohammedans, from which it follows that God cannot be the exclusive
possession of any sect or people; all their ideas as to His demands and His
judgements are imaginings. He asks only that we love Him and pursue the
good. All else we know nothing about. That there should be quarrels and
bloodshed about what we can never know is the greatest impiety.”980
Now Ecumenism may be described as religious egalitarianism, the doctrine

that one religion is as good as any other. When combined, as it was in the
lodges of Europe and America, with political and social egalitarianism, the
doctrine that one person is as good as any other, it made for an explosive
mixture – not just a philosophy, but a programme for revolutionary action.
And this revolutionary potential of Masonry became evident very soon after it
spread from England to the Continent…
979 Rousseau, The Social Contract, London: Penguin Books, p. 286.

980 Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 387.
564
67. FREEMASONRY AND REVIVALISM IN THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION
Although Freemasonry is best-known for its catastrophic influence on the

French and Russian revolutions, its influence was hardly less profound on the
American revolution and on the whole political and cultural development of
America, where the great majority of Masonic lodges are to be found today.
There were essentially two kinds of American religion in the eighteenth

century: on the one hand, the Masonry of the cultured leaders of the
Revolution, who usually belonged to some institutional church but whose
real temple was the lodge, and who, as Karen Armstrong writes, “experienced
the revolution as a secular event”981, and on the other, the Protestantism of the
lower classes.
Let us first look at American Masonry, the religion of the upper classes.
The first Masonic lodges were established in Boston and Philadelphia by

1730.982 And several of the leaders of the American revolution were Masons,
including Benjamin Franklin (master of his lodge in Philadelphia, George
Washington (master of Alexandria lodge No. 22), John Hancock, James
Madison, James Monrose, Paul Revere, John Paul Jones and La Fayette.983 As
Niall Ferguson points out, “At his first presidential inauguration on 30 April
1789, Washington swore the oath of office on the Bible of the St. John’s
Masonic Lodge No. 1 of New York. The oath was administered by Robert
Livingston, the Chancellor New York (the State’s highest judicial office) and
another Mason, indeed the first Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of New
York. In 1794, Washington sat for the artist Joseph Williams, who painted him
dressed in the full Masonic regalia the president had worn to level the
cornerstone of the United States Capitol a year before. George Washington’s
apron deserves to be as famous in the folklore of the American Revolution as
Paul Revere’s ride; for it seems doubtful that either man would have had the
influence he enjoyed had it not been for his membership of the Masonic
brotherhood. Later historians have cast doubt on the Masonic origins of
iconography of the Great Seal of the United States, globally recognizable since
its incorporation in the one-dollar bill in 1955. Yet the all-seeing eye of
Providence that crowns the unfinished pyramid on the obverse of the seal
does closely resemble the eye that gazes out at us from Washington’s apron in
nineteenth-century lithographs of the first president in Masonic attire…
981 Armstrong, The Battle for God, New York: Ballantine books, 2000, p. 81.
983 Ridley, op. cit., pp. 108-109.
565
“The evidence suggests that [Freemasonry] was at least as important as
secular political rhetoric or religious doctrines in animating the men who
made the revolution…”984
American Masonry was a mixture of English and French Masonry.

Lafayette represented radical French Masonry, but there were also
representatives of the more conservative and monarchist English Masonry.
Thus “of the 7 Provincial Grand Masters [in America], 5 supported George III,
and condemned revolutionary agitation against the established authority.”985
Moreover, many of the leaders of the British forces were also Freemasons. The
movement therefore had the unexpected property of spawning, as well as
most of the leaders of the revolution, several of the leaders of the counter-
revolution.
A similar paradox existed in Europe. Thus the anti-revolutionary Comte

d’Artois and King Gustavus Adolphus III of Sweden were Freemasons, while
the ultra-revolutionary Danton and Robespierre were not; that Napoleon was
not a Freemason (although he protected it), while the reactionary generals
who defeated him – Wellington, Blücher and Kutuzov - were.
One reason for this paradoxical phenomenon was the distinction,

discussed above, between two concepts of freedom prevailing in eighteenth-
century thought: freedom as a negative concept, that is, freedom from
restrictions of various kinds, and freedom as a positive concept, that is,
freedom to do certain things. English liberalism and the English
Enlightenment understood freedom in the negative sense; whereas the French
Enlightenment, as well as Counter-Enlightenment writers such as Rousseau,
tended to understand it in the positive sense – which was also the more
revolutionary idea.
Those who joined the ranks of the Masons were lovers of freedom in a
general sense. But when some of them saw how the Rousseauist, positive
concept of freedom led to Jacobinism and all the horrors of the French
revolution, they turned sharply against it. Some still remained members of the
lodge, but others broke all links with it. Thus the Duke of Wellington never
entered a lodge after his membership lapsed in 1795, and in 1851 wrote that
he “had no recollection of having been admitted a Freemason” 986
Masonry’s organization was decentralised and diffuse, and it had very

broad criteria of membership. This meant that a very wide range of people
could enter its ranks, and precluded the degree of control and discipline that
was essential for the attainment and, still more important, the retention of
supreme political power. Masonry was therefore the ideal kind of
organization for the first stage in the revolutionary process, the dissemination
984 Ferguson, The Square and the Tower, London: Penguin, 2018, pp. 115, 111.
566
of revolutionary ideas as quickly as possible through as large a proportion of
the population as possible.
Let us now turn to the religion of America’s lower classes: revivalism.
The American Protestantism of the Puritan type that had dominated New
England in the seventeenth century had metamorphosed into something
different in the eighteenth century. For, as David Reynolds writes, “the
Puritans were a dead-end, historically: their attempt to impose a church-
dominated uniformity was short-lived. The religious groups who shaped
America more profoundly were the Baptists, Methodists and other sects,
whose roving preachers set off a series of religious revivals that sparked and
crackled across the country from the mid-eighteenth century right up to the
Civil War. For these preachers and their followers, religion was an affair of
the heart, rooted in a conversion experience, and expressed in a rich, vibrant
community of the faithful. These evangelicals broke the stranglehold of the
older churches – Anglicans in the South, Congregationalists in New England
- and made the United States a nation of sects rather than churches. They also
generated much of the fervour behind causes like anti-slavery and later
women’s suffrage. America’s religion was a product of evangelicalism more
than Puritanism.”987
A revival of religious enthusiasm in the lower classes is discernible already

in the early eighteenth century. This movement had its roots in similar
European movements: the German Pietism of Count Zinzendorf (1700-1760)
and the British Methodism of John Wesley (1703-1791). The fiery preaching of
George Whitefield (1714-1770) was instrumental in bringing this wave of
Protestant revivalism to America.
“However,” writes Jean Comby, “there was also a distinctive American

dimension: the colonies’ roots in Puritan dreams of a new godly
Commonwealth which would remedy the corruption of Old England. By the
end of the seventeenth century these dreams had come to seem very
threadbare, and many felt that the Calvinist Congregationalist establishments
of New England had lost their way. Nevertheless, from the 1720s the same
Calvinist impulse which had so inspired the early colonists was beginning to
produce fresh energy: and frequently fresh quarrels! A group of Presbyterian
ministers in the Middle Colonies led by Gilbert Tennent (1703-64) caused
controversy by insisting on the importance of individual conversion in church
life, in reaction to what they saw as the formalism of much contemporary
religion; they found a powerful if unlooked for ally in George Whitefield
when he began a series of spectacular preaching tours in 1739, often reaching
great crowds by speaking to them in the open air.
987 Reynolds, op. cit., pp. xxiii-xxiv.
567
“The scenes of wild enthusiasm which Whitfield’s sermons generated
(although he did not encourage such outbursts) set a tone of emotionalism
which was to remain characteristic of ‘Revivalism’ in American Protestant
religion: and even during the eighteenth century, the gulf between this
religious style and a more restrained, reflective strain in American
Protestantism became obvious…”988
This Revivalist movement was called the First Great Awakening. As Peter
Watson writes, it “swept through the northeast and 250 new emotionalist
churches were established outside the Calvinist faith.” These were
increasingly outlandish and eccentric: “Such groups as those of Conrad
Beissel and the Ephrata Mystics, the Shakers and other visionary communities,
the Swedenborgians, with their concept of ‘correspondence’, that God speaks
to man through Nature; and the Transcendentalists, who also believed that
understanding could come through the contemplation of Nature – all of these
shared the view that intuition was a higher faculty than reason…”989
Revivalism and Irrationalism now interacted with the discontent

proceeding the American revolution… For, as Armstrong writes, “The
Founding Fathers of the American republic were an aristocratic elite and their
ideas were not typical. The vast majority of Americans were Calvinists, and
they could not relate to this rationalist ethos. Initially, most of the colonists
were just as reluctant to break with England as their leaders were. Not all
joined the revolutionary struggle. Some 30,000 fought on the British side, and
after the war between 80,000 and 100,000 left the new states and migrated to
Canada, the West Indies, or Britain. Those who elected to fight for
independence would be as much motivated by the old myths and millenial
dreams of Christianity as by the secularist ideals of the Founders…
“During the first decade of the revolutionary struggle, people were loath to
make a radical break with the past. Severing relations with Britain seemed
unthinkable, and many still hoped that the British government would change
its policies. Nobody was straining forward excitedly to the future or dreaming
of a new world order. Most Americans still instinctively responded to the
crisis in the old, premodern way: they looked back to an idealized past to
sustain them in their position. The revolutionary leaders and those who
embraced the more secular Radical Whig ideology drew inspiration from the
struggle of the Saxons against the invading Normans in 1066, or the more
recent struggle of the Puritan Parliamentarians during the English Civil War.
The Calvinists harked back to their own Golden Age in New England,
recalling the struggle of the Puritans against the tyrannical Anglican
establishment in Old England; they had sought liberty and freedom from
oppression in the New World, creating a godly society in the American
wilderness. The emphasis in the sermons and revolutionary rhetoric of this
period (1763-73) was on the desire to conserve the precious achievements of
988 Comby, How to Read Church History, London: SCM Press, 1985, vol. 2, p. 98.
989 Watson, The Age of Atheists, London: Simon & Schuster, 2014, p. 177.
568
the past. The notion of radical change inspired fears of decline and ruin. The
colonists were seeking to preserve their heritage, according to the old
conservative spirit. The past was presented as idyllic, the future as potentially
horrific. The revolutionary leaders declared that their actions were designed
to keep at bay the catastrophe that would inevitably ensue if there was a
radical severance from tradition. They spoke of the possible consequences of
British policy with fear, using the apocalyptic language of the Bible.
“But this changed. As the British clung obstinately to their controversial

imperial policies, the colonists burned their boats. After the Boston Tea Party
(1773) and the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775) there could be no
going back. The Declaration of Independence expressed a new determination
to break away from the old order and go forward to an unprecedented future.
In this respect, the Declaration was a modernizing document, which
articulated in political terms the intellectual independence and iconoclasm
that had characterized the scientific revolution in Europe. But the majority of
the colonists were more inspired by the myths of Christian prophecy than by
John Locke…
“… The Great Awakening had already made New Light Calvinists wary of
the establishment and confident of their ability to effect major change. When
revolutionary leaders spoke of ‘liberty’, they used a term that was already
saturated with religious meaning: it carried associations of grace, of the
freedom of the Gospel and the Sons of God. It was linked with such themes as
the Kingdom of God, in which all oppression would end, and the myth [sic]
of the Chosen People who would become God’s instrument in the
transformation of the world. Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), president of Yale
University, spoke enthusiastically of the revolution ushering in ‘Immanuel’s
Land’, and of America becoming ‘the principal seat of that new, that peculiar
Kingdom which shall be given to the saints of the Most High’. In 1775, the
Connecticut preacher Ebenezer Baldwin insisted that the calamities of the war
could only hasten God’s plans for the New World. Jesus would establish his
glorious Kingdom in America: liberty, religion and learning had been driven
out of Europe and had moved westward, across the Atlantic. The present
crisis was preparing the way for the Last Days of the present corrupt order.
For Provost William Smith of Philadelphia, the colonies were God’s ‘chosen
seat of Freedom, Arts and Heavenly Knowledge’.
“But if churchmen were sacralizing politics, secularist leaders also used the
language of Christian utopianism. John Adams looked back on the settlement
of America as God’s plan for the enlightenment of the whole of humanity.
Thomas Paine was convinced that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world
over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the days
of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand’. The rational
pragmatism of the leaders would not itself have been sufficient to help people
make the fearsome journey to an unknown future and break with the
motherland. The enthusiasm, imagery, and mythology of Christian
eschatology gave meaning to the revolutionary struggle and helped
569
secularism and Calvinists alike to make the decisive, dislocating severance
from tradition.”990
But if “the mystery of iniquity” was to achieve real political power, this
first stage had to be succeeded by a second in which a more highly disciplined
and ruthless, Communist-style party took over the leadership. Such a take-
over took place in both the French and the Russian revolutions. Thus in
France the Masonic constitutionalists, such as Mirabeau and Lafayette, were
pushed aside by the anti-democratic, anti-constitutionalist Jacobins or
“Illuminati”; while in the Russian revolution, the Masonic constitutionalists,
such as Kerensky and Lvov, were pushed aside by the anti-constitutionalist
Lenin and Stalin…
The American Revolution was unique in that the first stage has not been
succeeded by the second – yet… And we may speculate that this fact is owing
in part to the continuing influence of lower-class Revivalism on American
political culture. For Revivalism is highly emotional, even anarchical; it is not
conducive to the secretive, disciplined, hierarchical discipline of Illuminati-
like movements. Moreover, the American colonies were not used to any kind
of hierarchical control, whether in Church or State. The hand of the British
Crown, whatever the colonists might assert, had always been light, and the
Americans could always escape what control there was by simply moving
further west…
990
Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 80, 82-84.
570

IV. THE ST. PETERSBURG AUTOCRACY (1660-‐1789)
571
68. THE SCHISM OF THE OLD RITUALISTS (1)
The beginnings of the first major schism in Russian Church history lay in
the arrival in Moscow of some educated monks from the south of Russia,
which at that time was under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarchate
of Constantinople and the political yoke of Catholic Poland. They pointed to
the existence of several differences between the Muscovite service books and
those employed in the Greek Church. These differences concerned such
matters as how the word "Jesus" was to be spelt, whether two or three
"alleluias" should be chanted at certain points in the Divine services, whether
the sign of the Cross should be made with two or three fingers, etc.
A group of Muscovite clergy led by Protopriests John Neronov and

Avvakum rejected these criticisms. They said that the reforms contradicted
the decrees of the famous Stoglav council of 1551, which had anathematized
the three-fingered sign of the cross, and they suspected that the southerners
were tainted with Latinism through their long subjection to Polish rule.
Therefore they were unwilling to bow to their superior knowledge.
However, the Stoglav council, while important, was never as authoritative

as the Ecumenical Councils, and certain of its provisions have never been
accepted in their full force by the Russian Church - for example, its 40th
chapter, which decreed that anyone who shaved his beard, and died in such a
state (i.e. without repenting), should be denied a Christian burial and
numbered among the unbelievers. Another controversial canon of the council
was the 55th, which declared that if any patriarch had a quarrel with a
metropolitan or clergyman, no other patriarch could presume to interfere or
judge the matter – except the Patriarchate of Constantinople.991 Needless to
say, the ascription of such quasi-papist universal jurisdiction to the
Ecumenical Patriarch was never accepted by the Orthodox Church. Moreover,
in elevating merely ritual differences into an issue of dogmatic faith, the
“zealots for piety” were undoubtedly displaying a Judaizing attachment to
the letter of the law. In the long run it led to their rejection of Greek
Orthodoxy, and therefore of the need of any agreement with the Greeks
whether on rites or anything else, a rejection that threatened the foundations
of the Ecumenical Church.992 They forgot the admonition of St. Photius the
Great: “'In cases where the thing disregarded is not the faith and is no falling
away from any general and catholic decree, different rites and customs being
observed among different people, a man who knows how to judge rightly
would decide that neither do those who observe them act wrongly, nor do
those who have not received them break the law.”
991 Dan Ioan Mureşan, “Rome hérétique? Sur les décisions des conciles de Moscou et de
Constantinople (1589, 1590 et 1593)” (Heretical Rome? On the Decisions of the Moscow and
Constantinople Councils (1589, 1590 and 1593).
992 Thus “Protopriests Neronov, Habbakuk, Longinus and others considered that the faith of
the Greeks ‘had become leprous from the Godless Turks’, and that it was impossible to trust
the Greeks” (Lebedev, Velikorossia, p. 136).
572
This was the situation in 1652 when the close friend of the tsar,
Metropolitan Nikon of Novgorod, was elected patriarch. Knowing of the
various inner divisions within Russian society caused by incipient westernism
and Old Ritualism, the new patriarch demanded, and obtained a solemn oath
from the tsar and all the people that they should obey him in all Church
matters. The tsar was very willing to give such an oath because he regarded
Nikon as his “special friend” and father, giving him the same title of “Great
Sovereign” that Tsar Michael had given to his father, Patriarch Philaret. The
“zealots of piety” were also happy to submit to Nikon because he had been a
member of their circle and shared, as they thought, their views.
But Nikon had become convinced that the differences between Russian and
Greek usage had to be removed. As Kliuchevsky writes, “there was no lack of
reminders to confirm the conviction that such agreement was essential.
Eastern hierarchs, who came to Moscow more and more often in the
seventeenth century, reproachfully pointed out to the Russian clergy that
these peculiarities were local innovations, and that they could break up the
unity between the Orthodox churches. Something that happened shortly
before Nikon’s accession to the patriarchate pointed to the reality of such a
danger. The monks of all the Greek monasteries on Mount Athos declared in
council that it was heretical to cross oneself with two fingers, burned the
Muscovite liturgical books that prescribed this, and wanted to burn as well
the monk in whose possession the books were found…”993
In 1653 Nikon issued an order mandating the number of prostrations (four

full-length and 12 to the waist) to be performed during the Prayer of St.
Ephraim in Lent and the three-fingered cross. Since this was different from
the current practice in Rus’ (all prostrations full-length and the two-fingered
cross), the Protopriests protested against the “non-prostration heresy”. 994
They were exiled, and the schism had begun…
“Not immediately,” writes Lebedev, “but after many years of thought

(since 1646), and conversations with the tsar, Fr. Stefan [Bonifatiev], the Greek
and Kievan scholars and Patriarch Paisius of Jerusalem, [Nikon] had come to
the conviction that the criterion of the rightness of the correction of Russian
books and rites consisted in their correspondence with that which from ages
past had been accepted by the Eastern Greek Church and handed down by it
to Rus’ and, consequently, must be preserved also in the ancient Russian
customs and books, and that therefore for the correction of the Russian books
and rites it was necessary to take the advice of contemporary Eastern
authorities, although their opinion had to be approached with great caution
and in a critical spirit. It was with these convictions that Nikon completed the
work begun before him of the correction of the Church rites and books,
finishing it completely in 1656. At that time he did not know that the

994 Dobroklonsky, op. cit., pp. 402, 406.
573
correctors of the books had placed at the foundation of their work, not the
ancient, but the contemporary Greek books, which had been published in the
West, mainly in Venice (although in the most important cases they had
nevertheless used both ancient Greek and Slavonic texts). The volume of work
in the correction and publishing of books was so great that the patriarch was
simply unable to check its technical side and was convinced that they were
correcting them according to the ancient texts.
“However, the correction of the rites was carried out completely under his
supervision and was accomplished in no other way than in consultation with
the conciliar opinion in the Eastern Churches and with special councils of the
Russian hierarchs and clergy. Instead of using two fingers in the sign of the
cross, the doctrine of which had been introduced into a series of very
important books under Patriarch Joseph under the influence of the party of
Neronov and Avvakum, the three-fingered sign was confirmed, since it
corresponded more to ancient Russian customs995 and the age-old practice of
the Orthodox East. A series of other Church customs were changed, and all
Divine service books published earlier with the help of the ‘zealots’ were re-
published.
995 But not to Russian practice since the Stoglav council of 1551, which had legislated in favour
of the two-fingered sign because in some places the two-fingered sign was used, and in others
the three-fingered (Lebedev, op. cit., p. 70).
According to S.A. Zenkovsky, following the researches of Golubinsky, Kapterev and
others, the two-fingered sign of the cross came from the Constantinopolitan (Studite) typicon,
whereas the three-fingered sign was from the Jerusalem typicon of St. Sabbas. “In the 12th-13th
centuries in Byzantium, the Studite typicon was for various reasons squeezed out by the
Jerusalemite and at almost the same time the two-fingered sign of the cross was replaced by
the three-fingered in order to emphasise the importance of the dogma of the All-Holy Trinity.
Difficult relations with Byzantium during the Mongol yoke did not allow the spread of the
Jerusalemite typicon in Rus’ in the 13th-14th centuries. Only under Metropolitans Cyprian and
Photius (end of the 14th, beginning of the 15th centuries) was the Jerusalemite typicon partly
introduced into Rus’ (gradually, one detail after another), but, since, after the council of
Florence in 1439 Rus’ had broken relations with uniate Constantinople, this reform was not
carried out to the end. In the Russian typicon, therefore, a series of features of the Studite
typicon – the two-fingered sign of the cross, processing in the direction of the sun, chanting
alleluia twice and other features – were preserved” (“Staroobriadchestvo, Tserkov’ i
Gosudarstvo” (Old Ritualism, the Church and the State), Russkoe Vozrozhdenie (Russian
Regeneration), 1987- I, p. 86.)
There is strong evidence that the Orthodox Patriarchate of Rome before the schism of 1054
used the three-fingered cross. Thus Pope Leo IV, who reposed in 855 A.D., and whom St.
Photius the Great considered a Saint and the channel of many miracles, writes: "Sign the
chalice and the host, with a right cross and not with circles or with a varying of the fingers,
but with two fingers stretched out and the thumb hidden within them, by which the Trinity is
symbolized. Take heed to make this sign rightly, for otherwise you can bless nothing" (see
Georgi, "Liturg. Rom. Pont.", III) Sounds to me like the sign of the Cross made by laymen in
the Orthodox Church today. In any case, it is not the Old Ritualists' sign of the Cross because
the thumb has to be attached to the two fingers to make it three fingers, not two.(V.M.)
574
“As was to be expected, J. Neronov, Avvakum, Longinus, Lazarus, Daniel
and some of those who thought like them rose up against the corrections
made by his Holiness.”996
This elicited the following comments by Epiphany Slavinetsky, one of the

main correctors of the books: “Blind ignoramuses, hardly able to read one
syllable at a time, having no understanding of grammar, not to mention
rhetoric, philosophy, or theology, people who have not even tasted of study,
dare to interpret divine writings, or, rather, to distort them, and slander and
judge men well-versed in Slavonic and Greek languages. The ignoramuses
cannot see that we did not correct the dogmas of faith, but only some
expressions which had been altered through the carelessness and errors of
uneducated scribes, or through the ignorance of correctors at the Printing
Office”. And he compared the Old Ritualists to Korah and Abiram, who had
rebelled against Moses. 997
“Thus was laid the doctrinal basis of the Church schism, but the schism
itself, as a broad movement among the people, began much later, without
Nikon and independently of him. Patriarch Nikon took all the necessary
measures that this should not happen. In particular, on condition of their
obedience to the Church, he permitted those who wished it (J. Neronov) to
serve according to the old books and rites, in this way allowing a variety of
opinions and practices in Church matters that did not touch the essence of the
faith. [In this tolerance Nicon followed the wise advice of Patriarch Paisius of
Constantinople.]This gave the Church historian Metropolitan Macarius
(Bulgakov) a basis on which to assert, with justice, that ‘if Nikon had not left
his see and his administration had continued, there would have been no
schism in the Russian Church.’”998
Again, Sergei Firsov writes: “At the end of his patriarchy Nikon said about
the old and new (corrected) church-service books: ‘Both the ones and the
others are good; it doesn’t matter, serve according to whichever books you
want’. In citing these words, V.O. Klyuchevsky noted: ‘This means that the
matter was not one of rites, but of resistance to ecclesiastical authority’. The
Old Believers’ refusal to submit was taken by the church hierarchy and the
state authorities as a rebellion, and at the Council of 1666-1667 the disobedient
were excommunicated from the Church and cursed ‘for their resistance to the
canonical authority of the pastors of the Church’.”999
996
Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, pp. 36-37.
997 Epiphany in Paul Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual & Reform, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s
Seminary Press, 1991, p. 113).
998 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, p. 37. See also Archbishop Nicon (Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie
Blazhennejshago Antonia, Mitropolita Kievskago i Galitskago (Life of his Beatitude Anthony,

Metropolitan of Kiev and Galich), volume 3, New York, 1957, p. 161.
999 Firsov, Russkaia Tserkov’ nakanune peremen (konets 1890-kh – 1918 gg.) (The Russian Church
on the Eve of the Changes (the end of the 1890s to 1918)), Moscow, 2002, p. 252.
575
All this is true, but fails to take into account the long-term effect of the
actions of the Greek hierarchs, especially Patriarch Macarius of Antioch, in
anathematizing the old books and practices…
Early in 1656 Macarius was asked by Patriarch Nikon to give his opinion
on the question of the sign of the cross. On the Sunday of Orthodoxy, “during
the anathemas, Macarius stood before the crowd, put the three large fingers of
his hand together ‘in the image of the most holy and undivided Trinity, and
said: ‘Every Orthodox Christian must make the sign of the Cross on his face
with these three first fingers: and if anyone does it based on the writing of
Theodoret and on false tradition, let him be anathema!’ The anathemas were
then repeated by Gabriel and Gregory. Nikon further obtained written
condemnations of the two-fingered sign of the Cross from all these foreign
bishops.
“On April 23, a new council was called in Moscow. Its purpose was
twofold: first, Nikon wanted to affirm the three-fingered sign of the Cross by
conciliar decree; second, he wanted sanction for the publication of the
Skrizhal’. Once again, the presence of foreign bishops in Moscow served his
purpose. In his speech to the assembled council, Nikon explains the reasons
for his request. The two-fingered sign of the Cross, he states, does not
adequately express the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation…
“The significance of this council lies chiefly in its formal condemnation of

those who rejected the three-fingered sign of the Cross – and, by extension,
those who rejected the Greek model – as heretics. For those who make the
sign of the Cross by folding their thumb together with their two small fingers
‘are demonstrating the inequality of the Holy Trinity, which is Arianism’, or
‘Nestorianism’. By branding his opponents as heretics, Nikon was making
schism inevitable.”1000
Whether it made schism inevitable or not, it was certainly a serious

mistake. And, together with the Old Ritualists’ blasphemous rejection of the
sacraments of the Orthodox Church, on the one hand, and the over-strict
police measures of the State against them, on the other, it probably
contributed to the hardening of the schism. Paradoxically, however, this
mistake was the same mistake as that made by the Old Ritualists. That is, like
the Old Ritualists, Nikon was asserting that differences in rite, and in
particular in the making of the sign of the cross, reflected differences in faith.
But this was not so, as had been pointed out to Nikon by Patriarch Paisius of
Constantinople and his Synod the previous year. And while, as noted above,
Nikon himself backed away from implementing the decisions of the 1656
council1001, the fact is that they remained on the statute books. Moreover, they
1000Meyendorff, op. cit., pp. 61, 62.

1001
Paul Meyendorff writes, “to its credit, the Russian Church appears to have realized its
tactical error and tried to repair the damage. As early as 1656, Nikon made peace with
Neronov, one of the leading opponents of the reform, and permitted him to remain in
Moscow and even to use the old books at the Cathedral of the Dormition. After Nikon left the
576
were confirmed – again with the active connivance of Greek hierarchs – at the
council of 1667. Only later, with the Yedinoverie of 1801, was it permitted to be
a member of the Russian Church and serve on the old books.
The process of removing the curses on the old rites began at the
Preconciliar Convention in 1906. The section on the Old Ritual, presided over
by Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky), decreed: “Bearing in mind the
benefit to the Holy Church, the pacification of those praying with the two-
fingered cross and the lightening of the difficulties encountered by
missionaries in explaining the curses on those praying with the two-fingered
cross pronounced by Patriarch Macarius of Antioch and a Council of Russian
hierarchs in 1656, - to petition the All-Russian Council to remove the
indicated curses, as imposed out of ‘not good understanding’ (cf. Canon 12 of
the Sixth Ecumenical Council) by Patriarch Macarius of the meaning of our
two-fingered cross, which misunderstanding was caused in the patriarch by
his getting to know an incorrect edition of the so-called ‘Theodorit’s Word’,
which was printed in our books in the middle of the 17th century…, just as
the Council of 1667 ‘destroyed’ the curse of the Stoglav Counil laid on those
not baptised with the two-fingered cross.”1002
The All-Russian Council did not get round to removing the curses in 1917-
1918. But in 1974 the Russian Church Abroad did remove the anathemas on
the Old Rite (as did the sergianist Moscow Patriarchate).
“However,” writes Lebedev, the differences between the Orthodox and the
Old Ritualists were not only “with regard to the correction of books and rites.
The point was the deep differences in perception of the ideas forming the
basis of the conception of ‘the third Rome’, and in the contradictions of the
Russian Church’s self-consciousness at the time.”1003
The differences over the concept of the Third Rome, on the one hand, and
over books and rites, on the other hand, were linked in the following way…
After consolidating itself in the first half of the seventeenth century, the
Russian State was now ready to go on the offensive against Catholic Poland,
and rescue the Orthodox Christians who were being persecuted by the Polish
and uniate authorities. In 1654 Eastern Ukraine was wrested from Poland and
came within the bounds of Russia again. But the Orthodox Church in the
Ukraine had been under the jurisdiction of Constantinople and employed
Greek practices, which, as we have seen, differed somewhat from those in the
Muscovite Russian Church. So if Moscow was to be the Third Rome in the
patriarchal throne in 1658, Tsar Alexis made repeated attempts to pacify the future Old-
Believers, insisting only that they cease condemning the new books, but willing to allow the
continued use of the old. This was the only demand made of the Old-Believers at the 1666
Moscow Council. Only after all these attempts to restore peace had failed did the 1667
Council, with Greek bishops present, condemn the old books and revoke the 1551 ‘Stoglav
(Hundred Chapters)’ Council.” (op. cit., p. 33)
1002 Rklitsky, op. cit., p. 175.
577
sense of the protector of all Orthodox Christians, it was necessary that the
faith and practice of the Moscow Patriarchate should be in harmony with the
faith and practice of the Orthodox Church as a whole. That is why Nikon,
supported by the Grecophile Tsar Alexis, encouraged the reform of the
service-books to bring them into line with the practices of the Greek Church.
In pursuing this policy the Tsar and the Patriarch were continuing the
work of St. Maximus the Greek, who had been invited to Russia to carry out
translations from Greek into Russian and correct the Russian service books
against the Greek originals. For this he was persecuted by Metropolitan
Daniel. And yet “the mistakes in the Russian Divine service books were so
great,” writes Professor N.N. Pokrovsky, “that the Russian Church finally had
to agree with Maximus’ corrections – true, some 120 years after his trial,
under Patriarch Nikon (for example, in the Symbol of the faith).”1004
Paradoxically, the Old Ritualists cited St. Maximus the Greek in their
support because he made no objection to the two-fingered sign. However,
Professor Pokrovsky has shown that he probably passed over this as being of
secondary importance by comparison with his main task, which was to
broaden the horizons of the Russian Church and State, making it less
nationalist in spirit – and more sympathetic to the pleas for help of the
Orthodox Christians of the Balkans. On more important issues – for example,
the text of the Symbol of faith, the canonical subjection of the Russian
metropolitan to the Ecumenical Patriarch, and a more balanced relationship
between Church and State – he made no concessions.
Like their opponents, the Old Ritualists believed in the ideology of the
Third Rome, but understood it differently. First, they resented the lead that
the patriarch was taking in this affair. In their opinion, the initiative in such
matters should come from the tsar insofar as it was the tsar, rather than the
hierarchs, who defended the Church from heresies. Here they were thinking
of the Russian Church’s struggle against the false council of Florence and the
Judaizing heresy, when the great prince did indeed take a leading role in the
defence of Orthodoxy while some of the hierarchs fell away from the truth.
However, they ignored the no less frequent cases – most recently, in the Time
of Troubles – when it had been the Orthodox hierarchs who had defended the
Church against apostate tsars.
Secondly, whereas for the Grecophiles of the “Greco-Russian Church”

Moscow the Third Rome was the continuation of Christian Rome, which
implied no break with Greek Orthodoxy, for the Old Ritualists the influence
of the Greeks, who had betrayed Orthodoxy at the council of Florence, could
only be harmful. They believed that the Russian Church did not need help
from, or agreement with, the Greeks; she was self-sufficient. Moreover, the
1004 Pokrovsky, Puteshestvia za redkimi knigami (Journeys for rare books), Moscow, 1988;
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print_page&pid=779. The mistake

in the Creed consisted in adding the word “true” after “and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord”.
578
Greeks could not be Orthodox, according to the Old Ritualists, not only
because they had apostasized at the council of Florence, but also because they
were “powerless”, that is, without an emperor. And when Russia, too, in their
view, became “powerless” through the tsar’s “apostasy”, they prepared for
the end of the world. For, as V.M. Lourié writes, “the Nikonite reforms were
perceived by Old Ritualism as apostasy from Orthodoxy, and consequently…
as the end of the last (Roman) Empire, which was to come immediately before
the end of the world.”1005
This anti-Greek attitude of the Old Ritualists represented a serious threat to

the ideal of Ecumenical Orthodoxy. It was exemplified especially by
Archpriest Avvakum, who wrote from his prison cell to Tsar Alexis: "Say in
good Russian 'Lord have mercy on me'. Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the
Greeks: that's their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexei, not
Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church
or at home!" And in the trial of 1667, Avvakum told the Greek bishops: “You,
ecumenical teachers! Rome has long since fallen, and lies on the ground, and
the Poles have gone under with her, for to the present day they have been
enemies of the Christians. But with you, too, Orthodoxy became a varied
mixture under the violence of the Turkish Mohammed. Nor is that surprising:
you have become powerless. From now on you must come to us to learn:
through God’s grace we have the autocracy. Before the apostate Nikon the
whole of Orthodoxy was pure and spotless in our Russia under the pious
rulers and tsars, and the Church knew no rebellion. But the wolf Nikon along
with the devil introduced the tradition that one had to cross oneself with
three fingers…”1006
It was this attempt to force the Russian Church into schism from the
Greeks that was the real sin of the Old Ritualists, making theirs the first
nationalist schism in Russian history. And it was against this narrow,
nationalistic and state-centred conception of “Moscow – the Third Rome”,
that Patriarch Nikon erected a more universalistic, Church-centred conception
which stressed the unity of the Russian Church with the Churches of the East.
For “in the idea of ‘the Third Rome’,” writes Lebedev, “his Holiness saw
first of all its ecclesiastical, spiritual content, which was also expressed in the
still more ancient idea of ‘the Russian land – the New Jerusalem’. This idea
was to a large degree synonymous with ‘the Third Rome’. To a large extent,
but not completely! It placed the accent on the Christian striving of Holy Rus’
for the world on high.
“In calling Rus’ to this great idea, Patriarch Nikon successively created a
series of architectural complexes in which was laid the idea of the pan-
human, universal significance of Holy Rus’. These were the Valdai Iveron
Lourié, “O Vozmozhnosti”, op. cit., p. 14.

1005
Avvakum, translated in Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London:
1006
SCM Press, 1999, p. 165.
579
church, and the Kii Cross monastery, but especially the Resurrection New-
Jerusalem monastery, which was deliberately populated with an Orthodox,
but multi-racial brotherhood (Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians,
Lithuanians, Germans, Jews, Poles and Greeks).
“This monastery, together with the complex of ‘Greater Muscovite

Palestine’, was in the process of creation from 1656 to 1666, and was then
completed after the death of the patriarch towards the end of the 17th
century. As has been clarified only comparatively recently, this whole
complex, including in itself Jordan, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Capernaum,
Ramah, Bethany, Tabor, Hermon, the Mount of Olives, the Garden of
Gethsemane, etc., was basically a monastery, and in it the Resurrection
cathedral, built in the likeness of the church of the Lord’s Sepulchre in
Jerusalem with Golgotha and the Saviour’s Sepulchre, was a double image –
an icon of the historical ‘promised land’ of Palestine and at the same time an
icon of the promised land of the Heavenly Kingdom, ‘the New Jerusalem’.
“In this way it turned out that the true union of the representatives of all
the peoples (pan-human unity) in Christ on earth and in heaven can be
realised only on the basis of Orthodoxy, and, moreover, by the will of God, in
its Russian expression. This was a clear, almost demonstrative opposition of
the union of mankind in the Church of Christ to its unity in the anti-church of
‘the great architect of nature’ with its aim of constructing the tower of
Babylon. But it also turned out that ‘Greater Muscovite Palestine’ with its
centre in the New Jerusalem became the spiritual focus of the whole of World
Orthodoxy. At the same time that the tsar was only just beginning to dream of
becoming the master of the East, Patriarch Nikon as the archimandrite of New
Jerusalem had already become the central figure of the Universal Church.
“This also laid a beginning to the disharmony between the tsar and the
patriarch, between the ecclesiastical and state authorities in Russia. Alexis
Mikhailovich, at first inwardly, but then also outwardly, was against Nikon’s
plans for the New Jerusalem. He insisted that only his capital, Moscow, was
the image of the heavenly city, and that the Russian tsar (and not the
patriarch) was the head of the whole Orthodox world. From 1657 there began
the quarrels between the tsar and the patriarch, in which the tsar revealed a
clear striving to take into his hands the administration of Church affairs, for
he made himself the chief person responsible for them.”1007
This intrusion of the tsar into the ecclesiastical administration, leading to

the deposition of Patriarch Nikon, was the decisive factor allowing the Old
Ritualist movement to gain credibility and momentum. In the longer term, it
led to the subjection of the Church to the State, to Russian Caesaropapism…
1007 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, pp. 40-41.
580
69. TSAR VERSUS PATRIARCH
On becoming patriarch in 1652, as we have seen, Nikon had secured from

the Tsar, his boyars and the bishops a solemn oath to the effect that they
would keep the sacred laws of the Church and State “and promise… to obey
us as your chief pastor and supreme father in all things which I shall
announce to you out of the divine commandments and laws.” There followed
a short, but remarkable period in which “the undivided, although
unconfused, union of state and ecclesiastical powers constituted the natural
basis of public life of Russia. The spiritual leadership in this belonged, of
course, to the Church, but this leadership was precisely spiritual and was
never turned into political leadership. In his turn the tsar… never used his
political autocracy for arbitrariness in relation to the Church, since the final
meaning of life for the whole of Russian society consisted in acquiring
temporal and eternal union with God in and through the Church…”1008
Although the patriarch had complete control of Church administration and

services, and the appointment and judgement of clerics in ecclesiastical
matters, “Church possessions and financial resources were considered a pan-
national inheritance. In cases of special need (for example, war) the tsar could
take as much of the resources of the Church as he needed without paying
them back. The diocesan and monastic authorities could spend only strictly
determined sums on their everyday needs. All unforeseen and major
expenses were made only with the permission of the tsar. In all monastic and
diocesan administrations state officials were constantly present; ecclesiastical
properties and resources were under their watchful control. And they judged
ecclesiastical peasants and other people in civil and criminal matters. A
special Monastirskij Prikaz [or “Ministry of Monasticism”], established in
Moscow in accordance with the Ulozhenie [legal code] of 1649, was in charge
of the whole clergy, except the patriarch, in civil and criminal matters.
Although in 1649 Nikon as archimandrite together with all the others had put
his signature to the Ulozhenie, inwardly he was not in agreement with it, and
on becoming patriarch declared this opinion openly. He was most of all
disturbed by the fact that secular people – the boyars of the Monastirskij Prikaz
– had the right to judge clergy in civil suits. He considered this situation
radically unecclesiastical and unchristian. When Nikon had still been
Metropolitan of Novgorod, the tsar, knowing his views, had given him a
‘document of exemption’ for the whole metropolia, in accordance with which
all the affairs of people subject to the Church, except for affairs of ‘murder,
robbery and theft’, were transferred from the administration of the
Monastirskij Prikaz to the metropolitan’s court. On becoming patriarch, Nikon
obtained a similar exemption from the Monastirskij Prikaz for his patriarchal
diocese (at that time the patriarch, like all the ruling bishops, had his own
1008 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, p. 87. This relationship was characterized in a service book
published in Moscow in 1653, as “the diarchy, complementary, God-chosen” (Fr. Sergei

Hackel, “Questions of Church and State in ‘Holy Russia’: some attitudes of the Romanov
period”, Eastern Churches Review, vol. II, no. 1, Spring, 1970, p. 8).
581
special diocese consisting of Moscow and spacious lands adjacent to it). As if
to counteract the Ulozhenie of 1649, Nikon published ‘The Rudder’, which
contains the holy canons of the Church and various enactments concerning
the Church of the ancient pious Greek emperors. As we shall see, until the
end of his patriarchy Nikon did not cease to fight against the Monastirskij
Prikaz. It should be pointed out that this was not a struggle for the complete
‘freedom’ of the Church from the State (which was impossible in Russia at
that time), but only for the re-establishment of the canonical authority of the
patriarch and the whole clergy in strictly spiritual matters, and also for such a
broadening of the right of the ecclesiastical authorities over people subject to
them in civil matters as was permitted by conditions in Russia.”1009
From May, 1654 to January, 1657, while the tsar was away from the capital
fighting the Poles, the patriarch acted as regent, a duty he carried out with
great distinction. Some later saw in this evidence of the political ambitions of
the patriarch. However, he undertook this duty only at the request of the tsar,
and was very glad to return the reins of political administration when the tsar
returned. Nevertheless, from 1656, the boyars succeeded in undermining the
tsar’s confidence in the patriarch, falsely insinuating that the tsar’s authority
was being undermined by Nikon’s ambition. And they began to apply the
Ulozhenie in Church affairs, even increasing the rights given by the Ulozhenie
to the Monastirskij Prikaz. Another bone of contention was the tsar’s desire to
appoint Silvester Kossov as Metropolitan of Kiev, which Nikon considered
uncanonical in that the Kievan Metropolitan was in the jurisdiction of the
Patriarch of Constantinople at that time.1010
Since the tsar was clearly determined to have his way, and was snubbing
the patriarch in many ways, on July 10, 1658 Nikon withdrew to his
monastery of New Jerusalem, near Moscow… He compared this move to the
flight of the Woman clothed with the sun into the wilderness in Revelation 12,
and quoted the 17th Canon of Sardica1011 and the words of the Gospel: “If
they persecute you in one city, depart to another, shaking off the dust from
your feet”.1012 “The whole state knows,” he said, “that in view of his anger
against me the tsar does not go to the Holy Catholic Church, and I am leaving
Moscow. I hope that the tsar will have more freedom without me.”1013
Some have regarded Nikon’s action as an elaborate bluff that failed.

Whatever the truth about his personal motivation, which is known to God
1009 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, pp. 88-89.

1010 M.V. Zyzykin, Pariarkh Nikon, Warsaw: Synodal Press, 1931, part II, p. 101.
1011 “If any Bishop who has suffered violence has been cast out unjustly, either on account of
his science or on account of his confession of the Catholic Church, or on account of his
insisting upon the truth, and fleeing from peril, when he is innocent and in danger, should
come to another city, let him not be prevented from living there, until he can return or find
relief from the insolent treatment he had received. For it is cruel and most burdensome for
one who has had to suffer an unjust expulsion not to be accorded a welcome by us. For such a
person ought to be shown great kindness and courtesy.”
1012 Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., volume I, p. 23; Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 105.
1013 Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 104.
582
alone, there can be no doubt that the patriarch, unlike his opponents, correctly
gauged the seriousness of the issue involved. For the quarrel between the tsar
and the patriarch signified, in effect, the beginning of the schism of Church
and State in Russia. In withdrawing from Moscow to New Jerusalem, the
patriarch demonstrated that “in truth ‘the New Jerusalem’, ‘the Kingdom of
God’, the beginning of the Heavenly Kingdom in Russia was the Church, its
Orthodox spiritual piety, and not the material earthly capital, although it
represented… ‘the Third Rome’.”1014
However, Nikon had appointed a vicar-metropolitan in Moscow, and had

said: “I am not leaving completely; if the tsar’s majesty bends, becomes more
merciful and puts away his wrath, I will return”. In other words, while
resigning the active administration of the patriarchy, he had not resigned his
rank – a situation to which there were many precedents in Church history.
And to show that he had not finally resigned from Church affairs, he
protested against moves made by his deputy on the patriarchal throne, and
continued to criticize the Tsar for interfering in the Church's affairs, especially
in the reactivation of the Monastirskij Prikaz…
Not content with having forced his withdrawal from Moscow, the boyars
resolved to have him defrocked, portraying him as a dangerous rebel –
although the Patriarch interfered less in the affairs of the Tsar than St. Philip
of Moscow had done in the affairs of Ivan the Terrible.1015 And so, in 1660,
they convened a council which appointed a patriarchal locum tenens,
Metropolitan Pitirim, to administer the Church independently without
seeking the advice of the patriarch and without commemorating his name.
Nikon rejected this council, and cursed Pitirim…
In a sense the Muscovite autocracy was itself cursed, doomed to

destruction at that moment. For the State that encroaches on the Church
condemns itself. Thus in 1661 Patriarch Nikon had a vision in which he saw
the Moscow Dormition cathedral full of fire: “The hierarchs who had
previously died were standing there. Peter the metropolitan rose from his
tomb, went up to the altar and laid his hand on the Gospel. All the hierarchs
did the same, and so did I. And Peter began to speak: ‘Brother Nikon! Speak
to the Tsar: why has he offended the Holy Church, and fearlessly taken
possession of the immovable things collected by us. This will not be to his
benefit. Tell him to return what he has taken, for the great wrath of God has
fallen upon him because of this: twice there have been pestilences, and so
many people have died, and now he has nobody with whom to stand against
his enemies.’ I replied: ‘He will not listen to me; it would be good if one of
you appeared to him.’ Peter continued: ‘The judgements of God have not
decreed this. You tell him; if he does not listen to you, then if one of us
1014 Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, p. 141. Italics mine (V.M.).

1015 Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 106-107.
583
appeared to him, he would not listen to him. And look! Here is a sign for
him.’ Following the movement of his hand I turned towards the west towards
the royal palace and I saw: there was no church wall, the palace was
completely visible, and the fire which was in the church came together and
went towards the royal court and burned it up. ‘If he will not come to his
senses, punishments greater than the first will be added,’ said Peter. Then
another grey-haired man said: ‘Now the Tsar wants to take the court you
bought for the churchmen and turn it into a bazaar for mammon’s sake. But
he will not rejoice over his acquisition.’”1016
Not only in relation to the Church, but also in other matters the “most
merciful” tsar was exhibiting a sharp change in policy and life-style. Having
freed himself from the tutelage of the Church, and submitting himself to
western influences that he had previously abhorred, he began showing signs
of a fatal move towards Caesaropapism. These changes anticipated the still
sharper changes that would take place under his son, Peter the Great.
Thus Montefiore writes that he returned from the Polish war “a confident
warlord who had seen how the Polish lords lived. He commissioned an
English agent to buy tapestries, trees, lace, singing parrots and royal carriages
to embellish his newly sumptuous palaces and hired mineralogists,
alchemists, glassmakers and an English doctor, Samuel Collins, who soon
noticed that ‘he begins to make his court and edifices more stately, to furnish
his rooms with tapestries and contrive a house of pleasure.’ Engaging 2,000
new foreign officers, he reformed the army and studied ballistics technology.
“Rid of Nikon, he realized that every ruler needs a chancellery to enforce

his orders, creating a new Office of Secret Affairs. When boyars missed his
dawn church services he registered their names and had them collected with
hands bound behind their backs and wearing their robes, tossed into the river
where they might easily have drowned or died of the cold. ‘This is your
reward,’ he laughed, ‘for preferring to sleep with your wives instead of
celebrating the lustre of this blessed day.’ He relished this despotic bullying,
writing to his friends: ‘I have made it my custom to duck courtiers every
morning in a pond. The baptism in the Jordan is well done. I duck four or
five, sometimes a dozen, whoever fails to report on time for my inspection.’
“But these games were deadly serious. He put the old boyars in their place.
When he had to promote a military bungler like Prince Ivan Khovansky,
nicknamed the ‘Windbag’, the tsar did so ‘even though everyone called you a
fool.’ He indulgently reprimanded the Whispering Favourite Khitrovo for
keeping a harem of Polish sex slaves and he was infuriated by the
whoremongering of his own father-in-law Miloslavsky: Alexei told him either
to give up sex or to marry fast.
1016 Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., volume I, pp. 24-25.
584
“Now the war lurched towards disaster. The Poles and Swedes made
peace with each other, so that Poland and the Cossack and Tatar allies could
turn on Russia. In June 1659, Alexei’s army was routed by a Polish-Cossack-
Tatar coalition, losing as many as 40,000 men, and his gains in Ukraine and
Livonia. But the tsar had found a brilliant new minister to guide him out of
this crisis: Afanasy Ordyn-Naschchokin, son of a poor noble from Pskov,
secured peace with the Swedes at Kardis. Alexei consulted the Council. There
the bovine Miloslavsky suggested that if he were appointed to supreme
command he’d bring back the king of Poland in chains.
“’What?’ Alexei shouted. ‘You have the effrontery, you boor, to boast of
your skills? When have you ever borne arms? Pray tell us the fine actions you
have fought! You old fool… Or do you presume to mock me impertinently?’
Seizing him by the beard, he slapped him across the face, dragged him out of
the Golden Chamber and slammed the doors behind him.
“Naschchokin recommended not just peace with Poland but a real alliance
if not a union under Alexei as king of Poland. But meanwhile his general
Prince Grigory Romodanovsky struggled to hold to eastern Ukraine. When he
did well, Alexei praised him, but when he failed he received a furious epistle
that must have made his hair stand on end. ‘May the Lord God reward you
for your satanic service… thrice-damned and shameful hater of Christians,
true son of Satan and friend of devils, you shall fall into the bottomless pit for
failing to send those troops. Remember, traitor, by whom you were promoted
and rewarded and on whom you depend! Where can you flee?’”1017
The people as a whole were suffering, and this did not escape the eyes of
Patriarch Nikon. In 1661 he wrote to the tsar: “Secular judges dispense justice
and violate it, and through this you have gathered against yourself a great
assembly on the Day of Judgement, crying aloud at your wrongdoings. You
preach to everyone that they should fast, but there is scarcely anyone left now
who is not fasting, because bread is scarce; in many places they fast to death
because there is nothing to eat. No one is spared: the destitute, the blind,
widows, monks, and nuns are burdened with heavy taxes. Everywhere there
is weeping and misery. Nobody makes merry nowadays.”
Again, in 1665 he wrote to the Eastern Patriarchs: “Men are taken for
military service, bread and money are taken mercilessly. The Tsar doubles
and trebles the tribute laid on the Christian people – and all in vain…”1018
“On 25 July 1662,” continues Montefiore, “Alexei and his family were
attending church at his favourite Kolomenskoe Palace outside Moscow when
a huge crowd started calling for the head of his father-in-law Miloslavsky,
who as Treasury boss was hated for devalying the coinage with copper.
Sending his family to hide in the tsarina’s apartments, Alexei emerged to
1017 Montefiore, op. cit., pp. 53-54.

585
reason with the crowd while he summoned reinforcements from Moscow, not
realizing the capital was in the hands of the rioters and that more protesters
were approaching.
“Alexei was on his horse ready to ride back to Moscow when this furious
sea of humanity washed over him. He was manhandled, the tsarina insulted,
and his retainers were about to draw their swords when his troops charged
the crowd from behind. ‘Save me from these dogs!’ cried Alexei and spurred
his horse. The mob was driven into the river and many were arrested. Alexei
attended the torture chambers and specified the punishments: ‘ten or twenty
thieves’ hanged at once, eighteen left to rot on gibbets along the roads into
Moscow and a hundred at Kolomenskoe, were ripped out, bodies
dismembered.
“When he was riding through Moscow, he wielded the tsar’s traditional

steel-pointed staff, the very one with which Ivan the Terrible had murdered
his son. When a man rushed through his guards, Alexei killed him with the
staff. It turned out that the man had not been paid. ‘I killed an innocent man,’
but the commander who didn’t pay him ‘is guilty of his blood’ and was
dismissed.
“The Copper Riot shook the tsar, who suffered palpitations, nose-bleeds
and indigestion which his doctors Collins and Engelhardt treated with
laxatives, opium and hellebore to slow the heart. Yet his boisterous activity
shows an astonishingly tough constitution, as his brood of sons proved. His
eldest was also named Alexei and now Maria gave birth to another son,
Fyodor. When the carefully educated eldest turned thirteed, he was presented
as the heir.
“On the night of 18 December 1664, a convoy of ten sleighs swept into the
snow-covered Kremlin, halting outside the Dormition Cathedral. Out stepped
Nikon. Alexei ordered his immediate departure, but this mysterious visitation
exposed the seething conflicts around the tsar.
“Alexei ordered that everyone must obey the new rules of Orthodox ritual
– or die. He tried conciliating the leader of the Old Believers, Avvakum, but
he remained defiant. Two well-connected female courtiers, Feodosia
Morozova, sister-in-law of his late minister, and Princess Eudoxia Urusova,
were obdurate. They were banned from court, then arrested and offered
liberty if they just crossed themselves in the new way, but when Alexei
visited them in the dungeons Morozova defiantly gave him the two fingers.
Alexei was determined not to create martyrs, so he had them tortured then
starved to death. Avvakum had his wife and children buried alive in front of
him: he himself was just exiled. But across Russia, Old Believers were burned
alive. Many fled to Siberia and to the Cossack badlands: some fortified the
Arctic island monastery of Solovki.”1019
1019
Montefiore, op. cit., pp. 54-55.
586
With Nikon’s departure, the tsar was left with the problem of replacing
him at the head of the Church. S.A. Zenkovsky writes that he “was about to
return Protopriest Avvakum, whom he personally respected and loved, from
exile, but continued to keep the new typicon… In 1666-1667, in order to
resolve the question of what to do with Nikon and to clarify the complications
with the typicon, [the tsar] convened first a Russian council of bishops, and
then almost an ecumenical one, with the participation of the patriarchs of
Alexandria and Antioch [who had been suspended by the Patriarch of
Constantinople]. The patriarch of Constantinople (he wrote that small details
in the typicon were not so important – what was important was the
understanding of the commandments of Christ, the basic dogmas of the faith,
and devotion to the Church) and the patriarch of Jerusalem did not come to
this council, not wishing to get involved in Russian ecclesiastical quarrels.
“The first part of the council sessions, with the participation only of
Russian bishops, went quite smoothly and moderately. Before it, individual
discussions of each bishop with the tsar had prepared almost all the decisions.
The council did not condemn the old typicon, and was very conciliatory
towards its defenders, who, with the exception of Avvakum, agreed to sign
the decisions of the council and not break with the Church. The stubborn
Avvakum refused, and was for that defrocked and excommunicated from the
Church. The second part of the council sessions, with the eastern patriarchs,
was completely under the influence of Metropolitan Paisius Ligarides of Gaza
(in Palestine) [who had been defrocked by the Patriarch of Jerusalem and was
in the pay of the Vatican]. He adopted the most radical position in relation to
the old Russian ecclesiastical traditions. The old Russian rite was condemned
and those who followed it were excommunicated from the Church
(anathema). Also condemned at that time were such Russian writings as the
Story of the White Klobuk (on Moscow as the Third Rome), the decrees of the
Stoglav council, and other things.”1020
The council then turned its attention to Patriarch Nikon. On December 12,
1666 he was reduced to the rank of a monk on the grounds that “he annoyed
his great majesty [the tsar], interfering in matters which did not belong to the
patriarchal rank and authority”.1021 The truth was the exact opposite: that the
tsar and his boyars had interfered in matters which did not belong to their
rank and authority, breaking the oath they had made to the patriarch.1022
1020 Zenkovsky, op. cit., pp. 88-89.

1021 Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Rossijskoj Tserkvi (A History of the Russian Church), USA, 1993, p.
191.
1022 Ironically, they also transgressed those articles of the Ulozhenie, chapter X, which
envisaged various punishments for offending the clergy (Nikolin, op. cit., p. 71).
587
Another charge against the patriarch was that in 1654 he had defrocked
and exiled the most senior of the opponents to his reforms, Bishop Paul of
Kolomna, on his own authority, without convening a council of bishops.1023
But, as Lebedev writes, “Nikon refuted this accusation, referring to the

conciliar decree on this bishop, which at that time was still in the patriarchal
court. Entering then [in 1654] on the path of an authoritative review of
everything connected with the correction of the rites, Nikon of course could
not on his own condemn a bishop, when earlier even complaints against
prominent protopriests were reviewed by him at a Council of the clergy.”1024
The council also sinned in approving the Tomos sent by the Eastern
Patriarchs to Moscow in 1663 to justify the supposed lawfulness of Nikon’s
deposition. Under the name of Patriarchal Replies it expressed a caesaropapist
doctrine, according to which the Patriarch was exhorted to obey the tsar and
the tsar was permitted to remove the patriarch in case of conflict with him.
Patriarch Dionysius of Constantinople expressed this doctrine as follows in a
letter to the tsar: “You have the power to have a patriarch and all your
councillors established by you, for in one autocratic state there must not be
two principles, but one must be the senior.”
To which Lebedev justly replied: “It is only to be wondered at how the

Greeks by the highest authority established and confirmed in the Russian
kingdom that [caesaropapism] as a result of which they themselves had lost
their monarchy! It was not Paisius Ligarides who undermined Alexis
Mikhailovich: it was the ecumenical patriarchs who deliberately decided the
matter in favour of the tsar.”1025
However, opposition was voiced by Metropolitans Paul of Krutitsa and

Hilarion of Ryazan, who feared “that the Patriarchal Replies would put the
hierarchs into the complete control of the royal power, and thereby of a Tsar
who would not be as pious as Alexis Mikhailovich and could turn out to be
dangerous for the Church”.
They particularly objected to the following sentence in the report on the

affair of the patriarch: “It is recognized that his Majesty the Tsar alone should
be in charge of spiritual matters, and that the Patriarch should be obedient to
him”, which they considered to be humiliating for ecclesiastical power and to
offer a broad scope for the interference of the secular power in Church
affairs.1026
1023 Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 290; S.G. Burgaft and I.A. Ushakov, Staroobriadchestvo (Old
Ritualism), Moscow, 1996, pp. 206-207. According to the Old Ritualists, Bishop Paul said that,
in view of Nikon’s “violation” of Orthodoxy, his people should be received into communion
with the Old Ritualists by the second rite, i.e. chrismation.
1026 Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 350.
588
So, as Zyzykin writes, “the Patriarchs were forced to write an explanatory
note, in which they gave another interpretation to the second chapter of the
patriarchal replies… The Council came to a unanimous conclusion: ‘Let it be
recognized that the Tsar has the pre-eminence in civil affairs, and the
Patriarch in ecclesiastical affairs, so that in this way the harmony of the
ecclesiastical institution may be preserved whole and unshaken.’ This was the
principled triumph of the Nikonian idea, as was the resolution of the Council
to close the Monastirskij Prikaz and the return to the Church of judgement over
clergy in civil matters (the later remained in force until 1700).”1027
And yet it had been a close-run thing. During the 1666 Council Ligarides
had given voice to an essentially pagan view of tsarist power: “[The tsar] will
be called the new Constantine. He will be both tsar and hierarch, just as the
great Constantine, who was so devoted to the faith of Christ, is praised
among us at Great Vespers as priest and tsar. Yes, and both among the
Romans and the Egyptians the tsar united in himself the power of the
priesthood and of the kingship.” If this doctrine had triumphed at the
Council, then Russia would indeed have entered the era of the Antichrist, as
the Old Ritualists believed.
And if the good sense of the Russian hierarchs finally averted a

catastrophe, the unjust condemnation of Patriarch Nikon, the chief supporter
of the Orthodox doctrine, cast a long shadow over the proceedings, and
meant that within a generation the attempt to impose absolutism on Russia
would begin again…
Indeed, it could be said to have begun well before that, for, as Robert
Massie writes, “Nikon’s successor, the new Patriarch Joachim, well
understood his designated role when he addressed the Tsar saying:
‘Sovereign, I know neither the old nor the new faith, but whatever the
Sovereign orders, I am prepared to follow and obey in all respects.” 1028
True, the tsar asked forgiveness of Nikon just before his death. But the
reconciliation was incomplete. For the patriarch replied to the tsar’s
messenger: “Imitating my teacher Christ, who commanded us to remit the
sins of our neighbours, I say: may God forgive the deceased. But a written
forgiveness I will not give, because during his life he did not free us from
imprisonment” 1029
1027 Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, pp. 274, 275.

1028 Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 61.
1029 Nikon, in Rusak, op. cit., p. 193.
589
70. PATRIARCH NIKON ON THE SYMPHONY OF POWERS
The rebellion of the Old Ritualists and the unlawful deposition of Patriarch
Nikon opened up a schism within the people, and between the secular and
ecclesiastical authorities. And so the Lord allowed the State based on the
Orthodox ideal of the symphony of powers of Muscovite Russia to be
transformed into an absolutist despotism under Tsar Alexei’s son, Peter.
What should be the relationship of an Orthodox King to the Orthodox

Church within his dominions? “There is no question,” writes Lebedev, “that
the Orthodox Sovereign cares for the Orthodox Church, defends her, protects
her, takes part in all her most important affairs. But not he in the first place;
and not he mainly. The Church has her own head on earth – the Patriarch.
Relations between the head of the state and the head of the Church in Russia,
beginning from the holy equal-to-the-apostles Great Prince Vladimir and
continuing with Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nikon, were always
formed in a spirit of symphony.
“Not without exceptions, but, as a rule, this symphony was not broken and
constituted the basis of the inner spiritual strength of the whole of Rus’, the
whole of the Russian state and society. The complexity of the symphony
consisted in the fact that the Tsar and Patriarch were identically responsible
for everything that took place in the people, in society, in the state. But at the
same time the Tsar especially answered for worldly matters, matters of state,
while the Patriarch especially answered for Church and spiritual affairs. In
council they both decided literally everything. But in worldly affairs the last
word lay with the Tsar; and in Church and spiritual affairs – with the
Patriarch. The Patriarch unfailingly took part in the sessions of the State
Duma, that is, of the government. The Tsar unfailingly took part in the
Church Councils. In the State Duma the last word was with the Sovereign,
and in the Church Councils – with the Patriarch. This common responsibility
for everything and special responsibility for the state and the Church with the
Tsar and the Patriarch was the principle of symphony or agreement.”1030
That Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich sincerely believed this teaching is clear from
his letter to the Patriarch of Jerusalem: “The most important task of the
Orthodox Tsar is care for the faith, the Church, and all the affairs of the
Church.” However, it was he who introduced the Ulozhenie, the first serious
breach in Church-State symphony. And it was he who deposed Patriarch
Nikon…
Therefore while it is customary to date the breakdown of Church-State

symphony or agreement in Russia to the time of Peter the Great, the
foundations of Holy Russia had been undermined already in the time of his
father, Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich.
1030 Lebedev, “Razmyshlenia vozle sten novogo Ierusalima” (“Thoughts next to the Walls of
New Jerusalem”), Vozvrashchenie (Return), NN 12-13, 1999, p. 60.
590
As M.V. Zyzykin writes, “in Church-State questions, Nikon fought with
the same corruption that had crept into Muscovite political ideas after the
middle of the 15th century and emerged as political Old Ritualism, which
defended the tendency towards caesaropapism that had established itself. The
fact that the guardian of Orthodoxy, at the time of the falling away of the
Constantinopolitan Emperor and Patriarch and the Russian Metropolitan into
the unia, turned out to be the Muscovite Great Prince, had too great an
influence on the exaltation of his significance in the Church. And if we
remember that at that time, shortly after the unia, the Muscovite Great Prince
took the place of the Byzantine Emperor, and that with the establishment of
the de facto independence of the Russian Church from the Constantinopolitan
Patriarch the Muscovite first-hierarchs lost a support for their ecclesiastical
independence from the Great Princes, then it will become clear to us that the
Muscovite Great Prince became de facto one of the chief factors in Church
affairs, having the opportunity to impose his authority on the hierarchy.”1031
Patriarch Nikon corrected the caesaropapist bias of the Russian Church as

expressed especially by Ligarides in his famous work Razzorenie (“Refutation”
or “Destruction”), in which he defined the rights and duties of the tsar as
follows: “The tsar undoubtedly has power to give rights and honours, but
within the limits set by God; he cannot give spiritual power to Bishops and
archimandrites and other spiritual persons: spiritual things belong to the
decision of God, and earthly things to the king” (I, 555).1032
“The main duty of the tsar is to care for the Church, for the dominion of the
tsar can never be firmly established and prosperous when his mother, the
Church of God, is not strongly established, for the Church of God, most
glorious tsar, is thy mother, and if thou art obliged to honour thy natural
mother, who gave thee birth, then all the more art thou obliged to love thy
spiritual mother, who gave birth to thee in Holy Baptism and anointed thee to
the kingdom with the oil and chrism of gladness.”1033
Indeed, “none of the kings won victory without the prayers of the priests”
(I, 187).1034 For “Bishops are the successors of the Apostles and the servants of
God, so that the honour accorded to them is given to God Himself.”1035 “It
was when the evangelical faith began to shine that the Episcopate was
venerated; but when the spite of pride spread, the honour of the Episcopate
was betrayed.”

591
“A true hierarch of Christ is everything. For when kingdom falls on
kingdom, the kingdom and house that is divided in itself will not stand.”1036
“The tsar is entrusted with the bodies, but the priests with the souls of men.
The tsar remits money debts, but the priests – sins. The one compels, the other
comforts. The one wars with enemies, the other with the princes and rulers of
the darkness of this world. Therefore the priesthood is much higher than the
kingdom.”1037
The superiority of the priesthood is proved by the fact that the tsar is
anointed by the patriarch and not vice-versa. “The highest authority of the
priesthood was not received from the tsars, but the tsars are anointed to the
kingdom through the priesthood… We know no other lawgiver than Christ,
Who gave the power to bind and to loose. What power did the tsar give me?
This one? No, but he himself seized it for himself… Know that even he who is
distinguished by the diadem is subject to the power of the priest, and he who
is bound by him will be bound also in the heavens.”1038
The patriarch explains why, on the one hand, the priesthood is higher than
the kingdom, and on the other, the kingdom cannot be abolished by the
priesthood: “The kingdom is given by God to the world, but in wrath, and it
is given through anointing from the priests with a material oil, but the
priesthood is a direct anointing from the Holy Spirit, as also our Lord Jesus
Christ was raised to the high-priesthood directly by the Holy Spirit, as were
the Apostles. Therefore, at the consecration to the episcopate, the consecrator
holds an open Gospel over the head of him who is being consecrated” (I, 234,
235)… There is no human judgement over the tsar, but there is a warning
from the pastors of the Church and the judgement of God.”1039 However, the
fact that the tsar cannot be judged by man shows that the kingdom is given
him directly by God, and not by man. “For even if he was not crowned, he
would still be king.” But he can only be called an Orthodox, anointed king if
he is crowned by the Bishop. Thus “he receives and retains his royal power by
the sword de facto. But the name of king (that is, the name of a consecrated
and Christian or Orthodox king) he receives from the Episcopal consecration,
for which the Bishop is the accomplisher and source.” (I, 254).1040
We see here how far Nikon is from the papocaesarism of a Pope Gregory
VII, who claimed to be able to depose kings precisely “as kings”. And yet he
acquireded a reputation for papocaesarism because of his fearless exposure of

1038 Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 30, 32.
1039 Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 41. As Zyzykin says in another place, Nikon “not only does not
call for human sanctions against the abuses of tsarist power, but definitely says that there is
no human power [that can act] against them, but there is the wrath of God, as in the words of
Samuel to Saul: ‘It is not I that turn away from thee, in that thou has rejected the Word of the
Lord, but the Lord has rejected thee, that thou shouldest not be king over Israel’ (I Kings
15.26)” (op. cit., part II, p. 17).
592
the caesaropapism of the Russian tsar: “Everyone should know his measure.
Saul offered the sacrifice, but lost his kingdom; Uzziah, who burned incense
in the temple, became a leper. Although thou art tsar, remain within thy
limits. Wilt thou say that the heart of the king is in the hand of God? Yes, but
the heart of the king is in the hand of God [only] when the king remains
within the boundaries set for him by God.”1041
In another passage Nikon combines the metaphor of the two swords with
that of the sun and moon. The latter metaphor had been used by Pope
Innocent III; but Nikon’s development of it is Orthodox and does not exalt the
power of the priesthood any more than did the Fathers of the fourth century:
“The all-powerful God, in creating the heaven and the earth, order the two
great luminaries – the sun and the moon – to shine upon the earth in their
course; by one of them – the sun - He prefigured the episcopal power, while
by the other – the moon – He prefigured the tsarist power. For the sun is the
greater luminary, it shines by day, like the Bishop who enlightens the soul.
But the lesser luminary shines by night, by which we must understand the
body. As the moon borrows its light from the sun, and in proportion to its
distance from it receives a fuller radiance, so the tsar derives his consecration,
anointing and coronation (but not power) from the Bishop, and, having
received it, has his own light, that it, his consecrated power and authority.
The similarity between these two persons in every Christian society is exactly
the same as that between the sun and the moon in the material world. For the
episcopal power shines by day, that is, over souls; while the tsarist power
shines in the things of this world. And this power, which is the tsarist sword,
must be ready to act against the enemies of the Orthodox faith. The episcopate
and all the clergy need this defence from all unrighteousness and violence.
This is what the secular power is obliged to do. For secular people are in need
of freedom for their souls, while spiritual people are in need of secular people
for the defence of their bodies. And so in this neither of them is higher than
the other, but each has power from God.”1042
But Nikon insists that when the tsar encroaches on the Church he loses his
power. For “there is in fact no man more powerless than he who attacks the
Divine laws, and there is nothing more powerful than a man who fights for
them. For he who commits sin is the slave of sin, even if he bears a thousand
crowns on his head, but he who does righteous deeds is greater than the tsar
himself, even if he is the last of all.” 1043 So a tsar who himself chooses
patriarchs and metropolitans, breaking his oath to the patriarch “is unworthy
even to enter the church, but he must spend his whole life in repentance, and
only at the hour of death can he be admitted to communion… Chrysostom
forbade every one who breaks his oath … from crossing the threshold of the
church, even in he were the tsar himself.”1044

593
Nikon comes very close to identifying the caesaropapist tsar with the
Antichrist. For, as Zyzykin points out, “Nikon looked on the apostasy of the
State law from Church norms (i.e. their destruction) as the worship by the
State of the Antichrist, ‘This antichrist is not satan, but a man, who will
receive from satan the whole power of his energy. A man will be revealed
who will be raised above God, and he will be the opponent of God and will
destroy all gods and will order that people worship him instead of God, and
he will sit, not in the temple of Jerusalem, but in the Churches, giving himself
out as God. As the Median empire was destroyed by Babylon, and the
Babylonian by the Persian, and the Persian by the Macedonian, and the
Macedonian by the Roman, thus must the Roman empire be destroyed by the
antichrist, and he – by Christ. This is revealed to us by the Prophet Daniel.
The divine Apostle warned us about things to come, and they have come for
us through you and your evil deeds (he is speaking to the author of the
Ulozhenie, Prince Odoyevsky) Has not the apostasy from the Holy Gospel and
the traditions of the Holy Apostles and holy fathers appeared? (Nikon has in
mind the invasion by the secular authorities into the administration of the
Church through the Ulozhenie). Has not the man of sin been discovered - the
son of destruction, who will exalt himself about everything that is called God,
or that is worshipped? And what can be more destructive than abandoning
God and His commandments, as they have preferred the traditions of men,
that is, their codex full of spite and cunning? But who is this? Satan? No. This
is a man, who has received the work of Satan, who has united to himself
many others like you, composer of lies, and your comrades. Sitting in the
temple of God does not mean in the temple of Jerusalem, but everywhere in
the Churches. And sitting not literally in all the Churches, but as exerting
power over all the Churches. The Church is not stone walls, but the
ecclesiastical laws and the pastors, against whom thou, apostate, hast arisen,
in accordance with the work of satan, and in the Ulozhenie thou hast presented
secular people with jurisdiction over the Patriarch, the Metropolitans, the
Archbishops, the Bishops, and over all the clergy, without thinking about the
work of God. As the Lord said on one occasion: ‘Depart from Me, satan, for
thou thinkest not about what is pleasing to God, but about what is pleasing to
men.’ ‘Ye are of your father the devil and you carry out his lusts.’ Concerning
such Churches Christ said: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer, but
you will make it a den of thieves’; as Jeremiah says (7.4): ‘Do not rely on
deceiving words of those who say to you: here is the temple of the Lord.’
How can it be the temple of God if it is under the power of the tsar and his
subjects, and they order whatever they want in it? Such a Church is no longer
the temple of God, but the house of those who have power over it, for, if it
were the temple of God, nobody, out of fear of God, would be capable of
usurping power over it or taking anything away from it. But as far as the
persecution of the Church is concerned, God has revealed about this to His
beloved disciple and best theologian John (I, 403-408),… [who] witnesses,
saying that the Antichrist is already in the world. But nobody has seen or
heard him perceptibly, that is, the secular authorities will begin to rule over
the Churches of God in transgression of the commandments of God.’ For the
594
word ‘throne’ signifies having ecclesiastical authority, and not simply
sitting… And he will command people to bow down to him not externally or
perceptibly, but in the same way as now the Bishops, abandoning their
priestly dignity and honour, bow down to the tsars as to their masters. And
they ask them for everything and seek honours from them” (I, 193).”1045 For
“there is apostasy also in the fact that the Bishops, abandoning their dignity,
bow down before the tsar as their master in spiritual matters, and seek
honours from him.”1046
The power of the Roman emperors, of which the Russian tsardom is the
lawful successor, is “that which restraineth” the coming of the Antichrist.
And yet “the mystery of iniquity is already being accomplished” in the shape
of those kings, such as Nero, who ascribed to themselves divine worship.1047
The warning was clear: that which restrains the antichrist can be swiftly
transformed into the antichrist himself. Even the present tsar could suffer
such a transformation; for “what is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge
bishops, taking to himself a power which has not been given him by God?…
This is apostasy from God.”1048
1045 Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 24-25, 28.

1048 Patriarch Nikon, in Hackel, op. cit., p. 9.
595
71. THE KIEVAN METROPOLIA
With the weakening of Poland and the increase in strength of the generally
pro-Muscovite Cossacks under Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, large areas of
Belorussia and the Ukraine, including Kiev, were freed from Latin control,
which could only be joyful news for the native Orthodox population who had
suffered so much from the Polish-Jesuit yoke. Kiev itself was transferred to
Muscovy by the Treaty of Andrusovo in 1667 for only two years. But in 1686
the deal became permanent when Muscovy paid the Poles 146,000 rubles.1049
The question now arose whether the Kievan metropolia should remain
within the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. In 1686 Patriarch
Dionysius IV of Constantinople agreed to the transfer of the Kievan
metropolia to the Moscow Patriarchate to the extent of allowing Moscow to
ordain the Kiev metropolitan. However, it still remained, strictly speaking
within the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Moreover, the transfer
was subject to three conditions: 1) the election of the metropolitan of Kiev was
to take place by the bishops, clergy and nobles of the metropolia and with the
permission and at the command of the Hetman, not the Russian tsar; 2) both
the Ecumenical and the Moscow patriarchs were to be commemorated; and 3)
the metropolitan of Kiev was to preserve all his privileges.1050 The first two
conditions were never fulfilled.
In any case, in 1687 Patriarch Dionysius was removed for this act, and the
transfer of Kiev to Moscow denounced as anti-canonical by the Ecumenical
Patriarchate. Things were made worse when, in 1688, Moscow reneged on its
promise to give Kiev the status of an autonomous metropolia and turned it
into an ordinary diocese. This had consequences in the twentieth century,
when Constantinople granted the Polish Church autocephaly in 1924, and
then, from the beginning of the 1990s, began to lay claims to the Ukraine.
Constantinople’s so-called “transfer” of Kiev to the jurisdiction of the

Russian Church was extracted only under heavy pressure from the Sultan,
who was in turn under pressure from Moscow, and wanted to ensure
Moscow’s neutrality in his war with the Sacred League in Europe. Ironically,
the fact that he succumbed to this pressure tends to give strength to the
argument that it was better for Kiev to be under the free Church of Russia
rather than the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which was in captivity to the godless
Turks…
“The Treaty of Andrusovo is Signed”, History Today, January, 2017, p. 9.

1049
Konstantin Vetoshnikov, “’Peredacha’ Kievskoj mitropolii Moskovskomu patriarkhaty v

1050
1686 godu: kanonicheskij analiz” (The ‘transfer’ of the Kievan metropolia to the Moscow
patriarchate in 1686: a canonical analysis), report delivered in French in Belgrade in August,
2016, https://www.academia.edu, translated into Russian in Pravoslavie Segodnia (Orthodoxy
Today), September 16, 2016. Cf. V.G. Chentsova, “Sinodal’noe reshenie 1686 g. o Kievskoj
mitropolii” (The Synodal Decision of 1686 on the Kievan Metropolia), in Drevnaia Rus’.
Voprosy Medievistiki 2 (68), 2017, с. 89-110.
596
This is the argument of Sergei Kuznetsov, who writes: “The turning point
for Orthodoxy coincided with the awakening of national self-consciousness
among the Orthodox population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
[Polish: Rzeczpospolita]. In 1648, when King Jan II Casimir (Vasa) ascended
the Polish-Lithuanian throne, he resolved not to admit a single non-Catholic
to a leading post in the entire Commonwealth.
“Even the Hadiach treaty of 1658, which was signed to protect Orthodoxy
in Poland after an acute period of conflict, was set aside in favor of Uniatism.
“After the abdication of Jan Casimir from the throne in 1668, the general
Polish confederation passed a law whereby “apostates from Catholicism and
Uniatism” (i.e. Orthodox people) were deprived of civil rights and freedoms,
and were subject to exile.
“In church relations, the situation was no better. The Cathedræ [Episcopal
sees.—Trans.] in outposts of Orthodoxy in Western Ukraine, such as the Lviv
and Lutsk dioceses, were often purchased by Bishops for money under one
main condition—loyalty to the Unia. Orthodox Churches were seized en masse
by the Uniates. At the same time, this violence over freedom of religious
confession in Poland was strengthened at the legislative level, and as a result,
the Orthodox population of the Commonwealth had no defense in the courts
of law.
“The defenseless position of Constantinople, together with the deteriorating

state of the Orthodox people in Western Rus’, in the end led to the Russian
State sending their own representatives here [to Modern-day
Ukraine/Western Rus’—Trans.] to protect the rights of Orthodox believers.
Nominally, Western Rus’ was then still a part of the Patriarchate of
Constantinople.
“The Polish King in principle did not acknowledge the Patriarch of

Constantinople, a clear indication of this being a 1676 declaration of the Sejm
[Polish parliament.—Trans.] made ten years before the change of jurisdiction,
forbidding Orthodox Ukrainian Brotherhoods and local Hierarchs to have any
communication with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The Mother Church could
then do nothing about it, even as it already couldn’t do anything in principle,
being as it was a hostage of the Ottoman Empire.
‘Moreover, even 50 years before the events described, nothing prevented

the Polish authorities, for example, from declaring the assistant of the
Ecumenical Patriarch—Patriarch Theophan of Antioch—as an impostor, and
with the stroke of a pen, they declared all of the bishops whom he consecrated
in Western Rus’ non-canonical.
597
“Beyond sending notes of protest, written assurances, and exhortations for
the faithful to preserve Orthodoxy, the Ecumenical Patriarchate did nothing
concrete.
“Caught between the powerful Catholic West, and the powerless Greek
East, the Western Russian Church could only proceed down the path of the
restoration of historical justice: to restore the unity of the once divided
Russian Church, and to enlist the support of the Patriarch of Moscow as well
as the Russian tsar to restore not simply a nominal, but a real Church and
Secular authority.
“It would not be superfluous to add that the division of the Metropolia in
1458 was, in particular, the handiwork of Pope Callixtus III, who perceived
the Kievan Church as consisting of two parts: “Upper Russia” and “Lower
Russia”. Thus we can see that what once lead to the separation of the church,
now, on the contrary, contributed to its reunification.
“The exact moment and circumstances, of the transfer of the Kievan

Metropolis to the Moscow Patriarchate is to this day the subject of
speculation, which supposedly boils down to the nuances of the translation of
the Patriarchal letter. There are a large number of studies on this subject,
supported by an analysis of the original text of the letter of Patriarch
Dionysius, but, given the special character of Greek Church diplomacy, it is
extremely difficult to put an end to this complex issue.
“Firstly, there is no clear timeframe. In other words, the original letter

gives the Patriarchate of Moscow the right to consecrate and appoint the
Kievan Metropolitan, but it says nothing about any timeframe ascribed to this
right. From that time on, the Metropolitan of Kiev has recognized the
Patriarch of Moscow as his father.
“Secondly, the single connection between Constantinople and Kiev was

stipulated only at a liturgical level: The Kievan Metropolitan had to
commemorate the name of the Ecumenical Patriarch first during the Liturgy,
and only then the Patriarch of Moscow.
“The most successful antipode of this intricate church diplomacy, and the
key to understanding the ‘Ukrainian Church Question’, may be the Tomos of
autocephaly… of the Church of Greece. The fact is that decisions of the
Ecumenical Throne on the autocephaly or the autonomy of a particular
territory depends upon how important that territory is to them. The
Autocephalous Church of Greece consists of eighty-one dioceses, thirty of
which are the so-called ‘New Territories’.
“The peculiarity is that the New Territories, (Northern Greece), are part of
the Church of Greece, but in the Tomos of Autocephaly, it is stipulated that
they were transferred from Constantinople to Athens ‘for a time’ (αχρι καιρου/
ἄχρι καιροῦ).[3]
598
“In the letter of Patriarch Dionysius IV, there is no indication of a
timeframe or a concrete date. It seems that the Kievan Metropolia was not so
important for Constantinople, since they didn’t leave a way out for
themselves. Even if Patriarch Dionysius theoretically had in mind a
temporary nature of rule by the Moscow Patriarchate, then he would not have
hesitated to claim his rights at the earliest opportunity.
“However, neither during the liquidation of the Polish-Lithuanian

Commonwealth, nor during the Russo-Turkish Wars, nor after the February
revolution right up to 1923 (the [date of the] Tomos of Autocephaly of the
Polish Orthodox Church), do we see any documents of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate in which he claims his rights to these territories.”1051
The issue of which patriarchate administered the Church in the Ukraine

was not a matter of little importance, or simply a matter of national pride. The
real question was: which Church could more effectively counter the powerful
influence of the uniates, who distorted church dogma and church practice, as
for example through their practice of pouring instead full threefold
immersion for baptism?
In 1754 Archbishop Nikiphor of Slovania and Kherson issued an important

encyclical on this question: “Because of my rank I am obligated to watch
everything and see that everything be preserved fully and is not altered.
Firstly, I draw your attention to Holy Baptism, which is the door to all the
mysteries, the beginning of our salvation, the absolution of sins and
reconciliation with God. It is the gift of adoption since in baptism we become
the sons of God and the heirs of Christ, putting on Christ our Lord, by the
word of Holy Apostle Paul: "As many of you that have been baptized into
Christ, have put on Christ." Without this, salvation is not possible. "Verily,
verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he
cannot enter into the Kingdom of God."(John 3:5)
“Discussing the holy mystery, I must point out that:
“1) The very word or name of this mystery, in the language initially used
by the enlightened apostles to communicate the good news of the Gospel to
us, actually means immersion, not pouring or sprinkling.
“2) The first institutor of baptism—the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,
entered the River Jordan, and, having immersed Himself, was baptized.
“3) The Apostle Philip went down to the water with the eunuch, in order to
baptize him. "...and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the
eunuch; and he baptized him" (Acts 8,38).
1051 Kuznetsow, “The Historical Aspects of the Transfer of the KIevan Metopolia to the
Moscow Patriarchate”, Orthodox Christianity, August 20, 2018.
599
“4) The Orthodox Church, according to apostolic tradition, has always
baptized through immersion. This is seen in the 7th canon of the 2nd
Ecumenical Council, which speaks of immersion; in the second homily
concerning the performance of mysteries by St. Cyril of Jerusalem, it clearly
states: "Ye have confessed the salvific confession, and having immersed
yourselves thrice in water, came forth out of it," and in the words of St. Basil
the Great: "Through three immersions and the same number of invocations is
the great mystery of Baptism performed."
“5) The immersion into water, and specifically a triple immersion, and also
a triple coming out of the water was not instituted arbitrarily or accidentally,
but as the image of the Resurrection of Christ on the third day. "The water,"
says blessed Basil, "has the symbolic meaning of death, and accepts the body
as into a coffin." How then, do we liken ourselves to the One Who descended
into hell, imitating His burial through baptism? The bodies of those who are
baptized in water are buried, in a certain sense. Consequently, baptism
mystically represents the laying aside of bodily cares, by the word of the
apostle: "In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made
without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the
circumcision of Christ" (Col. 2: 11)." St. Cyril, in his commentary on the above
words, says: "Thus, with the help of these signs you have represented the
three-day burial of Christ because, as our Saviour was in the heart of the earth
three days and three nights, so in the first coming up from the water you
symbolized the first day of His sojourn under the earth, and through your
immersion, you symbolized the night. For, as one who walks in the night sees
nothing, and he who walks during the day does so in light, so you, having
immersed yourself in water saw nothing, as if you saw nothing in the night,
and having come forth from the water, you see everything as in daylight. You
were both dead and then born. So the salvific water was for you both a coffin
and a mother. Although we neither actually die, nor get buried, nor are we
nailed to the cross, but only simulate this symbolically, we, however, do
indeed achieve salvation. Christ was truly crucified, truly buried, and truly
resurrected. He granted all this to us, so that we, in imitating His passions,
would become partakers of them and indeed would achieve salvation.
‘6) The Orthodox Church the world over to the present time baptizes
through three-fold immersion and bringing-forth out of the water. The Greek,
Arabic, Bulgarian, and Serbian churches all baptize in this way. Thus it is
done in the Russian Church. Each one of these churches has a vessel in which
it immersed unclothed infants with the invocation of the name of the Holy
Trinity. There is no doubt that this practice of baptizing infants was the same
in all of Little Russia. Holy Prince Vladimir, who lived and reigned in Kiev,
accepted the faith and all its church ritual from the Greeks, who, both then
and now, baptize through immersion. Does it not seem strange that those
who had Greeks as their teachers, and those who were baptized by the
Greeks, now do not baptize through immersion?
“All in all, I think there is basis to the assumption that the practice of
baptizing through pouring on of water began in Kiev, and then spread
600
throughout Little Russia. Such departure came from the time when the
Uniates gained power over the Kievan metropolia. In the Roman Church, up
to the 12th century, or better said, to the end of the 13th century, baptism
through immersion was practiced. But then they began to baptize not only by
pouring, but also by sprinkling. As a result, the Little Russians are the only
Orthodox people who set aside immersion in favour of pouring. This has
given schismatics reason to accuse us of neglecting apostolic tradition, which
is preserved without change in the whole of the Orthodox Church. They
accuse us of following the example of the papists who, along with various
incorrect deletions, had the audacity to change Holy Baptism as well. The
divine apostle Paul praised the Corinthians highly for their preservation of
tradition with the following words: "Now I praise you, brethren, that ye
remember me in all things, and keep the Ordinances, as I delivered them to
you" (I Cor. 11:2). He entreats the Thessalonians to hold fast to traditions:
"Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been
taught, whether by word, or our epistle" (2 Thess. 2:15).
“The method of baptism by triple immersion is indeed apostolic tradition,
which the Orthodox Church firmly and unswervingly adheres to from
apostolic times to this day. St. Basil rather clearly points out the danger which
lies in excluding anything that has been passed down to us from the mystery
of Holy Baptism: "There is tribulation when someone dies without baptism, or
when something in the mystery of baptism as it has been handed down to us
is omitted."
“Why is it that we make omissions in something of such great importance?
Why do we not keep this holy and apostolic tradition (i.e. baptism through
immersion), as it is kept by the entire Orthodox Church? What reason, what
excuse can we give to explain why this mystery is performed differently by
us? Why is it not performed the way it was handed down by the holy
apostles, the way the holy fathers taught, the way the whole Orthodox
Church always performed it and performs it even now? Perhaps someone
will say that it is dangerous to immerse infants in water? But this excuse can
be likened to one of which the royal prophet prayed about thus: ‘Do not
incline my heart into words of evil, to make excuse for excuses in sins.’ The
lives of His Imperial Highness, the Emperor and Great Prince Paul Petrovich
and his royal children are very precious. They, however, without any
hesitation and by the grace of God, were baptized by triple immersion in
quite a deep vessel, which I saw with my own eyes in the imperial church. If
such an example is not enough, then the example of the countless infants
around the whole world, which the Church baptizes every day, or better said,
every hour, by triple immersion with no danger to their lives, should suffice.
Finally, if someone would say that cold water in the winter time could be
dangerous for an infant's health, he must know that there is no law which
states that the water used in baptism must be cold or near freezing. It is
possible to use water at room temperature, which is not as cold as that which
is found outside.
601
“Enough has been said, my beloved children in Christ, and honorable
priests. Enough has been said for you not to baptize through pouring, but
through immersion. Thus you will be among the first in Little Russia to set a
holy example, and to achieve glory by preserving apostolic tradition.
Likewise, by serving and keeping ancient traditions of the Church, you will
be deserving of a reward from God. Having said all this, so that no one
ignores this edict under the pretext that there were no concise directives, by
our archpastoral authority we decree that all those under our spiritual rule:
“1) Strive that in every church there be a silver or copper vessel (or one
made out of some other appropriate metal) which would have the shape of a
bell or tub: narrow at the bottom, and as deep as it is wide, practical for use.
“2) Instruct priests everywhere that over the said vessel containing water
the appropriate prayers be pronounced, and that infants be baptized in this
holy water through triple immersion with the invocation of one of the Persons
of the Holy Trinity with each immersion. In a word—that all be done in the
same manner as the baptisms which take place in Great Russia.
“3) Strictly insist that the holy water after baptism not be disposed of in
some unclean place, but poured out carefully, with due respect, into the basin
where the priest washes his hands. The baptismal vessel should not be used
for any other purpose, and should be kept in the church among the holy
vessels.
“Besides this we decree that in every church there should be two smaller
vessels made of silver, copper, or brass—one to hold holy chrism, which must
always be stored in the church in an appropriate place, and another to hold
holy oil, which is used during baptism. This vessel, along with a pair of
scissors must be kept in a clean box, which must be decorated appropriately,
so that those who are outside the faith would not have cause to accuse.
“For those who are obedient and are willing to comply with this edict, we
promise God's blessings, eternal glory and our pastoral blessing.”1052
It is clear from the archbishop’s testimony that in the decades since the
Kievan metropolia had been joined to Moscow, the uniate practice of pouring
instead of immersion had penetrated into the Church in Ukraine (or perhaps
it had done so even earlier). Whether the situation would have been better if
Kiev had remained under Constantinople is impossible to say. However, this
fact was important not only for the Ukrainians but also for the Russians,
because, as we shall see, the Russian Old Ritualist schismatics seized on any
evidence of western influence in their assault on the Russian Church and
State…
Archbishop Nikiphor, Against Baptism By Pouring, translated in Orthodox Life, January-

1052
February, 1990, oo. 16-19.
602
72. THE SCHISM OF THE OLD RITUALISTS (2)
At the coronation of Tsar Theodore Alexeyevich certain additions were

made to the rite that showed that the Russian Church now looked on the
tsardom as a quasi-priestly rank. “These additions were: 1) the proclamation
of the symbol of faith by the tsar before his crowning, as was always the case
with ordinations, 2) the vesting of the tsar in royal garments signifying his
putting on his rank, and 3) communion in the altar of the Body and Blood
separately in accordance with the priestly order, which was permitted only
for persons of the three hierarchical sacred ranks. These additions greatly
exalted the royal rank, and Professor Pokrovsky explained their introduction
by the fact that at the correction of the liturgical books in Moscow in the
second half of the 17th century, the attention of people was drawn to the
difference in the rites of the Byzantine and Muscovite coronation and the
additions were introduced under the influence of the Council of 1667, which
wanted to exalt the royal rank.”1053
The pious tsar did not use his exalted position to humiliate the Church. On
the contrary, he tried, as far as it was in his power, to correct the great wrong
that had been done to the Church in his father’s reign. Thus when Patriarch
Nikon died it was the tsar who ordered “that the body should be conveyed to
New Jerusalem. The patriarch did not want to give the reposed hierarchical
honours. [So] his Majesty persuaded Metropolitan Cornelius of Novgorod to
carry out the burial. He himself carried the coffin with the remains.”1054
Again, it was the tsar rather than the patriarch who obtained a gramota
from the Eastern Patriarchs in 1682 restoring Nikon to patriarchal status and
“declaring that he could be forgiven in view of his redemption of his guilt by
his humble patience in prison”.1055 This was hardly an adequate summary of
the situation. But it did go some of the way to helping the Greeks redeem
their guilt in the deposition of the most Grecophile of Russian patriarchs. For
it was not only the Russians that had sinned in Nikon’s deposition: the
Eastern Patriarchs had also submitted to the pressure of tsar and boyars.
Meanwhile, the Grecophobe Avvakum was continuing to rant, announcing

that all the “Nikonians” had to be rebaptized, and “that newborn babies knew
more about God than all the scholars of the Greek church”.1056 As Robert
Massie writes, “these outbursts led to a second banishment, this time to far-off
Pustozersk on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. From this remote spot, Avvakum
managed to remain the leader of the Old Believers. Unable to preach, he
wrote eloquently to his believers, urging them to preserve the old faith, not to
compromise, to defy their persecutors and to accept sufferings and

1054 Rusak, op. cit., p. 194.
1055 Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 26. In 1676 Patriarch Joachim had convened a council which
hurled yet more accusations against him… (Rusak, op. cit., pp. 193-194)
1056 Michael Cherniavsky, "The Old Believers and the New Religion", Slavic Review, vol. 25,
1966, pp. 27-33.
603
martyrdom gladly in imitation of Christ. ‘Burning your body’, he said, ‘you
commend your soul to God. Run and jump into the flames. Say, “Here is my
body, Devil. Take and eat it; my soul you cannot take.”’
“Avvakum’s final act of defiance assured his fiery destiny. From exile, he
wrote to young Tsar Theodor declaring that Christ had appeared to him in a
vision and revealed that Theodore’s dead father, Tsar Alexis, was in hell,
suffering torments because of his approval of the Nikonian reforms.
Theodore’s response was to condemn Avvakum to be burned alive. In April
1682, Avvakum achieved his long-desired martyrdom, bound to a stake in the
market-place of Pustozersk. Crossing himself a last time with two fingers, he
shouted joyfully to the crowd, ‘There is terror in the stake until thou art
bound to it, but, once there, embrace it and all will be forgiven. Thou wilt
behold Christ before the heat has laid hold upon thee, and thy soul, released
form the dungeon of the body, will fly up to heaven like a happy little bird.’
“Across Russia, the example of Avvakum’s death inspired thousands of his

followers. During a six-year period, from 1684 to 1690, Old Believers
voluntarily followed their leader into the fames, preferring martyrdom to
accepting the religion of the Antichrist. [The Regent] Sophia’s government
seemed to fit this image as well as that of Alexis or Theodore; indeed, she was
even harsher on schismatics than her father or her brother had been.
Provincial governors were instructed to provide whatever troops were
necessary to help the provincial metropolitans enforce the established
religion…”1057
We have noted the opinion that if Patriarch Nikon had not been forced to
leave his see, there would have been no Old Ritualist schism. Nor would
there have been that weakening of the authority of the Church vis-à-vis the
State that was to have such catastrophic consequences. And yet in the reign of
Tsar Theodore Alexeyevich, Patriarch Nikon was posthumously restored to
his see, the Old Ritualist schism was still of small proportions, and Church-
State relations were still essentially “symphonic”. Even the Monastirskij Prikaz,
which Nikon had fought so hard to remove, was in fact removed in 1675.
What made the situation worse, and made the schism more or less
permanent, was the stubborn fanaticism of the Old Ritualists and their
turning a Church quarrel into a rebellion against the State.
S.A. Zenkovsky writes: “The struggle between the supporters of the old
rite, on the one hand, and the state (the tsar) and the Church, on the other,
was complicated by two important phenomena: the rebellion of the Solovki
monastery (the monks were joined, at the beginning of the 1670s, by a part of
the defeated rebels of Stepan Razin) and the burnings. The siege of Solovki,
the very important monastery and fortress on the White Sea, lasted for ten
years and ended with the deaths of almost all its defenders. This was no
longer a conflict between the Church and the Old Ritualists, but between
604
rebels and the state. More important in their consequences were the burnings
– mass immolations of those Old Ritualists who considered that after the
council of 1667 grace in the Church had dried up and that the Antichrist was
already ruling on earth. The burnings had already begun in the middle of the
1660s under the influence of the ‘woodsman’, the fanatical and religiously
completely pessimistic elder Capiton.
“The burnings lasted until the beginning of the 19th century, but at the end
of the 17th, especially in the 1670s, they acquired the terrible character of a
mass religio-psychological epidemic. In Poshekhonye (in the Trans-Volga
region, near Kostroma) between 4000 and 5000 people perished in the
burnings; in one of the northern burnings about 2500 people died at once. It is
very difficult to estimate the general number of victims of the burning before
the end of the 17th century, but in all probability their number was no less
than 20,000, and perhaps even more…
“The uprising on Solovki, the burnings, the participation of the Old

Ritualists in the Razin rebellion, and the formation of a Cossack Old Ritualist
‘republic’ that separated from the Russian State at the turn of the 17th-18th
centuries, gave the government enough reasons to persecute all the
supporters of the Old Russian faith [sic] without examination…”1058
Indeed, as Bishop Gregory Grabbe writes: “The Church Herself hardly

participated in the persecution… The persecutions were from the State and
for political reasons, insofar as (some of) the Old Believers considered the
power of the State to be antichristian and did not want to submit to it.”1059
Those who did not attempt to challenge the authority of the State were not
persecuted. Thus Zenkovsky notes that the priestless communities were not
touched by the authorities, and that in general “the persecutions affected
[only] those who tried to preach amidst the non-Old Ritualist population”.1060
Fr. Seraphim Rose wrote: “[The Old Ritualists] are sectarians, and their
spirit, not just their externals, separates them from Orthodoxy. If God can
somehow draw one or many of them to Orthodoxy, very good, but the
measures of ‘penitence’ which John Hudanish describes would be simply a
flattering of their sectarian pride. Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky was against
receiving Old Believers even if they asked nothing but to keep the two-
fingered cross—not because of the small act, but because this revealed they
still had the sectarian mentality. Of course, since then the Russian Church has
allowed Old Believers to retain the two-fingered Cross and their service
books, but as a gesture of economy rather than an admission that Patriarch
Nikon was wrong. For an Old Believer to become Orthodox there must be an
awareness that the externals they preserve are not of the essence of
Orthodoxy.”1061
1058 Zenkovsky, op. cit., p. 89.

1059 Grabbe, Pis’ma (Letters), Moscow, 1998, p. 24.
1060 Zenkovsky, op. cit., p. 92.
1061 Rose, Letter 187, September 21 / October 4, 1975.
605
*
A critical point in the evolution of the schism came with the death of Tsar
Theodore in 1682. Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes: “He did not have a son and
heir. Therefore power had to pass to the brother of the deceased, Ivan, the son
of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich from his first marriage with Maria Ilyinichna
Miloslavskaia. Behind Ivan Alexeyevich, there also stood his very active sister
the Tsarevna Sophia. But we know that from the second marriage of Alexis
Mikhailovich with Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina there was another son,
Peter Alexeyevich, who was born in 1672. In 1682 he was ten years old, while
his half-brother Ivan was fifteen. The Naryshkins did not want to let their
interests be overlooked, and wanted Peter to be made Tsar. A battle began
between them and their supporters and the supporters of the Miloslavsky
princes. The result was yet another schism, this time in the Royal Family
itself… This of course elicited a time of troubles. Behind Sophia and the
Miloslavskys there stood a part of the boyars, including Prince Basil
Vasilyevich Golitsyn. Opposed to them was Patriarch Joachim (at first not
openly) and other supporters of the Naryshkins. A rumour was spread about
them that they wanted to ‘remove’ (kill) Ivan Alexeyevich. The army of
musketeers [streltsy] in Moscow rebelled. The musketeers more than once
burst into the royal palace looking for plotters and evil-doers, and once right
there, in the palace, before the eyes of the Royal Family, including Peter, they
killed the boyars A. Matveev and I. Naryshkin. The country was on the edge
of a new time of troubles and civil war. The wise Sophia was able to come to
an agreement with the Naryshkins and in the same year both Tsareviches,
Ivan and Peter, were proclaimed Tsars, while their ‘governess’, until they
came of age, became the Tsarevna Sophia. The leader of the musketeers’
army, the very aged Prince Dolgorukov, was removed in time and Prince Ivan
Andreevich Khovansky was appointed. He was able quickly to take the
musketeers in hand and submit them to his will.
“The Old Ritualists decided to make use of these disturbances. Protopriest

Nikita Dobrynin, aptly nicknamed ‘Emptyholy’, together with similarly
fanatical Old Ritualists, unleashed a powerful campaign amidst the riflemen
and attained the agreement of the Royal Family and the Patriarch to the
holding of a public debate on the faith with the ‘Nikonians’, that is, first of all
with the Patriarch himself. This debate took place on July 5, 1682 in the
Granovita palace in the Kremlin in the presence of the Royal Family, the
clergy and the Synclete. Nikita read aloud a petition from the Old Ritualists
that the new books and rites should be removed, declaring that they
constituted ‘the introduction of a new faith’. Against this spoke Patriarch
Joachim, holding in his hands an icon of Metropolitan Alexis of Moscow. He
was very emotional and wept. The Old Ritualists did not want even to listen
to him! They began to interrupt the Patriarch and simply shout: ‘Make the
sign of the cross in this way!’, raising their hands with the two-fingered sign
of the cross. Then Archbishop Athanasius of Kholmogor (later Arkhangelsk),
who had himself once been an Old Ritualist, with knowledge of the subject
606
refuted ‘Emptyholy’s’ propositions, proving that the new rites were by no
means ‘a new faith’, but only the correction of mistakes that had crept into the
services. Protopriest Nikita was not able to object and in powerless fury
hurled himself at Athanasius, striking him on the face. There was an uproar.
The behaviour of the Old Ritualists was judged to be an insult not only to the
Church, but also to the Royal Family, and they were expelled. Finding
themselves on the street, the Old Ritualists shouted: ‘We beat them! We won!’
– and set off for the riflemen in the area on the other side of the Moscow river.
As we see, in fact there was no ‘beating’, that is, they gained no victory in the
debate. On the same night the riflemen captured the Old Ritualists and
handed them over to the authorities. On July 11 on Red Square Nikita
Dobrynin ‘Emptyholy’ was beheaded in front of all the people.
“Then, at a Church Council in 1682, it was decided to ask their Majesties to

take the most severe measures against the Old Ritualists, to the extent of
executing the most stubborn of them through burning. And so Protopriest
Avvakum was burned in Pustozersk. This is perhaps the critical point beyond
which the church schism began in full measure, no longer as the disagreement
of a series of supporters of the old rites, but as a movement of a significant
mass of people. Now the Old Ritualists began to abuse not only the ‘Niconian’
Church, but also the royal power, inciting people to rebel against it. Their
movement acquired not only an ecclesiastical, but also a political direction. It
was now that it was necessary to take very severe measures against them, and
they were taken, which probably saved the State from civil war. Many Old
Ritualists, having fled beyond the boundaries of Great Russia, then began to
undertake armed raids on the Russian cities and villages. It is now considered
fashionable in our ‘educated’ society to have tender feelings for the
schismatical Old Ritualists, almost as if they were martyrs or innocent
sufferers. To a significant degree all this is because they turned out to be on
the losing side. And what if they had won? Protopriest Avvakum used to say
that if he were given power he would hang ‘the accursed Nikonians’ on trees
(which there is no reason to doubt, judging from his biography). He said this
when he had only been exiled by the ‘Nikonians’, and not even defrocked. So
if the Old Ritualists had won, the Fatherland would simply have been
drowned in blood. Protopriest Avvakum is also particularly venerated as the
author of his noted ‘Life’. It in fact displays the very vivid Russian language
of the 17th century and in this sense, of course, it is valuable for all
investigators of antiquity. But that is all! As regards the spirit and the sense of
it, this is the work of a boundlessly self-deceived man. It is sufficient to
remember that none of the Russian saints wrote a ‘Life’ praising
himself…”1062
The apocalyptic element in Old Ritualism took its starting-point from the
prophecy of Archimandrite Zachariah (Kopystensky) of the Kiev Caves
Lavra, who in 1620 had foretold that the coming of the Antichrist would take
place in 1666. And in a certain sense the Antichrist did indeed come in 1666.
1062 Lebedev, Velikorossia, pp. 154-156.
607
For as a result of the unlawful deposition of Patriarch Nikon, the symphony
of powers between Church and State in Russia was fatally weakened, leading,
in the long run, to the appearance of Soviet power, in 1917…1063
The Old Ritualists also saw apocalyptic signs in the Tsar’s acceptance of
the Patriarch’s reforms. And yet the parallel here, paradoxically, is with the
Protestants, who similarly believed that true Christianity ended when State
and Church came to work together in the time of the Emperor Constantine.
The Old Ritualists fled into the woods to escape the Antichrist and wait for
the Second Coming of Christ in their democratic communes, accepting the
authority of neither king nor priest. Similarly, the Czech Taborites and
German Anabaptists and English Puritans and Independents and Quakers
fled from existing states to build their millenial communities in which the
only king and priest was God.
This was particularly so with the priestless Old Ritualists, called the
Bespopovtsi (as opposed to the Popovtsi, who still had priests, and the
Beglopopovtsi who used priests fleeing from the official Church). The Popovtsi,
according to St. Ignati Brianchaninov, “are different in certain rites which
have no influence on the essence of Christianity, while the latter [Bespopovtsi]
have no Bishop over themselves, contrary to the ecclesiastical canons. The
formation of the former was aided in part by ignorance ascribing to certain
rites and customs a greater importance than these rites have; while the
formation of the latter was aided by the Protestant tendency of certain
individual people.” 1064
The communities of the priestless, like those on the River Vyg in the north,
were almost democratic communes, having no priests and recognising no
political authority – not unlike the contemporary Puritan communities of
North America. And gradually, as in the writings of Semeon Denisov, one of
the leaders of the Vyg community, they evolved a new conception of Holy
Russia, according to which the real Russia resided, not in the Tsar and the
Church, for they had both apostasised, but in the common people. As Sergius
Zenkovsky writes, Denisov “transformed the old doctrine of an autocratic
Christian state into a concept of a democratic Christian nation.”1065
From that time an apocalyptic rejection of the State became the keynote of
Old Ritualism. As Fr. George Florovsky writes, “the keynote and secret of
Russia’s Schism was not ‘ritual’ but the Antichrist, and thus it may be termed
a socio-apocalyptical utopia. The entire meaning and pathos of the first
schismatic opposition lies in its underlying apocalyptical intuition (‘the time
draws near’), rather than in any ‘blind’ attachment to specific rites or petty
1063 It was also in 1666 that Isaac Lurye proclaimed himself to be the (false) Messiah in
Smyrna.
1064 Brianchaninov, “O Raskole” (“On the Schism”), in “Neizdannia proizvedenia episkopa
Ignatia (Brianchaninova)” (“Unpublished Works of Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov)”),

Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), NN 1-2, January-February-March-April, 2003, p. 18.
1065 Zenkovsky, in Hosking, op. cit., p. 72.
608
details of custom. The entire first generation of raskolouchitelej [‘teachers of
schism’] lived in this atmosphere of visions, signs, and premonitions, of
miracles, prophecies, and illusions. These men were filled with ecstasy or
possessed, rather than being pedants… One has only to read the words of
Avvakum, breathless with excitement: ‘What Christ is this? He is not near;
only hosts of demons.’ Not only Avvakum felt that the ‘Nikon’ Church had
become a den of thieves. Such a mood became universal in the Schism: ‘the
censer is useless; the offering abominable’.
“The Schism, an outburst of socio-political hostility and opposition, was a

social movement, but one derived from religious self-consciousness. It is
precisely this apocalyptical perception of what has taken place which explains
the decisive or rapid estrangement among the Schismatics. ‘Fanaticism in
panic’ is Kliuchevskii’s definition, but it was also panic in the face of ‘the last
apostasy’…
“The Schism dreamed of an actual, earthly City: a theocratic utopia and

chiliasm. It was hoped that the dream had already been fulfilled and that the
‘Kingdom of God’ had been realised as the Muscovite State. There may be
four patriarchs in the East, but the one and only Orthodox tsar is in Moscow.
But now even this expectation had been deceived and shattered. Nikon’s
‘apostasy’ did not disturb the Old Ritualists nearly as much as did the tsar’s
apostasy, which in their opinion imparted a final apocalyptical hopelessness
to the entire conflict.
“’At this time there is no tsar. One Orthodox tsar had remained on earth,
and whilst he was unaware, the western heretics, like dark clouds,
extinguished this Christian sun. Does this not, beloved, clearly prove that the
Antichrist’s deceit is showing its mask?’
“History was at an end. More precisely, sacred history had come to an end;
it had ceased to be sacred and had become without Grace. Henceforth the
world would seem empty, abandoned, forsaken by God, and it would remain
so. One would be forced to withdraw from history into the wilderness. Evil
had triumphed in history. Truth had retreated into the bright heavens, while
the Holy Kingdom had become the tsardom of the Antichrist…”1066
In spite of this, some Old Ritualists came to accept Russia as the legitimate
Orthodox empire. Thus “the people continue to believe today that Moscow is
the Third Rome and that there will be no fourth. So Russia is the new Israel, a
chosen people, a prophetic land, in which shall be fulfilled all the prophecies
of the Old and New Testaments, and in which even the Antichrist will appear,
as Christ appeared in the previous Holy Land. The representative of
Orthodoxy, the Russian Tsar, is the most legitimate emperor on earth, for he
occupies the throne of Constantinople…”1067
1066 Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, part I, 1979, pp. 98, 99.
1067 V.I. Kel’siev, in Hosking, op. cit., p. 73.
609
73. PETER THE GREAT: (1) FROM HOLY RUS’ TO GREAT
RUSSIA
Although the Old Ritualists were truly schismatics, they were not wrong in
discerning signs of serious decline in Muscovy towards the end of the
seventeenth century. The penetration of foreign influence was evident already
in 1675 when Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich issued an ukaz, declaring: “Courtiers
are forbidden to adopt foreign, German and other customs, to cut the hair on
their heads, and to wear robes, tunics and hats of foreign design, and they are
to forbid their servants to do this.”1068 Under the influence of the West, such
practices as smoking and drunkenness appeared.1069 And concubinage also
appeared in the highest places.
Archbishop Nathaniel of Vienna writes: “There is evidence that Tsar Alexis

Mikhailovich had an illegitimate son (who later became the boyar Ivan
Musin-Pushkin). Concerning Tsaritsa Natalia Kirillovna Tikhon Streshnev
said that he was not her only lover, and Tsarevna Sophia had a ‘dear friend’
in Prince Basil Golitsyn. Such sinful disruptions had been seen earlier, being
characteristic of the generally sensual Russian nature. But earlier these sins
had always been clearly recognized as sins. People did not justify them, but
repented of them, as Great Prince Ivan III repented to St. Joseph of Volotsk for
his sin of sorcery and fortune-telling, as the fearsome Ivan the Terrible
repented of his sins. But if the tsars did not repent of their sins, as, for
example, Basil III did not repent of his divorce from St. Solomonia, these sins
were rebuked by the representatives of the Church and burned and rooted
out by long and painful processes. In the second half of the 17th century in
Moscow we see neither repentance for sins committed, nor a pained attitude
to them on the part of the sinners themselves and the surrounding society.
There was only a striving to hide sins, to make them unnoticed, unknown, for
‘what is done in secret is judged in secret’. A very characteristic trait
distinguishing Muscovite society of the second half of the 17th century from
preceding epochs, a trait fraught with many consequences, was the
unrestrained gravitation of the upper echelons of Muscovite society towards
the West, the sinful West and its sinful free life, which, as always with sin
viewed from afar, seemed especially alluring and attractive against the
background of the wearisome holy Russian way of life.
“Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, and all the higher Moscow boyars after him,
introduced theatres. Originally the theatrical troupes most frequently played
‘spiritual’ pieces. But that this was only an offering to hypocrisy is best
demonstrated by the fact that the actors playing ‘sacred scenes’ gratifying
unspoiled sensuality about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, David and Bathsheba
and Herod and Salome, were profoundly despised by the tsar and other
Tsar Alexis, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 442.

1068
There is evidence that drunkenness, long thought to be the vice of Russians from the
1069
beginning, was in fact rare before the seventeenth century and severely punished. Things
began to change under the Romanovs, and western traders encouraged the new trend…
610
spectators, who considered them to be sinful, ‘scandal-mongering’ people.
Neither holy days nor festal days, and still more not the eves of feasts, were
chosen for the presentation of these scenes. (It is known that Tsar Alexis
Mikhailovich changed the date of a presentation fixed for December 18, for
‘tomorrow is the eve of the Forefeast of the Nativity of Christ’.) The real
exponents of the really sacred scenes: The Action in the Cave and the
Procession on the Donkey were considered by nobody to be sinful people,
and their scenes were put on precisely on holy days. The tsar was followed by
the boyars, and the boyars by the noblemen; everything that was active and
leading in the people was drawn at this time to a timid, but lustful peeping at
the West, at its free life, in which everything was allowed that was strictly
forbidden in Holy Rus’, but which was so longed for by sin-loving human
nature, against which by this time the leading echelons of Muscovite life no
longer struggled, but indecisively pandered to. In this sinful gravitation
towards the West there were gradations and peculiarities: some were drawn
to Polish life, others to Latin, a third group to German life. Some to a greater
degree and some to a lesser degree, but they all turned away from the
Orthodox Old Russian way of life. Peter only decisively opened up this
tendency, broke down the undermined partition between Rus’ and the West,
beyond which the Muscovites timidly desired to look, and unrestrainedly
threw himself into the desired sinful life, leading behind him his people and
his state.
“Holy Rus’ was easily broken by Peter because much earlier it had already
been betrayed by the leading echelons of Muscovite society.
“We can see the degree of the betrayal of the Holy Rus’ to a still greater
degree than in the pandering to the desires of the flesh and the gravitation
towards the free and sinful life, in the state acts of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich,
and principally in the creation of the so-called Monastirskij Prikaz, through
which, in spite of the protests of Patriarch Nikon, the tsar crudely took into
his own hands the property of the Church ‘for its better utilization’, and in the
persecutions to which ‘the father and intercessor for the tsar’, his Holiness
Patriarch Nikon, was subjected. Nikon understood more clearly than anyone
where the above-listed inner processes in the Muscovite state were inclining,
and unsuccessfully tried to fight them. For a genuinely Old Russian
consciousness, it was horrific to think that the state could ‘better utilize’ the
property of the Church than the Church. The state had been able earlier - and
the more ancient the epoch, and the more complete its Old Russianness, the
easier and the more often – to resort to Church property and spend it on its
own urgent military and economic needs. After all, the Church took a natural
interest in this. A son or daughter can freely take a mother’s money in a
moment of necessity, and in the given case it is of secondary importance
whether he returns it or not: it is a question of what is more convenient to the
loving mother and her loving son. They do not offend each other. But in the
removal of the monastery lands by Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich (although this
measure was elicited by the needs of the war in the Ukraine, which the
Church very much sympathized with), another spirit was clearly evident: the
611
spirit of secularization. This was no longer a more or less superficial sliding
towards the longed-for sinful forms of western entertainment, it was not a
temporary surrender to sin: it was already a far-reaching transfer into the
inner sphere of the relations between Church and State – and what a state:
Holy Rus’ - of the secular ownership relations with a view to ‘better
utilization’ instead of the loving relations between mother and children
characteristic of Orthodox morality. Better utilization for what ends? For
Church ends? But it would be strange to suppose that the state can use
Church means for Church ends better than the Church. For state ends? But
then the degree of the secularization of consciousness is clear, since state ends
are placed so much higher than Church ends, so that for their attainment
Church property is removed. State ends are recognized as ‘better’ in relation
to Church ends…
“And so it was not Peter who destroyed Holy Rus’. Before him it had been
betrayed by the people and state nurtured by it. But Peter created Great
Russia…”1070
Still more important than the cultural and moral influences introduced
from the West into Muscovy (usually via Kiev) were the theological influences,
both Catholic and, increasingly, Protestant. The Russian hierarchy was
supported in its struggle against these tendencies by the Eastern Patriarchs,
and in particular by Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem, who as Archimandrite
Hilarion (Troitsky) wrote, was “a great zealot of Orthodoxy in the 17th
century, sharply following Russian church life and often writing epistles to
Russian patriarchs, tsars, even individual church and civil activists. Patriarch
Dositheus looked on Russia as the support of the whole of Ecumenical
Orthodoxy, and for that reason it was necessary for Russia first of all to keep
to the Orthodox faith in all its strictness and purity. The patriarch looked with
great alarm and fear at the increasing establishment of western, especially
Catholic influence in Moscow. Patriarch Dositheus thought in a very definite
way about Catholicism: ‘The papist delusion is equivalent to atheism, for
what is papism and what is the unia if not open atheism?’ ‘The lawless
papists are worse than the impious and the atheists; they are atheists, for they
put forward two gods – one in the heavens, and the other on earth.’ ‘Papism is
nothing other than open and undoubting atheism’. ‘The Latins, who have
introduced innovations into the faith, the sacraments and all the church
ordinances, are openly impious and schismatic, because they make a local
church universal, and instead of Christ they venerate the popes as the head of
the Church, and they venerate the Roman Church, which is a local church, as
universal. And for that reason, according to the words of the Fathers and
Teachers of the Church, they are deceivers, unfitting and shameless persons,
not having love and being enemies of the peace of the Church, slanderers of
1070 Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “O Petre Velikom” (“On Peter the Great”), Epokha (The
Epoch), N 10, 2000, no. 1, pp. 39-41.
612
the Orthodox, inventors of new errors, disobedient, apostate, as they were
recognized to be by the Fathers, and therefore worthy of disdain.’”1071
In order to preserve the purity of the faith in Muscovy, Patriarch Dositheus

proposed reserving the most important posts in the State and Church to Great
Russians, who were purer in their faith than the Little Russians coming from
Polish-dominated lands. He proposed that Patriarch Joachim burn heretical
books, and defrock or excommunicate those who read them. Moreover, he
supported the creation of a Greco-Slavonic Theological Academy that would
strengthen traditional patristic Orthodoxy against the Latinism of the Jesuit
schools. Most of these aims were achieved. However, during the reign of
Peter the Great, who turned the State and Church sharply towards the West,
the Academy had been renamed as Latino-Slavonic and Little Russians were
again in the ascendant over Great Russians…
The transition from Holy Rus’ to Great Russia can be seen in the last
decade of the seventeenth century, in the career of the last Patriarch of
Muscovite Russia, Adrian. At his enthronement in 1690 he expressed a
traditional, very Nikonian concept of the relationship between the Church
and the State: “The kingdom has dominion only on earth, … whereas the
priesthood has power on earth as in heaven… I am established as archpastor
and father and head of all, for the patriarch is the image of Christ. He who
hears me hears Christ. For all Orthodox are the spiritual sons [of the
patriarch] – tsars, princes, lords, honourable warriors, and ordinary people…
right-believers of every age and station. They are my sheep, they know me
and they heed my archpastoral voice…”1072
However, this boldness evaporated when the domineering personality of

Peter the Great came to full power in the kingdom. Thus, as M.V. Zyzykin
writes, “when Tsaritsa Natalia, who had supported Patriarch Adrian, a
supporter of the old order of life, died [in 1694], there began a reform of
customs which showed itself already in the outward appearance of the Tsar
[Peter]. The Tsar’s way of life did not accord with his sacred dignity and
descended from this height to drinking bouts in the German suburb and the
life of a simple workman. The Church with its striving for salvation…
retreated into the background, and, as a consequence of this, a whole series of
changes in customs appeared. Earlier the First-hierarchs and other hierarchs
had been drawn into the Tsar’s council even in civil matters; they had been
drawn to participate in the Zemskie Sobory and the Boyar’s Duma; now Peter
1071 Troitsky, “Bogoslovie i Svoboda Tserkvi” (Theology and the Freedom of the Church),
Bogoslovskij Vestnik (Theological Herald), September, 1915, vol. 3, Sergiev Posad, Kaluga,
2005, pp. 32-33.
1072 Patriarch Adrian, in Fr. Sergei Hackel, “Questions of Church and State in ‘Holy Russia’:
some attitudes of the Romanov period”, Eastern Churches Review, vol. II, no. 1, Spring, 1970, p.
10.
613
distanced the Church’s representatives from participation in state matters; he
spoke about this even during the lifetime of his mother to the Patriarch and
did not summon him to the council. The ceremony on Palm Sunday in which
the Tsar had previously taken part only as the first son of the Church, and not
as her chief master, was scrapped. This ceremony on the one hand exalted the
rank of the Patriarch before the people, and on the other hand also aimed at
strengthening the authority of his Majesty’s state power through his
participation in front of the whole people in a religious ceremony in the
capacity of the first son of the Church. Until the death of his mother Peter also
took part in this ceremony, holding the reins of the ass on which Patriarch
Adrian [representing Christ Himself] sat, but between 1694 and 1696 this rite
was put aside as if it were humiliating for the tsar’s power. The people were
not indifferent to this and in the persons of the riflemen who rebelled in 1698
they expressed their protest. After all, the motive for this rebellion was the
putting aside of the procession on Palm Sunday, and also the cessation of the
cross processions at Theophany and during Bright Week, and the riflemen
wanted to destroy the German suburb and beat up the Germans because
‘piety had stagnated among them’. In essence this protest was a protest
against the proclamation of the primacy of the State and earthly culture in
place of the Church and religion. So as to introduce this view into the mass of
the people, it had been necessary to downgrade the significance of the First
Hierarch of the Church, the Patriarch. After all, he incarnated in himself the
earthly image of Christ, and in his position in the State the idea of the
enchurchment of the State, that lay at the foundation of the symphony of
powers, was vividly expressed. Of course, Peter had to remove all the rights
of the Patriarch that expressed this. We have seen that the Patriarch ceased to
be the official advisor of the Tsar and was excluded from the Boyars’ Duma.
But this was not enough: the Patriarch still had one right, which served as a
channel for the idea of righteousness in the structure of the State. This was the
right to make petitions before the Tsar, and its fall symbolized the fall in the
authority of the Patriarch. Soloviev has described this scene of the last
petitioning in connection with the riflemen’s rebellion. ‘The terrible
preparations for the executions went ahead, the gallows were placed on Belij
and Zemlyanoj gorod, at the gates of the Novodevichi monastery and at the
four assembly houses of the insurgent regiments. The Patriarch remembered
that his predecessors had stood between the Tsar and the victims of his wrath,
and had petitioned for the disgraced ones, lessening the bloodshed. Adrian
raised the icon of the Mother of God and set off for Peter at
Preobrazhenskoye. But the Tsar, on seeing the Patriarch, shouted at him:
‘What is this icon for? Is coming here really your business? Get away from
here and put the icon in its place. Perhaps I venerate God and His All-holy
Mother more than you. I am carrying out my duties and doing a God-
pleasing work when I defend the people and execute evil-doers who plot
against it.’ Historians rebuke Patriarch Adrian for not saying what the First
Priest was bound to say, but humbly yielded to the Tsar, leaving the place of
execution in shame without venturing on an act of heroic self-sacrifice. He did
not oppose moral force to physical force and did not defend the right of the
Church to be the guardian of the supreme righteousness. The petitioning itself
614
turned out to be, not the heroism of the Patriarch on his way to martyrdom,
but an empty rite. The Patriarch’s humiliation was put in the shade by Peter
in that he heeded the intercession of a foreigner, the adventurer Lefort.
‘Lefort, as Golikov informs us, firmly represented to Peter that his Majesty
should punish the evil-doers for their evil-doing, but not lead them into
despair: the former is the consequence of justice, while the latter is an act of
cruelty.’ At that very moment his Majesty ordered the execution to be
stopped...”1073
In February, 1696 Patriarch Adrian was paralyzed, and in October, 1700, he

died. Peter did not permit the election of a new patriarch, but only a locum
tenens. Later in his reign he abolished the patriarchate itself and introduced
what was in effect a Protestant form of Church-State relations…
Thus the seventeenth century ended with the effective fall of the
symphony of powers in Russia in the form of the shackling of one of its two
pillars – the patriarchate…
1073 Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw : Synodal Press, 1931, part III, pp. 218-220.
615
74. PETER THE GREAT: (2) RUSSIA AND THE WEST
The early modern period (to 1688) was distinguished by two contrary
tendencies in politics: on the one hand, the tendency towards the absolutist
state, almost freed now from the shackles of ecclesiastical and feudal
obligation, and on the other hand, the rise of representative institutions and
the gradual re-imposition of shackles on the state by “the will of the people” –
that is, those classes of society (usually the aristocrats and landowners) who
took it upon themselves to proclaim that their opinions were the opinions of
the whole people. On the one hand, it was often assumed, as Bernard Simms
writes, “that absolutism delivered the best government at home and the most
effective defence of state interests abroad. Parliamentary or corporate systems,
on the other hand, were widely considered to be corrupt, chaotic and prone to
outside intervention. It was for this reason that the ‘reform’ party in Poland
tried to curb the rights of the Sejm from the mid-1730s in favour of a more
centralized government capable of resisting foreign powers…” On the other
hand, “as the eighteenth century wore on, it became clear that the increasing
bureaucratization of the continental European states [like Austro-Hungary]
hampered effective decision-making, while parliamentary Britain remained
capable of extraordinary clarity of vision, resilience and determined
action.”1074
However, from the perspective of about the year 1700, or even 1750, it was
the absolutist states such as France and Prussia that seemed to be the most
successful. Britain’s triumph over France in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763),
still lay in the future, as did the collapse of absolutist France in 1789. And that
is one reason why the tendency in Russia was to develop in the direction of
greater absolutism and despotism on the French or Prussian models, and not
in the direction of British (still less Polish) representative government.
But this meant that Russia also, under western influence, developed away
from the traditional model of Orthodox autocracy...
The difference between autocracy and despotism was well characterized

by Nicholas Berdiaev as follows: “[In the Orthodox autocracy] there are no
rights to power, but only obligations of power. The power of the tsar is by no
means absolute, unrestricted power. It is autocratic because its source is not
the will of the people and it is not restricted by the people. But it is restricted
by the Church and by Christian righteousness; it is spiritually subject to the
Church; it serves not its own will, but the will of God. The tsar must not have
his own will, but he must serve the will of God. The tsar and the people are
bound together by one and the same faith, by one and the same subjection to
the Church and the righteousness of God. Autocracy presupposes a wide
national social basis living its own self-sufficient life; it does not signify the
suppression of the people’s life. Autocracy is justified only if the people has
beliefs which sanction the power of the tsar. It cannot be an external violence
1074 Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, London: Allen Lane, 20-13, pp. 90, 94.
616
inflicted on the people. The tsar is autocratic only if he is a truly Orthodox tsar.
The defective Orthodoxy of Peter the Great and his inclination towards
Protestantism made him an absolute, and not an autocratic monarch.
Absolute monarchy is a child of humanism…
“In absolutism the tsar is not a servant of the Church. A sign of absolute
monarchy is the subjection of the Church to the State. That is what happened
to the Catholic Church under Louis XIV. Absolutism always develops a
bureaucracy and suppresses the social life of the people…”1075
As Francis Fukuyama writes, Peter “moved the capital from Moscow to St.
Petersburg and imposed a host of institutions from Europe. Peter was a giant,
both physically and in terms of his leadership ability, and single-handedly
pushed the limits of what was possible in terms of top-down social
transformation of a society. War was… the chief motive for state building,
especially the enormous pressures created by the Great Northern War with
Sweden. Following defeat by Charles XII at the Battle of Narva in 1700, Peter
began a thorough reorganization of the army along contemporary European
lines and build a navy from scratch (beginning with a single ship and ending
with a fleet of more than eight hundred that was capable of defeating the
Swedish navy). He also modernized Russia’s central administration by
abolishing the old prikazy and replacing them with a system of colleges
modelled on similar institutions in Sweden. The colleges were built around
technical expertise – often, at this point, coming from foreigners – and
exercised a deliberative function in debating and executing policies.
“The first phase of state building in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
was based on mobilization of the middle service class, which split the nobility
and ensured that a large number of them would be directly dependent on the
state. Peter went even further and drafted the entire aristocracy into state
service. The gentry entered the army as boys, were promoted on modern
merit criteria, and had to remain with the regiments for their entire lives. The
idea of a service nobility thus lasted far longer in Russia than it had in Europe,
though it was implemented very differently. The nobles who served the state
did not come with their own retinues of vassals and retainers but were
assigned positions by a centralized hierarchy. This led to an overall
militarization of Russian society, with a moral emphasis on duty, honor,
hierarchy, and obedience…
“Peter replaced the old mestnichestvo with a Table of Ranks in 1722, a

hierarchical system in which each of his subjects was entered into a legally
defined order with its own privileges and obligations. By reaching a certain
grade, a non-noble servitor, whether bureaucrat or military man, was
automatically entered into the ranks of the hereditary nobility. This provided
a path for new entrants into the nobility, which was needed because of the
1075 Berdyaev, “Tsarstvo Bozhie i tsarstvo kesaria” (“The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom
of Caesar”), Put’ (The Way), September, 1925, pp. 39-40.
617
state’s enormous staffing needs. The Table of Ranks solidified the corporate
identity of the nobility and its capacity for collective action. But it never saw
itself as an opponent of monarchical power; its interests had become too
tightly bound to the state for that.
“What the nobles got in return for service was exemption from taxation,
exclusive rights to the ownership of land and people, and the opportunity to
squeeze their serfs harder. The close relationship of the deteriorating
condition of the peasantry and the rise of a service gentry is indicated by the
fact that serfdom first appeared in the lands given by the prince to his gentry
as pomest’ia. These tended to be in the south, south-east, and west, frontier
regions where new land had been acquired from neighbouring countries. In
the great expanse of northern territories where there was no fighting, the
condition of peasants was much better – they were for the most part state
peasants with obligations to the state rather than a private landlord.
“Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a

continuing increase in the tax burden laid on peasants, but the more
important legal restrictions were placed on the right of movement. The
peasants’ right of departure had been an old tradition, but it was increasingly
limited and then abolished altogether. These limits on peasant movement
were critical to both the formation of a cohesive Russian aristocracy and its
alliance with the monarchy.
“The reason for this was, ironically, related to Russia’s geography, which…
was highly unfavourable to the development of slavery due to its lack of
circumscription. There are few natural barriers to movement such as
impassable rivers or mountain ranges in Russia, and the country’s
borderlands stretched outward with the expansion of the country,
particularly to the south and the south-east. The free Cossack communities
that grew up in southern Ukraine and in the Don basin were said to have
been founded by escaped serfs. Just as in the American South, whose slave-
owning territories abutted an open frontier, the institution of serfdom could
be made viable only if there was strong agreement among serf owners to
restrict their movement, to return runaways, and to severely punish not only
serfs but also other landowners who violated the rules. If one major actor
opted out of the system – whether a subset of landlords, or a group of free
cities, or the king himself offering protection to runaways – then the whole
system would collapse [as it did collapse in Western Europe]. Given the
relative scarcity of labor in this period, it would be highly profitable for any
individual landowner to defect from the coalition and attract serfs to his
territory by offering them better terms. Hence the solidarity of the
landowning cartel had to be reinforced through strong status privileges and
binding commitment to enforce rules against peasant movement. Russian
absolutism was founded on an alliance that emerged between the monarch
and both the upper and lower nobility, all of whom committed themselves to
binding rules at the expense of the peasantry.
618
“The need to maintain this serf-owning cartel explains many things about
Russian political development. The government put increasing restrictions on
the free ownership of land by non-serf-owning individuals. To acquire
property, one had to enter the nobility, whereupon one automatically
acquired serfs and the obligations to maintain the system. This then
constrained the growth of a bourgeoisie in independent commercial cities,
which had played such an important role in promoting peasant freedom in
the West. Hence capitalist economic development in Russia was spearheaded
by nobles rather than an independent bourgeoisie. The need to maintain the
cartel also explains Russian expansion to the south and southeast, since the
existence of free Cossack territories along the frontier presented a continuing
lure and opportunity for peasant escape and needed to be suppressed…”1076
This analysis is developed by Archpriest Lev Lebedev: “Under Peter I a

beginning was laid to that serfdom which for a long time became the shame
and illness of Russia. Before Peter from time immemorial not only state peasants,
but also those of the landowners were not deprived of rights, were under the
protection of the laws, that is, they could never be serfs or slaves, the property
of their lords! We have already seen that there were measures to limit and,
finally, to ban the free departure of peasants, or their transfer from one lord to
another. And there were measures to tie the Russian peasants to the land (but
not to the lords!) with the aim of preserving the cultivation of the land in the
central lands of Great Russia, keeping in them the cultivators themselves, the
peasants that were capable of working. But Russian landowners always had
bond-slaves, people who had fallen into complete dependence on the lords,
mortgaging themselves for debts, or runaways, or others who were hiding
from persecution. Gradually (not immediately) the landowners began to
provide these bond-slaves, too, with their own (not common) land, forcing
them to work on it to increase the lords’ profits, which at that time consisted
mainly in the products of the cultivation of the land. Peter I, in introducing a
new form of taxation, a poll-tax (on the person), and not on the plot of land
and not on the ‘yard’ composed of several families, as had been the case
before him, also taxed the bond-slaves with this poll-tax, thereby putting them
in the same rank as the peasants. From that time the lords gradually began to
look on their free peasants, too, as bond-slaves, that is, as their own property.
Soon, under Catherine II, this was already legalised, so that the Empress
called the peasants ‘slaves’, which had never been the case in Russia!” 1077
And so, as absolutism displaced autocracy, the freedoms that autocracy

preserved were whittled away… A similar process was happening in England,
where the landowners won the right to enclose the common spaces, thereby
driving out those the copyholders. Essentially, while the peasants did not
become slaves, they lost their freedom…
1077 Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 173-174.
619
The westernization of official Russia was accomplished by a revolution
from above, by Tsar Peter I and his successors, especially Catherine II.
However, state power would have been insufficient to carry out such a radical
change if it had not been supported and propelled by the spread of Masonic
ideas among the aristocracy, in whose hands the real power rested after the
death of Peter. So before examining Peter’s reforms, it will be useful to
examine the beginnings of Masonry in Russia.
Russia became infiltrated by Freemasonry during the reign of Peter the

Great, who undertook a programme of westernization that was supported
and propelled by the spread of Masonic ideas among the aristocracy.
“There is no doubt,” writes Ivanov, “that the seeds of Masonry were sown
in Russian by the ‘Jacobites’, supporters of the English King James II, who had
been cast out of their country by the revolution and found a hospitable
reception at the court of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich.
“Independently of the Masonic propaganda of the Jacobite Masons, the

Russians had learned of the existence of the mysterious union of free
stonemasons during their journeys abroad. Thus, for example, Boris Petrovich
Sheremetev had got to known Masonry during his travels. Sheremetev had
been given a most triumphant meeting on Malta. He took part in the great
feast of the Maltese order in memory of John the Forerunner, and they had
given him a triumphant banquet there. The grand-master had bestowed on
him the valuable Maltese cross made of gold and diamonds. On returning to
Moscow on February 10, 1699, Sheremetev was presented to the Tsar at a
banquet on February 12 at Lefort’s, dressed in German clothes and wearing
the Maltese cross. He received ‘great mercy’ from the Tsar, who congratulated
him on becoming a Maltese cavalier and gave him permission to wear this
cross at all times. Then a decree was issued that Sheremetev should be
accorded the title of ‘accredited Maltese cavalier’.
“’The early shoots of Russian Masonry,’ writes Vernadsky, ‘were

particularly possible in the fleet, since the fleet had been created entirely on
western models and under western influence.
“’In one manuscript of the Public library the story is told that Peter was
received into the Scottish degree of St. Andrew, and ‘made an undertaking
that he would establish this order in Russia, a promise which he carried out
(in the form of the order of St. Andrew the First-Called, which was
established in 1698)…
“’Among the manuscripts of the Mason Lansky, there is a piece of grey

paper on which this fact is recorded: ‘The Emperor Peter I and Lefort were
received into the Templars in Holland.’
620
“In the Public library manuscript ‘A View on the Philosophers and the
French Revolution’ (1816), it is indicated that Masonry ‘existed during the
time of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich. Bruce was its great master, while Tsar Peter
was its first inspector.’”1078
Russians joined the lodges, according to Hosking, because they “became a

channel by which young men aspiring to high office or good social standing
could find acquaintances and protectors among their superiors; in the Russian
milieu this meant an easier and pleasanter way of rising up the Table of
Ranks… “1079
There were, however, deeper, more sinister reasons for Masonry’s success.
“Freemasonry,” writes Andrzej Walicki, “had a dual function: on the one
hand, it could draw people away from the official Church and, by
rationalizing religious experience, could contribute to the gradual
secularisation of their world view; on the other hand, it could attract people
back to religion and draw them away from the secular and rationalistic
philosophy of the Enlightenment. The first function was fulfilled most
effectively by the rationalistic and deistic wing of the movement, which set
the authority of reason against that of the Church and stood for tolerance and
the freedom of the individual. The deistic variety of Freemasonry flourished
above all in England, where it had links with the liberal movement, and in
France, where it was often in alliance with the encyclopaedists. The second
function was most often fulfilled by the mystical trend, although this too
could represent a modernization of religious faith, since the model of belief it
put forward was fundamentally anti-ecclesiastical and postulated a far-
reaching internalisation of faith founded on the soul’s immediate contact with
God.”1080
Educated Russians, though not uninfluenced by the rationalist side of

Masonry, were especially drawn by its mystical side. For while their faith in
Orthodoxy was weak, they were by no means prepared to live without
religion altogether. “Finding myself at the crossroads between Voltaireanism
and religion”, wrote Novikov, “I had no basis on which to work, no
cornerstone on which to build spiritual tranquillity, and therefore I fell into
the society.”1081
1078 V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra I do nashikh dnej (The Russian
Intelligentsia and Masonry: from Peter I to our Days), Harbin, 1934, Moscow, 1997, pp. 95-96.
Keith founded his Russian lodge in 1741-1742, and left Russia in 1747. One contemporary
Masonic source writes: “One Russian tradition has it that Peter became a Mason on trip to
England and brought it back to Russia. There is no hard evidence of this…” (Richard I.
Rhoda, “Russian Freemasonry: A New Dawn”, paper delivered at Orient Lodge no. 15 on
June 29, 1996, http://members.aol.com/houltonme/rus.htm)
1079 Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, London: Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 164-165.
1080 Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, p. 19.
1081 Novikov, in Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, 1650-1825, Oxford
University Press, 1999, p. 232
621
The success of Masonry, therefore, was largely due to the weakening of
faith in Orthodoxy…
The conversion of Tsar Peter to Masonry, if it is a fact, was the fulfilment of

the fervent hopes of western Masons such as the philosopher Leibnitz, who in
1696 had written to Ludolph: “If only the Muscovite kingdom inclined to the
enlightened laws of Europe, Christianity would acquire the greatest fruits.
There is, however, hope that the Muscovites will arise from their slumbers.
There is no doubt that Tsar Peter is conscious of the faults of his subjects and
desires to root out their ignorance little by little.” 1082 According to K.F.
Valishevsky, Leibnitz “had worked out a grandiose plan of scientific
undertakings, which could be achieved with the help of the Muscovite
monarch and in which the greatest German philosopher marked out a role for
himself. Leibnitz studied the history and language of Russia.”1083 And it was
Leibnitz, together with his pupil Wolf, who played the leading role in the
foundation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.1084
1082 Ivanov, op. cit., p. 110.

1083 Valishevsky, Petr Velikij (Peter the Great), in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 120.
1084 Ivanov, op. cit., p. 137.
622
75. PETER THE GREAT: (3) RUSSIA THE THIRD ROME
The Russian Church never fully recovered from the blow dealt to the
“symphony of powers” by Patriarch Nikon’s unjust deposition and the
consequent secularization. As a result, the whole country was submitted by
Peter to the cultural, scientific and educational influence of the West.
Like almost all absolutist despots, Peter was cruel. In part, this can be
forgiven him as the pathological result of a very difficult and insecure
childhood. As Montefiore writes, “like other practitioners of political
autocracy [i.e.absolutism], such as Tsar Ivan the Terrible and King Louis XIV,
his early years were dangerous and uncertain, overshadowed by terrifying
coups and intrigues.”1085 This meant, on the one hand, that many lost their
lives in order to bring his vision into being – including even his son and heir;
and that much that was valuable in pre-Petrine Russia was destroyed or
corrupted in his passion to modernize and westernize it that would brook no
resistance. But on the other hand, it gave him the determination to carry out
his vision in a way that a less pathological or more merciful tsar would not
have been able to do. A more merciful descendant of his, Tsar Nicholas II,
expressed this duality in estimates of the great Peter: “Of course, I recognize
that my famous ancestor had many merits, but I must admit that I would be
insincere if I repeated your raptures. This is the ancestor whom I love less
than others because of his obsession with western culture and his trampling
on all purely Russian customs. One must not impose foreign things
immediately, without reworking them. Perhaps this time it was necessary as a
transitional period, but I do not sympathize with it.”
The transformation Peter accomplished in Russian life was symbolized

especially by the building, at great cost in human lives, of a new capital at St.
Petersburg. Situated at the extreme western end of the vast empire as Peter's
“window to the West”, this extraordinary city was largely built by French and
Italian architects on the model of Venice and Amsterdam, peopled by shaven
and pomaded courtiers who spoke more French than Russian, and ruled by
monarchs of mainly German origin. In building St. Petersburg, Peter was also
trying to replace the traditional idea of Russia as the Third Rome by the
western idea of the secular empire on the model of the First Rome, the Rome
of the pagan Caesars and Augusti.
As Wil van den Bercken writes: “Rome remains an ideological point of

reference in the notion of the Russian state. However, it is no longer the
second Rome but the first Rome to which reference is made, or ancient Rome
takes the place of Orthodox Constantinople. Peter takes over Latin symbols:
he replaces the title tsar by the Latin imperator, designates his state imperia,
calls his advisory council senate, and makes the Latin Rossija the official name
of his land in place of the Slavic Rus’…
1085
Montefiore, op. cit., p. 266.
623
“Although the primary orientation is on imperial Rome, there are also all
kinds of references to the Christian Rome. The name of the city, St.
Petersburg, was not just chosen because Peter was the patron saint of the tsar,
but also to associate the apostle Peter with the new Russian capital. That was
both a diminution of the religious significance of Moscow and a religious
claim over papal Rome. The adoption of the religious significance of Rome is
also evident from the cult of the second apostle of Rome, Paul, which is
expressed in the name for the cathedral of the new capital, the St. Peter and
Paul Cathedral. This name was a break with the pious Russian tradition,
which does not regard the two Roman apostles but Andrew as the patron of
Russian Christianity. Thus St. Petersburg is meant to be the new Rome,
directly following on the old Rome, and passing over the second and third
Romes…”1086
And yet the ideal of Russia as precisely the Third Rome, - that is, the
protector of Orthodoxy throughout the world - not a resurrection of the first,
pagan Rome, was preserved; for “neither the people nor the Church
renounced the very ideal of the Orthodox kingdom, and, as even V.
Klyuchevsky noted, continued to consider as law that which corresponded to
this ideal, and not Peter’s decrees.”1087
But if Russia was still the Third Rome, it was highly doubtful, in the
people’s view, that Peter was her true Autocrat. For how could one who
undermined the foundations of the Third Rome be her true ruler? The real
Autocrat of Russia, the rumour went, was sealed up in a column in
Stockholm, and Peter was a German who had been substituted for him…
However, if the Russians were beginning to doubt, the Greeks were

beginning to take to the idea, especially as Peter was now extending his
power to the south… Thus in 1709 he defeated the Swedes at the Battle of
Poltava, and then invaded the Balkans, calling on the Balkan Orthodox to see
him as their protector. Although Peter was defeated by the Ottomans at the
Battle of the Pruth, Russia now constituted a threat to Constantinople itself
that translated into real influence with the Sultan. In fact, it is with Peter the
Great and his eighteenth-century successors that we can first talk realistically
about Russia fulfilling her role as the protector of the non-Russian
Orthodox…
And so, as Lubov Millar writes, “he tried to obtain the return of the Holy
Sepulchre to the Greek community there. Nothing came of his efforts.
However, in 1700 an agreement was reached with the Ottoman empire,
granting Russian pilgrims free access to the Holy Land. Gradually Russia
obtained additional facilities from the Ottomans and, eventually, upon the
insistence of the Russian Orthodox Synod, a Russian consulate was
Van den Brecken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, pp. 168-169.
1086
1087Hieromonk Dionysius, Priest Timothy Alferov, O Tserkvi, Pravoslavnom Tsarstve i
Poslednem Vremeni, Moscow, 1998, p. 66.
624
established in Jaffa, the port through which Russian pilgrims entered the Holy
Land.”1088
At that time, writes V.M. Lourie, “hopes in Greece for a miraculous re-
establishment of Constantinople before the end of the world [based on the
prophecies of Leo the Wise and others], were somewhat strengthened, if not
squeezed out, by hopes on Russia. Anastasius Gordius (1654-1729), the author
of what later became an authoritative historical-eschatological interpretation
of the Apocalypse (1717-23) called the Russian Empire the guardian of the
faith to the very coming of the Messiah. The hopes of the Greeks for liberation
from the Turks that were linked with Russia, which had become traditional
already from the time of St. Maximus the Greek (1470-1555), also found their
place in the interpretations of the Apocalypse. Until the middle of the 19th
century itself – until the Greeks, on a wave of pan-European nationalism
thought up their ‘Great Idea’ – Russia would take the place of Byzantium in
their eschatological hopes, as being the last Christian Empire. They
considered the Russian Empire to be their own, and the Russian Tsar Nicholas
(not their Lutheran King Otto) as their own, to the great astonishment and
annoyance of European travellers.”1089
Less in the tradition of the Orthodox Emperor was Peter’s abolition of the
Russian patriarchate and its replacement by a Synod that was formally a
department of the State. In 1721 Peter petitioned the Ecumenical Patriarch to
recognize this “governmental” (pravitel’stvennij) Synod as having “equal to
patriarchal power”. In 1723 the reply came in the form of “two nearly
identical letters, one from Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople, written on
behalf of himself and the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria, and the
other from Patriarch Athanasius of Antioch. Both letters ‘confirmed, ratified,
and declared’ that the Synod established by Peter ‘is, and shall be called, our
holy brother in Christ’; and the patriarchs enjoined all Orthodox clergy and
people to submit to the Synod ‘as to the four Apostolic thrones’.”1090
The Eastern Patriarchs’ agreement to the abolition of the patriarchate they

themselves had established needs some explanation. Undoubtedly influential
in their decision was the assurance they received from Peter that he had
instructed the Synod to rule the Russian Church “in accordance with the
unalterable dogmas of the faith of the Holy Orthodox Catholic Greek
Church”. Of course, if they had known all the Protestantizing, not to speak of
pagan, tendencies of Peter’s rule, and in particular his reduction of the
Church to a department of the State, they might not have felt so assured…
Also relevant was the fact that the Russian tsar was the last independent
Orthodox ruler and the main financial support of the Churches of the East.
1088 Millar, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Richfield Springs, N.Y.: Nikodemos Orthodox
Publication Society, 2009, p. 55.

1089 Lourié, “O Vozmozhnosti Kontsa Sveta v Odnoj Otdel’no Vzyatoj Strane” (“On the
Possibility of the End of the World in One Separate Country”), pp. 1-2 (MS).
1090 James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great, London: Macmillan, 1971, p. 223.
625
This made it difficult for the Patriarchs to resist the Tsar in this, as in other
requests. Thus in 1716 Patriarch Jeremiah III acceded to Peter’s request to
allow his soldiers to eat meat during all fasts while they were on
campaign1091; and a little later he permitted the request of the Russian consul
in Constantinople that Lutherans and Calvinists should not be baptized on
joining the Orthodox Church.1092
But a still more likely explanation is the fact that the Eastern Patriarchs
were themselves in an uncanonical (simoniac) situation in relation to their
secular ruler, the Sultan, which would have made any protest against a
similar uncanonicity in Russia seem hypocritical. In fact, in the 18th century
we have the tragic spectacle of the Orthodox Church almost everywhere in an
uncanonical position vis-à-vis the secular powers: in Russia, deprived of its
lawful head and ruled by a secular, albeit formally Orthodox ruler; in the
Greek lands, under a lawful head, the Ecumenical Patriarch, who nevertheless
unlawfully combined political and religious roles and was chosen, at least in
part, by a Muslim ruler; in the Balkans, deprived of their lawful heads (the
Serbian and Bulgarian patriarchs) and ruled in both political and religious
matters by the Ecumenical Patriarch while being under the supreme
dominion of the same Muslim ruler, or, as in Montenegro, ruled (from 1782)
by prince-bishops of the Petrovic-Njegos family.
Only little Georgia retained something like the traditional symphony of

powers. But even the Georgians were forced, towards the end of the
eighteenth century, to seek the suzerainty of Orthodox Russia in the face of
the Muslim threat. The idea was: better submit to the absolutist but Orthodox
ruler of the Third Rome than the similarly absolutist but infidel ruler of the
Second Rome.
The problem for the smaller Orthodox nations was that there was no clear
way out of this situation. Rebellion on a mass scale was out of the question. So
it was natural to look in hope to the north, where Peter, in spite of his “state
heresy” (Glubokovsky’s phrase), was an anointed sovereign who greatly
strengthened Russia militarily and signed all the confessions of the faith of the
Orthodox Church. All these factors persuaded the Eastern Patriarchs to
employ “economy” (leniency, condescension to weakness) and bless the
uncanonical replacement of the patriarchate with a State-dominated Synod…
1091 However, “Christopher Hermann von Manstein found that during the Ochakov campaign
in the 1730s ‘though the synod grants them a dispensation for eating flesh during the actual
campaign, there are few that choose to take the benefit of it, preferring death to the sin of
breaking their rule” (Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, 1650-1825,
Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 242).
1092 Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., part I, p. 294. At the Moscow council of 1666-67, it had been
decreed, under pressure from Ligarides, that papists should be received, not by baptism, but
by chrismation.
626
76. PETER THE GREAT: (4) THE MISSIONS TO SIBERIA AND
CHINA
One of the chief tasks and characteristics of Christian Rome was missionary
work; and if the mission fields for the Second Rome of Byzantium were the
Slavic lands to the north of her, then the mission field of the Third Rome of
Russia was the vast expanse of Asia to the East.
In spite of the Time of Troubles and the internal divisions created by the
Old Ritualist schism, Muscovite Russia was still the leader of Orthodoxy, the
Third Rome, and was still bringing new nations to the True Faith. This was
especially the case in Siberia, a vast pagan land which Russian settlers –
mainly traders in that very valuable commodity, furs - had begun to penetrate
under Ivan the Terrible, notably the Novgorod merchant family of the
Stroganovs. After the Terrible one’s sacking of Novgorod in 1570, “The
territories the Novgordians had developed across the Urals, reaching toward
Siberia, were taken over by Muscovy.
“So this was the restless, dangerous and ambitious ruler whom the
Stroganov family persuaded to hand over privatized hegemony in huge
territories on either side of the Urals, including permission to build forts
along the rivers. They became the first Russian oligarchs, fabulously rich,
exploiting natural resources, protected by monopolies; and both dependent
on, and vital to, Moscow’s authoritarian ruler. With their own forts, a huge
wooden family palace far from Moscow, and a private army of traders and
trappers exploring ever further, the Stroganovs were something new in
history, a huge capitalist enterprise and family dynasty all in one. They could
be compared to the great Italian merchant-to-prince families of the Medici
and the Borgias, except that the Italians never had the Stroganovs’ imperial
zeal for expansion.”1093
However, there was a Mongol khanate of Sibir, with whom the Russians
now came into conflict. “The Russian conquest of Siberia began in July 1580
when some 540 Cossacks under Yermak Timofeyevich invaded the territory
of the Voguls, subjects to Küçüm, the Khan of Siberia. They were
accompanied by 300 Lithuanian and German slave laborers, whom the
Stroganovs had purchased from the tsar. Throughout 1581, this force
traversed the territory known as Yugra and subdued Vogul and
Ostyak towns…
“Following a series of Tatar raids in retaliation against the Russian

advance, Yermak's forces prepared for a campaign to take Qashliq, the
Siberian capital. The force embarked in May 1582. After a three-day battle on
the banks of the river Irtysh Yermak was victorious against a combined force
of Küçüm Khan and six allied Tatar princes. On 29 June, the Cossack forces
were attacked by the Tatars but again repelled them.
1093 Marr, A History of the World, London: Pan, 2012, pp. 287-288.
627
“Throughout September 1582, the Khan gathered his forces for a defence of
Qashliq. A horde of Siberian Tatars, Voguls and Ostyaks massed at Mount
Chyuvash to defend against invading Cossacks. On 1 October, a Cossack
attempt to storm the Tatar fort at Mount Chyuvash was held off. On 23
October, the Cossacks attempted to storm the Tatar fort at Mount Chyuvash
for a fourth time when the Tatars counterattacked. More than a hundred
Cossacks were killed, but their gunfire forced a Tatar retreat and allowed the
capture of two Tatar cannons. The forces of the Khan retreated, and Yermak
entered Qashliq on 26 October.
“Küçüm Khan retreated into the steppes and over the next few years
regrouped his forces. He suddenly attacked Yermak on 6 August 1584 in the
dead of night and defeated most of his army. The details are disputed with
Russian sources claiming Yermak was wounded and tried to escape by
swimming across the Wagay River which is a tributary of the Irtysh River, but
drowned under the weight of his own chainmail. The remains of Yermak's
forces under the command of Mescheryak retreated from Qashliq, destroying
the city as they left. In 1586 the Russians returned, and after subduing the
Khanty and Mansi people through the use of their artillery they established a
fortress at Tyumen close to the ruins of Qashliq. The Tatar tribes that were
submissive to Küçüm Khan suffered from several attacks by the Russians
between 1584–1595; however, Küçüm Khan would not be caught. Finally, in
August 1598 Küçüm Khan was defeated at the Battle of Urmin near the river
Ob. In the course of the fight the Siberian royal family were captured by the
Russians. However, Küçüm Khan escaped yet again. The Russians took the
family members of Küçüm Khan to Moscow and there they remained as
hostages. The descendants of the khan's family became known as the Princes
Sibirsky and the family is known to have survived until at least the late 19th
century.
“Despite his personal escape, the capture of his family ended the political
and military activities of Küçüm Khan and he retreated to the territories of the
Nogay Horde in southern Siberia. He had been in contact with the tsar and
had requested that a small region on the banks of the Irtysh River would be
granted as his dominion. This was rejected by the tsar who proposed to
Küçüm Khan that he come to Moscow and ‘comfort himself’ in the service of
the tsar. However, the old khan did not want to suffer from such contempt
and preferred staying in his own lands to ‘comforting himself’ in Moscow.
Küçüm Khan then went to Bokhara and as an old man became blind, dying in
exile with distant relatives sometime around 1605.
“In order to subjugate the natives and collect yasak (fur tribute), a series of
winter outposts (zimovie) and forts (ostrogs) were built at the confluences of
major rivers and streams and important portages. The first among these were
Tyumen and Tobolsk — the former built in 1586 by Vasilii Sukin and Ivan
Miasnoi, and the latter the following year by Danilo Chulkov. Tobolsk would
become the nerve center of the conquest. To the north Beryozov (1593) and
628
Mangazeya (1600-01) were built to bring the Nenets under tribute, while to
the east Surgut (1594) and Tara (1594) were established to protect Tobolsk and
subdue the ruler of the Narym Ostiaks. Of these, Mangazeya was the most
prominent, becoming a base for further exploration eastward.
“Advancing up the Ob and its tributaries, the ostrogs of Ketsk (1602) and
Tomsk (1604) were built. Ketsk sluzhilye liudi ("servicemen") reached the
Yenisei in 1605, descending it to the Sym; two years later Mangazeyan
promyshlenniks and traders descended the Turukhan to its confluence with the
Yenisei, where they established the zimovie Turukhansk. By 1610 men from
Turukhansk had reached the mouth of the Yenisei and ascended it as far as
the Sym, where they met rival tribute collectors from Ketsk. To ensure
subjugation of the natives, the ostrogs of Yeniseysk (1619) and
Krasnoyarsk (1628) were established.
“Following the khan's death and the dissolution of any organised Siberian
resistance, the Russians advanced first towards Lake Baikal and then the Sea
of Okotsk and the Amur River. However, when they first reached the Chinese
border they encountered people that were equipped with artillery pieces and
here they halted.
“The Russians reached the Pacific Ocean in 1639. After the conquest of the
Siberian Khanate (1598) the whole of Northern Asia - an area much larger
than the old khanate - became known as Siberia and by 1640 the eastern
borders of Russia had expanded more than several million square kilometres.
In a sense, the khanate lived on in the subsidiary title ‘Tsar of Siberia’ which
became part of the full imperial style of the Russian Autocrats.
“The conquest of Siberia also resulted in the spread of diseases. Historian

John F. Richards wrote: ‘... it is doubtful that the total early modern Siberian
population exceeded 300,000 persons. ... New diseases weakened and
demoralized the indigenous peoples of Siberia. The worst of these was
smallpox ‘because of its swift spread, the high death rates, and the permanent
disfigurement of survivors.’ ... In the 1650s, it moved east of the Yenisey,
where it carried away up to 80 percent of the Tungus and Yakut populations.
In the 1690s, smallpox epidemics reduced Yukagir numbers by an estimated
44 percent. The disease moved rapidly from group to group across
Siberia.’”1094
“In the year 1640, the great national movement to the east, ‘the meeting of
the sun,’ resulted in the Russian explorers arriving at the mouth of the Amur
River and the Pacific Ocean. Rus’ bordered pagan China on these frontiers.
The bulwark of Orthodoxy became the Russian fortress of Albazin, famous
for the wonderworking Albazin Icon of the Mother of God (March 9) and the
heroic “defense of Albazin” (1685-1686).
1094 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_conquest_of_Siberia.
629
“In the summer of 1679, during the Apostles’ Fast, Gabriel Florov and a
company of cossacks set out from Albazin to explore the Zea River valley. For
three years the cossacks did patrol duty on the Zea, making the rounds of the
surrounding settlements. They brought the Tungus settlers under Russian
rule, and they established winter quarters and a stockade.
“Once, cossack riders encountered two men on white horses, clad in armor
and armed with bows and swords. These were Saints Vsevolod and Dovmont
[holy warrior-princes of medieval Pskov]. Speaking with the cossacks and
learning that they were from Albazin, the holy warrior-princes predicted the
approach of Chinese armies upon the Amur soon afterwards. They said the
battle would be difficult, but predicted the ultimate triumph of Russian arms.
‘The Chinese will come again, and enter into a great battle, and we shall aid
the Russian people in these struggles. The Chinese will not trouble the city.’
“Several times during 1684-1686 the Chinese horde advanced towards

Albazin, but did not take the city. By the miraculous help of the Albazin Icon
of the Mother of God and the holy Princes Vsevolod and Dovmont of Pskov,
the enemy was rendered powerless against the Orthodox fortress.”1095
At Nerchinsk on August 27, 1689, as the Chinese surrounding the fortress

with a large fleet of heavily armed junks and some 17,000 soldiers, the
Russian government through its envoy Fyodor Golovin signed a treaty with
the Qing dynasty emperor. According to this treaty, which was written in
Latin with translations into Russian and Chinese, the Russians gave up the
area north of the Amur River as far as the Stanovoy Mountains and kept the
area between the Arrgum River and Lake Baikal. In effect, this gave the whole
of the Amur basin to China.
“Subsequently,” writes Robert K. Massie, “the Russians claimed that the

treaty had been based not on justice, but on the presence of so much
menacing Chinese military force. In 1858 and 1860, the tables were turned,
and Russia took back 380,000 square miles of territory from an impotent
China. Not all Russians approved this claim. After all, the Treaty of Nerchinsk
had been honoured for 180 years: all that time, the territory had been Chinese.
But Tsar Nicholas I [recte: Tsar Alexander II] approved, proclaiming: ‘Where
the Russian flag has once been hoisted, it must never be lowered.’
“This is the essence of the Soviet-Chinese dispute. The Russians argue that
the vast region was taken from them unfairly during Sophia’s regency and
that, as Izvestia put it in 1972, ‘this provided the grounds for Russian
diplomacy in the mid-nineteenth century to review the treaty by peaceful
means and to establish the final Russian-Chinese border in the Far East.’ In
reply, the Chinese argue that the Treaty of Nerchinsk was the legitimate
1095 “The Account of the Miracles of Holy Princes Vsevolod and Dovmont” was written by
Gabriel Florov at Yakutsk on October 23, 1689.
630
treaty and that the Russians simply stole the territory from them in the
nineteenth century. Today, the territory is Russian. But on Chinese maps it is
Chinese…”1096
Whatever the merits or otherwise of the Nerchinsk Treaty, it guaranteed a

period of stability and peace between Russia and its only great-power rival in
the region. And this in turn helped the development of missionary work in
Siberia and China. Tsar Peter played an important part in promoting these
missions.
Thus in a Life of St. John Maximovich, Metropolitan of Tobolsk, we read

that in 1700 the tsar “ordered the Metropolitan of Kiev to select a suitable
candidate for the mission of preaching the Gospel to the pagan peoples of the
vast Siberian lands. Two of St. John's close schoolmates were chosen for this
task, being assigned to the rapidly growing Siberian diocese of Tobolsk. The
first choice was St. Dimitry Tuptulo, who, however, due to his frail health was
never sent to Tobolsk, but rather to Rostov; in his place Blessed Philotheus
Leschinsky was made Metropolitan and sent to Tobolsk, and his zeal, his
ascetic life, and his love for the natives earned for him recognition as one of
Russia's greatest missionaries. In 1709 Metropolitan Philotheus became sick
and, thinking his end near, took the great schema. St. John was called to
succeed him in the Tobolsk cathedra and retired to private ascetic labors…
“In Chernigov St. John had by this time earned the unquestioning respect
and love of his flock, being known as a great man of prayer and an
outstanding prince of the Church. He was adorned also with supernatural
gifts, such as the ability to see the future; he predicted Tsar Peter's victory
over the Swedes, and in the Tobolsk Chronicles it is recorded that he foresaw
the Napoleonic invasion a century in advance.
“In the middle of the year 1711 St. John left Chernigov with its culture to
bring the light of Christianity to the cold and primitive Siberian frontier. For
his protection he took with him a copy of a miraculous Chernigov Icon of the
Mother of God, that of Ilyin, which only several decades before had
manifested the rare miracle of tears, and had granted since then numerous
miraculous healings. He arrived in the middle of August in the same year
with a great suite: church singers, educated clergymen, episcopal vestments,
service books, together with many trunks. He at once gained the respect and
admiration of all and was able without difficulty to apply himself to
missionary endeavors.
“Always a friend of education, St. John took loving care of the school
established by his predecessor. He established courses in icon painting. He
took charge of local missionary work, freeing Schema-Metropolitan
1096 Massie, Peter the Great, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 85, note.
631
Philotheus to preach Christ to the wild tribes farther away. He sent a well-
equipped mission to Peking. (Interestingly, the largest and most active center
of Orthodoxy in China would be headed two centuries later by his relative, St.
John Maximovitch, Bishop of Shanghai, whose life and activity strikingly
resembled that of St. John of Tobolsk.)
“St. John loved to do good in secret; he sent money and various things
through trustworthy persons to almshouses and the homes of poor people,
especially to widows. He would go to a window, knock, and say: ‘Accept this
in the Name of Jesus Christ,’ then quickly leave. He grieved especially over
impoverished clergymen. He was drawn with his whole soul to wherever
there was sorrow or need. He loved to go to prisons; he comforted, taught,
and likewise diverted the prisoners with gifts. He never went out just to visit,
and he never stopped into the houses of the rich.
“Even while occupied with his many pastoral cares, St. John also led a life
of the strictest asceticism. In his personal life he was quiet, humble,
compassionate, and very strict with himself. Possessing a great capacity for
work, he was never idle; he was always reading or writing, teaching or
thinking. Above all he prayed; shutting himself up in his cell, he would pray
for hours on his knees.
“For his God-pleasing deeds, St. John was granted a righteous death that
revealed the sanctity of his earthly life. Foreseeing his approaching death, he
prepared for it: the evening before, he went to confession, and the next day,
June 10, 1715, he solemnly celebrated the Divine Liturgy. Afterwards, as was
his custom on major feast days, he held a dinner in his quarters for the city
clergymen and the poor. He himself waited on the latter, thus literally
obeying the Gospel injunction: When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the
maimed, the lame, the blind. and thou shalt be blessed, for they cannot recompense
thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just (Luke 14:13-14).
“After the dinner the Saint touchingly bade farewell to his clergy, and then
briefly detained two of his best loved priests. What he said to them was never
divulged. Having dismissed them, he closed himself in his inner chambers.
Before Vespers, when it was customary to ask the Metropolitan’s blessing for
the ringing of the bells, his house servants came many times to his quarters,
knocked and called him; but the door did not open, and they heard no voice.
The residents of Tobolsk, who deeply revered and loved the Metropolitan,
did not hear the bells for Vespers at the usual time; and having been thrown
into confusion by the tales that quickly spread through the city about the
entirely extraordinary farewell of St. John with his clergy, they gathered in
large numbers in the enclosure before the bishop's house. Finally the Siberian
governor, Prince Gagarin, arrived, and after renewed vain attempts to call the
Metropolitan, he took the responsibility upon himself and ordered the door
broken. There they beheld Metropolitan John, in an attitude of prayer, on his
knees before the holy Icon of the Chernigov Mother of God. He was already
long dead.
632
“His death was supernaturally revealed to his beloved brother in Christ.
On the same day Blessed Philotheus, being miles away in the wild regions of
the Konda River, said to those who surrounded him: "Our brother John has
passed away. Let us go from here"; and he at once returned to Tobolsk.
“The Saint was buried in his cathedral to the great lamentation of his flock.
But immediately a series of visions and miraculous intercessions followed, so
that there was no doubt of his sanctity; and Tobolsk patiently waited for the
day of his canonization. However, this took 200 years, and even then it was
almost postponed because of the First World War. It took the ardent
intercession of the local Bishop Varnava, the future Patriarch Tikhon, and the
Martyr-Tsar Nicholas II to bring about the long expected canonization, which
took place on June 10, 1916, in the presence of all the Siberian hierarchs and
tens of Thousands of Orthodox believers from all over Holy Russia. It was the
last canonization before the satanic revolutionary storm broke out.
“The incorrupt relics of St. John are still preserved in Tobolsk today.”1097
In 1681, writes Dr. Jeremias Norman, ”when the town of Albazin was
recaptured from the Russians by the Manchus, a part of the Cossack
defenders with a few women and children chose to accept Chinese suzerainty
and were taken to Beijing by the Manchus. They forced Father Maksin
Leontev to accompany them, and they also took along church vessels and
icons.
“The Manchu emperor Kangxi granted the Russian captives a plot of

ground in the northeastern part of Beijing, as well as a former Buddhist
temple and cemetery on the outskirts of the city. The captives themselves
were forced into a special contingent of the Imperial Guard. The former
Buddhist temple was converted into a Chapel in honor of St. Nicholas the
Wonderworker, and Father Maksim began regular services there. Because of a
need for more adequate facilities, Father Maksim requested the Metropolitan
of Tobolsk to open a church in Beijing. The Metropolitan sent a priest, Father
Gregory, and a Deacon from the Tobolsk Cathedral, Father Lavrentii Ivanov,
who carried with him a new antimension for the Church in Beijing. The
Metropolitan also ordered Father Maksim and the other clergy to pray for the
Manchu emperor. Father Maksim continued his pastoral labors in Beijing
until his death in 1711 or 1712. The Albazintsy, as the Cossacks who had
submitted to the Manchus were known, took Manchu wives and before long
were beginning to forget their Orthodox Faith and their pastor. A pastoral
1097“ St. John of Tobolsk, Distant Relative of St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai”,
Pravoslavie.ru, 23 June, 2012.
633
admonition from the Metropolitan of Tobolsk in 1711 recalled them to the
practice of their Faith.
“In 1689 Russia signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk with China (the Manchu
Empire); one of the provisions of this treaty allowed the Russian government
to open and maintain a trading mission in the southern part of Beijing. Peter I
took a personal interest in these new contacts with China and, at the advice of
Patriarch Adrian, issued an ukase on June 18, 1700, in which he directed the
Metropolitan of Kiev, Varlaam, to find a good and learned man for the
Metropolitan See of Tobolsk, who would be able to direct the work of a
Chinese mission; at the same time, the Metropolitan was urged to find two or
three young men for training in the Chinese and Mongolian (Manchu)
languages for Apostolic work in the Chinese Empire. This ukase also put the
Chinese mission on firm financial footing. The goals of the mission at that
time were defined as follows: 1) to be an intermediary between China and
Russia; 2) to maintain Christianity among the Albazintsy and, if possible, to
convert the Chinese to Orthodoxy, and 3) to supply interpreters.
“In 1712, with the concurrence of the Chinese emperor, the Russian
Spiritual Mission was formally inaugurated in Beijing under the leadership of
Archimandrite Ilarion (Lezhaiski), a graduate of the Kiev Theological
Academy. He was aided by Hierodeacon Philip and six chanters. The
members of the mission were paid a generous salary by the Chinese
government.
“Little is known of this first mission. Archimandrite Ilarion died in less

than two years, and four other members of the mission returned to Russia; in
the end, only one Priest and three assistants remained. The mission did not
die, however. It was even proposed that a Bishop be appointed for Beijing to
counterbalance the influence of the Roman Catholic missionaries who at that
time were influential in the capital. In fact a Bishop was nominated
(Innokentii Kul’chinsky), but when he arrived at the Chinese border in March,
1721, he was prevented from entering the country at the request of the Jesuit
missionaries in Beijing. After a second unsuccessful attempt to set up a
Bishopric in Beijing in 1725, Archimandrite Antonii, who had first arrived in
1720, was made superior of the mission.
“After the death of the Kangxi Emperor in 1723, all Christian missionary
work in China was forbidden; however, the Spiritual Mission was allowed to
remain open and functioning according to the 1728 Treaty of Kyatchinsk. A
new Church was built and name in honour of the Meeting of our Lord
(Sretenie). It was agreed that every ten years one Archimandrite, two
Hieromonks, two Hierodeacons, two chanters and four theological students
would be allowed to come to the mission. All members of the mission would
be paid a salary, but no one would be allowed to leave Beijing until his ten-
year term was up.
634
“In 1729, the new Spiritual Mission settled in the diplomatic residence,
where it was to remain until 1863, when it returned to its original site. During
this long period of more than a century, the mission carried out its work, first
under the Diocese of Tobolsk and Irkutsk, and later directly under the Holy
Synod…”1098
1098 Norman, “The Orthodox Mission to the Chinese”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVIII (2001), no.
1, pp. 29-31.
635
77. PETER THE GREAT: (5) THE SHACKLING OF THE
RUSSIAN CHURCH
Peter’s return from his first journey to the West, writes B.A. Uspensky,
“was immediately marked by a whole range of cultural innovations. Already
in the next year there began the forcible shaving of beards; the destruction of
beards was marked for the New Year, 1699. It was then that there also began
the struggle against Russian national dress and a range of other reforms of the
same kind.”1099
Peter learned many useful things on this journey to the West, especially as
related to warfare. But in religion the influences were harmful. And many
were prepared to condemn his undermining of the foundations of Russian
society. Thus in 1699 or 1700, on a visit to Voronezh, he ordered the bishop of
the city, St. Metrophan, to visit him at the palace he had erected on an island
in the River Voronezh. “Without delay the holy hierarch set out on foot to go
to the tsar. But when he entered the courtyard which led to the palace, he saw
that statues of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses had been set up there on
the tsar’s order, to serve as architectural adornment. The holy one
immediately returned to his residence. The sovereign was apprised of this,
but, not knowing the reason why the holy Metrophan had turned back, he
sent another messenger to him with orders that he attend upon the sovereign
in the palace. But the saintly bishop replied: ‘Until the sovereign commandeth
that the idols, which scandalise all the people, be taken away, I cannot set foot
in the palace!’ Enraged by the holy hierarch’s reply, the tsar sent him the
following message: ‘If he will not come, he shall incur the death sentence for
disobedience to the powers that be.’ To this threat the saint replied: ‘The
sovereign hath authority over my life, but it is not seemly for a Christian ruler
to set up heathen idols and thus lead the hearts of the simple into temptation.’
Towards evening, the tsar suddenly heard the great bell of the cathedral toll,
summoning the faithful to church. Since there was no particular feast being
celebrated the following day, he sent to ask the bishop why the bell was being
rung. ‘Because His Majesty has condemned me to be executed, I, as a sinful
man, must bring the Lord God repentance before my death and ask
forgiveness of my sins at a general service of prayer, and for this cause I have
ordered an all-night vigil to be served.’ When he learned of this, the tsar
laughed and straightway commanded that the holy hierarch be told that his
sovereign forgave him, and that he cease to alarm the people with the
extraordinary tolling. And afterwards, Tsar Peter ordered the statues
removed. One should understand that Peter never gave up his innovations,
and if in this respect he yielded, it merely demonstrates the great respect he
cherished for the bishop of Voronezh…”1100
1099 Uspensky, in Fomin & Fomina, Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia before the Second
Coming), Sergiev Posad, 1998, volume I, p. 268. Clergy and peasants were allowed to retain
their beards. And nobles could keep them if they paid a “beard tax”.
1100 “The Life of our Father among the Saints Metrophanes, Bishop of Voronezh”, Living
Orthodoxy, vol. XII, N 6, November-December, 1990, p. 16.
636
It was not only the Church that suffered from Peter’s westernizing drive.
The nobility were chained to public service in the bureaucracy or the army;
the peasants - to the land. As we have seen, this was to some extent explained
by military necessity. For Peter had to fight foreign wars (against the Turks
and the Swedes) whose success required a standing army and modern
technology.
Before Peter could begin his reforms in earnest, he had to crush the
opposition to them. This meant, in the first place, the Streltsy (riflemen or
musketeers), who had caused him such suffering when he was a child, and
whose inefficiency and complaints, leading to open rebellion in 1700, led him
both to crush the rebellion and torture the rebels in order to extract
information from them. And he would not let anyone, even the Patriarch of
all Russia, to stop him…
Thus, as Robert Massie writes, “reports of the horror reached such

magnitude that the Patriarch took it upon himself to go to Peter to beg for
mercy. He went carrying an image of the Blessed Virgin, reminding Peter of
the humanity of all men and asking for the exercise of mercy. Peter, resenting
the intrusion of spiritual authority on temporal matters, replied to the
churchmen with great feeling: ‘What are you doing with that image and what
business is it of yours to come here? Leave immediately and put that image in
a place where it may be venerated. Know that I reverence God and His Most
Holy Mother more earnestly, perhaps, than you do. But it is the duty of my
sovereign office, and a duty that I owe to God, to save my people from harm
and to prosecute with public vengeance crimes that lead to the common ruin.’
In this case, Peter continued, justice and harshness were linked, the gangrene
ran deep in the body politic and could be cut out only with iron and fire.
Moscow, he said, would be saved not by pity but by cruelty…”1101
Nevertheless, even at this early stage of his reign, Peter’s attitude to the
faith was not quite as simple as he made out. Thus “for the regimental priests
who had encouraged the Streltsy, a gibbet constructed in the shape of a cross
was erected in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The priests were hanged by the
court jester, dressed for the occasion in clerical robes…”1102 In the second
place, Peter felt that he had to crush his son, the Tsarevich Alexis. For the
Tsarevich, whose mother Peter had cast away in favour of the German Anna
Mons and then the Lithuanian Catherine, represented a focus around which
there gathered all those who loved the old traditions of Holy Rus’ and hoped
for their restoration. In killing him, therefore, Peter was striking a blow at the
whole Orthodox way of life, and declaring, as it were, that there was no going
back to the old ways. Exactly two centuries later, in 1918, the Bolsheviks
would do the same, and for the same reasons, to Tsar Nicholas II…

1102 Massie, op. cit., p. 258.
637
Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes: “Peter I’s persecution of his own son,
ending with the secret killing of the latter, was in essence the persecution of
immemorial Great Russia, which did not want to change its nature, to be
reborn according to the will of the monarch into something complete opposite
to it. It was not by chance that the characteristics of the personality of the
Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich mirrored so well the characteristics of the
personality of the major part of Russia. In this major part the Tsar continued
to be venerated, in spite of everything, as ‘the Anointed of God’, whom it was
necessary to obey in everything except in matters of the faith, if he began to
break or destroy its root foundations. Peter could not directly and openly war
against this Great Russia (that is, with the majority of his people). Therefore
he went on the path of slander (that his actions were opposed, supposedly,
only by sluggards or traitors) and the hidden, as it were secret suffocation of
everything whose root and core was Holy Rus’, Orthodox Rus’. On this path
Peter was ineluctably forced to resort to one very terrible means: to cover his
deliberately anti-God, dishonourable, if not simply criminal actions with
pious words, using the name of God and other holy names, excerpts from the
Holy Scriptures and Tradition, false oaths, etc. – or in other words, to act
under the mask of Orthodox piety. Such had happened in earlier history and
especially, as we remember, in the form of the actions of the ‘Judaizing’
heretics, Ivan IV and Boris Godunov. But from Peter I it becomes as it were a
certain norm, a kind of rule for rulers that did not require explanation…”1103
Now that the Tsarevich was dead, Peter could proceed to his most
important “reform”, the subjection of the Church to the State…
Peter had certainly been deeply influenced by the West; and perhaps the
most important and dangerous influence that Peter had received on his
journey there was that of the Anglican Bishop Gilbert Burnet. The Tsar and
the famous preacher had many long talks, and according to Burnet what
interested the Tsar most was his exposition of the “authority that the
Christian Emperors assumed in matters of religion and the supremacy of our
Kings”. Burnet told the Tsar that “the great and comprehensive rule of all is,
that a king should consider himself as exalted by Almighty God into that high
dignity as into a capacity of doing much good and of being a great blessing to
mankind, and in some sort a god on earth”.1104
Peter certainly came to believe a similar teaching concerning his role as

tsar. “By God’s dispensation,” he said, “it has fallen to me to correct both the
state and the clergy; I am to them both sovereign and patriarch; they have
forgotten that in [pagan] antiquity these [roles] were combined.”1105

1104 James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great, London: Macmillan, 1971, pp. 37, 35.
1105 It had not always been so. Thus early in his reign, in 1701, he replied to some Catholic
Saxons who proposed a union between the Orthodox and Catholic churches: “Sovereigns
have rights only over the bodies of their people. Christ is the sovereign of their souls. For
638
And now he set out gradually to enslave the Church to the power of the
State. From 1701 to 1718 he enacted a series of piecemeal measures, but was to
some extent inhibited by the intermittent resistance of the patriarchal locum
tenens, Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky of Ryazan, and of his own son, the
Tsarevich Alexis. However, after the execution of the Tsarevich and the
effective replacement of Yavorsky by a man more after his reforming heart,
Metropolitan Theophan Prokopovich of Pskov, Peter set about a systematic
codification and consolidation of his reforms in his Ecclesiastical Regulation,
published in 1721…
On January 24, 1701 Peter ordered the re-opening of the Monastirskij Prikaz
which Patriarch Nikon had so struggled against. The Prikaz was authorized to
collect all state taxes and peasant dues from the estates of the Church, as well
as purely ecclesiastical emoluments. A large proportion of this sum was then
given to the state to help the war-effort against Sweden.
In other words, while the Church was not formally dispossessed, the State
took complete control over her revenues. St. Demetrius, Metropolitan of
Rostov, protested: “You want to steal the things of the Church? Ask
Heliodorus, Seleucus’ treasurer, who wanted to go to Jerusalem to steal the
things of the Church. He was beaten by the hands of an angel.”1106
The Church also lost her judicial independence, her ability to judge her
own people in her own courts. The State demanded that clergy be defrocked
for transgressing certain state laws. It put limits on the numbers of clergy, and
of new church buildings. Monks were confined to their monasteries, no new
monasteries could be founded, and the old ones were turned into hospitals
and rest-homes for retired soldiers.
“Under Peter”, writes Andrew Bessmertny, “a fine for the giving of alms
(from 5 to 10 rubles) was introduced, together with corporal punishments
followed by cutting out of the nostrils and exile to the galleys 'for the
proclamation of visions and miracles’. In 1723 a decree forbidding the
tonsuring of monks was issued, with the result that by 1740 Russian
monasticism consisted of doddery old men, while the founder of eldership, St.
Paisius Velichkovsky, was forced to emigrate to Moldavia. Moreover, in the
monasteries they introduced a ban on paper and ink - so as to deprive the
such a union, a general consent of the people is necessary and that is in the power of God
alone….” (Robert Massie, Peter the Great, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 345).
1106 St. Demetrius, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., volume I, p. 290. According to Andrew
Bessmertny-Anzimirov, Demetrius “was glorified as a fertile church writer, a composer of

collections of lives of the saints (the best known was the ‘Readings from the Menaion’ in four
volumes), the author of sermons dramas [e.g. his “Christmas Drama’ of 1704] and verses.
Academician D. Likhachev considered Demetrius of Rostov to be ‘the last writer who had a
huge significance for the whole of Orthodox Eastern and Southern Europe’” Facebook,
December 9, 2017).
639
traditional centres of book-learning and scholarship of their significance.
Processions through the streets with icons and holy water were also banned
(almost until the legislation of 1729)! At the same time, there appeared... the
government ban on Orthodox transferring to other confessions of faith.”1107
If Peter was a tyrant, he was nevertheless not a conventional tyrant, but

one who genuinely wanted the best for his country. And in spite of the
drunken orgies in which he mocked her institutions and rites, he did not want
to destroy the Church, but only “reform” her in directions which he thought
would make her more efficient and “useful”.
Some of the “reforms” were harmful, like his allowing mixed marriages.
The Holy Synod decreed that the children of these marriages should be
Orthodox, which mitigated, but did not remove the harmfulness of the
decree. Others were beneficial. Thus the decree that the lower age limit for
ordination to the diaconate should be twenty-five, and for the priesthood –
thirty, although motivated by a desire to limit the number of persons claiming
exemption from military service, especially “ignorant and lazy clergy”,
nevertheless corresponded to the canonical ages for ordination. Again, his
measures ensuring regular attendance at church by laypeople, if heavy-
handed, at least demonstrated genuine zeal for the flourishing of Church life.
Moreover, he encouraged missionary work, especially in Siberia, where the
sees of Tobolsk and Irkutsk were founded and such luminaries as St. John of
Tobolsk and St. Innocent of Irkutsk flourished during his reign. And in spite
of his own Protestant tendencies, he blessed the publication of some, if not all,
books defending the principles of the Orthodox faith against Protestantism.
The most shocking of the State’s demands on the Church that priests break
the seal of confession and report on any parishioners who confessed anti-
government sentiments. Thus did Peter create a “police state” in which the
priests were among the policemen. Now “a ‘police state’,” writes Fr. Georges
Florovsky, “is not only, or even largely, an outward reality, but more an inner
reality: it is less a structure than a style of life; not only a political theory, but
also a religious condition. ‘Policism’ represents the urge to build and
‘regularize’ a country and a people’s entire life – the entire life of each
individual inhabitant – for the sake of his own and the ‘general welfare’ or
‘common good’. ‘Police’ pathos, the pathos of order and paternalism,
proposes to institute nothing less than universal welfare and well-being, or,
quite simply, universal ‘happiness’. [But] guardianship all too quickly
becomes transformed into surveillance. Through its own paternalist
inspiration, the ‘police state’ inescapably turns against the church. It also
usurps the church’s proper function and confers them upon itself. It takes on
the undivided care for the people’s religious and spiritual welfare.”1108
1107 Bessmertny, “Natsionalizm i Universalizm v russkom religioznom soznanii”

(“Nationalism and Universalism in the Russian Religious Consciousness”), in Na puti k
svobode sovesti (On the Path to Freedom of Conscience), Moscow: Progress, 1989, p. 136.
1108 Florovsky, The Ways of Russian Theology, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1979, p. 115.
640
Peter’s choice to lead his new “reformed” Church, Metropolitan Theophan
(Prokopovich), was distinguished by an extreme pro-westernism. Thus he
called Germany the mother of all countries and openly expressed his
sympathy with the German Lutheran theologians. This attachment to
Lutheranism, especially as regards Church-State relations, is evident in his
sermons. Thus in his sermon on Palm Sunday, 1718, he said: “Do we not see
here [in the story of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem] what honour is
paid to the King? Does this not require us not to remain silent about the duty
of subjects to esteem the supreme authority, and about the great resistance to
this duty that has been exposed in our country at the present time? For we see
that not a small part of the people abide in such ignorance that they do not
know the Christian doctrine concerning the secular authorities. Nay more,
they do not know that the supreme authority is established and armed with
the sword by God, and that to oppose it is a sin against God Himself, a sin to
be punished by death not temporal but eternal…
“Christians have to be subject even to perverse and unbelieving rulers.

How much more must they be utterly devoted to an Orthodox and just
sovereign? For the former are masters, but the latter are also fathers. What am
I saying? That our autocrat [Peter], and all autocrats, are fathers. And where
else will you find this duty of ours, to honour the authorities sincerely and
conscientiously, if not in the commandment: ‘Honour thy father!’ All the wise
teachers affirm this; thus Moses the lawgiver himself instructs us. Moreover
the authority of the state is the primary and ultimate degree of fatherhood, for
on it depends not a single individual, not one household, but the life, the
integrity, and the welfare of the whole great nation.”1109
Already in a school-book published in 1702 Prokopovich had referred to

the emperor as “the rock Peter on whom Christ has built His Church”.1110
And in another sermon dating from 1718 he “relates Peter, ‘the first of the
Russian tsars’, to his patron saint Peter, ‘the first of the apostles’. Like the
latter, tsar Peter has an ‘apostolic vocation… And what the Lord has
commanded your patron and apostle concerning His Church, you are to carry
out in the Church of this flourishing empire.’ This is a far-reaching theological
comparison…”1111
In July, 1721 Prokopovich published an essay “expressing the view that

since Constantine’s time the Christian emperors had exercised the powers of a
bishop, ‘in the sense that they appointed the bishops, who ruled the clergy’.
This was, in short, a justification of Peter’s assumption of complete
jurisdiction over the government of the church; for a ‘Christian sovereign’,
Prokopovich concluded in a celebrated definition of the term, is empowered
1109 Prokopovich, in Cracraft, op. cit., pp. 57, 58-59.

1110 Prokopovich, in Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM
Press, 1999, p. 176.
1111 Prokopovich, in Van den Brecken, op. cit., p. 174.
641
to nominate not only bishops, ‘but the bishop of bishops, because the
Sovereign is the supreme authority, the perfect, ultimate, and authentic
supervisor; that is, he holds supreme judicial and executive power over all the
ranks and authorities subject to him, whether secular or ecclesiastical’.
‘Patriarchalism [patriarshestvo]’ – the belief that a patriarch should rule the
autocephalous Russian church – Prokopovich equated with ‘papalism’, and
dismissed it accordingly.”1112
The notion that not the Patriarch, but only the Tsar, was the father of the
people was developed by Prokopovich in his Primer, which consisted of an
exposition of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes:
“Question. What is ordained by God in the fifth commandment [‘Honour thy
father and thy mother’]? Answer: To honour all those who are as fathers and
mothers to us. But it is not only parents who are referred to here, but others
who exercise paternal authority over us. Question: Who are such persons?
Answer: The first order of such persons are the supreme authorities instituted
by God to rule the people, of whom the highest authority is the Tsar. It is the
duty of kings to protect their subjects and to seek what is best for them,
whether in religious matters or in the things of this world; and therefore they
must watch over all the ecclesiastical, military, and civil authorities subject to
them and conscientiously see that they discharge their respective duties. That
is, under God, the highest paternal dignity; and subjects, like good sons, must
honour the Tsar. [The second order of persons enjoying paternal authority
are] the supreme rulers of the people who are subordinate to the Tsar,
namely: the ecclesiastical pastors, the senators, the judges, and all other civil
and military authorities.”1113
As Cracraft justly observes, “the things of God, the people were being
taught by Prokopovich, were the things of Caesar, and vice-versa: the two
could not be distinguished.”1114
With Prokopovich as his main assistant, Peter now proceeded to the crown
of his caesaropapist legislation, his Ecclesiastical Regulation of 1721, which
established an “Ecclesiastical College” in parallel with nine secular Colleges,
or Ministries, to replace the old patriarchal system.
Peter did not hide the fact that he had abolished the patriarchate because
he did not want rivals to his single and undivided dominion over Russia. In
this he followed the teaching of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in
his Leviathan: “Temporal and spiritual are two words brought into the world
to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign… A man cannot
obey two masters…”
1112 Cracraft, op. cit., p. 60.

1113 Prokopovich, in Cracraft, op. cit., p. 284.
1114 Cracraft, op. cit., p. 285.
642
And so: “The fatherland,” intoned the Regulation, “need not fear from an
administrative council [the Ecclesiastical College] the sedition and disorders
that proceed from the personal rule of a single church ruler. For the common
fold do not perceive how different is the ecclesiastical power from that of the
Autocrat, but dazzled by the great honour and glory of the Supreme Pastor
[the patriarch], they think him a kind of second Sovereign, equal to or even
greater than the Autocrat himself, and imagine that the ecclesiastical order is
another and better state.
“Thus the people are accustomed to reason among themselves, a situation

in which the tares of the seditious talk of ambitious clerics multiply and act as
sparks which set dry twigs ablaze. Simple hearts are perverted by these ideas,
so that in some matters they look not so much to their Autocrat as to the
Supreme Pastor. And when they hear of a dispute between the two, they
blindly and stupidly take sides with the ecclesiastical ruler, rather than with
the secular ruler, and dare to conspire and rebel against the latter. The
accursed ones deceive themselves into thinking that they are fighting for God
Himself, that they do not defile but hallow their hands even when they resort
to bloodshed. Criminal and dishonest persons are pleased to discover such
ideas among the people: when they learn of a quarrel between their Sovereign
and the Pastor, because of their animosity towards the former they seize on
the chance to make good their malice, and under pretence of religious zeal do
not hesitate to take up arms against the Lord’s Anointed; and to this iniquity
they incite the common folk as if to the work of God. And what if the Pastor
himself, inflated by such lofty opinions of his office, will not keep quiet? It is
difficult to relate how great are the calamities that thereby ensue.
“These are not our inventions: would to God that they were. But in fact this
has more than once occurred in many states. Let us investigate the history of
Constantinople since Justinian’s time, and we shall discover much of this.
Indeed the Pope by this very means achieved so great a pre-eminence, and
not only completely disrupted the Roman Empire, while usurping a great part
of it for himself, but more than once has profoundly shaken other states and
almost completely destroyed them. Let us not recall similar threats which
have occurred among us.
“In an ecclesiastical administrative council there is no room for such

mischief. For here the president himself enjoys neither the great glory which
amazes the people, nor excessive lustre; there can be no lofty opinion of him;
nor can flatterers exalt him with inordinate praises, because what is done well
by such an administrative council cannot possible be ascribed to the president
alone… Moreover, when the people see that this administrative council has
been established by decree of the Monarch with the concurrence of the Senate,
they will remain meek, and put away any hope of receiving aid in their
rebellions from the ecclesiastical order.”1115
1115 Cracroft, op. cit., pp. 154-155; Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, pp. 229-230.
643
Thus the purely imaginary threat of a papist revolution in Russia was
invoked to carry out a revolution in Church-State relations along Protestant
lines. The Catholic threat was already receding in Peter’s time, although the
Jesuits continued to make strenuous efforts to bring Russia into the Catholic
fold. The real threat came from the Protestant monarchies, where
caesaropapism was an article of faith.
Sweden and Prussia were the main models by the time of the Ecclesiastical
Regulation. But the original ideas had come during Peter’s earlier visit to
England and Holland. Thus, according to A.P. Dobroklonsky, “they say that
in Holland William of Orange [who was also king of England] advised him to
make himself ‘head of religion’, so as to become the complete master in his
state.”1116
The full extent of the Peter’s Protestantization of the Church administration

was revealed by the oath that the clerics appointed to the Ecclesiastical
College were required to swear: “I acknowledge on oath that the Supreme
Judge [Krainij Sud’ia] of this Ecclesiastical College is the Monarch of All Russia
himself, our Most Gracious Sovereign”. And they promised “to defend
unsparingly all the powers, rights, and prerogatives belonging to the High
Autocracy of His Majesty” and his “august and lawful successors”.
The Church historian, Igor Smolitsch, called this the capitulation document
of the Russian Church.1117 Certainly, no Christian can recognize any mortal
man as his supreme judge in the literal sense, and its evil fruits were very
soon evident. Thus Tikhomirov writes: “In the first decade after the
establishment of the Synod most of the Russian bishops were in prison,
defrocked, beaten with whips, etc. I checked this from the lists of bishops in
the indicated work of Dobroklonsky. In the history of the Constantinopolitan
Church after the Turkish conquest we do not find a single period when there
was such devastation wrought among the bishops and such lack of ceremony
in relation to Church property.”1118
Hobbes had written in his Leviathan: “He who is chief ruler in any
Christian state is also chief pastor, and the rest of the pastors are created by
his authority”.1119 Similarly, according to Peter and Prokopovich, the chief
ruler was empowered to nominate not only bishops, “but the bishop of
bishops [i.e. the patriarch], because the Sovereign is the supreme authority,
the perfect, ultimate, and authentic supervisor; that is, he holds supreme
judicial and executive power over all the ranks and authorities subject to him,
whether secular or ecclesiastical”.
1116 Dobroklonsky, in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 132.

1117 Smolitsch, Geschichte der russischen Kirche 1700-1917, vol. I, Leiden, 1964, p. 106.
1119 Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 161; in Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw, 1931, part III, p. 237.
644
The Tsar henceforth took the place of the Patriarch – or rather, of the Pope,
for he consulted with his bishops much less even than a Patriarch is obliged to
with his bishops. Thus, as Uspensky relates, “the bishops on entering the
Emperor’s palace had to leave behind their hierarchical staffs… The
significance of this fact becomes comprehensible if it is borne in mind that
according to a decree of the Council of 1675 hierarchs left their staffs behind
when concelebrating with the Patriarch… Leaving behind the staff clearly
signified hierarchical dependence…”1120
Again, as Bishop Nicodemus of Yeniseisk (+1874) put it: “The Synod,

according to Peter’s idea, is a political-ecclesiastical institution parallel to
every other State institution and for that reason under the complete supreme
commanding supervision of his Majesty. The idea is from the Reformation,
and is inapplicable to Orthodoxy; it is false. The Church is her own Queen.
Her Head is Christ our God. Her law is the Gospel…” Bishop Nicodemus
went on to say that in worldly matters the Tsar was the supreme power, but
“in spiritual matters his Majesty is a son of the Church” and therefore subject
to the authority of the Church.1121
Zyzykin writes: “Basing the unlimitedness of his power in Pravda Voli

Monarshej on Hobbes’ theory, and removing the bounds placed on this power
by the Church, he changed the basis of the power, placing it on the human
base of a contract and thereby subjecting it to all those waverings to which
every human establishment is subject; following Hobbes, he arbitrarily
appropriated ecclesiastical power to himself; through the ‘de-enchurchment’
of the institution of royal power the latter lost its stability and the inviolability
which is proper to an ecclesiastical institution. It is only by this de-
enchurchment that one can explain the possibility of the demand for the
abdication of the Tsar from his throne without the participation of the Church
in 1917. The beginning of this ideological undermining of royal power was
laid through the basing of the unlimitedness of royal power in Pravda Voli
Monarshej in accordance with Hobbes, who in the last analysis confirmed it on
the basis, not of the Divine call, but of the sovereignty of the people…”1122
The paradox that Petrine absolutism was based on democracy is confirmed

by L.A. Tikhomirov, who writes: “This Pravda affirms that Russian subjects
first had to conclude a contract amongst themselves, and then the people ‘by
its own will abdicated and gave it [power] to the monarch.’ At this point it is
explained that the sovereign can by law command his people to do not only
anything that is to his benefit, but also simply anything that he wants. This
interpretation of Russian monarchical power entered, alas, as an official act
into the complete collection of laws, where it figures under No. 4888 in
volume VII.
1120 Uspensky, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., volume 1, p. 297.

1121 Bishop Nicodemus, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., volume I, p. 296.
1122 Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, p. 239.
645
“…. In the Ecclesiastical Regulation it is explained that ‘conciliar government
is the most perfect and better than one-man rule’ since, on the one hand,
‘truth is more certainly sought out by a conciliar association than by one
man’, and on the other hand, ‘a conciliar sentence more strongly inclines
towards assurance and obedience than one man’s command’… Of course,
Theophan forced Peter to say all this to his subjects in order to destroy the
patriarchate, but these positions are advanced as a general principle. If we
were to believe these declarations, then the people need only ask itself: why
do I have to ‘renounce my own will’ if ‘conciliar government is better than
one-man rule and if ‘a conciliar sentence’ elicits greater trust and obedience
than one man’s command?
“It is evident that nothing of the sort could have been written if there had
been even the smallest clarity of monarchical consciousness. Peter’s era in this
respect constitutes a huge regression by comparison with the Muscovite
monarchy.”1123
Thus did Peter the Great, “a Sun King of the steppe”, 1124 destroy the
traditional pattern of Church-State relations that had characterized Russian
history since the time of St. Vladimir. Not until the reign of Nicholas II did the
Church regain something like her former freedom. As Karamzin put it, under
Peter “we became citizens of the world, but ceased to be, in some cases,
citizens of Russia.”1125
If we compare Peter I with another great and terrible tsar, Ivan IV, we see
striking similarities. Both tsars were completely legitimate, anointed rulers.
Both suffered much from relatives in their childhood; both killed their own
sons and displayed pathological cruelty and blasphemy. Both were great
warriors who defeated Russia’s enemies and expanded the bounds of the
kingdom. Both began by honouring the Church and ended by attempting to
bend her completely to their will… There is one very important difference,
however. While Ivan never attempted to impose a caesaropapist constitution
on the Church, Peter did just that. The result was that Ivan’s caesaropapism
disappeared after his death, whereas Peter’s lasted for another 200 years…
So can we count Peter as an Orthodox Tsar? There are some, even among
conservative historians, who believe that Petrine absolutism was not an
unmitigated evil, but worked in some ways for the good of the Orthodox
People, in accordance with the principle that “all things work together for
good for those who love God” (Romans 8.28). Certainly, even an evil Tsar has
1123 Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg,
1992, pp. 302-303.

1124 Simon Jenkins, A Short History of Europe, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2018, p. 196.
1125 Karamzin, in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 137.
646
at least this advantage, that he humbles the people, reminding them how far
they have fallen, not being counted worthy of a good and merciful Tsar…
But some have even seen some of his aims as good in themselves. Thus the
monarchist L.A. Tikhomirov wrote: “It would be superfluous to repeat that in
his fundamental task Peter the Great was without question right and was a
great Russian man. He understood that as a monarch, as the bearer of the
duties of the tsar, he was obliged dauntlessly to take upon his shoulders a
heavy task: that of leading Russia as quickly as possible to as a complete as
possible a mastery of all the means of European culture. For Russia this was a
‘to be or not be’ question. It is terrible even to think what would have been the
case if we had not caught up with Europe before the end of the 18th century.
Under the Petrine reforms we fell into a slavery to foreigners which has lasted
to the present day, but without this reform, of course, we would have lost our
national existence if we had lived in our barbaric powerlessness until the time
of Fredrick the Great, the French Revolution and the era of Europe’s economic
conquest of the whole world. With an iron hand Peter forced Russia to learn
and work – he was, of course, the saviour of the whole future of the nation.
“Peter was also right in his coercive measures. In general Russia had for a
long time been striving for science, but with insufficient ardour. Moreover,
she was so backward, such terrible labour was set before her in order to catch
up with Europe, that the whole nation could not have done it voluntarily.
Peter was undoubtedly right, and deserved the eternal gratitude of the
fatherland for using the whole of his royal authority and power to create the
cruellest dictatorship and move the country forward by force, enslaving the
whole nation, because of the weakness of her resources, to serve the aims of
the state. There was no other way to save Russia [!]
“But Peter was right only for himself, for his time and for his work.
However, when this system of enslaving the people to the state is elevated
into a principle, it becomes murderous for the nation, it destroys all the
sources of the people’s independent life. But Peter indicated no limits to the
general enserfment to the state, he undertook no measures to ensure that a
temporary system should not become permanent, he even took no measures
to ensure that enserfed Russia did not fall into the hands of foreigners, as
happened immediately after his death.”1126
However, Archpriest Lev Lebedev, even while admitting the useful things
that Peter accomplished, comes to a different and much darker conclusion:
“We are familiar with the words that Peter ‘broke through a window into
Europe’. But no! He ‘broke through a window’ into Russia for Europe, or
rather, opened the gates of the fortress of the soul of Great Russia for the
invasion into it of the hostile spiritual forces of ‘the dark West’. Many actions
of this reformer, for example, the building of the fleet, the building of St.
Petersburg, of the first factories, were accompanied by unjustified cruelties
1126 Tikhomirov, op. cit., pp. 295-296.
647
and merciless dealing with his own people. The historians who praise Peter
either do not mention this, or speak only obliquely about it, and with
justification, so as not to deprive their idol of the aura of ‘the Father of the
Fatherland’ and the title ‘Great’. For the Fatherland Peter I was the same kind
of ‘father’ as he was for his own son the Tsarevich Alexis, whom he ordered
to be killed – in essence, only because Alexis did not agree with his father’s
destructive reforms for the Fatherland. That means that Peter I did not at all
love Russia and did not care for her glory. He loved his own idea of the
transformation of Russia and the glory of the successes precisely of this idea,
and not of the Homeland, not of the people as it then was, especially in its
best and highest state – the state of Holy Rus’.
“Peter was possessed by ideas that were destructive for the Great Russian
soul and life. It is impossible to explain this only by his delectation for all
things European. Here we may see the influence of his initiation into the
teaching of evil [Masonry] that he voluntarily accepted in the West. Only a
person who had become in spirit not Russian could so hate the most valuable
and important thing in Great Russia – the Orthodox spiritual foundations of
her many-centuried life. Therefore if we noted earlier that under Peter the
monarchy ceased to be Orthodox and Autocratic, now we must say that in
many ways it ceased to be Russian or Great Russian. Then we shall see how
the revolutionary Bolshevik and bloody tyrant Stalin venerated Peter I and
Ivan IV. Only these two Autocrats were venerated in Soviet times by the
communists – the fighters against autocracy… Now we can understand why
they were venerated – for the antichristian and anti-Russian essence of their
actions and transformations!
“Investigators both for and against Peter I are nevertheless unanimous in

one thing: those transformations in the army, fleet, state administration,
industry, etc. that were useful to Russia could not have been introduced (even
with the use of western models) without breaking the root spiritual
foundations of the life of Great Russia as they had been formed up to Peter.
Therefore when they say that the actions of Peter can be divided into
‘harmful’ and ‘useful’, we must object: that which was useful in them was
drowned in that which was harmful. After all, nobody would think of
praising a good drink if a death-dealing poison were mixed with it…”1127
Certainly, there were many in Peter’s reign who were prepared to pay with
their lives for their confession that he was, if not the Antichrist, at any rate a
forerunner of the Antichrist… And yet the consensus was that Peter was not
the Antichrist. The Church prayed for him and anathematized his enemies,
even when they were Orthodox, like the Ukrainian Hetman Mazeppa, who
deserted to the Swedish King Charles XII.1128

1128 Massie, op. cit., p. 465.
648
Archbishop Nathaniel of Vienna poses the question: “Why, in the course of
two centuries, have we all, both those who are positively disposed and those
who are negatively disposed towards Peter, not considered him as the
Antichrist? Why, next to the pious rebukers of Peter, could there be pious,
very pious venerators of him? Why could St. Metrophan of Voronezh, who
fearlessly rebuked Peter’s comparatively innocent attraction to Greek-Roman
statues in imitation of the Europeans, nevertheless sincerely and touchingly
love the blasphemer-tsar and enjoy his love and respect in return? Why could
Saints Demetrius of Rostov and Innocent of Irkutsk love him (the latter, as
‘over-hieromonk’ of the fleet, had close relations with him)? Why did the
most ardent and conscious contemporary opponent of Peter’s reforms, the
locum tenens of the Patriarchal Throne, Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky, who
struggled with Peter’s anti-ecclesiastical reforms and was persecuted and
constrained by him for that, nevertheless not only not recognize Peter as the
Antichrist, but also wrote a book refuting such an opinion? Why in general
did the Church, which has always put forward from its midst holy fighters
against all antichristian phenomena contemporary to it, however much these
phenomena may have been supported by the bearers of supreme power, the
Church which later, under Catherine II, put forward against her far more
restrained, veiled and far less far-reaching anti-ecclesiastical reforms such
uncompromising fighters as Metropolitans Arsenius (Matseyevich) and Paul
(Konyuskevich) – why, under the Emperor Peter, did the Church not put
forward against him one holy man, recognized as such, not one rebuker
authorized by Her? Why did our best Church thinker, who understood the
tragedy of the fall of Holy Rus’ with the greatest clarity and fullness, A.S.
Khomiakov, confess that that in Peter’s reforms, ‘sensing in them the fruit of
pride, the intoxication of earthly wisdom, we have renounced all our holy
things that our native to the heart’, why could he nevertheless calmly and in a
spirit of sober goodwill say of Peter: ‘Many mistakes darken the glory of the
Transformer of Russia, but to him remains the glory of pushing her forward
to strength and a consciousness of her strength’?
“And finally, the most important question: why is not only Russia, but the
whole of the rest of the world, in which by that time the terrible process of
apostasy from God had already been taking place for centuries, obliged
precisely to Peter for the fact that this process was stopped by the mighty
hand of Russia for more than 200 years? After all, when we rightly and with
reason refer the words of the Apostle Paul: ‘The mystery of lawlessness is
already working, only it will not be completed until he who now restrains is
removed from the midst’ to the Russian tsars, we think mainly of the Russian
[Petersburg] emperors, and not of the Muscovite tsars. 1129 These
comparatively weak, exotic rulers, to whom the world outside their
immediate dominions related in approximately the way that, in later times,
they related to the Neguses and Negestas of Abyssinia, could not be the
restrainers of the world. Consequently Peter was simultaneously both the
1129 Thus Sophia, Elector of Hanover, recognized in Peter “a very extraordinary man… at once
very good and very bad” (Montefiore, op. cit., p. 86).
649
Antichrist and the Restrainer of the Antichrist. But if that is the case, then the
whole exceptional nature of Peter’s spiritual standing disappears, because
Christ and Antichrist, God and the devil fight with each other in every human
soul, for every human soul, and in this case Peter turned out to be only more
gifted than the ordinary man, a historical personality who was both good and
evil, but always powerful, elementally strong. Both the enemies and the
friends of Peter will agree with this characterization…”1130
The assertion that in the presence of the Orthodox Kingdom – the Russian
Empire – that terrible universal outpouring of evil which we observe today
could not be completed, is not an arbitrary claim. This is witnessed to by one
of the founders of the bloodiest forms of contemporary anti-theism, Soviet
communism – Friedrich Engels, who wrote: “Not one revolution in Europe
and in the whole world can attain final victory while the present Russian state
exists.”1131
So Peter, according to this view, was at the same time both persecutor and
protector of the Church, both a forerunner of the Antichrist and the Restrainer
against the Antichrist. He did great harm to the Church, but he also
effectively defended her against her external enemies, and supported her
missionary work in Siberia and the East. And he sincerely believed himself to
be, as he once wrote to the Eastern patriarchs, ‘a devoted son of our Most
Beloved Mother the Orthodox Church’.”1132
Did Peter repent of his anti-Church acts? It is impossible to say. But we

know that at the end of his life “he confessed and received communion three
times; while receiving holy unction, he displayed great compunction of soul
and several times repeated: ‘I believe, I hope!’…”1133 This gives us, too, reason
to hope and believe in his salvation.
For from that eternal world his old friend and foe, St. Metrophan, once
appeared to one of his venerators and said: “If you want to be pleasing to me,
pray for the peace of the soul of the Emperor Peter the Great...”1134
1130 Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “O Petre Velikom” (“On Peter the Great”), Epokha (The
Epoch), N 10, 2000, N 1, pp. 35-36. Unlike several Byzantine emperors, he refused a unia with
Rome. Thus he once attended a Catholic mass in Poland, and “his interest in the service
prompted his Catholic hosts to propose a union of the Orthodox and Catholic churches, but
Peter replied, ‘Sovereigns have rights only over the bodies of their people. Christ is the
sovereign of their souls. For such a union, a general consent of the people is necessary and
that is in the power of God alone” (Massie, op. cit., p. 345).
1131 Engels, “Karl Marx and the revolutionary movement in Russia”.
1132 Cracraft, op. cit., pp. 27-28.
1133 Ivanov, op. cit., p. 140. See also “Smert’ Imperatora Petra I kak obrazets khristianskoj
konchiny” (“The Death of Peter I as a Model of Christian Death”), Svecha Pokaiania (The
Candle of Repentance), N 1, March, 1999, pp. 6-7.
1134 “Smert’ Imperatora Petra I”, op. cit., p. 7.
650
78. THE DEGRADATION OF THE RUSSIAN AUTOCRACY
In sharp contrast to the relative stability of succession under the Muscovite

tsars, every single change of monarch from the death of Peter I in 1725 to the
assassination of Paul I in 1801 was a violent coup d’état involving the
intervention of the Guards regiments and their aristocratic protégés. The
result was perhaps the lowest nadir of Russian statehood, when the state was
governed by children or women under the control of a Masonic aristocratic
élite whose own support came, not from the people but from the army. Thus
“in the course of thirty-seven years, Russia had, sardonic commentators
remark, six autocrats: three women, a boy of twelve, an infant, and a mental
weakling.” 1135
Before his death Peter had instituted a new method of determining the
succession to the throne. Abolishing primogeniture, which he called “a bad
custom”, he decreed “that it should always be in the will of the ruling
sovereign to give the inheritance to whomever he wishes”.1136 However, it
was only through a struggle for power among the nobles, Peter’s favourites,
that his successor was determined.
This turned out to be his wife Catherine I, who was backed by the most
ruthless of the favourites, Menshikov. A woman on the throne, writes
Lebedev, “had never happened before in Great Russia. Moreover, she was not
of the royal family, which nobody in Russia could ever have imagined up to
that time.”1137
Catherine soon died, and was succeeded by the fourteen-year-old Peter II,
grandson of Peter the Great through his murdered son Alexei. He died on his
wedding day, and was succeeded by Anna Ioannovna, daughter of Peter’s
brother, Tsar Ivan. During her reign the government came to be dominated by
three Germans, her advisers – Biron (her lover), Osterman and Münnich, and
Franco-German culture became dominant at court and in the aristocracy.
The way Anna Ioannovna came to the throne illustrates how the Orthodox
autocracy had deteriorated… Seven members of the Privy Council, consisting
mainly of Dolgorukys and Golitsyns, met to decide the succession. Prince
Dmitri Golitsyn argued for Anna of Courland. “’She was born in our midst
from a Russian mother and a good old family,’ he said – in other words, she
was no upstart Empress Catherine and she had neither faction, nor known
views, and she was single. Golitsyn suggested that ‘to make our lives easier
and provide ourselves with more freedoms,’ Anna would be a figurehead,
forced to accept only limited powers.
1135 N. Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 242.

651
“’Although we might achieve this,’ mused one of the Dolgorukys, ‘we
might not hold on to power.’
“’We’ll hold on to it all right,’ replied Golitsyn, dictating the terms to be

offered to Anna, ending with the words: ‘Should I not fulfill any part of this
promise, I shall be deprived of the Russian throne.’ This plan has been
compared to the monarchy dominated by a landed oligarchy that developed
in England after the Glorious Revolution forty years earlier, but really it was a
brazen Dolgoruky power-grab, meagerly camouflaged by highfalutin ideals.
To pull it off, they had to get to Anna before she discovered that this was just
the scheme of six old aristocrats. So they closed the gates of Moscow and
despatched a Golitsyn and a Dolgoruky to offer her their conditions: the tsar
would no longer be able to marry, appoint an heir, declare war, levy taxes or
spend revenues – without the permission of the Council. This would have
constituted the greatest change in Russian government between 1613 and
1905.”1138
Lebedev well described the plans of the aristocratic plotters: through the
conditions they imposed on Anna, “in essence the ‘superiors’ thereby
abolished the Autocracy!”1139
“As soon as this news spread through the Lefortovo Palace, the race was
on to beat the cabal to Anna. Karl Gustav von Löwenswolde, a Baltic courtier
who had been one of Anna’s lovers, despatched a courtier to reach her first.
“That night, on 18 January [1730], Anna went to bed in the dreary town of
Mitau not knowing that she was already empress of Russia.
“She learned the astonishing news from Löwenswolde. So on the 25th,

when Princes Vasily Lukich Dolgoruky (uncle of Ivan and Ekaterina) and
Mikhail Golitsyn (brother of Dmitri) arrived to offer her the throne, she knew
what to expect. Now thirty-seven years old, a swarthy, deep-voiced scowler,
she had cheeks ‘as big as a Westphalian ham’ and a face that her mother’s fool
had compared to a bearded Muscovite: ‘Ding-dong here comes Ivan the
Terrible!’ After twenty years of humiliation, this tsar’s daughter would have
agreed to anything to get out of Courland. ‘I promise to observe the
conditions without exception.’ She wrote – and prepared to leave for Moscow,
where the Guards were now seething with outrage at the aristocratic coup…
“… Many officers believed that autocracy was the only system that could
govern Russia; and all resented the machinations of Dolgorukys and
Golitsyns. The senior officers – the Generalitet – were organized by Osterman
to sign a petition. Meanwhile Anna cultivated the Preobrazhensky Guards,
served them with vodka with her own hand and declared herself their
colonel.

652
“On 25 February in the Kremlin, when Anna majestically greeted the elite
in the company of the Golitsyns and Dolgorukys, Prince Alexei Cherkassky,
Russia’s richest man and figurehead of the Generalitet, presented the petition
asking her to rule as autocrat.
“’What right have you got, prince, to presume to make law?’ asked Vasily
Lukich Dolgoruky.
“’As much as a Dolgoruky. You’ve deceived the empress!’ insisted

Cherkassky, supported by the Guards, who offered to kill Anna’s enemies.
Instead, the empress invited the Golitsyns and Dolgorukys to dinner.
Afterwards, they returned to the hall where the Generalitet asked her to
assume absolute power – but she feigned confusion. ‘The conditions I signed
in Mitau weren’t the wish of the people?’
“’Nyet!’ roared the Guards.
“Turning on the cabal, Anna said, ‘That must mean you have deceived
me!’ She sent for the signed conditions. ‘So this isn’t necessary,’ she declared,
as she slowly tore the paper in half…”1140
So only five years after the supremely despotic Peter the Great, the Russian
autocrats had to appeal to “the wish of the people” in order to justify their
power! This illustrates the important truth that when a true symphony
between Church and State is destroyed, the State veers between the seemingly
opposite poles of despotism and democracy, unfettered absolutism and
unbridled people-power. And if the Russian autocracy recovered,
nevertheless the foundations had been shaken, and would reveal all their
rottenness in 1917…
Anna’s reign was also known as Bironovshchina, that is, the period in which
her German favourite, Biron, was the de facto ruler, subjecting the Orthodox
Church to a true persecution.
No sooner was Peter dead than thoughts about the restoration of the
patriarchate re-surfaced. “The very fact of his premature death,” writes
Zyzykin, “was seen as the punishment of God for his assumption of
ecclesiastical power. ‘There you are,’ said Archbishop Theodosius of
Novgorod in the Synod, ‘he had only to touch spiritual matters and
possessions and God took him.’ From the incautious words of Archbishop
Theodosius, Theophan [Prokopovich] made a case for his having created a
rebellion, and he was arrested on April 27 [1725], condemned on September
11, 1725 and died in 1726. Archbishop Theophylact of Tver was also
1140
Montefiore, The Romanovs, pp. 151-152.
653
imprisoned in 1736 on a charge of wanting to become Patriarch. On December
31, 1740 he again received the insignia of hierarchical rank and died on May 6,
1741. 1141 For propagandizing the idea of the patriarchate Archimandrite
Marcellus Rodyshevsky was imprisoned in 1732, was later forgiven, and died
as a Bishop in 1742.1142 Also among the opponents of Peter’s Church reform
was Bishop George Dashkov of Rostov, who was put forward in the time of
Peter I as a candidate for Patriarch… After the death of Peter, in 1726, he was
made the third hierarch in the Synod by Catherine I. On July 21, 1730, by a
decree of the Empress Anna, he, together with Theophylact, was removed
from the Synod, and on November 19 of the same year, by an order of the
Empress Anna he was imprisoned, and in February, 1731 took the schema. He
was imprisoned in the Spasokamenny monastery on an island in Kubensk
lake, and in 1734 was sent to Nerchinsk monastery – it was forbidden to
receive any declaration whatsoever from him… Thus concerning the time of
the Empress Anna a historian writes what is easy for us to imagine since
Soviet power, but was difficult for a historian living in the 19th century: ‘Even
from a distance of one and a half centuries, it is terrible to imagine that awful,
black and heavy time with its interrogations and confrontations, with their
iron chains and tortures. A man has committed no crime, but suddenly he is
seized, shackled and taken to St. Petersburg or Moscow - he knows not where,
or what for. A year or two before he had spoken with some suspicious person.
What they were talking about – that was the reason for all those alarms,
horrors and tortures. Without the least exaggeration we can say about that
time that on lying down to sleep at night you could not vouch for yourself
that by the morning that you would not be in chains, and that from the
morning to the night you would not land up in a fortress, although you
would not be conscious of any guilt. The guilt of all these clergy consisted
only in their desire to restore the canonical form of administration of the
Russian Church and their non-approval of Peter’s Church reform, which did
not correspond to the views of the people brought up in Orthodoxy.’
“But even under Anna the thought of the patriarchate did not go away,
and its supporters put forward Archimandrite Barlaam, the empress’ spiritual
father, for the position of Patriarch. We shall not name the many others who
suffered from the lower ranks; we shall only say that the main persecutions
dated to the time of the Empress Anna, when the impulse given by Peter to
Church reform produced its natural result, the direct persecution of
Orthodoxy. But after the death of Theophan in 1736 Bishop Ambrose
Yushkevich of Vologda, a defender of the patriarchate and of the views of
Marcellus Rodyshevsky, became the first member of the Synod. With the
enthronement of Elizabeth he greeted Russia on her deliverance from her
internal hidden enemies who were destroying Orthodoxy…”1143
1141 See his short biography at http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/bio_f/feofilakt_lopatin.php
(V.M.)
1142 He tried to explain that “the patriarchate is not only the oldest but also the only lawful
form of government (understanding by the patriarchate the leadership of the Church by one
of her bishops)” (Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, p. 263). (V.M.)
1143
Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, p. 261.
654
"In Biron's time,” writes Bessmertny, “hundreds of clergy were tonsured,
whipped and exiled, and they did the same with protesting bishops - and
there were quite a few of those. 6557 priests were forced into military service,
as a consequence of which in only four northern dioceses 182 churches
remained without clergy or readers." 1144
“This is what happened in Russia,” writes Zyzykin, “when the State

secularisation which had begun under Alexis Mikhailovich led to the
dominion of the State over the Church, while the authority in the State itself
was in the hands of genuine Protestants, who did not occupy secondary posts,
as under Peter, but were in leading posts, as under the Empress Anna. The
ideology of royal power laid down under Peter remained throughout the
period of the Emperors; the position of the Church in the State changed in
various reigns, but always under the influence of those ideas which the
secular power itself accepted; it was not defined by the always unchanging
teaching of the Orthodox Church”1145 – the symphony of powers.
In Biron’s time, wrote Bishop Ambrose of Vologda, “they attacked our

Orthodox piety and faith, but in such a way and under such a pretext that
they seemed to be rooting out some unneeded and harmful superstition in
Christianity. O how many clergymen and an even greater number of learned
monks were defrocked, tortured and exterminated under that pretense! Why?
No answer is heard except: he is a superstitious person, a bigot, a hypocrite, a
person unfit for anything. These things were done cunningly and
purposefully, so as to extirpate the Orthodox priesthood and replace it with a
newly conceived priestlessness [bezpopovshchina]…
“Our domestic enemies devised a stratagem to undermine the Orthodox

faith; they consigned to oblivion religious books already prepared for
publication; and they forbade others to be written under penalty of death.
They seized not only the teachers, but also their lessons and books, fettered
them, and locked them in prison. Things reached such a point that in this
Orthodox state to open one’s mouth about religion was dangerous: one could
depend on immediate trouble and persecution.”1146
Biron’s was a time, recalled Metropolitan Demetrius (Sechenov) of

Novgorod, “when our enemies so raised their heads that they dared to defile
the dogma of the holy faith, the Christian dogmas, on which eternal salvation
depends. They did not call on the aid of the intercessor of our salvation, nor
beseech her defense; they did not venerate the saints of God; they did not bow
to the holy icons; they mocked the sign of the holy cross; they rejected the
traditions of the apostles and holy fathers; they cast out good works, which
attract eternal reward; they ate eat during the holy fasts, and did not want
1144 Bessmertny, op. cit., p. 136.

1146 Bishop Ambrose, in Florovsky, op. cit., pp. 128-129.
655
even to hear about mortifying the flesh; they laughed at the commemoration
of the reposed; they did not believe in the existence of gehenna.”1147
Hardly coincidentally, the humiliation of the Russians was accompanied

by the first real resurgence of Jewish influence since the heresy of the
Judaizers in the fifteenth century.
Thus Solzhenitsyn writes, citing Jewish sources: “In 1728, under Peter II,
‘the admission of Jews into Little Russia was permitted, as being people who
were useful for trade in the region’, first as a ‘temporary visit’, but ‘of course,
the temporary visit was turned into a constant presence’. Reasons were found.
Under Anna this right was extended in 1731 to the Smolensk province, and in
1734 – to Slobodskaya Ukraine (to the north-east of Poltava). At the same time
the Jews were allowed to rent property from landowners, and to take part in
the wine trade. And in 1736 the Jews were permitted to transport vodka also
to the state taverns of Great Russia.
“Mention should be made of the figure of the financier Levi Lipmann from
the Baltic area. When the future Empress Anna Ioannovna was still living in
Courland, she had great need of money, ‘and it is possible that already at that
time Lipman had occasion to be useful to her’. Already under Peter he had
moved to Petersburg. Under Peter II he ‘became a financial agent or jeweller
at the Russian court.’ During the reign of Anna Ioannovna he received ‘major
connections at the court’ and the rank of Ober-Gofkommissar. ‘Having direct
relations with the empress, Lipmann was in particularly close touch with her
favourite, Biron… Contemporaries asserted that… Biron turned to him for
advice on questions of Russian state life. One of the consuls at the Prussian
court wrote… that “it is Lipmann who is ruling Russia”.’ Later, these
estimates of contemporaries were subjected to a certain re-evaluation
downwards. However, Biron ‘transferred to him [Lipmann] almost the whole
administration of the finances and various trade monopolies’. (‘Lipmann
continued to carry out his functions at the court even when Anna
Leopoldovna… exiled Biron’.)”1148
1147 Metropolitan Demetrius, in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 155.

1148 Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti Let Vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), Moscow, 2001, pp. 26-27.
656
79. TSARITSA ELIZABETH
By the mercy of God, the Empress Anna died, and although Biron was
appointed regent the next day, the Germans fell out amongst themselves. So
in 1741, after the brief reign of Ivan VI, Elizabeth, a daughter of Peter the
Great, came to the throne. Known as “the Russian Venus” because of her
great beauty, she was sensual, extravagant and vain, a true daughter of her
father. Nevertheless, she restored Russianness and Orthodoxy to the State.
An important aspect of Elizabeth’s reign was the encouragement of

Russian national feeling; Russian identity began to be seen more in ethnic
than in religious or dynastic terms – a tendency, which, paradoxically, we
must see as reflecting Western influence in spite of the anti-Western
sentiments common in Elizabeth’s reign. Serhii Plokhy writes: “Anna’s rule
produced a widespread sense of resentment and anti-Western feeling among
the imperial elites. With Anna’s death and the accession to the Russian throne
of Peter’s daughter Elizabeth in 1741, the anti-Western attitude became a sea
change. Elizabeth was regarded and fashioned herself as a quintessentially
Russian princess, and it was ‘the faithful sons of Russia’, the guards officers,
who brought her to power as a true Russian princess. A clear indication of the
change was the simple fact that while Elizabeth, like Anna, remained
officially unmarried, her favourite and morganatic husband was not a
‘German’ but a ‘Russian’. The son of a Ukrainian Cossack and, in the
appellation of the time, a Little Russian, Oleksii Rozum made his way to St.
Petersburg as a talented singer and became Elizabeth’s favourite courtier
before her ascension to the throne. Once she took the throne, the former
Cossack became a count, and later field marshal under the name Alexei
Razumovsky.1149 Having little interest in affairs of state, Razumovsky, unlike
Biron, kept a low profile: court regulars referred to him as the ‘night emperor’.
“The rule of Elizabeth also witnessed a backlash against foreigners in the

Russian service. What had begun as a trickle under Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich
became a flood during the reign of his son, Peter I, and continued under his
successors. Resentment and distrust of foreigners in government were
accompanied by an unprecedented growth of Russian national assertiveness.
It was during Elizabeth’s rule that key discussions took place about the
empire’s history and literary language – two major elements of all nation-
building projects in early modern Europe. Peter’s all-Russian empire was
about to acquire an all-Russian nation, all-Russian history and all-Russian
language – all during the age of Elizabeth.
“’Origines gentis et nominis Russorum’, or ‘The Origins of the Russian

People and Name’, was the title of a talk given by Gerhard Friedrich Müller at
1149 Alexei’s nephew, Andrei Kirillovich Razumovsky (1752-1836), was the Russian
Ambassador to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. He commissioned the famous “Razumovsky”
quartets (opus 59, nos. 1, 2 and 3) of Ludwig van Beethoven, and Beethoven dedicated his
fifth and sixth symphonies to him. (V.M.)
657
a meeting of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences on August 23, 1749.
Müller was an ethnic German who came to St. Petersburg in 1725, the year in
which Tsar Peter I had founded the Imperial Academy of Sciences as a
research and teaching institution. The presentation did not go well. Müller’s
research pointed to the Scandinavian origins of the Rus’ name and dynasty.
These conclusions would have been welcomed by many Muscovite rulers of
previous centuries, including Ivan the Terrible, who traced his origins
through the Rurikids to Emperor Augustus and considered himself a German.
But in 1747, Müller’s arguments were found not only unpatriotic but also
damaging to Russia’s prestige. The academy cancelled his scheduled longer
presentation and appointed a commission to look into his research. Müller’s
address set off the first academic debate in Russian historiography, and the
outcome influenced its development for decades, if not centuries to come.
“Patriotic fever was running high in St. Petersburg in the wake of another
Russian war with Sweden (1741-1743). But the academy’s negative reaction to
Müller’s conclusion was more than a reflection of a short-lived patriotic
upswing. Imperial officials had been greatly concerned about patriotism in
the academy since the beginning of Elizabeth’s rule. In the early 1740s, the
academy was hit by defections – scholars, most of them Germans, were
leaving the Russian service and going to Europe to publish research
conducted in the Russian Empire. This was a blow to Russia’s prestige, to say
nothing of its academic potential. In 1744, the authorities posted guards in the
academy’s buildings, restricting access to its library, archives, and research
materials. Foreigners were no longer to be trusted.
“Two years later, the imperial court intervened in the affairs of the
academy by appointing a new president. He was Kirill Razumovsky (Kyrylo
Rozumovsky), the younger brother of the empress’s favourite, Aleksei
Razumovsky. A recent graduate of the University of Göttingen, he was only
eighteen at the time of the appointment. His age seemed less important than
his closeness to Elizabeth and the fact that he was the first ‘Russian’ president
of the academy, which had been chaired, controlled, and run largely by
foreigners – four previous presidents had come from abroad.
“It fell to Razumovsky and his close adviser Grigorii Teplov, a former
disciple of Prokopovych and an adjunct at the academy, to deal with the
‘historiography crisis’. They appointed a commission to investigate and
debate Müller’s findings. The debates in the academic commission took up
twenty-meetings between the fall of 1749 and the spring of 1750. Müller’s
main opponent in the historiographic debates was an ethnic Russia, Mikhail
Lomonosov. The son of a fisherman from Russia’s north, Lomonosov was
known largely for his accomplishments as a chemist. But then new age of
national mobilization called for universality, and he branched out of the
sciences into history and linguistics, becoming an amateurish but also forceful
and influential supporter of the nativist approach to both. Lomonosov argued
that Müller’s work glorified ‘the Scandinavians or Swedes’, while ‘doing
almost nothing to illuminate our history’. Kirill Razumovsky took
658
Lomonosov’s side in the historiographic debate on the origins of Rus’. The
print run of Müller’s dissertation on that subject was destroyed.
“For Lomonosov the main inspiration in his debates with Müller was the
outdated and often inaccurate Kyivan Synopsis of 1674. But it was the ideas of
the book rather than the facts that mattered most. This book on the origins of
the Rus’ nation had finally found not only publishers but also readers in
Russia who appreciated its focus on the origins of the nation, as opposed to
the state and dynasty. Lomonosov wanted the academy to adopt the Synopsis
as its standard history textbook. In accepting its historical explanation of the
origins of the Rus’ people, Lomonosov embraced a historical myth that
stressed the unity of the Great and Little Russian heirs to the medieval Kyiv
state, separating them from the European West…”1150
Not only Russianness but also the Orthodox Church was restored under
Elizabeth. “Chistovich writes: ‘The Synod remembered its sufferers under
Elizabeth; a true resurrection from the dead took place. Hundreds, thousands
of people who had disappeared without trace and had been taken for dead
came to life again. After the death of the Empress Anna the released sufferers
dragged themselves back to their homeland, or the places of their former
service, from all the distant corners of Siberia – some with torn out nostrils,
others with their tongue cut out, others with legs worn through by chains,
others with broken spines or arms disfigured from tortures.’ The Church
preachers under Elizabeth attributed this to the hatred for the Russian faith
and the Russian people of Biron, Osterman, Minikh, Levenvold and other
Lutheran Germans who tried to destroy the very root of eastern piety. They
were of this opinion because most of all there suffered the clergy – hierarchs,
priests and monks…”1151
Elizabeth also restored some of her former privileges to the Church. Thus
in 1742, writes Vladimir Rusak, “the initial judgement on clergy was
presented to the Synod, even with regard to political matters. The Synod was
re-established in its former dignity, as the highest ecclesiastical institution
with the title ‘Ruling’.
“The members of the Synod (Archbishop Ambrose Yushkevich of

Novgorod, Metropolitan Arsenius Matseyevich of Rostov, both Ukrainians)
gave a report to the empress in which they wrote that if it was not pleasing to
her to restore the patriarchate, then let her at least give the Synod a president
and body composed only of hierarchs. In addition, they petitioned for the
removal of the post of over-procurator. The empress did not go to the lengths
of such serious reforms, but she did agree to return to the clergy its property
and submit the College of Economics to the Synod.”1152
1150 Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 46-48.

1152 Rusak, Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi, 1993, p. 273.
659
However, writes Fr. Alexei Nikolin, “there was a significant rise in the
significance of the over-procurator, whose post was re-established (during the
reign of Anna Ivanovna it had been suspended). Prince Ya.P. Shakhovskoj,
who was appointed to the post, was given the right to give daily personal
reports to the empress, who entrusted him personally with receiving from her
all the ukazes and oral directives for the Synodal administration. Thereby,
however, there arose a very ambiguous state of affairs. On the one hand, the
Synod’s affairs were being reported directly to the supreme power, but on the
other the idea of the State’s interest, and its priority over the ecclesiastical
interest, was being constantly emphasized. The strengthening of the over-
procurator’s power was aided by an ukaz of the empress introducing a new
system of Church administration in the dioceses – the consistories. In these
institutions a leading role was acquired by the secretaries, who were
appointed by the over-procurator, controlled by him and accountable to him.
However, the noticeable tendency evident in these years towards a
strengthening of the over-procurator’s executive power in the Church was
restrained by the personal goodwill of the empress towards the clergy.”1153
Elizabeth “ordered crackdowns on Old Believers. There had been

ineffective decrees to expel the Jews in 1727 and 1740. [She] ordered these
decrees to be applied.”1154
In December, 1742, the tsaritsa forbade residence to Jews throughout the

Empire, since “from such haters of the name of Christ the Saviour great harm
for our subjects must be expected”. 140 Jews were expelled from Ukraine. But
then the wax trade reported to the Senate that “banning the Jews from
bringing in merchandise will bring with it a diminution of state income”. The
Senate itself added its voice to this complaint, telling the empress that her
decree had caused great harm to trade in Ukraine and the Baltic, with a
corresponding loss in customs receipts. But the empress replied: “I do not
want any profit from the enemies of Christ”… However, it seems likely that
the empress’ decree, like similar earlier decrees, remained a dead letter…1155
“On Elizabeth’s accession to the throne,” writes Ivanov, “a popular

movement appeared, directed against foreigners, which established itself in
the two following reigns. The lower classes were waiting for the expulsion of
the foreigners from Russia. But nothing, except some street brawls with
foreigners, took place.
“A reaction began against the domination of the foreigners who despised

everything Russian, together with a weak turn towards a national regime…
“During the 20 years of Elizabeth’s reign Russia relaxed after her former
oppression, and the Russian Church came to know peaceful days…
1153 Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo (Church and State), Moscow, 1997, p. 96.
1154 Montefiore, The Romanovs, p. 183, note.
1155 Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., pp. 28, 29.
660
“The persecution of the Orthodox Church begun under Peter I and
continued under Anna Ivanovna began to weaken somewhat, and the clergy
raised their voices…
“Under Elizabeth there began the elevation to the hierarchical rank of

Great Russian monks, while earlier the hierarchs had been mainly appointed
from the Little Russians…
“Under Elizabeth the Protestants who remained at court did not begin to
speak against Orthodoxy, whereas in the reign of Anna Ivanovna they had
openly persecuted it. Nevertheless, Protestantism as a weapon of the Masons
in their struggle with Orthodoxy had acquired a sufficiently strong position in
the previous reigns. The soil had been prepared, the minds of society were
inclined to accept the Freemasons.
“’In the reign of Elizabeth German influence began to be replaced by

French,’ an investigator of this question tells us. ‘At this time the West
European intelligentsia was beginning to be interested in so-called French
philosophy; even governments were beginning to be ruled by its ideas… In
Russia, as in Western Europe, a fashion for this philosophy appeared. In the
reign of Elizabeth Petrovna a whole generation of its venerators was already
being reared. They included such highly placed people as Count M.
Vorontsov and Shuvalov, Princess Dashkova and the wife of the heir to the
throne, Catherine Alexeyevna. But neither Elizabeth nor Peter III sympathized
with it.
“Individual Masons from Peter’s time were organizing themselves.

Masonry was developing strongly…”1156
Nevertheless, “in society people began to be suspicious of Masonry.

Masons in society acquired the reputation of being heretics and apostates…
Most of Elizabethan society considered Masonry to be an atheistic and
criminal matter…
“The Orthodox clergy had also been hostile to Masonry for a long time
already. Preachers at the court began to reprove ‘animal-like and godless
atheists’ and people ‘of Epicurean and Freemasonic morals and mentality’ in
their sermons. The sermons of Gideon Antonsky, Cyril Florinsky, Arsenius
Matseyevich, Cyril Lyashevetsky, Gideon Krinovsky and others reflected the
struggle that was taking place between the defenders of Orthodoxy and their
enemies, the Masons.”1157
It was in Elizabeth’s reign that the Secret Chancellery made an inquiry into
the nature and membership of the Masonic lodges. The inquiry found that
1156 Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 160, 161, 162-163.

1157
Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 165, 166.
661
Masonry was defined by its members as “nothing else than the key of
friendship and eternal brotherhood”. It was found not to be dangerous and
was allowed to continue, “although under police protection”.1158
Masonry was particularly strong in the university and among the cadets.
“The cadet corps was the laboratory of the future revolution. From the cadet
corps there came the representatives of Russian progressive literature, which
was penetrated with Masonic ideals….
“Towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna Masonry openly

revealed its real nature. At this time a bitter struggle was developing in the
West between Austria and Prussia for the Austrian succession. In 1756 there
began the Seven-Year war, in which Russia took an active part.
“The Mason Frederick II was again striving to subject Russia to his

influence.
“This aim was to be attained completely by means of the defeat of the

Russian army and her capitulation before the ‘genius’ commander.
“And one has to say that everything promised victory for Frederick II over
the Russian army.
“He had a very well trained, armed and provisioned army with talented
officers.
“Frederick was undoubtedly helped by the Masons – Germans who had

taken high administrative and military posts in Russia.
“The noted James Cate, the great provincial master for the whole of Russia,
was a field-marshal of the Russian army, but in fact carried out the role of
Frederick’s spy; in 1747 he fled [Russia] to serve him and was killed in battle
for his adored and lofty brother.
“In general the Russian army was teeming with Prussian spies and Russian
Mason-traitors.
“The Russian army was deliberately not prepared…
“And at the head of the Russian army the Masons placed Apraxin, who
gave no orders, displayed an unforgivable slowness and finally entered upon
the path of open betrayal.
“The victory at Gross-Egersford was won exclusively thanks to the courage

and bravery of the Russian soldiers, and was not used as it should have been
by the Russian commander-in-chief. Apraxin had every opportunity to cross
1158
Rhoda, “Russian Freemasonry: A New Dawn”, op. cit.
662
conquered Prussia, extend a hand to the Swedes in Pomerania and appear
before the walls of Berlin. But instead of moving forward he stopped at Tilsit
and refused to use the position that was favourable for the Russian army…
Apraxin was only fulfilling his duty of a Mason, which obliged him to deliver
his lofty brother, Frederick II, from his woes…
“But this was not the only help extended to Prussia by the Russian Masons.
In 1758, instead of Apraxin, who was placed on trial, Fermor was appointed
as commander-in-chief. He was an active Mason and a supporter of Frederick
II. Fermor acted just like Apraxin. He displayed stunning inactivity and
slowness. At the battle of Tsorndof the commander-in-chief Fermor hid from
the field of battle. Deserted and betrayed by their commander-in-chief the
Russian army did not panic…
“With the greatest equanimity the soldiers did not think of fleeing or
surrendering…
“Frederick II had everything on his side: complete gun crews, discipline,

superior weapons, the treachery of the Russian commander-in-chief. But he
did not have enough faith and honour, which constituted the strength and
glory of the Christ-loving Russian Army.
“The help of the dark powers was again required: and the Russian Masons
for the third time gave help to Frederick II.
“At first it was suggested that Fermor be replaced by Buturlin, whom

Esterhazy quite justly called ‘an idiot’, but when this did not happen, they
appointed Peter Saltykov to the post of commander-in-chief. The soldiers
called him ‘moor-hen’ and openly accused him of treachery. At Könersdorf
the Russian commanders displayed complete incompetence. The left wing of
the Russian army under the command of Golitsyn was crushed. At two
o’clock Frederick was the master of Mulberg, one of the three heights where
Saltykov had dug in. By three o’clock the victory was Frederick’s. And once
again the situation was saved by the Russian soldiers. The king led his army
onto the attack three times, and three times he retreated, ravaged by the
Russian batteries. ‘Scoundrels’, ‘swine’, ‘rascals’ was what Frederick called his
soldiers, unable to conquer the Russian soldiers who died kissing their
weapons.
“’One can overcome all of them (the Russian soldiers) to the last man, but
not conquer them,’ Frederick II had to admit after his defeat.
“The victory remained with the Russian soldiers, strong in the Orthodox
faith and devotion to the autocracy….”1159
1159
Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 169, 170, 171-172.
663
Frederick was saved because Elizabeth died unexpectedly in 1761 – this
was the so-called “Great Miracle of the House of Brandenburg”. She was
succeeded by Peter III, a grandson of Peter the Great who nevertheless
preferred the Germany he had been brought up in to Russia. So he stopped
the war against Prussia, and planned to join Prussia in attacking Denmark.
This alienated many senior officers, and prepared the way for the coup
against him by another German – Catherine the Great. But the days when
Germans could walk over Russianness and Orthodoxy were over. Whatever
judgement one makes of the personal piety of Catherine, she stood up for
both…
664
80. THE ORTHODOX UNDER THE AUSTRIAN YOKE
It was hard to know which were the worse masters for the Orthodox of
Eastern Europe – the Turks or the Austrians. The Turks kept their Christian
subjects in poverty and ignorance, and there was a steady stream of New
Martyrs of the Turkish yoke, especially in Greece. As for the Austrians,
though more “enlightened” than the Turks, they were a still greater threat to
the faith of the Orthodox.
This was a period of great danger to the Orthodox from the Roman
Catholics. Thus the Corfiot Eugene Voulgaris preached as far as the court of
the Catherine II on the dangers of Austro-Hungarian Catholicism to the
Orthodox of the Balkans. In Greece, too, there were strong pro-Catholic
tendencies even in the Church hierarchy1160, and inter-communion on some of
the islands. Still further east, as Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia writes, “in
1724 a large part of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch submitted to Rome;
after this the Orthodox authorities, fearing that the same thing might happen
elsewhere in the Turkish Empire, were far stricter in their dealings with
Roman Catholics. The climax in anti-Roman feeling came in 1755, when the
Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem declared Latin
baptism to be entirely invalid and demanded that all converts to Orthodoxy
be baptized anew. ‘The baptisms of heretics are to be rejected and abhorred,’
the decree stated; they are ‘waters which cannot profit… nor give any
sanctification to such as receive them, nor avail at all to the washing away of
sins’.”1161
In 1683, the Austrians stopped the Ottoman advance into Europe, and in
1697, under the command of Prince Eugene Sobieski, they defeated the
Ottomans at the Battle of Zenta. The balance of power in the region now
changed sharply: at the Treaty of Karlowitz (or Karlovtsy) in 1699 the
Habsburgs acquired Hungary and Slavonia.
However, as Simon Winder writes, “the end of Ottoman rule in Central

Europe raised immediately difficult questions about whether or not these new
conquests were a reintegration of lost lands that had in the past been
undoubtedly part of ‘the West’ or whether these were lands irredeemably
tainted by ‘Easterners’. The old Habsburg core, running from Lake Constance
in the west to the Military Frontier in the east, was some three hundred miles
across. The addition in a generation of the old Ottoman territories more than
doubled the monarchy’s width, taking it to only a hundred and fifty miles
from the Black Sea. The monarchy which had once been unmistakably Alpine,
German and Italianate was now very different. Most ‘eastern’ of all was that
the new territories were religiously pluralistic and in that sense liberal, with
1160 See, for example, the career of Archbishop Joseph Georgirenes of Samos, in Nicholas
Chapman, “A Greek Archbishop in 1660s London and the Americas”,

https://www.ludwell.org/greek-archbishop-1600s-london-america.
1161 Metropolitan Kallistos (Timothy Ware), The Orthodox Church, London: Penguin, 1964, p.
98.
665
Lutheran Saxons, Jewish Jews, Calvinist Hungarians and Orthodox Serbs and
Romanians. This picture would have been even more complicated if so many
Muslims had not fled the advance of the ‘Holy League’, seeking safety in
Bosnia and Thrace.
“The triumph of the West therefore perversely released a huge wave of

Catholic intolerance on these religiously patchwork territories. This renewed
religious intolerance had begun even before the Siege of Vienna with
increasing discrimination against Protestants in Royal Hungary.” 1162 The
persecution extended also to Orthodox Serbs and Romanians in the newly
conquered territories…
The danger was particularly acute in Transylvania, which came under

Hungarian dominion, and where many Romanians lived… As Barbara
Jelavich writes, “the Romanian Orthodox majority of the population was
effectively blocked from political influence. The control of the province lay in
the hands of the Hungarians; of the Szeklers, who were related to the
Hungarians and spoke the same language; and of the Germans, called Saxons,
descendants of twelfth-century immigrants. The Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist,
and Unitarian churches were recognized, but not the Orthodox.”1163
However, “in order to curb the Protestant influence in Transylvania,”

writes Dan Ioan Mureșan, “Emperor Leopold issued a series of privileges in
1697 inviting the Romanians to union with the Church of Rome. The social
and political emancipation implied by this document was too attractive for an
ecclesiastical elite long constrained to a low-grade status. In 1698 the
metropolitan of Transylvania, Athanasie Anghel, was consecrated in
Walachia by the metropolitan, assisted by Dorotheus of Jerusalem, and in his
signed Profession of Orthodoxy disapproved of both the liturgical
interference of Calvinism and Roman Catholic dogmas. But scarcely had he
returned to Transylvania, when the metropolitan organized two successive
local synods (1698, 1700) that recognized the pope’s primacy, on the basis of
the scrupulous retention of the Byzantine rite and the concessions of the
imperial privilege of 1697. In April 1701 in Vienna in the presence of the
emperor, Athansie accepted becoming a simple bishop under the jurisdiction
of the archbishop of Esztergom and to have the pope as his patriarch,
severing all the ancient relations with the ‘schismatic’ Eastern Church. This
suprising decision prompted his excommunication by the Orthodox
patriarchs and strong opposition in southern Transylvania around the
monasteries protected by the prince Brâncoveanu; meanwhile, the bishop of
Maramureș did the same with the help of the Church of Moldavia. The
successive Orthodox revolts of Visarion Sarai in 1744 and of Sofronie in 1761
obliged the Austrian authorities to accept the religious division of the
Transylvanian church – roughly, Greek Catholic [Uniate] to the north of the
1162Winder, Danubia, London: Picador, 2013, p. 192.

1163Jelavich, History of the Balkans: vol. 2, Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1983,
p. 6.
666
river Mures, and Greek Orthodox to the south. In 1784, Emperor Joseph II
promulgated the Edict of Tolerance and appointed a Serbian bishop of
Transylvania, subject to the Serbian metropolitan of Karlowitz….”1164
During the reign of Empress Maria Theresa (1741-1780), the Romanian

Orthodox of Transylvania and the Banat suffered great persecution from the
Hungarian Catholics. Among those martyred for the faith then were SS.
Bessarion, Sophronius and Oprea, and the Priests Moses and John.1165
Thus St. Bessarion (Sarai) was a Serb who was born in Bosnia in 1714.
Longing for the monastic life, he was tonsured at the Monastery of Saint Sava
in the Holy Land in 1738. He returned to Serbia and lived in a cave for several
years as a hesychast, and received from God the grace of working miracles.
About this time there was a great deal of unrest in the regions of the Banat
and Transylvania because many Romanian Orthodox Christians had been
forced into union with Rome. At Karlovits, Patriarch Arsenius had heard of
St. Bessarion’s holy and ascetical life, and asked to see him. After ordaining
him to the holy priesthood, he sent him to defend the Orthodox Faith
northwest of the Carpathian Mountains.
St. Bessarion left for the Banat in January of 1774, and was warmly received
by the local people. Hundreds of people came to hear him preach, and many
of them returned to the Orthodox Church. He encouraged his listeners not to
abandon the faith which their fathers had passed down to them, but to remain
firm and steadfast in it.
Preaching at Timishoara, Lipova-Arad, Deva, Orashtie, Salishtea of Sibiu,

and other places, he would set up a wooden cross in the middle of each
village, and people would gather to hear him. In each place, he was able to
bring most of the people back into the fold of the Orthodox Church. This, of
course, did not please the Roman Catholic authorities.
On April 26, 1744, St. Bessarion was arrested by the Austrian army while
on his way to Sibiu. They took him to Vienna, where he was placed on trial,
and then thrown into the Kufstein prison on the orders of Empress Maria
Teresa. There he endured much suffering because of his confession of the
Orthodox Faith. After about a year in chains and tortures, he surrendered his
soul to God.
Though no friend of the ideal of Romanian freedom, Nicholas

Mavrocardato and his successors did some good things for the Romanians.
1164 Mureșan, “The Romanian Tradition in the Orthodox Church”, n Augustine Casiday, The
Orthodox Christian World, London: Routledge, pp. 147-148.

1165 Hieromonk Makarios, The Synaxarion, Ormylia (Chalkidike), 1998, October 21, pp. 450-
454.
667
“Due to [the three Phanariot families’] connivance with the patriarchate, they
initiated restored relations between the Great Church and the Romanian
metropolitanates. Enlightened princes, they took measures to improve the
situation of the Church and decided to put an end to the servitude of the
peasantry in both Moldavia and Walachia. It was under the Phanariote
regime that Damashin of Râmnic accomplished the introduction of Romanian
as a liturgical language, diffusing far and wide all the necessary liturgical
books by means of the press. Metropolitan George IV introduced Romanian
liturgical books in the Church of Moldavia and this movement was
accelerated by even the Greek metropolitan Nikephorus after 1743. Romanian
and Greek cultures were in this way collaborating to replace the old Slavonic
tradition. These books were also larged used in the Greek Catholic Church in
Transylvania, unifying the Romanian language.” 1166
“Phanariot rule in the Principalities compared well with that of most

Pashas in other parts of the Empire and with the rule of the last native
princes. The corruption was not excessive by eighteenth-century standards.
Justice was fairly honestly administered, without excessive delays. But the
Princes were hampered by their uncertainty of tenure. For example,
Constantine Mavrocordato, the Exaporite’s grandson, was a conscientious
and enlightened ruler who issued a reformed constitution for each
Principality, making the incidence of taxation fairer and its collection less
wasteful; and he improved the lot of the serfs, whom he planned entirely to
liberate. But, though between 1730 and 1769 he reigned for six periods in
Wallachia and four in Moldavia, the longest of these periods lasted for only
six months. Such frequent coming and going made good government and a
consistent policy almost impossible. In particular, the uncertainty encouraged
the Princes to extract all the money that they could from their subjects. The
Principalities were naturally rich and the princely income large; but Moldavia
had to pay a yearly tribute of some 7,000 gold pounds to the Sultan, and
Wallachia a yearly tribute of some 14,000 pounds. By 1750 the Moldavian
throne cost the successful candidate roughly 30,000 god pounds, and the
Wallachian roughly 45,000. Transference from one throne to the other cost
about 20,000 gold pounds. In a good year Moldavia might produce up to
180,000 gold pounds in taxes and Wallachia up to 300,000. But the Prince had
not only to reciver his outlay and pay the annual tribute. He had to maintain
his court and administration; he had constantly to bribe Turkish officials, and
he was expected to give generous financial support to the Patriarchate. In
consequence he taxed his people to the utmost. If he remitted one tax, he
invented another. The Roumanians began to sigh nostalgically for the less
efficient but less exacting rule of their native princes…
“In view of the financial burden why did anyone ever wish to be Prince?
Partly the desire came from a love of pomp and of titles and a taste for power,
even though power was limited. A British visitor in 1817 remarked on ‘the
extraordinary phenomenon of a pure despotism exercised by a Greek Prince
1166 Mureșan, op. cit., p. 148.
668
who is himself at the same time an abject slave’. But chiefly it was in pursuit of
the Imperial idea, the rebirth of Byzantium. Under Phanariot princes a neo-
Byzantine culture could find a home in the Principalities. A Greek-born
nobility could root itself in lands there; Greek academies could educate
citizens for the new Byzantium. There, far better than in the shadowy palaces
round the Phanar, with Turkish police at the door, Byzantine ambition could
be kept alive. In Roumania, in Rum beyond the Danube, the revival of New
Rome could be planned.
“But the plans needed the co-operation of the Church. The Patriarch had
become the pensioner of the Phanariots, but he was still the head of the
Orthodox community. The Patriarchate gained much from the connection. If
from1695 to 1795 there were only thirty-one Patriarchal reigns, in contrast
with the sixty-one between the years 1595 and 1695, this was due to Phanariot
influence at the Sublime Porte. Though the sum to be paid to the Sultan for
the confirmation of a Patriarchal election was still high, the Phanariots saw to
it that it was not now increased and they paid the greater part of it. They used
their power and their wealth to ease the burden on the Great Church. But the
Great Church had to repay them for their help. The refomrs of 1741 and 1755,
by reducing the power of the synod and therefore of the lay officials that
dominated it, freed the Church to some extent from their influence over
appointments. But they imposed their ideas upon it; they forced it to become
an instrument of their policy.
“Many of the Phanariots’ ideas were excellent. They had a high regard for
education. There had been several scholars and distinguished authors
amongst them; and many of the princes, especially those of the Mavrocordato
family, were men of wide culture, able to converse on equal terms with the
most sophisticated visitors from the West. Under their influence the
Patriarchal Academy of Constantinople had been revitalized. The academies
founded at Bucharest and Jassy by the Hellenized princes of the seventeenth
century were encouraged and enlarged. Greek scholars flocked to them,
preferring to teach there rather than in the restricted atmosphere of
Constantinople…. The Phanariot example was copied by wealthy patrons
throughout Greek lands, who founded academies at Smyrna, in Chios, at
Janina, at Zagora on Pelion and at Dimitsana in the Peloponnese, and
elsewhere. These schools were devoted to the necessary task of improving
Greek lay education; and their founders and patrons were most of them men
who had themselves been educated in the West. Their model was more the
University of Padua than anything in the old Byzantine tradition. The Greek
Fathers of the Church might still be studied; but the emphasis was, rather, on
Classical philology and ancient and modern philosophy and science. The
professors were loyal members of the Orthodox Church, conscientiously
opposed to Latins and Protestants alike; but they were themselves affected by
the occidental fashions of the time, the tendency towards rationalism and the
dread of anything that might be labelled as superstition. They wanted to
show that they and their pupils were as enlightened as anyone in the West.
669
“It was good for the Church to have to meet an intellectual challenge; but
the challenge was too abrupt. The strength of the Byzantine Church had been
the presence of a highly educated laity that was deeply interested in religion.
Now the laity began to despise the traditions of the Church; and the
traditional elements in the Church began to mistrust and dislike modern
education, retreating to defend themselves into a thickening obscurantism.
The cleavage between the intellectuals and the traditionalists, which had
begun when Neo-Aristotelianism was introduced into the curriculum of the
Patriarchal Academy, grew wider. Under Phanariot influence many of the
higher ecclesiastics followed the modernist trend. In the old days Orthodoxy
had preferred to concentrate on eternal things and modestly to refuse to
clothe faith in the trappings of modish philosophy. The Phanariots in their
desire to impress the West had no use for such old-fashioned notions. Instead,
seeing the high prestige of ancient Greek learning, they wished to show that
they were by culture as well as by blood, the heirs of ancient Greece. Their
sons, lively laymen educated in the new style, were now filling the
administrative posts at the Patriarchal court. As a result the Patriarchate
began to lose touch with the great body of the faithful, to whom faith meant
more than philosophy and the Christian saints more than the sophists of
pagan times.
“Above all, the Phanariots needed the support of the Church in the pursuit
of their ultimate political aim. It was no mean aim. The Megali Idea, the great
idea of the Greeks, can be traced back to days before the Turkish conquest. It
was the idea of the Imperial destiny of the Greek people. Michael VIII
Palaeologus expressed it in the speech that he made when he heard that his
troops had captured Constantinople from the Latins; though he called the
Greeks the Romaioi. In later Palaeologan times the word Hellene reappeared,
but with the conscious intention of connecting Byzantine imperialism with the
culture and traditions of ancient Greece. With the spread of the Renaissance a
respect for the old Greek civilization had become general. It was natural that
the Greeks, in the midst of their political disasters, should wish to benefit
from it. They might be slaves now to the Turks, but they were of the great
race that had civilized Europe. It must be their destiny to rise again. The
Phanariots tried to combine the nationalistic force of Hellenism in a
passionate if illogical alliance with the oecumenical traditions of Byzantium, a
New Rome that should be Greek, a new centre of Greek civilization that
should embrace the Orthodox world. The spirit behind the Great Idea was a
mixture of neo-Byzantinism and an acute sense of race. But, with the trend of
the modern world the nationalism began to dominate the oecumenicity.
George Scholarius Gennadius had, perhaps unconsciously, foreseen the
danger when he answered a question about his nationality by saying that he
would not call himself a Hellen though he was Hellene by race, nor a
Byzantine though he had been born in Byzantium, but, rather, a Christian,
that is, an Orthodox. For, if the Orthodox Church was to retain its spiritual
force, it must remain oecumenical. It must not become a purely Greek
Church.
670
“The price paid by the Orthodox Church for its subjection to its Phanariot
benefactors was heavy. First, it meant that the Church was run more and
more in the interests of the Greek people and not of Orthodoxy as a whole.
The arrangement made between the Conquering Sultan and the Patriarch
Gennadius had put all the Orthodox within the Ottoman Empire under the
authority of the Patriarchate, which was inevitably controlled by Greeks. But
the earlier Patriarchs after the conquest had been aware of their oecumenical
duties. The autonomous Patriarchates of Serbia and Bulgaria had been
suppressed when the two kingdoms were annexed by the Turks; but the two
Churches had continued to enjoy a certain amount of autonomy under the
Metropolitans of Peć and of Tirnovo or Ochrid. They retained their Slavonic
liturgy and their native clergy and bishops. This did not suit the Phanariots. It
was easy to deal with the Churches of Wallachia and Moldavia because of the
infiltration of Greeks into the Principalities, where anyhow the medieval
dominance of the Serbian Church had been resented. The Phanariot Princes
had not interfered with the vernacular liturgy and had, indeed, encouraged
the Roumanian language at the expense of the Slavonic. The upper clergy was
Graecized; so they felt secure. The Bulgarians and the Serbs were more
intransigeant. They had no intention of becoming Graecized. They protested
to some effect against the appointment of Greek metropolitans. For a while
the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć was reconstituted, from 1557 to 1755. The
Phanariots demanded tighter control. In 1766 the autonomous
Metropolitanate of Peć was suppressed and in 1767 the Metropolitanate of
Ochrid. The Serbian and Bulgarian Churches were each put under an exarch
appointed by the Patriarch. This was the work of the Patriarch Samuel
Hantcherli, a member of an upstart Phanariot family, whose brother
Constantine was for a while Prince of Wallachia until his financial extortions
alarmed not only the tax-payers but also his ministers, and he was deposed
and executed by the Sultan’s orders. The exarchs did their best to impose
Greek bishops on the Balkan Churches, to the growing anger of both Serbs
and Bulgarians. The Serbs recovered their religious autonomy early in the
nineteenth century when they won political autonomy from the Turks. The
Bulgarian Church had to wait till 1870 before it could throw off the Greek
yoke. The policy defeated its own ends. It caused so much resentment that
when the time came neither the Serbs nor the Bulgarians would cooperate in
any Greek-directed move towards independence; and even the Roumanians
held back. None of them had any wish to substitute Greek for Turkish
political rule, having experienced Greek religious rule....”1167
1167Runciman, The Great Church, Cambridge University Press, 1968, pp. 377-380. Thus, as J.
Frazee writes, “the first Greek had been appointed to the patriarchate of Peć in 1737 at the
insistence of the Dragoman Alexandros Mavrokordatos on the plea that the Serbs could not
be trusted. The Phanariots began a policy which led to the exclusion of any Serbian nationals
in the episcopacy” (The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece, 1821-1853, Cambridge
University Press, 1968, p. 7, note 1). Again, Noel Malcolm writes: “By 1760, according to a
Catholic report, the Patriarch in Peć was paying 10,000 scudi per annum to the Greek
Patriarch. In 1766, pleading the burden of the payments they had to make under this system,
the bishops of many Serbian sees, including Skopje, Niš and Belgrade, together with the
Greek-born Patriarch of Peć himself, sent a petition asking the Sultan to close down the
671
“Everywhere,” writes Fr. Alexander Schmemann, “former bishops who
were native Bulgars and Serbs were deposed and replaced by Greeks. This
canonical abuse of power was accompanied by forced ‘Grecizing’, particularly
in Bulgaria, where it later served as the basis of the so-called Bulgarian
question.
“This same sad picture prevailed in the East as well, in the patriarchates of
Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, where Orthodox Arabs became the
victims of this forced unification. All these offenses, stored up and concealed
– all these unsettled accounts and intrigues – would have their effect when the
Turkish hold began to slacken and the hour for the rebirth of the Slavic
peoples drew near…”1168
Even in the eleventh century, when Emperor Basil II “the Bulgar-slayer”

destroyed the First Bulgarian empire, and demoted the Bulgarian patriarchate
to archiepiscopal status, he did not destroy the autocephaly of the Bulgarian
Church. Moreover, he appointed a Bulgarian as archbishop of Ochrid.1169 And
two centuries later, as we have seen, the Greeks were prepared to grant
autocephaly to the Serbian Church... In the eighteenth century, however, the
Greeks achieved through “peaceful” means – and through the agency of the
Turks – the complete suppression of Slavic ecclesiastical independence.
Moreover, if, earlier, in the eleventh century, they had had some excuse in
Serbian Patriarchate and place the whole Church directly under Constantinople... The
primary cause of this event was not the attitude of the Ottoman state (harsh though that was
at times) but the financial oppression of the Greek hierarchy. In the Hapsburg domains,
meanwhile, the Serbian Church based in Karlovci continued to operate, keeping up its de
facto autonomy.” (Kosovo, London: Papermac, 1998, p. 171). Again, Stanoe Stanoevich writes:
“The Patriarchate of Constantinople was aspiring to increase its power over all the Serbian
lands in the hope that in this venture the Greek hierarchy and Greek priesthood would
abundantly increase their parishes. The intrigues which were conducted for years because of
this in Constantinople produced fruit. By a firman of the Sultan dated September 13, 1766, the
Peć patriarchate was annulled, and all the Serbian lands in Turkey were subject to the
Patriarchate of Constantinople. Immediately after this the Greek hierarchy, which looked on
the Serbian people only as an object for material exploitation, began a struggle against the
Serbian priesthood and against the Serbian people” (Istoria Sprskogo Naroda (History of the
Serbian People), Belgrade, 1910, p. 249 (in Serbian)). Again, Mark Mazower writes: “A saying
common among the Greek peasants,’ according to a British traveller, was that ‘the country
labours under three curses, the priests, the cogia bashis [local Christian notables] and the
Turks, always placing the plagues in this order.’ In nineteenth-century Bosnia, ‘the Greek
Patriarch takes good care that these eparchies shall be filled by none but Fanariots, and thus it
happens that the… Orthodox Christians of Bosnia, who form the majority of the population,
are subject to ecclesiastics alien in blood, in language, in sympathies, who oppress them hand
in hand with the Turkish officials and set them, often, an even worse example of moral
depravity.’ The reason was clear: ‘They have to send enormous bribes yearly to the
fountainhead.’ This story of extortion and corruption spelled the end of the old Orthodox
ecumenicism, created bitterness between the Church and its flock, and - where the peasants
were not Greek speakers – provoked a sense of their exploitation by the ‘Greek’ Church
which paved the way for Balkan nationalism.” (The Balkans, London: Phoenix, 2000, pp. 61-62)
1168 Schmemann, The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy, London: Harvill, 1963, p. 280.
1169 Dvorkin, op. cit., p. 678.
672
that the Byzantine Empire was indeed the Empire of Christian Rome, and
recognized as such throughout the Orthodox world, in the eighteenth century
they were not even an independent nation-state, but slaves of the godless
Turks...
It was not only the Slavs who did not want to be Graecized. We have seen
that the Romanians were groaning under the tax burden imposed by the
Phanariots. And “in 1752, Moldavian metropolitan Iacov of Putna convened a
synod that formally interdicted Greeks from becoming prelates in Moldavia.
The reaction paved the way to new Russian influence. The Russian-Austrian-
Ottoman wars occasioned the continual presence of the Russian armies in the
principalities throughout the eighteenth century. When Empress Catherine II
took drastic measures against monasticism in Russia (1764), it was in
Romanian monasteries, organized on traditional Athonite rules, that highly
spiritual Russian figures found a haven. The first was Basil who settled in the
monastery of Poiana Mărului (Wallachia).”1170
The most famous of the Russian startsy in Romania was Paisii

Velichkovskii (1722-94), who, after a long discipleship on Athos, ruled the
communities of Dragomirna and Neamț… He went to extreme lengths to see
that his monks did not remain under the yoke of the Austrians. When the
Russians and Turks concluded peace after a six-year war in 1774, “the Roman
Catholic Empress (Austrian Empress Maria Theresa) began to demand of the
Turkish Sultan those parts of the Moldavian land which he had promised her
(for her help in the war). And so the Germans took the monastery of
Dragomirna under their rule. Then our Father [Paisius] shed many tears: he
wept bitterly over the devastation of the souls of the brethren and, on the
other hand, he was crushed that the monastery should remain under the rule
of the Papists, with whom the Eastern Church can never have spiritual peace.
Likewise, the brethren also greatly grieved and bitterly wept…
“’The Elder was so apprehensive about heresies and schism that… he left
his monastery with all its possessions, movable and immovable, and went to
Moldavia, saying to his brethren: “Fathers and brothers, whoever wishes to
obey and follow his Elder, the sinful Paisius, let him come with me; but I give
no one a blessing to stay in Dragomirna. For it is impossible to escape heresies
while living in the court of the heretics. The Pope of Rome roars like a lion in
other kingdoms also and seeks whom he may devour; he gives no peace even
in the Turkish kingdom and constantly disturbs and offends the Holy Eastern
Church, and how much more in the Austrian realm does he devour the
living.”’”1171
1170
Mureșan, op. cit., p. 148.
Schema-Monk Metrophanes, Blessed Paisius Velichkovsky, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of
1171
Alaska Brotherhood, 1976, p. 158.
673
Towards the end of the century the Austrian Emperor Joseph II introduced
a certain measure of religious freedom in his empire, including for the
Orthodox Christians. However, other measures introduced by him caused
great harm to the Orthodox. Thus the first known Masonic lodge in Serbia,
"Probitas" from Petrovaradin, was founded in 1785.1172 This was a sure sign of
strong western influence; for, as we read in the life of the Serbian Martyr
Theodore Sladich: “In the late eighteenth century, many confused Serbs who
had grown weary under the Turkish yoke and who wanted nothing of the
Roman heresy, decided to turn to the ‘new’ ideas of the Enlightenment which
came first to Voyvodina from Western Europe via Vienna, Bratislava,
Budapest, and other European university centers. One of these ideas was the
reduction of the number of holy days celebrated, in order to facilitate new
economic plans and conditions. Some one hundred holy days were to be
erased from the liturgical calendar. Also, under the Turkish system, Serbian
clerical education was rather limited. Emperor Joseph II (1780-1790), ‘the
enlightened despot’ in Vienna, with the blessing of Metropolitan Moses
Putnik (1781-1790) in Srenski Karlovci (Lower Karlovac), advocated the
closing of a number of monasteries in order to generate revenue to build
various educational institutions. One supporter of this idea was the famous
Serbian man of the Age of Reason, Dositheus Obradovich (1739-1811).
Beginning as a monk in the Monastery of New Hopovo, he then left for
Western Europe, returning to Vojvodina and later to Serbia as a humanist
philosopher, a fierce critic of Church practices, and as Serbia’s first Minister of
Education! In the end, this opting for the rationalism of the so-called Western
European Enlightenment created within the pious Serbian peasantry a
tremendous distrust of Church leadership, an abiding disdain for Church life
and practices, and a many-faceted regression which was to last well into the
nineteenth century.
“With all this in mind, it can now be easily ascertained why pious Serbs
everywhere especially venerate St. Theodore Sladich. Quite often in his
lifetime he was approached by both propagandists of the Latin Unia and by
Serbian converts to Western rationalism who wanted him to leave the Church
and embrace ‘modernistic’ ways of thought and living. Theodore was an
ardent Orthodox and, due to his love for liturgical ritual and the vision of the
doctrines of the Church, he became an outspoken proponent against the Latin
Unia and the rationalistic innovations of Western Europe… In regard to
rationalism and so-called ‘modern’ education, Theodore responded by
explaining that the source of every true knowledge flowed from the Church –
that all worldly knowledge can never replace that which a true Christian
receives in church, God Himself educates the believer wholly: by acting upon
his sight, hearing, smelling, feeling, taste, imagination, mind, and will, by the
splendor of the images and of the building in general, by the fragrance of the
incense, by the veneration of the Gospels, Cross and icons, by the singing and
1172 “Exhibition of Masons – ‘Free Masonry in Serbia 1785-1918”,
https://ilovezrenjanin.com/kultura/izlozba-o-masonima-slobodno-zidarstvo-u-srbiji-1785-
2018/
674
by the reading of the Scriptures. And most importantly, as Theodore once
said: ‘In no way can secular education bring about the greatest mystery
offered by the Church: the cleansing from sins’.”1173
1173 Fr. Daniel Rogich, Serbian Patericon, vol. I, Forestville, CA: St. Paisius Abbey Press, 1994,
pp. 150-152. St. Theodore and 150 followers were burned to death by the Turks in 1788.
675
81. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (1) THE NOBILITY
Nicholas Riasanovsky writes of Tsar Peter III: “His reign of several months,
best remembered in the long run for the law abolishing the compulsory state
service of the gentry, impressed many of his contemporaries as a violent
attack on everything Russian and a deliberate sacrifice of Russian interests to
those of Prussia. While not given to political persecution and in fact willing to
sign a law abolishing the security police, the new emperor threatened to
disband the guards, and even demanded that icons be withdrawn from the
churches and that Russian priests dress like Lutheran pastors, both of which
orders the Holy Synod did not dare execute. In foreign policy Peter III’s
admiration for Frederick the Great led to the withdrawal of Russia from the
Seven Years’ War, an act which probably saved Prussia from a crushing
defeat and deprived Russia of great potential gains. Indeed, the Russian
emperor refused to accept even what Frederick the Great was willing to give
him for withdrawing and proceeded to make an alliance with the Prussian
king.”1174
Although Peter III’s manifesto giving freedom from obligatory state service
to the nobility was, not unnaturally, applauded by the nobles, within a few
months, on June 28, 1762, they staged a coup which soon led to his death in
rather mysterious circumstances. His wife Catherine, a German, cooperated
with the coup that brought her to the throne, a coup that was organized by
the Masons Panin and Gregory Orlov and the French Count Saint
Germain…1175
Catherine’s accession to the throne was doubly illegal. Not only in that it
took place over the dead body of her husband, but also in that the legitimate
successor was her son, the future Tsar Paul I. Catherine was in fact a usurper;
the lawful monarch should have been her son. Always conscious of this, she
did not simply not love her son: she did everything in her power to humiliate
him. As Alexander Bokhanov writes, “she was not ashamed even to deny the
paternity of her lawful son [that is, that Tsar Peter III was his father]!
Catherine had an instinctive dislike of Paul Petrovich; we can even speak of a
kind of maniacal syndrome.”1176 Her hatred of him went so far as to deprive
him of the possibility of bringing up his own sons Alexander and Nicholas,
and to refuse him all participation in state affairs.
“The new regime,” writes Isabel de Madariaga, “proceeded at once to rally

the support of the groups that really mattered: the army, provincial officials
and the Church. The plotters themselves were well placed to win over the
soldiers with assurances that the Danish campaign [in alliance with Prussia]
would be called off, and the men evidently welcomed Catherine’s accession
with real rejoicing. The very limited degree of opposition in the army came

1176 Bokhanov, Pavel I (Paul I), Moscow: Veche, 2010, p. 78.
676
from some of the officers, who may have taken seriously their oath of
allegiance to Peter. No such scruple seemed to worry the Church hierarchy,
which showed no hesitation whatever in administering the oath of allegiance
to Catherine to those who had only six months previously sworn allegiance to
Peter III. The first manifesto issued by the new government on 28 June 1762
showed its awareness of the most emotionally vulnerable points of popular
opinion. It stressed that Catherine had taken power because of the danger to
the Orthodox faith, and the insult to the Russian army implicit in the
country’s ‘enslavement’ to her worst enemy, namely Prussia, the policy
supported by Peter…”1177
The Muscovite tsars had created a Chelobitnij Prikaz that enabled the
ordinary people to bring their complaints directly to the tsar. Even Peter,
while creating the beginnings of a powerful bureaucracy, had retained
sufficient control over the bureaucrats to ensure that he was not cut off from
the people and remained the real ruler of the country. “But after his death, as
Tikhomirov explained, “the supreme power was cut off from the people, and
at the same time was penetrated by a European spirit of absolutism. This
latter circumstance was aided by the fact that the bearers of supreme power
were themselves not of Russian origin during this period, and the education
of everyone in general was not Russian. The imitation of administrative
creativity continued throughout the eighteenth century.”1178
This tendency reached its peak under Catherine the Great, who followed in
the absolutist spirit of Peter the Great. At the beginning of her reign, Nikolai
Panin had tried to create a system that imposed certain aristocratic checks on
the sovereign’s power on the model of Sweden. However, Catherine cleverly
sidelined both this reform and Panin himself.
”The first changes in the structure and spirit of the government in Russia
undertaken by the new regime all tended to the strengthening of the direct
personal control of the sovereign over the institutions of central and local
government and their personnel. At a time when Catherine might have been
expected to woo the nobility in order to consolidate her precarious hold on
the throne, no concession whatsoever was made to noble ambition. No
outright attack was made on the vested interests of the high aristocracy. But
by playing off the partisans of the imperial council against the partisans of the
Senate Catherine succeeded in killing the one, and downgrading the other.
Meanwhile the procuracy, under Catherine’s obedient servant, Vyazemsky,
with his subordinate network of procurators, served increasingly as the oko
gosudarevo, the ‘eye of the sovereign’ and the effective instrument of her
policy and her power…”1179
1177 De Madariaga, Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great, London: Phoenix Press, 2002, p. 30.
1179 De Madariaga, op. cit., p. 60.
677
Catherine’s first act was to reward her co-conspirators handsomely with
money and serfs. This pattern became the rule during her reign as the number
of those who needed to be rewarded (mainly her lovers) increased, as well as
the numbers of serfs “on the market” through the conquest of new territories
and the expropriation of church lands. Thus she took away about a million
peasants from the Church, while giving about a million previously free (state)
peasants into the personal possession of the nobility.1180 She also imposed
even tighter restrictions on the movement of serfs. And she introduced the
system into the Ukraine…
Thus in the course of the eighteenth century, and especially during

Catherine’s reign, the nobility finally recovered the dominant position they
had lost under Ivan the Terrible and the seventeenth-century Tsars. Although
this was a dominance over the peasants, not over the sovereign… With this
dominance of the nobility came the dominance of westernism in all its forms.
As Richard Pipes writes: “It has been said that under Peter [the Great]
Russia learned western techniques, under Elizabeth western manners, and
under Catherine western morals. Westernization certainly made giant
progress in the eighteenth century; what had begun as mere aping of the west
by the court and its élite developed into close identification with the very
spirit of western culture. With the advance of westernization it became
embarrassing for the state and the dvorianstvo [nobility and civil servants] to
maintain the old service structure. The dvorianstvo wished to emulate the
western aristocracy, to enjoy its status and rights; and the Russian monarchy,
eager to find itself in the forefront of European enlightenment, was, up to a
point, cooperative.
“In the course of the eighteenth century a consensus developed between

the crown and the dvorianstvo that the old system had outlived itself. It is in
this atmosphere that the social, economic and ideological props of the
patrimonial regime were removed….
“Dvoriane serving in the military were the first to benefit from the general
weakening of the monarchy that occurred after Peter’s death. In 1730,
provincial dvoriane frustrated a move by several boyar families to impose
constitutional limitations on the newly elected Empress Anne. In
appreciation, Anne steadily eased the conditions of service which Peter had
imposed on the dvorianstvo…
“These measures culminated in the Manifesto ‘Concerning the Granting of

Freedom and Liberty to the Entire Russian Dvorianstvo’, issued in 1762 by
Peter III, which ‘for ever, for all future generations’ exempted Russian
dvoriane from state service in all its forms. The Manifesto further granted them
the right to obtain passports for travel abroad, even if their purpose was to
enroll in the service of foreign rulers – an unexpected restoration of the
678
ancient boyar right of ‘free departure’ abolished by Ivan III. Under Catherine
II, the Senate on at least three occasions confirmed this Manifesto,
concurrently extending to the dvorianstvo other rights and privileges (e.g. the
right, given in 1783, to maintain private printing presses). In 1785 Catherine
issued a Charter of the Dvorianstvo which reconfirmed all the liberties acquired
by this estate since Peter’s death, and added some new ones. The land which
the dvoriane held was now recognized as their legal property. They were
exempt from corporal punishment. These rights made them – on paper, at any
rate – the equals of the upper classes in the most advanced countries of the
west.”1181
“The nobles,” writes Sir Geoffrey Hosking, “thus possessed certain secure
rights, including that of private property in land. This was an unprecedented
situation in Russian society, and, in the absence of a similar charter for
peasants, it consolidated in practice their right to buy and sell the serfs who
occupied that land as if they too were private property.
“Catherine’s reforms thus took the first step towards creating a civil society
in Russia, but at the cost of deepening yet further the already considerable
juridical, political and cultural gap between the nobles and the serfs among
whom they lived. Serfs became mere chattels in the eyes of their masters,
objects which could be moved around or disposed of at will, as part of a
gambling debt, a marriage settlement or an economic improvement scheme.
In practice, they could normally be sold as commodities, without the land to
which they were theoretically attached, and without members of their own
families.
“Lords had judicial and police powers over their serfs, as well as economic
ones, which meant that they could punish serfs in any way they saw fit: they
could flog them, send them to the army or exile them to Siberia. Theoretically,
they were not permitted to kill a serf, but if a harsh flogging or other ill-
treatment caused a serf’s death, there was very little his fellow peasants could
do about it. Not that the great majority of lords were remotely so brutal or
careless. But the mentality induced by this impunity nevertheless blunted the
lord’s sense of responsibility for the consequences of his own actions.”1182
1181 Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, London: Penguin, 1995, pp. 132, 133. Lebedev writes
that “nobility itself was now also transferred by heredity insofar as the nobles had been
completely freed from the obligation to serve anywhere. They could send their serfs to forced
labour without trial, apply physical punishments to them, buy and sell them (‘exchange them
for wolfhounds’…) Catherine II forbade only the sale of families of peasants one by one, but
(this became usual) ordered them to be sold in families. But in practice this ruling was
violated pretty often.” (op. cit., p. 227).
1182 Hosking, op. cit., p. 158. “Only extreme cruelty in relation to serfs (and that in the rarest
cases!), sadistic torture and murder was punished, insofar as all this sickened the ‘moral
feelings’ of the nobles, who considered themselves an ‘enlightened’ class. They paid no
attention at all to ‘ordinary’ cruelty, it was in the nature of things. The serfs no longer vowed
allegiance to the Tsars, and their testimonies were not admitted in court and they themselves
could not take anybody to court. Their whole life, destiny, land and property were the
personal property of the landowners. By forbidding the transfer of peasants from their lords
679
Catherine also gave the nobles the rights to trade and to organize local
associations that would elect local government officials. All this would seem
to indicate the influence on Catherine of Diderot and Montesquieu, who had
advocated the creation of aristocratic “intermediate institutions” between the
king and the people such as the parlements and Estates General in France; he
believed that “no monarch, no nobility, no nobility, no monarch.” However,
Montesquieu’s aim had been that these institutions and the nobility should
check the power of the king. Catherine, on the other hand, was attempting to
buttress her power by buying the support of the nobles.1183
But if the sovereign and the nobility were coming closer together, this only
emphasized the gulf between this nobility and the masses of the Russian
people. Even their concept of Russianness was different. As Hosking writes,
“the nobles’ Russianness was very different from that of the peasants, and for
that matter of the great majority of merchants and clergy. It was definitely an
imperial Russianness, centred on élite school, Guards regiment and imperial
court. Even their landed estates were islands of European culture in what
they themselves often regarded as an ocean of semi-barbarism. The
Russianness of the village was important to them, especially since it was
bathed in childhood memories, but they knew it was something different.”1184
Above all, the Russianness of the nobles was different from that of the
peasants because the latter was based on Orthodoxy. But the nobles had
different ideals, those of the French Enlightenment. Even the sovereign, the
incarnation of Holy Russia, was becoming a bearer of the French ideals rather
than those of the mass of his people. Moreover, with the growth in the power
of the bureaucracy he was becoming increasingly isolated from ordinary
people and unable to hear their voice.
But Catherine was certainly no democrat. She approved a new edition of

the Rite of Orthodoxy, which declared: “Against those who think that
Orthodox rulers come to the throne not by special Divine favor toward them
and who think that with the anointing to the kingship the gifts of the Holy
Spirit are not poured out on them for the conduct of this lofty office; and
therefore who dare to revolt and to commit treason against them: anathema”.
Again, in her Nakaz or “Instruction” of 1767 she spoke against the state in
which the idea of equality takes root in the people to such an extent “that
everyone aims at being equal to him… who is ordained by the Laws to rule
over him” (article 503). And when the dramatist A.P. Sumarokov said: "The
majority of votes does not confirm the truth; truth is confirmed by profound
reason and impartiality," the empress replied approvingly: "The majority does
not confirm the truth, but only indicates the wishes of the majority."1185
in Little Russia, Catherine II began to spread serfdom into the Ukraine.” (Lebedev, op. cit., p.
227).
1185 De Madariaga, op. cit., pp. 157, 159.
680
82. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (2) THE UKRAINIANS AND
POLES
Since 1686 the Russian empire comprised large parts of what had once
been Kievan Rus’ and which we should now call Ukraine and Belarus; the
Russian nation was now understood to be divided into three parts: the Great
Russians in the north, the Little Russians in the south, and the White Russians
in the west. These sub-nations of the one Russian nation were considered to
be equal in rights: Little Russians, especially clergy, had been accorded many
favours and promotions in Peter the Great’s time. The question was: how
would Catherine deal with them in the context of the revived Russian
national imperial feeling of the later eighteenth century?
“Hopes were high,” writes Serhii Plokhy, “in the capital of the Hetmanate
[Kiev], and at first they appeared to be justified. Catherine began her rule
with a small concession to her loyal hetman and the Little Russian elites,
reinstating the Hetmanate’s traditional court system in 1763. The Cossack
officer council asked for more, and Razumovsky threw in an additional
request: he wanted the hetman’s office to become hereditary and stay in his
family.
“But Catherine’s gratitude had its limits, and her reaction was swift. In
1764, she summoned Razumovsky to St. Petersburg and removed him as
hetman, compensating him later with the title of field marshal. More
important, she abolished the office of hetman altogether. It was the third and
final liquidation of the office of Cossack leader, the first two having occurred
under Peter and Anna Ivanovna. It would take Catherine another two
decades to eliminate all the institutions of the Hetmanate, including its system
of military regiments, but the empress took her time and stayed her course. At
stake was the formation of an empire whose regions would all be governed
from the center according to Enlightenment principles of rational government
and universal laws. The hodge-podge of long-established customs and special
privileges accumulated in the course of history was to yield to well-ordered
and homogeneous bureaucratic norms.
“Even so, prudence called for a gradual transition to the new practices. In
February 1764, a few months before the abolition of the hetman’s office,
Catherine wrote to the procurator-general of the Senate – the empire’s
legislative, judicial, and administrative body – and de facto chief of
Catherine’s political police (‘secret expedition’), Prince Aleksandr Viazemsky:
‘Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed
privileges, and it would be improper to violate them by abolishing them all at
once. To call them foreign and deal with them on that basis is more than
erroneous – it would be sheer stupidity. These provinces, as well as Smolensk,
should be Russified as gently as possible so that they cease looking to the
forest like wolves… When the hetmans are gone from Little Russia, every
681
effort should be made to eradicate from memory the period and the hetmans,
let alone promote anyone to the office.’
“Catherine first turned the Hetmanate into the province of Little Russia
and then divided it into the viceregencies of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-
Siverskyi. The abolition of the Hetmanate and the gradual elimination of its
institutions and military structure ended the notion of partnership and
equality between Great and Little Russia imagined by generations of
Ukrainian intellectuals. Once incorporated into the administrative system of
the empire, the former Hetmanate was dwarfed by the huge Russian state.
Out of close to fifty imperial viceregencies at the end of the eighteenth century,
only three represented the former Hetmanate. The special statues of the
former Cossack polity was gone, its officer class integrated, though not
without difficulty, into the Russian nobility and expected to serve the interest
of the all-Russian nation. The Little Russians maintained their attachment to
their traditional homeland, which they continued to call a ‘fatherland’, but for
most of them there was no longer a contradiction between loyalty to their
historical patria and to the Russian Empire.
“Accordingly, the lands of the former Hetmanate continued to supply

cadres for the empire. Young Cossack officers, such as Oleksandr Bezborodko
and Petro Zavadovsky, enjoyed Catherine’s support and made spectacular
careers in St. Petersburg. Bezborodko served as her secretary and eventually
as one of the architects of imperial foreign policy; Zavadovsky became the
highest official in the empire’s educational system. The westward-looking
alumni of the Kyivan Academy were needed as much by the empress, who
proclaimed Russia a European state, as they had been by Peter I. But whereas
Peter had summoned clerics to the capital, Catherine brought in secular elites.
Given the Kyivan graduates’ good knowledge of Latin, they were considered
ideal candidates for training as medical doctors, and 60 percent of the
empire’s doctors in Catherine’s time were Ukrainians.
“Ukrainians constituted a significant part of the intellectual elite, with

Hryhorii Kozytsky, Vasyl Ruban, and Fedir Tumansky, all natives of the
Hetmanate, becoming publishers of some of the first Russian journals.
Kozytsky, who was one of Catherine’s secretaries, published the journal
Vsiakaia viachina (Anything and Everything, 1769-1770) on her behalf; Ruban
published Starina i novizna (Antiquity and Novelty, 1772-1773); and
Tumansky served much later as the publisher of the first historical journal in
the Russian Empire, Rosiiskii magazine (Russian Magazine, 1792-1794). They
were among the early ‘nationalists’ who helped form an emerging Russian
identity that embraced the new Russian literary language and associated
nation with empire more closely than ever before. According to Liah
Greenfeld, a distinguished student of early European nationalism, as many as
half the ‘Russian’ intellectuals promoting the idea of a Russian nation were in
fact ‘Little Russians’, or Ukrainians…”1186
1186 Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 58-60.
682
*
However one may evaluate it in other respects, Catherine’s reign was

outstandingly successful in one respect – militarily. Through her great
military commanders – Rumyantsev, Suvorov, Potemkin and Ushakov –
Catherine defeated the Turks in the south and the Poles in the west, while the
rebels in the east under Pugachev were easily disposed of. However, her reign
is also a textbook illustration of the important historical principle that we find
exemplified in many historical epochs: that the very victories of a regime,
especially if they are achieved in an aggressive war, can sow the seeds of its
eventual fall – whether through financial exhaustion, or imperial over-reach,
or the incorporation of irreconcilable enemies into the body politic…
Catherine developed a new concept of the place of Russia in the world.

“Russia,” she wrote in the very first line of her Instruction for government in
1767, “is a European power.” “The next paragraph,” writes Simms, “went on
to say that Russia had become a great power by being European, that is ‘by
introducing the manners and customs of Europe’. What Catherine had in
mind here was not the Europe of representative institutions, but that of
princely absolutism. This was because, as the second chapter of her
‘instruction’ explained, ‘the extent of the [tsarist] Dominion requires an
absolute power to be vested in that person who rules over it,’ in order to
expedite decisions. The ‘intention and end of Monarchy,’ she continued, ‘is
the glory of their citizens, of the state and of the monarchy’, that is, territorial
expansion and military success. ‘From this glory,’ Catherine added, ‘a sense of
liberty arises in a people governed by monarch, which… may contribute as
much to the happiness of the subjects as even liberty itself.’ In other words,
Russians would find compensation for their lack of freedom in the glory of
their state as a European great power.”1187
But this was directly contrary to the ordinary Orthodox Russian’s concept
of his state. First of all, to him Russia was not a European power in the sense
of just another of the Catholic or Protestant states of the West. She was the
Third Rome, the successor of Byzantium. And her aim was not her own glory,
or the glory of her citizens, but the glory of God and of Orthodoxy. Catherine
made some concessions to these sentiments, always insisting on her
Orthodoxy and gladly adopting the traditional aim of the Russian tsars of
liberating Constantinople and the Balkans from the Muslim yoke. (That is
why she called her grandson Constantine in anticipation of the desired event.)
But under the cloak of traditionally Orthodox aspirations, she pursued a
typically West European agenda of Great Power politics and territorial
expansion. This is not to say that her victories did not bring genuine benefit to
the Orthodox. But, as in the case of Peter the Great, we have to ask: were the
sovereign’s secular achievements on the battlefield and elsewhere sufficient to
offset the spiritual harm she inflicted?
1187 Simms, op. cit., p. 119.
683
This question was particularly relevant in relation to Poland. Even after the
union of the Eastern Ukraine with Russia in 1686, very extensive formerly
Russian lands still remained under Polish control. However, in 1717, as a
result of civil war between King Augustus II and his nobles, Poland fell under
the effective control of Russia. And so Poland’s domination of the South
Russian lands from the fourteenth century onwards now began to be
reversed… Poland was ruled by a weak monarchy that was paralyzed by its
over-powerful and unpatriotic nobility, whose frequent application of their
right to a liberum veto in the Polish Seim, or parliament, tended to paralyze
all constructive work for the state. As a result of this weakness (encouraged
by Catherine), Poland showed herself to be a failing state, and in 1772, 1793
and 1795 she was partitioned between Russia, Austria and Prussia.
Nevertheless, in spite of the weakness of the Polish state throughout the

eighteenth century, the persecution of the Orthodox living in Poland did not
cease. The Polish nobility did everything they could to deny the non-Roman
Catholic Christians (the Orthodox, the Lutherans, and the Calvinists) political
rights until well into the eighteenth century. And they continued to try and
keep the uniates, i.e. those Orthodox who had been beguiled into Catholicism
after the Unia of Brest-Litovsk, from reverting to Orthodoxy.
Moreover, they continued to cover the crimes of the Jews against the
Orthodox Christians, which had been one of the causes of the pogroms
committed by Khmelnitsky’s Cossacks. Thus in 1690 a six-year-old Orthodox
child by the name of Gabriel, who lived in Grodno province, was kidnapped
by a Jew and ritually slaughtered, “as was confirmed by a judicial
investigation. St. Gabriel was crucified, his side was pierced and he was
punctured by various instruments until all his blood came out and he died.
The body of the child was cast into a field, but was soon discovered and given
over to a Christian burial, while his tormentors received their due reward. 30
years later, in 1720, the relics of St. Gabriel were uncovered and found to be
incorrupt.” 1188 Years later, Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky) wrote a
service to the saint for his canonization…
The Orthodox Christians in Poland, writes A.P. Dobroklonsky, “suffered

every possible restriction. In 1717 the Sejm deprived them of their right to elect
deputies to the Sejms and forbade the construction of new and the repairing of
old churches; in 1733 the Sejm removed them from all public posts. If that is
how the government itself treated them, their enemies could boldly fall upon
them with fanatical spite. The Orthodox were deprived of all their dioceses
and with great difficulty held on to one, the Belorussian; they were also
deprived of the brotherhoods, which either disappeared or accepted the unia.
Monasteries and parish churches with their lands were forcibly taken from
1188 Archimandrite Nicon (Ivanov), Protopriest Nicholas (Likhomanov), Zhitia Russkikh
Sviatykh (Lives of the Russian Saints), Tutaev, 2000, vol. I, p. 392.
684
them… From 1721 to 1747, according to the calculations of the Belorussian
Bishop Jerome, 165 Orthodox churches were removed, so that by 1755 in the
whole of the Belorussian diocese there remained only 130; and these were in a
pitiful state… Orthodox religious processions were broken up, and Orthodox
holy things subjected to mockery… The Dominicans and Basilians acted in the
same way, being sent as missionaries to Belorussia and the Ukraine – those
‘lands of the infidels’, as the Catholics called them, - to convert the Orthodox…
They went round the villages and recruited people to the unia; any of those
recruited who carried out Orthodox needs was punished as an apostate.
Orthodox monasteries were often subjected to attacks by peasants and
schoolboys; the monks suffered beatings, mutilations and death. ‘How many
of them,’ exclaimed [Bishop] George Konissky, ‘were thrown out of their
homes, many of them were put in prisons, in deep pits, they were shut up in
kennels with the dogs, they were starved by hunger and thirst, fed on hay;
how many were beaten and mutilated, and some even killed!’… The Orthodox
white clergy were reduced to poverty, ignorance and extreme humiliation. All
the Belorussian bishops were subjected to insults, and some even to armed
assault….
“The Orthodox sought defenders for themselves in Russia, constantly

sending complaints and requests to the court and the Holy Synod. The
Russian government according to the eternal peace of 1686 had reserved for
itself the right to protect the Orthodox inhabitants of Poland, and often sent its
notes to the Polish court and through its ambassadors in Poland demanded
that the Orthodox should be given back the dioceses that had been granted to
them according to the eternal peace and that the persecutions should cease; it
also wrote about this to Rome, even threatening to deprive the Catholics living
in Russia of freedom of worship; more than once it appointed special
commissars to Poland for the defence of the Orthodox from abuse and in
order to investigate complaints. But the Polish government either replied with
promises or was silent and dragged out the affair from one Sejm to another.
True, there were cases when the king issued orders for the cessation of
persecutions… But such instructions were usually not listened to, and the
persecution of the Orthodox continued. Meanwhile the Russian government
insufficiently insisted on the carrying out of its demands.
“Only from the time of Catherine II did the circumstances change. On

arriving at her coronation in Moscow, George Konissky vividly described for
her the wretched condition of the Orthodox in Poland and besought her
intervention (1762). A year later all the Orthodox of Poland interceded with
her about this. The empress promised her protection and made the usual
representation to the Polish court. At that time a new king, Stanislav
Poniatovsky, had been established, with her assistance, on the Polish throne.
George Konissky personally appeared before him and described the sufferings
of the Orthodox in such a lively manner that the king promised to do
everything to restore the rights of the Orthodox (1765) and actually issued a
decree on the confirmation of their religious rights, demanding that the uniate
authorities cut short their violence. However, the uniate and Catholic
685
authorities were not thinking of obeying the king. Their spite against the
Orthodox found fresh food for itself. In 1765-1766, amidst the Russian
population of Poland, and mainly in Little Russia, a powerful mass movement
against the unia had begun. Its heart was the Orthodox see of Pereyaslavl
headed by Bishop Gervasius Lintsevsky and the Motroninsky monastery led
by Abbot Melchizedek Znachko-Yavorsky. Multitudes of the people went
there and were there inspired to the task of returning from the unia to
Orthodoxy. Crowds of people gathered everywhere in the villages; together
they swore to uphold the Orthodox faith to the last drop of their blood, they
restored Orthodox churches and restored Orthodox priests provided for them
by Gervasius. They persuaded uniate priests to return to Orthodoxy, and if
they refused either drove them out of the parishes or locked the churches.
Whole parishes returned to Orthodoxy. The uniate authorities decide to stop
this movement. The uniate metropolitan sent a fanatical zealot for the unia, the
official Mokritsky, to the Ukraine with a band of soldiers. The Orthodox
churches began to be sealed or confiscated; the people were forced by beatings
to renounce Orthodoxy. Abbot Melchizedek was subjected to tortures and
thrown into prison. There were even cases of killings for the faith… This
violence elicited a fresh representation from the Russian court. Moreover, the
courts of Prussia, England, Sweden and Denmark demanded that the Poles
reviewed the question of the dissidents (Orthodox and Protestants) at the Sejm
and protected their rights. However, the Sejm that took place in 1766 still
further restricted their religious liberty. The Catholic bishops Soltyk and
Krasinsky by their epistles stirred up the people against the dissidents; the
Pope himself (Clement XIII) tried to persuade Stanislav not to make
concessions. Then the dissidents began to act in a more friendly manner
towards each other. In Torn and Slutsk conferences of noblemen were
convened, and in other places up to 200 similar unions appeared with the aim
of obtaining rights for the non-Catholics of Poland. In her turn Russia, in order
to support these demands, moved her army into Poland. Relying on it, the
Russian ambassador in Poland Repin demanded a review of the question of
the dissidents at the new Sejm in 1767. When at this Sejm the Catholic bishops
Soltyk, Zalusky and some others continued to resist any concessions in favour
of the dissidents, Repin arrested them and the Sejm agreed upon some
important concessions: everything published against the dissidents was
rescinded, complete freedom of faith and Divine services was proclaimed,
they were given the right to build churches and schools, convene councils,
take part in Sejms and in the Senate, educate children born from mixed
marriages in the faith of their parents – sons in the faith of their fathers and
daughters in the faith of their mothers, and forcible conversions to the unia
were forbidden. These decrees were confirmed by a treaty between Russia and
Poland in 1768. It was then decided that the Belorussian see should remain
forever in the power of the Orthodox together with all the monasteries,
churches and church properties, while the monasteries and churches that had
been incorrectly taken from them were to be returned. For this a special mixed
commission of Catholics and dissidents – the latter led by George Konissky –
was appointed. In these circumstances the movement among the uniates that
had begun before was renewed with fresh force. Most of them – sometimes in
686
whole parishes – declared their desire to return to Orthodoxy; these
declarations were addressed to George Konissky, presented to Repin and
written down in official books; even the uniate bishops turned to the king with
a request that they be allowed to enter into discussions concerning a reunion
of the uniates with the Greco-Russian Church. But the indecisiveness of the
Polish and Russian governments hindered the realization of these desires.
Comparatively few parishes succeeded in returning to Orthodoxy, and then
the matter of their reunion was stopped for a time. Immediately the Russian
army left the boundaries of Poland, the Polish fanatics again set about their
customary way of behaving. Bishop Krasinsky of Kamenets went round
Poland in the clothes of a pilgrim and everywhere stirred up hatred against
the dissidents; the papal nuncio fanned the flames of this hatred in appeals to
the clergy, and sometimes also in instructions to the people. Those who were
discontented with the Sejm of 1767 convened the conference of Bar in order to
deprive the dissidents of the rights that had been granted them. Again there
arose a persecution of the Orthodox, who could not stand the violence. In
Trans-Dnieper Ukraine, under the leadership of the zaporozhets Maxim
Zhelezniak, a popular uprising known as the Koliivschina began. The anger of
the rebels was vented most of all on the landowners, the Jews, the Catholic
priests and the uniate priests. They were all mercilessly beaten up, their homes
were burned down, their property was looted; even the whole of the small
town of Uman was ravaged. The rebellion enveloped the whole western
region. The Polish government was not able to cope with it. The Russian
armies under Krechetnikov came to its aid. The revolt was put down. But
unfortunately, Krechetnikov and Repin, listening to the insinuations of the
Poles and not seeing the true reasons for the rebellion, looked on it as an
exclusively anti-state peasants’ rebellion, and so they themselves helped in
destroying that which stood for Orthodoxy and Russian nationality in the
Ukraine. Gervasius and Melchizedek, being suspected of rebellion, were
retired; the Orthodox people, being accused of stirring up the people, had to
hide in order to avoid punishment. The uniate priests took possession of many
Orthodox parishes; in many places the Orthodox were forced to appeal with
requests to perform needs to parishless priests coming from Moldavia and
Wallachia. Fortunately, in 1772 there came the first division of Poland, in
accordance with which Belorussia with its population of 1,360,000 was united
with Russia. At this the Polish government was obliged to take measures to
pacify the Orthodox who remained in their power, but in actual fact nothing
was done. A new woe was then added to the already difficult position of the
Orthodox: With the union of Belorussia with Russia not one Orthodox bishop
was left within the confines of Poland, and for ordinations the Orthodox were
forced to turn to Russia or Wallachia. Only in 1785 did the Russian
government, with the agreement of the Polish king, appoint a special bishop
for them, Victor Sadkovsky, with the title of Bishop of Pereyaslavl and vicar of
Kiev, with a salary and place of residence in Slutsk monastery. But when, with
his arrival, another movement in favour of Orthodoxy arose among the
Ukrainian uniates, the Poles were disturbed. Rumours spread that another
Koliivschina was being prepared and that the clergy were inciting the people
to rebel. Whatever Victor did to quash these rumours, they continued to grow.
687
They began to say that arms for a planned beating up of the Catholics and
uniates were being stored in the hierarchical house and in the monasteries. In
accordance with an order of the Sejm, Victor was seized and taken in fetters to
Warsaw, where he was thrown into an arms depot (1789); some Orthodox
priests were subjected to the same treatment; many were forced to save
themselves by fleeing to Russia. The whole of the Orthodox clergy were
rounded up to swear an oath of allegiance to the king. After this the thought
was voiced in the Sejm of 1791 of freeing the Orthodox Church within the
confines of Poland from Russian influence by making it independent of the
Russian Synod and transferring it into the immediate jurisdiction of the
Patriarch of Constantinople. The Pinsk congregation, made up of
representatives of the clergy and brotherhoods, did indeed work out a project
for the conciliar administration of the Church. But it was not fated to be put
into effect. Soon there followed, one after the other, the second (1793) and
third (1795) divisions of Poland, in accordance with which Russia acquired all
the ancient Russian lands with the exception of Galicia, and the Lithuanian
region with a population of more than 4 million.
“With the union of Belorussia and the south-western regions to Russia

there finally came to an end the age-old sufferings of the Orthodox there. At
the same time there came the right opportunity for the uniates to throw off the
fetters of the unia that had been forcibly imposed upon them. The Belorussian
Archbishop George Konissky received many declarations from uniate parishes
wishing to return to Orthodoxy. Although the Russian government did not
allow him to do anything about these declarations without special permission,
and itself did not give permission for about 8 years, the striving of the uniates
for Orthodoxy did not wane. When, finally, permission was given, up to
130,000 uniates went over to Orthodoxy. In the south-western region an
energetic assistant of George Konissky in the work of uniting the uniates was
Victor Sadkovsky, who had been released from prison and raised to the see of
Minsk (1793). With the permission of the government, he published an appeal
to the uniates of his diocese urging them to return to Orthodoxy. Soon, on the
orders of the government, the same was done in the Belorussian region.
Moreover, the government told local authorities to remove all obstacles that
might appear in the unification of the uniates on the part of the Roman
Catholic clergy and landowners, and threatened the guilty with responsibility
before the law, while at the same time forbidding their forcible union. The
appeals had an extraordinary success. In less than a year (from the middle of
1794 to the beginning of 1795), more than one-and-a-half million uniates had
joined the Orthodox Church; the numbers of those united by the end of the
reign of Catherine II came to no less than two million.” 1189
The liberation of millions of Orthodox peasants from their Polish and

Jewish persecutors, under whom they had suffered already for centuries, and
the return of millions of uniates to their original faith and Church, was
1189 Dobroklonsky, Rukovodstvo po istorii russkoj tserkvi (A Guide to the History of the Russian
Church), Moscow, 2001, pp. 651-652.
688
undoubtedly a great triumph of Orthodoxy. However, the bitter fact was that
the cost of the annexation of Poland and the liberation of the Orthodox
Christians (with help from Prussia in the west and Austria in the south) came
at a very high cost – not only in terms of the thousands of people killed on
both sides in the eighteenth century, but in another very important respect.
For it meant the inclusion into the Russian empire of many millions of Poles
and Jews who were bitterly hostile both to Russia and to the Orthodox faith,
and who were to cause continual civil strife in the western territories right up
to the First World War.
Serhii Plokhy writes: “’One Pole is a charmer; two Poles – a brawl; three
Poles – well, this is the Polish question,’ quipped Voltaire. The Russian Empire
acquired more than three Poles as a result of the partitions enthusiastically
supported by the French philosophe, and, as for the Polish question, it was
presenting an ever greater challenge to its Russian overlord. Catherine II, who
did not believe in special treatment of lands annexed to the empire,
abandoned the traditional practice of the Russian tsars, who had tolerated
broad autonomy for newly acquired territories, including the Hetmanate and
the Baltic provinces, for decades or even centuries. The annexed Polish lands
were given no special status, which created tension between the imperial
center and its new periphery.
“Many in the St. Petersburg imperial establishment, including some of

those appointed to rule in Poland, were sympathetic to fellow aristocrats in
that country and considered the partitions both unjust and imprudent as an
assertion of Russian interests in Europe. The sense of guilt towards conquered
but not fully vanquished neighbor was something new for the Russian
imperial psyche and presented a special challenge to the rulers. Poland had
been a regional power with a highly developed sense of its own imperial
mission and an elite loyal to its state and fatherland. A full-fledged political
nation, it was not prepared to give up the ideal of independent statehood. The
resentment of the Polish nobility, which considered itself culturally superior to
the conquerors (much more so than the elite of the Hetmanate had in the
seventeenth century), created an additional problem for the traditional modus
operandi of the Russian Empire. Its usual strategy had been to make a deal
with local elites at the expense of the lower classes and thus establish its
supremacy. A deal was made in this case as well, but the local elite was not
fully cooperative and occasionally refused to cooperate at all.
“The Russian Empire’s Polish question never remained in the purely

theoretical realm, limited to the soul-searching of intellectuals. More than once
the Poles took arms in hand, not just to make their voices heard or negotiate a
better deal with the empire, but to throw off Russian rule altogether and
restore the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in its pre-partition boundaries.
They were marching forward with their heads turned back. For the Russian
Empire, the Poles were dangerous enemies. The advent of nationalist
ideology, with its emphasis on linguistic and ethnic particularism, created
another obstacle to the successful integration of the annexed territories. The
689
Polish nobles were not only bearers of a political culture opposed to
absolutism, and adherents of a religion that the Russian Orthodox elites had
always regarded with utmost suspicion, but as Western Slavs were ethnically
distinct from the East Slavic core of the Russian imperial nation, and busily
establishing the foundations of modern Polish identity based on a distinct
history, political culture, language, literature, and religion…”1190
As Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes, “from the point of view of the interests
of Great Russia, it was necessary to pacify Poland, but not seize the age-old
Polish and purely Lithuanian lands. This wrong attitude of Russia to the
neighbouring peoples then became a ‘mine’ that later more than once
exploded with bad consequences for Russia…”1191
1190 Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 71-72.

690
83. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (3) THE JEWS
On Catherine’s accession to the throne, as De Madariaga writes, “there

were very few Jews in Russia, where settlement had not been allowed in
Muscovite days. But Jews had settled in Polish Ukraine, and a few
communities in Little Russia had survived the ferocious pogroms carried out
by Bogdan Khmel’nitsky’s Cossacks in the seventeenth century. A few Polish
Jewish prisoners of war had settled in Russia proper and their presence was
winked at, but Jews were not allowed into Moscow. Catherine I issued an
ukaz in 1727 ordering the expulsion of all Jews from Russia and Little Russia
– a law which was not implemented since Jews were far too necessary to the
Little Russian economy. Eighteenth-century religious intolerance reached its
zenith when a Jew was convicted in 1738 of having converted a naval officer
to Judaism. Both were burnt alive on 15 July 1738 in St. Petersburg. A more
effective edict of expulsion was dictated by Elizabeth in 1742, and by her
order the distinguished Sephardi court physician, Antonio Nunes Ribeiro
Sanches, was forbidden to return to his post in Russia and deprived of his
honorary membership of the Academy of Sciences.
“Four or five days after her accession Catherine attended a routine session
of the Senate, to find on the agenda a proposal dating from Peter III’s days to
admit Jews to settle in Russia. The empress doubted the wisdom of beginning
her reign with a measure marking such a deviation from her proclaimed
intention of defending the Orthodox faith. She was rescued from her
predicament by a senator who proposed examining Elizabeth’s decision on a
previous project of the same kind. On reading the empress’s words: ‘I wish to
derive no benefit from the enemies of Jesus Christ’, Catherine was
emboldened to postpone the question. The manifesto inviting foreigners to
settle in Russia, issued on 4 December 1762 explicitly excluded Jews…”1192
According to Lebedev, she “was convinced that it was impossible to forbid

the entrance of the Jews into Russia, it was necessary to let them in. But she
considered it dangerous to do this at the very beginning of her reign, since she
understood that she had to deal with the Russian people, ‘a religious people’,
who saw in her ‘the defender of the Orthodox Faith’, and that the clergy were
extremely upset by Peter III’s order on the expropriation of the Church’s land-
holdings. Moreover, she had been shown the resolution of Elizabeth Petrovna
on the entrance of the Jews…”1193
However, the successive partitions of Poland forced her to look at the

question again; for through them the Russian empire acquired, according to
one estimate, as many as a million Jews, according to another - 1.36
million. 1194 Administering this vast new population and territory with its

1194 Martin Gilbert, The Dent Atlas of Russian History, London: Dent, 1993, p. 42; Dobroklonsky,
op. cit. However, David Vital (A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, Oxford University
691
mixed population of Russians, Poles and Jews would have been a major
problem for any State. In this case, when the newly subject populations were
fanatically anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox, the problem was still greater. As
the worried empress wrote: “what seemed a child’s game is becoming a most
serious matter. The Russian state has bumped into the most numerous Jewish
masses in Europe”.1195 The problem was made still worse by the fact the
Jewish population constituted a “State within the State”, being governed by
its rabbis and kahals. It was they who indoctrinated their people into the anti-
Christian world-view of the Talmud, which in Russia, as in Byzantium and so
many other Christian states, made cooperation between the Christian state
and the Jewish population so difficult.
The problem of the kahal could not be ducked. The authorities had a
responsibility both to the Russian peasants who were exploited by it
economically and to those ordinary Jews who suffered from its despotism.
Nevertheless, Catherine, - influenced, no doubt, by the Toleranzpatent (1782) of
her fellow “enlightened despot”, Joseph II of Austria – at first tried to duck it
by adopting the easier expedient of acting like a liberal… Hence her ukaz of
May 7, 1786 proclaiming equality for the Jews, which has been called “the first
official statement of the civil equality of the Jews in Europe”.1196
Solzhenitsyn writes: “When the Jews passed under the authority of the
Russian State, the whole of this internal system in which the kahal hierarchy
was interested was preserved. And, as Yu. I. Hessen presupposes with that
irritation that by the middle of the 19th century had grown among
enlightened Jews against the ossified Talmudist tradition, ‘the representatives
of Jewry’s ruling class did all they could to convince the [Russian]
government of the necessity of keeping the age-old institution in being, since
it corresponded to the interests both of the Russian authorities and of the
Jewish ruling class’; ‘the kahal together with the rabbinate possessed the
fullness of power, and not infrequently abused this power, stealing public
resources, trampling on the rights of poor people, incorrectly imposing taxes
and taking revenge on personal enemies’. At the end of the 18th century one
of the governors of the region joined to Russia wrote in a report: ‘the rabbi,
the spiritual court and the kahal, “yoked together by close bonds, and having
in their power and disposing even of the very conscience of the Jews, lords it
over them on their own, without any reference to the civil authorities”’.
“And when, in the 18th century, there developed in Jewry the powerful
religious movement of the Hassidim, on the one hand, and on the other, the
enlightenment movement of Moses Mendelssohn towards secular education,
the kahals energetically suppressed both the one and the other. In 1781 the
Vilnius rabbinate declared kherem [anathema] on the Hassidim, and in 1784 a
Press, 1999, p. 89) gives 400,000, while Hartley (op. cit., p. 15) gives “anything between
155,000 and 900,000 persons, but probably closer to the lower figure”.
1195 Catherine II, in Oleg Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow,
1998, p. 237.
692
congress of rabbis in Mogilev declared the Hassidim to be ‘outside the law’
and their property ‘escheated’. After this the common people in some towns
destroyed the houses of the Hassidim, that is, they caused an intra-Jewish
pogrom. The Hassidim were persecuted in the most cruel and dishonourable
way, they were not even spared false political denunciations against them to
the Russian authorities. However, in 1799, on the denunciation of the
Hassidim, the authorities arrested the members of the Vilnius kahal for
expropriating taxes they had collected. Hassidism continued to spread, in
some provinces with particular success. The rabbinate delivered the books of
the Hassidim to public burning, while the Hassidim spoke out as defenders of
the people against the abuses of the kahals. ‘At that time the religious struggle
put into the shade, as it would seem, the other questions of Jewish life.’
“The part of Belorussia united to Russia in 1772 was constituted by the

Polotsk (later the Vitebsk) and Mogilev provinces. It was declared to them in
the name of Catherine that the inhabitants of this region ‘whatever race or
calling they might be’ would from now on [retain] the right publicly to
practise their faith and possess private property’. Moreover, they would be
given ‘all those rights, freedoms and privileges that her subjects enjoyed of
old’.1197
“Thus the Jews were made equal in rights with the Christians – they had
been deprived of this in Poland. Moreover, a special addition was made
concerning the Jews, that their communities ‘would be left and preserved
with all those freedoms that they now… enjoy’ – that is, nothing would be
taken from what they enjoyed in Poland. True, the power of the kahals was
thereby preserved, and the Jews through their kahal organization still
remained cut off from the rest of the population, and did not yet enter directly
into that mercantile-industrial estate that corresponded to their main
occupations.
“At first Catherine was wary both of the hostile reaction of the Polish
nobility, which had lost power, and of the unpleasant impression [her decree]
produced on her Orthodox subjects…”
“But,” continues Solzhenitsyn, “being sympathetic towards the Jews and

expecting from them economic benefit for the country, Catherine was
preparing for them still greater rights. Already in 1778 there was extended to
the Belorussian region the recent measure that applied to the whole of Russia:
those who possessed capital up to 500 roubles from now on constituted the
estate of the town-dwellers [meshchane], and those who had more – the estate
of the merchants [kuptsy], the three guilds, in accordance with their wealth,
1197 David Vital writes: “’Her Imperial Majesty’s love of her fellow men [chelovekoliubie]’ did
not permit her to exclude the Jews from the valour with which she treated all her subjects,
provided they, for their part, were loyal, obedient, and engaged in occupations that were
appropriate to their status (zvanie)” (op. cit., p. 84). (V.M.)
693
and were freed from poll tax, and would pay 1% from the capital that they
had ‘declared in accordance with conscience’.
“This decree had a special, great significance: it destroyed the national

isolation of the Jews that had prevailed to that time (Catherine wanted to
destroy it). It also undermined the traditional Polish view of the Jews as a
non-State element. It also undermined the kahal structure, and the coercive
power of the kahal. ‘From this moment there begins the process of the
introduction of the Jews into the Russian State organism… The Jews widely
used the right of registering among the merchants’ – so that, for example, in
Mogilev province 10% of the Jewish population were declared to be
merchants (and of the Christians – only 5.5%). The Jewish merchants were
now freed from paying taxes to the kahal and were no longer obliged, in
particular, to seek permission from the kahal for every trip, as before: they
now had to deal only with the common magistrate, on common terms. (In
1780 the Jews of Mogilev and Shklov met Catherine with odes.)
“With the departure of the Jewish merchants the State rubric ‘Jew’ also
ceased to exist. All the rest of the Jews now had to be categorized in some
estate, and it was evident that they could be categorized only as town-
dwellers. But at first there were few who wanted to transfer, because the
annual poll tax from town-dwellers at that time was 60 kopecks, while from
the Jews it was 50 kopecks. However, no other path remained to them. And
from 1783 the Jewish town-dwellers, like the Jewish merchants, had to pay
their taxes, not to the kahal, but to the magistrate, on common terms, and
receive a passport for a journey from him, too.
“This movement was strengthened by a general municipal decree of 1785,

which envisaged only estates, and by no means nations. According to this
decree, all the town-dwellers [and therefore all the Jews) received the right to
participate in local administration according to estates and to take up public
posts. ‘According to the conditions of that time, this meant that the Jews
became citizens with equal rights… Entering the merchant and town-dweller
classes in the capacity of members with equal rights was an event of major
social significance’, and was meant to turn the Jews into ‘a social force of
which it was impossible not to take account, thereby raising their moral self-
esteem’. This also alleviated the practical task of defending their vital
interests. ‘At that time the mercantile-industrial class, as also the municipal
societies, enjoyed broad self-rule… Thus into the hands of the Jews, on an
equal basis with the Christians, was handed considerable administrative and
judicial power, thanks to which the Jewish population acquired strength and
significance in social-state life.’ There were now burgomeisters and ratmans
and judges from the Jews. At first in the major towns a limitation was applied:
that there should be no more Jews than Christians in elected posts. However,
in 1786 ‘Catherine sent the Belorussian governor-general an order signed in
his own hand’: that equal rights for the Jews ‘in municipal-estate self-rule…
694
should “unfailingly and without any delay be brought into effect”, while non-
fulfillers of the decree “would be punished by law”’.1198
“Let us note that in this way the Jews received civil equality of rights not
only in distinction from Poland, but earlier than in France or the German
lands. (Under Frederick II there was a very powerful oppression of the Jews.)
And, which is still more significant: the Jews in Russia from the beginning
had that personal freedom which the Russian peasants were not to have for a
further 80 years. And paradoxically: the Jews received even greater freedom
than the Russian merchants and town-dwellers: the latter lived unfailingly in
the towns, while the Jewish population, not following their example, ‘could
live in the uyezd settlements, occupied, particularly, in the wine trade’.
‘Although the Jews lived in large numbers not only in the towns, but also in
the villages, they were registered in the municipal societies… included into
the estates of the merchants and town-dwellers’. ‘By reason of the nature of
their activity, surrounded by unfree peasantry, they played an important
economic role – the [village] trade was concentrated in their hands, they
leased various sections of the landowners’ sources of income, and sold vodka
in the taverns’ – and thereby ‘assisted in the spread of drunkenness’. The
Belorussian administration pointed out that ‘the presence of Jews in the
villages has a harmful effect on the economic and moral condition of the
peasant population, since the Jews… develop drunkenness among the local
population’. ‘In the reports of the local administration, mention was made,
incidentally, that the Jews led the peasants into drunkenness, idleness and
poverty by giving them vodka on credit…’ But ‘the wine industry was a
tempting source of income’ – both for the Polish landowners and for the
Jewish middlemen.
“It is natural that the civil gift received by the Jews could not fail to bring
with it a reverse threat: it was evident that the Jews had to submit to the
common rule, stop the wine trade in the villages and leave them. In 1783 it
was published that ‘”a direct rule obliges each citizen to determine his trade
and craft, a decent wage, and not wine distilling, as being an industry not
appropriate for him”, and if a landowner permits the distilling of vodka in the
village “to a merchant, a town-dweller or Jew”, then he will be considered a
1198 “In 1785 and again in 1795 (on the occasion of the Third Partition),” writes Vital, “the
principle that Jewish town-dwellers and merchants were entitled to treatment on an equal
footing with all other town-dwellers and merchants was authoritatively restated. Allowance
was made for Jews of the appropriate class to serve as electors to municipal office and to be
elected themselves. But precisely what social class or classes Jews should be permitted to
belong to was (and would remain) a vexed question. Clearly, they were not peasants
(krestyaniny). They were certainly not serfs (krepostnye). They were not of the gentry
(dvoryanstvo). They might be merchants (kuptsy), but membership of the guilds of merchants,
especially the higher guilds, was a costly affair and few Jews were of the requisite wealth and
standing to join them; and, in any event, such membership entailed rights to which the
‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ people (korennoe naselenie), namely the ethnic Russian (and of course
the Polish) merchants, objected. That left the class of town-dwellers (meshchantsvo); but the
fact was that the great majority of the Jews of Russia and Poland at this time were not town-
dwellers…” (Vital, op. cit., pp. 84-85). (V.M.)
695
breaker of the law’. And then: ‘they began to thrust the Jews out of the
villages and into the towns, so as to distract them from their age-old
pursuits… the leasing of wine distilleries and taverns’.
“It goes without saying that for the Jews the threat of being thrown out of
the villages looked, not like a State tidying-up measure, but like a special
measure against their national-confessional group. In being clearly deprived
of such a profitable industry in the villages, and being moved to the town, the
Jewish town-dwellers fell into a thick net of intra-municipal and intra-Jewish
competition. The Jews became very upset, and in 1784 a deputation from the
kahals to St. Petersburg to lobby for the rescinding of this measure. (At the
same time the kahals calculated: with the help of the government they would
get back the fullness of the power over the Jewish population that they had
lost.) But the reply in the name of the empress was: ‘Since the people of the
Jewish confession have already entered into a condition equal with others, it
behoves them in all cases to observe the rule established by Her Majesty that
everyone in accordance with his calling and condition should enjoy the
benefits and rights without distinction of confession or nation.’
“However, she had to take account of the concentrated strength of the

highly involved Polish landowners. Although in 1783 the administration of
the Belorussian region had forbidden them from farming out or leasing the
wine distilleries ‘to people who do not have the right to it, “especially the
Jews”,… the landowners continued to farm out the wine distilleries to the
Jews. This was their right’, the well-established heritage of age-old Polish
customs.
“And the Senate did not dare to compel the landowners. And in 1786 it
rescinded the transfer of the Jews to the towns. For this the following
compromise was worked out: let the Jews be considered as having been
moved to the towns, but retain their right to temporary absence in the
countryside. That is, let them remain in the village, wherever they lived. The
Senate’s decree of 1786 allowed the Jews to live in the villages, and ‘the
landowners were allowed to farm out the production and sale of spirits to the
Jews, while the Christian merchants and town-dwellers did not receive these
rights.’
“Moreover, the lobbying of the kahal delegation to St. Petersburg did not
remain completely without success. It did not obtain what it asked for, the
establishment of separate Jewish courts for all law-suits between Jews, but
(1786) the kahals were given back a significant part of the administrative
rights and oversight over the Jewish town-dwellers, that is, the majority of the
Jewish population: the apportionment not only of public duties, but also the
collection of the poll-tax, and once again the regulation of the right of absence
from the community. That meant that the government saw its own practical
interest in not weakening the power of the kahal.
696
“In general throughout Russia the whole of the mercantile-industrial estate
(merchants and town-dwellers) did not enjoy freedom of movement and was
tied to the place of its registration (so that by their departure they not lower
the capacity of pay of their municipal societies). But for Belorussia in 1782 the
Senate made an exception: the merchants could go from town to town ‘in
accordance with the convenience of their commerce’. This rule again gave the
advantage to the Jewish merchants.
“However, they began to use this right more broadly than it had been
defined: ‘the Jewish merchants began to be registered in Moscow and
Smolensk’. ‘The Jews began to settle in Moscow soon after the reunion of the
Belorussian region in 1772… At the end of the 18th century there was a
significant number of Jews in Moscow… Some Jews, having registered among
the local merchants, started to trade on a large scale… But other Jews sold
foreign goods in their flats or coaching inns, and also by delivering to houses,
which at that time was completely forbidden.’
“And in 1790 ‘the Moscow society of merchants made a judgement’ that in

Moscow there had appeared from abroad and from Belorussia ‘a very large
number of Jews’, some of whom had registered straight into the Moscow
merchants and were using forbidden methods of trading, by which they were
causing that trade ‘very significant harm and disturbance’, while the
cheapness of their goods indicated that they were contraband. Moreover, ‘the
Jews, as is well-known, clip coins; it is possible that they will do this also in
Moscow’. And in response to ‘their cunning schemes’ the Moscow merchants
demanded the removal of the Jewish merchants from Moscow. But the Jewish
merchants in their turn presented ‘a complaint… that they were no longer
being received among the Moscow and Smolensk merchants’.
“The ‘Council of the Empress’ reviewed the complaints. In accordance with

the unified Russian law it found that the Jews did not have the right ‘to be
registered into the Russian mercantile towns and ports’, but only in
Belorussia. They said that ‘“no benefit is foreseen” from allowing the Jews
into Moscow’. And in December, 1791 an imperial decree was issued ‘on not
allowing the Jews to be registered in the inner provinces’, while they could go
to Moscow ‘only for definite periods on business’. The Jews could enjoy the
rights of the merchants and town-dwellers in Belorussia. But Catherine added
a softener: the Jews were given the right to live and be registered as town-
dwellers also in newly-acquired New Russia – in the governor-generalship of
Yekaterinoslav and in the province of Tauris (soon this would be the
Yekaterinoslav, Tauris and Kherson provinces). That is, she opened to the
Jews new and extensive provinces into which Christian merchants and town-
dwellers, in accordance with the general rule, were not allowed to settle from
the inner provinces…
“The pre-revolutionary Jewish Encyclopaedia writes: by the decree of 1791 ‘a

beginning was made to the Pale of Settlement, although unintentionally.
Under the conditions of the general structure of society and the State at that
697
time, and of Jewish life in particular, the government could not have had in
mind to create for the Jews a special oppressive situation, or of introducing
exclusive laws for them, in the sense of limiting their rights of residence.
According to the circumstances of that time, this decree did not contain in
itself anything that could put the Jews in this respect in a less favourable
position by comparison with the Christians… The decree of 1791 did not
introduce any limitation in the rights of the Jews in respect of residence, it did
not create a special ‘pale’, and even ‘before the Jews were opened new
provinces into which according to the general rule it was not allowed to
move’; ‘the centre of gravity of the decree of 1791 did not lie in the fact that
they were Jews, but in the fact that they were trading people; the question
was viewed not from a national or religious point of view, but only from the
point of view of usefulness’.
“And so this decree of 1791, which was even advantageous for Jewish by
comparison with Christian merchants, with the years was turned into the
basis of the future ‘Pale of Settlement’, which lay like a dark shadow on the
existence of the Jews in Russia almost to the revolution itself…”1199
However, there was a last twist to Catherine’s Jewish policy. De Madariaga

writes: “With the second and third partitions of Poland, new areas with
substantial populations were annexed by Russia (the gubernii of Volynia and
Podolia in 1793, the gubernii of Vilna and Grodno in 1795). In general the
same civil and religious rights were extended to these Jews as in Belorussia.
But in 1794 Catherine inaugurated a major departure from previous Russian
policy. An ukaz of 23 June 1794 decreed that the Jewish population should
pay double the tax paid by the Christian members of the corresponding
estate. At the same time the area of authorized Jewish settlement was
widened to include the three guberniya of Little Russia (Kiev, Chernigov and
Novgorod Seversk).
“Various explanations of the decree of 1794 have been put forward. Did it
represent a beginning of government anti-semitism? Was it a purely revenue
raising measure during a financial crisis designed to offset Jewish exemption
from the recruit levy? Did it represent fear of the Jews as carriers of the
seditious ideas of the French Revolution? Or did it respond to the desire of the
government to move people from the more densely populated western
borders to the lightly settled southern lands acquired from the Porte at the
peace of Jassy? For those who emigrated escaped all taxation for a while, and
in the long run contributed to the development of one of the great cities of
Russian Jewry, Odessa…”1200
1199 Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., pp. 35-42.

698
The hypothesis of fear of the Jews as carriers of the seditious ideas of the
French Revolution is likely to be at least part of the explanation. For the role
of the Jews in that revolution was well known – they had been emancipated
just before the Terror began, and the link between Jewry and the revolution
became stronger and clearer throughout the following century. Therefore
once the decision had been taken – precisely in order to stop the spread of the
revolutionary contagion1201 - to annex Poland rather than simply control it, it
was inevitable that a stricter attitude would have to be taken to the Polish
Jews also.
And yet, as Bakhanov writes, “there were quite a few people in Russia who
did not consider the decision on endless territorial expansion as correct; but
nobody dared to contradict the will of Catherine II. Only one man was found
who cast doubt on the chosen expansionist course. He was the Tsarevich Paul.
In 1774 he presented a note to Catherine – ‘Meditations on the state in general,
on the number of soldiers required to defend it, and the defence of all its
borders’. The twenty-year-old young man actually formulated a military-state
doctrine that after his enthronement would become the basic principle of
imperial politics.
“Its essence boiled down to three important points. First, Russia should not
conduct offensive wars, but only defensive ones. Secondly, Russia should not
expand her borders and should reject territorial expansion. Thirdly, the army
should be cut down, but reorganized on the basis of strict reglamentation,
thanks to which it would be possible to obtain significant economies in state
expenditures.
“Catherine did not simply ignore the suggestions offered by her son, but
she angrily rejected them, considering them to be ‘the stupidity of a stupid
man’…”1202
And yet this supposedly stupid man was the rightful ruler of Russia, who,
when permitted to inherit the throne on his mother’s death, showed that he
was indeed wise, being the man chosen by Divine Providence to begin the
return of Russian statehood to true Autocracy…
1201 As De Madariaga writes, “with the passage of time the dangers of ‘Jacobinism’ became
ever clearer to the Russians. The ‘seed’ had struck such deep root that it was impossible for
governments, anxious to prevent the established order from being overturned by ‘absurd
equality and transient freedom’, to allow a Polish government to subsist. Past experience
showed that it was impossible to make friends of the Poles” (op. cit., p. 448).
1202 Bakhanov, op. cit., pp. 74-75.
699
84. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (4) THE CHURCH
Absolute monarch that she was, Catherine was no supporter of the

traditionally Orthodox “symphonic” model of Church-State relations. Thus
“[the Archbishop of Novgorod],” she wrote to Voltaire, “is neither a
persecutor nor a fanatic. He abhors the idea of the two powers”.1203And in her
correspondence with the Austrian Emperor Joseph II she called herself head
of the Greek Church.1204 Under Peter, the election of bishops had been as
follows: the Synod presented two candidates for the episcopacy of a vacant
see to the monarch, and he chose one of them. The newly elected bishop then
had to swear an oath that included recognizing the monarch as “supreme
Judge” of the Church. Catherine did not change this arrangement; and she
restricted the power of the bishops still further in that out of fear of
“fanaticism”, as Rusak writes, “cases dealing with religious blasphemies, the
violation of order in Divine services, and magic and superstition were
removed from the competence of the spiritual court…”1205
“The first over-procurator in the reign of Catherine II,” writes Vladimir

Rusak, “was Prince A. Kozlovsky, who was not particularly distinguished in
anything, but under whom the secularization of the Church lands took place.
“His two successors, according to the definition of Kartashev, were

‘bearers of the most modern, anti-clerical, enlightenment ideology’. In 1765
there followed the appointment of I. Melissino [a “deeply anti-clerical
Mason”1206] as over-procurator. His world-view was very vividly reflected in
his ‘Points’ – a project for an order to the Synod. Among others were the
following points:
“3)… to weaken and shorten the fasts…
“5)… to purify the Church from superstitions and ‘artificial’ miracles and
superstitions concerning relics and icons: for the study of this problem, to
appoint a special commission from various unblended-by-prejudices people;
“7) to remove something from the long Church rites; so as to avoid pagan
much speaking in prayer, to remove the multitude of verses, canons, troparia,
etc., that have been composed in recent times, to remove many unnecessary
feast days, and to appoint short prayer-services with useful instructions to the
people instead of Vespers and All-Night Vigils…
“10) to allow the clergy to wear more fitting clothing;

1204 She once said to Countess Dashkova: “Also strike out ‘as a beneficent Deity’ - this
apotheosis does not agree with the Christian religion, and, I fear, I have no right to sanctity
insofar as I have laid certain restrictions on the Church’s property” (Fomin & Fomina, op. cit.,
vol. I, p. 299).
1205 Rusak, op. cit., p. 276. Cf. Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 100, 101.
1206
De Madariaga, op. cit., p. 119.
700
“11) would it not be more rational completely to remove the habit of
commemorating the dead (such a habit only provides the clergy with an extra
excuse for various kinds of extortions)…
“In other points married bishops, making divorces easier, etc., were
suggested.
“As successor to Melessino there was appointed Chebyshev, a Mason, who

openly proclaimed his atheism. He forbade the printing of works in which the
existence of God was demonstrated. ‘There is no God!’ he said aloud more
than once. Besides, he was suspected, and not without reason, of spending
large sums of Synodal money.
“In 1774 he was sacked. In his place was appointed the pious S. Akchurin,
then A. Naumov. Both of them established good relations with the members
of the Synod. The last over-procurator in the reign of Catherine II was the
active Count A. Musin-Pushkin, the well-known archaeologist, a member of
the Academy of Sciences, who later revealed the “Word on Igor’s Regiment’.
He took into his hands the whole of the Synodal Chancellery. Being a Church
person, he did not hinder the members of the Synod from making personal
reports to the empress and receiving orders directly from her.”1207
The best hierarchs of the time were inhibited from attending Synodal
sessions by the impiety of most of the over-procurators. Thus Metropolitan
Platon of Moscow protested “on seeing that the over-procurators in the Synod
(Melessino and Chebyshev) were penetrated with the spirit of freethinking,
and that the opinions of the members of the Synod were paralyzed by the
influence of the then all-powerful in church matters spiritual father of the
empress, Protopriest Ioann Pamphilov”.1208 Few were those who, in this nadir
of Russian spirituality, had the courage to expose the vices of Russian society
while proposing solutions in the spirit of a truly Orthodox piety.
One of the few was St. Tikhon, Bishop of Zadonsk. He both rebuked tsars
and nobles for their profligate lives and injustice to their serfs, and criticized
the western education they were giving their children: “God will not ask you
whether you taught your children French, German or Italian or the politics of
society life – but you will not escape Divine reprobation for not having
instilled goodness into them. I speak plainly but I tell the truth: if your
children are bad, your grandchildren will be worse… and the evil will thus
increase… and the root of all this is our thoroughly bad education…”1209
Another righteous one was Metropolitan Arsenius (Matseyevich) of

Rostov, a firm believer in the independence of the Church who rejected
1207 Rusak, op. cit., pp. 275-276.

1209 St. Tikhon, in Nadejda Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, London: S.P.C.K., 1976, p. 127.
701
Catherine’s expropriation of the monasteries in 1763-1764, saying that the
decline of monasticism in Russia might in the end lead “to atheism”. He also
refused to swear an oath of allegiance to her as “Supreme Judge” of the
Church. He had refused to do this also in the reign of Elizabeth; and she, a
true believer, had not punished him for this. But Catherine was different: she
had him defrocked and exiled to the Therapontov monastery, where Patriarch
Nicon had once been kept. But since he continued to write letters against
secularization, he was deprived of monasticism and under the name of
“Andrew the Liar” was incarcerated for life in the prison of the castle in Revel
(Tallinn). There he died in 1772, after accurately prophesying the fates of
those bishops who had acquiesced in his unjust sentence.1210
With Arseny in prison, the other hierarchs meekly submitted to Catherine

expropriating ecclesiastical lands. Already between 1762 and 1764 the number
of monasteries was reduced from 1072 to 452, and of monastics – from 12,444
to 5105! In exchange, the Church was put on the State’s payroll. Thus,
according to De Madariaga, “the total income made available to the state from
Church lands amounted to some 1,366,299 r.p.a. From this sum, the state paid
to the Church about 462,868 r.p.a. in the years 1764-8. Over the years, state
income from the church peasants rose steadily, reaching 3,648,000 r. in 1784.
The state grant to the Church also rose to 540,000 r.p.a in 1782, 710,000 in 1792
and 820,000 in 1796. A further 115,000 r.p.a. was allotted to the almshouses for
retired officers and soldiers and funds were made available to seminaries. The
state thus made a very good bargain at the expense of the Church…”1211
With the hierarchs in paralysis, it is not surprising that in the eighteenth

century the lower clergy were in a still more humiliating condition, and were
even subjected to physical violence by governors and landowners. As De
Madariaga writes: “The relationship of the local authorities with the clerical
estate was complex and the extent of their jurisdiction limited. In principle
members of the clerical estate came under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical
authorities but in practice much depended on ran: whereas a church
dignitary, or an abbot, would be respected by governors and voyevodas, the
local village priest or local church servants were often arrested with impunity,
particularly if there was any suspicion of connivance with peasant disorders.
But the Church authorities called on the civil authorities for legal support in
such important matters as combatting heresy and sacrilege, preventing
proselytizing activities of other faiths and the conversion of infidels to
Orthodoxy. This task was particularly important in those guberniyi
[provinces] containing large Tartar populations, e.g. Kazan’. The civil
1210 Lebedev, op. cit., p. 221. Metropolitan Arsenius has recently been canonized by the
Moscow Patriarchate. While he was still alive Archimandrite Theophylact of the Novotorzhsk
Borisoglebsk monastery said that St. Demetrius of Rostov had appeared to a certain deacon in
a dream and said to him: ”Do you know that you have a God-pleaser who is incomparably
greater than I still living on earth – his Eminence Metropolitan Arseny.” For this story the
Senate decreed: “to defrock Theophylact, deprive him of his monasticism and exile him to
Irkutsk monastery”.
1211
702
authorities dealt with the Old Believers, and it was their function to attempt
to prevent the acts of collective self-immolation by fire which occasionally
occurred among the more extreme groups. In addition the civil authorities,
both at the request of the ecclesiastical authorities and on their own initiative,
prosecuted those of all classes who failed to attend confession and
communion, and to appear regularly at church, those guilty of adultery and
evil living, etc.”1212
“The secularization of church lands, and the ensuing legislation, affected

the parish priest in a number of ways. To begin with, in the 1760s a number of
taxes on the priests were abolished now that the bishops had a fixed income.
But the income of the urban or rural parish priest still remained low and
insecure… The death of a wife could be a fatal blow, since widowers were not
allowed to officiate, nor could they remarry. The position of a priest too old to
fulfill his duties and of the dependents of a deceased priest remained very
difficult unless a relative could be speedily inducted…”1213
As Lebedev writes, “the age-old Russian home and church schools for
children were forbidden as not being scientific and aiding superstition. The
local authorities were ordered ‘from the highest levels’ to introduce ‘correct’
schools with good teaching. But at that time for a series of reasons they were
not able to do this, while the schools of the old ‘amateur’ type disappeared
both in the cities and in the countryside. And it turned out that ‘the
enlightened age of Catherine’ laid a beginning to the wide spreading of
illiteracy and ignorance in the masses of the Great Russian people, both in the
lower classes of the city population and even more in the country. In the
cities… schools and gymnasia were built mainly for the higher classes. It was
at that time that lycea for men and the women’s Smolny institute appeared…
There they studied the secular sciences thoroughly, but it was necessary to
teach something spiritual there as well! The imperial power understood that it
was impossible not to teach religion. But in the interests of the authorities the
Orthodox Faith and Church and Orthodox education were used as a means to
educating the ‘new breed’ of noble (above all noble) fathers and mothers in
the spirit of devotion to the authorities, a definite ‘morality’ and the
honourable fulfillment of duty. But in ‘society’ at that time the Law of God
was considered to be a purely ‘priestly’ subject. It was ordered that ‘children
should not be infected with superstition and fanaticism’, that is, they were not
to speak to them about the Old Testament punishments of God or about
miracles and the Terrible Judgement (!), but they were to instill in them
primarily ‘the rules of morality’, ‘natural (?!) religion and ‘the importance of
religious tolerance’. We shall see later what kind of ‘new breed’ of people
were the products of this kind of ‘Law of God’…”1214

1213
1214
Lebedev, op. cit., p. 260.
703
85. CATHERINE THE GREAT: (5) THE REVOLUTION
Seeing the increasing alienation of their sovereigns from traditional

Orthodoxy, sections of the simple people took action to liberate, as they saw
it, the Russian tsardom from foreign and heterodox influence.
Thus the rebellion of Pugachev in 1774, while superficially a rebellion for

the sake of freedom, and the rights of Cossacks and other minorities, was the
very opposite of a democratic rebellion in the western style. For Pugachev did
not seek to destroy the institution of the tsardom: on the contrary, he
proclaimed himself to be Tsar Peter III, the husband of the Empress
Catherine. He was claiming to be the real Tsar, who would restore the real
Orthodox traditions of pre-Petrine Russia – by which he meant Old Ritualism.
For he was “blessed for the kingdom” by the Old Ritualist “elder” Philaret,
whom he in turn promised would become “patriarch” when he conquered
Moscow…
As we have seen, a false legitimism, as opposed to liberalism, was also

characteristic of the popular rebellions in the Time of Troubles. K.N. Leontiev
considered it to be characteristic also of Stenka Razin’s rebellion in 1671, and
saw this legitimism as another proof of how deeply the Great Russian people
was penetrated by the Byzantine spirit: “Almost all of our major rebellions
have never had a Protestant or liberal-democratic character, but have borne
upon themselves the idiosyncratic seal of false-legitimism, that is, of that
native and religious monarchist principle, which created the whole greatness
of our State.
“The rebellion of Stenka Razin failed immediately people became

convinced that the tsar did not agree with their ataman. Moreover, Razin
constantly tried to show that he was fighting, not against royal blood, but
only against the boyars and the clergy who agreed with them.
“Pugachev was cleverer in fighting against the government of Catherine,

whose strength was incomparably greater than the strength of pre-Petrine
Rus'. He deceived the people, he used that legitimism of the Great Russian
people of which I have been speaking."1215
“The slogan of Pugachev’s movement,” writes Ivanov, “was The Freedom

of the Orthodox Faith. In his manifestos Pugachev bestowed ‘the cross and
the beard’ on the Old Ritualists. He promised that in his new kingdom, after
Petersburg had been destroyed, everyone would ‘hold the old faith, the
shaving of beards will be strictly forbidden, as well as the wearing of German
clothes.’ The present churches, went the rumour, would be razed, seven-
domed ones would be built, the sign of the cross would be made, not with
three fingers, but with two. In Pugachev the people saw the longed-for lawful
1215 Leontiev, “Vizantinizm i Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism”), in Vostok, Rossia i
Slavianstvo (The East, Russia and Slavism), Moscow: “Respublika”, 1996, p. 105.
704
tsar. It was in this that the power of Pugachev’s movement consisted. There is
no doubt that economic reasons played a significant role in this movement.
The dominance of foreigners and Russian rubbish under Peter I and of the
Masonic oligarchy under his successors had created fertile soil for popular
discontent. The Masonic oligarchy acted in its own egoistic interests,
despising the needs and interests of the people.”1216
However, the Church and most of the people still recognized Catherine as
the lawful anointed sovereign, and the hierarchs of the Church publicly called
on the people to reject the pretender. As a result, “it is not surprising that
Pugachev dealt cruelly with the clergy. From their midst he created at this
time no fewer than 237 martyrs for faithfulness to the throne.”1217
The main reason why the main mass of the people and the clergy rejected
Pugachev was that the eighteenth-century sovereigns, while being despotic in
their administration and non-Russian in their culture, never formally
renounced the Orthodox faith, and even defended it at times. Thus “Peter I,”
writes Dobroklonsky, “who allowed himself a relaxed attitude towards the
institutions of the Church, and even clowning parodies of sacred actions,
nevertheless considered it necessary to restrain others. There was a case when
he beat Tatischev with a rod for having permitted himself some liberty in
relation to church traditions, adding: ‘Don’t lead believing souls astray, don’t
introduce free-thinking, which is harmful for the public well-being; I did not
teach you to be an enemy of society and the Church.’ On another occasion he
subjected Prince Khovansky and some young princes and courtiers to cruel
physical punishments for having performed a blasphemous rite of burial on a
guest who was drunk to the point of unconsciousness and mocked church
vessels. While breaking the fast himself, Peter I, so as not to lead others astray,
asked for a dispensation for himself from the patriarch. Anna Ioannovna, the
former duchess of Courland, who was surrounded by Germans, nevertheless
paid her dues of veneration for the institutions of the Orthodox Church; every
day she attended Divine services, zealously built and adorned churches, and
even went on pilgrimages. Elizabeth Petrovna was a model of sincere piety:
she gave generous alms for the upkeep of churches, the adornment of icons
and shrines both with money and with the work of her own hand: in her
beloved Alexandrovsk sloboda she was present at Divine services every day,
rode or went on foot on pilgrimages to monasteries, observed the fast in strict
abstinence and withdrawal, even renouncing official audiences. There is a
tradition that before her death she had the intention of becoming tonsured as
a nun. Even Catherine II, in spite of the fact that she was a fan of the
fashionable French philosophy, considered it necessary to carry out the
demands of piety: on feastdays she was without fail present at Divine
services; she venerated the clergy and kissed the hands of priests…”1218
1216 Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 182-183.

1218 Dobroklonsky, op cit., pp. 717-718.
705
Moreover, the eighteenth-century sovereigns undoubtedly served the ends
of Divine Providence in other important ways. Thus it was under Peter I, and
with his active support, that the Russian Spiritual Mission in Beijing was
established. 1219 Again, it was towards the end of the eighteenth century that
the Russian mission to Alaska began. And it was under Catherine especially
that the age-old persecutor of Russian Orthodoxy, Poland, was humbled,
literally disappearing from the map of Europe, while Ottoman Turkey was
driven from the north shore of the Black Sea, thus enabling the fertile lands of
southern Russia to be colonized and exploited. These important military
triumphs, which were essential for the survival of the Orthodox Empire into
the next century (although they created their own problems, as we shall see),
would have been impossible, given Russia’s lack of economic development,
without a very authoritarian power at the helm.
The eighteenth-century rulers of Russia can be seen both as forerunners of

the Antichrist, insofar as they undermined the traditional Orthodox way of
life in Russia, and as restrainers of the Antichrist, one of the chief functions of
the Roman emperor in Orthodox eschatological thought, in that they built up
a mighty state that was able to defend what was left of the Orthodox way of
life in the next century while spreading that way of life by missionary means
to other peoples. Thus they made possible both the glorious victory of 1812
over the French Antichrist, and the catastrophic surrender of 1917 to the
Soviet Antichrist. And so it was in the eighteenth century that Russia finally
emerged on the world stage as the universalist empire of the Third Rome, the
heir of the Second, New Rome of Byzantium – only to fall, in the twentieth
century, to the pagan spirit of the First Rome that these same eighteenth-
century rulers had re-implanted in her.
In the nineteenth century it was remarked, with some justice, that the
Orthodox Church since Catherine had been “in paralysis”. However, a better
metaphor might be “kept from falling by a straitjacket”. For it must be
remembered that at this low point in Russia’s spiritual progress, a rigid
straitjacket or encasing may well have been necessary.
Thus with regard to religion, as the historian Mikhail Pogodin commented,

“if the ban on apostasy had been lifted, half the Russian peasants would have
joined the raskol [Old Ritualists], while half the aristocrats would have
converted to Catholicism.”1220 And if this remark is clearly an exaggeration, it
nevertheless contains this kernel of truth: that the greater initiative and
responsibility given to the Church and people in a true Orthodox autocracy
with a real symphony of powers would have been too great a burden for the
Russian Church and people to sustain at this time. They were simply not
prepared for it.
1219 Dr. Jeremias Norman, “The Orthodox Mission to the Chinese”, Orthodox Tradition, vol.
XVIII, N 1, 2001, pp. 29-35.

1220 Pogodin, in Hosking, op. cit., p. 237.
706
For sometimes the body needs to regain its strength before the soul can
begin the process of regeneration. A broken limb needs to be strapped in a
rigid encasing of plaster of Paris until the break has healed, the plaster can be
removed and the restored limb is strong enough to step out without any
support. In the same say, the straitjacket of "Orthodox absolutism” on the
Church, contrary to the Orthodox ideal though it was, was perhaps necessary
until the double fracture in Russian society caused by Petrine westernism and
the Old Ritualist schism could be healed…1221
De Madriaga notes that Catherine, “set herself the task of continuing [Peter
the Great’s] policies but by diametrically opposite means. Thus where Peter
indiscriminately imported the form and the substance of European thought
and customs, Catherine neglected the form and went for the substance. Where
Peter denigrated Russia in the interests of westernization, Catherine, the
foreigner, extolled the native virtues of Russia and Russians, and imbued
them with a high sense of their equality with, if not their superiority over,
Western Europe. Where Peter used terror, Catherine used persuasion.”1222
Indeed, it was in her softening of the excessively harsh life and attitudes of
Peter’s reign by what she saw as the best products of western thought and
practice that she earned the title of an “enlightened despot” together with her
contemporaries Frederick of Prussia and Joseph of Austria. Of course,
however “enlightened” she may have been, she remained a despot, retaining
an iron fist within her feminine velvet glove. And one of the main criticisms
of her reign was that while not surrendering any of her own power as despot,
she did not radically change the despotism wielded by the nobles over the
serfs, and even extended the serfdom system into the Ukraine. However, she
tried hard to alleviate the lot of the serfs, whose life, though hard, was
probably no harder than that of the English peasants and easier than that of
the French.1223 She truly abhorred torture, and even managed to see that the
greatest rebel of her reign, Pugachev, was executed before he could be
tortured.1224
Moreover, as De Madariaga points out, there were strong reasons why she
did not meddle with the basic hierarchical structure of society. “Thus it was
not fear of the nobility which prevented Catherine from intervening
decisively in the vexed field of serfdom. It was rather the conviction,
particularly deeply rammed home by the Pugachev revolt, that the time was
not yet ripe to tackle a problem so closely linked with public order, finance
and military strength. Russia was not yet rich enough, nor well-governed
enough, there was indeed not enough government throughout the country, to
1221 “Before the Pugachev revolt the Old Believers seemed to present no political threat to
[Catherine] and she took steps to stop persecution and renewed the offer [made by Peter] of
amnesty to all who returned from abroad. In 1769 the right to give evidence in court was
restored to them” (De Madariaga, op. cit., p. 122).
1222
1223
De Madariaga, op. cit., ch. 35.
707
enable it to cope with the massive social upheaval implicit in a change in the
status of the serfs… Yet where Catherine could narrow down the range of
those entitled to own serfs, reduce the ways by which people were enserfed,
and increase the security of those who had been freed, she did so. The
empress’s remark to the Baltic official, Dahl, comes to mind: ‘Wherever you
touch [the peasant question], it does not yield.’”1225
It did not yield, above all, because the nobility would not yield; and since
the nobility provided the whole of the administration of the country, as well
as all the military officers, she could not afford, and would not have been able
to, change the system – Catherine’s reign was indeed the heyday of the
Russian nobility.
But the nobility was changing… It could not failed to be touched by the
western ideas which were now penetrating the country in many ways and –
until the very last years of Catherine’s reign – in relatively uncensored forms.
One of the most important channels of westernization was Freemasonry. In
Catherine’s reign there were about 2500 Masons in about 100 lodges in St.
Petersburg, Moscow and some provincial towns.1226 “By the middle of the
1780s,” writes Dobroklonsky, Masonry “had even penetrated as far as
Tobolsk and Irkutsk; Masonic lodges existed in all the more or less important
towns. Many of those who were not satisfied by the fashionable scepticism of
French philosophy or, after being drawn by it, became disillusioned by it,
sought satisfaction for their heart and mind in Masonry”.1227
Fr. Georges Florovsky writes: “The freemasons of Catherine’s reign

maintained an ambivalent relationship with the Church. In any event, the
formal piety of freemasonry was not openly disruptive. Many freemasons
fulfilled all church ‘obligations’ and rituals. Others emphatically insisted on
the complete immutability and sacredness of the rites and orders ‘particularly
of the Greek religion’. However, the Orthodox service, with its wealth and
plasticity of images and symbols, greatly attracted them. Freemasons highly
valued Orthodoxy’s tradition of symbols whose roots reach back deeply into
classical antiquity. But every symbol was for them only a transparent sign or
guidepost. One must ascend to that which is being signified, that is, from the
visible to the invisible, from ‘historical’ Christianity to spiritual or ‘true’
Christianity, from the outer church to the ‘inner’ church. The freemasons
considered their Order to be the ‘inner’ church, containing its own rites and
‘sacraments’. This is once again the Alexandrian [Gnostic] dream of an
esoteric circle of chosen ones who are dedicated to preserving sacred
traditions: a truth revealed only to a few chosen for extraordinary
illumination.”1228
1225
1226 Riasanovsky, op. cit.
1228 Florovsky, op. cit., pp. 155-156.
708
“Who became freemasons?” asks Janet Hartley. “The Russian historian
Vernadsky estimated that in 1777 4 of the 11-member Council of State, 11 of
the 31 gentlemen of the bedchamber, 2 of the 5 senators of the first
department of the Senate, 2 of the 5 members of the College of Foreign Affairs
and the vice-president of the Admiralty College were masons (there were
none known at this date in the War College). A large number of the noble
deputies in the Legislative Commission were masons. Members of the high
aristocracy and prominent figures at court were attracted to freemasonry,
including the Repnins, Trubetskois, Vorontsovs and Panins. Special lodges
attracted army officers (like the Mars lodge, founded at Iasi in Bessarabia in
1774) and naval officers (like the Neptune lodge, founded in 1781 in
Kronstadt). There were masons amongst the governors of provinces
established after 1775 (including A.P. Mel’gunov in Yaroslavl’ and J.E. Sievers
in Tver’), and amongst senior officials in central and provincial institutions.
Almost all Russian poets, playwrights, authors and academics were masons.
Other lodges had a predominantly foreign membership, which included
academics, members of professions, bankers and merchants….
“Catherine II had little sympathy for the mystical elements of freemasonry

and their educational work and feared that lodges could become venues for
conspiracies against the throne. In the 1790s, at a time of international tension
following the French Revolution, Catherine became more suspicious of
freemasonry, following rumours that Grand Duke Paul… was being induced
to join a Moscow lodge. In 1792 (shortly after the assassination of Gustavus III
of Sweden), [the publisher N.I.] Novikov’s house was searched and Masonic
books were found which had been banned as harmful in 1786. Novikov was
arrested and sentenced, without any formal trial, to fifteen years
imprisonment, though he was freed when Paul came to the throne in 1796. In
1794, Catherine ordered the closure of all lodges.”1229
Catherine was not wrong to suspect the Masons. Already in 1781, in

Frankfurt, the Illuminati “had decided to create in Russia two capitularies ‘of
the theoretical degree’ under the general direction of Schwartz. One of the
capitularies was ruled by Tatischev, and the other by Prince Trubetskoj. At a
convention of the Mason-Illuminati in 1782 Russia was declared to be ‘the
Eighth Province of the Strict Observance’. It was here that the Masons swore
to murder Louis XVI and his wife and the Swedish King Gustavus III, which
sentences were later carried out. In those 80s of the 18th century Masonry
decreed that it should strive to destroy the monarchy and the Church,
beginning with France and continuing with Russia. But openly, ‘for the
public’, and those accepted into the lower degrees, the Masons said that they
were striving to end enmity between people and nations because of religious
and national quarrels, that they believed in God, that they carried out
charitable work and wanted to educate humanity in the principles of morality
1229 Hartley, op. cit., pp. 233-235. “I made a mistake,” said Catherine, “let us close our high-
brow books and get down to our ABC” (in Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 662).
709
and goodness, that they were faithful citizens of their countries and
kings…”1230
However, Russia did not follow the path of France at this time because
eighteenth-century Russian Masonry, unlike its contemporary French
counterpart, was not very radical in its politics. Thus Novikov, according to
Pipes, must be classified as “a political conservative because of his
determination to work ‘within the system’, as one would put it today. A
freemason and a follower of Saint-Martin, he thought all evil stemmed from
man’s corruption, not from institutions under which he lived. He mercilessly
exposed ‘vice’ and promoted with such enthusiasm useful knowledge
because of the conviction that only by improving man could one improve
mankind. He never questioned the autocratic form of government or even
serfdom. This stress on man rather than the environment became a hallmark
of Russian conservatism.”1231
Another conservative Mason was Prince Michael Shcherbatov, who

represented the extreme right wing of the aristocratic opposition to Catherine.
He was a monarchist who believed in the close alliance of tsar and aristocrats,
and opposed all concessions to the peasantry or the merchants. He believed
that Russia’s traditional autocracy had been replaced by despotism under
Peter, who treated the aristocrats brutally and opened the way for widespread
“voluptuousness” in Russian life.
If Shcherbatov represented a nobleman pining nostalgically for the non-

despotic orderliness of pre-Petrine Russia, Count Nikita Panin and Alexander
Radishchev represented a more radical, forward-looking element in the
aristocracy. Panin and his brother had already, as we have seen, taken part in
the coup against Peter III which brought Catherine to the throne. But when
Catherine refused to adopt Nikita’s plan for a reduction in the powers of the
autocrat and an extension of the powers of the aristocratic Senate, they plotted
to overthrow her, too. Their plot was discovered; but Catherine pardoned
them… Nothing daunted, Nikita wrote a Discourse on the Disappearance in
Russia of All Forms of Government, intended for his pupil, Crown Prince Paul,
in which he declared: “Where the arbitrary rule of one man is the highest law,
there can be no lasting or unifying bonds; there is a state, but no fatherland;
there are subjects, but no citizens; there is no body politic whose members are
linked to each other by a network of duties and privileges.”1232
With Alexander Radishchev, we come to the first real intelligent in the

nineteenth-century understanding of the word – that is, an intellectual openly
criticizing the autocracy from a liberal, westernizing point of view. His
Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), writes Pipes, “exposed the
seamier sides of Russian provincial life… [He] drank deeply at the source of

1231 Pipes, op. cit., p. 258.
1232 Walicki, op. cit., p. 33.
710
the French Enlightenment, showing a marked preference for its more extreme
materialist wing (Helvétius and d’Holbach).”1233
“Modelled in outward form on Sterne’s Sentimental Journey,” writes De

Madariaga, “Radishchev’s book expresses in the language of sensibility a
passionate critique of the evils man inflicts on man, including serfdom, and
an equally passionate belief in the ability of man to find within himself the
means – truth, justice – to achieve reform. In episodes arising at each staging
post he describes the inhumanity of the recruit levy, the abuse of serf labour,
the defenceless state of serf women belonging to lecherous landlords, the
verdicts of corrupt judges and the sufferings of honest ones. He uses the
technique of the ‘bundle of papers found by accident’ to produce a plan for
the emancipation of the serfs, preceded by a devastating indictment of slavery
in general and Russian serfdom in particular. He issued the warning: ‘Do you
now know… what destruction threatens us and in what peril we stand?’ And
he went on to stress that the serfs, driven desperate by oppression, and with
no glimmer of hope for the future, were merely waiting their chance to revolt.
Then ‘the destructive force of bestiality’ would break loose, ‘round about us
we shall see sword and prison. Death and fiery desolation will be the meed
for our harshness and inhumanity.’ Radishchev openly referred to the horrors
of the Pugachev revolt, in which the serfs ‘had spared neither sex nor age’ and
‘had sought more the joy of vengeance than the benefit of broken shackles’.
The danger was mounting, he warned, and the serfs would respond to the
appeal of the first demagogue… Realizing that ‘the supreme power was not
strong enough to cope with a sudden change of opinions’, Radishchev
proposed a gradual emancipation of the serfs. All domestic serfdom should
be abolished at once, but peasants should first be granted full ownership of
their private plots and then be allowed to buy their freedom for a fixed sum.
Other targets of Radishchev’s criticism were ranks awarded merely for court
service, and censorship, even of pornography: let venal girls be censored, but
not the productions of the mind, however dissolute, since no book has ever
infected one with venereal disease.
“Radishchev submitted his book anonymously to the chief of police of St.

Petersburg in charge of censorship, who took it, after a cursory glance, to be
no more than a travelogue à la Sterne, approved it, and returned it to the
customs office, whence it had been submitted. Radischev took the
opportunity to add a few more passages, including a reference to the French
Revolution, before printing and distributing it.
“Catherine read the ‘Journey’ in June 1790, when she was already
beginning to exercise a secret quarantine against possible French contagion. In
April 1790, orders had been issued to guard against the machinations of a
club set up in Paris to organize foreign propaganda. The police were told to
keep a discreet watch on its possible activities in Russia and to forbid all
secret meetings and conventicles of Masonic lodges and other such ‘concealed
1233 Pipes, op. cit., p. 258.
711
and absurd gatherings’. Catherine’s views on Radishchev’s ‘Journey’ can be
followed in her secretary’s diary and above all in her own marginal notes on
her copy of the book.
“The empress commented adversely on Radishchev’s criticism of

landowners and on his emotional portrayal of the condition of the serfs,
which she utterly rejected since, in common with many Russians, including
e.g. Fonvizin, she sincerely believed that ‘the Russian peasants under good
masters were better off than anywhere in the world’. She secretly noted
Radishchev’s proposals for emancipation, but was outraged by his warning of
the impending revenge of the serfs. She saw in him a man worse than
Pugachev (whom Radishchev had condemned), inciting the peasants to
bloody rebellion. Not only peasants, but the people in general were being
roused to disregard the authority of rulers, tsars, emperors, magnates and
officials, noted Catherine, and Radishchev was comparing himself to Franklin
as ‘the inciter to rebellion’. Here Catherine detected the ‘French poison’ with
which Radishchev was infected and which manifested itself even more clearly
in several stanzas of an Ode to Liberty which he had included in the
‘Journey’. The poem was originally written in 1781-3, with reference to the
American Revolution, and contained lengthy tirades against the despotism of
priests and kings. Radishchev calls on the spirits of Brutus and William Tell,
and praises Cromwell by whom the ‘king was brought to the block’. But
Cromwell also incurs the writer’s condemnation for having seized power
from Charles I, and destroyed the freedom of England. On the well-known
allegorical scene of the dream, in which a blind ruler is portrayed sitting in
glory, surrounded by sycophantic courtiers, and is suddenly enabled to see by
the pilgrim Truth the dreadful reality, the poverty and corruption, the horrors
of war, where the commander-in-chief, instead of fighting, ‘wallows in luxury
and pleasure’, Catherine merely remarked: ‘The author is maliciously
inclined.’ It was not therefore this particularly savage denunciation of her
own government and of Potemkin which aroused her anger, it was the effort
to introduce French revolutionary principles into Russia: the violent
overthrow of established authority and of the social order.
“It did not take long for Catherine to identify the author, and Radishchev
was soon arrested and taken to the Peter and Paul fortress. He was
interrogated at length by Sheshkovsky (head of the Secret Expedition of the
Senate) who based many of his questions on Catherine’s marginal notes.
Radishchev was not, according to all the available evidence, subjected to any
physical duress let alone any form of torture, though incarceration in the grim
fort was in itself a terrifying enough experience.
“Radishchev’s answers and admissions suggest that his arrest aroused him
out of a dream world into the world of reality; he woke up to the unwisdom
of the manner in which he had expressed himself, particularly in the heated
atmosphere of the 1790s. He declared that his main object had been the
winning of literary acclaim. He denied any intention of attacking the present
Russian form of government, and the Statute of 1775 in particular; he
712
intended only to point to certain practical shortcomings, as reported by public
opinion. He had not intended to arouse peasants against landowners; he had
only wished to force bad landowners to be ashamed of their cruelty. He
admitted that he hoped for the freedom of the serfs, but by means of legislate
action such as that already undertaken by the empress, when she had banned
the sale of serfs or the assignation of state peasants to industrial enterprises,
or when she had regulated the treatment of industrial serfs, or forbidden the
corporal punishment of soldiers without a court martial.
“Without thus going back on the substance of what he had written,

Radishchev, aware of the possible consequences to his family, did his best to
minimize its consequences by admitting that his language had been
exaggerated and insulting, and his accusations against government officials
wild. He threw himself on Catherine’s mercy. But in spite of his appeals, he
was tried by the St. Petersburg criminal court on charges of sedition and lèse
majesté, and sentenced to death on 24 July 1790, a sentence which had to be
passed to the Senate and the empress for confirmation. The Senate, as might
be expected, confirmed the verdict on 8 August. Not until 4 September was
Radishchev put out of his misery, on hearing that Catherine had commuted
the death penalty, on the occasion of the peace with Sweden, to the loss of his
status as a noble, and ten years’ exile in Ilimsk, a remote fort in Siberia.
Roughly dragged away in chains almost at once, Radishchev’s lot was much
alleviated thanks to A.R. Vorontsov. When he informed Catherine that the
condemned man was in irons, she ordered them to be removed at once; and
Vorontsov gave Radishchev a total of 500 rubles to equip him with adequate
clothing and supplies. He was allowed to break his journey several times – he
took sixteen months to reach Ilimsk – and Vorontsov gave him an annual
allowance of 500, then 800, then 1000 rubles during his exile…”1234
We have dwelt at length on Radishchev because he represents the first

truly modern, westernised Russian. His thought, his relationship with the
autocracy, and even the relative gentleness of his exile in Siberia, were to be
repeated many times in the nineteenth century intelligentsia – from the
Decembrists to Dostoyevsky to Lenin… He was the forerunner of the
revolutionaries, and the Journey has been called “the first trial balloon of
revolutionary propaganda in Russia.”1235 The ideas of duty, of self-sacrifice, of
God and immortality play no part in Radishchev’s thought. Nothing of the
sacred, of the veneration due to that which is established by God, remains.
Only: “The sovereign is the first citizen of the people’s commonwealth”, and:
“Wherever being a citizen is not to his advantage, he is not a citizen.” Such
ideas lead logically to the self-annihilation of society. In his personal case,
they led to suicide…
De Madariaga, op. cit., pp. 542-545.

1234
1235Olga Eliseeva, “Puteshestvie iz Peterburga v Sibir’” (“Journey from Petersburg to
Siberia”), Rodina (Homeland), N 3, 2004, p. 48.
713
“There are grounds for assuming,” writes Walicki, “that this act was not
the result of a temporary fit of depression. Suicide had never been far from his
thoughts. In the Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow he wrote: ‘If outrageous
fortune hurl upon you all its slings and arrows, if there is no refuge left on
earth for your virtue, if, driven to extremes, you find no sanctuary from
oppression, then remember this: you are a man, call to mind your greatness
and seize the crown of bliss which they are trying to take from you. Die.”1236
Radischev clearly exemplifies the bitter fruits of the westernizing reforms

of Peter the Great and his successors. It was this mad, proud striving for
mastery of one’s life, without acknowledgement of the Master, God, that was
to lead much of Europe to a kind of collective suicide in the next age. And its
appearance in Orthodox Russia, leading to the shackling and poisoning of the
only source of all true spiritual life, the Orthodox Church, was the result, in
large part, of the westernism of Peter I and Catherine II…
And yet, as so often in history, we see that the seeds of revival were being
sown in this, the nadir of Russian spiritual history. For it was in the reign of
Catherine that St. Paisius Velichkovsky was laying the foundation for the
revival of Russian monasticism in the nineteenth century that would produce
such beautiful fruits as the elders of Optina. And it was in her reign that a
young man called Seraphim entered the monastery of Sarov and from there
began his ascent to the summit of spiritual perfection… For history remains
the domain, not only of psychological, sociological, political and economic
laws, but also of that which is in principle unpredictable - the free will of man
and the grace of God…
And so, on the one hand, the results of the transformation of the Russian
State in the eighteenth century from an autocracy into an absolutist state were
spiritually disastrous (even if they had some good results in the secular
realm). And on the other hand, while groaning beneath this western yoke, the
people retained its Orthodox faith, making possible the slow, not always
steady, and unfortunately incomplete, but nevertheless real return of Russia
to its pre-Petrine traditions from the reign of the Emperor Paul (1796-1801)
onwards. Thus while the eighteenth century represented the deepest nadir yet
in Russian statehood, Russia still remained recognizably Russia, the chief
bearer and defender of the true faith in God in the world…
1236 Walicki, op. cit., p. 38.
714
CONCLUSION. THE DARK HEART OF THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
There were obvious deficiencies in the optimistic view of the world

presented by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. In the first place, it failed
to explain the existence of evil - prejudice and bad education could account
only for the less serious forms of evil. Again, if this was the best of all possible
worlds, as Leibniz claimed, why did the terrible earthquake of Lisbon in 1755
take place? Some fault in the harmony of God’s laws? Or a deliberate
irruption of God’s wrath into a sinful world? In either case one had to admit,
with Voltaire himself, that “the world does, after all, contain evil”, and that
either nature was not harmonious and perfect, or that God did intervene in its
workings – postulates that were both contrary to the Enlightenment creed.
Another problem was that the Enlightenment failed to satisfy the cravings
of the religious man; for man is not only a rational animal, but also a religious
animal. And when his religious nature is denied, there is always a reaction.
For, as Roger Scruton writes, “Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, Hume,
Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment, the Kant of Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone – such thinkers and movements had collectively remade the God
of Christianity as a creature of the head rather than the heart. God retreated
from the world to the far reaches of infinite space, where only vertiginous
thoughts could capture him. Daily life is of little concern to such a God, who
demands no form of obedience except to the universal precepts of morality…
As God retreated from the world, people reached out for a rival source of
membership, and national identity seemed to answer to the need...”1237
Already in the first half of the eighteenth century the religious cravings
suppressed by Enlightenment rationalism were seeking outlets in more
emotional forms of religion, the very opposite of enlightened calm. Such were
Methodism in England and Pietism in Germany, Revivalism and the Great
Awakening in America and “Convulsionarism” in France.
In some ways, however, these very emotional, passionate forms of religion

worked in the same direction as the cult of reason. They, too, tended to
minimise the importance of theology and dogma, and to maximise the
importance of man and human activity and human passion. Thus in
American Revivalism, writes Cragg, “conversion was described in terms of
how a man felt, the new life was defined in terms of how he acted. This was
more than an emphasis on the moral consequences of obedience to God; it
was a preoccupation with man, and it became absorbed in what he did and in
the degree to which he promoted righteousness. In a curious way man’s
activity was obscuring the cardinal fact of God’s rule.”1238
1237 Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, London: Continuum,
2002, p. 43.
1238 Cragg, op. cit., p. 181.
715
The French revolution was to bring together the streams of Enlightenment
rationalism and irrational religion in a single, torrential rebellion against
God…
The rationalists became adept at explaining religion in naturalistic terms.

Religion was simply a “need”, no different in principle from other needs, as
Freud later tried to demonstrate. Of course, no religious person will find such
explanations even remotely convincing. But it must be admitted that,
unconvincing though their explanations might be, the Enlightenment
philosophers managed to convince enough people to create whole
generations of men possessing not even a spark of that religious “enthusiasm”
which they so despised.
Were they happier for it? Hardly. Condorcet wrote: “The time will come
when the sun will shine only upon a world of free men who recognise no
master except their reason, when tyrants and slaves, priests, and their stupid
or hypocritical tools will no longer exist except in history or on the stage”.
That time has not yet come. Most men do indeed “recognise no master except
their reason”. But there are still tyrants and slaves (and priests) – and no
discernible decrease in human misery.
Moreover, there was not just unhappiness – the accompaniment of most

ages of human history: there was something deeper and darker, a madness
underlying the urbane and sophisticated surface of Enlightenment Europe.
The greatest thinkers and artists of the age could not fail to be sensitive to this
madness, just waiting to break out in the horrors of the French revolution. We
sense it, for example, in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, where the Don is dragged
screaming into the fire of hell by demons.
Still more horrifying, because happening in real life to the most famous
and typical representative of the age, was the death of Voltaire: “When
Voltaire felt the stroke that he realized must terminate in death, he was
overpowered with remorse. He at once sent for the priest, and wanted to be
‘reconciled with the church.’ His infidel flatterers hastened to his chamber to
prevent his recantation; but it was only to witness his ignominy and their
own. He cursed them to their faces; and, as his distress was increased by their
presence, he repeatedly and loudly exclaimed, ‘Begone! It is you that have
brought me to my present condition. Leave me, I say; begone! What a
wretched glory is this which you have produced to me!’
“Hoping to allay his anguish by a written recantation, he had it prepared,

signed it, and saw it witnessed. But it was all unavailing. For two months he
was tortured with such an agony as led him at times to gnash his teeth in
impotent rage against God and man. At other times in plaintive accents, he
would plead, ‘O, Christ! O, Lord Jesus!’ Then, turning his face, he would cry
out, ‘I must die - abandoned of God and of men!’
716
“As his end drew near, his condition became so frightful that his infidel
associates were afraid to approach his beside. Still they guarded the door, that
others might not know how awfully an infidel was compelled to die. Even his
nurse repeatedly said, ‘For all the wealth of Europe I would never see another
infidel die.’ It was a scene of horror that lies beyond all exaggeration. Such is
the well-attested end of the one who had a natural sovereignty of intellect,
excellent education, great wealth, and much earthly honor.”1239
The immediate result of the Enlightenment was the French revolution and
all the revolutions that took their inspiration from it, with all their attendant
bloodshed and misery, destroying both the bodies and souls of men on a
hitherto unprecedented scale. Science and education have indeed spread
throughout the world, but poverty has not been abolished, nor war nor
disease nor crime. If it were possible to measure “happiness” scientifically,
then it is highly doubtful whether the majority of men are any happier now
than they were before the bright beams of the Enlightenment began to dawn
on the world.
It is especially the savagery of the twentieth century that has convinced us

of this. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer write: “In the most general
sense of progressive thought the Enlightenment has always aimed at
liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully
enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.” 1240 And as Nadezhda
Mandelstam writes: “We have seen the triumph of evil after the values of
humanism have been vilified and trampled on. The reason these values
succumbed was probably that they were based on nothing except boundless
confidence in the human intellect.”1241
And the reason why “boundless confidence in the human intellect” has
brought us to this pass is that, as L.A. Tikhomirov writes, the cult of reason
“very much wants to establish worldly prosperity, it very much wants to
make people happy, but it will achieve nothing, because it approaches the
problem from the wrong end.
“It may appear strange that people who think only of earthly prosperity,
and who put their whole soul into realising it, attain only disillusionment and
exhaustion. People who, on the contrary, are immersed in cares about the
invisible life beyond the grave, attain here, on earth, results constituting the
highest examples yet known on earth of personal and social development!
However, this strangeness is self-explanatory. The point is that man is by his
nature precisely the kind of being that Christianity understands him to be by
faith; the aims of life that are indicated to him by faith are precisely the kind of
aims that he has in reality, and not the kind that reason divorced from faith
1239 Rev. S.B. Shaw, Dying Testimonies of Saved and Unsaved, pp. 49-50.
1240 Adorno and Hokheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1972, p. 3; in M.J. Cohen and John
Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 487.
1241 Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope.
717
delineates. Therefore in educating a man in accordance with the Orthodox
world-view, we conduct his education correctly, and thence we get results that
are good not only in that which is most important [salvation] (which
unbelievers do not worry about), but also in that which is secondary (which is
the only thing they set their heart on). In losing faith, and therefore ceasing to
worry about the most important thing, people lost the possibility of
developing man in accordance with his true nature, and so they get distorted
results in earthly life, too.”1242
The problem is that “reason is a subordinate capacity. If it is not directed

by the lofty single organ of religion perception – the feeling of faith, it will be
directed by the lower strivings, which are infinitely numerous. Hence all the
heresies, all the ‘fractions’, all contemporary reasonings, too. This is a path of
seeking which we can beforehand predict will lead to endless disintegration,
splintering and barrenness in all its manifestations, and so in the end it will
only exhaust people and lead them to a false conviction that in essence
religious truth does not exist.”1243
And yet such a conclusion will be reached only if the concept of reason is
limited in a completely arbitrary manner. For, as Copleston points out, the
idea of reason of the Enlightenment philosophers “was limited and narrow.
To exercise reason meant for them pretty well to think as the philosophes
thought; whereas to anyone who believes that God has revealed Himself it is
rational to accept this revelation and irrational to reject it.”1244
But the Enlightenment philosophers not only limited and narrowed the
concept of reason: they deified it, thereby reducing it to absurdity. This has
been well demonstrated by C.S. Lewis in relation to Marxism and
Freudianism. But it applies in a general way to all attempts to enthrone reason
above everything else:-
“It is a disastrous discovery, as Emerson says somewhere, that we exist. I

mean, it is disastrous when instead of merely attending to a rose we are
forced to think of ourselves looking at the rose, with a certain type of mind
and a certain type of eyes. It is disastrous because, if you are not very careful,
the colour of the rose gets attributed to our optic nerves and is scent to our
noses, and in the end there is no rose left. The professional philosophers have
been bothered about this universal black-out for over two hundred years, and
the world has not much listened to them. But the same disaster is now
occurring on a level we can all understand.
1242 Tikhomirov, “Dukhovenstvo i obshchestvo v sovremennom religioznom dvizhenii” (“The
Clergy and Society in the Contemporary Religious Movement”), in Khristianstvo i Politika

(Christianity and Politics), Moscow, 1999, pp. 30-31.
1243 Tikhomirov, “Dukhovenstvo i obshchestvo…”, op. cit., p. 32.
1244 Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 6, part II, New York: Image Books, 1964,
p. 209.
718
“We have recently ‘discovered that we exist’ in two new senses. The
Freudians have discovered that we exist as bundles of complexes. The
Marxians have discovered that we exist as members of some economic class.
In the old days, it was supposed that if a thing seemed obviously true to a
hundred men, then it was probably true in fact. Nowadays the Freudian will
tell you to go and analyze the hundred: you will find that they all think
Elizabeth [I] a great queen because they have a mother-complex. Their
thoughts are psychologically tainted at the source. And the Marxist will tell
you to go and examine the economic interests of the hundred; you will find
that they all think freedom a good thing because they are all members of the
bourgeoisie whose prosperity is increased by a policy of laissez-faire. Their
thoughts are ‘ideologically tainted’ at the source.
“Now this is obviously great fun; but it has not always been noticed that
there is a bill to pay for it. There are two questions that people who say this
kind of things ought to be asked. The first is, Are all thoughts thus tainted at
the source, or only some? The second is, Does the taint invalidate the tainted
thought – in the sense of making it untrue – or not?
“If they say that all thoughts are thus tainted, then, of course, we must
remind them that Freudianism and Marxism are as much systems of thought
as Christian theology or philosophical idealism. The Freudian and the Marxist
are in the same boat with all the rest of us, and cannot criticize us from
outside. They have sawn off the branch they were sitting on. If, on the other
hand, they say that the taint need not invalidate their thinking, then neither
need it invalidate ours. In which case they have saved their own branch, but
also saved ours along with it.
“The only line they can really take is to say that some thoughts are tainted
and others are not – which has the advantage (if Freudians and Marxians
regard it as an advantage) of being what every sane man has always believed.
But if that is so, then we must ask how you find out which are tainted and
which are not. It is no earthly use saying that those are tainted which agree
with the secret wishes of the thinker. Some of the things I should like to
believe must in fact be true; it is impossible to arrange a universe which
contradicts everyone’s wishes, in every respect, at every moment. Suppose I
think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And
suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is ‘wishful thinking’.
You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological
condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through
the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only,
will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic
correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can
be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may
be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my
arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant – but
only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on
purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with thinking and all systems of
719
thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the
wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must
find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as
arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological
causes of the error.
“In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you start
explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without
discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only
real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the
last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a
name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write the biography of
its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the
age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who had been
maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than the third –
‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment,’ E. Bulver assures us,
‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no
necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then
explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he
is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the
national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.’ This is how Bulver
became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
“I find the fruits of his discovery almost everywhere. Thus I see my

religion dismissed on the grounds that ‘the comfortable parson had every
reason for assuring the nineteenth century worker that poverty would be
rewarded in another world’. Well, no doubt he had. On the assumption that
Christianity is an error, I can see early enough that some people would still
have a motive for inculcating it. I see it so easily that I can, of course, play the
game the other way round, by saying that ‘the modern man has every reason
for trying to convince himself that there are no eternal sanctions behind the
morality he is rejecting’. For Bulverism is a truly democratic game in the sense
that all can play it all day long, and that it gives no unfair privilege to the
small and offensive minority who reason. But of course it gets us not one inch
nearer to deciding whether, as a matter of fact, the Christian religion is true or
false. That question remains to be discussed on quite different grounds – a
matter of philosophical and historical argument. However it were decided,
the improper motives of some people, both for believing it and for
disbelieving it, would remain just as they are.
“I see Bulverism at work in every political argument. The capitalists must

be bad economists because we know why they want capitalism, and equally
the Communists must be bad economists because we know why they want
Communism. Thus, the Bulverists on both sides. In reality, of course, either
the doctrines of the capitalists are false, or the doctrines of the Communists,
or both; but you can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning – never
by being rude about your opponent’s psychology.
720
“Until Bulverism is crushed, reason can play no effective part in human
affairs. Each side snatches it early as a weapon against the other; but between
the two reason itself is discredited. And why should reason not be discredited?
It would be easy, in answer, to point to the present state of the world, but the
real answer is even more immediate. The forces discrediting reason,
themselves depend on reasoning. You must reason even to Bulverize. You are
trying to prove that all proofs are invalid. If you fail, you fail. If you succeed,
then you fail even more – for the proof that all proofs are invalid must be
invalid itself.
“The alternative is either self-contradicting idiocy or else some tenacious

belief in our power of reasoning, held in the teeth of all the evidence... I am
ready to admit, if you like, that this tenacious belief has something
transcendental or mystical about it. What then? Would you rather be a lunatic
than a mystic?
“So we see there is a justification for holding on to our belief in Reason. But
can this be done without theism? Does ‘I know’ involve that God exists?
Everything I know is an inference from sensation (except the present moment).
All our knowledge of the universe beyond our immediate experiences
depends on inferences from these experiences. If our inferences do not give a
genuine insight into reality, then we can know nothing. A theory cannot be
accepted if it does not allow our thinking to be a genuine insight, nor if the
fact of our knowledge is not explicable in terms of that theory.
“But our thoughts can only be accepted as a genuine insight under certain
conditions. All beliefs have causes but a distinction must be drawn between (1)
ordinary causes and (2) a special kind of cause called ‘a reason’. Causes are
mindless events which can produce other results than belief. Reasons arise
from axioms and inferences and affect only beliefs. Bulverism tries to show
that the other man has causes and not reasons and that we have reasons and
not causes. A belief which can be accounted for entirely in terms of causes is
worthless. This principle must not be abandoned when we consider the
beliefs which are the basis of others. Our knowledge depends on the certainty
about axioms and inferences. If these are the result of causes, then there is no
possibility of knowledge. Either we can know nothing or thought has reasons
only, and no causes…
“It is admitted that the mind is affected by physical events; a wireless set is
influenced by atmospherics, but it does not originate its deliverances – we’d
take notice of it if we thought it did. Natural events we can relate to another
until we can trace them finally to the space-time continuum. But thought has
no father but thought. It is conditioned, yes, not caused…
“The same argument applies to our values, which are affected by social
factors, but if they are caused by them we cannot know that they are right.
One can reject morality as an illusion, but the man who does so often tacitly
721
excepts his own ethical motive: for instance the duty of freeing morality from
superstition and of spreading enlightenment.
“Neither Will nor Reason is the product of Nature. Therefore either I am

self-existent (a belief which no one can accept) or I am a colony of some
Thought or Will that are self-existent. Such reason and goodness as we can
attain must be derived from a self-existent Reason and Goodness outside
ourselves, in fact, a Supernatural…”1245
Thus Lewis does not decry Reason, but vindicates it; but only by showing
that Reason is independent of Nature. However, in doing this he shatters the
foundations of Enlightenment thinking, and therefore also of the modern
world-view, which is based on the Enlightenment. This world-view is based
on the following axioms, which Lewis has shown to be false: (a) Truth and
Goodness are attainable by Reason alone, without the need for Divine
Revelation; and (b) Reason, as a function of Man, and not of God, is entirely a
product of Nature. Lewis demonstrates that even if (a) were true, which it is
not, it could only be true if (b) were false. But the Enlightenment insisted that
both were true, and therefore condemned the whole movement of western
thought founded upon it to sterility and degeneration and, ultimately,
nihilism.
The whole tragedy of western man since the Enlightenment – which,

through European colonization and globalization has become the tragedy of
the whole world - is that in exalting himself and the single, fallen faculty of
his mind to a position of infallibility, he has denied himself his true dignity
and rationality, making him a function of irrational nature – in effect, sub-
human. But man is great, not because he can reason in the sense of ratiocinate,
that is, make deductions and inferences from axioms and empirical evidence,
but because he can reason in accordance with the Reason that created and
sustains all things, that is, in accordance with the Word and Wisdom of God
in Whose image he was made. It is when man tries to make his reason
autonomous, independent of its origin and inspiration in the Divine Reason,
that he falls to the level of irrationality. For Man, being in honour, did not
understand; he is compared to the mindless cattle, and is become like unto them
(Psalm 48.12).
1245 Lewis, “’Bulverism’ or the Foundation of 20th Century Thought”, in God in the Dock, Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, pp. 271-275, 276. Lewis developed this important argument in other
works of his such as Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain.
722

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THE AGE OF REASON

From an Orthodox Christian Point of View

@ Copyright, Vladimir Moss, 2019. All Rights Reserved

The chief gift of nature… is freedom.

As free, and not using your liberty as a cloak of maliciousness,

He hasn’t changed, your little god on earth –

We have no government capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by

I. THE SHAKING OF THE FOUNDATIONS (1453-­‐1660) 14

2. THE ITALIAN CITY-STATES AND MACHIAVELLI 26

4. SPAIN, THE JEWS AND THE MUSLIMS 47

5. LUTHER AND THE PRINTING PRESS 53

6. LUTHER AND THE INDIVIDUAL CONSCIENCE 57

8. LUTHER ON FAITH AND WORKS 66

10. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 81

11. THE SPANISH AMERICAS 88

12. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 96

13. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT AND NATURAL LAW 107

14. ELIZABETH I, THE VIRGIN QUEEN 111

15. SHAKESPEARE’S UNIVERSE 123

16. JAMES I AND THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 132

17. FRANCIS BACON AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE 138

18. THE DUTCH REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM 148

19. THE NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES 155

20. BODIN, RICHELIEU AND THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR 162

21. THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA AND INTERNATIONAL LAW 169

22. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (1) POLITICS OR RELIGION? 177

23. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (2) KING VERSUS PARLIAMENT 180

24. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (3) THE CIVIL WAR 192

26. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (5) CROMWELL’S PROTECTORATE 207

29. THE SUN KING 237

II. THE MUSCOVITE AUTOCRACY (1453-­‐1660) 242

30. THE ORTHODOX UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE (1) 243

31. TRANSLATIO IMPERII 254

32. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (1) IVAN III 258

33. JUDAIZERS, NON-POSSESSORS AND THE GREAT PRINCE 264

35. IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND THE OPRICHNINA 281

36. CHURCH AND STATE IN MUSCOVY 298

37. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (3) TSAR THEODORE 305

38. THE ORTHODOX UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE (2) 311

39. THE UNIA OF BREST-LITOVSK 320

40. THE TIME OF TROUBLES 327

41. THE RESURRECTION OF MUSCOVY 343

42. MUSCOVY AND UKRAINE 359

III. THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROGRAMME (1660-­‐1789) 368

43. THE RESTORATION OF THE ENGLISH MONARCHY 369

44. THE NEWTONIAN REVOLUTION AND THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 379

45. THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION 387

46. THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: (2) JOHN LOCKE 394

47. WAR, CALVINISM AND THE JEWISH BANKERS 405

48. THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION 413

49. THE PEACE OF UTRECHT 430

50. THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 436

51. ENGLAND’S CONSERVATIVE ENLIGHTENMENT 440

52. FRANCE’S RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT 453

54. HUME: THE IRRATIONALITY OF RATIONALISM 466

55. KANT: THE REAFFIRMATION OF WILL 477

56. HAMANN AND HERDER: THE DENIAL OF UNIVERSALISM 482

57. TWO CONCEPTS OF FREEDOM 485

58. EAST MEETS WEST: (1) INDIA 492

I. THE SHAKING OF THE FOUNDATIONS (1453-‐1660) 14

II. THE MUSCOVITE AUTOCRACY (1453-‐1660) 242

III. THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROGRAMME (1660-‐1789) 368

IV. THE ST. PETERSBURG AUTOCRACY (1660-‐1789) 571