If one were dealing with the religion of Eastern Christianity one would naturally dwell on its aesthetics and ethics. But our concern is with the political performance of the Russian church and especially with its involvement in the relationship of state to society: not with what the best religious minds preached and practised, but with what the church as an institution did. And once the inquiry shifts to this ground one quickly discovers that notwithstanding its extreme other-worldliness, the Orthodox church of Russia was to an uncommon degree implicated in all the sordid business of survival. In actual practice, it turned out to be much less spiritual than faiths like Judaism and Protestantism which regard involvement in worldly affairs as essential to the fulfilment of religious obligations. Observing its fate one is reminded of Montaigne's saying placed at the head of this chapter, linking supercelestial thought with subterranean behaviour. It can hardly be otherwise since anyone who renounces involvement in life is without principles to guide him whenever life compels him to become involved. Lacking rules of practical conduct, the Russian church did not know how to adapt itself to its circumstances and still uphold, even if in an imperfect, compromised form what it regarded as its fundamental spiritual values. The result was that it placed itself more docilely than any other church at the disposal of the state, helping it to exploit and repress. In the end, it lost its institutional identity and allowed itself to be turned into an ordinary branch of the state bureaucracy. All of which made it unusually vulnerable to shifts in political alignments and trends in public opinion. Unlike the other churches, it failed to carve out for itself an autonomous sphere
THE CHURCH AS SERVANT OF THE STATE
of activity. It had nothing to call its own, and identified itself to such an extent with the monarchy that when the latter fell, it went right down with it. The relative ease with which the communists succeeded in eliminating the church from public life in Russia contrasts tellingly with the resistance they encountered in Catholic Eastern Europe where, having attempted the same and failed, in the end they had to accept the church as an independent institution. Except for the Hungarians, the Russians were the last east Europeans to be converted to Christianity. Formal conversion occurred in 987 (rather than 988-g, as the chronicles report) when Prince Vladimir and his court, followed by the rest of the warrior class received baptism from the Greek clergy. The Slavic population at large was converted slowly and often under duress; for many centuries afterwards it continued to adhere to pagan practices. The choice of Orthodoxy for Kievan Russia was a perfectly natural one if one takes into account the wealth of Byzantium in the tenth century and the superiority of its culture relative to Rome's, as well as the importance to Kiev of commercial relations with it.
The fact that Russia received its Christianity from Byzantium rather than from the west had the most profound consequences for the entire course of Russia's historic development. Next to the geographic considerations discussed in the opening chapter of this book, it was perhaps the single most critical factor influencing that country's destiny. By accepting the eastern brand of Christianity, Russia separated itself from the mainstream of Christian civilization which, as it happened, flowed westward. After Russia had been converted, Byzantium declined and Rome ascended. The Byzantine Empire soon came under siege by the Turks who kept on cutting off one by one parts of its realm until they finally seized its capital. In the sixteenth century, Muscovy was the world's only large kingdom still espousing eastern Christianity. The more it came under the assault of Catholicism and Islam, the more withdrawn and intolerant it grew. Thus, the acceptance of Christianity, instead of drawing it closer to the Christian community, had the effect of isolating Russia from its neighbours.
The Orthodox Church, being composed of independent national units, is by its very nature decentralized. It has no papacy to give it cohesion; its units tend to be 'autocephalous' or 'self-headed'. Major doctrinal and administrative issues are settled by councils (synods) which on important occasions assume the format of international church congresses. This practice too is more faithful to the spirit of early Christianity, but it does tend to weaken Orthodoxy's ability to stand up to secular authority. Its structural decentralization is reinforced by the right of national branches of the Orthodox church to make use of local
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languages in liturgies and theological writings. Intended to bring the church closer to the people, the practice has the effect of separating the members of the Orthodox community still further. Orthodoxy has nothing corresponding to Latin to give its members a sense of oneness transcending national boundaries. The Russian clergy, for example, were ignorant of Greek, and had to import monks from the Balkans whenever they needed to consult Byzantine books.
The whole trend of Orthodox Christianity may be said to be centrifugal, away from the ecumenical towards the regional. And this trend, in turn, has tended to blur the distinction between church, state and nation. The Orthodox church never had the power and the cohesion needed to defend its interests from secular encroachments. Divided into many national branches, each separated from the rest by frontiers and barriers of language, each under its own hierarchy, it had little choice but to adapt itself to whatever temporal power it happened to live under. A perceptive French observer noted already in 1889, long before the Revolution had demonstrated the fact, the utter dependence of the Russian church on the shifting winds of politics:
In Eastern Orthodoxy, the ecclesiastical constitution tends to model itself on the political, while the boundaries of the churches tend to reproduce the boundaries of states. These are two correlative facts, inherent in the national form of the Orthodox churches. Confined within the frontiers of the state, deprived of a common head and religious centre abroad, independent of one another, these churches are more susceptible to the influence of temporal power, more vulnerable to the backlash of revolutions of lay society. With their everywhere identical hierarchy of identical priests and bishops, the Orthodox churches adapt themselves, depending on the time and place, to the most diverse regimes: the mode of their internal administration always ends up by harmonizing with the mode of the political organization.1
The close, almost symbiotic identification of church and state characteristic of eastern Christianity has deep roots in historic and doctrinal factors.
To begin with the historic. The eastern church was fortunate to enjoy from its inception the patronage of the Roman Emperors who, after conversion, transplanted their capital to Constantinople. In Byzantium, the emperor was head of the church, and the church 'was within the state and... part of the state organization'. In the words of Emperor Justinian there existed a relationship of 'harmony' between secular and ecclesiastical authorities which in practice meant that the Emperors participated in some of the most important church functions, including formulation of canon law, summoning of general church councils, and the appointment of bishops. In return, the state used the power at its disposal to uphold the decisions of the synods and to maintain on their territory religious orthodoxy.2 For Byzantine theorists it was axiomatic that the church could not subsist without protection of the state. The matter was stated succinctly by the Patriarch of Constantinople in a letter he sent to Prince Basil 1 of Moscow around 1393. Objecting to Basil's reputed assertion that Muscovy had a church but no emperor, the Patriarch reminded him that it was the duty of emperors to convoke synods, support church rules, and fight heresies. Hence 'it is not possible for Christians to have a church and not to have an emperor. Imperial authority and church exist in close union and communication with one another, and the one cannot be separated from the other.'3