THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Vladimir Moss
And unto the angel of the Church in Sardis
write:
These things saith He that hath the seven
spirits of God, and the seven stars:
I know thy works, that thou hast a name that
thou livest, and art dead.
Be watchful, and strengthen the things that
remain, that are ready to die.
For I have not found thy works perfect before
God.
Revelation 3.1-2.
On this rock I shall build My Church,
and the gates of hell shall not
prevail against her.
Matthew 16.18.
The
One, Holy, Orthodox-Catholic and Apostolic Church entered the twentieth century
in a state of external prosperity, but serious internal disorder. The Russian
empire, which contained the largest local Church and in which the great
majority of Orthodox Christians lived, was reaching the zenith of its political
and economic power. But it was riven with strife and undermined by freethinkers
and revolutionaries. In 1904-05 it was seriously shaken by defeat in the
Russo-Japanese war and the first, abortive revolution; and in 1917 it fell.
Most of the Greek, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Arabic Orthodox lived in
the Ottoman empire. They, too, were divided: Greeks against Bulgarians, Serbs
and Arabs, and Serbs against Romanians, leading to the splitting up of the
Ecumenical Patriarchate and the creation of several autonomous Churches. In
1912-13 two Balkan wars pitted Turk against Christian, and Christian against
Christian; and in 1917, the Ottoman empire also fell.
The
“democratic” regimes that replaced the old empires – those of Lenin and Ataturk
– were unmitigated disasters for the Orthodox. Millions died, further millions
were expelled from their homes or emigrated voluntarily. This set the pattern
for the twentieth century, a century unparalleled in the history of
Christianity for its sufferings and confusion. But also for the vast numbers of
its holy martyrs and confessors…
The
first martyrs suffered in the very first year of the century: the Chinese
Orthodox of the Russian Spiritual Mission in Peking who were killed by the
Boxers.[1]
This pointed to another important aspect of twentieth-century Christianity: its
worldwide missionary activity. The Lord said: “This Gospel of the Kingdom shall
be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the
end come” (Matthew 24.14). To many, the preaching of the Gospel in the
greatest and most inaccessible of the pagan empires, China and Japan, and its
first-fruits in the form of the 222 Chinese martyrs, indicated the coming of
the end. And indeed, the twentieth century was the beginning of the end, not
only in the sense that it witnessed the planting of Orthodox missionaries,
voluntarily or involuntarily, in the furthest corners of the earth, but also in
the sense that it witnessed the appearance, for the first time in concrete
form, of the clearest and most terrible sign of the end: the Antichrist.
The
theme of the Antichrist was to dominate the twentieth century. The great
hermit, St. Seraphim of Sarov, had spoken, already in the first half of the
nineteenth century about the imminent arrival of the Antichrist, who would
remove the crosses from the churches and kill so many people that the angels
would scarcely have time to gather all the souls as they left their bodies.
This theme was taken up by such holy churchmen as St. Ambrose of Optina, Bishop
Theophan the Recluse and St. John of Kronstadt. In the year 1900 the
philosopher Vladimir Soloviev had a vision of Christians fleeing into the caves
to escape what he called “the collective Antichrist”. It was not difficult to
see the fulfillment of this vision in the appearance of Soviet power and in the
appearance, from the 1920s, of the Catacomb Church, True Orthodox Christians
who fled into the “catacombs” from the apocalyptic red beast.
In
general, the pre-revolutionary period could be described as the period of
preparation for the coming of the collective Antichrist. The reign of the meek
and gentle Tsar Nicholas II, with its increasing economic prosperity, rapid
expansion of churches and parish schools, wide missionary outreach (to Siberia,
Persia, China, Japan and America), and many glorifications of saints (beginning
with the prophet of the Antichrist, St. Seraphim, in 1903) gave an unparalleled
opportunity to tens of millions of people both within and outside the Russian
empire to come to a knowledge of the truth and be saved. But the forerunners of
the Antichrist were not inactive either: revolutionaries such as Lenin and
Trotsky, freethinkers and blasphemers such as the novelist Lev Tolstoy,
theosophists such as Blavatsky, heretics such as the Athonite “name-worshipper”
Bulatovich, and a huge army of liberals, anti-monarchists and ecumenists were
busy undermining the foundations of Church and State. In the tumult two figures
stood out as representing the two sides with especial clarity: Lev Tolstoy and
St. John of Kronstadt. The duel between these two, like that between Arius and
St. Athanasius the Great, defined the issues for the educated public.
There
were few who took the opportunities provided by the relatively peaceful
pre-revolutionary period to repent. We could mention Lev Alexandrovich
Tikhomirov, who repented of his time a revolutionary to became a prominent
champion of the Orthodox monarchy, or Michael Alexandrovich Novoselov, who
repented of his Tolstoyism to become a church publicist and later a Catacomb
Church martyr. In general, however, it took the massive shock of huge political
upheavals, like the First World War or the October revolution, to bring large
numbers of people to their senses. In this we can see the special Providence of
God, Who draws the greatest good out of the greatest evil. Thus the coming of
the Antichrist to Russia was, paradoxically, the means towards the coming to
Christ of many previously tepid and heretical Christians.
But what was this Antichrist? And in what did his – or its – antichristianity consist? Speaking very generally, we may say that “the heresy of the twentieth-century Antichrist” consisted in a distorted understanding of the relationship between the Church and the world, whereby the Church was understood as serving the world, not as its conscience, by being the salt which preserves it from final corruption and destruction, but as its pander, by conforming herself to its fallen desires and godless world-views.
This distorted understanding of the Church’s relationship with the world manifested itself in two main forms: what came to be known as “sergianism” after its leading exponent, the Russian metropolitan and later “patriarch of Moscow”, Sergius, and “ecumenism”, the world-wide movement for the reunification of the Churches. Sergianism is the teaching that the Church must work with all forms of political power, even the most antichristian, even communism; ecumenism is the teaching that the Church must compromise with all forms of religion, even the most antichristian, even paganism. The pathos of both movements is unity – unity with any power, at any price, so long as conflict is averted and peace is attained. Both propose a wholesale surrender of the Church’s truth and freedom and dignity to the dominant forces in the contemporary world: political forces in the case of sergianism, religious forces in the case of ecumenism, with the ultimate end, whether willed or not willed, of the complete secularization of the human race. Both heresies are movements of apostasy, and both attempt to justify this apostasy, “dogmatize” it, as it were – in the case of sergianism, by claiming that only such apostasy can save the Church (from destruction by communism), and in the case of ecumenism by claiming that only such apostasy can recreate the Church (from sectarian disintegration). Essentially, therefore, they are two aspects of a single ecclesiological heresy, for which the present writer has coined the term “ecucommunism”[2], a single assault on the existence and the dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.
Let us look a little more closely at the ecumenist and communist aspects of ecucommunism.
Ecumenism attempts to destroy the notion of the Church as “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy. 3.15) by preaching that there is no one truth, and therefore no one Church which it can be the pillar of. It maintains that all Churches – and in its more extreme, contemporary forms, all religions – contain partial or relative truths which, on being reduced to their lowest common denominator, will form the dogmatic basis of a new Church or universal religion of a new, enlightened mankind. The development of this doctrine, which first appeared in the West before penetrating into the Orthodox world, is traced especially in chapters 2, 4, 6 and 7.
Communism attempts to destroy the
moral, social and eschatological teaching of the Church by preaching a new
“revolutionary morality” whose goal is not the Kingdom of Heaven but a
communist paradise on earth. In place of the Church we have the Party, in place
of God – Fate. Communism, like ecumenism, was introduced into the Orthodox
world from the West; and we trace its struggle with the Church in chapters 1,
3, 5, and 7.
“The ideologue of ecumenism,” writes
Archbishop Averky, “which is the natural consequence of the nostalgia of the
Protestant world for the Church that they have lost, was the German pastor
Christopher Blumhardt, whom the Protestants call for that reason ‘the great
prophet of the contemporary world’. He called all the Protestants to unity for
‘the construction of the Kingdom of God on earth’, but he died before the
organization of the ecumenical movement, in 1919. His fundamental idea
consisted of the proposition that ‘the old world has been destroyed, and a new
one is rising on its ruins’. He placed three problems before Christianity: 1)
the realization of the best social structure, 2) the overcoming of confessional
disagreements and 3) the working together for the education of the whole world
community of nations with the complete liquidation of war.
“It
was in these three points that the aims of ecumenism were formulated by the
present general secretary of the Council of the ecumenical movement,
Visser-t-Hooft, who saw the means for their realization in the Church’s pursuit
of social aims. For this it is first of all necessary to overcome confessional
differences and create one church. The renewed one church will have the
possibility of preparing the way for the triumph of Socialism, which will lead
to the creation of one world State as the Kingdom of God on earth…”[3]
As we have noted, the struggle between ecucommunism and the Church was clearly foreshadowed, at the beginning of the century, by the struggle between the novelist Lev Tolstoy, who stood for a Christianity reduced to “pure” morality without the Church, the sacraments or any other other-worldly element, and St.. John of Kronstadt, who demonstrated by his wonderful life abounding in good works and extraordinary miracles, that Christianity “does not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God” (I Corinthians 2.5).
The
Church anathematised Tolstoy on February 20-23, 1901 as follows: “In his
writings Count Lev Tolstoy has blasphemed against the holy sacraments, denying
their grace-filled character, has not venerated the Orthodox Church as his
Church, has spoken evil of the clergy, has said that he considers that to
venerate Christ and worship Him as God is blasphemy, while saying of himself,
by contrast: ‘I am in God, and God in me’. It is not the Church that has
rejected him, casting him off from herself, but he himself has rejected the
Church: Lev himself has of his own will fallen away from the Church and is no
longer a son of the Church, but is hostile to her. All attempts of the clergy
to admonish the prodigal have failed to produce the desired fruits: in his
pride he has considered himself cleverer than all, less fallible than all and
the judge of all, and the Church has made a declaration about the falling away
of Count Lev Tolstoy from the Russian Orthodox Church”.[4]
But
the confrontation between Tolstoy and St. John of Kronstadt was only a prelude
to the titanic struggle, involving hundreds of millions of people on several
continents, which has still not come to an end today. Although the blood and
suffering caused by this conflict has been incalculable, it has, like previous
such struggles in the history of the Church, had the good consequence of
providing the opportunity, through the necessity of struggling with heresy, of
clarifying the Church’s teaching – in this case, the Church’s teaching on
herself. Thus the following questions have been posed: Is the Church One, Holy,
Catholic and Apostolic, as the Nicene Creed defines her? Is she truly of Divine
origin and nature, or is she a purely human organization? Does she evolve in
her teachings and practice, or does she remain the same? Does she embrace all
the vast multitudes who call themselves Christian today, or is she the
gathering of a small faithful remnant on earth? Is she truly the only ark of
salvation, or only one of many roads leading to God?
However,
in order to understand this struggle in its full depth, it is necessary to
understand that the attack on the dogma of the Church has been only a part of a
still wider attack on the concept of Tradition
as the source of truth not only in the Church, but in all branches of
knowledge. This wider movement, which I will call, quite simply, the Revolution, has been through several
historical stages, of which the revolution in the Church accomplished by Pope
Gregory VII was the first. Papism led to Scholasticism and Humanism, then
Protestantism, Scientism, Deism, Materialism, Romanticism, Hegelianism,
Darwinism, Marxism, Freudianism, Ecumenism and, most recently, New-Ageism.
It
is beyond the scope of this work to show how all these “isms” are
interconnected and take their origin from the primal rebellion against the
Church which we call “schism”. Suffice it to say for the present that
underlying the revolution in all its stages is a single antichristian,
antitheist, man-centred philosophy.
This
philosophy can be summarized as follows: Man is his own master. If there is a
God, then he is a God in man’s own image, perhaps even of man’s own making; and
man does not depend on Him to learn the truth, for his own unaided mind is
capable of that. The wisdom of the ages is a myth; tradition is a brake on progress.
As man is a product of evolution from the lower animals, so his social and
religious and political institutions are in a process of constant upward
evolution. Therefore there is no such thing as absolute truth, no sacred,
unchanging, God-given authority. Everything is in flux, therefore everyone must
change. The only unchanging, ineluctable fact is the fact of the revolution –
the social revolution, the political revolution, the religious revolution, and
above all the scientific revolution upon which all the other revolutions are
based. Therefore the only unforgivable sin (if it is not simply a kind of
illness, which can be treated by drug-therapy in a psychiatric hospital) is the sin of counter-revolution, the sin
of being bigoted, intolerant of change, out-of-date. Everything is permitted –
the craziest of beliefs, the most deviant of life-styles – so long as it does
not stand in the way of the revolution, that revolution which is making man
master of himself and of his environment. But for those who stand in the way of
“progress”, there will be no mercy; they will be cast onto the rubbish heap of
history like the extinct species of Darwinian pre-history. For nothing must
stand in the way of man’s ascent to godlike status. Just as in physics the
anthropic principle “seems to be on the verge of substituting man for God, by
hinting that consciousness, unbound by time’s arrow, causes creation”[5],
so in life based on the scientific revolution man must substitute himself for
God, removing all those constraints associated with the Divine Creator…
After
a couple of “trial runs” in the English and French revolutions, the revolution
received its most complete incarnation in the Russian revolution of 1917, which
at the same time overthrew the primary stronghold of traditional thinking in
the world. Just as all the apostate trends of European history from the
eleventh century onwards lead up to, and find their culmination in, the Russian
revolution, so all world history since 1917 has evolved from it and under its shadow.
Now
it is commonly thought that the anti-communist coups of 1989-91 brought this
phase of history to a close. But this is a mistake. If some of the economic
ideas of the revolution have been discredited, its fundamental concepts – the
replacement of the Church by the State, God by the people, Tradition by
science, Spirit by matter – remain as firmly entrenched as ever. The Russian
revolution was like a nuclear explosion, splitting the elements not only of
religious, but also of all cultural and social life; it attempted to destroy
the faith, the family, the nation and the individual.[6]
And just as the fall-out from a nuclear explosion is felt over a wide area and
over a long period of time, so has it been with the fall-out from the Russian
revolution.
For
as the hierarchs of the Russian Church Abroad have written: “If the results of
the Chernobyl catastrophe are still making themselves known in the bodies of
the children of the surrounding region, the spiritual catastrophe of all Russia
will show its effects for a far longer period of time. Just as Chernobyl’s
radiation will continue for many years to annihilate the lives of the children
of our land with its sinister, invisible fire, it is clear that the
consequences of the spiritual catastrophe will not quickly depart from us.”[7]
In
order to understand the Russian revolution, it is necessary to understand its
roots, not only in the European revolutions of the past one thousand years, but
also in the Jewish revolution that took place one thousand years before that.
This perception is not a manifestation of “anti-semitism”, as the West would
have it; for how can a Christian historian who worships a Jewish God, and is a
member of the Church founded by exclusively Jewish apostles seriously maintain
anti-semitic ideas? It is the product of the simple but basic and
incontrovertible fact that the Russian revolution in its initial phase was the
work mainly of Jews inspired by a philosophy of history that is in essence
Jewish; and that even when the leaders of the revolution were no longer Jews,
they continued to be motivated, consciously or unconsciously, by essentially
Jewish ideas. The writer of this work is not anti-semitic, but he is anti-Judaist
in the sense that he is against the religion which is founded upon the Talmud
and which is fiercely and explicitly anti-Christian in its fundamental beliefs.
In this sense all the apostles and fathers and martyrs were, and every
consciously believing Orthodox Christian must be – anti-Judaist.
Now
when Abraham left his earthly homeland in search of a promised land in which
God alone would be King, world history began a series of violent oscillations
between the two poles: Zion and Babylon, the God-Man and the man-god, theocracy
and satanocracy.
Two
thousand years later, the God-Man Himself visited His Kingdom, and a second
series of violent oscillations took place. First, the kings of the East came to
worship Him – Babylon bowed down before Zion. Then the veil of the temple was
rent in twain, the temple itself was destroyed and the people of God were
scattered over the face of the earth – Zion became spiritually Babylon, and in
the Babylonian Talmud the Jews worked out the apostate creed of Zionism.
But
then the new Israel, “the Israel of God” (Galatians 6.16), the Church of
Christ, was born in Zion, and the former children of wrath from the Babylon of
the West, the pagan Greeks and Romans, came to bow down at her feet. And when
Constantine became king of Old Rome, even the pivot and crown of the Babylonian
system, the worship of the god-man-emperor, was transformed into its opposite
and the God-fighting satanocracy of Old Rome became the God-loving theocracy of
the New Rome.
Now,
nearly two thousands years after Christ, we are in the middle of the third
great series of violent oscillations in world history. In 1917 the God-loving
theocracy of the Third Rome, Russia, was transformed into the God-hating
satanocracy of the Babylon of the North, the Soviet Union. And the apostate
Jews took revenge on the Third Rome for the destruction of their State by the
First, Old Rome.
That
this was indeed the significance of the Russian revolution was demonstrated by
an extraordinary “coincidence” that has been little noted. On November 9, 1917,
the London Times reported two events in the same column of newsprint:
above, the Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd, and immediately below it, the
British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour’s promise of a homeland to the Jews in Palestine.
To the unbeliever, the two events seem to have no relation to each other; the
fact that they happened at exactly the same time, and under the leadership of
men from the same race and class and locality – the Jewish intelligentsia of
Western Russia and Poland – seems purely coincidental. To the believing eye,
however, they are two aspects, in two geographical areas, of one and the same
event – the event called in the Gospel “the beginning of sorrows” (Matthew
24.8), in the epistles of St. Paul – “the removal of him that restraineth” (II
Thessalonians 2.7), and in the Apocalypse of St. John – “the releasing of
the beast from the abyss” (Revelation 20.3).
Now
if we look at the event from its Jewish aspect, it looks like the triumph of a
purely national movement – Zionism. From the Russian aspect, on the other hand,
it looks like a purely political-social coup motivated by a purely secular
vision of world history – Marxism-Leninism. In truth, however, Zionism and
Marxism-Leninism are two aspects of a movement which is neither purely
nationalist nor political in essence, but religious – or rather, demonic.
This
is most clearly seen in the killing of the Tsar on July 4/17, 1918. On the wall
of his death-chamber was found an inscription which fittingly sums up the deed
from the point of view of the Jewish revolution. It was a quotation from the
German Jewish poet Heine, slightly altered to bring out the word “tsar” and
identifying the tsar with Belshazzar:
Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht
On the same night Belshazzar
Von seinen knechten
umgebracht. Was killed by
his own slaves.[8]
But
the truth was quite the opposite. Belshazzar hated the people of God, and his
removal opened the way for the rebuilding of the Temple of God in Zion by
Zerubbabel (which means “alien to Babylon, or confusion”). The killing of Tsar
Nicholas, on the other hand, opened the way to the destruction of Orthodox
Russia and its transformation into Babylon.
Such
a view is not confined to Orthodox Christians or “anti-Semites”. Thus Winston
Churchill wrote: “It would almost seem as if the Gospel of Christ and the
gospel of anti-Christ were designed to originate among the same people; and
that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme
manifestations, both of the Divine and the diabolical… From the days of
‘Spartacus’ Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela
Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this
worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the
reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious
malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a
modern writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable
part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of
every subversive movement during the nineteenth century; and now at last this
band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of
Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads
and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism
and in the bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and
for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it
probably outweighs all others.”[9]
Douglas
Reed writes: “The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which wielded the supreme
power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin[10])
and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive
Commission (or secret police) comprised 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts,
Georgians and others. The Council of People’s Commissars consisted of 17 Jews
and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13
others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially
published in 1918-1919 were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central
committees of small, supposedly ‘Socialist’ or other non-Communist parties…
were 55 Jews and 6 others.”[11]
Even
the “pro-Semite” historian Richard Pipes admits: “Jews undeniably played in the
Bolshevik Party and the early Soviet apparatus a role disproportionate to their
share of the population. The number of Jews active in Communism in Russia and
abroad was striking: in Hungary, for example, they furnished 95 percent of the
leading figures in Bela Kun’s dictatorship. They also were disproportionately
represented among Communists in Germany and Austria during the revolutionary
upheavals there in 1918-23, and in the apparatus of the Communist
International.”[12]
Of
course, the Jewish Bolsheviks were not religious Jews, and were in fact as
opposed to Talmudic Judaism as any other segment of the population. Moreover,
as Pipes points out, “the results of the elections to the Constituent Assembly
indicate that Bolshevik support came not from the region of Jewish
concentration, the old Pale of Settlement, but from the armed forces and the
cities of Great Russia, which had hardly any Jews”.[13]
So blame for the Russian revolution must fall on Russians as well as Jews; and
in fact hardly any of the constituent nations of the Russian empire can claim
to have played no part in the catastrophe.
Nevertheless,
the extraordinary prominence of Jews in the revolution is a fact that must be
related, at least in part, to the traditionally anti-Russian and anti-Christian
attitude of Jewish culture, which is reflected in both of its major political
offspring – Bolshevism and Zionism. For, as Chaim Weitzmann, the first
president of Israel, showed in his Autobiography, the atheist Bolshevik
Jews and the theist Zionist Jews came from the same milieu, often the very same
families; so that his mother was able to witness her sons’ triumph both in
Bolshevik Moscow and Zionist Jerusalem…[14]
Moreover,
so complete was the Jewish domination of Russia as a result of the revolution that
it is really a misnomer to speak about the “Russian” revolution; it should more
accurately be called the anti-Russian, or Russian-Jewish revolution. Indeed,
the Russian revolution may be regarded as one branch of that general triumph of
Jewish power which we observe in the twentieth century in both East and West,
in both Russia and America and Israel. It is as if, by God’s permission and for
the chastisement of the sins of many nations, there arose in the Pale of
Settlement an avenging horde that swept away the last major restraining power
and ushered in the era of the Apocalypse.
If
we turn to the philosophical basis of the revolution, we find the same Jewish
element seemingly inextricably entwined with it – and this not only because so
many of the theorists of the revolution were Jews.
As
Bertrand Russell pointed out, many elements of the Marxist system are
reminiscent of Judaism: the same striving for the promised land on earth and in
time (communism and the withering away of the state); the same division of the
peoples of the world into the chosen people (the proletariat) and the goyim
(the exploiting classes), and the hatred incited against the latter; and the
same cult of the false Messiah (the infallible leader or party).[15]
Utopianism
is certainly at the heart of the philosophical system of Marxism-Leninism. Igor
Shafarevich has traced examples of utopian thought and statehood in many epochs
and geographical regions. He has concluded that it is always (a) totalitarian,
leading to the abolition of private property, the family and religion, and (b)
guided by a kind of death-wish which results in the physical and spiritual
death of the people.[16]
Under
the name of “chiliasm” or “millenarianism”, utopianism was one of the earliest
Christian heresies (with, as we might now expect, a strongly Jewish colouring).
It is possible that the addition of the phrase: “Whose Kingdom shall have no
end” to the Nicene Creed at the Second Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in
381 was aimed against this heresy.[17]
For chiliasm essentially amounted to the belief that Christ Himself will come
to earth before the Last Judgement in order to install His Kingdom physically
for a period of a thousand years, this Kingdom being characterised, according
to the heretics, by the triumph of the Jewish race and the Jewish law.
But
the Church rejected this, teaching that the true Kingdom of Christ will come
only after the Judgement, and that it will then be a spiritual Kingdom that is
“not of this world” and “has no end”. We can enter the Kingdom of God partially
before the Judgement, but only in and through the Church, which is not, and can
never be, a sensually apprehended, temporal kingdom.
Utopianism
is based not only on a heretical eschatology, but also on a false anthropology
that denies the fall of man. For utopia on earth is possible only on the
assumption that the men who live in the utopia are sinless and passionless,
being governed only by perfect love and humility. To suppose that any class of
men, once delivered from injustice and poverty, will automatically behave like
angels, is a myth. Still more mythical is the idea that the kingdom of love and
brotherhood can be ushered in by hatred and fratricidal war. The means do not
justify the ends; and the employment of evil means leads unfailingly to evil
ends.
As
Solzhenitsyn has said, the line between good and evil passes, not between
classes or nations, but down the middle of each human heart. Therefore the
final triumph of good over evil is possible only through the purification of
the human heart, every human heart.
And that is a spiritual task which is accomplished by spiritual, not material
or political means, by confession of the faith and repentance of sin, not by
rebellion against the king and the redistribution of property.
This
brings us to a still deeper flaw of utopianism – its materialism. For while the
heresy of chiliasm at any rate recognized the existence of God and the
spiritual nature of man, utopianism reduces everything to the blind determinism
of insensate matter. For the ancient heretics, utopia could only be introduced
by God, and was awarded to the righteous in response to the right use of their
freewill. For the moderns, there is neither God nor freewill – but utopia will
come in any case, as the result of the iron laws of necessity. And this
fatalistic faith both gives the revolution its frightening power – for men
acquire extraordinary self-confidence when they know that they must win in the
end – and guarantees its terrifying cruelty – for without freewill there is no
responsibility, and, as Dostoyevsky said, “if there is no God, everything is
permitted”.
“Cosmic
possession,” writes Fr. George Florovsky, “ – that is how we can define the utopian
experience. The feelings of unqualified dependence, of complete determination
from without and full immersion and inclusion into the universal order define
utopianism’s estimate of itself and the world. Man feels himself to be an
‘organic pin’, a link in some all-embracing chain – he feels that he is
unambiguously, irretrievably forged into one whole with the cosmos…
“From
an actor and creator, consciously willing and choosing, and for that reason
bearing the risk of responsibility for his self-definition, man is turned into
a thing, into a needle, by which someone sews something. In the organic
all-unity there is no place for action – here only movement is possible… There
is no place for the act, no place for the exploit (podvig).”[18]
If
chiliasm-utopianism is one of the earliest Jewish Christian heresies, the
division of the world into “clean” and “unclean” classes or nations is the
earliest, being the subject of the very first Church Council held at Jerusalem
under the presidency of the Apostle James. And if even the great Apostle of the
circumcision, St. Peter, fell, albeit temporarily into it, then it is small
wonder that apostate Jewry and the Marxist-Leninists should have perpetuated
it. Nor is such a temptation confined to the Jews: nationalism, the exaltation
of one’s own nation or class as being essentially superior to all others, is a
perennial temptation for all nations, and never more so than among certain
Orthodox nations now.
When
God commanded Noah to lead pairs both of “clean” and of “unclean” animals into
the ark, and when He commanded the Apostle Peter to eat of both “clean” and
“unclean” foods, He demonstrated that there is no essentially clean nation.
“For there is no difference; for all have sinned, all have fallen short of the
glory of God” (Romans. 3.22-23). All outside the ark, the Church of
Christ, are unclean; and all inside the Church are, if not completely clean, at
any rate in the process of being cleansed. And all, regardless of nationality,
can enter the Church. For “is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not the God of
the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, since there is one God Who will
justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith” (Romans. 3.29-30). Of course,
nationalism is not always a pathological phenomenon, and has often contributed
to the saving of a nation and the buttressing of the true faith; so perhaps we
should reserve the term “nationalism” for the pathological phenomenon, while using
another term – “patriotism”, perhaps – for the positive phenomenon to which we
now wish to draw attention.
Thus
when, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Russian Emperor Nicholas I
approved of the Slavophile slogan “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Narodnost”, he
was referring by “narodnost” to the positive virtue of patriotism or
love of country. Narodnost was linked to Orthodoxy, in the minds of
Nicholas and the Slavophiles, because it was subject to Orthodoxy and exalted
the nation, not for its own sake and not in opposition to other nations, but as
the bearer of one aspect of the Divine idea of nationhood. Thus the aim of
national self-consciousness, according to this conception, is “the attainment
in the destiny and spirit of the people of that ‘which God thinks of it in
eternity’, as Vladimir Solovyov put it.”[19]
Now
the revolution strives to destroy “the Divine idea of nationhood”, the
collective personality of each nation, just as it strives to destroy the Divine
image of manhood, the individual personality of each man. Thus Lenin said that
the aim of socialism was not only the drawing together of the nations, but also
their fusion – i.e. their destruction. For, as Dostoyevsky wrote, “socialism
deprives the national principle of its individuality, undermining the very
foundations of nationality.”[20]
Of course, Lenin was not averse to approving of and stirring up the
nationalisms of the smaller nations of the Russian empire in order to destroy
the God-bearing nation that he hated and feared the most. But having stirred up
nationalist feeling, he then tried to destroy it again, subordinating the
nations to the only nation and caste of which he approved – the nation of
Jewish internationalism, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.[21]
The
paradox that socialism both incites nationalism and destroys the nation is one
aspect of the general paradox of the socialist revolution, that while preaching
freedom it practises slavery, while proclaiming equality it creates inequality,
and while dreaming of brotherhood it incites fratricidal war. In the same way,
the French revolution proclaimed the freedom and equality of all nations; but
its first appearance on the international arena was in the form of Napoleonic
imperialism, which strove to destroy the freedom of all the nations of Europe.
And paradoxically, it was autocratic Russia, the conqueror of Napoleon, which
guaranteed the survival of the nations of the West, and their freedom from
totalitarianism, for at least another century.
For
the truth is that the revolution, while inciting the passions for personal and
national freedom in order to destroy the old church and state structures, was
aimed at the destruction of all freedom and individuality, both personal and
national. And while hypocritically invoking those ecumenical ideals which
Christianity gave to the world – “neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor
free, neither male nor female,” – it actually aimed at their complete
destruction by destroying the pivot upon which they all rest – “for you are all
one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3.18). Thus like the serpent in the Garden of
Eden, it promised life, but delivered death…
However, even more than its
anti-personal and anti-national passion, the deepest, most characteristic
longing of the Jewish-Russian revolution is its worship of the false Messiah.
Through its utopianism, the revolution merges the personalities of its
adherents into an elemental, all-embracing process to which they surrender
their freedom and personality. And through its class-warfare and
anti-patriotism, it destroys those last strongholds of personal and collective
freedom that stand in the way of its final victory. But what is such a
“victory”, if there is no supreme victor to whom to give the spoils, no
personal cause and leader of the victory of the proletariat? That is why the
revolution is incomplete until it has found its god, why the personal “modesty”
of Lenin had to be “corrected” by the “all-wise” Stalin, and why the collective
Antichrist of Sovietism must one day reach its apotheosis in the personal
Antichrist of Judaism…
In
The Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky saw this need for universal worship
that lies at the heart of the revolution. He traced its origin to the worship of
the infallible Pope of heretical Rome and, still further back, to the worship
of the imperator-pontifex maximus of pagan Rome. Deep in the soul of
man, as Blessed Augustine pointed out, there is a God-shaped hole; and if that
hole is not filled by the worship of the true God, it will be filled by the
worship of a false god; and to that god, man will give himself totally. Thus
recently, after the funeral of the dictator of the Ivory Coast (who built the
world’s largest church on the model of St. Peter’s in Rome), a young man,
beside himself with grief, threw himself into the crocodile-infested waters of
the moat round the dictator’s palace. This shows how the need for worship and
total self-sacrifice is as alive now, in our materialist age, as it has ever been.
Now
the West has ascribed the emergence of totalitarianism in Russia to the
weakness of her democratic institutions in 1917 and to her long history of
autocratic rule. The satanocracy of Bolshevism, according to this conception,
is closely akin to the theocracy of Holy Russia, both being opposed to the
“true godliness” of western democracy. Indeed, the very institution of kingship
is evil in western eyes.
In
truth, however, the very basis of society is hierarchically ordered. Thus, as Tuskarev
writes: “The cell of the State is the family. In the family the father is the
head by nature, while the son is subject to him; the authority of the father is
not the result of elections in the family, but is entrusted to him naturally by
the law of God (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow). Just as from the extended
family of the tribe there arises the people, so out of the family headed by one
man there arises tsarist autocracy. Both the familial and the monarchical
organization are established by God for the earthly existence of the sinful,
fallen man. The first-created man, living in living communion with God, was not
subject to anyone besides God, and was the lord of irrational creation. But
when man sinned, destroying the Divine hierarchy of submission and falling away
from God, he became the servant of sin and the devil, and as a consequence of
this became subject to a man like himself. The sinful will of man requires
submission for the restraint of his destructive activity. This Divine ordinance
has in view only the good of man – the limitation of the spread of evil. And
history itself shows that whatever the inadequacies of monarchies, they bear no
comparison with that evil that revolutions and anarchies have brought to the
peoples.
“Monarchical
administration has been established by God in accordance with His likeness.
‘God being One established the authority of one person; as Almighty –
autocratic authority; as Eternal – hereditary authority’ (Metropolitan Philaret
of Moscow). Such is monarchy in general, independent of its spiritual content;
being established in accordance with the likeness of God, it already has an
educational religious significance. Christian monarchy was formed and developed
under the immediate leadership and grace-filled sanctification of the Church of
Christ, and for that reason has a special spiritual content.”[22]
The
revolution strove to overthrow this natural order, not out of a love of
democracy and the people, but in order that one people – not the Russian
people, but the Jewish – should rule over all; for, as the Talmud says, “the
Messiah is, without metaphor, the Jewish people”[23]
This was clear already in the French revolution, when, having won, by dint of
bribery, personal influence and violence, the emancipation of their race, the
Jews so abused their newly won privileges that in 1806, on returning from
Austerlitz, Napoleon was forced to convene a special meeting of the Sanhedrin
in order to ask them the straight question: are you loyal to the French State
and its laws? He received the answer he wanted; but the Jews continued to abuse
their freedom to dominate others to such an extent that he had to withdraw some
of their privileges.
In any case, even as the nineteenth-century democratic revolutions in Europe led to the emancipation of the Jews almost everywhere, the Rabbis, fearing the dissolution of the Jewish identity among the Gentiles, created the Zionist movement in order to recreate the Jewish ghettoes in Palestine. So democracy for the Jewish revolution was only a means towards the dictatorship of the Jewish “proletariat” – ultimately, of the Antichrist. As the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion put it: “From liberalism were born the constitutional states, which took the place of Autocracy which was saving for the goys [Gentiles]. And a constitution, as you well know, is nothing other than a school for scandals, quarrels, arguments, disagreements, fruitless party agitation and party tendencies – in a word, a school for everything that will depersonalise the activity of the state… By such measures we will acquire the possibility of abolishing, little by little, step by step, everything that, at the beginning when we entered into our rights, we were forced to introduce into state constitutions, for the transfer to the unnoticed removal of every constitution, when the time will come to transform every government into our autocracy…”[24]
“Depersonalised”
states are always weak states; the people cannot express their victory fully
without having a focus for it in the veneration of a leader. So the overthrow
of personal autocracy by depersonalised democracy cannot stop there, but must
go on to its ultimate consequence – satanocracy, the enthronement of the
personal Antichrist. Thus in modern times we see an ever-quickening descent
from autocracy to democracy to satanocracy. Democracy cannot be more than a
transitional phase because the rule of the people by the people is a
contradiction in terms. For “rule” means the imposition of one will on the will
of the people, while the will of the people, at least in its fallen state, is
always multiple.
That
is why the great saints of the nineteenth and early twentieth century insisted
on the necessity – the religious
necessity – of faithfulness to the Tsar. Thus St. Seraphim of Sarov said that
after Orthodoxy, faithfulness to the Tsar was “our first Russian duty and the
chief foundation of true Christian piety”. Again, St. John of Kronstadt said:
“The autocracy is the sole condition of the piety of Russia; if there is no autocracy,
there will be no Russia; power will be taken by the Jews, who greatly hate us…”
And Metropolitan Macarius, the apostle to the Altai, said: “You don’t want your
own Russian authority, so you will have a foreign power over you.” [25]
Thus,
to summarize: world history is a perennial struggle between two irreconcilable
religio-political principles: theocracy and satanocracy. Theocracy denotes the
type of society in which the whole of the life of the people, including politics,
is devoted primarily to the service of God, Who is seen as the true King of
kings and Lord of lords. Strictly speaking, a true theocracy can only be the
Kingdom of God on earth, which is the Church. However, in view of the fall of
man, and the consequent necessity of fighting wars and indulging in other such
unspiritual activities, theocratic societies from the time of the kings of
Israel have created a kind of division of labour between the Church, on the one
hand, which occupies itself more or less exclusively with spiritual matters,
and the Crown, on the other, which occupies itself with more material matters –
although Church and Crown, like soul and body, both serve the same end, in a
kind of symbiotic symphony of powers.[26]
Satanocracy, by contrast, abolishes the distinction between Church and State
and subordinates society in all its spheres to the will of the earthly ruler,
who is recognized to be the incarnation of a god (as in Ancient Babylonia and
Egypt) or of an impersonal heavenly order (as in Ancient China and the
Platonic, Aristotlean and Hegelian philosophies) or, more dynamically, of the
March of History (as in Marxism-Leninism). “Pure” satanocracies have been rare
since Christ, largely because of the power of the Orthodox Christian theocratic
ideal. But that ideal has come to be undermined by, on the one hand,
pseudo-theocracies such as Papism and Islam, and on the other, by
anti-theocratic theories which have deceitfully pretended to be compatible with
true theism, such as Protestant democracy and Jewish nationalism. Finally,
after a “trial run” in the French revolution, a “pure” satanocracy came to
power in 1917 on the ruins of the Russian theocracy. This satanocracy combined
elements of all the previous satanocracies and pseudo- and anti-theocracies:
the totalitarianism and individualist man-worship of the ancient pagan
monarchies and Papism; the fatalist determinism of Islam; the collectivist
people-worship of the Protestant democracies; and the Jewish and other kinds of
nationalism.
While,
until 1917, the revolution had made only partial inroads into the life of the
Orthodox Churches, in the next ten years it penetrated into the very heart of
her external organization, removing the last of her pious autocrats, and
eventually leading all the Local Autocephalous Churches, with the possible
exception of the Mother of the Churches, Jerusalem, to fall away from the
Truth. This has led to the arising of movements of resistance to the official,
fallen Churches, which have come to be known as “True Orthodox” or “Old
Calendar” or “Catacomb” Orthodox Churches in opposition to their
pseudo-Orthodox or new-style or above-ground official counterparts. The most
important of these have been the True Orthodox or Catacomb Church of Russia,
the True Orthodox or Old Calendar Churches of Greece and Romania, and the
Russian Church Abroad. Thus by contrast with the externally united, wealthy and
numerically large Churches of Orthodox Christendom in 1914, the picture
presented today is one of a small, persecuted and externally divided remnant.
The
main purpose of this book is to show how this change took place, how the
Orthodox Church before the revolution became the Orthodox Church in modern
times, and what are the prospects for her recovery now, at the end of the
twentieth century.
Of
course, it is easy to exaggerate the difference between then and now. Church
life on the eve of the catastrophe was, as might be expected, at a low
spiritual ebb, in spite of the external pomp.[27]
Ecumenism and socialism had already sown their pernicious seeds, especially in
the educated classes; and nationalism had already produced at least one formal
Church schism – that between the Greek and Bulgarian Churches.[28]
The catastrophe was to a large extent simply a reaping of the bad fruits which
had already been sown. Moreover, the present divisions between the True
Orthodox Churches, damaging though they are, conceal a perhaps greater unity
with regard to the main questions of the age than existed at the beginning of
the century.
The
Apostle Paul said: “There must be heresies among you, that those who are
approved may be made manifest among you” (I Corinthians 11.19). Nowhere
has the truth of these words been revealed more clearly than in our century,
when the martyrs against the heresies of ecumenism and communism have numbered
in the millions. A secondary purpose of this book, therefore, is to celebrate
the glory of this century, its new martyrs and confessors. For to chart the
triumphs of Satan while ignoring the feats of those who have conquered his
power in the most difficult of circumstances would be to distort the truth.
Christ Himself came “for the rise and fall of many in Israel” (Luke
2.34), and it is in studying the rise of some and fall of others in the Church
of the twentieth century that we ourselves come to a fuller knowledge of the
truth.
And
what is that truth which, it is hoped, this humble work will help to establish?
The truth of the Church. The truth
that, contrary to the teachings of the heretics, the Church is truly One, Holy,
Catholic and Apostolic. The truth that this unity, holiness, catholicity and
apostolicity have been preserved to our day exclusively in the remnant of the
Orthodox Church known as the True Orthodox Church. The truth, finally, that in our
days of “the triumph of Satan and the power of the Antichrist”, as the
Martyr-Patriarch Tikhon said[29],
“the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church”, which is and always
will be the only ark of salvation.
Through
the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on
us!
March 20 / April 2, 2003.
Week of the Holy Cross.
St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne.
East House, Beech Hill, Mayford, Woking, Surrey, England.
We have no king, because we feared not the Lord.
Hosea 10.3.
The mystery of iniquity is already at work, only it will not be perfected until he who now restrains is taken from the midst.
II Thessalonians 2.7.
At
the beginning of the twentieth century, the Orthodox Church in both the major
States in which she lived – the Russian and Ottoman empires – found herself in
a position of subservience to the civil government, a position that had certain
external advantages but which was contrary to the holy canons of the Church and
therefore greatly debilitated her strength in the long run.
In
the Ottoman empire, the Muslim State forbade conversions to Orthodoxy on pain
of death, restricted the Church in various other ways, and made the post of the
patriarch himself subject to the highest bidder in a way that both drained the
financial resources of the Orthodox community and made the man who was
eventually “elected” patriarch in effect a simoniac. At the same time, this
position of the patriarchate had hidden blessings which became clearer only
after the collapse of the empire. First, the Ottoman rulers provided a certain
protection from the depradations of western missionaries, who, if allowed free
access into the Orthodox lands, might well have torn a large part of the
largely uneducated flock from Orthodoxy (as happened in Transylvania, where
Ottoman power was weaker). And secondly, the millet system of
administering the empire according to religious confessions forced the Orthodox
nations together in a way which countered the centrifugal tendencies that had
already led to wars between Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia before the Turkish
conquest. The tragedy of Greek and Balkan Orthodoxy in the twentieth century
consisted in the fact that, while overthrowing the admittedly uncanonical
system of dependence on the Ottoman rulers, the Orthodox subjected themselves
to the still more destructive forces of nationalism, on the one hand, and
westernism, on the other.[30]
In
Russia, Peter the Great’s reglament of 1721 had abolished the
patriarchate and made the Church in effect a department of the State under the
direction of a Procurator appointed by the Tsar. Again, there were hidden
blessings in this uncanonical situation: the State supported the Church
financially, encouraging her missionary and educational work, and State
legislation muzzled the activities of sectarians and uniates on the borders of
the empire. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century these advantages
were seen by many in the Church, from the president of the council of ministers
and the Holy Synod to the Church intelligentsia and the white clergy, to be
largely outweighed by the disadvantages, which included: the impotence of the
bishops, whose administrative functions were in many cases superseded by
diocesan consistories answerable to the Procurator; the invidious position of
priests who were required by law to report on seditious activities by their
parishioners, even if this involved breaking the seal of confession; and the
identification of preachers among the heterodox as government agents, which
greatly hindered the task of converting the Muslims, Old Believers, Protestants
and Uniates.
Since
the Russian Church was by far the largest and strongest Church in Orthodoxy,
and the main bulwark of the empire on which the prosperity of the other
Orthodox Churches around the world depended, the reform of her relations with
the State and of her internal administration was a most pressing necessity. And
this was recognized by the Tsar himself, who from 1903 openly suggested both
the restoration of the patriarchate and the convocation of a Local Council. He
even proposed that he take monastic vows and become the patriarch himself – to
which the Holy Synod replied only with an astonished silence.[31]
However,
the disastrous Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, followed by the revolution of
1905-6, arrested the reform process just as it was getting under way; for at a
time when the foundations of the State were being shaken to the core, it was
felt that to allow radical change in the Church would encourage further
destabilisation – especially when the revolutionary spirit had penetrated deep
into the Church herself. And yet the Tsar’s Toleration decree of April, 1905,
which allowed all the non-Orthodox confessions in the empire to organize
themselves autonomously and to accept converts, while keeping the Orthodox
Church chained to the State, made reform even more pressing. For only a
reformed and revitalized Church which was in harmony or “symphony” with the
State, but did not have one hand tied behind her back by a State determined to
use her for political ends, could hope to withstand the sudden resurgence of
the non-Orthodox religions, especially the uniates in the south-western regions
of the empire.
However,
in balancing the need for reform against the necessity for stability the Tsar
came down on the side of stability, and his order to convene the Council never
came. There followed a decade in which the wounds of the Church continued to
fester, and the authority of both Church and State continued to decline. And in
the end the much needed Local Council was convened, in accordance with Divine
Providence, only when the Tsar himself had been swept away…[32]
And
yet there had been spiritual gains in the pre-revolutionary period. The
pre-conciliar commission had discussed at length the main issues which were to
dominate the history of the Orthodox Church in the coming century, including
Church-State relations, the relations between the hierarchy and laypeople
within the Church (i.e. sobornost or conciliarity) and the beginnings of
Ecumenism. Many of the recommendations of the commission were eventually
adopted without major modification by the Local Council of 1917-18.
Moreover, the period had brought to
the fore several of those churchmen who would play such important roles, both
for good and for ill, in the coming struggle with the revolution: on the one
side, men such as Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky), Archbishop Anthony
(Khrapovitsky), Archbishop Theophan (Bystrov) of Poltava and Archbishop Tikhon
(Bellavin), and on the other, Bishop Antoninus (Granovsky), Bishop Sergius
(Stragorodsky) and Bishop Eulogius (Georgievsky). Thus the battle-lines for the
coming struggle had been drawn, and a discerning observer might even have
foreseen the outcome of the struggle by examining the events of 1905-07.
Especially well-known in the pre-war years was Archbishop Anthony of Volhynia. On all the major issues of the day he adopted an uncompromisingly Orthodox position. Thus he supported the Tsar and rebuked the liberal, “unchurched” part of the Russian population, writing of them in 1899: “It is no longer a people, but a rotting corpse, which takes its rotting as a sign of life, while on it, or in it, live only moles, worms and foul insects… for in a living body they would find no satisfaction for their greed, and there would be nothing for them to live on”.[33]
Another
of Vladyka Anthony’s major concerns was the defence of the Orthodox population
of Austria-Hungary. The Hungarian government and the uniates tried by all means
to prevent the return of the Carpatho-Russians to their ancestral Orthodox
faith. This led to martyrdoms, such as that of the priest Maximus Sandovich,
who had been ordained by Vladyka Anthony.[34]
“Vladyka
Anthony struggled with the unia and both by the printed word and in his sermons
he often addressed this theme. He tried by all means to destroy the incorrect
attitude towards the unia which had been established in Russia, according to
which it was the same Orthodoxy, only commemorating the Pope of Rome. With
profound sorrow and irritation he said: ‘They can in no way accept this simple
truth, that the unia is a complete entry into the Roman Catholic church with
the recognition of the Orthodox Church as a schism.., with the recognition of
all the Latin saints and with a condemnation of the Orthodox saints as having
been schismatics outside the true Church…’
“…
Vladyka Anthony also laboured much to establish in Russian society an Orthodox
attitude towards Catholicism. In educated Russian society and in ecclesiastical
circles in the Synodal period of the Russian Church the opinion was widespread
that Catholicism was one of the branches of Christianity which, as V.S.
Solovyov taught, was bound at the end of time to unite into one Christianity
with the other supposed branches – Orthodoxy and Protestantism, about which the
holy Church supposedly prayed in her litanies: ‘For the prosperity of the Holy
Churches of God and for the union of all’.
“The
correct attitude towards Catholicism as an apostate heresy was so shaken that
the Holy Synod under the influence of the Emperor Peter I and with the blessing
of his favourite, the protestantising Metropolitan Theophanes Prokopovich,
allowed Swedish prisoners-of-war in Siberia to marry Russian girls with the
obligatory conversion to Orthodoxy. Soon this uncanonical practice of mixed
marriages became law and spread, especially in the western regions. In his
diocese Vladyka Anthony strictly forbade the clergy to celebrate mixed
marriages.
“Vladyka
Anthony well knew that Catholic influence in the midst of the Russian clergy
was introduced through the theological schools: ‘We have lost (an Orthodox
attitude towards Catholicism) because those guides by which we studied in
school and which constitute the substance of our theological, dogmatic and
moral science, is borrowed from the Catholics and Protestants; we are left only
with straight heterodox errors which are known to all and have been condemned
by ecclesiastical authorities…’
“Seeing
the abnormal situation of church life in subjugated Carpathian Rus’, Vladyka
Anthony turned to the Ecumenical Patriarch Joachim III with a request to accept
the Orthodox Galicians and Carpatho-Russians under his omophorion, since the
Russian Synod for political reasons was unable to spread its influence there.
The patriarch willingly agreed and appointed Vladyka Anthony as his exarch for
Galicia and Carpathian Rus’. The Galicians, after finishing work in the fields
and in spite of the great obstacles involved in crossing the border, sometimes
with a direct danger to their lives, made pilgrimages in large groups to the
Pochayev Lavra. Many Carpatho- Russians and Galicians entered the Volhynia
theological seminary.
“Under
the influence of all these undertakings, the Orthodox movement in these areas
began to grow in an elemental manner with each year that passed. This elicited
repressions on the part of the Austro-Hungarian government, which tried to
suppress the movement. The persecution grew and soon Vladyka was forced to
speak out in defence of the persecuted Christians. In August, 1913 he published
an encyclical letter in which he eloquently portrayed all the woes and
persecutions of the Orthodox population of the western regions. In going
through the various instances of Catholics humiliating Orthodox, he cited the
following example of the firmness of the persecuted and the cruelty of the
persecutors: ‘Virgins who had gathered together to save their souls in fasting
and prayer were stripped in winter and driven out onto a frozen lake, like the
40 martyrs of Sebaste, after which some of them soon died. Thus do they torture
our Russians in Hungary and Austria in broad daylight in our civilized age…’
“But
when massive arrests and tortures of the Orthodox began, and there was a trial of
94 Orthodox in Sihet, Vladyka Anthony composed a special prayer and petitions
in the litanies, which were read in all the churches of the Volhynia diocese in
the course of the whole period of the trial, which lasted for two months.
“This
was the only voice raised in defence of the persecuted, not only in Russia but
also throughout Europe.
“The
Austro-Hungarian political circles, in agreement with the Vatican, undertook
decisive measures to suppress the incipient mass return to Orthodoxy of the
Carpatho-Russians and Galicians. It seems that they undertook diplomatic
negotiations in St. Petersburg in order to remove the main cause of the
movement that had arisen, Vladyka Anthony, from his Volhynia see.”[35]
On May 20, 1914 Archbishop Anthony was duly transferred from the see of Volhynia to that of Kharkov… However, where human leaders fail, the King of kings intervenes. The First World War, which broke out on the feast of the recently canonized St. Seraphim of Sarov, July 19, 1914, removed – temporarily, at any rate – many of the dangers which had arisen in the pre-war period and against which Archbishop Anthony had struggled. Thus patriotic emotion and reverence for the Tsar revived, and concern for the fate of the Orthodox Christians in Serbia and the south-west regions made the struggle, in the minds of many, into a holy war in defence of Orthodoxy against militant Catholicism and Protestantism.
By 1914 there were about seven million Jews in the Russian empire – the largest non-Slavic ethnic minority. Most of them lived in the Pale of Settlement. Russian law, very loosely observed, confined them to this area, but on religious, not racial grounds; Karaite Jews, who did not accept the Talmud, the Mountain Jews of the Caucasus, who were strongly tainted with paganism, and Jews who became Christians of any denomination, were given equal rights with the rest of the population.
Moreover, permission to live outside the Pale was given to various categories of Jews: Siberian colonists, domestic servants, artisans, university graduates (one-fifth of the students of Kharkov university were Jews), businessmen, industrialists, bankers and others. This meant that in spite of the discriminatory laws there were considerable colonies of Jews throughout the empire and even in the capital, which enabled them to play a prominent role in the cultural and commercial life of pre-revolutionary Russia. In all, Jews made up about a third of Russia’s total trading community.
In spite of the considerable opportunities thus presented to Jews in the Russian empire, the traditionalist, rabbi-dominated Talmudic Jews of the Pale continued to think of Christians and Christian society as unclean and despicable. “The eminent Jewish-Russian lawyer, Genrikh Sliozberg,” write Fitzlyon and Browning, “never forgot the ‘real grief’ of his family and relations when they discovered that his father had sent him to a Russian grammar school. His school uniform they found particularly irritating, sinful even. It was, they thought, ‘an apostate’s garb’, and his mother and grandmother cried bitterly every time they saw him in it.’ Again, ‘the Russian-Jewish revolutionary, Lev Deutsch, writing in 1923, clearly remembered the time when the Jews ‘considered it sinful to learn Russian, and its use was allowed only if absolutely essential and, of course, only for speaking to Christians (the goyim).’”[36]
It was in this fanatical atmosphere that Communist and Zionist propaganda made inroads into Jewish youth; and, as Chaim Weitzmann recalled in his Autobiography, zealots of both types were to be found in his own family, being united only in their hatred of Orthodox Russia.[37]
Such sentiments were bound to lead to a reaction on the part of the surrounding population. Moreover, Jewish money-lenders exploited Russian peasants who wished to buy their freedom after Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs in 1861. The government tried to help with generous, low-interest loans, and on several occasions cancelled the debts outright; but the remaining need was filled by less generous Jews, who stepped in with much tougher, high-interest loans.
Dostoyevsky wrote: “Jewry is thriving precisely there where the people are still ignorant, or not free, or economically backward. It is there that Jewry has a champ libre! And instead of raising, by its influence, the level of education, instead of increasing knowledge, generating economic fitness in the native population, – instead of this, the Jew, wherever he has settled, has still more humiliated and debauched the people; there humaneness was still more debased and the educational level fell still lower; there inescapable, inhuman misery, and with it despair, spread still more disgustingly. Ask the native populations in our border regions: What is propelling the Jew – has been propelling him for centuries? You will receive a unanimous answer: mercilessness. ‘He has been prompted so many centuries only by pitilessness for us, only the thirst for our sweat and blood.’
“And, in truth, the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws. They always managed to be on friendly terms with those upon whom the people were dependent, and, certainly, it is not for them to complain, at least in this respect, about their restricted rights compared with the native population. They have received from us enough of these rights over the native population. What, in the course of decades and centuries, has become of the Russian people where the Jews settled is attested by the history of our border regions. What, then? – Point to any other tribe from among Russi