Russia under the Old regime

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when religious leaders in the west, passion and enthusiasm safely behind them, were worrying how to accommodate faith to science or the needs of society, Russians were experiencing personal conversions leading in the very opposite direction, towards renunciation, mysticism, hypnosis and ecstasy. Among Russian peasants in that age of rationalism there spread sectarian movements of an extreme irrational type such as western Europe had not seen since the Reformation.

An aspect of this resignation is humility and dread of hubris. Orthodox theologians claim that their church has remained truer to the teachings of Christ and the practices of early Christianity than either the Catholic or the Protestant ones on the grounds that the latter, having become contaminated by contact with classical civilization, have assigned far too great a role to analytic reason, a concession which has inexorably led them to the sin of presumption. Orthodoxy preaches patient acceptance of one's fate and silent suffering. The earliest canonized saints of the Russian church, the medieval princes Boris and Gleb, attained sainthood because they had let themselves be slaughtered without offering resistance.

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