Russia under the Old regime

242

century, it had been common for dvoriane and boyars to maintain at their own expense domestic chapels and support one or more priests. But already one century later, in the reign of Catherine n, an English traveller noted with surprise that during his five months' stay in St Petersburg he had not seen a single noble attended by a priest.16 Other foreign travellers of the imperial era furnish similar negative evidence. There were several reasons for this growing isolation of the clergy from the country's elite. One was Peter's law forbidding the construction of family churches and the maintenance of family priests. Another was the widening gulf between the westernized, secular kind of education given the upper class and that offered by even the best seminaries. Social differences also played their part. The strict prohibitions imposed by the Muscovite government against nobles joining the clerical estate - prohibitions reinforced by Peter's legislation - prevented in Russia that blood kinship between nobility and upper ranks of the clergy usual in western Europe. In their vast majority, Russian clerics were commoners, often of the lower sort, culturally and socially close to the urban petty bourgeoisie. The westernized dvorianstvo simply did not feel at ease in the company of such people. The characters inhabiting the novels of Leskov, the chronicler of clerical life in Russia, seem to live in a world of their own, even more shut off from the world at large than the merchants inhabiting their 'dark kingdom'. They remained to the end of the imperial regime a closed caste, attending their own schools, marrying priests' daughters, and sending their offspring into the priesthood. Even in the early twentieth century, when it was possible to do so, Russian laymen rarely took holy orders. Impoverished, isolated and identified with the autocracy, the clergy commanded neither love nor respect; it was at best tolerated. What could the church in Russia have been realistically expected to do? Given its conservative philosophy and traditional reliance on state authority, it could certainly not have acted as a liberalizing force. Still, it could have accomplished two important things. First, it might have upheld the principle of duality of temporal and spiritual authority as laid down in Matthew 22:16-22, and elaborated in the theory of the Byzantine church. Had it done so, it would have gained for itself sovereignty over the country's spiritual realm and by this very fact imposed a certain limit on the state's authority. By failing to do so, it enabled the state to claim power over men's minds is well as over their bodies, thereby contributing heavily to the monstrous development of secular power in Russia, then and even more so later.

Secondly, it could have stood up and fought for the most elementary Christian values. It should have protested against the institution of serf- dom, so contrary to Christian ethics. No branch of Christianity has shown such callous indifference to social and political injustice. One can fully sympathize with the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn that Russian history would have been "incomparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries if the church had not surrendered its independence and had continued to make its voice heard among the people, as it does, for example, in Poland'.16

The ultimate result of the policies of the Russian Orthodox Church was not only to discredit it in the eyes of those who cared for social and political justice, but to create a spiritual vacuum. This vacuum was filled with secular ideologies which sought to realize on this earth the paradise that Christianity had promised to provide in the next.