An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

63. RUSSIA AND EUROPE: (3) HERZEN VS. KHOMIAKOV

Belinsky had deified the West, but never felt at home there. Alexander Herzen was the first Westernizer to symbolize the westerners’ exile from Russian values by permanently settling in the West, in London. From there, writes Berlin, “he established his free printing press, and in the 1850s began to publish two periodicals in Russia, The Pole Star [recalling the Masonic lodge of the same name] and The Bell (the first issues appeared in 1855 and 1857 respectively), which marked the birth of systematic revolutionary agitation – and conspiracy – by Russian exiles directed against the tsarist regime.”³³⁹

Herzen followed Belinsky and the westerners in his disdain for Russia’s pre-Petrine past: “You need the past and its traditions, but we need to tear Russia away from them. We do not want Russia before Peter, because for us it does not exist, but you do not want the new Russia. You reject it, but we reject ancient Rus’”.³⁴⁰
However, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, Herzen began to lose faith in the western path to happiness. He began to see the futility (if not the criminality) of violent revolution, and of such senseless slogans as Proudhon’s “all property is theft”, or Bakunin’s “the Passion to destroy is the same as the Passion to create”. The revolution had only left the poor poorer than ever, while the passion to destroy seemed as exhilarating as the passion to create only in the heat of the moment, and not when the pieces had to be picked up and paid for the next day…
“A curse on you,” he wrote with regard to 1848, “year of blood and madness, year of the triumph of meanness, beastliness, stupidity!… What did you do, revolutionaries frightened of revolution, political tricksters, buffoons of liberty?… Democracy can create nothing positive… and therefore it has no future… Socialism left a victor on the field of battle will inevitably be deformed into a commonplace bourgeois philistinism. Then a cry of denial will be wrung from the titanic breast of the revolutionary minority and the deadly battle will begin again… We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general, just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.”³⁴¹
And again: “If progress is the goal, or whom are we working? Who is this Moloch who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, draws back; and, as a consolation to the exhausted and doomed multitudes, shouting ‘morituri te salutant’ [‘those who are about to die salute you’], can only give the… mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth. Do you truly wish to condemn the human beings alive today to the sad role… of wretched galley-slaves who, up to their knees in mud, drag a barge… with… ‘progress in the future’ upon its flag?… a goal which is infinitely remote is no goal, only… a deception; a goal must be closer – at the very least the labourer’s wage, or pleasure in work performed.”³⁴²
“He was disillusioned with western civilization and found that it was deeply penetrated by the petty bourgeois spirit, and was built on ‘respect for the sacred right of property’ and ‘has no other ideals except a thirst for personal security’.
“’Europe,’ said Herzen, ‘is approaching a terrible cataclysm. The medieval world is collapsing. The political and religious revolutions are weakening under the burden of their own powerlessness, they have done great things, but they have not fulfilled their task… They have destroyed faith in the throne and the altar, but have not realized freedom, they have lit in hearts a desire which they are not able to satisfy. Parliamentarism, Protestantism – all these were deferments, temporary salvation, powerless outposts against death and degeneration; their time has passed. From 1849 they began to understand that neither ossified Roman law nor cunning casuistry nor nauseating deistic philosophy nor merciless religious rationalism are able to put off the realization of the destinies of society.’
“Herzen did not believe in the creative function of contemporary democracy, he considered that it possessed only a terrible power of destruction, but not the capacity to create.
“’In democracy,’ said Herzen, ‘there is a terrible power of destruction, but when it takes it upon itself to create something, it gets lost in student experiments, in political etudes. There is no real creativity in democracy.’
“Hence Herzen drew the merciless conclusion that the perishing order must be destroyed to its foundations.
“This destruction had to be universal, it would come in a storm and blood.
“’Who knows what will come out of this blood? But whatever comes out, it is enough that in this paroxysm of madness, revenge, discord and retribution the world that restricts the new man, and hinders him from living, hinders him from establishing himself in the future, will perish. And that is good, and for that reason let chaos and destruction flourish and may the future be constructed.’”³⁴³
But then the unexpected: disillusioned with the West, this westernizer par excellence turns in hope to – Russia. “’The future,’ declared Herzen, not without some pride, ‘belongs to the Russian people, who is called to bring an end to the decrepit and powerless world and clear a place for the new and beautiful [world].’
“In 1851 in a letter to Michelet Herzen wrote: ‘Amidst this chaos, amidst this dying agony and tormented regeneration, amidst this world falling into dust around its cradle, men’s gaze is involuntarily directed towards the East.’”³⁴⁴ And when Alexander II emancipated the peasants in 1861, he hailed him in the words of Julian the Apostate to Christ: “You have conquered, Galilaean!”³⁴⁵
That which particularly aroused the hopes of Herzen for Russia was the peasant commune or mir. He thought that this was a specifically Russian kind of socialism. As N.O. Lossky writes: “Disappointed with Western Europe and its ‘petty bourgeois’ spirit, he came to the conclusion that the Russian village commune and the artel hold a promise of socialism being realized in Russia rather than in any other country. The village commune meant for him peasant communism [‘The Russian People and Socialism’, 1852, II, 148]. In view of this he came to feel that reconciliation with the Slavophiles was possible. In his article ‘Moscow Panslavism and Russian Europeanism’ (1851) he wrote: Is not socialism ‘accepted by the Slavophiles as it is by us? It is a bridge on which we can meet and hold hands’ (I, 338).”³⁴⁶
Certainly, the Slavophiles agreed with Herzen on the mir. The most famous of them, Alexis Stepanovich Khomiakov, praised “its meetings that passed unanimous decisions and its traditional justice in accordance with custom, conscience, and inner truth.”³⁴⁷ As Richard Pipes writes, the Slavophiles “became aware of the peasant commune as an institution confined to Russia, and extolled it as proof that the Russian people, allegedly lacking in the acquisitive ‘bourgeois’ impulses of western Europeans, were destined to solve mankind’s social problems. Haxthausen popularised this view in his book, published in 1847. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Russian mir became in Western Europe the starting-point of several theories concerning communal land-tenure of primitive societies…”³⁴⁸ Moreover, there seemed to be some prima facie similarity between Herzen’s idea of “Russian socialism” and Khomiakov’s key idea of sobornost’…
Khomiakov had not gone through the tormenting journey from westernism to Orthodoxy that his friend Kireyevsky had undergone, but had remained that rarity in the Russian educated classes – a committed Orthodox who practised his faith openly and without shame while remaining completely au courant with modern developments (he had several technological inventions to his credit). As Roy Campbell writes, “he was as far removed from the ‘ridiculousness of conservatism’ as he was from the revolutionary movement with its ‘immoral and passionate self-reliance’”.³⁴⁹
“In contradistinction to Kireyevsky and K. Aksakov,” writes Lossky, “Khomiakov does not slur over the evils of Russian life but severely condemns them. At the beginning of the Crimean War (against Turkey, France and England, 1854-1855) he denounced with the fire and inspiration of a prophet, the Russia of his day (before the great reforms of Alexander II) and called her to repentance.
“Western Europe has failed to embody the Christian ideal of the wholeness of life through overemphasizing logical knowledge and rationality; Russia has so far failed to embody it because complete, all-embracing truth from its very nature develops slowly… Nevertheless Khomiakov believes in the great mission of the Russian people when it comes fully to recognize and express ‘all the spiritual forces and principles that lie at the basis of Holy Orthodox Russia.’ ‘Russia is called to stand at the forefront of universal culture; history gives her the right to do so because of the completeness and manysidedness of her guiding principles; such a right given to a nation imposes a duty upon every one of its members.’ Russia’s ideal is not to be the richest or most powerful country but to become ‘the most Christian of all human societies’.
“In spite of Khomiakov’s… critical attitude toward Western Europe,… [he] speaks of it in one of his poems as ‘the land of holy miracles’. He was particularly fond of England. The best things in her social and political life were due, he thought, to the right balance being maintained between liberalism and conservatism. The conservatives stood for the organic force of the national life developing from its original sources while the liberals stood for the personal, individual force, for analytical, critical reason. The balance between these two forces in England has never yet been destroyed because ‘every liberal is a bit of a conservative at bottom because he is English’. In England, as in Russia, the people have kept their religion and distrust analytical reason. But Protestant scepticism is undermining the balance between the organic and the analytic forces, and this is a menace to England in the future…”³⁵⁰ In another place, Khomiakov saw the menace to England in her conservatism: “England with her modest science and her serious love of religious truth might give some hope; but – permit the frank expression of my thoughts – England is held by the iron chain of traditional custom.”³⁵¹
While attached to England, when it came to comparing the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity, Khomiakov was severe in his judgements. Influenced by Elder Ambrose of Optina as Kireyevsky had been by Elder Macarius, he had a deep, unshakeable confidence in the Orthodox Church. “Peter Christoff characterizes Khomiakov’s belief as follows, ‘Although Khomiakov respected and valued much in the Western nations he was absolutely convinced of the superiority of Orthodoxy.’ The Slavic world-view and the Russian peasant commune specifically served as a foundation for a new social order with the emphasis on the Orthodox Church. To refer to Khomiakov’s Christian Orthodox messianism would in no way do him an injustice. Khomiakov believed that Russia had a mission to bring the whole world under the ‘roof’ of the Orthodox Church.”³⁵²
“The Church,” he wrote in his famous ecclesiological tract, The Church is One, “does not recognize any power over herself other than her own, no other’s court than the court of faith”.³⁵³ The Church is One, declared Khomiakov, and that Church is exclusively the Orthodox Church. “Western Christianity has ceased to be Christianity,” he wrote. “In Romanism [Roman Catholicism] there is not one word, not one action, upon which the seal of spiritual life might lie”. “Both Protestantisms (Roman and German)… already bear death within themselves; it is left to unbelief only to take away the corpses and clean the arena. And all this is the righteous punishment for the crime committed by the ‘West’”.³⁵⁴
This points to the fundamental difference between the Slavophiles and westerners: their attitude to the faith, to Orthodoxy; the Slavophiles embraced Orthodoxy, while the westernizers rejected it. “It is to Herzen [the leader of the westernizers] that there belongs the most apt word expressing the difference between the two camps. Not without sorrow at the collapse of his friendship with Kireyevsky, Herzen wrote: ‘The walls of the church were raised between us.’³⁵⁵
Paradoxically, however, some have accused Khomiakov of degrading the theological mystery of sobornost’ into a secular, westerning ideal, of confusing sobornost’ with democracy, the spiritual warmth of communion in Christ with the natural warmth of a family or society.
It is certainly true to say that for Khomiakov, as for the other early Slavophiles, there was a close connection between his teaching on the Church and his teaching on the peasant commune, the mir.
Indeed, as Fr. Georges Florovsky writes, “the hidden meaning of the Slavophile teaching becomes completely clear only when we divine that both these, at first sight discordant teachings coincide completely, in that what the commune should be in the sphere of external inter-human relationships, in the sphere of ‘earthly’ life, is what the Church is in the order of the spiritual life of the person. And the other way round: the commune is that form of social existence which is realized as a result of the application of the principles of Orthodox ecclesiasticism to the question of social inter-relations.”³⁵⁶
“One could even say,” writes S. Khoruzhij, “that the social aspect, the interpretation of sobornost’ as the principle of social existence, in time came to occupy centre stage, leaving the original ecclesiological meaning of the concept in the background and almost forgotten. Here we see a fairly systematic evolution. From the beginning there lived in the minds of the early Slavophiles an idea of the communal ideal expressing the harmonious management of social life. They were in agreement in considering the closest historical approximation to it the village commune, the peasant mir, and, correspondingly, the ideal was usually called ‘communality’ or ‘communal unity’, being defined as ‘unity which consists in… the concept of a natural and moral brotherhood and inner justice’ (I, 99). It is a banal tradition to reproach the Slavophiles for idealizing the communal set-up and Russian history. For all its triteness, the reproach is just; although Khomiakov tried to moderate this tendency (especially after the Crimean war), he never managed to measure with one measure and judge with an equal judgement home and abroad, Russia and the West. But we must point something else out here. However embellished were his descriptions of the sources and bases of Russian history and statehood, embellishment never became deification, nor was communality identified with sobornost’. They were two different principles, and Khomiakov did not think of merging them into each other, bringing a human, secular matter to the level of the Theandric and grace-filled. He saw an impassible boundary between the one and the other.
“However, it was not long before people with frightening ease lost the ability to discern this boundary – and then learned to deny it. Sobornost’ was inexorably, with greater and greater strength and openness, brought down to earth, deprived of its grace-filled content and reduced to a simple social and organic principle: to a certain degree this process was the very essence of the ideological evolution of Slavophilism, from its earlier to its later variants, and from it to the conservatism of the last reign, to post-revolutionary Eurasianism and still further. In this process of the degeneration of the path of sobornost’ it crossed paths with the socialist idea: as has been pointed out more than once, ‘in this attraction to the ideal of… the commune it is not difficult to discern a subconscious and erroneous thirst for sobornost’ [Florovsky]. Therefore in the same descending line we find in the end all the communard variations on the theme of collectivisation, Soviet patriotism and even National Bolshevism… At the same time as grace freedom is cast out – and, as a result, sobornost’ completely lost its spiritual nature, being turned into the regulative principle either of mechanical statehood, or of the organic life of the primitive community. The link with the Church, churchness, was for the most part preserved externally. However, it goes without saying that the very idea of the Church could here degenerate as much as the idea of sobornost’. In the first case the Church was likened to the state to the point of being indistinguishable from it, and in the second it was a primitively pagan institution for the sanctification of life and manners. They claimed to be preserving churchness, while rejecting the principle of freedom – and this was spiritual blindness. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’, says Paul, and Orthodoxy reveals his covenant through the ascetic principle of synergy: the grace of the Holy Spirit lives in the Church, but each member of the Church acquires it by his personal spiritual activity, to the realization of his own personal liberty. And only in ‘the agreement of personal liberties’ (Khomiakov) is the grace-filled Body of the Lord put together.”³⁵⁷