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

59. RUSSIAN HEGELIANISM

The most important influence on young intellectuals in Russia in the 1820s was German idealism, especially the philosophy of Hegel. Many went to Germany and listened to the lectures of Hegel himself, and of other important German philosophers such as Schelling. The influence of these lectures on the Russian intelligentsia lasted deep into the nineteenth century.
“In Russia, as elsewhere,” writes Richard Pipes, “the principal consequence of Idealism was greatly to enhance the creative role of the human mind. Kant’s critique of empirical theories had this inadvertent result that it transformed the mind from a mere recipient of sensory impressions into an active participant in the process of cognition. The manner in which intelligence, through its inbuilt categories, perceived reality was in itself an essential attribute of that reality. With this argument, the Idealist school which sprung up to overshadow Empiricism, gave a weapon to all those interested in promoting the human mind as the supreme creative force – that is, in the first place, the intellectuals. It was now possible to argue that ideas were every bit as ‘real’ as physical facts, if not more so. ‘Thought’ broadly defined to include feelings, sensations, and, above all, creative artistic impulses was raised to a status of equality with ‘Nature’. Everything fitted together; nothing was accidental: intelligence merely had to grasp how phenomena related to ideas. ‘I owe to Schelling the habit I now have of generalizing the least events and the most insignificant phenomena which I encounter’, wrote V.F. Odoevskii, a leading Schellingian of the 1820s. In the late 1830s when Russian intellectuals became drunk on Hegel, the addiction acquired extreme forms. Alexander Herzen, having returned from exile, found his Moscow friends in a kind of collective delirium:
“’Nobody at this time would have disowned such as sentence as this: “The concrescence of abstract ideas in the sphere of the plastic represents that phase of the self-questing spirit in which it, defining itself for itself, is potentialized from natural immanence into the harmonious sphere of the formal consciousness in beauty”… Everything that in fact is most immediate, all the simplest feelings were erected into abstract categories and returned from thence as pale, algebraic ghosts, without a drop of living blood… A man who went for a walk… went not just for a walk, but in order to give himself over to the pantheistic feelings of his identification with the cosmos. If, on the way, he met a tipsy soldier or a peasant woman who tried to strike up a conversation, the philosopher did not simply talk with them, he determined the substantiality of the popular element, both in its immediate and its accidental manifestations. The very tear which might arise to his eye was strictly referred to its proper category: to Gemüth or the “tragic element in the heart”.’
“Secondly, and only slightly less importantly, Idealism injected into philosophy a dynamic element. It conceived reality, both in its spiritual and physical aspects, as undergoing constant evolution, as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’. The entire cosmos was evolving, the process leading towards a vaguely defined goal of a perfectly free and rational existence. This ‘historicist’ element, present in all Idealist doctrines, has become ever since an indispensable ingredient of all ‘ideologies’. It gave and continues to give the intelligentsia the assurance that the reality with which they happen to be surrounded and in varying degrees repudiate is by the very nature of things transitory, a stepping stone to something superior. Furthermore, it allows them to argue that whatever discrepancy there might exist between their ideas and reality is due to the fact that reality, as it were, has not yet caught up with their ideas. Failure is always temporary for ideologues, as success is always seen by them to be illusory for the powers that be.
“The net effect of Idealism was to inspire Russian intellectuals with a self-confidence which they had never possessed before. Mind was linked with nature, both participating in a relentless unfolding of historical processes; compared to this vision, what were mere governments, economies, armies and bureaucracies? Prince Odoevskii thus describes the exaltation he and his friends experienced on being first exposed to these heady concepts:
“’What solemn, luminous, and joyful feeling permeated life once it had been shown that it was possible to explain the phenomena of nature by the very same laws to which the human spirit is subject in its evolution, seemingly to close forever the gap separating the two realms, and fashion them into a single receptacle containing the eternal idea and eternal reason. With what youthful and noble pride did we at that time envisage the share which had been allotted to man in this universal existence! By virtue of the quality and right of thought, man transposed visible nature within himself and analysed it in the innermost recesses of his own consciousness: in short, he became nature’s focal point, judge and interpreter. He absorbed nature and in him it revived for rational and inspired existence… The more radiantly the eternal spirit, the eternal idea reflected themselves in man, the more fully did he understand their present in all the other realms of life. The culmination of the whole [Idealist] outlook were moral obligations, and one of the most indispensable obligations was to emancipate within oneself the divine share of the world idea from everything accidental, impure, and false in order to acquire the right to the blessings of a genuine, rational existence.’
“Of course, not all Russian intellectuals succumbed to such ecstasy. Idealism had also more sober followers, as, for example, among academic historians who took from Hegel little more than a general scheme of development of human societies. But in some degree, in the reign of Nicholas I (1825-55) Idealism was an all-pervading philosophy of the Russian intelligentsia, and its influence persisted well into the second half of the nineteenth century, after its principal tenets had been repudiated and replaced by materialism…”³⁰¹
But idealism was not replaced only by materialism… Some of the Russian Hegelians became materialists and Marxists. But others began to return to the roots of Russian national and religious consciousness in the movement known as Slavophilism…
There were some positive things that the Russians gained from Hegelianism. Among them was the idea of universal history. Thus the great novelist Nicholas Gogol wrote: “Universal history, in the true meaning of the term, is not a collection of particular histories of all the peoples and states without a common link, plan or aim, a bunch of events without order, in the lifeless and dry form in which it is often presented. Its subject is great: it must embrace at once and in a complete picture the whole of humanity, how from its original, poor childhood it developed and was perfected in various forms, and, finally, reached the present age. To show the whole of this great process, which the free spirit of man sustained through bloody labours, struggling from its very cradle with ignorance, with nature and with gigantic obstacles – that is the aim of universal history! It must gather into one all the peoples of the world scattered by time, chance, mountains and seas, and unite them into one harmonious whole; it must compose out of them one majestic, complete poem. The event having no influence on the world has no right to enter here. All the events of the world must be so tightly linked amongst themselves and joined one to another like the rings of a chain. If one ring were ripped out, the chain would collapse. This link must not be understood in a literal sense: it is not that visible, material link by which events are often forcibly joined, or the system created in the head independently of facts, and to which the events of the world are later arbitrarily attached. This link must be concluded in one common thought, in one uninterrupted history of mankind, before which both states and events are but temporary forms and images! The must be presented in the same colossal size as it is in fact, penetrated by the same mysterious paths of Providence that are so unattainably indicated in it. Interest must necessarily be elicited to the highest degree, in such a way that the listener is tormented by the desire to know more, so that either he cannot close the book, or, if it is impossible to do that, he starts his reading again, so that it is evident how one event gives birth to another and how without the original event the last event would not follow. Only in that way must history be created…”³⁰²
However, it will be noted that there is no hint of Hegelian determinism in this picture: it is “the free spirit of man” that propels universal history forward. The determinism of Hegel did not attract the Russian thinkers; and characteristic of almost all of them was their emphasis on the importance of the individual and individual freedom. Those who inherited the Hegelians’ determinism later took the more radical road of atheism and Marxism.
Another difference between the Hegelian and the Russian interest in history was the greater concentration, among the Russians, on Hegel’s concept of “the historical nation”, and on Herder’s idea of the unique essence of every nation, which stimulated Russian thinkers to take a more historical and dialectical approach to the study of their own land.
Thus the nobleman Peter Chaadaev, a convert to Catholicism, according to Andrej Kompaneets, “attached a great importance to history in his investigations. Chaadaev was sure: if humanity allowed itself to see in their true light the causes and consequences of the historical process, then even nationalities divided up to now ‘would unite for the attainment of an agreed and general result’. The aim of the philosophy of history is ‘to attain a clear representation of the general law governing the succession of epochs’, but this law constituted a certain idea (a moral idea) moving civilizations. But when this idea is exhausted, the state perishes. Thus, for example, the Roman Empire, Egypt, Alexandria: ‘these were rotting corpses; they (the barbarians – A.K.) only scattered their dust in the wind’.”³⁰³
“What was the relationship between the old, pre-Petrine Russia and the new, post-Petrine Russia?” they asked. “Could these antithetical Russias be reconciled in a new synthesis of the future?” “Is it necessary decisively to choose the one and reject the other?”
More particularly, it was Hegel’s failure “to find room for the Slavs”, as G. Vernadsky put it, that provoked and intrigued the Russian intellectuals, both westerners like Chaadaev and Herzen and Slavophiles like Khomiakov and Kireyevsky. For Hegel wrote: “[The Slavs] did indeed found kingdoms and sustain vigorous conflicts with the various nations that came across their path. Sometimes, as an advance guard – an intermediate nationality – they took part in the struggle between Christian Europe and unchristian Asia. The Poles even liberated beleaguered Vienna from the Turks; and Slavs have to some extent been drawn within the sphere of Occidental Reason. Yet this entire body of peoples remains excluded from our consideration because hitherto it has not appeared as an independent element in the series of phases that reason has assumed in the world.”³⁰⁴
Was Russia no more than “an intermediate nationality”?, asked the Russian intellectuals indignantly. Had History really passed the Slavs by? Were they just a footnote to “the sphere of Occidental Reason”?
Or did they have something original to contribute? In the next stage of the historical dialectic perhaps? After all, if Hegel thought that the Romano-French period of history had been overtaken by the German, why should not the German in its turn be overtaken by the Slav?...³⁰⁵

60. GREECE AFTER THE REVOLUTION

The Greeks after the revolution were desperately poor and even more desperately divided. The new patriarch, Eugenius, again anathematized the insurgents. In response, twenty-eight bishops and almost a thousand priests in free Greece anathematized the patriarch, calling him a Judas and a wolf in sheep's clothing.³⁰⁶ The Free Greeks now commemorated “all Orthodox bishops” at the Liturgy instead of the patriarch. Not surprisingly, in 1824 the patriarchate refused a request from the Greek Church for Holy Chrism.³⁰⁷
At the same time, in 1822 the Free Greeks entered into negotiations with the Pope for help against the Turks. Very soon the Faith was being betrayed for the sake of the political struggle, as it had been at the council of Florence. President Mavrokordatos wrote to the Papal Secretary of State: “The cries of a Christian nation threatened by complete extermination have the right to receive the compassion of the head of Christendom.”³⁰⁸ Greek delegates to the meeting of the Great Powers in Verona wrote to Pope Pius VII that the Greek revolution was not like the revolutions of other nations raised against altar and throne. Instead, it was being fought in the name of religion and “… asks to be placed under the protection of a Christian dynasty with wise and permanent laws”. In another letter the delegates addressed the pope as “the common father of the faithful and head of the Christian religion”, and said that the Greeks were worthy of the pope’s “protection and apostolic blessing”. Metropolitan Germanus was even empowered to speak concerning the possibility of a reunion of the Churches. However, it was the Pope who drew back at this point, pressurized by the other western States which considered the sultan to be a legitimate monarch.³⁰⁹
How soon had a struggle fought “for faith and fatherland” betrayed the faith while only partially winning the fatherland! For real political independence had not been achieved. If the Turks had been driven out, then the British and the French and later the Germans came to take their place.
The election of Capodistrias as “governor of Greece” in 1827 brought a limited degree of order. In an encyclical to the clergy he wrote: “Speak to the hearts of the people the law of God, rightly dividing the word of truth. Announce peace. Evangelize unanimity. Teach philanthropy, love for each other, that all may be one in Christ”.³¹⁰ But he made many enemies by his contempt for the élites of Greek society. Thus “he dismissed the primates as ‘Christian Turks’, the military chieftains as ‘robbers’, the intelligentsia as ‘fools’ and the Phanariots as ‘children of Satan’”.³¹¹
Misha Glenny comments: "Although [he] attempted to integrate the various factions into his system of authoritarian government, he underestimated the strength of particularism. All sides distinguished themselves by their appalling behavior. The Hydriots, who had excelled themselves during the war, mounted an insurrection in August 1831 so bitter that they preferred to scuttle their entire fleet, the only real source of independent Greek power, rather than see it come under central government control. By imprisoning Petrobey, the Maniot leader of the Mavromichalis family, Kapodistrias sealed his own fater. The President was shot dead in October 1831 while leaving the church in Greece's first capital, the pretty harbor town of Nauplio."³¹²⁴⁰⁴
On May 7, 1832 Britain, France, Russia and Bavaria signed a treaty in London guaranteeing Greece’s independence and naming Otto, son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, as king. And yet this independence was purely nominal. When Byron was dying in Greece in 1824, the Duc d’Orléans had commented “that he was dying so that one day people would be able to eat sauerkraut at the foot of the Acropolis”. He was not far from the truth; for Greece was now under a German Catholic king ruling through German ministers and maintained in power by German troops. Zamoyski comments sardonically: “Sauerkraut indeed…”³¹³
Until King Otto came of age, three regents were appointed by the Great Powers to rule Greece in his name: Colonel Heideck, a Philhellene and the only choice of the Tsar but a liberal Protestant, Count Joseph von Armansperg, a Catholic but also a Freemason, and George von Maurer, a liberal Protestant. Pressed by the British and French envoys, von Armansperg and von Maurer worked to make Greece as independent of Russia and the patriarchate in Constantinople as possible. Russian demands that the king (or at any rate his children) become Orthodox, and that the link with the patriarchate be preserved, were ignored…
It was Maurer who was entrusted with working out a new constitution for the Church. He “found an illustrious collaborator, in the person of a Greek priest, Theocletus Pharmacides. This Pharmacides had received his education in Europe and his thought was exceedingly Protestant in nature; he was the obstinate enemy of the Ecumenical Patriarch and of Russia.”³¹⁴
Helped by Pharmacides, Mauer proceeded to work out a constitution that proposed autocephaly for the Church under a Synod of bishops, and the subordination of the Synod to the State on the model of the Bavarian and Russian constitutions, to the extent that "no decision of the Synod could be published or carried into execution without the permission of the government having been obtained".
As Frazee comments: “If ever a church was legally stripped of authority and reduced to complete dependence on the state, Maurer’s constitution did it to the church of Greece.”³¹⁵
In spite of the protests of the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Tsar, and the walk-out of the archbishops of Rethymnon and Adrianople, this constitution was ratified by thirty-six bishops on July 26, 1833. The conservative opponent of Pharmacides in the government was Protopresbyter Constantine Oikonomos. He said that the constitution was “from an ecclesiastical point of view invalid and non-existent and deposed by the holy Canons. For this reason, during the seventeen years of its existence it was unacceptable to all the Churches of the Orthodox, and no Synod was in communion with it.”³¹⁶
Not only did the Ecumenical Patriarchate condemn the new Church: many Greeks in Greece were also very unhappy with their situation.
In effect, the Greek Church had exchanged the uncanonical position of the patriarchate of Constantinople under Turkish rule for the even less canonical position of a Synod unauthorized by the patriarch and under the control of a Catholic king and a Protestant constitution! In addition to this, all monasteries with fewer than six monks were dissolved (425 out of 500), and heavy taxes imposed on the remaining monasteries. And very little money was given to a Church which had lost six to seven thousand clergy in the war, and whose remaining clergy had an abysmally low standard of education.
Among the westernising reforms envisaged at this time was the introduction of the new, Gregorian calendar. Thus Cosmas Flammiatos wrote: “First of all they were trying in many ways to introduce into the Orthodox States the so-called new calendar of the West, according to which they will jump ahead 12 days [now 13], so that when we have the first of the month they will be counting 13 [now 14]. Through this innovation they hope to confuse and overthrow the feastdays and introduce other innovations.”³¹⁷
And again: “The purpose of this seminary in Halki of Constantinople which has recently been established with cunning effort, is, among other things, to taint all the future Patriarchs and, in general, all the hierarchy of the East in accordance with the spirit of corruption and error, through the proselytism of the English, so that one day, by a resolution of an ‘ecumenical council’ the abolition of Orthodoxy and the introduction of the Luthero-Calvinist heresy may be decreed; at the same time all the other schools train thousands and myriads of likeminded individuals and confederates among the clergy, the teachers and lay people from among the Orthodox youth.”
For his defence of Orthodoxy, Cosmas was imprisoned together with 150 monks of the Mega Spilaion monastery. The monks were released, but Cosmas died in prison through poisoning.³¹⁸
In 1852 the schism between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Free Greek Church was healed. But there was no sign that the Greeks (on either side) had fully understood the cause of the schism - the evil doctrine of revolutionary nationalism. To this day, March 25 is a national holiday in Greece; those who died in the revolution are "ethnomartyrs" (a term unknown to the Holy Fathers); and the "great idea", while watered down to correspond to the realities of modern Greece's small-power status, remains a potent psychological force...