The Greek and Eastern Churches/Part 2/Division 3/Chapter 5

by Walter Frederic Adeney

 

CHAPTER V

PETER THE GREAT AND THE HOLY SYNOD

 

Morfill; Rambaud; Leroy Beaulieu; Nicolas Polevoy, History of Peter the Great; Torudin, The Roman Pope and the Eastern Popes; Schuler, Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia, New York, 1884; Merejkowski, Peter and Alexis (a well-informed historical novel).

 

Alexis died in the year 1676 at the age of forty-seven, and was succeeded by his eldest son Feodor, a young man of weak health, who reigned without distinction for six years, and died without an heir. Sophia, the daughter of Alexis, a handsome, clever woman, then contrived to have herself proclaimed regent for her imbecile brother Ivan and her young half-brother Peter, a child of Alexis by a second wife, born in the year 1672, and therefore four years of age when his father died. Peter was an intelligent, keenly observant child. But by the cruel policy of Sophia and the able but unpopular minister Basil Golitsin, who was as her right hand, his education was deliberately neglected. The object of this cruel injustice was to keep him permanently unfit to administer the government of the State, so that they might continue to share it between them. It was a diabolically subtle policy. But it failed utterly. At the age of seventeen Peter seized the reins and sent his unnatural sister off to a convent, where she died after seventeen years' imprisonment. Much of the brutality and coarseness of the great tsar's subsequent conduct must be set down to the account of his deliberately neglected youth. His life-story would have been very different in many respects if it had not been for the iniquitous disadvantages with which he set out. If it is a crime to steal the bread from a child's month, it is scarcely less a crime to deprive him of the education that is his natural right; and this is the charge that must be laid to the account of the ambitious regent and her unscrupulous minister.

With the commencement of the reign of Peter the Great we enter on the modern history of Russia. The events noticed in the immediately preceding chapters will have disproved the popular notion that Russia was ever entirely isolated and dissevered from the comity of European nations, excepting during the dismal three centuries of the Mongol possession. Previous to that time she had been in close contact with Constantinople. Both in Church and in State at the great centres of Kiev and Novgorod Russian civilisation had been in line with the civilisation of Eastern Europe. In some respects it was even more advanced than that of Western Europe at the break-up of the Roman Empire and during the wars of the barons. The Mongol invasion had swept much of this culture away, checked the course of national development, shut off the Sclavonic population from Greek and Teutonic Europe, and turned Russia into a semi-Asiatic country. It took many generations for her people to recover from so huge and crushing a calamity. The vastness of the territory of Russia, the thinness of its widely scattered populations, and the remoteness of most of them from the centres of enlightenment, have always resulted and must still result in great differences in the social conditions of the people. Necessarily the mass of the outlying peasants are only indirectly affected, if at all influenced, by the advance of culture in the towns. Religiously as well as socially, most of Russia is still in the Middle Ages, that is to say, in the period before the Renaissance.

But in Moscow, Rostoff, Novgorod, and other great towns there was a consciousness of the larger world long before Peter came on the scene. Ivan the Terrible took decided steps towards bringing Western culture into Russia. The Romanoff dynasty followed on similar lines. The gentle Alexis was anxious to import education and enlightened manners into his empire. Still, when all that was done in this way has received due recognition, it remains true that Peter the Great achieved the huge twofold task of restoring Russia to Europe and introducing Europe to Russia. His clear ideas and his vigorous pursuit of them went far beyond anything accomplished or even attempted or conceived by his predecessors in these directions. He aimed at modernising Russia by bringing her into contact with the progressive nations of the West, and in a considerable degree he succeeded, though by no means to the extent that external appearances would suggest. We might compare Russia in the time of Peter with Japan in our own day. In both cases we have a long-stagnant people suddenly stirred and roused by a rush of life from the progressive West. But the immediate effect is much greater in Japan than it was in Russia. Whether the permanent results will be equally to the advantage of the yellow race remains to be seen.

Peter was always fond of mechanical contrivances, and it was quite congenial to him to work side by side with the artisans in the dockyard at Deptford when he came over to England to learn shipbuilding. Neither his education nor his manners were beyond the standard of an English working-man of his day. But he had a great intellect and an indomitable will, and it was much to him that neither were warped or prejudiced by the conventions of the schools. Even more than Napoleon, Peter, though the son of an emperor, was really a self-made man. His European travels and the mechanical labour that so scandalised his courtiers had their place in his deliberate policy. Peter visited dockyards to learn shipbuilding, because he saw that Russia needed a navy if she was to hold her own on the Baltic. For the same reason he founded his new capital close to this sea (a.d. 1703). But he had greater ideas and wider projects than those of naval defence or offence. Moscow was buried deep in the heart of Russia. Before the age of railways this metropolis was quite out of touch with foreign countries. Now it was the design of Peter the Great to bring his country into vital contact with the rest of Europe. The founding of St. Petersburg was one important step in this direction. With herculean energy he did all that one man could do by his own action to introduce the ideas and arts of the advancing nations to his benighted subjects. Many influences from the West flowed into Russia when Peter opened the door. Englishmen and Germans especially came in great numbers, spreading commerce and scientific education among the people of the towns.

These novelties were not brought about without opposition. While Peter was on his travels he heard of a dangerous revolt of the Streltsi, the choicest imperial troops, the Russian "prætorian guard." The tsar hurried back, suppressed the insurrection, and punished the rebels with savage cruelty. The old Nationalist party called Peter "the foreign tsar," and his followers "the Germans." Nevertheless he did not swerve from his purpose. He was convinced that this was for the good of his people. Paternal government is of the essence of tsardom, and since Peter was by far the ablest man in the country, head and shoulders above his people, he felt justified in treating them as children. So we have the paradox of an uneducated man spreading new ideas and laying the foundations of civilisation and culture in a great nation. In all this Peter was thoroughly patriotic. There was no ground for any suspicion like that which sprang up in England when Queen Mary wished to introduce Philip's Spaniards to high places in the Church. The English, the Germans, the Dutch might come as teachers and traders to bring knowledge and wealth to Russia; but none of them were appointed to posts of honour. Peter's ministers and officials in high positions were all born Russians.

The great tsar thoroughly reorganised his empire in military, social, and religious affairs. He dissolved the mutinous Streltsi, and raised a regular army of over 200,000 men. Thus he strengthened the autocracy by increasing its military power. This had an influence on all departiiioiits of State. Peter's idea was the establishment of an elaborate, unified organisation. Everybody was to serve the State—some in the army, others in the Church, the rest by payment of taxes. He introduced important changes into the social order. No doubt these were not all improvements. In place of the old custom of equal inheritance, Peter initiated the German law of primogeniture; and the peasants lost power and rights by becoming parts of a great territorial system. But in one important matter Peter brought about a great reform. This was in the emancipation of woman. Hitherto the women of Russia had been kept in Oriental seclusion and subjection, partly owing to old Byzantine influences, partly also owing to the effect of the long Mongolian dominance. The tsar had seen the very different position of woman in the West, and he aimed at giving similar freedom and similar rights to the women of his empire. He ordered that betrothal should take place six weeks before marriage, with a right to break the contract during the interval. Parents and guardians were compelled to swear that they were not making their young people marry against their will, and masters to do the same in the marriage of their slaves. Midwives were forbidden to make away with illegitimate children. Then there were reforms in other directions. Thus the praviozli, or public flogging of debtors, was stopped. Peter allowed domestic serfs to enter the army even without the consent of their masters, and he permitted those who had gained some money by trade to enrol themselves as citizens of the towns where they lived — also without their masters' consent. He ordered the Senate to prohibit the sale of peasants apart from the land.^[1]

One of Peter's changes brought Russia into line with the rest of Europe in a very significant way. The old Russian calendar had been dated from "the creation of the world," and the old Russian year had begun in September. Peter reckoned by the Christian era; the year was to begin in January, as with us.^[2]

But some of Peter's imitations of the West were beyond the manners of his people. He introduced the "assembly," in which European costume was to be worn; but it was "only a parody of Versailles."^[3] Visitors from the West observed that men smoked in the presence of ladies, and that frequently noble cavaliers had to be taken out drunk.

Peter also introduced reforms into the government of the Church. The most important of these innovations was the substitution of the Holy Synod for the patriarchate. The patriarch Adrien, who had shown little sympathy with the new ideas imported from the West, died in the year 1700. Peter did not appoint any successor. He conferred on Stephen Javorski the title of "custodian of the patriarchal throne," while he was arranging for a new form of ecclesiastical government.

Later on he organised the Holy Synod^[4] for the supreme government of the Russian Church. The synod takes the place of the patriarch. It consists of bishops and priests nominated by the tsar and presided over by a State official, called the "High Procurator," a layman, whom Peter preferred to be a military officer, representing the tsar. The procurator is popularly known as "the eye of the tsar." Formerly the inferior clergy were in a majority; but now they are outnumbered by the bishops. The synod sits at St. Petersburg; it has delegates in Moscow and elsewhere. It is sometimes said that the tsar is the head of the Russian Church. This is true enough in fact, for the autocracy comprehends the Church as well as the State. But it is not allowed in theory, nor is it recognised in the forms of ecclesiastical order. The Oriental Church protests against the Roman papacy; it cannot set up a papacy of its own, which in one respect would be even more scandalous, since the pope is a bishop, but the tsar a layman. The Russian Church is not built on the theory invented by Henry viii., and thoroughly lived up to by the imperious Elizabeth—that the king is the real head of the Church and as such master of the bishops. It agrees with thoroughgoing Protestantism in maintaining that only Christ is the Head of the Church, and it does not allow that He has any earthly vicar. Under Christ the synod is supposed to rule independently. This is the decent fiction.

The establishment of the Holy Synod was justified by Peter on the precedent of the ancient Church councils. He maintained that he was reverting to precedent in having his Church governed by a council. But of course the mere revival of archæology was the very last thing the daring, innovating tsar was likely to promote. Peter issued an ecclesiastical code which was wholly utilitarian in character. He rode rough-shod over customs and precedents that did not favour his aims. With the tsar theories counted for nothing; practical considerations were all he thought of. He argued that government by a council was better than autocratic authority, because it obviated the danger of tyranny—wilfully blind to the application of the same principle to his own position as autocrat. But he could not endure the rivalry of a patriarch. He had the warning example of Nicon before his eyes. Peter would give no second Nicon his chance.^[5] Therefore, while the abolition of the patriarch was ostensibly an action in favour of liberty, it was really one that crippled the independence of the Church and brought it into subjection to the State. The masterful tsar would not allow a Church which was as a second state within the State; therefore he made the Church a department of his State. Peter's high-handed dealings with the Church were only submitted to by his bishops with bitter resentment. The new system was endorsed by the patriarchs of the other parts of the orthodox Church. But we must not forget that these dignitaries were in the miserable condition of subjects of the Turkish Empire among a poverty-stricken people, largely dependent on the bounty of the tsar for the supply of their necessities.

Peter accused his bishops of pride, and bade them conduct themselves more humbly. He ordered them to have schools in which the children of the popes were to be educated. Any who were not thus educated were to be drafted into the army. It was compulsory education under penalty of conscription. The sons of the nobles were also to attend the bishops' schools. The tsar was anxious to spread popular education; he had schools established for this purpose in every province of his empire, the masters of which were furnished from his mathematical school at St. Petersburg. He also established special naval and engineering colleges. But the people were not ripe for these improvements, and even Peter's herculean efforts left Russia as a whole still far behind the rest of Europe.

Such wholesale innovations forced upon a conservative people by authority could not but arouse opposition, which would look for an opportunity to express itself. The priests were obstinate opponents of the whole movement. No doubt Peter's knowledge that they would take up this attitude was one of the motives leading him to suppress the patriarchate and bring the Church more effectually under his own power. But that in turn provoked resentment and led to counter-plots. It is in the light of this condition of affairs that we must regard the saddest scene in the life of the tsar, the execution of his son Alexis. This unhappy prince had incurred the displeasure of his father by giving way to dissolute habits. Then he had followed the not uncommon example of an heir-apparent, and sided with the opposition. He had even done much worse. He had intrigued with Sweden against his father's government, though as he believed in the true interest of his country. In his opposition to the new methods of government he was aided by his mother Eudoxia, Peter's first wife, whom the tsar had treated with heartless brutality and sent to a convent. She had converted the convent into a court, where she welcomed the disaffected, for Eudoxia was the patroness of the priests' party. Alexis is reported to have said, "I will whisper a word to the bishops. They will pass it on to the priests; who will repeat it to the people, and everything will be as it was before."^[6]

The treason was intolerable and unpardonable. Eudoxia was sent to another convent, where she was kept in strict confinement, and the tsarevitch was tried, condemned, flogged, and executed—probably by the knout. Peter was certainly responsible for the torture and death of his son Alexis. It was an act of deliberate policy. As such it is not comparable with Ivan the Terrible's dreadful deed when he struck his son dead with his own hand in a fit of mad rage. But the whole story is a mournful tragedy. Weak and dissolute as he was, Alexis was led to believe that his father's policy was ruinous to the State and impious with regard to the Church. On the other hand, Peter saw in his son, the heir to his throne, a wretched opponent of the reforms to which he was devoting his titanic energies. The great tsar believed in those reforms with all his heart as necessary for the well-being of his country. Then how could he permit them to be thus traitorously checked and thwarted, with the certainty that when he died they would all be swept away? We may pity Peter as much as we pity poor Alexia.

Peter felt the monks to be the worst enemies of his reforms, and he saw the institution of monasticism to be socially harmful in two ways: the monasteries held a large part of the land of Russia, and the monks were rich in the midst of the poverty of the peasants. Russia was suffering, as the Roman Empire had suffered in its later days, by the withdrawal of so many able-bodied men from the service of their country. The tsar did not venture to deal directly with the first of these evils. He did not dare to confiscate Church land. But he made some attempt to lessen the second by not permitting anybody to become a monk under the age of thirty. Then he crippled the power of the monasteries by restricting their literary influence. He forbade monks to have ink or pens in their cells. Men were not to shut themselves up to write; they were to work at trades. On the other hand, Peter encouraged the literary activity of bishops, and in his reign Dmitri Touptalo, the metropolitan of Rostoff, re-edited the Menologium (the Lives of the Saints) and wrote theological works of his own. Other writers of less account also flourished in the hothouse atmosphere of an exotic culture which Peter had introduced into Russia.

It must not be supposed that Peter's masterfulness led him into narrow intolerance. The raison d'être of his policy was rationalistic liberalism. He was in constant opposition to the prevalent inert conservatism of Russian life and religion. Accordingly we may be prepared to see in him a certain amount of indifference to varieties of religious belief, and this was the case. He did not interfere with the greater part of the sect of the Raskolniks,^[7] who lived in the remote forests. He would protect the peaceable schismatics from popular persecution. "God has given the tsars power over the nations," he said, "but Christ alone has power over the conscience of men."^[8] But he imposed on those members of the sect who lived at Moscow a double capitation tax, and required them to wear distinctive clothing. They must pay for the liberty of nonconformity; they must live as marked men. Peter did not disguise his opinion that their position was an error, and he treated it as such. He prohibited them from propagating their views with threats of a penalty. Attendance at church every Sunday and at the Easter communion was made obligatory.

The tsar protected the Capuchins at Astrakan, because, as Voltaire remarked, these monks were of no consequence; but in the year 1718 he expelled the Jesuits from Russia as dangerous politicians. Although he was particularly friendly with the Dutch and the English, he persecuted his own Protestants. For instance, a Russian Protestant lady, Natasia Zima, was conducted with her husband and six other converts to "the terrible chancelry" and there cruelly tortured.^[9]

Peter the Great died in the year 1725 at the age of fifty-three. He had compressed an enormous amount of work into his comparatively short life. He found Russia remote from the world's progress, sunk in mediæval barbarism, more Oriental than Western in life and manners. Solely owing to his own energy, against the wishes and feelings of most of his people, before his death he had the satisfaction of seeing his country in vital relations with the rest of Europe and on the road to progress. His schools and colleges, libraries and museums, galleries of painting and sculpture, only touched the few; his canals and his ships brought fresh life and new energy to a larger number of his subjects. Peter cared nothing for pomp and state, had no personal dignity, no manners. He was tyrannous, cruel, coarse, gluttonous. His practical jokes were those of a rude schoolboy. On the other hand, his scorn of old-fashioned proprieties had its good points. Quite indifferent to the opinion of the orthodox, he would freely visit heretics and stand godfather to their children. Perhaps his chief claim to honour, next to the throwing open of his country to Europe, is his zeal for education. This is seen especially in ecclesiastical matters. Peter aimed at giving some culture to the grossly ignorant parish clergy. But his autocratic dealings with the Church paralysed its energy. From this time onwards there is little to chronicle in Russian ecclesiastical affairs. The sects will become active and interesting, but the orthodox Church ever more and more somnolent. "The Church," writes M. Leroy Beaulieu, "has come to be considered a sort of adjunct to the police, and the religious practices as police regulations."^[10] Therefore in thinking of the Church in Russia as it has settled down subsequently to the establishment of the Holy Synod by Peter the Great, with the virtual absorption of its official life into that of the bureaucracy, we must entirely dismiss from our minds the ideas of the relations of pastor and people seen in England and America, or that of the French curé or the Irish priest and his flock. The village pope is miserably poor, and he has to maintain a bare livelihood by taking his dues from the peasants, who resent his visits as the calls of a tax-gatherer. They do not look up to him as a religious leader. He is a functionary who has to perform certain rites. He rarely preaches, and he must never do so until he has submitted his sermon to the judgment of an ecclesiastical superior. Nobody expects him to be a model of higher living than is customary among his neighbours. We have seen that while the bishops are celibates and are found in the monasteries, the parish priests or popes must be married men. A priest must marry before he can be ordained. If his wife dies he may not marry again. But neither should he continue in office as a widower. He should resign at once, and retire to a monastery. Recently, however, this requirement has been relaxed, and there are now some widowed priests in Russia. As a rule, it appears, his bishop finds a wife for the young postulant of priesthood. This curious custom has sprung out of the bishop's responsibility for his priests and their families. The salary of a village pope allows him no means for saving. But when he dies his wife and family are not to be left destitute, and the bishop has them on his hands. The easiest way to provide for them is to pass them on to the deceased man's successor by giving him one of the daughters for his wife.^[11] The result is that the priests have become a caste. The office is hereditary in a sort of Levitical tribe. The position of a country pope is very anomalous and most unsatisfactory. He feels himself above the peasants, and his wife affects the dress of Western Europe; but he is not received into society, and in this respect he is very differently situated from the English clergyman. "I know he gets drunk once in a while," said a peasant of his pope, "but he is a good Christian, and he is never drunk on Saturday night or Sunday morning."^[12]

It must be allowed that not only is the orthodox Church in Russia intellectually inert; it is a hindrance rather than a help to the national development. Its functions are ceremonial, not spiritual. The people attend the liturgy as by law required; but they do not understand the old Sclavonic dialect of the service books. There is no idea in the Russian Church corresponding to that of the Roman Church where the priest says mass regardless of the attendance of the laity. The liturgy is supposed to be congregational; the laity must be present. Yet the people who stand through the weary hours of the lengthy ritual do not know the meaning of the words chanted in their hearing. This is a result of the pedantry of archaism that has fossilised the Church, for the Greek liturgies of St. Basil and St. Chrysostom were originally translated into Sclavonic for the express purpose of being understood by the congregations who took part in them. With the ignorant peasant, bowing to icons is the chief religious performance. Icons are in every house, in every room of every house. On entering a room a Russian looks at the icon hung in the corner facing him, and bows to it. That is his primary religious duty.

As in Ireland, commercial and educational progress is hindered in Russia by the multitude of saints' days. The dies nefas, when work is tabooed, becomes a serious handicap in the race of modern life. These saints' days together with the Sundays rob the Russian of nearly one-third of his time, for they leave him only about 250 days for work. He would sooner work on a Sunday than on a saint's day.

Pilgrimages assume enormous proportions in the Church life of Russia. Kiev is now the chief centre of pilgrimages in the world. It has been calculated that in the year 1886 at least a million pilgrims, each contributing a candle and a coin, visited this city, the shrine of primitive Russian Christianity.^[13] Sometimes the atmosphere in a church becomes positively stifling, and the people are nearly choked by the fumes of the pilgrims' innumerable candles. Relics and miracle-working icons are the special objects visited in these huge pilgrimages. In many convents the monks' occupation seems to consist simply in keeping relics and icons and collecting alms.^[14]

 

1. Morfill, p. 343.
2. This must not he confounded with the question of "Old Style." The "Old Style" (i.e. the Julian year) still continued uncorrected in Russia, and is now twelve days behind the corrected year of Europe.
3. Rambaud, p. 386.
4. Its full title is "The Most Holy Governing Synod."
5. In his preamble to the order establishing the synod, Peter says: "The collegiate organisation would not bring on the country the troubles and seditions which could survive where there is one man only who is found at the head of the Church. … The people would not see the difference between the spiritual and the temporal powers. … Struck with the virtue and splendour of the pastor of the supreme Church, they imagine that he is a second sovereign, equal in power to the autocrat and even superior." See Rambaud, p. 392.
6. Leroy Beaulieu, part iii. p. 158.
7. See pp. 441 ff.
8. Rambaud, p. 394.
9. Rambaud, p. 394.
10. The Empire of the Tsars, part iii. p. 139.
11. See Wallace, Russia (new and enlarged edit.), vol. i. pp. 64–89.
12. Leroy Beaulieu, part iii. p. 246.
13. Leroy Beaulieu, part iii. p. 212.
14. Ibid. p. 216.