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An Essay in Universal History

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AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point of View VOLUME II: THE AGE OF REASON (1453 to 1789) PART 2: from 1660 to 1789 Vladimir Moss © Copyright Vladimir Moss, 2017: All Rights Reserved The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual. Diderot, Encyclopedia. Whatever I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; the best of all casuists is the conscience… Reason deceives us only too often and we have earned all too well the right to reject it, but conscience never deceives. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract. I love the cause of liberty, but the madness of the multitude is but one degree better than submission to the Tea Act. James Allen of Philadelphia. As for My people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. My people! Those who lead you cause you to err, and destroy the way of your paths. Isaiah 3.12 By God’s dispensation it has fallen to me to correct both the state and the clergy; I am to them both sovereign and patriarch; they have forgotten that in [pagan] antiquity these [roles] were combined… I have conquered an empire, but have never been able to conquer myself. Tsar Peter the Great. Of course, I recognize that my famous ancestor had many merits, but I must admit that I would be insincere if I repeated your raptures. This is the ancestor whom I love less than others because of his obsession with western culture and his trampling on all purely Russian customs. One must not impose foreign things immediately, without reworking them. Perhaps this time it was necessary as a transitional period, but I do not sympathize with it. Tsar Nicholas II on Peter the Great. The State, it seems to me, is not made for religion, but religion for the State. Abbé Guillaume Raynal (1780). In a democratic state, one must be continually on guard against the desire for popularity. It leads to aping the behaviour of the worst. And soon people come to think that it is of no use – indeed, it is dangerous – to show too plain a superiority over the multitude which one wants to win over. Madame Germaine de Stael: On Literature and Society (1800). The majority does not confirm the truth, but only indicates the wishes of the majority. Empress Catherine the Great. Monarchies conform best to human nature, and therefore constitute the most durable form of state. Gianbattista Vico. 2 3 III. THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT (1660-1789) 6 35. THE SUN KING 7 36. THE RESTORATION OF THE MONARCHY 12 37. THE ANGLO-DUTCH WARS 15 38. RELIGION IN RESTORATION ENGLAND 18 39. THE NEWTONIAN REVOLUTION 20 40. “THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION” AND THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 26 41. CAPITALISM AND THE JEWS 41 42. THE IDEA OF RELIGIOUS TOLERATION 52 43. THE PEACE OF UTRECHT AND THE RISE OF PRUSSIA 60 44. ENGLAND’S CONSERVATIVE ENLIGHTENMENT 67 45. FRANCE’S RADICAL ENLIGHTENMENT 78 46. ROUSSEAU: FROM LIBERAL TO SOCIALIST HUMANISM 90 47. HUME: THE IRRATIONALITY OF RATIONALISM 105 48. KANT: THE REAFFIRMATION OF WILL 113 49. HAMANN AND HERDER: THE DENIAL OF UNIVERSALISM 118 50. TWO CONCEPTS OF FREEDOM 121 51. THE ORIGINS OF FREEMASONRY 128 52. THE GRAND ORIENT 136 53. FREEMASONRY AND THE JEWS 139 54. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 143 55. RELIGION IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 156 56. SAUDI WAHHABISM 169 57. THE DARK HEART OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT 173 58. EAST MEETS WEST 181 IV. THE ST. PETERSBURG AUTOCRACY (1660-1789) 190 59. TSAR VERSUS PATRIARCH 191 60. PATRIARCH NIKON ON THE SYMPHONY OF POWERS 200 4 61. THE REBELLION OF THE OLD RITUALISTS 206 62. FROM HOLY RUS’ TO GREAT RUSSIA 215 63. PETER THE GREAT AND THE WEST 221 64. PETER THE GREAT AND THE RUSSIAN CHURCH 228 65. THE DEGRADATION OF THE RUSSIAN AUTOCRACY 247 66. THE GERMAN PERSECUTION OF ORTHODOXY 250 67. TSARITSA ELIZABETH 254 68. ORTHODOXY UNDER THE AUSTRIAN YOKE 259 69. CATHERINE THE GREAT, THE NOBILITY AND THE CHURCH 263 70. CATHERINE AND THE POLES 276 71. CATHERINE AND THE JEWS 283 72. CATHERINE AND THE WEST 292 5 III. THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT (1660-1789) 6 35. THE SUN KING If the liberalism of Northern Europe and North America was the wave of the future, and would in time conquer almost the whole world, nevertheless the seventeenth century was, in political and cultural terms, the century of French absolutism… If we compare the English monarchy in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries with the French one in the same period, we see a striking contrast. In England a powerful monarchy becomes steadily stronger, defeating the most powerful despotism of the day in the Spanish Armada, only to be gradually overcome by the wealthier classes and reduced, finally, to the position of symbolic head of an essentially aristocratic society. The vital changes here, as we have seen, were the rejection of the papacy and the dissolution of the monasteries, which caused both the temporary increase in the monarchy’s power and its longer-term descent into impotence, especially after Charles I’s loss of the power of taxation. In France, on the other hand, the reverse took place: a weak monarchy besieged by a semi-independent nobility within and the united Hapsburg domains of Germany, Italy and Spain from without, gradually recovered to reach a pinnacle of fame and power under the sun king, Louis XIV. The vital factors here were: (i) the invocation of the Divine Right of kings1, (ii) the retention of Catholicism as the official religion, (ii) the monarchy’s retention, in accordance with its Concordat with the Vatican, of control of the Church’s appointments and lands, and (iii), last but not least, the monarchy’s retention of the power of general taxation – although its venal and unjust use of it contributed greatly to the regime’s ultimate fall in 1789.2 Both England and France had consolidated their internal unity by the end of the period, but in different ways that gave to each the complex character of the modern nation-state. In England, the monarchy adopted the Anglican middle ground. In France, on the other hand, the monarchy took the Catholic side (Paris, as Henry IV said when he converted to Catholicism, was worth a mass), from which it did not waver until the revolution of 1789. In England, the Protestant aristocracy first persecuted and then tolerated the diminished and tamed Catholic minority; but the latter’s eventual absorption within the State left a permanent traditionalist stamp on the English national character. In France, on the other hand, while the Catholic monarchy first tolerated and then expelled the Protestant (Huguenot) minority, the latter’s cultural heritage left a permanent rationalist stamp on the French national character. * The fruit of Bodin’s absolutist theories and Richelieu’s nationalist politics was the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, a true despot in that, like every despot, he tried to gain control of the Church and the nobility. 1 Thus in France in 1614 the bourgeois order in the Estates General made the Divine Right of Kings Article I of their petition. Barzun, op. cit., p. 248. 2 Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, London: Profile, 2012, chapter 23. 7 “The position of the French nobility,” writes Jasper Ridley, “had greatly changed during the previous hundred years. In the sixteenth century the great noble houses of Guise and Bourbon, with their power bases in eastern and south-west France, had torn the kingdom apart by thirty years of civil war; and the fighting between the nobility and the State had started up again in the days of the Fronde, when Louis XIV was a child. But when he came of age, and established his absolute royal authority, he destroyed the political power of the nobles by bribing them to renounce it. He encouraged them to come to his court at Versailles, to hold honorific and well-paid sinecure offices – to carve for the King at dinner, or to attend his petit levée when he dressed in the morning, and hand him his shirt, his coat and his wig. He hoped that when the nobles were not engaged in these duties at court, they would be staying in their great mansions in Paris. He wished to prevent them as far as possible from living on their lands in the country, where they could enrol their tenants in a private army and begin a new civil war. “The King governed France through middle-class civil servants, who were mostly lawyers. The provincial Parlements had limited powers, most of which were judicial rather than legislative; but the King could veto all their decrees. The government was administered by the intendants, who had absolute authority in their districts, and were subject only to the directives of their superiors, the surintendants, who were themselves subject only to the King’s Council, where the King presided in person, and might either accept or reject the advice given to him by his councillors. “The nobles had the privilege of having their seigneurial courts in which they exercised a civil and a criminal jurisdiction over their tenants; but the presiding judges in the seigneurial courts were the same middle-class lawyers who presided in the King’s courts, which could on appeal override the decisions of the seigneurial courts.”3 As for the lower nobility, their energies were channelled into army service, in accordance with their medieval conception of themselves as the warrior class.
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