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An Essay in Universal History

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An Essay in Universal History AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point of View VOLUME II: THE AGE OF REASON (1453 to 1789) PART 1: from 1453 to 1660 Vladimir Moss © Copyright Vladimir Moss, 2017: All Rights Reserved Romania has passed away, Romania is taken. Even if Romania has passed away, it will flower and bear fruit again. Pontic folk-song, on the Fall of Constantinople. The chief gift of nature… is freedom. Leonardo da Vinci. As free, and not using your liberty as a cloak of maliciousness, But as the servants of God. I Peter 2.16. The Tsar was the embodiment of the Russian people’s… readiness to submit the life of the state to the righteousness of God: therefore do the people submit themselves to the Tsar, because he submits to God. St. John Maximovich. The earthly fatherland with its Church is the threshold of the Heavenly Fatherland. Therefore love it fervently and be ready to lay down your life for it, so as to inherit eternal life there. St. John of Kronstadt, (1905). From plague, pestilence and famine, from bishops, priests and deacons, good Lord, deliver us! The Litany of John Bastwick (1630s). We are very apt all of us to call that faith, that perhaps may be but carnal imagination. Oliver Cromwell (1647). At different times, in different places, Emperor and Anarchist alike may find it convenient to appeal to Holy Writ. Sir Edmund Leech. Temporal and spiritual are two words brought into the world to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign… A man cannot obey two masters… Seeing there are no men on earth whose bodies are spiritual, there can be no spiritual commonwealtsh among men that are yet in the flesh. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. We still believe and maintain that our Kings derive not their title from the people, but from God; that to Him only they are accountable; that it belongs not to subjects either to create or censure, but to honour and obey their sovereign, who comes to be so by a fundamental hereditary right of succession, which no religion, no law, no fault or forfeiture can alter or diminish. Cambridge University to King Charles II (1681). What is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge bishops, taking to himself a power which has not been given him by God?… This is apostasy from God. Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, Razzorenie. 2 3 INTRODUCTION 6 I. THE SHAKING OF THE FOUNDATIONS (1453-1660) 10 1. RENAISSANCE HUMANISM 11 2. THE ITALIAN CITY-STATES AND MACHIAVELLI 18 3. LIBERTY AND MONARCHISM 28 4. SPAIN, THE JEWS AND THE MUSLIMS 36 5. THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 42 6. THE REFORMERS ON CHURCH AND STATE 51 7. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE 62 8. THE SPANISH AMERICAS 69 9. THE COUNTER-REFORMATION 75 10. THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 78 11. ELIZABETH I, THE VIRGIN QUEEN 85 12. JACOBEAN ENGLAND 98 13. FRANCIS BACON AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE 105 14. THE DUTCH REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM 113 15. THE NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES 120 16. BODIN, RICHELIEU AND THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR 125 17. THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA AND INTERNATIONAL LAW 131 18. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (1) KING VERSUS PARLIAMENT 139 19. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (2) RIVAL IDEOLOGIES 151 20. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (3) THE KILLING OF THE KING 160 21. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (4) CROMWELL’S PROTECTORATE 165 22. HOBBES’ LEVIATHAN 175 II. THE MUSCOVITE AUTOCRACY (1453-1660) 183 23. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (1) IVAN III 184 24. JUDAIZERS, NON-POSSESSORS AND THE GREAT PRINCE 193 25. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (2) IVAN IV, “THE TERRIBLE” 203 4 26. CHURCH AND STATE IN MUSCOVY 227 27. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (3) TSAR THEODORE 234 28. THE GREEKS UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE 239 29. THE SERBS UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE 245 30. THE UNIA OF BREST-LITOVSK 251 31. THE TIME OF TROUBLES 257 32. THE FIRST ROMANOV TSAR 272 33. UKRAINE: JEWS, COSSACKS AND MUSCOVITES 285 34. THE SCHISM OF THE OLD RITUALISTS 294 5 INTRODUCTION This book represents the second volume of my series, An Essay in Universal History. The first volume, subtitled: The Age of Faith, ended with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. This brought to an end the medieval world, which was characterized, on the one hand, by the Christian Faith in its traditional, hierarchical forms, and on the other, by monarchical modes of political government that continued to draw inspiration and legitimacy from the Church. In the modern world that was about to begin, both Christianity and monarchism were on the retreat – although the retreat was accompanied by some notable and prolonged counter-attacks. The Orthodox religio-political outlook and civilization that we have called Christian Romanity largely disappeared from its Mediterranean homeland: while its religious centre, formally speaking, remained in Constantinople, in the Ecumenical Patriarchate, its political centre moved north, to Moscow, “the Third Rome”. From there, in what most Europeans considered to be a barbaric outpost on the edge of civilization, the Orthodox Christian heritage of the Mediterranean world was preserved in its original purity. And so the main theme of this second volume in my history is the struggle between Russia and the waves of new ideas that assaulted it from the West until 1789 – Humanism and Rationalism, Protestantism and Catholicism, Freemasonry and Democratism... The struggle between Russia and the West was foreordained in the very date of her birth: the period between the baptism of Russia under St. Vladimir in 988 and the death of his son, Yaroslav the Wise, in 1054 corresponds almost exactly to the decline and fall of Western Orthodox civilization, culminating in the great schism between Old Rome and Constantinople in 1054. Thus Orthodox Russia came into being just as the Orthodox West was dying; she appears to have been called by Divine Providence to take the place of the West in the scheme of Universal History, and to defend the whole of Orthodox Christendom against the western heresies. The first major turning-point in modern western history was the Renaissance-Reformation, which placed man at the centre of the universe and man’s reason as the ultimate criterion of truth. It purported to free men from the fetters of medieval scholasticism, to bring the light of reason to bear on every aspect of human life, even the revelations of religion. It sought to raise the common man to that potential that he would supposedly be capable of achieving if he were not enslaved to the tyranny of popes and kings. However, the early modern period was not a revolutionary movement in the sense that it overthrew tradition in toto and in principle. On the contrary, in order to correct what it saw as the distortions of the Middle Ages, it appealed to the authority of the still more ancient past - the past of pagan Greece and Rome, and of the early, pre-Constantinian Church. And as late as the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century both Catholics and Protestants, both Divine right monarchists and anti-monarchist republicans, appealed sincerely and passionately to Holy Scripture. In other words, the 6 early modern age was still a believing age, a Christian age, albeit an heretical one. And in Muscovite Russia there still existed one of the great and right- believing Christian kingdoms. The Enlightenment, however, the second major turning-point in post- Orthodox western history, went a decisive step further. No authority, whether pagan or patristic, scholastic or scriptural, was held sacred or immune from the ravages of unfettered reason. In the face of the assault of this new “enlightened” religion Orthodox Russia faltered, but did not fall: if, from the time of Peter the Great, the noble class became largely westernized, absorbing the new ideas through a cluster of Masonic lodges, the common people remained faithful to Orthodoxy and worthy of the mercy of God. The book ends with the creation of the first state founded on Enlightenment principles, America, bringing us to the eve of the third major turning-point of post-Orthodox western history, the French revolution of 1789. The period under discussion (1453-1789) was an epoch of greatly increasing complexity and variety in European culture. The dominant ideas of medieval Europe had been basically two: Catholicism and Feudalism, as in the earlier period there had been two: Orthodoxy and Autocracy. But any list of the dominant ideas of early modern Europe must include, in addition to these, the various ideas of economic, social, political and religious freedom, together with perhaps the most revolutionary idea of all – the all-sufficiency of scientific method for the finding of truth. This extreme cultural richness and diversity explains in part why the West, under the influence of these new libertarian ideas, did not move immediately to more democratic forms of government, but even evolved despotic governments more powerful than any seen in medieval times, such as the England of Elizabeth I, the Spain of Philip II or the France of Louis XIV. The reason for this was, as K.N. Leontiev has explained, that cultural diversity and richness require a strong autocratic power to hold them together and give them form, as it were. “As long as there are estates, as long as provinces are not similar, as long as education is different in various levels of society, as long as claims are not identical, as long as tribes and religions are not levelled in a general indifferentism, a more or less centralized power is a necessity.”1 Archbishop Averky of Syracuse has emphasized the dual character of the modern quest for freedom – both Christian protest and antichristian rebellion.
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