UNIVERSAL EVOLUTIONISM - Autocracy, despotism and democracy

|
Autocracy, despotism and democracy
|
bet | 8/46 | Sana | 01.04.2020 | Hajmi | 1,31 Mb. | | #9514 |
13. UNIVERSAL EVOLUTIONISM
After the initial opposition to it had been overcome, Darwinism rapidly evolved from a purely biological theory of origins into an explanation of the origins of the whole universe and the basis of a complete new philosophy or religion. But it was a religion without God. "In the beginning" now was not "the Word" but mindless chaos, and "all things were made" not by God, but by blind mutation and "natural selection" (i.e. death). These were the two hands of original Chaos, the father of all things - a conception as old as the pre-Socratic philosophers Anaximander and Heraclitus and as retrogressive as the pre-Christian religions of Egypt and Babylon.
Arthur Balfour, who became British Prime Minister in 1902, described the world-view that universal evolutionism proclaimed as follows: "A man - so far as natural science is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science indeed, as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligent enough to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish."146
A truly melancholy philosophy - and one that we must now define - and criticise - more closely. C.S. Lewis wrote: "By universal evolutionism I mean the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the elaborate, the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely implausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe. You remember the old puzzle as to whether the owl came from the egg or the egg from the owl. The modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion, produced by attending exclusively to the owl's emergence from the egg. We are taught from childhood to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn and to forget that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We are reminded constantly that the adult human being was an embryo, never that the life of the embryo came from two adult human beings. We love to notice that the express engine of today is the descendant of the 'Rocket'; we do not equally remember that the 'Rocket' springs not from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself - namely, a man of genius. The obviousness or naturalness which most people seem to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure hallucination."147
Darwinism believed that Divine Providence did not exist and that "might is right". And so Darwinist evolutionary biology fitted Schopenhauer's metaphysical philosophy like a glove. For both the blind, selfish Will to live was everything; for both there was neither intelligent design nor selfless love, but only the struggle to survive. And if Schopenhauer's striving for nothingness recalled the Buddhist nirvana, Darwin's idea of species evolving into each other recalled the Hindu idea of reincarnation.
Schopenhauer in metaphysics, Darwin in science, and Marx in political theory formed a kind of unholy consubstantial trinity, whose essence was Will.148 Marx liked Darwinism because it appeared to justify the idea of class struggle as the fundamental mechanism of human evolution. "The idea of class struggle logically flows from 'the law of the struggle for existence'. It is precisely by this law that Marxism explains the emergence of classes and their struggle, whence logically proceeds the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead of racist pre-eminence class pre-eminence is preached."149
However, Darwinism was also congenial to Marxism because of its blind historicism and implicit atheism. As Richard Wurmbrand notes: "After Marx had read The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, he wrote a letter to Lassalle in which he exults that God - in the natural sciences at least - had been given 'the death blow'".150 "Karl Marx," writes Hieromonk Damascene, "was a devout Darwinist, who in Das Kapital called Darwin's theory 'epoch making'. He believed his reductionist, materialistic theories of the evolution of social organization to be deducible from Darwin's discoveries, and thus proposed to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. The funeral oration over Marx's body, delivered by Engels, stressed the evolutionary basis of communism: 'Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.'"151
"The years after 1870," writes Gareth Stedman Jones, "were dominated by the prestige of the natural sciences, especially that of Darwin. Playing to these preoccupations, Engels presented Marx's work, not as a theory of communism or as a study of capitalism, but as the foundation of a parallel 'science of historical materialism'. Socialism had made a transition from 'utopia' to 'science'"...152
Not only Marxism, but also its ideological rival, free-trade capitalism, found support in Darwinism. Or rather: Darwinism can be seen as the application of the principles of capitalist competition to nature. Thus Bertrand Russell writes: "Darwinism was an application to the whole of animal and vegetable life of Malthus's theory of population, which was an integral part of the politics and economics of the Benthamites - a global free competition, in which victory went to the animals that most resembled successful capitalists. Darwin himself was influenced by Malthus, and was in general sympathy with the Philosophical Radicals. There was, however, a great difference between the competition admired by orthodox economists and the struggle for existence which Darwin proclaimed as the motive force of evolution. 'Free competition,' in orthodox economics, is a very artificial conception, hedged in by legal restrictions. You may undersell a competitor, but you must not murder him. You must not use the armed forces of the State to help you to get the better of foreign manufacturers. Those who have the good fortune to possess capital must not seek to improve their lot by revolution. 'Free competition', as understood by the Benthamites, was by no means really free.
"Darwinian competition was not of this limited sort; there were no rules against hitting below the belt. The framework of law does not exist among animals, nor is war excluded as a competitive method. The use of the State to secure victory in competition was against the rules as conceived by the Benthamites, but could not be excluded from the Darwinian struggle. In fact, though Darwin himself was a Liberal, and though Nietzsche never mentions him except with contempt, Darwin's 'Survival of the Fittest' led, when thoroughly assimilated, to something much more like Nietzsche's philosophy than like Bentham's. These developments, however, belong to a later period, since Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, and its political implications were not at first perceived."153
14. SOCIAL DARWINISM AND RACISM
And yet the political implications of Darwin's book are obvious from its full title: On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the struggle for life. Darwin did not mean by "races" races of men, but species of animals. However, the inference was easily drawn that certain races of men are more “favoured” than others; and this inference was still more easily drawn after the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871.
Very soon different races or classes or groups of men were being viewed as if they were different species. "Applied to politics," writes Jacques Barzun, "[Darwinism] bred the doctrine that nations and other social groups struggle endlessly in order that the fittest shall survive. So attractive was this 'principle' that it got the name of Social Darwinism."154 Thus Social Darwinism may be defined as the idea that "human affairs are a jungle in which only the fittest of nations, classes, or individuals will survive".155
Social Darwinism leads to the conclusion that certain races are congenitally superior to others.156 "Only congenital characteristics are inherited," writes Russell, "apart from certain not very important exceptions. Thus the congenital differences between men acquire fundamental importance." As Fr. Timothy Alferov writes: "The ideas of racial pre-eminence - racism, Hitlerism - come from the Darwinist teaching on the origin of the races and their unequal significance. The law of the struggle for existence supposedly obliges the strong races to exert a strong dominance over the other races, to the extent of destroying the latter. It is not necessary to describe here the incarnation of these ideas in life in the example of Hitlerism, but it is worth noting that Hitler greatly venerated Darwin."157
However, while appearing to widen the differences between races of men, Social Darwinism also reduces them between men and other species - with some startling consequences. Thus Bertrand Russell writes: "If men and animals have a common ancestry, and if men developed by such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be all equal? Would Pithecanthropus erectus, if he had been properly educated, have done work as good as Newton's? Would the Piltdown Men have written Shakespeare's poetry if there had been anybody to convict him of poaching? A resolute egalitarian who answers these questions in the affirmative will find himself forced to regard apes as the equals of human beings. And why stop at apes? I do not see how he is to resist an argument in favour of Votes for Oysters. An adherent of evolution should maintain that not only the doctrine of the equality of all men, but also that of the rights of man, must be condemned as unbiological, since it makes too emphatic a distinction between men and other animals."158
Another science that was used to support racist ideas was physical anthropology. "The 19th century," writes Barzun, "was the heyday of physical anthropology, which divided mankind into three or more races. It was taken for an exact science in spite of conflicting statements, and it was the playground of historians, social theorists, and politicians, who surfeited the public with tomes, monographs, pamphlets, and magazine articles. The words Celt, Caucasian, Aryan, Saxon, Semite, Teuton, Nordic, Latin, Negro, Hamitic, Alpine, Mediterranean mingled with 'cephalic index' - 'dolicho-', 'brachy-', and 'mesocephalic' - and other techniques of the laboratory....
"The physical anthropologists measured the dry specimen lengthwise and across, divided the latter measure by the former and multiplied by 100 to obtain their index. The three Greek prefixes cited above mean long, broad, and middle, and by the range within which an index falls an individual is classified. The line separating one range from another is of course arbitrary, and some zealous workers found more races than others by subdividing groups.
"The principal scientist engaged in this measuring and speculation was Paul Broca in Paris... He acknowledged that the cephalic index was not a natural feature and hence that the races derived from it were likewise an artifice.
"The next step was to find the concentrations of each type of skull in the population. This game was facilitated, unexpectedly, by the building of railroads. The land taken for them often included disused cemeteries, and the exhumed skulls went to those most eager to exploit them. The former inhabitants of the locality were then found to belong, all, or most, to the long- or the broad-headed race. The final step was to link the index with other characteristics by ascertaining the traits of the skulls' owners when alive. (Measuring skulls in the living was uncertain owing to hair and tissue.) To find these traits, history and geography were consulted. It appeared that long skulls clustered in northern parts, had blue eyes, blond hair, and tall stature; southerly people had broad skulls, with brown eyes and hair and were short. Broca's terms and digits soon formed the underpinning of a new 'science' name anthroposociology. In it blond hair and blue eyes meant Nordic, which mean Aryan, which meant superior.
"Rudolf Virchow, famous as a physician, public man, and anthropologist, noticed what apparently nobody else had seen, that the Germans were not all tall, blue-eyed blonds. He conducted a vast survey of German schoolchildren which showed over a third of them to be short and brown in coloring. It should have put an end to anatomical chauvinism, but it did not. The fantasy went on: in the superior long skull resided a brain that was self-reliant, enterprising, a likely planter of colonies and founder of empires. His German ancestors were truly noble - read Tacitus. By contrast, the broad skull denoted a subject race. Living under regimentation by a strong state (the Roman empire) had affected its character permanently. A broad skull would most likely be a proletarian and a socialist.
"Not all who argued about race for 60 years believed the same solemn fictions, but almost educated westerners believed in the root idea that race equals character and uttered some fiction of their own. There were Celtists who exalted the race's imagination. Many in England had attacks of Saxonism. In southern Europe, 'Latin' leagues were founded to fend off the Teutonic barbarism. In Central Europe, Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism (mostly religious) opposed each other and all others. History and literature were ransacked for evidence of former eminence and 'purity of stock'. There were a few critics such as Alfred Fouillée, who reaffirmed the unity of the human race and the autonomy of ideas. They were rare. Until the end of the century, the best men of letters kept explaining art, temperament, or destiny by some casual or extended reference to race."159
II. THE EAST: THE GOD-CHOSEN RACE (1861-1894)
15. RUSSIA IN ASIA AND AMERICA
Unlike the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Far East did not represent an area of vital geopolitical importance to Russia or Georgia; and therefore Russian conquests there must be evaluated in a different way.
In 1859, following the victory of Britain over China in the Second Opium War, and as a British and French force was approaching Peking to enforce the terms that had been agreed, Count Nicholas Ignatiev managed to secure the weakened Emperor's formal ceding of Manchuria to Russia. Then, when the foreign troops had left Peking after securing the agreement they wanted, Ignatiev signed the Treaty of Peking with the Chinese. Peter Hopkirk writes: "It had been a Machiavellian performance of the highest order by the young Ignatiev, then still in his late twenties, and a remarkable diplomatic triumph for the Russians. First, they had formally added a vast tract of territory, the size of France and Germany together, to their already huge northern Asiatic empire. Second, they had got the Chinese to agree to their opening consulates at Kashgar, in Eastern Turkestan, and at Urga, the capital of Mongolia, then both under Peking's rule. They had thereby stolen a march on their rivals, the British, who had obtained no such facility, for the establishment of consulates meant that Russian merchants and goods would have exclusive access to these important new markets. It was with considerable satisfaction, therefore, that Ignatiev left Peking on November 22 and rode hard for St. Petersburg. 'Not since 1815,' one British historian has written, 'had Russia concluded such an advantageous treaty, and probably never before had such a feat been carried off by so young a Russian diplomat. The successes of 1860 went far to obliterate the bitter memories of the Crimean defeat, the more especially as they had been achieved in good measure by hoodwinking the English.’”160
Machiavellianism? Hoodwinking? From the Russian Tsars? Such an idea would have been considered outrageously unjust in relation to Alexander I or Nicolas I, both of whom conducted their foreign policy on the basis of high principle: Alexander (from 1815, at any rate) - on the basis of the Sacred Union of Christian powers against the revolution, and Nicholas on the basis of the interests of the Orthodox Christian commonwealth as a whole. But in the new reign a group of senior army officers and diplomats, determined to take revenge for their country's defeat in the Crimean War, took advantage of the inexperience of the young tsar to push through a foreign policy that was often Machiavellian, sometimes outrightly deceitful and imperialist in the western sense - that is, designed, not for any higher spiritual purpose, such as the spreading of the Orthodox Christian Faith among the pagans, but simply in order to increase the political and economic power of Russia and steal a march on the scheming British.
*
This was particularly clear in Central Asia, where from 1864 the Russians gradually acquired huge territories by a series of sudden coups and advances, each time declaring that they had no intention of acquiring more territory.
The first such disavowal came in December, 1864, when just after the Russians had seized the oasis towns of Chimkent and Turkestan from the Khan of Khokand, the Russian Foreign Minister Prince Gorchakov issued a memorandum to the European Powers: "'The position of Russia in Central Asia,' declared this celebrated document, 'is that of all civilised States which are brought into contact with half-savage nomad populations possessing no fixed social organisation. In such cases it always happens that the more civilised State is forced, in the interests of the security of its frontiers and its commercial relations, to exercise a certain ascendancy over those whose turbulent and unsettled character make them undesirable neighbours.' In their turn these newly pacified regions had to be protected from the depredations of the lawless tribes beyond them, and so on. The Russian government therefore had to choose between bringing civilisation to those suffering under barbarian rule and abandoning its frontiers to anarchy and bloodshed. 'Such has been the fate,' Gorchakov wrote, 'of every country which has found itself in a similar position.' Britain and the other colonial powers had been 'irresistibly forced, less by ambition than by imperious necessity, into this onward march'. The greatest difficulty, he concluded, lay in deciding where to stop. Nonetheless, having consolidated its frontier with Khokand, Russia was intending to advance no further.
"'We find ourselves,' he assured the other powers, 'in the presence of a more solid, less unsettled and better organised State, fixing for us with geographical precision that point at which we must halt.' Whether he himself really believed this, or whether he was merely playing for time on behalf of a government already bent on subjugating the khanates, is a question which still exercises scholars. Certainly N.A. Khalfin, the Soviet historian of this era, believes that it was a deliberate smokescreen aimed at deceiving the British. Needless to say, the Russian advance did not stop there as Gorchakov had promised. Within a few months they were driving south once more. The great Russian push into Central Asia was about to begin."161
Essentially the Russians were playing the same “great game” of colonial conquest as the British had been playing. For that reason, the British could not protest with too much conviction, and preferred the policy of “masterful inactivity”. And so by 1881, the Russians had consolidated their border along the northern frontier of Afghanistan, while that country stood as the neutral buffer State between Russian Central Asia and British India.
The reaction at home was mixed. "In 1874," writes Figes, "the Ministry of Internal Affairs in St. Petersburg hosted an extraordinary exhibition by the artist Vasily Vereshchagin, whose enormous battle scenes of the Turkestan campaign had recently returned with high acclaim from a European tour. Huge crowds came to see the exhibition (30,000 copies of the catalogue were sold in the first week) and the building of the Ministry became so cramped that several fights broke out as people jostled for a better view. Vereshchagin's pictures were the public's first real view of the Imperial war which the Russians had been fighting for the past ten years against the Muslim tribes as the Tsar's troops conquered Turkestan. The Russian public took great pride in the army's capture of the khanates of Kokand, Bukhara and Khiva, followed by its conquest of Tashkent and the arid steppe of Central Asia right up to the borders with Afghanistan and British India. After its defeat in the Crimean War, the campaign showed the world that Russia was a power to be reckoned with. But Vereshchagin's almost photographic battle images revealed a savagery which had not been seen by civilians before. It was not clear who was more 'savage' in his pictures of the war: the Russian troops or their Asiatic opponents. There was 'something fascinating, something truly horrifying, in the wild energy of these canvases', concluded one reviewer in the press. 'We see a violence that could not be French or even from the Balkans: it is half-barbarian and semi-Asiatic - it is a Russian violence.'
"It had not originally been the painter's aim to draw this parallel. Vereshchagin started out as an official war artist, and it was not part of his remit to criticize the conduct of the Russian military... But his experience of the war in Turkestan had given rise to doubts about the 'civilizing mission' of the Russian Empire in the East. On one occasion, after the Russian troops had massacred the people of a Turkmen village, Vereshchagin dug their graves himself. None of his compatriots would touch the dead. Vereshchagin came to see the war as a senseless massacre... The message of Vereshchagin's epic canvases was clearly understood. He portrayed the Asian tribesmen, not as savages, but as simply human beings who were driven to defend their native land. 'What the public saw,' Stasov later wrote, 'was both sides of the war - the military conquest and the human suffering. His paintings were the first to sound a loud protest against the barbarians of the Imperial war.'
"There was a huge storm of controversy. Liberals praised the artists for his stance against all war. Conservatives denounced him as a 'traitor to Russia', and mounted a campaign to strip him of his Order of St. George. General Kaufman became so enraged when he saw the artist's pictures that he began to shout and swear at Vereshchagin and physically attacked him in the presence of his fellow officers. The General Staff condemned his paintings as a 'slander against the Imperial army', and called for them to be destroyed; but the Tsar, ironically, was on the liberals' side...
"In Russia's educated circles the military conquest of the Central Asian steppe produced two opposing reactions. The first was the sort of imperialist attitude which Vereshchagin's paintings had done so much to offend. It was based on a sense of racial superiority to the Asiatic tribes, and at the same time a fear of those same tribes, a fear of being swamped by the 'yellow peril' which reached fever pitch in the war against Japan. The second reaction was no less imperialist but it justified the empire's eastern mission on the questionable grounds that Russia's cultural homeland was on the Eurasian steppe. By marching into Asia, the Russians were returning to their ancient home. This rationale was first advanced in 1840 by the orientalist Grigoriev. 'Who is closer to Asia than we are?' Grigoriev had asked. 'Which of the European races retained more of the Asian element than the Slavic races did, the last of the great European peoples to leave their ancient homeland in Asia?' It was 'Providence that had called upon the Russians to reclaim the Asian steppe'; and because of 'our close relations with the Asiatic world', this was to be a peaceful process of 'reunion with our primeval brothers', rather than the subjugation of a foreign race. During the campaign in Central Asia the same thesis was advanced. The Slavs were returning to their 'prehistoric home', argued Colonel Veniukov, a geographer in Kaufman's army, for 'our ancestors had lived by the Indus and the Oxus before they were displaced by the Mongol hordes'. Veniukov maintained that Central Asia should be settled by the Russians. The Russian settlers should be encouraged to intermarry with the Muslim tribes to regenerate the 'Turanian' race that had once lived on the Eurasian steppe. In this way the empire would expand on the 'Russian principle' of 'peaceful evolution and assimilation' rather than by conquest and by racial segregation, as in the empires of the European states.
"The idea that Russia had a cultural and historic claim in Asia became a founding myth of the empire. During the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway in the 1890s, Prince Ukhtomsky, the press baron and adviser to the young Tsar Nicholas II, advocated the expansion of the empire across the whole of the Asian continent, reasoning that Russia was a sort of 'older brother' to the Chinese and the Indians. 'We have always belonged to Asia,' Ukhtomsky told the Tsar. 'We have lived its life and felt its interests. We have nothing to conquer.'
"Inspired by the conquest of Central Asia, Dostoyevsky, too, advanced the notion that Russia's destiny was not in Europe, as had so long been supposed, but rather in the East. In 1881 he told the readers of his Diary of a Writer: 'Russia is not only in Europe but in Asia as well... We must cast aside our servile fear that Europe will call us Asiatic barbarians and say that we are more Asian than European... This mistaken view of ourselves as exclusively Europeans and not Asians (and we have never ceased to be the latter)... has cost us very dearly over these two centuries, and we have paid for it by the loss of our spiritual independence... It is hard for us to turn away from our window on Europe; but it is a matter of our destiny... When we turn to Asia, with our new view of her, something of the same sort may happen to us as happened to Europe when America was discovered. For, in truth, Asia for us is that same America which we still have not discovered. With our push towards Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength... In our Europe we were hangers-on and slaves, while in Asia we shall be the masters. In Europe we were Tatars, while in Asia we can be Europeans. Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia will encourage our spirit and draw us on; the movement needs only to be started.’”162
Russia certainly did have a civilizing mission in Asia: to bring Orthodoxy to its peoples. Unfortunately, this mission was sometimes forgotten in the ardour of nationalist or commercial passion. But in the wake of Russia's conquering armies, Orthodoxy did make gains - but more among the pagans than among the Muslims, and even more in Russian America beyond Asia - Alaska - than in Asia proper.
*
In Siberia, the Russian Church had been evangelizing the native tribes since the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century great progress was made especially in the region of the High Altai. "The High Altai regions in the mid-19th century were still 'pagan' and we may describe their religion as 'Shamanism'. In the past there had been waves of various cultural influences: from the Chinese and hence of Buddhism and Taoism and also from the Turkic peoples to the south spread Islamic ideas and perhaps even Manichaeism and Nestorianism. Nevertheless these influences were weak and the main religion was Shamanism. The Russian Orthodox mission to the area was founded by Fr. Macarios in 1828. He settled in Biisk as permanent priest in residence in 1830. The missionaries, especially those who were sympathetic to the Altai native people (which was mostly the case) made a fundamental contribution to the work of establishing a written Altai language which became a classic of its type. Later, following the model, the grammars of many other Turkic languages were to be defined. Archimandrite Macarios introduced a version of the Bible in the Altai language in the late 1830s. It is amazing to think that this work was begun in 1837 at Easter, not somewhere in highly educated Orthodox centres in the West but far on the frontiers in pagan Altai, in a small place called Ulala.
"Fr. Macarios was certainly an exceptional figure. He was a well-educated theologian who commanded several languages, including Greek and Hebrew. He translated the Bible into modern Russian. In his early years he studied the philosophy of the German philosopher Herder and was also familiar with the botanical work of Linneus and Denandel and the works of the astronomer Herschel and in general took a great interest in the natural science. For some time he was professor at the Theological Academy. From contemporary descriptions he seems to have been a man of great holiness who gave incorruptible service and love to the native peoples. In his approach to missionary work he advocated a definite program: it was not only to baptize the 'natives' and turn them into true children of the Heavenly Kingdom but also to lead them to a settled way of life, to literacy and to encourage them towards a more developed and more profitable form of agricultural practice. His program demanded of the missionaries a thorough knowledge of the Altai language, some basic ideas of science and medicine and an understanding of agrarian economics. He prepared for the mission practically useful objects such as seeds for market gardening and fruit growing, agricultural tools and so on. He produced the first translation into Altai of prayers and texts for church services. For the first time in the history of the missionary movement he took seriously the organization of missionary activities for women. He appointed female assistants. The first among these were the Russia Praskovia Landysheva and the Frenchwoman, Sofia Belmont. Among their duties were the education of the newly converted Altai women in the skills of childcare, sewing, bread making, elementary medical care and the fundamentals of midwifery. He even established an icon-painting studio where some gifted students learned about the fine arts to the extent that in time they established the Altai school of painting which spread over the whole region."163
*
But perhaps the most striking success of Russia as the Third Rome was on the American continent. In 1794 the Russian Holy Synod sent a mission to convert the Indians of Alaska to Orthodoxy. The mission was successful and by 1815 already had its first saint - St. Peter the Aleut, who was martyred by Roman Catholics in San Francisco. The most famous member of this mission was the Valaam monk St. Herman of Alaska, who died in 1837 and was canonized in 1970. And there were other saints sent into this mission-field.
"From 1823," writes Lebedev, "there begins a second special Church mission, whose most prominent representative turned out to be the young priest Fr. John Popov-Veniaminov, later Metropolitan Innocent of Moscow and Kolomna. This great and wonderful man was born in 1797 in the village of a poor village reader near Irkutsk. He finished his studies at the Irkutsk seminary, where he displayed great interest both in theological and in secular sciences. In 1823, with the whole of his family, wife and children, he arrived at the island of Unalaska and began his apostolic ministry among the Aleuts, Kadyaks, Eskimos and Indians of the west coast of Alaska and Northern California (the city of Novo-Arkhangelsk on the island of Sitka). Teaching the local inhabitants various arts and household crafts, he with their help built a church, introduced schools, work-houses and hospitals, and baptised thousands of natives without ever resorting to violence or any pressure, but acting only through love and the word of truth. Fr. John mastered six local languages, and studied and described the everyday life, manners and anthropology of the bribes, the local geography and climates, becoming a true father of the 'wild' peoples, or, as St. Herman of Alaska used to say about himself, their 'nanny'! For the Aleuts he composed an alphabet and translated the Gospel of Matthew and some necessary prayers and other books into their language. His works on the ethnography of the peoples of Alaska, California and the adjacent islands are still used in science to this day and are considered models. Even then, during his lifetime, they were highly valued by the academies of science of Russia and Europe! Father John Popov-Veniaminov continued the best traditions of the Russian missionaries of Siberia, the Altai and the Far East. In those times that was not simple, it demanded courage, asceticism. The point is that the interests of the apostolate of the Church in those places often contradicted the interests of the Russian-American Company (RAC), which traded in furs and sea animals. 'Industrial' people and RAC officials sometimes displayed cruelty, and sometimes were inclined mercilessly to exploit the natives, although one has to say that these were excesses, but not the rule! As a rule, even our 'industrials' behaved in a friendly and fraternal manner to the native population of America. Shelikhov considered marriages between Russian and Indians as very desirable. There were mixed marriages. The children from these marriages (Creoles) often turned out to be very capable people, while some of them attained high rank in state service in Russia. Catherine II and Paul I prescribed only friendly relations towards the natives under threat of punishment. A special decree of Emperor Alexander I ordered the RAC 'first of all to venerate humanity' in all the peoples of America, and in no case to resort to cruelty and violence. Russia often sent notes of protest to the USA, whose merchants sold firearms to the Indians. The USA replied that they were 'free', and that they could not ban this trade in death... But in the 19th century among our workers in RAC there were people who were completely foreign to Orthodox, who simply did not understand it (for example, the RAC's 'chronicler', Khlebnikov). And sometimes it was difficult for our missionaries to defined whom they had to enlighten first of all - the Aleuts and Indians, or our own people, the Russians!... In such circumstances only an all-encompassing (spiritual and secular) education of the apostles of America, like Fr. John Popov, could force some of the officials of RAC to venerate the Church and her missionary work. In 1840, on the recommendation of Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), who had become friends with Fr. John, Tsar Nicholas I appointed the priest Popov-Veniaminov, who had been widowed by this time and had accepted monasticism, as the first bishop of the newly formed Kamchatka, Kurile islands and Aleut diocese. When the Tsar gave this name to the diocese, people remarked to him: 'But Your Majesty! There is not a single church on the Kurile islands!' 'Build them!' snapped the Emperor. That is how the new hierarch of the Russian Church Innocent (Veniaminov) appeared..."164
Metropolitan Philaret said of St. Innocent, who later succeeded him in the see of Moscow, that he had the apostolic spirit. His labours, together with those of Archimandrite Macarius in the Altai and Archbishop Nicholas in Japan, give the lie to the idea that Russian Orthodoxy in this period was "ossified" or "paralysed".165 In fact, the labours of these men, supported as always by the Tsars, prove both the vitality of Russian Orthodoxy in general and the continuing vitality of the Church-State "symphony".
In the Tsar's encouragement of the American mission "was reflected, as in a drop of water, the essence of the politics of the Third Rome - the widening of the boundaries of the Church. In her expansion to Alaska and Northern California, to the possessions of Japan and China, and to the sands of Central Asia, Russia derived not only commercial and military-strategic advantages (although these, too, were not of little importance), but brought to the new lands the light of her Orthodox Faith and spirituality. Besides, as has already been pointed out, she related to the peoples of these new lands with great respect. In contrast to the expansion of the Roman Catholic church, the Russian Orthodox Church and state did not convert one people to Christianity by forcible means! Amidst the pagan tribes of Siberia, the North, the Far East and America, the Russian spiritual missions were very active in preaching the Word of God, building churches and monasteries, hospitals, homes for invalids and the elderly, providing medical help and what would now be called 'social security', often quarrelling because of these good works with the local secular bosses. As regards the Mohammedan peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, here there was almost no missionary work. After the unsuccessful attempts to create spiritual missions for the Tatars and Kalmyks in the 18th century, Russia renounced special ecclesiastical missions in Mohammedan areas distinguished for their strong predeliction for Islam. Orthodoxy was not imposed on the Mohammedan people; they were left to live freely in accordance with their own customs, but Orthodox churches naturally arose on their lands for the Russians who had settled there, so that all those desiring it among those peoples received the opportunity to learn Orthodoxy!"166
However, in 1867 the Tsar sold Alaska and the Aleutian islands to the United States for $7.2 million. Could the need to pay for the armies in Central Asia have motivated this unexpected decision? Or the cost of defending 10,000 Russians and 40,000 Indians against the expected influx of American explorers and settlers? If so, then it was a mistake - there were gold deposits under the Alaskan soil.167 But more importantly, Alaska, in contrast to Central Asia, had proved to be fertile territory for Russian missionaries, and the Indians were therefore not merely colonial subjects but brothers in Christ. What could justify the abandonment of thousands of brothers in Christ to a heretical government (even if the church buildings remained in the hands of the Orthodox, and permission was granted to the Russian Spiritual Mission to continue its work in Alaska)? Was not the Third Rome obliged to protect the interests of her converts in the New World?
As it turned out, Divine Providence protected the Orthodox Indians where the Russian tsar did not: in 1917 Russia herself came under the yoke of the atheists, so from that point of view it may have been just as well that the Orthodox Alaskans found themselves within the borders of another State.
|
| |