The unparalleled power and glory of the Roman
Empire, and the acceptance of its authority by almost all the civilised
nations of the Ancient World, gave a new legal and moral basis to
political power in the ancient world. Briefly, legitimate political power was Roman power,
or that power which could claim some kinship with, or descent from it.
This was accepted (albeit with different degrees of conviction and
satisfaction) by Germanic warriors as well as Roman senators, by
Monophysite Copts as well as Orthodox Greeks. Thus the British apostle
of Ireland, St. Patrick, called the Scottish chieftain Coroticus a
“tyrant” because his power was not from Rome, and considered himself and
all other Britons to be citizens of Rome although the last Roman
legions had left the island in the year 410. British and English kings
continued to use Roman and Byzantine titles and symbols until late in
the tenth century.
The basic principle was that all power that was
Roman or on the Roman model was of God (Romans 13.1), and all power that
was anti-Roman was of the devil (Revelation 13.2). For Rome, it was
agreed, was that power which held back the coming of the Antichrist (II
Thessalonians 2.7), and would be destroyed only by the Antichrist. As
Patriarch Nicon of Moscow said: “The Roman Empire [of which he
understood Russia, the Third Rome, to be the continuation] must be
destroyed by the Antichrist, and the Antichrist – by Christ.”
After Rome became Christian under St.
Constantine, an additional criterion of legitimate political power was
that it should be Orthodox. Thus in the late sixth century the son of
the Visigothic King of Spain, St. Hermenegild, rose up against his Arian
father Leogivild in the name of Orthodoxy, and was supported by the
armies of the Byzantine province of Spania (south-west Spain).
Hermenegild’s rebellion was unsuccessful, and he himself was martyred
for refusing to receive communion from an Arian bishop at Pascha, 585.
However, at the Council of Toledo in 589, the new king, Reccared and the
whole of the Gothic nobility accepted Orthodoxy. Thus, as St. Dmitri of
Rostov writes, “the fruit of the death of this one man was life and
Orthodoxy for all the people of Spain”.
This helped to establish the principle that legitimate political power is either Roman power, or that power which shares in the faith of the Romans, Orthodoxy.
A power that is not Orthodox can legitimately be overthrown from
without or rebelled against from within as long as the motive is truly
religious – the establishment or re-establishment of Orthodoxy. This
does not mean, however, that Christians are obliged to rebel against all
pagan or heterodox régimes. On the contrary, since civil war is one of
the worst of all evils, the decision to rebel cannot be taken lightly.
And in fact, such rebellions have been rare in Orthodox history, and
have been successfully undertaken only with the blessing of the Church –
as when St. Sergius of Radonezh blessed the rebellion of the Russians
against the Tatar horde.
Could a Roman emperor after Constantine who was
not Orthodox be counted as legitimate? In general, the Christians tended
to give a positive answer to this question on the grounds that the root
of the Roman tree was good even if its fruits were occasionally bad,
which is why they obeyed the Arian, Monophysite and Iconoclast emperors
in all but their religious policies. However, as we shall see, there
were precedents for a more rigorous position which accepted a power as
Roman and legitimate only if it was also Orthodox.
What about the numerous emperors who won power by means of a military coup?
The possibility that an emperor might rule by might but not by right
gave rise to the need for a further, more ecclesiastical form of
legitimization – specifically, the sacrament of royal anointing. This
sacrament went back to the age of the Old Testament Kings Saul and
David, who were anointed by the Prophet and Priest Samuel. The grace of
anointing both separates and strengthens the king for his holy task, and
gives his person a sacred inviolability. The truly anointed king
partakes in Christ’s Kingship in the same way that a duly ordained
priest partakes in His Priesthood.
Anointing in the Pagan Empires
Of course, the early Roman Emperors did not
receive the sacrament of royal anointing because they were pagans.
However, the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ was born in the Roman
Empire, was enrolled in a census by it and paid taxes to it, and that
the Apostle Paul was even a Roman citizen, pointed to the fact that Rome
had been chosen, separated out from earlier pagan empires, made
pregnant with potential for good. Just as the Lord in the Old Testament
had invisibly anointed the Persian Emperor Cyrus “to subdue nations
before him” (Isaiah 45.1) and “make the crooked places straight” (45.2),
in order that God’s people could return to their homeland in the
earthly Jerusalem, so in New Testament times the Lord “anointed” the
Roman Emperors to subdue the nations before them and make the crooked
places straight, in order that the Christian Gospel could bring all the
nations of the Empire to their homeland in the Heavenly Jerusalem.
Thus the sacrament of royal anointing could be
construed as having existed before Christ, just as the sacrament of
marriage existed before Christ. Both are “natural” sacraments existing
to reinforce the natural bonds of family and state life. Indeed, the
state, as Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow pointed out, is simply an
extension of the family, with the Tsar-Batyushka in the place of the paterfamilias.
But with the Coming of Christ – which
providentially coincided, as several of the Holy Fathers pointed out,
with the birth of the Roman Empire – State power was given a more lofty
task – that of holding “the mystery of iniquity” at bay and protecting
the Church - which required a greater outpouring of Divine Grace. Of
course, the Emperors were not conscious of this task, and the grace they
received they received, not directly through the Church, but through
the invisible anointing of God Himself. But the results – in the
stability and order of the Roman Empire – were evident for all to see
and admire.
For with a few exceptions, such as Nero and
Domitian, the Roman Emperors did carry out the task that was entrusted
to them. For, as Professor Sordi has convincingly demonstrated, the
opposition to the Christians in the first three centuries of Christian
history generally came not from the Emperors, but from the Senate
and the mob (both pagan and Jewish), and it was the Emperors who
protected the Christians from their enemies. That is why the Christians
considered the emperor, in Tertullian’s words, to be “more truly ours
(than yours) because he was put into power by our God”.
Sordi comments on these words: “Paradoxically,
we could say that the Christian empire, made into reality by Constantine
and his successors, was already potentially present in this claim of
Tertullian’s, a claim which comes at the end of such a deeply committed
declaration of loyalty to Rome and its empire that it should surely
suffice to disprove the theory that a so-called ‘political theology’ was
the fruit of Constantine’s peace. Tertullian says that the Christians
pray for the emperors and ask for them ‘a long life, a safe empire, a
quiet home, strong armies, a faithful senate, honest subjects, a world
at peace’.”
“Again,” continues Sordi, “they pray ‘for the
general strength and stability of the empire and for Roman power’
because they know that ‘it is the Roman empire which keeps at bay the
great violence which hangs over the universe and even the end of the
world itself, harbinger of terrible calamities’. The subject here, as we
know, was the interpretation given to the famous passage from the
second Epistle to the Thessalonians (2.6-7) on the obstacle, whether a
person or an object, which impedes the coming of the Anti-Christ.
Without attempting to interpret this mysterious passage, the fact
remains that all Christian writers, up to and including Lactantius,
Ambrose and Augustine, identified this restraining presence with the
Roman empire, either as an institution or as an ideology. Through their
conviction that the Roman empire would last as long as the world
(Tertullian Ad Scapulam 2) the early Christians actually renewed and appropriated as their own the concept of Roma aeterna. ‘While we pray to delay the end’ – it is Tertullian speaking (Apologeticum 32.1) – ‘we are helping Rome to last forever’.”
Anointing in Byzantium
When the Empire became Christian under St.
Constantine and his successors, the task for which the Empire had been
called into being was made clearly explicit, as we see, for example, in
Eusebius of Caesarea’s words: “From Him and through Him [the Word of
God] the king who is dear to God receives an image of the Kingdom that
is above and so in imitation of that greater King himself guides and
directs the course of everything on earth…He looks up to see the
archetypal pattern and guides those whom he rules in accordance with
that pattern… The basic principle of kingly authority is the
establishment of a single source of authority to which everything is
subject. Monarchy is superior to every other constitution and form of
government. For polyarchy, where everyone competes on equal terms, is
really anarchy and discord.”
But while the task was now acknowledged, the
visible sacrament that gave the grace to accomplish the task was not
immediately instituted. For the striking fact about the sacrament of
anointing in Byzantium is the lateness of its introduction by
comparison with the West. Whereas the anointing of kings in the West can
be traced back to the sixth or seventh centuries, in Byzantium “the
purely ecclesiastical rite of anointing was only introduced into the
inauguration ritual in the twelfth century”. True, the first
ecclesiastical coronation of the Emperor took place as early as 457. But
this act was not felt to be constitutive of legitimacy.
However, this fact did not mean that the Empire
was considered to be a merely human institution. As the Emperor
Justinian’s famous sixth novella makes clear, the monarchy was believed
to have been instituted – like the Church, but independently of her - by God alone. It did not therefore need to be re-instituted
by the Church – although, of course, its union with the Church was the
whole purpose of its existence and exalted it to an altogether higher
plane.
The independent origin of the Empire was obvious
whether one dated the beginning of the Empire to Augustus or to
Constantine. If the Empire began with Augustus, then the Church could
not be said to have instituted it for the simple reason that she came
into existence simultaneously with it. For, as St. Gregory the
Theologian said: “The state of the Christians and that of the Romans
grew up simultaneously and Roman supremacy arose with Christ’s sojourn
upon earth, previous to which it had not reached monarchical
perfection.” But if it began with Constantine, then everyone knew that
Constantine had been made emperor, from a human point of view by the
people and the senate of Rome (more specifically, the soldiers in York
in 306 and the senate in Rome in 312), but in actual fact by God’s
direct call through the vision of the sign of the Cross and the words:
“By this sign conquer”. For, as the Church herself chants in the
liturgical service to St. Constantine, “Thou didst not receive thy name
from men, but, like the divine Paul, didst have it from Christ God on
high, O all-glorious Constantine”. This was another reason – apart from
his truly apostolic activity on behalf of the Universal Church – why
Constantine was accorded the title “equal-to-the-apostles”. For just as
the Apostles were appointed and ordained for their task, not by men, but
directly by God, so Constantine was made emperor, not by men, but by
God alone.
The fact of the Divine origin of the Orthodox
autocracy was important for several reasons. First, in the Old Testament
the Lord had made clear that a true king, a king acceptable to Him as
the King of kings, could only be one whom He, and not the people
had chosen. For as He said to the people through Moses: “When thou shalt
come unto the land which the Lord thy God shall choose, and shalt
possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king
over me, like as all the nations that are about me: thou shalt in any
wise set him king over thee, whom the Lord thy God shall choose: one
from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over thee: thou mayest not
set a stranger over thee, which is not thy brother...” (Deuteronomy
17.14-15).
When the people of Israel came into possession
of the promised land, the land that God had chosen for them, He Himself
chose Saul, and then David to rule over them – “I have raised up one
chosen out of My people; I have found David My servant” (Ps. 88.18-19).
Then, since it is His will that man should work together with Him in the
work of salvation, He commanded the Prophet Samuel to anoint him. But
the anointing, no less than the calling, was God’s – “With My holy oil
have I anointed him” (Ps. 88.19). In the same way, the calling and the
anointing of Constantine – for “thou wast the image of a new David,
receiving the horn of royal anointing over thy head” – was God’s. And as
if to make the point with special emphasis, after His direct calling of
the first Christian Emperor the Lord waits eight centuries before commanding the Church, in the image of the Prophet Samuel, to anoint his successors.
Secondly, the independence of the two
institutions - the Autocracy and the Church - lies at the base of the
canonical prohibitions against a priest entering secular service and a
king entering the priesthood. If Orthodox kings are sometimes called
priests, this is only in the sense that they are also pastors, overseers
of the flock of Christ, but not in the sense that they can ministers
the sacraments. The only man to combine the kingship and the priesthood
with God’s blessing was Melchizedek. But Melchizedek’s importance lies,
not in his being a precedent for ordinary mortals to follow, but in his
being a type of Christ, Who uniquely combined all the charisms within
Himself. The combination of the roles of king and priest was
characteristic of the pagan god-kings of antiquity, and was to be
characteristic also of the post-schism Papacy.
Thirdly, if the Church had to admit that the
Autocracy had a Divine origin independent of her, then the Autocracy had
to admit, conversely, that the Church had a Divine origin independent
of it. And this concession was vitally important, especially in the
early centuries of the Byzantine empire. For the pagan inheritance of
Rome was still strong – one of the Emperors, Julian the Apostate
(361-363), even reverted to paganism, and it was not until late in the
fourth century that the Emperors felt able to drop the pagan high
priest’s title pontifex maximus, which had given the pagan
emperors religious as well as political supremacy in the Empire. Indeed,
as late as the eighth century the iconoclast Emperor Leo III tried to
crush Pope Gregory II’s opposition to him in just that way, claiming: “I
am emperor and priest”. Even later, in the early tenth century,
another, this time Orthodox Emperor Leo (the Sixth) “claimed to be head
of Church and State in the sense that, if the Church as led by the
Patriarch was irreconcilably opposed to the Emperor, the Emperor could
resolve the conflict”. Thus when Patriarch Nicholas the Mystic opposed
his fourth marriage to Zoe, the Emperor simply removed him from office,
forced a priest to perform the marriage and then, in the absence of a
patriarch, himself placed the imperial crown on his “wife’s” head,
eliciting the former patriarch’s comment that the Emperor was to Zoe
“both bridegroom and bishop”. Then he put his friend Euthymius on the
patriarchal throne, who permitted the fourth marriage, saying: “It is
right, sire, to obey your orders and receive your decisions as emanating
from the will and providence of God”!
However, shortly before his death in 912 Leo was
forced to depose Euthymius and restore St. Nicholas, after which
caesaropapism was no longer a serious threat in Byzantium. The new,
still more serious threat was Western papocaesarism. For by 1100
the Pope, claiming to wield the “two swords” of kingship and the Church,
had already crushed the Orthodox autocracies of the West and reduced
the monarch to a desacralized lay state.
It is perhaps for this reason that the sacrament
of anointing was added to the coronation service in the twelfth
century, at just the moment when the papist threat, not only to the
Church, but also to the Empire of Byzantium became clear. For now
especially it was necessary to show that the Empire, too, was holy,
having been anointed by the Church under Christ the Anointed One. And
although the Empire was inferior to the Church, it could not be
swallowed up by the Church, as the western kingdoms were being swallowed
up by the Western Church, in the same way that Christ’s human nature
was not swallowed up by His Divinity.
However, before turning to an examination of the
western conflict, we may ask: what was the Byzantines’ concept of
political legitimacy? In what circumstances did they reject an Emperor
as illegitimate?
At first sight, it might seem that the
Byzantines, following the traditions of pagan Rome, had no real concept
of legitimacy. There were innumerable coups and palace revolutions in
Byzantine history, and at no time did the Church refuse to sanction the
authority of the man who emerged on top. Thus in 865 St. Irene
Chrysovalantou revealed to the eunuch Cyril that the Emperor Michael III
was to be murdered. However, she said, “do not by any means oppose the
new Emperor [Basil I], who shall come to the throne, though murder be at
the root of it. The holy God has preferred and chosen him, so the enemy
himself will not benefit.”
Even heretical emperors, such as the Iconoclast Leo, or the Latin-minded Michael VIII or John VIII, were accepted as emperors, even while their religious policies were fiercely resisted.
However, there are hints of a stricter approach
in some of the Holy Fathers. Thus when the Emperor Constantius II became
an Arian, St. Athanasius, who had previously addressed him as “very
pious”, a “worshipper of God”, “beloved of God” and a successor of David
and Solomon, now denounced him as “godless”, “unholy” and like Ahab and
Pharaoh, worse than Pilate and a forerunner of the Antichrist. Again,
St. Isidore of Pelusium wrote: “If some evildoer unlawfully seizes
power, we do not say that he is established by God, but we say that he
is allowed, either to spit out all his craftiness, or in order to
chasten those for whom cruelty is necessary, as the king of Babylon
chastened the Jews."
However, with one exception, none of the Fathers
practised or counselled rebellion against – as opposed to passive
disobedience to - the evildoer Emperors. The exception was St. Basil the
Great, who prayed for the defeat of Julian the Apostate. It was through
his prayers that the apostate was killed, as was revealed by God to the
holy hermit Julian of Mesopotamia.
And
not only St. Basil; for when Julian was killed and succeeded by the
Orthodox Emperor Jovian, St. Gregory the Theologian wrote: “I call to
spiritual rejoicing all those who constantly remained in fasting, in
mourning and prayer, and by day and by night besought deliverance from
the sorrows that surrounded us and found a reliable healing from the
evils in unshakeable hope… What hoards of weapons, what myriads of men
could have produced what our prayers and the will of God produced?”
This raises the interesting question: what was
different about Julian the Apostate that made him so much worse than
previous persecutors and unworthy even of that honour and obedience that
was given to them? Two possible answers suggest themselves. The first
is that Julian was the first – and last – of the Byzantine emperors who
openly trampled on the memory and legitimacy of St. Constantine,
declaring that he “insolently usurped the throne”. In this way he
questioned the legitimacy of the Christian Empire as such – a
revolutionary position that we do not come across again in Eastern
Orthodox history (if we except the short interlude of the political
zealots in Thessalonica in the 1340s) until the fall of the Russian
Empire. And the second is that he allowed the Jews to return to
Palestine and start building the Temple. This meant that he could no
longer be identified with “him that restraineth” the coming of the
Antichrist, the traditional role of the Roman Emperor (II Thessalonians 2.7), but rather was to be identified with the Antichrist himself, or at any rate, his forerunner…
Anointing in the Orthodox West
Now in the West papocaesarism was always a
greater danger than its opposite, because while the Western Empire had
collapsed after 476 and split up into a number of independent kingdoms,
the Western Church had remained united, making her by far the most
prominent survival of Christian Romanity. Even the most powerful of the
western kings did not command a territory greater than that of a Roman
provincial governor (which is what they had been in some cases), whereas
the Pope was not only the undisputed leader of the whole of Western
Christendom but also the senior hierarch in the whole of the Church,
Eastern and Western. However, as long as the Popes remained both Orthodox in faith and
loyal subjects of the Eastern Emperor in politics – that is, until
approximately the death of the last Greek Pope, Zachariah, in 752, – the
lack of a political power in the West commensurate with the
ecclesiastical power of the Popes was not a pressing necessity. For
everyone accepted that in the political sphere the Eastern Emperor was
the sole leader, the basileus of the whole of Christendom, and
the western kings were his sons or satraps, as it were; but in the
ecclesiastical sphere there was no single head, the Body of Christ being
overseen by its “five senses”, the five patriarchates, of which Rome
was simply the primus inter pares. But problems arose when Rome
broke its last political links with the Eastern Empire and sought a new
protector in the Frankish empire of Pippin and Charlemagne. This caused
changes in the political ideology of the Franks, on the one hand, who
came to see themselves as the real Roman Empire, more Roman and
more Orthodox than the Empire of the East; and on the other hand, in the
ecclesiology of the Popes, who came to see themselves as the only Church of this renewed Roman Empire, having ultimate jurisdiction over all the
Churches in the world. Frankish caesaropapism soon collapsed; but
Papist pride developed until it claimed supreme authority in both Church and State…
Orthodox consciousness rose up against Papism
from two directions. From the East, St. Photius the Great and the
Eastern bishops, together with the Western archbishops of Trèves and
Cologne, condemned the Pope’s claims to universal supremacy in the Church (as well as the Frankish heresy of the Filioque,
which Rome, too, opposed at first). From the West, meanwhile, there
arose powerful native autocracies which disputed the Pope’s claims to
supremacy in the State. The most important of these were England
and Germany – although Germany, being a successor state of the
Carolingian Empire, was still tainted somewhat by the caesaropapist
ideology of the Franks. English opposition was crushed by a papally
blessed armed invasion and the first genocide in European history (the
Norman Conquest of 1066 to 1070); while German opposition was gradually
neutralized in a spider’s web of cunning dialectic – although conflict
between Roman Popes and German emperors continued well into the later
Middle Ages.
It can hardly be a coincidence that the mystery
of royal anointing became widespread in the West at precisely the time
that the political rift between East and West materialized. Now that the
links with the Eastern basileus were no more than formal, it
became necessary to prove that the Western powers were still in some
important sense Roman. Otherwise, according to Church Tradition, the
Antichrist was near!
Romanity, it was felt, could be bestowed on the
western barbarian kingdoms that arose out of the rubble that was the
Western Empire by the Eastern Emperor’s gift of regalia or high
Roman rank (usually not the imperial rank, however) on their kings. Thus
St. Gregory of Tours writes of Clovis, the first Christian king of the
Franks, that he received letters “from the Emperor Anastasius to confer
the consulate on him. In Saint Martin’s church he stood clad in a purple
tunic and the military mantle, and he crowned himself with a diadem. He
then rode out on his horse and with his own hand showered gold and
silver coins among the people present all the way from the doorway of
Saint Martin’s church to Tours cathedral. From that day on he was called
Consul or Augustus.”
There is an opinion that Clovis also received
the sacrament of royal anointing from St. Remigius, Archbishop of
Rheims. But it is more generally believed by western scholars that the
sacrament of anointing did not appear in the West until the seventh
century. However, St. Gildas the Wise speaks of “anointed” kings in
Britain already in the sixth century, and in the middle of the sixth
century the Italian archbishop Gregory anointed the first Christian King
of the South Arabian kingdom of Homer, Abraham, in the presence of St.
Elesbaan, king of Ethiopia: “Raising his eyes and mind and hands to
heaven, [St. Gregory] prayed fervently and for a long time that God, Who
knows the life and thoughts of every man, should indicate to him the
man who was worthy of the kingdom. During the prayer of the archbishop,
the invisible power of the Lord suddenly raised a certain man by the
name of Abraham into the air and placed him in front of King Elesbaan.
Everyone cried out in awe for a long time: ‘Lord, have mercy!’ The
archbishop said: ‘Here is the man whom you demanded should be anointed
to the kingdom. Leave him here as king, we shall be of one mind with
him, and God will help us in everything.’ Great joy filled everyone on
beholding the providence of God. Then King Elesbaan took the man
Abraham, who had been revealed by God, led him to the temple of the
All-Holy Trinity which was in the royal city of Afar, put the royal
purple on him and laid the diadem on his head. Then St. Gregory anointed
him and the bloodless Sacrifice was offered for the kings and all the
people, and both kings communicated in the Divine Mysteries from the
hands of the archbishop…”
Not long after this, in 574, Irish apostle of
Scotland, St. Columba, consecrated (by laying on of hands rather than
anointing) the first Orthodox King of Scotland, Aidan Mor. The
seventh-century Abbots of Iona Cummineus Albus and Adomnan both relate
the story, according to which, when the saint was staying “in the island
of Hymba [Eileann-na-Naoimh, in the Scottish Hebrides], he was in an
ecstasy of mind one night and saw an Angel of the Lord who had been sent
to him, and who held in his hand a glass book of the Ordination of
Kings. The venerable man received it from the Angel’s hand, and at his
command began to read it. And when he refused to ordain Aidan as king
according to the direction given to him in the book, because he loved
his brother Iogenan more, the Angel, suddenly stretching out his hand,
struck the saint with a scourge, of which the livid mark remained on his
side all the days of his life, and he added these words, saying: ‘Know
thou for certain that I am sent to thee by God with this glass book,
that according to the words which thou hast read in it, thou mayest
ordain Aidan to the kingship – and if thou art not willing to obey this
command, I shall strike thee again.’ When, then, this Angel of the Lord
had appeared on three successive nights, having in his hand that same
glass book, and had pressed the same commands of the Lord concerning the
ordination of that king, the saint obeyed the Word of the Lord, and
sailed across to the isle of Iona where, as he had been commanded, he
ordained Aidan as king, Aidan having arrived there at the same time.”
The next year, St. Columba went with King Aidan
to the Synod of Drumceatt in Ireland, where the independence of Dalriada
(that part of Western Scotland colonised by the Irish, of which Iona
was the spiritual capital) was agreed upon in exchange for a pledge of
assistance to the mother country in the event of invasion from abroad.
It is perhaps significant that these two
sixth-century examples of sacramental Christian kingmaking come from
parts of the world that were remote from the centres of Imperial power.
Neither Ethiopia nor Northern Scotland had ever been parts of the Roman
Empire. We may speculate that it was precisely here, where Roman power
and tradition was weakest or non-existent, that the Church had to step
in to supply political legitimacy through the sacrament, especially
since in both cases a new dynasty in a new Christian land was
being created, which required both the blessing of the former rulers and
a special act of the Church – something not dissimilar to the creation
of a new autocephalous Church.
In the formerly Roman West the sacrament of
royal anointing first appeared in Spain. Now Spain, after being one of
the most Orthodox and Roman provinces of the West, fell away from both
Orthodoxy and Romanity when its Visigothic rulers, like the Ostrogoths
of Italy, accepted the Arian heresy. The country was then partially
conquered by the armies of the Emperor Justinian, after which, as
Canning writes, - that is, from the mid-sixth century - “it seems that
no western kings sought imperial confirmation of their rule.” However,
as we have seen, after the martyrdom of St. Hermenigild a spirit of
repentance stirred in the people, the nation was converted to Orthodoxy,
and Spain entered the family of Roman Orthodox kingdoms.
But at this point, as so often in the history of
newly converted peoples, the devil stirred up political chaos. Thus
Collins writes that in the first half of the seventh century,
“principles by which legitimacy of any king could be judged, other than
sheer success in holding onto his throne against all comers, seem to be
conspicuously lacking. Thus Witteric had deposed and killed Liuva II in
603, Witteric had been murdered in 610, Sisebut’s son Reccared II was
probably deposed by Swinthila in 621, Swinthila was certainly deposed by
Sisenand in 631, Tulga by Chindaswinth in 642. Ephemeral kings, such
Iudila, who managed to strike a few coins in Baetica and Lusitania in
the early 630s, also made their bids for power.”
The only generally recognized authority that
could introduce order into this chaos was the Church. And so, probably
toward the middle of the seventh century, the Orthodox Church in Spain
introduced the rite of royal anointing. From now on, kings would not
only be called “kings by the grace of God”, they would be seen to be such by the visible bestowal of sacramental grace at the hands of the archbishop.
Thus in 672 King Wamba was anointed by the
archbishop of Toledo in a ceremony that was described by his
contemporary, St. Julian of Toledo, as follows: “When he had arrived
there, where he was to receive the vexilla of the holy unction,
in the praetorian church, that is to say the church of Saints Peter and
Paul, he stood resplendent in his regalia in front of the holy altar
and, as the custom is, recited the creed to the people. Next, on his
bended knees the oil of blessing was poured onto his head by the hand of
the blessed bishop Quiricus, and the strength of the benediction was
made clear, for at once this sign of salvation appeared. For suddenly
from his head, where the oil had first been poured on, a kind of vapour,
similar to smoke, rose upon the form of a column, and from the very top
of this a bee was seen to spring forth, which sign was undoubtedly a
portent of his future good fortune.”
In 751, when the last weak Merovingian ruler of
Francia was deposed and sent to a monastery (with Pope Zachariah’s
blessing), the first king of the new, Carolingian dynasty was specially
crowned and anointed by St. Boniface, archbishop of Mainz. For the
change of dynasty had to be legitimised, as did the claims of the new
dynasty to power over the vast new territories that had just been
Christianized by St. Boniface and his army of English missionaries to
the east of the Rhine. This anointing of the first Carolingian king led
gradually, as we have seen, to the rite becoming standard practice in
kingmaking throughout the West. It was some time, however, before
anointing came to be seen as constitutive of true kingship. As in
Rome and Byzantium, western kings who were raised to the throne by
election or acclamation only were not considered illegitimate; it was
simply that anointing added an extra authority and sacred character to
the monarchy.
The extra authority and grace provided by the
sacrament of anointing produced tangible results; for in Spain, in
Francia and in England the introduction of the anointing of kings,
accompanied by stern conciliar warnings “not to touch the Lord’s
Anointed”, led to a reduction in regicides and rebellions and a
considerable strengthening and consolidation of monarchical power.
In Spain, this process came to an abrupt end in
711, when most of the peninsula was conquered by the Arab Muslims. In
Western Francia (modern France), it was also brought to an end towards
the end of the ninth century by the Viking invasions, in spite of the
efforts of such champions of royal power (and opponents of papal
despotism) as Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims; and France did not develop a
powerful monarchy until the twelfth century. But in Eastern Francia
(modern Germany) and, especially, in England, the monarchy survived and
put down deep roots. Thus from the time that Prince Egfrith of the
kingdom of Wessex was anointed in 786 even before he had ascended the
throne of his father, one dynasty, that of Wessex, came to dominate
political life in England, led the recovery against the Viking invaders,
and succeeded in uniting most of Britain (and, at times, parts of
Scandinavia) in a single Orthodox kingdom until the Norman-papist
invasion of 1066-70.
Now Janet Nelson writes: “If relatively many
reigning Merovingians and no Carolingians were assassinated, this can
hardly be explained simply in terms of the protective effect of
anointing for the latter dynasty, at least in its earlier period. More
relevant here are such factors as the maintenance of a fairly
restrictive form of royal succession (and the Carolingians’ abandonment
of polygamy must soon have narrowed the circle of royals) and the growth
of a clerically-fostered ideology of Christian kingship.” However, all
these factors were related. Once it became accepted that the Church had
an important part to play in kingmaking through the sacrament of
anointing, then it also became natural for the Church to have a say in
deciding who was the best candidate for the throne, and then in
administering a coronation-oath in which the king swore to protect the
Church and uphold justice, peace and mercy, etc. Theoretically,
too, the Church could refuse to sanction a king, and even lead the
people in rebellion against him if he did not rule rightly, breaking his
coronation oath – although in practice this ultimate sanction was very
rarely applied, and was not applied with decisive effect until the time
of troubles in seventeenth-century Russia.
A clear example of how the Church intervened
decisively in the kingmaking process for the benefit of the nation is
the crowning of the English King Edward the Martyr in 975 (whose
wonder-working relics were acquired in 1984 by the Russian Church
Abroad). Now Edward’s father, King Edgar the Peaceable, had been
anointed twice on the model of King David: first in 960 or 961,
when he became King of England, and again in 973, when he became
“Emperor of Britain” and received the tribute of eight sub-kings of the
Celts and Vikings. But between these two anointings he had married again
and fathered a second son, Ethelred (“the Unready”). When King Edgar
died in 975, Ethelred’s partisans, especially his mother, argued that
Ethelred should be made king in preference to his elder half-brother
Edward, on the grounds that Edgar had not been anointed when he begat
Edward in 959 or 960, and his first wife, Edward’s mother, had never
been anointed, so that the throne should pass to the younger son,
Ethelred, who had been born “in the purple” when both his parents were
anointed sovereigns. The conflict was settled when the archbishop of
Canterbury, St. Dunstan, seized the initiative and anointed St. Edward.
The union between Church and State in England
was so close that crimes against the Church’s laws were seen as crimes
against the king, and were duly punished by him. As St. Isidore of
Seville wrote, it was the duty of the king “through the terror of
discipline” to accomplish what the priest was unable to do “through the
preaching of doctrine”. “For a Christian king is Christ’s deputy among
Christian people”, as King Ethelred’s laws put it. Both the king and the
archbishop were “the Lord’s Anointed” – the archbishop so that he might
minister the sacraments, and the king “he might,” in Bede’s words, “by
conquering all our enemies bring us to the immortal Kingdom”.
Regicide was the greatest of crimes; for, as
Abbot Aelfric wrote, “no man may make himself a king, for the people
have the option to choose him for king who is agreeable to them; but
after that he has been hallowed as king, he has power over the people,
and they may not shake his yoke from their necks.” And so, wrote
Archbishop Wulfstan of York, “through what shall peace and support come
to God’s servants and to God’s poor, save through Christ, and through a
Christian king?”
In fact, the Byzantine ideal of a true symphony
between Church and State was perhaps more passionately believed in –
and, at times, more closely attained – among the former barbarians of
the Orthodox West than among the more worldly-wise Byzantines
themselves. Thus in Northumbria in the eighth century we see the almost
ideal harmony between the brothers King Edbert and Archbishop Egbert, of
whom Alcuin writes:
So then Northumbria was prosperous,
When king and pontiff ruled in harmony,
One in the church and one in government;
One wore the pall the Pope conferred on him,
And one the crown his fathers wore of old.
One brave and forceful, one devout and kind,
They kept their power in brotherly accord,
Each happy in the other’s sure support.
Again, on the very eve of the schism, and in
Rome itself, Peter Damian wrote: “The heads of the world shall live in
union of perfect charity, and shall prevent all discord among their
lower members. These institutions, which are two for men, but one for
God, shall be enflamed by the divine mysteries; the two persons who
represent them shall be so closely united by the grace of mutual
charity, that it will be possible to find the king in the Roman pontiff,
and the Roman pontiff in the king…”
Only a few years later, however, the ideal was
not simply distorted, but completely destroyed by the Roman pontiff
Gregory VII as he anathematized the kings of England and Germany and
ordered their populations to rise up against their sovereigns, absolving
them of their oaths of allegiance. Rome rose up against her own
inheritance and her own defenders, her own inestimable legacy of law and
order; the essentially Roman teaching on obedience to secular
authority, which was expounded in the epistles of the Roman Apostles
Peter and Paul, was destroyed by the Pope of Rome himself, who thereby
became the first ideologically motivated revolutionary in European
history and the direct ancestor, as Tyutchev, Kireyevsky and Dostoyevsky
were to point out, of the Russian socialist revolutionaries. Using
forgeries such as The Donation of Constantine, Gregory argued
that both secular and ecclesiastical power, the so-called “two swords of
Peter”, had been given to him, so that the power of the kings was
merely delegated to them by the Pope, and could be taken back by the
Pope at will, which meant that a king was no higher essentially than the
most ordinary layman in spite of his anointing to the kingdom. Thus
Gregory wrote: “Greater power is conceded to an exorcist when he is made
a spiritual emperor than could be given to any layman for secular
domination.” “Who would not know that kings and dukes took their origin
from those who, ignorant of God, through pride, rapine, perfidy, murders
and, finally, almost any kind of crime, at the instigation of the
Devil, the prince of this world, sought with blind desire and unbearable
presumption to dominate their equals, namely other men?” “Who would
doubt that the priest of Christ are considered the fathers and masters
of kings, princes and of all the faithful?” The only truly anointed
ones, therefore, were the priests – or rather, the Popes, who supposedly
had the charismas of both ecclesiastical and political government.
Anointing in Russia
Many western scholars have argued that if papocaesarism ruled in the West, the East was no less in captivity to caesaropapism.
In support of this thesis, they point to the attempts of many Byzantine
Emperors to impose heresy on the Church - indeed, the fall of Byzantium
may be ascribed to the successful attempts of the last Byzantine
Emperors to force the Church to accept union with the heretical West,
which led to the withdrawal of God’s protection from the Empire. As for
Russia, they say, it is sufficient to point to the tyrannical reigns of
Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great…
However, although Russia succumbed at times to
caesaropapism and nationalism, she always recovered from these
temptations as a result of several factors which distinguished Russian
history from that of Byzantium. First, Russia had a long, nearly
five-hundred year training in humility in the shadow of the Byzantine
Empire, during which, in spite of her vastly greater size and political
independence from Byzantium for most of this period, her metropolitans
were always appointed by the Constantinopolitan Patriarch, and her
great-princes always looked to the Byzantine Emperors as to their elder
brothers. This meant that, when Russia came to take the place of
Byzantium as the bearer of the cross of the Christian Empire, she was
not tempted to think of herself as the first or only or best
Christian people. And when that temptation appeared in the form of the
Old Believer schism, it was rejected by the ecumenical consciousness of
the Russian Church and State.
Secondly, while the Byzantine Empire contracted
from the large, multi-national dominion of Constantine the Great to the
small, exclusively Greek dominion of Constantine XI, the Russian Empire
grew in the opposite direction, expanding from its Muscovite heartland
to the borders of Sweden and Germany in the West and China and America
in the East. This meant that the Russian Empire was always and
increasingly multi-national, with a large number of non-Russian saints
and a strong commitment to missionary activity right until 1917 and (in
the Russian Church Abroad) to the present day. This truly ecumenical,
non-nationalistic character of the Russian Empire was emphasized by its
last three wars - the Crimean war, the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78 and
the First World War, which were fought in a self-sacrificial spirit for
the sake of the non-Russian Orthodox of the Balkans and Middle East.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, at the
greatest crises of national history, and with the exception of a long
period in the eighteenth century, the Russian episcopate has refused to
anoint non-Orthodox Tsars or princes, still less follow them into union
with heretics. This led to the elevation of truly Orthodox Tsars and
princes, who led the nation in the struggle against heresy. Let us
briefly mention several cases:-
(a) In the early thirteenth century, when Pope
Innocent III sent a legate to Prince Roman Mstislavovich of Galicia,
claiming that the Pope with the sword of Peter would soon subdue all the
people and make him king, Roman, taking his sword, said: “Is this sword
of Peter that the Pope has? If it is, then he can take cities with it
and give them to others. But this is against the Word of God; for the
Lord forbade Peter to have such a sword and fight with it. But I have a
sword given me by God.”
(
b) A generation later, Prince Alexander Nevsky
of Novgorod was faced with enemies on two fronts - the pagan Mongols, on
the one side, and the Catholic Swedes and Teutonic knights on the
other. He chose to submit to the former while fighting the latter, since
he judged that the latter were a greater danger to the Orthodox faith
of his subjects. In this he made exactly the opposite choice to the
Byzantines two centuries later, and won the victory – both the spiritual
victory and the military victory.
(c) When the Byzantines signed the false unia
with Rome in 1439, the Russians, led by Grand Prince Basil II, “the new
Constantine”, as he was called by the holy Metropolitan Jonah of Moscow,
were forced, for the sake of Orthodoxy, to break communion with their
former mentors and formed a de facto autocephaly. This was quite
unlike the similarly self-proclaimed autocephaly of the Bulgarian Church
in the early tenth century, which had a more nationalist character. And
so God’s blessing was on it, and the Russian State grew and prospered.
(d) Later, in the time of troubles in the early
seventeenth century, when the Poles and renegade Russians forced Tsar
Basil Shuisky to abdicate and installed a Catholic tsar in the Kremlin,
Patriarch Hermogen not only anathematized the new “tsar” and all who
followed him, but called on the Orthodox to rise up in armed rebellion
against the usurper. Such a step was completely unprecedented in Church history. It signified that, for
an Orthodox nation, a ruler who takes the place of a truly anointed
ruler – and, moreover, does not confess the Orthodox faith, as all truly
anointed rulers must - is not simply a bad ruler, but an “anti-ruler” –
an “anti-christ”, since he was “in the place of” the truly anointed one (the Greek word “christ” means “anointed one”).
The basic difference between Byzantine and
Russian practice was that whereas in Byzantium, as we have seen, the
Emperor did not receive his legitimacy from the Church’s anointing, but
from the acclamation of “the Senate and People of Rome”, in Russia it
was the Church that anointed the Tsar “into the kingdom”, so that
without the Church’s anointing he was not considered to be a true Tsar.
Thus Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow said: “The Sovereign receives his
entire legitimacy from the Church’s anointment”. This strengthened both
the Church’s position and that of the Tsar while binding the two
institutions closer to each other. For on the one hand the Church could
refrain from anointing a heterodox tsar, or, having anointed him,
declare him deposed from his rank because of his apostasy from
Orthodoxy, as we have seen in the case of the false Demetrius. And on
the other hand, the Tsar, once anointed, could not legitimately be
removed by any person or power except the Church – and even then, not
for any personal or political sins, but only for apostasy from
Orthodoxy. Thus we read that while the Church did not allow Tsar Ivan
the Terrible to receive communion because of his seven marriages (this
punishment was administered to him in his capacity as a layman of the
Church who, like every other layman, was subject to her moral
discipline), she never called on the people to overthrow him, insofar as
he remained formally Orthodox.
The unique authority of the Russian Tsar is
illustrated by the following interesting incident from the life of
Schema-Hieromonk Hilarion the Georgian. During the Crimean War of
1854-56, when the Russian armies were fighting the Turks and their
Western allies on Russian soil, the Ecumenical Patriarch issued an order
that all the monasteries on Mount Athos should pray for the triumph of
the Turkish armies during the war. On hearing this, the Georgian elder,
Fr. Hilarion said of the patriarch: "He is not a Christian", and when he
heard that the monks of Grigoriou monastery had carried out the
patriarch's command, he said: "You have been deprived of the grace of
Holy Baptism, and have deprived your monastery of the grace of God." And
when the abbot came to the elder to repent, he said to him: "How did
you dare, wretched one, to put Mohammed higher than Christ? God and the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ says to His Son: 'Sit Thou at My right
hand, until I make Thine enemies the footstool of Thy feet' (Psalm 109.1), but you ask Him to put His son under the feet of His enemies!"
Again, in a letter to the head of chancellery of
the Russian Holy Synod, Elder Hilarion wrote: "The other peoples' kings
[i.e. not the Russian Tsar] often make themselves out to be something
great, but not one of them is a king in reality, but they are only
adorned and flatter themselves with a great name, but God is not
favourably disposed towards them, and does not abide in them. They reign
only in part, by the condescension of God. Therefore he who does not
love his God-established tsar is not worthy of being called a
Christian..."
The greater authority of the Russian Tsar over
all other political authorities did not reside in his purely political
power, but in the mystical anointing that he received from the Church.
Other authorities might be powers in St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s
understanding of the word, in that they in general punished evildoers
and rewarded the good (I Peter 2.14; Romans 13.3), but the grace to
protect the Church of God was given to the Russian Empire alone. That is
why it was incumbent upon all Orthodox Christians to pray and give
thanks for the Russian Tsar, even if they lived in other States. For, as
St. Seraphim said: "After Orthodoxy, zealous devotion to the Tsar is
the Russian's first duty and the chief foundation of true Christian
piety."
In other words, God-established authority, being
one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit (I Corinthians 12.28), belongs in
the first place only to the Christian Roman emperors and to those other
Christian rulers who have received the true anointing of the Holy
Church. In a secondary sense, it may also be said to belong to other,
non-Christian rulers who maintain the basic principle of law and order
against the forces of anarchy and revolution. However, this secondary
kind of authority is only partial and relative; and the authority of
truly Christian rulers must always be revered by Christians above any
other kind of political authority, even if the latter is the authority
they live under.
But the examples of Julian the Apostate and the
false Demetrius remind us that obedience to the Tsar is always
conditional on his obedience to the Orthodox Faith…
The Russian Revolution
On the eve of the Russian revolution, the Church
canonized St. Hermogenes, as if to emphasize that, just as St.
Hermogenes had refused to recognize the false Demetrius as a legitimate
political authority, so the time was coming when it would again be
necessary make a similar distinction between true and false political
authorities.
That time came on March 2/15, 1917, when Tsar
Nicholas abdicated from the throne in favour of his brother, Grand
Prince Michael Alexandrovich. Since the Grand Prince refused to accept
the throne, power now passed to the Provisional Government. The question
was: was it legitimate?
Now the constitution of the Russian Empire did
not allow for any transition to a non-autocratic form of government. So
there was no legitimate alternative to seeking a Tsar, perhaps, as in
1613, through a “Council of the Land”. Sadly, however, the Holy Synod
refused the request of the Procurator, Rayev, that it publicly support
the monarchy. Instead, it welcomed Great Prince Michael’s refusal to
accept the throne from his brother, and offered no resistance when the
Royal Throne was removed by the new Procurator, Prince V. Lvov, from the
hall in which its sessions took place. Then, on March 9/22, it
published an Address to the faithful children of the Orthodox Church in
which it declared that “the will of God has been accomplished” (in the
abdication of the Tsar and the fall of the Orthodox Autocracy!) and
called on the church people to support the new government.
“This document, which appeared during the days
when the whole of Orthodox Russia was anxiously waiting for what the
Church would say with regard to the events that had taken place in the
country, introduced no clarity into the ecclesiastical consciousness of
the people. The Synod did not utter a word about the arrest of the
Emperor and even of his completely innocent children, about the bloody
lynch-mob trials established by the soldiers over their officers or
about the disorders that had led to the death of people; it did not give
a religio-moral evaluation of the revolutionary excesses, it did not
condemn the guilty ones. Finally, the Address completely ignored the
question how one should relate to the deposition and arrest of the
Anointed of God, how to conduct Divine services in church without the
important prayer for the prosperity of the Emperor’s House…”
For the liberals in the Church, however, the
Synod’s Address did not go far enough. They wanted the removal, not of
the Tsar only, but of the very concept of the Monarchy. Thus the Council
of the Petrograd Religious-Philosophical Society resolved that the
Synod’s acceptance of the Tsar’s abdication “does not correspond to the
enormous religious importance of the act, by which the Church recognized
the Tsar in the rite of the coronation of the anointed of God. It is
necessary, for the liberation of the people’s conscience and to avoid
the possibility of a restoration, that a corresponding act be issued in
the name of the Church hierarchy abolishing the power of the
Sacrament of Royal Anointing, by analogy with the church acts abolishing
the power of the Sacraments of Marriage and the Priesthood.”
But not only can the Sacrament of
Anointing not be abolished, since it is of God: even the last Tsar still
remained the anointed Tsar after his abdication. For as Shakespeare put
it in Richard II (III, ii, 54-7):
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
Again, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi has written:
“King Saul lost the power of his anointing when he deliberately
disobeyed God’s command. King Jehu was anointed to obey God’s commands,
but he also failed. Divine blessing was withdrawn. That, however, was
God’s decision. Can the anointed person, of himself, resign?..
“The mystery of anointing and crowning creates a
special person; a person not untouchable or infallible, nor
all-powerful or absolute, but sacred, consecrated and set apart from
others and above the waves of politics.
“Tsar Nicholas II, anointed, crowned and
consecrated in May, 1896, bore within himself, and shared with his
Tsarina and wife, an inner calm and tranquillity of faith beyond all
changes in politics and political forces. Spiritually speaking, his
abdication on March 2, 1917, was of no effect. Those who are anointed
cannot resign their spiritual elevation, though they may lay down the
earthly trappings of power or have them torn away. Those who are true
and devoted adherents of the Russian Orthodox Church have no right to
speak of His Late Majesty as the ‘ex-Tsar’ or as the ‘Tsar-abdicate’.
Clearly, those of the Russian Orthodox faith should recognize the direct
link that has come down from the days of Moses, through the High
Priests and Kings of Israel, to Tsar Nicholas II, in the God-commanded
ceremony of anointing.”
As George Sprukts writes: “Nicholas II, Emperor
and Tsar' of All Russia became such at His coronation - and not before
-, when He was anointed with "the balm of Heav'n" (the "Oil of
Gladness"). And He remained such, even unto the very moment of his
death, which is why.. he has been glorified by God as the Martyr-TSAR' - rather than merely as the martyred "citizen" Nikolai Romanov…
“Anyone who believes or teaches otherwise --
whether he does so in ignorance, or with malice aforethought -- is
simply playing into the hands the sworn enemies of Holy Rus' -- of those
who participated in that terrible act of regicide -- and, consequently,
stands condemned by the fearsome words of that sacred and holy oath
which was sworn by all Russia at the Zemskii Sobor [Land Council
(composed of representatives of every stratum of Russian society)] in
1613:
"’It is hereby decreed and commanded that God's
Chosen One, Tsar' Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov, be the progenitor of the
Rulers of Rus' from generation to generation, being answerable in his
actions before the Tsar' Of Heaven, Alone; and should any dare to go
against this decree of the Sobor - whether it be Tsar', or Patriarch, or
any other man, may he be damned in this age and in the age to come,
having been sundered from the Holy Trinity...’"
In the end very few remained faithful to the
oath first given in 1613 and refused to swear a new oath to the
unanointed Provisional Government. Among the few was Count Paul
Mikhailovich Grabbe (who later raised the question of the restoration of
the patriarchate, and therefore of “episcopal monarchy”, at the Local
Council of the Russian Church). Only slightly less uncompromising was
Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky), who on March 5/18 preached to his
flock in Kharkov: “When we received the news of the abdication from the
Throne of the Most Pious Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich, we prepared, in
accordance with his direction, to commemorate the Most Pious Emperor
Michael Alexandrovich. But now he, too, has abdicated, and has ordered
obedience to the Provisional Government, and that is the reason, and the
only reason, why we commemorate the Provisional Government. Otherwise
no power would be able to force us to cease the commemoration of the
Tsar and the Tsar’s House.”
Probably the clearest justification of the
Synod’s line was expressed by the future hieromartyr, Archpriest John
Vostorgov: “Our former Emperor, who has abdicated from the throne,
transferred power in a lawful manner to his brother. In his turn the
brother of the Emperor, having abdicated from power until the final
decision of the Constituent Assembly, in the same lawful manner
transferred power to the Provisional Government, and to that permanent
government that which be given to Russia by the Constituent Assembly.
And so we now have a completely lawful Provisional Government which is
the powers that be, as the Word of God calls it. To this power, which is
now the One Supreme and All-Russian power, we are obliged to submit in
accordance with the duty of religious conscience; we are obliged to pray
for it; we are obliged also to obey the local authorities established
by it. In this obedience, after the abdication of the former Emperor and
his brother, and after their indications that the Provisional
Government is lawful, there can be no betrayal of the former oath, but
in it consists our direct duty.”
And yet, when the foreign minister of the new
government, Paul Milyukov, was asked who had elected his government, he
replied: “The Russian revolution elected us”. But the revolution cannot
be lawful, being the incarnation of lawlessness… Therefore to recognize
an authority put in place by the revolution is to legalize lawlessness;
in effect, it is to assent to the overthrow of lawful authority. If the
Tsar called on people to obey the Provisional Government, it was only so
as to avoid bloodshed, in the hope that it would provide a transition
to a return to lawful authority. But we all know that the result was not
as he hoped…
Thus a group of Orthodox Christians wrote to the
Holy Synod on July 24, 1917 as follows: “We Orthodox Christians most
ardently beseech you to explain to us in the newspaper Russkoye Slovo
what.. the oath given to us to be faithful to the Tsar, Nicholas
Alexandrovich, means. People are saying in our area that if this oath is
worth nothing, then the new oath to the new Tsar [the Provisional
Government?] will be worth nothing. Which oath must be more pleasing to
God. The first or the second? Because the Tsar is not dead, but is alive
and in prison…”
Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow, who had been
uncanonically ejected from his see, wrote about the Provisional
Government that had removed the Tsar and the over-procurator Lvov in
particular: “They corrupted the army with their speeches. They opened
the prisons. They released onto the peaceful population convicts,
thieves and robbers. They abolished the police and administration,
placing the life and property of citizens at the disposal of every armed
rogue… They destroyed trade and industry, imposing taxes that swallowed
up the profits of enterprises… They squandered the resources of the
exchequer in a crazy manner. They radically undermined all the sources
of life in the country. They established elections to the Constituent
Assembly on bases that are incomprehensible to Russia. They defiled the
Russian language, distorting it for the amusement of half-illiterates
and sluggards. They did not even guard their own honour, violating the
promise they had given to the abdicated Tsar to allow him and his family
free departure, by which they prepared for him inevitable death…
“Who started the persecution on the Orthodox
Church and handed her head over to crucifixion? Who demanded the
execution of the Patriarch? Was it those whom the Duma decried as
‘servants of the dark forces’, labelled as enemies of the freedom of the
Church?... No, it was not those, but he whom the Duma opposed to them
as a true defender of the Church, whom it intended for, and promoted to
the rank of, over-procurator of the Most Holy Synod – the member of the
Provisional Government, now servant of the Sovnarkom – Vladimir Lvov.”
In 1922, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of
Kiev said that “if the Council was at fault in anything, it was perhaps
in failing to express with sufficient force its condemnation of the
revolution and the overthrow of his Majesty. Who will be able to deny
that the February revolution was as God-hating as it was
anti-monarchist? Who can condemn the Bolshevik revolution and at the
same time approve of the Provisional government?”
T
he Provisional government was hardly less
guilty than the Bolsheviks because it was they who overthrew the Tsar,
which led to the overthrow of everything else. For, as St. John
Maximovich said: “It cannot be otherwise. He was overthrown who united
everything, standing in defence of the Truth.”
It was only in January, 1918 that the Russian
Church returned to a confessing stance in relation to the antichristian
power. For it was then that Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the
Bolsheviks and abjured the people to have no dealings whatsoever with
“the outcasts of the human race”. Then, in July, 1918, he unequivocally
condemned the murder of the Tsar.
But it took time for the Church publicly to
admit that the power that rose up “against the Lord, and against His
Christ” (Psalm 2.2) in 1917 must itself be the Antichrist, and that the
first cause of the sufferings of Russia was her unfaithfulness to her
anointed Tsar.
It was in the Russian Church Abroad and in the
All-Russian Catacomb Church that the theology of Soviet power as the
“collective Antichrist” was developed. And it is to a document of the
Catacomb Church dating from the 1960s that we owe the clearest, most
theologically convincing explanation of why Soviet power was not simply a
true authority gone wrong, not simply a ruler abusing his God-given
authority, but precisely an anti-authority. Here is an extract
from this document: "How should one look on the Soviet authority,
following the Apostolic teaching on authorities [Romans 13]? In
accordance with the Apostolic teaching which we have set forth, one must
acknowledge that the Soviet authority is not an authority. It is an
anti-authority. It is not an authority because it is not established by
God, but insolently created by an aggregation of the evil actions of
men, and it is consolidated and supported by these actions. If the evil
actions weaken, the Soviet authority, representing a condensation of
evil, likewise weakens... This authority consolidates itself in order to
destroy all religions, simply to eradicate faith in God. Its essence is
warfare with God, because its root is from satan. The Soviet authority
is not authority, because by its nature it cannot fulfil the law, for
the essence of its life is evil.
"It may be said that the Soviet authority, in
condemning various crimes of men, can still be considered an authority.
We do not say that a ruling authority is totally lacking. We only affirm
that it is an anti-authority. One must know that the affirmation of
real power is bound up with certain actions of men, to whom the instinct
of preservation is natural. And they must take into consideration the
laws of morality which have been inherent in mankind from ages past. But
in essence this authority systematically commits murder physically and
spiritually. In reality a hostile power acts, which is called Soviet
authority. The enemy strives by cunning to compel humanity to
acknowledge this power as an authority. But the Apostolic teaching on
authority is inapplicable to it, just as evil is inapplicable to God and
the good, because evil is outside God; but the enemies with hypocrisy
can take refuge in the well-known saying that everything is from God.
This Soviet anti-authority is precisely the collective Antichrist,
warfare against God..."
The canonist of the Russian Church Abroad,
Bishop Gregory Grabbe, pointed out the similarity between Soviet power
and that of Julian the Apostate: “With regard to the question of the
commemoration of authorities, we must bear in mind that now we are
having dealings not simply with a pagan government like Nero’s, but with
the apostasy of the last times. Not with a so far unenlightened
authority, but with apostasy. The Holy Fathers did not relate to Julian
the Apostate in the same way as they did to the other pagan Emperors.
And we cannot relate to the antichristian authorities in the same way as
to any other, for its nature is purely satanic.”
Soviet power was similar to Julian’s both in its
rejection of the tradition of the Christian Empire and in its support
for the Jewish Antichrist. It both trampled on the memory and legitimacy
of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas and all the anointed kings before him, and
resurrected antichristian Jewish power both in Russia (in 1917) and in
the newly-formed State of Israel (in 1948), of which it was (with Great
Britain) one of the sponsors. Therefore it was rejected by the Fathers
of the Russian Church as illegitimate and satanic, just as Julian’s
power had been rejected by the Fathers of the Byzantine Church.
Conclusion: What Power is of God?
The preceding discussion suggests a general
criterion to discern that power which is of God, and must be obeyed,
from that power which is not of God, but of the devil, and which must
therefore be resisted by all means. The power that is of God is the
power that has the royal anointing, Roman power, the power of the
right-believing kings. The power that is not of God, on the other hand,
is that power which denies and tramples on the unction of the truly
anointed ones, overthrowing them by revolutionary action, war and
genocide, and directly preparing the way for the Jewish Antichrist, the
pseudo-anointed pseudo-god-king.
The sacrament of royal anointing is the mystery of lawfulness which holds back the mystery of lawlessness,
the Antichrist, and whose removal therefore ushers in the last times.
It was first manifested in its full splendour in the New Christian Roman
Empire founded by St. Constantine, and was transferred by lawful
succession to the Third Rome of Russia. A fourth Rome there will not be,
so the final fall of Russia will usher in, as St. Ambrose of Optina
prophesied, the era of the Apocalypse.
In Christian history so far, the sacrament has
been removed three times in the three major regions of the formerly
Orthodox world: Byzantium, the West and Russia. In Byzantium it was
removed temporarily when Julian the Apostate came to power, and was
removed again more permanently when the empire was subdued politically
by the antichristian power of Islam and spiritually by the antichristian
power of Papism. In the West it was removed when the antichrist Pope
crushed the power of the western anointed kings, trampling on their holy
unction. And in Russia it was removed temporarily when a papist ruled
in the Kremlin in the time of troubles, and again for a longer period
when the last truly anointed Emperor, Nicholas II, was cast down from
his throne and murdered by the antichristian power of the Soviets.
According to the vision granted to the faithful
in 1917 through the “Reigning” icon of the Mother of God, since the fall
of the Russian Autocracy the royal anointing has not ceased to exist,
but has been assumed by the Mother of God herself, the Queen of Russia.
The royal child whose destiny was to rule all nations with a rod of iron
was taken up to the throne of God, there to wait for the appointed time
when the nations will again be ready to accept his rule (Revelation
2.27, 12.5). For at a time known only to the Mother of God and the King
of kings, Christ God, the royal anointing will be returned to earth for a
short time, to prepare and protect the world before the last battle
against the mystery of iniquity, the power that is not of God.
In the meantime, there is no fully legitimate
and grace-filled political power on earth, no guardian to protect the
Church of Christ from her external enemies… Wherefore in
repentance we cry out: O Lord, through the intercession of the great
passion-bearer, the martyred Tsar, grant Thou to the suffering Russian
land deliverance from them that contend against God and the restoration
of the throne of our Orthodox tsars.
July 4/17, 1998.
80th anniversary of the Martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II and his Family.
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