The Transfer of the Imperial Eagle from Byzantium to Moscow.

During the two centuries preceding the fall of Constantinople both the spiritual and the temporal powers had been subjected to frequent severe crises. The new Slav states made various attempts to take over the historical role of Byzantium. As early as the tenth century the Bulgarian ruler Simeon (893-927) was already assuming the Byzantine title, styling himself “Emperor and Autocrat of all the Bulgars and Greeks.” This could scarcely be tolerated and the first Bulgarian Empire was destroyed by Byzantium; but after its restoration in 1185 we find Ivan Asen I assuming the title of “Tsar and Autocrat of the Bulgars in Christ.” In 1349, Prince Stevan Dushan of Serbia assumed the title of Caesar (Tsar), claiming that he was historical successor to the rulers of Constantinople. The fall of the imperial city itself greatly furthered this idea of inherited Caesarship on the soil of the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The idea was further promoted by the marriage of Grand Duke Ivan III (1462-1505) to the Byzantine princess Sophia. Ivan III zealously fostered the concept of the third Rome. It was he who introduced the two-headed Byzantine eagle into the Russian state insignia and made the title “Tsar of all Russia” a reality.

Precisely at this time the Church became convinced that it stood at the beginning of a new age. According to its computations, the year 1492 marked the end of the seventh and last millennium of the world's history. The Last Days which had been promised in the Apocalypse were approaching. The Moscow Church counted on the end with such conviction that it did not continue its calendar beyond 1492. The world should and must come to an end at the end of the seventh millennium. Had there not been only seven councils? Were there not only seven days to the week, seven sacraments, and seven pillars of wisdom?

But the world did not end, and Metropolitan Zosimus had to have new Easter tables made. In the preface accompanying their publication he heralded the dawn of a new Christian era. He further ordained that God had now chosen, after St. Vladimir, the “devout Ivan Vasilievich as Tsar and Autocrat of all Russia” to be a new Emperor Constantine for a new Constantinople, namely Moscow. At the beginning of the world's eighth millennium the Grand Duke of Moscow stood proclaimed by the highest dignitary of the Russian Church as the protector of Orthodoxy, and the direct descendant of the devout Emperor Constantine.

The new ideology was most distinctly put forth in the letters of Starets Filofey of Pskov († 1547) directed to the ruler of Moscow. In one he wrote: “I should like to say a few words about the existing Orthodox realm of our ruler. He is upon earth the only Tsar over the Christians, the leader of the Apostolic Church that stands now in the blessed city of Moscow instead of Rome and Constantinople. It alone glows brighter than the sun throughout the world; for know, thou devout one, that all Christian realms have run their course and all together have passed over into the realm of our ruler, in keeping with the prophetic books. Such is the Russian Empire. For two empires have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth.... The woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars, the Christian Church of whom John speaks, who fled from the dragon into the wilderness — she fled from old Rome because of azyme;[10] great Rome fell because of the Apollinarian heresy. The woman fled to the new Rome; that is the city of Constantine. But there too she found no rest, for they had united with the Latins, at the eighth Council. The Church of Constantinople was destroyed. But she fled to the third Rome, which is new, great Russia. Now, being the only Apostolic Church, she shines more brightly than the sun in all the world, and the great and devout Russian Tsar alone leads and preserves her. Let him be on guard and be watchful, by the grace and wisdom of our Lord.”

It is significant that the historical theory herein expressed, the transference of the Empire from Byzantium to Moscow, is justified on grounds of apostasy, just as the claim of Byzantium to being the “New Rome” was similarly justified. Byzantium charged that Rome had lost her precedence by falling into heresy; here the destruction of Byzantium is regarded as divine retribution for the Latin heresy, that is the union with Rome. The fact that Byzantium had entered into negotiation with Rome because of the military pressure of the Turks was not, in Moscow, considered sufficient extenuation. Rome herself was the quintessence of heresy; therefore, to make common cause with her was heresy. The Russian conception of both Church and state was formed in terms of this ideology of “the third Rome.”

According to this doctrine, Russian tsarism and the Russian Orthodox Church merged. The “great and devout” Tsar Ivan IV, upon his coronation in the Cathedral of the Ascension in Moscow, assumed the title of “Holy Tsar and Autocrat of all Russia, crowned by God.” Inspired by this idea, in which a sense of religious, ecclesiastical and political destinies were inextricably interwoven, Ivan IV set out to expand the Russian Empire.

It was in the same spirit that the Russian Church requested and obtained a patriarchate of its own. In 1588, when Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople paid a visit to Moscow, Boris Godunov persuaded him to establish an independent Russian patriarchate. On January 26, 1589, Metropolitan Job was solemnly consecrated “Patriarch of Moscow and of all Russia.” Thus the Moscow Church at last attained the rank that seemed commensurate with its belief in its historic mission.

Armed with this religious idea the Russian patriarchate was able to survive through the gravest crises. It withstood formal abolition and the establishment of a synodal constitution under a government procurator by Peter the Great. When tsarism collapsed under the impact of the Revolution of 1917, the Russian Church, despite the confusions of the period and the onset of severe persecution by the Bolshevists, took courage and reinstituted its patriarchate. Despite the violent opposition of the Bolshevist regime to the principle of the patriarchate and its antipathy to the first holder of the dignity under the Revolution, Patriarch Tikhon, the Church stood firm and preserved this form of organization.

U nder the stress of current political problems, there is a tendency to look at Russia and see all the ways in which her intellectual, political and social structures are at variance with those of Europe. In short, Russia is consigned to “Asia.” This political myth draws its sustenance from the idea of an eternal threat to Europe by “Asia.” It is rather fashionable to compare Soviet Russia's present threat to Europe to the Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages. An epigram embodying this myth was, in fact, already coined in the nineteenth century: “Grattez le Russe et vous trouvez le Tatare.” People will also point to the special ecclesiastical development of Russia, her choice of the Byzantine form of Christianity, as another example of her “Asiatic” character. We cannot therefore give an account of the Orthodox Church without considering this question. From the historian's point of view we can only say that the idea of Russia as an “Asian” country is pure shibboleth. A quick survey of the religious and ecclesiastical history of Russia makes this amply clear.

From the days of the old Duchy of Kiev, Russia had always been objectively an integral part of Europe and of European history. Subjectively, too, she felt herself linked to Europe. The princes of Rus had been allied by marriage to the most important of the Scandinavian and German princely families. The Duchy of Kiev itself maintained the closest political, cultural and economic ties with its neighbors to the north and west. A feeling of separation from the Church of the West had not yet sprung up. Especially close ecclesiastical ties existed between Kiev and Prague, so much so that St. Wenceslas was one of the most revered of saints in the Duchy of Kiev, and his legend was translated into Old Church Slavonic.

During the Turkish wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Poland was called the “bulwark of Christendom” — antemurale Christianitatis propugnaculum Ecclesiae. The same term might well be applied to the Duchy of Kiev for earlier centuries. Christian Kiev was engaged in constant struggles with the Khazar, the Petcheneg, the Cuman, and the Bulgar tribes. Within a few decades of its Christianization, Kiev assumed the military and spiritual task that had been the lot of Byzantium in Asia Minor ever since the fourth century. At the cost of great sacrifices, she constituted herself Christendom's bulwark against the ever-renewed assaults of Asiatic nomads. In this respect Kiev was carrying out a task that paralleled that of the Merovingian kingdom in the West, when it succeeded in stemming the Arab invasions from the Iberian Peninsula.

The same assignment was later taken over from Kiev by the Duchy of Moscow. To be sure, the Mongol invasion destroyed Kiev; the Russian dukes became vassals of the Mongol khans. But since, as we have seen, the Mongol rulers followed the principles of the “Great Yasa” and tolerated all religions, the Orthodox Church lost none of its possessions and rights in the Russian duchies occupied by the Mongols. The Russian Orthodox Church could continue as the real heart of a national Russian culture throughout the period in which the Russian duchies had been stripped of their political sovereignty. A similar phenomenon may be seen in the Orthodox churches of Greece and Serbia during the period of Turkish dominion in the Balkans, or in the Orthodox Church of Cyprus under present-day British occupation. These churches became the center of the national and cultural self-consciousness of their peoples and provided the intellectual basis for their liberation movements. Indeed, the freedom fighters often gathered around their bishop's ecclesiastical banner. So, too, the Orthodox Church in Russia became, during the Tatar era, the principal nucleus for the intellectual and later the political resistance to the Mongol overlords. The first military efforts to shake off the Mongol yoke were undertaken as an Orthodox crusade against the Mongol unbelievers. The leader of this crusade was Ivan the Terrible, who took advantage of the dissension among the various Mongol chiefs and called together Russian forces in the name of the holy cause of Orthodoxy.

Central and western Europe never forgot that Muscovy belonged to the corpus Christianum. Evidence of this may be found in the various political programs Leibnitz presented to the monarchs of his age. In a youthful essay written in 1669 he treated the Grand Duke of Moscow from the Polish and Roman Catholic point of view as the “Turk of the North”; but in the memorial on European politics which he wrote in August 1670, entitled Considerations on the Security of the German Empire, he viewed the Grand Duchy of Moscow as “a possible future ally” of the European powers for their common defensive struggle against the Turks and Tatars.

The same ideas were further explored in the Consilium Aegyptiacum, a study that Leibnitz wrote for Louis XIV, in which he pointed out all the advantages to be derived from the Holy Roman emperor's marching with the Poles and Swedes against the Turks while the Russians attacked the Tatars, who were constantly disturbing the empire from their base in Kherson. The sensible thing for Russia to do was to exterminate these robbers rather than to advance against the West and occupy Riga. In letters and memorials addressed to Peter the Great, Leibnitz hammered away at this idea. Peter the Great was so impressed by this advice that he conferred the title of a Russian King's Counsel upon the German philosopher. Again and again Leibnitz pointed out to the tsar that the most important task of a Christian monarch was war against the Turks. The tsar's journey to central Europe encouraged the philosopher to hatch broad political programs; he hoped to bring about an alliance of Poland, Russia and the empire which would drive the arch foe of Christendom, the Turks, from European soil. In all this political speculation Leibnitz took it for granted that the Grand Duchy of Moscow was an integral part of European Christendom.

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