Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia: The Teachings of Metropolitan Platon

By Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter

This valuable study explores the Russian Enlightenment with reference to the religious Enlightenment of the mid to late eighteenth century. Grounded in close reading of the sermons and devotional writings of Platon (Levshin), Court preacher and Metropolitan of Moscow, the book examines the blending of European ideas into the teachings of Russian Orthodoxy. Highlighting the interplay between Enlightenment thought and Orthodox enlightenment, Elise Wirtschafter addresses key questions of concern to religious Enlighteners across Europe: humanity's relationship to God and creation, the distinction between learning and enlightenment, the role of Christian love in authority relationships, the meaning of free will in a universe governed by Divine Providence, and the unity of church, monarchy, and civil society. Countering scholarship that depicts an Orthodox religious culture under assault from European modernity and Petrine absolutism, Wirtschafter emphasizes the ability of Russia's educated churchmen to assimilate and transform Enlightenment ideas. The intellectual and spiritual vitality of eighteenth-century Orthodoxy helps to explain how Russian policymakers and intellectuals met the challenge of European power while simultaneously coming to terms with the broad cultural appeal of the Enlightenment's universalistic human rights agenda.

Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia defines the Russian Enlightenment as a response to the allure of European modernity, as an instrument of social control, and as the moral voice of an emergent independent society. Because Russia's enlightened intellectuals focused on the moral perfectibility of the individual human being, rather than social and political change, the originality of the Russian Enlightenment has gone unrecognized. This study corrects images of a superficial Enlightenment and crisis-ridden religious culture, arguing that in order to understand the humanistic sensibility and emphasis on individual dignity that permeate Russian intellectual history, and the history of the educated classes more broadly, it is necessary to bring Orthodox teachings into the discussion of Enlightenment thought. The result is a book that explains the distinctive origins of modern Russian culture while also allowing scholars to situate the Russian Enlightenment in European and global history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781609090845

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© 2013 by Northern Illinois University Press

Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

Manufactured in the United States using acid-free paper.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling.

Religion and enlightenment in Catherinian Russia : the teachings of Metropolitan Platon / Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-87580-469-9 (cloth) — ISBN 978-1-60909-084-5 (e-book)

1. Enlightenment—Russia—History—18th century. 2. Philosophy and religion—Russia—History—18th century. 3. Platon, Metropolitan of Moscow, 1737–1812. 4. Faith and reason—Christianity. 5. Learning—Religious aspects—Christianity. 6. Spiritual life—Christianity. 7. Sermons, Russian—18th century. 8. Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’—Theology—History—18th century. I. Title.

B4215.E5W57 2013

248.2—dc23

2012045345

To the memory of my mom,

Rita Capouya Kimerling

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Dating and Biblical Citations

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Meaning of Enlightenment

Enlightenment in a European Setting

Religious Enlightenment and Enlightenment in Russia

Enlightenment in Russian Orthodoxy

Chapter 2

Christian Enlightenment and Enlightenment Learning

Spiritual and Sensual Wisdom

Enlightenment and the Oneness of God’s Creation

Conclusion

Chapter 3

Divine Providence and Human History

The Spiritual Feat of Everyday Life: Celebration of Tsarevich Dimitrii

Absolute Monarchy as Christian Rulership

Conclusion: Enlightenment and Historical Consciousness

Chapter 4

Free Will and the Human Person

Free Will as Moral Choice

Free Will and Religious Toleration

Conclusion: From Toleration to Equality

Conclusion

Toward a Definition of the Russian Enlightenment

From State Building to Government by Moral Means

Unity and Reconciliation in the Russian Enlightenment

Limits to (the) Enlightenment in Russia

Appendix 1: Chronology of Metropolitan Platon’s Career

Appendix 2: Metropolitan Platon’s Subscribers

Notes to Introduction

Notes to Chapter One

Notes to Chapter Two

Notes to Chapter Three

Notes to Chapter Four

Notes to Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

The research and writing of this book has benefited from the support of numerous colleagues and institutions. California State Polytechnic University at Pomona provided research and professional leaves at regular intervals. The interlibrary loan services of Document Delivery in the University Library remain unsurpassed. In spring 2010 the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris furnished a stimulating and hospitable environment in which to begin serious writing and share ideas with an international group of scholars. UCLA, USC, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Bremen University, and the British Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia hosted presentations and workshops that offered encouragement and critique. The New York Public Library, the libraries of Harvard University, and the Slavic Reference Service at the University of Illinois supplied essential research materials. For more than a decade, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills has hosted the Rashi Study Group, led by Rabbi Laura Geller, which (like Platon) continues to remind me that religious traditions are both eternal and modern. I am indebted to all of these institutions.

For careful reading and critique of the complete manuscript, I am grateful to Gary M. Hamburg and Gregory L. Freeze, two consummate intellectuals, scholars, and gentlemen, who served as reviewers for NIUP. Daniel Kaiser, Jerry Muller, and Ronald Vroon generously read and commented on multiple chapters in various stages of preparation: I thank them for the perspectives and expertise that each brought to his reading(s). For more years than I can remember, annual lunches with Jane Burbank, Valerie Kivelson, and Nancy Kollmann have continued to inspire. So has the annual UCLA Workshop in Medieval and Early Modern Slavic Studies, organized by Gail Lenhoff. I am also grateful to the journals, presses, and editors who published earlier work based on materials contained in this book: Gail Lenhoff, Ann Kleimola, Anthony Cross, Simon Dixon, Gary Hamburg, Semion Lyandres, Slavica Publishers, the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter, the Slavonic and East European Review, and the Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography. Finally, I am indebted to Amy Farranto, Susan Bean, and the entire staff of NIUP for their efficient and professional handling of the review and publication of this study.

On a personal note I would like to mention the passing of my mentor, Marc Raeff (1923–2008), whose influence remains even though he is no longer here to read completed first drafts. The same can be said of my mother, Rita Capouya Kimerling (1931–2010), who read the last version of every manuscript I sent to press. The vacuum left by these two extraordinary individuals can never be filled. But life goes on, and so I thank my husband, Gary; my children, Eric, Carla, and Valerie; my dad, Solomon Kimerling; my siblings and our Kimerling, Mazer, and Feigelson cousins; and my Wirtschafter family in California, all of whom have nourished this book and its author with ongoing love and support.

Note on Dating and Biblical Citations

Throughout this book dates are given in the Old Style, based on the Julian calendar used in Russia from the reign of Tsar Peter I until January 1918. In the eighteenth century the Julian calendar lagged eleven days behind Europe’s Gregorian calendar; in the nineteenth century, twelve days. Unless otherwise stated, the biblical passages cited throughout this book appear in Platon’s writings and are therefore set off by single quotation marks within double quotation marks. In instances where Platon paraphrases or gives a partial biblical quote and I provide the exact wording or full passage, double quotation marks are used. In identifying Psalms I follow the numbering of the Septuagint, as used by Platon.

For English translation of biblical passages, I rely on the latest edition of The Orthodox Study Bible (St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology, 2008), hereafter OSB (2008). Old Testament scripture is taken from the St. Athanasius Academy Septuagint, copyright 2008 by St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology. Used by permission. All rights reserved. New Testament scripture is taken from the New King James Version, copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Beginning with the reforms of Tsar Peter I (ruled 1682/1689–1725), the governing and educated elites of eighteenth-century Russia worked tirelessly to make their country European. Although the role of European ideas and administrative models in the Petrine and subsequent reforms is well studied, the substantive process of cultural Europeanization remains poorly understood.¹ In analyzing this process, most scholars look first at the European ideas being assimilated into Russia and then at their Russian interpreters or adapters.² An alternative approach, and the one taken here, is to emphasize the Russian soil into which the European ideas were received. Central to this approach is the question of how the traditional but by no means unchanging culture of the Russian Orthodox Church came to terms with the philosophical modernity of eighteenth-century Europe.

Defined by historian Jonathan Israel as a package of interconnected principles, values, and concepts, philosophical modernity requires 1) recognition of mathematical-historical reason as the sole criterion of truth; 2) rejection of all supernatural agency, magic, and divine providence; 3) belief in the equality of all humankind, including racial and gender equality; 4) belief in a secular, nonconfessional, universalistic ethics, grounded in equality and concerned with equity, justice, and charity; 5) full religious toleration, freedom of conscience, and freedom of thought; 6) freedom of expression, political criticism, and the press; 7) acceptance of democratic republicanism as the most legitimate form of politics; and 8) personal liberty of lifestyle and sexual orientation.³ In current scholarship Israel’s principles of philosophical modernity are likely to be identified with the Radical Enlightenment or with the Enlightenment origins of European-style democratic government. Yet, as every historian knows, at the time of the Enlightenment, much of philosophical modernity remained both unimagined and unattainable—not only in Russia but also in many parts of western and central Europe.⁴ For this reason, historians also describe a limited form of philosophical modernity, which Israel calls the moderate mainstream Enlightenment and which other scholars associate with the religious Enlightenment.

Less widely appreciated but already the subject of a vibrant scholarship, the religious Enlightenment developed out of efforts to find a reasonable faith, neither excessively enthusiast nor rigidly doctrinaire, that would be capable of sustaining belief in an age of ongoing scientific discoveries and new societal priorities. The religious Enlightenment sought above all to reconcile the new learning of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with established authority and religious belief.⁵ It is this Enlightenment that speaks to the Russian experience. Indeed, when Russian historians describe a process of Europeanization beginning in the late seventeenth century, they have in mind not the importation of Western culture in the broad sense—Western imports could be found in Russia already in the Middle Ages—but the secular learning and mechanical arts derived from Cartesian, Baconian, and Newtonian science.

The question of whether historians should analyze Russian reality with reference to European patterns of development remains contested and is not likely to be resolved with any finality. What can be said, however, with finality and full objectivity is that starting in the seventeenth century, and continuing with greater urgency in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries, Russia, like every other part of the globe, was forced to confront the allure and challenge of European modernity.⁶ By the time that Tsar Peter I ascended the throne, Russia’s governing classes had no choice but to respond to the threat posed by Europe’s economic, military, and political power, and they simultaneously had to come to terms with the broad cultural appeal and expansiveness of the European Enlightenment’s universalistic human-rights agenda. How Russia met the European challenge is the story of the Russian Enlightenment.

Because the Russian Enlightenment did not inspire movements for social and political change (at least not before the second quarter of the nineteenth century), historians are accustomed to denying its meaningfulness.⁷ As this book will show, however, Russian enlighteners produced a rich culture that blended effectively with established authority and religious belief. The Russian Enlightenment, like moderate mainstream and religious Enlightenments across Europe, reconciled reason and revelation, science and religion, human autonomy and divine providence. In a manner consistent with European ideas and Orthodox religious teachings, Russian intellectuals conceptualized Enlightenment progress and the human condition more generally in universalistic moral terms. Their thinking rested on recognizable Enlightenment principles such as the natural and God-given dignity of the individual human being; the equal, again natural and God-given, capacity of all people to achieve moral goodness; and finally, the ability of individuals and governments—using their, yet again, natural and God-given reason—to reform human behavior and institutions. A project of synthesis, debate, and multiple developmental trajectories, the pan-European Enlightenment, or rather specific aspects of various Enlightenments, found a receptive home in eighteenth-century Russia.⁸

Among the outstanding features of the Russian Enlightenment were its simultaneous openness to change and commitment to tradition, including the teachings and traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church. Not unlike the German Aufklärung, which entered Russian thought through cameralism, Pietism, and the philosophical rationalism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754), the blending of Enlightenment ideas into Orthodox religious teachings encouraged a universalistic moral humanism that could be reconciled with Christian belief, absolutist monarchy, and social relationships based on patriarchy, hierarchy, and serfdom. The strength of Russia’s social, political, and religious traditions, rather than their vulnerability in the face of European power and cultural models, remains a critical and little-recognized dimension of the Russian Enlightenment.

The absorption of Enlightenment principles into the Russian Orthodox conception of Christian enlightenment represented a central dynamic in the cultural Europeanization of Russia’s educated elites. To probe this dynamic, Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia defines the Russian Enlightenment through the prism of eighteenth-century religious teachings. Based primarily on the sermons and devotional writings of Metropolitan of Moscow and court preacher Platon (Levshin, 1737–1812), but with an eye to a broad range of religious, literary, journalistic, autobiographical, epistolary, legislative, and judicial sources, the chapters that follow explore theological, philosophical, social, and political questions of concern to religious enlighteners and their audiences. The perspective derived from church teachings sheds new light on scholarly understandings of the Russian Enlightenment. When conceptualized as 1) a response to the challenge and allure of European modernity, 2) an instrument of state building and social control, and 3) the moral voice of an emergent independent society, the Russian Enlightenment comes into focus in a manner that is both situated in European history and true to the history and traditions of Russia.

Chapter One

The Meaning of Enlightenment

The Russian Enlightenment rarely garners serious attention among historians of Europe. Scholars tend either to deny its meaningfulness or to hold it responsible for a linear process of development leading from Westernization to revolution. Starting with the assimilation of European cultural models and the origins of intellectual dissent in the eighteenth century; then moving to open political opposition, the birth of the intelligentsia, and the spread of radical ideologies in the nineteenth century; and finally ending with socialist revolution and communist utopianism in the twentieth century—all of these transformations are touted as products of the Enlightenment ideas that began to define elite culture and thought in the reign of Tsar Peter I. Historians of Soviet totalitarianism are likewise prone to read the Russian Enlightenment with reference to a modernist trajectory. In Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Stephen Kotkin writes,

The main reason the USSR needs to be incorporated into European history is that Stalinism constituted a quintessential Enlightenment utopia, an attempt, via the instrumentality of the state, to impose a rational ordering on society, while at the same time overcoming the wrenching class divisions brought about by nineteenth-century industrialization. That attempt, in turn, was rooted in a tradition of urban-modeled, socially oriented utopias that helped make the Enlightenment possible. Magnitogorsk had very deep roots.¹

Abbott Gleason invokes a similar connection in Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War:

Along with the pervasive loss of faith in the statist Left has come, in recent years, a more subtle loss of faith in revolutions to accomplish major and lasting social change in the world, especially through the application of state power. This kind of disillusion is connected to the loss of faith in modernist eschatologies more broadly, especially among intellectuals, and their loss of faith in the historical European Enlightenment. There is presumably a connection between the collapse of political, especially leftist utopias and the recrudescence, around the world, of fundamentalisms of all kinds. If there is no political utopia in the future, there must be a golden age in the past that can redeem individual lives or revitalize the world.²

The historiographic line drawn from Enlightenment ideas to communist revolution is defensible insofar as it goes.³ But such one-dimensional characterizations cannot do justice to the Enlightenment or its eighteenth-century practitioners. One obvious problem is that modernist readings remove the Enlightenment from its old-regime social and political context. Historians of modern Europe, who are inclined to emphasize the Enlightenment’s optimism and celebration of reason, almost always ignore the religious, or at least providential, sensibilities of many eighteenth-century thinkers. Enlightenment culture did indeed strike an optimistic note, and Enlightenment intellectuals did assume that through the proper cultivation and application of human reason moral and material progress could be achieved. But Enlightenment thinkers also understood the vulnerability of human life in the face of uncontrollable passions and harsh physical realities. Thus, while moral clarity and instrumental rationality might be intellectually attainable, the realization of morality and reason in human affairs required constant struggle. That the Enlightenment assumed the possibility of progress is undeniable; however, the belief in progress remained tentative and muted. Despite expectations of ongoing improvement, Enlightenment thinkers also recognized that truth and reality sometimes transcend human understanding. Scholars living in a post-gulag, post-Holocaust, post-Hiroshima age may see in Enlightenment assumptions about progress an attitude of arrogance and utopianism, yet it is clear that eighteenth-century reformism did not come close to the hubris or presumptuousness of twentieth-century social engineering. Throughout the eighteenth century iconic representatives of Enlightenment thought continued to believe in the existence of a God-given natural order, the workings of which human beings could never fully comprehend. The modern reliance on human reason may in fact be traceable to Enlightenment ideas, but it in no way constituted an essentialist Enlightenment principle. Regardless of how historians interpret the Enlightenment, the instrumentalist trajectory is just one possibility in a multifaceted cultural phenomenon.

Enlightenment in a European Setting

Almost any educated person in today’s wider European world—Anglo-American, Latino, or European (including Russian European)—recognizes that he or she is a child of the Enlightenment.⁴ Broadly cherished features of European or Western modernity—civil liberties, equality before the law, economic opportunity, social mobility, respect for the dignity of the individual, and representative democracy—can in their current articulations be traced back to Enlightenment thought. Across the globe the Enlightenment legacy of human rights and liberal democratic agendas is undeniable.⁵ Still, as scholars long have recognized, the notion of a single Enlightenment with an identifiable outcome or trajectory of development is highly problematic. Historians therefore speak of multiple Enlightenments: an Early Enlightenment, a Late Enlightenment, a Radical Enlightenment, a moderate mainstream Enlightenment, a Counter-Enlightenment, a High Enlightenment, a popular Enlightenment, national Enlightenment(s), religious Enlightenment(s), and of course a form of monarchy referred to as enlightened absolutism.⁶ Although often equated with the philosophical modernity of eighteenth-century Europe, the Enlightenment defies any systematic or all-inclusive definition.⁷ To count the ways of scholarly understanding, not to mention actual historical realities, is indeed a daunting task.⁸ As J. G. A. Pocock puts the matter, the specificity of (the) Enlightenment lies in its plurality, not its unity.⁹

In the oft-quoted essay What Is Enlightenment? Immanuel Kant highlights the ambiguity of the concept:

If we were asked, "Do we now live in an enlightened age? the answer is, No," but we do live in an age of enlightenment. As things now stand, much is lacking which prevents men from being, or easily becoming, capable of correctly using their own reason in religious matters with assurance and free from outside direction. But, on the other hand, we have clear indications that the field has now been opened wherein men may freely deal with these things and that the obstacles to general enlightenment or the release from self-imposed tutelage are gradually being reduced. In this respect, this is the age of enlightenment.¹⁰

It is telling that Kant equates enlightenment not with any particular doctrine or set of principles but with the escape of men from their self-incurred tutelage—chiefly in matters of religion because our rulers have no interest in playing the guardian with respect to the arts and sciences and also because religious immaturity is not only the most harmful but also the most degrading of all.¹¹ Kant’s understanding of enlightenment highlights the loss of authority experienced in fits and starts by religious institutions throughout eighteenth-century Europe.¹² More importantly, it reveals the philosopher’s striving for intellectual autonomy and his ability, as a Christian believer, to come to terms with Copernican, Cartesian, Baconian, and Newtonian science. Across Europe, beginning in the mid-seventeenth century and continuing throughout the eighteenth century, the discoveries of the scientific revolution, particularly the heliocentric universe and the plurality of worlds, raised questions about Judeo-Christian conceptions of God and his creation.¹³

The centrality of Kant’s emphasis on independent thought, at once empowering and humbling, is affirmed by recent Enlightenment scholarship. Building on Max Weber’s definition of modernity as the loss of unquestioned legitimacy for the divinely instituted order, Louis Dupré calls the Enlightenment "a breakthrough in critical consciousness, a culture of reason and sentiment that represented a project, rather than a full achievement.¹⁴ Peter Hanns Reill repeats this characterization when he highlights the complex aspirations and epistemological modesty of the late Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, Reill argues, did not seek to provide absolute universal answers. To the contrary, the Enlightenment harmonized variance, recognized the value of ambiguity and paradox, and displayed a healthy respect for differentness, free movement, and creation.¹⁵ The German perspective of Reill contrasts with the French orientation of Dan Edelstein, who describes the Enlightenment’s intellectual contribution as narratological, rather than epistemological. Still echoing Kant, however, Edelstein defines the Enlightenment as the period when people thought they were living in an age of Enlightenment. Once again (the) Enlightenment is a matter of critical consciousness, in this instance consciousness of society as the world of all human interaction."¹⁶

Given the Enlightenment’s infinite richness as an object of both admiration and condemnation, it comes as no surprise, and generations of historians have shown, that Enlightenment thought encompassed a broad range of religious, philosophical, and scientific viewpoints. Equally representative are Newtonian science, which measured and predicted physical phenomena with reference to mechanistic laws of nature, and Kantian idealism, which exhorted human beings to use their reason, proclaiming the individual’s emancipation from the intellectual and moral tutelage of church and state. Based on the assumption that truth emanates from a transcendent cause, the rationalism of René Descartes, Benedictus (Baruch) de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Christian Wolff taught that the human mind is the sole source of discoverable truth, whereas the empiricism of John Locke and David Hume rejected the reality of a priori knowledge, assuming instead that the origin of ideas lies in direct sensual experience. Both physical science and empiricist philosophy raised challenges to Judeo-Christian traditions, yet many Enlightenment thinkers continued to believe in God, providence, and divine truth. Isaac Newton, who demonstrated that the universe functions mechanistically, in accordance with immutable laws of nature, and who recognized the applicability of scientific discoveries to human ends, nonetheless believed that God could at any moment intervene in the divinely ordained natural order. At once progressive and traditional, rebellious and conciliatory, the Enlightenment did not absolutely glorify human reason or any particular set of philosophical principles. Enlightenment thinkers did, however, insist that the individual develop his or her critical consciousness.¹⁷

The cultivation of critical consciousness produced multiple outcomes, among them the reformist impulses and movements for social and political change most readily identified with Enlightenment ideas. Less resonant today, though perhaps more broadly transformative, was the moral dimension of critical consciousness. Attention to the moralistic quality of Enlightenment thought makes it possible for historians to bring countries such as Russia, which did not embrace radical reform or even philosophical modernity, into the larger European story.¹⁸ Highlighting the impact of moral deliberation, German historian Thomas Saine notes that while