‘The Free Sale of Opium’: The Reaction of Russian Orthodox Churchmen to Freedom of Conscience,1864–1905

Introduction

Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovskii, poet, novelist, and general eccentric, spent much of 1902 ensconced in the Religious-Philosophical Meetings, of which he was a founder. These meetings were intended to foster a greater degree of dialogue between intellectual representatives of the ‘Russian religious renaissance’ and the Church: opened in 1901, they initially received backing from the Synodal authorities, but were subsequently shut down in 1903. ¹ One session in 1902 was devoted to discussing freedom of conscience.

Archimandrite Antonin (Granovskii), a member of the St Petersburg Theological Academy's censorship committee, responded to an opening statement from Prince S. M. Volkonskii in favour of such freedom by establishing Christianity's status as the sole path to salvation. If the Church were to renounce its efforts in pressuring heathens and schismatics to abandon their errors, Granovskii argued, it would be akin to refusing to aid the sick against disease: ‘Christianity is a divine inoculation, restoring health’. ² Merezhkovskii was having none of it: ‘even the smallest apostasy from total freedom is apostasy from Christ’. Where Christ was, there could be no coercion. Antonin's response to this argument was abrupt: such an ‘arbitrary’ definition of freedom had ‘a demonic source: from it arises the question of a compromise of Christ with demons’. ³ He was not alone. Sergii (Stragorodskii) stated ‘if we consider ourselves to be representatives of the Church, then we cannot look on the spread of false teachings as anything other than the free sale of opium’. ⁴

To explain such harsh words, it is necessary to analyse the intellectual reaction of churchmen to the growing liberal discourse on freedom of conscience in the late nineteenth century. ⁵ From the 1860s onwards, bishops, theologians, missionaries, and priests wrote numerous articles, treatises, and sermons on the subject of freedom of conscience, which were disseminated to a wide audience through ecclesiastical journals, proselytic tracts, diocesan newspapers, academy lecterns, and church pulpits. What these works lack in sophistication, they make up for in terms of their potential audience, since some were sermons and were therefore presumably propounded to sizeable crowds of mixed social origin. Others made their way through the diocesan press, thereby reaching rural priests, teachers in church schools, and a few zealous parishioners. Indeed, perhaps the want of intellectual perspicacity aided the spread of such works among less discerning readers, who may have been baffled by the deluge of philosophical and theological terminology propounded by Vladimir Solov'ev and Aleksei Khomiakov, two extraordinarily influential thinkers on the relationship between freedom and Orthodox Christianity. ⁶ Although these sources have attracted some attention in Russian and German scholarship, they have been far less well studied in the Anglophone literature. ⁷

Like Antonin and Sergii, most churchmen rejected freedom of conscience outright, but also argued that the basis of Christianity and the Church was grounded in freedom. They therefore had to articulate their own understanding of freedom, usually in terms diametrically opposed to those of their adversaries. This article will examine two interrelated questions. First, in what terms did churchmen oppose freedom of conscience? And second, how did they articulate their own understanding of freedom so that it excluded freedom of conscience?

The views of churchmen warrant study because their reactions to freedom of conscience reveal how men affiliated with the Church looked on changing notions of religion. Previously it had held a confessional and collective definition: religion was a group matter, determined by ancestry and utilized by states as a category to assign privileges, responsibilities, and limitations. ⁸ The Russian Empire was no exception. However, as notions of individualism, liberties, and rights spread throughout Europe and Russia, such a confessional understanding of religion began to be undermined. Religious choice came to be seen as something that should be determined by a sovereign individual rather than by external forces such as lineage or raison d'etat.

The demand for freedom of conscience, understood as an inviolable individual right, embodied the individualization of religion and thus was a direct challenge to the autocracy. Nor was it easy for the Church to accept, especially since its leading theologians were increasingly defining Orthodoxy set against Protestantism's supposedly excessive focus on the individual. More than one writer also espied secularization under freedom of conscience's veil: they understood that the reduction of religion to a matter of individual conscience might mean its exile from the public sphere, reflecting modern debates on the possibility and desirability of this very subject. ⁹ Examining ecclesiastical reactions to such changes grants us a glimpse into how writers embedded within a particular institutional and intellectual context understood this aspect of modernity. ¹⁰ Their works allow us to stare at the confessionalized consciousness of Orthodox churchmen as they sought to secure their institution from religious opponents in theological terms whilst simultaneously wrestling with the paradoxes created by an intimate relationship with the state.

Before we begin, we need to understand some terminology. When talking about freedom of conscience (svoboda sovesti), Russian clerical writers frequently brought a whole host of other terms to the table: ‘religious toleration’ (veroterpimost’), ‘freedom of confession’ (svoboda ispovedaniia), and, most generally, ‘religious freedom’ (religioznaia svoboda). ¹¹ It was common for church authors to support veroterpimost’ while opposing svoboda sovesti: other faiths could be allowed to exist within Russia, but this existence had to be subject to a variety of restrictions. As we will discuss later, this distinction between the two terms is important given the tendency of some modern historians and political theorists to suggest that toleration rests on the same notions of religious pluralism and autonomous individualism as freedom of conscience.

Institutional and Intellectual Background

It is necessary to situate the responses of the churchmen to freedom of conscience within three separate contexts: the state's efforts to instrumentalize religious plurality, the institution of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the intellectual milieu whence such views sprang.

As the Russian Empire emerged in the early eighteenth century, it brought with it a legacy of entanglement with other faiths, such as Islam, Roman Catholicism, and Lutheranism. ¹² The Old Believer schism offered its own brand of Russian Orthodoxy, free from bureaucratic oversight and the detested ritual innovations of the mid-seventeenth century. ¹³ Finally, there were the sects, home-grown dissenters who rejected the Church in order to enter into a more personal and emotive relationship with the divine. ¹⁴

Religious belonging had a heightened importance in Russia because it was the most obvious category by which political control could be established: ‘religious confession represented a critical foundation for what people before the late nineteenth century understood to be politically salient difference – that is, difference meriting institutional forms for its regulation and manipulation’. ¹⁵ Religious toleration was therefore enthroned in Russian law as a necessity of governance. ¹⁶

This led to the gradual evolution of Russia's ‘multi-confessional establishment’. ¹⁷ This catchall term, coined by Paul Werth, refers to a series of agreements, institutions, and policies that sought to harness religion as a method of government from the late eighteenth century onwards. It did not represent a single, enduring order but rather a piecemeal and fluid situation that changed over time and in accordance with differing policy objectives and contingent events. It was this system that determined the privileges and restrictions placed on non-Orthodox Christian denominations (inoslavie), the non-Christian religions (inoverie), and the ‘harmful’ schismatics and sectarians. ¹⁸ At the top of this arrangement sat Orthodoxy, the ‘predominant and preeminent faith’ of the empire. It possessed a range of privileges, the most important being a monopoly on missionary work and a legal prohibition against apostasy.

There was, however, a basic paradox at the heart of this system. Russia was officially Orthodox. This religion lay at the heart of the legitimization of the autocracy and therefore the emperors had to concede its absolute truth. Surely the tsars had a duty to see Orthodoxy spread to the benighted peoples under their benevolent rule? There was, in essence, an internal contradiction between the need to promulgate Orthodoxy's absolute truth and the utilization of other faiths to secure the empire's internal and external security.

By the end of Peter the Great's reign in 1725, the prestige and autonomy of the Russian Orthodox Church had sustained many blows. Peter had abolished the Moscow patriarchate and established the collegial Holy Synod. The financial independence of the Church was destroyed with Catherine the Great's seizure of monastery land in 1764, leaving the institution and its servitors dependent on a budget that could never adequately cover its needs. While Gregory Freeze has argued that the Church did retain a degree of autonomy over the ecclesiastical sphere in the eighteenth century, ¹⁹ this changed in the nineteenth century, haltingly under Alexander I and much more strongly under Nicholas I. The Church began to resemble a ministry of state, with the ober-procurator of the Synod as its lord and master. ²⁰ Spheres such as theology began to be tampered with by the secular authorities and prelates were subject to a humiliating and thoroughly uncanonical game of musical chairs as they were transferred to sees at the whim of the emperor's servants. ²¹

Unsurprisingly, the increased level of government control over the Church in the nineteenth century began to generate opposition to the Synodal order from within its ranks. ²² With the allocation of substantial freedom to the press during the Great Reforms of the 1860s, some began to speak out about the debilitating nature of church-state relations. ²³ By 1900, this spirit had infected much of the episcopate as well and united otherwise disparate wings of the Church.

However, much of the Church acquiesced to increased levels of state interference because the goals of both were, to a certain extent, similar. In the nineteenth century, the Church had become concerned about the strength of other confessions and thus sought to see its privileges strongly defended and the renewal of missionary efforts. ²⁴ In the reign of Nicholas I, for whom Orthodoxy was linked to political obedience, this led to the general support of missionary activities and the withdrawal of liberties for groups like the Old Believers and the Uniates (or Greek Catholics). ²⁵ As such, the Church received backing for the promulgation of its faith and increased protection against confessional competition in exchange for increased political interference.

Here then was the Gordian knot. On the one hand, the Church welcomed state backing against other faiths but, on the other, it resented the interventions in its affairs. Intellectual reactions to the discourse of freedom of conscience gave voice to this paradox. Churchmen were almost universal in their condemnation of the expansion of religious liberties out of fear for their confessional interests but, at the same time, were aware that such a discourse placed a powerful weapon in their hands for critiquing the state's relation to the Church. Or, as one writer put it, freedom of conscience finally led ecclesiastical commentators ‘to become sincerely conscious of the abnormal standing of Russian church life, constrained in its form and movement by a whole system of mandatory police and civil legislation’. ²⁶

As J. R. Collins has noted, there has been a tendency among historians to conflate ‘“toleration” with religious autonomy and the right to free worship’, a modern understanding of the term deriving from the Enlightenment. ²⁷ However, recent studies have revealed that toleration as a concept is both older and distinct from freedom of conscience. Istvan Bejczy has demonstrated that there was a ‘highly developed political concept’ of toleration at work in the Middle Ages: ‘it had nothing to do with religious freedom or the plurality of the truth’ and instead was ‘the forbearance of bad people (the immoral, the heterodox, the infidel) by those who had the power to dispose of them’. ²⁸ Thus, toleration was not an inherent freedom, but a concession from an external authority.

Such insights are certainly applicable to the views of Russian churchmen. Toleration remained a practice rather than a principle in the Russian Empire, despite the importation of European Enlightenment philosophies in the eighteenth century: ‘for most thinkers social imperatives (the need for ethnic Russians to come to terms with their Tatar neighbors and with other Muslim groups, for example) and state interests in domestic tranquillity outweighed moral justifications for toleration’. ²⁹ Ecclesiastical discussions about toleration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries thus generally arose in response to a practical need: it was an act of ‘weakness to the weak’, a concession to moral and religious failings, and not a freedom in the modern sense of the word.

Take Platon (Levshin), metropolitan of Moscow between 1787 and 1812. From 1763, Catherine the Great slowly but surely rolled out greater privileges to the Old Believers, removing some of the more onerous restrictions on their position and encouraging them to return from foreign exile. ³⁰ Platon, as Catherine's court preacher, translated this new policy into theological terms. In his sermons and books, he advocated a gentler approach to the schismatics. Love and patience were surer weapons for ending the schism than fire and the sword. His widely disseminated 1766 appeal to the Old Believers moved away from categorizing them as heretics and instead approached them as erring children, deceived by ignorance and superstition. ³¹ As Elise Wirtschafter recently put it:

Platon in no way implies that Old Belief, unbelief, or any non-Orthodox religious belief, is beneficial or true. He is a traditional Orthodox believer, not a tolerant modern committed to the principle of religious pluralism, even within Christianity. Still, his approach to those who have left the church is to extend to them the love that, based on Christ's words, unites all Orthodox Christians. We abhor their error, he explains, but we also must pray for them and try to heal them. ³²

Similar patterns can be detected in St Makarii (Glukharev's) early nineteenth-century mission in the Altai region of Siberia. ³⁴ Here, the Church was working amongst shamanistic tribes who had already been granted freedom of conscience in Mikhail Speranskii's Siberian law code. ³⁵ Glukharev argued that tolerance offered a steadier road to success than coercion. His mission therefore utilized preaching, teaching, and medical aid rather than mass baptism, as had sometimes been the practice earlier. ³⁶ Makarii offered a direct definition of tolerance: ‘in the heart of Jesus, tolerance is not indifference to truth and error but mercy to the erring’. ³⁷ Again, toleration is defined as an indulgence, one that Makarii may have extended because the state had already guaranteed a high level of religious freedom to the polytheistic peoples of the Altai.

What these examples show is that thinking about tolerance within the Church tended to derive either from utilitarian motives regarding missionary efficacy or the need to work within the empire's multi-confessional legal framework. Toleration, when it came to be defined, was seen as a temporary act of indulgence and love. This notion proved long-lasting: an anonymous writer in 1905 declared that ‘true religious toleration is the divine exemplar of patience, which expects the conversion of all: the erring, the obdurate, and the feuding. However, it does not require defencelessness against the enemies of the faith and the Church’. ³⁸ This concept of religious toleration therefore ‘never entailed the radical religious individualism and relativism that often undergirds modernity's much more triumphant notions of toleration’. ³⁹

The framework for ecclesiastical discussions of a more abstract and positive notion of religious freedom was limited: as Gary Hamburg has shown, it is difficult to find a discourse of freedom of conscience even in secular Russian society before 1820. ⁴⁰ However, there were two potential breeding grounds for such ideas in the Church. Firstly, Patrick Michelson has persuasively argued that a blossoming of patristic theology in the 1820s proved pivotal for the idea of freedom of conscience. In their research on man's creation in the image of God, theologians reached the conclusion that people required absolute freedom in order to achieve theosis (deification), the ultimate union between the divine and humanity: by extension, this meant the freedom to err in religious matters. ⁴¹

Secondly, Slavophile philosophy in the 1840s had a considerable impact. The Slavophiles argued that the defining trait of Russian Orthodoxy was sobornost’. This concept emerged from a confessionalized application of the Hegelian dialectic. The absolute earthly tyranny of Roman Catholicism (union without freedom) had produced the antithesis of individualizing Protestantism (freedom without union). Russian Orthodoxy and sobornost’ provided the synthesis, a free and collective union of believers. Or, to put it in Khomiakov's terms, ‘external unity, which rejects freedom and is not therefore genuine: such is the law of Rome. External freedom, which does not allow unity and therefore is not genuine: such is the spirit of the Reformation’. ⁴² The Orthodox Church, on the other hand, was ‘a single indivisible entity which alone could give meaning to the life of an individual’. ⁴³ This dialectic could play a role in debates about religious freedoms: the missionary Konstantin Golubov stated that:

If some western states allow freedom of confession, then that is their business: they have no church in the Orthodox sense of the word. There prevails either the papacy (or, better, Jesuitism), which makes faith a weapon in its material, stately aims and destroys all freedom, attempting even to destroy conscience and replace it with the infallible dicta of one person in the affairs of faith and morality, or Protestantism, which is ignorant of the apostolic succession and gives to each individuum the scope to save oneself however one wants – outside the ecumenical church, outside the generally recognized eternal truth, and even outside the sacrament of penance. ⁴⁴

An example of this duality can be found in the Stakhovich controversy of 1901. Mikhail Stakhovich, a local marshal of the nobility in Orel, was invited to speak at a local missionary conference in the presence of the bishop and several notable missionaries. Stakhovich then delivered an impassioned plea for the Church to recognize freedom of conscience and to support the abolition of its legal privileges. ⁴⁸ His speech was peppered with quotes from Ivan Aksakov, a later Slavophile thinker. The Moscow missionary Ivan Aivazov responded with an article where he argued that the nobleman had completely misunderstood Aksakov: he repeatedly cited the philosopher to show that he had stood against freedom of conscience. ⁴⁹ Thus both proponents and opponents of freedom of conscience used a Slavophile thinker to justify contradictory definitions of the very term ‘freedom’.

In sum, there was little, if any, intellectual support for freedom of conscience in the Church by the 1860s. For the most part, church actors gave voice to an understanding of toleration in the classic sense of that word: it was an act of forbearance, grudgingly made as a concession to the requirements of the state and the realities of proselytizing in a multi-confessional empire. There was no sign of the modern ecumenical idea that truth can be found in all religions. Furthermore, the Slavophiles, the most sophisticated Orthodox philosophical thinkers, had posited that freedom, far from a right inherent in each individual by virtue of his or her humanity, was an organic and communal quality bestowed by God. Slavophile concepts could therefore be used as much against as in favour of a legalistic, individualistic notion of freedom of conscience.

The Slavophile framework in which churchmen understood religious freedoms necessarily had a comparative dimension, demanding a negative comparison between the one-sided character of Protestantism/Catholicism and holistic Russian Orthodoxy. The European context offered no shortage of examples. As the historian Safonov notes,

it is also impossible to fail to take into account the influence on Russian legal thought of the historical experience and legal tradition of the countries of Western Europe and America, which were realizing the transition from the confessional to the secular state from the end of the 18th century. ⁵⁰

For the churchmen themselves, however, freedom of conscience was used to explain the perceived collapse in social cohesion and morality that they claimed to espy in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. In part, then, the debate over freedom of conscience reflected the civilizational discourses of the Westernizers and Slavophiles: its absence was both a sign of lamentable retardation and a marker of Russia's spiritual sonderweg and potential as a source of salvation in a corrupted world.

Christian Consciences: History, Society, Coercion, and Freedom

The Great Reforms of the 1860s allowed the Russian press unprecedented freedom, gave impetus to church reform, and led the state to consider changes to the multi-confessional establishment. Indeed, for a brief period, it looked as if the term ‘freedom of conscience’ might even gain government backing: Petr Valuev, the minister of the interior, pushed for its incorporation into law. ⁵² However, the few advances made (which were mostly limited to reforming legislation surrounding mixed marriage in the Baltic provinces) were removed during the period of counter-reform ushered in by Alexander III. ⁵³

Official reforms of the Church were limited to ending the perennial problems of the clerical estate, namely the poverty of the priesthood and chronic over-staffing. ⁵⁴ However, many were becoming aware of the need to reach out to other elements of Russian society, particularly the secularized intelligentsia and the supposedly de-Christianized proletariat. Writers like Fedor (Bukharev) and Vladimir Solov'ev sought to interact with modern developments in theological terms. ⁵⁵ The Society for the Admirers of Spiritual Enlightenment frequently hosted lectures and debates on religious topics: these were often well attended by clergy and laity and garnered substantial coverage in both the secular and ecclesiastical press. ⁵⁶ The near-complete collapse of church censorship and a massive expansion of its academic and diocesan journals complemented this mission to the intelligentsia, providing a new public venue for churchmen to express their views on a host of modern topics. ⁵⁷ It is against this background that ecclesiastical discussions on freedom of conscience need to be seen. These were made possible by the explosive growth of the Church press, propelled forward by the desire to broadcast an Orthodox Christian viewpoint on one of the most controversial issues of the day, and made urgent by missionary concerns surrounding both the existing flock and potential converts.

Ioann (Sokolov) was the first churchman to take advantage of the new circumstances to discuss freedom of conscience. ⁵⁸ An expert on church law, Sokolov was a rector at both the Kazan and St Petersburg ecclesiastical academies before he was raised to the episcopate in 1865. His multi-part article on freedom of conscience, published in 1864–65, was widely influential in church circles. ⁵⁹ He also preached on the subject on 18 February 1868 to the congregation in the Smolensk cathedral. ⁶⁰ There he blankly refused to even concede that the coercion of religious minorities was a problem: ‘the inovertsy [non-Orthodox believers] freely enter our churches; in the schools, our Orthodox children study together with inovertsy ones: and in our towns, the holy altar of Orthodoxy stands alongside the altars of inoverie (and schismatic prayer houses), often under one roof’. ⁶¹

Sokolov's ground-breaking article was principally historical. History was an enduringly popular choice of genre for church writers researching religious freedoms. Checking the historical past for discussions on freedom and relations to other religions was essentially a process of establishing whether freedom of conscience was compatible with the bases of Orthodoxy. It also offered a relatively safe refuge for discussions of modern church-state relations in Russia: criticisms of Rome and its interference in church affairs could easily be read as Aesopian allegories for the heavy-handed approach of the tsars in Orthodox matters.

Sokolov's article demonstrates this in abundance. Methodically going through the scriptures, the ecumenical councils, and the works of the church fathers for any sign of freedom of conscience, the bishop eventually concluded that ‘we decisively do not find any beneficial foundation for freedom of conscience. On the contrary, they strictly condemn the human conscience in affairs of religion’. ⁶² For the most part, his analysis was relatively brief. The real heart of the discussion is Ioann's examination of the relationship of the Roman state to Christianity after the latter had been effectively turned into a state religion. The ferocity and bitterness of his prose is remarkable: ‘if guile, deception, and cheating do not help, then there are no measures that the state would not resort to in order to eliminate this awful disjunction: there will be no limit to the coercion they use to subordinate the Church to their views’. ⁶³ At times, Ioann even broke out of the realm of historical allegory to directly assail the Synodal order: ‘there cannot be stronger proof of the weakness in the life of the Church in our times than the fact that it is impossible to call an ecumenical council’. ⁶⁴

Others were not so forthright. A.S. Lebedev, professor of church history at Kharkov University, argued in 1871 that religious toleration and a complete rejection of coercion were at the very heart of the early Church: ‘the spirit of the ecumenical Church is the spirit of all-tolerant love. This spirit manifested itself with particular fullness in the most ancient period of the Christian Church’. ⁶⁵ It was the emperors who had changed this state of affairs. ⁶⁶ Under their influence, the Church had partially forgotten the principle of toleration and had begun to zealously persecute heretics. The historical lesson was that relations with the state had corrupted with the Church's teachings and practices: it would not take a particularly perceptive reader to extend the lesson to Russian modernity. ⁶⁷

Some, however, exalted state influence when used in favour of the Church. Bishop Platon (Rozhdestvenskii), lecturing to an audience at the Kiev Religious Enlightenment Society on 31 March 1902, also held that a few church fathers were in favour of religious freedoms. ⁶⁸ However, it was not the emperors who had twisted the Church away from freedom. Rather, it was the fault of these church fathers themselves. They had been naïve and underestimated the challenges that freedom in religious questions presented. That threat quickly manifested itself in the form of Arius: he ‘showed the terrible danger for life from full freedom in questions of religion and the necessity for some restraint in these questions’. ⁶⁹ Platon directly compared the threat of Arius with that posed to the modern Russian Orthodox Church by sectarian groups. ⁷⁰

This brief excursus shows how reactions to freedom of conscience give us a window on the paradox of church-state relations from the point of view of the former. On the one hand, the way in which the Roman state intervened to defend the integrity of the early Church was sometimes applauded. On the other, state pressure could be depicted as perverting the Church's early tolerance and diminishing spiritual life. In both cases, authors were, explicitly or implicitly, drawing a comparison between Rome and Russia.

The first point that Ioann (Sokolov) established was the religious nature of the question at hand, which meant that only religion could furnish a satisfactory answer:

Thus, the only people who had a right to formulate a correct answer to the problems posed by freedom of conscience were those who had a correct and deep understanding of religion. Solutions were not to be found in ‘culture and civilization’, or, in other words, the secular world. The Penza archpriest Aleksei Kliucharev wrote in a similar vein in 1876 when he stated that freedom of conscience ‘is our question: it belongs to the sphere of church teachings because the teaching of freedom of conscience itself became known to the world only through divine revelation’. ⁷²

The general warning was clear: freedom of conscience was not a secular matter. Attempts to resolve the issue in a secular way would end badly since such enquiries were not truly rooted in a higher essence. Aivazov noted that ‘all these liberal principles, dislocated from the basis of Christian consciousness, logically lead to the absurd: progress ultimately becomes repression …, freedom – despotism and slavery’. ⁷³ As an example, he cited France, where ideas of freedom of conscience had essentially led to the secularization of public space and the education system. Thus, a Christian people had seen God forcibly expelled from their schools, a repression made in the name of freedom. ⁷⁴ Furthermore, freedom of conscience had led to the separation of church and state.

Discussions about religious freedoms often touched upon this question. An author identified only by the initials S. L. tried to point out some of the practical problems with disentangling the religious from the secular in an article on criminal courts trying religious crimes like blasphemy. If his opponents at the liberal paper Vestnik Evropy had their way, such offences would be removed from the criminal code. ⁷⁵ But did this not fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of these crimes and the society that the state had to protect? ‘Church life and state life, although each has their own specific character, nonetheless come into close contact with one another and in many cases inevitably require mutual assistance’. ⁷⁶ Blasphemy and sacrilege were public crimes that threatened civil order. This was especially the case given that ‘the Russian man, because of the vitality of his religious feeling and his insufficient mental development, cannot withdraw from being subject to crude instincts’. ⁷⁷ The author meant that average Russians would resort to a mob mentality if they saw icons being desecrated or the name of Christ taken in vain. The state, too, was an Orthodox one: it had an interest in developing the religious instincts of its citizens. ⁷⁸

Therefore, the criminal code should not be secularized, since this might provoke violence and contradict one of the principal aims of the state. Again, the idea that religion could be subordinated entirely to a private conscience was impossible: religion was too intertwined with the concerns of state and society to be limited in such a way. Indeed, to permit blasphemy in the name of a secularized sense of freedom of conscience would result in violations of the free consciences of believers, who would be compelled to hear blasphemy and not receive any redress for their insulted sensibilities. ⁷⁹

The state bureaucrat F. G. Terner argued similarly that ‘religious manifestations of life … have the right to external administrative and police protection against any coercion and against any insults or outrages by word or deed’. ⁸⁰ A writer for the Podol’sk diocesan gazette, attempting to prove that freedom of conscience existed in Russia, pointed out that ‘the state … persecutes not the religious convictions themselves, but only their criminal manifestation’. ⁸¹ Platon (Rozhdestvenskii) meanwhile argued that freedom in art would lead to the abandonment of religious imagery for overly sexualized works like those of Gustav Klimt: thus ‘in the name of freedom and for its sake, coercion is performed by those who … sacrifice all that is noble in life, all that is higher and holy … for the sinister, the sensual, and the fleshly’. ⁸² The priest T. A. Nalimov also put it in similar terms: freedom of conscience ‘in reality leads not to religious freedom but to the deepest coercion over religious convictions’. ⁸³ In essence, all of these writers held that turning freedom of conscience into a right enshrined in law would lead to a secularized public space. Here, all religious minorities, dissenters, and freethinkers would be able to legitimately espouse views and practices that were offensive to the faith of the majority: since no legal or police action could be taken against such denigratory actions, the result would be ‘coercion’ over the religious sensibilities of the majority.

All of this suggests that freedom, if it was to exist, could not belong to all, but only to the majority, to Orthodox Christians. Ioann (Sokolov) was in no doubt that

freedom of conscience can be found only in the one true religion: on this basis, and only this basis, ought we search for the foundation of the correct meaning of this freedom, a meaning which eternally guides it in the life of man and places a limit on the freedom of other religions. ⁸⁴

Equally, in Ioann's definition there was little room for the autonomous individual: they had to be bound by God's truth and, as he later said, it was the Church that had the right to do the binding. ⁸⁸ Again, this suggests an anxiety about freedom of conscience's philosophical basis in a theory of the sovereign individual and inviolable personhood. Irinei (Orda), another bishop, addressed an article to combating the idea that religion ‘has application to personal, private life but that it is not a matter in social life’. ⁸⁹ The prelate argued that this was simply not the case: God had given faith to people as a collective, not to any one individual. Not only this: ‘family, social and state life would not be possible without religion. To confess religion in private and completely remove it from social life would be a mad contradiction, direct nonsense’. ⁹⁰ Logically, therefore, Irinei saw complete social collapse and atheism in the privatization of religion.

Golubov also wrote that ‘unconscious’ religious toleration in the West had led to ‘free marriage, unconscionable relations between both sexes, irresponsibility for moral corruption, independence, self-administration (anarchy), fiery revolutions, and constant disturbances [caused by] self-dissatisfaction’. ⁹¹ His distinction between ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ religious toleration in this article is rather interesting. The former, he argued, was basically governmental and social indifference to religious error, a demand made by ‘superstitious sects’ (‘Mohammedism, Yidism, [and] papism’) ⁹² so that they could be left to luxuriate in their mistaken beliefs unchallenged. Conscious toleration, on the other hand, gives ‘external equality in civil relations to every religion’ so that ‘the unifying truth’ of Orthodoxy could convince the erring. ⁹³ It was also something given to ensure civic order: ‘Religious toleration is sometimes necessary for a while in order to calm superstitious disturbances in the state’. ⁹⁴ This was thus a justification of the system of religious toleration extant in Russia: while other religions could be allowed to exist temporarily, the Orthodox Church necessarily possessed a monopoly over missionary activities in order to convince people to abandon their erroneous beliefs.

Archpriest S. A. Sollertinskii, a professor at the St Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy who spoke at the Religious-Philosophical Meetings in 1902, looked in depth at the division between private and social religion. ⁹⁵ When churchmen opposed freedom in religious matters, they were opposing ‘external freedom’, which derived from the position ‘that any person, as a self-contained individuum, has the full right to have their own views and consider them true’. ⁹⁶ This individualization of faith had, in the Protestant world, led to the constant re-editing of the Scriptures so that they suited individual preferences: the Gospels were thus now in a ‘chaotic condition’. ⁹⁷ In other words, full and unfettered individual freedom in religion shattered the ability of authority to preserve sacred doctrine intact. It is also worth noting that there is a more than a hint of the Slavophiles in this argument, who had also noted that Protestant individualism had led to fragmentation and disorder.

Sollertinskii opposed ‘external’ freedom with an ‘internal’ one based on submission to Christ: other authors called this ‘Christian freedom’. Many based their definition of Christian freedom on ‘self-renunciation’ (samootrechenie). This was a key word in the vocabulary of the priest Nalimov. He stressed that it was at the basis of both freedom of conscience and religious toleration. In terms of the former, true freedom was to be found in the renunciation of the will, in utter subordination to Christ: only then would one be free from sin and the eternal death that came with it. The latter derived from following the example of Christ. Just as Christ loved sinners, so too must the Christian love those who erred by choosing the wrong faith. ⁹⁸ This neither meant indifference to their errors (Christian toleration could never abandon ‘the undoubted victory of His Church over all other religions and teachings’) nor coercion and legal privileges. ⁹⁹

Platon (Rozhdestvenskii), too, argued that ‘the freedom of the Christian is the freedom of renunciation and self-limitation’. ¹⁰⁰ Platon ranted against the victory of egoism and gratification of the flesh in modern society: ‘self-gratification is the chief reason to live and freedom is the means leading to it’. ¹⁰¹ For him, missionaries were the highest expression of self-renouncing Christian love. They suffered in order ‘to liberate man from the net of errors, enlighten him with the truth and make him free, because by being made free internally and spiritually, man is liberated from external shackles’. ¹⁰²

As we saw above, Sokolov's definition also conflated freedom with the truth: to be free means to be in the truth and that means to be a Christian. To be outside the truth meant to be enslaved and therefore it would follow that freedom of conscience meant only the freedom to be in the truth. As he elaborated, freedom could not be gifted to those who dwelt in lies: they could only be forgiven for the sins to which their conscience had led them. ¹⁰³ Similarly, Archpriest N. Malinovskii, giving a sermon on the anniversary of Nicholas II's accession to the throne in the Podol’sk cathedral, asked: ‘Is it possible to recognize a person with clearly one-sided or directly false convictions as actually being free? False convictions prevent him from seeing the light in himself, similar to how light and all the visible world look wrong [when viewed] through a coloured window’ – this made such an individual a ‘slave of error’. ¹⁰⁴

It is clear that a consideration of Christian freedom necessarily had to deal with the issue of toleration. If freedom could only be achieved by being an Orthodox Christian, then how was one to deal with those who obstinately remained entrapped within lies? Sokolov declared that freedom lay only in the truth, not ‘truth and lies together’. Nalimov wondered:

If Christian freedom is only the whole-hearted obedience of the conscious truth, the conscious fulfilment of the will of God, then do we have the right to talk about religious toleration for those who think differently? Where does the right for Christians to indulgently relate to the inovertsy when there is one absolute God and one true religion suddenly come from: does not service of the truth by its spread among unbelievers or by the internal perfection of the servitors of the truth indispensably suggest struggle with all lies and errors, the rooting out of all that does not agree with the truth, sin? ¹⁰⁵

So, generally, toleration was defined as temporary indulgence, as had been the case among earlier churchmen like Platon (Levshin) and Makarii (Glukharev). Aivazov defined its limits as ‘giving them [other religions] freedom of confession but without loss to Christian or state interests and without any assistance for their private religious needs’. ¹¹¹ Nalimov further stated that such indulgence could not be dictated by ‘abstract legal principles but the historical conditions of life and the development of humanity’. ¹¹² In other words, toleration was contingent and subject to constant revision.

This notion of toleration was not wide in scope: it certainly would not allow other religions the same access to the public sphere that the Orthodox Church enjoyed. One anonymous pamphleteer argued that such was precisely the meaning behind the ‘false’ religious toleration pedalled by the intelligentsia: ‘it is our direct responsibility to preserve the weak from the activities of the erring. Who would demand from a father that, out of a feeling of religious tolerance, he should allow materialist or non-Orthodox propaganda to be given to his children?’ ¹¹³ The idea that external threat justified limits on freedom and toleration frequently recurred. For Rozhdestvenskii, public religious freedom was the equivalent of ‘freedom of temptation,’ which meant nothing other than

to give our simple Orthodox peasantry to embezzlement and coercion, to full domination over their consciences by the enemies of Orthodoxy, strong in riches and culture. To present our people full freedom and independence of opinion in religious questions means to give them the possibility to stop being Orthodox while not freeing their consciences. ¹¹⁴

In conclusion, the problem these Orthodox churchmen had with freedom of conscience stemmed from several sources. They defined freedom as being Orthodox, which meant that the non-Orthodox were necessarily in a state of a slavery. Freedom of conscience made the individual the locus of religious value: the churchmen, however, demanded self-renunciation to the will of the one true God. Within the multi-confessional establishment, the Church as an institution was bound to defend a status quo that privileged Orthodoxy and confined other religions: particularly important was the need to maintain the monopoly over public space embodied in the right to proselytize. On the other hand, the Russian state's defence of religion toleration for raison d'etat meant that the Church had to reconcile itself to co-existence with other faiths. Equally, the churchmen rejected open coercion in religious matters. This meant that a limited degree of toleration, defined as indulgence to the weak, could be permitted. In other words, these writers condemned the modern, notion of freedom of conscience from both theological and institutional perspectives, but did stand behind a definition of toleration that had much in common with medieval and early modern exemplars.

Post-1905

On 17 April 1905, Nicholas II passed the Edict of Toleration, which decriminalized apostasy from the Russian Orthodox Church and expanded some of the privileges of other faiths. Then, on 17 October, the tsar reluctantly promulgated the Manifesto on the Improvement of State Order: this gave citizens a range of fundamental rights, including freedom of conscience. However, this right was never encoded in legislation, meaning that the April edict was the more substantive change. It is important to note, therefore, that the multi-confessional establishment, with its hierarchical ordering of religions and its privileging of the Orthodox Church, remained in effect, even though the Church formally had to sacrifice a large measure of police protection.

A survey of the ecclesiastical press in 1905 reveals the range of Orthodox thinking on the toleration edict. Bishop Nikanor (Kamenskii) of Grodno publically gave a terse explanation: ‘Any pagan or Muslim or Jew can change their faith. A Lutheran and a Catholic can also change their faith. The 17 April also gave this right to the Orthodox’. ¹¹⁸ He followed this with a longer interpretation in print, which noted that the Orthodox had not lost any rights since they were owed toleration just as much as, if not more than, the believers of other faiths: after all, they were members of a church which remained predominant. Thus, he demanded that any use of coercion from the other confessions had to be met with full prosecution under the law. Equally, the Church's basic position remained unchanged: ‘the Orthodox cannot and must not allow the apostasy from Orthodoxy of their brothers and sisters’ and had to act to prevent this with all measures permitted by the law. ¹¹⁹

Father A. Levitskii, a missionary, bemoaned in a sermon in the village of Nemyryntsi (as it is known today) that the new edict had unleashed rumours and confusion: these were being spread among the ‘simple people by the enemies of Orthodoxy’,

[with] the aim of tearing away from the Orthodox Church a large number of its flock. And woe to the weak in faith and conscience, who are now deprived of the barricade that kept them within the Church. Great for them is the temptation: hourly apostasy from salvational unity with the mother Orthodox Church may occur! ¹²⁰

However, Father Levitskii noted some benefits: firstly, ‘the state authorities recognized us as having achieved the appropriate self-consciousness and maturity in our spiritual capabilities when it placed on us all the care for defending the greatest national treasure – our Orthodox faith!’ ¹²³ Secondly, the edict would free the Church ‘from undeserved criticisms of intolerance and coercion’ and those who belonged to it only in order to reap privileges and benefits. ¹²⁴ A widely disseminated piece from the journal Missionerskoe Obozrenie insisted that:

At this time, it is necessary both from church cathedrae and in religious lessons to arouse the spirit of religious toleration in our flocks, raise them in the consciousness that while there is nothing higher or holier than our Orthodox faith, there are other faiths and they are dear to the people who confess them: the inovertsy deserve neither contempt nor condemnation nor disrespect, but indulgence, love, and the evangelical mildness with which the ancient Christians astonished and conquered the world. ¹²⁵

However, it was the defensive attitude that ultimately won the day. With the Russian state's reassertion of control after 1905, hopes for church reform dimmed, leading a considerable number in the Church to view the Edict of Toleration as a mistake that, if it could not be revoked, should go no further. While attempts to utilize the edict's provisions often met with administrative obfuscation on the ground, ¹²⁸ the Church sought to prevent the Old Believers and sectarians in particular from obtaining further privileges, utilizing its influence in the State Council and at court to achieve this. ¹²⁹ As Heather Coleman has observed, the Church did not use the edict as an opportunity to revitalize its missionary strategies, instead continuing to hope for police intervention to prevent the Orthodox from converting away. ¹³⁰

In terms of the rhetorical strategies employed on the pages of the ecclesiastical press, churchmen continued to promote the same view that had dominated their thinking over the past five decades: toleration was permissible as a temporary concession to the erring within a system where Russian Orthodoxy was dominant, but freedom of conscience, a gateway to the privatization of religion and all kinds of social and moral collapse, was beyond the pale. One of the very few prominent churchmen to defend freedom of conscience, Bishop Andrei (Ukhtomskii), did so within very well-defined limits: he rejected the secularization of the state and public space, thus suggesting that Orthodoxy still had the right to claim certain privileges in both the state and civil society. ¹³¹ To a considerable extent, many other bishops and leading priests came to the same conclusion after the collapse of the tsarist regime in 1917: although some stood for some kind of separation of church and state, they were at the same time reluctant to see the Church sacrifice its predominant position. ¹³²

Conclusion

Rex Adhar and Ian Leigh have argued recently that there are several bases for a Christian conception of religious freedom: that faith is voluntary; that Christ himself preached against coercion; that persecution angers the Lord; that man can be mistaken and thus must be humble; that ‘truth will, in the long run, triumph’; that God works in mysterious ways; that religious faith is a duty people should be free to fulfil; and that the state has no right to interfere in the religious sphere. ¹³³ While one can find some of these arguments in the works discussed above (none of them, for instance, deny that faith needs to be uncoerced or that Christ set an example of love and peace to all), they were not used to forward an argument for freedom of conscience or freedom more generally: they instead served to justify the status quo of toleration, of a state-guaranteed order whereby minority confessions could, within prescribed limits, practice their faiths freely.

This can be seen in our opening example of Antonin (Granovski), for whom freedom had a demonic origin. Religious freedom was synonymous with the paganism of the ancient world, a rationalistic principle whereby all gods were worshipped so as to cover all possible bases: ‘liberal consciences are content to replace Christ with Mohammed and Buddha’. ¹³⁴ In other words, freedom of conscience was the right to reject the Christian God in favour of false deities. Freedom of conscience was therefore demonic: it represented the freedom to sin by choosing the wrong path. It also meant ‘the freedom of propaganda, the freedom to proselytize’. ¹³⁵

Antonin's arguments thus lie firmly in the tradition I have sketched out in this essay. He defined freedom as being in Christ; he thought freedom of conscience was rationalistic and legalistic and thus contrary to an understanding of freedom as a divinely revealed gift; and he saw in the principle a challenge to Orthodoxy's sole right to operate a mission. Other writers stipulated further reasons to challenge freedom of conscience: for instance, its atomizing effect on society and the state or that the consciences of Orthodox Christians deserved more protection than those of rival groups. Further, some probed the depths of the Christian past and found it bereft of any canonical legitimation for the modern understanding of freedom of conscience.

Nevertheless, there remained decided tension within these arguments: how could a religion of love justify the coercion that enhanced its position and spread? Some argued that there was no coercion at all. Others suggested that all fault lay on the side of the state for corrupting the original innocence of the Church. An anonymous speaker, talking to the Arkhangel’sk town duma with the permission of Bishop Ioannikii (Kazanskii) in March 1905, summarized this tension pithily: there was ‘an irresolvable contradiction: in internal consciousness, freedom of conscience is an irrefutable truth: in external matters, freedom of conscience is unreasonable and harmful’. ¹³⁶

Tension also lay in the Church's relation to the state. Toleration was a key strut in the stability of the polity, which meant that the Church had little other option than to accept co-existence. Others also understood that the close ties between the autocracy and Orthodoxy were not necessarily healthy for the latter. However, all recognized the benefits that Orthodoxy accrued from the state, namely its honoured position among Russia's religions and the associated entitlements. Some therefore defined toleration as a temporary and contingent indulgence, issued in recognition of the historical situation in which the Russian Church presently dwelt. It was not a permanent position nor an enshrined legal principle. But of course this was inherently unstable and it was questioned as demands for reshaping Russia's church-state relations increased. Discussions of freedom of conscience proved to be an adept vehicle for conveying these demands for men who were expected to publically tow the state's line.

Principally, the Church was constrained by paradoxical institutional limitations and a deep-seated fear of a free religious market. Reactions to freedom of conscience therefore were almost bound to be negative and polemical. On a more intellectual level, churchmen had a different understanding of freedom to their intelligentsia antagonists. Freedom was, principally, submission to God and a gift from God. It was sacrificing one's individual impulses to a divine authority. Consequently, freedom based on the radical autonomy of the individual could only mean, in the words of Archpriest Sollertinskii, ‘freedom of repudiation’, the freedom to turn away from God and indulge in egoistic hedonism, unbound by any religious, social, or even ethical authority. ¹³⁷

The relative consistency in how churchmen discussed the subject of religious freedoms between the 1860s and 1905 masks the considerable change in the civic discourse charted by Michelson. By 1905, freedom of conscience had come to be seen as ‘the most important right’ by Russian civil society, a marker of the state's willingness to recognize the inviolability of the individual. This link was noted by Archpriest Sapfirov when he stated, ‘closely connected with this right [of personal inviolability] is another right declared in the [October] manifesto – freedom of conscience. If personhood is inviolable in general, then all the more inviolable should be the most valuable and important blessing of personhood – religious beliefs’. ¹³⁸ No less than this, the international context had changed, with many of Europe's states having recognized freedom of conscience and incorporated it within their legal codes. Russia's backwardness in this regard began to be embarrassing. Thus, the Russian Orthodox Church's stance, while in keeping with the state policy it served to justify, was considerably out of step with that of educated civil society, contributing to the alienation evident at the Religious-Philosophical Meetings between 1901 and 1903 and in the Stakhovich controversy in 1901, where a common Slavophile framework did little to bridge the gap between the two sides. For one group, freedom of conscience was a fundamental right of the sovereign individual and a sign of civilizing progress; for the other, it was quasi-demonic, a danger to social cohesion, state power, and ecclesiastical authority.

This shows how the emergence of freedom of conscience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a profound shift in how religion was understood in the context of society. Earlier, religion provided the grounding and framework for social institutions and relations. Freedom of conscience, however, sought the basis of religion not in society or the state but rather in the individual. Necessarily therefore the debates about freedom of conscience were over religion's public role: as Sergei (Stragorodskii) put it, ‘when we talk about freedom of conscience, we do not talk about freedom of internal faith, but external confession’. ¹³⁹ Could state and church be utterly divided from each other?

Russian Orthodox churchmen were right to insist that the two spheres could never be separated perfectly: as the priest Nalimov said, there was something quite utopian in such a presumption. ¹⁴⁰ Religion is never a purely personal matter, especially given that some sociologists argue that religion has now become ‘deprivatized’. ¹⁴¹ Church buildings exist in city squares; believers work in state bureaucracies and businesses; and churches retain a considerable amount of financial, political, and cultural power. Whilst this remains the case, religion will always have influence in the public sphere as well as the private. This in turn raises some of paradoxes of freedom of conscience. On the one hand, all public spaces should be free of religious influence and should be secularized: such is a corollary of the individualization of religion that lies at the basis of freedom of conscience. However, that very same principle guarantees individuals the right to practise their religion freely, which may include public worship and behaviours. Statesmen, philosophers, and sociologists continue to introduce ever more complex ways of dealing with modern Western secularity. ¹⁴² The priests, bishops, missionaries, and theologians of this article were in some ways precursors of this debate.