Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (9 page)

In the Slavophiles’ worldview, exemplified by Dostoyevsky, we should not be trying to solve problems through the human intellect; we should seek salvation instead. We cannot grasp the tragic sense of life through reason, but only through the wisdom of the heart. As Pascal said, “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”The reasons of the heart are informed by one’s own suffering, and by seeing others suffer. Suffering as the great educator is denied by the Western mind, which always pursues happiness. Hedonism and too much reliance on the intellect bar the West from what it needs most, a way to salvation.

The Russian peasant was supposed to have grasped this by instinct. Here is Tolstoy: “I believe that the Russian people, who are less civilized than others—i.e., less intellectually corrupted and still possessed of a dim conception of the essence of the Christian teaching—that the Russian people, and above all the agriculturists, will understand at last where the means of salvation lie and will be the first to begin to apply it.”

 

 

 

“WHAT IS TRULY OURS IS STRANGE TO EUROPE,” DOSTOYEVSKY declared. This is patently untrue. Much of what the Russians considered to be “ours” was not strange to Europe at all, but actually came from there.

Like vodka, which came to Russia from the West in the fourteenth century, just about when the Turks defeated the Serbs in Kosovo, nineteenth-century Occidentalism, though to a large extent imported from Germany, became strongly associated with Russia. Of course, the question of precisely what comes from the West and what is of genuine Slavic origin is an argument without end. Even the name Rus, some say, came from a Scandinavian source. German historians believed that Russians, left to their own devices, were so anarchic that they would have needed the Scandinavian Varangians to impose some order on them. The ruling structure of the old Russian kingdom in Kiev, these historians claim, was such an imposition. This German tendency is the opposite of the farcical effort of the Stalinist regime to claim that all technological inventions were of Russian origin, but no less absurd. Russians are perfectly capable of developing their own ideas. And it is nonsense to try to find a Western pedigree for every idea that gained currency in Russia. Occidentalism in Russia is both a domestic product of Russian history and imported, mainly from the Romantic and idealistic strains of German philosophy.

One of the most significant events in Russian history is the conversion to Christianity of the kingdom of Kiev at the time of Vladimir. Refusing to adopt Roman Catholicism, Vladimir converted to the Greek Orthodox version of Christianity in 988. This put Russia firmly on the Eastern side of Christendom. When the center of Russian life moved from Kiev to Moscow, and the kingdom of Muscovy became the leading center of the Russian principalities in the fourteenth century, the head of the Orthodox church moved to Moscow too. As a result, Moscow became the spiritual center of Russia, and not merely the seat of power. In 1439, at the Council of Florence, the Roman Catholic Church called for the unification of all Eastern churches under papal rule. This was viewed in Moscow as a perfidious act, and so the Russian church became a strongly national church, fated to carry the authentic message of Christianity. Russia became the “holy Rus,” and Moscow the “third Rome.” The conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 cemented this messianic view, according to which Russia is the only legitimate heir to the true Christian faith.

The Muscovy kingdom was in many respects closer to a religious civilization than to a political order. There was a great deal of uniformity in the general outlook of this civilization, and Russians tended to view the West as monolithically as they viewed themselves. But they underestimated the variety of religious thought in the West. There was, for example, less room for theology in the Russian Orthodox Church. Russians were mostly concerned with ritual, liturgy, and the monastic life. Simple piety more than theology informed their approach to religion, making it different from the Greek Orthodox Church and Western Catholicism.

The standard theological bone of contention in the Greek Orthodox Church was the nature of the Godhead. Theology was taken very seriously in Roman Catholicism as well. Its various schisms came from theological debates about the nature of man. To be sure, there is always something else involved in a split besides the declared religious issues, but it is a serious mistake to deny that there are true believers, and moreover believers who are willing to fight and die for their beliefs.

The Russian church, however, was not just relatively indifferent to theology; it actively resisted the idea of turning religion into a form of geometry. Religion, it maintained, was a spiritual enterprise, not an intellectual one. Devotion to icons should count more than a clever gloss of chapter and verse. There was, in fact, a major schism in the Russian church, but this did not come from any intellectual rift. In 1652, Nikon, the patriarch of Moscow, tried to reform the Russian church to bring it more in line with the Eastern Greek church. The reforms affected old customs: three hallelujahs instead of two, five consecrated loaves instead of seven, the procession against the sun rather than in the direction of the sun, and even a change of spelling of Jesus’ name. These examples show that the schism was not about creed, even though those who opposed the reforms are described as the Old Believers. It was about ritual customs. The Old Believers threw stones at an official church procession in the Kremlin for walking in the wrong direction, but not because the church was going astray in matters of dogma. Creed is associated with the Western church, but custom belongs to the East.

At least two elements of Russian religious culture anticipated Occidentalism. The stress on intellectual matters in the Catholic church was a sure sign, to Russian believers, that it was lacking in simple and pure-hearted faith. The other element, which was at the root of the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, was a deep suspicion of any innovation. Novelty, to these believers, was always something that came from the outside. It was deemed to be inauthentic and humiliating, suggesting that there was something essentially lacking in the old ways. This religious sensibility cuts very deep. It views the church not as a source of new knowledge, but as the depository of collective memory, the memory of Rus as a holy community. Memory and simple faith are the main virtues of the human mind, not reason and the newfangled sophistry it produces. Mysticism, expressing a higher mode of existence, was valued much more than the exertions of a methodical mind.

The Old Believers sensed that behind Nikon’s reforms lay a host of Greek priests who had arrived from Kiev with the old strategy of domination by complication—that is, complicating beyond recognition the religious life of the true believers and thus taking charge of telling them what to do. Simple religious life was, to the Old Believers, something quintessentially Russian, whereas Nikon’s new manual of worship was foreign, artificial, and inauthentic.

 

 

 

THERE WERE OF COURSE STRONG COUNTERCUR RENTS to Russian nativism. The Slavophiles reacted to efforts by the Westernizers to modernize Russia. To grasp these actions and reactions one must bear in mind the three centers in the history of Russia. Each move from one to another was an ideological and not just a political decision. The first move, from Kiev to Moscow, was an ideological shift toward Russian isolationism. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the center moved to the newly established city of St. Petersburg, which was founded in 1703. It replaced Moscow as the capital ten years later. And later still, the center shifted back to Moscow.

St. Petersburg was built by Peter the Great with the express intention of making it a “window to Europe.” It was not entirely clear whether this was meant to be an open window through which new ideas could breeze in from the West, or a show window to present Europe with the new face of Russia. In any case, Czar Peter’s new Russia looked to the West, and was secular, in contrast to the xenophobic religious ideology of Muscovy. Peter’s reforms from above were not particularly spiritual or artistic. From the time of his youth in the German section of Moscow, Peter had viewed the West as superior in technology, organization, and cleanliness. These virtues were what Peter wanted to import to Russia.

The effects of Peter’s Western enthusiasms were profound. He inspired enough confidence among urban Russians to have them believe that “this monarch raised our fatherland to comparison with others, and taught us to recognize that we too are human.”
²
Perhaps rather naïvely, they took the West as the sole standard by which Russia should be measured.

Catherine the Great, who reigned from 1762 to 1796, was born in Germany and had a more sophisticated idea of the West. She wanted Russia to import culture, not just material civilization. This meant importing books as well as German craftsmen who knew how to build ships and cannon. Catherine did much to create the educated class from which the Russian intelligentsia emerged. But she turned against her creation when the French Revolution showed that words could be dangerous. And the intelligentsia lives by words. Her dim son Paul (1796-1801) was so terrified of intellectual contamination that he banned the import of books and stopped Russians from traveling abroad.

Nonetheless, after his death, the intelligentsia made Russia’s relationship with the West its main topic. Intellectuals hoped that this would give them a clearer idea of themselves and their place in the world, which was given a boost by Czar Alexander I’s victory over Napoleon, the paradigmatic Western leader. Tolstoy depicts Alexander’s commander in chief of the Russian army, Kutuzov, as the personification of the Russian spirit, rooted in nature, as opposed to the French spirit of contrived artificiality, exemplified by Napoleon. But Alexander’s officers, who took part in the Napoleonic wars in Europe, were actually much influenced by the French Enlightenment, and far removed from the mystical conversion of their czar, whose soul was warmed by the fires of wartime Moscow. He became a messianic reactionary, while they, on their return to Russia, found their country backward by Enlightenment standards.

During the reign of Nicholas I (1825-1855), the debate about Russia and the West revolved around the question of Russian identity: what it was, or ought to be. In the battles between Slavophiles and Westernizers, Russian Occidentalism was transformed from a cultural reflex into a full-fledged ideology. Like many other ideological labels, Slavophilia was a term of abuse to describe the bigoted tribalism of those who opposed the Westernizers. But Westernism was also a term of abuse, used by the Slavophiles to label the betrayal of the Russian soul in favor of the mechanical, artificial, and above all arrogant Western mind.

The most articulate Slavophiles were the brothers Kireyevsky, Peter (1808-1856) and especially Ivan (1806-1856), as well as Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860), Konstantin Aksakov (1817-1860), and Yury Samarin (1819-1876). These are largely forgotten figures now, but they created an immensely powerful ideology without which nineteenth-century Russia cannot be understood. Philosophy, more than literature, was what inspired them. Under the oppressive regime of Nicholas I, philosophy was seen as the most subversive discipline. So it went underground, so to speak, and with it the writings of German idealists and Romantics.

Ivan and Peter Kireyevsky were born to a “mixed” family. Their father was an enlightened Freemason, and their mother an incurable Romantic ideologue. From an early age, the two brothers were able to meet anyone who counted in the cultural life of Russia. The precocious Ivan was only a seventeen-year-old student when he joined the Wisdom Lovers (1823-1825), a society of young aristocrats interested in European philosophy. Their main intellectual hero was the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German thinker Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling.

Few read Schelling today, and even fewer find him cogent. One cannot imagine anyone nowadays bringing a bust of Schelling to Russia (or anywhere else for that matter), but that is what Ivan Kireyevsky did. Schelling was lionized and idolized in Russia in a way that is hard to understand now. Indeed, he was revered by such radical thinkers as the saintly anarchist Kropotkin, quite as much as by a reactionary thinker like Pogodin (the kind of reactionary who gives reaction a bad name). What did these men find in Schelling?

German Romanticism, unlike other forms of Romanticism in western Europe, was not just a literary and artistic movement; it had intense political and social implications. In his
Naturphilosophie,
Schelling paints the universe as a living organism, behaving in a goal-directed manner. This is a complete reversal of Isaac Newton’s idea of nature as a mechanism, directed not by goals, but by forces and causes. Schelling’s organic notion was a means of doing away with the calculating mind of the West and provided the idea of society as a living organism, driven by communal goals. This was the antithesis of the liberal notion of a society made up of individuals bound by contract.

Schelling’s ideas of the universe were very much in tune with the Slavophile mood. Society, to the Slavophiles, corresponded to the church, or religious community, as a divine-human organism. An often-used word for this was
sobornost. Sobor
was the church council, and the verb
sobirat
meant “to unite”; thus the original ecclesiastical idea was the unity of the believers in the mystical body of Christ. Kireyevsky spoke of “integrality.” In any case, inspired by Schelling’s ideas, Russia was seen as the opposite of Western society, as represented by England, Holland, or the French republic.

In his
New Principle in Philosophy,
Ivan Kireyevsky made clear distinctions between the mind of the West and the mind of the rest—Russia, of course, being the paradigmatic non-Western mind. The West, in Kireyevsky’s way of thinking, was built on rotten foundations: spiritually, on scholastic rationalism as adopted by the Catholic church; politically, on Roman and Teutonic conquests that formed the political order of Europe; and socially, on the Roman idea of absolute property rights, which Kireyevsky saw as an incipient form of individualism. He identified the mind of the West with abstract, fragmented reasoning, cut off from the wholeness of the world. The organic Russian mind, on the other hand, is guided by faith and able to grasp the totality of things.