Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin

Jeffrey Bruce Beshoner

Description

Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin analyzes questions of nationality and religious identity in nineteenth-century Russian history as reflected in the life of Jesuit priest Ivan Gagarin. A descendent of one of Russia’s most ancient and politically powerful families, Father Ivan Gagarin, S.J. (1814–1882) dedicated his life to creating a union between the Orthodox and Catholic churches that would preserve the dogmatic and traditional beliefs of both.

Traditional understandings of Russian identity have emanated from the perspective of the dominant Orthodox religion; this captivating study uses the unionist work of Gagarin to illumine Russia's national identity from the perspective of Roman Catholicism. Seeing his unionist proposals as necessary for the preservation of Russian stability, Gagarin found himself in frequent opposition to the Orthodox Church. While Gagarin believed that Church union would preserve Russia from the threats of communism and revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church believed that union would mean the sacrifice of religious truth, ecclesial independence and religious orthodoxy.

Jeffrey Beshoner’s even-handed analysis reveals that the Roman Catholic Church presented its own share of barriers to attempts at church union. Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin examines Roman Catholic attitudes of superiority vis-à-vis the Orthodox Church and argues that the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic Church simply did not possess the humility or respect for Eastern beliefs that church union required.

Despite the failure of his unionist activity, Gagarin exerted important influence on such contemporary and later Roman Catholic and Russian thinkers as Pope Pius IX, Alexei Khomiakov and Vladimir Solovev. As the collapse of communism has permitted Russia to again seek its national identity in Russian Orthodoxy, Gagarin's ideas and perspectives on the relationship between national and religious identity continue to prove relevant.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Former Soviet Union
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• URSS
• Catholicism
• General officer
• Russian
• Russia
• Orthodox
• Society of Jesus
• Hinduism
• Christianity
• General
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268159085
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin
Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin, courtesy of the Archives de la Biblioth que Slave, Paris.
Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin
The Search for Orthodox and Catholic Union
JEFFREY BRUCE BESHONER
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, IN 46556
All Rights Reserved
undpress.nd.edu
ISBN: 978-0-268-15907-8 (paper)
ISBN: 978-0-268-03166-4 (hardcover)
Copyright 2002 University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
A record of the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request from the Library of Congress.
eISBN 9780268159085
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
Contents
Preface
CHAPTER ONE
Moscow, Munich, and Petersburg
CHAPTER TWO
Paris: Conversion and Ordination
CHAPTER THREE
The Beginnings of the Mission to the Slavs
CHAPTER FOUR
Signs of Hope
CHAPTER FIVE
Signs of Failure: I
CHAPTER SIX
Signs of Failure: II
CHAPTER SEVEN
Byzantine Catholics and the Middle East
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Vatican and the Russian Church
CHAPTER NINE
Ends and Beginnings
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
Tensions between East and West remain an ever present part of world affairs. Despite the end of the Cold War, the struggles between traditionalism and progressivism, between democracy and authoritarianism, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, continue to influence Russia s national and ecclesiastical identity. This monograph examines the issues of Russian national identity and the Roman Catholic church s relationship with the churches of the East as presented in the life and work of the nineteenth-century Russian Jesuit Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin. 1 His activity throws much-needed light on the Russian question as well as the Catholic question, each of which remains problematic today. 2
Beginning with a brief summary of the historical relationship between Russia and Rome, this work will discuss Gagarin s life before his conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, his work in the Russian foreign ministry, his association with major Russian writers such as Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Fydor Ivanovich Tiutchev, Iuri Fyodorovich Samarin, and Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev, and the intellectual and religious influences which affected him. The focus will then shift to Gagarin s growing belief in Roman Catholicism as the source of Western progress, his connections with Roman Catholics in Paris, his conversion and decision to enter the Jesuits and the reaction that these actions generated in Russia, and his initial decision to work for the conversion of the Orthodox Slavs. 3 The third and fourth chapters will discuss Gagarin s early attempts to promote union between Russian Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. A discussion of Polish and Russian reactions to Gagarin s initiatives follows. Chapter 6 will analyze issues of Russian national identity, church community ( sobornost ), Catholicism, and Gagarin s relation to the Slavophiles. Chapter 7 will analyze his activities in the Middle East, among the Bulgarians and Byzantine Catholics, and his interests in linguistic nationalism. Chapter 8 will discuss his suggested reforms for the Russian clergy. Chapter 9 will treat Gagarin s final vision of church union and his lasting influence.
This examination of Gagarin s life and work will demonstrate how Russian Orthodoxy s tendency to conflate nationality and religion combined with Catholic religious and cultural arrogance to obstruct Christian unity in the nineteenth century. The receptiveness of such Russian elites as Gagarin to Catholic ideas will also demonstrate the need for greater religious inclusiveness in Russian conceptions of national identity.
Gagarin s unionist activity occurred within a particular religio-historical context that encouraged his conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism yet hindered his attempts to promote union between the Orthodox and Catholic churches. In order to understand this, some historical observations need to be made. First, the state of religious animosity between the East and West which had existed since the schism of 1054 severely limited the possibility for peaceful reunion of churches in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, ever since Saints Cyril (Constantine) (827-869) and Methodius (825-884) brought Christianity from Constantinople to the Slavs in 863, Russia s cultural heritage was linked to that of Byzantium. Thus, after Constantinople s break with Rome, Moscow too ended its ecclesiastical relations with the papacy. This rupture between Rome and Russia which arose from theological disagreements intensified as a result of Polish Catholic military aggression and forced conversion of the Russian Orthodox in the seventeenth century.
Attempts to end this animosity and reunify the churches demonstrated both the problems of seeking union through agreement among the religious elites as well as the continuing existence of important theological ties which could encourage union. Conclusions of church councils at Lyons in 1274 and Ferrara-Florence in 1438, though favorably received by the ecclesiastical hierarchies of East and West, were rejected by the Orthodox masses. Roman attempts to establish Byzantine Catholic churches among certain groups of Orthodox, as at the Union of Brest (1596), proved problematic as well. Byzantine Catholic churches were not fully accepted as equals by the Latin West. Orthodox churches perceived them as part of a Catholic attempt to create new schisms within Orthodoxy.
The influence of such Jesuits as Petr Skarga (1536-1612) and Antonio Possevino (1534-1611) among the Russian Orthodox demonstrated the receptiveness of certain Russian Orthodox elites to Jesuit polemics, but the Jesuits very successes reinforced their image as tools of Roman Catholic aggression against Russia. Jesuit successes also demonstrated the poor status of theological education in the East. As Father George Florovsky has noted, With sorrow and anguish contemporaries tell of the great rudeness and ignorance of the common people and the local clergy. The [Orthodox] hierarchy was little better equipped to do battle [against Jesuit theologians]. The Orthodox themselves deplored and exposed their low moral standards and worldliness. It was commonly complained that the bishops were more interested in politics, personal prestige, and privilege than in matters of faith or the spiritual needs of the people. 4 In sum, the seventeenth-century Orthodox clergy were theologically unprepared to oppose sophisticated Catholic apologetics. Some Orthodox divines who opposed the Jesuits turned to Protestant theological texts for ammunition against Roman Catholicism. Thus, Orthodox theologians adopted both Protestant and Catholic insights in their struggle to arrive at a defensible Russian Orthodox worldview.
Jesuit schools at Nemetskaia Sloboda in the late seventeenth century and under Catherine II, Paul, and Alexander I in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also demonstrated the attractiveness of Roman Catholicism to influential Russian families such as the Golitsyns, Tolstois, Gagarins, Rostopchins, Shuvalovs, Kutuzovs, Viazemskiis, Odoevskiis, Kamenskiis, Glinkas, Pushkins, Stroganovs, Novosil tsovs, and Kochubeis. Eighteenth-century Russian nobles saw in the Jesuits a means of obtaining Western scientific and technical knowledge. Even after the Jesuits expulsion from Russia in 1820, Russian nobility traveling abroad maintained their ties to the Society of Jesus. Furthermore, the Jesuits were able to obtain broad access to Russian society as a result of the perception that the Jesuits would prove useful in preventing the spread of revolutionary ideas, particularly in the Polish territories. It was for this reason that Catherine II refused to promulgate Pope Clement XIV s brief Dominus ac Redemptor , which would have suppressed the Jesuits in Russia in 1773. Perceptions of Jesuit usefulness against revolution continued under Paul and Alexander I.
Opposing the pro-Western, pro-Catholic current in Russian thought, Slavophiles instead gloried in the perceived superiority of Russia over the West. Whereas the West had sacrificed the spiritual for gross materialism, strong communities for unchecked individualism, and an ordered state for chaotic democracy, Russia had avoided these sins. Official nationalists, for their part, put forward Russia s divine obligation to protect Orthodoxy from Roman contamination, especially after Constantinople s perceived apostasy at Ferrara-Florence and its capture by the Turks in 1453. As Nicholas I s doctrine of Official Nationality stated on 2 April 1833:
A Russian, devoted to his fatherland, will agree as little to the loss of a single dogma of our Orthodoxy as to the theft of a single pearl from the tsar s crown. Autocracy constitutes the main foundation of the political arrangement of Russia. The Russian giant stands on it as on the cornerstone of his greatness. . . . The saving condition that Russia lives and is protected by the spirit of a strong humane and enlightened autocracy must permeate popular education and must develop with it. Together with these two national principles there is a third, no less powerful: Nationality . 5
Support for this exclusive national conception, which was articulated by Nicholas I but actually predated his reign, sometimes led to the persecution of Russia s religious minorities, including Roman and Byzantine Catholics. Particularly egregious examples of such persecution were the massacres of Byzantine and Roman Catholics by the Orthodox Cossacks in 1623, the closing of 251 Roman Catholic monasteries between 1804 and 1847, and the elimination of the Byzantine Catholic church in Russia in 1839.
Meanwhile, Russian hostility to and pe