The gist of Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s once celebrated solution of how to reclaim the rotting corpse of the pre-Soviet Russian Christianity from further corruption, was by letting the eternal spirit of Jesus Christ into the youthful body of Apollo. The authentic Russian body was obviously not good enough for his liking. He was obviously an avid Nietzsche reader, and got himself hooked on the physique of Dionysus, without however giving up on the spirituality of Christianity as such.
Merezhkovsky is interesting, albeit unoriginal. In promoting his “New Christianity” he does not intend to go with Nietzsche all the way, but only halfway, and essentially goes back to the Renaissance era, with its cult of the Graeco-Roman Antiquity, for the other half, resulting in half-measures. In his famous essay The Last Russian Saint, dwelling on the recently done canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church of the wretched in body, yet strong in spirit, glorified wonderworker-starets Seraphim Sarovsky, Merezhkovsky sides with Nietzsche, regarding the abomination of the “ascetic ideal,” yet sees the solution in combining Nietzsche’s finding with the answer suggested by the Renaissance, of going back to the classics.
It is easy for us today to ridicule Merezhkovsky for his childish naïveté. But can anybody blame him for his sincere desire to help revive Russian Christianity, and thus embarking on the mission of becoming Russia’s spiritual doctor and religious reformer. It is only from our vantage point of today that we can understand not only the problem of the Russian religion at the turn of the twentieth century, but also the most effective and undoubtedly the only feasible way of its eventual resolution.
The problem is indeed very easy to pinpoint particularly with the benefit of the Soviet era’s experience. The Russian Orthodox Church, the proud co-torchbearer (with the Tsars) of the Christian Faith, according to the “Third Rome Doctrine,” had been thoroughly humiliated by the Russian Tsars, her arrogant partners in the act of torchbearing. Peter the Great was actually so much annoyed by the Church leaders’ intrusion into the sanctus sanctorum of his Absolutist Domain that, with his usual swift and resolute cutting through the chase, he chose to abolish altogether the office of the Patriarch in 1700, replacing it in 1721 with a congregation of government bureaucrats, known as the Holy Synod, a very misleading title, because even those of them who had come to the office from the clergy were effectively transformed into secular administrators. Needless to say, the Russian Church was dispirited and corrupted. The educated Russians were losing their faith, and no wonder, considering that their Church had been turned into a joke! Being a priest became synonymous with drunkenness, ignorance, crudeness. In the meantime, although religion was still running strong among those uneducated masses and the peasants, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the Russian population, their faith amounted to sheer superstition, and thus was miserably failing the exclusivity test, to which it was subjected by the demands of Russia’s Third Rome destiny.
The thinking community saw the need for drastic action. Merezhkovsky was on the wrong track, because he had been too much under the foreign influence of both Nietzsche and the Renaissance, to such an extent that he was now completely misreading the native Russian problem of religion, so that everything he had to offer had to be totally rejected without even trying it in earnest, and all for the better, I may add, as these days the Russian Orthodox Church, rejuvenated and spiritually stronger than ever in Russian history, except in times of war, has no need whatsoever for Apollo’s beautiful Greek body, but continues to venerate the decrepit St. Seraphim Sarovsky’s hallows, while Merezhkovsky’s “New Christianity” is resting in peaceful obscurity in the same grave with its author.
What happened in reality was that the Russians discovered the right remedy for the Russian religion, the one hinted by the great Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (ironically, a third major foreign influence on Russia’s religious thought and action), who ran afoul of Danish church authorities by claiming that Christianity without persecution loses its moral legitimacy. The Russians believed him, gave the power to the Bolsheviks, and thus cured their religion from its seemingly incurable degenerative disease. The rest, as they say, is history… of the past, the present, and the future!
Merezhkovsky is interesting, albeit unoriginal. In promoting his “New Christianity” he does not intend to go with Nietzsche all the way, but only halfway, and essentially goes back to the Renaissance era, with its cult of the Graeco-Roman Antiquity, for the other half, resulting in half-measures. In his famous essay The Last Russian Saint, dwelling on the recently done canonization by the Russian Orthodox Church of the wretched in body, yet strong in spirit, glorified wonderworker-starets Seraphim Sarovsky, Merezhkovsky sides with Nietzsche, regarding the abomination of the “ascetic ideal,” yet sees the solution in combining Nietzsche’s finding with the answer suggested by the Renaissance, of going back to the classics.
It is easy for us today to ridicule Merezhkovsky for his childish naïveté. But can anybody blame him for his sincere desire to help revive Russian Christianity, and thus embarking on the mission of becoming Russia’s spiritual doctor and religious reformer. It is only from our vantage point of today that we can understand not only the problem of the Russian religion at the turn of the twentieth century, but also the most effective and undoubtedly the only feasible way of its eventual resolution.
The problem is indeed very easy to pinpoint particularly with the benefit of the Soviet era’s experience. The Russian Orthodox Church, the proud co-torchbearer (with the Tsars) of the Christian Faith, according to the “Third Rome Doctrine,” had been thoroughly humiliated by the Russian Tsars, her arrogant partners in the act of torchbearing. Peter the Great was actually so much annoyed by the Church leaders’ intrusion into the sanctus sanctorum of his Absolutist Domain that, with his usual swift and resolute cutting through the chase, he chose to abolish altogether the office of the Patriarch in 1700, replacing it in 1721 with a congregation of government bureaucrats, known as the Holy Synod, a very misleading title, because even those of them who had come to the office from the clergy were effectively transformed into secular administrators. Needless to say, the Russian Church was dispirited and corrupted. The educated Russians were losing their faith, and no wonder, considering that their Church had been turned into a joke! Being a priest became synonymous with drunkenness, ignorance, crudeness. In the meantime, although religion was still running strong among those uneducated masses and the peasants, who constituted the overwhelming majority of the Russian population, their faith amounted to sheer superstition, and thus was miserably failing the exclusivity test, to which it was subjected by the demands of Russia’s Third Rome destiny.
The thinking community saw the need for drastic action. Merezhkovsky was on the wrong track, because he had been too much under the foreign influence of both Nietzsche and the Renaissance, to such an extent that he was now completely misreading the native Russian problem of religion, so that everything he had to offer had to be totally rejected without even trying it in earnest, and all for the better, I may add, as these days the Russian Orthodox Church, rejuvenated and spiritually stronger than ever in Russian history, except in times of war, has no need whatsoever for Apollo’s beautiful Greek body, but continues to venerate the decrepit St. Seraphim Sarovsky’s hallows, while Merezhkovsky’s “New Christianity” is resting in peaceful obscurity in the same grave with its author.
What happened in reality was that the Russians discovered the right remedy for the Russian religion, the one hinted by the great Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard (ironically, a third major foreign influence on Russia’s religious thought and action), who ran afoul of Danish church authorities by claiming that Christianity without persecution loses its moral legitimacy. The Russians believed him, gave the power to the Bolsheviks, and thus cured their religion from its seemingly incurable degenerative disease. The rest, as they say, is history… of the past, the present, and the future!
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