Palmer’s Meeting With A. N. Muravyov and Theological Conversation With Him. The Relationship of the Churches and Obstacles to Their Union. The Armenian Heresy. The Connection Between the Religious Movement in England and Political Revolution. Theological Conversation With Archpriest Kutnevich. Anglican Theory and Orthodox Reality. Two Tendencies in Russian Theological Thought

At the time appointed by Count Protasov, Palmer presented himself at the Holy Synod—or, as he put it, in the synodal chamber—and was there introduced to the Assistant Ober-Procuror, A. N. Muravyov. After his meeting with Count Protasov, and thanks to the obliging forewarning of the British envoy, Palmer was no longer surprised to find in the Assistant Ober-Procuror yet another cavalry officer; and so Muravyov struck him not by the incongruity of his military rank with his ecclesiastical position, but «only by his gigantic stature, which required a sturdy horse to carry such a cavalryman.» Be that as it may, A. N. Muravyov was undeniably one of the remarkable men of his time. If Count Protasov, for all his high ecclesiastical-administrative standing, was not a theologian but—as he himself put it—a soldier, his colleague was not only a theologian in the best sense of the word, but a man fully and genuinely of the Church. He was one of the few—and, regrettably, ever-dwindling—representatives among us of that type of cultivated layman who is able to discover beneath the seemingly dry scholastic forms of our church-religious life a spring of living water and to refresh his whole moral being with it. In the Western confessions, where religious life, for well-known historical reasons, allows more room for personal religious consciousness, such men are a common phenomenon, and this fact serves as one of the most striking proofs of the living interaction between life and the Church. Among us, by contrast, theological questions are the almost exclusive province of clergy or professional theologians, who by their very nature are often unable to venture beyond the narrow technicalities inaccessible to the ordinary moderately educated public. As a result, educated secular society in Russia lives, one might say, outside the influence of church-religious ideas—as one may judge even from the well-knownfact that our ecclesiastical periodicals circulate almost exclusively among the clergy and struggle in vain against the unyielding indifference of secular society toward them. Since Orthodox theological thought does not spread through the mass of that society, it sometimes concentrates with all the greater energy in a few individuals, usually distinguished by great gifts and a philosophical cast of mind, and through them our theological thought finds not only an appropriate channel for penetrating public consciousness, but also makes, so to speak, its own history of development. To a considerable degree all of this applies to Muravyov as well—to whom the Anglican theologian had now come.

At their first meeting the conversation could naturally not be lengthy and was confined to a few remarks on either side. As a man of strict—one might say exclusive—Orthodox spirit, Muravyov regarded Palmer with some suspicion, bearing in mind the incursion of extreme Protestant ideas into the Anglican Church. Palmer quickly grasped his thought and replied: «Whatever dangers may threaten the Anglican Church, Protestantism is not among them: that monster is dead. And here we may even render some service to the Russians and Greeks. They too often make use of Papist, Lutheran, and Calvinist books, and their desire to be more spiritual than formal or superstitious in matters of religion has produced Protestant tendencies whose dangers they do not know. We, however, know this danger through long and painful experience, and have at last learned to find, even in the free use of the Bible, a counterweight to the abuse of the Bible.»

This warning from Palmer about the dangers of Protestantism, however well-founded in the abstract, was scarcely applicable to the period when he was in Russia. The era of mystical enthusiasms had by then already passed, and as a reaction had come the opposite period of Roman enthusiasm, whose immoderate representative was Count Protasov, who even in his high ecclesiastical-administrative post had not shed the traces of an education received at a Jesuit college.

As a man of broad theological reading and cultivation, A. N. Muravyov could only make a favorable impression on Palmer, and the Anglican theologian seized the first convenient opportunity for a more serious conversation about his mission. On September 21, Palmer went to Muravyov’s home, where a lengthy theological discussion ensued between them. They touched first on the question of the relations between Church and State, and here a misunderstanding came to light on both sides—a misunderstanding that, moreover, persists to this day. Muravyov maintained that the Anglican Church had a secular monarch as its head, but that to say the same of the Russian Church would be the most absurd of slanders. How independent and exalted the church’s authority is in the Orthodox Church may be seen from the fact, Muravyov argued, that even Peter the Great—a sovereign of unbending, iron will—submitted to the authority of the Eastern Patriarchs and observed all proper forms in establishing the Holy Synod. Even now, the consecration of a bishop is performed not in the name of the emperor but in the name of Christ; the emperor merely selects one of three candidates presented to him and can decide nothing in spiritual matters—whereas in England everything depends on royal power. «I remarked,» writes Palmer, «that we English often speak of the relation between Church and State in Russia in exactly the same way as he (Muravyov) spoke of the relation between Church and State in England—the truth being the same on both sides: the State has undoubtedly violated the rights of the Church.» When the Englishman on his side began to qualify the extremes of the Russian view of the Anglican Church’s relation to the State, Muravyov exclaimed: «Ah! You begin to deny thisnnow, when not only in England but everywhere people are beginning to rentrer dans l’ordre, ce torrent du protestantisme est passé (return to normal order, as the tide of Protestantism ebbs). The same is true, you know, in Russia as well.»

Palmer then presented his Russian interlocutor with several works by English theologians and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and promised to procure a copy of the Scottish liturgy, wishing Muravyov not only to become thoroughly acquainted with the doctrinal teaching of the Anglican Church but also to be convinced of how little the prevailing opinion of it as a purely Protestant communion is borne out by its confessional and liturgical books, which—as, for example, the Scottish liturgy—clearly allow for transubstantiation in a sense close to the Orthodox understanding of that term.

When the conversation turned to the principles of the union of the churches and Palmer proposed his well-known maxim — in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas (in essentials unity, in doubtful matters freedom, and in all things charity and love)—which, made current by the Tractarians, had become the motto of all subsequent attempts at church union, and when he added that this principle accorded with the spirit of the primitive, apostolic Church, Muravyov replied: «At the present time the Church is no longer what she was in the early centuries. Then she possessed such vitality and strength that everything remained without precise definition; but now all has been arranged, classified, and brought within known boundaries, and we must not alter those boundaries. I know,» he continued, «that abroad, and in particular in England and especially in Oxford, there is now a tendency to promote very broad principles of catholicity, but I think that the Greek Church is in some respects less able to accommodate your principles and arrangements than the Latin Church is. The Latin Church has a central authority in the Pope, to whom all must be obedient, and he can readily enter into negotiations and explanations and can even make certain concessions; for the Greeks this is impossible—they are uneducated, both clergy and laity, and blindly attached to everything received among them, down to the smallest details of their rites. Were the Russians, in such circumstances, to enter into any kind of agreement with the Anglicans, the sole consequence would be that they would forfeit communion with the Eastern Patriarchs.»

«If the matter is conducted not rashly,» Palmer remarked, «but proofs are adduced on each point of agreement from both sides, from the holy Fathers recognized by both, then the Greek Patriarchs may, one may hope, prove to be not so unreasonable.»

But Muravyov shook his head and said: «You have no conception of how ignorant and uncivilized the Greek clergy are; and among us in Russia too there is no little ignorance, but however that may be, whoever wishes to enter into communion with the Eastern Church must take her as she is.» To illustrate his point, Muravyov recounted the following incident. Once he had asked the Patriarch of Constantinople what precisely the heresy of the Armenians consisted in—for it seemed to Muravyov quite elusive. «The Armenians,» he explained to Palmer, «are in reality almost the same as us, and now that Etchmiadzin belongs to Russia they could easily be united with the Orthodox Church, since they do not in the least hold to the actual Eutychian heresy.» But the answer the Patriarch gave to Muravyov’s question was: «O, do not ask me about that, my son! Know only that all the heresies of the world, every pernicious and wicked one, are combined in the heresy of the Armenians.» Going on to point out to Palmer the obstacles standing in the way of church union, Muravyov continued: «Such communion as you seek now would be impossible. If the Russian clergy were to admit you to communion (in the sacraments), the Anglicans themselves—who regard Russians and Greeks as barbarians and idolaters—would raise a cry against you for having adopted the rites of the Greek Church, just as the Greeks would raise a cry against us Russians if we were to come to an agreement with the Armenians. You view this matter in a particular way. You see what prejudices exist here and would wish to reconcile both sides by way of explanation. To you it is clear that some things here are not especially important, others can be reconciled, and still others are both true and not true—from different points of view. But the common people, on either side, do not see this at all.»

A few days later Palmer met Count Protasov at the Synod and informed him that he was engaged in translating the Orthodox Confession into English. The Count remarked that he would do better to translate Metropolitan Philaret’s Catechism. But Palmer had his own idea. «We have in view,» he said, «to publish all the essential documents in order to give a full account of the actual state of theology in Russia. In these documents, however, there appears some inconsistency. Not only in your Catechism do you avoid defining transubstantiation by means of ‘substance’ and ‘accidents’, but even in the recently published translation of the Eighteen Articles of the Jerusalem Council you have altered the text of the original in order to avoid mentioning ‘accidents’, which appears in the Greek text. Yet in the Russian translation of the Orthodox Confession from which the Eighteen Articles borrowed this term…» «We retained the term that we removed from the Eighteen Articles—that is true,» the Count quickly completed Palmer’s thought, and then, turning to characterizing the general state of the East, continued: «We are endeavoring as much as possible to raise education and sound doctrine, but great is the prevailing ignorance, especially in Greece and the Levant—the people do not reflect but blindly cling to everything they are accustomed to. In Greece itself too such a movement has begun. For our part we are undertaking publications both in Slavonic and in Greek and are distributing them free of charge to the churches of the Levant, by which we hope to fortify the Orthodoxpopulation there against the pressure of the Latins and the Methodists. We have thus published in Slavonic and Greek, in two columns, the Orthodox Confession, the Longer and Shorter Catechisms—in Greek. If you could assist us in this regard, so much the better,» the Count added. Palmer replied: «We ought on our side to be ready for this, because we desire nothing but the truth and the unity of the Church; but we have no strength or assistance save what learning and God’s grace can give us, since the civil government of England is at present, rather, on the side of the Papists and Protestant sectarians.»

Turning the conversation to the question of the church-religious state of England, Count Protasov asked Palmer which of the Anglican elements was the most catholic? Palmer replied that it would be easier for him to point out those who were least catholic. «So long as our Church,» he said, «was under the exclusive patronage of the State, even well-disposed churchmen referred to the Church, both in speech and in writing, chiefly as a ‘sacred establishment,’ though the name ‘apostolic Church’ was sometimes heard as well. But when in 1828 and 1829 the change came—when Protestants and dissenters were admitted to political power—and especially when the Reform Bill of1832 gave the triumph to the Whig party that supported them, then within the Church itself there began a revival of those catholic and apostolic ideas which our Protestantizing politicians had for a century and a half consistently endeavored to suppress, calling to the throne first a Dutch Calvinist and then a German Lutheran.» This political change—which expressed itself in the removal of the Anglican Church’s exclusive privilege and right to state patronage—had a beneficial effect on the church-religious consciousness of Englishmen. In their minds, under the complete subordination of the Church to the State, the very concept of the Church had grown obscure and even the name ‘Church’ had been lost, as the Church had been reduced to a mere ‘establishment’—something like one of the departments or ministries of the royal government. «The men of the last generation,» Palmer continued, «still call, all or nearly all of them, their Church a Protestant Church, or an Established Church, or simply the Establishment; but the rising generation of clergy is more and more abandoning the use of these suicidal and ambiguous names and finds that it should call its Church simply Orthodox, Catholic, Apostolic, and nothing else, and that in all its thoughts, words, and actions it should concern itself with the unity of the whole, and not merely treat of a national church in the local, sectarian sense of the word.» Count Protasov hinted that this catholic movement was the work of a learned circle in Oxford University and therefore could not have great prospects for the future, but Palmer hastened to assure him that the movement had a much deeper source and was spreading throughout England independently of Oxford.

The secular representatives of Russian theological thought, however elevated their ecclesiastical standing might be, could of course not fully satisfy an English theologian, and so Palmer sought to enter into contact with the actual representatives of the Russian Church. The first such representative he had occasion to meet and exchange theological views with was a member of the Holy Synod, Archpriest V. Kutnevich, Chief Chaplain of the Army and Navy. He was a man of solid theological education who entered into discussion with Palmer with evident interest. The conversation was conducted in Latin. In former times the inability to express oneself in modern languages found a happy counterbalance in that fine knowledge of Latin which our old theological schools imparted. In the West, Latin still holds its right of citizenship in learned circles, and at various learned congresses where scholars of different nationalities gather, speeches are commonly delivered in Latin as the international and, so to speak, neutral language of the scholarly world. Among us, however, since the expulsion of Latin under the influence of a misunderstood realism, a very inconvenient gap has formed in this respect, and the representatives of our theological thought of the old school, thanks to their Latin, had, one might say, greater means for intellectual exchange with the theological world of Western Europe. Had it not been for Latin, Palmer—who did not succeed in acquiring a thorough knowledge of Russian—would have had no means of penetrating into the inner sanctuary of Russian theological thought as expressed in its most original representatives. In Latin, then, as we have said, he conducted a lengthy conversation with Archpriest Kutnevich, to whom he had been introduced at the Holy Synod. Kutnevich said that he had already read the letter of recommendation from Magdalen College and Palmer’s letter to Count Protasov, that he was in general acquainted with Palmer’s intentions, and with regard to his desire to receive communion in the sacraments of the Russian Church at once remarked that this was possible only on the condition that the person seeking communion confessed the full faith in all that the Orthodox Eastern Church teaches. The Archpriest laid stress on the word Eastern, and this at once touched Palmer’s catholic idea.

«All that the Catholic or Universal Church teaches,» he objected, «and not what any particular church—Western or Eastern or any other local church—requires one to acknowledge.»

«He must confess,» the Archpriest repeated, «the very same faith that the Eastern Church confesses.»

«I confess, in my own conviction, one and the same faith as the Eastern Church,» said Palmer, «because the catholic faith is one, whether in the West or in the East. If, however, the Eastern and Western Churches are not in agreement on the essential principles of faith, then one of the two sides must be heretical. But I believe that the Church from which I have come, and I myself, are orthodox and catholic, and we regard the Eastern Church as likewise orthodox and catholic. Therefore, the British Church finds that there is no disagreement between her and the Eastern Church with respect to the substance of the faith.»

On this occasion a lengthy theological discussion arose between Archpriest Kutnevich and Palmer, touching on all the subtleties of dogmatic science, but there is no need for us to follow it in all its details. The conversation took on its most animated character on the question of transubstantiation, to which Palmer returned with particular persistence, endeavoring—on the basis of a discrepancy he had discovered between the Russian translation of the Eighteen Articles of the Jerusalem Council of 1672 and the original text—to demonstrate that the teaching of the Orthodox Church on this point differed from that of the Roman Church, and thereby to bring his Anglican teaching closer to it. But Palmer’s attempt, as before, so now, remained in vain. Archpriest Kutnevich maintained the complete conformity of Orthodox teaching in this regard with the Roman, and since Palmer would not agree, the Archpriest resolved the question of admitting him to the Sacrament of the Eucharist in the Orthodox Church in the negative. And it would be hard to say that he was wrong in this. The question of transubstantiation has far greater significance within the system of the Church than might appear at first glance. One’s view of the Sacrament of the Eucharist determines one of the most essential principles of the Church’s life—it is, one may say, the vital nerve by which the entire church organism is animated. Protestantism, by rejecting transubstantiation in the Eucharist, thereby undermined this nerve of a truly organic church life, and in Protestantism church life in the proper sense of the word ceased, and there began simply a communal life, subject to all the conditions of ordinary existence. As a perceptive theologian, Palmer understood the importance of this question to the task he had undertaken, and so one can understand the persistence with which he returned at every convenient opportunity to the precise clarification of the views of Russian theological thought on this subject. And it must be said that the representatives of Russian theological thought consistently displayed on this point a firm groundedness of conviction, and despite all of Palmer’s assurances stood firmly on the doctrine of transubstantiation—to no small confusion of the Anglican theologian, who, faced with such a response to his view, lost all hope of being admitted to communion in the sacraments of the Russian Church. When, at the close of his conversation with Kutnevich, Palmer once more expressed the desire to be admitted to communion on the same footing as an Orthodox Christian, the Archpriest simply remarked to him:

«You have your own chaplain here; there is no need for you to come to us.»

«What—can the English Church be within your diocese?» exclaimed the champion of ideal catholicity or universality, stung to the quick.

«Yes, but she is here—fully in agreement with your Church in England, using the same rites—just as there are here a Lutheran church, a Calvinist church, a Latin church, an Armenian church—twelve different churches and confessions in all, or thereabouts.»

«I recognize no such confessions,» replied Palmer, «but only one confession, one faith—the creedal faith. In one place there cannot de jure be two confessions or two bishops. I am now a member not of the English Church in Russia, but of the Russian Church—at least in desire and intention. If the English living here are in fact in separation, I cannot in this respect justify them—nor, equally, can I justify you. Your bishop thinks that if there exists in the world, and even in his diocese, not one Church but several, this somehow does not concern him in the slightest. In the same way our own people, on arriving here, pay no attention whatever to the bishop of the locality but live and act as though they had brought England itself with them on their ship.»

«Of course, in one place there ought to be one Church,» replied Archpriest Kutnevich, «and we pray for the realization of this. But if we were to admit Anglicans to church communion on that basis, given their disagreement with us on important points of faith, this would be extremely dangerous and would disturb our people beyond all measure. The same would be true even for yourselves; your own people would likewise undoubtedly be disturbed and would begin to think that their bishops and pastors had concluded an alliance with heretics and idolaters. Oh, this would cause terrible confusion!…»

Thus, in his first encounter with a professional representative of Russian theological thought, Palmer suffered a defeat, and his diffuse idea of a theoretically constructed catholicity had to give way before the fact of a living, practical church self-consciousness. However, theological thought in Russia has never been confined to a single strictly defined direction that would exclude all possibility of divergent views. On the contrary, within it there have always existed—at least since its encounter with Western theological thought—two main directions, two, so to speak, channels in its flow, whose original spokesmen were the representative theological thinkers of the Petrine era. Though springing from a single source, the autochthonous Russian church consciousness, these two currents, under the influence of the particular conditions of our cultural life, run against two opposing systems of Western churchmanship—Roman Catholicism and Protestantism—whereby each of these currents takes on a distinctive and peculiar coloring. In the absence among us of developed schools of theological thought, these two directions have an important significance in the development of our religious-theological consciousness, much as the Westernizer and Slavophile tendencies existing among us have an important significance in the development of our social and literary self-consciousness. At the very outset, Palmer found himself encountering representatives of both these directions. If in Archpriest Kutnevich he met a man of the strict formal Orthodox type, before whose ecclesiastical viewpoint Palmer’s «catholic» theory dissolved, so on the other side in Father Malov, a priest of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, he encountered, so to speak, a Western-oriented theologian who in his views boldly stepped beyond the bounds of strict orthodoxy. When the conversation turned to the true Church and to the relation of existing confessional forms to it, Palmer was not a little troubled when Father Malov expressed the personal opinion that true Christians were to be found in every church and community, since religion of the heart was more important than anything else.