An English Deacon in High Society. The Church-Religious Life of the Fashionable World. The Instability of High-Society Thought. Periodic Enthusiasms and Their Causes. Attitude Toward the Church. Various Forms of Religious Enthusiasms. Seekers of Religious Adventure. Liberal Evangelicalism

In observing Russian ecclesiastical and religious life and theological thought, Palmer did not confine himself to the professional spheres, which naturally could produce only a more or less one-sided impression; he endeavored to penetrate all spheres and strata of the Russian people in order to study their ecclesiastical and religious worldview from every angle. In this regard he was particularly fortunate in high society, where in a short time he acquired numerous acquaintances and connections. Our high society, despite the breaking down of all class and caste barriers, remains to this day a strictly closed world unto itself, living by its own particular traditions, its own particular life, and its own particular worldview that has nothing in common with the rest of the world. As a consequence of this closedness, its inner life is little known to society at large, and only through society novelists is it periodically introduced into the mainstream of ordinary social and literary life. As for the religious condition of this milieu, one may say that nothing is known about it, and to this day there has not even been an attempt to study it in any more or less thorough manner. Our clergy is too “vulgar” to be received in this milieu, and all its relations with it are limited to the formal performance of necessary services. For this reason, the most vague and contradictory notions exist concerning the ecclesiastical and religious state of high society, agreeing only in recognizing the predominance of a void in the ecclesiastical and religious life of this milieu. But such a notion would not be entirely just. In our high-society world there is constantly active work going on of the religious and theological mind, as can be seen even from those religious enthusiasms that periodically make themselves known within it. A void is incapable of reacting; but if our high-society world is capable of being carried away by various religious movements, this is a sure sign that the religious instinct is alive in it—an instinct that is abused by various visiting abbés, sanctimonious lords, and holy-fool Pashkovites. The same is testified by the sensitivity and interest with which our high-society world responds to various religious and theological novelties. Palmer’s book provides many examples of this. He had occasion to engage in lengthy theological conversations with various persons from high society, and the views of some of his interlocutors—both men and women—may serve as typical specimens of high-society theology.

As an Englishman, Palmer was very interested to determine the attitude of our high-society or aristocratic circle toward the Church. In England, as is well known, the established Church is preeminently the Church of the aristocracy, which glitters with refined preaching, luxurious appointments, and higher prices for pews that put them entirely beyond the reach of the plain poor people. The highest aristocracy there forms the principal support of the Church, and the clergy is placed so high in social and material terms that it comes into close contact with the aristocracy, and in its higher ranks emerges directly from it. If on the one hand this is good, in that it points to the higher social significance and influence of the Church, on the other hand it is precisely this that serves as the source of the chief weakness of the Anglican Church. Relying upon the aristocracy and constantly striving to maintain a corresponding social standing, it has lost its popular footing; the people have drifted away from it and gone into sectarianism. Palmer was fully sensible of this weakness in his Church and therefore with particular interest notes that advantage of our Church, that it is precisely a people’s Church, the altar of which is freely accessible to the last poor man. But this latter advantage in turn acquires its full significance only when it does not pass into an extreme, and when in the name of the people as a mass the higher class is not crowded out—the class that is the chief bearer of the national mind and spirit. It was from this angle, then, that Palmer was interested to determine the attitude of our aristocracy toward our people’s Church.

It should be noted that Palmer had occasion to make his observations at a most unfavorable time. In the intellectual life of educated Russian society of those days, two turbulent currents of entirely opposite tendency had only just recently swept through. These were, on the one hand, the powerful influence of Romanism, the seeds of which were spread by bold and skillful hands by the Jesuits until their complete expulsion from Russia in 1820; and on the other hand, the infatuation with mysticism that had taken hold under the influence of the Anglo-continental Biblical Society. Both currents had passed exclusively through the intellectual life of our higher educated society, but all the more powerful a mark did they leave behind. The weaker personalities, who were moreover, by their intellectual makeup, already standing, so to speak, outside the Church’s enclosure, were caught up by these currents and carried away—some to the foot of the Roman papal throne, and some into the abyss of mystical unprincipledness. But for the development of our society, far greater significance attached to the traces left by these currents on the mass of that educated high society which had held its place within the Church’s enclosure. They had influenced the entire religious worldview of this society so powerfully that the characteristic direction of ecclesiastical and religious life and theological thought in this milieu was thereby determined for a long time to come. The infatuation with Romanism gave a strong Papist coloring to the intellectual makeup of our educated society, and when this infatuation collided with the no less powerful stream of mysticism hostile to it, the clash of these two opposing forces finally deprived the high-society mind of its necessary equilibrium—and as a result there set in that vacillation of theological thought that characterizes the religious and intellectual life of our high society in Palmer’s memoirs.

Such instability in the religious worldview of our high society immediately struck the Anglican theologian’s eye, and in recounting his theological conversations with various representatives of that circle he constantly notes this peculiarity, which at first seemed to him puzzling—all the more so because in this same milieu he saw unmistakable signs of sound churchmanship. In all the houses he visited he was received with the greatest hospitality and was constantly drawn into religious conversations with evidently genuine interest, especially by the ladies, who even asked him to come to them in his clerical dress and overwhelmed him with questions about various peculiarities of Anglican church life—about priests and bishops, whether the custom of asking their blessing existed in England and in what form it was given, and so forth. In some cases he encountered a deep attachment to the forms of the ecclesiastical and religious life of the Orthodox Church. Princess Potemkina reproached the English for the fact that “their bishops live like secular people and have neither the spiritual character that distinguishes our bishops, nor the reverence that attaches to the latter.” Another lady made an energetic attack on Palmer and, with all the ardor of a strict adherent of her Church, denied any possibility of realizing the scheme of church union that Palmer was advocating. A third charmed the Anglican theologian by the simplicity of her religious faith, when in his presence she made the sign of the cross in blessing over her nephew as he set off for the night’s rest. But amid all the visible features of religiosity characterizing the inner and outer life of our high society, Palmer could not miss the estrangement from the Church that appeared alongside these religious signs. He began to search for the cause of it, and found a partial explanation from the lips of representatives of that very circle.

On the feast of the Archangel Michael, the 8th of November, Palmer dined at Princess Sophia Golitsyna’s. In the usual manner, a religious conversation arose, and the Princess began to complain that there were very few opportunities with us for such religious conversation with spiritual pastors from which one might draw religious counsel or edification, since the clergy never entered their society. “There is no doubt,” she continued, “our custom of going to confession is very good; but that is only once a year, and in the long intervals between we are left entirely to ourselves. The church services are exceedingly fatiguing, and we understand but little of them—especially Vespers and Matins—and from the upper classes almost no one attends Matins at all. It is very long, and one must stand the whole time. The Liturgy is more comprehensible to us, and we can follow it better.”

“But if one were to purchase the church books and follow along with the service by means of them, it would become more comprehensible,” Palmer observed.

“No, that is impossible—to stand in church with a book in one’s hands! That would be disrespectful toward the holy things.”

“I mean something slightly different,” replied Palmer. “I mean—to read the liturgical books for about a quarter of an hour or so each day at home; then the church services will soon become more intelligible to you.”

“Some of our older people do this, and that is perhaps why they stand through all the services, which do not seem fatiguing to them,” replied the Princess; and, as if sensing the demolition of her previous argument, she sought to justify her attitude toward the Church by pointing out that our clergy had by no means yet abandoned its bad habit of drinking.

Palmer was constantly encountering such conversations and conversations like them in the hospitable homes of his high-society friends. Dining at the Potemkins’ on the first day of the Christmas fast, where in accordance with Orthodox custom a fasting table was set, Palmer was curious to learn how strictly the church regulations concerning fasts were observed in the upper classes. From the fasting table of his hosts he wished to draw a favorable generalization about the high-society circle as a whole, but was bound to be disappointed when he was told that “the upper classes have now become so Protestantized that fasts are observed by only very few, at least in Petersburg, where some seventy thousand Germans live. Some, or perhaps many, observe the fast only in the first and last week of Great Lent.” But how generally unpopular fasts were in the upper classes, Palmer could see from the fact that with the onset of one fast or another, the regular soirées at the Potemkins’ would quickly empty, since by their established custom the suppers there were at such times usually fasting ones. At that same fasting dinner the Anglican theologian heard various not entirely favorable comments about our ecclesiastical and religious arrangements. “Our church services,” he was told in complaint, “are far too long—suited only for monasteries, whence they were borrowed—and as a result are accompanied by great disorder and irreverence. This is because on the one hand the great mass of the common people looks with superstitious dread on any abbreviation, so that it would be dangerous even for the authorities to make any alterations; while on the other hand it would often be physically impossible for a priest and for people living in the world to perform them or attend them if they were conducted in their full and proper entirety. Moreover, the educated and secular classes of the urban population, constantly growing in number, are repelled from church worship by its length to precisely the same degree that this same length appeals to merchants and peasants. The consequence of all this has been that a system has become established in the churches for reading the appointed kathismata, hours, and the greater part of the canons by which all this is performed with extreme speed. Everyone complains about such irreverence, is ashamed of it, and from time to time decrees have been issued with the aim of correcting this deficiency—but all in vain. Despite the fact that everything possible is now done to shorten the service—the singing proceeds rapidly, the appointed repetitions are omitted, singing is frequently replaced by reading—despite all this, priests, readers, and singers in the performance of worship in churches attended by the upper classes must make various omissions at their own discretion in order to accommodate the church service to the endurance of their flock or their own physical strength. All this comes out with special force during the season of Great Lent, which a great many find a burden. Others, however, are able to find a kind of consolation in it, as Prince Potemkin expressed it. ‘During Great Lent,’ he said, ‘we grow thin—but then both spirit and body exult in anticipation of Pascha.’”

Alongside this dissatisfaction with established ecclesiastical and religious forms, Palmer saw at the same time a complete unsteadiness of ecclesiastical and religious principles in high society. The reason for this lay partly in upbringing, but chiefly in those currents that had swept in alternating gusts through the religious and intellectual life of this milieu. Prince Meshchersky, who had formerly been Ober-Procuror of the Holy Synod, told him that Russians until recently had been very poor members of the Church, since they usually received their upbringing at the hands of foreign Protestant tutors and governesses. Even he himself had been a freethinker until the age of thirty, having been educated in this direction by his Protestant tutor. Since the clergy did not enter into high society, young people, in his account, ordinarily absorbed whatever religious notions happened to be current in fashionable secular society at the time—and those notions were either Protestant or Catholic.

It is easy to imagine what practical results might accompany such a religious upbringing, and Palmer recounts several individuals in whom such an upbringing had produced a kind of seekers after religious adventure—people who changed their religious convictions according to the mood of the moment. Such, for example, is Princess Potemkina. Even in childhood, when she was a girl, she had fallen under the sway of the then-fashionable infatuation with Romanism, zealously propagated by the Jesuit fathers. The sons of Loyola surrounded the young society lady with every possible care of their fatherly solicitude, tirelessly instilling in her the idea that the Catholic Church is the only path to salvation, and that to resist the desire to belong to it, should such a desire arise in her, would be to commit a mortal sin against the Holy Spirit. Naturally, the honeyed words of the Jesuit fathers turned the head of the young Princess; a passionate desire to become a Catholic arose in her, and this desire agitated her for some time. Torn between this desire and an instinctive fear for her Orthodox faith, she turned for advice to certain Orthodox clergy, but these rather increased than diminished her religious anguish when they offered as their chief arguments the grief or displeasure of her parents and acquaintances, and the impropriety of abandoning one’s own faith. The Jesuit influence was on the verge of actually triumphing over the Princess when by chance she encountered a Methodist preacher who turned her in an entirely opposite direction. Having heard from the Russian Princess the sorrowful tale of her religious torments and doubts, the Methodist cried out with heartfelt pathos—“quel manque de foi” (what a lack of faith!) — and proceeded to explain to her in detail the catechism of his “spiritual” faith: the doctrine of the natural state of the soul, of justification by free grace for all, of the need for living communion with the Saviour, of the assurance of union of the soul with Him, and similar Methodist tenets. All of this, in Princess Potemkina’s own words, was then new to her and illuminated her like a ray of light. This new revelation filled her with joy, and in this state she lived in Paris for about four years, so that the Methodists around her said that she had at last found Christ, or was conscious of having received salvation. However powerful the enthusiasm for Methodism, it too could not hold the Princess in its grip forever. By degrees she grew weary of the vague and sentimental soteriology of the Methodists, and the Princess turned to reading more wholesome works of English theological literature. This literature opened her eyes to the glaring shortcomings of itinerant Methodism and directed her mind toward the sound religious nourishment to be found in the writings of the ancient Fathers, which she began to study to great benefit for her mind and heart, and ultimately made her peace once more with her own Church, from which the gusts of diverse enthusiasms had for a time torn her away.

Religious enthusiasms in those days were a kind of epidemic, and in conversations with his high-society friends Palmer was continually hearing about victims of these enthusiasms. And what gusts would seize the straying sheep of the high-society flock! Dining with a certain Russian prince, a colonel of the Imperial Guard, Palmer heard from him a sad tale. When the Prince was preparing in the Orthodox fashion to go to confession and receive communion in Holy Week, he suddenly received a letter from his family, who were living abroad near Geneva at the time, in which his eldest daughter, writing on behalf of her mother and two younger sisters, informed her dear papa that they had all abandoned the superstition of the Russian Church and converted to the Anglican Church. What distressed the poor Prince most was not that they “had abandoned the superstition of the Russian Church,” but that they had turned to the wrong quarter. “Now Rome,” he said, “is a different matter: there is splendor and grandeur, learning and zeal, and if I had received such a letter from Rome I should not have taken it so much to heart. But their conversion to Protestantism has grieved me deeply.” As for Roman Catholicism, the Prince generally regarded it with favor; by his own admission he was himself ready to acknowledge the Pope, if only it could be proved that the Apostle Peter had once been in Rome, and if the government were, for example, to agree to union with the Roman Catholic Church, then the Prince “would be the first man” among those who would acknowledge the primacy of the Pope.

In Princess Dolgorukaya, Palmer encountered a particular religious enthusiasm all her own. She liked to attend services at the Moravian Brethren’s chapel and thought that this in no way contradicted her Orthodox faith. When Palmer disagreed with her on this point and said that such liberalism was incompatible with true Christian love, the princess energetically defended the rightness of her convictions. “On the contrary,” she said, “it is precisely the manner in which the Catholics put their principles into practice that repels and irritates me against them, and I would sooner go and pray in the temples of the Lutherans and Calvinists than with them. Besides, there is no danger for me in this, because when I am there I do not even feel that I have been in church at all.” — “Your example, however,” Palmer remarked, “may lead others to do the same, which may cause them serious harm. The exclusive zeal and love of the papists convinces and draws people to what they proclaim as the one true Church, whereas your boundless latitudinarian tolerance will never help to snatch anyone from the fire.” At that moment Prince Dolgoruky entered and, joining the conversation, cited scripture in proof that all those are true Christians who confess Jesus Christ and obey their conscience. But even the princess found this principle too broad, and she observed that the prince was going altogether too far.

In the Ryumin household the Anglican theologian encountered with surprise yet another singular enthusiasm. By his religious convictions, as revealed in religious conversation, Ryumin reminded Palmer of the teaching of the Quakers and, as it later emerged, was an ardent propagator of Quakerism. Palmer found at his house whole stacks of Quaker pamphlets and tracts, which Ryumin was distributing everywhere among the English. Such a fact could not fail to strike the Anglican theologian, and he remarked to the Russian Quaker: “You have been infected with dangerous ideas.”

The most extended theological conversation Palmer had in Moscow was with Princess Meshcherskaya. She proved to be very well read in theological literature and had in her turn passed through the usual school of enthusiasms. Her upbringing coincided with the era of the French freethinking and religious scepticism that predominated in Russia at the end of the previous century, but from this malady she had been cured by Dr. Pinkerton, the well-known agent of the Anglo-Continental Bible Society in Russia. He had reawakened in her the religious instinct lulled to sleep by a French education and cultivated in her a taste for theological literature—naturally of the type represented and propagated by that society. The influence of that society’s ideas was strongly reflected in Princess Meshcherskaya, which immediately struck Palmer, who records in his notes the lengthy conversation he had with her, with the purpose of “illustrating that type of liberal evangelicalism whose traces he had already noted more than once in his recollections of conversations with Russians, especially with religious and educated ladies.”

The conversation touched first of all on the question of the Church, and Princess Meshcherskaya said to the Anglican theologian: “I believe in the inner or essential Church, which is in accordance with scripture, but as for the separate external churches, none of them is perfect. Even in the time of the Apostles there were already divisions and very different spiritual conditions in different churches.”

“But the Church was once one in visible and external communion for a period of twelve hundred years, and may become so again,” remarked Palmer, hinting at the possibility of ecclesiastical unity in the idea of catholicity.

“That is merely a pleasant dream. In reality it is quite impossible. The division at the outset arose from the moral corruption and evil desires of Christians. In time there gradually formed even the conviction that division and remaining in it is almost a necessity of the organic structure of society. The original division continued and increased. No, there will be no end to it until the very coming of Christ, when, scarcely finding faith on earth, He will have to rebuild anew the inner and heavenly economy. Take the Roman Catholic communion: it has its defects; insofar as it possesses the essential faith it is very good; but insofar as men have added to it and distorted it, it is very bad. You have your Anglican Church; in many things you have made mistakes, but you have what is necessary—what more do you need? The Russian Church, the Greek Church—altered and distorted less than the papal Church, solely, it seems to me, because the circumstances were different and its prelates were not tempted, as the Roman ones were, by wealth and dominion. And yet it also has its defects. Men have introduced into it their additions and inventions. Thus it has the veneration of saints.”

Such “liberal evangelicalism” on the part of the Russian princess disconcerted the Anglican theologian, and he was compelled to deploy his store of theological argumentation in order to demonstrate to the princess the naturalness and rightness of the doctrine of the veneration of saints—naturally, limiting it in accordance with his own point of view—and he observed that the language she was using was completely Protestant and unworthy of an Orthodox Russian woman. The princess’s general observation that none of the existing churches is perfect and each has its defects found full agreement in Palmer, who confirmed it with his Oxford ideas; but this gave the princess occasion in her turn to note the inconsistency of Palmer himself. “If you agree with me,” she said, “that in every church there are defects and things requiring change, then why do you propose to leave one church in order to exchange it for another? That would only mean exchanging one set of defects for another. The true, essential faith of scripture is one and the same in all of them.”

“I do not wish to leave the English Church in order to accept the Russian, but to unite them. We must not by any means abandon our own church simply because it has defects, so long as we believe that it forms a part of the true Church, and no one can do so without sin. But what do you understand by ‘separate churches’ and by ‘the faith of the Bible, which is one and the same in all of them’? We believe that there is only one Church, and it is both visible and invisible.”

“Where is it, then, and which church exactly?” asked the princess.

“Ask in any country, and everywhere it will be pointed out to you, even by sectarians. The Roman Church is in Rome, the English in England, the Russian in Russia. If anywhere the claim to the title of church should seem doubtful, one can have recourse to the epithets of the true Church—such as Orthodox, Catholic, Apostolic and the like—and by them one can determine which is the ancient original church in any given country. Again, historically we can trace the unity of the whole Church for eleven or twelve hundred years, and, notwithstanding the outward disagreements and divisions between them, we still see traces of three apostolic communities which before that division were one, and which, in substance, if the disagreement is only superficial, remain in the unity of truth even to this day. But if you were to include within your concept of the visible Church all those sects which have set up their own private judgment against the Church, or rather their supposed right to judge and teach against the duty and right of the Church to teach and judge, and have opposed their private interpretation of Holy Scripture to her apostolic and catholic interpretation—then every true Englishman would be compelled to disagree with you.”

“I mean nothing of the sort,” said the princess. “Scripture says nothing of the right of disobedience or of human churches. The formation and governance of the Church, the Bible says, must be accomplished through apostolic mission and authority. Of course the right to teach belongs to the Church, but on the other hand tell me, please, what you understand when you speak of the faith and teaching of those parts of it which you acknowledge as apostolic. In what does the faith and teaching consist in which these parts are in agreement with one another?”

“It would take a great deal of time to enumerate all the points of agreement. They are all agreed with one another in all the articles of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, and are in general sufficiently agreed in the teaching concerning the Church and the sacraments to be on guard against the heresies of Protestantism. Furthermore, they are all agreed that all Christians must be baptized and observe the four things set forth at the end of the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles (continuing steadfastly in the Apostles’ teaching, in the fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers—II, 42).”

“Yes, all of this is in the Bible; I quite agree with you. If such is your church and faith, then I am in some measure a member of it,” agreed the Russian princess.

In order to acquaint the princess with the ideas of the Oxford society, Palmer gave her to read a publication of that society entitled “Plain Sermons.” At their next meeting the princess told Palmer that she had read these “sermons” with great pleasure. “I intend to translate some of them into Russian and publish them,” she said. “Just recently I translated and published the work of Baxter—‘The Saints’ Everlasting Rest.’” Palmer was surprised and asked: “Do the censors really allow such books through?”

“They make certain changes at their discretion, but these changes are usually trifling and of no significance.”

“And yet it seems it cannot be easy—to make a book written on the basis of false doctrine suitable for use by an Orthodox Christian,” Palmer remarked with gentle sarcasm.

“As for me, I see no difference between the theology of the ‘Plain Sermons’ and the books of the English dissenters. I read edifying books by writers of both these classes alike, and I see no difference, because I do not look for any.”

“Nevertheless,” replied Palmer, “it is easy to see that you read predominantly sectarian writers, and your ideas and language are strongly coloured by their peculiar and, as we think, extremely erroneous opinions.”

In connection with Princess Meshcherskaya’s account of the Bible Society’s activity in Russia, Palmer observes that the Russians apparently had no conception of what subtle poison lay hidden in every particle of the enlightened zeal—or zeal for enlightenment—that distinguished this society, and how it had made itself known in the opinions expressed by his high-society interlocutress. “Madame Meshcherskaya,” he says, “was a victim, as I must call her, of one of two religious movements against the Orthodox Church, which were produced or sustained by two antagonistic societies and whose traces have been visible on the preceding pages—namely the society of the Jesuits and the Bible Society. Each of them had a temporary success, but in the end, first one and then the other were forcibly expelled from the country, as soon as the government and the hierarchy saw that both, in their different ways, were working against the ecclesiastical traditions and national convictions of Russia.” The influence of the Bible Society, which had produced an extreme unsettling of theological thought in high-society circles, was so strong that even some members of the higher ecclesiastical administration were not free from it. Thus Mr. Skripitsyn, who held one of the highest posts in the Synodal administration, said to Palmer: “Our Church, like ourselves, has one good quality: its tolerance. We are not like Rome, which anathematizes all others. We have our own ritual, but we can be at peace with others, because in essence all is one. We all worship the same Christ, and everything else is a matter of comparative indifference.” Such a view seemed to Palmer extremely mistaken, and to this liberal “evangelicalism” of the Synodal official the Anglican theologian replied: “I cannot allow two or more faiths, as you apparently do, but think that either we are of the same faith, or else one of us is a heretic. There is only one faith, one Church, one baptism…”

In the face of such a shakiness of theological thought in high-society circles, Palmer naturally found it difficult to establish a correct perspective on his scheme of Catholic union of the churches. Whenever he introduced the subject, he met either extreme confessionalism, which threatened the horrors of popular uprisings and bloodshed as the consequence of carrying out this scheme, or extreme indifferentism, which attached so little importance to the confessional forms of church life that Palmer found himself having to introduce his interlocutors and interlocutrices within the bounds of reasonable orthodoxy, or finally, a liberal evangelicalism which in principle contradicted the very idea of the Oxford movement and thus destroyed any hope of establishing a firm church unity built on strict principles of catholicity. It is understandable that in these circles Palmer could not obtain any more or less correct and serious evaluation of his scheme. For this he had to turn to one of the rigorous exponents of Orthodox theological thought, and he turned to Metropolitan Philaret.