Autocracy

A Sermon for the day of the Sacred Chrismation and the Coronation of Our Most Pious Sovereign Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich

I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession (Ps 2:8)

The solemn day has arrived for the remembrance and celebration of the Sacred Chrismation and Coronation of our Most Pious Sovereign Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich.

I thank the Lord, who deemed me worthy to stand very near as a beholder and partaker of this sacred royal and all-Russian solemnity. May the grace of the Sacred Chrismation abide upon our Sovereign indelibly and ever effectually, and may the Holy Spirit rest upon Him always—the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of courage and strength.

Let us converse, beloved brethren, in honor of the present all-Russian solemnity, on the superiority of autocracy over all other forms of state government.

I will give you the nations as your inheritance, and the ends of the earth as your possession, says the Lord through the Prophet-King; that is, I will give you the peoples as an inheritance, and the bounds of the earth as your possession. Strictly speaking, this saying refers to the promised Messiah Christ, the expectation of all nations; but it can justly be applied also to the sovereign Leader of the Russian Kingdom, which comprises many tribes and peoples and stretches almost to all the ends of the earth; for the Russian Sovereign is the only Orthodox Anointed One of God and the image of God’s dominion on earth, the first crowned Son of the Church.

From ancient times our tsars and emperors have been called autocratic and sole-sovereign, and in their autocracy and sole sovereignty, together with Orthodoxy, lies the might, breadth and glory of Russia: for ever since our pious tsars gathered our fatherland and knit it into one whole political body, it quickly began to grow strong and to spread in every direction, and now it stands by the mercy of God at the height of its political position. Autocracy is the most natural, most rational, and most beneficial form of government for earthly kingdoms, the most reliable authority, since it comes directly from God, the one Creator and Sustainer of the world. Authority has been given to you by the Lord, and power from the Most High[1], says the wise Solomon.

The world, created by a motion of the will and by the word of the one God, is governed in all its parts, infinitely great and small and invisibly small, by the wisdom and power of the one God.

The earth and an infinite number of heavenly bodies, or luminaries and planets, incomparably larger than our earth or equal to it or smaller, hang in the depths of cosmic space on nothing at all and move in wondrous order for whole millennia, never meeting or colliding with a single luminary and producing not the slightest disorder in the moving worlds—why? Because one almighty Hand holds them, moves them and guides them according to the laws of gravity. Everywhere in the universe and in all created worlds there is seen one infinite Mind, a single power and will of the Creator.

On our earth, as a planet, the same laws operate in all creatures, in all the elements, in all the kingdoms of nature. The human race is subject to one moral law—conscience.

The Creator and God common to all subjected all people to a single law—the law of love and mutual obedience. From the most ancient times, human families and societies were subject first to fathers, or to the elders of their kin, then to patriarchs, as among the Hebrews, and then to princes and tsars. Every species among the countless multitude of beings or creatures of the earth, animate and inanimate, is guided in its existence by the same instincts and habits given to it from God; by these it lives and is governed, supplying well-being to itself, or to the man who tames them to himself.

In all the reasoned actions of people, in all their works—in the sciences, in the arts—there can be discerned a single unifying thought; in writings, in treatises, in books there is a single one that binds together the whole multitude of thoughts and words—an idea, or a thought, that permeates the whole book as the soul does the body, and gives it order, life, interest, edification.

In every well-ordered institution—state, educational, charitable, or medical—there is one statute for all, and likewise one chief person governing the institution; in the army—in time of war or of peace—there is one chief commander who unites and directs all the parts and actions of the army; in the institutions of government all ranks are subject to one chief head—the minister—and the whole state is subject to one person, the monarch or sovereign.

Thus, sole rule and autocracy in a state is the most natural form of government, one pointed out and sanctioned by God, the form most of all conducive to the prosperity and success of the state and to the good of its subjects, and indeed to the good of the peace of other states as well. A single sovereign word from a mighty monarch can put a stop to the bloodshed of war and establish peace between warring powers, as has just now taken place, at the word of our Sovereign, between the warring Greeks and Turks—something a republic of any state would scarcely ever have been able to achieve.

Let us recall the internal discord of our ancient Russian princes, who warred against one another and weakened Russia. What did this discord lead to? To enslavement by the Tatars. And what did the unification of Rus by one autocratic tsar, Ivan III, lead to? To complete deliverance from the Tatar yoke. And by the policy that followed, and by the monarchical power of the tsars and emperors of Russia, she has been brought to her present greatness and glory.

So then, let us always thank God with all our heart that He has given, and to this day still gives, us autocratic and sole-sovereign tsars after His own heart, preserving the succession of the house of Romanov, and in them the spirit of Orthodoxy and of striving for the exaltation of the Orthodox faith and Church, and of the Russian state. Amen.