Chapter VII

There is a certain obvious parallel between religion in North America and religion in Russia, because both countries are, and have been, for centuries, fundamentally Christian. Yet the dissimilarities on the face of it, are so manifest that it might seem to a visitor from another planet that the religious life of the two countries sprang from sources as opposed as the religion, let us say, of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Assyria. What American Christianity accepts, Russian Christianity rejects, and vice versa.

In both lands, Christianity came from without, and was an entirely foreign creed to the animism practised by the natives before its advent. But where American Christianity emerged from what has been called Protestantism, that is to say the right of the individual to decide on questions of faith for himself, Russian religion came from the Orthodoxy of the Byzantine church, with its submission of the individual intelligence to a super-personal, wonder-working power transmitted by consecration from patriarch to patriarch. The differences in form and outward observance all spring from an inner difference in psychological attitude. To the American, the soul of the individual believer is alone important, and his salvation is the one desirable aim; to the Russian the communion of believers is alone important, and the individual soul only retains his hold on salvation by virtue of his complete adherence and loyalty to it. Consequently in America, religion exalts the moral standard of the individual good life; in Russia it upholds the spiritual standard of the communal believing life. The one exalts conduct, the other faith.

It has not escaped the notice of shrewd historians that the American makes a constant attempt to prove that his great men were intensely moral and respectable in character. Washington is exalted above Jefferson on the basis of a few legends like that of the cherry tree or the other story, not less unhistorical, to the effect that the great Revolutionary leader prayed at Valley Forge. Paine, who by his inspired polemic probably did more to precipitate the Revolution than any other publicist of the time, is tacitly ignored as being “a dirty little atheist.” Recently, attempts have been made to show that Lincoln was exaltedly religious; attempts that rest on exceedingly flimsy foundations. And if Woodrow Wilson maintains any favour in America, it will be rather because of his unbending Presbyterianism than because of his eminent ability as a statesman. It is because Roosevelt, his great rival, upheld the motto of “Fear God and take your own part” and led the life of the normal husband and father, that he is immensely popular among millions of his fellow-countrymen to-day.

The Russians go to the exactly opposite extreme. Their heroes are precisely those whose lives were heroic examples of disregard of moral conduct. Ivan the Terrible, blood-soaked, sensual, and incapable of achieving any faith beyond the basest superstition; Peter the Great, mocking the church-ceremonies with drunken parody, making and unmaking patriarchs, the accursed Antichrist of the Old Believers; Pugachev, the outlaw who despoiled nobles and monasteries alike; Tolstoy, the great heretic and excommunicate, such are the sort of men Russia unconsciously honours. Against them the Church can put nothing in the field but a handful of monks and thaumaturgists.

That morals can be separated from faith has been consistently denied throughout the history of European Christianity, by some of the most intelligent men that European Christianity has produced. Whether this denial is valid or not, there can be no doubt that Nature in itself is morally indifferent, just as it is æsthetically indifferent. One can, unfortunately, believe in life without believing in any specific moral code; and the result is that what we call Christianity has been divided into warring sects, those that exalt the observance of the feasts and sacraments prescribed by the Church above moral discipline, and those that exalt the achievement of lofty moral character above all feasts and ceremonies. The former in the main, is the way taken by Russia; the latter the way taken by America. In Russia one asks first whether so-and-so is a believer or an atheist; in America whether so-and-so is or is not “a good man.”

2

Every religious system (not excluding polytheism) defines Godhead now in terms of outward nature, now in terms of man’s own inner comprehension of himself. Religion is the meeting-place of objective fact and subjective psychology; it is therefore the most comprehensive and at the same time the least definable of all human activities. Until we understand this fact we are in the position of a great many nineteenth century free-thinkers, who for the life of them could not understand why people should want to make such a pother about religion when they could build factories instead of cathedrals, and amass worldly wealth instead of seeking for the kingdom of heaven. To such people, religion in itself seemed too childish and unprogressive to be considered important. As a matter of fact, it was precisely these nineteenth century materialists and unbelievers who were childish in their faith in human progress, as the Great War proved.

Religion, in its most complete sense, might almost be defined as the “most complex and mature attitude it is possible to take towards reality.” This attitude comes from a fusion of all our faculties: animal as well as intellectual, moral as well as æsthetic, individual as well as social; organised on the plane of the individual will. This fusion combines the boundless and at bottom irrational faith in life that must guide us if we are to live at all, with the limited and rational faith in a common moral code of conduct. It is because of this combination of opposites that religion exists in some measure, even among the irreligious; while the most highly religious being only achieves it imperfectly. It attempts to reconcile both the absolute and the relative, the single individual’s relation to the infinite, with man’s whole relation to society.

From such a standpoint, both Russia and America have been incompletely religious. In the one case, religion has relied altogether on its thaumaturgic power over nature. One gets an impression, from reading much Russian history, that the whole people have spent most of their lives for centuries in making pilgrimages, praying to icons, visiting monasteries, crying “Christ is risen!” on each successive Easter Day, despite the fact they were living all the time in inimitable dirt, disorder, oppression, and misery. Russian literature, being, for the most part, an intellectual revolt against the pre-intellectual instinct that dictated these practices, and aiming also for the most part at a source of power that is far beyond the grasp of religious semi-magic ritual, has largely disregarded these plain obvious facts, but they remain in history. When we read that in Catherine the Great’s day, the Moscow mob raised riots because the government proposed to remove from its place a celebrated wonder-working image of the Madonna,[4] at the foot of which the people were dying of cholera in heaps; when we read that, in the revolution of 1905, one of the heroes was Father Gapon who led the starving and striking mob into the square before the Winter Palace, and bade them kneel there, where they were promptly shot down by the Czar’s troops (it later transpired that Father Gapon was an _agent provocateur_ in government employment); when we read of the enormous prestige of Rasputin, then we realise that to every Russian religion is something vast, mysterious, miracle-working. Only Dostoevsky has brought out this quality of the Russian mind; his great work, “The Brothers Karamazov,” essentially defines the attitude towards God of all its characters. And God is primarily to all, power, a force divorced from good or bad alike, that which will give each of these characters the desires of his own heart. Even old Karamazov, monster of immorality that he is and incapable of any redeeming action, in this sense worships God.

One is even more impressed at this emphasis on the magic power of religion made by the Russian mind, when one realises that the Church not only blessed the fields, agricultural implements and cattle of the peasants in the past, but also, according to Tolstoy, the government-owned vodka factories and the brothels. So strong was the feeling that religion gave to its professors a power of superhuman and super-moral healing and blessing, that a Rasputin could under the cloak of religion, carry on his shameless erotic practices undisturbed. The feeling that everything in religion was necessarily sacrosanct, accounts also for the rise of the Old Believers, who could not accept Peter the Great’s and the Patriarch Nikon’s reform of the spelling of the Church books. The Church, even in its errors, was so much above the world that the world must not interfere with it. The Word of the Church was sacred, and must be held so at whatever cost to logic.

The typical Russian peasant would therefore have agreed with Blake that “everything that lives is holy” without adding thereto the corollary that the tradition of the Church was not a living thing, but was merely a dead tradition stifling the free spirit of independent inquiry. And even the thorough-going attack on religion and the Orthodox Church engineered by the Bolsheviks, has partaken of the same fanatic faith in the magic power of rites and phrases. The body of Lenin was substituted for saints and icons; and faith in Marxian formulas took the place of faith in Church ceremonies. We will not understand Bolshevism if we continue to think it irreligious. In all essentials it is simply a new religion--or if one prefers, a new heresy. It is rooted in the same fanatic faith in magic practices that the Russian mind has everywhere displayed, from the time that Ivan the Great spoke of the _pallium_ of Rome being transferred to Moscow.

3

We are accustomed to think of America as primarily the land of religious toleration; but we are apt to forget that this toleration was only born after nearly a century of complete intolerance, in which New England itself, then at the head of American colonial effort, took the lead. The American historian, Brooks Adams, in his “Emancipation of Massachusetts,” has given us a useful summary of this period, dating from the foundation of the Massachusetts Colony down the eve of the Revolution; and has shown us how the founders of New England, Endicott, Winthrop, and the rest, aimed at a thorough-going theocracy which would permit neither religious dissent nor liberty of conscience. The tale of executions, whippings, imprisonments, outrages and threats executed upon unfortunate Antinomians, Quakers, Episcopalians, and other sects dissenting from the “established faith” of New England Congregationalism makes painful reading.

As a matter of fact, American toleration rests and always has rested on respect for established property rights. The Puritans who founded New England had obtained a charter from the King enabling them to make a settlement in Massachusetts territory. They constrained this to mean that no other opposing Protestant sect would be allowed either to enter or to preach in their territory; while the Catholics in Maryland, the Episcopalians in Virginia behaved not very differently. Their religion became to them the symbol of their possessions--possessions that they guarded jealously not less against all Indian attempts to recover them, but against Royal and Parliamentary interference alike. The result was that it was only such sentimental deists as Jefferson, or such sentimental Quakers as Franklin, who realised the necessity for toleration. They were in a minority. To most Americans religious toleration has been but a phrase for moral intolerance.

To this day in America, great educational foundations which enjoy enormous endowments, prestige, and power, are outwardly identified with certain religious sects. Nothing can be taught in them except what these sects prescribe as “moral.” To the traveller in America, interested in education, it is often puzzling to be told that such and such a university has a chapel to which all students are compelled to go, although they may subscribe to some totally different religious creed. Thus Princeton is Presbyterian; Yale, Congregational; the University of Chicago, Baptist; Vanderbilt and dozens of other southern colleges, Methodist; and so on. The non-sectarian college or university is the exception, rather than the rule. And that is because religion and moral teaching go hand in hand.

The American, it must be understood, maintains the attitude of complete inner spiritual liberty only at the price of outward moral conformity. In this respect he stands at precisely the opposite pole to the Russian, whose steady maintenance of inner spiritual obedience is frequently belied by furious outward revolts in the direction of complete moral license. Each has one half of a religion and each neglects the fact that every lasting religious body is a great compromise between the external and internal character of man, representing alike an outward discipline and an inner assent. To the American the assent is all that matters, not the discipline. Thus even so respectable a member of the Catholic faith as Governor Alfred Smith of New York could recently declare that he believed in the complete separation of the Church and State, and assert that the Church had no right to interfere with politics, without realising that in thus upholding the private assent of the citizen above all religious discipline, he completely destroyed the ancient Roman Catholic opposition to right of private judgment and thereby fully justified the long revolt of Protestantism.

In such a state as America presents to the world, religion becomes a question not of “By what power is God going to save me?” but of “How am I to behave, so as to do right?” This question lies at the root of the American conscience. If England is, as Frenchmen have said, the land of moral fog, America is the land of moral blindness. It has not escaped foreign observers that America is ruled by sermons and by preachers. Here, indeed, American literature has little to reveal to us, as Russian literature has little to say about peasant superstitions concerning icons and saints’ days.[5] But from Jonathan Edwards to Channing, from Channing to Henry Ward Beecher, from Beecher down to the recent Billy Sunday and Aimee McPherson, all America--vulgar as well as intelligent--waits every Sunday morning on its favourite preacher in order to obtain moral guidance for the ensuing week in its affairs. The sermon is to the American what the sacrament and the benediction is to the Russian--a special talisman, something enabling him to carry on his life, get his business done, clear up his relations with women, regulate his activity. Hence the enormous popularity in recent America of sermons dealing with the conduct of one’s business. Hence the upholding of Jesus and the Apostles as typical “go-getters” and even efficiency experts; the culmination of which is in such a recent book as “The Man Nobody Knows” where Christ becomes the prototype of the typical American advertisement agent!

The typical American therefore conceives of everyone as being “free and equal” in Jefferson’s phrase without adding thereto the corollary that everyone should be free to behave as it pleases him. On the contrary, the more you meddle with your neighbour’s conduct the better for both him and you. The Americans tend more and more to substitute “uplift” in the place of religion--and the hankerings of the mystically-minded (mostly the least literate and least economically independent, therefore the least powerful) among them, pass unheard. Most Americans would readily subscribe to Mark Twain’s dictum that man is “worthless unless he is regulated,” and far from agreeing with Matthew Arnold that conduct is three-fourths of life, they would make conduct all of it. The belief that has emerged out of such a creed, resolutely held, may be briefly summarised as a faith that the increase of business, higher wages, and more prosperity on the American model will definitely save the world. This belief has already its apostles, chief of whom is perhaps Henry Ford. It, like Bolshevism, is a heresy, which we must nevertheless reckon with as America’s chief contribution to the solution of the great religious problem which vexes the world. Instead of demanding that the oppressed proletarians everywhere must unite to conquer the world, it says simply, “Make your fortune quick. In prosperity lies happiness.”

4

It is impossible to leave this subject of religion and of America’s and Russia’s peculiar angle of approach to it, without some reference to the reciprocal influence America and Russia have had on religion as practised in Europe. For both countries obtained their religions ultimately from this source, though in the one case it was Byzantine Orthodoxy that was borrowed, while on the other, it was Puritanic Northern Protestantism.

To the average American any European form of religion is not good enough. He demands a standard of conduct that is morally speaking, egalitarian. What shocks him in religion as practised in European countries is its disregard of the standards of living that he is accustomed to at home. The picturesque dirt and disorder of Italian lazzaroni, Spanish beggars, the promiscuity of English slums, the grossness of German or Dutch peasants--all this shocks him as a manifestation of moral blindness. He would gladly see all these peoples washed, sanitated, above all made literate: his own respect for “law and order,” shown in the popularity of sermons, is proof of this. The ideal of useful citizenship which he maintains as substitute for the mystic experience of Godhead, or the no less mystic experience of repentance and reconciliation, makes him intolerant of any creed that refrains from interference with the individual. His insistence upon moral conduct has made him frequently uncharitable to his own neighbours--as anyone who has lived for long in an American small town can testify. This uncharitableness he extends in even fuller measure to the stranger within and without his gates. The hordes of European immigrants that come into his own country, the hosts of unwashed and unregenerate foreigners without are not respectable--they do not regulate their lives by his standards. His solution of the problem upholds a great hope, but it is a hope without charity.

The average Russian, on the other hand, looks on European religion as deficient not in goodness, but in truth. Catholicism has merely become a branch of state-service, and Protestantism is too deeply tainted with moral hypocrisy. But what is important to the Russian to know is this; whether it is true that by any sacrament, prayer, or magic ritual men become united to God? Is it true that Christ really did rise from the dead for all mankind and manifests himself to them? Then let us make trial of that possibility. In the days before the downfall of the Romanovs, thousands of Russian peasants annually made the pilgrimage to Palestine, and thought themselves lucky if they died on the banks of the Jordan, believing that by this magic act they would be immediately transported to Paradise, whatever their previous sins. And the whole basis of Dostoevsky’s teaching, and to a great extent that of Tchekhov and Tolstoy, was that “everything must be forgiven.” The whole of Russia demanded a miracle, and perhaps it was because the Bolsheviks promised such a miracle, that Russia accepted the Bolsheviks. Above all the miracle must come from without, and the Bolsheviks came from abroad bringing with them a new gospel. That was enough to convince millions who were utterly unprepared to accept the historic materialism, or the opposition to religion that lay at the root of Bolshevik teaching. The question the Russian continually asks--even the most open and avowed atheist among them asks it--is, by what means can man obtain the superhuman power to make himself akin to God? The Russian, in his desire for power, is willing to disregard every standard of ordinary moral conduct in order to become united to Godhead. The American, in his insistence on the Mosaic code which is motivated almost altogether by respect for property, is willing to take up the most intolerant Puritanism, rather than suffer interference with his property. Unlike the American creed of moral conformity to the community for the sake of material gain, the Russian religion has infinite charity to the sinner, despises the wealth of the world, and produces outlaws, anarchists, schismatics continually. That is why to the Russian mind of to-day, a few words of Karl Marx or of Darwin may become equally important as a Gospel as anything in the Bible; it equally explains why to the American mind of to-day, a Bruce Barton or a Billy Sunday are of superior importance to Saint Augustine or the Apostles.