Liberating Christianity

Is Russia European or Asian?

Rev. Dr. Thomas Calnan Sorenson

© Thomas Calnan Sorenson, 2020. All rights reserved.

A little while ago my adult daughter, knowing of course that earlier in my life I had earned a Ph.D. in Russian history, asked me: Is Russia European or Asian? I answered: Yes. I meant by that perhaps cryptic answer that Russia is both European and Asian. There is of course a geographic component to that answer. Although the continents we call Europe and Asia are only one landmass (of which Africa is also a part), we usually place a dividing ling between them at the Ural Mountains. The historical homeland of the Russians is on the European side of that line. Over the centuries, however, Russia expanded to the east. Russian control came to extend to what is now the US state of Alaska. So for at least the last several hundred years geographically speaking Russia has had one foot in Europe and one foot in Asia. In that geographic sense Russia is indeed both European and Asian.

There is however another aspect to my answer that Russia is both European and Asian that is actually more important. That aspect of my answer is cultural and historical rather than geographic. I mean cultural here in the broadest sense. It includes things like art and religion, but I intend it also to include the political aspects of a people’s life. In this broad cultural sense Russia has always been a bit hard to define. There are and long have been both European and Asian aspects to Russia’s identity.

I wish here to explore those aspects of Russia’s identity, but before I do I need to explain what I mean by European and what I mean by Asian. I mean no value judgment in what I say here. Of course I have my personal preferences and opinions. They are however irrelevant here. I will try to leave them out of my discussion of Russia’s identity in this piece.

By Asian, or Asiatic, at least as it applies to Russia, I mean primarily the sociological and political elements of culture. Asian political systems, at least until quite recent times and still in China and elsewhere, have been authoritarian or even totalitarian. Most people have had few or no rights the government had to respect and no meaningful participation in their government. Asian cultures have had no tradition of individual freedom. The collective has always been more important than the individual. Independent civil institutions are largely unknown in traditional Asian cultures. There were no institutions that could act as centers of opposition to the state. The people have been a mass that the government governs but usually not for the benefit of the masses but only for the benefit of a small, wealthy elite. Most of the people by far were impoverished peasants working land they didn’t own. Asian cultures for the most part may have been influenced to some degree by the great developments in European culture, but until recently they haven’t much participated in those developments.

It is those great developments that distinguish and define European culture. They begin, more or less at least, with the Roman Empire. Western Europe inherited Rome’s traditions of a standardized legal code and a practical, rational way of thinking. The Roman Empire was gone by the sixth century CE, and western Europe entered the so-called Dark Ages. It’s not that nothing happened in those centuries. One important development was the creation in the year 800 CE of the Holy Roman Empire, with Charlemagne as its first emperor. It was neither holy, Roman, nor a true empire, but it was a political institution separate from the church and often in conflict with it. Those supposedly dark centuries also saw the beginnings of what became western Europe’s nation states, especially in France. Those embryonic states were also independent of and often in opposition to the church.

Beginning in roughly the eleventh century CE western Europe entered what we call the High Middle Ages. Those centuries saw the rise of cities as centers of commercial and cultural activity. Roman Catholic culture blossomed, as seen particularly in the spectacular Gothic cathedrals the emerging cities constructed. Those magnificent structures express a soaring of the human spirit and a faith in the future unlike anything seen before.

One of the major cultural developments of the High Middle Ages was western Europe’s rediscovery of Aristotle. That great philosopher of ancient Greece and forerunner of modern science had been unknown in the West. His works and thought were preserved by the Islamic cultures of the time, which for centuries had far surpassed western European culture in virtually every cultural realm including architecture, theology, science, mathematics (there is a reason we call them Arabic numerals), and philosophy. Arab scholars translated Aristotle into Arabic. In Muslim Spain Christian scholars translated those Arabic translations of Aristotle in to Latin. These Latin translations found their way from Spain into France and other parts of western Europe. They played a major role in the development of scholastic theology. Epitomized by intellectual giants like Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas, scholastic theology introduced a highly rationalized way of thinking into western culture. That way of thinking would find its fullest development centuries later in the European Enlightenment. Scholastic thought differed from Enlightenment rationalism in that it accepted the supposedly revealed truths of Christianity as given and unassailable, but it was rationalistic in the extreme in the way it worked with those truths.

The High Middle Ages were quickly followed, quickly in the historical sense at least, by the Renaissance. Beginning in the fourteenth century in Italy and then in other areas of western Europe as well, western Europeans rediscovered the centrality of the human being that had characterized ancient Greece. Western European culture became humanistic in ways it never had been before. Look, for example, at Michelangelo’s magnificent depiction of the male human form in his David or at the way Renaissance painters created realistic portraits of individual persons.

Not long after the flourishing of artistic culture in the Renaissance western Europe experienced (or perhaps suffered through) the Protestant Reformation. Protestant thought developed the humanism of the Renaissance in the terms of Christian theology. For our purposes here the most important thing about the Reformation is its contention that each individual person has her or his own personal, direct relationship with God with no need for intermediaries in the form of saints or priests. Protestantism raised the individual from a status that required religious structures for salvation to the level of autonomous individuals free from the dictates of Rome.

Then in 1637 the French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist Rene Descartes wrote, first in French, “Je pense, donc je suis,” I think therefore I am, better known in its Latin form of Cogito ergo sum and often referred to as simply “the Cogito.” The world hasn’t been the same since. Descartes’ contention that because he experiences himself thinking he can know that he is, that he exists, is purely rationalistic. (It’s also incorrect, for his experience that he is sitting there thinking could be deceiving him, but never mind.) He reached his world-changing conclusion by setting out to doubt everything he could doubt. He concluded that he could doubt everything except that he was there doubting. He could not doubt that there was an “I” doing the doubting. Ergo Cogito ergo sum.

In the Cogito from 1637 we see the beginnings of what was and remains the most radical and important shift in thinking in human history, the European Enlightenment. In the Enlightenment human reason displaced divine revelation as the source and standard of all truth. The rational came to rule the day. People reasoned their way to new insights about politics, economics. ethics, and every other realm of human life. A new reliance on the human mind as the source of truth produced the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and thereafter. Truth was reduced to fact. People came to believe that if something could not be proved to be factually true it wasn’t true in any sense at all.

All of these developments in western Europe produced some fundamental understandings that characterize western culture to this day. West European culture (and that phrase includes the dominant cultures in the United States and elsewhere) values the political and economic rights of the individual to an extent that no other human culture does or ever has. West European culture relies on science as the sole source of knowledge and truth to an extent that no other human culture does or ever has. The leading edge of western culture may be moving beyond some of the verities of the Enlightenment, but those verities remain the mainstays of western European culture to this day.

So: Is Russia European or Asian? The answer has to be I think that despite its original geographic location Russia in its origins was almost exclusively Asian. Throughout its history Russia was untouched by most of the historical developments discussed above that establish western culture. There was no Roman Empire. There was no High Middle Ages, no Renaissance, no Reformation, and no indigenous Enlightenment. At no time until very recently did the mass of the Russian people have any rights that the state was compelled to respect. Over the centuries most of them became serfs tied to the land and hardly better off than slaves. Serfdom didn’t end in Russia until 1861. At least until very recent times at best Russia has never had any civil or religious institutions that have stood in opposition to the state. In 988 CE Russia became Orthodox Christian when Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev converted to that faith. It did not inherit the tradition of church-state antagonism that was so important in the history of western Europe. Following the pattern of the Byzantine Orthodox Church from which it sprung, the Russian Orthodox Church became a bulwark of the state and never stood in opposition to it, not even to any meaningful extent during the decades of Communist rule when the state, at times at least, was aggressively hostile toward the Church and would have destroyed it entirely had it been able to do so.

There never was any other civil organization that did or ever could become a meaningful center of activity or values apart from the state. Even in Vladimir Putin’s Russia of today the state works hard to keep civil organizations under its thumb. Russia has never had any tradition of popular participation in government. The country today is nominally democratic, but President Putin so controls the country’s political processes that meaningful opposition is virtually impossible. Some who have tried to lead an opposition have ended up murdered. Given Russia’s history that reality is certainly understandable, but it means that politically Russia remains largely Asiatic to this day.

Which is not to say that western European culture has been unknown or without influence in Russia. Quite the contrary. Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725), is well known for his attempts to “westernize” Russia. He introduced western styles of dress and grooming to Russia and compelled the people of his court to comply with them. He build a new city on empty swamp land along the river Neva near the Gulf of Finland. He gave it a German name, Sankt Peterburg, rather than a Russian one. (The Russian version would be Petrograd, which is what the name was changed to during World War I.) He intended that it look European not Russian. It looks more western European than any other Russian city to this day. He built a summer palace on the Gulf of Finland to the west of the city and intended it to challenge and in some ways to imitate Versailles. It is a truly magnificent structure, but it would look more in place in France than it does in Russia. Peter was intrigued by western Europe’s advanced technology, especially shipbuilding technology. He traveled, supposedly incognito, to Holland to study that technology. It’s hard to imagine that as a 6’8” tall Russian he wouldn’t stand out, but never mind.

Peter did have some lasting effects on Russia. The Russian imperial court looked more western than Russian from his day until its end in 1917. He reorganized the Russian government on western models, although he intended that reorganization to improve the efficiency of the government and to increase the tsar’s control of the country rather than to decentralize it or give any power to anyone else. He abolished to Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church and replaced it with the Holy Synod, a collective body overseen by an Over Procurator appointed by the tsar. It came to function much like an imperial ministry of religious affairs. So Peter the Great did have some significant effect on Russian life.

Yet we must say that that effect always remained superficial at least in its westernizing aspects. In Peter’s day and thereafter the Russian upper classes took on a western appearance. They began to create art and music in the western style of their day. They would come to write some of the greatest literature in western forms. Think of novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or the plays of Chekhov for example. Tchaikovsky and other great Russian composers wrote some of Europe’s greatest music. The upper echelons of Russian society became westernized and made significant contributions to western European culture. Beyond these developments certain circles of the Russian elite accepted aspects of western political philosophy. Some of them adopted western liberal ideas and began to hope that Russia would somehow become a western style parliamentary democracy.

Others were drawn to Marxism, a thoroughly western ideology that claimed to be perfectly scientific. Russians and people of other nationalities within the Russian Empire, most notably the Georgian Josef Stalin, who claimed to be Marxists seized control of the country between 1917 and 1922. They claimed to be creating worker’s paradise on earth on a Marxist model, never mind that Marx’s political and economic analysis was based on and addressed societies far more industrially advanced than Russia was. The Soviet Marxists, who came to call themselves Communists, actually created a totalitarian hell that was thoroughly Asiatic in its total disregard of the rights of the individual and of individual human dignity and worth. They did some things more grounded in western thought than were their political structures and actions. They created universal literacy. They developed western science to a high degree especially in the fields of engineering, rocket science, and weaponry. Yet they did all that under political and economic systems that looked far more Asiatic than European.

The Soviet system collapsed and was officially abolished in late 1991. Both in Russia and in the west there was hope that a new Russia would emerge patterned more on western institutions than Russia ever had been before. That did happen to some extent. Russia today has a parliamentary form of government, or at least on paper it does. Russian citizens have more rights and more personal freedom than they have ever had before. Moscow, the essential Russian city, looks a lot more like a western metropolis than it used to.

For all that, however, Russia today is hardly a model of western European politics. Vladimir Putin has concentrated political power in his own hands in a perfectly Russian way. Some call him Russia’s new tsar for good reason. Russia holds nominally free and fair elections, but Putin and his party always win by suspiciously large margins. The state has once again cozied up to the Russian Orthodox Church in a very Russian way, even writing some Orthodox social teaching into a proposed new constitution. In the Soviet years Russia had a legal system that worked reasonably well in cases in which the Communist Party took no interest. When the KGB took an interest in a case however, it always got the result it wanted. The Russian legal system works the same way today. When Putin wants to silence an opponent the courts are always happy to oblige.

Perhaps the most important development in Russia’s history is what didn’t happen. Russia didn’t participate in most of the major developments of western European history. Russia had no legacy from Rome. It had no High Middle Ages. It had nothing like the Italian Renaissance. The Protestant Reformation was meaningless to it. The elite upper classes of Russia dabbled in the thought of the European Enlightenment. Catherine the Great even brought some of the major minds of the French Enlightenment to Russia. The Enlightenment, however, had no significant effect on most of the Russian people. Peter the Great may have been a westernizer, and Catherine the Great was German not Russian. Neither they nor any other Russian ruler before Alexander II in the 1860s, however, even tried to make Russia’s foundational social structures more western. Enlightenment political thought had no real effect in Russia until at least the mid-19^th century.

So is Russia European or Asian? Yes. Russia is actually both. Over the last three hundred years it has taken on many aspects of western European culture. Yet at heart it remains Asian especially in its political culture. Russia has no meaningful tradition of democratic government or respect for individual rights. Yes, in the first decades of the twentieth century some western countries descended into totalitarian systems as destructive as the Soviet one, but in those countries totalitarianism was an anomaly. After the nightmare of Nazism Germany, for example, became a model western democracy. After the Soviet nightmare Russia didn’t. It won’t for a long time if ever. Such is the power of history, and Russia’s history is far too Asiatic for that to happen. So yes, Russia is European and Asian. It is likely to remain so for a very long time.