...The war France is going to wage against Russia is not a political war at all but a holy war; that this is not a war between state and state, between nation and nation, but solely a war of religion; that all the other reasons put forward by the cabinets are merely pretexts; that the true cause of this war, the sacred cause, the cause agreeable to God, is the necessity of expunging the error of Photius, of repressing, suppressing this error; that this is the acknowledged goal of this crusade, and that this has been the hidden but unacknowledged goal of all the other crusades.

— Archbishop Marie-Dorainique-Auguste Sibur, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Paris at the start of the Crimean War, 1855.

Alexei Khomiakov (1804-1860) is likely the most misunderstood thinker of the Russian nineteenth century. He is, frankly, the synthesis of Orthodox thinking on papism and the West, and thus represents a major intellectual threat to the unthinking liberalism of the American talking class and to the pseudo-morality of post-modem liberal capitalism. Khomiakov's critique of the West is multilayered and complex, taking in to itself metahistory, theology, metaphysics and political theory. Either from lack of desire or ability, there are few honest publications on the Slavophile phenomenon, and, honestly, this author believes the dons of "Russian history" prefer it that way. Therefore, like all else that is threatening about Holy Russia, Slavophilism is dismissed, slandered, and most importantly, completely misunderstood by the spoiled and tenured. Therefore, this brief chapter will be dedicated to the exposition of the Slavophiles' basic critique of the West, which deserves a chapter all to itself, so important is this basic synthesis of the Orthodox and Slavic understanding of philosophy and theology. In many respects, Russian history cannot be understood without understanding Slavophilism.

Khomiakov did not create the school of thought known as "Slavophilism." This set of concepts and critiques has been in existence as long as Orthodoxy has been. It is little more than the conceptualization of a traditional way of life, one neither accepted nor appreciated by western intellectuals or westernizing Russians. This author, having spent a lengthy period of time poring over the texts of the Slavophiles, has reduced the school to a set of propositions for the sake of clarity:

1. Thought is not primarily about the mere external connection of concepts;

2. Thought and knowledge are intensely social, not being separable from the culture and religion of a people;

3. Therefore, the West, existing intellectually on a basis of ice cold logic, has also reciprocally developed a notion of law and the state that exists solely as external force and power, and the West calls that "unity." It can be found in papism, Protestantism, statism and capitalism.

Now, this is a simplification, but it makes clear the essential point that social life is holistic: society, history and theology affect epistemology in a reciprocal fashion. Logic, as a cold system of symbolic thinking that is separated from the interests and tradition of a specific people, is a figment of the modern imagination; logic is not thought, it is rather thought divorced from society, reality, belonging and feeling.

It is true, in Khomiakov's case, that his major criticism is in the realm of religion. Because Russia is culturally dominated by Orthodoxy, and it can be said to be a product of Orthodoxy, it makes sense that the Slavophiles will find its main line of argument on the question of papism and its rebellious offshoot, Protestantism, both ideas created by the abstract logic of reason divorced from revelation and a holistic methodology. Within the criticism of western theology, however, is contained the epistemology of the Slavic and Orthodox counterassault against Rome and the West in general. It is therefore absolutely necessary to understand the theological epistemology developed by Khomiakov and to understand the basic apologetic structure of Orthodox thinking on such matters. No one has summarized the theophilosophical idea of Holy Russia better than Khomiakov, and therefore, a working understanding of the concept of "Holy Russia" requires a detailed understanding of him and the Slavophiles in. general particularly Ivan Kireevsky (1806-1856).

The two central terms one needs to understand to begin with are extremely complex: the first is the notion of sobornost, and the second, integral knowledge. These two terms, though exposited by Khomiakov better than anyone else, are certainly not his invention, but are the philosophical armor of the Orthodox patristic tradition, expounded best, perhaps, by St. Isaac of Syria. Both of these terms can be reduced to the notion that knowledge is not primarily an individual phenomenon, nor is it reducible to the connection of concepts in logical sequence.

The nature of the Church, for Khomiakov, is that of inner unity, that is, the action of the Holy Spirit upon every believer that leads him to knowledge. In other words:

The Spirit of God, alive in the Church, guiding her and making her wise, is manifested in her in multiple forms: in Scripture, in Tradition, and in works; for the Church, performing the works of God, is the Church that preserves Tradition and wrote the Scripture. It is neither individuals nor a multitude of individuals in the Church that preserve Tradition and wrote the Scripture, but the Spirit of God, alive in the sum of the Church. Therefore it is impossible and improper to search for the foundation of Tradition in the Scripture, or for proofs of the Scripture in Tradition, or for justification of the Scripture and Tradition in works. One who lives outside of the Church neither the Scripture, or Tradition or works are comprehensible. ("The Church is One," quoted in Jakim, 34).

As a necessary counterpart therefore, "For this reason it is proper to understand that a confession, a prayer, and works are nothing in themselves, but are only an external manifestation of inner spirit. Thus, neither one who prays, nor one who performs works, nor one who confesses the confession of the Church is pleasing to God, but rather one who performs works, confesses, an-d prays according to the Spirit of Christ living within. ("The Church is One," 37).

The distinction between papism — the idea that the pope of Rome is the sole judge in matters of tradition, dogma, Scripture, sacraments etc; and the Protestant rebellion against it, viz., that only the individual will, informed by Scripture, can be the judge of such things — exists from a rebellion against the Orthodox notion that:

Either the truth of faith is given to the union of all and to their mutual love in Jesus Christ, or it can be given to every individual without regard to all other individuals. In order to avoid this consequence and the resulting anarchy, it was necessary to replace the moral law that was found to be constraining for the young pride of the Germano-Roman nations by some new law, whether internal or external, which could give an indisputable authority to the decisions of the ecclesiastical society in the West, or which could at least appear to give such authority. This need gradually led to the idea of the infallibility of the pope (68).

In other words, if the Church is not bound together in doctrine and the communal interdependence of its bishops, priests and people, then one must find another source of authority that need not worry about bishops, priests and people united in dogmatic agreement. If the Church is united in faith, then the existence of an external authority seems unnecessary. If dogma and tradition are judged by an external authority, that is, one above the Church, and who can alter or condemn any part of it, then faith becomes not a matter of internal and communal devotion, but something established by an external authority, something ultimately foreign and "imposed."

Now this theological critique, again, is not new, but has endless political moral and philosophical consequences. The Slavophile school of thought took the doctrine of the papacy and made it the lynchpin of western society. In many ways of course, the papacy is a product of Roman jurisprudence, and this the Slavophiles did not ignore, but insofar as the nineteenth century was concerned, the Latin conceptions of law and justice are found in either the papal schism or the Protestant rebellion against it, both of which are activated by the same principle.

Ivan Kireevsky, Khomiakov's student and follower writes in this regard:

In brief, all the characteristics of the Romans, in all the nuances of their intellectual and spiritual activity, we find the same common trait: that the superficial harmony of their logical concepts was more essential to them than the very essence of the concepts, and that the internal equilibrium of their being, as it were, consisted for them solely in the balance of rationalistic ideas and of external, formal activity ("On the Nature of European Culture and its Relationship to Russian Culture," quoted in Jakim, 201).

For this school, most of the pathology of the modern West can be laid on this doorstep. From the notion that Church doctrine was essentially a matter of external authority and approval, the fields of law and philosophy soon followed. This distinction existed because, according to Kireevsky, the western states were founded on violence, that is, the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire, while the Russian state was founded on the consent of the original Slavic tribes with a minimum of violence. Therefore, the notions of law and "right" in the west were a matter of litigating between the various estates in society, the conquered, and the conquerors, the knightly class and the peasantry. For Kireevsky, even the ideas of chivalry resulted from this, with the connections between various classes, united not in any shared concepts of the world, but instead being manifest and founded solely in the abstract unity of external rituals. It was not a stretch to imagine the modern era, with its class war and battles between various groups demanding their abstract "rights" as a direct result of this concept of external authority outweighing the internal coherence of concepts in human life and tradition. For the post-modem West, even "traditionalism" has become an ideology. Indeed, such a critique of the relation between thought and inter-personal relations is extremely common in Russian thinking, even from non-Slavophiles.

For example, the scientist Paul Florensky (1882-1933) wrote that the law of identity is false, for it leads to a vision that persons exist only as discrete units. Logical rigor, based on Aristotle, leads to a state of affairs of impenetrability, of social status rather then nations and "societies," properly so called. Human communication, for Florensky, assumes connections among people that transcend mere definition and logic, but presupposes a real living communion that rejects the "law of identity" (Cf. Nicholl's Triumph of the Spirit in Russia for an effective summary of Florensky's thought, 177-192).

In other words, the battles that plague the post-modern West derive from something that is alien to the Slavic and Orthodox spirit, the notion of an abstract and purely conceptual analysis that is distinct from the living society at large which provides the necessary content to such concepts. Rights and duties are therefore abstract, as is law. For Russia, law and right were something communally denned through unanimous agreement of the local community:, united to all others though a common faith and language taking its sustenance from basic historical experience. Russia had not a need of class war, the "state of nature" producing abstract rights or papism, given that all such conflicts that produced such institutions had already been resolved in the direct conduct of day to day life: "Usually, a law in Russia was not composed, but simply written down after the idea for it had been conceived by the nation, and after it had gradually, by the compulsion of objective necessity, become part of the popular customs and way of life" (Kireevsky, 218).

For this reason could "law" in Russia be a matter of distinct communes running their own affairs through a basic unanimous agreement; for this reason could the state in Moscow remain basically aloof from the affairs of the countryside. And it is for this reason that the Slavophile school could criticize the Russian state for removing from Russia this conception of law and right in favor of a more western notion of absolutism and standardization starting with Peter I.

Considering the development of western political theory, Kireevsky writes:

Having broken the wholeness of the spirit into fragments, and having left the higher consciousness of truth to detached logical thinking, in the depth of their self consciousness, people were torn from all connection to reality, and they themselves appeared on earth as abstract beings, like spectators in a theater, capable of sympathy, love, and aspiration for all things on the solid condition that the physical personality not suffer and not be disturbed. For the only thing that their logical abstractness did not allow them to repudiate was their physical being ("On the Necessity and Possibility for New Principles in Philosophy," quoted in Jakim, 256).

Of course, this is false, for the German idealists did indeed reject the idea of the physical being. There is no doubt that the bulk of western political and moral theory has nothing to do with reality. People do not exist, they are abstract wills, as in Kant, or cogs in the wheels of history, as in Hegel, or bundles of repressed sexual desires, as in Freud, or abstract producers, as in Marx, or completely contextless entities "behind a veil" as in Rawls, or social atoms, as in Hobbes, or mere acultural units as in Rousseau and Locke. Such abstraction divorced from the context of a living society needs to be explained, and it is this that Kireevsky set out to do. Must rights be separate from actual individuals? Or actual situations? Rights are either contextually created or they are abstract. If the latter, then the community means nothing, and is subject, like the Roman Church to the pope, to their rule. If it contextual, then the western system of law and politics is illegitimate. For the Slavophiles, western intellectual history is a gradual decline from rights and duties contextually defined, to a vision of humanity as a set of automata dictated to by "natural necessity" and possessed, inexplicably, of "natural rights" whose primary duty, it seems, is to set the individual off from others, the community as well as the state. For the Russian Slavophiles, this is the intellectual cause of liberalism, alienation, class war and the rejection of reality by post-modernism, a phenomenon Kireevsky had predicted.

By the twentieth century, the West's obsession with abstract reason was a dismal failure: not only did World Wars I and II destroy the elite of European manhood through the latest in scientific methods of warfare, Stalin's USSR was also based on "scientific principles." Further, Nietzsche, the post-modernists and existentialists as well as Freud, had abandoned reason altogether since it was not self-justifying. Reality, as Nietzsche envisaged it, was a creation and function of naked will. Postmodern "identity politics" posits the state as an arena where the collective wills of various groups (races, classes, sexes) fight it out. There is no truth, only the victory of will and the ability to marshal resources, money and ultimately power. Kireevsky writes:

Hence, European societies, founded on violence, cemented by formal personal relationships, permeated with one-sided rationality, were bound to produce not a social spirit, but a spirit of individual separation, and they were held together only by the knots of private interest and parties. Consequently, although the history of European states often presents external signs of a flourishing social life, in fact social forms always served merely to disguise the separate particular parties which forgot about the life of the whole state in pursuit of their private goals and personal systems. Papal parties, imperial parties, city parties, Church parties, court, private, government, religious, political and popular parties, parties of the middle state and even metaphysical parties were ever contending in the European states, each vying to upset the existing system in accordance with its own particular aims. As a result, European states developed not through peaceful growth but always by means of a more or less palpable revolution. Revolution was the precondition of all progress, until it became not a means to an end, but in itself the distinctive end of popular aspiration ("On the Nature of European Culture and Its Relationship to Russian Culture," quoted in Jakim, 205-6).

There is, therefore, a direct connection between Aristotle, ancient Rome, scholasticism, Occam, the Renaissance and Enlightenment empiricists, ideology, Nietzsche and existentialism. In other words, when Anselm of Canterbury elevated reason above Church authority, he placed in the human mind the ability to judge all things and make sense out of all things. Once the scholastic synthesis broke down at Oxford university in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the Renaissance, vulgar empiricists such as Hobbes took the reins. There was no alien force that destroyed the thinking of Aquinas, but rather the demolition of Aristotle into Hobbes was merely an extension of the Anselmian doctrine that it is naked reason that judges. Unfortunately, when naked reason judges itself, a conceptual circle is created, and it was not long before Hume and the much later post-modem schools of thought were to develop in the ashes of western rationalism, leading to the dominance of the "will to power" of the present moment.

However, by Russia's keeping the West at a distance, by her refusal to imitate the intellectual forms of the western world, Russia was spared such dissolution. Her westernizing philosophers and rulers were erroneous, for they were importing the seeds of revolution and class war. For Russia, the patristic tradition from Greece and the Near East was a holistic way of thinking, taking to itself faith, social life, society and philosophy into a large whole animated by the Holy Spirit, rather than becoming a sect dedicated to the teachings of one man or office. The spirit was internalized (though not imminetized, in Eric Voegelin's sense), and authority was something shared by the body of believers guided by the hierarchy (though not entirely by them), rather than alien ideas spoken in an alien tongue. The notion of the state and law immediately followed from this, for the state was not a cold and distant monster, but was represented by the "little father" who shared their concerns and pains. However, the invasion of western ideas was starting to vitiate this idea. For the Slavophiles, the structure of the basically independent commune was always to be the living answer to the West and the guarantee of the communal and cultural idea of liberty that the West had long forgotten; of course, Khomiakov also believed that Russia was heading down that same path if her state continued her centralizing and standardizing tendencies.

For Khomiakov, the answer to the distress, indeed the meltdown of the West the present day is just beginning to see, was found in his view of knowledge and action:

One of them — the fundamental, innate force that is characteristic of the system as a whole, of the entire past history of a given society — is the force of life, developing independently from its own principles, from its organic foundations; the second — the rational force of individuals — is founded on the first, which lends it vitality; it is incapable of creating anything by itself nor does it strive to create; it only participates in the general development and prevents it from ending up in the blind alley of dead instinct or in unsound one-sidedness. Both forces are necessary, but the second — the force of consciousness and intellect — ought to be bound to the first force — the force of life and creativity — by a vital and all-embracing love. Dissension and struggle result whenever the unity of faith and love is broken (Quoted in Walicki from page 127-8 of the seventh volume of Khomiakov's Works, 227).

And, again, clarifying this all-pervasive sense of love, he writes that love:

cannot be aspired to in isolation; it demands, finds, and produces responses and mutual relationships, and itself grows, becomes stronger and perfected in such responses and mutual relationships. Hence the community of love is not only useful, but absolutely essential to the attainment of the truth — the conquest of truth depends upon it and is impossible without it. The truth which is inaccessible to separate individuals is accessible only to a community of individuals bound together by love. This is what clearly distinguished Orthodox teaching from all other religions; from the Roman, which is based on external authority and from Protestantism which turns man into an isolated individual and permits him to enjoy freedom in a vacuum of rational abstractions. Whatever has been said about this supreme truth also applies to philosophy. Seemingly accessible only to a few, it is in fact created and shared by all (Quoted in Walicki from page 283 of Khomiakov's Works, 204).

The basic, underlying idea here is rather clear. Thought, action, cooperation, economics, understanding, and all other significant things that an individual engages in presuppose a substratum. This substratum is not the will nor the intellect, for these too presuppose something more basic, and that is the connections among people: a shared language, tradition, culture and that basic set of moral truths and assumptions. Without these, action cannot take place, for it would be unintelligible to anyone. Human beings would become isolated units, without reference to anything or anyone. Only these connections (and Khomiakov refers to the historical connections and the present bonds they create, as "love") can maintain a society or any civic cooperation whatsoever. Love here is not some sappy, western middle class notion of a "long term" relationship, or the even more vapid notion of a "significant other," but the long standing, intergenerational and developmental bonds of culture and religion that make any action, cooperation and thought possible. Love, to be clearer, is that which is the product of the bonds that hold people together. Human life is impossible without them because thought and action need to be contextualized: thought needs to be about something in particular, and that something needs to be accessible to all those one is trying to communicate with. If thought is so conditioned, then action is as well, for actions can only exist in a context of mutual intelligibility, and such a context is the purpose of a community of language, religion and morality. Russia had preserved this; the West has forgotten it in the fog of individual rights and abstract analytic philosophy divorced from real living peoples. The modern western obsession with "multiracialism" and "multi-culturalism" can be reduced to this perennial notion that thought is to be separate from life and experience, and that conceptual agreement is more important than the living community.

Rarely is academic ill-will shown more blatantly than in historical writing on the Orthodox Church in later Russian history. Nichols Riasanovsky quite plainly claims that the Church did not have a role historically here at all. This author, however, does not believe at the mainstream writers on Russian history can be so ignorant that they do not know of the exploits of St. Nicholas of Japan or St. Theophan the Recluse. For any "Russia scholar" not to know of the massive monastic writing from St. Ignatius Brianchaninov or Leo of Optima is to be incompetent. Such a state might well be the case today, though there might be reason to believe they are ignored to make the theory of Russian decay and cultural backwardness feasible.

Nevertheless, the work of the Russian Church in the nineteenth century, much of it fueled by the writings of the Slavophiles, was a time of triumph and expansion. Not a single continent on planet earth was left unaffected by the expansion and missionary work of the Russian branch of the Orthodox Church. There is also no doubt, however, that within the arrogant Russian oligarchy crowded into Petersburg, the Church was losing its hold. The oligarchy in that unfortunate city was experimenting — much like the soccer moms in present day America — with occultism, materialism and paganism. The sexual conquests of that sectarian Rasputin, backed by copious police reports, are proof enough of that. Even within the royal family itself, it was difficult enough for a bear like Alexander III to keep them all on the moral straight and narrow, never mind for a humble St. Nicholas II. In other words, the Church's greatest challenge was to beat back the pseudo-morality and the pseudo-spirituality of the long decayed West, a West that had traded in its heritage for massive military budgets, the utopian promises of technics and "oligarchical democracy." The rise of great saints such as Theophan, Ignatius or John of Kronstadt were die Church's answer.

In Kazan, for example, the nineteenth century witnessed a major missionary program. The academy erected there, one of the best in the world, had translation programs dealing with Tartar, Chuvash, Turkish and Persian. Hundreds of thousands of either pagan or Islamic people in Central Asia were converted through these educational methods.

As is better known, Alaska and the West Coast were also targets for conversion during the triumphant nineteenth century. St. Innokentii of Moscow and North America — originally a married priest named Ivan — created an alphabet for the Aleut tribes and converted thousands. St. Herman, equally well known, became one of the most beloved figures in Indian culture in extreme North America. The Orthodox Church in America (OCA) has taken Herman and Innokentii as patrons. Dimitri Pospielovsky writes concerning these Alaskan missions: ".....an American Alaskan governor reported to President Theodore Roosevelt that, by the early twentieth century, the Americans had done nothing for the natives, while all the schools for Alaskan natives were Russian and belong to the Orthodox mission" (163). The same occurred in Siberia as she slowly but surely became Orthodox.

Orthodox missionary work, from Sts. Cyril and Methodius to St. Stephen of Perm, was to inculturate the Church to native conditions. It was always the case that missionaries would learn the local language and compose an alphabet and a basic grammar for them. A Church would be constructed, and the liturgy as well as the monastic hours would be read. Curious natives would have a look around, and many eventually came to Christianity in this fashion. In China, the Russian Church developed a phalanx of those skilled in the Chinese language, and the abbot Iakinf was quite skilled in composing Chinese grammars and dictionaries. The mission in Peking was destroyed during the Boxer Rebellion, with thousands of Chinese converts being butchered. They have been canonized as martyrs. St. Nicholas of Japan did something similar there, and in spite of grave difficulties (that is, that conversions to Christianity were punishable by death), there is a functioning Autonomous Church of Japan today. By 1917, there were 100 Japanese, fluent in Russian, doing missionary work and translations, and, of course, they had their own seminary. Missions in Korea proceeded apace, and, by the 1860s, about 10,000 Koreans had been baptized, and later, the abbot Paul learned Korean, and translated the hours and the liturgy into that language (cf Pospielovsky's excellent chapter, "The Church in post-reform Russia").

As if that was not enough: Islam was combated in the Caucasus, the Nestorians were converted in Iraq with 80 functioning parishes (eventually forced to convert to Islam by the Turks in 1918), and the Palestinian society was created to shore up the Orthodox Churches there, always harassed by Muslims and Jews, while Roman Catholics were proselytizing heavily in the region. The pilgrimages to the Holy Land at this time were massive, as were the devotional crowds that gathered around St. John of Kronstadt, giving the lie to the common claim (basically secular wishful thinking) that devotions were declining.

Russian Orthodoxy during the last half of the nineteenth century was a massive, growing, intellectually sophisticated and monastically based organization. It was, of course, extremely difficult to engage in missionary work in Korea, China and Japan, where state hostility to Christianity was continually made manifest, and elements such as the Boxers could be let loose at any given moment. Nonetheless, as Pospielovsky has explained, it is simply a lie for secular historians to speak of the "irrelevance" of the Church during the nineteenth century.