A Russian church, wherever it may be, is Russia.
—Prince Petr Andreevich Viazemsky, 1855
Critics of Russia have long tended to view the Russian Orthodox Church as subordinated to the state and the predominant religion in Russia as a political instrument of autocratic rulers. This model has been applied to tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes.1 It surfaced in press coverage of Patriarch Kirill’s high-profile meetings with Pope Francis in February 2016 and his trips to London and Paris in October and December 2016, respectively, where he consecrated Russian Orthodox churches and met with leading political and religious authorities: Queen Elizabeth, the archbishop of Canterbury (Justin Welby), and President François Hollande.2 Detractors see Kirill’s activities as evidence of a close alliance between President Vladimir Putin and the patriarch and as the expression of a new Russian imperialism that, based on conservative social values, seeks to confront secularism and undermine the system of universal human rights that undergirds European identity.3 While some commentators see Kirill as Putin’s partner, others see him as Putin’s puppet in this Russian propaganda campaign. Especially in light of tensions triggered by Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, military conflict in eastern Ukraine, and Putin’s Syria policy, some critics suggested that by receiving the patriarch, western political and religious leaders legitimized Putin’s policies and bolstered his power.4
In 2010 Russian President Dmitry Medvedev secured a deal that allowed the Russians to purchase a prime piece of real estate on Quai Branly in Paris, between the Invalides and the Eiffel Tower, for a large cultural complex (four buildings in all) featuring a new cathedral dedicated to the Holy Trinity.5 Built at a cost of 170 million euros (70 million for the land and 100 million for the construction), this massive cultural diplomacy project, dubbed “a Putin project,” was subsidized by the Russian state, despite the Russian Federation’s constitutional separation of church and state.6 President Putin had planned to inaugurate the cultural center in October 2016 but canceled his scheduled state visit to France due to the cooling in Franco-Russian relations. Patriarch Kirill consecrated Holy Trinity Cathedral on December 4, 2016. Seeing the affair as Russia’s attempt to reassert itself as a spiritual and military force in Europe, in opposition to secular, liberal agendas, critics of the project have christened the church “St. Vladimir’s,” referring to Putin, not the tenth-century prince known for Christianizing the Rus.7 Furthering the political overtones, Paris is the seat of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Diocese of Korsun (Chersonèse), named after the site of St. Vladimir’s baptism in the Crimean Peninsula. Officially, this diocese was created in the late 1980s—the millennial anniversary of the conversion of the Rus to Christianity—to replace the Exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchate in Western Europe that had transferred its loyalty to the Ecumenical Patriarchate during the Stalin era.8
“St. Vladimir’s” on the Seine was mired in controversy from the beginning. The original design (by Manuel Nuñez) was rejected as “too ostentatious” in favor of the more Parisianized design of Jean-Michel Wilmotte.9 The close proximity to French government offices raised concerns that the complex could be used as a center of espionage, leading French intelligence services to place jamming devices around the site. One of the outspoken detractors of the project in France is the historian and writer Galia Ackerman, who views the project as an intolerable manifestation of Russian political propaganda on French soil. “The Moscow patriarchate is anti-western to an unimaginable degree: they are against all the principles that are dear to us. Then why build right in the center of Paris an organization that is going to propagate ideas completely contrary to ours? This is something beyond my understanding.”10 The philosopher and journalist Michel Eltchaninoff has expressed similar sentiments: “Holy Russia has always been used as a tool of foreign influence. [The cathedral] is a seductive statement of power, imposed by a country which boasts of its Christian roots on the capital of a secular state judged (by the Russians) to be enfeebled by multiculturalism and spiritual amnesia.”11
The controversies surrounding the Moscow Patriarchate’s international activities highlight a recurring set of historical problems regarding Russian national identity, Russia’s alignment vis-à-vis the West, and the Russian Church’s relations with the state, the rest of the Orthodox ecumene, and the other Christian churches. Expressing concerns about Holy Trinity Cathedral, a French diplomat voiced the opinion that no one dealt directly with “Russia’s ulterior motives for creating what will inevitably become a symbol of Russian power in the heart of Paris.”12 Yet Holy Trinity Cathedral was not the first “symbol of Russian power in the heart of Paris,” and 2016 was not the first time that a Russian prelate consecrated an Orthodox church in the West. Less than six years after France and Russia fought a war with each other couched in the rhetoric of a religious crusade, the first freestanding Orthodox church in Paris was consecrated by a Russian bishop in 1861. St. Alexander Nevsky Church was built as part of a broader publicity campaign to enhance Russia’s international prestige and to counter widespread anti-Orthodox prejudices that portrayed Eastern Orthodoxy as a disfigured form of Christianity and the Russian Church as nothing but a political tool of despotic tsars.
A century and a half later, Holy Trinity Cathedral, in conjunction with the Moscow Patriarchate’s other actions on the international front, is provoking the kind of negative press that St. Alexander Nevsky Church was built to counter. Detractors view the Russian Orthodox Church as an arm of the state, an instrument exploited by an autocratic ruler for political purposes, and a menace to values westerners hold dear. These recurring patterns of rhetoric about the Russian Church express ideological opposition to it in a manner that masks the “multivocality” that exists in Russian society, within the Russian Orthodox Church, and in European society more broadly.13
This book does not attempt to explain why simplistic, negative constructions of the Russian Orthodox Church have been so persistent; rather, it deals with Russian responses to the popularization of such ideas in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing mainly on the period between the revolutions of 1848–1849 and the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), this study compares Orthodoxy’s public image as portrayed by westerners and as imagined by Russian publicists. It explores the circumstances under which westerners, concerned about the fate of the papacy, the Ottoman Empire, Poland, and Russian imperial power, constructed a reductionist view of the Russian Orthodox Church, conflating it with the state. By creating caricatures of Eastern Christianity in general and a bogeyman of the Russian Church in particular, important cross-sections of educated western European society ostracized Russia from what they considered to be the Christian and civilized ecumene, thereby reinforcing the sense of a dichotomous relationship between Russia and the West. Orthodox publicists responded by launching a public relations campaign to challenge negative stereotypes about their religion. St. Alexander Nevsky Church of Paris was the linchpin of their efforts, which produced important results. The church and educational infrastructure that accompanied it laid the groundwork for a better understanding of Orthodoxy in the West, including some reappraisal of Russian church-state relations. In Russia, the Orthodox press linked the new church and media campaign to the idea that Russia was fulfilling its providential destiny by shining the light of Orthodoxy on the West. As the embodiment of the belief that Russia had a great historical purpose inextricably tied to Orthodoxy, the Paris church both reflected and contributed to the rise of religious nationalism in Russia that followed the Crimean War. Yet the confrontation with westerners’ negative ideas about the Eastern Church also fueled calls for reform.
On July 26, 1862, the eve of St. Vladimir’s Day, Father René-François Guettée (1816–1892) wept on being received into the Russian Orthodox Church in Paris.14 The conversion of this French Roman Catholic priest to Orthodoxy was exceptional, although it fit into a broader trend of French Catholic dissidence in the late 1850s and 1860s. During this period, an important segment of the French Church, including much of the episcopate, resisted ultramontanism (i.e., the concentration of church authority in Rome) and the growing infallibilist movement (i.e., the drive to clarify that the Holy Spirit prevented the pope from erring when he “spoke as mouthpiece of the Church”15). Guettée was one of the most outspoken critics of these tendencies. Another group of influential Catholic dissidents, the liberal Catholics, believed that Christianity and liberal principles—freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and constitutionalism—were compatible.16 Their belief was out of sync with Pope Pius IX’s vision of society, which was provocatively expressed in a papal encyclical, The Syllabus of Errors (1864), that classified liberal principles like freedom of conscience, separation of church and state, and civil marriage as modern errors. While not all liberal Catholics were anti-ultramontane—some believed a strong papacy was necessary as a barrier against the high levels of state intrusiveness that characterized the Gallican Church—their acceptance of liberal principles was not palatable to Catholic conservatives, typically monarchists, who perceived this vocal minority as a dangerous enemy within the church.17
As logical as it would seem for a Catholic dissident opposed to the expansion of papal authority to turn to the Christian tradition that had always resisted papal overreach, Guettée’s decision to join the Russian Orthodox Church was extraordinary. Few Europeans considered an eastward turn an option. As one French bishop put it, no one from a Roman Catholic country in Europe would even consider becoming “a schismatic Greek” because “this Church, of which one half bows down under the knout of the tzars and the other under the scimitar of the sultans, this married clergy, this motionless dogma, this Byzantine art, say nothing to our free, progressive, and ardent nature.”18 The reluctance to look eastward was due to attitudes that linked Orthodoxy with a lack of civilization and with Caesaropapism: complete subservience of the church to the temporal ruler.
Catholic polemicists often singled out two European countries for having established churches that were entirely subordinated to civil power: England and Russia.19 The legal arrangement of the former was clear enough, with the sovereign named, since the time of Henry VIII, as the head of the Anglican Church. In the 1830s a High Church Anglican dissident movement emerged at Oxford University that was critical of Erastian tendencies in the church—tendencies that appeared to jeopardize the Anglican episcopacy’s claims to apostolic succession and threatened to turn the established church into a parliamentary church in a parliamentary state. The Oxford movement produced one of England’s most notable converts to Roman Catholicism, John Henry Newman, who submitted to Rome in 1845. The Gorham Affair in 1850 was the provocation for further defections from Anglicanism to Rome. When George C. Gorham’s bishop, Henry Phillpotts, refused to institute Gorham on grounds that he did not accept the regenerative nature of baptism, Gorham appealed his case to the Privy Council. This lay body overruled the bishop on what was clearly a doctrinal matter, which many Anglicans interpreted as an unacceptable governmental intrusion in ecclesiastical affairs. The following year, Henry Edward Manning joined the Church of Rome, rising to the rank of archbishop of Westminster in 1865 and cardinal in 1875.
Another Anglican defector was William Palmer (1811–1879), who, after abortive attempts to achieve intercommunion between the Anglican and Russian churches, and after seeking admission into the Greek Church but refusing to be received by baptism, turned to Rome in 1855. Palmer was one of the few to actually consider Orthodoxy, only to reject it. His case created more material for anti-Orthodox polemics. When it was publicized that the Greeks insisted on receiving converts only by baptism, which was contrary both to Orthodox doctrine and the Russian practice that recognized the validity of the sacrament among the heterodox, anti-Orthodox polemicists concluded that there was no real doctrinal unity among the Orthodox, and that the Greek and Russian confessions were not even the same religion.20
For some in the Russian Church, Palmer’s interest in Orthodoxy raised hopes that westerners would find their way back to the Eastern Church, and in the aftermath of the affair, Russian officials made concerted efforts to attract western converts. Palmer’s conversion to Orthodoxy would have been a real coup for the Russian Church. Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy, over-procurator of the Holy Synod (1856–1862), could not understand how Palmer got so close to Orthodoxy only to go over to the Roman Catholics.21 “I cannot but feel how great was the loss of Palmer for the work which is occupying us.”22 The Palmer case peaked Tolstoy’s interest in attracting converts to Orthodoxy. In September 1858 the Synod passed a decree instructing clergy in foreign service to receive heterodox converts without unnecessary delays, while reminding them to avoid appearing as though they were “conducting general religious propaganda.”23 Tolstoy also wrote to Fr. Evgeny Popov, the embassy priest in London from 1842 to 1875, with a request to translate the Divine Liturgy into English and an admonition that he would be “rendering a great service to the Holy Church if beside you and with your participation there should appear in London even a small community of sons of the Orthodox Church.”24 The Synod passed another resolution in 1859 requiring even members of the lower clergy at the foreign churches to be graduates of the theological academies. This step was seen as necessary in order to have well-educated clergy abroad who could actively conduct missionary work in the future.25
If in Russia the Palmer affair suggested there was potential to cultivate converts abroad, for some western observers the affair further discredited the Eastern Church. For French Catholic dissidents who were unhappy with the concentration of power in the papacy, Orthodoxy was an untenable alternative. French Catholics from the most intransigent ultramontanes to the esteemed liberal Catholic Felix Dupanloup (1802–1878), bishop of Orléans, shared a wholly negative view of the Russian Church as a church enslaved, “an institution of State and a police matter.”26 Where could the dissident then go?
The vast majority of Catholic dissidents submitted to Rome. Despite the fact that Pius IX and the French intransigent ultramontanes were convinced that the most dangerous enemies of the church were the liberal Catholics, the Roman Church found itself broad enough to encompass the bitterest of political and intellectual adversaries. Anti-infallibilists remained in their church because, as they saw it, no other church could make a legitimate claim to being catholic—that is, universal—or independent. Furthermore, in the decade preceding the First Vatican Council, Emperor Napoleon III’s support for the national unification of Italy drove French Catholics closer to Rome. By 1861 his Italian policy resulted in the papacy’s loss of most of its temporal domains and jeopardized the temporal power altogether. As a result, French Catholics rallied to the papacy, and a large segment of the French Church adopted an oppositional stance toward the imperial government.27 After the Vatican Council, one group of dissidents formed a small, transnational Old Catholic movement and sought unity with the Jansenist Church of Utrecht, which had been separated from Rome since the early eighteenth century but considered itself to have retained the apostolic succession. A few dissidents defected to Protestantism. A few others followed Guettée’s example and turned to the Orthodox Church.
A committed Gallican, Guettée could not accommodate himself to the centralization of authority in the Roman Church. He reached the conclusion that the Gallican and Orthodox traditions almost seamlessly represented true catholicism. It was necessary, from his point of view, to sever his ties with Rome in order to remain catholic.28 Guettée regarded himself as catholic, from cradle to coffin, and not as a “convert.”
Guettée’s reception into the Orthodox Church was contingent on another series of events that took place in Paris between 1857 and 1861. He did not, like Palmer, undertake a pilgrimage to Russia in pursuit of Orthodoxy. He was living in Paris when he was sought out by a Russian expat, Sergei Sushkov, while the Russians, at the initiative of Archpriest Iosif Vasilievich Vasiliev (1821–1881), were in the process of building a magnificent church on what was then Croix-du-Roule Street, subsequently renamed Daru Street.29 The new church, dedicated to St. Alexander Nevsky, was completed within six years of the end of the Crimean War.30
St. Alexander Nevsky Church, its founder Vasiliev, and Guettée were at the heart of a Russian public relations campaign in Paris, the immediate goal of which was to spread true information and dispel misinformation about the Eastern Church. This goal, in turn, was tied to a broader ecumenical project: to reunify the churches by calling western Christians back to the Orthodox Church that had preserved the primitive faith. At a moment when the papacy’s temporal power was on the wane, casting uncertainty on Rome’s claim to the leadership of the universal church, Orthodox publicists believed Russia was called to fulfill a great providential and historical mission.
The efforts to transform the public image of Orthodoxy were centered in France because Russian publicists and statesmen regarded Paris as a sort of capital of Europe, and the most important Roman Catholic city after Rome. While the struggle for Orthodoxy’s international prestige was fought on multiple fronts, they believed Paris held a preeminent place.
Public image refers to ideas about Orthodoxy that circulated in the public sphere (e.g., newspapers, magazines, tour guides, books and brochures including government or religious propaganda, travelogues, political debates, polemical treatises, or scholarly studies). Public image is not necessarily synonymous with public opinion, since the latter would encompass attitudes beyond those expressed in print.31 Although it is reasonable to suppose that there was a correlation between the narratives about Orthodoxy that were circulating in print media and public opinion, it cannot be assumed that there was direct correspondence.
St. Alexander Nevsky Church in Paris exists because there was a concerted effort by Vasiliev, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, members of court circles, aristocrats, and other clerical and lay representatives of the Orthodox faith to refashion Orthodoxy’s public image and enhance Russian prestige. While the founding of the church was part of a broader effort by Orthodox publicists to educate westerners about Orthodoxy and promote Russian interests, there was neither a clear blueprint nor a clear consensus about how best to do that.
Russian churches and clergy abroad were never primarily political, but clergy abroad assisted their countrymen and did what they could to promote Russia’s interests.32 By the mid-nineteenth century, Russian embassy clergy formed an elite group within the white (secular, married) clergy. They were tied to the foreign service, received their salaries—several times greater than what members of the white clergy earned in Russia—from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and reported to both the Foreign Ministry and the Holy Synod.33 While embassy priests saw to the spiritual needs of their compatriots abroad, they moved with the upper crust. As members of the foreign service, they were public figures and official representatives of Russia, who had to be able to resist temptations like revolutionary thought or luxurious living, while being able to adapt to the expectations of high society in their host country.34 Thus, they were chosen from the most outstanding graduates of the theological academies. Belonging to this elite group, Vasiliev enlisted the support of Guettée and worked with like-minded individuals for the defense of Orthodoxy and of Russia.
The need for the defense of Orthodoxy became especially clear in the dozen years preceding the Crimean War and during that conflict, when anti-Orthodox and often Russophobic narratives circulated widely in the French press. Chief among anti-Orthodox prejudices was the widespread belief that the tsar was the supreme pontiff of the completely enslaved Russian Church. In the French imagination, this tsar-pope/enslaved church myth represented the specter that the Russian tsar was using a religion followed blindly by millions as an instrument of imperial expansion.
Not coincidentally, the rise of anti-Orthodox sentiment in France coincided with the growth of ultramontanism. Roman Catholic publicists argued that the papacy was the center of Catholic unity and that the pope’s absolute sovereignty was necessary to guarantee the church’s independence. In nineteenth-century France, ultramontanism developed as a reaction against the subordination of the French Church to the state that had been ushered in by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790), that was maintained with modifications more acceptable to Catholics by the Concordat (1801) and Organic Articles (1802), and that remained in effect in post-restoration France until church and state were separated in 1905.35 While French ultramontanism developed in response to revolution-era church-state policies, Roman Catholic apologists juxtaposed their vision of Catholicism centralized under the leadership of an independent pope against the powerful foreign bugbears of Anglican Erastianism and Russian Caesaropapism, but especially the latter. The myth of the tsar-pontiff presiding over his enslaved church became a component of Roman Catholic defenses of papal authority and of Catholic reaction against Napoleon III’s Italian policies. After the Second War of Italian Independence (1859), it served a rhetorical purpose for French Catholics concerned about the direction of Napoleon III’s Rome policy, since criticizing Russia was an indirect way to criticize Napoleon III.
Given the climate of Russophobia in France, Russian Orthodox publicists and Russia’s Foreign Ministry felt a need to publicly defend Russia and its church in the West.36 In the late 1850s, Archpriest Vasiliev began to publish polemical and informational works about Orthodoxy and entered into a collaboration with Guettée to do so. Yet practically from the moment he first set foot in Paris in 1846, he concluded that the most effective way to challenge negative attitudes about Orthodoxy would be to build an impressive church. He was right. The new church, consecrated in 1861, led to an alternative narrative about Orthodoxy—one that countered anti-Orthodox prejudices—in the French press.
While the founding of the church was significant for the public image of Orthodoxy in the West, those results were less dramatic, especially in the short term, than the Russian press, in a spirit of providentialism and with considerable enthusiasm, suggested. This disconnect between actual circumstances in France and coverage of those events in the Russian Orthodox press demonstrates Orthodox publicists’ thirst to believe in a resurgent and revitalized Russia and Orthodoxy following the Crimean War.
The Russian church in Paris was integrally linked to the development and growth of religious nationalism. When making arrangements for the church’s consecration, Vasiliev argued:
The Paris church is not only the fruit of royal munificence or a government establishment… . It is the collective affair of pan-Russian and even pan-Orthodox piety. And therefore one must surround it with large-scale grandeur as an expression of the basis of our national [narodnaia] life, as a sign of the greatness and piety of our Autocrats… . The consecration of the Paris church will raise the honor and glory of Orthodoxy and Russia; it will secure [in the faith] many of our travelers, those who are wavering; it will produce a favorable and conciliatory effect on foreigners and the non-Orthodox.37
The church on Daru Street embodied the idea that the Eastern Church preserved the primitive faith in all its fullness, a core belief of Slavophile and Panslav ideologues. It was the result of conscious efforts to enhance Orthodoxy’s international visibility in accord with belief in Russia’s historical destiny. Since Russian publicists perceived the church as a tremendous success and interpreted it as evidence that Orthodoxy was experiencing a new dawn in the West, the Paris church was the first and most important example in what became a veritable campaign of Orthodox church-building efforts in the West.
Russia’s churches abroad were established for the religious needs of the Orthodox, but they contributed to broader diplomatic and ideological goals. They have been viewed as “showcases of autocracy” that “played a key role in the transmission of Russian imperial ideology in the West,” although imperial ideology was not a fixed entity in the period covered by this study.38 The stories about the new church on Daru Street that circulated back in Russia both expressed and contributed to the development of Russian religious nationalism and lent impetus to further campaigns for the empire to heighten its international prestige by the cross and the written word.39 Thus, the St. Alexander Nevsky Church can be interpreted as a “showcase” of Slavophilism.
This book focuses on the two decades preceding the Vatican Council of 1869–1870, but especially on the decade from the purchase of the land for St. Alexander Nevsky Church in late 1857 to the remarkable events surrounding Alexander II’s visit to Paris in 1867. While it would be ideal to extend a study on the public image of Orthodoxy in France to the period of Franco-Russian entente in the mid-1890s, given the limitations of space and time, two main events support an earlier endpoint for this study: Vasiliev’s return to Russia in 1867, which ended his term of foreign service and his work as priest-publicist in Paris, and the First Vatican Council.
In the two decades following the revolutions of 1848–1849, questions about the impending fate of the papacy—its existence and the extent of its temporal and spiritual authority—loomed large throughout Europe. After being ousted from Rome by the republicans during the revolution, Pope Pius IX, restored to Rome in 1850 and guarded by French troops until 1870, took measures to enhance the authority of his office.
In 1854 the Catholic Church officially defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the teaching that Mary was miraculously preserved from original sin. For the first time, a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church was decreed by the pope before being confirmed by the bishops.40 This newly defined dogma lent impetus to the Catholic dissident movement. Some objected to defining the teaching as a dogma, while others objected to the top-down manner by which the dogma was defined, ratified, and promulgated. Because a dogma is an incontrovertible truth necessary for salvation, the controversy was not so much about whether the Mother of God was conceived without sin, a long-standing tradition within Catholic thought, as about whether the matter should be defined as a dogma instead of remaining in the realm of pious opinion. The teaching was popular and widely accepted among Catholics before it was officially promulgated. Owen Chadwick notes, “The people wanted this doctrine; no one should think it forced upon the simple people by hierarchs.”41 Guettée was a consistent and steady critic of the dogma, which widened the rift between him and the Roman Church that began in 1852 when several volumes of his Gallican Histoire de l’Église de France (History of the Church of France, 1848–1857) were placed on the papal Index of Prohibited Books. His uncompromising opposition to the dogma after its formal adoption ensured him the continued wrath of his enemies.
There was a logical and steady progression from the Catholic Church’s adoption of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception to the definition of the dogma of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council, since both dogmas concentrated church authority in the papacy. Catholic teaching holds the church to be infallible, and faithful Catholics already agreed “that solemn papal utterances spoke for the Church.”42 However, the idea of formalizing this understanding of the authoritative nature of “papal utterances” by proclaiming a dogma of papal infallibility was extremely controversial. There were debates about how expansive the definition of papal infallibility ought to be. Would the person of the pope be separated from his teaching? There were concerns that a definition of papal infallibility, especially a broad one, would diminish the authority of tradition, the episcopacy, and ecumenical councils. At one point Pius IX even claimed: “I am the tradition.”43 Some foresaw that a dogma of papal infallibility would adversely affect relations between the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian confessions. Besides the theological issues, there were political considerations, such as concern about the impact of such a dogma on Catholic minorities in predominantly Protestant states. There were questions about whether the controversial Syllabus of Errors would henceforth be defined as infallible teaching of the church. Leading up to the Vatican Council, there were worries that if papal infallibility was on the agenda, European states might intervene to prevent the council from taking place; indeed, some anti-infallibilist bishops lobbied for such intervention.44 While most French bishops, including the anti-ultramontane group, accepted the idea of papal infallibility, they did not believe its official promulgation was opportune.45 Nonetheless, on July 18, 1870, a narrow definition of papal infallibility was approved: “When the Roman pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.”46
In the end, almost all of the bishops who had opposed defining the dogma (and who had left the Vatican Council rather than vote) reconciled themselves to it and submitted.47 Although there were dissenters who never accepted the dogma, Vatican I largely ended an internal Catholic controversy about papal authority, making 1870 a bookend in the history of French Roman Catholic dissidence.
Another reason for framing this study in the context of the Vatican Council concerns the implications of the dogma of papal infallibility for Christian unity. The dogma drove another wedge between the Roman Catholic Church and the other confessions, especially those that emphasized the authority of the ecumenical councils and the episcopacy.
Whenever and wherever divisions have rocked the church, there have also been attempts to restore unity and communion. Ecumenism can refer either to efforts to resolve doctrinal disputes and to restore the visible unity of the church or to the willingness of Christians to cooperate across confessional lines to accomplish common goals. The nineteenth century gave rise to organizations devoted to such purposes.
For example, missionary zeal among Protestants led to the formation of the influential, interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society established in 1804, which disseminated its translations of the Bible in many languages, including Russian.48 The society’s work in Russia, which began in 1812, depended on the support of highly placed individuals in St. Petersburg. Due to suspicions that the society was jeopardizing Orthodox tradition, the society was closed and its translation of the Bible was banned between 1826 and 1856. Under Alexander II, however, the society’s Petersburg agency played an important role in disseminating the official “synodal” translations of scripture.49
Regarding relations between Anglicans and Orthodox Christians in the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Catholic movement at Oxford University in the 1830s and 1840s laid the groundwork for Anglo-Orthodox dialogues. When he was exploring Orthodoxy, Palmer established relationships with important Russian figures from the over-procurator of the Holy Synod, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Protasov (1798–1855), to the Slavophile and lay theologian Aleksei Khomiakov (1804–60), raising Russian awareness of and interest in Anglicanism.50 Another Anglo-Catholic, John Mason Neale, began writing his History of the Holy Eastern Church in the early 1840s. He soon turned to the Russian embassy priest in London, Fr. Evgeny Popov, for assistance. Blaming the 1054 schism on Roman innovations like the filioque and deeply sympathetic to Orthodoxy, Neale’s History and work on Eastern Orthodox liturgies earned high praise and gifts from Emperor Alexander II and Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov).51 Neale was one of the founding members of the ecumenical Eastern Church Association, created in 1863, with Popov as one of its standing committee members.
Greater unity among Christians seemed especially urgent in the 1850s and 1860s. There were several different motivations behind the aspirations for Christian unity that emerged from Roman Catholic and Orthodox quarters during these years. First, among conservatives across Europe, the revolutionary conflagrations of 1848–1849 fueled interest in uniting the churches as a bulwark against the revolutionary threat. Roman Catholic publicists thought any such unification could only take place under papal auspices, while the Orthodox apologists thought otherwise. Ecumenically minded Christians of this stripe were ready to embrace their fellow Christians, just as long as the opposing camp was ready to accept the blame for schism and to renounce its errors. Second, for some Roman Catholics, ecumenical activity was motivated by the belief that Russia was an expansionist power and a menace to European civilization. Thus, some Catholics were eagerly pursuing efforts to bring the Orthodox Christians of southeastern Europe and Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire into union with Rome as a strategy to check Russian influence. Third, all of Europe was living in the shadow of the Roman question: the fate of Rome, the papacy, and the temporal power were hanging in the balance. The possibility that the papacy’s temporal power was on the verge of collapse exhilarated Orthodox thinkers like Vasiliev and Guettée, because such an outcome could undermine papal claims to ecclesiastical supremacy. With the temporal power of the papacy potentially facing elimination, with a burgeoning Catholic dissident movement, with High Church Anglicans concerned about Erastianism, the decades preceding the Vatican Council were ripe for reevaluation of issues that had divided European Christians for centuries, like the role of the bishop of Rome or apostolic succession in the Anglican Church. Vasiliev and Guettée both promoted a better understanding of the Orthodox Church as a prerequisite for the reconciliation of the Christian churches. Expecting the papacy to collapse, they thought a new heyday for Orthodoxy was on the horizon.
Events of 1870 squashed much of that optimism regarding a successful resolution to the problem of authority in the Christian Church and the end of the East-West schism.52 What the papacy lost that year in material terms—its remaining temporal possessions except the Vatican—was compensated a hundred-fold in spiritual authority. The definition of the dogma of infallibility represented a decisive victory for Pius IX and ultramontanism, reinforcing the East-West schism. Furthermore, and crucially, even among non-ultramontane, liberal Catholics, the arguments in favor of the papacy as the independent center of unity in the Church had rested in part on anti-Orthodox narratives that equated Roman Catholicism with civilization and Orthodoxy with the worst excesses of Caesaropapism—total enslavement and fruitlessness. After 1870 Orthodox publicists could still hope to sway Anglicans and Old Catholics to turn to Orthodoxy, but the main question of church authority that had fueled the polemics of the 1850s and early 1860s had been settled—unfavorably for East-West reunion.
Chapter 1 discusses the development of anti-Orthodox and anti-Russian sentiment in France after 1830 within the context of, first, the schools of thought that divided French Catholics in the nineteenth century and, second, the geopolitical tensions between France and Russia. The second chapter turns to the early efforts of the two priest-publicists, Vasiliev and Guettée, to challenge anti-Orthodox prejudices. After recounting the circumstances that led these two priests to found the first Orthodox periodical in the West in 1859, L’Union chrétienne (Christian unity), the chapter discusses the most significant polemical works of Vasiliev: his letters to two French bishops and the French historian François Guizot. Vasiliev’s recognition that polemical works could go only so far prompted him toward his most significant and impressive achievement: the founding of St. Alexander Nevsky Church in Paris, the subject of the third chapter. Besides recounting why and how the church came into existence, chapter 3 examines the church’s reception in France. The church and the media that accompanied it started to reshape Orthodoxy’s public image. Orthodox publicists gained some control over the narratives about Orthodoxy and accurate information about the Eastern Church was widely disseminated in newspaper articles and tour guides. Yet discussions of the church simultaneously blurred and sharpened the distinctions between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and between notions of Russian-ness and French-ness.
Chapter 4 shifts the focus from the French milieu to the Russian Orthodox press, which represented the new church as a spectacular success. For Orthodox publicists, the Paris church signified that the light of Orthodoxy was dawning in the West and represented a critical step in Russia’s providential task of reuniting Christendom. Even though Orthodox publicists had great expectations that the new church represented a harbinger for overcoming the schism that divided West and East, like French discourses about the Paris church, the Russian accounts reinforced the dichotomy between the Orthodox Christian and the heterodox other.
While the establishment of the Russian church in Paris contributed to the widespread dissemination of an alternative narrative that challenged the tsar-pope myth by affirming that the Orthodox Church recognized no head but Christ, anti-Orthodox sentiments did not disappear. Chapter 5 demonstrates that with the fate of Rome and the papacy unresolved in the 1860s, the tsar-pope/enslaved church myth remained an integral part of Catholic narratives defending the pope’s temporal as well as spiritual authority. Furthermore, there was some backlash against the heightened visibility and closer proximity of Russian Orthodoxy among Roman Catholics in the French capital.
The last chapter compares how Guettée, Vasiliev, and their periodical L’Union chrétienne were understood by their contemporaries in France and Russia. While Russian civil and ecclesiastical authorities saw Guettée as a trophy and an outspoken defender of Orthodoxy in the West, his reputation and personality were such that it was problematic to cast him in that role.53 Guettée’s and Vasiliev’s Russian contemporaries had an exaggerated sense of how significant and impactful Guettée’s conversion and the priest-publicists’ polemical activities, including L’Union chrétienne, really were. Nonetheless, events in Paris reverberated in Russia, where they contributed to reformist tendencies: namely, reconsideration of church-state relations, educational reforms, and calls for freedom of conscience. Overall, the negative publicity in the West and the Russian campaign to change the public image of Orthodoxy had some positive results in Russia.
The study concludes with reflections on the significance of the Russian Orthodox publicity campaign in Paris. The Orthodox publicists found sympathy in some quarters and successfully initiated a reappraisal of Russian church-state relations in the West. Meanwhile, in Russia, the sense of historical destiny spurred further efforts to enhance Orthodoxy’s global visibility and prestige.