In addition, the emperors and empresses became less and less paternal and Russia less and less a family. Power was not so much spiritual as it was legal. If administrators were not Frenchmen or Germans, they were Russians who had lost their faith. The autocracy of love and faith became the autocracy of force and cunning. The Freemasons, Bible Societies and theosophists invaded holy Russia. Her seminaries and academies spewed Western rationalism and skepticism. The people were confused and discontented." (SACRED MONARCHY AND THE MODERN SECULAR STATE)
I'm curious as to the source. Surely this is a polemic, as opposed to a work of scholarship --- for one thing, the Russian peasants weren't having all that much fun under the autocracy of "love and faith" that preceded Peter I, and which presumably reached a climax of joy under Ivan the Terrible.
"Some 75 years ago the greatest twentieth-century hierarch of the Russian Church, Metropolitan Antony of Kiev, wrote that the roots of the fall of Russia, which he had foretold on several occasions before 1917, went back to 1666. It was then that the holy Russian Patriarch Nikon had been deposed and had already foretold the collapse of Russia as an Orthodox land. After this, there had inevitably followed the complete abolition of the Russian Patriarchate by Peter I in 1721, and in 1797 the proclamation of the Emperor as the head of the Russian Church under Paul I. The Church had become a mere department of State, as in the Protestant model - as indeed in the Soviet model. Quoting Genesis 6,3, which foretold the Flood, "And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years," Metropolitan Antony wrote of how 1917 was exactly 120 years after 1797. Thus, 120 years after 1797, there began the all-destructive Flood of 1917. (See the Biography of Metropolitan Antony, Vol III, pp 6-9, Bishop Nikon (Rklitsky), New York 1957).
This is strangely reminiscent of the numerology nonsense that was being unleashed on the French royal threads a few months ago. Belief in this kind of thing (1917 is 120 years after 1797, and this is important because of . . . Genesis?
Hello?) is of great comfort, but no use whatsoever in an historical discussion. I know, I'm going to burn, but allow me to point out as a fellow Catholic, Amour des Bourbons (catchy revamp, btw) that this is exactly the kind of superstitious hogwash that is routinely discarded by the Vatican, and which in Orthodoxy leads to things like magic combs.
The tragedy of the Russian Royal Family was that they were to die, not for their own human sins, but for the sins of their dynasty and all Russia. They were in fact prisoners of a system, a system into which they were born, a system whereby the whole of the Russian Empire was governed not by Church and State, but by the State and a decapitated Church. With the spiritual principle of the Church subverted, the Russian State was unbalanced and, sooner or later, the Revolution had to happen. The State needed the Church, just as the Church needed the State." (RUSSIAN DESTINIES)
The Russian Imperial Family did not die for their sins, still less for the sins of their dynasty and all Russia. They died because they were prisoners of a Bolshevik government that made the decision to execute them rather than let them fall into the hands of the White Army that was approaching Yekaterinburg.
Furthermore, the argument advanced by this passage from
Russian Destinies apparently takes the position that there was such a thing as a 'principle of the Church' that was commonly understood. If in fact subversion of this principle was a guarantee of Revolution, then how did (1) the English Royal Family avoid being stood up in a cellar in, say, Leeds, in 1918 and (2) what on earth did poor Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette ever do to the spiritual edifice of France?
Simon