The Age of Humanism (1453-1658)

429 Pages·2020·2.785 MB·English

by  Vladimir Moss

THE AGE OF HUMANISM
(1453-1658)

Volume III
of
AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY
From an Orthodox Christian Point of View

Vladimir Moss

@ Copyright, Vladimir Moss, 2020. All Rights Reserved

1
Romania has passed away, Romania is taken.
Even if Romania has passed away, it will flower and bear fruit again.
Pontic folk-song, on the Fall of Constantinople.

I and my companions suffer from a disease of the heart that can only be cured by gold.
Hernan Cortes to the Aztecs.

The chief gift of nature… is freedom.
Leonardo da Vinci.

God gave us the papacy; now let us enjoy it.
Pope Leo X (Giovanni de Medici).

As free, and not using your liberty as a cloak of maliciousness,
But as the servants of God.
I Peter 2.16.

The king is above the law, as both the author and the giver of strength thereto.
King James I of England.

As in the Arts and Sciences the first foundation is of more consequence than all the
improvements afterwards, so in kingdoms, the first foundation or plantation is of
more dignity and merit than all that followeth.
Francis Bacon.

Knowledge is power.
Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae.

[Monarchy is] the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship -
loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendour,
ceremony, continuity - still trickle down to irrigate the dustbowl of modern economic
Statecraft.
C.S. Lewis, “Myth Becomes Fact”.

At different times, in different places, Emperor and Anarchist alike may find it
convenient to appeal to Holy Writ.
Sir Edmund Leech.

We are very apt all of us to call that faith, that perhaps may be but carnal
imagination.
Oliver Cromwell (1647).

[The people’s] liberty consists in having government… It is not their having a share
in government, sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are
clear different things…
King Charles I of England (1649).

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Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in
the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let
her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open
encounter?
John Milton, Areopagitica (1644).

Temporal and spiritual are two words brought into the world to make men see double,
and mistake their lawful sovereign… A man cannot obey two masters… Seeing there
are no men on earth whose bodies are spiritual, there can be no spiritual
commonwealth among men that are yet in the flesh.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651).

In the European West, Christianity gradually became transformed into humanism.
For several centuries the God-man became more and more limited and confined to His
humanity, eventually becoming the infallible man of Rome and of Berlin. Thus, on the
one hand there appeared a western Christian humanistic maximalism (the papacy)
which took everything away from Christ, and on the other hand a western Christian
humanistic minimalism (Protestantism) which sought very little if anything from
Christ. In both man takes the place of the God-man as that which is of most value and
is the measure of all things.
Archimandrite Justin Popovich (+1979).

What is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge bishops, taking to himself a power
which has not been given him by God?… This is apostasy from God.
Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, Razzorenie (Demolishment).

We still believe and maintain that our Kings derive not their title from the people, but
from God; that to Him only they are accountable; that it belongs not to subjects either
to create or censure, but to honour and obey their sovereign, who comes to be so by a
fundamental hereditary right of succession.
King Charles II of England (1681).

The Church of Christ is exalted above the hills - above all earthly and human
greatness. Human philosophy and art, and all the cultures of people, as well as all
earthly values, represent only the low hills in comparison to the infinite heights of
Christ's Church.
St Nikolai Velimirovich.

Yea, sacred are you, O Russia. The ancient writer was correct who said that you are
the Third Rome, and there will be no fourth. You have surpassed the ancient Rome by
the multitude of exploits of your martyrs, you have surpassed also the Rome which
baptized you [Constantinople] by your standing in Orthodoxy, and you will remain
unsurpassed to the end of the world. Only the land which was sanctified by the
sufferings and the earthly life of the God-man is holier than you in the eyes of
Orthodox Christians.
St. John Maximovitch.

3
INTRODUCTION
  7

I.
 RENAISSANCE
 AND
 REFORMATION
  10

1. RENAISSANCE HUMANISM: (1) THE REBIRTH OF ANTIQUITY
  11

2. RENAISSANCE HUMANISM: (2) THE CULT OF THE INDIVIDUAL
  15

3. RENAISSANCE HUMANISM: (3) SCIENCE, MAGIC AND ART
  20

4. RENAISSANCE HUMANISM: (4) CONCEPTS OF FREEDOM
  29

5. THE ITALIAN CITY-STATES
  33

6. MACHIAVELLI’S POLITICAL MORALITY
  39

7. KINGS AND PARLIAMENTS
  47

8. THE SPANISH, THE MUSLIMS AND THE JEWS
  55

9. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
  61

10. THE SPANISH AMERICAS
  71

11. THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION AND THE PRINTING PRESS
  81

12. LUTHER ON CONSCIENCE
  88

13. LUTHER ON SACRAMENTS, FAITH AND WORKS
  94

14. LUTHER ON PREDESTINATION
  97

15. LUTHER ON CHURCH AND STATE
  101

16. CALVINISM
  109

17. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION: (1) HENRY VIII
  116

18. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION: (2) THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES

  124

19. THE ENGLISH REFORMATION: (3) THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT
  131

20. THE COUNCIL OF TRENT AND NATURAL LAW
  136

21. ELIZABETH I, THE VIRGIN QUEEN
  140

22. SHAKESPEARE’S UNIVERSE
  155

II.
 THE
 MUSCOVITE
 AUTOCRACY
  165

23. THE GREEKS UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE
  166

24. ORTHODOXY AND PROTESTANTISM
  176

25. ST. STEPHEN THE GREAT
  181

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26. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (1) IVAN III AND BASIL III
  186

27. THE JUDAIZING HERESY
  194

28. SAINT MAXIMUS THE GREEK
  203

29. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (2) IVAN IV
  206

30. IVAN THE TERRIBLE AND THE OPRICHNINA
  214

31. THE CONQUEST OF SIBERIA
  232

32. CHURCH AND STATE IN MUSCOVY
  236

33. MOSCOW THE THIRD ROME: (3) TSAR THEODORE
  246

34. THE SERBS UNDER THE OTTOMAN YOKE
  253

III.
 ABSOLUTISM
 AND
 REVOLUTION
  260

35. JAMES I AND THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS
  261

36. THE DUTCH REVOLUTION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM
  268

37. RICHELIEU AND THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
  275

38. THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA
  281

39. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (1) POLITICS AND RELIGION
  284

40. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (2) KING AND PARLIAMENT
  288

41. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (3) CIVIL WAR
  299

42. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (4) THE KILLING OF THE KING
  306

43. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (5) CROMWELL AND THE RADICALS
  313

44. THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION: (6) CROMWELL THE LORD PROTECTOR
  321

45. HOBBES’ LEVIATHAN
  328

46. THE JEWS OF EUROPE: (1) FROM SPAIN TO HOLLAND
  338

47. THE JEWS OF EUROPE: (2) FROM HOLLAND TO ENGLAND
  342

48. GROTIUS, SELDEN AND SPINOZA
  346

49. THE NORTH AMERICAN COLONIES
  354

IV.
 THE
 ROMANOV
 DYNASTY
  364

50. THE TIME OF TROUBLES: (1) BORIS GODUNOV
  365

51. THE TIME OF TROUBLES: (2) THE FALSE DMITRI AND VASILY SHUISKY
  369

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52. THE TIME OF TROUBLES: (3) ST. HERMOGEN OF MOSCOW
  374

53. THE FIRST ROMANOV TSAR
  381

54. THE HEREDITARY PRINCIPLE
  384

55. THE RESURRECTION OF MUSCOVY
  394

56. MUSCOVY AND UKRAINE
  402

58. THE SCHISM OF THE OLD RITUALISTS
  413

CONCLUSION. CHURCH-STATE SYMPHONY IN THE THIRD ROME
  424

6
INTRODUCTION

This book represents the third volume in my series, An Essay in Universal
History. The first volume, The Age of Faith, ended with the Seventh Ecumenical
Councils in 787. The second volume, The Age of Papism, ended with the fall of
Constantinople in 1453. This third volume ends with the death of Oliver
Cromwell in 1658.

“The world changed in the late fifteenth century,” writes Peter Frankopan.
There was no apocalypse, no end of time, as Columbus and others feared – at
least not as far as Europe was concerned. A series of long-range expeditions
setting out from Spain and Portugal connected the Americas to Africa and
Europe and ultimately to Asia for the first time. In the process, new trade
routes were established, in some cases extending existing networks, in others
replacing them. Ideas, goods and people began to move further and more
quickly than at any time in human history – and in greater numbers too.

“The new dawn propelled Europe to centre-stage, enveloping it in golden
light and blessing it with a series of golden ages. Its rise, however, brought
terrible suffering in newly discovered locations. There was a price for the
magnificent cathedrals, the glorious art and the rising standards of living that
blossomed from the sixteenth century onwards. It was paid by populations
living across the oceans: Europeans were able not only to explore the world
but to dominate it. They did so thanks to the relenteles advances in military
and naval technology that provided un unstoppable advantage over the
populations they came into contact with. The age of empire and the rise of the
west were built on the capacity to inflict violence on a major scale. The
Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, the progression towards democracy,
civil liberty and human rights, were not the result of an unseen change
linking back to Athens in antiquity or a natural state of affairs in Europe; they
wer the fruits of political, military and economic success in faraway
continents.”1

However, a deeper cause of the propulsion of Western Europe to world
dominance was a deep shift in ideas, which we can summarise in the word
“humanism”.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought to an end the medieval world,
which was mainly characterized, on the one hand, by the Christian Faith in its
traditional, Orthodox form, and on the other, by monarchical modes of
political government that continued to draw inspiration and legitimacy from
the Church. In the modern world that was about to begin, both Christianity
and monarchism would be on the retreat – although the retreat was
accompanied by some notable and prolonged counter-attacks. After 1453, the
Orthodox religio-political outlook and civilization that we have called
Orthodox Christian Romanity, whose political aspect was Autocracy and its

1 Frankopan, The Silk Roads, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 202.
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religious aspect - Orthodoxy, largely disappeared from its Mediterranean
homeland and as it were bifurcated: while its religious centre remained in
Constantinople, in the Ecumenical Patriarchate, its political centre moved
north, to Moscow, “the Third Rome”. In Moscow, in what most Europeans
considered to be a barbaric outpost on the edge of civilization, or even beyond
its bounds, Orthodox Christian Romanity was preserved. And so the main
theme of this third volume in my history is the struggle between Russia and
the waves of new ideas that assaulted it from the West – Humanism and
Rationalism, and Protestantism and Catholicism...

The struggle between Russia and the West was foreordained in the very
date of her birth: the period between the baptism of Russia under St. Vladimir
in 988 and the death of his son, Yaroslav the Wise, in 1054 corresponds almost
exactly to the final decline of Western Orthodox civilization, culminating in
the great schism between Old Rome and New Rome (Constantinople) in 1054.
Thus Orthodox Russia came into being just as the Orthodox West was dying;
she appears to have been called by Divine Providence to take the place of the
West in the scheme of Universal History, and to defend the whole of
Orthodox Christendom against the western heresies. Meanwhile, the
Ecumenical Patriarchate retained its leadership role in the ecclesiastical
sphere, though under the political yoke of the Ottoman sultans. But it
recognized the Russian Tsar as the political leader of all Orthodox Christians,
and Russia herself as “the Third Rome”, as she crept slowly southward,
aiming at the liberation of the ancient capital of Christendom.

The first major turning-point in modern western history was the Humanist
Renaissance, which placed man at the centre of the universe and man’s reason
as the ultimate criterion of truth. As the Thomist scholar Étienne Gilson put it,
Renaissance humanism was the Middle Ages “not plus humanity but minus
God”. It purported, through a resurrection of ancient, Classical Greco-Roman
culture to free men from the fetters of medieval scholasticism, to bring the
light of reason to bear on every aspect of human life, even the revelations of
religion. It sought to raise the common man to his full potential, which he
would supposedly be capable of achieving if he were not enslaved to the
tyranny of popes and kings and religious superstition.

The expansion of human consciousness that took place in the Renaissance
coincided with a widening of western man’s understanding of the bounds of
his physical environment, in the discovery of the New World, and in the
discovery that the earth revolves around the sun (although many of the
ancients knew this already). For this was truly an Age of Discovery… But in
discovering some new things, man lost some older, much more important
things, notably the knowledge of God in the Church… The sixteenth century
saw a reaction against Humanism in the rise of Protestantism, which was
followed by a revival of Catholicism in the Counter-Reformation and a series
of horrific religious wars. However, the seeds of Renaissance Humanism were
not extirpated by the Reformation, but found new and fertile soil in the
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Protestant world, bringing forth the poisonous fruits of Rationalism and
religious scepticism in the eighteenth century.

The main victim of the new ways of thinking was authority in both Church
and State. The authoritarian foundations of medieval society in the West were
essentially twofold: feudalism and papalism. Both were shaken by the new
thinking, but both survived in some parts of Europe until the nineteenth
century. In their place there arose Divine Right Monarchy, a religious form of
despotism, which in Catholic countries had the support of the Pope, and in
Protestant countries – that of the kings and (in part) of Holy Scripture. But
monarchism suffered a severe blow in the English revolution, which gave
birth later to Social Contract theory and democratism. The new authority that
arose in the place of the old was reason, both the individual reasoning mind
and its collective expression, science.

The early modern period was not a revolutionary movement in the sense
that it overthrew tradition in toto and in principle. On the contrary, in order to
correct what it saw as the distortions of the Middle Ages, it appealed to the
authority of the still more ancient past – the literature and art of pagan Greece
and Rome (“old books from which new learning springs”, as Geoffrey
Chaucer put it), and the early, pre-Constantinian Church. And even when
humanist modes of thought were already well esconced in the West, Christian
modes of thought were not forgotten or erased. Thus as late as the English
revolution of the mid-seventeenth century both Catholics and Protestants,
Divine right monarchists and anti-monarchist republicans, appealed sincerely
and passionately to Holy Scripture. In other words, the early modern age was
still a believing age, a Christian age, albeit an heretical one. And in Muscovite
Russia there still existed one of the great and right-believing Christian
kingdoms.

Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have
mercy on us!

9
I.
 RENAISSANCE
 AND
 REFORMATION

10