Basil Lourié: The Route from Joseph de Maistre to Constantine Leontiev: Three First Generations of Russian Catholics, 1800–1860

When, in 1817, Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) departed from St Petersburg, he felt himself a half-Russian (and of course still half-Savoyard), who was forcibly deprived of his second homeland, where he hoped to die. My intention here is to substantiate the thesis that de Maistre was the first Russian “lay theologian” and the founder of a specific theological tradition. This tradition was continued, within Catholicism but not in its mainstream, by Jean Rozaven, S.J. (1772–1851), and, then, by his and de Maistre’s Russian disciples, especially abroad, including Ekaterina Petrovna Rostopchine (1776–1859), Elizabeth Galitzin, R.S.C.J. (1795–1843), Sophie Swetchine (1782–1857), Jean Gagarin, S.J. (1814–1882), Peter Augustine Shuvalov, B. (1804–1859), and several others, belonging to three generations (although not all Russian Catholics of the time). This theological tradition profoundly affected Orthodox theology too. Not Vladimir Soloviev and the so-called Russian Religious Renaissance, however. Soloviev and his followers were more opposite to its anti-occultist (anti-Böhmian) attitude than agree with its Catholicism, not to say that the “Russian” Catholicism shaped by de Maistre and Rozaven was too rigid, too ascetic, and too little sentimental for these thinkers. In this respect, Soloviev opted for Franz von Baader (formally, Catholic as well) instead of de Maistre. Von Baader did not plan to become a half-Russian but actually became a Russian influence agent on the payroll and dreamed to transform the Russian state religion into his Böhmian “theosophy”. 

For the part of the Russian educated society that had some kind of Christian faith but distrust “Martinism” (as then used to call, in Russia, the entire spectrum of western extra-confessional mystic doctrines), de Maistre and those with him re-established two most fundamental Christian truths: that (1) Christianity is something different and incomparably higher than any patriotism or culture, and that (2) Christianity requires no less than the entire person, which makes monastic or, anyway, ascetic way of life the most natural. The second thesis was implicit in de Maistre but easily understandable (especially with the help of Rozaven), as the intended audience quickly proved. 

In the early 19th-cent. Russia, there existed an Orthodox monastic theological tradition mostly connected with the Romanian monasticism of Paisius Veličkovsky (and, therefore, indirectly also with the Greek Kollyvades), but it was kept underground, and the high society had absolutely no access to it. Even the printed Slavonic Philocalia was, before 1822, a little-known book; the contemporaneous ascetic literature in either Slavonic or Russian was spread without a recourse to printing, not to say that, among the Russian aristocracy whose mother tongue was pre-revolutionary French, the knowledge of Russian was only rudimentary and that of Slavonic was absent. The Russian Orthodox monastic tradition with its theology did not come to the surface even in 1818–1822, when the defeat of masonic extra-confessional mysticism was performed under the leadership of an eccentric and prone to theatrical deception archimandrite Photius (Spassky; 1792–1838).

For Russian aristocracy, the only accessible representatives of a convincing Christianity—that is, ascetic, confessing, passed through martyrdom, and able to explain its theology—was that of the Catholic émigrés. Such were those who arrived in Russia before de Maistre, especially Louise-Emmanuelle, princess de Tarente (1763–1814), and chevalier Jean-Joseph-Dominique de Bassinet d’Augard (ca 1740–1808) in St Petersburg and abbé Adrien Surugue (1753–1812) in Moscow. They planted what de Maistre and Rozaven watered. The fruits that grew as a result were first Russian Catholics. In the third generation, in the early 1840s, these Catholics faced the growing Russian Slavophile movement.

The documents published in the 1980s–2000s demonstrate that Alexey Stepanovich Khomiakov’s (1804–1860) involvement in theological discussion, his anti-Catholicism and his interest in theology was stimulated by his competition with Jean Gagarin for the soul of the future renown Slavophile Yuri Fëdorovich Samarin (1819–1876). Samarin was, at first, heavily influenced by his relative Gagarin but eventually became an admirer of Khomiakov considering him quite seriously as a Doctor of the Church. The competition with Gagarin impacted Khomiakov’s theology from the very beginning in about 1842, even when he managed to avoid, in his writings, explicit mentions of his name, but, in the 1850s, this polemic became explicit. Khomiakov’s theology was, to a great extent, rather especially anti-Catholic than Orthodox in a positive sense (not to say that Khomiakov took theological inspiration in the works of the Calvinist Alexandre Vinet and, in the latest years, in those of the extremely liberal Lutheran Christian von Bunsen). However, the main target of Khomiakov’s anti-Catholicism was Gagarin.

Looking retrospectively at Slavophiles’ and Dostoevsky’s anti-Catholicism, on the one hand, and Catholicism, on the other, Constantine Leontiev (1831–1891)—then a representative, among the European-educated Russians, of  the traditional monastic-inspired Orthodoxy—wrote in 1882: some Russian lay writers in their zeal of defending Orthodoxy against Catholicism, “…most often condemned in Catholicism, because of their ignorance or their liberalism, not the dogmatic and canonical highly important nuances in which it differs from Orthodoxy but, on the contrary, especially the aspects which it has with Orthodoxy in common, or which are, at least, worthy of imitation: asceticism and the optimistic pessimism of the worldview; strong power of the clergy; development of the spiritual care and eldership, female schools organised by the monasteries etc. Thinking to harm the Papacy, these writers harmed very much Orthodoxy…”

Now, looking retrospectively at the entire Russian nineteenth century, one can see that the line of Leontiev, Mikhail Novoselov (1864–1938), and other confessors and martyrs of the Catacomb Church, despite its obvious genetic connexion to Slavophilism, continued the line of the Russian Catholics from de Maistre to Gagarin especially in “asceticism and the optimistic pessimism of the worldview”, as well as in an interest in the Fathers as something absolutely vital (unlike Khomiakov’s purely imitative interest in them). This line was rejected by those who, at the crossroad between von Baader and de Maistre, opted for the first.