Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (155 page)

A WAR THAT KILLED CHRISTENDOM (1914-18)

The most prominent pieces of furniture added during the twentieth century to the fine medieval church where my father was rector were a new pipe organ and a tall sideboard-like structure bearing a list of sixteen male names in alphabetical order. Both are Wetherden's memorials to its dead in the First World War, and it is significant that in this little Suffolk village, the parish church was then felt to be the right setting for community commemoration. So it was in my father's neighbouring parish of Haughley, where a stone churchyard cross with figures of Christ crucified, Mary and John tops another list (alphabetical by regiment) of twenty-nine dead men: a crushingly large number from a small place. Not all such memorials take Christian forms, but virtually every community or old-established company, school or college in the United Kingdom has one, almost always still carefully tended and once a year the focus for one of the last national rituals widely observed in Britain, the Service of Remembrance. They were overwhelmingly paid for by public subscription: 'the biggest communal arts project ever attempted'.
¹
Their presence through the rest of Europe is likewise all-pervasive, although in many places they have fared less well than in Britain, because the political institutions whose soldiers fell have long disappeared, caught up and often discredited by the long-term effects of the war itself.
²
The greatest casualty commemorated in this multitude of crosses and symbols of war is the union between Christianity and secular power: Christendom itself. By the end of the 1960s, the alliance between emperors and bishops which Constantine had first generated was a ghost; a fifteen-hundred-year-old adventure was at an end.

The war which began in August 1914, triggered by complex diplomacy and a tangle of fears and aspirations, did not seem likely to set any such new patterns. It involved four Christian emperors - German and Austrian Kaisers, the Russian Tsar and the British King-Emperor
³
- but such rulers had habitually ignored their common faith to fight each other. They went to war over a long-standing cause of instability for Christendom: the gradual disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, or, more precisely, the competition to dominate its former Balkan conquests. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrones, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, a devout Catholic keenly interested in the restoration of historic church buildings, was gunned down with his wife in Sarajevo, capital of the Habsburgs' most recently acquired province, Bosnia-Herzegovina. His murderers were part of an Orthodox-inspired movement to create a Greater Serbia which would include this religiously pluralistic territory. Beyond religion were power politics, ranging the Orthodox Tsar Nicholas II alongside the Protestant (and ethnically German) King-Emperor George V, in uncomfortable entente with an anticlerical Third French Republic. They acted in defensive nervousness, hoping to quell the expansionist ambitions of the new imperial Germany, which had encouraged its Habsburg ally to pressure Serbia, in order to confront Serbia's protector Russia. Religion lurked in unpredictable ways. When the German Kaiser's armies invaded Belgium to strike at the Franco-Russian alliance, they were violating the neutrality of a state formed in the 1830s specifically to accommodate the Roman Catholic faith of its inhabitants. Britain fought ostensibly to enforce that neutrality under guarantees that it had made to Belgium in 1839.

In summer 1914 the Second Socialist International tried in vain to summon up a cross-border solidarity of workers against the growing crisis; it found that far more were swayed by the rhetoric of nationalism backed up by the institutions of Christianity, which caused a continent-wide outpouring of popular enthusiasm for war. All sides excitedly coupled the theme of Christian faith with national unity as they launched their armies, none more so than the government of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was also supreme Bishop of the Prussian Evangelical Church (see Plate 47). 'No lust for conquest prompts us - unshakeable determination inspires us to guard the place in which God has set us and all generations to come,' he proclaimed. 'You have read, Gentlemen, what I have said to my People from the Castle balcony. Here I say again: I know parties no more, I know nothing but a German!' The Kaiser's speech from the throne of August 1914 to the leaders of the Reichstag parties echoed the public proclamation drafted for the Emperor by the Imperial Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, aided by the great liberal Protestant historian Adolf von Harnack, Rector of Berlin University, now Royal Librarian, and ennobled only six months before. German Protestant theologians and academics, Harnack's colleagues, had internalized the new imperial ideal with remarkable and unedifying speed after the Hohenzollern triumph of 1870-71. At no time did they trumpet that more than in 1914 - very specifically, in a Proclamation of Ninety-three German Professors to the Cultural World. It says a good deal about the legacy of Wilhelm von Humboldt (see pp. 830-31) that German professors could take themselves that seriously.
⁴

Some Anglican bishops could be heard making equally remarkable statements. The Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, in one sermon in Advent 1915 called on the British Army 'to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old'. At least Herbert Asquith, British Prime Minister, did not share the Kaiser's enthusiasm for bellicose sentiments from scholars and clerics, and styled Winnington-Ingram with elegant distaste 'an intensely silly bishop'. But the killing on all sides was as thorough as the Bishop of London had prescribed.
⁵
The four years of slaughter revealed where the power lay between nationalism and religion. When Pope Benedict XV used his studied neutrality to seek a negotiated peace in 1917, both sides ignored him, despite his outstanding record as a diplomat.
⁶
Just as symbolic were the desperate demands by the increasingly beleaguered German government to churches to sacrifice treasured items for the war effort. German parishioners watched in misery as their bells were carried away after being rung for the last time - the very bells which had rung out so cheerfully for the outbreak of war.
⁷

Then in 1917 came the first fall of a Christian empire, the seat of the Russian Orthodox Church which had so long styled itself the Third Rome. Tsar Nicholas II was amiable, pious and well intentioned, but dull-wittedly autocratic - James Joyce neatly described Nicholas even before his downfall as having 'the face of a besotted Christ'.
⁸
The Tsar made the mistake of appointing himself as commander-in-chief in a war which he increasingly mismanaged, thus associating the Romanov dynasty intimately with the catastrophe into which Russia descended. At the centre of the empire, the Tsarina Alexandra was prominent in home government, to equally disastrous effect. Public outrage at the sense of drift focused on the faith-healing holy man Grigorii Rasputin, who had gained a hold over the Tsar and Tsarina because of his apparent ability to control the haemophilia of the heir to the imperial throne. Rasputin has been an object of much sensationalist fascination, not least because of the Grand Guignol ghastliness of his assassination by furious aristocrats in 1916, but it is as well to appreciate his ambiguity: pilgrim on foot from Siberia to Mount Athos, contemptuous of social hierarchy, treated with sympathy and respect by some senior churchmen (others loathed him). Even in his drunkenness and promiscuity, Rasputin looks remarkably like the Holy Fools whom we have met repeatedly in their long journey from the eastern Mediterranean - and so his many admirers saw him. Russian folk religion was returning to take its revenge on the autocracy which had shackled its Church in Peter the Great's Holy Synod.
⁹

Rasputin's murder did not remedy the dire situation. 'Parastatal' organizations - local councils, representatives of business, the Red Cross - had been increasingly filling the gap left by the government's maladministration, and it was a combination of their leadership and the terrible toll of death in the war which finally forced abdication on the Tsar in March 1917; a Provisional Government followed.
¹⁰
For the Orthodox Church, it was a moment of opportunity. It is a tribute to the renewal and reflection that had been going on in the Church over the previous decades, as part of Russia's development of grass-roots representative institutions, that Church leaders now acted so swiftly and with such vision. By August a council of bishops, clergy and laypeople had gathered in Moscow to make decisions for the whole Church, something unprecedented in Russia's history. They elected the first patriarch for two centuries, since Peter the Great had brought an end to the patriarchate. Tikhon Bellavin was a bishop who had spent nine years in the United States, where he had been responsible for the setting up of institutional structures for the Orthodox Church; many of his proposals might now be brought back to this newly representative Church in Russia. A swathe of reforming measures was agreed: laywomen were accorded unprecedented opportunities in the Church's activity and administration, and the council even gave time to sending messages of friendship to the Church of England.
¹¹

Yet as Patriarch Tikhon was elected, in the background was the sound of gunfire and bombardment: the Kremlin was under attack from Bolshevik socialists. The Provisional Government in St Petersburg (now Russified as Petrograd) had made no great effort to end the war, and popular disillusion with its rule gave the Bolsheviks their chance to seize power in October. They made peace with the central European emperors to consolidate their own power against a broad coalition of opposition. The Bolsheviks were not fighting tsarist autocracy: that had already been dismantled. They saw themselves as instituting a new world order, and such visions are rarely conducive to tolerance of the past, or indeed of any contrary opinion. Their attitude was summed up in the words of Boris Pilnyak, a Russian novelist who, like so many other idealists of the Bolshevik Revolution, was eventually executed by those who turned the revolution into Stalin's Russia:

Our Revolution is a rebellion in the name of the conscious, rational, purposeful and dynamic principle of life, against the elemental, senseless biological automism of life: that is, against the peasant roots of our old Russian history, against its aimlessness, its non-technological character, against the holy and idiotic philosophy of Tolstoy's Karataev in
War and Peace
.
¹²

For the Bolsheviks, the Church was the embodiment of the society which they were trying to destroy. Their detestation of Christianity was as extreme as that of the Jacobins in the French Revolution; the formal separation of Church and State in January 1918 was just one first step towards death and destruction, the Romanov family's murder being symbolic of so many others. The civil war which was already raging by then, and which ended in 1922 with Bolshevik victory, marked the beginning of seventy years for the Russian Orthodox Church which represent one of the worst betrayals of hope in the history of Christianity. During those terrible decades, the destruction of life and of the material beauty of church buildings and art outdid anything in Orthodox experience since the Mongol invasions; the Orthodox faithful were made strangers amid the culture which they had shaped over centuries. Patriarch Tikhon, desperately trying to protect his Church with no real assets at his disposal apart from the ability to forgive his enemies, eventually died under house arrest in 1925. It is likely that he was murdered by thugs commanded by a Bolshevik leader who was possibly the bastard son of a priest and in early life was one of the most unpromising of seminarians. Long before Tikhon's death, this Georgian gangster, who never fulfilled his mother's hopes that he might become a bishop, had adopted the pseudonym Josef Stalin.
¹³

The Bolsheviks' hatred of religious practice extended far beyond the official Church. Of all the stories of Christian suffering in Russia after 1917, that of the Mennonites can stand for others because of the peculiar moral dilemma it presented for this sect, which since the Reformation had itself rejected the ideal of Christendom now in collapse. First gathered in the Netherlands in the 1530s by Menno Simons, a Frisian former priest sickened by the blood-soaked end to the siege of Munster (see pp. 623-4), Mennonites expressed their difference from the world around them by renouncing all forms of coercion or public violence, soldiering of course included. Their hard work and orderly peaceableness made them attractive colonists for the tsars, and by the time of the revolution hundreds of thousands lived in Mennonite communities, mostly in the Volga region. Their prosperity attracted Bolshevik and anarchist raids, both out of ideological hatred of 'bourgeois' farmers, and from simple greed or necessity - but there was another intoxicating element for bullies: the Mennonites would not fight back when attacked. Men were murdered, women raped, everything was stolen. For many of them, it was too much. They fought back and sent perpetrators of the outrages packing - but now they had to face the wrath of brethren and sisters who said that they were betraying Mennonite principles. When Russian Mennonites finally had the chance, most made new lives in communities in North America; but they did not forget the controversy. Bad feeling and arguments about the Russian civil war still beset quiet places in the prairies of Canada.
¹⁴

The end of the war on Europe's other frontiers in late 1918 brought the collapse of three more empires. The twin Protestant and Catholic heirs of the Holy Roman Empire now quit their thrones, as the pressure of central European nationalisms led to the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the shock of Germany's sudden capitulation in the West precipitated the overthrow of Kaiser Wilhelm. An array of impressively bewhiskered German princelings followed in their wake. The third to fall was the Ottoman Sultan, who had entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria, and who was ejected from his palaces in 1922; the caliphate was formally abolished two years later. Of all the European imperial crowned heads, only the British King-Emperor remained.
¹⁵