Atheists: The Origin of the Species by Nick Spencer

Author:Nick Spencer [Spencer, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472902962
Amazon: 1472902963
Barnesnoble: 1472902963
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2014-07-02T23:00:00+00:00

The road to revolution (part 2)

‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’: The conditions for Russian atheism

Marx’s ideas would transform Russian society far more than any in which he actually lived, but that was many years in the future. At the time, Russian atheism faced more determined opposition than anywhere else in Europe.

Atheism had been known in Russia since the 1770s when Diderot had been invited to St Petersburg by Catherine the Great, provoking indignation and sermonizing among many Orthodox clergy. In spite of Diderot’s atheistic zealotry, however, the orthodox were chasing shadows, albeit shadows painted in lurid colours. ‘The essence of [the atheists’] actions are clear,’ cried one indignant cleric. ‘They are blasphemy, trampling on faith and doctrine, lack of submission to God, parents and authorities, adultery, debauchery, greed, enmity, jealousy, murder, drunkenness, disregard for future divine judgement, carelessness, despair, suicide, and so on.’28 Nicholas Breton couldn’t have put it better.

It was not until the French Revolution and its grisly wake that atheism became a genuinely live possibility in Russia and here, as elsewhere, the engine was not science but a combination of philosophy and politics. In the 1820s, a circle of Russian intellectuals, called the Society for the Love of Wisdom, began to meet in St Petersburg. They were elite and elitist, upper class, highly educated, and had little desire to reach or convert a wide audience. Influenced by romanticism and German idealism, they sought to reconcile the divine and the material, perceiving the former within the latter in a kind of pantheistic synthesis that was in a state of permanent flux. Theirs was the task of grasping this mutable reality, for which doubt and scepticism were essential tools.

If not a threat to theism, this was undoubtedly a challenge to Orthodoxy, which was then being reasserted as central to Russian social, political and cultural stability. Following the Napoleonic wars, and a sense that the nobility had become corrupt under Catherine II, Tsar Alexander I set about a programme of reform, including the banning of all secret societies, which his successor, the temperamentally suspicious (even by the standards of Tsars) Nicholas I continued. Nicholas tackled bureaucratic corruption and sought to foster a sense of noble responsibility towards Russian people. He also nurtured an official cult of the pious Tsar, promoting religious morality and looking out for the spiritual health of his subjects.

Russian education had always been deeply suspicious of philosophy. The country had been without a university until 1755 and even thereafter had retained a singular emphasis on the Church Fathers over any later theologians, let alone philosophers. Voltaire’s library, brought to St Petersburg by Catherine the Great after his death, was locked safely away in the basement of the Hermitage. The Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Public Enlightenment reported in 1822 that idealism was ‘a perverse system of doubting the authenticity of divine revelation’, which it sought to replace ‘with the false reasoning and insolent conjectures of alleged scholars and philosophers’.29 Soon after Tsar Nicholas I ascended to the throne in 1825, courses in ‘moral and dogmatic theology’ became mandatory for all Moscow University students.

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