www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West "All Progress Is Bad"

This doesn't directly apply to Eastern Catholics, but it does apply specifically to Russian Eastern Orthodoxy.

Yesterday, in my Modern Civilizations class, we had to do a very simple worksheet (my 8 year old sister could have mastered it, don't ask me why they're givin' this stuff to private school sophomores) which concerned Peter the Great and his goals of westernizing Russia. The material in the worksheet stated that "in Russian Orthodoxy, the time of Peter the Great, geometry was considered a sin" and that "men had to have beards to get into heaven." It said some other things downgrading Orthodoxy and even stated that to according the Russian Orthodox clergy at that time, "all progress was bad". In his lecture, our Modern Civ teacher also emphasized the "backwardness" of Russian Orthodxy in the late 1700's. I'm not Orthodox, but I find this COMPLETELY unfair and untrue, and to characterize a Christian body like that in a Christian school is beyong me. My teacher is also pretty staunchly anti-Catholic, and tries at every chance he gets to put down the Church. He absolutely detests me even though I have the highest average in his class (I know, I need some modesty) because half the time I say "hey wait a minute..." because I don't want his bias rubbing off on my classmates. Whoa, what a tangent...but anyway, is Peter the Great a saint in Russian Orthodoxy? Many of his reforms were very Western. How did this settle over with the clergy at that time? Any comments?

ChristTeen287

Most Holy Theotokos, pray unto God for the betterment of my grammar and the correction of my typos. Amen!

Shlomo ChristTeen,
Amen Brother, you should read my post on the elevation of Fr. Munn.

Tomorrow I will answer your question about Peter the Great (I can use my history degrees yeah!!!)

Poosh BaSlomo,
Yuhannon

LOL, thanks Yuhannon.

Dear ChristTeen,

Robert K. Massie, now an Orthodox Christian, wrote "Peter the Great" and it is an excellent and balanced overview of his life and times.

If anyone were going to make Peter out to be a hero of modernization, which is what happens frequently, I suppose one would also have to approve of his dictatorial manner and cruelty (torturing and killing his own son).

He was in love with Western European ways and often signed his name in letters to his mother in Latin "Petrus" which sometimes drove Russian Orthodox Hierarchs bananas. (He did it on purpose knowing it would upset him - like what some posters here do at times, me included ).

He went against the stream of Russian society at the time.

The beard had and has religious significance - no one ever said one needed it to get to heaven.

But rather than decry the beard thing, shouldn't the teacher look at how Peter I treated those who wouldn't shave it off? (Check this with Massie's book).

Old Believers had to pay a tax for keeping their beards, people were encouraged to ridicule them in the streets as "backward" etc. and they had to have a medallion with a caricature of a bearded man on it at all times - or else risk imprisonment.

And heaven help anyone attending a banquet with a beard at which Peter was present!

He would often pin such to their chairs during dinner with his knees as he crudely cut off their facial hair.

Yes, he was in favour of modern medicine too!

When at Kensington Palace (where Princess Diana lived), he witnessed the cutting open of a cadaver.

When his people snickered, he grabbed one assistant by the hair and shoved his face into the dead body, ordering him to bite off a piece . . .

Yes, this enemy of "Backward Orthodoxy" was a real epitome of an enlightened and cultured gentleman!

Unfortunately, the kind of crap that you have to put up with in school is all too frequently taught - and believed.

Alex

C.T.287,

I think teachers should teach to challenge their pupils minds. Teach them to learn how to think on their own. Not just feed pupils comfortable information, that allows them to ease smoothly in their trained roles, as team players in their society and culture.

And I don't think a teacher explaining his/her personal opinion on a subject is wrong. But the teacher should explain his/her opinion as just that - his/her personal opinion.

How one can go about teaching students to honestly think for themselves with out introducing the teachers personal bias to a point of manipulation is a question I'm not sure I have the answer too. I would be interested in hearing from some of the educational professionals on this forum as to their suggestions how this can be accomplished.

At any rate I've read that Roman Catholicism forbade the use of the compass for four hundred years. Is this true? I don't know? But if it is, you can see how beard wears in Russia and star watchers in Tuscany can have the aura of 'backwardness.' To those who venture to think on their own.

Justin

Shlomo ChristTeen,
Here is the article that I promissed. This will get you started.

Poosh BaShlomo,
Yuhannon

Peter the Great and the Russian Empire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Peter the Great and the Russian Empire covers Russian history during the reign of Peter the Great from 1696 to 1725. During this period the state of Muscovy was expanded to become the Russian Empire, and Peter became emperor of Russia in 1721.

As a child of the second marriage of Tsar Aleksey?, Peter at first was relegated to the background of Russian politics as various court factions struggled to control the throne. Aleksey was succeeded by his son from his first marriage, Fedor III?, a sickly boy who died in 1682. Peter then was made co-tsar with his half brother, Ivan V?, but Peter's half sister, Sofia, held the real power. She ruled as regent while the young Peter was allowed to play war games with his friends and to roam in Moscow's foreign quarters. These early experiences instilled in him an abiding interest in Western military practice and technology, particularly in military engineering, artillery, navigation, and shipbuilding. In 1689, using troops that he had drilled during childhood games, Peter foiled a plot to have Sofia crowned. When Ivan V died in 1696, Peter became the sole tsar of Muscovy.

War dominated much of Peter's reign. At first Peter attempted to secure the principality's southern borders against the Tatars and the Ottoman Turks. His campaign against a fort on the Sea of Azov failed initially, but after he created Russia's first navy, Peter was able to take the port of Azov? in 1696. To continue the war with the Ottoman Empire, Peter traveled to Europe to seek allies. The first tsar to make such a trip, Peter visited Brandenburg, the Netherlands, England, and the Holy Roman Empire during his so-called Grand Embassy. Peter learned a great deal and enlisted into his service hundreds of West European technical specialists. The embassy was cut short by the attempt to place Sofia on the throne instead of Peter, a revolt that was crushed by Peter's followers. As a result, Peter had hundreds of the participants tortured and killed, and he publicly displayed their bodies as a warning to others. Peter was unsuccessful in forging a European coalition against the Ottoman Empire, but during his travels he found interest in waging war against Sweden, then an important power in northern Europe. Seeing an opportunity to break through to the Baltic Sea, Peter made peace with the Ottoman Empire in 1700 and then attacked the Swedes at their port of Narva? on the Gulf of Finland. However, Sweden's young king, Charles XII?, proved his military acumen by crushing Peter's army. Fortunately for Peter, Charles did not follow up his victory with a counteroffensive, becoming embroiled instead in a series of wars over the Polish throne. This respite allowed Peter to build a new, Western-style army. When the armies of the two leaders met again at the town of Poltava in 1709, Peter defeated Charles. Charles escaped to Ottoman territory, and Russia subsequently became engaged in another war with the Ottoman Empire. Russia agreed to return the port of Azov to the Ottomans in 1711. The Great Northern War, which in essence was settled at Poltava, continued until 1721, when Sweden agreed to the Treaty of Nystad?. The treaty allowed Muscovy to retain the Baltic territories that it had conquered: Livonia, Estonia, and Ingria?. Through his victories, Peter acquired a direct link with Western Europe. In celebration, Peter assumed the title of emperor as well as tsar, and Muscovy officially became the Russian Empire in 1721.

Peter achieved Muscovy's expansion into Europe and its transformation into the Russian Empire through several major initiatives. He established Russia's naval forces, reorganized the army according to European models, streamlined the government, and mobilized Russia's financial and human resources. Under Peter, the army drafted soldiers for lifetime terms from the taxpaying population, and it drew officers from the nobility and required them to give lifelong service in either the military or civilian administration. In 1722 Peter introduced the Table of Ranks?, which determined a person's position and status according to service to the tsar rather than to birth or seniority. Even commoners who achieved a certain level on the table were ennobled automatically.

Peter's reorganization of the government structure was no less thorough. He replaced the prikazy with colleges or boards and created a senate to coordinate government policy. Peter's reform of local government was less successful, but his changes enabled local governments to collect taxes and maintain order. As part of the government reform, the Orthodox Church was partially incorporated into the country's administrative structure. Peter abolished the patriarchate and replaced it with a collective body, the Holy Synod?, led by a lay government official.

Peter tripled the revenues of the state treasury through a variety of taxes. He levied a capitation, or poll tax, on all males except clergy and nobles and imposed a myriad of indirect taxes on alcohol, salt, and even beards. To provide uniforms and weapons for the military, Peter developed metallurgical and textile industries using serf labor. Peter wanted to equip Russia with modern technology, institutions, and ideas. He required Western-style education for all male nobles, introduced so-called cipher schools to teach the alphabet and basic arithmetic, established a printing house, and funded the Academy of Sciences, which was established just before his death in 1725 and became one of Russia's most important cultural institutions. He demanded that aristocrats acquire the dress, tastes, and social customs of the West. The result was a deepening of the cultural rift between the nobility and the mass of Russian people. The best illustration of Peter's drive for Westernization, his break with traditions, and his coercive methods was his construction in 1703 of a new, architecturally Western capital, St. Petersburg, situated on land newly conquered from Sweden on the Gulf of Finland. Although St. Petersburg faced westward, its Westernization was by coercion, and it could not arouse the individualistic spirit that was an important element in the Western ways Peter so admired.

Peter's reign raised questions about Russia's backwardness, its relationship to the West, the appropriateness of reform from above, and other fundamental problems that have confronted many of Russia's subsequent rulers. In the nineteenth century, Russians debated whether Peter was correct in pointing Russia toward the West or whether his reforms had been a violation of Russia's natural traditions.

Thanks all, and thanks Yuhannon for the helpful article.

Yes, we learned about St. Petersburg facing west and all that. You should meet my modern civ. teacher: middle aged, critical, narcissistic, atrocious Yankee accent (Lord save him, he said he doesn't like Georgia etc. etc...well as the late Georgian Lewis Grizzard once said, "Delta's ready when you are" but once again I'm going off on a tangent), anti-Christian, and basically anti any religion really. He has VERY biased views (but then again who doesn't?) and sometimes I fear he is rubbing off on my very impressionable classmates.

ChristTeen287

P.S.- I don't discriminate on accents, but his DOES need some work .

Hey, I resemble that! :lol

ZT, a Massachusetts Yankee in King Tobacco's Court (NC)

Haha,

Well he's originally from Oklahoma, and apparently Oklahomians sound very northern, but then again so do folks from in and around Atlanta.

ChristTeen287

Hello Fellow Georgian!

My favorite part of Massey's book on Peter the Great is when Peter travelled in Europe incognito.
Noone was supposed to know it was him, but at
6' 6" (?), it was hard to miss him. When he was learning ship building in the Netherlands, or was it Denmark, he lived very simply. He slept in a simple building on a cot, had simple meals. This was the same time period as King Louis XIV of France, I believe, or was it XVI, I always get them confused; but one of the most lavish and self-centered and pampered kings ever.

Also, Peter died of pneumonia which he suffered as a result of diving into cold water to save someone else. He certainly was cruel if you came against him, but I found him one of the most fascinating men in history.
denise

Byzinroswell,

We learned that Peter was 6'9'' and 300 lbs. and that in many of the places in Europe he visited it was whispered that it was Peter the Great.

Louis XVI. Interesting you should mention him: I am doing my term paper on his wife, Marie Antoinette. I have read a couple of books on both of them (in the past couple of weeks) and YES, he was lavish, and definitely had his faults. I can't help feeling VERY sorry for the Royal Family, however, because they were tortured mentally and physically and finally guillotined by crazed socialists and Republicans (in the classical sense of the term). Louis and Antoinette were both supposedly VERY devout. Before her execution, Antoinette refused to receive Extreme Unction from a pro-Revolutionist priest, because the Revolution sought to destroy the Church and the Revolutionists attempted to execute every clergymen who did not sign themselves as supporters of the Revolution. Thousands of clergy and nobility were slaughtered during the Reign of Terror.

ChristTeen287

Dear ChristTeen,

I was in Paris last year at this time (sniff!) and stayed at a hotel around the corner of which was a Carmelite Church.

About 130 priests were shot by revolutionaries in the courtyard of that church . . .

I also stood in the room in which Marie Antoinette lived out the final months of her life - there is a high altar there now.

And when we got to the marker that indicates the site at which King Louis and Marie Antoinette were beheads, I got down on my knees, prayed and reverenced it.

There is a movement to canonize the two along with the many martyrs who were so brutally killed by the proponents of "englightened philosophy."

As you know, the opponents of the revolting leaders bore the insignia of the Sacred Heart and that is, today, the insignia of the new restorationist groups in France and elsewhere.

Alex

Dear Alex,

CIX!

I'm looking forward to that! Ss Louis and Marie the Royal-Martyrs of France... has a nice ring to it. I'll put their icon right next to my icon of the Russian Royal Martyrs

Just my two francs!

In Domino,

Edward

Dear Edward,

Yes, it is interesting how Royal Martyrs are related to others.

It was Tsar Alexis IV who first referred to King Charles I after his execution as "King Charles the Martyr" in a letter to his widow, Queen Henrietta.

And it was King Louis XVI who spent his final days reading the "Eikon Basilike" of King Charles I.

FYI, when the French Volonte fought the revolutionaries, they used to cross themselves prior to firing their muskets - each time.

Alex