SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



itself in the interests of a particular theory as to how the mercantile 

 life should be lived. The Patriarchs, chosen from a monastic order 

 remarkable for its detachment from secular business, left all economic 

 questions to the chamberlains and officials who thronged the imperial 

 court. After the fall of Byzantium, this same tradition of complete 

 other- worldliness transferred itself to the Church of Russia. The 

 Russian Orthodox Church had no pope, no Hildebrand, to impose 

 a theological system of economics on Russian societ}^ It had no 

 scholastic philosophers, no "mediaeval clerks" to dictate to kings and 

 rulers what measures they should take to secure social justice. It 

 had nothing corresponding to our 17th-century High Churchmen, or 

 to our 19th-century Anglo-Catholics, reviving those traditions and 

 reminding men of the ideals of a pre-capitalist age. When capitalism, 

 in the time of Peter the Great, reached Russia, it found a perfectly 

 virgin soil for its operations, and had no such uphill task as it found 

 in the west. In three generations it enslaved a population which 

 could make no appeal to any distinctively christian social theories. 

 The appeal would have been vain, for the Orthodox Church had no 

 such theories, and had never developed the first beginnings of them. 

 On the contrary, it had become completely identified with the process 

 of exploitation of the Russian people. The contrast between this 

 situation and our own is quite remarkable. 



It may be said that the meaning of the phrase "religious opium" 

 was that by anaesthetising the people, it prevented them from per- 

 forming those social actions necessary for social progress, combining 

 in unions, rebelling against exploitation, fighting the possessing class 

 in every possible way. "Scientific opium" could have no such meaning. 

 Yet I think it has, and it may be explained as follows. It is a blindness 

 to the suffering of others. A certain degree of ruthlessness is absolutely 

 inevitable in the period of revolutions when the people are defending 

 themselves against the final attack of the possessing class which sees 

 itself on the verge of expropriation. "Revolutions," said Lenin, 

 "cannot be made without breaking heads." But just as Lunacharsky 

 (whose role will be better appreciated by later historians) pleaded 

 successfully for the preservation of certain buildings, art treasures, 

 etc. in the heat of the revolution; so it is always necessary for the 

 christian man (even he who without reservation allies himself with 

 the revolution) to plead for the retention of certain christian principles 

 in dealing with people. The ruthlessness necessary in a revolutionary 

 period or an age of wars may too easily pass over, especially in a 



69 



