Ivan’s Theory

A passage from The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
  February 8, 2003

…During the first three centuries Christianity only existed on earth in the Church and was nothing but the Church.  When the pagan Roman Empire desired to become Christian, it inevitably happened that, by becoming Christian, it included the Church but remained a pagan State in very many of its departments.  In reality this was bound to happen.  But Rome as a State retained too much of the pagan civilisation and culture, as, for example, in the very objects and fundamental principles of the State.  The Christian Church entering into the State could, of course, surrender no part of its fundamental principles—the rock on which it stands—and could pursue no other aims than those which have been ordained and revealed by God Himself, and among them that of drawing the whole world, and therefore the ancient pagan State itself, into the Church.  In that way (that is, with a view to the future) it is not the Church that should seek a definite position in the State, like “every social organisation,” or as “an organisation of men for religious purposes” (as my opponent calls the Church), but, on the contrary, every earthly State should be, in the end, completely transformed into the Church and should become nothing else but a Church, rejecting every purpose incongruous with the aims of the Church.  All this will not degrade it in any way or take from its honour and glory as a great State, nor from the glory of its rulers, but only turns it from a false, still pagan, and mistaken path to the true and rightful path, which alone leads to the eternal goal.  This is why the author of the book On the Foundations of Church Jurisdiction would have judged correctly if, in seeking and laying down those foundations, he bad looked upon them as a temporary compromise inevitable in our sinful and imperfect days.  But as soon as the author ventures to declare that the foundations which he predicates now, part of which Father Iosif just enumerated, are the permanent, essential, and eternal foundations, he is going directly against the Church and its sacred and eternal vocation…

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