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Russian Orthodox Suspicions of the West
Ever since the early pagan Russians cast their lot with the Eastern Orthodox faith
over Catholicism, the Orthodox Church went on to stamp Russia powerfully
with its cultural outlook; this included a new Russian mission for the salvation of
all mankind through propagation of the True Faith. These themes pervade
Russian culture: the deep reservoirs of Russian mysticism, traditions of ecstatic
belief, wandering holy men, belief in the Christlike simplicity of the Russian
peasant and the purity of the Russian soul, the place of the holy fool in Russian
society (indelibly portrayed in a powerful scene in the opera Boris Godunov),
and Russia’s mission civilisatrice. All of this bolstered the deep conviction of
Orthodox believers in the spiritual superiority of their faith and church over that
of an aggressive, expansionist, materialist, coldly analytic, individualistic, and
corrupted West, which thirsted for power and vainglory. These themes in
Russian folk belief are later elevated in the nineteenth century in Russian
philosophical systems of thought extolling the world vision of Orthodoxy and
pan-Slavism.
Russia to this day remains schizophrenic toward the West—part of its
struggle for identity. Pro-Western views have long clashed with pro-nativist—
later framed as a struggle of Russian “Westernizers” versus “Slavophiles.” In
one sense, the Slavophiles came to represent a Romantic vision of Russian
culture and its unique spiritual tradition standing up to a rationalistic and
aggressive West. The fear was not ungrounded: after the Mongol-Tatar threat to
Russia receded in the fourteenth century, the most dangerous foreign threats to
Moscow consistently loomed from the West, either from Roman Catholic
Poland, the Teutonic Knights, Napoleon’s France, Protestant German states and
Sweden, or Hitler.
Russians similarly developed a sense of inferiority toward the West, its
technological accomplishments, its powerful nation-states, and its economic and
military power. In their insightful book Occidentalism, Ian Buruma and Avishai
Margalit point out that the roots of much Slavophile anti-Western philosophy is
borrowed from German Romantic philosophy, which itself partly represented a
reaction against dominant French economic and military power in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. With the French Revolution, France had come to
symbolize Enlightenment-derived exaltation of reason and science over religion
and intuition. And it was this same rational France under Napoleon, seemingly
the embodiment of the West, that then launched an all-out invasion of Russia and
torched Moscow before suffering an ignominious defeat by ragtag Russian

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forces and by “General Winter”—the primeval force of Nature working in
tandem to save Holy Mother Russia.
It was not surprising that Russian thinkers should view the driving ideology
of this expansionist and crusading Western state of France as a threat to Russia
and its values. German Romanticism, with its appreciation of the role of
emotion, intuition, folk art, and Nature against the brutalisms of
industrialization, was more in tune with Slavophile Russian thinking. The eternal
character of nativist Russian values were extolled in the novels of such literary
giants as Leo Tolstoi and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. And Russia in the nineteenth
century produced a large body of philosophic thinking that critiqued the
materialist, even nihilistic basis of Western philosophy. (It also produced an
impressive body of counterarguments from Russian philosophers linked from
among the Westernizers.)
One of the more fascinating examples of this brand of Russian thought is
found in the writings of the nineteenth-century conservative philosopher, the
monarchist-aristocrat Konstantin Leontiev, who propagated the concept of
“Byzantinism”—the idea that Russia’s true roots lie in Byzantium, the
monarchy, and the Orthodox Church, and that Russia must oppose “the
catastrophic egalitarian, utilitarian and revolutionary influences from the West”
and instead direct Russia’s “cultural and territorial expansion eastward to India,
Tibet, and China.” Leontiev’s writings also happened to contain several
remarkably prescient insights made before the beginning of the twentieth century
into the future evolution of the West, including the belief that Germany would
soon cause “one or two wars” in Europe, that there would be a “bloody
revolution in Russia led by an ‘anti-Christ’ that would be socialist and tyrannical
in nature, and whose rulers would wield more power than their tsarist
predecessors.” He also made the fascinating prophesy that “socialism is the
feudalism of the future.”
Many in the West readily dismiss anti-Westernism as mere pathology rather
than reasoned evidence-based argument—after all, “How could one be anti-
Western on a rational basis?” But if there are elements of pathology to anti-
Westernism, so, too, the character and actions of Western power itself, in its will
to conquest and domination and its racial discrimination, contain their own
pathology. The West may not be unique in demonstrating these qualities, but it
has exercised such qualities in its global policies more sweepingly than any other
powers of the world for most of the modern era. Thus, it is the West as supreme
practitioner of these negative values in the world that stirs up hostility. While
some may describe this process as a “clash of civilizations,” it is very clear that
the clash has little to do with civilizational values and everything to do with

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certain realities of powerful and aggressive Western confrontation with the East
over the past five hundred years.
As unwelcome as it may be to American ears, the Byzantine scholar Vasilios
Makrides at the University of Erfurt argues that “anti-Westernism reached its
peak in the violent anti-American attacks of the 11th September 2001 in the
United States. These forms of anti-Westernism are mostly the direct corollary of
the Western political, economic and cultural expansion across the world in
modern times in the wake of imperialism and colonialism.”
Furthermore, notes Makrides:
It is particularly interesting to observe certain anti-Western coalitions
[across] otherwise incommensurable lines which took place at that time,
namely between Orthodox and Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean
area…. Orthodox and Ottoman anti-Westernism were far from being
identical, but their eventual “cooperation” was not out of the ordinary….
An analogous attitude towards Muslims and Western Christians can be
observed in thirteenth-century Orthodox Russia. Tsar Aleksandr Nevsky
gave preference to a coalition with the Tatars and Mongols over an anti-
Muslim alliance and a union with Rome, which had been proposed to him
in 1248 by Pope Innocent IV.
THE ORTHODOX WORLD—Russia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and pieces
of the Middle East—has unquestionably lagged behind Western Europe in
modern industrial and economic development, creating a sense of inferiority vis-
à-vis the West. The West has reinforced this through its arrogant display of
imperial power against most of the rest of the world during the Age of
Imperialism, including China. Much of this anti-Western anger emerged outside
the Muslim world, such as in nineteenth-century China, but is shared by
Muslims as well, helping to foster a kind of solidarity among anti-Western
thinkers.
The West in turn has itself maintained a generally distant, condescending, and
sometimes hostile view of the Orthodox world. After the Great Schism of 1054,
the Eastern Church had in effect become a clear rival, if not quite an outright
enemy to Rome. The borderlands between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy in
Eastern Europe and the Balkans have remained contested to this day—witness
tensions and divisions between Orthodoxy and Catholicism in Ukraine, and the

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perpetual cultural divisions and hatreds between Orthodox Russia and Catholic
Poland that have taken on a geopolitical character.
Over past centuries, Europeans have practically defined “Europe” to mean
Western Europe. They viewed even Eastern Europe as a different world, a
backwater, rarely integrated with the rest of Europe. Only the Catholic/Protestant
cultures of the Czechs, Poles, and Hungarians were viewed as just acceptably
within the borders of cultural Europe. When Eastern Europe, both Catholic and
Orthodox, fell under control of the Soviet Empire, the cultural gap between the
two worlds was further reinforced. The European Union has encountered far
greater problems in trying to integrate the Orthodox states of Eastern Europe
than those of Catholic or Protestant faith. Thus Poland, the Czech Republic,
Slovakia, and Hungary are easier for Europe to digest; Orthodox Romania,
Serbia, Bulgaria, and, of course, Ukraine and Russia are far more uncertain
quantities.
Cultural differences were even expressed in terms of church ritual and art.
The West allowed musical instruments in the rites of Western churches,
supplanting the strict Gregorian plainsong chants of the Eastern rite. In
architecture, the West abandoned the traditional domed Orthodox church design
—later absorbed into the design of many Muslim mosques—and adopted what
was seen in Orthodox eyes to be the seemingly “harsher and sharper” lines of
Gothic architecture. Religious art in the East maintained the highly idealized and
stylized forms of painting of the Byzantine world, in sharp distinction to the later
realism and literalism of Western religious painting, including their frequent bold
(blasphemous?) portrayals of even God himself.

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