Thursday, May 2, 2024

It is the 2nd of May 2024. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

I would take it as some kind of rule that if someone is given the sobriquet “the great” and are involved in the affairs of the church they get their own episode of the Almanac. We’ve had Leo the Great, Albert the Great, and Charlemagne (which translates to Charles the Great). But of all “the greats” in history, there is only one woman: the Russian Empress or Tsarina Catherine the Great. In salacious biographies or historical films, she is remembered as an enlightened despot with a robust appetite for power and other such things. In academic work, her Christian thought and conversion are treated with a commonly, but incorrectly, held “Enlightenment distaste” for any religious thought. Her life is one of my particular interests as in it. We see the juxtaposition of public and private faith, new questions about church and state, and good intentions mixed with the problem of power. Indulge me with a quick “big picture” and look at her conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church and religious reforms.

Catherine was born Sophie Friederike August on this, the 2nd of May in 1729. She was born in what was then Prussia, is today Poland and was born to a German prince. She was a princess of the Anhalt-Zerbst line and she was arranged to marry Karl Ulrich a German duke. His father’s sister was Elizabeth Petrovna, who had just implemented a coup in Russia and sat as Empress. As she was childless she took Karl to be her successor as Peter III.

Thus, they wed Peter III and were received into the Orthodox Church as Yekaterina, or Catherine. The two would come to the throne with the death of Empress Elizabeth.

Let’s look at the conversion of Sophie to Catherine from the Lutheran church of her youth to the Russian Orthodox Church- an event often seen as one of mere political expediency.

Sophie/Catherine’s father, the Duke of Anahlt-Zerbst, was a committed Lutheran in the Pietist tradition. He had one Priest Wagner catechize his daughter but she would be put off by what she saw as his overbearing and cold demeanor. Her maid, however, was, according to her, a warm and devoted Christian in the French Calvinist tradition. In her diary, she later refers to Wagner as a “blockhead” and sees the faith of her maid as reasonable and gentle. When she was invited to come to Russia with her mother, her father was afraid that she would convert to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the father and daughter exchanged letters that emphasized the daughter's faith and desire to do right by her father but also her conscience. Her tutor in the “Greek Religion” was Simon Todorskij, the son of a Ukrainian Jewish convert to Christianity who set his son up to become a priest. Todorskij would study in the Russian tradition but also in Halle amongst August Herman Francke and the Lutheran Pietists. He would help young Sophie-soon-to-be-Catherine reconcile the Lutheranism of her youth and the Russian Orthodox Church, reasoning (perhaps with oversimplifications) that the two churches differed in outward ceremony but held the same Gospel. With this, her father would allow her marriage to the soon-to-be Tsar. 

The life and reign of Catherine were always difficult on account of her husband, an impotent, angry drunk who beat her and was wildly unpopular on account of his pro-Prussian and anti-Russian views. She would arrange a coup within the first year of his reign, and he would be imprisoned and strangled to death. Catherine would thus rule alone, and her reign would oversee the expansion of the empire and the attempt to reform the country along European lines. It was not all successful, and her various lusts would hinder some of her goals. But she did open the country to the Mennonites persecuted amongst the German Lutherans. When the Jesuits were kicked out of European countries, she offered them refuge. She used the church’s coffers and sold church property to pay for wars. She tried to offer religious tolerance to the “Old Believers” in the orthodox church but was angered when they wouldn’t unite with the New believers and imprisoned many of them. She was not indifferent to the faith; she sought religious freedom unknown to Europe, but it was hindered by old grudges and differences in theology, language, and ceremony. She’s one of history’s most complicated rulers- her political and personal exploits are legendary, but we do well to remember her own faith, informed by a hybrid Lutheranism and Orthodoxy, and her attempts, even if failed or poorly attempted, approaches to faith and religious freedom. Catherine would die just outside St. Petersburg in November of 1796. Born on this day in 1729, Catherine the Great was 67 years old.

The last word for today is from the daily lectionary and Isaiah 49, a prophecy about the coming Messiah:

And now the Lord says—
    he who formed me in the womb to be his servant
to bring Jacob back to him

    and gather Israel to himself,

for I am honored in the eyes of the Lord

    and my God has been my strength—

he says:

“It is too small a thing for you to be my servant

    to restore the tribes of Jacob

    and bring back those of Israel I have kept.

I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,

    that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 2nd of May 2024, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man, who like that dastardly Peter III prefers Brats to Borscht- he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who was delighted to read the term “blockhead” and wishes he could find whatever word in German or Russian it was translated from- I’m  Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.