Byzantinism - Praise

Praise

While the Byzantine Empire was commonly seen in a negative fashion, there were exceptions. Byzantium was rehabilitated in the France of the Age of Absolutism, from the 17th century to the French Revolution, in the works of such individuals as Jesuit Pierre Poussines.

As the Enlightenment swept Western Europe, French traditions found refuge in the Russian Empire. The term Byzantinism was used in a positive context by 19th century Russian scholar Konstantin Leontiev in Byzantism and Slavdom (1875) to describe the type of society which Russian Empire needs to counter the degenerating influence of the West. Leontiev praised the Byzantine Empire and the tsarist autocracy, and a society and political system that comprises authoritative power of the monarch, devout following of the Russian Orthodox Church, the maintenance of obshchina for peasants, and sharp class division; he also criticized universal education and democracy.

When we mentally picture Byzantinism we see before us as if... the austere, clear plan of a spacious and capacious structure. We know, for example, that in politics it means autocracy. In religion, it means Christianity with distinct features, which distinguish it from Western churches, from heresies and schisms. In the area of ethics we know that the Byzantine ideal does not have that elevated and in many instances highly exaggerated notion of terrestrial human individual introduced into history by German feudalism. We know the inclination of the Byzantine ethical ideal to be disappointed in all that is of this world, in happiness, in the constancy of our own purity, in our capacity here, below, to attain complete moral perfection. We know that Byzantinism (as Christianity in general) rejects all hope of the universal well-being of nations; it is the strongest antithesis of the idea of well-being of nations; it is the strongest antithesis of the idea of humanity in the sense of universal worldly equality, universal worldly freedom, universal worldly perfectibility, and universal contentment. —Konstantin Leontiev, Byzantism and Slavdom (1875)

In Russian political discourse, Russia is sometimes affectionately called Third Rome, the second Rome being the Eastern Roman Empire, which outlived its western counterpart at Rome itself, the first Rome, by a thousand years.