WI: French and Russian monarchs try to end the Great Schism

I'm thinking of a timeline where through a French victory in the Seven Years War, Prussia gets smashed as a major power and France acquires the Austrian Netherlands, which gives it the finances to survive the revolution. I am imagining an extremely strong French-Russian royal alliance going into the 19th Century.

What I would like to ask is, if its possible for the French and Russian monarchies to want to merge the Catholic and Orthodox churches in order to have a single religious front against the Ungodly English? I imagine there would be some sort of ideological fudge where the Bishop of Rome is "the first among equals", but on other matters something could be worked out. The Pope wouldn't be happy, but I was hoping to have him under the thumb of the French monarchy.
 
I don't think the problem is resolvable by diplomacy. Even if a russian tsar and a french king would be encline to make such agreement (that i highly doubt, as an anachronic and meaningless preoccupation for both), the orthodox people couldn't accept it.

See the Council of Florence by exemple, having an official and diplomatic agreement to make the Basileus a catholic never made anything else than separate himself more from orthodox clergy and believers.

Not only a russian tsar that would make this would have to force the application in vain, but it would very likely upset the russians beyond imagination. I can see him being dead meat in 2 years, maybe 3 and replaced by a relative that claim to restaure the true faith with a popular support.
 

Philip

Donor
I don't think the problem is resolvable by diplomacy. Even if a russian tsar and a french king would be encline to make such agreement (that i highly doubt, as an anachronic and meaningless preoccupation for both), the orthodox people couldn't accept it.
This. People always seem to underestimate the unwillingness of the Orthodox to compromise in any way. Mark of Ephesus remains a highly regarded saint in the East.
 
What if they got a serious win out of it? Agreement for the dropping of the Filioque perhaps? That seemed to be the main problem.

That's a theological issue, and they were really superficial.

The problem is the self-identification as orthodox. An agreement means for base clergy and followers compromission of christianity, submission into heresy and abandon of their identity.
The orthodox believers weren't concerned by the points you quote, when they were aware of these., they were concerned about themselves in a spiritual danger and most of all about a loss of their identity.

Besides, you can't force roman christianity to simply give away everything that was elaborated since 1000 years. Not because it would simply "upset" the pope, but because it would upset greatly the catholic powers as Spain and most of all the Habsurghs that have a de facto protectorate on Rome.

And a Franco-Russian alliance is not likely to counterbalance that, especially if Britain judge that is dangerous for its interests on the continent.

It would be interesting though, a parlementarty protestant kingdom to help the imperial catholic autocracy.
 
The word meaning 'peasant' in the Russian language is derived from Christian: they were defined by Christianity (true Christianity, from their point of view, which is what what 'Orthodox' means) against Islamic and western Christian foes, armies, and rulers. Of course they were largely illiterate and had hardly any understanding of actual theology, never mind comparative theology. As had been pointed out, the theological stuff is gloss, really: it's all about identity.

The flipside of this is that if not much changed in the villages, they might be brought to accept some theological compromise (meaning of course that in practice there would be identifiably different rites and organisations still, even in the same territories). The Poles tried that and it more-or-less worked, 'less' being the loss of a third of the Commonwealth's population and it not sticking, but anyway.

But why would the Russian authorities particularly want such a thing? This is after they've already bludgeoned the independent decision-making capacity out of the church and turned it into an arm of their state. Why change such a favourable arrangement? Especially when the last round of large, partly western-inspired change in practice created the Old Believers, and they took part extensively in the insurrections of Razin and Pugachev?
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the insight. Is it possible for some sort of communion to exist between the two churches without combining the legal structures? Or is full communion the same thing?

I mainly want to do it to cement French-Russian friendship into a permanent alliance, and because both churches feel they are under threat from Anglicanism growing much faster in the third world in this timeline.
 
Top