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Križanić's Interpretation of History
Ivan Golub
Sažetak
As far as Križanić's theological interpretation of history is concerned, it was explicitly ecclesiological. It was founded, as was typical of the time, on the famous interpretation of king Nabuchodonosor's dream from the Book of Daniel (chapter 2). King Nabuchodonosor saw in a vision a monstrous statue consisting of gold, silver, bronze, and iron-clay parts. He saw a stone that was cut out by no human hand. This stone then destroyed the statue, striking at its iron-clay feet, breaking die statue to pieces. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. Daniel interpreted the dream to the king in the following way. The golden head of the statue was King Nabuchodonosor himself. After him there shall come a new kingdom, represented by silver, which shall be weaker than his. Later, there will be a still weaker universal kingdom, represented by bronze. A fourth kingdom, both strong and weak, both iron and clay in its texture, will follow. This fourth kingdom was usually held to be the Roman Empire. Križanić, too, held this traditional view, but with a difference. Through the tradition
held that the stone which destroyed the statue was Christ, Križanić went one step further. In his interpretation, the stone was Christ but also was the one whom Jesus called Peter-Rock-Stone and on whom he built his church: »Christ is Stone by Right Peter is Stone by Grace — Kámen Hristós po óblasti, Kamen že i Peter po milosti.« Križanić's unique interpretation is an ecclesiological one.
It should be understood that Daniel's prophecy held an enormously important position in Christian understanding of world's present and future. The interpretations of Daniel's prophecy became a form of political consciousness in time of Križanić. The concrete question was when did the Stone (Christ) smite the Roman Empire and if that empire remained in any shape or form, specifically, in a resolution of purely political riddle, was the prophecy of Daniel fulfilled.
Robert Bellarmine, maintaining a typically Catholic position, held that Daniel's prophecy was not entirely fulfilled, because the throne and title of the Roman Empire still continued in the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. J. Ph. Sleyden, a German Protestant, writing in his book »About the Four Supreme Empires — De quattuor summis imperiis« (1624), which 55 editions, including a Russian translation, claimed that the fourth kingdom of Daniel's prophecy, that is, the Roman Empire, still exists and that it will exist until the Second coming of Christ. He noted that the Roman Popes and the Turks tried to destroy this empire, whose title by right belongs to Germany alone. For the Orthodox Paisios Ligaridis, a Greek who worked in Russia at the tsar's court in the time of Križanić's exile in Siberia, the destruction of the statue by the stone took place at the birth of Christ during the reign of Augustus. The Stone (Christ) then smote the Roman Empire, but did not destroy it fully. Moscow was the legitimate successor of New Rome (Constantinople) and it will last till it too be removed at the Second Coming of Christ.
Križanić's interpretation differs with these Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox interpretations. Križanić believed that the Stone (Christ-Peter-Pope) struck the Statue (Roman Empire) at the point when Constantine took the Roman throne to Constantinople, leaving Rome to the Papacy. The statue was finally destroyed with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, who assumed neither the name nor the symbols of Roman Empire. The Holy Roman German Empire, contrary to the German Protestant and Catholics, was as far as Križanić was concerned, merely a mockery of Rome.
As concerns the theory of Moscow the Third Rome, Križanić was entirely opposed to such a notion. He wrote: »The Greeks plume themselves on the empty name of Romans [...] In the same way the Germans call their Germany the Holy Roman Empire. And finally Patriarch Jeremias has commanded that Moscow be the Third Rome [...] Patriarch Jeremias made Tsar Fedor Ivanović Emperor of the Romans, Greeks, and all Christians. He spoke to him thus: »The first Rome fell through Apollinarius' heresy, the godless Turks have conquered the Second Rome, but your great Russian empire surpasses them all in piety/ The simple people (who cannot judge the case) call Moscow the Third Rome and say: There have been two Romes, the third still stands, there will be no fourth/ [...] Daniel prophesied of carnal Rome that it would be destroyed. But on the site of carnal Rome, once destroyed, there would rise a spiritual Rome, the Kingdom of Christ [...] We Slavs should rejoice and thank God, first of all because our nation has produced no such tormentor or persecutor of the name of Christ as did the Romans [...] Secondly we should thank God that this most glorious Russian state docs not lie within the borders of that unhappy empire, and that this state possess neither its fatal-omened name, nor its blazon nor, therefore, the punishment foretold for it by the prophets.« Križanić wrote directly: »That one is not our friend who calls our kingdom the Third Rome.«
Križanić was clearly the opponent of Russian Messianism in the form of the theory of Moscow the Third Rome — to proclaim Moscow the Third Rome would be to close the way to the church unity of Moscow with Papal Rome. However, he was very much a champion of another form the religious mission of Russia. Convinced that the division of the Slavs into the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, both from the theological and national standpoint, was fatal, Križanić did his best to bring them together within one (Catholic) Church. Binding itself in a single Church (the Roman church, though not of the Roman discipline and rite) Russia should help the Greeks to unite in a single Church as well. Moreover, the Russians had accepted the Christian faith from the Greeks and were hence in debt to Greeks. The Greeks had done the Russians a spiritual benefit when they had led them to the path of salvation; from the Greek church Russians received the gift of the Gospel, though with an admixture of error. Now the Russians should return the Greeks mercy for mercy and aid them to unify themselves with the Catholic church. Križanić poses the question whether God had not decreed that the Greeks who, proud of their own wisdom, had rejected the teaching of the Western fathers of the Church, should be given a lesson, or at least a good example by the Slavs, who came last in wisdom. It was fitting, Križanić held, that the Slavs (in the person of the Bulgarians), who were the occasion that the Greeks had begun to anathemize the Latins, should contribute to the Greeks' reconciliation with the Latins, and that they who had been the cause of division should become the agents of unification.
Ključne riječi
Hrčak ID:
21674
URI
Datum izdavanja:
2.6.1986.
Posjeta: 1.610 *