Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

sentence had been duly passed according to law they had no powers to change their minds. In short those poor devils were sacrificed to judicial procedures. Philip or somebody provided for a similar absurdity in the following manner. He had condemned a man to pay heavy damages to another and the sentence had been pronounced. Some time afterwards the truth was discovered and he realized that he had made an unjust judgement. On one side there were the interests of the case as now proven: on the other, the interests of judicial procedure. To some extent he satisfied both, allowing the sentence to stand while reimbursing from his own resources the expenses of the condemned man. But he was dealing with a reparable situation: those men of mine were irreparably hanged.”[223]

An honorary Roman citizen, a mayor of Bordeaux freely elected by the residents, a scrupulous landowner, and a remarkable legal specialist, Michele de Montaigne never assumed in his life that he could enslave hired peasants who worked on his fields and had no land of their own. That is, he never wanted to turn the workers into his bonded servants, drawing on the principle of justice in its classical Roman definition as expressed in Matthew Blastares’s Syntagma canonum, “Law is art in the area of all that is kind and equal.”

One of the main reasons why the Reformation – a wide religious, cultural, and sociopolitical movement aimed to reform Catholicism in the Western and Central Europe – happened in the 16th century was that Christian leaders usurped the power in their religious community, endowing their administrative and economic power with sacral qualities. However, Jesus never said anything about bishops or their special rights in the community, himself satisfied with the modest title of “teacher.”

The Reformation influenced the transition from feudal to capitalist economic relations, gave rise to the age of Enlightenment and the abolition of slavery, and declared spiritual equality. Thus, it opened up the path for political equality and the development of free thinking. The principles of Enlightenment formed the basis of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, which articulated the concept of equality and freedoms belonging to everyone by birth. Note that the ideas of the Enlightenment were promoted along with religious values. Personal freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of belief, and the right to resist oppression were acknowledged as natural rights of man and citizen.

At the same historical time, the rulers of the totalitarian state of Muscovy strove to oppress the man. The Tsardom was ruled by injustice,[224] expressed in the dominant “symphonic” state-religious ideology, particularly in the Old Russian literary work of the 16th century knowns as the Domostroi.

For example, according to Muscovite religious ideologists, for sins like “pride, hatred, wicked grudges, anger, enmity, offense, lying, theft, swearing, wicked speech, sorcery, witchcraft, ridicule, blasphemy, gluttony, drunkenness, eating early and late in the day, evil deeds of all sorts, lechery, and impurity” God not only sends hunger, plague, fire, flood, or other misfortunes, but also “may cause the tsar to seize our property in anger, so that we will be mercilessly punished with a shameful death while our property is carried off by robbers and thieves, or confiscated through judges’ fines while we suffer torture,”[225] which inadmissibly puts human deeds on the same footing as the work of God.

The Universal Church, according to its Creed, is catholic and apostolic. Apostles, presbyters, and Christian brethren decided at a meeting, “For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay no greater burden on you than these few requirements: You must abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or the meat of strangled animals, [and] from sexual immorality [the Russian translation adds: and from doing to others what you do not want done to yourself—translator’s note]” (Acts 15:28–29). Thus they expressed the commandment of mutual love (John 13:34) – free, voluntary, and unconditional – to begin their apprenticeship under the Founder and Leader of the Church. In doing so, they asserted the principle of reciprocity, which is the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2), now that Jesus died for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also that He would gather together in one the children of God who were scattered abroad. (John 11:51–52).

However, because lawlessness was abound, the love of many grew cold (Matt. 24:12), and ravenous wolves came in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15) with diabolical souls (Athanasius the Great), who always add deceit to truth, as though having special privileges.

The imperial religious and political ideology distorted the Christian teaching with the myth of servile submission to any ruler as God himself (Chapter 5 of the Domostroi), forcing to worship the creation instead of the Creator under threat of death. The mythmakers made hypocritical excuses for slave trade, agonizing death under torture, and maiming by the will of God. In doing so, they sought to terrorize people and suppress their free will in order to subjugate and dominate them. However, as the Latin proverb goes, there is nothing more deceitful than justifying crimes by the will of the gods. “According to Plato, the ultimate species of injustice is when what is unjust is held to be just.”[226]

“I said, ‘You are gods, And all of you are children of the Most High. But you shall die like men and fall like one of the princes’” (Ps. 81:6–7). Our Heavenly Father “makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). Were the Galileans killed by Pilate, whose blood he “had mingled with their sacrifices, worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were