Pietro L. Di Giorgi

The article presents the Italian translation of the chapter “Church and State in Russia” from Weber’s Bourgeois Democracy in Russia (1906), with interesting remarks on Orthodox Church and tsarist autocracy, Russian Orthodox hierarchy, Old Believers and sectarian movements, “white clergy” and “black monks”, Christian Social movements and Orthodox doctrine. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905) Weber had studied social and economic role of puritan worldly asceticism in the development of western capitalism, and defined the puritan believer as God’s instrument to fulfil His will. In this essay, in a comparative way he examines Russian spirit and relationship to the divinity and to the world, Orthodox believer’s ethical and social ideas; so Weber describes Orthodoxy as worldly mysticism, which searches mystical contact in spite of a modest acceptance of the world. According to Weber, this apolitical and anti-individualistic attitude would not have supported the development of bourgeois and liberal ideals in the struggle for Duma and constitutional monarchy in Russia.