Legend of the White Cowl

“When did destiny become manifest?” asks Ernest Lee Tuveson in his classic Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Midway Reprint Series) . He answers the earliest formulations of the apocalyptic American millennialism arises in the 1760s, best exemplified by the poems and sermons of Timothy Dwight.

At the end of his discussion, Tuveson (pp. 134-6) makes a revealing comparison of the American sense of destiny with the Russian legend of the white cowl. According to the legend, Constantine made and gave a white cowl to Pope Sylvester, which was passed on to the Patriarch of Constantinople in 1054. When a later Pope demanded the return of the cowl, Pope Sylvester appeared in a dream to the Patriarch and told him to send it to Novgorod, to the land that “will be called Radiant Russia, which, by the Grace of God, will be glorified with blessings” and will eventually “become more honorable than the two Romes which preceded it.” This legend of a translatio imperii is the “cornerstone of Russian national ideology,” and Tuveson thinks it bears comparison with the notion that America is the purified version of Britain, since Britain, “although the pioneer of the Reformation, . . . failed to fulfill its task.”

Similar as the two ideologies are, they produce very different nationalisms and national missions:

“The role of ‘radiant Russia’ is to preserve the true religion like a treasure, unchanged, and to bring the other nations into the fold of the church in preparation for the sequence of eschatological events, all of which are yet to happen. It is to be a solider in the cause of Christ, but not, in the sense of the hymn, a ‘Christian soldier.’ The Russian program is static, dedicated to maintaining a faith already completed.”

In American millennialism, by contrast, there is a “dynamic expectation” and an expectation of progress. Americanist eschatology sees English Protestant empire expanding ever westward until America becomes (in Dwight’s words) the location where “bliss shall spring . . . As, from the tomb, when great Messiah rose, / heaven bloom’d with joy, and Earth forgot her woes.” Russia was the fifth monarchy already, and just needed to hold on. America would bring the fifth monarchy: “Here Empire’s last, and brighter throne shall rise; / And Peace and Right, and Freedom, greet the skies” (Dwight again).