‘Et le bon Dieu me pardonnera: c’est son mêtier,’ said Catherine the Great. She saw it as her function to be an autocrat. Forgiveness was God’s specification. But wasn’t the Empress Catherine a Russian? Why should she speak in French? That’s what an autocrat could do in those days. It was fashionable to have a French-speaking court. After all, what’s the point of being an autocrat if you can’t dictate what language your subjects should speak? It’s an instinctive thing. It was instinctive too, for William the Conqueror to try the same trick but it didn’t work for him.
We may not express ourselves so succinctly. Even for the Empress Catherine this was unusual. It is the only quotation attributed to her. But the attitude it adopts is one that many might even today feel sympathetic about. If there is a God, what is he up to? If his job specification is forgiveness, he’s going to be busy. There’s plenty that needs forgiveness in the world as we know it. If the Russians have their Catherine, we have our Alfred.
But to be a Russian Empress is not to know everything. And it does not carry with it supreme wisdom of human beings and human nature. Nor can it be the case that to speak of an Almighty God is to imagine that Catherine was right in her choice of words.
If we do indeed have a Maker and Redeemer, such a person must be somewhat above any character we attribute to him. Speculation is bound to falsify our conclusions. We, remember, are poor witnesses, straitened by three or four dimensions,
We are flawed by self-interest, cowed by powers greater than our own. Can a caterpillar understand the cabbage he is is mutilating? Can a fish know what it is to live on dry land?
Catherine conducted campaigns, won wars, extended her empire. no wonder she was called great. The greatness that eluded her did not come the way of man, ‘the measure of all things.’ In the end that elusive greatness is the only one that matters.
*See Matthew 11,11,
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