01 — Foundations
The ground on which the career of St. Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow (1782–1867) stands: the post-Petrine Synodal Church into which he was born and ordained, and the provincial clerical world of Kolomna and the Trinity-Sergius schools that formed him. This section establishes the institutional system Peter the Great created in 1721 — a Church governed by a Holy Synod under an over-procurator who was “the eye of the tsar” — and traces Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov from a deacon’s house in Kolomna through the seminaries to his monastic tonsure as Filaret in 1808.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)
Philaret of Moscow was, for nearly half a century, the most powerful churchman in the Russian Empire, but he entered a Church that had been deliberately subordinated to the state by Peter the Great and that taught its theology in Latin out of textbooks largely derived from Western, often Protestant and Catholic, models. To understand him — his caution, his philological brilliance, his lifelong campaign for a Russian Bible, and the contradictions of a saint who was also a servant of the autocracy — one must first see the world he was born into: the Synodal system, the theological academies, and the unsettled spiritual climate of the early nineteenth century.
This section also sets out his origins. He was born at Kolomna in 1782 as Vasily Drozdov, son of a deacon, into the hereditary clerical caste that Gregory Freeze has called “the Russian Levites.” His path — the diocesan seminary, then the school of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the patronage of Metropolitan Platon (Levshin), and the monastic tonsure of 1808 — is the standard ladder of an exceptionally gifted clergyman’s son in that society, climbed faster and higher than almost anyone else of his generation.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Synodal Church of the Early Nineteenth Century | The post-Petrine system: the 1721 abolition of the Patriarchate, the Spiritual Regulation, the Holy Governing Synod and the over-procurator as “the eye of the tsar”; the Latin-scholastic academies and seminaries; and the spiritual climate of Alexander I’s reign — the Bible Society, pietism, and the first stirrings of a patristic renewal. |
| From Kolomna to the Academy | Birth at Kolomna in 1782 as Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov, son of a deacon; education at the Kolomna seminary and the Trinity-Sergius (Holy Trinity) Seminary; his brilliance as a student and the patronage of Metropolitan Platon (Levshin); his early career as teacher and preacher; and his tonsure as the monk Filaret in 1808. |
See Also
- Teacher and Reformer at St. Petersburg — the next stage: his move to the St. Petersburg Academy and the 1814 reform of the schools
- The Battle for the Synodal Translation — how the Bible-Society currents of his youth became his life’s work
- The Synodal Period — the broader frame of the Petrine Church order
- The Russian Patristic Revival — the recovery of the Fathers Philaret helped to set in motion
References
- Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971.
- Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979.
- Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.
- Nichols, Robert L., and Theofanis George Stavrou, eds. Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.