From Kolomna to the Academy

The future Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow was born Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov on 26 December 1782 (Old Style) at Kolomna, a provincial town southeast of Moscow, the son of a deacon who later became a priest. He was schooled in the hereditary clerical world of the Synodal Church — the Kolomna seminary and then the seminary of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra — where his exceptional gifts drew the patronage of Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow, the leading churchman of the age. He stayed on at Trinity as a teacher and a celebrated young preacher, and in 1808 he was tonsured a monk, receiving the name Filaret (Philaret). This file traces his life to that tonsure; his move to the St. Petersburg Academy belongs to the next section.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

Birth at Kolomna, 1782

Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov was born on 26 December 1782 (Old Style; 6 January 1783 on the New Style / Gregorian reckoning) in the town of Kolomna, on the Moscow River southeast of the old capital. [Disputed: the day is given as 26 December 1782 in the Russian (Old Style) calendar used throughout his life; sources that convert to the New Style render it 6 January 1783, and a few works cite the year loosely as 1782/83 — the discrepancy is a matter of calendar conversion, not of conflicting record (the 1782 Old-Style date is standard: Florovsky, *Ways of Russian Theology*, Part One; the biographical entries in Nichols and Stavrou, eds., *Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime*).] He was born into the hereditary clerical estate — Gregory Freeze’s “Russian Levites” — that supplied the Synodal Church with almost all its priests and bishops (Freeze, The Russian Levites, on the closed clerical caste from which such careers began).

His father, Mikhail Fyodorovich Drozdov, was at the time of Vasily’s birth a deacon at the Kolomna church (he was later ordained priest and served as an archpriest in the town); the household was thus a clergy household of the standard kind, in which a son’s enrollment in the church schools and eventual ordination were the expected, almost automatic, course of life (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One; on the social pattern, Freeze, The Russian Levites and The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia). The surname Drozdov — from drozd, “thrush” — was a typical seminary-bestowed clerical name of the kind common in that estate. Kolomna itself was then the seat of a diocese, and the boy’s first schooling was at the Kolomna diocesan seminary.

The Trinity-Sergius Seminary and the Patronage of Platon

When the Kolomna see was reorganized, Vasily Drozdov continued his education at the seminary attached to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra at Sergiev Posad — the Holy Trinity Seminary, one of the foremost theological schools of the Moscow region, under the direct patronage of the Metropolitan of Moscow. There the curriculum was the Latin-scholastic course standard in the Synodal academies and seminaries of the day: instruction in Latin, the disciplines of rhetoric, philosophy, and theology taught largely from Western-derived manuals (on the character of this schooling, see The Synodal Church of the Early Nineteenth Century; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on the Latin-scholastic seminary curriculum).

Drozdov proved an extraordinary student — quick, exact, and gifted in languages and in expression — and his abilities brought him to the notice of the dominant churchman of the age, Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow (1737–1812). Platon, himself a celebrated preacher and the most influential Russian hierarch of the later eighteenth century, presided over the Trinity-Sergius schools and took a personal interest in their most promising pupils. He became Drozdov’s patron, advancing him within the school and marking him out for a future of consequence (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on Platon and his patronage of the young Drozdov; Nichols and Stavrou, eds., Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, on Philaret’s early formation under Platon). The connection to Platon is the hinge of Philaret’s early career: it lifted a provincial deacon’s son out of the ordinary clerical track and placed him on the path to the heights of the Russian Church.

Teacher and Preacher at Trinity

On completing the course, Drozdov did not leave for a parish but was retained at the Trinity-Sergius Seminary as a teacher. In the years after 1803 he taught successively the lower and then the higher subjects of the curriculum — among them rhetoric, poetry (the literary disciplines), Greek and Hebrew, and eventually higher subjects of philosophy and theology — establishing himself quickly as one of the ablest instructors of the school (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on Philaret’s teaching at Trinity; biographical accounts in Nichols and Stavrou, eds., Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime). His command of the biblical languages — Greek and Hebrew especially — was the seed of the philological gift that would later make him the indispensable man of the Russian Bible translation.

It was as a preacher, however, that the young Drozdov first became widely known. Under Platon’s eye he developed a manner of preaching that broke, in its precision and its scriptural saturation, from the inflated rhetorical style then in fashion; his sermons of these years already display the close attention to the exact sense of the sacred text that would become the hallmark of his mature homiletics (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on Philaret’s preaching; and see the treatment of his homiletic method in this collection). His reputation as an exceptional young preacher spread from the Trinity-Sergius pulpit and was one of the things that recommended him for advancement to St. Petersburg.

Tonsure as the Monk Filaret, 1808

The decisive personal step came in 1808, when Vasily Drozdov was tonsured a monk, receiving in religion the name Filaret (Philaret) — Greek Philaretos, “lover of virtue.” [Disputed: the tonsure is standardly dated to 1808 (so Florovsky, *Ways of Russian Theology*, Part One, and the biographical accounts in Nichols and Stavrou, eds., *Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime*); a few popular accounts place the events of his early monastic ordinations across 1808–1809, reflecting the close sequence of tonsure, diaconate, and priesthood rather than a genuine conflict over the year of tonsure.] Monastic profession was, in the Synodal Church as before it, the indispensable gateway to the higher offices of the Church: only a monk (a member of the “black” clergy) could become a bishop, and tonsure thus marked Drozdov’s turn from the ordinary path of a married parish priest toward the episcopal heights. He took the name of St. Philaret the Merciful, and within a short time of his tonsure he was ordained to the diaconate and then to the priesthood.

The tonsure of 1808 coincided with the great reform of the theological schools, then being set in motion, in which the rising Philaret would soon play a central part, and with his transfer to the orbit of the new and reorganized St. Petersburg Theological Academy. That next stage — his work in the capital, his role in the 1814 reform of the academies, and his ascent through the hierarchy toward the see of Moscow — opens the following section of this collection (see Teacher and Reformer at St. Petersburg). What the Kolomna years and the tonsure of 1808 had produced was already clear in outline: a brilliantly equipped young monk-scholar, formed in the Latin-scholastic system yet exceptionally learned in Scripture and the biblical languages, a preacher of the first rank, and the protégé of the most powerful churchman in Russia — the man who, within little more than a decade, would himself become Metropolitan of Moscow and the dominant figure of the Russian Synodal Church.

References

Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979. (Philaret’s birth and origins at Kolomna; his formation at the Trinity-Sergius Seminary; the patronage of Metropolitan Platon (Levshin); his teaching and preaching at Trinity; his monastic tonsure and the Latin-scholastic schooling of the period.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. (The hereditary clerical estate from which Drozdov, a deacon’s son, came, and the seminary path that such sons followed.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (The social world of the parish and seminary clergy in Philaret’s century.)
Nichols, Robert L., and Theofanis George Stavrou, eds. Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. (Robert L. Nichols’s studies of Philaret of Moscow, including his early formation under Platon and his rise within the Synodal hierarchy.)