The Synodal Church of the Early Nineteenth Century

When Vasily Drozdov — the future Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow — was born in 1782, the Russian Orthodox Church had lived for two generations under the order Peter the Great imposed in 1721: no patriarch, a collegial Holy Governing Synod in his place, and a lay over-procurator appointed by the sovereign to watch over it as, in Peter’s own phrase, “the eye of the tsar.” This file describes that system — the abolition of the Patriarchate, the Spiritual Regulation, the Synod and its over-procurator, the Latin-scholastic academies and seminaries — and the unsettled spiritual climate of the early nineteenth century into which Philaret rose: an age of Western theological dependence, of pietism and the Bible Society under Alexander I, and of the first stirrings of a patristic and spiritual renewal.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

The Abolition of the Patriarchate

The Church Philaret entered was the creation of a single, deliberate act of state. When Patriarch Adrian of Moscow died in 1700, Peter the Great declined to permit the election of a successor. For two decades the patriarchal throne stood vacant, administered by a locum tenens, Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky, whose powers Peter steadily curtailed. Then in 1721 the tsar abolished the office altogether and replaced it with a collegial body — first called the Spiritual College, almost immediately renamed the Most Holy Governing Synod — which would govern the Russian Church in the place of a patriarch (Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great, esp. the chapters on the locum tenens period and the establishment of the Synod). The reform was confirmed by the Eastern patriarchs in 1723, who recognized the Synod as their “brother in Christ” with patriarchal authority — a recognition that gave the new arrangement canonical cover, however much it had been driven by reasons of state (Cracraft, Church Reform).

Peter’s motives were not primarily theological. A single patriarch, he had concluded, could become a rival center of authority — the spectacle of Patriarch Nikon’s collision with his father, Tsar Alexis, in the previous century stood as a warning — whereas a collegial board of bishops and clergy, salaried and supervised, could be folded into the machinery of the reformed, Westernizing state (Cracraft, Church Reform; on the political logic, see also Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on the Petrine reform of the Church). Georges Florovsky’s verdict has become classic: the reform did not merely reorganize church administration but effected a “Westernization” of Russian church life, subordinating the Church to the absolutist state and grafting onto it an alien, juridical conception of its own nature (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, “The Petrine Reforms”).

The Spiritual Regulation

The charter of the new order was the Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovnyi Reglament) of 1721, drafted chiefly by Feofan (Theophan) Prokopovich, archbishop of Pskov and Peter’s leading clerical ally — a man steeped in Protestant theology from his studies abroad and openly hostile to the pretensions of the old hierarchy (Cracraft, Church Reform, on Prokopovich and the drafting of the Regulation; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on Prokopovich). The Regulation justified collegial government over monarchical, set out the duties of the clergy, and laid down a program for clerical education, ordering the establishment of schools to train a literate, disciplined priesthood. It is, in effect, the constitutional document of the Synodal Church, and its spirit — administrative, didactic, suspicious of “superstition,” and frankly subordinationist toward the state — pervaded the institution for the next two hundred years (Cracraft, Church Reform; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One).

The Synod and the Over-Procurator

The Holy Governing Synod was a board of bishops, archimandrites, and archpriests appointed by the sovereign. But the decisive innovation was not the Synod itself; it was the office created to supervise it. In 1722 Peter appointed a lay official, the over-procurator (ober-prokuror), to sit in the Synod as the sovereign’s representative, charged with ensuring that the Synod conducted its business lawfully and in conformity with the imperial will. Peter’s instruction described the over-procurator as “the eye of the sovereign and the attorney for state affairs” — oko gosudarevo — and the phrase “the eye of the tsar” has clung to the office ever since (Cracraft, Church Reform; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One). Through this lay official the autocracy held a permanent hand on the Church’s central government.

In the eighteenth century the over-procurators were often relatively modest functionaries, but across the period — and decisively in the nineteenth century, the era of Philaret — the office accumulated power until the over-procurator, rather than the senior bishops, effectively directed the Synod’s affairs, controlled its agenda, and mediated between the Church and the throne (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou, eds., Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, the essays on the structure of the Synodal Church). This is the constitutional fact that frames Philaret’s whole career: as Metropolitan of Moscow he was the most authoritative churchman in Russia, yet he was a member of a Synod over which a layman appointed by the emperor presided in practice, and his sharpest later conflicts — above all with Over-Procurator N. A. Protasov in the 1830s and 1840s — were collisions with precisely this office.

The Hereditary Clergy and the Theological Schools

Beneath the Synod lay the clergy themselves, who in this period formed a nearly closed hereditary caste — what Gregory Freeze, in his study of the eighteenth-century priesthood, has called “the Russian Levites.” Sons of clergy were enrolled in the church schools, and the parish clergy reproduced itself generation after generation as a distinct social estate, registered, taxed, and disciplined apart from the rest of the population (Freeze, The Russian Levites, on the formation of the clerical estate and the seminary system; and Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia, on its later condition). Vasily Drozdov, son of a deacon, was a child of exactly this world, and his ascent ran along the rails it laid down.

The educational instrument of the Spiritual Regulation was a network of diocesan seminaries crowned by a small number of higher theological academies — at Kiev, Moscow, and (from 1721/1809) St. Petersburg. Their curriculum was the great paradox of Russian theological formation. Modeled ultimately on the Kiev academy that Peter Mohyla had reorganized in the seventeenth century along Jesuit lines, instruction was conducted in Latin, and the textbooks of dogmatic and moral theology were largely adaptations of Western scholastic and confessional manuals — Roman Catholic in their scholastic form, sometimes Protestant in particular doctrines (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on the Latin-scholastic theology of the academies and its “pseudomorphosis”). Florovsky’s severe judgment was that Russian academic theology of this era suffered a “pseudomorphosis,” its native Orthodox substance forced into borrowed Western molds, so that the Fathers were studied less than the Latin manualists and the language of theology was not even Russian (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One). A Russian bishop of the early nineteenth century had typically been formed to think and write theology in Latin, on Western models — a formation Philaret would both master and, in his preaching and his catechism, quietly work to transcend.

The Spiritual Climate under Alexander I

The reign of Alexander I (1801–1825), which spans Philaret’s youth and rise, gave this institutional order a distinctive and unstable spiritual coloring. The emperor himself, especially after 1812, was drawn to a vague, ecumenical, mystical religiosity — a “universal Christianity” colored by Western pietism, freemasonry, and the writings of Western mystics — that he sought to make a kind of governing spirit of the age (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on the Alexandrine “mysticism”; Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, on the religious atmosphere of the reign). The institutional expression of this mood was the Russian Bible Society, founded in 1812–1814 on the model of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the short-lived “dual ministry” of spiritual affairs and public instruction under Prince A. N. Golitsyn (from 1817), which fused the administration of the Orthodox Church with that of other confessions and with public education under a single, pietistically inclined head (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou, eds., Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime).

For the Church this was a genuinely ambiguous moment. The Bible Society’s program — to put the Scriptures into the hands of the people in their own tongue — opened the question of a Russian translation of the Bible, since the people did not understand the Church Slavonic of the liturgical text. The young Philaret threw himself into this work, producing a Russian version of the Gospel of John and laboring on the translation; it became the seed of his life’s great campaign for a Russian Bible (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on the Bible Society and Philaret’s part in it; and see the treatment of the translation history in this collection). But the same pietist current carried with it a suspicion of dogmatic precision and ecclesiastical order, a taste for an undifferentiated “inner” Christianity that many in the Church regarded as a solvent of Orthodoxy itself. When the conservative reaction came at the end of Alexander’s reign — the fall of Golitsyn in 1824, the suppression of the Bible Society in 1826 under Nicholas I — the Russian Bible project was halted, and Philaret spent the following decades defending and reviving it against ecclesiastical and political opposition (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou, eds., Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime).

The Beginnings of a Renewal

Yet the early nineteenth century was not only an age of Western dependence and pietist enthusiasm. Beneath and against the Latin-scholastic establishment, a recovery of the Church’s own sources was beginning. The Slavonic Dobrotolyubie (the Slavonic Philokalia) of St. Paisius Velichkovsky had appeared in 1793, channeling the hesychast and patristic tradition back into Russian and Slavic monasticism, and the renewal of eldership (starchestvo) it nourished would issue, in Philaret’s own lifetime, in the great spiritual centers of Optina and Sarov (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on Paisius and the monastic revival; and see the broader account of the patristic revival in the orthodoxy guide). The reform of the theological schools in 1808–1814 — in which the rising Philaret was a central figure — aimed, at least in aspiration, to deepen and to russify theological education. And Philaret’s own preaching and dogmatic work, with its turn from the Latin manuals toward Scripture and the Fathers, belongs to the front edge of this renewal (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on Philaret as a theologian; Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, on Philaret’s significance).

This, then, was the Church into which Philaret rose: a Church governed by a Synod under the eye of the tsar, teaching its theology in Latin from Western books, caught between a court-sponsored mysticism and a conservative reaction — and, almost imperceptibly, beginning to find its way back to its own Fathers. Philaret of Moscow would spend half a century inside this system, embodying both its constraints and the renewal that strained against them.

References

Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971. (The abolition of the Patriarchate, the locum tenens period, the drafting of the Spiritual Regulation by Feofan Prokopovich, the establishment of the Holy Governing Synod and the office of over-procurator, and the 1723 recognition by the Eastern patriarchs.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979. (The Petrine reform as Westernization; the “pseudomorphosis” of Russian academic theology and its Latin-scholastic schooling; the Alexandrine mysticism, the Bible Society, and Golitsyn’s dual ministry; Paisius Velichkovsky and the monastic revival; Philaret as theologian.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. (The formation of the hereditary clerical estate and the seminary system that produced it.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (The condition of the clergy and the church schools in Philaret’s century.)
Nichols, Robert L., and Theofanis George Stavrou, eds. Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. (Essays on the structure of the Synodal Church, the over-procuracy, the religious climate of Alexander I’s reign, and Philaret’s place within it — including Robert L. Nichols’s studies of Philaret and the Synodal hierarchy.)