02 — The Rise to Moscow

The two decades in which Vasily Drozdov, tonsured the monk Filaret in 1808, rose from a young teaching-monk at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy to the see of Moscow. This section follows his brilliance as lecturer and preacher, his central role in the great 1814 reform of the Russian theological schools, his rapid passage through the episcopate (consecrated bishop in 1817, archbishop of Tver in 1819, of Yaroslavl in 1820), and his elevation to Moscow in 1821 — the beginning of the longest and most commanding hierarchical tenure of the entire Synodal era.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

When Filaret arrived in St. Petersburg around 1809 he was a provincial deacon’s son barely past his mid-twenties; by 1821 he was archbishop of the second city of the Empire, and within a few years “the Metropolitan” — the hierarch whom emperors consulted and the Synod deferred to. This section traces that ascent in two movements. The first is the academic and reforming phase: his years at the reorganized St. Petersburg Theological Academy, where he became professor and then rector, and his decisive contribution to the 1814 statute that rebuilt the entire four-tier system of academies, seminaries, and district and parish schools on which the Russian Church’s education would rest for a century. The second is his entry into the hierarchy and his elevation to Moscow, where the catechism, the Russian Bible, the relations with the state, and the theology of his preaching — each reserved for its own section — would all unfold under his hand.

Files in This Section

File	Description
Teacher and Reformer at St. Petersburg	Filaret at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy from c. 1809: inspector, professor, and rector (1812); his fame as lecturer and preacher; his central role in the 1814 reform of the theological schools — the new statute, the four-tier system, the curricular shift away from rote Latin scholasticism; his consecration as bishop of Revel in 1817, then archbishop of Tver (1819) and Yaroslavl (1820); and the scholarly output of these years.
Metropolitan of Moscow (1821)	His translation to Moscow in 1821 as archbishop, raised to metropolitan in 1826 at the coronation of Nicholas I; the nearly forty-six-year tenure (1821–1867), the longest and most influential of the Synodal age; the stature he attained as effectively the leading hierarch of the Russian Church, a permanent member of the Synod, and superior of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra; his authority over Moscow and over Russian church life generally.

See Also

• From Kolomna to the Academy — the formation that preceded this rise: Kolomna, the seminaries, and the tonsure of 1808
• The Synodal Church of the Early Nineteenth Century — the institutional order whose schools Filaret helped to reform
• The Longer Catechism — the work the young Moscow hierarch produced out of his St. Petersburg teaching
• The Battle for the Synodal Translation — the Bible question that began in his academy years and became his life’s work
• Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I — the church-state order within which his Moscow authority operated
• The Philological Preacher — the preaching that made his early reputation
• The Synodal Period — the broader frame of the post-Petrine Church order
• The Russian Patristic Revival — the return to the Fathers that the reformed academies helped to set in motion

References

• Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979.
• Nichols, Robert L., and Theofanis George Stavrou, eds. Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.
• Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.
• Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.