Metropolitan of Moscow (1821)

In 1821 Filaret was translated to the see of Moscow as archbishop; in 1826, at the coronation of Nicholas I, he was raised to metropolitan. The tenure that followed lasted until his death in 1867 — nearly forty-six years, the longest and most commanding hierarchical reign of the entire Synodal era. This file establishes the elevation itself, the stature Filaret attained as effectively the leading hierarch of the Russian Church, and the scope of his authority over Moscow, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and Russian church life generally. The catechism, the Bible, his relations with the state, and his theology are each reserved for their own sections.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

The Translation to Moscow, 1821

In 1821, after brief tenures at Tver and Yaroslavl (see Teacher and Reformer at St. Petersburg), Filaret was translated to the ancient see of Moscow as archbishop of Moscow (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou 1978). Moscow was the historic spiritual capital of Russia and the second of its great sees; to be given it at not quite forty was an extraordinary mark of favor and confidence. It was also, in a sense, a homecoming: Filaret had been formed in the Trinity-Sergius schools just outside Moscow under the patronage of the previous metropolitan, Platon (Levshin), and now succeeded to the line of the Moscow hierarchs in the city of his early formation (see From Kolomna to the Academy).

A clarification of title is in order, because the popular shorthand “Metropolitan Philaret from 1821” conflates two distinct moments. Filaret governed Moscow from 1821, but he did so first as archbishop; he was elevated to the dignity of metropolitan of Moscow only in 1826, at the coronation of the Emperor Nicholas I — the new reign whose coronation honors raised him to the higher rank [Disputed: standard accounts agree that Filaret came to Moscow as archbishop in 1821 and was raised to metropolitan in 1826 at the coronation of Nicholas I (so Florovsky 1979, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou 1978); looser popular and devotional sources style him "Metropolitan of Moscow" from 1821 throughout, eliding the 1821–1826 archiepiscopal interval — the more precise dating is followed here]. From 1826 until his death in 1867 he was metropolitan of Moscow, and it is by that title that history knows him.

“The Metropolitan”: Stature and Authority

The tenure that began in 1821 was the longest and most influential of the Synodal period. Filaret governed the see of Moscow for nearly forty-six years, from 1821 to his death on 19 November (Old Style) 1867 (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou 1978). No other hierarch of the post-Petrine Church combined so long a reign with so commanding a personal authority. For much of the nineteenth century, to speak in Russia of “the Metropolitan” without qualification was to mean Filaret of Moscow.

That authority rested on several foundations at once. He was a permanent and dominant member of the Holy Governing Synod, the body that ruled the Russian Church under the over-procurator; his learning, his administrative mastery, and his sheer longevity made him, in practice, the senior voice of the Russian episcopate across reign after reign (Nichols and Stavrou 1978; Florovsky 1979, Part One). Robert L. Nichols’s studies of Philaret as churchman present him as the indispensable hierarch of the era — the man whose judgment on doctrine, discipline, and church policy carried a weight no other bishop of the Synodal Church could match, and to whom the central administration turned on questions great and small (Nichols and Stavrou 1978). He was consulted by emperors and trusted, within limits, by a state that was wary of any churchman’s independent power: he served Alexander I in his last years, was raised by Nicholas I, and lived into the reign of Alexander II, for whom he drafted the 1861 manifesto emancipating the serfs (the church-state dimension is treated in Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I).

His pre-eminence was not unqualified, and it should not be sentimentalized. The Synodal Church was a department of state, and even Filaret’s authority was exercised under the over-procurators — above all under Count N. A. Protasov, whose tenure from the late 1830s curtailed the bishops’ independence and with whom Filaret’s relations were strained (Nichols and Stavrou 1978; treated in Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I). For long stretches Filaret was kept at a distance from the Synod’s sitting in St. Petersburg, governing his vast affairs by correspondence from Moscow. Yet precisely that combination — physical distance from the capital and unrivaled moral and intellectual authority — gave him a peculiar independence. He became the great hierarch of Moscow, presiding over the Church’s historic heart while the bureaucratic machinery ground on in the northern capital, and his resolutions and letters reached into every corner of Russian church life (on these as primary sources, see His Writings and Letters).

Governance of Moscow and the Russian Church

As metropolitan of Moscow, Filaret governed one of the largest and most important dioceses of the empire, with its hundreds of parishes, its clergy, its monasteries, and its theological schools. His method of governance was famously personal and exacting: he ruled through a flood of written resolutions (rezolyutsii) on the affairs and petitions that crossed his desk, terse and precise judgments that became models of administrative wisdom and were collected and studied after his death (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou 1978). Through these resolutions and his enormous correspondence he supervised ordinations, discipline, parish disputes, the education of the clergy, and the spiritual life of his diocese in minute detail.

His authority reached beyond the diocese of Moscow to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, the greatest monastery of Russia, of which the metropolitan of Moscow was the superior (svyashchenno-arkhimandrit, sacred archimandrite). Filaret thus presided over the spiritual center of Russian monasticism and over the academy that the 1814 reform had planted there — the Moscow Theological Academy, housed at the Lavra — binding his oversight of the Church’s premier monastery to his earlier work on the reform of its schools (Florovsky 1979, Part One; on the reform, see Teacher and Reformer at St. Petersburg). It was at the Lavra that he established the Gethsemane skete and fostered the monastic and spiritual currents he favored, and there that, in the fullness of his years, much of his deepest religious life was lived.

Beyond Moscow, his influence was felt across the whole Russian Church. As the senior hierarch of the Synodal era he shaped its doctrine, its discipline, and its great projects — most enduringly the Longer Catechism, which became the standard catechism of the Russian Church and is reserved for its own section (see The Longer Catechism), and the Russian Synodal Bible, the labor of his lifetime, completed only after his death (see The Battle for the Synodal Translation). His theology and his celebrated preaching, which gave Russian academic theology much of its nineteenth-century character, belong to their own treatment as well (see The Philological Preacher). The point to be fixed here is simply the scale of the man’s standing: for the better part of half a century, little of national consequence in the Russian Church moved without the knowledge, and often the decisive word, of the metropolitan of Moscow.

The Length and Meaning of the Tenure

The sheer duration of Filaret’s Moscow tenure is itself part of its significance. Forty-six years in a single great see — across the reigns of three emperors, the Decembrist crisis, the Crimean War, and the Great Reforms — gave him a continuity and a accumulated authority that no over-procurator and no fellow bishop could rival. He was the living institutional memory of the Russian Church through the whole middle of the nineteenth century, the one fixed point as ministers and procurators and even emperors came and went (Nichols and Stavrou 1978; Florovsky 1979, Part One).

That continuity is what makes the Moscow years the hinge of the whole collection. Almost everything for which Filaret is remembered — the catechism, the Bible, the sermons, the emancipation manifesto, the disputes with the Slavophiles, the saintly image and the critical historiography of a powerful church-statesman — unfolded during these decades and under the authority described here (each is treated in its own section; the historiographical question of the saint-versus-statesman is taken up in Hagiographic vs. Critical Portraits). The elevation of 1821, and the metropolitan dignity of 1826, are therefore not merely steps in a career but the opening of the central act of nineteenth-century Russian church history. The provincial deacon’s son had become the most powerful churchman in the empire — and would remain so until his death.

References

Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979. (The standard theological assessment of Filaret’s place in Russian thought: his translation to Moscow, his elevation to metropolitan, his governance through resolutions, his oversight of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra and the Moscow Academy, and his dominance of the Synodal-era Church.)
Nichols, Robert L., and Theofanis George Stavrou, eds. Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. (Robert L. Nichols’s essays on Philaret as churchman: his stature as the leading hierarch of the Synodal Church, his membership in the Synod, his strained relations with the over-procurator Protasov, and the scope of his authority across the reigns of Alexander I, Nicholas I, and Alexander II.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (The institutional context of the Synodal Church Filaret governed: the diocesan administration, the clergy, and the theological schools.)