Teacher and Reformer at St. Petersburg

The decade between Filaret’s arrival in St. Petersburg around 1809 and his translation to Moscow in 1821 made his career. At the newly reorganized St. Petersburg Theological Academy he rose from teaching-monk to rector (1812), won a reputation as the most brilliant lecturer and preacher of his generation, and took a central part in the 1814 reform that rebuilt the entire Russian system of theological schools. Consecrated bishop in 1817, he passed quickly to the archbishoprics of Tver (1819) and Yaroslavl (1820). This file traces the academic and reforming phase of his rise; the catechism, the Bible, and the church-state politics it set in motion are reserved for their own sections.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

Arrival in the Capital

Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov, the deacon’s son from Kolomna, had been tonsured the monk Filaret in 1808 and ordained, and was teaching in the Trinity-Sergius schools under the patronage of Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow (on this formation, see From Kolomna to the Academy). His move to St. Petersburg, around 1809, came at the precise moment when the Russian Church’s educational system was being remade. Alexander I had, in 1808, established a commission of theological schools (the Komissiya dukhovnykh uchilishch) to reorganize ecclesiastical education across the empire, and the St. Petersburg Theological Academy was reconstituted as the model and crown of the new system (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Freeze 1983). Filaret, recommended for his evident gifts, was drawn into the capital just as that reconstruction began, and his fortunes were bound to it from the start.

At the reorganized Academy he advanced with unusual speed. He served as inspector and then as professor, lecturing in theology and in the sacred and church-historical disciplines, and in 1812 — still in his twenties — he was made rector of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, the senior teaching post in the most prestigious school of the Russian Church (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou 1978). That a provincial monk barely thirty years old should hold the rectorship of the capital’s Academy is itself a measure of how exceptional his abilities were judged to be, and of how thin the supply of first-rate teaching talent in the Latin-bound old academies had become.

The Lecturer and Preacher

What set Filaret apart, in the testimony of those who heard him and of the scholars who have studied the period, was a combination of philological precision and theological depth rare in the Russian schools of the time. The old academies taught their dogmatics in Latin out of textbooks largely derived from Western, Protestant and Catholic, models, by rote and disputation; Filaret lectured with a directness rooted in the biblical and patristic texts themselves (Florovsky 1979, Part One). Florovsky, who is by no means uncritical of him, places Filaret at the head of the recovery of a living, scriptural theology in nineteenth-century Russia and regards his teaching and preaching as the point at which Russian academic theology began to find its own voice (Florovsky 1979, Part One).

His preaching made his public reputation. Even as a young teaching-monk Filaret was recognized as an extraordinary preacher — exact, compressed, and saturated with Scripture, building his sermons by close attention to the wording of the sacred text. The mature theology of this preaching, its “philological” character and its handling of grace and human freedom, belongs to a later section (see The Philological Preacher); what matters here is that by his early thirties Filaret was already the most talked-of preacher in the capital, and that this reputation, as much as his administrative gifts, carried him toward the episcopate.

His scholarly and catechetical labors of these years were of a piece with the reform of the schools. He produced expositions of Scripture and the foundations of the dogmatic and catechetical work that would later issue in his famous Longer Catechism (1823) — a work whose roots lie in the teaching he did at the St. Petersburg Academy in this decade (Florovsky 1979, Part One; see The Longer Catechism). It was also in these capital years that he became involved with the work of the Russian Bible Society, founded in 1812–1813, whose project of rendering Scripture into Russian would become the central labor of his life (see The Battle for the Synodal Translation). The young rector was thus simultaneously a teacher, a preacher, a reformer of the schools, and a translator-in-the-making — the several strands of his later greatness already visible and intertwined.

The 1814 Reform of the Theological Schools

The most consequential institutional work of Filaret’s St. Petersburg years was his part in the reform of the Russian theological schools, the new statute for which was confirmed in 1814. The reform was not Filaret’s alone — it was the work of the commission of theological schools established under Alexander I in 1808, in which Mikhail Speransky and others had a hand — but Filaret, as a leading figure of the reorganized Academy and a member of the reforming circle, took a central part in framing and carrying it through (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Freeze 1983). The reform reached its definitive form in the statute confirmed in 1814, after the experimental years following the 1808–1809 reorganization. [Disputed: the reform is dated variously by its stages — the founding of the reorganizing commission in 1808, the reconstitution of the St. Petersburg Academy in 1809, and the confirmation of the general statute (*Ustav*) of the theological schools in 1814; Florovsky (1979, Part One) and the institutional treatment in Freeze (1983) describe the process as a multi-stage reform of 1808–1814 rather than a single act, and dates given in popular accounts for "the reform" accordingly differ by which stage they fix on].

The reform’s architecture was a graded, four-tier system, integrating ecclesiastical education from the parish up. At the base stood the parish schools (prikhodskiye uchilishcha); above them the district schools (uyezdnyye uchilishcha); above these the diocesan seminaries (seminarii); and at the summit the theological academies (dukhovnyye akademii), of which St. Petersburg was the first and the model, with Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan completing the set over the following decades (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Freeze 1983). Each tier fed the next, so that a gifted clergyman’s son could in principle ascend from a parish school to the highest academic theology — the very ladder Filaret himself had climbed. The whole apparatus was administered centrally by the commission of theological schools, giving the Synodal Church for the first time a coherent, empire-wide educational structure (Freeze 1983).

The reform was as much curricular and spiritual as it was administrative. Its intent, in which Filaret’s influence is most clearly felt, was to move the academies away from the arid Latin scholasticism of the eighteenth-century schools — the disputations and the derivative Western textbooks — toward a theology grounded in Scripture and the Fathers and increasingly taught in Russian (Florovsky 1979, Part One). Florovsky reads the 1814 settlement as a genuine turning-point: the moment at which the Russian theological academies were given the form, and something of the orientation, that would make possible the patristic and biblical revival of the century to come (Florovsky 1979, Part One; on that revival, see The Russian Patristic Revival). The new academies were never wholly emancipated from their Western models, and the Latin-scholastic inheritance proved long-lived; but the institutional frame within which Russian theology would think for the next hundred years was set in 1814, and Filaret was among its principal builders. This four-tier system, and the Church-and-state order that funded and governed it, are the institutional backdrop of the whole Synodal period (see The Synodal Period and The Synodal Church of the Early Nineteenth Century).

For his work on the reform and at the Academy, Filaret received a doctorate of theology — among the earliest such degrees conferred in the reorganized Russian system — and a series of honors and appointments that marked him out as a coming man of the Church (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou 1978).

Into the Episcopate: Revel, Tver, Yaroslavl

The reputation Filaret had built as teacher, reformer, and preacher carried him into the hierarchy with the same speed that had marked his academic rise. In 1817 he was consecrated bishop of Revel (Reval, modern Tallinn), as a vicar (suffragan) bishop of the metropolitan see of St. Petersburg, while continuing his connection with the Academy and its work (Florovsky 1979, Part One; Nichols and Stavrou 1978). The vicariate gave him episcopal rank without removing him from the center of church affairs in the capital, and it confirmed that he was being groomed for the highest responsibilities.

His advance through the senior sees followed at once. In 1819 he was appointed archbishop of Tver and named a member of the Holy Governing Synod — his entry into the standing governing body of the Russian Church, a body of which he would remain a member, in fact if not always continuously in form, for the rest of his life (Nichols and Stavrou 1978; Florovsky 1979, Part One). In 1820 he was translated to the archbishopric of Yaroslavl. These were brief tenures — way-stations rather than settled episcopates — but they marked his passage through the ranks of the hierarchy and placed him, by 1820, among its most senior and most visibly favored members.

Throughout this rapid ascent his scholarly and reforming labors continued. He remained engaged with the Bible Society’s translation work and with the affairs of the theological schools, and he was already at work on the catechetical material that would become the Longer Catechism of 1823 (Florovsky 1979, Part One). By the time he was translated to Moscow in 1821 — the subject of the companion file — Filaret was, at not quite forty, the most accomplished churchman of his generation: a doctor of theology, an architect of the reformed academies, a celebrated preacher, a member of the Synod, and an archbishop. The capital had made him; Moscow would make him “the Metropolitan” (see Metropolitan of Moscow (1821)).

References

Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979. (The standard theological account of Filaret’s place in Russian thought: his teaching and preaching at the St. Petersburg Academy, his rectorship of 1812, his role in the 1808–1814 reform of the theological schools, the four-tier system, the shift away from Latin scholasticism, and his early episcopate.)
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 rise through the academy and the hierarchy, his consecration and the archbishoprics of Tver and Yaroslavl, and his entry into the Synod.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (The institutional history of the Synodal Church’s schools and clergy: the commission of theological schools, the graded system of academies, seminaries, district and parish schools, and the administration of ecclesiastical education.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. (The hereditary clerical estate and the educational ladder from which Filaret rose.)