03 — The Catechism
St. Philaret’s Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church (1823; revised 1827/1828, definitive 1839) is the single most influential doctrinal textbook of modern Russian Orthodoxy — a question-and-answer summary of the faith organized around the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Decalogue (faith, hope, love), composed in a sober, scriptural, patristic key that broke with the Latin-scholastic manner of its predecessors. This section presents the Catechism itself and the contested episode of its 1824 suppression and revision, in which the chief objection was that it quoted the Creed, prayers, and Scripture in Russian rather than Church Slavonic — the same anxiety that, in the same years, halted the Russian Bible.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)
Of all that Philaret wrote, the Catechism reached the most people for the longest time. For generations it was simply the catechism of the Russian Church — memorized in seminaries and parish schools, translated across the Orthodox world, and embedded by Philip Schaff in The Creeds of Christendom as the representative confessional statement of the Eastern Church for Western readers. Its method was as consequential as its content: where the seventeenth-century Orthodox Confession of Peter Mogila had been framed in dialogue with, and partly in the categories of, Latin scholasticism, Philaret’s Catechism sought to ground each answer in Scripture and the Fathers and to organize the whole around the three theological virtues — faith expounded through the Creed, hope through the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes, love through the Ten Commandments.
That very method generated the controversy this section also documents. In 1824, in the reaction at the close of Alexander I’s reign that brought down the Russian Bible Society, the Catechism was withdrawn from use. The objection that did the work was philological and ecclesial at once: Philaret had printed the texts the faithful were to learn — the Creed, the Our Father, Scripture quotations — in modern Russian, and his opponents held that the sacred texts must remain in Church Slavonic. He was compelled to revise. The two files below treat, in order, what the Catechism is and the episode of its suspension and re-issue.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Longer Catechism | The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church (Prostrannyi khristianskii katikhizis): its 1823 composition, question-and-answer structure, and organization around faith (Creed), hope (Lord’s Prayer, Beatitudes), and love (Decalogue); its scriptural, patristic method against the Latin-scholastic background of Mogila; the parallel Shorter Catechism; the Blackmore and Schaff English translations; and its standing as the standard catechism of the Russian Church. |
| The Catechism Controversy | The 1824 suppression and forced revision: the Russian-versus-Slavonic objection (Creed, prayers, Scripture in the vernacular), tied to the fall of the Bible Society; the actors — Metropolitan Seraphim (Glagolevsky), Archimandrite Photius (Spassky), Count Arakcheev, Admiral Shishkov — and both sides of the dispute, with the contested points marked. |
See Also
- The Battle for the Synodal Translation — the Russian-versus-Slavonic conflict in its largest form, of which the catechism episode is one front
- The 1876 Synodal Bible — the eventual vindication of the Russian Scripture the Catechism had quoted
- The Synodal Church of the Early 19th Century — the institutional and spiritual setting of the Catechism and its suppression
- Dogmatics and the Fathers — Philaret’s patristic, anti-scholastic theological method, of which the Catechism is the popular expression
- Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I — the church-state order within which the Catechism was governed and revised
- The Synodal Period — the post-Petrine system of church government
- Holy Scripture — the Orthodox doctrine of Scripture the Catechism expounds
- The Russian Patristic Revival — the return to the Fathers in which Philaret’s method stands
References
- Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow. The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church. Trans. R. W. Blackmore. In The Doctrine of the Russian Church (Aberdeen, 1845); reprinted in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II: The Greek and Latin Creeds. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877.
- Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Vaduz / Belmont, MA: Büchervertriebsanstalt / Nordland (Collected Works, vols. 5–6), 1979.
- Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Translation and Canon in the Conflict over the Russian Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Nichols, Robert L. “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the Awakening of Orthodoxy.” In Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.