Church and Autocracy Under Nicholas I

St. Philaret of Moscow’s relation to the Russian state reached its most strained under Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855), the most rigorously autocratic and bureaucratic of the nineteenth-century tsars. Philaret was, in principle, a convinced defender of autocracy and of the “symphony” of Church and empire; but he was not a servile court bishop, and his insistence on the Church’s distinct spiritual authority brought him into sustained conflict with the militarizing synodal administration of Count Nikolai Protasov, over-procurator from 1836 to 1855. From 1842 Philaret ceased to attend the Holy Synod in person at St Petersburg and governed his diocese from Moscow, a withdrawal bound up with that conflict. This file sets out his political theology and the institutional friction it produced, without reducing him either to a chaplain of the throne or to a hidden critic of it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

The Synodal Frame

To speak of Philaret “and the state” under Nicholas I is to speak of a Church that had no patriarch and no independent supreme organ of its own. Since Peter the Great’s abolition of the Patriarchate in 1721 and the Spiritual Regulation that replaced it, the Russian Church had been governed by the Most Holy Governing Synod, a collegial body of bishops whose proceedings were supervised by a lay over-procurator — in the Regulation’s own conception an officer answerable to the sovereign, later glossed as “the eye of the tsar” (on the system, see The Synodal Period; on its origins, Metropolitan of Moscow, 1821). The bishops who sat on the Synod retained their dioceses and were summoned to St Petersburg in rotation; the over-procurator controlled the agenda, the chancellery, and the channel to the throne.

The decisive fact about Philaret’s public career is that it ran almost entirely inside this frame and never against it in principle. He never agitated for the restoration of the Patriarchate; he accepted the Petrine settlement as the lawful order of the Church in his time (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One, on Philaret; Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978). What he contested was not the existence of the over-procurator but the steady expansion of that office at the expense of the bishops’ own spiritual competence — and that expansion is the story of the reign of Nicholas I.

The Accession of 1825 and the Decembrist Context

Philaret’s relation to Nicholas began before Nicholas was tsar, in the tangled succession of December 1825. Alexander I died childless at Taganrog on 19 November 1825. The legitimate heir was his brother Constantine, who had, however, secretly renounced the throne in a series of acts that Alexander had had drawn up and deposited — one copy famously sealed in the Dormition Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin — with instructions that they be opened only after his death. Philaret, as Metropolitan of Moscow, was among the small number entrusted with the existence of these documents and was involved in their safekeeping (Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One). The secrecy of the arrangement produced, on Alexander’s death, an interregnum in which Nicholas and the army first swore allegiance to Constantine, who had no intention of reigning, before the act of renunciation was made public and Nicholas was proclaimed.

That confusion over the oath of allegiance is the immediate setting of the Decembrist revolt of 14 December 1825, when officers exploiting the dynastic uncertainty led troops onto Senate Square at St Petersburg refusing to re-swear to Nicholas. Philaret’s role belonged to the Moscow end of the affair: he conducted the ceremonies surrounding the change of oath in the old capital and preached on the accession. His sermons of the period give the new reign a providential, scriptural sanction — the tsar’s authority is from God, rebellion against it a sin against the order God has established — and this set the tone of the lifelong association between the strictly autocratic Nicholas and the Church’s most eloquent voice (Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978). [Disputed: the warmth of the relationship that followed is read differently — Nichols and the English-language scholarship treat Philaret as a sincere but independent-minded supporter of the throne who guarded the Church's distinct sphere; older hagiography presents the bond as untroubled mutual reverence; Soviet-era historiography reads Philaret flatly as an ideologue of autocracy and serfdom (e.g. in surveys of the "official-church" of Nicholas's reign), a reading the documented conflicts with the synodal administration complicate.]

Political Theology: Autocracy and Symphony

Philaret’s defense of the autocracy was theological before it was political, and it is best understood as a doctrine of order rather than a flattery of any particular tsar. In his sermons and catechetical teaching he grounds civil authority in the providence of God: the sovereign rules by divine appointment, subjects owe him conscientious obedience, and the well-ordered Christian state mirrors the order of heaven (see his treatment of the fifth commandment in the Longer Catechism; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One). This is a strong doctrine of autocracy, and Philaret never softened it. But it is paired with an equally strong doctrine of the Church’s own sphere: the tsar’s authority does not extend to the inner governance of the faith, the administration of the sacraments, or the teaching office of the bishops, which belong to the Church by Christ’s institution and not by the sovereign’s grant.

The model he assumed is the Byzantine ideal of symphonia — the harmonious cooperation of two distinct authorities, the priesthood and the empire, each supreme in its own order (on the ideal in the Russian setting, The Synodal Period; Russian Orthodox Tradition). The difficulty — and the source of all the friction that follows — is that the Petrine synodal system was not in fact a symphony of two authorities but a single state apparatus that had absorbed the Church’s administration into itself. Philaret affirmed the ideal of two harmonious powers while serving in an institution built on the subordination of one of them. He worked, in practice, to expand the bishops’ room inside that institution and to resist its further bureaucratization, without ever challenging its legitimacy. That is the precise sense in which he was a defender of autocracy who was not its servant: he upheld the throne and contested the chancellery (Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One).

The Over-Procurators and the Rise of Protasov

The office of over-procurator grew enormously under Nicholas I, and that growth is the institutional spine of Philaret’s troubles. Early over-procurators had been, in effect, supervising officials; under Nicholas the office became a ministry, with a swelling chancellery that increasingly mediated — and controlled — the business that reached the bishops of the Synod. The decisive figure was Count Nikolai Alexandrovich Protasov, a cavalry general appointed over-procurator in 1836, who held the post until his death in 1855 and remade it (Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia, Princeton, 1983, on the Protasov regime; Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978).

Protasov brought to the Church the outlook of a military administrator. He reorganized the over-procurator’s chancellery into something resembling a ministry of church affairs, centralized control over finances, appointments, and the theological schools, and reduced the practical independence of the bishops who sat on the Synod, who increasingly found business pre-digested and decided by his apparatus (Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia, 1983). Under him the over-procuracy reached the height of its power over the Russian Church before the Great Reforms. His reform of the ecclesiastical schools — reorienting the seminary curriculum toward subjects useful to the state and the parish, and away from the higher learned culture — was among the most contested of his measures, and it is here that the collision with Philaret was sharpest. Philaret, the foremost product and patron of the academic theology Protasov wished to prune, resisted the reorientation of the schools and the diminution of the bishops’ control over them (Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia, 1983; on the broader institutional reshaping of the clergy, Freeze, The Russian Levites, Harvard, 1977).

The conflict was also bound up with the Bible question. Protasov’s over-procuracy was hostile to the resumption of the Russian-language Scripture project that Philaret had championed since the days of the Russian Bible Society, and the suppression of that project deepened the antagonism between the metropolitan and the synodal administration (on the whole struggle, see The Battle for the Synodal Translation; and on the catechism conflict that ran alongside it, The Catechism Controversy). The Russian Bible and the Russian catechism — Philaret’s two great projects — both ran afoul of a synodal establishment that distrusted vernacular Scripture, and Protasov stood at its head.

The Withdrawal of 1842

The friction came to a head at the beginning of the 1840s. In 1842 Philaret ceased to attend the Holy Synod in person at St Petersburg and thereafter governed the Moscow diocese — and exercised his continuing influence on church affairs — from Moscow, through correspondence and resolutions, rather than from the synodal chamber in the capital (Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One). He remained a member of the Synod and one of the senior hierarchs of the empire; what changed was that he no longer sat at its table under Protasov’s management. The withdrawal is generally read as the consequence of his conflicts with the over-procurator’s regime — a refusal to lend his presence and authority to an administration whose direction he opposed, and a recognition that he could defend the Church’s interests more freely from Moscow than as one more outvoted bishop in a chancellery-run Synod (Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978).

[Disputed: the proximate cause and character of the 1842 withdrawal are weighted differently by different writers — Nichols and the institutional historians stress the structural conflict with Protasov's centralizing over-procuracy and the Bible and schools questions as its substance; some devotional and older biographical accounts frame it more as Philaret's personal disfavor at court and his dignified retreat from intrigue; the surviving record makes the conflict with the synodal administration the common thread, but the balance between principled protest and enforced marginalization is read variously.]

This is the point at which the saint-versus-statesman portrait of Philaret is most instructive. He did not resign, did not protest publicly, did not appeal over the over-procurator’s head against the system itself; he withdrew quietly and continued to govern and to be consulted. The result was paradoxical: a hierarch out of favor at court and absent from the Synod who nonetheless remained, through the weight of his learning and the sheer length of his Moscow tenure, the single most authoritative churchman in Russia. For roughly the last quarter-century of his life little of consequence in the Russian Church moved without reference to his opinion, even as he governed from a capital that was not the seat of power (Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978; and on the historiographical knot, Controversies and Critics).

Neither Court Chaplain Nor Crypto-Liberal

The temptation in reading Philaret under Nicholas I runs in two opposite directions, and both must be resisted. The first is the caricature of the court bishop — the eloquent ornament of the throne who sanctified whatever the autocracy did. Against it stands the plain record of conflict: his sustained resistance to Protasov’s reshaping of the Church, his championing of a vernacular Scripture the synodal establishment feared, his withdrawal from the Synod, and his long period of disfavor (Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia, 1983; Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978). A simple chaplain of the autocracy does not spend the prime of his career out of favor over the prerogatives of his Church.

The second temptation is to recruit him as a hidden liberal — a critic of autocracy and serfdom whose true sympathies ran against the regime he served. Against this stands his political theology, which was a genuine and unbending doctrine of autocracy and order; his social conservatism, which was real and is most visible in his ambivalence over the emancipation of the serfs (see The 1861 Emancipation Manifesto); and the absence of any program of constitutional or social reform in his thought. He did not oppose the autocracy; he insisted that the Church within it had a sphere of its own that the autocracy’s lay servants must not absorb (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One; Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978).

What he was, on the best reading the sources support, is a hierarch of the symphonic ideal trapped in a synodal apparatus that fell increasingly short of it — a defender of the throne who was also a defender of the altar’s independence from the throne’s bureaucracy, and who paid for the second loyalty with his standing at court. The friction with Nicholas’s state was not the friction of a dissident but of a churchman insisting that the Church was not merely a department of the empire. That insistence, pressed without rebellion and without surrender, is the most characteristic thing about his relation to the state under Nicholas I (Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, 1978).

References

Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979. (Philaret’s political theology, his place in the Synodal Church, and his relations with the synodal administration.)
Nichols, Robert L. “The Orthodox Elders (Startsy) of Imperial Russia” and his essays on Metropolitan Philaret, in Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou, eds., Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. (The principal English scholarship on Philaret as churchman and statesman: the 1825 succession and oath, the political theology, the Protasov conflict, and the 1842 withdrawal.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (Protasov’s reorganization of the over-procuracy and the ecclesiastical schools, and the centralization of synodal administration under Nicholas I.)
Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. (The clerical estate and the institutional shaping of the Synodal Church that Protasov’s reforms continued.)
Philaret of Moscow. The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church. 1823; rev. 1827–1839. (The teaching on civil authority and the fifth commandment underlying his doctrine of obedience to the sovereign.)