Controversies and Critics

Philaret of Moscow governed the Russian Church for nearly half a century, and authority on that scale draws charges. Critics have read his famous caution as timidity and excessive prudence — the same patience that finally won the Russian Bible looked, during the Nicholas years, like a failure of nerve. He has been charged with an autocratic temperament: that he ruled Moscow and the Russian Church with an iron and sometimes severe hand, was exacting with his clergy, and could be cold and imperious; and his frosty relations — with the over-procurator Protasov, with brother hierarchs — are part of the record. This file presents these charges honestly and even-handedly, neither endorsing the hostile caricature nor whitewashing, and sets against them the defense: his genuine pastoral concern, his integrity, and the deep respect he commanded.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

The Charge of Caution

The first and most persistent charge against Philaret concerns his caution. He was, by temperament and by long training in a dangerous bureaucratic world, a man of extraordinary prudence: he calculated, waited, withheld himself, advanced no further than the ground would bear (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the Awakening of Orthodoxy,” in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime). To his admirers this was wisdom — the patience of a man who knew how much the Church could lose by a false step under hostile masters, and who in the end outlasted them. To his critics the same trait was timidity: a churchman of his stature, they urged, might have pressed harder, spoken more boldly, risked more for the causes he believed in, and his prudence shaded into an excessive accommodation to power.

The cause that focuses this charge most sharply is the Russian Bible. The translation Philaret had championed in the 1810s and early 1820s was suspended under Nicholas I, and for the long reign of Nicholas (1825–1855) Philaret largely held his peace on it, not forcing the question, working within the limits the reign imposed, and waiting (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; see The Battle for the Synodal Translation). Only with the new reign of Alexander II did he press again, and the Synodal Bible was authorized in 1876, after his death. Here the two readings of his caution stand in their starkest form. The very persistence that finally secured the Russian Bible — the willingness to wait out a hostile reign rather than break against it — is, viewed from another angle, precisely the long silence of which critics complain: decades in which the great cause lay dormant and its chief advocate did not fight (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). The same conduct yields both the hero of patience and the figure of prudent retreat, depending on the eye that reads it.

[Disputed: scholars assess Philaret's caution under Nicholas I differently — Florovsky (*Ways of Russian Theology*) and Nichols ("Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow") read it largely as principled prudence that preserved the Bible cause for a better day and finally vindicated it, whereas a more critical line treats the long quiescence as a real failure to contest the reaction more forcefully; the line between strategic patience and timidity is genuinely contested, and the same decades support both readings.]

The Charge of an Autocratic Temperament

The second charge is heavier and touches the man more nearly: that Philaret was autocratic. He ruled the see of Moscow and, through his commanding influence in the Synod, much of the Russian Church with what critics describe as an iron hand — demanding, exacting, intolerant of slackness, and at times severe (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”). With his clergy he was a hard taskmaster: he held them to high standards of learning and conduct, scrutinized their work closely, and was not lavish with praise or warmth. He could be cold in manner and imperious in bearing, and there are accounts of subordinates who feared him more than they loved him (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, on Philaret’s commanding and reserved personality; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”). His vast output of administrative resolutions (rezolyutsii) on the cases that crossed his desk shows a mind that governed in detail and let little pass uncorrected (on the resolutions as sources see Hagiographic vs. Critical Portraits).

It must be said plainly that this is not pure invention by enemies. The reserve, the exactingness, the cold authority were real features of the man, attested across sources friendly and unfriendly alike (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”). What is contested is the meaning to be put on them. To his critics they describe a domineering prelate who concentrated power and ruled by fear. To his defenders the same severity was the discipline of a man who took the Church’s standards with deadly seriousness, who governed an enormous and often slack ecclesiastical machine the only way it could be governed, and whose demands on others never exceeded the demands he placed on himself. The exactingness, on this reading, is inseparable from the integrity: a lax Philaret would not have been the Philaret who held the line on doctrine, the schools, and the Scriptures for half a century.

Quarrels and Frosty Relations

The charges find concrete form in Philaret’s relations with particular men. The most consequential were his tensions with the over-procurators of the Synod, the lay officials through whom the state controlled the Church. His relations with Count Nikolai Protasov, over-procurator from 1836, were notably cool: Protasov sought to enlarge the over-procurator’s bureaucratic control over the Church and to school its administration on military-bureaucratic lines, and Philaret — jealous of the prerogatives of the episcopate and of the integrity of the Church’s own order — resisted, with the result that the powerful Metropolitan of Moscow spent much of the Protasov years at a certain distance from the center of Synodal business (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”; on the church-state order see Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I). The frost here was not personal pettiness but a structural conflict over who would govern the Church; yet it left Philaret, for a long stretch, partly sidelined.

With brother hierarchs, too, Philaret could be guarded and his relations less than warm. His commanding stature, his closeness to and then distance from the levers of Synodal power, and his sheer longevity at the top set him somewhat apart, and he was not a man who easily admitted others to intimacy or shared authority gladly (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”). His guardedness — the same reserve noted above — extended to his dealings with the lay theologians of the Slavophile circle, whom he held at arm’s length (see Philaret and the Slavophiles). The portrait that emerges is of a man much respected, much feared, and not much loved at close quarters — a solitary eminence rather than a beloved colleague.

The Defense, Even-Handedly

Against the charges stands a real and substantial defense, and even-handedness requires that it be given its weight. First, Philaret’s severity was matched by a genuine pastoral concern. The same hierarch who exacted so much of his clergy labored for their education and standing, preached with a depth and care that drew crowds, and applied himself to the cases before him not as a martinet enforcing rules but as a pastor answerable for souls (Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). His resolutions, read closely, show not only severity but discernment and, often, mercy tempered to the case. Second, his integrity was rarely questioned even by those who found him cold: he was not a careerist or a flatterer, he did not bend doctrine to power, and on the great matters — the Catechism, the Scriptures, the defense of the episcopate’s proper sphere — he held firm at real cost to his own standing under Nicholas and Protasov (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”).

Third, and decisively, is the respect he commanded. Across a divided church and a suspicious court, through changes of reign and the hostility of powerful officials, Philaret remained for nearly fifty years the single most authoritative voice in Russian church life — a standing that cannot be explained by fear alone (Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). When the state needed a churchman to draft the manifesto emancipating the serfs in 1861, it turned to him; when Russia wanted to know the mind of the Church, it listened for his. Authority of that durability rests on something more than an iron hand. He was trusted because he was incorruptible, and revered because he was, whatever his coldness, manifestly serious about God and the Church.

How the Portrait Is Drawn

The figure that results is genuinely contested, and the methodology requires the contest to be displayed rather than resolved. [Disputed: the character of Philaret is drawn very differently across the literature — Soviet-era and other hostile readings present an autocratic, reactionary prelate, the very type of the Synodal church's subordination to the throne; the hagiographic tradition surrounding his 1994 glorification presents a holy hierarch whose firmness was sanctity and whose severity was zeal; and the measured scholarly portrait, exemplified by Nichols ("Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow," in *Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime*) and by Florovsky (*Ways of Russian Theology*), holds the elements together — a man of real authority and real coldness who was also a man of real integrity and pastoral seriousness; this guide follows the measured reading while naming the other two.]

[Disputed: the meaning of Philaret's severity and reserve is itself read in opposite directions — as the domineering temper of an autocratic ruler of the Church (the hostile reading), or as the discipline of a hierarch who demanded of others no more than of himself and governed a vast and slack church the only way it could be held (the sympathetic reading, cf. Nichols, "Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow"); the attested facts of his exactingness and coldness underdetermine the verdict, and the sources support neither the hostile caricature nor the hagiographic varnish without remainder.]

The honest conclusion is the unglamorous one. Philaret was cautious, and his caution was at once strategic wisdom and, at times, a real reticence one may regret. He was autocratic, exacting, and cold, and those traits were at once the discipline of an incorruptible servant of the Church and a hardness that left him feared and solitary. He quarrelled with the over-procurator and kept his distance from many, and that frost was at once principled resistance to the state’s encroachment and the guardedness of a man not given to warmth. None of these is wholly to his credit, and none is wholly to his discredit; the truthful portrait holds them together. He was a great churchman and a difficult man, and the difficulty is part of the greatness, not a stain to be wiped from it.

References

Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA / Vaduz: Nordland / Büchervertriebsanstalt (Collected Works, vols. 5–6), 1979. (Philaret’s commanding, reserved, and exacting personality; his caution and prudence under the reaction; his resistance to Protasov and his distance from the center of Synodal business; his integrity and stature amid the awakening of Russian theology.)
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, pp. 206–229. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. (The measured portrait of Philaret’s authority, pastoral aims, and standing; his place in the nineteenth-century awakening; the basis for reading his severity as discipline rather than mere domination.)
Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Translation and Canon in the Conflict over the Russian Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (The suspension of the Russian translation under Nicholas I, Philaret’s long patience, and the vindication of the Synodal Bible in 1876; the evidentiary basis for both the “strategic patience” and the “long quiescence” readings of his caution.)