Philaret and the Slavophiles

The Slavophiles — and above all the lay theologian Aleksei Khomyakov (1804–1860) — admired the Orthodox Church above any institution in Russia and built from it an ecclesiology of sobornost’, conciliar communion in love and freedom, that would shape modern Orthodox thought far beyond their own circle. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, the chief hierarch of the very Synodal church the Slavophiles criticized, regarded them with reserve: wary of a layman theologizing, wary of essays published abroad and not freely printed in Russia, wary of their idealization of pre-Petrine Muscovy. Yet the reserve was not enmity, and on the cause Philaret cared about most — the Russian Bible — the Slavophiles stood with him. This file sets the admiration and the caution side by side and names where scholars read the relationship differently.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

The Slavophiles and Their Church

Slavophilism arose in Moscow in the 1830s and 1840s as a circle of educated noblemen — Ivan Kireevsky, Aleksei Khomyakov, Konstantin Aksakov and others — who, in conscious reaction against the Westernizers, sought the principle of Russian life not in the reforms of Peter the Great but in Orthodoxy and the communal forms of old Russia (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, on the Slavophiles and Khomyakov). What distinguished them from mere romantic nationalists was that, in Khomyakov above all, the search terminated in the Church. For Khomyakov the Church was not one institution among others but the living organism of grace, and the truth of Orthodoxy lay precisely in its having preserved, against both Roman authority and Protestant individualism, the right relation of unity and freedom (Khomyakov, The Church Is One; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology).

This is the conviction that crystallized in the term most associated with the Slavophiles, sobornost’ — conciliarity, catholicity, communion. Khomyakov took the Slavonic sobornaia of the Creed, the word that renders “catholic,” and read it not as a geographical extension but as a quality of being: the Church is a unity of many persons held together not by external coercion but by the inner bond of love in the Holy Spirit (Khomyakov, The Church Is One; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Nichols and Stavrou, Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, on the Slavophile setting). Authority in such a body cannot be located in a single see or a single hierarch over against the faithful, but lives in the whole — clergy and laity together — guarded by the Spirit. Khomyakov pressed this into a sharp critique: Rome had sacrificed freedom to unity, the Protestants unity to freedom, and only the Orthodox East had kept both, because only there was the Church understood as sobornost’ (Khomyakov, The Church Is One; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). His chief ecclesiological essay, known in English as The Church Is One, together with the polemical pamphlets he addressed to Western Christians, became the seedbed of much later Orthodox ecclesiology, admired by figures as different as Florovsky, who praised its intuition while criticizing its romantic edges, and the émigré theologians of the twentieth century (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology).

Philaret’s Reserve

Against this background stands Philaret, and the contrast is pointed. The Slavophiles were laymen, gentry intellectuals doing theology in their studies and their journals; Philaret was the Metropolitan of Moscow, the ranking working hierarch of the Russian Church and the most powerful voice in its Synod. The Slavophiles indicted the Petrine settlement and the Westernized, bureaucratized church it had produced; Philaret was the foremost servant and beneficiary of that very settlement, the man who for decades made the Synodal system function (Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the Awakening of Orthodoxy,” in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). It would have been surprising if the chief hierarch of the Synodal church had embraced a movement whose premise was that the Synodal church had lost something essential.

Philaret’s reserve had several distinct grounds, and it is worth separating them. First was the question of who was speaking. For Philaret, formed entirely within the disciplined world of the theological academies, theology was the work of the Church’s teachers, tested and authorized, not the free composition of gifted amateurs. Khomyakov’s ecclesiology, however brilliant, was a layman’s lay theology, advanced outside the structures by which the Church examined and received doctrine, and Philaret — like the censorship authorities generally — regarded such writing warily (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”). The wariness was not merely personal: Khomyakov’s theological essays were in fact not freely published in Russia in his lifetime. The Church Is One and the French-language brochures to Western Christians circulated abroad and in manuscript, and only after his death in 1860, and after further delay, did his theological works appear in Russia at all (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; the publication history is summarized in Birkbeck’s English edition of Khomyakov, Russia and the English Church). That a major statement of Orthodox ecclesiology should have first reached print abroad, by a layman, outside the ordinary channels of ecclesiastical review, was exactly the kind of thing that made the hierarchy uneasy — and Philaret was the hierarchy.

Second was the matter of the Slavophile idealization of old Russia. The Slavophiles tended to read pre-Petrine Muscovy as an organic Orthodox society whose wholeness Peter had shattered, and to make of it a norm against which the present was found wanting. Philaret did not share this romance. He was himself a critic of various features of the Synodal order and no uncritical apologist for Peter’s church, but he did not locate the Church’s health in a lost golden age of Muscovy, and he was too sober a student of the actual condition of the pre-Petrine Russian Church — its uneven learning, its struggles over the books and the rites — to sentimentalize it (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, on Philaret’s historical realism; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”). Where the Slavophiles saw a paradise to be recovered, Philaret saw a history to be soberly weighed.

Third, and underlying the rest, was temperament and method. Philaret’s whole cast of mind was precise, juridical, cautious; he distrusted enthusiasm and the grand a priori construction. Khomyakov’s ecclesiology, for all its depth, proceeded by bold intuition and sweeping antithesis — Rome against Protestantism, authority against freedom, unity-in-love against the rationalism of the West. To a hierarch trained to weigh every formula against conciliar precedent, such theology could look unanchored, more a vision than a doctrine securely received (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, who himself voices a related criticism of Khomyakov’s “romanticism”; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow”). Florovsky, no enemy of Khomyakov, registered precisely this danger in the Slavophile theology even as he honored its insight — which suggests that Philaret’s caution was not mere institutional self-protection but touched a real question about Khomyakov’s method.

Where They Met

To leave the matter at “reserve” would, however, distort the record, for the two were not simply antagonists, and on several fronts they converged. Both Philaret and the Slavophiles wanted a theology that was more authentically Orthodox and less captive to the Latin scholastic forms that had dominated the Russian academies since the seventeenth century. Philaret’s own dogmatic work was a deliberate turn from the scholastic manuals back toward Scripture and the Fathers; the Slavophiles, from outside the academy, were pressing in a kindred direction, against the same Western tutelage (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; on Philaret’s patristic and anti-scholastic instinct see Dogmatics and the Fathers). They were, in this sense, allies in the larger nineteenth-century awakening of Russian theology even when they distrusted one another’s persons and methods.

The sharpest convergence was over the Bible. The great cause of Philaret’s life was the translation of the Scriptures into Russian — pressed from the days of the Russian Bible Society, suspended under Nicholas I, and vindicated only with the Synodal Bible of 1876, after his death (see The Battle for the Synodal Translation; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars). The Slavophiles, who reverenced the people and the people’s tongue and who wanted the faith to live in Russian life rather than be locked in a learned Slavonic, came to favor the Russian Scripture as well; their valorization of the narod and its language pointed the same way as Philaret’s philological conviction that the Word of God should be heard in the language people actually spoke (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). On the single issue that mattered most to Philaret, in other words, the Slavophiles were on his side, and the chief hierarch and the lay critics of his church wanted the same Russian Bible. That shared cause is the clearest proof that the relationship cannot be reduced to opposition.

There is, finally, a deeper irony. The very sobornost’ the Slavophiles celebrated — the Church as a communion in freedom rather than a machinery of authority — was in some tension with the Synodal apparatus Philaret administered, an apparatus subordinated to the state through the over-procurator and run, in practice, with a strong hierarchical hand (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; on the church-state order see Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I). Yet Philaret’s own theology of the Church was not the bureaucratic caricature the Slavophile critique sometimes implied; he too understood the Church as the Body of Christ animated by grace, and the distance between his ecclesiology and Khomyakov’s was narrower in substance than the difference in their stations and methods suggested (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). The two men were closer in what they believed the Church to be than in how they thought one ought to speak of it, or who had the standing to speak.

How Scholars Read the Relationship

The Philaret–Khomyakov relationship is read in more than one way, and the methodology requires that the readings be named rather than harmonized. [Disputed: Florovsky (*Ways of Russian Theology*) presents Philaret's reserve as substantially principled — a sober hierarch rightly wary of a romantically constructed lay theology published outside the Church's review, while still crediting the Slavophiles' ecclesiological insight; other readings emphasize the institutional dimension, presenting Philaret's caution as in part the self-protection of the Synodal church's chief servant against critics of that very system (cf. Nichols, "Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow," and Nichols and Stavrou, *Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime*, on Philaret's structural position); these need not be exclusive, and the weight given to principle versus institutional interest is where the accounts diverge.]

The character of the personal relation is likewise uncertain. [Disputed: the sources do not give a record of warm collaboration or of open rupture between Philaret and Khomyakov, and scholars accordingly describe the relationship variously — as guarded distance and mutual wariness (Florovsky, *Ways of Russian Theology*), or as the predictable friction between a powerful hierarch and lay theologians criticizing his church (Nichols, "Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow"); claims of either personal hostility or quiet sympathy run beyond what the documented record will firmly bear.]

What can be said without dispute is this. The Slavophiles, and Khomyakov pre-eminently, gave modern Orthodoxy one of its most fertile ecclesiological ideas, and they did so as laymen, outside and partly against the official church. Philaret, the head of that official church, met them with a reserve that was at once institutionally interested and theologically serious — a legitimate caution about lay theology advanced outside the Church’s channels and about a romanticism he did not share, not a refusal of the Orthodox vision they served. And on the Russian Bible, the cause by which Philaret is most remembered, the critics and the hierarch wanted the same thing. The relationship is best held, then, not as a clash of hero and villain but as the meeting of two genuine forms of love for the Orthodox Church — one from the chair of the Metropolitan, one from the study of the lay theologian — that could not quite trust each other’s hands.

References

Khomyakov, Aleksei S. The Church Is One. In W. J. Birkbeck, ed., Russia and the English Church during the Last Fifty Years, vol. 1. London: Rivington, Percival & Co., 1895; repr. London: SPCK, 1917. (Khomyakov’s principal ecclesiological essay and the polemical brochures to Western Christians in English; the doctrine of the Church as unity-in-freedom, the reading of sobornaia/“catholic,” and the critique of Rome and Protestantism; the note on the abroad/posthumous publication of his theological writings.)
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA / Vaduz: Nordland / Büchervertriebsanstalt (Collected Works, vols. 5–6), 1979. (The Slavophiles and Khomyakov; sobornost’ and Khomyakov’s ecclesiology with Florovsky’s own criticism of its romanticism; Philaret’s theology, his historical realism about pre-Petrine Russia, and his place in the awakening of Russian theology; the wariness of the hierarchy toward lay theology published outside the Church’s review.)
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. (Philaret’s institutional position as chief hierarch of the Synodal church; his place in the nineteenth-century awakening; the structural reading of his caution.)
Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Translation and Canon in the Conflict over the Russian Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (The Russian-versus-Slavonic conflict and the eventual Synodal Bible; the constituencies favoring a Russian Scripture, including the populist instincts that aligned the Slavophiles with the vernacular cause.)