08 — Sources and Portraits
The documentary base on which any account of St. Philaret of Moscow (1782–1867) must rest, and the contest over how to read it. No other Russian hierarch of the Synodal age left so vast a paper trail — catechisms, multi-volume sermons, tens of thousands of administrative resolutions, and a correspondence and body of official memoranda gathered into the great printed editions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — and that abundance is the reason Philaret is documented as few saints are. But the same record is contested: the devotional portrait of the wise, ascetic, holy Metropolitan stands beside the critical portrait of a formidable church-statesman, the dominant ecclesiastical politician of his age. This section sets out, first, what the primary sources are and where they were published, and second, the historiography that has read them in such opposed ways.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)
Philaret governed the Church of Moscow for forty-six years (1821–1867) and shaped the wider Russian Church for nearly all of that time, and he committed almost everything he did to paper. He wrote the doctrinal textbook of modern Russian Orthodoxy; he preached sermons that were printed and reprinted as models of the Russian pulpit; he issued a flood of written resolutions on the daily business of his diocese; and he carried on a correspondence — with the abbot of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, with the over-procurators of the Synod, with fellow hierarchs, with the imperial family and the court, with his own father — that ran for half a century. After his death his admirers gathered this material into large printed collections, and it is on those editions, far more than on any single biography, that the historical Philaret can be reconstructed. The two files in this section treat the two questions a source-critical reader must ask of so rich an archive: what survives and where, and how it has been read.
The first file inventories the writings and the editions — the Catechisms, the Slova i rechi (Sermons and Addresses), the rezolyutsii (resolutions), the Pisma (letters), and the Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov (Collected Opinions and Responses) — and weighs both their value and their hazards, above all the selection bias of a record largely published by men who venerated him. The second file turns to the historiography itself, the most contested ground in this collection: the hagiographic image and the critical portrait of the church-statesman, the scholars who have drawn each, and how an Orthodox reader holds a genuine saint and a powerful, sometimes severe, politician in one frame.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| His Writings and Letters | The primary sources for Philaret: the Longer and Shorter Catechisms; the multi-volume Slova i rechi (Sermons and Addresses); the rezolyutsii (administrative resolutions) as a major historical source; the vast correspondence (Pisma — to Antony of the Lavra, to over-procurators, to family and hierarchs); and the Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov (Collected Opinions and Responses), the gathered official memoranda. What survives, where it was published in the great editions, the challenge the volume poses, and the selection bias of a corpus issued by admirers. |
| Hagiographic vs. Critical Portraits | The historiography as a contested zone: the saintly devotional image (the wise, holy, ascetic hierarch, culminating in the 1994 glorification) versus the critical portrait of a powerful church-statesman, severe and exacting. Florovsky, Robert L. Nichols, the nineteenth-century Russian hagiographic literature, and Soviet-era hostile historiography; how an Orthodox reader holds both — sanctity that is not the absence of a hard temperament or political entanglement. |
See Also
- The Longer Catechism — the chief published doctrinal source, the most read of all his writings
- Dogmatics and the Fathers — the theology distilled from the sermons and catechism treated here as sources
- Controversies and Critics — the charges of caution and autocratic temper that the critical portrait develops
- Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I — the church-state nexus the Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov documents
- Glorification (1994) — the act in which the hagiographic portrait reached its culmination
- The Synodal Period — the institutional world the resolutions and memoranda record
- The Russian Patristic Revival — the theological movement in which Florovsky locates Philaret
References
- Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, Part One. Vol. 5 of the Collected Works. Belmont, MA: Nordland / Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1979. (Part One; the chapters on Philaret and the “struggle for theology.”)
- Nichols, Robert L. “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the Awakening of Orthodox Christianity,” and related essays. In Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.
- Freeze, Gregory L. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (Institutional context of the Synodal Church Philaret administered.)
- Filaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow. Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo, po uchebnym i tserkovno-gosudarstvennym voprosam (Collection of Opinions and Responses). St. Petersburg / Moscow, 1885–1888 and supplements. (The gathered official memoranda.)
- Filaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow. Slova i rechi (Sermons and Addresses), collected editions, Moscow, nineteenth century; and the published volumes of his letters (Pisma), including the correspondence with Archimandrite Antony (Medvedev) of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra.