His Writings and Letters

St. Philaret of Moscow left a body of writing without parallel among Russian hierarchs of the Synodal age: the Longer and Shorter Catechisms, the multi-volume Slova i rechi (Sermons and Addresses), the tens of thousands of administrative rezolyutsii (resolutions) on diocesan business, a correspondence of half a century, and the Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov (Collected Opinions and Responses) in which his official memoranda on church and state questions were gathered. This file inventories these primary sources, describes what survives and where it was published in the great editions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and weighs both the value and the hazards of so vast an archive — above all the fact that it is precisely this paper trail that makes Philaret one of the best-documented of all Orthodox saints, and the fact that much of it was published by admirers, with the selection bias that implies.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

A Documented Saint

Most Orthodox saints reach us through thin and late sources: a vita written generations after death, a handful of attributed sayings, a liturgical office. Philaret is the opposite case. He was a working administrator and author for some sixty years, from his first lectures at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in the 1810s to his death as Metropolitan of Moscow in 1867, and he documented his activity to an extraordinary degree. The result is that the historian of Philaret faces not a scarcity of evidence but an embarrassment of it — a corpus so large that no single scholar has fully mastered it, and one that allows his life and mind to be reconstructed from his own words with a precision available for almost no other figure in this guide (Nichols, in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Nichols and Stavrou, 1978; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I). This abundance is itself a fact worth naming at the outset, because it shapes everything that follows: the contested portraits of the next file are contested over a rich record, not in its absence.

The writings fall into several broad classes — the doctrinal works, the sermons, the administrative resolutions, the correspondence, and the official memoranda — and each was published in its own series after his death. Taken together they constitute the primary-source base of this entire collection.

The Catechisms

The most read of all Philaret’s writings is the Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church (Russian Prostrannyi khristianskii katikhizis), first published in 1823 and brought to its definitive form in 1839, together with its compressed companion, the Shorter Catechism (Sokrashchennyi katikhizis) (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I; Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, ch. 2). These are the only works of Philaret that reached a mass readership in his lifetime and beyond, printed and reprinted as the doctrinal textbook of the Russian Church and translated into Western languages — the Longer Catechism appears in R. W. Blackmore’s English version and in Philip Schaff’s The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II. As a primary source the Catechism is unusual in being a public, fixed, and officially authorized text, and its successive recensions (1823, 1827/1828, 1839) are themselves historical evidence, since their differences over Russian versus Church Slavonic Scripture are the substance of the catechism controversy (see The Longer Catechism). For the rest of his output, the situation is the reverse: most of it was occasional, private, or administrative, and reached print only after his death.

The Sermons: Slova i rechi

Philaret’s sermons were celebrated in his own lifetime as models of the Russian pulpit, and they were gathered into the multi-volume collection known as Slova i rechi (Sermons and Addresses), issued in successive editions across the nineteenth century. These volumes preserve his preaching from the early St. Petersburg years through the long Moscow episcopate: festal homilies, sermons for imperial occasions (coronations, name-days, the consecration of churches), funeral orations, and addresses delivered on the great public events of the reign. They are the chief source for his theology of the word and for the precise, philological, anti-rhetorical manner that made his preaching famous (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I; and see Dogmatics and the Fathers).

As sources the sermons must be read with their genre in view. They are polished, public, and often delivered before the court or the emperor, which means they show Philaret as he wished to be heard in his official capacity rather than in the unguarded register of his letters or the terse practicality of his resolutions. A sermon preached at a coronation is evidence of how Philaret articulated the sacral theology of monarchy in public; it is weaker evidence of his private estimate of a particular sovereign, for which the correspondence and memoranda are better witnesses (see Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I). The Slova i rechi give us the preacher and the public theologian; the man of business and the man of private judgment must be sought elsewhere.

The Resolutions: Rezolyutsii

The least familiar but, for the historian, one of the richest classes of source is the body of Philaret’s resolutions (rezolyutsii) — the written rulings he issued, day after day for nearly half a century, on the administrative business of the Moscow diocese and of the wider Church. As ruling bishop and as the senior and most influential member of the Holy Synod, Philaret was asked to decide an unending stream of practical questions: appointments and transfers of clergy, disputes between parishes, applications and petitions, disciplinary cases, building and repair of churches, matters of seminary and monastery governance, marriage and divorce questions, and the countless small affairs of a great diocese. To each he appended a written resolution, often brief and pointed, frequently severe, and these accumulated into a record of tens of thousands of decisions.

The historical value of the rezolyutsii is hard to overstate. Where the sermons show the public theologian, the resolutions show the administrator at work — his mind on the concrete, his standards of governance, his exactness, and the temper with which he ran his Church. They are the most direct evidence we have of Philaret as the working hierarch, and they document the texture of Synodal-era church administration as few other sources do (Nichols, in Nichols and Stavrou 1978; on the institutional setting, Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia, 1983). They were published in collected form among the materials gathered after his death, and they remain a quarry that has been worked far less thoroughly than the sermons or the doctrinal works. The same record that demonstrates Philaret’s diligence also supplies much of the evidence for the critical portrait of a demanding and sometimes harsh administrator (see Controversies and Critics) — a point taken up in the companion file.

The Correspondence: Pisma

Philaret was a prolific correspondent, and his letters (Pisma) were gathered, after his death, into several large published series organized by recipient. Among the most important and most cited are:

The letters to Antony (Medvedev), superior of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Archimandrite Antony was the abbot of Philaret’s beloved Lavra and his close spiritual confidant, and the long correspondence between them — running over decades — is among the most revealing of all the Philaret materials, because it shows him in a register of relative candor and on spiritual as well as practical matters. This collection was published in multiple volumes and is a principal source for the inner and the monastic Philaret.
The letters to the over-procurators and to the Synod’s lay officials. Philaret corresponded with the lay over-procurators of the Holy Synod and with state officials over his long career, and these letters document the church-state friction of the period from his side — particularly the tension under Count N. A. Protasov (see Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I).
The letters to family. His correspondence with his own father and family — Philaret was born Vasily Drozdov, son of a Kolomna deacon — was published and offers a more personal register than almost any other source.
The letters to other hierarchs and to lay figures, scattered across many published collections and periodicals of the late nineteenth century, fill out the network of his relationships across the Russian Church and society.

As primary evidence the correspondence is the closest we come to the unofficial Philaret. The letters to Antony in particular let us hear him reflect, complain, advise, and decide outside the public eye, and they are indispensable for any judgment of his character that does not rest solely on his public face. They must still be read critically — letters are addressed to particular correspondents and shaped by those relationships — but they are the natural corrective to the polish of the sermons and the terseness of the resolutions.

The Official Memoranda: Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov

Distinct from the private correspondence is the great collection of Philaret’s official opinions and responses, published as the Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo, po uchebnym i tserkovno-gosudarstvennym voprosam (Collection of Opinions and Responses on Educational and Church-State Questions), issued in several volumes with supplements in the 1880s. Over his decades on the Synod and as the de facto senior theological authority of the Russian Church, Philaret was repeatedly asked to draft, review, or comment on the major questions of church and state policy — the reform of the theological schools, the catechism, the Bible translation, relations with the Old Believers and with other confessions, mixed marriages, censorship of religious literature, and the wording of state documents, most famously his role in the 1861 Emancipation Manifesto (see Church and Autocracy under Nicholas I). His memoranda on these matters — reasoned, weighty, and frequently decisive — were gathered into this collection.

The Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov is the single most important source for Philaret as a churchman engaged with the affairs of the empire. Where the sermons give the public theologian and the resolutions the diocesan administrator, the Opinions and Responses give the statesman-hierarch deliberating on the great questions, and it is on this collection that the scholarly portrait of Philaret as the dominant ecclesiastical politician of his age substantially rests (Nichols, in Nichols and Stavrou 1978; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology I). For the historian of the Synodal Church it is a primary document of the first rank.

The Challenge and the Value of So Large an Archive

The sheer scale of this material is both its value and its difficulty. The value is that Philaret can be studied as few saints can — not through pious reconstruction but through his own catechisms, sermons, resolutions, letters, and memoranda, cross-checked against one another. This is why he is, in the literal sense, one of the most thoroughly documented figures in the Russian Orthodox tradition, and why a guide such as this one can cite him so densely from his own words. The difficulty is equally real: the corpus is so vast, scattered across many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century editions and periodicals, much of it in Church Slavonic and pre-reform Russian orthography, that no reader can claim command of the whole, and selective citation can construct very different Philarets from the same archive.

One hazard deserves particular emphasis, because it governs the historiography of the next file. Much of this material was published by admirers. The great collected editions — the Slova i rechi, the letters, the Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov — were assembled in the decades after his death by editors who venerated Philaret and who were preparing the documentary monument of a man already regarded as a luminary of the Russian Church. That work of preservation is an enormous service; without it the sources would be far poorer. But it carries an inescapable selection bias: what was chosen for publication, how it was arranged, and what was passed over were decisions made by men disposed to present Philaret at his best, and the surviving printed record is therefore not a neutral sample but a curated one (a point Florovsky, himself an admirer, registers in his criticism of Philaret’s “reticence” and in his caution about the received image; Ways of Russian Theology I; and see Hagiographic vs. Critical Portraits). The resolutions, blunter and less flattering, are a partial corrective — they were issued for business, not for posterity — but even they reach us through editors. The honest reader of Philaret therefore works from a record that is at once unusually rich and unusually shaped: abundant evidence, but evidence largely transmitted by those who loved him. That double fact is the bridge to the historiographical problem treated next.

References

Filaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow. Slova i rechi (Sermons and Addresses). Collected editions, Moscow, nineteenth century. (The multi-volume corpus of his preaching.)
Filaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow. Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov Filareta, mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo, po uchebnym i tserkovno-gosudarstvennym voprosam. St. Petersburg / Moscow, 1885–1888, with supplementary volumes. (The gathered official opinions and responses.)
Filaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow. Pisma (Letters), published collections, including the correspondence with Archimandrite Antony (Medvedev), superior of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, and letters to the over-procurators and to his family. Nineteenth-century editions.
Filaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow. The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church. Trans. R. W. Blackmore; in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II. New York: Harper, 1877 (and later printings).
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, Part One. Vol. 5 of the Collected Works. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979. (Assessment of Philaret’s writings and of the received image.)
Nichols, Robert L. “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the Awakening of Orthodox Christianity.” 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 administration the resolutions record.)
Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Translation and Canon in the Conflict over the Russian Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (Publication history of the Catechism and its recensions.)