09 — Veneration and Legacy
St. Philaret of Moscow died on 19 November (Old Style) 1867, after nearly half a century at the head of the Russian Church, and was glorified as a saint by the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1994 — his feast kept on 19 November / 2 December. This closing section sets out the two ways his memory endures: the formal veneration that crowned the long-standing reverence for him, with the careful attestation that a saint’s cult requires; and the legacy itself, weighed soberly — the Catechism that taught generations, the Russian Synodal Bible completed nine years after his death and still read today, the theological renewal he opened, and, against these, the limits of the church-statesman whose caution and entanglements the historiography does not let us forget.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)
The veneration of Philaret did not begin in 1994. From his own lifetime he was regarded by many as a man of unusual holiness as well as power, and his memory was kept with reverence through the late imperial and Soviet periods; the 1994 glorification by the Moscow Patriarchate gave conciliar form to a cult already long alive (on the wider movement of canonizations in that era, see Post-Soviet Revival). This section treats that glorification with the discipline the methodology requires — pinning the hagiographic and miracle material to what the sources attest rather than certifying it as fact — and then turns to the harder question of legacy. Philaret’s greatest monument is not a relic-shrine but a book: the Synodal Bible of 1876, the single most-read fruit of his life’s labor, which gave the Russian people the Scriptures in their own tongue and remains their standard Bible a century and a half later. The collection closes on that book, and on a measured assessment that neither inflates the saint into a flawless oracle nor reduces the holy man to a mere ecclesiastical politician.
A note for the reader: this Philaret is Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow (1782–1867), not the twentieth-century ROCOR hierarch Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky) of New York (1903–1985). The two are regularly confused; the disambiguation is set out in the final file and at St. Philaret of New York.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Glorification 1994 | His repose on 19 November (Old Style) 1867 — which, the devotional tradition reports, he foresaw; his glorification (canonization) by the Bishops’ Council (Arkhiereisky Sobor) of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1994; the feast on 19 November / 2 December; the translation and enshrinement of his relics at the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow; the growth of his veneration and his iconography — with miracle and hagiographic claims pinned to their attestation, and the relic question flagged where sources differ. |
| The Enduring Synodal Bible | His greatest monument: the Russian Synodal Bible (complete 1876), still the standard Russian-language Bible of the Orthodox, Protestants, and others; a sober overall assessment of his legacy — the Catechism, the Bible, the theological renewal — balanced against the church-statesman’s entanglements and the limits of his caution; the disambiguation from Philaret (Voznesensky) of New York; and a measured, non-triumphalist close. |
See Also
- The 1876 Synodal Bible — the completion of the translation Philaret steered, the source of the legacy weighed here
- The Battle for the Synodal Translation — the long contest that gives the enduring Bible its weight
- The Longer Catechism — the other work by which generations were catechized
- Theology and Preaching — the theological renewal counted into the legacy
- Sources and Portraits — the saint-versus-statesman historiography against which any assessment must be set
- The Synodal Period — the church-state order that frames both his work and his canonization a century later
- St. Philaret of New York — the other Philaret, with whom this one must not be confused
References
- Acts of the Bishops’ Council (Arkhiereisky Sobor) of the Russian Orthodox Church, 1994 (Деяния Архиерейского Собора Русской Православной Церкви, 1994). (The conciliar act of glorification.)
- Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, Part One. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979.
- Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
- Nichols, Robert L. “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow and the Awakening of Orthodox Russia.” In Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.