The Enduring Synodal Bible

The single most-read fruit of St. Philaret’s life is not a relic or a shrine but a book: the Russian Synodal Bible, completed in 1876, nine years after his death, and still the standard Russian-language Bible — read by Russian Orthodox, by Russian Protestants, by Catholics, and by Bible-society readers of every kind, a century and a half on. This closing file weighs his legacy as a whole. It sets the Bible beside his other great works — the Longer Catechism that catechized generations, the patristic and scriptural renewal he opened in Russian theology — and it sets all of these against the entanglements and limits of a church-statesman whose caution and whose closeness to the autocratic state the historiography does not let us forget. It distinguishes him, finally, from the twentieth-century Metropolitan Philaret of New York with whom he is so often confused, and ends the collection on a measured, non-triumphalist note.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Synodal period)

A Book, Not a Monument of Stone

The proper measure of Philaret’s legacy is the Synodal Bible. He did not live to see it finished — the complete Russian Bible, Old and New Testaments together, was published in 1876, nine years after his repose in 1867 (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, ch. 6; see The 1876 Synodal Bible). But it was his work more than any other man’s: he had defended the principle of a Russian translation across two reigns and three decades of suppression, supplied its governing decision to render the Old Testament from the Hebrew with the Septuagint kept in view, revised the work with his own hand in the last decade of his life, and carried it to the threshold of completion before he died (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, chs. 5–6; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One; Nichols, “Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow,” 1978). The long contest that gave the achievement its weight is set out elsewhere in this collection (see The Battle for the Synodal Translation).

What makes the Synodal Bible the true monument is its endurance. It became, and has remained, the standard Russian Bible — never displaced despite repeated later proposals to revise or replace it, printed by the Bible societies, and used across the confessional divisions of the Russian-speaking world: by the Orthodox as their reading and study Bible, by Russian Protestants as their Bible tout court, and by Russian-speaking Catholics and others (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, conclusion). Batalden’s study of the long “Bible wars” closes precisely on this point — that the Synodal version achieved a cultural authority no successor has overturned, becoming the Russian Scripture in the way the King James Version became the English (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013, conclusion). It never replaced the Church Slavonic Bible in the liturgy, where Slavonic remains the language of worship; it was always the Bible for reading, the role Philaret had argued for from the first. But in that role it gave the Russian people the Scriptures in their own living tongue, and that gift has outlasted the empire, the Synodal order, the Soviet attempt to extinguish it, and every churchman of Philaret’s century. A saint is most truly venerated, in this case, by being read.

The Catechism That Taught the Generations

Beside the Bible stands the Longer Catechism. Composed in 1823 and revised through the 1820s and 1830s, the Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church became the doctrinal textbook of modern Russian Orthodoxy — the book from which generations of Russians, in seminary and parish school, learned the faith, and a text whose authority reached beyond Russia into the wider Orthodox world and into the comparative study of the Christian confessions (it was printed in Philip Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom as a standard symbolic text of the Eastern Church). Its composition, content, and the controversy over the Russian-versus-Slavonic Scripture within it are treated in their own place (see The Longer Catechism). For the assessment of his legacy the point is its reach: where the Bible gave Russia the Scriptures, the Catechism gave it the ordered summary of doctrine, and between them the two works shaped how modern Russian Orthodoxy read and stated its own faith more than any other texts of the Synodal age.

The Theological Renewal

Philaret’s third great legacy is harder to point at but no less real: the renewal of Russian theology itself. He stands, in Florovsky’s influential reading, at the hinge of its modern history — the man with whom “a new and decisive era in the history of Russian theology begins” (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part One). At a moment when Russian academic theology was still taught in Latin out of manuals derived from Protestant and Catholic scholasticism, Philaret pressed it back toward Scripture and the Greek Fathers and toward the Russian language, and so stands at the source of the patristic and scriptural turn that runs through the nineteenth-century academies (see Theology and Preaching; on the wider movement, The Russian Patristic Revival). His celebrated sermons — the Slova i rechi — were the practical expression of this “theology of the word,” a theology done by close reading of the scriptural text. He founded no formal school and wrote no dogmatic Summa; his influence ran through method and example rather than system. But the direction he set outlasted him, feeding the academic theology of the later century and, beyond it, the religious thought of the Russian renaissance.

The Limits of the Church-Statesman

A sober assessment cannot end with the achievements, because Philaret was not only a saint and a teacher but a church-statesman, and the same record that documents his greatness documents its limits. He governed the Church of Moscow for forty-six years inside the Petrine synodal order — a Church with no patriarch, supervised by a lay over-procurator answerable to the tsar — and he governed it as the dominant ecclesiastical politician of his age (see Sources and Portraits). That entanglement with the autocratic state is the hardest part of the legacy. He drafted the solemn 1861 Manifesto by which Alexander II freed the serfs — and he did so reluctantly, from duty, against the grain of his own social conservatism (see Theology and Preaching for the wider context of his thought; the manifesto itself is treated in section 05). His relations with Nicholas I and the centralizing over-procuracy of Count Protasov were strained, and the strain drove him from the Synod to govern from Moscow after 1842. His instincts were cautious and his temperament could be autocratic; his reserve toward the Slavophiles and their ecclesiology, and the charges of caution and severity brought against him, are handled even-handedly in this collection (see Sources and Portraits). The very translation that is his glory advanced slowly in part because of the cautious, consensus-seeking, state-conscious way he pursued it across two reigns. The holy man and the church-politician are not two men but one, and an honest veneration holds both.

How Great, Finally? A Disputed Verdict

How decisive, how “modern,” how great was he, finally? Here the verdict is genuinely contested, and the methodology requires that the contest be named rather than resolved by assertion. [Disputed: assessments of Philaret's ultimate significance differ. Florovsky, in *Ways of Russian Theology* (Part One), gives the most influential reading: Philaret is the hinge of modern Russian theology, the figure with whom a new era begins, who began to free Russian theology from its Latin "pseudomorphosis" — yet Florovsky's praise is qualified, for he finds in Philaret a residual reticence and reserve, a theology that opened the way without fully walking it, marked still by the caution of his age. Other scholars weight the elements differently: some (in the tradition of Nichols and the institutional historians) emphasize Philaret the churchman and administrator — the architect of the Synodal Bible and the dominant hierarch of his century — over Philaret the theologian, locating his greatness in what he built and governed rather than in any theological breakthrough; others, more critical, stress the church-statesman's accommodation to the autocratic order and the limits of a reforming impulse always held within the bounds of the Petrine system. The disagreement is not over the facts but over the proportion: whether the decisive thing about Philaret is the renewal he opened, the institutions and texts he built, or the caution and the entanglement that bounded both. This guide records the dispute rather than settling it.] What is not in dispute is the magnitude of the works themselves — the Bible read to this day, the catechism that taught the generations, the theological turn that outlived him.

Disambiguation: Not Philaret of New York

A word is owed to a persistent confusion. This Philaret — Philaret (Drozdov) of Moscow (1782–1867), the great Synodal-era Metropolitan, glorified by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1994 — is not Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky) of New York (1903–1985), the third First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), a churchman of the following century and of the émigré Church, known above all for his “Sorrowful Epistles” and for ROCOR’s stance during the Cold War. The two are regularly conflated because of the shared monastic name and the shared metropolitan rank, but they are different men, of different centuries, in different jurisdictions, glorified (where glorified) by different bodies. For the ROCOR hierarch, see St. Philaret of New York.

A Measured Close

The temptation, in closing a collection on a great saint, is to end in triumph; the subject does not warrant it, and the methodology forbids it. Philaret of Moscow was a genuinely great churchman — perhaps the greatest of the Synodal age — and, in the judgment of his Church, a saint. He gave Russia its standard Bible and its standard catechism, and he turned its theology back toward Scripture and the Fathers. He was also a man bound to the autocratic state he served, cautious where others would have been bold, slow where the work cried out for speed, formidable and at times severe in the exercise of an immense authority. The Synodal Bible itself, his greatest monument, was finished only after his death and remains the object of an unsettled debate over its Hebrew base (see The 1876 Synodal Bible) — a fitting emblem of a legacy that is large, lasting, and not without its disputed seams. The fairest verdict is the one the documents support and the methodology permits: a holy man who was also a statesman, whose greatest gift to his people was to put the Scriptures into their own tongue, and who is most truly honored not by the inflation of his memory but by the reading of the book he gave them. On that measured note this collection ends.

References

Batalden, Stephen K. Russian Bible Wars: Modern Scriptural Translation and Cultural Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (The authoritative study; ch. 6 on the completion of the Synodal Bible in 1876, and the conclusion on its enduring cultural authority as the standard Russian Bible used across the Orthodox, Protestant, and other Russian-speaking communities.)
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. (Part One, “The Struggle for Theology”: Philaret as the hinge of modern Russian theology, the “pseudomorphosis” of the academic tradition, and the qualified, admiring-but-critical verdict on his reserve.)
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. (Philaret the churchman and administrator; his role in the Russian Bible and his standing under the imperial state.)
Philaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow. The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church. 1823, rev. 1827–1839. English in R. W. Blackmore’s translation and in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II. (The doctrinal textbook of modern Russian Orthodoxy.)
The Holy Bible, Russian Synodal Version (Синодальный перевод). Complete edition 1876; New Testament 1860/1862. (The text itself: the standard Russian-language Bible to the present day.)