The Petrine Settlement

The church into which Timofey Kirillov was born in 1724 was three years into the greatest constitutional change in its history: Peter the Great’s abolition of the patriarchate and the creation of the Most Holy Governing Synod (1721). This file describes the Petrine settlement — the Spiritual Regulation, the Synod, the Latin-scholastic schools — as the given world of St. Tikhon’s whole life: he was formed by its seminaries, served its episcopate, and became, with St. Dimitri of Rostov, one of the very few saints the synodal church itself glorified.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (canonized 1861)

A Church Without a Patriarch

When Patriarch Adrian of Moscow died in October 1700, Tsar Peter I did not permit the election of a successor. He appointed Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky of Ryazan as locum tenens of the patriarchal throne and left the see vacant for two decades while he consolidated control over the Church, and in 1721 he abolished the patriarchate outright, replacing it with a collegial board — the Most Holy Governing Synod — established by the Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovny Reglament), drafted chiefly by Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich of Novgorod (Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great, London: Macmillan, 1971, chs. 2–8; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I, ch. 4, “The St. Petersburg Revolution”; see the fuller treatment in The Synodal Period). The Synod’s members were appointed by the tsar and served at his pleasure; a lay ober-procurator — “the eye of the tsar” — oversaw its proceedings; monasticism was counted, taxed, and restricted; and in 1723 the Eastern Patriarchs, with evident discomfort, recognized the new body as the lawful governance of the Russian Church (Cracraft, Church Reform, 1971, chs. 5–8; Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, ch. 1).

Peter’s model was not the Byzantine symphonia but the Protestant state-church consistories he had observed in northern Europe; his purpose was to make the Church a department of the modernizing state, its lands and men and moral authority a resource for the empire (Cracraft, Church Reform, 1971; Freeze, The Russian Levites, 1977, ch. 1). From the Orthodox side the settlement is assessed as what it was — an uncanonical subjection of the Church’s government to the state, endured for two centuries until the Council of 1917–18 restored the patriarchate under St. Tikhon of Moscow (see St. Tikhon of Moscow) — but the assessment must be made without caricature: the synodal church remained the Orthodox Church, with her sacraments, her monasteries, her saints, and the same two centuries produced St. Tikhon of Zadonsk, St. Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina elders, and the Philokalic revival (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I–II; see The Synodal Period).

The Latin Schools

The second face of the settlement was educational. The seminaries that the Petrine church built — and the Spiritual Regulation mandated schools for the clergy — were modeled on the Kyiv Mohyla Academy: instruction in Latin, the scholastic method of the loci theologici, textbooks Catholic and Protestant in origin, a whole apparatus of Western learning imported wholesale into a church whose native theological idiom was patristic and liturgical (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I, chs. 2, 4; Freeze, The Russian Levites, 1977, on the seminary system). Florovsky’s famous verdict on this — the “Western captivity” (zapadnoe plenenie), the “pseudomorphosis” of Russian theology — is the historiographical frame against which St. Tikhon’s own formation and writings have ever since been read, and it is examined at length, with its critics, in Section 06 (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, trans. Robert Nichols, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979, Part I).

For the purposes of the life, three facts about the schools matter. First, they were new: the Novgorod seminary that took in the sexton’s orphan from Korotsk was organized only in 1740, out of an earlier Slavic school, in the first generation of the seminary system (OCA, Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk, oca.org, August 13; see The Boy from Korotsk). Second, they were Latin: the future saint would spend some fourteen years in the Novgorod seminary as pupil and teacher, absorbing and then teaching the rhetoric and philosophy of the Western curriculum — the equipment he would later turn to purposes the curriculum never envisioned (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky, London: SPCK, 1951, chs. 1–2). Third, they were a ladder: for a boy of the destitute clerical estate, the state-funded seminary place was almost the only escape from the poll tax, the plow, or conscription — a fact the childhood narrative in Section 02 makes vivid (Freeze, The Russian Levites, 1977, on the seminary and the clerical estate; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org).

The Century Between Two Saints

Tikhon’s life (1724–1783) sits almost exactly within the first synodal century, and the period’s ecclesiastical temper is legible in the history of its canonizations. The synodal church glorified saints with extreme rarity: St. Dimitri of Rostov, canonized in 1757, was the first of the entire period and the only Russian canonization of the eighteenth century; Tikhon himself, glorified in 1861, would be among the mere handful that followed before 1917 (see The Glorification of 1861; on Dimitri, St. Dimitri of Rostov, and the treatment of the 1757 canonization there). The parallel between the two men runs deeper than the statistics: both were learned bishops formed in the Latin schools, both poured their learning into devotional writing for the people rather than into the politics of the settlement, both retired from their sees, and both were found incorrupt and glorified by the very synodal institution whose “captivity” the later historiography would indict (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951; Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Part I, on both figures). St. Dimitri is the closest earlier parallel to Tikhon in the whole Russian tradition, and this collection returns to the comparison repeatedly.

The reign under which Tikhon’s mature service fell added its own pressures. Catherine II (r. 1762–1796), a sovereign of Enlightenment tastes, secularized the Church’s landed estates in 1764, converting the monasteries to fixed state stipends and closing many outright; French freethinking — Voltaire above all — became fashionable in the gentry whose souls a bishop of Voronezh had in his charge (Freeze, The Russian Levites, 1977; Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951, on the Voltairean gentry Tikhon encountered; see Meekness, Almsgiving, and Melancholy for the famous anecdote). Tikhon’s writings — On True Christianity addressed to a society whose baptized members lived as practical unbelievers — are unintelligible apart from this setting: he wrote for a church established in law and hollowed in life, and his insistence that true Christianity is a matter of the heart and not of external conformity is his answer to the synodal establishment’s characteristic disease (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951; see On True Christianity).

The Given World

It is worth saying plainly what this section’s framing implies: Tikhon did not choose, resist, or reform the Petrine settlement, any more than St. Dimitri had authored the reforms he served under. The settlement was simply the given world — the church there was — and within it he did the perennial work: taught, ordained, preached, catechized, wrote, gave alms, prayed. Like Dimitri before him (see Faith Under the Reforms), his implicit witness was pastoral rather than political; and like Dimitri, his holiness was recognized — eventually, and to enormous popular response — by the synodal church itself. The historiographical question of what the Latin schools did to his theology is real and is treated in Section 06 without adjudication; the prior fact, which no party to that debate disputes, is that the synodal era’s constricted, bureaucratized, Western-schooled church proved able to produce and to recognize a saint whom Russia would come to call, in a phrase the biographers record from his own century, a teacher and father of the people (Gorodetzky, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, 1951; OCA, Saint Tikhon, oca.org).

See Also

References

  • Cracraft, James. The Church Reform of Peter the Great. London: Macmillan, 1971. (The abolition of the patriarchate; the Spiritual Regulation; the Synod and ober-procurator; the Eastern Patriarchs’ recognition.)
  • Freeze, Gregory L. The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. (The synodal structure; the seminary system; the clerical estate; the 1764 secularization’s context.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. Trans. Robert L. Nichols. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979 (Russian original Paris, 1937). Part I. (The “St. Petersburg Revolution”; the Latin schools; the “Western captivity” frame.)
  • Gorodetzky, Nadejda. Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk: Inspirer of Dostoevsky. London: SPCK, 1951 (repr. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976). (Tikhon’s formation in the Novgorod seminary; the Catherinian setting; the Voltairean gentry.)
  • Saint Tikhon, Bishop of Voronezh, Wonderworker of Zadonsk and All Russia. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 13. (The Novgorod seminary of 1740; the state-funded place; the life.)