The Athonite Dispute of 1912–1913

The most painful chapter in the Jesus Prayer’s modern history: a book of Caucasian hesychasm teaching that “the Name of God is God Himself” split the Russian monasteries of Mount Athos, drew condemnations from Constantinople and the Russian Holy Synod, and ended with soldiers and fire hoses removing hundreds of monks from the Holy Mountain in July 1913. This file narrates the events per METHODOLOGY §4.2 — both parties’ positions reported in their own terms, contested figures attributed to their sources, the dogmatic question left where the Church left it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Athonite (intra-Orthodox dispute, formally unresolved)

The Book: On the Mountains of the Caucasus

The controversy began with a work of devotion, not a manifesto. Schemamonk Ilarion (Domrachev, c. 1845–1916), a veteran of the Russian St. Panteleimon Monastery on Athos who had withdrawn to a hermit’s life in the Caucasus mountains, published in 1907 Na gorakh Kavkaza (“On the Mountains of the Caucasus”), an account of the hermit’s practice of the Jesus Prayer cast as dialogue and reflection; second and third editions followed in 1910 and 1912, the book circulating widely in Russian monasteries — the third edition issued by the Kiev Caves Lavra (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina Tserkvi: Vvedenie v istoriiu i problematiku imiaslavskikh sporov, 2 vols., Aleteia, 2002, which remains the fullest scholarly history and is the backbone of this narrative; Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name: The Name-Glorifying Dispute in the Russian Orthodox Church and on Mt. Athos, 1912–1914, OCABS Press, 2013). Its provocative kernel was the sentence that “the Name of God is God Himself” (Imia Bozhie est’ Sam Bog) — for Ilarion an experiential confession of what the one praying meets in the invocation, buttressed by the diary of St. John of Kronstadt, whose published formulations on the divine presence in the Name the book drew upon (Ilarion, Na gorakh Kavkaza, 1907; on the Kronstadt texts and their use, Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; see Theophan, Ignatius, and the Pilgrim).

The Quarrel on the Mountain

Criticism arose first among Athonite Russians themselves: a review by the monk Chrysanthos (Minaev) of the St. Elias Skete, circulated from 1909 and given wide publicity when the journal Russkii inok — under the aegis of Archbishop Antony (Khrapovitsky) — took up the attack, charged the book with deifying a created name (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name, 2013). The defenders found their leader in Hieroschemamonk Antony (Bulatovich, 1870–1919), a former hussar officer and explorer of Ethiopia turned Athonite ascetic, whose Apologia of Faith in the Name of God and in the Name of Jesus (Moscow, 1913; published by M. A. Novoselov’s Religious-Philosophical Library, with an anonymous foreword now known to be Pavel Florensky’s) gave the movement its theological articulation: the Name of God, as divine energy — God’s self-revelation in action — is God Himself, per the Palamite teaching that every energy of God is truly God; while God, of course, “is not a name,” and the created sounds and letters are not deified (Bulatovich, Apologiia very vo Imia Bozhie i vo Imia Iisus, Moscow, 1913; Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002, on Florensky’s foreword; on the Palamite frame see Barlaam, Palamas, and the Hesychast Councils).

The two Russian houses on Athos polarized. The party soon labeled imiaslavtsy (“name-glorifiers”; their opponents called them imiabozhniki, “name-deifiers,” a polemical coinage each side rejected for itself) gained the majority at the St. Andrew’s Skete, where in January 1913 the brotherhood deposed its abbot Jerome and elected Archimandrite David; St. Panteleimon Monastery divided likewise, in scenes of accusation and counter-accusation that scandalized the Mountain (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name, 2013). Constantinople intervened against the new teaching: Patriarch Joachim III had already in September 1912 pronounced it unfounded, and his successor Germanos V in early 1913, armed with an assessment from the theological school of Halki, condemned it as blasphemous and pantheistic (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002, for the patriarchal acts and their texts).

The Synodal Condemnation of May 1913

The Russian Holy Synod took the question in hand in the spring of 1913, commissioning three reports — from Archbishop Nikon (Rozhdestvensky), Archbishop Antony (Khrapovitsky), and the lay theologian S. V. Troitsky — and on their basis issued its Epistle of 18 May 1913, published in Tserkovnye vedomosti: the teaching that “the Name of God is God” was condemned; the Synod confessed the divine names holy and worthy of veneration, God’s presence active in them for the believing, but denied that the Name may be identified with God Himself, and characterized the imiaslavie doctrine as akin to pantheism and to a magical view of the Name (the Synodal Epistle of 18 May 1913, in Tserkovnye vedomosti, 1913; analyzed in Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002, and Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name, 2013). Per §4.2, both evaluations of this document must be reported: its defenders then and since have held that the Synod rightly cut off an unexamined novelty that confused the created sign with the uncreated God; its critics — including theologians of standing, below — have held that the three reports were theologically uneven (Antony Khrapovitsky’s contribution notoriously polemical in tone), that the Epistle’s own account of the Name’s efficacy sat awkwardly with its condemnation, and that a dogmatic question of this depth belonged to a council, not a synodal bureau (both assessments documented, with the texts, in Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; cf. Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, T&T Clark, 2019, on the dispute’s theological stakes).

The Removal of the Monks

What followed is the episode’s indelible image. Archbishop Nikon, dispatched by the Synod, arrived at Athos in June 1913 aboard the gunboat Donets, and when persuasion failed, force was used: in July 1913 Russian soldiers and sailors cleared the imiaslavtsy from St. Panteleimon’s — the sources describe fire hoses turned on monks who resisted passively — and the St. Andrew’s Skete was emptied after it. By the tally given in Alfeyev’s history, 621 monks were shipped from St. Panteleimon on the steamer Kherson, and 212 more left St. Andrew’s on the Chikhachev, over eight hundred in all; deported to Russia, they were stripped of monastic standing, forbidden the sacraments pending submission, and dispersed — many to the Caucasus, where pockets of the movement persisted for decades (the figures and the narrative: Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name, 2013, whose account of the violence draws the contemporary testimonies; per §4.2 the numbers are attributed to their source rather than asserted as uncontested, since contemporary reports vary in detail). The spectacle — soldiers evicting hesychasts from the Holy Mountain over a question of mystical theology — shocked Russian society across the spectrum of opinion, and the sense that something had gone procedurally and pastorally wrong is one of the few judgments the two parties’ historians share (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019).

What Was and Was Not Decided

The narrative’s precise residue matters for everything that follows (see The Unfinished Question). What the acts of 1913 established juridically: the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Russian Synod both condemned the formula “the Name of God is God Himself” as it stood; the imiaslavtsy were disciplined; the books were proscribed. What was not thereby settled: the underlying dogmatic question — the relation of the divine names to the divine energies, and of both to the practice of the Jesus Prayer — because within months the Russian church authority itself began treating the condemnation as provisional. In 1914 the Moscow Synodal Office under Metropolitan Makarii, with the Synod’s subsequent acquiescence, accepted the confessions of faith of Bulatovich and other imiaslavtsy as sufficient for admission to the sacraments without requiring renunciation of their formulas, explicitly leaving the doctrinal substance to a future council; and the All-Russian Council of 1917–18 took the question up but was dispersed before deciding it (Alfeyev, Sviashchennaia taina, 2002, for the 1914 acts and the conciliar file; Dykstra, Hallowed Be Thy Name, 2013). The Church’s formal position, exactly stated, is therefore: a synodal condemnation of 1913, mitigated in application from 1914, referred to a council that never concluded — a question adjourned, not adjudicated. This collection reports it so, and neither canonizes the imiaslavtsy nor treats the 1913 Epistle as the Church’s last word, because as a matter of record it was not the last word the Russian Church itself intended to speak.

References

Alfeyev, Hilarion. Sviashchennaia taina Tserkvi: Vvedenie v istoriiu i problematiku imiaslavskikh sporov [The Sacred Mystery of the Church: An Introduction to the History and Problematic of the Name-Glorifying Disputes]. 2 vols. St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2002. (The fullest scholarly history; the patriarchal and synodal acts; the deportation figures; the 1914 mitigation.)
Dykstra, Tom. Hallowed Be Thy Name: The Name-Glorifying Dispute in the Russian Orthodox Church and on Mt. Athos, 1912–1914. St. Paul, MN: OCABS Press, 2013. (The events on Athos; the contemporary testimonies; the Synodal reports.)
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019. (The controversy’s theological stakes and afterlife in modern Orthodox thought.)
Ilarion (Domrachev), Schemamonk. Na gorakh Kavkaza [On the Mountains of the Caucasus]. 1st ed. 1907; 3rd ed. Kiev, 1912.
Antony (Bulatovich), Hieroschemamonk. Apologiia very vo Imia Bozhie i vo Imia Iisus [Apologia of Faith in the Name of God and in the Name of Jesus]. Moscow: Religiozno-filosofskaia biblioteka, 1913.
Holy Synod of the Russian Church. Epistle of 18 May 1913. Tserkovnye vedomosti, 1913. (The condemnation, with the three commissioned reports of Nikon, Antony, and Troitsky.)
John of Kronstadt. My Life in Christ. Trans. E. E. Goulaeff. London, 1897. (The formulations on the Name drawn upon by Ilarion.)