A History of the Orthodox Church
The Church of Russia (1448-1800)
Introduction |
History | Doctrine
Origin of the Muscovite patriarchate |
Relations between patriarch and tsar
The reforms of Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725)
Origin of the Muscovite Patriarchate
At the Council of Florence, the Greek "metropolitan of Kiev and all
Russia," Isidore, was one of the major architects of the Union. Having
signed the decree, he returned to Moscow in 1441 as a Roman cardinal but
was rejected by both church and state, arrested, and then allowed to
escape to Lithuania. In 1448, after much hesitation, the Russians received
a new primate, Jonas, elected by their own bishops. Their church became
autocephalous, administratively independent under a "metropolitan of all
Russia," residing in Moscow. In territories controlled by Poland, Rome (in
1458) appointed another "metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia." The
tendencies toward separation from Moscow that had existed in the Ukraine
since the Mongol invasion and that were supported by the kings of Poland
thus received official sanction. In 1470, however, this metropolitan broke
the union with the Latins and re-entered—nominally—the jurisdiction of
Constantinople, by then under Turkish control. After this, the fate of the
two churches "of all Russia" became quite distinct. The metropolitanate of
Kiev developed under the control of Roman Catholic Poland. Hard pressed by
the Polish kings, the majority of its bishops, against the will of the
majority of their flock, eventually accepted union with Rome at
Brest-Litovsk (1596). In 1620, however, an Orthodox hierarchy was
reestablished, and a Romanian nobleman, Peter Mogila, was elected
metropolitan of Kiev (1632). He created the first Orthodox theological
school of the modern period, the famous Academy of Kiev. Modelled after
the Latin seminaries of Poland, with instruction given in Latin, this
school served as the theological training centre for almost the entire
Russian high clergy in the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1686 the Ukraine
was finally reunited with Muscovy, and the metropolitanate of Kiev was
attached to the patriarchate of Moscow, with approval given by
Constantinople.
Muscovite Russia, meanwhile, had acquired the consciousness of being
the last bulwark of true Orthodoxy. In 1472 Grand Prince Ivan III (reigned
1462-1505) married Sofia (Zoë), the niece of the last Byzantine emperor.
The Muscovite sovereign began to use more and more of the Byzantine
imperial ceremonial, and he assumed the double-headed eagle as his state
emblem. In 1510 the monk Philotheus of Pskov addressed Vasily III as
"tsar" (or emperor), saying: "Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands,
and a fourth there will not be." The meaning of the sentence was that the
first Rome was heretical, the second—Byzantium—was under Turkish
control, and the third was Moscow. Ivan IV, the Terrible, was crowned
emperor, according to the Byzantine ceremonial, by the metropolitan of
Moscow, Makary, on January 16, 1547. In 1551 he solemnly presided in
Moscow over a great council of Russian bishops, the Stoglav ("Council of
100 Chapters"), in which various issues of discipline and liturgy were
settled and numerous Russian saints were canonized. These obvious efforts
to live up to the title of the "third Rome" lacked one final sanction: the
head of the Russian Church was lacking the title of "patriarch." The
"tsars" of Bulgaria and Serbia did not hesitate in the past to bestow the
title on their own primates, but the Russians wanted an unquestionable
authentication and waited for proper opportunity. It occurred in 1589 when
the patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremias II, was on a fund-raising tour
of Russia. He could not resist the pressure of his hosts and established
the metropolitan Job as "patriarch of Moscow and all Russia." Confirmed
later by the other Eastern patriarchs, the new patriarchate obtained the
fifth place in the honorific order of the Oriental sees, after the
patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
Relations between patriarch and tsar
After the 16th century, the Russian tsars always considered themselves
as successors of the Byzantine emperors and the political protectors and
financial supporters of Orthodoxy throughout the Balkans and the Middle
East. The patriarch of Moscow, however, never pretended to occupy formally
the first place among the patriarchs. Within the Muscovite Empire, many
traditions of medieval Byzantium were faithfully kept. A flourishing
monastic movement spread the practice of Christian asceticism in the
northern forests, which were both colonized and Christianized by the
monks. St. Sergius of Radonezh (c. 1314-92) was the spiritual father of
this monastic revival. His contemporary, St. Stephen of Perm, missionary
to the Zyryan tribes, continued the tradition of SS. Cyril and Methodius,
the "apostles to the Slavs" in the 9th century, in translating the
Scripture and the liturgy into the vernacular. He was followed by numerous
other missionaries who promoted Orthodox Christianity throughout Asia and
even established themselves on Kodiak Island off the coast of Alaska
(1794). The development of church architecture, iconography, and
literature also added to the prestige of the "third Rome."
The Muscovite Empire, however, was quite different from Byzantium both
in its political system and in its cultural self-understanding. The
Byzantine "symphony" (harmonious relationship) between the emperor and the
patriarch was never really applied in Russia. The secular goals of the
Muscovite state and the will of the monarch always superseded canonical or
religious considerations, which were still binding on the medieval
emperors of Byzantium. Muscovite political ideology was always influenced
more by the beginnings of western European secularism and by Asiatic
despotism than by Roman or Byzantine law. Though strong patriarchs of
Constantinople were generally able to oppose open violations of dogma and
canon law by the emperors, their Russian successors were quite powerless;
a single metropolitan of Moscow, St. Philip (metropolitan 1566-68), who
dared to condemn the excesses of Ivan IV, was deposed and murdered.
A crisis of the "third Rome" ideology occurred in the middle of the
17th century. Nikon (reigned 1652-58), a strong patriarch, decided to
restore the power and prestige of the church by declaring that the
patriarchal office was superior to that of the tsar. He forced the tsar
Alexis Romanov to repent for the crime of his predecessor against St.
Philip and to swear obedience to the church. Simultaneously, Nikon
attempted to settle a perennial issue of Russian church life: the problem
of the liturgical books. Originally translated from the Greek, the books
suffered many corruptions through the centuries and contained numerous
mistakes. In addition, the different historical developments in Russia and
in the Middle East had led to differences between the liturgical practices
of the Russians and the Greeks. Nikon's solution was to order the exact
compliance of all the Russian practices with the contemporary Greek
equivalents. His liturgical reform led to a major schism in the church.
The Russian masses had taken seriously the idea that Moscow was the last
refuge of Orthodoxy. They wondered why Russia had to accept the practices
of the Greeks, who had betrayed Orthodoxy in Florence and had been justly
punished by God, in their view, by becoming captives of the infidel Turks.
The reformist decrees of the patriarch were rejected by millions of lower
clergy and laity who constituted the Raskol, or schism of the "Old
Believers." Nikon was ultimately deposed for his opposition to the tsar,
but his liturgical reforms were confirmed by a great council of the church
that met in the presence of two Eastern patriarchs (1666-67).
The reforms of Peter the Great (reigned 1682-1725)
The son of Tsar Alexis, Peter the Great, changed the historical fate of
Russia by radically turning away from the Byzantine heritage and reforming
the state according to the model of Protestant Europe. Humiliated by his
father's temporary submission to Patriarch Nikon, Peter prevented new
patriarchal elections after the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700. After a
long vacancy of the see, he abolished the patriarchate altogether (1721)
and transformed the central administration of the church into a department
of the state, which adopted the title of "Holy Governing Synod." An
imperial high commissioner (Oberprokuror) was to be present at all
meetings and, in fact, to act as the administrator of church affairs.
Peter also issued a lengthy Spiritual Regulation (Dukhovny Reglament) that
served as bylaws for all religious activities in Russia. Weakened by the
schism of the "Old Believers," the church found no spokesman to defend its
rights and passively accepted the reforms. With the actions of Peter, the
Church of Russia entered a new period of its history that lasted until
1917. The immediate consequences were not all negative. Peter's
ecclesiastical advisers were Ukrainian prelates, graduates of the Kievan
academy, who introduced in Russia a Western system of theological
education; the most famous among them was Peter's friend, Feofan
Prokopovich, archbishop of Pskov. Throughout the 18th century, the Russian
Church also continued its missionary work in Asia and produced several
spiritual writers and saints: St. Mitrofan of Voronezh (died 1703), St.
Tikhon of Zadonsk (died 1783)—an admirer of the German Lutheran Johann
Arndt and of German Pietism—as well as other eminent prelates and
scholars such as Platon Levshin, metropolitan of Moscow (died 1803). All
attempts at challenging the power of the tsar over the church, however,
always met with failure. The metropolitan of Rostov, Arseny Matsiyevich,
who opposed the secularization of church property by the empress Catherine
the Great, was deposed and died in prison (1772). The atmosphere of
secularistic officialdom that prevailed in Russia was not favourable for a
revival of monasticism, but such a revival did take place through the
efforts of a young Kievan scholar, Paissy Velichkovsky (1722-94), who
became the abbot of the monastery of Neamts in Romania. His Slavonic
edition of the Philocalia contributed to the revival of Hesychast
traditions in Russia in the 19th century.
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