Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946 available in Hardcover
Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946
- ISBN-10:
- 0253341280
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253341280
- Pub. Date:
- 10/24/2002
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253341280
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253341280
- Pub. Date:
- 10/24/2002
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253341280 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/24/2002 |
| Series: | Indiana-Michigan Series in Russian and East European Studies |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Red Priests
Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905â"1946
By Edward E. Roslof
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2002 Edward E. RoslofAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34128-0
CHAPTER 1
THE PATH TO CHURCH REVOLUTION
Red priests emerged out of the same social turmoil that produced other revolutionary groups in late imperial Russia. After Russia's disastrous defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856), the new emperor, Alexander II (r. 1855–1881), decided to introduce significant social changes known as the Great Reforms. Social elites from both ends of the political spectrum supported this decision, at least initially, and the Great Reforms began in 1861 with a decree that emancipated the serfs. Other reforms followed during the 1860s and 1870s. The zemstvo, a new body of local government, gave more power to rural local officials. Similar changes were implemented in city governments. Elementary schools for former serfs came into being along with other changes in the education system. The military was reconstructed and reorganized, as was the judicial system. Censorship was relaxed, opening the way for greater public discussion of social problems.
The Great Reforms brought unforeseen consequences, many of them negative. The government's attempts to implement gradual change at a slow pace meant that society as a whole was disturbed but not reconstructed. Nobles, bureaucrats, merchants, professionals, soldiers, and peasants alike found much to dislike in the reform legislation. They saw their privileges eroded without any compensating reward. Revolutionary groups of radical young people formed among the intelligentsia. They believed that they could construct a new kind of state in Russia and, when their ideas were ignored, turned increasingly to violence and terrorism to bring about social revolution.
The Orthodox Church as both an organization and as communities of believers was caught up in this whirlwind of political and economic change during the second half of the nineteenth century. Reform touched the institutional church with the introduction of parish councils and the modernization of ecclesiastical schools. These changes led to a reduction in the number of clerical positions and simultaneously afforded the sons of clergy an opportunity to leave church service for secular professions. Many educated men who remained in the priesthood found the ideas of the revolutionary intelligentsia appealing, especially when society as a whole began demanding a radical shift in political power at the start of the twentieth century. This chapter traces the demands for religious regeneration from 1905 through 1921 by analyzing how advocates of reform responded to the development of revolutionary Russia.
Pressures for Change within the Church Prior to 1905
The roots of renovationism lay in a long-standing concern about the degree to which the Russian people were Christianized. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, educated Russians had concluded that the laity held a "dual faith" (dvoeverie) that contained as many pagan elements as Christian ones. Church leaders, working with government officials, experimented with various methods for changing popular religion throughout the imperial era. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the Orthodox episcopate relied on coercion and punishment to battle superstition among the masses. When this failed, the hierarchy switched to a more positive approach aimed at enlightening the people through various forms of religious instruction.
This emphasis on conscious Christianity from 1750 to 1850 required the active participation of the parish clergy, whom the bishops expected to educate their flocks in the course of performing other religious rituals. Competing demands on parish priests, inadequate education of minor parish clergy (deacons and sacristans), and a widening cultural gap between educated priests and simple laity all impeded this approach to rechristianization. From the middle of the nineteenth century until 1917, the Orthodox Church followed a new strategy for fighting religious ignorance among the people. It expanded religious instruction outside the church by establishing a popular religious press and a system for public education. Simultaneously, church leaders explored ways to reform Orthodoxy internally by prohibiting liturgical variations that were said to promote non-belief.
While experimenting with these programs for changing popular religion, the institutional Orthodox Church had to cope with organizational transformation. Prior to the reign of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), the church had been a loosely structured organization, ruled by monastics and connected with the state, that dictated — or at least attempted to dictate — the rules for daily life to every Russian. Peter the Great's Ecclesiastical Regulation of 1721 restricted the church's functions to spiritual education and the supervision of moral conduct throughout the empire. He also replaced the Moscow patriarchate with a Holy Synod and mandated the establishment of an educational system for the clergy. The postPetrine state claimed prerogatives, previously within the exclusive domain of the church, in deciding the nature of the common good. Peter's reforms primarily limited the church's power by separating its structure from the government.
Orthodoxy's ineffectiveness at stopping the growing wave of popular antireligious feeling led some Russian churchmen to make a different assessment of the Petrine ecclesiastical reform at the start of the twentieth century. They said that reform intentionally and successfully undermined the foundations of Russian spirituality by stripping the church of all power and transforming it into a mere governmental ministry for religious affairs. In other words, these Orthodox thinkers equated the loss of ecclesiastical sovereignty with the spiritual decay they perceived in their nation. They argued that restoring the church's sovereignty — that is, giving the church leaders final legal authority over a completely independent institution — was indispensable for Russia's spiritual revitalization.
The impact of this thinking on renovationism can be seen in the writings of Boris V. Titlinov, a historian who participated in the reform movement. He argued that unification of the Russian Orthodox Church and the tsarist government was incomplete. Nevertheless, their unity had become the "main feature" of church-state relations prior to 1917. In his view, the church had gradually lost both independence and legal equality when the tsarist government adopted the Byzantine model of caesaropapism. Under the Petrine innovation of synodal chief procurators, clergy became "bureaucrats (chinovniki) in cassocks," parishes lost their autonomy, and the church was transformed into a state bureaucracy. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the church was "already a fully depersonalized institution" with little moral authority. Believers were mired in ritualism, and secular society viewed the church with "contempt and condescension."
Titlinov's damning indictment reflected a sense of disillusionment shared by his contemporaries among the Russian Orthodox clergy. They had suffered greatly in the nineteenth century's failed ecclesiastical reforms, aptly described by historian Gregory Freeze as pseudo-reform (réforme manqué), during which priests lost much of their influence in non-peasant society. Diocesan administration was arbitrary, chaotic, bureaucratic, and corrupt. Ecclesiastical schools were of low quality and were out of touch with developments in Russian secular culture. The intellectual level of the clergy declined; men educated in church schools often refused to serve as parish priests because of the profession's low status. In deserting, they allowed those with little or no education to fill parish staff positions. On the whole, clergy lacked a sense of their mission, purpose, and place in changing Russian society.
An Orthodox priest named A. Molozhskii captured the frustration of the clergy with their country's culture when he said, "We have in Russia a score of orthodoxies that differ from each other in their fundamental beliefs." He was correct, for Orthodoxy had divided into three main camps by 1905 (black clergy, white clergy, laity), and each had its own response to the continuing crisis in the faith. The black clergy, who had taken monastic vows and from whom the Orthodox episcopate was chosen, had a strong sense of group identity thanks to the Petrine ecclesiastical reforms. A new type of bishop emerged during the imperial period, when the brightest church academy graduates were offered rapid promotion into the episcopal ranks in exchange for their accepting celibate, monastic life. This system produced a class of dedicated episcopal administrators whose first loyalty lay with the church as an institution. The monastic bishops opposed relinquishing their prerogatives to either state officials or the lower ranks of clergy who pushed for ecclesiastical democratization. Bishops saw the Orthodox laity as "pious" but "ignorant" and the parish clergy as corrupt, poorly educated, and greedy.
In the aftermath of pseudo-reform, the episcopacy united behind a reform program of "episcopal conciliarism" (sobornost'). Main elements of this program included stripping power away from the Holy Synod and its chief procurator, restoring the patriarchate with limited powers, convening periodic church councils in which bishops would be preeminent, granting greater independence of local dioceses in decision-making, limiting clerical involvement in government, and permitting parishes to elect their own priests. Theologically, episcopal conciliarism drew on Orthodox traditions that saw the grace of God flowing through men who were linked to Christ through apostolic succession. Their purity was maintained through monastic vows that raised them to the status of angels, in constant prayer to God. Institutionally, episcopal conciliarism aimed to restore sovereignty to the church over all its affairs. The hierarchy intended that church councils, not the state, would give direction to a revived organization that would renew the traditional foundations of Orthodox culture.
Married parish priests (the white clergy) generally opposed such proposals on the grounds that they concentrated even more ecclesiastical power in the hands of the episcopacy. These parish priests envied the status of the bishops, whose advance out of the priestly estate could not be duplicated by anyone with a wife. The parish clergy had become a distinct, closed caste in Russia by 1800. While their general level of education rose dramatically as a result of the Ecclesiastical Regulation of 1721, rural parish priests felt themselves becoming increasingly impoverished and isolated. Their rising levels of education seemingly worked against them, at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Politically, they became aware of the very church structures that kept them subservient to the interests of the monastic clergy and the government. Theologically, they grew increasingly skeptical of the "superstitious" and "non-Christian" worldview of the mostly uneducated laity. Conflict with parishioners was a recurring theme for the parish clergy in the nineteenth century, centering on such issues as size of income and exceptions to church and state laws on marriage, divorce, confession, and communion.
Some among the white clergy forged reform proposals that fall under the general rubric of "clerical liberalism." Clerical liberalism can be defined as a philosophy critical of both ecclesiastical and governmental authority, sympathetic to public needs, and supportive of the parish clergy's social and economic interests. Just as other liberals in Russian society among other professional groups (local officials, lawyers, doctors and university professors) aggressively agitated for constitutional reform, liberal parish clergy proposed convening a church council for the purpose of revitalizing church life and governance. They opposed, however, the increased centralization of power that stood at the heart of episcopal conciliarism. Parish clergy favored measures that would make bishops accountable to the priests and laity in their dioceses. More importantly, white clergy believed they could solve the national spiritual crisis if they had real power to dictate the church's direction, and that power would only come when they were allowed to enter the episcopate.
Proposals from parish clergy for change challenged Russian Orthodox traditions. Attacks on episcopal privilege drew on a Western understanding of equality of opportunity that was alien to hierarchical Russian culture. Similarly, parish clergy who were educated in the leading theological academies of the late nineteenth century (in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan) developed a view of pastoral work that emphasized the church's teaching role, not its ritual. They were alarmed by the success of Russian sectarians, such as Baptists, in preaching and proselytizing among the Orthodox. That success highlighted Orthodoxy's weakness among its own adherents. In response, Orthodox clergymen tried to apply effective methods from German Protestantism to their "new" mission field, the Russian Orthodox parish. They approached the task of re-Christianizing the Orthodox parish as theological liberals who affirmed two underlying principles: "freedom of conscience ... freeing people to pursue their needs and interests apart from the direct tutelage of religion or a church" and "the relative autonomy of the secular spheres of life, such as science, politics, economics and art ... [which] is a way of recognizing the complex nature of rationality, of affirming reason's need for critical distinctions."
One cannot be surprised that the lay members of the church felt estranged from clergy who held such views. The short tenure of bishops within most dioceses and nearly constant conflict between bishops and parish priests increased the laity's sense of alienation from all clergy. Ordinary believers lacked systemic proposals for church reform. They simply wanted a priest who would charge low fees and a bishop who would not interfere with their affairs by raiding the parish treasury for nonlocal needs or appointing unacceptable clergymen to their parish. Lay believers probably opposed all reform proposals, no matter how well intentioned, precisely because they did not address those very problems.
Suspicion of the institutional church reflected interests of differing segments in lay society. The intelligentsia tried to find common intellectual ground with church leaders only to be stymied by the tendency of most clergy to think exclusively in terms of Orthodox traditionalism. Government officials experienced heightened alienation from the church due to their mistrust of the clergy's intentions. Bureaucrats thought clergy were unreliable in implementing reforms dictated by the state. At the same time, clergy stopped trusting the government because of its many broken promises to provide financial assistance in the form of state salaries for churchmen. Discontent simmered beneath the seemingly calm surface of church politics for decades. Mistrust and alienation permeated the Russian Orthodox Church at the start of the twentieth century. The 1905 Revolution brought all grievances to the surface.
Renovationism's First Appearance
In the late nineteenth century, the noted Orthodox philosopher and theologian Vladimir Soloviev asked, "How can we renew (obnovit') our church's strength?" In posing this question, he did not merely express a general concern for ecclesiastical reform. Rather, he wanted the church to take its rightful place in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. Soloviev's challenge was answered during the 1905 Revolution, which loosened many of the old strictures and freed portions of Russian society to explore new options for ordering their country.
Orthodox Christianity played a key role in events that led to the first Russian Revolution of the twentieth century. Russia experienced military humiliation in its war with Japan in 1904-1905, and defeat ignited unrest among all layers of society. Fr. Georgii Gapon had organized thousands in St. Petersburg into an Assembly of Russian Factory Workers, which the government tried to contain at the end of 1904. A general strike throughout the city resulted, and Gapon decided to lead a mass march to the Winter Palace in order to present a petition for higher wages, shorter hours, and constitutional reforms to Nicholas II. The tsar refused to meet the protesters or receive their petition. Instead, soldiers were ordered to shoot at protesters, who included women and children carrying Orthodox icons and banners. The massacre of January 9, 1905 — known as Bloody Sunday — sparked political revolt in Russia.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Red Priests by Edward E. Roslof. Copyright © 2002 Edward E. Roslof. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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