Christianity in Russia
From Byzantium Christianity in its Orthodox form spread to Russia at least from the ninth century. The baptism of Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, in 988 made Christianity the religion of the Kievan state.
Imposed in its Slavic Byzantine form on the people by the state, Orthodoxy quickly struck deep roots, and developed its own Russian qualities. It was nourished by the Slavonic literature stemming from the work of St Cyril and St Methodius, and soon by native writing. The spiritual centre of the Kievan Church was the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, founded by St Anthony in 1051 and organised by St Theodosius, the father of monasticism in Russia. Church and state worked together in Kievan Russia to create a society inspired by Christian ideals. But paganism remained strongly entrenched among the ordinary people; and the fact that Russia had inherited an Orthodoxy already fully developed and to a large extent fixed meant that Russian Orthodoxy was marked from the beginning by intense conservatism.The Kievan state was destroyed by the Tartar invasions of 1237-40. Under Tartar domination the centre of state power in Russia moved north, first to Suzdal and then to Moscow. The Metropolitan of Kiev also moved north, settling in the early fourteenth century in Moscow. The Church gave its full support to the princes of Moscow in their policy of uniting under their own rule all the Russian lands, in order to drive out the Tartars, but in doing so came increasingly under the domination of the state. Church as well as state underwent spiritual and moral decline as a result of the Tartar yoke.
Meanwhile Russian monasticism, nourished by the hesychastic revival on Mount Athos in the fourteenth century, flourished under the guidance of St Sergius of Radonezh (1320-92) and his disciples. The monastery of the Holy Trinity at what is now Zagorsk became a national religious centre, and the many monasteries in the north of Russia founded by St Sergius and his followers were centres both of missionary activity and spiritual culture, sources of light in a society often brutal and corrupt.
The union with Rome signed by the Greeks at Florence in 1439 deeply shocked the Russians, and encouraged them to declare their ecclesiastical independence of Constantinople in 1448, when Metropolitan Jonah was elected by a Russian council of bishops. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 seemed just punishment for the betrayal of Orthodoxy by the Greeks. The marriage of Ivan III of Moscow in 1472 to the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and the final liberation of Russia from the Tartars in 1480, encouraged the Muscovite Church to take up the view, first formulated by the monk Philotheus, that the Christian Empire, having passed from Old Rome to New, had now passed from New Rome to Moscow, the third Rome, whose emperor was now responsible for the future of Orthodoxy. The adoption of the Byzantine concept of the theocratic state, served to reinforce the autocratic character of the Muscovite princes, and to complete the process of subordinating Church to State.
In 1503 a dispute broke out between two groups of monks over the question of property. The so-called ‘possessors’ led by Joseph of Volokolamsk held that the monasteries needed to have wealth in order to fulfil their social responsibilities. The ‘non-possessors’ led by St Nil of Sorsk held to the original concept of monastic poverty. Their suppression by the Tsar, and the victory ofthejosephites, further weakened the spiritual freedom of the Church and contributed to its growing subservience to the State.
Under Ivan IV the Terrible this process reached its climax. Although the Council of the Hundred Chapters in 1551 marked the full achievement of Russian Orthodox self-consciousness, the murder by the anointed Tsar of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow in 1569 finally extinguished the Church’s ability or willingness to protest against the abuse ofpower by the State. When in 1589 Metropolitanjob was made Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia by Constantinople, the Church finally identified with the State.
Spiritual freedom continued to find a home in the remote north of the country, but the tradition of spirituality became increasingly detached from the life of the Russian state, and even from that of the institutional church.
The Muscovite Church’s intense conservatism caused it to withdraw into its own fixed tradition, reacting against any outside influence, not least from Greek Orthodoxy.Meanwhile Russian Orthodoxy in the Kievan metropolitanate was being forced into contact with Western thought. Politically within the Lithuanian, and later the Polish, states, Orthodoxy came under strong pressure from Roman Catholicism. By the Union of Brest-Litovsk in 1596 many Orthodox recognised the Papacy. The Orthodox metropolitans of Kiev continued to defend Orthodoxy, but in doing so increasingly came to use the categories of Western theological thought. Peter Mogila, Metropolitan of Kiev (1633—47), was an enthusiastic Westerniser, and introduced Latin thought as well as the Latin language into the teaching of Orthodox theology, which became progressively more Westernised.
Suspicion of the West, and of everything nonRussian, lay in part behind the schism of the Old Believers from the official Russian Church. The immediate cause of the split was the correction of the Slavonic liturgical books used by the Russian Church on the basis of existing Greek texts. Patriarch Nikon (1652-8) forced the reform through with the backing of the Tsar in the face of fierce opposition from conservatives, led by the Archpriest Avvakum. He saw reliance on Greek books printed in Catholic Venice as undermining the validity of the native Russian Orthodox tradition. Excommunicated in 1667, those who refused to accept the reform became known as Old Believers, or Old Ritualists. Often fiercely persecuted by the Empire whose authority over the Church they rejected, their numbers increased under Peter I when many opponents of his policy of Europeanisation joined the Old Believers. Deprived of bishops, they were split into two groups, those with priests and those without. In 1846 a deposed Bosnian bishop, Ambrose, provided the former with an episcopate. The priestless Old Believers were still further divided.
The Church of the Old Believers continues to exist in the Soviet Union.Under Peter the Great (1676-1725) the Patriarchate was abohshed in 1721, and replaced by a governing Holy Synod. The Synod was a government department, presided over by a lay Chief Procurator. The change was part of Peter’s policy of transforming Russia into an absolutist monarch on the Western pattern, and was the culmination of a long process by which the Church in Russia, inheriting the ambiguous relationship of Church to State in the Byzantine world, became finally subordinate to the State, which treated it like any other government department, whose decisions were taken only by permission of the Emperor. The Church continued to think of its relationship with the State in terms of Byzantine theocracy, viewing the anointed Tsar as the image of the Christian Empire. The synodal period in the life of the Russian Orthodox Church, which lasted until 1917, saw extensive westernisation in Russian theological thinking and education. But theological learning remained alive, and the monastic tradition produced remarkable spiritual leaders and centres. By the beginning of the twentieth century a renewal of Orthodoxy was beginning to become apparent, to be cut short tragically by the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917.
The Council of the Russian Church, which had begun its work just before the Revolution, re-established the Patriarchate, and elected Metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow as Patriarch. The Bolshevik government disestablished the Orthodox Church, and secularised all education. Church activity was effectively confined to church buildings. Persecution soon broke out, and many church leaders were killed or imprisoned. In 1923 Tikhon declared his loyalty to the Soviet State, but when he died in 1925 it proved impossible to elect a successor, and Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow became Patriarchal Locum Tenens. Sergius aligned the Church with the Soviet State, but his loyalty did not prevent the devastation of the Church by fierce persecution.
By 1939 the Church as an organised body had virtually ceased to exist. In 1943 Stalin, in order to rally behind the government all sections of Russian society in the defence of the Fatherland against Nazi Germany, allowed the Church to come into the open and reorganise itself. Sergius was elected Patriarch, and many churches were opened for worship. Eight theological seminaries and two academies were allowed to function to train new clergy. In 1945 Metropolitan Alexis of Leningrad was elected to succeed Patriarch Sergius. After the war the Church enjoyed some freedom to worship, and its external structure was built up. Renewed pressure was applied by the State after the death of Stalin, and in the early 1960s roughly half the working churches were closed, together with five of the eight seminaries. Under Alexis’ successor, Patriarch Pimen, the church leadership has continued to co-operate with the State, not least in matters of foreign policy. Recently it has beome prominent in the ‘peace movement’. Perhaps because of the difficulties experienced by Christian believers in keeping alive their faith in a state whose official philosophy is hostile to religion, Russian Orthodox Christians, like other Christians in the Soviet Union, often display great fervour in the practice of their religion.