World religions. Рахимбергенова М.Х. - 33 стр.

fallen, while Moscow, the THIRD ROME, had displaced them, and for ever.                    Nikon is remembered also for the liturgical reforms, which he vigorously
One thing was sure: Moscow was now alone among the EASTERN                           promoted in an over-ambitious attempt to bring Russian practice into line with
ORTHODOX patriarchates in being free of Islamic rule.                                Greek. Well-intentioned though they were, these reforms were widely regarded
     Not that the first ROME was to be discounted in determining the status and      as heretical and alienated large numbers of the faithful, many of whom, like the
orientation of the Russian church. The 1448 decision about autonomy had been         archpriest AVVAKUM Petrov (1621–1682), went to the stake rather than ac-
taken in the aftermath of a crisis brought about by Isidor, metropolitan of Mos-     cept their legitimacy. Thus was born that schismatic Old Ritualist movement,
cow (1436–1441). The Moscow establishment, church and state alike, had               which, with its various sub-divisions, has not yet been reintegrated with its par-
spurned his initiatives in furthering formal reunion of the Eastern and Western      ent church.
churches at the Council of Ferrara/FLORENCE (1438–1439). Isidor had been                   At the death of Patriarch Adrian (1700), the role of patriarch was con-
deposed and the reunion nullified.                                                   sciously allowed to lapse. Peter the Great placed his hopes successively on two
     By 1458 the southern metropolitanate of Kiev was taking a different view        church leaders of markedly Protestant orientation, Metropolitan Stefan Iavorskii
of the matter and accepted the decisions of the Ferrara/Florence council for a       (1658–1722) and Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich (1681–1736). It was the lat-
time. In due course, being under Polish-Lithuanian rule, the southern metropoli-     ter who provided much of the text for Peter’s Ecclesiastical Regulations (1720),
tanate accede to a further union with Rome, which was signed ah Brest (1596).        which determined how the Russian church was administered until the fraught
The resulting UNIATE church, even when it was in conflict with the local Or-         summer of 1917. Although it concerned the structure of a church with pro-
thodox population, was still in a position to exercise an influence on the latter,   nounced conciliar traditions, the text was drawn up in camera at the emperor’s
affecting among other things its theological vocabulary, its iconography and its     behest.
worship. As Muscovy and Ukraine entered into increasingly close relations dur-             The same emperor nominated his own representative as supervisor of the
ing the second half of the seventeenth century and the metropolitanate of Kiev       new governing body of the Russian church, the Holy Synod. No matter how
came under Moscow’s jurisdiction in the years 1685–1687, the influence of            many bishops of that synod subsequently validated them their signatures, the
Ukrainian clergy in the Russian church tended to increase. Notable as a channel      new regulations accorded the signatories themselves little more than titular
of this influence was a pioneer school of higher education in the Muscovite          status. Appropriately enough, the title of the synod’s senior civil servant was
realm, the Helleno-Greek Academy (1685). Here was the starting point for the         given in plain German: Oberprokuror; for the Lutheran G.W. Leibnitz (1646–
later theological academies of Kiev (1701), St Petersburg (1797), Kazan (1797)       1716) was the ultimate source of much of the regulations’ text. The church’s
and Sergiev Posad (1814).                                                            administration now took the form of a government department. No longer was
     Yet there was also an ingrained reluctance among the Orthodox to accept         there any question of symphony between church and state, still less of state sub-
Western influences in church life, or indeed at all. A spokesman of the orthodox     ordination to the church.
resistance was Patriarch Filaret of Moscow (circa 1554–1634), who had himself              In 1762–1764, soon after Catherine the Great’s accession, the church was
been imprisoned by the Catholic Poles for eight years prior to his enthronement      deprived of extensive land-holdings and, with them, of over 2 million serfs. The
in 1618. Opposition to all Western influences was to be most firmly expressed        church’s economic dependence on the state now matched its administrative sub-
in that conservative milieu which gave rise to the Old Ritualist (OLD                jugation. A symbol of this subjugation was metropolitan Arsenii Matseevich of
BELIEVERS) movement halfway through the century.                                     Rostov (1696–1776), whose protests against these actions of the state led to his
     Patriarch Filaret, father and mentor of the first Romanov tsar, sought a        demotion and imprisonment.
prominent role in church and state alike. He adopted the title Great Lord. One             Monasteries were among the bodies hardest hit under the new dispensa-
of his successors, NIKON (1605–1681), insisted that the title spoke of the           tion. But this did not prevent a fresh flowering of the spiritual life in the monas-
church’s pre-eminence in church-state relations. This went further than the          tic milieu by the turn of the eighteenth century. Most influential in its promo-
Byzantine theory of “symphony” between the two spheres, reaffirmed at the            tion was the elder PAISSII VELICHKOVSKII (1722–1794). His partial transla-
Moscow church council of 1551. Nikon was opposed by the tsar, deposed                tion into Slavonic (1793) of the recently completed PHILOKALIA provided
(1659) and disgraced (1666). His failure to assert and safeguard the primacy of      this revival with its textbook. Paissy is remembered also for his advocacy of the
the church paved the way for the subjugation of the church administration to the     JESUS PRAYER and his validation of the informal institution of the monastic
bureaucracy of Peter the Great in the eighteenth century.                            elder or STARETS. For much of his life the Ukrainian Paissii lived on the pe-

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