20. Maintaining Orthodoxy
The eighteenth century was turbulent within and without Orthodoxy. Church and
state both turned critical eyes on the state’s dominant religious institution. The
state imposed reforms to seize land and income and to redirect the Church’s
attention to its pastoral duties, while church hierarchs introduced new spiritual
emphases from broader Enlightenment and compatible Christian trends. Socially
the priesthood coalesced into a social caste. Church and state policed the faith to
present a united front to believers, responding aggressively to challenges from
within Orthodoxy from the Uniate Church and Old Believer communities. Ortho-
doxy emerged by the end of the century diminished economically but spiritually a
more complex entity.
REFORMING THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Russian Orthodox Church was a
target of change. On the one hand, Peter I viewed the Church instrumentally. He
expected the Church to play positive roles in his bold projects, providing income
and manpower and, on the model of Protestant Churches Peter knew of in Sweden
and Prussia, in its pastoral role fostering loyalty to the state, providing education,
and improving the moral life of the laity. Peter found much to criticize in the
current state of the Church: he disdained monastic life and the Church’s landed
wealth as unproductive and found the complete absence of seminaries and parish
schools to educate his new officialdom unacceptable.
At the same time the Church as institution faced internal challenges. The Old
Belief was drawing thousands away from the Church, other sects were forming,
itinerant preachers were predicting End of Time, disaffected monks were spreading
sectarianism, and prominent treason trials (Tveretinov, Talitskii) had involved
accusations of sorcery or heretical belief. It had the good fortune to possess a
dynamic group of churchmen, educated in Ukraine, to address the political,
theological, and pastoral challenges of the time. Peter I gathered around himself a
coterie of distinguished bishops to reform and strengthen Orthodoxy.
These men included Dmitrij Rostovskij (family name Tuptalo), Ioasaf Krokovs’kij,
Lazar Baranovych, and most prominently Stefan Javorskij and Feofan Prokopovich.
These men brought an array of new ideas, genres, and institutional models from their
experiences in the reformed Orthodoxy of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy and other