science and rationality into belief without dismissing revelation. Faithful to Ortho-
dox moral philosophy, they put particular emphasis on individual morality and
piety, translating and integrating into their sermons works on meditative prayer
from the Catholic (Ignatius of Loyola), Protestant (Johann Arndt, Jacob Boehme,
Joseph Hall, James Hervey), and Orthodox traditions.
By Catherine II’s time Russia’s Orthodox bishops deployed a sophisticated
theology and moral philosophy adapting Enlightenment humanism to Orthodox
concepts and Russian life. They put particular emphasis into sermonizing, preaching,
and publishing homilies that stressed not only piety but also social responsibility. Elise
Wirtschafter and Gary Marker have explored how one of the most impressive
Enlightenment religious leaders, Platon Levshin, metropolitan of Moscow and court
preacher to Catherine II’s family and elite, integrated Enlightenment concepts into
Orthodoxy. Marker details how Levshin’s catechism, which replaced Prokopovich’s
and Tuptalo’s by the end of the century, brought in secular thought while maintaining
a steady focus on God, salvation, and redemption. Wirtschafter shows how Levshin’s
sermons to the elite used Enlightenment concepts of the rational self to support
Orthodox social values. For the noble elite, such preaching by men who were their
intellectual equals reinforced their own European training in German Pietism and
Enlightenment philosophy within an Orthodox context that few if any abandoned.
Gradually the Russian Orthodox Church felt the effects of these intellectual
trends in institutional reforms in the eighteenth century. Starting in the 1740s and
continuing to the end of the century, the Synod embarked on what Gregory Freeze
called a second Petrine revolution in church administration, terming it not secu-
larization but“spiritualization.” The hierarchy devoted itself to policing and
improving religious life for the laity, addressing familiar goals of reform. It raised
the number of dioceses to twenty-six across the empire in the 1780s, creating about
ten more in the 1790s (generally in the demographically vibrant black earth and
Black Sea steppe lands). It strengthened diocesan supervision with new diocesan
consistories (advisory boards of three tofive clerics) and boards and supervisors at
the district level; it introduced supervisors of small groups of parishes and their
clergy; it created more consistent bureaucratic organization and record keeping
across the system, using the PetrineGeneral Regulation; it founded seminaries and
raised the standards for ordination; it worked to raise the moral and educational
quality of parish priests.
The Church accomplished some unfulfilled goals of seventeenth-century church
reformers. In the 1770s it systematically distributed newly printed liturgical books,
including church music in a newer style. It encountered some resistance in this, but
nothing like the seventeenth-century schism, and standardization progressed. The
Church also gingerly addressed the area of popular spirituality, tightening control
over the sacred, limiting local cults of saints and icons, prosecuting magic, insti-
tuting proper decorum during liturgies and processions.
Rulers across the century (Peter I, Elizabeth, Peter III, and Catherine II) had all
eyed the Church’s property as a source of income for the state, but also in the
context of religious reform. It was an old argument in Christianity that church
institutions should be serving the social good, not accumulating wealth. Catherine
Maintaining Orthodoxy 413