II’s massive secularization of monastic and church income and property was, then,
in some ways a culmination of a century-long religious reform. Bishoprics and the
remaining monasteries were awarded state salary subventions; better budgetary
and revenue control was instituted to make the remaining institutions more viable
and more pastorally engaged. In the short term, the Church’s physical presence and
wealth was decimated; it lost more than 8.5 milliondesiatinyof land (about 36,000
square miles) and some 1 million peasants, who overnight became“Economic”
peasants. Two-thirds of the realm’s monasteries were closed, leaving only 318 male
monasteries and 67 convents. Since the secularization forbade new tonsures,
between 1725 and 1825 the number of monks, nuns, and novices in the empire
was cut in half. At the same time the state recruited“superfluous”members of
the clerical estate (unemployed monks, priests, and sacristans and their sons) into
the army.
In the long run, this erosion of the traditional role of monasticism in Russia
combined with new trends in spirituality to support a revival of monasticism by the
end of the century. One manifestation was a movement towards contemplative
spirituality led by the Ukrainian monk Paisii Velychkovskii. Velychkovskii had
been trained at the Mohyla Academy but rejected its scholastic approach and
turned to a life of mystical contemplation for several years on Mount Athos. He
was not alone in reaching back to the ancient Christian meditative tradition that
had been sidelined in Latin and eastern Christianities over the centuries. Protest-
ants, Catholics, and Orthodox were reviving contemplative prayer and its ancient
sources; Greek clerics assembled a collection of devotional works by early Christian
desert fathers and Byzantine hesychast writers (thePhilokalia), publishing it in
Venice in 1782. One of the scholars involved in this effort, Nicodemos the
Hagiorite, also translated similar pietistic works by St. Ignatius of Loyola and
other Catholic writers. Velychkovskii used such works in assembling his own
Philokaliatranslated into Slavonic (entitledDobrotoliubie). He founded monaster-
ies in Moldavia and southern Russia and hisDobrotoliubiefound its way to major
Russian monasteries, being published in six editions by the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. Under its influence they developed a new “hesychasm,”shaped around
spiritual elders (startsy) who led laymen in meditation. Proto-nationalist Russian
political theorists called the“Slavophiles”in the 1830s and 1840s and the writer
Feodor Dostoevsky were deeply attracted to this movement.
In the wake of the abolition of many monasteries in 1764, and inspired by neo-
hesychasm and Enlightened Orthodoxy, female spirituality revived at the end of the
century. Paralleling the Old Belief’s attractiveness to women, Orthodox women
began tofind solace and social support in informal religious communities. They
created charitable institutions (orphanages, almshouses, hospitals) and in their own
communities provided refuge for widows, elderly and impoverished women.
Russia’s educated church hierarchy and laymen, thus, were exposed to a vibrant
Orthodoxy that blended Orthodoxy’s commitment to revelation and the mysteries
of the faith with the rationalism of science and Enlightenment. The majority of
the members of the“religious estate”in the eighteenth century, however, did not
match the bishops in education and outlook; nor did the Church as an institution do
414 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801