a good job of disseminating these new ideas to the laymen. The majority of members
of the social estate of religious people were married parish clergy—ordained priests
and deacons, non-ordained sacristans and other servitors—and their dependent
families. Over the century they evolved as a tight social group, in many ways
contrasting to the looseness of othersoslovieidentities. In some ways they were
privileged: ordained clergy and non-ordained churchmen were not liable to poll tax
or military service (although periodically the state declared those without position or
their dependents“excess”and demoted them into taxpaying status or military
service); as in Muscovite times they were overseen in all but the highest criminal
cases by the Synod. But their separate status also excluded them from lay society: the
clerical estate was not included in either status or salary in the Table of Ranks of
1722, nor invited as a corporate group to the Legislative Commission in 1767, nor
awarded corporate privileges when the nobility and townsmen received them in
- Left to the oversight of the Synod, over the century they did not turn their
separateness to an advantage. Lack of resources was a key culprit. The state under-
mined the Church’s economic position throughout the century: direct state subsid-
ies for churches common in Muscovy (ruga) were virtually eliminated; subventions
provided after the 1764 confiscations were inadequate; parish priests never received
state salaries, although this was repeatedly proposed up through the 1790s.
Such lack of resources bedeviled the Synod’s efforts for clerical and lay pastoral
improvement. Despite mandates by Peter I and Catherine II, a system of parish
schools was not created, although district schools to prepare clerical children for
seminary were founded in the last decades of the century. By the 1780s most
dioceses had seminaries, but most who attended completed no more than two of
the four years (in 1805 only 15 percent of parish priests had completed seminary).
In any case seminary education was narrow and inadequate. Seminarians were
presented with a challenging and theoretical curriculum that combined Catholic
scholastic and modern Protestant theology, taught in the common medium of
European theological discussion, Latin. Some contemporary Enlightenment
philosophy was also taught, but surprisingly little attention was given to Ortho-
doxy per se, let alone to specifically Russian theology, pastoral needs, or practical
knowledge. While Peter I had envisioned seminaries providing religious and
practical education for his burgeoning bureaucracy, the Synod resisted secular
subjects and thus missed the opportunity to create a literate class that might move
freely between officialdom and clerical service. Seminary education not only left
ordained priests with much irrelevant erudition, but also endowed them with
cultural differences that garnered them no social mobility: the Europeanized
urbanity they acquired distanced them from peasants and townsmen, while
their poverty alienated them from the nobility. Their lack of pastoral training
also prevented clergy from focusing on spiritual leadership; clergy earned a
reputation as philistine, corrupt, and crude—charging excessive fees, bickering
among themselves over parish appointments. To combat these images, in the
second half of the century the Synod worked to educate the clergy and to improve
their dignity by mandating proper dress (no peasant garb), cultured behavior,
aristocratic manners.
Maintaining Orthodoxy 415