The poverty of the parish clergy was, however, a central obstacle to such efforts.
Aside from comfortable urban parishes, parish clergy were at the mercy of the rural
communities who elected them and who provided land, upkeep, and fees for
services. Clergy had little leverage in trying to eradicate folk customs, introduce
catechist training, or otherwise disturb local customs. Over the century poverty
turned the parish clergy into a virtually hereditary estate by encouraging de facto
father to son succession to the few available parish appointments. The Synod,
lacking resources to provide salaries, retirement, or employment for dependent
families, tacitly acquiesced, when it should have been appointing the best qualified
seminary graduates by merit in order to improve parish quality. By the end of the
century the Synod was curtailing the practice of parishes selecting their own priests,
but parishes still exerted a great deal of control.
At the turn into the nineteenth century, the Orthodox Church put renewed
efforts into preparing parish priests for pastoral work. It reoriented seminary
curriculum towards Orthodoxy and Russian reality, emphasizing pastoral work,
sermonizing, and catechistic and secular education at the parish level. Fearful of
competition from the Old Belief and other sects, and eager to cultivate the
peasantry as a pillar of political stability, it relented somewhat on persecution of
folk religious beliefs, engaging parishioners in ritual life (icon processions, holyday
celebrations) in ways that to some extent accommodated the complexity of lay
Christian belief.
The social impact of institutional reform in the eighteenth century went in two
directions. On the one hand, whereas in Muscovite Russia people of all back-
grounds had joined the clergy, in the eighteenth century such mobility ended, both
for hierarchs and parish clergy. Legislation of the 1760s–70s prohibited the taxed
populace from joining the clergy, blocking upward social mobility, while the
nobility considered religious service demeaning. Culturally bishops tended to live
the lifestyle of Enlightened nobles in the eighteenth century, but that changed in
the next century with a greater social divide between nobles and hierarchs. The
clerical estate became isolated by education and culture from other literate, poten-
tial leadership groups. On the other hand, the dynamic economic change of the
century generated space for educated but unplaced seminary graduates; they moved
into university professorships, trade, and officialdom as“men of various ranks”
(raznochintsy).
OLD BELIEVERS
The schism in the seventeenth century splintered Russian Orthodoxy into a large
traditionalist minority and the institutional Church, but it also opened up a broad
arena for doctrinal differences and further division into myriad Christian“sects.”
By the mid-nineteenth century it is estimated that one-sixth of those claiming to be
Orthodox were“in dissent.”The most enduring branch of dissent, however, was
the“Old Belief”: it splintered into at least two currents, but maintained a cohesion
around belief and practice that endures into the present day.
416 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801