12
Varieties of Orthodoxy
Empires project supranational ideologies to legitimize their power, often deriving
their“imperial imaginaries”from an established religion. For Russia, that was
Orthodoxy. Imperial rulers use their dominant religion circumspectly, shaping
their message around it but not excluding other religious groups from a sense of
loyalty to the state or from practice of their faiths. Chapters 3–5, and 19 discuss the
religions of the empire’s subject peoples; in Chapter 6 we explored how Muscovite
rulers projected an image of themselves as pious defenders of the faith. Since
Orthodoxy was the religion of the majority of the empire’s population (East Slavic
Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarus’ans) and provided the cultural package of ideas
and visual expression for political power, here we explore Orthodoxy and its
varieties, as faith and institution.
PATHS OF SPIRITUALITY
Christianity came to the East Slavs definitively in 988 when the grand prince of
Kyiv, Vladimir, accepted the faith from Byzantium in a pragmatic political alliance,
rejecting overtures with Latin Catholicism, Judaism from the Khazars on the lower
Volga, and Islam from the Middle Volga Bulgars. There is ample evidence of
Christian presence in Kyiv before then, but this conversion lasted. The Greek
Church, as typical in eastern Christianity, allowed new converts to practice the faith
in their native language. Liturgical and pietistic works, translated into Old Church
Slavonic (a South Slavic language dating back to Bohemian Christianization efforts
in the ninth century), were sent to Kyiv and to the archbishopric at Novgorod.
A centuries-long process of converting the East Slavs began.
Institutionally eastern Orthodoxy is organized as individual churches roughly
reflecting political entities or ethnic groups—Syrian, Coptic, Greek, Bulgarian,
Georgian, Russian, each with a sacerdotal hierarchy of consecrated priests, bishops,
archbishops, and metropolitans. Unlike the Catholic Church (with which Ortho-
doxy broke by 1054), eastern Christianity did not evolve a single ruler like the
Pope; of the four patriarchs (Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem),
Constantinople’s was respected as senior, but he did not have formal juridical,
administrative, or sacerdotal authority over the others. Within national Churches
bishops conferred on issues of practice, but eastern Orthodoxy considered thefirst
seven Ecumenical Church Councils (to 787) as an unchangeable foundation of
Christian doctrine and did not summon councils for issues of dogma thereafter.