Alexander Schmemann

6. Russian Orthodoxy (41 pages)

From Schmemann's A History of the Orthodox Church

Page 33

Reforms of Peter the Great.

The dispute over the significance and the evaluation of the Petrine reforms may be called the basic dispute in Russian Orthodoxy. It is a sharp and painful theme in the thinking of the Russian Church. True enough, no one will defend the spirit of Peter’s ecclesiastical reforms — the synodal structure of the Russian Church, the procurator, and the de facto transformation of the Church into the “Department of the Orthodox Confession.”[67] But there remains a far-reaching question, frequently concealed behind the others, about the general meaning of the synodal period in the history of Orthodoxy. It can be answered within the framework of this book only if reduced to an inevitably simplified form. The time has not yet come for a scholarly answer, and the answer in terms of life can be given by the future alone.

Hardly anyone will argue against the proposition that Peter’s reform was first of all a sharp break in a theocratic tradition, a deliberate passage along many lines toward a Western system of thinking. It represented the reign of Western state absolutism in Russia. Usually Peter and his successors and the whole Petersburg period are accused of depriving the Church of its freedom and independence. But the Church had not been free, in the modern sense of the term, since the time of Constantine the Great — neither in Byzantium nor in Moscow. Yet without being free, it was still distinct from the state and had not been dependent on it for its very existence, structure, and life. However far the departures from “symphony,” they were always departures and sooner or later recognized as such — as, for example, when the state itself venerated its own victims. This occurred because the state recognized a law higher than itself, Christian truth, of which the Church was the preserver. Western absolutism, born out of struggle against the Church, denied that it had any right to be the conscience of the state and squeezed it within the narrow framework of “ministering to spiritual needs,” which the state itself defined, as it defined how they should be ministered to.

In its caretaking inspiration the “police state” inevitably turned against the Church. The state not only is its guardian; it takes its own tasks from the Church, takes them away and undertakes them itself. It assumes responsibility for the indivisible task of caring for the religious and spiritual well-being of the people. If it subsequently again entrusts this concern to the clergy, it does so by governmental delegation of power, and only within the limits of this delegation of power to the Church is it alloted its place in the structure of the life of the people and the state, and only to the extent and with the motivation of its usefulness and need to the State.[68]

 

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Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/schmemann-orthodoxy-6-russian-orthodoxy.asp?pg=33