In 1721, the Ecclesiastical Regulation was enacted by decree. It struck hard at those features of the old Muscovite church which so angered Peter. Ignorance and superstition were to be rooted out, not only among the parishioners but among the clergy. "When the light of learning is lacking," read the Regulation, "it is impossible that the church should be well run." Bishops were ordered to establish training schools for priests; forty-six such schools opened their doors within four years. Priests were to learn theology; "he who would teach theology must be learned in Holy Scripture and be able to corroborate all the dogmas with scriptural evidence," declared the Ecclesiastical Regulation. On Prokopovich's insistence, priests also had to study history, politics, geography, arithmetic, geometry and physics. Parishioners were required to attend church, and those who failed to appear or who talked in church were fined.
The mosts notable feature of the new Regulation was the abolition of the Patriarchate as the governing body of the church, and its replacement with a bureaucratic institution called the Holy Governing Synod. In effect, the Synod was organized on the same model as the colleges of the civil government; it had a president, a vice president and eight members. In fact, Peter wished it to be apart from and superior to the colleges, equal to the Senate. Like the Senate, the Synod had a civilian watchdog administrative officer, the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod, whose job it was to oversee church administration, settle quarrels and deal with negligence and absenteeism. In effect, the Holy Synod, which was responsible for all spiritual as well as temporal affairs of the church, became a Ministry of Religious Affairs, and the Chief Procurator, the Minister of Religion.
In a lengthy preamble, Prokopovich (and, through him, Peter) explained the decision to abolish the one-man rule of the Patriarchate and replace it with collective administration:
From collegiate government in the church there is much less danger to the country of sedition and disorder than may proceed from rule by a single spiritual ruler. For the common people do not understand the difference between the spiritual power and that of the autocrat. Instead, dazzled by the splendor and glory of the highest clergyman, they think that he is a second sovereign equal to or even greater than the autocrat, and that the spiritual power is of another and better realm. If then there should be any dispute between the patriarch and the tsar, they might take the part of the patriarch in the belief that they were fighting for God's cause.
For the next two centuries, until 1918, the Russian Orthodox Church was governed by the principles set down in the Ecclesiastical Regulation. The church ceased to be an institution independent of government; its administration, through the office of the Holy Synod, became a function of the state. The rule of the autocrat in all matters except doctrine was supreme and absolute; ordained priests were required to swear an oath pledging themselves "to defend unsparingly all the powers, rights and prerogatives belonging to the High Autocracy of His Majesty." In return, the state guaranteed to Orthodoxy the role of state religion within the Russian empire.
Although Yavorsky was strongly opposed to the new institution, Peter installed him in the leading post as president of the Holy Synod, deciding that he would be far less dangerous enmeshed in the new machinery than in opposition to it. Yavorsky tried to decline, asking to be allowed to finish his days in a monastery, but, over his objections, he was appointed and remained in the post a year until his death in 1722.
Prokopovich, despite his relative youth (he was forty-one in 1721) and junior position in the church hierarchy, was appointed to the third-ranking position in the Holy Synod, second vice president. From this office, he effectively administered the church along the lines he himself had drawn, surviving Peter by ten years and continuing to dominate the Holy Synod under the Emperor's successors until eventually he was appointed to the prestigious post of Archbishop of Novgorod.
By abolishing the Patriarchate and transforming the administration of the church into a branch of the secular government, Peter had achieved his goal. There was no further danger from a second competitve focus of power in the land; how could there be when the church bureaucracy was actually administered by his own lieutenants? Some improvement in the education and discipline of priests resulted, although Russian village priests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never became paragons of learning. The most striking feature of the Ecclesiastical Regulation was that it met no opposition, either within the church or among the people. In large part, this was because Peter had not tampered with the elements which mattered most in the Russian church, the sacred ritual and dogma. Who administered the church was of overriding concern to Peter; the form of the liturgy and sacraments did not interest him, and so he did not touch it.
In time, however, the assumption of state control over the church had an injurious effect on Russia. Individual parishioners could seek salvation and find solace from life's burdens in the glory of the Orthodox service and its choral liturgy, and in the warm communality of human suffering found in a church community. But a tame church which occupied itself with private spiritual matters and failed to stand up against successive governments on behalf of Christian values in questions of social justice soon lost the allegiance of the most dynamic elements of Russian society. The most fervent peasants and simple people seeking true religion gravitated toward the Old Believers and other sects. Students, educated people and the middle classes disdained the church for its conservative anti-intellectualism and slavish support of the regime. The church, which might have led, simply followed, and ultimately the entire religious bureaucracy established by Peter followed the imperial government over the cliff; the Holy Synod was abolished in 1918 along with all the other governing institutions of the imperial regime. Lenin re-established the Patriarchate, but it was a puppet Patriarchate, more controlled by the state than the Holy Synod ever was. Not once in its existence has this new Patriarchate uttered a word of criticism against the regime it serves. It was the continuing passivity and servitude of the Russian church which Alexander Solzhenitsyn was regretting when he declared that the history of Russia would have been "in comparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries if the church had not surrendered its independence and had continued to make its voice heard among the people, as it does, for example, in Poland."
61
THE EMPEROR IN ST PETERSBURG
The Emperor, noted one foreigner, "could dispatch more affairs in a morning than a household of senators could do in a month." Even in winter, when the sun in St. Petersburg does not rise until nine in the morning, Peter awoke at four and immediately, still wearing his nightcap and a billowing old Chinese dressing gown, received reports or held conferences with his ministers. After a light breakfast, he went to the Admiralty at six, worked there for at least an hour, sometimes two, then went to the Senate. He returned home at ten to work for an hour at his lathe before dinner at eleven. After dinner, he lay down for his regular two-hour nap, which he took wherever he was. At three, Peter made a tour around the city or worked in his office with Makarov, his private secretary. He carried a tablet or notebook in his pocket to write down ideas or suggestions which struck him during the day and if he had no tablet, he scribbled notes in the margin of the first piece of paper he could lay his hands on. In the evening, he visited friends in their houses or attended one of the new public assemblies which he had instituted after his return from France.