The publication of Resurrection brought the question of the excommunication of Tolstoy back to the top of the Holy Synod’s agenda.
Tolstoy’s rebellion against the Orthodox Church was driven by his perception of its supine position as the mainstay of Russian autocracy. ‘The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity,’ he had thundered in his 1886 article ‘Church and State’. Supporting the state when it went to war was tantamount to the direct sanction of violence, and this was completely untenable as far as he was concerned, for it was a flat contradiction of Christ’s teaching, not to mention one of the Ten Commandments. The Orthodox Church was vulnerable to Tolstoy’s charges, and for the root causes of its moribund state at the end of the nineteenth century we need to look back to the fundamental changes to its autonomous status wrought by Peter the Great. The Russian Orthodox Church was still a very powerful institution when Peter became tsar in 1682, but his determination to forestall any challenge to his autocratic powers led him to take the momentous decision not to replace Patriarch Adrian after his death in 1700. Instead he placed the Church under the jurisdiction of a newly created department of state, the ‘Most Holy Synod’, which was established in the secular capital of St Petersburg in 1721 to replace the Patriarchate in ‘Holy Mother Moscow’. Overseen by a lay chief procurator, whose title in Russian – Ober-prokurator – betrays the German Protestant origins of Peter’s reformist ideas, the Russian Orthodox Church now became for many simply a tool of the government. Peter introduced formal seminary training to Russia in order to raise standards, but he also reduced the large number of Orthodox clergy, only a third of whom were actually ordained and had received some form of education. Peter’s organisation of the state into a hierarchy of service ranks effectively also created a caste system in Russia which separated the clergy from all other classes and made it more or less hereditary, because only the sons of priests were eligible to enter seminaries and train for the priesthood.105
Most clergy were very poor. They received no salary and were dependent for their livelihood (and that of their often numerous families) on the small sums offered by parishioners in return for the performance of church offices. This was only slightly augmented by the income from farming the small plot of land attached to their parish, so their standard of living was often scarcely better than the average peasant. Chekhov’s story ‘A Nightmare’, written in 1886, describes the embarrassment of a conscientious young priest who is too poor even to be able to offer tea to a visitor. His church is as shabby as his ill-fitting, patched cassock and his house, which is described as being ‘no different from the peasant izbas, except that the straw on the roof was a bit more even, and there were little white curtains in the windows’.106 It is quite a different picture from the usual portrayal in English fiction of the country vicar in his comfortable parsonage, a respected and educated member of the community, and socially inferior only to the local squire. The status of most rural Russian priests, who depended on the peasantry for their basic income, remained very low.
The moral authority of the clergy had steadily eroded over the course of the nineteenth century for understandable reasons. Reliant on assistance from the local peasants in tilling their land, parish priests were understandably disinclined to offend them by refusing their hospitality during icon processions, or by proffering unwelcome moral reproof. The clergy often found themselves equally compromised, for different reasons, when it came to their relations with members of the nobility. Priests found themselves having to pander to the whims of despotic, lawless landowners by carrying out forced marriages or burials of serfs who had died in suspicious circumstances. The overall result of Peter the Great’s ‘reform’ was a highly conservative Church with no interest in doctrinal development, and a demoralised and corrupt clergy which was little respected.107 The publication abroad in 1858 of a frank exposure of the realities of Russian parish life written by a priest hopeful of change created a sensation when it was illicitly read in Russia on the eve of the Great Reforms.108 Attempts were made in the late 1860s to improve the church education system (in 1863 seminary graduates were allowed for the first time to go to university, and in 1864 children of clergy were allowed the privilege of attending a state lycée), but the reforms went no further after the seminaries became hotbeds of revolutionary activity.109 Against such a background, the rise in spiritual prestige of the Optina Pustyn Monastery becomes clearer: by reviving the Hesychast traditions of the Church Fathers, its elders were able to separate themselves from the tainted world of ecclesiastical officialdom.
At the end of the nineteenth century the Russian Orthodox Church certainly felt embattled. The legendary piety of the peasantry expressed itself more in ritual observance of fasts and processions than in attendance at church, its acquaintance with the Scriptures severely restricted by the archaic Church Slavonic which remained the ecclesiastical language of both the Bible and all services.110 There were already about 180 fast days of differing severity in the Orthodox calendar, but it was quite common for peasants to observe extra fasting days. One old woman confessed to her priest that she had eaten forbidden food on a fast day: radishes whose seeds had been soaked in milk before planting. Many peasants regarded it as sinful to drink tea with sugar on fast days, as they not only regarded tea as ‘semi-sinful’, but thought that sugar was made of animal bones (dog bones, in fact). There were even some fiercely ascetic peasants who regarded mother’s milk as sinful. The Church had also long before ceased to be looked up to as a spiritual authority by the intelligentsia, whose more radical members typically tended to see themselves as morally superior to the clergy, while the aristocracy tended to be apathetic, and their religious devotions merely notional. This is why Protestant Evangelists like Lord Radstock who championed private Bible study made great inroads in high-society circles frequented by people like Chertkov’s mother, Elizaveta Ivanovna. By resisting the production of modern Russian translations of the Bible for so long, the Church played its own part in sustaining the rich world of superstitions which the Russian people lived by. Fearing that ordinary believers might make their own erroneous interpretations, and challenge its authority, it was only in 1876 that the Synod officially approved a translation from Church Slavonic into the modern vernacular as mentioned earlier. Even then it tried to control access, but by the end of the nineteenth century about a million copies had been successfully distributed by Russian and foreign religious groups.111
The other main challenge to the Russian Orthodox Church came from religious dissenters. In order to dissuade the peasantry from being drawn to the Old Believers, who had been identified with popular rebellion by the authorities ever since the schism of the 1660s, clergy were exhorted in the 1880s to make their services as sumptuous as possible.112 Most threatening of all to the Church and government, however, were the many newer sects which grew rapidly in popularity in the nineteenth century. The Old Believers, and to a lesser extent sects such as the Khlysty and the Skoptsy at least subscribed essentially to the same faith – their differences were over details of ritual. The so-called ‘rational’ sectarian faiths, however, dispensed fundamentally with religious ritual, along with priests, churches, icons and all other paraphernalia. Their adherents preached a Christian doctrine of love, equality and freedom which did not recognise governmental authority. On the one hand there were the descendants of German colonists known as ‘Stundists’, whose economic enterprise, teetotalism and devotion to personal Bible reading in the vernacular began to attract large numbers of Russian peasants in the nineteenth century, while on the other there were the indigenous dukhobors and the Molokans.