Unity in Faith?
164 pages
English

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164 pages
English

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Description

Established in 1800, edinoverie (translated as "unity in faith") was intended to draw back those who had broken with the Russian Orthodox Church over ritual reforms in the 17th century. Called Old Believers, they had been persecuted as heretics. In time, the Russian state began tolerating Old Believers in order to lure them out of hiding and make use of their financial resources as a means of controlling and developing Russia's vast and heterogeneous empire. However, the Russian Empire was also an Orthodox state, and conversion from Orthodoxy constituted a criminal act. So, which was better for ensuring the stability of the Russian Empire: managing heterogeneity through religious toleration, or enforcing homogeneity through missionary campaigns? Edinoverie remained contested and controversial throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, as it was distrusted by both the Orthodox Church and the Old Believers themselves. The state reinforced this ambivalence, using edinoverie as a means by which to monitor Old Believer communities and employing it as a carrot to the stick of prison, exile, and the deprivation of rights. In Unity in Faith?, James White's study of edinoverie offers an unparalleled perspective of the complex triangular relationship between the state, the Orthodox Church, and religious minorities in imperial Russia.


Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Ritual and the Origins of Edinoverie
2. Edinoverie Transformed, 1801-1855
3. A "Step to Orthodoxy" No More, 1865-1886
4. Crisis, Reform, and Revolution, 1905-1918
5. Lived Edinoverie, 1825-1917
Conclusion: Decline, Disappearance, Reinvention
Appendix A: The Rules of Metropolitan Platon, 27 September 1800
Appendix B: Replacements for the Rules of Platon, 1917-1918
Bibliography
Index

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Publié par
Date de parution 03 novembre 2020
Nombre de lectures 0
EAN13 9780253052520
Langue English
Poids de l'ouvrage 1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0087€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by James White
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04970-4 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04972-8 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-04971-1 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Ritual and the Origins of Edinoverie
2. Edinoverie Transformed, 1801-1855
3. A Step to Orthodoxy No More, 1865-1886
4. Crisis, Reform, and Revolution, 1905-1918
5. Lived Edinoverie, 1825-1917
Conclusion: Decline, Disappearance, Reinvention
Appendix A: The Rules of Metropolitan Platon, September 27, 1800
Appendix B: Replacements for the Rules of Platon, 1917-1918
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FROM THE SUNNY TERRACES OF Florence to the icy streets of Ekaterinburg, from the hustle and bustle of Moscow to the sleepy university town of Tartu, researching and writing this book has taken me on a winding journey across Europe. Along the way, I have had the good fortune to encounter immensely helpful fellow travelers: I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to thank some of them by name.
First, I must thank Professor Steve Smith, my supervisor for four years at the European University Institute, for his practical and professional advice. I also thank the members of my PhD examination board for their suggestions and criticisms: Simon Dixon, Boris Kolonitskii, and Irina Paert. I am further obliged to Irina for her support at the University of Tartu, where I have been able to gather some materials on edinoverie and Old Belief in the Baltic. It also behooves me to offer gratitude to the anonymous peer reviewers for their in-depth evaluation of this book and the staff at Indiana University Press for their assistance.
Second, I must thank the many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances I have made at Ural Federal University: without them, I would never have been able to make Ekaterinburg my home over the past few years. I have to single out Aleksandr Palkin for helping me come to the Urals in the first place, for the numerous conversations we have had on the subject of edinoverie, and for the many, many occasions he has bailed out this rather hapless Englishman as he navigates life in Russia. Sergei Sokolov and Andrei Keller also deserve mention for their advice, support, and assistance.
Third, a great many of my friends from all over the world have either read through various versions of this book or provided invaluable moral support: I am especially obliged to Octavie Bellavance, Robrecht Declercq, James Hassell, Graham Hickman, Matthew Powles, Trond Ove T llefsen, and Andrea Warnecke.
Fourth, this book would not have been possible without the assistance and professionalism of archivists, librarians, and university administrators in Italy, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In Moscow, Father Evgenii Sarancha rendered invaluable assistance in the gathering of valuable materials.
Last, but by no means least, I thank my father, Stephen, my mother, Nadine, and my grandmother, Barbara, for all the time, effort, and money they poured into my education and upbringing. This book is for you.
This book was written with the financial support of the Russian Science Fund (RNF), project no. 18-18-00216.
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
EAA
Eesti Ajalooarhiiv
GARF
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii
GASO
Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sverdlovskoi oblasti
LVVA
Latvijas Valsts v stures arh vs
NART
Natsionalnyi arkhiv respubliki Tatarstana
PSZ
Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii
RGIA
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv
TsANO
Tsentralnyi arkhiv Nizhegorodskoi oblatsi
TsDOOSO
Tsentr dokumentatsii obshchestvennykh organizatsii Sverdlovskoi oblasti
TsGAUR
Tsentralnyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Udmuritskoi respubliki
TsIAM
Tsentralnyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy

INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS EDINOVERIE?
On January 12, 2013, a peculiar liturgy was held in the Uspenskii cathedral in the heart of the Moscow Kremlin. The five hundred worshippers who attended to have Metropolitan Iuvenalii (Poiakov) administer the sacraments crossed themselves with two fingers rather than the customary three. The hallelujahs were sung twice rather than thrice. Monophonic chants were performed rather than the usual polyphonic singing with its distinctive baroque elements. 1 This was a liturgy performed in the ancient style of the Russian Orthodox Church, and it was the first such divine service seen in the Uspenskii cathedral in over 350 years. In the mid-seventeenth century, the old rituals had been expelled from the churches of Russian Orthodoxy, along with their adherents, the Old Believers. It took until the twentieth century for the Church to go back on its liturgical prohibition, after much blood was spilled and pain caused in its enforcement. The long road the old rites have taken back to acceptability has its beginning in edinoverie.
The question of what edinoverie is lies at the heart of this book. There is no easy answer, since many clergymen, Old Believers, government officials, and secular observers provided definitions frequently at variance with each other. Given how alien the term is to the English-speaking world, I offer a provisional definition that can guide the reader through the following discussion. Edinoverie translates approximately as the united faith or unity in faith. It describes a settlement formulated in 1800 whereby Old Believers were allowed to keep their distinctive rituals and elements of parish management on conversion to Russian Orthodoxy so long as they conceded the Church s legitimacy and authority. The settlement was defined by sixteen conditions written principally by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) of Moscow. Those living according to the rules of Platon were called edinovertsy. By the end of the imperial era in 1917, the edinovertsy probably numbered no more than 350,000 and were scattered in roughly three hundred parishes across the empire. 2
The Old Believers were a diverse and diffuse group who rejected liturgical reforms in the 1650s and thus had left the flock of the Russian Orthodox Church. These reforms, introduced by Patriarch Nikon (Minin) and confirmed by the Great Moscow Council of 1666-1667, made several ritual changes: the sign of the cross was to be performed with three fingers rather than two, the name of Jesus was to be spelled slightly differently, people were to proceed around their churches clockwise rather than counterclockwise, and so on. The council anathematized those who refused to accept the changes, and since heresy was a capital crime in early modern Muscovy, the Old Believers found themselves subjected to intensive and violent persecution. 3 Since no bishops joined Old Belief, they also lost access to a priesthood that was unquestionably part of the apostolic succession, forcing them to embark on a series of less-than-satisfactory replacements. By offering the Old Believers priests who would serve by the old rites so long as they declared their loyalty to the emperor and the Church, edinoverie offered a solution to this continual problem. It also had the virtue of bringing Old Believers under the direct supervision of the Church and thus the state. As such, edinoverie can be understood as an attempt to instrumentalize Old Believers without legitimizing Old Belief itself, something the Russian Orthodox Church and, to a lesser extent, the confessional imperial state could not countenance.
Throughout edinoverie s existence, it was contested from nearly every conceivable direction. The servitors of the Church, viewing the old ritual with contempt and suspicious of the converts motives, maintained a distance between themselves and the edinovertsy. The edinovertsy themselves were routinely dissatisfied with the provisions given to them by Platon and campaigned either for extensive alterations or complete reformulation. Much of the liberal and radical intelligentsia condemned it as a false half measure given in lieu of full toleration: as one character in A. F. Pisemskii s 1869 novel People of the Forties comments, Throughout Russia, this edinoverie is only fog and lies for the government s sake. 4 And the Old Believers relentlessly castigated their former coreligionists as traitors and government stooges. All of these reasons offer an initial explanation as to why edinoverie failed not only to end the schism but also to provide a convincing demonstration of unity in faith.
THE BALANCING ACT
The story of edinoverie is fundamentally one of how four different groups (the edinovertsy, the Church, the state, and the Old Believers), each with different and often conflicting interests, interacted with one another over the course of several centuries in the context of an expanding and modernizing empire. Of central importance is the relationship between church, state, and schism, where religiou

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