Russian Orthodox Thought in the Church’s Clerical Academies

This chapter identifies and examines various currents of thought in the Russian Church’s four clerical academies (dukhovnye akademii), ranging from their founding in the first half of the nineteenth century to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Located in the dioceses of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan’, the academies were established to revitalize right belief on the suspicion that authentic Orthodoxy, however imagined, had been undermined by Scholasticism, Pietism, sectarianism, and other confessional threats. Consequently, these schools played a key role in the development of neopatristic Orthodoxy, academic Orthodoxy, and, more broadly, Orthodox thinking about state, society, religion, law, culture, history, Russia, and the West. Faculty members, administrators, and students regularly engaged the works of religious and atheistic thinkers from across ancient, medieval, and modern Europe, which helped to make the clerical academies centres not just of theology, canon, and doctrine, but also of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and literary criticism. The focus on recovering genuine Orthodoxy, however, generated a new set of problems for the Russian Church. Drawing upon sources, theories, and methods learned at school, Orthodox intellectuals began to interpret their faith through an array of antagonistic lenses, fracturing the schools into competing ideological camps. As the Church responded to the disruptive forces of war, revolution, and modernity (ca. 1905–1917), educated clergy and laity soon discovered that Orthodoxy was more cacophony than harmony. In its efforts to bring the faithful (back) to right belief, the Church, through its clerical academies, had sown its own divisions.