Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime was first published in 1978. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In this book, which is especially suitable for course use, eleven scholars examine one of the most important institutions of imperial Russia, the Orthodox church in the two centuries before the Russian revolution. The material is arranged in two sections, the first devoted to Orthodoxy's role in Russian social and cultural life and the second dealing with the church's relationship to the tsarist regime.
The little known history of an attempt to end a religious schism in imperial Russia, and the questions it raised about church and state. 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 seventeenth 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 nineteenth and early twentieth 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.
"Alexander Negrov surveys the history of biblical interpretation within the history of the Russian Orthodox church from the Kiev period (tenth to thirteenth centuries) until the Synodal period (1721-1917). He presents a coherent analysis of the essential elements of Orthodox biblical hermeneutics as it developed over a period of several centuries critical to the defining of the Orthodox church."--BOOK JACKET.
"The Orthodox Church, presented here in a newly revised edition, has become an indispensable classic on the history of the Orthodox Church and the unique position it holds in today's world. Fr. Meyendorff reviews the great events and the principle stages in a history of nearly two thousand years, its diversity not only in Eastern and far-Eastern countries, but also in the West and in the whole world. He also presents the culture and spiritual tradition of Orthodoxy, its connection to other Christian churches, its religious activities in various communities and its position and actions in former Eastern Communist countries. The postscript describes the new post-Communist situation of Orthodoxy."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Explores sacred community, and how it functioned (or sometimes did not) in Russian Orthodoxy before the fateful historic events of the 1917 Russian Revolution.
"In the void left by the fall of Communism in Russia during the late twentieth century, can that country establish a true civil society? Many scholars have analyzed the political landscape to answer this question, but in The Orthodox Church and Civil Society in Russia, Wallace L. Daniel offers a unique perspective: within the church are individuals who hold the values and institutional models that can be vital in determining the direction of Russia in the twenty-first century. What the "tireless workers" of the church are doing and whether they will succeed in building a new cultural infrastructure are questions of crucial importance." "Daniel tells the stories of a teacher and controversial parish priest, the leader of Russia's most famous women's monastery, a newspaper editor, and a parish priest at Moscow University to explore thoroughly and with a human voice the transformation from Communist country to a new social order, focusing on normal, everyday realities. Unlike other scholars, who have concentrated on government and politics or looked only within the church's Moscow patriarchy, Daniel explores specific religious communities and the way they operate, their efforts to rebuild parish life, and the individuals who have devoted themselves to such goals. This is the level, Daniel shows, at which the reconstruction of Russia and the revitalization of Russian society is taking place." "This book is written for general readers interested in the intersection between politics, religion, and society, as well as for scholars. The subject and the approach cut across several disciplines: area and cultural studies, history, political science, and religious studies."--Jacket
Theosis, or the principle of divine-human communion, sparks the theological imagination of Orthodox Christians and has been historically important to questions of political theology. In The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy, Aristotle Papanikolaou argues that a political theology grounded in the principle of divine-human communion must be one that unequivocally endorses a political community that is democratic in a way that structures itself around the modern liberal principles of freedom of religion, the protection of human rights, and church-state separation. Papanikolaou hopes to forge a non-radical Orthodox political theology that extends beyond a reflexive opposition to the West and a nostalgic return to a Byzantine-like unified political-religious culture. His exploration is prompted by two trends: the fall of communism in traditionally Orthodox countries has revealed an unpreparedness on the part of Orthodox Christianity to address the question of political theology in a way that is consistent with its core axiom of theosis; and recent Christian political theology, some of it evoking the notion of “deification,” has been critical of liberal democracy, implying a mutual incompatibility between a Christian worldview and that of modern liberal democracy. The first comprehensive treatment from an Orthodox theological perspective of the issue of the compatibility between Orthodoxy and liberal democracy, Papanikolaou’s is an affirmation that Orthodox support for liberal forms of democracy is justified within the framework of Orthodox understandings of God and the human person. His overtly theological approach shows that the basic principles of liberal democracy are not tied exclusively to the language and categories of Enlightenment philosophy and, so, are not inherently secular.
The author at the centre of this study, Russian priest-theologian Nikolai Nikolaevich Afanas'ev, was perhaps the most influential thinker about the Church Russia has produced. In Aidan Nichols's careful evaluation, he emerges as a key figure in the rapprochement of Christian East and West, and most notably of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Nichols illustrates how Afanas'ev has been influential in two key respects: first of all in his conviction that the Eucharist constitutes the foundation of the whole Church; and secondly in his contribution to an Orthodox understanding of the role of the Roman Church and bishop in the context of a united Church. Afanas'ev's achievements are seen to have continuing relevance in view of the inauguration of the Orthodox-Catholic dialogue at the monastery of St John on Patmos in 1980, and the importance of his thinking in terms of contemporary ecumenism becomes clear. It is to such a reappraisal that this book - concerned as it is with how Russian orthodoxy understands the Church - is devoted, in the hope of an eventual restoration of unity between the Orthodox of all the Russias and the see of Rome.
