The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

This article presents a comparative analysis of the foundational documents of pre-revolutionary movements for church reform in Russia (the “group of 32 priests” from St. Petersburg, or the “Union for the Renewal of the Church”), and those of the post-revolutionary Renovationist movement, i. e., the church reforms envisaged by the group of clergy and laypeople known as the “Living Church”. The goal of this research is to answer the following question: “how did the ideas of the pre-revolutionary movement for reform morph into the situation that obtained in the 1920s?” An overview of the historical-ecclesial situation in which documents were created is presented and their signing is reconstructed, after which a hypothesis regarding the level of external political influence vis-a-vis the programmes of 1905–1906 and 1922 is put forward. By analysing both the form and the linguistic content of said documents, the author comes to the conclusion that the programmes of 1905–1906 preserve an ecclesial orientation, both in that they use ecclesial language and display the dialogical character of proceedings/essays, while documents out of the Living Church movement (1922) are reminiscent of a political party’s agenda and notable for the categorical nature of certain wordings, actively making use of “revolutionary language”. The author notes that certain ecclesial catch phrases, such as “the Kingdom of God”, and “sobornost” are simply missing from the 1922 programme. Whereas pre-revolutionary acti vists strove, to a great degree, to consolidate the opinions of all the movement’s participants and achieve unity of understanding in terms of the goals and tasks of church reform, the many programmes of the 1920s evidence division in terms of opinions and positions, even showing that authors’ attention to constructive programmes of reform has largely been replaced with a programme of criticism vis-a-vis the synodal church or church of Patriarch Tikhon. The appearance of programme documents in both cases is due to the situation of severe crisis. In the first case, this crisis is within the life of society and in the second within the life of the Church. These tipping points brought with them opportunities for new forces within the Church to appear, establish positions, and collect under their banners other likeminded people. In both cases it was necessary to garner the support of authorities so as to bring programmes before a broad audience of readers, though in 1905–1906 this primarily meant ecclesial authorities, whilst in 1922 the authorities in question were primarily those of the state. The author comes to the conclusion that despite the dependence of a number of ideas evident in later programmes (1920s) upon ideas from 1905–1906, there are nevertheless very significant differences between the two cases, relating both to the relative positions of the programmes’ authors and to the theological foundations undergirding these positions. Programmes in the 1920s display radicalization of pre-revolutionary ideas, their displacement from ecclesial context, and a move toward the language of leftist programmatic politics. Post-revolutionary authors show that their relationship to the ecclesial organism has morphed at its very foundation; they no longer have love and concern for careful structuring within a spirit of sobornost, but rather show themselves to be dealing with the object of a church-societal experiment in the spirit of constructing the new world and the new man.