THE SPIRITUAL REGULATION (REGLAMENT) OF PETER THE GREAT

THE SPIRITUAL REGULATION (REGLAMENT) OF PETER THE GREAT. It must be understood that the religious reforms of Tsar Peter occurred in the greater context of the Westernization and reform of Russia, including the military, all government administrations (which meant for him the Russian Church, too), the economy, education, society, and culture. Though the reforms were ad hoc during a time of continual war, their scope and comprehensiveness cannot be overemphasized. Peter was definitely the visionary who, for better or for worse, united the various and disparate measures in his own person.

In 1700 Peter changed the calendar in two ways: Years were counted from Christ’s birth, not the date of the (supposed) creation of the world, and the first month was January rather than September of the ecclesiastical year. He arranged for books to be published by a Dutch press, and produced the first newspaper in Russia. But this was after he allowed the national language to be Russian, and not Dutch as he had seriously considered. Still, the older Slavic language was reformed and simplified with Slavic, Greek, and Latin letters to produce what came to be known as the civil alphabet. Slavic alphabetic numbers, quite cumbersome, were replaced with Arabic numerals. Only church liturgical books (q.v.) were allowed to continue with the old alphabet and numbers.

The establishment of secular schools on the European model anticipated what was to happen with ecclesiastical schools. Besides sending students abroad, Peter created a School of Mathematical and Navigational Sciences (Moscow, 1701), a Naval Academy (St. Petersburg, 1715), medical schools (1706, 1709), a museum of natural science and a library (St. Petersburg), the Imperial Academy of Science (St. Petersburg), and about forty elementary schools in provincial towns. Private schools and tutoring for the gentry survived Peter’s death, unlike the public schools-which did not take root until Catherine II made Russian, not Latin, the language of instruction. As a result of Peter’s educational reform, a university was begun in Moscow (1755) with departments of law, medicine, and philosophy. (Before one might idealize Peter as the liberal visionary who promoted education at all costs, it should be considered that almost all of his schools had a direct bearing on “oiling his war machine,” which he kept functioning continually during his reign with the exception of twenty-four scattered months.)

When Archbishop Theophanes Prokopovich prepared the “Spiritual Regulation” for Peter, who issued it on 25 January 1721, uniform ecclesiastical schools were provided for with grades that progressed to philosophy and theology (qq.v.) as the height of learning. Prokopovich, who had studied at the Uniate (q.v.) College of Athanasius in Rome, took the Kievan academy as his model for theological education. But like the foreignness of the secular schools, the Kievan academy was grounded in the “Latin learning” of Scholasticism (q.v.), and life in the seminaries was “cloistered” from the influences of family and tradition. Curiously, Prokopovich preferred to follow Protestant rather than Roman Catholic problems in his Scholasticism-though Aquinas was well-known. Since the ecclesiastical schools were predicated on the Kievan model, hierarchs from the Ukraine opened them in Russia, staffed them with Ukrainian teachers, and frequently brought their students from the Ukraine. In certain instances only Ukrainian was spoken, and only Ukrainians were advanced to candidacy for the episcopacy. A forced “Ukrainization” occurred in Russia due to Peter’s reforms.

Ironically, the secular schools did not survive the 18th c. and the ecclesiastical schools did. In the last decades of the century when Catherine II popularized education, the ecclesiastical schools provided the new teachers, who now graduated from “teachers’ seminary.” Still, the success was forced: Peter’s ecclesiastical schools were “caste” schools with mandatory participation from clergy offspring. By mandatory is meant not merely physical punishment, but criminal prosecution! The student was fulfilling a duty to the state, and desertion was treated with severity-the “criminal” was pursued and returned in chains, if necessary. In spite of this, the attrition rate was high, sometimes half a seminary class; the reason was not an unwillingness to learn, but the uselessness of the education. The Latin-Polish curricula were foreign and left the more useful subjects of theology and rhetoric in Russian for the last year-which few reached. Latin and Scholasticism had no relevance to Orthodox or Russian life, and they were not a large part of contemporary European culture. The contradiction between praying in Church Slavic (q.v.) and theologizing in Latin was too glaring.

An even more profound change by Peter was the abolition of the Russian patriarchate (q.v.). In Prokopovich’s Regulation, written over the course of some years, the patriarch’s authority was replaced by the “Ecclesiastical College,” which within a month was renamed “The Most-Holy Ruling Synod.” At this time the Holy Synod was comprised of three bishops, four archimandrites, and four archpriests. All matters were settled by majority, but all decisions were subject to state control. There was no access to the emperor as the patriarch had; but all members were appointed by the emperor. The ober-procurator was the intermediary between the Synod and the tsar, and this “eye of the Tsar” participated in all Synod meetings.

In time both the ratification of the Synod’s decrees and the appointment of new members to the Synod came to depend on the ober-procurator. Over the next twenty years various bishops and clergy objected to or tried to change the “Regulation,” including Prokopovich, but the “Regulation”-brought into law by Peter’s imperial commands and threats-was not to be superceded. The power of the ober-procurator increased until he became a minister of state. Then, under Alexander I, the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Education was organized (1817–1824). This department of state so alarmed the hierarchy that they complained of it as a threat to and persecution of the Church. The situation did not change until the patriarchate was reestablished in 1918.

Since Peter was no friend of monasticism (q.v.), he attempted to transform it into a state agency of educated social workers. Prohibitions against monks having books or pen and paper in their cells were designed to curtail any thinking and writing activities that were not state approved. Fortunately, the reforms were unsuccessful in monastic circles.

Although not originally intended to do so, the intellectual and economic impact of the Regulation on the Church by the end of the 18th c. was devastating. Intellectually, the spirit of the Age of Reason, prepared for by Peter, left the Church only with the “old ways”-the old alphabet, the old calendar, the old language-displaying little originality and contrasting with an idealized Europe. Russia’s intellectuals were ripe for Voltaire’s antichurch polemics and self-indulgent habits. In this atmosphere the Russian Church’s land and serfs were confiscated in 1764, then it was subsidized at one-third its previous budget, and that on a declining basis. The clergy and their dependents, about 1 percent of the population, were impoverished by the treby (q.v.) system, while the government maintained a large army and bureaucracy, and the imperium enjoyed one of the largest courts in Europe with a wealthy gentry. Thus, Peter’s reforms not only Westernized, but also began the secularization of, the Church. (See Russian Orthodox Church.)