DISCUSSION ABOUT THE TERRITORIAL AND NATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF THE CHURCH STRUCTURE IN THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOXY OF THE XX CENTURY

Abstract

The question of principles - territorial or national - that should be the basis of the church structure became one of the key in the history of Russian Orthodoxy in the 20th century. The article reviews the discussion on this issue in the work of the PreConciliar Presence of 1906, the Local Council of 1917-1918, in the official documents of the Moscow and Constantinople Patriarchates, the works of Russian Orthodox theologians of the three jurisdictional orientations - «Moscow», «Karlovac» and «Evlogian». The analysis is placed in the context of the civil and political events of the Russian and world history of this period that determined the relevance of this discussion for Russian Orthodoxy and influenced the positions of the parties: separatist movements on the outskirts of the Russian state at the beginning and at the end of the 20th century, mass Russian emigration and jurisdictional disputes in it, exacerbation in the 20th century of the church-political confrontation between Constantinople and Moscow. The author comes to the conclusion that the positions of theologians of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Church Abroad are similar, in contrast to the approach of the "Evlogians" who followed in this issue the position of Constantinople, which attached a dogmatic significance to the territorial principle. The arguments of the parties testified to the groundlessness of the absolutization of national or territorial approaches. Today the problem of correlation of the two ecclesiological principles remains relevant not only for the Russian Orthodox tradition, but also for the all-Orthodox level.