“The Patriarchal Authority Always Remains Present in the Church in its Entirety”: Patriarch Tikhon, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) and the Ideas of Church Democracy

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The sharp criticism expressed by opponents towards Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) was not so much related to their complimentary statements towards the Soviet government (Patriarch Tikhon’s such statements have been known since 1923), but rather to their methods of governance. Opponents believed that Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Sergius were dismantling the established church democracy that had emerged as a result of the Local Council of 1917–1918. In the early 20th century, such democracy was called conciliarity, which implied church representation, a system of elections from the bottom up with a periodicity of several years. The ideas of intrachurch republicanism were actively developing throughout the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The system of representative church institutions established after the spiritualschool reform at the deanery and diocesan levels served as a school of democracy for the Russian clergy for half a century. Republican ideas were still strong at the Local Council of 1917–1918. They were the main basis for opposing the plans to introduce patriarchy. The ordinations of married priests to bishops without taking monastic vows by the renewalists, and then the recognition of a married episcopate at the so-called Second All-Russian Local Council of 1923, led the R.O.C. (Russian Orthodox Church) of the renewalists beyond the canonical field, which the renewalists were well aware of. Therefore, they sought to superimpose the church democratic system that had formed within their structures after the “abolition” of patriarchy in 1923 to a universal level. Together with the Greeks, the renewalists developed plans for the periodic regular holding of representative assemblies of Local Churches, which they called Universal Councils. These councils were envisaged as a radical transformation of both the canonical structure and, subsequently, the dogmatic teachings of the Orthodox Church. Thus, under favorable historical circumstances, the development of Russian church republicanism could fundamentally undermine the foundations of Universal Orthodoxy. However, patriarchal authority in post-revolutionary Russia stood in the way of these plans. Such actions by the patriarchal authority require a closer look at the perception of the Moscow metropolitan, and then the patriarch in the Russian church consciousness of the 15th-17th centuries, where the fact of repeated episcopal ordination indicates that the Head of the Church was not simply one of the bishops.