Tolstoy

It was just as Tolstoy fell ill in November 1899 that Orthodox hierarchs began to discuss seriously the question of what to do with the heretic in their midst. Some of the most scathing chapters in Resurrection had been directed at the Orthodox Church, and this was an acute problem for an institution whose prestige and moral authority were closely bound up with those of the Russian government, which felt threatened on several fronts by the end of the nineteenth century. The final instalment of Resurrection had yet to appear, but Tolstoy had already provided enough evidence of his blasphemy in the eyes of the Holy Synod, not least in his vicious satire of the thinly disguised Chief Procurator Toporov, and two infamous chapters describing a service held for convicts which subject Orthodox rites to merciless ridicule. Consider, for example, Tolstoy’s infamous description of the Holy Eucharist in chapter 39 of Part One:

The essence of the service consisted in the supposition that the bits [of bread] cut up by the priest and put by him into the wine, when manipulated and prayed over in a certain way, turned into the flesh and blood of God. These manipulations consisted in the priest’s regularly lifting and holding up his arms, though hampered by the gold cloth sack he had on, then, sinking on to his knees and kissing the table and all that was on it, but chiefly in his taking a cloth by two of its corners and waving it regularly and softly over the silver saucer and golden cup. It was supposed that, at this point, the bread and the wine turned into flesh and blood; therefore, this part of the service was performed with the utmost solemnity.¹⁰⁴

The publication of Resurrection brought the question of the excommunication of Tolstoy back to the top of the Holy Synod’s agenda.

Tolstoy’s rebellion against the Orthodox Church was driven by his perception of its supine position as the mainstay of Russian autocracy. ‘The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity,’ he had thundered in his 1886 article ‘Church and State’. Supporting the state when it went to war was tantamount to the direct sanction of violence, and this was completely untenable as far as he was concerned, for it was a flat contradiction of Christ’s teaching, not to mention one of the Ten Commandments. The Orthodox Church was vulnerable to Tolstoy’s charges, and for the root causes of its moribund state at the end of the nineteenth century we need to look back to the fundamental changes to its autonomous status wrought by Peter the Great. The Russian Orthodox Church was still a very powerful institution when Peter became tsar in 1682, but his determination to forestall any challenge to his autocratic powers led him to take the momentous decision not to replace Patriarch Adrian after his death in 1700. Instead he placed the Church under the jurisdiction of a newly created department of state, the ‘Most Holy Synod’, which was established in the secular capital of St Petersburg in 1721 to replace the Patriarchate in ‘Holy Mother Moscow’. Overseen by a lay chief procurator, whose title in Russian – Ober-prokurator – betrays the German Protestant origins of Peter’s reformist ideas, the Russian Orthodox Church now became for many simply a tool of the government. Peter introduced formal seminary training to Russia in order to raise standards, but he also reduced the large number of Orthodox clergy, only a third of whom were actually ordained and had received some form of education. Peter’s organisation of the state into a hierarchy of service ranks effectively also created a caste system in Russia which separated the clergy from all other classes and made it more or less hereditary, because only the sons of priests were eligible to enter seminaries and train for the priesthood.¹⁰⁵