Abstract

The idea that church reforms of Peter the Great had antiecclesiastical character originated with the Slavophiles in the course of their philosophical pursuit: the decline of the Christian Church after the French Revolution resulted from the aberrations of Western Christianity, but Russia could avoid this decline by purifying Orthodoxy from alien Western ideas uncritically absorbed during the Petrine reforms. However, the thesis that the Russian Church should be freed from the power of the secular state only took its final shape in postreform political journalism as an argument that allowed to counterpose the Orthodox Church against the Romanov autocratic monarchy. In the prerevolutionary years, the journalistic thesis of the antiecclesiastical focus of the Petrine reforms became the basis for a series of politicized academic works intended to substantiate the calls of opposition figures for radical changes in churchstate relations. These works applied ideas of Max Weber, who viewed secularization as a process of cultural transformation in the transition to modernity, to the history of the Russian Church, and argued that the Church in the 17th-18th centuries underwent secularization and secularism. The writers of the Russian diaspora made the thesis of the secularization of the Orthodox Church after the Petrine reforms one of the corner stones of their concept of the history of Russian Orthodoxy. The works of Fr. G. Florovsky, G.P. Fedotov and their students became a classic for Western historiography of Orthodoxy, established in the postwar period. Through the writings of scholars from the TartusMoscow and Leningrad schools, Soviet historians became acquainted with the ideas of the authors of the Russian diaspora. The abandoning of secularization theory and the emergence of new concepts of European religious history led to the fact that from the 1980s scholars began questioning the longheld view of the Russian Empire's Orthodox Church as a “servant of the state”. However, even in the early 21st century the most common interpretation of the Petrine Church reforms is still the one which stems from the works of prerevolutionary authors.