Globalization and orthodoxy in imperial Russia

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Globalization and orthodoxy in imperial Russia

G.L. Freeze

Abstract

Historians of the Russian Orthodox Church have hitherto given scant attention to two primary dynamics in the religious history of Imperial Russia: globalization and transconfessionality. The former of course has been widely recognized and studied with respect to such spheres as politics and economics; that globalization led inexorably to an erosion of national boundaries, obviating the traditional nation-state paradigm in historical narratives and foregrounding the idea of "entangled histories". But the same level of scholarship does not exist with respect to transconfessionality; i.e., the growing importance of confessional interaction, where a rising volume and velocity of "connectedness" led on occasion to polemics and competition, but also to mutual study and selective emulation. As in secular spheres such as economics and politics, it is impossible to limit analysis to a narrowly confessional, internal history of national churches. On the contrary, it is absolutely essential to consider the impact and dynamics of the transconfessional that accompanied globalization. This article examines the process of transconfessionality in Imperial Russia. It seeks to explain the role of transconfessionality in the development of the Russian Orthodox Church and its relationship to state and society. It gives particular attention to the impact of transconfessionality on Church institutions and their worldly role. The general thrust of the article is "conceptual-methodological": it suggests how historians might reframe future research and illustrates the value of this approach by presenting specific case studies at the macro and micro levels. Those empirical examples draw on substantial archival material as well as the rich store of confessional publications and journals (both Russian and European) from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Dindorf and Kasinec 1970; Davis 1989; Geffert 1996). Refs 91.

Keywords: Russian Orthodox Church, globalization, confessionalization, transconfessionality, Imperial Russia, confessions, Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy.ГЛОБАЛИЗАЦИЯ И ПРАВОСЛАВИЕ В ЦАРСКОЙ РОССИИ

Г.Л. Фриз

Историки религиозной истории имперской России мало внимания уделили двум ее важнейшим движущим силам: глобализации и трансконфессионализации. Первая, конечно, уже учитывается и изучается в таких сферах, как политика и экономика, поскольку обусловливает размывание национальных границ, таким образом устраняя традиционные национально-государственные парадигмы в исторических нарративах. С трансконфессионализацией, т.е. возрастающим значением конфессионального взаимодействия, которое все уливается и периодически вызывает и полемику, и соревнование, и взаимное изучение, и подражание, дело обстоит сложнее, так как здесь невозможен, как в мирских сферах - экономике и политике, "узкоконфессиональный подход" к изучению внутренней истории церквей. Очень важно учитывать силу воздействия трансконфессионализации, которая сопровождает глобализацию. В статье изучены волны трансконфессионализации в царской России, объясняется, какая роль принадлежала данному процессу в развитии Русской православной церкви, раскрывается и ее отношение к государству и обществу. Особое внимание уделено непосредственному влиянию трансконфессионализации на церковные институты и их деятельность. Главная цель данной статьи - концептуально-методологическая: предложить, как в новых исследованиях может быть использован новый подход к русской церковной истории, и выборочно проиллюстрировать как на макроуровне, так и на микроуровне пользу такой "глобальной парадигмы". Для анализа примеров используются большой архивный материал и богато представленные конфессиональные издания и церковные журналы XIX - начала XX в. - как российские, так и зарубежные (Dindorf and Kasinec 1970; Davis 1989; Geffert 1996). Библиогр. 91 назв.

Ключевые слова: Русская православная церковь, глобализация, конфессионализация, трансконфессионализация, имперская Россия, конфессии, католицизм, протестантизм, православие.

European historiography has of late undergone a double paradigm shift: from national to global history, from secularization to confessionalization. The well-known shift from national to global history - the "imperial turn" in historiography - has led historians to conclude that the nation-state narrative simply cannot explain developments in the "long nineteenth century" [Aust, Vulpius, Miller 2010, pp. 5-13], a finding that has been amply demonstrated in empirical scholarship, such as that on Imperial Germany [Conrad, Osterhammel 2004]. As the processes of globalization sharply accelerated from the midnineteenth century with massive flows of capital, people, and goods (material and cultural), national boundaries no longer determined the main dynamics of development and provided no real barrier to what is now called "cultural transfer". And much the same can be said of religious history; the printing press and missions inexorably flowed across national boundaries. Religious globalization thus led to a growth of transconfessionality, enabling a new and unprecedented scale of interaction by religious structures in different countries.

Another historiographical shift - the "religious turn" - has ensued from the well- nigh universal rejection of the older secularization paradigm and the new appreciation for confessionalization. As recent research has demonstrated, nineteenth-century Europe experienced not an inexorable and ubiquitous decline of religiosity, but a powerful resurgence of faith and piety. Indeed, some historians have posited the very antithesis of secularization, rather a "second confessionalization", a resumption of the salient role that confessions had played in the Reformation [Blaschke 2000; Blaschke 2002]. Whatever the terminology, religion certainly played an especially important role in the multi-ethnic, multi-confessional empires of central and eastern Europe. And governments recognized the importance of religion: to legitimize the status quo and expansion, to ensure cohesion despite internal confessional conflict and the subversive role of diasporas abroad, both the Habsburg and Romanov empires foregrounded the role of religion [Schulze Wessel, 2011, pp. 337-338]. But this "second confessionalization" transpired in an age of hyper-globalization (18501914) and generated transconfessionality - that is, interaction, dialogue, and emulation of religious institutions in various countries. Although scholars have recently examined administrative confessionalization in Russia (the state construction of confessional organizations) [Crews 2003; Minenko 2013], thus far researchers have given only scant attention to the transnational religious dimension, namely the transconfessionality that resulted from globalization and had a profound impact on all confessions, Russian Orthodoxy included.

This essay examines that transconfessionality and how it shaped the interaction of Russian Orthodoxy and its Western peers. Although transconfessionality at first glance seems contradictory to confessionalization (suggesting an automatic rejection of the "Other"), globalization inadvertently promoted growing interaction--that is, generated not only the well-known polemics but also a growing interaction, mutual study, and even pragmatic emulation. In the Russian case, transconfessionality was the equivalent, in the religious sphere, of what global historians call supra-national, "entangled history"; it had roots in the eighteenth century, receded in the first half of the nineteenth century, but then increased exponentially from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War I. The Russian case also had a significant internal, intra-imperial dynamic: not only the Churches in Western Europe, but domestic Catholicism and Protestantism within the Russian Empire generated transconfessionality. Indeed, the very expansion of the empire increased the quotient of non-Orthodox subjects, significantly elevating the importance of the "domestic transconfessional". According to official statistics from 1719 and 1897, the Orthodox population declined from 84.5 % to 69.4 %. [Kabuzan 2008], and that 69.4 % included a large number of Old Believers [Paert 2006; Roth 1991]. In short, the "nonOrthodox" (inoslavnye) and "non-Christian" (inovertsy) came to include at least a third of an empire that was becoming ever more multi-confessional. church tsarist society

Transconfessionality: Antecedents and Retrenchment

Even before the accelerated globalization that commenced in the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church had already developed close ties with Western Churches. Foreshadowed in the Petrine church reforms [Verkhovskoi 1916], the transconfessional became still more pronounced during the decades of Catherinean rule. As the state proclaimed enlightened absolutism, it also embraced religious tolerance, and that meant a rejection of harsh repression and forced conversions. In the "Great Instruction" Catherine II castigated religious intolerance "as a very harmful mistake for the peace and security of its citizens" [Nakaz 1907, p. 134] and in 1773 granted toleration to "all faiths, languages, and confessions" [PSZ, vol. 19, no. 13996]. Not only the empress but also the Russian Orthodox Church embraced the German Aufklдrung and incorporated its principles and policies in the publications and administration of the "Orthodox enlightenment" [Wirtschafter 2013]. Partly because of the challenges generated by religious tolerance (reinforcing a determination to raise the confessional consciousness of believers), partly because of foreign criticism of popular religion, the Orthodox Church launched a campaign to regulate parish religious life. This involved imposing tighter restrictions on religious processions and institutionalizing new controls over icons and service books. And all that was strikingly reminiscent of the religious enlightenment in Europe [Freeze 1999]. Western influence was also evident in the diocesan seminaries, which not only became a mandatory precondition for ordination to the priesthood but also relied heavily on Protestant textbooks [Znamensky 1881]. This Western influence was apparent as well in the holdings of seminary libraries; in 1800, for example, 73 percent of the books in the Smolensk seminary library were in foreign languages, chiefly Latin [Speransky 1892, pp. 113-114]. The Synod routinely approved the publication of Western works in translation; in 1781, for example, the Synod authorized the printing of a translated guide for girls coming of age and marrying, with the explanation that "nothing in the content of this book is contrary to the Holy Church" [RGIA, f. 796, op. 62, d. 410, ll. 1-2]. And even when Church authorities took exception, they failed to avert dissemination as in the belated attempt in 1783-4 to prevent the a new translation and distribution of Johann Arndt's Wahres Christentum [RGIA, f. 796, op. 64, d. 475, ll. 1-24], which first appeared in 1735 and had had a strong and continuing influence, even on St. Tikhon Zadonsky [Avgustin (Nikitin) 1999; Khondzinskii 2004].

From the French Revolution to the mid-nineteenth century, however, that transcon- fessionality, along with globalization, declined sharply. But it did not altogether disappear even in the important sphere of pastoral training and guidance. Thus in 1799 the Synod considered a proposal to publish a translation of an influential pastoral guide by a Viennese Catholic, F. Giftschьtz's Leitfaden fьr die in den k. k. Erblanden vorgeschriebenen deutschen Vorlesungen ьber die Pastoraltheologie [Giftschьtz 1786]. The Moscow Censorship Committee found that this work "has nothing contrary to Divine Law, state rules, morality" and enthusiastically recommended its publication "as exceptional and useful". That judgement led the Synod in 1802 to approve a press run of2,400 copies [RGIA, f. 796, op. 80, d. 549, ll. 1-53], with the book actually appearing the following year [Giftshiuts 1803]. In the Nikolaevan era the religious sphere mirrored the political and emphasized the uniquely national (expressed in the "Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality"). Concretely, the Church turned from Western works and published the Church Fathers along with original works on theology (dogmatic, moral, pastoral). Although the Church acquired its first two journals (Khristianskoe chtenie and Pribavleniia k tvoreniiam sv. Ottsov), neither displayed interest in the West. This was hardly surprising given the stifling censorship, especially of the latter years of the Nikolaevan regime [Kotovich 1909]. Nevertheless, transconfessionality did not altogether expire: in 1854, at the very acme of censorship, the Synod approved a textbook on pastoral theology [Kirill (Naumov) 1854] that included references not only to the Church Fathers and Russian publications, but also to standard Western works [Powondra 1818; Gaume 1845; Sailer 1788-1789]. The Church also sponsored translations of Russian texts, such as Metropolitan Filaret's Long Catechism [Filaret 1840]; the emperor personally ordered a printing of 1,200 copies "for foreigners", followed by another printing of 1,200 copies in 1849 [RGIA, f. 797, op. 10, d. 26526, ll. 1-129; RGIA, f. 797, op. 19, d. 42609, ll. 1-30]. But the retrenchment was far-reaching, especially with respect to Catholicism, a policy presumably driven by hostile foreign publications after the Polish Rebellion of 1830-1831 and the so-called "reunion" (vossoedinenie) of Uniates in 1839 [Theiner 1841; Horrer 1843; Theiner 1843]. But not all the Western publications were hostile: to acquaint Western readers with Russian Orthodox teachings and parish priest's activities, in 1845 R. W. Blackmore published a compendium with translations that amounted to a basic primer, Filaret's shorter and longer catechism, and the standard Orthodox handbook on the "duties of parish priests" [Blackmore 1845; Parfenii 1776]. In general, however, the transconfessionality of the Enlightenment had undergone a significant decline.

Nothing better illustrates this decline of transconfessionality than the fate of August Haxthausen's famous Studies on the Interior of Russia. The first two volumes had been approved for circulation in 1847, but the third volume ran afoul of ecclesiastical censorship in 1853 - despite the emperor's clear predisposition to permit circulation (directing officials to focus on major errors and avoid knit-picking). Asked to assess the chapter on the "religiosity of the Russian people", however, Church censors strongly objected to the author's "highly biased opinion about raskol'niki" (whom Haxthausen praised for their superior religious knowledge [Haxthausen 1862, p. 84-86]) and took issue with his observation that Protestant theology was "widespread" (eliciting a rejoinder from the censors that, while such influence was present, it should not be exaggerated). The Church therefore ruled that "various incorrect judgements about our clergy contained in this book can have an unfavorable impression on the readers" and insisted that several pages be deleted before the book be permitted for free circulation in the public [RGIA, f. 797, op. 22, otd.1, st. 3, d. 157, ll. 1- 66].

Resurgence of Transconfessionality

In a few short years, however, transconfessionality reappeared and again prevailed: with the dawning of the Great Reform era (and the end to the smug exceptionalism of the Nikolaevan era), the Orthodox Church resumed its interaction with Western churches, demonstrated a willingness to borrow ideas and institutions, and undertook to publicize its own achievements in the West. Censorship remained, to be sure, but it plainly lost the capacity to stem or even to control the flow of ideas amidst the growing volume of publications, including the opportunities to publish abroad and not just at home.

This resurgence of the transconfessional was due to multiple factors. One was renewed globalization: the communications revolution and the expanding transfer of cultural goods after mid-century dramatically increased the volume and velocity of confessional interaction. All across Europe, the tidal wave of book and periodical publications raised transconfessionality to a new level. And within the Russian Empire religious publications experienced a parallel surge: the Orthodox Church established journals at all four academies, gradually built a network of diocesan newspapers (eparkhial'nye vedomosti), and facilitated, and sometimes subsidized, a significant increase in unofficial Orthodox journals and books. By the 1860s the empire was awash with religious publications, and these gave increasing attention to non-Orthodox confessions in the empire and abroad. A second stimulus was the rise of confessional tensions within the empire, impelling the Church to compete, analyze, and, where useful, emulate. Some pressure emanated from without, as missionaries (official, self-appointed, or diaspora-sponsored) promoted sectarianism, even among the privileged class (such as the Radstockism [McCarthy 2004]). A further incentive was the inexorable shift in state confessional policy from Nikolaevan repression to secularist accommodation. This was selective (excluding, famously, Polish Catholicism), but overt and far-reaching when it came to Old Believers [Marsden 2015; Schmidt 2015, pp. 142-215] and especially Baltic Lutheranism [Freeze 2004], forcing the Church to come to its own defense. A third stimulus was the onset of Church reform from the late 1850s and 1860s: the status, well-being, and privileges of other confessions provided a powerful argument on the need for structural reform and material support for the "ruling Church" [Freeze 1983, pp. 189-247].

Transconfessionality was a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it meant a robust Orthodox response to adversaries. Catholic "propaganda" continued in the next decade, spearheaded by Jean Gagarin's team of Russian Jesuits in Paris [Beshonor 2002] and intensified after the Polish uprising of 1863 and ensuing anti-Catholic policies. The lay advocate of Orthodoxy, P. N. Batiushkov, denounced the Catholic criticism in a memorandum "On the Latin Propaganda in Western Russia" [RNB, f. 52, d. 29, ll. 1-17; another copy is in RGIA, f. 832, op. 1, d. 88, ll. 1-71]. Authorities took specific measures to combat the foreign criticism: they zealously suppressed publications deemed pernicious [RGIA, f. 779, op. 4, d. 38, ll. 64 ob. - 65, 107 ob.], published rebuttals in Western languages [RGIA, f. 797, op. 28, otd. 28, st. 2, d. 138, ll. 1-5], and actively targeted Russians like N. B. Golitsyn who propagandized on behalf of Catholicism [RGIA, f. 797, op. 28, st. 2, d. 224, ll. 10-11 ob.; Filaret (Drozdov) 1886, pp. 415-419]. The Russian Church also went on the offensive: it established and subsidized a journal in Paris to "disseminate in the West true information about the teachings of the Orthodox Church, refute the attacks of enemies, and expose the errors of other Christian confessions" [RGIA, f. 796, op. 143, d. 2081, ll. 1-2; f. 797, op. 30, otd. 1, st. 2, d. 245, ll. 1-4]. The same imperative of informing Western opinion led the future ober-prokuror D. A. Tolstoi to use French for his study of Catholicism in Russia. As he explained to M. N. Katkov: "You will understand why I wrote in French, not Russian: my goal was to acquaint foreigners with the Latin [Catholic]-Polish question in western Russia and to reestablish facts that have been deliberately distorted" [RNB, f. 120, k. 11, d. 17, ll. 2-2 ob.]. The Baltics also generated confessional polemics about conversions in the 1840s and later repression of "Reversal" - the attempt of converts to return to Lutheranism. Thus, Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, the journal of the Moscow Theological Academy, even reported a secret imperial order suspending prosecution of apostasy in the Baltics - an act of journalistic courage that elicited censure from the government and a spirited defense from Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow [Brodsky 1905, pp. 282-290]. After the emperor suspended prosecution for "apostasy", his successor resumed repression in the 1880s and waged a campaign against Lutheran pastors for violating state law [Weber 2013; Stupperich 1957]. Faced with a surge in sectarianism, the Orthodox Church tended to place the blame on foreign, especially German, influence.

Acrimonious polemics thus did not magically vanish, but they did not prevent trans- confessionality, as each side - the Western churches and the Orthodox Church - faced significant problems at home and looked to other confessions for inspiration and solutions. In the case of the Orthodox Church, that led to attempts to emulate strategies of European peers. To cite five important examples:

l. The Catholic seminar as a model. In 1858, as the Church contemplated reform in its seminaries, it dispatched an emissary to Paris to study the Catholic seminary system, with the explanation that "it was deemed necessary to have similar information about the condition of analogous institutions in France" [RNB, f. 316, k. 66, d. 28, ll. 1 - 61 ob.; Filaret (Drozdov) 1886, pp. 421-424]. The very fact that the Church looked to the West represented a dramatic break with the exceptionalist premises of the previous reign. It was especially surprising that the Synod looked to the Catholic Church for a model, but - significantly - pragmatism ruled: the Orthodox Church was open to importing whatever seemed to work.

2. Reform of the parish clergy. A central focus of the ecclesiastical Great Reforms was a transformation of the parish clergy, the goal being to dismantle the hereditary caste, improve its economic condition, and thereby enable the recruitment of zealous candidates from all social groups. To assess the Russian clergy's condition and problems, many made comparisons with Catholic and Protestant peers. Such comparisons also informed analyses from diocesan clergy. The response from Riga diocese, for example, was predictably blunt: "In our fatherland the Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy are better off than the Orthodox, although the latter is regarded as the clergy of the ruling Church; thus, in the Baltic area the minimum income of a [Lutheran] pastor exceeds the maximum support for an Orthodox priest, although the service of Lutherans (who deny five sacraments and other dogmas) is less than that of the Orthodox priest" [RGlA, f. 804, op. 1, p. III, d. 325, ll. 11-11 ob.]. Minister of Interior P. A. Valuev, a key figure in the church reforms and confessional policy, made this unflattering comparison in a critical memorandum in 1861: "The Latin [Catholic] estate is close-knit; it is not numerous, in part impoverished, often poorly educated, but has no family and therefore more easily endures deprivation, or distributed among corresponding strata of educated strata of the population, and also superbly disciplined. The Protestant clergy has families; in the aggregate, it has a large material base and high degree of education, because it is less numerous than the Latin [clergy] in comparison with the general mass of the population. In accordance with the very character of its teaching it has less need for hierarchical discipline and constitutes an estate, given the family relations of its members, which has direct ties with other estates. Both of these clergies are in constant contact with higher and lower classes of the population. In our country only the [Orthodox] clerical estate is sealed off and constitutes a hereditary, separate unit of the state. The children of the ordained and sacristans belong to this estate by birth. They can leave it when they enter state service (whereupon they are subject to well-known restrictions) or when (to use the language of the law) they choose [another] career; i.e., enter the [lower] poll-tax population. The [Orthodox] clergy has families and, at the same time, is multitudinous, poor, and subject to severe discipline (insofar as it is under the unchecked power of diocesan authorities)" [RGIA, f. 908, op. 1, d. 112, ll. 42 ob.- 43 ob.: P A. Valuev, "About the real condition of the Orthodox Church and Orthodox clergy" 22. 09.1861].

3. Education and role of women. From the mid-nineteenth century the Church exhibited growing interest in female religiosity and constructed a network of diocesan and convent schools for girls that by 1913-14 had enrolled 28,672 female pupils [Vsepod- danneishii otchet 1916, pp. 112-115]. No less impressive was the exponential growth of female monasticism, with the number of nuns and novices far surpassing their male counterparts by 1914 [Miller 2009; Wagner 2006]. Of particular interest, and reflecting the Western model, was the growing interest in the office of deaconess, which had enjoyed considerable success in the Lutheran Church in Germany (with some 20,000 deaconesses in eighty such communities). Mirroring the "feminization" of religion in the West, some clergy had espoused the creation of the deaconess office from the mid-nineteenth century [RGIA, f. 908, op. 1, d. 112, ll. 42 ob. - 43 ob.; RGIA, op. 445, d. 340]; the German Protestant model specifically aroused interest, as reflected in a 1908 review in Tserkovnyi vestniki for a popular German book about the institution [Gol'ts 1906, p. 976]. In 1912 the Synod established the deaconess, igniting public scandal involving Bishop Germogen of Saratov [Freeze 1996, pp. 332-333], but the Rubicon had been crossed [Beliakova E. V., Beliakova 2001].

4. Parish Reform. Transconfessionality thus generated institutional borrowing from other confessions. Emulation was sometimes indirect, such as the tserkovnyi sovet (parish council) in 1864, with the title changed to tserkovno-prikhodskoe popechitel'stvo (parish-church trusteeship) to conceal the foreign association [Freeze 1983, p. 252259]. As the Church and society devoted ever greater attention to the "parish question" in late Imperial Russia, that interest in the parish organization of other confessions only mounted. In the 1905 revolution, for example, the proposal by the diocesan assembly in Riga diocese to transform the parish drew clearly on the model of its Lutheran competition in the Baltics [Rizhskii eparkhial'nyi sobor 1905] elicited enormous attention in Orthodox diocesan assemblies all across the empire.

5. Pastoral education and training. As earlier, the Russian Church continued to draw on Catholic and especially Protestant theology and scholarship, especially for textbooks and instructions in the seminaries and academies. In 1867, for example, the central church educational board proposed to adopt a new text in moral theology [Soliarsky 1869] that specifically recommended teachers to make use of analogous Catholic and Protestant texts [Hirscher 1836; Wuttke 1826]. The Synod approved adoption of the pastoral guide, which became a standard work in the seminary [RGIA, f. 796, op. 148, d. 1539, ll. 1-13]

The impact of transconfessionality is strikingly evident at the microhistorical level: Ioann S. Beliustin (with Belliustin as his nom de plume), the same provincial priest who wrote Description of the Rural Clergy that was published abroad in 1858 [Belliustin 1858], ignited a firestorm of interest not only at home but also abroad [Deliиre 1862], and helped put the "clerical question" on the Great Reform agenda. Subsequently a prolific publicist, Beliustin explicitly compared the Russian clergy to their Catholic and Protestant peers (to underscore the privileged status and superior material condition of the latter) and even published a book about the Catholic clergy in France [Belliustin 1871]. That volume, based on the work of an anonymous "abbй" [Michon 1867], predictably raised the ire of ecclesiastical censors, who took exception to his footnotes, "since here is cast a dark shadow of unbelief and even contempt for the traditions of antiquity and practices of the church that have been accepted and employed in the Orthodox Church." The censors concluded that "it is impossible not to notice the author's general view of the ritual side of the Church as superfluous and even harmful" [RGIA, f. 807, op. 2, d. 1502, l. 52; d. 1504/b, without pagination (doc. no. 360]. In 1876 Beliustin wrote N. S. Leskov that he was also working on a parallel volume about "the rural clergy in Protestant countries" [RGALI, f. 275, op. 4, d. 12, ll 9 - 9 ob.] but did not complete the work before his death in 1890.

But the Kaliazin priest was interested in theology, not just the clergy, despite his remote location (the district town of Kaliazin in Tver diocese). Even from Kaliazin, however, he displayed familiarity with the latest currents in Western religious debate, such as Ernest Renan's notorious Vie de Jйsus (banned by the Committee on Foreign Censorship in 1863 [Polianskaia 1938, p. 91-92]). He even included references to the banned book in a manuscript about Holy Week, an authorial decision that precipitated long battles with ecclesiastical censorship. Beliustin eventually published the work [Belliustin 1869], but only after four years of confrontation over his citations of Renan. In 1867 the Synod directed his bishop to "make Beliustin understand that such a composition as his, in large measure or wholly drawn from the work of Renan, is unworthy of an Orthodox priest". Beliustin fought back, arguing that he "used only factual information from Renan and did so from sheer necessity", given his provincial location and lack of access to other resources. Eventually the Synod gave permission to submit a revised manuscript [RGIA, f. 807, op. 2, 1868, d. 1478, ll. 16-27]. Beliustin in fact was no admirer of Renan; he later wrote Leskov that "I do not especially like and, more precisely, very much dislike Renan, despite his stylistic mastery--because of his distortions and false interpretation of texts in Vie de Jйsus and, especially, in Les Apфtres" [RGALI, f. 275, op. 4, d. 12, l. 17 ob.] But the Kaliazin priest read not only Renan but also Western devotional literature. He showed an interest in English religious life and expressed particular enthusiasm for two books in English, one a devotional tract for a broad readership [Mortimer 1846; RGB, f. 327/II, r. 5, d. 31, l. 8 ob.], the other a collection of sermons by an English pastor. The preface to the latter work suggests why the book appealed to Beliustin: "In the publication of modern sermons, too little attention appears to have been paid to the illiterate classes of the community. Some attempts indeed have been made ... but without any disparagement to these attempts, it may be safely asserted, that the supply has not been adequate to the demand" [Cooper 1817, p. v; RGALI, f. 275, op. 4, d. 12, l. 5 ob.].

That transconfessionality was not the idiosyncrasy of a provincial priest but was characteristic of the Orthodox press after mid-century [Kohler-Baur 1997, pp. 52-81]. It was salient in Khristianskoe chtenie (1821-1917), the scholarly journal from the St. Petersburg Academy, which published extensive reports about Western religious life and relied heavily on Orthodox priests serving at embassy chapels. For example, the first issue in 1861 included an article on the Gallican and ultramontane parties in French Catholicism [Chel'tsov 1861] and a report on religious affairs from an archpriest serving in Wiesbaden [Ianyshev 1861]. The other academy journals had their own special interests, but all demonstrated an interest in other confessions, including those in Western Europe. By the turn of the century the transconfessionality noticeably intensified, as in the case of the newly established "thick journal" of the Moscow Spiritual Academy, Bogoslovskii vestnik (18921917), which actively engaged Western theologians and displayed a growing engagement in social and ecclesiastical problems, including the highly sensitive and important "parish question" [Geffert 1997]. Bogoslovskii vestnik was hardly unique: others also devoted growing attention to the West and its newer theological currents, especially in Protestantism [Wasmuth 2007]. Likewise, prominent texts on pastoral theology drew extensively on Western works: a historical survey of pastoral theology [Innokenty (Pustynsky) 1899], for example, cited an array of Western works [Graf 1841; Harnack 1877; Palmer 1860; Hoppin 1884]. Nor was pastoral theology an exception. Dissertations from a broad range of fields [for example, Sokolov 1907; Rozdestvensky 1908; Kerensky1903] also reflect this transconfessionality and interest in European teachings, as is clearly evident from a full list that has been recently compiled [Sukhova 2006, p. 530-570]. Significantly, this interest of Russian Orthodox scholars also included theologians espousing a "social Gospel," such as Adolf von Harnack, whose Essence of Christianity appeared in Russian translation in 1907 [Harnack 1907]. The transconfessionality also gained impetus from intra-imperial dynamics; the ethnic tensions among Baltic Lutherans, for example, elicited demands by the Latvian and Estonian underclass for more power in the parish; that was evident, for example, in the interest in a book entitled Herrenkirche oder Volkskirche?, published first in Juriew in 1899 and two years later in Russian [Grenzstein 1899; Grenzstein 1901].

Although the West initially showed relatively less interest in Orthodox teachings [Felmy 1983], there were exceptions such as the three-volume French translation of Metropolitan Filaret's sermons and other works in 1866 [Filaret 1866]. But Western scholarship and engagement significantly increased by the end of the century, with more translations and reviews to apprise the Western reader of the teachings and activities in Russian Orthodoxy. That new attention was understandably a source of pride for Russian authors. For example, when Bishop Serafim (Meshcherikov) encountered criticism from the ober- prokuror (who reportedly said that "for the Church such complex books [as Serafim's] in which people could understand nothing, are not essential"), Bishop Serafim could boast of having published a major tome in English translation [Serafim 1900], and in a private letter he noted that British church papers had praised his book and that "my name became known in the foreign countries and my work excited the interest of the West for Russian theological literature" [RGIA, f. 796, op. 205, d. 744, ll. 47-48]. Western scholars also included Russian texts in their assessments of Russian teachings on such important religious subjects as baptism and penance [Bukowski 1911; Grass 1902; Staerk 1903]. Revealingly, some Western Christians, probably in response to the signs of de-churching (Entkirchlichung), showed a deeper appreciation for Orthodox liturgy and services: "Die hohe Bedeutung der morgenlдndischen Liturgie, zumal fьr unsere Zeit, ist allgemein zugegeben; sie bietet uns eine Menge wertvoller Kenntnisse fьr das Studium des christlichen Altertums, Erhabenheit der Ideen, Schцnheit des Ausdrucks und tiefe Symbolik" [Ehr- hard 1899, VII]. For its part, the Orthodox Church undertook a vigorous campaign to translate and disseminate translations of liturgical texts and books about core teachings [Hapgood 1906; Maltzew 1998; Maltzew 1902; Overbeck 1898].

Conclusion

Historians of the Church in Imperial Russia have much ground to make up for the decades lost in the twentieth century when, in contrast to European scholarship, much was destroyed, little preserved, and still less produced. Since the late 1980s scholars in the West and especially in Russia have done much to rectify that neglect, but much remains to be done especially with respect to believers (not just among the clergy and ecclesiastical institutions). It is important, however, to frame that research broadly, to recognize the transnational dynamics of confessionalization and its correlate, transconfessionality. As in the secular domain, it is impossible to write Russian church and religious history without greater awareness of the external, not only other confessions in Russia, but abroad as well.

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