its lands and serfs. When Elizabeth was followed by her nephew, Peter III, the pendulum swung back. On taking the throne, Catherine had reversed it again, immediately revoking her dead husband’s decree, and granting the church renewed possession and administration of its land and serfs. A few months later, she changed course again.
The unfolding of this political and religious drama was marked by indecision, opposition, and, finally, a major confrontation. In July 1762, Catherine ordered the Senate to investigate and tabulate the immense wealth of the Orthodox Church and to recommend a new policy for the government to follow. The Senate’s first response was a compromise proposal: the estates should be returned to the church but the tax on church peasants should be increased. This created a split within the church hierarchy. The majority, led by Archbishop Dimitry of Novgorod, accepted the overall idea of surrendering the burden of administering their agricultural estates and becoming paid servants of the state on the same footing as the army and the bureaucracy. To examine the problem and work out the details, Dimitry proposed setting up a joint religious and secular commission. Catherine agreed, and on August 12, 1762, signed a manifesto confirming her temporary annulment of Peter III’s decree and returning church lands to ecclesiastical administration. At the same time, she established Dimitry’s recommended commission of ecclesiastical and civil representatives (three clerics and five laymen) to examine the matter.
Catherine had to treat the church hierarchy carefully. She had always exercised a rational flexibility in matters of religious dogma and policy. Brought up in an atmosphere of strict Lutheranism, she had as a child expressed enough skepticism about religion to worry her deeply conventional father. As a fourteen-year-old in Russia, she had been required to change her religion to Orthodoxy. In public, she scrupulously observed all forms of this faith, attending church services, observing religious holidays, and making pilgrimages. Throughout her reign, she never underestimated the importance of religion. She knew that the name of the autocrat and the power of the throne were embodied in the daily prayers of the faithful, and that the views of the clergy and the piety of the masses were a power to be reckoned with. She understood that the sovereign, whatever his or her private views of religion, must find a way to make this work. When Voltaire was asked how he, who denied God, could take Holy Communion, he replied that he “breakfasted according to the custom of the country.” Having observed the disastrous effect of her husband’s contemptuous public rejection of the Orthodox Church, Catherine chose to emulate Voltaire.
Her principal advisers disagreed as to how to handle the church. Bestuzhev had favored leaving the church hierarchy in control of church affairs; Panin, closer to the beliefs of the Enlightenment, favored state administration of the church and its property. As it was, the manifesto of August 1762, hinting at the desirability of freeing religion from the burden of worldly cares, carried ominous forebodings for the church’s future. When the commission began its work, concerns about secularization stirred clerical anxiety, but the majority of priests were uncertain what could or should be done. Few were ready to fight.
One towering exception to this submissive attitude was Arseniy Matseyevich, metropolitan of Rostov, who was a fierce opponent of any state interference in church affairs, and especially of the secularization of church properties. Sixty-five years old, a Ukrainian nobleman by birth, a member of the Holy Synod, he presided over the richest of all the church sees (the see owned 16,340 serfs), and he believed firmly that the church had been granted its property not for secular but spiritual purposes. Fearless, passionate, and equipped with a thorough knowledge of theology, he prepared to use his pen and his voice to challenge the empress. He hoped that a scheduled face-to- face meeting with the new autocrat would provide him an opportunity to convince her that he was right and she was wrong.
Early in 1763, Catherine was to make a pilgrimage from Moscow to Rostov to consecrate the bones of Saint Dimitry Rostovsky, known as Saint Dimitry the Miracle Worker, a newly canonized saint who had been Arseniy’s predecessor. The bones were to be placed in a silver shrine in the presence of the empress, after which Arseniy meant to speak to her. But as the time approached, Catherine postponed her visit.
When this delay was announced, Arseniy seized the initiative. On March 6, 1763, he forwarded to the Holy Synod a violent denunciation of the policy of secularization, which, he declared, would destroy both church and state. He reminded the Synod that on her accession, Catherine had promised to protect the Orthodox religion. He railed against the suggestion that the church should be responsible for education in philosophy, theology, mathematics, and astronomy; its only Christian duty, he thundered, was to preach the Word of God. Bishops should not be responsible for establishing schools; this was the duty of the state. If the church were secularized, he said, bishops and priests would no longer be shepherds of their people but “hired servants, accountable for every crust of bread.” He aimed harsh words at his clerical colleagues in the Holy Synod, who, in this crisis, “sat like dumb dogs without barking.”
He rose before the assembled clergy of Rostov and condemned those who challenged the church’s right to its property in land and serfs: these were “enemies of the church … [who] stretch out their hands to snatch what has been consecrated to God. They want to appropriate the wealth formerly given to the church by the children of God and by pious monarchs.”
Arseniy had miscalculated. He had underestimated Catherine’s strength and that of other powerful elements in the Russian state arrayed against him. The high nobility were deeply secular; local landowners wanted more access to church-owned land and labor; government officials, struggling with the state’s financial condition, agreed with Catherine that the wealth and revenues of the church should be used for secular purposes.
When Catherine read Arseniy’s petition to the Synod, she realized that it was aimed directly at her. Describing the metropolitan’s arguments as “perverse and inflammatory distortions,” she insisted that “the liar and humbug” be punished as an example. Commanding the Synod to act, she signed a decree committing Arseniy for trial. On March 17, the offending cleric was arrested and brought under guard from Rostov to a monastery in Moscow for examination. In a series of nocturnal sessions, the members of the Synod interrogated their former colleague. Catherine, who was present, listened as Arseniy brought up questions of her right to the throne and the death of Peter III. “Our present sovereign is not native and not firm in the faith,” the archbishop cried. “She should not have taken the throne which should have gone to Ivan Antonovich [Ivan VI].” The empress, covering her ears, shouted, “Stop his mouth!”
The Synod’s verdict was not in doubt. On April 7, Arseniy was found guilty, sentenced to loss of ecclesiastical rank, dismissed from his see, and banished to a remote monastery on the White Sea. He was denied the use of pen and ink and condemned to do hard labor three days a week, carrying water, chopping wood, and cleaning cells. His ecclesiastical degradation was staged at a public ceremony in the Kremlin. Arseniy, appearing in flowing robes, was ritually disgraced: one by one, his ecclesiastical garments were removed. Even during this procedure, he refused to remain silent, shouting insults at his fellow churchmen and predicting that all would die violently. Four years later, incarcerated in the far north, he was still denouncing Catherine as a heretic and despoiler of the church, and still challenging her right to the throne. The empress then deprived him of all religious status and had him transferred to solitary confinement in a cell in the fortress of Reval on the Baltic. Here, the fiery voice was finally silenced: until his death in 1772, his guards, who spoke no Russian, knew him only by the name Andrew the Liar.
Catherine had established the supremacy of the state over the church. A month after sentence was passed on Arseniy, she appeared before the Synod to give her reasons:
You are the successors to the apostles who were commanded by God to teach mankind to despise riches, and who were themselves poor men. Their kingdom was not of this world. I have frequently heard these words from your lips. How can you presume to own such riches, such vast estates? If you wish to obey the laws of your own order, if you wish to be my most faithful subjects, you will not hesitate to return to the state that which you unjustly possess.
No second Arseniy rose to challenge her.
