Bringing Theology Back In: The Russian Orthodox Church, the State, and the West in Imperial Russia

Abstract

“For most of the nineteenth century,” writes Heather L. Bailey, “the question of Russia’s relationship to the rest of Europe was inseparable from religion” (45). Of course, this had long been the case. From the time in the 11th to 13th centuries when the lines between Eastern and Western Christianity hardened, religious differences structured international relations and mutual perceptions. By the 19th century, the view of the Russian Orthodox Church as the purveyor and defender of a conservative, anti-Western, inwardlooking culture was well established abroad—a view that continues to color general accounts of imperial Russian history and present-day politics. So was the conviction that the imperial-era Church was the pliant handmaiden of the state. Perhaps as a result, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the history of Russian Orthodox theology in the imperial period. The works under review here demonstrate, however, that theology was a crucial site of