Entering now that part of the History section where we are looking at the more noteworthy specimens of the Romanov dynasty, let us consult the findings of the already frequently mentioned Imya Rossiya project, and discover that although most of the Romanovs had been included in the initial 500 List by the Academics (in deference to their royal status mainly, rather than to any undeniable individual accomplishments), only three of them: Peter I, Catherine II, and Alexander II, reached the top List of 12, joined in the intermediate List of 50 by just one more Russian ruler: Nicholas II, not on account of his excellence (after all, he was a very bad tsar: foolish and reckless beyond comprehension!), but on account of his tragic martyrdom, together with all his family, which eventually “landed” him in the hallowed company of Saints of the Russian Church.
In our Romanov subsection, however, we are not governed by the criterion of greatness or notoriety, but by the kind of ‘semi-subjective/semi-objective’ determination of whether or not I have something interesting to say in connection with that particular monarch, and in the case of our very first contestant we are finding an excellent illustration of what I have in mind, which puts everything in its place.
Mikhail I Fedorovich Romanov (born in 1596, reigned, rather than ruled, from 1613 until his death in 1645) was elected to the Russian throne by a consensus among those boyars who survived the Time of Troubles in decent shape, that is, without being compromised by its excesses and constantly changing fortunes. The old Romanov family happened to be related to Ivan Grozny’s first wife Anastasia Romanova, and therefore the new tsar was a relative of Anastasia’s son Tsar Fedor Ioannovich, which constituted some kind of legitimate succession, to adhere to the unwritten laws of royal propriety. What was even more important, the Romanov family had suffered severe persecution during the reign of Boris Godunov and the ensuing Time of Troubles earning for itself a respectable aura of martyrdom. The only major surviving male relative, father of the kind-of-inept sixteen-year-old tsar-elect, former boyar Fedor Nikitich Romanov, had been forced to become a monk and was at the time languishing in Polish captivity.
The sixteen-year-old first Romanov tsar was not only young, but weak as well, and so there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that he would never become an independently-minded, ergo unpredictable, ruler. Indeed, in the thirty-two years of his reign he was continuously controlled first by his nun mother, then famously by his monk father, and after the latter’s death by his advisers. Nothing spectacular was achieved during his reign, but at least the person of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich was providing Russia with the much needed stability, and his rather controversial marriage (ironically, the most contentious part of his reign revolved around his choices of spouse) to Eudokia Lukyanovna Streshneva propitiously produced, among ten children altogether, the next Russian Tsar Alexei I Mikhailovich Romanov.
…Well into this entry already, and no mention yet of its title focus: the Romanov Duumvirate. So, here now comes our other dramatis persona, by far the most influential actor of Russian history in the reign of the first Romanov Tsar, his father Fedor Nikitich, also known as Patriarch Philaret.
As nephew of Ivan Grozny’s beloved wife Anastasia, Fedor Nikitich Romanov (1554-1633) had been considered one of the strongest contenders to the Russian throne, vis-à-vis the other powerful contender Boris Godunov. Fedor’s mighty rival obviously saw him and the other members of his family as the greatest threat to himself in his steady ascent all the way to the top. In order to remove this threat, in 1600 he exiled Fedor and Xenia, his wife, and forced them to become monk and nun, thus depriving them of any chance of success in secular pursuits. But Fedor was an exceptionally capable man. Although he had loved “the world” and had dreamed of a secular career, he managed to make the most of his ecclesiastical “change of venue,” returning in 1619 to Moscow to be enthroned as the Patriarch of the Russian Church.
His son the Tsar now playing a feeble second fiddle to his formidable father, Patriarch Philaret immediately became the actual ruler of Russia, and remained such until his death in 1633. He dominated all government functions and often exercised his absolute authority without even bothering to enlighten his son about what he was doing. Yet officially a duumvirate it was: Mikhail was the Tsar, and Philaret was the Patriarch, even if he signed all official papers as “Great Sovereign Philaret Nikitich” (a very unusual practice, by the way, of adding one’s secular patronymic to the self-sufficient ecclesiastical single name).
Casting an attentive general look at this picture, we may readily conclude that Philaret was indeed in charge in Russia for a full fourteen years, although we can by no means go any further than that, to assume that the Russian Church was necessarily on top in this arrangement. To a large extent, Philaret/Fedor Nikitich was a man of the world, rather than a man of the cloth, and remained such to the end of his life. The affairs of the State surely interested him much more than the matters of the Church, and it is well known that he delegated most of his ecclesiastical functions, knowing, or even eager to understand, little about them, in the first place. In other words, Philaret was a secular statesman forced into the position of churchman, and there was little immediate gain in this arrangement for the Church itself.
But there was still a very serious consequence in this for the future heads of the Russian Church. There was a precedent created, in the person of Philaret, for the Patriarch to get involved in the ostensible prerogatives of Russia’s secular rulers. Patriarch Nikon would soon thereafter try to emulate Philaret, in his own effort to dominate the next Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and give the Tsar’s other counselors such headaches that they eventually conspired to depose him, and they did depose him, using Nikon’s arrogance against him (see my next entry titled The Second Duumvirate), although the Tsar later repented of the harshness of this measure and chose to reconcile with his by then powerless friend and ex-Patriarch. Still later, Patriarch Adrian would lock horns with none other than Peter the Great, who was by far the stronger of the two in this third and last confrontation, forcing the Patriarch to back down. Their enmity, however, did not thrill the Tsar, leading to the eventual abolition of the Patriarchate, after Adrian’s death in 1700.
The basically secular Holy Synod, established by Peter as the State’s governing authority over the Church, kept the Church down for two centuries. Ironically, it was the much-maligned Bolshevik Revolution that, at least chronologically, takes the credit for the reinstitution of the Patriarchate (in 1918), by now in a clearly subsidiary role to the State.
I cannot say that the new post-Soviet duumvirate of Church and State in Russia has exceeded expectations, in terms of its effectiveness so far in returning the Russian nation as a whole to Christian, or rather Orthodox, morality and social practice. The historical tension between the State and the Church remains unresolved, in a number of ways, although the State under Vladimir Putin and the Church under the late Patriarch Alexius II had come a long way toward embracing each other as complementary and necessary to each other parts of Russia’s governing wholeness. My hope is that the State-Church duumvirate will continue to develop along positive ethical and practical lines under the new Patriarch Cyril I and his successors, and whoever succeeds Presidents Putin and Medvedev in the secular arm of power in Russia. Indeed, in numerous entries already I have explained the tremendous importance in my view of the Russian Church-State duumvirate which alone safeguards Russia’s moral and spiritual compass on her arduous road toward the fulfillment of her historical Destiny.
Having said that, or rather having reminded the reader of one of the leitmotifs of my whole book, the reason why I attach such importance to the Church-State relationship in Russia is quite clear, and giving a separate historical entry to the very first Romanov Duumvirate ought to be taken for granted, and serve as substantial food for further thought.
In our Romanov subsection, however, we are not governed by the criterion of greatness or notoriety, but by the kind of ‘semi-subjective/semi-objective’ determination of whether or not I have something interesting to say in connection with that particular monarch, and in the case of our very first contestant we are finding an excellent illustration of what I have in mind, which puts everything in its place.
Mikhail I Fedorovich Romanov (born in 1596, reigned, rather than ruled, from 1613 until his death in 1645) was elected to the Russian throne by a consensus among those boyars who survived the Time of Troubles in decent shape, that is, without being compromised by its excesses and constantly changing fortunes. The old Romanov family happened to be related to Ivan Grozny’s first wife Anastasia Romanova, and therefore the new tsar was a relative of Anastasia’s son Tsar Fedor Ioannovich, which constituted some kind of legitimate succession, to adhere to the unwritten laws of royal propriety. What was even more important, the Romanov family had suffered severe persecution during the reign of Boris Godunov and the ensuing Time of Troubles earning for itself a respectable aura of martyrdom. The only major surviving male relative, father of the kind-of-inept sixteen-year-old tsar-elect, former boyar Fedor Nikitich Romanov, had been forced to become a monk and was at the time languishing in Polish captivity.
The sixteen-year-old first Romanov tsar was not only young, but weak as well, and so there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that he would never become an independently-minded, ergo unpredictable, ruler. Indeed, in the thirty-two years of his reign he was continuously controlled first by his nun mother, then famously by his monk father, and after the latter’s death by his advisers. Nothing spectacular was achieved during his reign, but at least the person of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich was providing Russia with the much needed stability, and his rather controversial marriage (ironically, the most contentious part of his reign revolved around his choices of spouse) to Eudokia Lukyanovna Streshneva propitiously produced, among ten children altogether, the next Russian Tsar Alexei I Mikhailovich Romanov.
…Well into this entry already, and no mention yet of its title focus: the Romanov Duumvirate. So, here now comes our other dramatis persona, by far the most influential actor of Russian history in the reign of the first Romanov Tsar, his father Fedor Nikitich, also known as Patriarch Philaret.
As nephew of Ivan Grozny’s beloved wife Anastasia, Fedor Nikitich Romanov (1554-1633) had been considered one of the strongest contenders to the Russian throne, vis-à-vis the other powerful contender Boris Godunov. Fedor’s mighty rival obviously saw him and the other members of his family as the greatest threat to himself in his steady ascent all the way to the top. In order to remove this threat, in 1600 he exiled Fedor and Xenia, his wife, and forced them to become monk and nun, thus depriving them of any chance of success in secular pursuits. But Fedor was an exceptionally capable man. Although he had loved “the world” and had dreamed of a secular career, he managed to make the most of his ecclesiastical “change of venue,” returning in 1619 to Moscow to be enthroned as the Patriarch of the Russian Church.
His son the Tsar now playing a feeble second fiddle to his formidable father, Patriarch Philaret immediately became the actual ruler of Russia, and remained such until his death in 1633. He dominated all government functions and often exercised his absolute authority without even bothering to enlighten his son about what he was doing. Yet officially a duumvirate it was: Mikhail was the Tsar, and Philaret was the Patriarch, even if he signed all official papers as “Great Sovereign Philaret Nikitich” (a very unusual practice, by the way, of adding one’s secular patronymic to the self-sufficient ecclesiastical single name).
Casting an attentive general look at this picture, we may readily conclude that Philaret was indeed in charge in Russia for a full fourteen years, although we can by no means go any further than that, to assume that the Russian Church was necessarily on top in this arrangement. To a large extent, Philaret/Fedor Nikitich was a man of the world, rather than a man of the cloth, and remained such to the end of his life. The affairs of the State surely interested him much more than the matters of the Church, and it is well known that he delegated most of his ecclesiastical functions, knowing, or even eager to understand, little about them, in the first place. In other words, Philaret was a secular statesman forced into the position of churchman, and there was little immediate gain in this arrangement for the Church itself.
But there was still a very serious consequence in this for the future heads of the Russian Church. There was a precedent created, in the person of Philaret, for the Patriarch to get involved in the ostensible prerogatives of Russia’s secular rulers. Patriarch Nikon would soon thereafter try to emulate Philaret, in his own effort to dominate the next Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, and give the Tsar’s other counselors such headaches that they eventually conspired to depose him, and they did depose him, using Nikon’s arrogance against him (see my next entry titled The Second Duumvirate), although the Tsar later repented of the harshness of this measure and chose to reconcile with his by then powerless friend and ex-Patriarch. Still later, Patriarch Adrian would lock horns with none other than Peter the Great, who was by far the stronger of the two in this third and last confrontation, forcing the Patriarch to back down. Their enmity, however, did not thrill the Tsar, leading to the eventual abolition of the Patriarchate, after Adrian’s death in 1700.
The basically secular Holy Synod, established by Peter as the State’s governing authority over the Church, kept the Church down for two centuries. Ironically, it was the much-maligned Bolshevik Revolution that, at least chronologically, takes the credit for the reinstitution of the Patriarchate (in 1918), by now in a clearly subsidiary role to the State.
I cannot say that the new post-Soviet duumvirate of Church and State in Russia has exceeded expectations, in terms of its effectiveness so far in returning the Russian nation as a whole to Christian, or rather Orthodox, morality and social practice. The historical tension between the State and the Church remains unresolved, in a number of ways, although the State under Vladimir Putin and the Church under the late Patriarch Alexius II had come a long way toward embracing each other as complementary and necessary to each other parts of Russia’s governing wholeness. My hope is that the State-Church duumvirate will continue to develop along positive ethical and practical lines under the new Patriarch Cyril I and his successors, and whoever succeeds Presidents Putin and Medvedev in the secular arm of power in Russia. Indeed, in numerous entries already I have explained the tremendous importance in my view of the Russian Church-State duumvirate which alone safeguards Russia’s moral and spiritual compass on her arduous road toward the fulfillment of her historical Destiny.
Having said that, or rather having reminded the reader of one of the leitmotifs of my whole book, the reason why I attach such importance to the Church-State relationship in Russia is quite clear, and giving a separate historical entry to the very first Romanov Duumvirate ought to be taken for granted, and serve as substantial food for further thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment