“The Consecrated Sobor”. On the History of Ideas about Church Sobors in Russia (Part 2)

The genesis and transformation of interpretations of the church sobor in Russian social thought of the second half of the 19th century were examined. It was analyzed how, under the influence of Pan-Slavist ideas, Polish emigrant journalism, and internal debates on Russia’s development, the concept of the “sobor” was evolved from a strictly ecclesiastical institution into a multifaceted political and ideological construct.The formation of three main interpretations of the sobor was demonstrated: the republican-federalist (traced back to radical circles and Ukrainophilism), the Slavophile (in which conciliarity is understood as the organic unity of the church people), and the canonical-clerical (in which the sobor is interpreted as a body of estate-based self-government of the clergy). Particular attention was paid to the polemics surrounding the reform of the church court in the 1870s, in which the category of conciliarity was used as an argument in the struggle for the autonomy of the Church from the bureaucratic state. It was concluded that by the mid-1870s the “sobor” had become established in intellectual discourse not so much as a historical institution, but rather as an instrument for interpreting the contemporary contradictions between national specificity, religious identity, and imperial statehood.

EDN LASPTN