Philaret Drozdov

Philaret Drozdov, born Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov in 1782 in Kolomna in the Moscow Governorate of the Russian Empire, belonged to a clerical family; his father served as a deacon and later as a priest. He was educated at the Kolomna Theological Seminary and then at the seminary attached to the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, where he showed a marked aptitude for Greek, Hebrew, and theology. While still a young man he was retained as a teacher. In 1808 he received the monastic tonsure and the name Philaret, after which he was ordained deacon and priest. His academic reputation took him to Saint Petersburg, where he joined the Theological Academy and, still in his late twenties, became its rector, including during the crisis of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.

Consecrated a bishop in 1817 as vicar of Reval, he advanced quickly through the episcopate, serving as archbishop of Tver and then of Yaroslavl before his transfer in 1821 as archbishop of Moscow. In 1826 he was raised to metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna, an office he retained for more than forty years. This was the Synodal period, when the Russian Church had no patriarch and was administered under the Holy Synod and the imperial Ober-Procurator. As metropolitan, Philaret became the most influential hierarch in the Russian Orthodox Church, a celebrated preacher, a member of the Synod, and an adviser to emperors Alexander I, Nicholas I, and Alexander II.

His theological and catechetical writings shaped official Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century. The Longer Catechism associated with his name, first issued in the 1820s and subsequently revised, became the standard instructional text of the Russian Church. He published extensive sermons and biblical studies, including work on Genesis, and he was a leading advocate of a complete Bible in Russian. After the Russian Bible Society was suppressed in the 1820s he continued to promote vernacular Scripture; the later Synodal translation, published after his death, rested in substantial part on work he had directed or undertaken. He combined patristic learning and linguistic skill with an awareness of contemporary European scholarship, while remaining a defender of Orthodox tradition against rationalist and Protestantizing currents.

In public affairs he occupied a cautious place between autocracy and pastoral duty. At the request of Alexander II he drafted the imperial manifesto of 1861 announcing the emancipation of the serfs, giving a major social reform a biblical and ecclesiastical framing. He generally upheld the existing order of Church and state, resisted certain Westernizing tendencies in theology and church life, and yet encouraged theological education and missionary work. He died in Moscow in 1867 after a tenure that had made him the dominant voice of official Russian Orthodoxy for a generation. He was buried at the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius.

The Russian Orthodox Church glorified him as a saint in 1994. He is commemorated on 19 November in the Orthodox liturgical calendar. Historians regard him as the outstanding Russian hierarch of the nineteenth century, whose catechetical, homiletic, and biblical labors defined much of the Church’s teaching life until the upheavals of the twentieth century.