Stefan Yavorsky, as a newcomer from another country, did not merge in these emotions with the Great Russians. Officially, he was a panegyrist of Peter's deeds and naively expected that with his praise he would hasten the receipt of the patriarchal honor. But soon the relationship between the tsar and the locum tenens was mutually clarified, as a kind of misunderstanding. Stephen did not give Peter the slightest hope of zeal for church reforms. And Peter became more and more convinced that Stephen was a sympathizer of the hated Latin spirit. The Moscow milieu, having guessed that Stephen was a conservative, put aside their personal enmity towards him and recognized him as a useful weapon in the struggle against Peter's radicalism. With one mouth and one heart with the Muscovites, Stephen condemned the second marriage of the tsar with the rootless Catherine during the lifetime of his first wife, Evdokia Lopukhina, who was forcibly tonsured. Stephen was offended by Peter because Peter had obtained the abolition of the fast for the army during the Prut campaign directly from the Patriarch of Constantinople without his knowledge. As is known, the hopes of the old Moscow party were concentrated on Tsarevich Alexei, who was like-minded with it. And Stephen fatally merged with these circles, finally disappointing Peter. Honest and straightforward in his own way, Stephen revealed his anti-reformism in his sermons quite openly. In 1712, in a sermon on the day of the Tsarevich's Angel, he called the birthday boy "the only hope of Russia." In his preaching denunciations, Stephen clearly alludes to Peter's sins. He condemns those who do not keep fasts, who offend the church of God and leave their wives. Peter reacted immediately. He demanded the written text of the sermon and wrote a resolution on it, not without wit, referring to the Gospel directive: "First one by one, then with witnesses, and also tell the church"... Stephen turned out to be both pastorally and politically incorrect. Mutual relations between the heads of church and state irreparably deteriorated. Stephen received a direct ban on preaching in the presence of the tsar without prior censorship. That Stefan's career was over was still unclear, perhaps to him alone. Stephen belonged to the category of inflexible and honest servants. The more he observed Peter's sympathy for the German Protestant spirit, the more his Latin anti-Protestant pathos awoke in him. Stephen's mood was clearly revealed in the struggle with a crude outburst of vulgar Protestant preaching in the person of the Moscow physician Dimitri Tveritinov, who studied in the German quarter. A fairly large circle was formed around Tveritinov, carried away by fashionable freethinking. From the theological point of view, the ideas of the circle were illiterate. The basic dogma of Protestantism, justification by faith, was here transformed into its elementary opposite. Faith is nothing in the matter of justification, but everything in deeds and merits. And apart from good deeds, no heavenly intercessors and no church prayers will save a person. A curious historical accident that here too a relative of Dimitri Tveritinov, Foma Ivanov, a barber by profession, was a barber, i.e., probably not just a "shearer", but an orderly, a paramedic. When in 1713 the case was revealed, it turned out that among the fashionable critics of Orthodoxy there was also a student of the Moscow Theological Academy, Maximov, and through him his other comrades were infected with freethinking, and that all this had been dragging on for fourteen years.

Stefan sincerely, but not without party inspiration, conducted a loud and public investigation. Peter understood that this was a struggle with him, with his cause; that this is terror against foreigners, whom Peter attracted and seduced with all kinds of benefits and comforts; that this is grist to the mill of the Russian ignoramuses, who threaten pogroms against foreigners. As a tactical counterattack, Peter demanded that all the work begun be transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg, under the control of the newly formed Senate there. The heresiarchs themselves were brought to St. Petersburg for a new interrogation. The senators demanded that the guilty simply renounce in words, which they did with false ease. Then an order was sent to Stephen and the "consecrated council" under him to join to the church the leaders of heresy who had been brought back to Moscow and repented. Stephen obeyed, but did not grant a complete amnesty. He sent the supposedly repentant to the monasteries to check their repentance, which, of course, was essentially correct. Imprisoned in the Chudov Monastery, Thomas Ivanov, in a wild sectarian frenzy, stocked up on a huge knife and chopped up the icon of the Moscow saint Alexei with it. This was a sad but convincing justification of the judicial jealousy of Stefan Yavorsky. Stephen after that, without the formal permission of the St. Petersburg authorities, with the full sympathy of his fellow bishops, convened a "consecrated council" (1714) for trial, at which he anathematized the newly-appeared iconoclasts and Protestants, subjected them to the discipline of church repentance, and burned Thomas at the stake. This burning at the stake, which had already broken through to us once from the West at the end of the fifteenth century through the Croatian Benjamin and, according to the story of the Austrian ambassador to Archbishop Gennadius, again began to pave the way to us along with the flood of Latin-Polish influences at the end of the seventeenth century. Even the orthodox Lutherans in the German Quarter burned at the stake their heretic, the visionary and Adventist Quirin Kuhlmann. The examples are contagious, and Stephen could not lag behind in zeal for the faith even from Peter's favorites, the Germans. Nevertheless, the tsar exploded and ordered Stephen to be reprimanded through the Senate. Stephen had no trouble proving that the indisputable heresy was obvious. But the senators looked at it from a different, utilitarian point of view. They rudely chose Stephen and, as the memoirist puts it, "with great sting and pity they drove him out, and he left the court chamber weeping." From that moment on, Stephen turned his polemical energy to writing his voluminous work "The Stone of Faith", which presented the Russian Church with a polemical apparatus for refuting Protestantism. Of course, Stephen was told in time that such a work, harmful to the state, which needed to attract foreigners, would not be published. During his lifetime, Stephen did not see it in print. For a decade and a half, The Stone of Faith lay in manuscript in the care of conservative hierarchs. Stefan gradually turned from a stranger into a pillar of old Moscow orthodoxy. This fanned his personality with gunpowder, for the camp in which he found himself waged an all-out war with Peter to the point of a direct state and dynastic conspiracy. The conspirators dreamed of the release of Peter's forcibly tonsured wife, Evdokia Lopukhina, at the time of the accession of Alexei Petrovich. When Alexei repented to his spiritual father, Archpriest Yakov Ignatov, that he wished death to his father, the confessor sympathetically said to him: "We all wish him death." There were many persons in the conspiracy: the Rostov Metropolitan Dositheus, and the confessor of Tsarina Eudoxia, Fyodor Pustynny, and their semi-secret "publicist" and agitator, the holy fool Michael Bosoi, all awaited the imminent death of Peter. Tsarevich Alexei himself fled abroad under a plausible pretext, but from there he was lured back by Peter with even greater cunning and then condemned and executed. Alexis' correspondence with the Russian bishops ruthlessly handed them over to the merciless trial of the enraged tsar. Alexei corresponded with Dositheus, Metr. Rostovsky, with Ignatius Smola, Met. Krutitsky and with Joasaph Krokovsky met. Kiev, and formulated his plan for the use of church authority in the following way: "When I have time without a priest (and Peter was going abroad at that moment), then I will whisper to the bishops, bishops to parish priests, and priests to parishioners, then they will reluctantly make me the ruler." Peter, of course, suspected the broad sympathy of the episcopate for the plans of Tsarevich Alexei, but he judged only by direct evidence. The consecrated council probably performed its heavy judicial duty with trepidation. Dositheus of Rostov said directly at the conciliar court: "I was the only one who was caught... Look, and everyone has what is on their minds. Will you please send your ears to the people, what do the people say?" Metropolitan Joasaph of Kiev died of excitement on the way to Moscow. Defrocked by the council and handed over to the civil authorities of Met. Dositheus and archpriests Yakov Ignatiev and Fyodor Pustynny were executed. Ignatius Smola was spared due to old age and banished "to retirement". Peter was heated up against the clergy. "O bearded men!", he sighed, "my father had to deal with one (meaning Nikon), and I have to deal with thousands. If it had not been for the nun (Eudoxia) and the monks, Alexei would not have dared to commit such an unheard-of evil." There was no evidence against Stephen, but Alexei's party considered him one of their own and hoped that Stephen would remove the monkhood from the Tsarevich if he was forcibly tonsured.

Having placed his stake on Kievan scholarly monasticism and having somewhat understood its two school trends, Peter intensified the selection of anti-Latins and freethinkers from among them as candidates for the episcopacy. In Novgorod, among the persecuted Cherkassy who fled from Moscow under Patriarch Adrian, Archimandrite Theodosius Yanovsky, gave him shelter hospitable to the Kievan schoolchildren, Metr. Novgorod Job. Theodosius was already the abbot of the Khutyn monastery here. Born from the Polish nobility with secular cheeky manners, a very free language, Peter liked Theodosius from the very first time. There were no such among the Great Russians. Peter was ready to make him a kind of church dictator in his new St. Petersburg region. In 1712, he placed him at the head of the newly opened St. Petersburg Alexander Nevsky Monastery with broad educational and reformist prospects. Peter invested Theodosius with his full confidence in church affairs and, disregarding canonical formalities, appointed him administrator of all church affairs of the Petersburg region. Peter especially liked the demonstratively secular manners of the Polish style of this secular prince of the church. In order to formalize him in the role of the church head of the region, after the death of Metr. In 1716, Peter ordered the appointment of Theodosius as Metropolitan of Novgorod. In the end, Peter made a mistake in Theodosius of Yanovsky. Already after the death of Peter, Theodosius tragically ended his life in the camp of the opponents of Peter's spirit. He was replaced in Peter's heart and, with sufficient reasons, by another, truly great Kievite, Theophan Prokopovich.

Theophanes, on the instructions of Peter himself, in the same year of 1716 was summoned to St. Petersburg, as they later began to say, "to the ranks," i.e., to be promoted to the episcopacy, from the Kiev Academy. According to Peter's plan, the Alexander Nevsky Monastery was to become a hotbed of a new and learned episcopate. In Theophanes these qualities were present in the highest and brilliant degree. Born in 1681 in the family of a Kiev merchant and baptized Eleazar, Theophanes only in adulthood adopted the name of his uncle, Theophan Prokopovich, who held the high post of rector of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Like Stefan Yavorsky, in order to "steal" higher education, knowing the then universal Latin, Eleazar embarked on foreign travels. It was necessary to enter for the full passage of the Roman Uniate College of St. Athanasius into the Basilian Order and become a Uniate monk with the name Elisha. The Jesuits could not help but appreciate the outstanding abilities of the then Elisey Prokopovich and offered him to join their order and remain a scholar at the Vatican Library. But Theophanes was able to conceal from them his guts, which were deeply and hostilely repelled by the whole of Romanism and drawn entirely to the side of Reformation theology. There are no documentary materials to reveal this process in the soul of the young Prokopovich. But the fact of his bright and scholarly transition to the camp of the anti-papists testifies to the fact that this kind of revolution took place in his soul already in his apprenticeship years in Rome. Having "stolen" the school and scholarship, Prokopovych returned to Kiev in 1702 and here, according to custom, took off all the masquerade of Uniatism. He was tonsured again and given the new name of Samuel. Samuel became a professor of poetry at the Academy. In 1705, Theophan was honored at his request with a new change of name in honor of his late uncle Theophanes. Theophan successively taught courses in rhetoric, then philosophy, and from 1714 to 1716 the Higher Course of Theology. It was here that in the exposition of theology the new historical and critical method of expounding dogmas, which he had assimilated by himself from the entire libraries of Protestant theology he had read in Latin, was revealed in all its force. A kind of beginning of the History of Dogmas. This was so fresh, weighty and influential that it became a creative factor for the entire Russian school theology of the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, which served to liberate our Orthodox theology from the deadening Latin scholastic fetters.

Peter did not immediately notice Theophanes, although already in 1706 Theophanes, when meeting Peter in Kiev, said a word of greeting to him. But when, in the jubilant moment after the victory of Poltava in 1709, during divine services on the battlefield itself, Theophan was instructed to deliver a solemn sermon, Theophan shocked Peter with his brilliant art of eloquence. He connected various accidents, such as, for example, the calendar coincidence of the day of victory, June 27, with the memory of the Monk Sampson. Peter, of course, was turned into a hero, the judge Sampson, who slew 10,000 Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey and tore apart a lion, i.e., Charles XII. The coat of arms of Sweden is made up of the figures of three lions, and the sun enters the zodiacal sign of the lion from the end of June and in July. All this was a spectacular play on oratorical words, but at an exceptional moment it sounded mystical symbolism even for Peter. Peter's cocked hat, shot through by a bullet, was not forgotten in his speech. Enchanted, Peter, of course, could not forget Theophanes after this. Setting out on the Prut campaign of 1711, Peter wished to take Professor Theophan with him as the head of the military clergy and, of course, became even more convinced of the special value of the personality of Theophan for all his church plans. He appointed him head of the Academy and abbot of the Kiev-Brotherhood Monastery, and professor of theology, and rector of the Academy. For the conservative Latin scholastic school of the majority of the academic corporation, this career rise of Theophanes was a frightening revolutionary dictatorship. The Protestant trend of Theophanes' theology was simply incomprehensible to the mass of professors hardened in Catholic scholasticism. They perceived it as rationalism and freethinking, and their own Latin scholasticism was identified with Orthodoxy and served as its criterion. The honest and courageous leaders of the Academy, Archimandrites Theophylact Lopatinsky and Gideon Vishnevsky, soon known bishops, decided to file an open protest against the sovereign, who was mistaken, in their opinion, due to ignorance of theology. In 1712, such an accusatory report was sent to the new northern capital. Peter tactically took into account this kind of mood, did not sharpen the situation deliberately, but did not deviate from his firm line either. In 1716, he summoned Theophan to St. Petersburg "for a servant," as a preacher. It was clear that this was the closest step towards the episcopacy. The Academy was alarmed again. Both Gideon and Theophylact wrote a new accusation against Theophan of Protestantism, sent it to the emperor through the locum tenens Stephen, who also attached his signature to the accusation. Peter patiently put everything under the shelf again. And, having waited three years, in 1718 he proposed to the consecrated council to appoint Theophan Archbishop of Pskov, so that his residence would be St. Petersburg, which had already become the real capital of the Baltic northern region in place of Pskov and Novgorod.

Peter correctly appreciated both the erudition and talents of Theophanes in comparison with Theodosius Yanovsky, whom he had previously placed in the post of St. Petersburg, with the title of Novgorod. Theodosius' secularism and ostentatious brilliance were a will-o'-the-wisp in comparison with the truly bright light of Western learning, culture, and Theophanes' broad state-political ideology. Finally, after a series of mistakes, Peter found and groped among the theologians and hierarchs the one he could only dream of. He was a congenial personality. A type of innovator, a reformer, armed with genuine knowledge and, it must be admitted, endurance and tact, rare in the conservative atmosphere of the church. A pair of great people have been selected, to whom we owe the church reform with all its positive and negative qualities. Now Peter was only waiting for Stephen's natural death to replace the leadership of church administration with a new reliable leader. And Theophanes, in collusion with Peter, decided to become an inspired inhabitant of a new, unloved capital on the Neva swamp. On the plot allotted on Karpovka, Theophanes, at the expense of the Novgorod cathedra, built himself a good bishop's estate and in it, delighting Peter, led a secular open way of life. Theophan was by temperament the continuer of that cheerful humanistic idealism which blossomed in the fourteenth century, was carried through the laic circles of the Reformation, and was revived again in Catholic circles of the epoch of "enlightenment" (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Theophan was an "enlightener." Under the patronage of Peter, it gave him pleasure to mock the Old Testament forms of everyday and ecclesiastical obscurantism and to propagate humanitarian optimism for the glory of the sovereign-reformer and the bright banner of enlightenment. In 1716, Theophanes, summoned to the Neva capital, wrote to his friend from the Academy, the nobleman Y. Markevich: "Perhaps you have heard that I am summoned for the episcopacy. This honor also attracts and seduces me, as if I were condemned to be thrown to be devoured by wild beasts. The fact is that with the best powers of my soul I hate mitres, sakkos, rods, candlesticks, censers, and other other pleasures. Add to that very fat and huge fish. If I love these things, if I seek them, may God punish me with something worse. I love the work of the episcopacy and would like to be a bishop if I did not have to be a comedian instead of the episcopacy, for the episcopal situation is extremely unfavorable to this, if Divine Wisdom does not correct it. Therefore, I intend to make every effort to deflect this extraordinary honor from myself and fly back to you." Here the reformer in Orthodoxy opens his heart to his fellow theologian. His enemies are ritualists, ritualists and medieval opponents of the optimism of the new humanistic culture. It is with bold pathos that Theophan preaches from the ambo under the metropolitan's mitre. "The essence of the netii, (and God would grant that many would not be) either a secret demon of flattery, or a melancholy darkened, who have such a freak in their thoughts, that everything is sinful and filthy to them, that they will either see wonderful, cheerful, great, and glorious, also righteous, and right, and not contrary to God... Such were called misanphropi by the Hellenes of old, they are misanthropes. And these, above all, do not tremble at the glory of dishonor, and have all worldly power not only for the work of God, but impute it to an abomination... And so they want to think about the supreme power below, to be righteous and legitimized by God." Foreign and Russian "chicks of Petrov's nest" often feasted with Theophanes in his wooden palace on Karpovka, as a kind of order of a new breed of people. Peter himself liked to marry in this company. One day, it was already about midnight, when Peter the Uninvited had the idea to appear at the feast with Theophanes. The guests were already tipsy. Theophanes was not at a loss, and greeted the unexpected guest with a theological joke: "Behold, the bridegroom is coming at midnight. And blessed is the servant, whom the vigilant shall find"! Peter was delighted and the feast continued.

Until recently kept in the Novgorod Seminary, the library of Theophan consists of more than 3,000 volumes, most of the folios in leather bindings, three-quarters of which consists of Protestant authors. This is both a material value and a rich apparatus that served Theophan in his literary works. Removed from the Kiev cabinet and placed on the broad market of the reform-political life of Russia, Theophan left behind him about seventy works of varying length and peculiar quality, characteristic of a militant publicist. Theophanes, aware of his intellectual superiority over the environment, did not hesitate to abuse rather bold sophisms for the sake of practical and polemical goals, although he could have clothed the same ideas in more restrained objective forms.

For Peter, Theophan was a living Academy in all matters of church and state. Theophanes then became Peter's brain. Who else could ideologically and competently serve Peter in his tragedy with his heir son and in the plan to break the very law of succession to the throne, except Theophanes? Using the ready-made theory of natural law and its doctrine of supreme power, Theophan handed Peter a magic apparatus to justify his state revolution from above. This concept was set forth by Theophan in a well-known treatise-manifesto entitled: "The Truth of the Monarch's Will." Quoting Hugo Grotius, Theophanes defines the essence of supreme power under the name of "Mayesteta" as a power that, "according to God, is greater than that in the world." Mayestet legislates, but "is not subject to any laws himself." No other human will can destroy the will of the maiestet, except himself, "for he can change his will powerfully." Theophanes is a bishop, and cannot but explain in what relations the absolute earthly supremacy of the maiestet consists in relation to the laws of God. The supreme authority is "so subject to the law of God that it is guilty of the transgression of that (i.e., the law of God) only of God, and not of human judgment." A sophistry is hidden here: the entire visible church and hierarchy are eliminated, as also organs of "God's judgment," tacitly relegated here to the category of human judgment only. There is a reference to Theodore Balsamon, that "the king is below the canons, below the laws." Balsamon's excess, which is not generally accepted in Orthodoxy, in freeing the basileus from the power of the canons, makes it easier for Theophanes to draw the necessary conclusion, "that every autocrat, both in all others and in this matter, i.e. in the determination of an heir to his throne, is very free and free."

Such a philosophy of church-state law fundamentally overthrew the entire ancient Russian theocratic structure. Not two supreme parallel powers, not two maiestets, but one. And this single maiestet, the monarch, tests himself by the yardstick of God's law directly, directly, without the interference of the church. He knows only the judgment of his conscience over himself. If it is a theocracy, then it is not embodied in anything, unorganized: neither canonical, nor juridical, but purely subjective. Theophan himself does not even deign to mention and analyze all the old church-state relations. In this treatise, the absolute rights of the maiestet are applied only to the clause on succession to the throne. But it became clear to every thinking head that, according to the new legal doctrine, a completely free path was open to the secular maiestet – to rebuild the supreme administration of the Russian Church and to radically change its position in the Russian state with one stroke of the pen.

Operating with a theory of natural law alien to the Church, Theophan throws away all the old theocratic foundations as unfit for use. It replaces the last goal of the state and power. Previously, they served the kingdom of heaven, eternal salvation. Now "every supreme power has the ultimate fault of its institution – the benefit of the whole people. Only the people should know this, that their sovereign should take care of the common good. But in matters of his care, he stands or falls to the non-people, but to God alone, and is subject to Him alone's judgment." The judgment of God is not completely forgotten, but it is transferred to the recesses of the monarch's conscience. Nothing "human" is allowed to see him, not even the hierarchy, clothed in sakkos and mitre, and with the cross and the Gospel in their hands. He is no longer a Christian basileus, but a secular absolute monarch of natural law according to Hobbes and Pufendorf, serving the "public good." For the Christian basileus, this common benefit, this summum Vonum, was determined by the Church. Now this quality of the common good is determined by the absolute secular power itself, which has already broken away from the nationwide according to the same theory by means of a contrat sosial. This agreement once and for all stripped the all-people (and the church and the hierarchy are mentally included in the all-people) of its right to determine the highest good and transferred it into the stream of monarchical inheritance. Theophanes formulates it thus: "In accordance with all that we will, that thou mayest possess us eternally for our common good, that is, since thou art mortal, then thou shalt henceforth leave us an inherited ruler; but we, having once cast off our will, will never use it in the future, lower after your death, but as we obey you with an oath promise, we bind our heirs with the same obligation." But Theophanes is a keen theologian. He needs to somehow combine with this rationalistic theory of authority the apostolic teaching that "there is no authority except from God." The rationally clear, natural order, according to Theophanes, coincides with the providential one: "It is fitting that the people's will... it does not happen without God's own providence, but acts by God's beckoning. And for the sake of all the duty, both of the subjects to their sovereign, and of the sovereign to the common good of their subjects, proceeds not from the will of the people, but also from the will of God." Since "from the will of God", then it would seem that the authorized interpreter of the latter and for the monarch himself, it would seem, should be the church and the hierarchy. Theophanes sophistically evades this logical conclusion. And at the same time, in the same place, it dazzles the eyes of the listeners with the absolute independence of monarchical power in determining the positive qualities of the common good and benefit. All this is legally capable of being established by the absolute monarch himself at his own discretion. In order to avoid cases where this discretion diverges from the will of God, Theophan confines himself to one sly reservation of a negative nature. "The monarch sovereign can lawfully command the people not only everything that is necessary for the noble benefit of his fatherland, but also everything that he pleases; as long as it is not harmful to the people and not contrary to the will of God." The monarch is the creator of laws in the proper sense of the word, i.e., the creator of the new, as yet unknown to the people. It is not yet possible to verify this novelty by any references to old truths, nor by quotations from the Holy Scriptures. Nor by the voice of the councils of the hierarchy, nor by anything positive. Only the minimum sign of truth remains, a negative one: "as long as it is not harmful" (and who is the judge? common sense?..) "and it is not contrary to the will of God" (again, who is the judge? the same common sense, since the voice of the Church is excluded?). Theophan understands that here he is agreeing to the absolutism of monarchical power over truth itself, and boldly admits this as the result of the people's fundamental renunciation of their will, i.e., of the evaluation of all these questions by their own consciousness. The most sacred, mystical principle of Orthodoxy, its national conciliarity in the matter of witnessing to the truth, is here significantly distorted and limited. The area of assessments constituting the monopoly of the monarch is closed to the conciliar court of the church. On the contrary, along with civil issues, some religious and ecclesiastical issues are completely open to the monarch. Something in faith, in worship, and in the church, the monarch has the right to reform "as he pleases." Here are the transparently vague words of Theophanes: "To this power of the monarch is the basis of the above-mentioned, that the people have cast off their will as rulers" before him and have given all power over themselves to him. And here are all kinds of rites, civil and ecclesiastical, changes in customs, the use of dress, houses, buildings, ranks and ceremonies in feasts, weddings, burials, and so on and so forth."

In his break-up of the Old Church theocracy, Peter was in his own way very cautious, slow, and not even quite sure. For him, Theophanes' head was a maximalist reflector of his transformative desires. No one else later, none of the zealots and chief procurators of the Synodal Period, came to such radical conclusions as Theophan Prokopovich. Theophanes' ideological destruction of the Orthodox-canonical order has remained in our history as an unrepeated fortissimo, only clouded by oblivion for 250 years. Here, for example, is the power of the monarch in the Church, according to Theophanes, in his sermon of 1718 "On the power and honor of the Tsar": "Does anyone think, and many think, that not all people are obliged by this obligation" (i.e., absolute dependence on the monarch) "to the essence, but some are turned off, namely the priesthood and monasticism. This is a thorn, or rather a sting, but this sting is a serpent's sting, — this is a papal spirit, but it does not somehow reach and touch us. For the priesthood is a different matter, there is a different order in the people, and not another state." Here Theophanes has a conscious polemical-sophistic confusion of concepts, a silence about the antinomic polarity of church and state. He takes advantage of the weakness of thought of his opponents, the Old Moscow theocrats. Out of traditional naivety, they also monistically thought of the merged church and state, and in necessary cases, the same keys of the concepts of "priesthood, monasticism... they emitted other, incomparable with earthly, heavenly sounds. Theophanes catches his opponents in this confusion and drives them into the rut of monism, which only excludes all mysticism, the monism of the secular, absolute state. The Church and the priesthood on this line are for him only the same ranks or categories of people's state functions, i.e., simply cogs in a single integral machine, fatally obedient to one moving lever: the monarch. Here is Theophanes' syllogistic, not devoid of gross naivety. "As the army is different, citizenship is different, doctors are different, artists are different, and all with their affairs are subject to supreme power. Thus pastors, teachers, and simply all spiritual beings have their own work, since they are servants of God and builders of His mysteries, both are subject to the command of the sovereign authorities, and abide in the work of their calling. And to punishment, if they do not abide. Moreover, if they do not do what they have in common with the rest of the people." A deliberately false equation of the matter, the church with "other duties of the people." Slyly using the monistic point of view of his opponents, Theophan bombards them with the usual quotations from St. Theophanes. For example, "let every soul obey those in power." "Everyone" means also ecclesiastical; There is no question of exceptions. Only the elementary truth that obedience to "everyone and everything" refers only to the goal and object of state power, i.e., to purely political questions, and not to questions of religion, conscience, or the Church, is silent. To the naïve theocracy, which has not built a clear system for itself, Theophan mockingly takes revenge by citing its premises ad àbsurdum.

These general presuppositions, in a number of special treatises, are developed in their applied meaning to the question of the abolition of the patriarchate and its replacement by a new collegial principle, unknown to ecclesiastical canonics. When, from 1717-1718, Peter clearly conspired with Theophan about the general features of the planned reform, both of them did not conceal the foundations of the reform on occasion, and Theophan carefully and cunningly argued for it. The Byzantine system, with its norms and factual abuses, opened up the possibility for the disputing parties to refer to it equally. More cunning, of course, were the exiles of Theophanes. According to Nartov's testimony, Peter now expressed himself decisively: "God has deigned to correct my citizenship and clergy, I am both sovereign and patriarch of them. They have forgotten, in antiquity it was combined." This power, in particular the reformatory power, is historically derived by Theophanes in his study or "Search for the Pantifex" from the power of the Roman emperor, which also included religious power as rontiphex mahimus. In the history of church law, this is a well-known fact. But Theophan uses it in order to artificially clothe the emperors in episcopal vestments and, conversely, the bishops as such, to deprive them of the mystical weight of their power and, if possible, to equate their service with technical, organizational service. Theophan asks the question: "Can Christian sovereigns be called bishops, bishops, and in what mind?" First of all, it is advantageous for Theophan to debunk the very idea of the episcopate by means of a philological and archaeological interpretation of it from the most prosaic, elementary aspect. As early as in Roman pagan times, the term bishops meant literally: "overseers, overseers, guards, observers." "The name of the bishop, not according to the priesthood, but according to the duty of supervision, supervision, and government, lies with the pastors." Having thus humiliated the role of the bishop in the church hierarchy in the eyes of the reader, Theophanes, on the contrary, throws the episcopal terminological mantle over the shoulders of the sovereign and tries to give it an ecclesiastical hierarchical tinge. The method of equation through mixing. Sovereigns are the "bishops of bishops" of their people. Bishops are overseers, and sovereigns are overseers over them, for they have "the supreme supervision over public affairs."

As a result, the old pagan role of pontifexes among Christian sovereigns is justified. Only not by performing sacraments, as in paganism, do the Christian pontifexes lawfully and righteously govern both the hierarchy and church affairs by virtue of their supreme state power... In this argument there is a subtle ideological forgery, which not everyone will soon discover. From the pagan root rontifekh mahimus came the ecclesiastical and administrative power of the theocratic Byzantine basileus, sanctified by Christianity, and the power of our Moscow tsars, copying it. Theophanes, on the other hand, allegedly deduces and justifies from the same root the new European, anti-theocratic power of the absolute European monarch according to the idea of natural law, where it is not the monarch who serves the church, but the church serves the monarch. Yes, the Christian basileus had some jura sirsa sasra for the higher purposes of serving the Kingdom of God. And the absolute monarch of natural law has the highest goal of his service in the realm of this earthly culture. A theocratic king gave his kingdom to the service of the church, an absolute monarch gives the church to the service of the state. That this is precisely the purpose of all Theophanes' journalistic arguments, he himself later comments on in a letter to the hegumen Markell Rodyshevsky: "In the book about the Emperor-Pontifex it is clearly shown that the tsar is the judge and ruler of the entire spiritual order, and they, every rank, and the patriarch himself, are subject to the tsar and subject to justice, like other subjects. And the same is true for spiritual power-seekers, who desire the patriarchy, and dust in the eyes." Such are the ideological prerequisites for the overdue reform of church administration in the views of Peter and Theophanes.

The Secret Beginning of Church Reform