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

Only the spirit of reform was clear to Peter. But he was powerless to formalize it precisely legally and canonically. Theophanes was a scholarly and sighted specialist. As an anti-Romanist, he was certainly sympathetic to the spirit of enlightened absolutism, which fought for its primacy in Catholic countries: in France, the so-called Gallicanism, and later in Austria, the so-called Josephinism. But even more direct and close to Theophanes' heart example of the primacy of the state over the church were the systems of Protestant countries. According to the Protestant canonical systems, the churches located on the territory of a given state depend in their supreme administration on the head of the given territory, the Landes Ner. This is the so-called canonical territorialism. Theophan clearly thought of the solution of the church-state problem precisely in the spirit of Protestant territorialism.

But neither Gallicanism nor Protestant territorialism has yet precluded undesirable friction between church and state, as long as the church, according to the alphabet of the Orthodox canons, was headed by a "first bishop," whom others "recognize as the head and do nothing without his consideration" (First Apostolic Canon). It was necessary to copy some other, non-Orthodox model, where such ecclesiastical primacy and leadership would not exist. The only thing left to do was to turn to a headless, hierarchical, pluralistic Protestantism. Peter, even before Theophanes, knew well that for the administration of the church in Protestant countries, along with other bureaucratic apparatuses, there existed, along with other bureaucratic apparatuses, an apparatus of the same name for the administration of church affairs. The term "ministries" did not yet exist. The term "collegium" was in vogue. Collegiums are a variant of bureaucracy, where the managing official is internally limited to the votes of the members. This fashionable constitutional form of bureaucracy interested Peter very early. And he, from the time of his first trip to England in 1698, ordered there a specialist Francis Lee (Le) to draw up a draft of collegiums in case it was used in the Muscovite state. In F. Lee's project, among the seven collegiums, there is also a collegium called "for the propagation of the Christian religion" (fоr thе ррораgаtiоn оf thе Сhristiаn Religion). Peter, who since then had been constantly occupied with the idea of introducing a collegial system at home, and during his travels, directly and through the intermediary of persons specially sent for intelligence to various states, did not cease to collect materials for collegial reform. In 1711, Peter met Leibniz and advised him on this issue. Under the name of Leibniz, a project of nine collegiums has been preserved, among which there is a Religious Collective. Peter did not need to go far for examples of state-Protestant forms of church government. In Moscow, in the German quarter, he had both the Kirshen Kollegium and in it the Kirshenrаth, where the pastors — Kirshen vоrstеhеr and the laity — Kirshen ältеstеn. And the statute of this institution was issued "with the approval of His Imperial Majesty" in 1715. In 1712, Peter began to introduce collegiums for individual departments, starting with the Collegium of Commerce. From 1715, Peter made a choice of the model of reform in the form of the Swedish system. For the final comparison and possible improvement, he even hired the Dutchman Fick for this special task, who, after two years of work, together with Bruce, had to specify in detail the entire plan of work. Upon his return from abroad in October 1717, Peter appointed presidents to ten planned colleges, ordered the presidents to "compose their collegiums" and come into action. It is characteristic of Peter's cautious tactics that among the ten collegiums there is not even a mention of a church collegium. Under the leadership of the locum tenens, the former patriarchal orders continued to conduct business. Various staff ranks of the former patriarchal court still existed, and the clergy of that time, not without naivety, at times annoyed Peter with reminders that it was time to elect a patriarch as well. This was a complete misunderstanding of the then anti-patriarchal sentiment of Peter, who in 1717-1718 was experiencing a tragic trial of Tsarevich Alexei. After the introduction of the system of ten collegiums, Peter's thoughts came close to another daring – to establish a similar state ministry for church affairs – a "collegium". Peter discovered this as if by accident.

In May 1718, he summoned Stephen from his comfortable life in Moscow to the unsettled, barracks of St. Petersburg. Having been homeless for the whole summer and autumn, Stephen submitted to the tsar, who had been hardened in field life, a faint-hearted, whiny request to let him go to Moscow for the time being for more thorough preparations, pestering the tsar with a number of other questions: a) how can we live here without our locum tenens? b) How can the Moscow and Ryazan dioceses be governed from here? c) How can bishops be summoned here, where should they live here? d) How should vacant cathedras be filled in the future? All these annoying questions clearly sabotaged the uncomfortable new capital and together were evidence of Stefan's administrative inertia and lack of talent. Peter exploded, and after a series of reproachful remarks on the report, as if by chance, he ended them with the following significant statement: "And for better management in the future, it seems that there will be a Spiritual Collegium, so that it would be more convenient to correct such great things." Boiling over against Stephen, Peter, apparently, immediately ordered Theophan to write a motivated project for the establishment of the Ecclesiastical Collegium, and Theophan was already writing it in December 1718. Each collegium was guided by its own charter, called "regulations". And Theophanes was also ordered to have regulations. In the draft manuscript of the Ecclesiastical Regulations, Theophan wrote that the other collegiums Peter "wisely... set in this year of 1718." Theophanes wrote a whole book so that the king's plan would be best motivated and protected. This is not a brief statute of the new institution, but only what we now call an explanatory note to the future law. And in the draft of the State Archives, the manuscript does not bear the name of "regulations". It is entitled as follows: "This book, the Ecclesiastical Collegium, containing a description and reasoning..." In its form, this book of Theophanes is not a dry, condensed law and regulations, but a journalistic agitational work in defense of the Reformation plan, written in a very subjective satirical, partly descriptive style. Often even in the first person: "We propose to find out if the good and not our inventions, God willing, so that they could only think about it." As a literary work that vividly reflects the living face of the author, this document entered the general history of Russian literature. All of Peter's legislation is full of resonance. It is not surprising that in such a delicate matter as church reform, Peter even directly disposed Theophan to a broad resonance, to documentation, from which it is necessary to extract special brief legislative theses. Neither Peter nor Theophanes, carried away by the difficult task of persuading church circles, did not even notice that the document they were putting into circulation under the guise of "Regulations" represented a certain formal absurdity. But the task was extremely delicate, and the reformers did not worry in the least about the harmony and legal elegance of the form. Once, in 1719, Peter was in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, and, according to the notes of his orderly P. V. Nartov, he asked Theophanes: "Tell me, father, how soon will our patriarch be ready?" To this Peter added cheerfully: "And I have a hat ready for him!" If the last words are not empty jokes, then it is permissible to think that Peter here meant the hat under which he would place the future "patriarch". If Theophanes made a cassock for the "patriarch" – regulations – according to the template of the collegiums, then in Peter's scheme all 12 collegiums were harmoniously and uniformly subordinated to a common head – the Senate, the deputy in emergency cases of the monarch himself. This is the "cap" under which Peter thought to put the new college, like under the hen of a new chicken. On the manuscript of the draft regulations, marked in places with Peter's own notes, at the end of it we read the postscripts in Theophanes' hand: "This is all written here first by the All-Russian Monarch Himself, His Imperial Most Holy Majesty, to listen to what is in front of him, to reason and correct this 1720 on the 11th day of February." This first moment of the birth of church reform proceeds in complete secrecy from the Church and its hierarchy. Reform is a product of the will of an absolute monarch.

Open autocratic reform

For Peter, at last, the moment came for the open implementation of the long-planned reform. He involved his deliberative bodies in the discussion of the project: the Senate and some hierarchs who had been in St. Petersburg in the position of the former "consecrated council." On February 23, Peter sent a decree to the Chief Secretary of the Senate:

"Upon receipt of this, announce to the Most Reverend Bishops and Gentlemen of the Senate, so that the draft of the Ecclesiastical Collegium, enclosed with it, may be heard tomorrow: shall it be so? And if something does not seem so, the remarks should be accompanied by an explication of the guilt of the case." Apparently, the verbal unwritten order also required lightning-fast progress in the entire procedure. Ecclesiastical and secular persons, not yet having either a telegraph or a telephone, considered it necessary not to postpone the hearing of the emergency bill until the indicated "tomorrow", but tried to meet on the same day, February 23. They continued to read the next day. According to the clerical certificate "of the same February 24, according to the above-written His Empress. The Majesties of the decree, the Most Reverend Bishops and Gentlemen of the Senate listened to the draft that had been sent," in some points they supplemented. "And about the rest they announced that everything was done pretty well." The ecclesiastical dignitaries who recognized the whole act as "considerable" were as follows: 6 bishops – Stephen (Yavorsky) of Ryazan, Sylvester (Kholmsky) of Smolensk, Pitirim (Potemkin) Archbishop. Nizhny Novgorod, Varlaam (Kossovsky) ep. Tverskoy, Aaron (Eropkin) ep. Karelsky, Theophan (Prokopovich) ep. Pskov; and 3 archimandrites: Theodosius (Yanovsky) St. Petersburg Al. Nevsky Monastery, Anthony, Moscow. Zlatoust Monastery, Jonah of the Kazan Transfiguration Monastery. Hastening to consolidate this first formal victory over the clergy, the very next day Peter demanded that the agreement reached be sealed with signatures. "As yesterday," writes Peter in a special decree to the Senate, "I heard from you that both the bishops and you heard the project on the ecclesiastical collegium and accepted everything as a blessing, for this reason it behooves the bishops and you to sign it, which I will then seal as well. And it is better to sign two and leave one here, and send the other to the other bishops for signing." According to the stationery, two copies were signed and sealed on February 27 and signed by the tsar. The force of a formally binding law was fully expressed by these signatures of the bearers of supreme state and ecclesiastical authority. Further formalities of signing the Spiritual Regulations by spiritual dignitaries in the dioceses had only moral significance: - informing about the accomplished fact and collecting benevolent advice on the improvement of the created institution. The new form of supreme administration of the Russian Church flowed out of the one-man will of the absolute monarch, without the conciliar will of the Russian Church itself and without agreement with the conciliar will of all the other autocephalous Orthodox Churches. The top of the Russian hierarchy unquestioningly accepted this constituent expression of the will of the secular authorities. The formal non-canonicity of this reform is beyond any dispute. Non-canonicity in essence will become clear to us soon.

Satisfied with the first decisive victory, Peter gave a year to join the rest of the hierarchy in this group de l'églis. By decree of the Senate, a secular agent of power, Lieutenant Colonel Semyon Davydov, was appointed to collect signatures from the hierarchy of all parts of Russia. Accompanied, for the sake of decency, by a clergyman, Archimandrite Anthony of Chrysostom. By a new decree of the Senate of 9/III 1720, it was ordered to begin the signatures with Moscow, with the Metropolitan of Krutitsa, with the bishops, archimandrites and abbots who happened to be there. The decree, not without rudeness, expressed the desire to have only an obedient signature without reasoning: "Announcing the proposal to them by the decree of the Tsar's Majesty, that, having heard it, they should sign with their own hands, namely, the bishop on the half of the sheet on which the bishops and archimandrites, who were in St. Petersburg, signed, and on the other, the archimandrites and abbots, without waiting for the arrival of others, so that they would not be delayed in Moscow. And when anyone signs, he will go to his places as before. And if one of them is impossible for a bishop to go to Moscow for some illness, then for the sake of this signing, the Archimandrite of Chrysostom and Davydov himself will go themselves. And then order them to sign together with the archimandrites and abbots of the monasteries there. And if anyone does not sign, and take by the hand of him who does not sign it for the sake of it, so that he may show it by name." Davydov reported weekly to the Senate on the progress of the case and, seven months later, having traveled around Russia, returned to St. Petersburg on January 4, 1721. So I gathered myself under the Spirit. Regulations on the completeness of signatures. In addition to the tsarist and six senators, there were signatures of a total of 87 clergymen: 6 metropolitans, 1 archbishop, 12 bishops, 48 archimandrites, 15 abbots, 5 hieromonks. There was no sign of objections or amendments. Only in Southern Russia did a certain clerical and freedom-loving spirit make itself deafly felt. Bishop Anthony (Stakhovsky) of Chernigov and Kirill (Shumlyansky) of Pereyaslavl clearly delayed their response. On 14/VII, 1720, the Senate ordered the Kiev governor to send saboteurs to St. Petersburg, and in the decree the guilty themselves were threatened with deliberate rudeness: "The Great Tsar has indicated... to send you to St. Petersburg as before, in spite of all your dissuasions and illnesses." Signatures were given after that, of course.