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.

Thus, without any ecclesiastical unction, even if only ceremonial and ceremonial, the will of the secular absolute monarch, under the habitual appearance of the will of the Orthodox tsar in an Orthodox state, was given a prescription to the church. Not by some conciliar, ecclesiastical act, even if only ostentatious, but in the ordinary, purely state order, by a legislative manifesto of the emperor signed by the Senate. The Church, which is within the framework of the Russian state, was prescribed to abolish the old traditional canonical system of government, and a new collegial administration was introduced, unusual for the Church, but already usual and generally accepted in the state. Instead of the hoped-for patriarch, at the head of the church is placed an ordinary state institution among others, even with an ugly Latin name: "Collegium Spiritual." Officials, executors of the supreme monarch's will, appointed members of the Collegium to it, just like to other collegiums. The members of the Ecclesiastical Collegium are enjoined to take an oath of allegiance in the Senate, according to the text that has already been prepared, just as it was done when all the other collegiums were established. Service is service. No thought of any bifurcation of powers under a single absolute monarch is allowed. On the next day, January 26, in the usual legislative order, the Senate submitted for the highest approval and approved the standard staff of the new collegium: a) President from metropolitans – 1, b) Vice-presidents from archbishops – 2, c) Counselors from archimandrites – 3, d) Assessors from protopopes – 4, e) Yes from Greek black priests – 1. The personnel was also proposed for approval: "In the Spiritual Collegium, the bishops are: President Stephen, Metropolitan of Ryazan; Vice-Presidents: Archbishops: Theodosius of Novgorod, Theophan of Pskov; The advisers were archimandrites: Peter Simonovsky, Leonid Petrovsky, Hierotheos Donskoy, Gabriel of the Ipatsky Monastery. The assessors are archpriests: John of Troitsky, Peter Sampsonievsky, and the Greek black priest, and about the fourth, whom the Ecclesiastical Collegium pleases." Peter put down a resolution: "Summoning these to the Senate, to declare. Also, the decree should be handed over to them and the oath." From January 25 to February 14, all the appointed 11 members of the Collegium gradually appeared in the Senate, received a decree and took the oath, as was customary for all collegiums serving the Tsar and being under one Senate "cap" covering them.

After the signing of the Spiritual Regulations by the entire hierarchy, which was successful for Peter, the tsar-reformer must have felt satisfied and ready to give up some of the Protestant excesses of his projects. Such, for example, is the proposal made by Theophan in Part I of the Rules of Procedure under Point 5, that it should be "impossible for everyone to form secretly" in the Ecclesiastical Collegium (i.e., in order to avoid political conspiracies). These should be "persons of various ranks and ranks: bishops, archimandrites, abbots and from the authorities of the white priesthood; and what is more pleasing to this fear, if honest and prudent persons are added to the spiritual rank from the secular rank." These lines, underlined by us and not put into effect by Peter, are nevertheless present in all white and draft official copies of the Regulations. But already in the text kept in the Chamber of Sessions of St. These words are enclosed in square brackets not by the scribe's hand, but, judging by the ink, apparently by Theophan himself, of course, with the permission of Peter himself. The list includes the Spirit. of the Rules of Procedure, which was kept in the Synodal Archives, the words were crossed out by Theophanes. And in the list of the Senate, they remained untouched. But in all printed publications of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these lines are missing. And only for the first time were they promulgated with historical accuracy in the first volume of the monumental publication of the Synod in 1879: "The Complete Collection of Resolutions and Orders on the Department of the Orthodox Confession of the Russian Empire." This means that the original idea of the construction of the Ecclesiastical Collegium was sharply Protestant.

Manifesto and Oath

The texts of these two founding documents, dated "the 25th of January, in St. Petersburg" sounded extraordinarily characteristic and innovative to the ears of the old Moscow church, as they do to ours now.

In the manifesto, the "Autocrat of All Russia" directly declares his power and duty to correct "the disorders of the spiritual rank, on the same grounds as the "military and civil ranks." The Church here is reduced only to a "spiritual rank" subject to the monarch "by the image of the former pious tsars." But the former tsars acted through church councils. In fact, Peter does not act "in their image" at all. Odin, by his secular power, prescribes a new government to the Church, without deigning to mention the abolition of the old, patriarchal one. The tsar simply declares: "Seeing no better way to correct the order of the spiritual order than a conciliar government, since it is not without passion in a single person, moreover, it is not hereditary power, for this reason we are negligent, we establish the Spiritual Collegium, i.e. the Spiritual Conciliar Government." That the "council" (the representation of free votes) and the "collegium" (appointed bureaucratic officials) are essentially antipodes of power, this is either naïveté or cunning camouflaged by playing with the vague word "conciliarity." Peter established this pseudo-conciliar governmental authority in the Russian Church, as supreme, peremptory, i.e., even excluding an appeal to the court of the Council of Eastern Patriarchs. This is said cunningly and covertly, in vague terms, by no means accurate. But the trend is clear:

"And we command all Our faithful subjects of every rank, spiritual and temporal, to have this for an important and powerful Government (how "important and strong"? is not directly defined; one cunning hint) and from him the extreme affairs of the spiritual administration to ask for decisions and decisions" (does this mean sovereign power?!) and to be satisfied with his definite judgment" (i.e., without appeals to any higher authority that no longer exists or is forever closed to the clergy). But the final phrase of this paragraph is striking in its sophistry. If the Spirit. The collegium is presented as the supreme and state authority (for the existence of any ecclesiastical authority is here tacitly simply denied), then, it would seem, that it is necessary to compare the newly-invented organ of supreme ecclesiastical authority with the supreme state one, i.e., with the peremptory, i.e., the Senate, which is not subject to the jurisdiction of anyone except the monarch. And the manifesto reads:

"and to listen to his decrees in everything, under great punishment for resistance and disobedience "against the other Colleges" (!!). If the Spirit, the Collegium, does not legally exceed the rank of Collegiums, and the Collegiums can be complained to the Senate, then it means that the Spirit is also complained about. Collegium, as it is to appeal to the Collegium (no more) to the Senate. If, in addition to the Senate, it was directly addressed to the monarch, then it was necessary to have the courage and sincerity to write so directly in the law. But this was not done. And this, as we shall see, was the reason for the heated struggle of the future Synod for its dignity with the Senate, which logically remembered the original sin of the Synod, which was imprudently conceived as one of the Collegiums, i.e., bodies of general administration, subordinate to it – the Senate.