Alexander Kireev and Theological Controversy in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1890–1910

Abstract

In 1888 a pamphlet was published in Europe whose authors declared that the Russian Church was facing a doctrinal crisis. Perhaps an effort of the Society of Jesus, the work concluded that the scholarly exchanges of the early 1870s between the German Old Catholics and some Orthodox theologians inspired a questioning among Russian participants about important Orthodox dogmatic teachings. The central issue concerned the dogma of the procession of the Holy Spirit (filioque). The crisis was induced by an inability of the Russians to accept all their former traditions in the light of the superior logic and historical understanding of western theologians.¹ The publication was denounced in St Petersburg as a falsity typical of the Jesuits. The Orthodox faithful were assured that traditional Eastern instructions on the Trinity were intact, and that the Old Catholics had presented nothing that required change.² By 1890, however, it was quite clear that the Russians were quarrelling over the filioque and also over other dogmatic and ecclesiastical matters. They denied, of course, that a crisis had broken out. In his memoirs, Georges Florovsky referred to the debate as merely a vigorous controversy, and N. N. Glubokovskii insisted that it was only a sympathetic discussion, in spite of some signs of extreme intransigency.³