1836 г.

April 18. Metropolitan Philaret's opinion on the question: should marriages of schismatics with Lutherans be allowed, and under what conditions? The question – “whether to allow marriages of schismatics with Lutherans, and under what conditions” – is difficult in relation to church rules and state legislation. The schismatics constitute a broken branch of the dominant religion, to which they completely belonged in their ancestors. If their marriages with Lutherans are left without attention and restrictions, then it can easily happen that their children will be raised in the Lutheran confession, and therefore this confession will be extended to the account of the dominant religion, which is contrary to the fundamental state law, which gives the right to the dominant religion to acquire from others, and not back. A further consequence of this may be that Lutheran education, grafted onto the schism through marriage and the upbringing of children, will give it new strength and greater independence. But how to prevent this? Demand that a Lutheran and a schismatic woman raise children in schism? Strange. In Orthodoxy? Inconvenient. Wouldn't it make it easier for schismatics to marry Orthodox Christians as a disqualification from marrying Lutherans? If a Lutheran is allowed at the altar of Orthodox churches to marry an Orthodox person, then is it not possible, under decent conditions, to admit a schismatic who is in many ways closer to the Orthodox Church than a Lutheran? This subject would require further discussion by the Holy Synod 283. May 2. Metropolitan Philaret’s opinion on the proposed publication: “spiritual granary, or fruits of the cross” The collegiate assessor Jan presented a note in which, among other things, he wrote: “out of zeal for the eternal good of those of my neighbors who, due to their insufficient condition, cannot feed on spiritual food in the ripe fruits of the piety of the holy ascetics, revered by our Orthodox Church, I dare, like a slave gathering ears of corn in the great field of his master, to ask permission to extract from the Christian magazine Readings of the writings of the Holy Fathers, for publication at a price, as cheap as possible. According to my calculations, the entire publication, under the general title: “spiritual granary, or the fruits of the cross,” can be contained in 24 volumes, each from 20 to 25 printed sheets, for a total of 30 rubles. Regarding this note, Metropolitan Philaret wrote the following opinion in his own hand: “It is inconvenient to agree with this project; because: 1) one is not worthy to fill one’s granary by stealing from someone else’s. Christian Reading is the legal property of the publishers. Reprinting will harm the consumption of their remaining copies. You can borrow from them and print, but not much. They will not fight for their property; therefore, however, it should not harm them. 2) Multi-volume editions are not so common. Smaller is better. 3) Not everything that is indicated in the project is intended for nationwide edifying reading. 4) The works destined for the granary do not in any respect constitute one whole. It seems better to print individual essays, little by little, with choices. I have noted some of this kind on the list 284. Metropolitan Philaret’s opinion on the project of treating peasants using homeopathic methods The proposal to introduce homeopathic treatment for peasants throughout Russia, no matter how hard they try to reduce and simplify the means to carry it out, is a huge undertaking. To create 27,000 doctors and send them to treat 45,000,000 people would be an important acquisition for life; but by the same token the difficulties and various losses would be great if this undertaking, having been undertaken, turned out to be inconvenient or unreliable through experience. Therefore it requires careful preliminary consideration. The proposed project must be considered, firstly, in relation to the subject itself, and secondly, in relation to theological schools and the clergy, through which it is supposed to be carried out. The author of the project notes that peasants in villages are left without the help of medical art. This shortcoming can be noticed not only in Russia. Nature is not afraid of this deficiency. She multiplied peoples and filled the universe with them before art produced doctors of medicine, and before disappointment in the reliability of ordinary medicine produced Dr. Hannemann (1755-1843). However, it should also be noted that in villages they live without doctors, but not without healing. In each house there is a number of medical institutions, and in the whole village or in several villages there is a very significant folk medicine that operates by simple and safe means. Learned doctors, uninfected by the pride of science, such as, for example, the author of a common people's medical book mentioned in the project, Doctor Kamenetsky, are not ashamed to make observations on this village medicine and learn useful things from it. The writer points to the unfortunate experiences of common folk treatment with poisonous drugs. There is no evidence that these experiments were frequent, and rare cases do not provide sufficient grounds for a huge undertaking. Moreover, if these unfortunate experiences do not destroy themselves with their harmful consequences, and are not destroyed by the force of laws, then it is difficult to hope that homeopathy will destroy them. Proving the need for homeopathy, the author of the project, among the diseases of the peasants, mentions cuts, dislocations, fractures of members, difficult childbirth, and drowning. Is it really possible to use a homeopathic method to straighten a dislocated or broken bone, or to revive a drowned person? In these cases, by the way, surgery and obstetric art are needed, and for the knowledge of these two sciences, anatomy, for anatomy, the dissection of corpses. But all this for priests represents neither convenience nor decency. If, unfortunately, the testimony of the author of the project were true that the syphilitic disease had spread throughout the state, then this disastrous evil would truly require active measures from the government, but not a priestly eye for examination and not priestly hands for treatment. According to the information of the author of the project on mortality in Russia, one would think that death reigns more in Russia than anywhere else. On the contrary, it is known that the population in Russia is growing faster than in other lands, except, perhaps, America, which, however, owes its increase in population not only to natural birth, but also to migrations from Europe. It is true that infant mortality in Russia is significant; but there is a remedy against this, mainly smallpox vaccination, which has been introduced. Consequently, statistical information on mortality does not provide a solid basis for the project. Choosing homeopathic methods of treatment primarily over other methods of treatment, the author of the project says that homeopathy has made progress in different countries, that it has armed medical faculties throughout Europe against itself, that it has not been refuted. The most complete conclusion from these principles can only be that homeopathy can be partly tolerated with supervision for further testing, as the Russian government does in relation to it, but these principles do not yet lead to the conclusion that homeopathy training should be introduced for the whole state. Our age is greedy for newfangled knowledge. As an example of this, one can point to animal magnetism, which has created a special department for itself in some German universities. But it is not heard that homeopathy is systematically taught in any school. From this, shouldn’t we conclude that homeopathy is either not yet ripe for school teaching, or is completely incapable of it, that it can be more conveniently adopted by a home student who accidentally believes in it, rather than by a correctly thinking public audience? Striving for what he wanted, the author of the project was carried away by the convenience of small receptions and small pharmacies, but did not notice the inconveniences that the subtlety and caution required in the preparation and storage of homeopathic medicines could present. He does not estimate that anything will cost 27,000, although small pharmacies are 286. He does not bring to mind Law 287, which tells the homeopathic doctor to give one dose to the patient, and keep the other, sealed, with the patient, in case of checking the treatment performed, through which the consumption of the medicine doubles. If 27,000 homeopathic doctors have 50 patients per year and each is given 10 appointments, then 13,000,000 packages of homeopathic appointments per year will have to remain in peasant houses, in case of research into former treatments. Will this be convenient for achieving the goal proposed by the law? Will these packages be kept in order? If in which house the treatment is successful, will they not use the leftover techniques indiscriminately for the first painful case? To avoid these inconveniences, the author of the draft would probably have demanded the repeal of the law; but this would mean the government abandoning the caution that has guided it until now and placing so many millions of rural residents in unsecured trust in homeopathic doctors, for whom only the author of the project can vouch. Since from what has been said so far it is clear that the project proposes an object whose need and usefulness has not been proven, and whose inconvenience is tentatively visible, then it would be quite a courageous decision to make an experiment in the implementation of the project in a private and small form, but to propose it in a broad and general form for the whole state is an extremely surprising courage. However, since the author of the project hoped to provide him with special convenience through its application to theological schools and the clergy, it is necessary to consider it from this side. Based on the training courses of theological seminaries, the author of the project guesses that they have a lot of free time. But the authorities of theological schools, not from a casual, outsider glance, but from the experience of many years, notice that in theological schools the courses of auxiliary secular sciences are shy of the courses of the strictly spiritual sciences, and intends to shorten and reduce the former in favor of the latter. Consequently, in theological schools there is now no time to add three or four courses of sciences that are completely extraneous to spiritual teaching, such as a course in anatomy, surgery, pathology and homeopathy itself. This multitude and sharp difference in subjects should inevitably result in the entertainment of students, and the fact that those who retain an inclination towards spiritual subjects will not succeed in medical ones, and those who are seduced by medical ones will grow cold towards spiritual ones; that one trained to be a good priest will not be a good doctor, and one trained to be a doctor will not be a good priest. What consideration says in this case is what experience has already said, as recalled by the author of the project himself. When it was ordered to teach certain medical sciences in theological academies and seminaries, not a single priest was noticed who, as a result, became a doctor; and several students of the Moscow Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, seduced by the news of the subjects and the encouragements of the teacher, became doctors, but no longer wanted to remain in the clergy. The observations of the author of the project are also incorrect in the case when he finds a lot of free time with rural priests. What those engaged in agriculture have no time for, he does not reject; and that priests do not engage in agriculture at all, he thinks this is a mistake. In small parishes, priests have little parish business; but it is here that poverty forces them to engage in agriculture. Priests who are not engaged in agriculture must more often engage in priestly service, which in the Orthodox Church generally requires incomparably more time than is the case in other faiths. In parishes that are crowded or scattered over a large area, the execution of parish affairs occupies the priest so much that he sometimes even cramps the time needed for church services. The administration of church writing, such as: daily maintenance of metric records of births, marriages and deaths, writing confessional lists, church receipts and expenditure books, clergy registers, smallpox registers, except for cases on special occasions and for the positions of dean, deputy, exhorter, takes a lot of all priests, and even burdens some. This inevitable occupation for them is followed by other busy responsibilities: speaking as often as possible in church to the people, converting the erring, teaching village children the original truths of the faith in order to make them Orthodox Christians, and protecting them from being seduced into schisms or sects. Much more work belongs to the spiritual authorities in order to achieve a satisfactory fulfillment of these duties, which are essentially connected with the title of parish priests; and only when all this is done satisfactorily will it be possible to see whether the parish priests will have small portions of free time left to use for treatment with the slightest techniques. Whether anyone is truly as close to being a doctor as a priest can be judged by what was said above about certain diseases. To make this clear, on the other hand, it is enough to pay attention to the teaching of anatomy. The author of the project is silent about it; but it is obvious that the surgery that he requires cannot be learned without anatomy, and when teaching anatomy, dissection of corpses is inevitably necessary, because artificial equipment for this is insufficient. One must imagine how the Orthodox people would look if, according to the project, an anatomical theater opened in the Holy Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, among the shrine, in the eyes of so many thousands of pilgrims, and then similar spectacles began to be repeated in all seminaries, and future priests would be seen with knives in their hands over dissected human bodies. The fact that they would take medicine from these priests is not nearly as likely as the fact that they would not receive holy communion through such hands. Recognizing the poverty of the largest number of rural priests, the author of the project did not find it convenient to demand that they be unpaid doctors. The idea that a priest, having become a doctor, would receive greater respect from parishioners and greater benefits, could only be born in ignorance of both the spirit of church service and the spirit of the people. The helmsman's book, second part, in chapter 49, the priest, as a minister of a bloodless sacrifice, is forbidden to shed the blood of an animal slaughtered for food; Therefore, surgical actions associated with the shedding of blood are also incompatible with the title of priest. According to the 6th apostolic canon, a saint who takes upon himself worldly care is not sacred, that is, a priest engaged in worldly care, if he does not leave this, must be deprived of the priesthood. Treatment for money, as a worldly matter, and a matter of one’s own benefit, would expose the priest to the condemnation of this rule, and would also humiliate him in the opinion of the people, and not elevate him. A chiropractor, a bloodletter, a midwife, a doctor, perhaps because they are needed in difficult circumstances, in the eyes of the common people do not belong to people respected and loved, but to those with whom they become close only out of necessity, for a while. The author of the project thinks that a sick Molokan will join the church in order to be treated by a priest. An unreliable connection if it happened this way. But isn’t it more likely that a Molokan, even if he decided to take medicine from someone, would not take it from a priest? It is known that schismatics call vaccination with smallpox the seal of the Antichrist; therefore, it may very well happen that a strange treatment with insignificant techniques, strangely composed, will be called the magic of the Antichrist, and they will run away from both the medicine and the priest even more than before. Speaking about the small costs required for the establishment and maintenance of a homeopathic institute for 84 students, with teaching aids and a clinic for 20 beds, the writer does not calculate these costs, and therefore does not provide a way to believe his hope. As for its placement in the Lavra of St. Sergius, the buildings occupied by the Lavra itself are so filled that the lower floors, partly located in the ground, and therefore previously empty, are now occupied, and also in the buildings provided by the Lavra for the academy, nothing idle remains behind its premises. Therefore, it must be admitted that the proposed project, both in its very subject matter, is unreliable, and when applied to theological schools and the clergy, it is extremely difficult to implement, and threatens with insurmountable difficulties and actual harm, when striving for fortune-telling benefits 288. October 24. A note by Metropolitan Philaret, entitled: “On the collection of church laws, and the publication of the full text of church rules” Actual State Councilor A. Kunitsyn (†1840), in a report dated July 15, 1836, wrote to the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, Count N. A. Protasov: “As a result of the highest approved report of the former Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, Actual State, now Privy Councilor, Nechaev, past, 1835, On March 11, spiritual laws are collected for publication in a special publication. From the opening of the class, the officials seconded for this subject from the II Department of His Imperial Majesty’s own Chancellery were collected and put into proper form for printing and legalization from 1721 to 1762. But since this publication must first be reviewed by spiritual authority, I humbly ask your Excellency to make the appropriate order on this subject, so that we can begin to print this collection, while continuing at the same time the further production of it.” Probably, Mr. Kunitsyn’s report was submitted for consideration to Metropolitan Philaret, who gave the following feedback on Mr. Kunitsyn’s work: Anyone who has not seen the project for the publication of a collection of church laws, or any part of this collection, is not as comfortable to judge this matter as if he had in mind the project and the experience of implementation, partly already done. But it is not difficult to see that the collection of civil laws cannot serve as a model and justification for the proposed collection of church laws. The collection of civil laws is a whole legislation in historical order; the supposed collection of ecclesiastical laws would be only the last excerpt of ecclesiastical legislation. The collection of civil laws stands on its own, and contains its foundations within itself; the collection of definitions of the Holy Synod of the last century does not have this character of independence. The basis and verification of these definitions must be sought outside their collection, in antiquity, in the apostolic and patristic rules. Synodal decrees are only the application of these rules to more or less private cases encountered in the administration of the Russian church. The collection of civil laws does not create difficulties due to their diversity; for the rule here is that the latest law is stronger than the previous ones. Thus, the collection of laws tells the lawyer: know the old, follow the new. But this cannot be applied to church legislation, in which the ancient rules of the holy apostles, holy councils and holy fathers have decisive importance and force. Therefore, a collection of church decrees from one last century cannot be satisfactory, since it would leave unresolved the question: is this in accordance with the rules of the holy councils and holy fathers. This difficulty will increase if there is diversity in some decisions of different times on some subjects. Gradual changes in civil legislation, as the effect of the law of the supreme autocratic power, are common in states; the sight of changes in church government can be tempting. From this it follows that if it is necessary to make church laws more known, understandable and convenient for use in the actions of church government and justice than they were before, then it is necessary to start the matter from the root, that is, with the publication of an accurate translation of the complete rules of the holy apostles, the seven ecumenical and nine local councils and the rules of the holy fathers, which constitute the helm of church government. The need to have a collection of these rules has always been recognized as a necessary need in the church. As the above-mentioned councils took place, the rules of the subsequent ones were added to the rules of the previous ones and distributed in the churches. When, in this way, the ecclesiastical code reached sufficient completeness for church administration and court, then the duty to collect church rules turned into the duty to preserve them and make them convenient for understanding and use. Hence the interpretations of Zonar 289, Balsamon 290; hence the abbreviated nomocanon 291; hence the abbreviated text of all the rules of the church code, processed by Aristin 292. This last text, in the helmsman's book, serves as a guide for administration and justice in the Russian Church. But the text of the Slavic helmsman's book is in many cases unsatisfactory, partly due to the imperfection of the Slavic translation, partly due to the imperfection of Aristinov's abbreviation itself, which does not always accurately represent the meaning of the complete rules. This difficulty has long been felt in the Russian church; and, in order to help in this, two assumptions were made at different times. First: translate and publish complete church rules. The Holy Synod dealt with this for quite some time; and, unfortunately, did not bring this to a decisive conclusion, because he could not rely on ordinary translators in such an important matter, and the highest verification of the translation made through people who were very busy was not successful. Another suggestion: to compile and publish a systematic educational book of church rules. This idea, naturally, arose from the time of the transformation of theological schools according to the provisions of the committee of 1808, when canon law was included among the educational subjects. The fact that this idea was not fulfilled is less to be regretted, because the compilation, verification, and use of an educational book on this subject would be inconveniently convenient when the foundations on which this educational book should be based, that is, church rules, are presented in the helmsman’s book in an unsatisfactorily perfect form. All this leads to the conclusion that the proposal of the Holy Synod to publish a collection of complete church rules is worthy of renewal and zealous action for its implementation. To do this, you need to carefully examine the translation made, and make sure of its accuracy through comparison with the original, and especially with the edition made at the beginning of this century, with the blessing of the Patriarch of Constantinople, under the title Pidalion, that is, the helm 293. From a handwritten draft original. Inventory No. 99; document No. 1. The following articles have been marked by Metropolitan Philaret: Volumes 1 and 2 of St. Basil the Great. Divided into articles for retail sale: 3) detailed rules on issues. Volumes 3 and 4 of St. Gregory the Theologian. Dogmatic teaching extracted from his writings. This place was crossed out by the Metropolitan and written: “unsuitable.” Volume 11 of the Holy Fathers of the 4th century: a) St. Mark the Ascetic on the spiritual law, 200 chapters and other small articles. St. Athanasius of Alexandria on virginity, Blessed Jerome's letter to Leta, about raising his daughter, St. Theodore of Edessa, 100 soul-helping chapters and a speculative word. From secrets, office papers. Chief Prosecutor St. Synod, 1836; No. 101, pp. 1–6. According to the certificate, a smaller homeopathic pharmacy costs 75 rubles, and a more complete one costs 120 rubles. Therefore, 27,000 pharmacies, at the first price, will cost 2,025,000, and at the second, 3,240,000 rubles. If not all of this expense, then probably at least half of it will be required annually. From rough. authentic, storing to Moscow spiritual academic; package No. 3, document. No. 8. Zonara I. was, at the court of Emperor Alexei Komnenos, the head of the palace guard and the first secret adviser to the state, but then, leaving secular honors, he devoted himself to scientific works as a monk. His important work for church law was the interpretation of church rules (“Ἐξήγησις ἱερῶν καὶ θείων κανόνων, et caet.) Balsamon O., nomophilax and chartophylax of the Church of Constantinople, then Patriarch of Antioch (†1199). The most important of his works is an explanation of church rules (᾿Εξήγησις). Patriarch Photius (†Oct. 891). Aristinus A., the great steward of the Constantinople church in nomophilax, (†1160) wrote explanations of the church rules, in their abbreviated form (σύνοψις - epitome canonum). From an autograph kept in the Moscow Theological Academy; package number 3; document No. 7; a copy is kept in the secret papers of the office of the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, 1836; No. 100, sheets 4–8.