Miracle-working icons, laity, and authority in the Russian Orthodox Church, 1861-1917

Russian Review

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 26-48

  Shevzov, Vera ^a  

^a SMITH COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 56249145030     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.561999056     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (RGIA), St. Petersburg, f. 796, op. 195, d. 1436, ll. 56, 112
2. Miracles have been the subject of lively debate in the history of Christianity. See Johannes Wendland, Miracles and Christianity, trans. H. R. Mackintosh (London, 1911)
3. and Robert Bruce Mullin, Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven, 1996)
4. Although these issues had been discussed among Orthodox educated circles since the 1860s, the intensity of the debates reached its peak in 1905 and 1906, in anticipation of ecclesiastical reform and the summons of a national church council. See Otzyvy eparkhial'nykh arkhiereev po voprosu o tserkvnoi reforme, 3 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1906)
5. Zhurnaly i protokoly zasedanii vysochaishe uchrezhdennago predsobornago prisutstviia, 4 vols. (St. Petersburg, 1906-7)
6. and, for an overview of these debates, James W. Cunningham, A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905-1906 (Crestwood, 1981)
7. Note that I distinguish the Church's institutional practice from the Orthodox theological vision of laity. I use "ecclesial community" and "faith community" interchangeably to refer to both clerical and lay believers who identified with the Russian Orthodox Church in matters of faith and, in turn, were counted among "the faithful" by ecclesiastical officials. I use the term "common believers" to refer to lay men and women from all socioeconomic groups who did not play a role in the Church's institutional "establishment." The experiences and views of common laity in prerevolutionary Russian Orthodoxy have been attracting the attention of an increasing number of scholars during the past decade. See, for example, Chris J. Chulos, "Peasant Religion in Post-Emancipation Russia" Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1994)
8. Kimberly Page Herllinger, "Class, Piety, and Politics: Workers, Orthodoxy, and the Problem of Religious Identity in Russia, 1881-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996)
9. and Glennys Young, "'Into Church Matters': Lay Identity, Rural Parish Life, and Popular Politics in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, 1864-1928," Russian History/Histoire Russe 23 (Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter 1996): 367-84. In large part, recent scholarship has approached the study of laity on the basis of social groups - that is, peasants, workers, and so on. The phenomenon of specially venerated icons reveals certain shared religious experiences among these various groups
10. For the role such icons played in the deliberations of the Seventh Ecumenical Council regarding the legitimacy of the Eastern Christian practice of icon veneration see Deianiia Vselenskikh Soborov, vol. 7 (Kazan, 1873). The theology of the miracle-working icon in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia is beyond the scope of this article, but will be discussed in my book
11. P. Smirnov, Chudesa v prezhnee i nashe vremia (Moscow, 1895), 15
12. Ieromonakh Vasilii, Pouchenie pri poseshchenii ikony Belynichskoi Bozhiei Materi Orshanskago Bogoiavlenskago monastyria (Mogilev, 1911), 2. The precise number of such icons, however, is difficult to establish because many remained known only locally
13. In 1908, for example, A. Vysotskii countered the stereotypic association between miracle-working icons and the "superstitious" simple folk by pointing out that the events leading to the special veneration of one of the most popular and widely publicized icons of the late nineteenth century - the Mother of God named "Kozel'shchanskaia" - involved members of an "enlightened, educated family" (A. Vysotskii, Beseda o chudotvornykh ikonakh, kak ochevidnom dokazatel'stve istinnosti i bogougodnosti ikonopochitaniia [Simferopol, 1908], 10)
14. For traditional treatises on the theological meaning of the icon in Eastern Christianity see John of Damascus, On the Divine Images (Crestwood, 1980)
15. and Theodore the Studite, On the Holy Icons (Crestwood, 1980)
16. General works on the history and meaning of icons include Paul Evdokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (California, 1993)
17. Leonid Ouspensky The Meaning of Icons (Crestwood, 1982)
18. and Egon Sendler, The Icon: Elements of Theology, Aesthetics and Technique (California, 1993)
19. For the story associated with this iconographie type see Skazanie ob ikone imenuemoi Dostoino est'(Moscow, 1895)
20. Skazanie ob ikone Bozhiei Materi imenuemoi Abalatskoiu (Nizhnii Novgorod, 1887)
21. "Svod ustavov o preduprezhdenii i presechenii prestuplenii," Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 14 (Petrograd, 1916), par. 26
22. For a detailed description of this icon's visitation schedule see ibid., d. 1444, and op. 187, d. 6929, ll. 187-90. For the story of the icon's "life" see Skazanie o chudotvornoi Bogoliubskoi ikone Bozhiei Materi (St. Petersburg, 1869)
23. and Skazanie o chudotvornoi Bogoliubskoi ikone Bozhiei Materi, chto v sele Zimarove, Riazanskoi gubernii (Riazan, 1916)
24. Skazanie o iavlenii i chudesakh ikony Bozhiei Materi Kaluzhskoi (Kiev, 1888)
25. For a classic study on the construction of national identity see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York, 1983)
26. For an interpretive discussion of the iconographic image in terms of Russian national identity see E. N. Trubetskoi, Tri ocherka o russkoi ikone (Paris, 1965)
27. and O. Iu. Tarasov, "Ikona i blagochestie," Ocherki ikonnogo dela v imperatorskoi Rossii (Moscow, 1995)
28. "Chudesnoe istselenie devitsy Very Gitsevich ot ikony Bogomateri imenuemoi Kozel'shchinskoi," Astrakhanskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti, no. 13, chast' neofitsial'naia (1885): 477-80
29. For an example of the process by which news of specially venerated icons spread see Skazanie ob ikone Bozhiei Materi imenuemoi Abalatskoiu, 42-43
30. V. G. Korolenko, "Za ikonoi," in his Izbrannoe (Moscow, 1973), 291-92
31. For another literary account of an icon visitation see the short story Muzhiki by A. P. Chekhov in his Sochineniia (Moscow, 1922), 11:170-71
32. Indeed, the proceedings of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 show that miracle-working icons were adduced to establish the legitimacy of the practice of icon veneration in general. See, for example, Deianiia vselenskikh soborov 7:257, 316
33. In addition, Orthodox liturgical tradition called (and continues to call) for every icon to become "special." In the service for the blessing of icons of the Mother of God, for instance, one of the prayers calls on God to grant the icon "the power and strength of miraculous works." Similar petitions characterized the prayers associated with the blessing of icons of Christ and the saints. See "Chin blagosloveniia i osviashcheniia ikony presviatoi bogoroditsy," Trebnik, pt. 2 (Moscow, 1906)
34. For studies of miracle-working icons in Byzantium and medieval Russia see A. M. Lidov, ed., Chudotvornaia ikona v Vizantii i drevnei Rusi (Moscow, 1996)
35. and Andreas Ebbinghaus, Die altrussischen Marienikonen-Legenden (Berlin, 1990). Evidence for the liturgical address of a particular icon as a sign of its special veneration appears in the twelfth century
36. See Nancy Patterson Sevcenko, "Icons in the Liturgy," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 45 (1991): 53
37. Opisanie dokumentov i del, khraniashchikhsia v arkhive Sviateishego pravitel'stvuiushchego Sinoda, vol. 2, pt. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1879), 329-30
38. See also A. Malevinskii, Instruktsiia blagochinnomu prikhodskikh tserkvei, iz ''iasnennaia ukazami sv. Sinoda, rasporiazheniiami eparkhial'nago nachal'stva, svodom zakonov, i tserkovnoi pratikoi (St. Petersburg, 1910), 10
39. According to Peter the Great's Spiritual Regulations, which were still the basis of ecclesiastical legislation in late imperial Russia, priests, deacons, and other clergy were not to perform prayer services at places reputed to be miracle working that had not been "officially" recognized as such (Malevinskii, Instruktsiia blagochinnomu, 181-82)
40. For reports of this event see Chudesnoe spasenie ikony Znameniia Presviatyia Bogoroditsy ot vzryva (Odessa, 1898)
41. and L. Denisov, Chudo 8 maria (Moscow, 1898)
42. E. Poselianin, Bogomater'(St Petersburg, 1914), 667-68
43. Tserkovnye vedomosti, no. 30, 1896
44. Although the subject matter of the icon made it especially popular among peasants, who saw in this icon the Mother of God as a helper and protectress to those whose livelihood depended on agricultural labor, especially during a time of famine, it is noteworthy that it was also known among educated circles. Note Pavel Florensky's reference to this image in Iconostasis, trans. Donald Sheehan and Olga Andreyev (Crestwood, 1996), 87-88
45. At a conference of Russian émigré philosophers and theologians in France in 1924, the priest Sergius Bulgakov noted the popularity of this icon in early twentieth-century Russia (Khristianstvo i sovremennaia zhizn'[Paris, 1925], 16-17)
46. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York, 1983), 302
47. A. V. Kartashev, Reforma, reformatsiia i ispolnenie tserkvi (Petrograd, 1916), 42-43