The revival of the Name-Glorifiers debate in post-Soviet Russia

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Russian Orthodoxy has witnessed a revival of a century old religious dispute over the veneration of the divine names (imiaslavie). Debate over the issue has raged on the internet and in print across both the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) and non-canonical churches claiming to be the ‘true’ Orthodox. Yet unlike many issues in contemporary Russian Orthodoxy (monarchism, ecumenism, and so on), advocacy for and opposition to the veneration of the divine names divides both those within the Moscow Patriarchate and within dissenting groups. It also cuts unpredictably across the usual divide between ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ currents within the Church and ‘traditionalist’ or ‘fundamentalist’ currents. This contribution seeks to challenge binary interpretations of Russian Orthodoxy both from ‘within’ by those religious actors who seek to assert that one or another version of Orthodoxy is the ‘true’ one as well as from ‘without’ by observers who underestimate the complexity of diverse currents within it.

KEYWORDS:

• imiaslavie
• onomatodoxy
• Divine Names
• Name Glorifiers

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants in the Havighurst Young Researchers Conference (Cuma, Italy, 2015) and in the Orthodox Kaleidoscope Network (Amsterdam, 2016), the two anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team for all their feedback and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No conflict of interest has been reported by the author.

Notes

1. http://mosvedi.ru/imyaslavie.html.

2. I hesitate to use the term ‘fundamentalist’ because the term carries too much baggage and negative presuppositions. See Rock (2002), Verkhovsky (2002), and Mitrofanova (2014) for discussion of ‘Orthodox fundamentalism’.

3. Translation here, as throughout, is mine.

4. When the main body of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) reconciled with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007, some rejected the reunion and several competing factions were established, all with the same name in Russian. The one referred to above as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCA) is under Archbishop Vladimir in San Francisco.

5. Other fringe groups embracing the Name Glorifiers include the priest Oleg Molenko and his Church of John the Theologian in Toronto; Molenko was ordained a priest by ROCOR, but has left all jurisdictions and has created a stand-alone community. His website contains a great collection of imiaslavie materials (http://www.omolenko.com/imyaslavie/).

6. The ‘Renovationists’ were a group of liberal clergy in the 1920s who collaborated with the Soviet government and also sought to carry out extensive reforms in the Russian Church. Contemporary currents that advocate reforming or renovating church life in Russia are labelled ‘renovationist’ by their conservative opponents. It is important to recognise that there are substantial differences between such ‘traditionalist’ or conservative journals: see one journal’s critique of another in Andrievskii (2002).

7. For just a sampling, see the materials collected from the internet in Borshch (2003–2005), vol. 2; the discussion on monarchist-publicist Mikhail Nazarov’s blog after Diomid’s decree: http://www.rusidea.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1424&sid=68ac5dca849b397aa81d1cf85f40bd7a.

8. Kiprian Shakhbazian, head of the publishing department of the Kuban diocese, also critiqued imiaslavie on his blog over many years: https://kiprian-sh.livejournal.com/tag/Имябожничество. See also http://ruslanvolg.livejournal.com/tag/имяславие.

9. Borshch continues to collect materials on imiaslavie and publish them online; as of the end of 2018, reaching volume 13: http://wordforsoul.wixsite.com/borschks.

10. This is not true for those in the Russian Church Outside Russia, whose founding father was Antonii (Khrapovkitsii); see Soldatov (2008).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott M. Kenworthy

Scott M. Kenworthy is the author of the award-winning study of modern Russian monasticism, The Heart of Russia: Trinity-Sergius, Monasticism and Society after 1825 (Oxford University Press, 2010) and numerous articles on monasticism as well as the Name Glorifiers controversy. He is co-author, with Alexander Agadjanian, of an introductory book on Understanding World Christianity: Russia (forthcoming with Fortress Press) and is currently writing a biography of Patriarch Tikhon Bellavin and the fate of Russian Orthodoxy during the Bolshevik Revolution.