Introduction

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Introduction

The modern Russian Bible, like all such sacred texts, is a political and cultural document. One of the axioms of modern text criticism is that all texts, including such sacred texts as the Hebrew Bible and the Arabic Qur’an, reflect the historical circumstances surrounding their creation, translation, and dissemination. Within the three main Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity), Christianity has arguably placed greatest emphasis upon the translation of its sacred text into local languages. That translation process, in turn, has added to the local significance of the Bible as a political and cultural artifact. A hallmark of the process of biblical translation in the Eastern Orthodox world is its unusual timing. In Eastern Orthodoxy, biblical translation occurred both earlier and later than elsewhere in Europe – earlier in the case of the Slavonic world because the original Slavonic translation of scripture took place as a part of the missions of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century; and later because translation into modern languages, in contrast to the German and English translations of the Reformation era, came to the Orthodox world only from the nineteenth century. The relatively late translation of the Bible into Russian reflected, in part, the persistence of linguistic diglossia in Russian culture, a situation that exists to the present in which the historical evolution of the modern Russian language was paralleled by the continued authority of the old Slavonic biblical text for liturgical worship. Modern Russian biblical translation in the nineteenth century was from the outset highly politicized. The title for this work draws upon the language of “culture wars,” framing the politics of modern scriptural translation in figurative terms as Russian Bible wars. It is the thesis of this work that the debates over modern scriptural translation in nineteenth-century Russia contributed to the transformation of modern Russian religious culture by posing fundamental questions of authority within Eastern Christian tradition. These debates reached well beyond the confines of 1

2 Russian Bible Wars the religious culture into the wider public sphere. How and why did modern biblical translation become such a contested issue for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russia? That is the question this volume seeks to answer. It may have been inevitable that modern Russian biblical translation would become politically charged, having been launched as it was by formal imperial proclamation in 1816. The fact that the establishment of the Russian Bible Society in the reign of Alexander I was closely identified with the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society ultimately heightened the controversy over biblical translation, and made the politics of the Russian Bible an issue also involving Russian cultural ties with the West. But the politics of modern Russian biblical translation extended well beyond its occasional imperial blessings and proscriptions, and the perceptions of western influence. Russian biblical translation was politically charged – and remained so at least to the end of the Soviet era – because it posed for modern Russian religious culture fundamental, unresolved issues of authority. At stake in these issues was the very arbitration of modern Russian religious culture itself. Who should be authorized to translate Holy Scripture? What texts should be considered authoritative? What linguistic medium should be used, and for what purposes? Who should have the authority to publish and disseminate Holy Scripture? These questions of authority invariably left the traditional arbiters of Russian religious culture − the Russian church hierarchy and its emperor – divided. Indeed, the failure of the religious culture to resolve these fundamental issues of authority left the church all the more vulnerable in the twentieth century. Two assumptions have guided this framing of the problem of Russian biblical translation. First, traditional Russian religious culture, while it necessarily responded to the interests of the wider believing community, invested official authority in a hierarchical elite.1 Russian religious culture was not intended to be brokered on the basis of “market” forces, but was rather subjected to the controls of the Russian state and the church hierarchy. In subordinating church administration to state authority, the Petrine church reform of 1721, while it did little to challenge the church hierarchy’sofficial authority in matters of faith and doctrine, demonstrated the power of the state over religious institutions. The Petrine reform

1 The relationship between elite ecclesiastical authority and the wider believing community has been well addressed for Orthodox Slavs in Eve Levin’s, Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1989). Levin’s point is that “the gap between ecclesiastical and community norms was not great” (302). But the ultimate arbitration of religious authority in early modern Russia, particularly in matters of biblical texts, translation, and distribution, continued to rest in the hands of elite ecclesiastical and political authorities.

Introduction 3 also reinforced imperial authority over official episcopal appointments. Catherine II’s subsequent secularization of monastic properties in 1764, while it may have limited the church’s economic independence from the state, drawing the state directly into local diocesan financing, reconfirmed the longstanding shared authority of church and state in matters pertaining to Russian religious culture. The capacity of the post-Petrine church and state to identify and label “heresy,” as in the case of the Old Believer communities, was an indication that this prescriptive, hierarchical authority continued to be embedded in modern Russian religious culture. Slavophile critics would argue that this hierarchical control became even greater, and more impersonal, in the aftermath of the Petrine reforms than it had been in traditional Russian religious life. Modern Russian biblical translation, by generating market demand and a modernized supply system for Holy Scripture, and by introducing modern text criticism, fundamentally challenged the prevailing traditional elite arbitration of authority in modern Russian religious culture. The second assumption underlying this study is that religious authority in Russia, as elsewhere, has always been culturally conditioned. H. Richard Niebuhr noted many years ago in his classic study, Christ and Culture, that religious traditions are never independent of culture.2 The transmission of religious tradition has always occurred within a cultural context. Religious traditions may challenge prevailing cultural norms, but they do so within concrete social or political contexts. Thus, as Elaine Pagels demonstrated so convincingly for early Christianity, even such basic matters as the establishment of the biblical canon were conditioned by specific political issues facing the early church, notably its confrontation with Gnosticism.3 In western Christian tradition, canon lawyers and inquisitorial judges served as the arbiters of church authority, interpreting with greater or lesser scholastic skill the norms of religious tradition. Such canonists, however, operated within clearly identifiable cultural and political constraints, despite their occasional claim to operate above culture at the direct command of divine authority. The contested politics of religious culture was often concealed in this arbitration and interpretation of divinely ordained authority. Whether it be papal bulls, hagiography, confessional literature, or even Holy Scripture, all such religious texts, like their secular counterparts, were constructed representations arising out of specific, contested circumstances. The fact that sacred texts have arisen out of concrete political contexts

2 H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Row, 1951). 3 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979).

4 Russian Bible Wars merely defines their status as texts, and does not address their divine authority. This book, in focusing upon the contextual issues surrounding Russian biblical translation, recognizes modern Russian religious culture as a domain of contested authority worthy of scholarly study. As such, this is a work of history, not a guide to biblical exegesis or textology. In the absence of a more rigid canon law, Eastern Christendom developed alternative vehicles for defining a normative Christian tradition. These vehicles included a wealth of confessional, hagiographic, and patristic literature, as well as the aesthetically rich iconographic, musical, and sacramental resources of Orthodox liturgical worship. A most important part of that tradition was the transmission of sacred scriptural texts. For Eastern Orthodoxy, the Bible remained not only the repository of God’s divine word, but was also venerated as an icon, a witness to God’s saving grace. The Bible’s iconic character, reinforced by the seventeenth-century controversies over changes in liturgical texts – the source of the Old Believer schism – lent a heightened note of caution to those who would engage in the revision of sacred texts.4 Nevertheless, the Orthodox Slavonic scriptures, as texts, continued to be refashioned to meet very specific historical circumstances. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian Orthodox Church had adopted as the standardized Slavonic biblical text a translation first published in 1751 during the reign of Empress Elizabeth. The process and the politics surrounding that Elizabeth Slavonic text, a work launched in the reign of Peter the Great, has been well recorded in secondary accounts.5 Artificial separation of text from context is no more justified for earlier periods of Slavonic textology than for the nineteenth-century translation of the Bible into Russian. Fortunately, the documentation for the history of the Russian Bible has been well preserved. The primary archival sources for this study are found in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Cambridge, UK. In St. Petersburg, the Russian State Historical Archive (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, hereinafter RGIA) houses most of the extant papers of the Russian Bible

4 On the conﬂict between Old Believers and Nikonian reformers over the use of language, see Boris A. Uspensky, “The Schism and Cultural Conﬂict in the Seventeenth Century,” in Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, ed. Stephen K. Batalden (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 106–43. 5 On the revisions incorporated into the Elizabeth Bible, see I. A. Chistovich, “Ispravlenie slavianskogo perevoda Biblii pered izdaniem 1751 g.,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, 1860, chast’ 1: 499–507; also the publications of I. E. Evseev on the Slavonic Bible, including his Ocherki po istorii slavianskogo perevoda Biblii (Petrograd, 1916); Henry R. Cooper’s Slavic Scriptures: The Formation of the Church Slavonic Version of the Holy Bible (Madison, NC: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003); and A. A. Alekseev, Tekstologiia slavianskoi Biblii (St. Petersburg, 1999).

Introduction 5 Society (fond 808), as well as the papers of the Holy Synod (fond 796) and its lay administrator, the ober-prokuror (chief procurator) (fond 797). These Holy Synod papers document, among other matters, the Pavskii affair recounted in Chapter 3 and the internal workings of the Russian Bible Society addressed in Chapter 2. In Cambridge, the archive and the Bible collection of the British and Foreign Bible Society (hereinafter BFBS) remain preserved on permanent loan to the Cambridge University Library. BFBS papers pertaining to Russian biblical translation, including the “Paterson Deposited Papers,” the “BFBS Agents Books,” and a wealth of other indexed correspondence and deposited papers from its agents in Russia, have been well catalogued and are readily accessible.6 There is also an abundance of published work on Russian biblical translation. Most of these studies have tended to focus upon one small period of the translation process, and have generally failed to utilize the archival record of biblical translation in St. Petersburg and Cambridge. Particularly system- atic, however, has been the attention to the earliest decades of modern translation during the Bible Society era of the early nineteenth century. The pioneering study by social historian A. N. Pypin, Religioznyia dvizheniia pri Aleksandre I (Religious Movements in the Period of Alexander I) (1868), was complemented a century later by the doctoral thesis of Judith Cohen Zacek, “The Russian Bible Society, 1812–1826.”7 The Bible Society era has also left a wealth of published memoir and related documentary literature, ranging from the ﬁrst-person accounts of the British agents, John Paterson and Ebenezer Henderson, to the correspondence of the most prominent Russian translator, Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow.8

6 See the published catalogue of the BFBS archive prepared by Kathleen Cann found in Sowing the Word: The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804–2004, ed. Stephen K. Batalden, Kathleen Cann, and John Dean (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, 2004), 344–59. For collections bearing specifically on the Russian Bible, see Stephen K. Batalden, “Revolution and Emigration: The Russian Files of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1917–1970,” in The Study of Russian History from British Archival Sources, ed. Janet M. Hartley (London: Mansell Publishing for the University of London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1986), 147–71. 7 Pypin’s study was first published under the title, “Rossiiskoe bibleiskoe obshchestvo,” in Vestnik Evropy, 1868. The third edition, published in 1916 in Petrograd, bears the title, Religioznye dvizheniia pri Aleksandre I. The Zacek thesis was defended at Columbia University in 1964. 8 For Paterson’s published memoir, see The Book for Every Land: Reminiscences of Labour and Adventure in the Work of Bible Circulation in the North of Europe and in Russia, ed. William Lindsay Alexander (London: John Snow, 1858). For the Henderson memoir, see Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia (London: James Nisbet, 1826). Among the voluminous papers of Metropolitan Filaret, see in particular Sobranie mnenii i otzyvov Filareta, Mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo, po uchebnym i tserkovno-gosudarstvennym voprosam, vol. iv (Moscow, 1886); also I. N. Korsunskii, Pamiati Sviatitelia Filareta, Mitropolita Moskovskogo. K istorii redaktsii russkogo perevoda Sviashchennago Pisaniia (Moscow, 1894).

6 Russian Bible Wars In addition to the many memoirists and contributors to nineteenth- century Russian religious journals, there have been several historical accounts of the Russian Bible in the century following its 1876 publication. The most widely cited of these is the work of Ilarion Alekseevich Chistovich, whose standard history of the Russian Bible, Istoriia perevoda Biblii na russkii iazyk (A History of the Translation of the Bible into Russian), covers the period from the Russian Bible Society to the publication of the completed synodal translation (sinodal’nyi perevod)in1876. Chistovich’s study has been augmented by the biographical accounts of Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) prepared by Moscow Theological Academy librarian Ivan Nikolaevich Korsunskii. Often overlapping the coverage of Chistovich and Korsunskii has been the work of Nikolai A. Astaf’ev, whose history of the Russian Bible reflected the evangelical interest and involve- ment of Astaf’ev in the nineteenth-century Society for the Dissemination of Holy Scripture in Russia. Finally, there has been a flurry of late Soviet and post-Soviet writing on the Russian Bible, including the work of Mikhail Iosifovich Rizhskii, Istoriia perevodov Biblii v Rossii (The History of Translations of the Bible in Russia). The Rizhskii study appropriately refocused scholarly attention on modern biblical translation after fifty years of Soviet rule, but tended to do so in such a reductionist way as to discredit the authority of the Russian Bible by dismissing it simply as a product of petty scholarly conflicts.9 More promising has been the recovery of interest in biblical studies in post-Soviet Russia symbolized by the publication of the late Aleksandr Men’, Bibliologicheskii slovar’ (Dictionary of Biblical Studies).10 Despite the tragic assassination of Aleksandr Men’ in 1990, the recovery of Russian scholarly interest in biblical studies has continued to advance.11

9 See I. A. Chistovich, Istoriia perevoda Biblii na russkii iazyk, 2nd edn (St. Petersburg: Tip. M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1899).Thevolumewasreissuedina1997 rotoprint edition in Moscow. Korsunskii’s work, Opodvigakh,waspublishedasvol.ii of Sbornik izdannyi obshchestvom liubitelei dukhovnogo prosveshcheniia, po sluchaiu prazdnovaniia stoletnego iubileia so dnia rozhdeniia (1782–1882) Filareta, Mitropolita Moskovskogo (Moscow: Tip. Snegireva, 1883), 215–666.Astaf’ev’sworkcitedherewas published in the Zhurnal ministerstva narodnogo prosveshcheniia in 1888 and then separately in St. Petersburg in 1892.Rizhskii’s monograph appeared in Novosibirsk in 1978. 10 Aleksandr Men’, Bibliologicheskii slovar’, 3 vols. (Moscow: Fond im. Aleksandra Menia, 2002). 11 See in particular the multivolume Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia begun in 2000 (Moscow: Tserkovno- nauchnyi tsentr). On Russian biblical studies, see Anatolii Alekseev’s Tekstologiia slavianskoi Biblii (St. Petersburg, 1999) and his essays on the Russian Bible, including “Pervyi russkii perevod Novogo Zaveta v izdanii 1823 goda,” in Rol’ perevodov Biblii v stanovlenii i razvitii slavianskikh literaturnykh iazykov (Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia, 2002), 7–38, and “Bibliia: Perevody na russkii iazyk,” in Pravoslavnaia entsiklopediia, v: 153–61.

Introduction 7 While the rich legacy of published and unpublished sources on the Russian Bible illumines the critical issues of authority that biblical translation and publication posed for modern Russian religious culture, the Russian Bible itself, throughout its many editions, has also served to guide this study. Because of the significance of these nineteenth- and twentieth-century biblical imprints, an extended, annotated guide to Russian biblical imprints has been appended. The bibliography of the Russian Bible documents the rare Russian Bible holdings of the British and Foreign Bible Society Library in Cambridge, the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, the British Library in London, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In assessing the wider significance of the politics of modern Russian biblical translation, this study draws upon an eclectic body of theory that today rests at the center of the sociology of religion and religious history – namely, the widening debate over religion, secularism, and modernity. Forty years ago the paradigm of “secularization” and its link with “modernization” commanded widespread authority in academic circles. Drawing upon Max Weber’s association of secularization with the passage from traditional to modern society, the paradigm presented a historical process in which religious institutions were fundamentally being trans- formed, marginalized from the public sphere. As a consequence, religious belief in the modern age was inevitably privatized in a broadly universal process of modernization and rationalization affecting all societies. This largely Eurocentric and reductionist secularization theory – what Charles Taylor calls the “subtraction story”12 – remains a part of the sociology of religion, but has been largely superseded by theoretical currents that offer far greater saliency in addressing the politics of the Russian Bible. Three such currents – what I refer to as post-secularization theory – provide an interpretive framework for this study. The first of these has been the effort of sociologists, beginning already in the 1960s, to reformulate the theory of secularization.13 Claiming that the original framing of secularization theory was simply wrong, sociologists such as Peter Berger and David Martin effectively sought to separate the modern theory of the differenti- ation of the secular and religious spheres from the accompanying thesis that the end result would be the inevitable decline and eventual disappearance of

12 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 13 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967); David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005); and José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 1994).

8 Russian Bible Wars religion. Instead, Berger argued that in confronting modernity and the secular or public sphere, religious institutions develop a range of strategies extending from confrontation to accommodation in a process that he called “cognitive bargaining.”14 In assessing the range of responses arising within Russian religious culture to the process of modern Russian biblical translation, it is this “cognitive bargaining” that allows us to appreciate the “wars” that occurred within Russian culture − for example, over the Pavskii affair or the related controversy over the abortive Russian attempt to canonize the Greek Septuagint Old Testament text, as opposed to the Hebrew Masoretic counterpart. These were highly charged disputes over authority in the arbitration of modern Russian religious culture, and the divisions that ensued reﬂected the kind of “cognitive bargaining” that Berger and others have addressed in their critique of traditional secularization theory. What this early critique of secularization theory did was to restore agency to religious institutions as these institutions addressed issues of modernity and the secular. A further reﬁnement of the critique has particular relevance for this study – namely, the work of José Casanova in his Public Religions in the Modern World. Casanova’s focus is particularly on the privatization argument accompanying traditional secularization theory. He argues that, rather than religion having been removed from the public sphere as a consequence of modernity, such “privatization is not a modern structural trend,” but rather one of several historical options.15 The Russian church of the nineteenth century represented, in this Casanova sense, a “public religion,” a state-supported monopoly. This remained the case even when the dissemination of the Russian Bible began to open up alternative “options” of private devotional piety in late Imperial Russia. In his most recent treatment of the “post-secular,” Casanova once again recasts the secularization of modern Europe as a “de-confessionalization” that followed distinctly different patterns across a European state system that offered a variety of statist religious institutional forms.16 In this Casanova sense, the Russian Bible wars constituted a defensive effort of the established Russian Orthodox Church, buttressed by the state, to withstand the pressures of

14 Peter Berger, “Modernisation and Religion,” Fourteenth Geary Lecture (Dublin: Economic and Social Research Council, 1981), 20. 15 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 215. 16 José Casanova, “Exploring the Post-Secular: Three Meanings of ‘the Secular’ and their Possible Transcendence,” in Habermas and Religion, ed. Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).

Introduction 9 de-confessionalization posed by modern scriptural translation. At stake was the arbitration of authority in modern Russian religious culture. A second major “post-secularization” theoretical current informing this study is the body of writing associated with Charles Taylor’s work, A Secular Age, and the commentaries generated by this work in the Social Science Research Council’s blog, “The Immanent Frame.”17 In his volume, Taylor sets out to answer the question of how there came to be the “shift to secularity” in western Christendom between the years 1500 and 2000. The rise of modernity and secularity for Taylor involved far more than a story of subtraction – the retreat of religion from the public sphere – or the simple absence of God in what he calls a “post-cosmic universe” or “disen- chanted world.” Rather, Taylor argues that the precondition for the shift to secularity involved the growing disaffection of elites, including those who might be considered traditional religious elites. This is the transition Taylor sees from the “enchanted universe” of medieval Christendom to alternative forms of spiritual and moral aspiration – what he calls “the great disembedding.” It was this turn that, for Taylor, marked the movement toward an “exclusive humanism” in which ultimately the “God-reference” becomes but one option in the modern world. While Taylor’s treatment is intended primarily to address the cultural world of Latin Christendom and its post-Reformation descendants, there are important points of reference that link his theoretical framework with deeper threads of Russian history and, indeed, the story of modern Russian biblical translation. Most clearly is this the case in his discussion of the “rise of the disciplinary society,” a discussion of the “well-ordered police state” that draws explicitly on Marc Raeff’s study of cameralist legal and bureaucratic institutions.18 What Taylor has in mind by the “rise of the disciplinary society” is the movement within Christendom, particularly in seventeenth- century German Protestantism, toward a more secular view of statecraft that set forth bureaucratic and legal demands for obedience to state authority separate from appeals to divine authority. For Taylor, what is signiﬁcant about the “rise of the disciplinary society” is that, however much it may have contributed to the abandonment of an enchanted medieval world,

17 For the SSRC blog, see http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/, “The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere,” accessed 26 May 2012. See also the essays relating to the Taylor volume in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). The reference to the “great disembedding” is from Taylor, A Secular Age, 146–58. 18 Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). On “the rise of the disciplinary society,” see Taylor, A Secular Age, 90–145.

10 Russian Bible Wars the disciplinary society was fundamentally a movement championed by religious elites themselves. In Taylor’s view, the elite arbiters of traditional Christian culture in western European religious culture gave critical impetus to the rise of a new secular order. Similarly, and even more directly relevant to this study, Taylor assesses the role of evangelicalism in the coming of “a secular age.” He points out that the wave of evangelicalism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – what he calls the “age of mobilization”–sought to bring order to “forms of behavior that were idle, irresponsible, undisciplined and waste- ful.”19 Citing the impact of evangelicals on the anti-slavery movement, Taylor identiﬁes evangelicalism as an “anti-hierarchical force,” a part of the drive for democracy. By appealing to democracy and the marketplace, early nineteenth-century evangelicals became a causal force driving the engine of modernity. In depicting this commercial, market-oriented “mobilization” of evangelicals, Taylor’s work captures the dynamism of the British and Foreign Bible Society whose operatives in St. Petersburg effectively launched the Russian Bible Society (Rossiiskoe bibleiskoe obshchestvo) in 1812. It was this Russian Bible Society that embarked upon the most effective commercial publication and dissemination of Holy Scripture then known to Eastern Christendom. Taylor’s assertion that the engines of secularity lay within the religious culture itself is an important point of departure for understanding the highly charged politics of modern Russian biblical translation. Finally, a third current of post-secularization theory informing this study comes, perhaps surprisingly, from the contributions of rational choice theory to the sociology of religion.20 Rational choice theory (RCT) begins with the simple assumption that human beings seek what they perceive to be rewards, and avoid what they perceive to be costs. As Michael Hechter puts it, “people are rational to the degree that they pursue the most efﬁcient means available to attain their most preferred ends.”21 While I am not persuaded by other aspects of RCT regarding religion, especially as they relate to the pre-modern period, rational choice theorists in addressing “supply-side explanations for religious change” turn out to have provided an unintended explanation for the critical opening moment in the history of the modern Russian Bible. Roger Finke has noted in his essay,

19 Taylor, A Secular Age, 451. 20 Lawrence A. Young, ed., Rational Choice Theory and Religion: Summary and Assessment (New York: Routledge, 1997). 21 Michael Hechter, “Religion and Rational Choice Theory,” in Young, ed., Rational Choice Theory and Religion, 148.