ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the role the Orthodox Church has played in the legal culture of Russia. The chapter begins with a description of law in the Orthodox Church itself. It then describes how Orthodox judicial institutions interacted with indigenous Russian law. Slavonic nomocanons, Orthodox conciliar practice, and the theory of church-state “harmony” (symphonia) are described. The chapter then turns to the novel constitution imposed on the Orthodox Church by Peter the Great in 1721, a constitution that violated the church’s canonical order. Through the renewal of canon law studies in Russia and the Orthodox world in the nineteenth century, Russian Orthodox thinkers acquired the tools to challenge the Petrine ecclesiastical system. During the crisis of the imperial Russian state in 1905–17, leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church offered well-wrought proposals for reform. The reform movement culminated in one of the great church councils in the history of Christianity: the All-Russian Council of Moscow of 1917–18.
