Secularization (history)

In Russian, the term "secularization" is usually used for the process of expropriation of church land holdings and other church property in favor of the state. Other meanings of the term “secularization” (according to TSB ):

• the process of reducing the role of religion in society, the same as "secularization"; see Secularization (sociology) ;
• the transition of a clergyman in Western Europe to a secular state by permission of the church with the release from church office and the loss of relevant rights.

For the first time, the term "secularization" was used in the 17th century and meant the transfer of land from the church to secular administration. The process itself took place before: with the formation of centralized nation-states with the help of secularization, secular power was freed from church patronage and strengthened public finances at the expense of the clergy.

• In the Frankish state, Karl Martell secularized in the 1st half of the 8th century and distributed the confiscated lands of the nobility.
• In Byzantium, secularization has been carried out many times. So, in 1058 [Isaac I Komnin confiscated part of the monastic lands, and the Patriarch of Constantinople Mikhail Kirulariy was deposed and exiled at the end of 1058 .
• In the era of the Reformation , large-scale secularization took place in Western Europe. Already in the XIV-XV centuries, John Wycliffe and Jan Hus demanded secularization, and in the XVI century. secular feudal lords supported Luther . The German princes who supported the Reformation secularized after the Peasant War of 1524-1526.
• With the spread of Zwinglianism and Calvinism in the Swiss cantons, secularization took place there.
• XVI century Dutch revolution transferred the church lands to the bourgeoisie.
• During the Reformation in England in 1536-1539 secularized lands passed to the bourgeoisie and the gentry , contributing to the initial accumulation of capital ^[1] .
• In the XVII century. The English revolution led to the ordinances of 1646 on the destruction of archbishoprics and bishoprics and the secularization of their lands.
• In the second half of the eighteenth century, the strengthening of enlightened absolutism included the secularization carried out in Austria by Joseph II , and in Portugal by S. J. Pombal .
• The Great French Revolution by decree of November 2, 1789 nationalized the church and monastery lands in France. During the Napoleonic conquests, secularization took place throughout Western Europe, including Italy . The Luneville world of 1801 made it possible to secularize the church principalities in Germany.
• During the unification of Italy, secularization was carried out in 1855 and 1866, with the liquidation of the Papal Region in 1870.
• In Russia, as a result of the secularization reform of 1764, the bulk of the monastic lands passed to the state (which became the source of the appearance of most of the state peasants ); in the 19th century the government of the Russian Empire also carried out the secularization of the Waqfs in the Central Asian possessions of the empire.

The first signs of secularization are seen in Russia at the end of the fourteenth century among representatives of the church itself; this trend develops at the end of the XV and the beginning of the XVI centuries, and at the same time the trend in favor of secularization asserts itself in society - in the heresy of the Judaizers - and in the administration of John III and Basil III . In the sixteenth century, the first two currents are drying up, and the government, on the contrary, is becoming more and more persistent. In the XVII century, the Code of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich includes several very serious measures in this direction, the triumph of which was the church reforms of Peter the Great and Catherine II .

Reasons

The reasons for secularization in Russia were almost the same as in other European countries: the enormous development of white-place (tax-free) church lands, which had a hard response to the national and state economy, and the harmful effect of this development on monastic customs. The movement against monastic land ownership was facilitated, moreover, by the inconsistency of his vow of non-possession , clearly through the compromise worked out by Byzantine law even before the time of the adoption of Christianity by Russia and transferred to Russia along with the Nomocanon . It consisted in the fact that the monk cannot have personal property, but can use the property of the monastery. On this basis, Nomocanon recognized the rights of monasteries, among other things, to land ownership inhabited by peasant tenants, denying unconditionally only direct church slavery. To ensure that ownership of large estates does not harm the ascetic rigor of life, the church established the principle: “Church wealth is the poor wealth”, and on the basis of it demanded that the monks do not “enter the villages” and the monastic authorities spend a minimum share of the income on the food of the monks, and everything else would be used for church building and decoration, school work and all kinds of charity.

Intra Church Polemic

At that time, the Nomocanon was revered in Russia as a inspired book and therefore not subject to criticism, therefore, ideally-minded Russian ascetics, if they wanted to remain strictly Orthodox and at the same time realize the ascetic ideal, presented two outcomes: either with inexorable severity, through severe discipline and punishment to conduct a coercive charter, or renounce both estates and charter, recommending another form of monastic life. The first path is chosen by Joseph Volotsky and the Josephites , the second by the Monk Neil of Sora and the Volga non-possessors . At the cathedral in 1503, with the knowledge of Vasily III, "the elder Nile began to say that there wouldn’t be villages and monasteries would live in the deserts and feed on their handiwork." This proposal of general secularization and the change of “dormitory” to “hermitage” caused a lively debate; in the end, after the departure of the Nile, the cathedral presented the grand duke with an answer (according to the project of Joseph Volotsky), which stated that "the saints and monasteries don’t dare and do not favor giving church acquisitions," with reference to the rules of the Papers, books that legalized land ownership and forbade secular authorities take away church property. Subsequently, the monk-prince Vassian Kosoy Patrikeev , who was considered a pupil of the Nile of Sora, and Maxim Grek actively opposed monastic land ownership. The first led the matter abruptly and arrogantly, depicting abuses of the monastery estates in exaggeratedly black colors, interpreting in its own way and incorrectly the rules of the Pilot Book and speaking scornfully of both them and the church leaders recognized by the church as “possessive” monasteries (“This is not the rule, but it was crooked. "Lord, what kind of miracle workers are they? They say Makar works miracles in Kalyazin, and the peasant was rural.") With such reviews, he gave reason to doubt his Orthodoxy and compare his polemic against the monasteries of Osiphians with the polemic of the Judaizers. Maxim Grek was a stranger, and his harsh criticism of Russian books, rituals and customs made him unpopular. On the other hand, some Osiflanskiy monasteries showed that land ownership can not harm the severity of monastic life: the scientist Zinovy ​​Otensky, a pupil of Maxim the Greek, having familiarized himself with the life of the Osiphians and comparing it with the luxurious life of Vassian in the Simon Monastery , went to the Osiflian camp. The Volokolamsk monastery in its famine supplied whole districts with tens of thousands of people, and for this, as well as for the rigor of life and the beauty of worship, he enjoyed popular love. Therefore, the Osiflansky direction, which did not require, moreover, breaking and firmly rooted in the nearest and most abundant church-historical tradition, prevailed in the church, and the secularization movement passed to the state.

Secularization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

With the development of the Russian state, the issue of church and monastery estates will receive national importance: there was not enough land to provide service to the class, and monastic lands were growing, and the servants who were served suffered from the departure of peasants to privileged monastery lands. The concession by Novgorod to John of a number of sovereign and monastery lands in 1478 cannot be considered an act of secularization in the exact sense; John "took by right of conqueror and in the form of punishment to the guilty clergy" ( Metropolitan Macarius ). For the state, the matter of secularization was complicated by the fact that the church clearly spoke out against it: therefore, it went extremely slowly. At Stoglavy Cathedral in 1551, new patrimonies were laid for the lords and monasteries to be received only with the consent of the tsar, and in the Moscow Region proper not to be accepted at all; to review the cash possessions and return to the treasury or to the donors those that were taken by force or against the law in royal infancy. The Livonian War brought about a new cathedral of estates in 1580. On it, it was decided to return the lands given to the soul, to the relatives of the testator, and to reward the monasteries with money; if there are no relatives, select the same fee for the treasury. In 1584 there was an attempt to destroy the privileges of the monastery lands, but they were restored within a month. The gradual attachment of peasants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was partly due to these privileges, for the sake of which the peasants escaped from the estates of the laity to the monastery lands. According to the account of foreigners, in the 17th century about 1/3 of the whole territory was considered to be a church; according to Kotoshikhin , bishops and monasteries owned 118,000 peasant households. The code of Tsar Alexei in 1648 forbade a further increase in church estates, and some of them were directly assigned to the treasury: heavy people complained that the spiritual White inhabitants settled near cities and beat off their trades and crafts; these settlements were unsubscribed to the sovereign free of charge. Under Tsar Fyodor Alekseevich (1676–82), a detailed inventory of church estates and their income was compiled to determine fees from the church department and to control its economy. This control and the temporary conversion of a certain part of the church's income to state needs have come into custom for a long time, even with Basil III; under the Romanovs, control was carried out by order of the Grand Palace . In addition, the government increased the fees for church lands that they incurred on a par with others: Yamskie , Streletskiy , Polonyanichnye , etc. In the XVII century, the government also began to use the primordial designation of monasteries as centers of charity, sending them to the maintenance of crippled and elderly servants , their widows and orphans.

18th Century Secularization

Under Peter the Great, the terrible tension of the country's financial forces raised the question of monastery estates with an edge. Stefan Yavorsky once called Peter "an iconoclastic ", alluding probably to Emperor Constantine V , who converted monasteries to barracks, monks to soldiers, and confiscated their property in favor of the army. When the synod announced that there were no more places and salaries in the monasteries for the disabled in the Swedish war , Peter forbade anyone to be tonsured again as a monk. In the “Announcement, when and for what sake the monastic order began”, compiled by Feofan Prokopovich on behalf of Peter, the following views are stated: “And what they say - they pray, then everyone prays; what is the profit to society from this? Most of them flee to the monasteries to eat bread for nothing. ” Thus, Peter sharply criticized that point of view on monasteries, under the influence of which ancient Russia carried its offerings in them, wanting to furnish their churches with a richer chance, and to give monks the opportunity to completely surrender to prayer for themselves and for the whole Russian land. Peter called the monastery lands “tunegible” (in vain disappearing), as they bring too little material benefit to society. Already in 1700, all the benefits preserved by the monasteries from the time of the Code were destroyed; in 1701 the monastery order , abolished in 1675, was restored, and the monasteries and bishops were completely eliminated from managing their households and incomes. They were ordered to issue extremely modest salaries for the maintenance of their order, “without which it is impossible to stay”; the rest was to go to the state, schools and charitable institutions. At the age of 20, an order arranged 93 almshouses for 4400 people in Moscow and a hospital for 500 people. The Holy Synod in his first report requested that the administration of the church estate be returned to the clergy, and in 1724 the monastery order turned into a synodal chamber office. The synodal administration provoked discontent both above and below — discontent unjustly, since the synod could neither collect more for the treasury than it collected, nor give out to the clergy more than was allowed. Already under Peter, it was once ordered to delay the salary of the members of the synod, until they collect the arrears. Under Anna Ivanovna in 1732, the arrears from church estates were estimated at 81 thousand rubles; the subsidiary office greatly tormented them, and their management was transferred to the collegium of economy under the Senate , which received the same meaning as the monastery order had under Peter. The matter did not get better: in 1740, at some synodal institutions there was an arrears of 32,000 rubles, and there was nothing to pay a salary to the synod. Elizaveta Petrovna closed the collegium of economy in 1744 and transferred the estates again to the spiritual authorities, but the fees and salaries remained the same. In 1757, at a conference of the Senate and the Synod, the empress remarked that since monasteries could not use their incomes other than according to the state of the state, land management constituted a “vain difficulty” for them.

Peter III made an order to include church estates in the general composition of the state; Catherine II first canceled it, but already at the end of 1762 she ordered to consider the issue of the mixed spiritual and secular commission, with Dmitry Sechenov at the head. Catherine approved her report in 1764; On February 26 ( March 8 ), 1764 , the Manifesto on the Secularization of Monastery Lands was signed ^[2] . All church estates (911 thousand peasants) were transferred from the spiritual department to the college of economy; the salaries in three classes are assigned for the maintenance of monasteries and bishops' houses; the no-cause monasteries are partly abolished, partly left to their fate (not included in the states). Of all the proceeds to the collegium of savings, only 404 thousand rubles were spent on church institutions, while one peasant quitrent until the 1780s received 1366 thousand, and later about 3400 thousand. In 1786, secularization was extended to Little Russia and at the same time the collegium of economy was closed, so that the former church estates finally merged with state land. The last bishop who stood for the old order and therefore suffered was Arseny Matseevich . The consequence of secularization was a significant reduction in the number of monasteries and their “enlargement” (monks from closed monasteries were transferred to the nearest operating ones). According to the states of 1764, out of 954 Great Russian monasteries, 569 were abolished, 161 were left behind the state; by 1801 in the whole Empire from 1072 there were only 452 monasteries.

Secularization in 1764 did not extend to the western provinces, and was carried out in the Kiev, Chernihiv and Novgorod-Seversky provinces only by decree of April 10, 1786. The decree of April 25, 1788 carried out secularization in the Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav, Kursk and Voronezh provinces.

Secularization in the 19th — 20th centuries

In the provinces of Vitebsk, Grodno, Mogilev, Vilna and Minsk, Białystok Territory, as well as Podolia and Volhynia, the lands of bishops' houses and monasteries were secularized by decree of December 25, 1841, and parish lands by decree of May 10, 1843.

The final secularization in Russia was carried out by the Bolsheviks . После Октябрьской революции декретом о земле 1917 были конфискованы все остававшиеся в собственности духовенства земли (около 3 млн десятин). Декретом от 20 января (2 февраля) 1918 года церковь была отделена от государства и в её распоряжении оставлены лишь здания для отправления богослужения, и те на условиях безвозмездной аренды у государства.

• Секуляризационная реформа 1764 года
• Манифест о секуляризации монастырских земель (1764)
• Реституция церковного имущества в России — применяемый в Российской Федерации термин для описания осуществленного государством "возврата" имущества религиозных организаций, национализированного в 1918 году, преемникам этих организаций.

• Секуляризация в России // Энциклопедический словарь Брокгауза и Ефрона : в 86 т. (82 т. и 4 доп.). - SPb. , 1890-1907.
• Секуляризация (история) — статья из Большой советской энциклопедии .
• И. К. Смолич, История Русской Церкви: 1700—1917: В 2 частях. — М.: Валаамский монастырь, 1997. Глава II. Церковь и Государство .