The problem of internal church division at the Pre-council Presence of 1906: teleological and dogmatic substantiations of the idea of representation
Abstract
The article is devoted to the analysis of the discussion at the Pre-Council Commission of 1906 on the composition of the participants in the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church and on the procedure for choosing delegates to the Council. The key topic of controversy between the members of the Commission was the question of the admissibility of the presence at the Council (in addition to the bishops) of representatives of the laity and the clergy and of the rights that such delegates should be endowed with. This discussion traces the understanding of the problem of the existence of intra-church groups with different interests and the desire of these groups to be represented at the Local Council (the idea of representation). In the argumentation of supporters of the idea of representation, economic (teleological) arguments stand out, justifying the violation of the canons by the actual needs of church life, as well as attempts to dogmatically substantiate the existence of different groups with equal rights into the church community. The article deals with the issue of "political analogies" manifested themselves in the argumentation of the supporters of the idea of representation in the Commission. An analysis of the arguments of the participants in the discussion gives grounds to conclude that, although supporters of the broad composition of the Local Council rarely appealed to modern political institutions as models for the body of church administration, political analogy was implicitly present in their theological argumentation. Related to this is the understanding of the “Body of the Church” in a mechanical rather than a mystical sense. The article concludes that the assessments that supporters of the idea of representation gave to isolated intra-church groups are inconsistent. While teleological argumentation characterized such a situation as unhealthy and offered ways to heal it, dogmatic argumentation, on the contrary, was called upon to justify such a situation as a norm. Comparison of the various arguments of the supporters of the idea of representation and the reaction of opponents to it allows us to make a conclusion about the choice in favor of teleological argumentation in the process of the final discussion of the composition of the members of the Local Council.
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