Committee for transformation of the educational part of the ecclesiastical seminaries (1840–1847): success and failures of theological-educational reforms
Abstract
The article is devoted to one of the least studied episodes in the history of the Russian theological school, i.e. the activities of the Committee for the revision of the “abstracts of seminar teaching” (1840–1847). The work of this committee was initiated by the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, Count N. A. Protasov (1836–1855) as part of a project to transform church-educational system. At the same time, many leaders of the theological and educational environment took part in the development and implementation of the transformations: prominent theologians and hierarchs of their time, who had their own theological view of the training of a pastor. The relevance of considering the work of the committee is due to the fact that its work stands at the intersection of internal theological-academic processes and the infl uence of an external context. In part, there is a strengthening of what was decided in the framework of the reform of 1808–1814; in part, what was laid down for the future is being revealed. In the theological context, this is refl ected in the allocation of new areas of theological knowledge from its general structure, their active development; in the spiritual and educational context, there is a search for new educational models within the private initiative of rectors of theological schools. At the same time, the question was raised of clarifying the goal of education in theological seminaries, a call was made to bring the spiritual and educational process closer to the goal — the preparation of the pastor of the Church — which, within the framework of the spiritual and educational reform of 1808–1814, was only implicitly laid down in the fi nal documents, along with another task — to educate children of the clergy. But the work of such committees raises the question of correlating the theological and pastoral ideas of the era with the immediate results of their work. To what extent was the theological thought of the era taken into account in the framework of the sessions, was it suffi ciently developed to conceptualise the curriculum, or was it just organisational problems that caused the failures? Thus, based on the results, a conclusion is made about the reasons for the failures of Protasov’s reforms through the prism of the work of the main committee of this era. Proceeding from the tasks, the structure of the article is built according to the chronological principle, and the period under consideration covers the operation of the charter of theological schools: the 1820–1860s. According to the results of the study, it is possible to establish that the Committee was assigned a key role in promoting the initiatives of various fi gures of the spiritual and educational environment and the development of a meaningful theological concept of transformations, for which the institution of the chief prosecutor was only an external stimulus. However, the fi nal result of the Committee’s work was infl uenced by a number of organisational problems of the synodal theological and educational system, and the lack of unity among the members of the Synod regarding views on the preparation of a pastor. The presented conclusions show an inextricable connection between the spiritual educational process and the theological understanding of pastorship, and the problem of preparing a pastor is gradually being realized as a key one for the theological school.
Keywords
