Spiritual Consistory in Contradiction between the Idea of God and the Idea of the State

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of legislative acts, archival materials, and other narrative sources, on the basis of which a description of one of the church administrative and judicial institutions of the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries is given. The principles of the formation of spiritual consistories, the mode of functioning, the specifics of cases examined by this church-judicial body are considered. According to the authors, ecclesiastical consistories performed administrative and judicial roles in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Spiritual consistories were an important element of the system of state and legal institutions during this period. The old concept of the “symphony of powers” was replaced by the principle of subordination of the church to the state. In this regard, the historical fate of the spiritual consistories turned out to be closely connected with the fate of the state and legal institutions of the Russian Empire. The historical development of the Russian Orthodox Church led to the situation when a significant part of legal issues that were of great importance to the population of the Russian Empire was controlled within ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The methodological principles used for the research are the dialectical approach, which enables to consider this problem in historical retrospective; the method of problem-centered analysis; the comparative legal method of legal knowledge.