His chapter carefully scrutinizes the writings of Archimandrite Ioann, whose understanding of freedom of conscience was essentially freedom from sin and the resultant ability of an Orthodox believer to commune with God with a clear conscience. Patrick Lally Michelson addresses the intellectual trajectory of Orthodox clerical thought on freedom of conscience in the first half of the century. Even after this point, those who endorsed toleration did so within prescribed limits and for its assumed practical advantages.ĤThe remaining chapters largely focus on nineteenth century developments. As have other historians, Hamburg critiques the notion that toleration emerged primarily from the Enlightenment, noting that Russian thinkers considered toleration well before this period, and that only with Catherine’s reign did the Enlightenment significantly impact Russian writing on the subject. Hamburg explores the intellectual evolution of the term “religious toleration” in the Russian context from 1500 to 1825. He characterizes the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a period of sustained religious revival, a development that was interwoven with growing awareness of and articulated demands by religious subjects of the empire for individual freedom and human dignity.ģWhile Poole stresses religious freedom in his introduction, G.M. Hamburg tackles the separate question of religious toleration in a chapter that provides an intellectual prehistory to the other chapters. Poole also draws a necessary distinction between religious toleration and religious freedom, as the two terms have divergent meanings in the imperial period. That said, the contributions by Coleman and Naganawa do much to broaden this focus beyond Orthodoxy. This focus is understandable given Orthodoxy’s outsized role in the multiconfessional empire. The volume directs most of its attention to intellectual and philosophical developments within Russian Orthodoxy, a limitation he acknowledges at the outset. Werth’s seminal definition of the Russian Empire as a “multiconfessional Orthodox state-that is a polity that established several religions while constituting only one of them as dominant,” is a critical framework for many of the authors (9).ĢRandall A. Poole’s introduction offers an extensive overview of evolving notions of freedom of conscience in modern Russia. Given this fact, it is not surprising that co‑editor Paul W. As such, the authors in this volume focus the bulk of their attention on non‑state actors, even as they acknowledge the fact that the imperial Russian state loomed large over religious communities and had a profound impact on them. 1This edited volume fits in with a sustained surge in scholarship on lived religious experience in modern Russia.
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