PROFESSSOR REV. MIKHAIL ZHETLOV: HISTORICAL-CANONICAL BASIS FOR THE UNITY OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH

PROFESSSOR REV. MIKHAIL ZHETLOV: HISTORICAL-CANONICAL BASIS FOR THE UNITY OF THE RUSSIAN CHURCH

The following article describes in detail and scrupulously analyzes the historical events connected with the arrangement of Church life in Kiev, Moscow, and Western Rus’ over the span of the last millennium. Over that period of time, the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church has been attacked a number of times from various sides, but it has nevertheless continued to exist significantly longer than those broken periods. In Byzantine times it was namely the Church of Constantinople that advocated for this unity against the rising political conflicts between one or another Russian princedom. Only the Byzantium elite itself was able to tear the metropolia of all the Russias from Constantinople, when it first tried to use Russian Orthodoxy as a bargaining chip in its desperate attempt to get the West to come to the aid of perishing Constantinople, and then allowed the Uniate metropolitan to usurp the title of the primate of “All Rus’”; but the objective course of history has given a comprehensive answer to this question, fixed in a whole series of ecclesiastical-canonical documents cited by the author, which leave no grounds for any lawful reinterpretation whatsoever.