The Sermons of the Metropolitan Filaret — Technique of Composition, Order and Logic of Linguistic Presentation

The personality and work of Filaret, the Metropolitan of Moscow and Kolomna (secular name: Vasilii Mikhailovich Drozdov, 1782−1867), attracted the attention of pre-revolutionary scholars. An outstanding church and public figure of the Synodal period he was arguably the greatest Russian Orthodox theologian of the 19th century. In the post-Soviet era, a number of works were dedicated to various aspects of his multifaceted activities at different periods of his life. Insufficiently studied, however, is the question of Filaret’s distinctive technique of composing and linguistially rendering his sermons. The aim of this article is to present these sermons as an outstanding example of church preaching in the first half of the 19th century. Since the mid-17th century, Russian preaching had been under the defining influence of South Russian learned monks and hierarchs who followed a scholastic tradition that was modeled on Polish Catholicism. The rejection of this scholastic tradition began with Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich (1681−1736). The final and complete break and the establishment of a distinctive standard for the technique and language of Russian preaching came with Filaret. In his sermons, he primarily addressed questions of Christian doctrine as well as spiritual and moral issues, adhering to an order and logic of presentation which strictly adhered to the principle of remaining grounded in facts. Filaret opposed any improvisation in preaching. Restraint in sermon structure was characteristic. When composing his homilies, the Metropolitan selected those themes and questions from Christian doctrine and church dogma that he considered particularly important for his flock. The language of Metropolitan Filaret’s sermons is a living Russian language with numerous Slavic insertions, primarily as quotations but appearing often within the text of the sermon itself. The preacher employed a multitude of poetic devices, leading to the conclusion that he contributed to the revitalization of preaching, and significantly elevated its importance in liturgical practice. The themes, approaches to composition, and the language of his sermons became a model for preaching in the second half of the 19th century. In distinction to the preceding period when preaching could develop only within a very narrow circle of high church hierarchs, this allowed for a number of major and renowned preachers to emerge from among the parish clergy. Considering Filaret their teacher, they adopted his technical idiom and standard model for the composition of sermons.