“Synodal Orthodoxy”: Contemporaries in Search for the Notion for the Church Administration in Imperial Russia

The understanding that Peter I had created an original system of the Church administration which had differed from previous forms (now we usually call it the Synodal system) was not created iimediately. A certain historical distance and the introduction of critical historical analysis were needed to invent a concept. This article analyzes when and how this concept emerged, what were the terms the contemporaries used to shape it until 1917–1918, what were the semantic and stylisitc shades in elaborating the concept. The conditions for recognizing a new period in the history of Russian Church with its special administrative system appeared only by the middle of the 19th century. In historical and canon law researches, publicistic articles, policy briefs of authors of the second half of the 19th — early 20th century, speeches of the 1917–1918 Council of Russian Church’ and its preparatory bodies’ members many variants of naming of the current system of the Church administration were proposed. They had a temporal and qualitative dimension and the majority of them were judgmental. There was no single concept till the revolution. The searching of it did not only reflect the awakened historical consciousness but was also an expression of the ideological struggle in the field of the Church history.