EdinoverieOccasionally also transcribed as Yedinoverie or Yedinoveriye. () is an arrangement between certain Russian Old Believers communities and the official Russian Orthodox Church, whereby such communities are treated as a part of the normative Church system while maintaining their own rites. Thus, they are often designated "Old Ritualists" (, staroobryadtsy), as opposed to "Old Believers". The followers of this movement preserve the ancient liturgical rites (like , services according to pre-reform printed books, etc.) and the old Russian way of life, recognise the hierarchical jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. In the definition of Bishop Simon (Shleev): "Edinoverie is Old Belief reconciled with the Russian and Universal Church".
It emerged in the 18th century and was, on the one hand, an expression of the desire of some adherents of the "old faith" to unite with the Russian Orthodox Church due to the absence of a church hierarchy among the Old Believers and, on the other hand, arose in connection with the government's recognition of the ineffectiveness of forceful methods of "suppressing the schism", which provoked the Old Believers into resistance. It was sanctioned by the highest church authority in the 1780s and regulated in 1800 by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin). At the same time, requests for the appointment of a special bishop for Edinoverie adherents and for the lifting of the "anathemas" of the Councils of 1656 and 1667 against the old rites were not met. Edinoverie was from the outset regarded with suspicion both by the majority of Old Believers, who viewed Edinoverie adherents as traitors and compared Edinoverie to a unia,Palkin, A. S. Ne soedinentsy, no podchinentsy… : The Attitude of Old Believers toward Edinoverie in the Late 18th — Mid-19th Centuries (Based on Polemic Works) // Vestnik Ekaterinburgskoy dukhovnoy seminarii [Bulletin of the Yekaterinburg Theological Seminary]. 2012. No. 2 (4). pp. 74–85. from the original on February 29, 2024. and by most of the clergy of the state church, who saw them as "half-schismatics" and secret Old Believers. Despite restrictions on their rights, by 1918 approximately 600 Edinoverie parishes and more than ten monasteries were operating on the territory of the Russian Empire. At the All-Russian Local Council of 1917–1918, the question of appointing Edinoverie bishops was resolved affirmatively. The "anathemas" against the old rites were lifted only at the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1971. In the Soviet era, due to the total persecution of the Church and the old way of life in general, Edinoverie virtually disappeared. Since the late 1980s, the old rite within the Russian Orthodox Church has experienced a second birth. At the same time, "among the main features of the contemporary situation of the Old Rite parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church one may note the absence of an official ecclesiastical-canonical status that would define the structure of their liturgical and communal life"Old Ritualist parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church. Access date: October 14, 2013. Archived October 16, 2013. Only on March 24, 2022, did the Synod approve the "Statute on the Old Rite Parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church".
Terms and meanings In the pre-revolutionary period, in addition to the term Edinoverie ("Unity in Faith"), several other terms were also used. In the 1780s, Old Believers who sought reconciliation with the official Church while preserving their own rituals, books, and traditions began to be called soglasniki (literally "those in agreement"), and their movement was known as soglasnichestvo ("conciliation [movement]"). In the 1790s, another term appeared — soyedinentsy ("those who joined [the Church]"), and this tendency was referred to as soyedinenstvo ("reunion" or "unification").
In 1800, Metropolitan Platon Levshin introduced a new concept, calling the Old Believers, supporters of the join, as edinovertsy (co-religionists, ones of the same faith): "those who accepted and agreed and received the Church on the above-mentioned basis should no longer be called schismatics or old-ritualists, because there is nothing new in the Church and there are no new-ritualists, to call them soyedinentsy or edinovertsy, to which names they, according to my suggestion, declare themselves agreeable...", and therefore their Church should be called Edinoverie"). More open-minded hierarchs of the State Church saw in the Edinoverie a mutual acceptance. In the words of Metropolitan Philaret Drozdov of Moscow, addressed to the Edinovertsy at the 1854 consecration of Saint Nicholas Church for them at Rogozhskoye Cemetery: "You are people of our faith, and we are people of your faith".Vladimir Karpets, What is Edinoverie?
After the First All-Russian Congress of Co-Religionists, held in October 1912 in St. Petersburg, another name for this church movement became widespread – Orthodox Old Believers.
History
Old rites before 1800 The reforms of Patriarch Nikon did not become established immediately. Although in Moscow, under Nikon, services were already conducted according to the new rite, in the provinces many bishops who had signed the conciliar decrees in favour of the reforms along with Nikon quietly sabotaged their own decisions so as not to provoke unrest among their flocks. In the provinces, services were mostly conducted according to the old rite. Intermediate forms were also common. Even after the anathemas of the Moscow Council of 1656 and the Grand Moscow Council of 1666–1667, according to whose decisions those who practiced the two-fingers blessing were declared heretics, cases of the coexistence of the old and new rites within the ruling Church still occurred. Pyotr Chubarov noted: "It is known that even in the second half of the 17th century in many places in actual liturgical practice, especially on the periphery, old and new books and rites coexisted. Many believers attended ordinary Orthodox parishes but kept to the two-fingered sign and old rites". Such tendencies, as the researcher notes, were extremely persistent. The fact that at the beginning of the 18th century there were people who permitted the old rite in the official church is attested by the decree of the Holy Synod of February 28, 1722, which required the elimination of the mixing of old and new rites: "Those who, although they submit to the Church and receive all the church sacraments, yet make the sign of the cross with two fingers… shall be recorded as schismatics, regardless of anything". Nevertheless, in the mid-18th century Bishop of Astrakhan Ilarion (1731–1755) permitted clergy in his diocese, due to the large number of Old Believers living in the region, to conduct services according to pre-reform books."Philosophy of Edinoverie: Past–Present–Future." Report of Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad Kirill, Chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Chairman of the Commission on Interaction and Cooperation between the Russian Orthodox Church and Old Believers, at the jubilee conference dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the canonical existence of Old Rite parishes within the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow, DECR, 27 November 2000 // Orthodox Edinoverie in Russia / Comp. P. Chubarov, V. N. Pavlov. — Saint Petersburg: Herzen State Pedagogical University Press, 2004. — pp. 17–39 According to documents of the Astrakhan Spiritual Consistory, the Terek Cossacks "remained almost until the mid-18th century in unity with the Orthodox Church and in submission to the Bishop of Astrakhan, while at the same time maintaining, together with their priests, not only privately but also ecclesiastically, the old rites according to old printed books". An analogous situation until the 1780s also existed among the Yaik (Ural) Cossacks, who maintained old rites and orders in their churches while remaining under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Kazan. A known conflict arose between the host and the Metropolitan of Kazan Luka (Konashevich), during which the Cossacks gave written responses to the bishop, indicating that the books in the Mikhail-Archangel Cathedral were old printed ones. Luka was compelled to ordain the Cossack Maxim Pavlov, who crossed himself with two fingers, as a protopope for the host, and to abandon the establishment of a spiritual administration in Yaik Gorodok. Nevertheless, these were for the most part isolated actions by individual bishops that had no effect on the overall situation.