Georgian Autocephaly and the Ethnic Fragmentation of Orthodoxy

Acta Slavica Iaponica, issue: 23 / 2006, pages: 74-100.In conclusion, then, we might emphasize the importance of canon to virtually all of the historical actors that we have encountered. If for Georgians respect for canon required the restoration of the territorial autocephaly of their church, Russian insistence on the sanction of a church council was, by all indications, no less genuine. Vorontsov-Dashkov explicitly recognized the need for the question’s canonical resolution, as did the Emperor, when he transferred it to the jurisdiction of the church council. The Holy Synod refrained from interference in the Greco-Bulgarian conflict on canonical grounds, even as the issue was obviously of great concern to the imperial Russian government.
Even Ignat’ev made strenuous efforts to invest resolution of the conflict with canonicity. His intervention on the Bulgarian side towards the end of the crisis was a product of his exasperation with the Greek hierarchs and his recognition that, if compromise was ultimately impossible, Russian interests were better served by supporting the Bulgarians than by either backing the patriarchate or
maintaining a position of strict neutrality. Thus even while the national question challenged religious conceptions of community and authority with ever greater success, ecclesiastical conceptions and provisions continued to frame national struggles within the church.