“Caesaropapism” of church-state relations in the orthodox empire: assessments of historians and canonists of the 19th-20th centuries

The concept of “caesaropapism” has been used to characterize medieval churchstate relations in Orthodox countries since at least the middle of the 19th century. The Russian Church was also accused of Caesaropapism, especially in connection with the synodal reform of Emperor Peter I. There is an opinion in modern science that this term is not quite suitable for characterizing the position of the Byzantine emperor in the Church. The more caution should be used for the Petrine era. At the end of the 19th - the first half of the 20th century, researchers evaluated the Petrine reform from the point of view of their contemporary ideas about the Church as a public institution independent of the state. But for church-state relations in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 18th century, the medieval understanding of the Orthodox state as a Christian society, in which Church and state are inextricably linked, is more suitable.