Is morality above the law? The ecclesiastical court and Nicholas I in the cases of the clergy's participation in peasant uprisings of 1826

The Ecclesiastical Court of the Russian Orthodox Church attracts more researcher’s attention, but most works focus on legal dimension. The author offers an approach based on trial practice. Although the ecclesiastical and secular courts’ jurisdiction were different, they often investigated the same cases. The parish clergy’s participation in rural rebellions of 1826 led the state and the church to formulate new legal criteria. It would be different judgments of secular and ecclesiastical institutions. As a result, the formal proof of guilt begins to gradually give way to the study of the morality and trustworthiness of clerics. The development of new norms led to a revision of the foundations of the church-judicial system as a whole. The change in legal practice shows the approaches common to the transformation of ecclesiastical and secular courts of the new political course of Nicholas I, focused on the supervision of order and morality in society. This study is based on materials from the archives of the Holy Synod, the highest court of appeal, which considered controversial cases in investigative cases about the misconduct of the clergy in the 1820s.