The influence of the formation of the departments of church law at the law faculties of secular universities in Russia in the 19th century on the development of ecclesiastical legal science

The article is devoted to the role and significance of the educational discipline of church law for the development of church law scholarship in Russia in the 19th century. In the 18th century, church law was considered part of the theological disciplines and was developed only by professors of theology and teachers among the clergy. Until the 19th century the idea of teaching ecclesiastical law (“ecclesiastical jurisprudence”) in secular universities remained debatable. With the change in the statutes of universities at the beginning of the 19th century, the practice of teaching church law began to be included in secular education. By the middle of the 19th century, church-legal problems became the object of scholarly research by secular lawyers and jurists. The article indicates the institutional changes in the field of university education, which affected the specifics of the teaching of church law. It is noted that the development of church law as a scholarly discipline gave preRevolutionary jurisprudence new legal categories and some institutions of law. At the same time, as an academic discipline, church law suffered from political bias, uncritically supporting the existing format of church-state relations in the Russian Empire (the so-called Synodal system). It is concluded that the departments of ecclesiastical law at the law faculties of secular universities of the Russian Empire had a major impact on the development of domestic ecclesiastical law scholarship. The article was written on the basis of a report made by the author at the 5th Barsov Readings at St. Petersburg Theological Academy on December 13, 2021.