The Episcopate

Like the Church of Rome, Orthodoxy too, as it developed first in Byzantium and then in the Russian East of the Church of Moscow, suffers from papalism– not consciously dogmatic, clearly or responsibly formulated, but actual and psychological. Orthodoxy is grounded in sobornost, the communality of the body of the Church, and not in the episcopacy, the bishop or bishops alone, and on this account it cannot be regarded as a parody, I should say a caricature, of Roman ecclesiastical autocracy and absolutism. Nevertheless there is a peculiar kind of exaggeration prevalent in the Russian and other Slavic churches with regard to episcopacy. …
I have to make this confession hoping that as a voice from the grave it will carry more weight and not be vitiated by any personal considerations. In my lifetime I endure the evil in silence, and my silence is partly due to lack of courage and partly to the aversion I feel to the petty scandal to which such a protest of a little Russian Luther would inevitably give rise. As a matter of fact it has nothing to do with the Lutheranism or a desire to undermine the gracious power of episcopacy, which is to me a mystical reality as evident as daylight. My ‘Lutheranism’ is a struggle not against but for episcopacy, a striving to reclaim it in it’s true dignity, to free it from the contamination of despotism, based on a slavish psychology.
This slavishness is to be found first of all in the attitude of the bishops to secular power, in caesaro-papism – the ‘union of the church with the state’, in substituting the kingdom of this world for the kingdom of God. … While thus submitting to Caesar outside the Church, the bishops have demanded the same submission to themselves within the church – not of course from the laity, who have remained free and in a sense exercise power over the bishops, but from the clerics bound by canonical obedience.
Such an abuse of the pastoral power and the tendency towards the despotic autocracy is psychologically made worse by the fact that, contrary to the second canon of the Sophia Council (which excluded monks from episcopal office), our episcopate has been confined to monks – or rather, to pseudo-monks since the vows of obedience became a step for obtaining episcopal power and lost all relation to monastic spiritual discipline.
Owing to the actual conditions of Russian Church life, taking monastic vows for the sake of an episcopal career became one of the most painful peculiarities of our ecclesiastical system; everybody knows this. The intolerable spiritual contradiction involved in this has become more and more manifest, especially in our time, when due to war and revolution secular authorities constantly supersede one another. Each new regime has its own incumbents and power elite, and the episcopacy is filled to an alarming extent by men bent on making a career. All this must inevitably lead to a purifying crisis in the life of the Church that will save it not from episcopacy but, in its name, from bishops of a certain type.
Sergius Bulgakov, d. 1944