Historians have often disagreed over the framing of “Enlightenment” in modern Russian history. Earlier generations of Russian émigré writers often sought to contrast the Russian experience with that of the west, noting that in the Russian instance the age of enlightenment with its appeal to science, as in the case of the nihilists, followed, rather than preceded, the romantic era. By contrast, Soviet historians were at pains to legitimize, even lionize, the development of a secular enlightenment parallel to that of the west in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Andrey Ivanov, in this well-argued account of “spiritual revolution” in the long eighteenth century, transforms the discussion of enlightenment in Russia by positioning Russian Orthodoxy—specifically, enlightened religious leadership within the episcopate—as a driver of reform and enlightenment in the eighteenth century. His point is that, very much a part of Reformation and Enlightenment currents in the west, Russian church leaders of the eighteenth century unleashed a series of radical changes in theology and practice that paralleled that of their western counterparts. The agenda was unusually far-reaching: reformulation of icon veneration, utilitarian monastic reforms, catechetical revision, innovative preaching, rejection of serf ownership by the church, heliocentrism, scientific empiricism, support for vernacularization of sacred texts, and more. That this spiritual revolution at each stage remained hotly contested within the church reflects the diversity within Orthodox leadership that, in turn, signals for Ivanov Russia's emerging modernity.

Ivanov argues that this spiritual revolution had both a clearly identifiable opening and a well-marked closure. The critical starting point, according to Ivanov, was the arrival in St. Petersburg of Feofan Prokopovich, the Protestantizing rector of the Kievan Academy and chief protagonist of reform—Russia's Luther. Prokopovich not only succeeded in rooting out the faction loyal to the philo-Catholic patriarchal locum tenens Stefan Iavorskii and launching a series of church reforms, including those embedded in the 1721 Reglament, but he also managed to install a set of disciples, church hierarchs who became allies in the ongoing reform effort. At the other end of the century of church reform and enlightenment Ivanov sees the closure of the Russian Bible Society and the death of more liberal bishops ultimately culminating in 1836 with Tsar Nicholas I's appointment of the repressive, bureaucratic Synodal Oberprokuror, Nikolai Protasov. Protasov challenged not just the religious awakening of the early nineteenth century, but the independent authority of the church hierarchy that he sought to replace with procuratorial power. In Ivanov's view, the long eighteenth century of religious reform, notwithstanding its early dependence on Ukrainian leadership, effectively constructed the modern Orthodox Church in Russia both as an imperial and a Russian ecclesial institution. The clerical liberalism that was its legacy would be retained in theological seminaries and academies, and would be manifest in the 1905 revolution and in radical religious renovationist movements of the twentieth century.

In arguing his case for the Russian church's emerging modernity, Ivanov builds off the work of prior American scholarship on western cameralist and enlightenment influences, notably the works of Marc Raeff and Elise Wirtschafter. But it is Ivanov's own closely-argued historical contextualizing that elevates his work to one of the finest interpretations of the early modern Russian episcopate—a must read for students of the Russian church and Russian religious history. Feofan Prokopovich in particular, but also Simon Todorskii, Platon Levshin, Gavriil Petrov, and Filaret Drozdov, among a host of other hierarchs, are presented in all their complexity, driven as they were by contested issues of modern Orthodox theology and practice.

Precisely because of its interpretive force, Ivanov's work is also likely to inspire ongoing debate. Does it fit, for example, to lump together adherents of western mysticism and inner piety—the readers of Jung-Stilling—with “enlightenment”? Perhaps, as in the complicated case of Filaret Drozdov, but at times the common denominator ends up being simply the toleration of diverse Protestant ideas, what Ivanov calls the “intellectual cosmopolitanism of church elites” (236). Similarly, readers will be interested to see that Ivanov finds the renewed focus on ancient Greek Orthodoxy and the patristic writers to be something of a cudgel used by Protasov to redirect the church away from its eighteenth-century enlighteners. Yes, Protasov sought to canonize the Greek Septuagint text, but ironically the translators of patristic writings, dating from the early nineteenth century, included some of the most liberal theologians and strongest advocates of vernacularization in the Russian church (Gerasim Pavskii).

Ivanov notes in his introduction that Georges Florovsky's work on Russia's theological engagement with European Protestantism remained unfinished at the time of his death, adding that this volume is intended to provide an in-depth continuation of that conversation. It is a measure of Ivanov's success that his “spiritual revolution” will now frame that ongoing discussion.