FILARET, Vasilij Michajlovič Drozdov, Metropolitan of Moscow. - Born 26 Dec. 1782, died 19 Nov. 1867, he studied at Kolomna and in the lavra of the Most Holy Trinity, where he also began to teach. Having become a monk, he was rector of the Ecclesiastical Academy of St. Petersburg and then auxiliary bishop. In 1819 he was elected archbishop of Tver and member of the Holy Synod. Having passed in 1820 to the see of Yaroslavl, he was installed in 1826 as metropolitan of Moscow. F. was a zealous pastor and an eloquent preacher; his activity extended over all of Russia, Church and State.
For about 50 years he was regarded as an oracle and laden with honors and decorations. Except during the period of the influence of the procurator general of the Holy Synod, Protasov, F. decided theological and canonical questions. He encountered resistance in his intention, finally successful, to translate Holy Scripture into Russian and to replace Church Slavonic in certain customary prayers (the Our Father, the Creed, etc.) with Russian. The celebrated reform of Protasov in 1836, which interrupted the Protestantizing tradition of Feofan Prokopovich, forced him to conceal his Protestant opinions (cf. his work Ialoženie raznosti meddu vostočenju i zapadnju Cerkoviju v učiniji vary, "On the difference between the Eastern Church and the Western Church in the doctrine of the faith"), of which some traces are found in the first two redactions of his great catechism (Christianskij katichisis pravoslavnyja grekorostijskija Cerkvi, etc., Moscow 1823 and 1827), corrected later in the third redaction of 1839. The catechism had many editions and was translated into many languages. The numerous writings of F., reports, notices, replies, decisions of a doctrinal, canonical, administrative, political nature, were for the most part published after his death. The influence exercised by F. on Russian theology is immense.