Preface

This work belongs to the pen of the late Hieromonk Tarasius (Kurgansky); it was his Ph.D. thesis in 1899-1900, when he graduated from the Kazan Theological Academy in the rank of hieromonk, being 25 years old, and was first published in the "Missionary Review" for 1903 under the title: "Great Russian and Little Russian Theology of the XVI and XVII Centuries." Hieromonk Tarasius was gifted with a brilliant talent and possessed great erudition from childhood, which he spent in Moscow in an Old Believer family with his father and mother.

After graduating from the Moscow gymnasium, he entered the theological academy, and then, after spending six months as a confessor at the penal prison in Zerentui outside Nerchinsk, he entered the theological educational service and from the very first year became famous as a preacher and lecturer.

He died in Moscow on August 30, 1904 with the rank of caretaker of the Zaikonospassky Theological School at the age of 29. In addition to the proposed Ph.D. thesis, he published several sermons, and then a number of critical articles in the Moscow spiritual journal "Faith and Church" about Milyukov's works "Essays on Russian Culture". These articles were the subject of his public lectures in Zhytomyr and attracted numerous listeners.

We will not now dwell on his excellent, highly scientific dissertation, but will only point out that for all the simply incredible amount of erudition of the then 24-year-old author in the Holy Bible, the Holy Fathers and in theological science, he did not have time to receive and take into account one very valuable source on the history of dogmatic theology, about which a few words must be said here. - We mean the book by Hieromonk Cyril Tranquillion "The Mirror of Theology", first printed "in the Pochaev Monastery" in 1617, and subsequently repeatedly reprinted by the author himself, who, alas, converted to the Uniate faith, and his further like-minded people, - reprinted in a distorted form with a clearly Latin direction.

Our author, Hieromonk Tarasius, considered as the first representatives of Southern Russian theology of the 17th century only Archpriest Lavrenty Zizanius, the author of the Great Catechism, and Metropolitan Peter Mogila, the author of the Small Catechism, or the so-called Orthodox Confession, whom the author rightly recognizes as the first culprits of the Roman Catholic influence on our school theology, which has been preserved in it until recently, and presents this influence as "Little Russian." Already after the death of our author, or shortly before it, I was able to familiarize myself in the Pochaev Lavra with the above-mentioned book by Cyril Tranquillion in its original form, and I consider it my duty to testify that it is completely alien to the Latin influence, so that it is not entirely fair to call the latter Little Russian.

I. The "Mirror of Theology" by Hieromonk Cyril, as well as other Old Russian theological works, is free from the scholastic division of Christian theology into the departments of faith, hope and love;

II. Completely free from the explanation of our salvation by the Lord Jesus Christ in the juridical sense, as it began with us with Lavrenty Zizanii ("who is all the creation, i.e. the tares in the field of the Church" - the words of an old Russian theologian);

III. The "Mirror" does not have a mechanical teaching about the sacraments and does not affirm their septenary number. In short, it is incomparably closer to the ancient patristic theology than to medieval Latin and modern school theology.

In the above-mentioned "Mirror", the author, having expounded in sufficient detail the Orthodox teaching about God, about the Holy Trinity, about the Incarnation, proceeds further, following the example of the most ancient Fathers, and even earlier - the Apostolic Fathers, to an exposition of the concept of the two kingdoms - God and the devil - and their mutual struggle, and like the books of the New Testament and in particular the works of Ap. John, beginning with the teaching about God and His Son and ending with the Apocalypse, that is, the prophecy of the struggle between the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of the devil, with which the 4th Gospel is also set forth.

Perhaps the unfortunate conversion of Tranquillion to the Roman Union was the reason why subsequent South Russian theologians did not use his "Mirror", and it, together with its author, was consigned to oblivion.

Mitre. Anthony (Khrapovitsky)

Chapter One. The General Character of the Theology of Moscow and Kiev