Alexander Ivanovich Brilliantov was born in 1867 in the family of a priest of the Ilyinskaya Church in the village of Tsypino, Kirillov district, Novgorod diocese. He studied at the Kirillov Theological School and the Novgorod Seminary. In 1887–1891 he was a student, and in 1891–1893 he was a professorial scholar of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. In 1893-1900, he taught the history and exposure of the Russian schism at the Tula Theological Seminary, at the same time performing the duties of a diocesan missionary. In 1893, he presented to the Council of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy his master's thesis "The Influence of Eastern Theology on Western Theology in the Works of John Scotus Erigena", which was successfully defended by him in 1898.

In April 1900, A. I. Brilliantov was elected associate professor at the Department of General Church History of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy instead of the deceased V. V. Bolotov. From 1904 he was extraordinary, and from 1914, after the award of his doctoral degree, he was an ordinary professor of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, in which position he held until the closure of the Academy in September 1918. Synod on the Old Catholic and Anglican Questions. For a number of years, he was also the chairman of the Library Commission of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy. He was a member of the Pre-Council Presence at the Holy Synod. In the spring of 1917, he was nominated as one of the candidates for the election to the cathedra of the ruling bishop of the Petrograd diocese.

After the closure of the Higher Theological School in Petrograd, A. I. Brilliantov made great efforts to preserve the academic library, from the funds of which the First Department of the State Public Library in Petrograd was later formed. From 1921 he was a librarian of the First Department, and from 1925 he was the chief librarian of the GPB. In 1920–1923 he was a professor at the Petrograd Theological Institute. Since 1919 he was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (since 1924 of the USSR Academy of Sciences). He took part in the scientific activities of the Russian Palestine Society and the Byzantine Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences. During the period of church turmoil and disorder of the 1920s, Alexander Ivanovich firmly remained faithful to the canonical hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. His opinion on the issues of ecclesiastical reality of that time was highly valued by his numerous admirers – hierarchs, clergy and church scholars. On June 10, 1930, A. I. Brilliantov, along with many other academic workers, was arrested and soon died (according to some testimonies - in July of the same year, according to others - in 1933) from dysentery during the stage on the way to Svirlag.

Apart from the dissertation, Brilliantov did not publish any other particularly important works. However, this fact does not detract from his importance as a scientist. The world-famous "Lectures on the History of the Ancient Church" by V. V. Bolotov were his brainchild and cost him twelve years of painstaking work. As for his "Readings on General Church History," which is a fairly processed and quite solid academic course, he did not intend to be published. Of his other published works, the most famous are: On the Characteristics of the Scientific Activity of Professor V. V. Bolotov as a Church Historian. HCh, 1901, ch. 1 i otd. ed., St. Petersburg, 1901, 33 p.; The origin of Monophysitism. HCh, 1906, ch. 1 i otd. St. Petersburg, 1906, 30 p.; Professor Vasily Vasilyevich Bolotov. Biographical sketch. HC, 1910, chch. 1, 2 and otd. St. Petersburg, 1910, 75 p.; The works of V. V. Bolotov on the question of the Filioque and the polemics on his theses on the Filioque in Russian literature. KhCH, 1913, part 1, pp. 431–457; On the History of the Arian Controversy before the First Ecumenical Council. KhCH, 1913, ch.2 i otd. St. Petersburg, 1913, 51 p.; Emperor Constantine the Great and the Edict of Milan of 313. HC, 1914, 1915 and 1916 and otd. ed., Pg., 1916, VII, 197 p.; On the Place of Death and Burial of St. Maximus the Confessor. KhV, 1918, No 1 and otd. Ed. In addition, he prepared for publication in the "Christian Reading" more than a dozen works left by V. V. Bolotov.

Brilliantov's work "The Influence of Eastern Theology on Western Theology in the Works of John Scotus Erigena" (ed.: St. Petersburg, 1898, LVIII, 514 pp.) and to this day, as the abbot rightly points out. Innocent (Pavlov), "is perhaps the best study devoted to the theological views and literary activity of Erigena, this most interesting representative of the religious thought of the Middle Ages. [1] In addition, it contains detailed characteristics of the theological views of Bl. St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Maximus the Confessor and the works attributed to St. Dionysius the Areopagite. Analyzing the teachings of these church thinkers, A. I. Brilliantov comes to the conclusion about the fundamental difference in Western theology, the main ideas of which were expounded by Bl. Augustine, from the Eastern, expressed in the most distinct form in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Augustine. Maximus the Confessor. The psychologism of Bl. Augustine and ontologism of the Areopagiticus and St. According to A. I. Brilliantov, these are not just particular features of the teaching of this or that theologian, but are a manifestation of the essential features of Western and Eastern theology, respectively, which later developed into a difference between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox ways of knowing God and worldview.

The personality of John Scotus Erigena was taken for study by A. I. Brilliantov not by chance. As a man of Western culture, Erigena was brought up in the Augustinian tradition, but with a perfect knowledge of Greek, he was able to read and translate into Latin a number of works by the Byzantine Church Fathers, which also had a great influence on him. At the intersection of these theological traditions, which are often very different from each other, the paradoxical thought of Erigena develops. Perhaps it was this interest in Orthodox theology, which was not quite characteristic of the subsequent medieval scholastics, that gave rise to such an unusual theological and philosophical teaching for the West, which in many moments preceded the positions of Western philosophy by several centuries.

Although exactly one hundred years have passed since the date of the first publication, the book by A. I. Brilliantov has not lost its scientific significance at all. On the contrary, now, when the threads of the continuity of theological thought have been largely broken in Russia, this study can become an invaluable aid for the modern reader both for the study of the theology and philosophy of John Scotus Erigena, and for understanding the complex and diverse paths of development of Christian theology in general, both Eastern and Western.

In preparing this edition, we tried to preserve the author's style, spelling and punctuation as much as possible, bringing the text in line with modern norms of the Russian language only in the most necessary cases. Brilliantov's book abounds in quotations from the works of the Fathers and Teachers of the Church in ancient Greek and Latin, and there are especially many quotations from the works of Erigena, but we did not translate them into Russian, since the author retells the content of these quotations in sufficient detail in the text of the book.

However, some non-fundamental changes were also made to the book, making it easier for the reader to work with the text. First, typos noted at the end of the first edition were taken into account. Secondly, the additions that A. I. Brilliantov made after the book was typed and which were printed at the end of it, we have placed in the appropriate places, enclosing each such insertion in square brackets [] and marking it with the words "From the Addition". The index of references to the books of the Holy Scriptures, compiled by Brilliantov on all the works of Erigena, also placed in the Supplement, we have separated into a separate Index.

Introduction

John Scotus Erigena, a Western thinker of the ninth century, apparently misunderstood by his contemporaries, who even during his lifetime and repeatedly afterwards provoked a trial against himself by representatives of the church authorities in the West by disagreeing with the generally accepted teaching of the Western Church expressed by him, or only attributed to him, and then forgotten for a long time, has become the subject of rather careful study by Western scholars in the present century. It is possible to point out in Western literature a number of special studies about him and his teaching, which have appeared since the beginning of this century, not to mention various kinds of general courses in history, for example, philosophy, the history of dogmas, the history of mysticism, scholasticism, the history of literature, church history, etc., in which more or less space is given to information about his personality and views. The appearance of a new study, moreover, in the Russian language, about a Western thinker, about whom Western scholars had already written so much that in the 1960s it was considered difficult to say anything new about him that could be of more or less important importance, will not be superfluous.

Erigena belongs to the west proper. But the characteristic feature of this Western thinker is that, living in the Latin West and belonging to the West, he at the same time directed all his sympathies towards the Greek East and, nourishing the highest respect for Eastern theology and philosophy, set the goal of his scholarly activity precisely the assimilation of the results of the philosophical and theological speculation of the East. Turning himself to the "purest and most abundant" Greek sources, as he put it, he tried to make them accessible to others in the West, and was successful in doing so, to the extent that, at least, the translation of the Areopagite works that belonged to him was, as it were, a vulgate for medieval Western mystics and scholastics. His excessive sympathy for the Greeks from the Western point of view was no small reason for the suspicious and even hostile attitude towards him in the West, when the question of his views was raised there. From the Orthodox, Eastern point of view, so to speak, deserves more or less attention a Western scholar who treated the East with such high respect and interest, and partly for this reason did not enjoy favor in the West.

As regards the above-mentioned wealth of literature on Erigen, first of all, in view of the absence of special works on him in Russian literature, in this case it seems that such a work could already be of some importance, which would set itself the task of simply communicating the results to which Western science has arrived with regard to Erigena and his views. But if we pay attention to the actual results achieved by various Catholic and Protestant representatives of Western science, and to what position the solution of the most important questions raised by Erigena and his system has been in Western literature up to the present time, perhaps a new study on the same subject will not be considered superfluous from the point of view of purely scientific interests.