The beginning of the domination of the Little Russian episcopate

After the famous Rostov saint Dmitry, who had already died in Peter's youth, Stephen Yavorsky was the first bishop appointed by Peter from the Little Russians. And the tsar-reformer attached fundamental importance to this case. He laid the foundation for a whole system, for a number of decades, of transferring the Russian Church into the hands of Kievan scholars precisely because they were school-trained and according to the methods of the Western European Latin school. It seemed to Peter that through these ecclesiastical Westernizers the Russian Church would cease to be an obstacle to him in the implantation of Western enlightenment and the Western type of reforms. Peter was not yet able to figure out that conservatives who were deeply hostile to his innovations, a south-Russian edition of the same Moscow "bearded men" hated by him, could grow up in the Western school. In this sense, he was mistaken in Stephen and soon found another Westernizer hierarch, but a liberal and a convinced reformer, as psychologically Protestant as Peter himself. We mean Theophan Prokopovich.

The path of school and culture for Stefan was a typical path for the Orthodox Galician nobility. His surname comes from the name of the town of Yavorovo, west of Lviv. After the Kiev Academy, as a zealous student, he was blessed by his family and Kiev teachers to perfect himself in Latin theological science in Jesuit colleges within the boundaries of Poland at that time: in Lvov, Lublin, Vilna and Poznan. The slave life of both Orthodox Greeks under Turkey and Orthodox Russians under Poland created forms of everyday slave morality. Orthodox youths were blessed by their spiritual fathers for outright deception. In order to take theological classes in Roman Catholic schools, they had to accept Latinism, on the terms of the Florentine Union, and when they returned home with diplomas, their own hierarchy forgave them this "theft of science" and restored them to Orthodoxy. And Stephen was a Uniate with the name of Stanislav. Returning from his studies, Stephen became a monk in Kiev, was made a professor at the Academy, and at the very beginning of 1700 he was sent to Moscow by the Kiev Metropolitan Varlaam Yasinsky, as a candidate for some kind of vicariate. Here the learned archimandrite was called to the ceremonial duty of saying a word at the burial of the boyar A. S. Shein. Peter, who was present, was delighted. The word of a stranger from Kiev was so unlike the meager eloquence of Muscovites. The word shone with artificial rhetoric, which seemed to be a sign of wisdom and learning. It seemed to Peter that this was the man whom he would take as an instrument of his educational reforms and oppose the unlearned Moscow bishops. Stephen accepted this prospect with disappointment. He dreamed of becoming a bishop in his native southern Russia. And his spoken language was far from Moscow. But Peter, not without fervor, ordered the "consecrated council" of Muscovites to appoint the young Stephen as metropolitan in Ryazan. Moscow grumbled: "Pole, Oblivanis, Latinnik"... But Peter went against the current. Less than a year later, he headed the supreme church administration with this "Latinist". He appointed Stephen Locum Tenens of the Patriarchal Throne. The bishoprics bit their tongues, but resorted to roundabout pressure on Peter. A report was sent to the then coryphaeus of all the East, Patriarch Dositheus of Jerusalem. Dositheus immediately reflected these sighs and desires of the Muscovites in his pastoral epistle to Peter. In Pat. Dositheus had many of his own bitter difficulties from the poison of the Latinism and Protestantism of the Greek disciples in Western Europe. Close to his heart was the suspicion of Muscovites for the Kievan Latins, for the "Cherkassians", as the Little Russians were called in Moscow, or even more hostile, for the "Cherkassies". Therefore, Dositheus begs Peter not to appoint either Greeks or Cherkassians to hierarchical posts, but only Orthodox Muscovites, "if there is no wisdom." "So that neither a Greek, nor any other breed of people, that is, or from Little and White Russia, who were nourished and study in both Latin and Polonian countries and schools, should become patriarchs." Afterwards, Dositheus sent a stern letter to Stephen himself, apparently drawing material from the zealous denunciations of Stephen by the Muscovites who were spying on him. Dositheus confronts Stephen with his Latin way of thinking and threatens him with non-recognition of the entire Orthodox East, if Stephen dares to accept the dignity of patriarch. Stefan had a hard time in Muscovy. But the South Russian hierarchy, of course, was proud of his high position and persuaded, in the name of the prestige of Kievan culture, to stand firmly in his high post.

It cannot be said that at this time the Great Russian hierarchy was impoverished by worthy and even outstanding representatives. St. Mitrophan of Voronezh, Athanasius Archbishop of Kholmogory and Job Metropolitan of Novgorod – these were the outstanding episcopal trinity of that time. Each of them could have been the Patriarch of Moscow with honor. And Peter was not blind at all. He appreciated and noted all these hierarchs, but his radical idea of abolishing the patriarchate seemed to him feasible only with the help of learned outsiders. Athanasius of Kholmogorsk, a clever self-taught, a native of the Trans-Urals, the Tobolsk diocese, a monk and abbot of the Dalmatovsky monastery on the Iset River, moved to Arkhangelsk and here showed breadth and diplomacy in very friendly relations with foreigners, mainly with the British, against the background of the lively life of the Arkhangelsk seaport. As a child, Peter saw Athanasius in the dramatic days of the Streltsy revolt at a competition with schismatics in the Pomegranate Chamber, where a fanatic of ignorance, Archpriest Nikita Dobrynin (Pustosvyat) physically attacked Athanasius and stabbed him. Then Peter himself observed the behavior of Athanasius in Arkhangelsk. Tradition says that Peter then saw in Athanasius a worthy successor to Adrian.

Saint Mitrophan of Voronezh, in addition to his personal holiness, aroused Peter's special sympathy, when both in Voronezh and on the Don Peter built his river fleet in the rear against the Turks, with the blessings of the holy Voronezh pastor, who regarded the struggle with the Turks as a sacred struggle between the cross and the crescent. The saint did not compromise, but accepted the tsar's cause in his own way, according to the primordial one, theocratically, as a holy, truly Orthodox cause. Being friends with Peter in this matter, he did not encourage the admixture of another, unclean spirit in him. When Peter invited the saint to dine in his newly-built palace house, and at the entrance he set up statuettes of some half-naked goddesses to decorate them, Saint Mitrophanes, having arrived and seeing this impiety, turned back to his home. Peter realized that he was at least tactless and continued to sincerely respect his honest friend-opponent. When in 1703 Saint Mitrophan died, Peter personally carried his coffin to the grave and declared: "I have no other such holy elder left."

Job of Novgorod could not but like Peter for his outstanding educational and charitable activities. In contrast to the inactive bishops, Job of Novgorod proved to Peter by his enterprising spirit that the land and economic property of the Church were not "riches that are perishing in vain." At his cathedra he built ten hospices, fifteen hospitals, one house for foundlings, and raised the organization of his theological school highly, using the scientific forces of the Likhud brothers, who had been expelled from Moscow. From the remnants of his economic sums, Met. Job made voluntary and significant contributions to the Tsar's treasury, just as St. Mitrophan donated money from the Voronezh cathedra to the fleet and to the war with the Turks.

But the majority of the Great Russian bishops and church dignitaries, like the abbots and archimandrites of large monasteries with many lands, perceived the new control of the Monastic Order over their economy with resolute opposition and even in their assessment of the entire reign of Peter adhered to the schismatic theories about the onset of the times of the Antichrist and even about the identification of the very personality of Peter with the Antichrist. In 1700, Bishop Ignatius of Tambov was brought to trial and defrocked for his open sympathy and encouragement of the underground writings of some fanatic Grigory Talitsky that Peter was the Antichrist. Ignatius, hearing these writings from the lips of the author, shed tears of emotion. In 1707, Metropolitan Isaiah of Nizhny Novgorod was also removed from the cathedra and retired to the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery for open non-payment of taxes to the Monastery Prikaz.

Stefan Yavorsky, as a newcomer from another country, did not merge in these emotions with the Great Russians. Officially, he was a panegyrist of Peter's deeds and naively expected that with his praise he would hasten the receipt of the patriarchal honor. But soon the relationship between the tsar and the locum tenens was mutually clarified, as a kind of misunderstanding. Stephen did not give Peter the slightest hope of zeal for church reforms. And Peter became more and more convinced that Stephen was a sympathizer of the hated Latin spirit. The Moscow milieu, having guessed that Stephen was a conservative, put aside their personal enmity towards him and recognized him as a useful weapon in the struggle against Peter's radicalism. With one mouth and one heart with the Muscovites, Stephen condemned the second marriage of the tsar with the rootless Catherine during the lifetime of his first wife, Evdokia Lopukhina, who was forcibly tonsured. Stephen was offended by Peter because Peter had obtained the abolition of the fast for the army during the Prut campaign directly from the Patriarch of Constantinople without his knowledge. As is known, the hopes of the old Moscow party were concentrated on Tsarevich Alexei, who was like-minded with it. And Stephen fatally merged with these circles, finally disappointing Peter. Honest and straightforward in his own way, Stephen revealed his anti-reformism in his sermons quite openly. In 1712, in a sermon on the day of the Tsarevich's Angel, he called the birthday boy "the only hope of Russia." In his preaching denunciations, Stephen clearly alludes to Peter's sins. He condemns those who do not keep fasts, who offend the church of God and leave their wives. Peter reacted immediately. He demanded the written text of the sermon and wrote a resolution on it, not without wit, referring to the Gospel directive: "First one by one, then with witnesses, and also tell the church"... Stephen turned out to be both pastorally and politically incorrect. Mutual relations between the heads of church and state irreparably deteriorated. Stephen received a direct ban on preaching in the presence of the tsar without prior censorship. That Stefan's career was over was still unclear, perhaps to him alone. Stephen belonged to the category of inflexible and honest servants. The more he observed Peter's sympathy for the German Protestant spirit, the more his Latin anti-Protestant pathos awoke in him. Stephen's mood was clearly revealed in the struggle with a crude outburst of vulgar Protestant preaching in the person of the Moscow physician Dimitri Tveritinov, who studied in the German quarter. A fairly large circle was formed around Tveritinov, carried away by fashionable freethinking. From the theological point of view, the ideas of the circle were illiterate. The basic dogma of Protestantism, justification by faith, was here transformed into its elementary opposite. Faith is nothing in the matter of justification, but everything in deeds and merits. And apart from good deeds, no heavenly intercessors and no church prayers will save a person. A curious historical accident that here too a relative of Dimitri Tveritinov, Foma Ivanov, a barber by profession, was a barber, i.e., probably not just a "shearer", but an orderly, a paramedic. When in 1713 the case was revealed, it turned out that among the fashionable critics of Orthodoxy there was also a student of the Moscow Theological Academy, Maximov, and through him his other comrades were infected with freethinking, and that all this had been dragging on for fourteen years.

Stefan sincerely, but not without party inspiration, conducted a loud and public investigation. Peter understood that this was a struggle with him, with his cause; that this is terror against foreigners, whom Peter attracted and seduced with all kinds of benefits and comforts; that this is grist to the mill of the Russian ignoramuses, who threaten pogroms against foreigners. As a tactical counterattack, Peter demanded that all the work begun be transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg, under the control of the newly formed Senate there. The heresiarchs themselves were brought to St. Petersburg for a new interrogation. The senators demanded that the guilty simply renounce in words, which they did with false ease. Then an order was sent to Stephen and the "consecrated council" under him to join to the church the leaders of heresy who had been brought back to Moscow and repented. Stephen obeyed, but did not grant a complete amnesty. He sent the supposedly repentant to the monasteries to check their repentance, which, of course, was essentially correct. Imprisoned in the Chudov Monastery, Thomas Ivanov, in a wild sectarian frenzy, stocked up on a huge knife and chopped up the icon of the Moscow saint Alexei with it. This was a sad but convincing justification of the judicial jealousy of Stefan Yavorsky. Stephen after that, without the formal permission of the St. Petersburg authorities, with the full sympathy of his fellow bishops, convened a "consecrated council" (1714) for trial, at which he anathematized the newly-appeared iconoclasts and Protestants, subjected them to the discipline of church repentance, and burned Thomas at the stake. This burning at the stake, which had already broken through to us once from the West at the end of the fifteenth century through the Croatian Benjamin and, according to the story of the Austrian ambassador to Archbishop Gennadius, again began to pave the way to us along with the flood of Latin-Polish influences at the end of the seventeenth century. Even the orthodox Lutherans in the German Quarter burned at the stake their heretic, the visionary and Adventist Quirin Kuhlmann. The examples are contagious, and Stephen could not lag behind in zeal for the faith even from Peter's favorites, the Germans. Nevertheless, the tsar exploded and ordered Stephen to be reprimanded through the Senate. Stephen had no trouble proving that the indisputable heresy was obvious. But the senators looked at it from a different, utilitarian point of view. They rudely chose Stephen and, as the memoirist puts it, "with great sting and pity they drove him out, and he left the court chamber weeping." From that moment on, Stephen turned his polemical energy to writing his voluminous work "The Stone of Faith", which presented the Russian Church with a polemical apparatus for refuting Protestantism. Of course, Stephen was told in time that such a work, harmful to the state, which needed to attract foreigners, would not be published. During his lifetime, Stephen did not see it in print. For a decade and a half, The Stone of Faith lay in manuscript in the care of conservative hierarchs. Stefan gradually turned from a stranger into a pillar of old Moscow orthodoxy. This fanned his personality with gunpowder, for the camp in which he found himself waged an all-out war with Peter to the point of a direct state and dynastic conspiracy. The conspirators dreamed of the release of Peter's forcibly tonsured wife, Evdokia Lopukhina, at the time of the accession of Alexei Petrovich. When Alexei repented to his spiritual father, Archpriest Yakov Ignatov, that he wished death to his father, the confessor sympathetically said to him: "We all wish him death." There were many persons in the conspiracy: the Rostov Metropolitan Dositheus, and the confessor of Tsarina Eudoxia, Fyodor Pustynny, and their semi-secret "publicist" and agitator, the holy fool Michael Bosoi, all awaited the imminent death of Peter. Tsarevich Alexei himself fled abroad under a plausible pretext, but from there he was lured back by Peter with even greater cunning and then condemned and executed. Alexis' correspondence with the Russian bishops ruthlessly handed them over to the merciless trial of the enraged tsar. Alexei corresponded with Dositheus, Metr. Rostovsky, with Ignatius Smola, Met. Krutitsky and with Joasaph Krokovsky met. Kiev, and formulated his plan for the use of church authority in the following way: "When I have time without a priest (and Peter was going abroad at that moment), then I will whisper to the bishops, bishops to parish priests, and priests to parishioners, then they will reluctantly make me the ruler." Peter, of course, suspected the broad sympathy of the episcopate for the plans of Tsarevich Alexei, but he judged only by direct evidence. The consecrated council probably performed its heavy judicial duty with trepidation. Dositheus of Rostov said directly at the conciliar court: "I was the only one who was caught... Look, and everyone has what is on their minds. Will you please send your ears to the people, what do the people say?" Metropolitan Joasaph of Kiev died of excitement on the way to Moscow. Defrocked by the council and handed over to the civil authorities of Met. Dositheus and archpriests Yakov Ignatiev and Fyodor Pustynny were executed. Ignatius Smola was spared due to old age and banished "to retirement". Peter was heated up against the clergy. "O bearded men!", he sighed, "my father had to deal with one (meaning Nikon), and I have to deal with thousands. If it had not been for the nun (Eudoxia) and the monks, Alexei would not have dared to commit such an unheard-of evil." There was no evidence against Stephen, but Alexei's party considered him one of their own and hoped that Stephen would remove the monkhood from the Tsarevich if he was forcibly tonsured.

Having placed his stake on Kievan scholarly monasticism and having somewhat understood its two school trends, Peter intensified the selection of anti-Latins and freethinkers from among them as candidates for the episcopacy. In Novgorod, among the persecuted Cherkassy who fled from Moscow under Patriarch Adrian, Archimandrite Theodosius Yanovsky, gave him shelter hospitable to the Kievan schoolchildren, Metr. Novgorod Job. Theodosius was already the abbot of the Khutyn monastery here. Born from the Polish nobility with secular cheeky manners, a very free language, Peter liked Theodosius from the very first time. There were no such among the Great Russians. Peter was ready to make him a kind of church dictator in his new St. Petersburg region. In 1712, he placed him at the head of the newly opened St. Petersburg Alexander Nevsky Monastery with broad educational and reformist prospects. Peter invested Theodosius with his full confidence in church affairs and, disregarding canonical formalities, appointed him administrator of all church affairs of the Petersburg region. Peter especially liked the demonstratively secular manners of the Polish style of this secular prince of the church. In order to formalize him in the role of the church head of the region, after the death of Metr. In 1716, Peter ordered the appointment of Theodosius as Metropolitan of Novgorod. In the end, Peter made a mistake in Theodosius of Yanovsky. Already after the death of Peter, Theodosius tragically ended his life in the camp of the opponents of Peter's spirit. He was replaced in Peter's heart and, with sufficient reasons, by another, truly great Kievite, Theophan Prokopovich.

Theophanes, on the instructions of Peter himself, in the same year of 1716 was summoned to St. Petersburg, as they later began to say, "to the ranks," i.e., to be promoted to the episcopacy, from the Kiev Academy. According to Peter's plan, the Alexander Nevsky Monastery was to become a hotbed of a new and learned episcopate. In Theophanes these qualities were present in the highest and brilliant degree. Born in 1681 in the family of a Kiev merchant and baptized Eleazar, Theophanes only in adulthood adopted the name of his uncle, Theophan Prokopovich, who held the high post of rector of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Like Stefan Yavorsky, in order to "steal" higher education, knowing the then universal Latin, Eleazar embarked on foreign travels. It was necessary to enter for the full passage of the Roman Uniate College of St. Athanasius into the Basilian Order and become a Uniate monk with the name Elisha. The Jesuits could not help but appreciate the outstanding abilities of the then Elisey Prokopovich and offered him to join their order and remain a scholar at the Vatican Library. But Theophanes was able to conceal from them his guts, which were deeply and hostilely repelled by the whole of Romanism and drawn entirely to the side of Reformation theology. There are no documentary materials to reveal this process in the soul of the young Prokopovich. But the fact of his bright and scholarly transition to the camp of the anti-papists testifies to the fact that this kind of revolution took place in his soul already in his apprenticeship years in Rome. Having "stolen" the school and scholarship, Prokopovych returned to Kiev in 1702 and here, according to custom, took off all the masquerade of Uniatism. He was tonsured again and given the new name of Samuel. Samuel became a professor of poetry at the Academy. In 1705, Theophan was honored at his request with a new change of name in honor of his late uncle Theophanes. Theophan successively taught courses in rhetoric, then philosophy, and from 1714 to 1716 the Higher Course of Theology. It was here that in the exposition of theology the new historical and critical method of expounding dogmas, which he had assimilated by himself from the entire libraries of Protestant theology he had read in Latin, was revealed in all its force. A kind of beginning of the History of Dogmas. This was so fresh, weighty and influential that it became a creative factor for the entire Russian school theology of the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries, which served to liberate our Orthodox theology from the deadening Latin scholastic fetters.

Peter did not immediately notice Theophanes, although already in 1706 Theophanes, when meeting Peter in Kiev, said a word of greeting to him. But when, in the jubilant moment after the victory of Poltava in 1709, during divine services on the battlefield itself, Theophan was instructed to deliver a solemn sermon, Theophan shocked Peter with his brilliant art of eloquence. He connected various accidents, such as, for example, the calendar coincidence of the day of victory, June 27, with the memory of the Monk Sampson. Peter, of course, was turned into a hero, the judge Sampson, who slew 10,000 Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey and tore apart a lion, i.e., Charles XII. The coat of arms of Sweden is made up of the figures of three lions, and the sun enters the zodiacal sign of the lion from the end of June and in July. All this was a spectacular play on oratorical words, but at an exceptional moment it sounded mystical symbolism even for Peter. Peter's cocked hat, shot through by a bullet, was not forgotten in his speech. Enchanted, Peter, of course, could not forget Theophanes after this. Setting out on the Prut campaign of 1711, Peter wished to take Professor Theophan with him as the head of the military clergy and, of course, became even more convinced of the special value of the personality of Theophan for all his church plans. He appointed him head of the Academy and abbot of the Kiev-Brotherhood Monastery, and professor of theology, and rector of the Academy. For the conservative Latin scholastic school of the majority of the academic corporation, this career rise of Theophanes was a frightening revolutionary dictatorship. The Protestant trend of Theophanes' theology was simply incomprehensible to the mass of professors hardened in Catholic scholasticism. They perceived it as rationalism and freethinking, and their own Latin scholasticism was identified with Orthodoxy and served as its criterion. The honest and courageous leaders of the Academy, Archimandrites Theophylact Lopatinsky and Gideon Vishnevsky, soon known bishops, decided to file an open protest against the sovereign, who was mistaken, in their opinion, due to ignorance of theology. In 1712, such an accusatory report was sent to the new northern capital. Peter tactically took into account this kind of mood, did not sharpen the situation deliberately, but did not deviate from his firm line either. In 1716, he summoned Theophan to St. Petersburg "for a servant," as a preacher. It was clear that this was the closest step towards the episcopacy. The Academy was alarmed again. Both Gideon and Theophylact wrote a new accusation against Theophan of Protestantism, sent it to the emperor through the locum tenens Stephen, who also attached his signature to the accusation. Peter patiently put everything under the shelf again. And, having waited three years, in 1718 he proposed to the consecrated council to appoint Theophan Archbishop of Pskov, so that his residence would be St. Petersburg, which had already become the real capital of the Baltic northern region in place of Pskov and Novgorod.

Peter correctly appreciated both the erudition and talents of Theophanes in comparison with Theodosius Yanovsky, whom he had previously placed in the post of St. Petersburg, with the title of Novgorod. Theodosius' secularism and ostentatious brilliance were a will-o'-the-wisp in comparison with the truly bright light of Western learning, culture, and Theophanes' broad state-political ideology. Finally, after a series of mistakes, Peter found and groped among the theologians and hierarchs the one he could only dream of. He was a congenial personality. A type of innovator, a reformer, armed with genuine knowledge and, it must be admitted, endurance and tact, rare in the conservative atmosphere of the church. A pair of great people have been selected, to whom we owe the church reform with all its positive and negative qualities. Now Peter was only waiting for Stephen's natural death to replace the leadership of church administration with a new reliable leader. And Theophanes, in collusion with Peter, decided to become an inspired inhabitant of a new, unloved capital on the Neva swamp. On the plot allotted on Karpovka, Theophanes, at the expense of the Novgorod cathedra, built himself a good bishop's estate and in it, delighting Peter, led a secular open way of life. Theophan was by temperament the continuer of that cheerful humanistic idealism which blossomed in the fourteenth century, was carried through the laic circles of the Reformation, and was revived again in Catholic circles of the epoch of "enlightenment" (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). Theophan was an "enlightener." Under the patronage of Peter, it gave him pleasure to mock the Old Testament forms of everyday and ecclesiastical obscurantism and to propagate humanitarian optimism for the glory of the sovereign-reformer and the bright banner of enlightenment. In 1716, Theophanes, summoned to the Neva capital, wrote to his friend from the Academy, the nobleman Y. Markevich: "Perhaps you have heard that I am summoned for the episcopacy. This honor also attracts and seduces me, as if I were condemned to be thrown to be devoured by wild beasts. The fact is that with the best powers of my soul I hate mitres, sakkos, rods, candlesticks, censers, and other other pleasures. Add to that very fat and huge fish. If I love these things, if I seek them, may God punish me with something worse. I love the work of the episcopacy and would like to be a bishop if I did not have to be a comedian instead of the episcopacy, for the episcopal situation is extremely unfavorable to this, if Divine Wisdom does not correct it. Therefore, I intend to make every effort to deflect this extraordinary honor from myself and fly back to you." Here the reformer in Orthodoxy opens his heart to his fellow theologian. His enemies are ritualists, ritualists and medieval opponents of the optimism of the new humanistic culture. It is with bold pathos that Theophan preaches from the ambo under the metropolitan's mitre. "The essence of the netii, (and God would grant that many would not be) either a secret demon of flattery, or a melancholy darkened, who have such a freak in their thoughts, that everything is sinful and filthy to them, that they will either see wonderful, cheerful, great, and glorious, also righteous, and right, and not contrary to God... Such were called misanphropi by the Hellenes of old, they are misanthropes. And these, above all, do not tremble at the glory of dishonor, and have all worldly power not only for the work of God, but impute it to an abomination... And so they want to think about the supreme power below, to be righteous and legitimized by God." Foreign and Russian "chicks of Petrov's nest" often feasted with Theophanes in his wooden palace on Karpovka, as a kind of order of a new breed of people. Peter himself liked to marry in this company. One day, it was already about midnight, when Peter the Uninvited had the idea to appear at the feast with Theophanes. The guests were already tipsy. Theophanes was not at a loss, and greeted the unexpected guest with a theological joke: "Behold, the bridegroom is coming at midnight. And blessed is the servant, whom the vigilant shall find"! Peter was delighted and the feast continued.

Until recently kept in the Novgorod Seminary, the library of Theophan consists of more than 3,000 volumes, most of the folios in leather bindings, three-quarters of which consists of Protestant authors. This is both a material value and a rich apparatus that served Theophan in his literary works. Removed from the Kiev cabinet and placed on the broad market of the reform-political life of Russia, Theophan left behind him about seventy works of varying length and peculiar quality, characteristic of a militant publicist. Theophanes, aware of his intellectual superiority over the environment, did not hesitate to abuse rather bold sophisms for the sake of practical and polemical goals, although he could have clothed the same ideas in more restrained objective forms.