As a serious researcher, Α. Β. Kartashev, of course, could not confine himself to the framework of the immediate history of the Ecumenical Councils. He presents it against the broad background of the socio-political and cultural life of that era. and the epoch covered in the work of A. V. Kartashev is truly unique. This is the era of transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, when the economic, social, political and spiritual foundations of European civilization were laid in the area of the Roman Empire, which largely determined the ways of its further development.

"Ecumenical Councils" is a fundamental historical work to which the author devoted many years. But this considerable stretching in time of the process of creating a book could not but affect the language and stylistics of its various parts: some of them are closer to the norms of the modern Russian language, others are farther away. Often the author uses phrases and words that are unusual for the modern Russian reader, seemingly archaic. However, when you start reading the book, you soon cease to notice this "outdated" manner of presentation and are completely immersed in the experience of the most acute collisions, which are so rich in the ancient history of the Christian Church and which the author of the book was able to convey to us so vividly.

This publication is intended not only for a narrow circle of specialists, but also for all those who today show a keen interest in the history of religion and the church. Among this last category of readers there may be people who are little familiar with the Christian religious-ecclesiastical terminology that the author of the book widely uses. Taking this into account, the editors considered it necessary to give brief footnotes of an explanatory nature. Unlike the author's notes, which are marked with numbers, editorial notes are marked with an asterisk.

Preface.

Dogmas are eternal and inexhaustible. The stages of their revelation in the consciousness and history of the Church, the definitions, the "oroses" of the ecumenical councils, are not tombstones rolled to the doors of the sealed sepulchre of eternally crystallized and petrified truth. On the contrary, they are milestones, on which are inscribed infallible guiding indications where and how confidently and safely a living Christian thought, individual and conciliar, should go, in its irrepressible and boundless search for answers to theoretical-theological and applied life-practical questions.

The history of the Church, like the biblical history that preceded it, is the unfolding of the stages of the ever-growing revelation of God in the destinies of earthly mankind and, more precisely, in the destinies of certain of its parts, i.e., of individual peoples. When we look at these peoples with the eyes of faith, they appear to us as chosen vessels and organs of revelation. With such providential pre-election, these peoples, with their inherent qualities and their cultures, were not in the least ashamed in their natural free development, in their passions, extremes, passions, mistakes, falls, and rebellions. The history of the chosen peoples does not stop in its natural movement, does not stiffen and die, like a mechanical instrument in the hands of Providence. Divine revelation does not need to abolish freedom. The natural evolution of these peoples served only as the most expedient background and environment on which the finger of Providence inscribed the writings necessary in the economy of the salvation of the world. "In many parts and in many forms, of old, God, who spoke by the father in the prophets" (Hebrews 1:1), at times corrected the course of events by the intrusion into it of miraculous influences from above, "working miracles sometimes."

Sacred biblical and ecclesiastical history could have been different in concrete forms, with all their invariability in essence. It is the realm of freedom, not of physical, deadening necessity, of fatal predestination. The conceivability of other variants of the history of the Church is brilliantly illustrated by the differences in the universal ecclesiastical evolution within the framework of a single ancient "universe" – "οικουμένη" with the differences in the experience of questions of dogma and piety in its Latin and Hellenic [1] halves, which ultimately led to the fatal disintegration of the Church into two branches that diverged separately.

Metaphysical Hellenic thought could not restrain itself from the refined speculations given to it by Christian revelation: about the Holy Scriptures. The Trinity and the Incarnation. The Western, Latin half of the Church was only involuntarily drawn by the East into these speculations, of which it was itself incapable. On her own initiative, she theologized about other questions, about moral and practical issues: she was interested in the combination of human freedom with the grace-filled forces given from above in the act of salvation. The same mystery of salvation, the same soteriology, interested the two cultures from different angles and in different ways. If the East was fascinated by the theological side, then the West was carried away by the anthropological side. The East had its deviations from the norm of orthodoxy, its heresies, and the West had its own.

The very form of resolving controversial questions and pacifying the agitated Church by means of so-called ecumenical councils was not theoretically, not premeditatedly, but empirically groped for in connection with the particularly broad and especially acute upheavals in the depths of the eastern half of the Church. In the western half, thanks to the centralizing authority of the Roman see, there was no need for ecumenical councils. Organized by the emperors, in collusion with the Eastern episcopate, the ecumenical councils were reluctant to be attended by Western representatives. The popes themselves did not even honor them with a personal presence. The heretical disturbances of the East psychologically seemed in the West to be something annoying, alien and painful, without which it would be possible, as without ecumenical councils, to do without it.

Словом, будь Римская империя монотонно латинской или эллинской по pace, языку и культуре, лик истории церкви был бы один. Теперь, в фактической данности, он другой, раздвоенный. Но эта данность не абсолютная, а относительная, зависящая от переменных условий исторической почвы, среды и обстановки, в которых протекала жизнь церкви. Состарились, ослабели, умерли очаги древних культур, римской и греческой, отпали и свойственные им постановки вероучительных и моральных вопросов. У новых христианских народов сложилась своя расовая, культурная и религиозная ментальность, на почве которой пробудились в сознании новые вопросы, а старые, так тяжко волновавшие древнюю церковь, заснули, потеряли интерес или ожили в сознании европейских христиан в неузнаваемо новой форме.

I Вселенский собор в Никее 325 г.

Арианство.

Эпоха гонений не останавливала внутренней жизни и развития церкви, в том числе и развития догматических учений. Церковь потрясалась и расколами и ересями и решала эти конфликты на больших соборах и путем вселенского обмена мнений через переписку и взаимные посольства церквей, отдаленных друг от друга.

Но факт государственного признания церкви Константином Великим [2] и приятия ее интересов к сердцу самим главой всей империи не мог не создать условий, благоприятных для быстрой передачи переживаний одной какой-либо ее части и всем другим. Внутренняя вселенскость, кафоличность церкви имела теперь возможность легче воплощаться и во внешних формах вселенского общения.