Collection of church historical works. Volume 3

Volume I • Volume II • Volume III • Volume IV Lectures on the history of the ancient church. History of the Church in the Period Before Constantine the Great. In the third volume of the collection of church historical works of V.V. Bolotov included the second part of “Lectures on the history of the ancient church”, covering the first three centuries of the history of Christianity, published by A.I. Brilliantov in 1910, corrected and supplemented with previously unpublished lecture material. In this volume of “Collected Church Historical Works” V.V. Bolotov, we publish the second part of his “Lectures on the History of the Ancient Church,” which outlines the period before Constantine the Great. This is the story of persecution, the first successes of the spread of Christianity, the formation of church teaching and discipline. This volume is based on the publication of A.I. Brilliantov 1910, corrected and supplemented with previously unpublished fragments of lectures by V.V. Bolotov. Thus, paragraph 3 of Chapter IV of the first section “The Spread of Christianity in the West” (pp. 303–325) is supplemented by an essay on the history of the Christianization of Britain and Ireland, which was specially read by V.V. Bolotov to students of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1897/1898. in memory of the sermon of Augustine of Canterbury to the English in the 6th–7th centuries. In this essay, V.V. Bolotov touches on the activities of Irish monks (St. Patrick, Virgil, etc.), examines the struggle between supporters of Roman and Irish practice, and details the history of the formation of the British church under the successors of Augustine. Chapter VI of the second section of this volume “Church system in the first three centuries of Christianity” (pp. 477–491, 520–523) is published according to the surviving autograph of V.V. Bolotov. As in the previous volume, for the convenience of readers, prof. A.I. Sidorov and M.L. Voskresensky made a translation of Greek and Latin terms and expressions (in most cases they are given in the text in brackets and are not specifically specified). Notes compiled for the 1910 edition by Prof. A.I. Brilliantov (labeled A.B.), prof. priest D. A. Lebedev (D. L.) - and for this publication prof. A.I. Sidorov (A.S.). The Apostolic Age is a fundamental period, an age of resolving fundamental issues in their basic formulation. The post-apostolic time shares with the apostolic age this characteristic feature of the radical formulation of questions both a) in relation to the outside, and b) internal. In the first case, the church responded to both the external force of the state (martyrdom and judicial apologies) and pagan philosophy (scientific apologies, the fight against gnosis) that Christianity is an independent religion toto genere and cannot live on compromises with paganism, cannot accept the mask of one of its many varieties. The internal questions that occupied Christian theologians of this time are distinguished by the same fundamental character: we are talking about the whole, not about details, about premises, not about conclusions. The question is: shouldn’t the doctrine of the Holy Trinity be abolished in the name of monotheism? Should we refuse to recognize Jesus Christ as God (and not only, as Arianism puts it, consubstantial with the Father)? Or should we not reject the reality of His human nature, even recognize His body as illusory (and not just, as with the Monophysites: which mental phenomena belong to φύσις (“nature”) and which to ὑπόστασις (“hypostasis”)? where are the boundaries between these two concepts?). - But at the same time, the germs of that historical formation appear, which later receives such important significance, albeit of a negative nature - the germs of the papacy.