Academician E. E. Golubinsky

Theological science surveys the spread and implementation of grace-saving content not only throughout the entire world in general, but also in each individual nation, for which their Christian past, of course, is closer, dearer, more understandable and more accessible, both in terms of internal meaning and external manifestation, and even in terms of the sources themselves from the point of view of their receipt and interpretation. Hence, it is completely natural that the fate of Christianity in Russia is developed specifically in Russian church history in greater detail and in more detail. However, even in this area, the whole matter was limited for a long time to chronicle-narrative reports, until scientific interests developed with all the necessary means for worthy satisfaction... The most difficult and often thankless task in its destructiveness fell to the lot of academician Professor E.E. Golubinsky and was heroically accomplished by him in “The History of the Russian Church,” of which the author during his lifetime († January 7, 1912) managed to release the first volume in two huge books and the equally monumental first half of the next volume, and the second was just beginning to be published under the editorship of S.A. Belokurov; but in general, the entire work covers events up to and including Metropolitan Macarius (1542–1563). With his usual decisiveness and inviolable directness, E. E. Golubinsky, already a venerable scientist, categorically testified about himself: “History comes in three kinds: stupid, taking everything that the past time has left us with the name of historical material at face value and therefore telling us old wives’ tales; a liar who is not deceived herself, but deceives others, who, for various practical reasons, represents black as white and white as black, blasphemes what is worthy of praise and praises what is worthy of blame, etc.; and the present, which strives to recognize the past as accurately and thoroughly as possible and then try to also reproduce it correctly and thoroughly. Leaving those willing and willing to be supporters of stupid and lying history, I, for my part, am an ardent admirer of real history.” The latter “according to its scientific ideal, is a possibly satisfactory reproduction of the past historical life of people - such a reproduction that this historical life stands before us as real, in all its vital liveliness and in all its integral completeness (with that addition against the present - so that it also has its own meaning).” “This ideal of history requires that people who make up the succession of hierarchical persons and historical figures in general should be depicted as living people with an individual personal physiognomy and with the individual moral character of each, since in history, like the real life that it reproduces, every person matters only as a living moral personality, since our moral feeling seeks to be in living communication with historical people and wants to know whether we should give them honors or pronounce over them a strict, so-called, historical court." This reciprocity with the past entails that “to be a historian is in some respects almost as delicate as to be a publicist.” The history of any society cannot be a word of praise or a panegyric, but must be an accurate reproduction of its past life with all the advantages and disadvantages of the latter; otherwise it will lose all its meaning and cease to be history. But, speaking of the shortcomings of the past tense, it is sometimes impossible not to grasp the present to some extent for the reason that sometimes the past continues to more or less remain the present. Thus, in some cases, a historian, willy-nilly, becomes a publicist, especially since he is a “living person” who, “talking about the past, cannot completely detach himself from the present.” And here, “allowing for silence, he would be forced to bend his conscience; and as soon as he allows himself to do this, then history is no longer history.” After all, “there is no great sense and no great benefit in portraying oneself as beautiful in the past with the help of writing and imagination. This is not what we need to do, but something else: having the courage to recognize the past as it was, try, in deliberate compensation for it, to become the best possible in the future.” All this in the mouth of E. E. Golubinsky expressed the unconditional demand that a true and honest historian must comprehend and clarify reality with the best accuracy and in its name “cut the truth,” even if it “pricks not in the eyebrow, but right in the eye.” “For these purposes, any history regarding its material - whether it is abundant or scarce - must be subjected to critical processing. The rule of ordinary life: not to believe everything that people say and write has exactly the same application to history; just as nowadays, when preparing material for future history, people, partly out of ignorance, partly out of direct intentions, write about deeds and events that are destined to become the property of history, far from being the pure truth, so it was in the past, under the conditions of social life of that time, there was still much greater freedom for unintentional and intentional lies: and to this day folk art creates legends, but these legends no longer have the opportunity to acquire the significance of historical material. In general, the need for criticism in relation to the material of any history is completely clear and obvious, and how naive that future historian of our time will be who gives complete faith to everything that he receives from us in the form of historical material, how naive we would be if we treated the material of past history in our hands with similar complete faith. In my study of Russian church history, I set as my deliberate task a critical attitude towards its material.” This means that systematic criticism was the main scientific and historical postulate of E. E. Golubinsky, the very first ability of any conscientious historical work. This was the main stimulus of the entire scientific achievement and left the essential quality of all its results. We can safely say that the scientific history of E. E. Golubinsky is a continuous and complete criticism, which covers absolutely everything, not excluding the last little things, like the inscription of the name “VLADIMIR”, which, according to special research, he intended to write “VLADIMIR”. He critically reviewed to the very end the entire baggage of material data and scientific theories, weighed and evaluated every detail with the most scrupulous care, all judgments and conclusions were documented and inexorably verified. Nothing without the strictest critical testing - this was his confessional motto and the embodied essence of the church-historical work of E. E. Golubinsky. Limitless in quantity, such criticism did not allow qualitative restrictions in this direction, not stopping before any authorities of traditional sacredness and universal respect for pious custom and learned reputation. This property is no less decisive and everywhere in the scientific construction of our historian. To illustrate, it is enough to mention that - to the horror of most believers and to the bewilderment of many scientists - E. E. Golubinsky, well aware of this, fearlessly and categorically rejected the chronicle story of the baptism of St. Vladimir and directly declared it a later legend, as if suspecting at the root and striking at the head the very historical beginning of Christianity in Russia... It is clear that with the merciless implementation of the critical method, everything old and accepted, inherited and mined received a new look and unexpected light. This establishes the second feature of the scientist - his complete independence and complete originality. All opinions and statements were always formulated by him and expressed only “according to his own sincere convictions.” On this subject, he testified from the objective side that “every history has the hope of being properly developed not in the case when those working on it put aside concerns about independent research, which is the cause of differences in views, but, on the contrary, in the case when they consider this independent research to be their obligatory task.” As a result, it turned out that the author, in his words, “deviates too much from his predecessors” and sometimes so much that everything is the opposite for him or even contrary to them, as was especially discovered regarding the ancient period. All of the above does not exhaust the scientific typicality of E. E. Golubinsky. According to the striking remark of one opponent (Prof. N.I. Subbotin) at his doctoral disputation on December 16, 1880, he “approached the erected solid edifice of history with a heavy hammer of criticism,” unceremoniously knocked on all its parts and broke many of them into pieces, crushed entire main stones into powder and let them go to waste. Such an operation would simply be a pogrom, turning over historical acquisitions for “flood and plunder.” Such barbarism was least consistent with the scientific interests of the historian, but would inevitably triumph if it were not paralyzed by equal opposition. The danger was rooted in excessive criticism, and serious creative criticism only clears the neglected field and pulls out weeds in order to sow good-quality grain on the soil it cultivates. It is necessary to have more and better of the latter, so that all the work does not come down to the destruction of what is available, even if it is small and weak. New and good building materials are needed in order to evaluate them on their merits, to mutually polish the entire aggregate, and from all this processed mass to build a historical church on a critically prepared foundation. For this purpose, it is necessary to involve abundant factual information and the most documented justification. This side, parallel to the two described and harmoniously in solidarity with them, is furnished by E. E. Golubinsky with rare pomp and amazing splendor. He did not suffer from a vain mania for discoveries in his field and did not strive for them, but everything accessible to science, known to him in detail in all the main and secondary things that served as the subject of his discussion. The actual competence of this learned recluse was simply amazing on every – even the smallest – issue, and he tried not to say a single word without documentary support, out of simple conjecture. In the memory of all his listeners, this professor, who did not care at all about his lecture successes, was preserved with reverent glory that E. E. Golubinsky is historical truth itself, incapable of adding even one sound beyond what is authorized by indisputable factual evidence. And this is his entire “History” in every line, to the extent that such documentation was feasible for human self-sacrifice. But E. E. Golubinsky knew well and sharply confirmed the actual insufficiency of Russian sources - especially for the ancient period, and was often left without documentary means in his criticism. In these numerous and important cases, he found scientific salvation in the fact that Church Rus' essentially fed and lived from Byzantium, and therefore had to be explained from it by analogy in all its conditioned and similar elements. Hence, he has the broadest development of related data, a deep and detailed investigation through independent study and systematic use of the obtained results in Byzantine studies to illuminate the illusory historical reality of Russia, as a direct reflection of the Byzantine radiance. E. E. Golubinsky was an independent Byzantine scholar who showed the most authoritative competence here, in addition to the immediate applications to his church-historical needs. In this last respect, his scientific and creative successes are so great that, for example, he again creates the entire history of church administration in the Kiev period, which is extremely vague in our chronicles, reveals much that was hitherto dark in Russian monasticism and, in general, extremely enriches it with comparative church-archaeological observations, bringing sufficient clarity to all corners where previously it was impossible to walk by touch; even the mute and humming monuments began to speak clearly and clearly. Historical reality was resurrected with vivid clarity. But at the same time, its true historical genesis was actually revealed, serving as the most important element of scientific knowledge and determining its comprehensiveness. Such factual validity of the research through self-suggestion inevitably protected against theoretical bias in the scientific constructions themselves, as is again characteristic of E. E. Golubinsky. He states that the dominant view was that “societies were represented only in the form of governments, which is why the history of societies meant exclusively the history of governments.” This naturally did not prove a completely different orientation, but E. E. Golubinsky adhered to the principle that “from what parts (facts) the whole life of each Church is composed, the history of each, which reproduces life, should consist of the same parts.” And the life of society, civil or church, has its own purpose; which it achieves or should achieve with the assistance of a deliberate reason, which is the government, and with the use of the means communicated to it... The goal and name of the Church as a society is to educate people in the faith and true Orthodoxy to promote their eternal salvation; its governmental body, which serves it for this purpose, constitutes a divinely established hierarchy; its means are: its own and through the Scriptures and divine services (with the acquisition of the invisible grace of God in the sacraments)... Consequently, the composition of the parts of any church history, since it is necessary and, so to speak, organically determined by the composition of Church life, which history reproduces, must be the government with its activities, teaching, worship, church life of society.” E. E. Golubinsky is determined here by the essence of the matter, by which he was always guided in his judgments of a fundamental phenomenon, and did not recognize their actual suitability for immediate historical needs, which Metropolitan Macarius usually followed. The noted property is distinguished by his delimitation of the entire Russian church history, where he, deviating from the Right Reverend Philaret and even polemicizing with him, actually unites the first four periods into two and receives only three: Kiev, Moscow and St. Petersburg with the division of the middle into two halves by the Stoglavy Council under Met. Macarius. It must be admitted that this systematization, which the author unfortunately called topographical, is not so original in comparison with Filaretov’s, but it is simpler and more natural. E. E. Golubinsky firmly established and unshakably ensured the dominance of historical criticism in science in general, which he generously enriched over a vast space far beyond the boundaries of the church-historical field. This is his enduring merit, but also his inevitable defectiveness. The honorary historian proceeded from too extreme distrust of all historical sources and, sometimes falling into petty pickiness, missed very large things without the necessary assessment, when, for example, he characterized the church-liturgical and canonical orders of the Kyiv period according to the so-called Charter of Metropolitan George, and Prof. A. S. Pavlov later discovered with certainty that this was a genuine document. E. E. Golubinsky directly turned the human possibility of making mistakes into the actual potential to lie, which is necessarily inherent in all historical materials. This categorical skepticism threatened to undermine all historical reliability and shook the very existence of science, since in the name of abstract and therefore empirically non-existent certainty it actually destroyed in advance all relative reality and was unable to replace or provide for the lack of factual indisputability, which actually never happens anywhere in this world. For the sake of scientific self-preservation, it is necessary to revive the subjectivism of personal suspicion and sophisticated fortune-telling, which are equally disastrous for sober scientific-historical knowledge, even if only conditional. Reality is inevitably transformed into a critically stylized theme, in which everything is symbolically transparent, as we see further in the catechetical experiments of this series (for example, in the entire book by M. D. Priselkov “Essays on the ecclesiastical and political history of Kievan Rus in the 10th-11th centuries”, St. Petersburg, 1913). Against these applications that are murderous for science, a great talent is needed, as huge as it is subtle, so that, while purifying false and side effects, one does not severely damage the very core and discovers its natural energy (an example of which can be the more careful scientific research of Academician A. A. Shakhmatov). E. E. Golubinsky did not have all the advantages of this rare gift. His critical hammer was not just impressively heavy, but also indiscriminately rough, hitting on its way right and left everything that came across directly to death for simple weakness, depriving it of its very right to exist, always conditional in earthly limitations. Of course, “every man is a liar,” but the Apostle Paul states this only in comparison with God (Rom. III, IV) with the recognition of obligatory and factual truth in its sphere and measure. E. E. Golubinsky seems to forget about this and primarily tries to suspect and expose. In general, his critical side is higher than his constructive side, for which he had less inclination and ability. The great historian himself avoided great extremes due to the constraint of his colossal phenomenal erudition, and among his successors and successors this danger is eliminated and smoothed over by a healthy instinct of scientific struggle for a threatened and trampled life. In such an ennobled form, the method of E. E. Golubinsky, one might say, reigns in Russian historical science, fertilizes it and moves it in progressive development along all lines. You might be interested in: