In memory of the great saint. Metropolitan Philaret as a biblical scholar

Even after their death, great people leave a bright streak of light that lies above the mobile and treacherously changeable human memory. Saint Philaret was such a great man, who with his living, active Christian spirit passed through the gates of death and entered the family of the eternally living. In him, with death, “the burning substance died out, but the light itself left unflickering rays” 2. A representative of the Department of Biblical History would go beyond the scope of his task if he began to talk about St. Philaret in general. Back in 1883, one admirer of the great saint made an approximate calculation of his writings. There were more than seven hundred of them, not counting several volumes of his letters and motivated resolutions. By this time, over 2,200,000 volumes of the works of St. were requested from one Moscow printing house. Philareta. His opera II opuscula, close in spirit to his favorite works of St. Gregory the Theologian, in its volume it resembles Origen's opera II opuscula 3. And it takes a lot of time to operate with such a mass of material. The biblical scholar will not touch upon the well-known work: “Transcripts of Church Biblical History” by St. Philaret, in which we have concise and precise prolegomena to New Testament church history. A high assessment of the “Inscription” was given by one of the venerable predecessors in our department, A.P. Smirnov 4, who showed well that St. Filaret in his “Inscription” “did a lot in his time and not just for his time” 5. Our task is simpler. In our brief word, we want to note only two moments, so to speak, of the spiritual origin of the biblical saint beyond the boundaries of his special biblical works, beyond which he remained, however, a soulful and strict biblical scholar - a servant and apostle of the Divine Word. We will give an illustration of how the eagle gaze of St. Philareta noticed and embraced the careless movements of scientific thought that operated with the Bible, and as a synthesis of faith and knowledge, generally characteristic of the works of the glorious collaborators of his contemporaries - the Metropolitan and Archpriest - St. Filaret and A.V. Gorsky, was embodied in a living word. Starting to write his “Outline of Church Biblical History”, one might say at the very beginning of his general church and biblical-scientific ascetic activity, Saint Philaret expresses fear “that those who pluck fresh flowers from someone else’s field will not take over the “poisonous grass” mixed with them, that “unchewed German food” will introduce temptation 6 . This fear will remain with him throughout his long life. And in learned treatises, in conversations, in letters and resolutions, he will call, in his own words, to clothe the “virgin - Christian truth” in splendid clothes and protect her from “patchwork clothes”, “with dirty spots”, “low words” 7. And almost at the end of the working days of his life, he, true to himself, calls to value words, because, he said, “words are not trifles” 8 if we are talking about high truths, and “bookmaking is not a craft” 9. In the tone of these fears and in the tone of this strictly circumspect and warning mood, the blessed saint pronounced a decisive, sometimes harsh, judgment on individual treatises, manuals and stories on the Biblical history of his time. And the time of his directing and leadership activity was considerable. Therefore, we note, the severity of his judgment became especially prominent. He strictly judged “violations of the laws of logic” 10. He condemned even more strictly the distortion of biblical facts, confusion of thought and rash boldness of conclusions. He, as a biblical scholar, is perplexed, for example, at how censorship approves of “The Prehistoric Life of Man,” when the Bible begins the existence of humanity with the first man 11 . He condemns a number of manuals and stories on sacred history, in which “romanticism” and “poetic idle talk” are noticeable, which is destroyed, for example, in one of these stories by the name of the law-enhancing books “The Jewish Odyssey.” Moreover, the history of the Jewish people is called “the magnificent, gigantic epic of Jehovah” 12. But the analyzing power of a bright mind is recognized not only in motivated judgments expressed on the basis of a special study of this material, but also in random notes. The power of St. Philaret - and considerable strength - is visible in these notes. His great mind, like the polished surface of a concave reflector, not only perceived rays of light, but at every moment could reflect them with redoubled force. In the first quarter of the last nineteenth century, the French genius scientist Champollion figured out the complex hieroglyphic writing. The Russian Greek Gulyanov, 13 who served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at various missions, began an unsuccessful polemic with Champollion, 14 condemning his correct method of reading hieroglyphs. Gulyanov's works became known to the saint. And in 1828, when Egyptology was still taking its first more or less confident steps, with his characteristic insight, in a private letter addressed to Repninsky, calling his daughter’s illness a hieroglyph, he simultaneously noted about Gulyanov’s “discoveries.” He says that his discoveries “show in the mysterious darkness simply darkness, and not gloomy light” 15. It is worthy of attention that 75 years after this letter from St. Philaret, one scientist (Bulich) called some of Gulyanov’s works “bizarrely pompous and dark in presentation and sterile in content” 16. Indeed, Gulyanov’s “discoveries” would not give any Egyptologist the right to draw a big conclusion. They did not reveal the secrets of the hieroglyphs. Others have done it. Gulyanov did not provide any services - which he promised - to the cause of studying the Old Testament. At one time, he surprised only Granovsky with his intention to do this in a huge five-volume introduction to his “discoveries” in the field of demonology in Egypt. But Granovsky, who met Gulyanov in 1838, had to admit that he had not read or heard anything about his works, 17 while the Metropolitan of Moscow had a certain awareness of them ten years before. Not trusting the discoveries of Gulyanov and the “Egyptian wisdom”, which, according to the apt expression of St. Philaret, and is passing even now among the rationalists “into Egyptoism,” the blessed saint was wary, however, of pronouncing a decisive judgment on the Russian bobsledders, who involved in their scientific works the results of the research of Western Egyptologists. For example, he spoke with caution and restraint about the article of the late professor of the Moscow Academy P.S. Kazansky, included in the anniversary collection entitled “Evidence from the monuments of Egyptian history about the stay of the Jews in Egypt.” In letters addressed to the rector of the academy, Rev. A.V. Gorsky, he does not put any obstacles to the publication of this article, although he rightly points out, on the one hand, the ambiguity of evidence from the field of Egyptology, which the professor himself recognizes, 18 and, on the other, the inaccuracy of chronological calculations relating to the time of the Israelis’ stay in Egypt 19. And perhaps Saint Philaret was not wrong if in his “Inscription” he limited himself more to the analysis of the testimonies of Herodotus, Diodorus, Hecataeus and the Egyptian priest Manetho, which are highly valued by Egyptologists of our day, and which were known to the Jewish historian Josephus, Clement of Alexandria, Sincellus, Africanus and the church historian Eusebius. The Egyptology of Philaret's time did not yet have sufficiently powerful wings that would give it the strength to overcome the gap that lay between the data of the Bible and the rudiments of knowledge in the field of Egyptology. And Filaret saw that she did not yet have these wings. Moving into the realm of his element, into the realm of biblical data, a thoughtful biblical scholar with a certain confidence challenges the general provisions of biblical scholarship that disagree with the Bible, even if they belong to its authoritative representatives. Thus, in 1836, the rector of the Moscow Theological Academy, Filaret, later the Archbishop of Chernigov, presented the Metropolitan with a speech “on prophetic schools.” Returning this speech, the Metropolitan, in a letter addressed to the rector, notes, as if correcting the inaccuracy of his own expression, used by him in “The Outline of Church-Biblical History” 20, that “Germans, and Lutherans at that, want to find schools everywhere” and that it is consistent with Scripture by understanding the institutions of the sons of the prophets as “spiritual-guiding societies similar to monastic ones.” The communities of the sons of the prophets were indeed spiritual leadership brotherhoods or prophetic kenobii, whose members united and acted in the most troubled times of Israeli history. But in order to assert this, it was necessary to know the data of biblical terminology, which leaves no room for identifying the prophetic communities with any special preparatory schools 21. And the metropolitan biblical scholar knew this data well, therefore he approaches the question of organizing prophetic communities very carefully. He does not consider them in the proper sense of the word monastic communities, which some fathers and teachers of the church were inclined to consider them without sufficient grounds, 22 but he does not recognize them as solitary academies or seminaries, where theological and philosophical sciences were supposedly taught and from where “advocates of theology” emerged, as Abarbanel Kimchi thinks. Vitringa, Kranichfeld, Danko, Meignan, Munk, Reville and others 23. And more than once a zealous servant of the Divine Word gave such guidance. And how harmonious were his biblical ideological concepts even in words and teachings, how tightly welded together by the power of the understanding of Scripture was a truly golden chain that connected the beginning of human existence with the beginning of the blessed kingdom... When the Moscow Theological Academy, in the fiftieth year of the testimony of St. Philaret marked with a spiritual triumph “the day of the so-called episcopal birth” 24, the rector of the Academy, Archpriest A.V. Gorsky, on her behalf, pointed out in a speech precisely this feature of the soulful understanding of the spirit of the scriptures of St. Filaret. “To you,” he said, the Lord revealed the language of images and shadows of the Old Testament world, in which history itself was a prophecy” 25. It is enough to look at the conversations, words and studies of the ever-memorable saint to see with what deep attention the “disciple and teacher of the word of the godfather” 26 treated “the hidden verbs of the spirit”, how miraculously the “simplicity of infantile faith” 27 was combined with his word of reason, how skillfully he looked for the roots of the Old Testament institutions in the sacraments and rites of the New Testament church, and how the whole biblical history came to life. as applied to the events of his time. The biblical scholar remained a biblical scholar even outside of his special works. Here, for example, is how in a few words of the saint the beginning of the book of Genesis, or more precisely the story of the fall of man, is combined with the beginning of the gospel of his uprising. “Sin enters like a thief, then goes on a rampage like a robber: it exposes, enslaves, kills” 28. By sin, “man stopped in himself the eternal circulation of the glory of God, deciding not to return it to God, but to appropriate it for himself, in the hope, according to the promise of the seducer, to be like God himself. From this, in a spiritual man, something similar happened to what happens in a sensual man when the circulation of the blood stops. Man spiritually died for the glory of God, or, at least, became dead in such a way that in him there remained weak, in comparison with the previous state, movements of spiritual life, darkened, naked, painful and corruptible. Since throughout the entire visible world the glory of God spread primarily through man, being reflected in him as in the image of God, having hidden from man, it is no longer as clear as at first it shines throughout the entire visible world. Although the Psalmist, who had purified his senses, even after this heard the verb of heaven, broadcasting the glory of God, and their sound passing throughout the whole earth, this sound, without a doubt, is no longer as high and magnificent as it was in the beginning. For then only the majestic and sweet sounds of life and harmony were heard, but now they are mixed with the tearing sounds of suffering and the noise of destruction. In the very first minutes of man’s separation from the glory of God, God sought him in order to return him to it: Adam, where are you? (Gen.3:9) But the sinner could not bear her presence: he fled and hid from her. Later, in order to make it accessible to people, God sometimes clothed it in the appearances of His Angels, but even this terrified human nature and could not maintain it in communion with the glory of God. Woe is me, Lord, Lord, Gideon cries, for he saw the Angel of the Lord face to face (Judges 6:22). Let us die to death, Manoah cries out, as we have seen God (Judges 13:22). The people of Israel were prepared for the manifestation of the glory of God at Sinai, but even standing at a distance, they could not withstand its manifestation. Having fulfilled the measure of human iniquities, He could not, without betraying His holiness, respond to the cry ascending to God with the voice of love and mercy, but responded with the formidable and striking destinies of His justice, as was the case, for example, in the condemnation of Cain, in the global flood, in the destruction of Sodom. The God of glory thundered (Ps. 28:3), the earth trembled, man disappeared: where was there to rejoice? Who should we praise? What, finally, does God, inexhaustible in the means of mercy and salvation, do in order to restore man to the hope of glory? God approaches man and shares in his humiliation. Like a skilled physician, the Heavenly physician of souls and bodies, seeing that humanity, infected with the deadly disease of sin, fears the Divine, while nothing can be cured except the Divine, He encloses His Divinity in the image of humanity, and thus the human race, before it knew it, actually tasted the Divine, all-healing healing of grace. In the very hiding of the glory of God to us, we receive the hope of glory. And when this glory is revealed, it will not blind us, will not frighten us, but having shone in us, it will enlighten the whole world in which we have eclipsed it. The heavenly servants of light saw the dawn of sowing glory before us and immediately turning to us, exclaimed: glory to God in the highest... (Luke 9:14). Now is no longer the dawn, but a full day of sowing glory 29 . “This is one of the few days on which all the days of the earth rely, so as not to collapse into one endless hellish night” 30. Returning to the book of Genesis and passing through the legal, historical, teaching and prophetic books to the New Testament, the biblical scholar-hierarch Philaret, in parallel with the question of the deprivation of the glory of God, in the same three or four words gives another biblical concept about the triumph of the Seed of the Woman over the seed of the serpent, completing the miracle of Divine creation in the moral world order on the non-evening day of the Eternal Easter. “When death came to a person in the wake of sin, then the merciful God, stopping it, deigned to sow a new seed of life in an already dying and perishing humanity. Seed, no doubt, means offspring, or a certain person in the offspring. But what does the Seed of the Woman mean? In ancient genealogies we see that the seed or offspring is always attributed to the husband, and not to the wife. What does the unusual name of the Seed of the Woman indicate? Either for nothing - in the order of nature, or for the sacrament - which is above nature. For birth, about which nature asks: what will this be like, where I don’t know a husband? (Luke 1:34) And about whom grace answers: The Holy Spirit will come upon you” 31. Thus, in these last days (Heb. 1:2), ancient fortune-telling is resolved. “Jesus Christ, lamb (Ex. 12) - in meekness, perfect - in the union of the Divinity with humanity, male - in strength to bear our infirmities, blameless - in purity from sin, even hereditary, slain on the cross, at the mystical supper, always without deficiency and always without excess. He is consumed in the absence of leaven of purity. And the invisible Pharaoh, the ruler of the darkness of this age (Eph. 4:12), faints in his fury. This is a new blessed Easter, foreshadowed by the Old Testament. But our mysterious Passover of Exodus, being an event of ancient prototypes, is itself only a new prophecy and expectation of the solemn Passover of Entry. But now, while still inwardly coming to God from the world, we remain in it, for our spiritual meal, just like the Jews for the Passover supper. There must be a lot of bitter things mixed in: sorrows and misfortunes grow in abundance in this deplorable vale. “The ancient serpent, despite the fact that he himself received a deadly blow to the head (Gen. 3:15), still watches our heel, sharpening his dull sting on our flesh.” “O poor flesh! Lazy dust that suppresses the active spirit! Treacherous friend, flattering enemy! Traitor assistant! Terrible... darling! Where can I hide from you? I make peace with you without defeating you, and without enjoying the peace, I resume the fight... You groan when I exhaust you - when I please you, you are willful. Sharp thorns pierce you, fragrant roses plunge you into bliss and relaxation. You serve as a target for the flaming arrows of the evil one and even cover his forges. I strive for the Light of Zion - you keep me in the darkness of Egypt.” “And while you, in an incomprehensible melancholy, are groaning for my Lord, and approaching the very Source of life, like that Magdalene, you are still looking for a dead body - sensual images - do not touch me (John 20:17), says the Lord. And the spirit itself, more or less, is forced to share this condemnation with you.”... However, Eternal Easter awaits us. The full and solemn Passover of Israel was to be celebrated in the Promised Land, in the chosen place of the presence of God - in Jerusalem, the city of peace (Deut. 16:6). Likewise, our Easter will be accomplished when the “Intercessor of the New Testament” opens “a safe path through the stream of corruption, the filling of our being. Then Eternal Easter will be coupled with Eternal Saturday, eternal ascent to God with eternal peace in Him” 32. It would be possible to further illustrate the starting points of our word. But further illustrations would only confirm these provisions. That's why we don't multiply them. Let’s just say that from the words and teachings of St. Philaret one can compose an ideological guide to understanding the data of the Bible. “The saint’s love of wisdom, obedient to faith” 33 should leave him an eternal memory, as a conscious pilgrim who actively made, together with the Church, a great pilgrimage to eternal Zion. Relatively little acquainted with Western scientists, but recognized by them 34 , who did not listen to higher sciences, but created them, not being a professor at the highest secular schools, but revered by them in his time 35 and called into the scientific family of the Academy of Sciences, as its ordinary academician, biblical scholar Saint Philaret influenced all aspects of church and public life. And if forest boars (Ps. 79:14) undermined the trees of paradise and if “foxes” destroyed the fence of the Church of Christ, he stopped the predators with the imperious power of spirit and word. This expressive biblical word is still effective today. And in our days, when persistent speeches of narcissistic pride are heard, when truly Edomian cries are heard: destroy, destroy to the ground (Ps. 137:7), when, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, some roar like bears, and others groan like doves (Is. 59:11), when the dark twilight in public life promises an even darker night, the servants of God and truth, gathered in a modest church This is especially timely to bring closer to your consciousness the image of the evangelist of the true biblical word, whose power alone can stop the roaring of the “bears” and spiritually ease the grief of the groaning “doves.” Pronounced on November 18, 1917 at a solemn meeting at the Moscow Theological Academy in memory of the 50th anniversary of the death of St. Philaret. Prot. Bogoslovsky-Platonov. A word on the death of Met. Philareta. Soulful. Thurs. 1867, vol.III. pp. 217–218 Filaret, Metropolitan of Moscow. Russian Antiquity. 1883, T. XXXVIII. Art. prof. N. N. Barsova. Page 40–41. Metropolitan Philaret, as the author of the Outline of Church Biblical History. A. Smirnov. Moscow 1883. Metropolitan Philaret, as the author of the Ts.-Biblical Inscription. Stories. A. Smirnov. Op. cit., p. 36. Letter from Moscow Metropolitan Philaret to Archimandrite Anthony. Part 4. Letters 1857–1867 Moscow, 1884. Letter 1254, p. 149. Add. to creativity St. father, ed. at Moscow spirit. Academy. 1884 Book. 1. Letters from Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, to Philaret Gumilevsky, former rector of the Academy, later Archbishop of Chernigov. Letter 30, December 31st, 1864, p. 340. Letter from Moscow Metropolitan Philaret to Anthony. Op. сit. Part III. Moscow. 1883. Letters 1850–1856 Letter 1130. Pp. 430. Letters to Filaret Gumilevsky. Arr. to creativity St. father 1884 Book. 1. Op. cit. letter 30 Soulful. Thurs. 1882 April. Resolutions Moscow. .metropolitan Philareta. Page 510. Resolution of 1867 Sept. 16. Thurs. in General Love. Spirit. Prosveshch, 1868 book. V. April. Letter from the Metropolitan. Philaret K. Abbess of the Spaso-Borodinsky Monastery of Mary (Tuchkova). Letter 44, pp. 106–107. V. A. Turaev. History of the ancient east. Part I. S.-II. 1913 pp. 32. Thurs. in General Love. Spirit, Enlightenment. 1873 April. Materials for the biography of Moscow Metropolitan Philaret. Letters to F. Ya. Repninsky. Letter 2, pp. 32–33. Essay on the history of linguistics in Russia. S. Bulich. Zap. Historian-philologist. Faculty of St. Petersburg university Russian Archive. 1873 Book. 4. Page 479–480. From letters from T.N. Granovsky to N.V. Stanyukovich. Add. to ed. Holy Father Part 30. 1882 Letters from Philaret Mitrop. Moscow to A.V. Gorsky. See letters 28 and 29. Page. 62 –65. Evidence from the monuments of Egyptian history about the stay of the Jews in Egypt. P. Kazansky. Dept. imprint Moscow. 1864 See page 67. It is known that Egyptology also influenced biblical chronology, due to which some biblical scholars allowed significant deviations from the chronological indications of the Bible. See our comments on this issue. Patriarch Joseph and Egypt. Sergeev Posad. 1914 pp. 52 et seq. Edition 13–0, Moscow. 1897 pp. 190, 250. See quite detailed information on this issue in Dictión paige de la Bible F. Yigouroux.T. 2. Paris. 1899. Col. 1567–1570. There is a detailed work concerning, among other things, this issue in Russian biblical and theological literature. See M. Verzhbolovich. Prophetic ministry in the ten-tribe kingdom of Israel. Kiev 1891 pp. 226 et seq. Blazh. Jerome, St. Isidore. Diсt, de la Bible F. Yigouroux. Op. cit. Col. 1568. See Orthodox. Review 1867 T. 24. September. Anniversary of the fiftieth year of service of His Eminence Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, in the rank of bishop. Page 11. Homily for the 4th week after Pentecost. Word for Christmas. Word on the Day of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Word for St. Day Easter. 1811 Right Review 1867 vol. 24. Op. cit, page 12. The name of St. Philaret is included in several foreign dictionaries. See, for example, the index to Realencyclopadie fur protest. Theologie und Kirche Herzog-Hauck. III Aufl. Leipzig. Philaret. Cp. also Konversations–Lexikon Meyers. Leipzig. 4 Aufl. The West, which knows Philaret from translations belonging mainly to Prince M.D. Volkonsky, puts Saint Philaret on a par with its Bossuets and Macsillons. Russian Star. 1883 T. XXXVIII. Op. cit. p.41. It is known that Moscow University responded to the honoring of Metropolitan Philaret on the day of the fiftieth anniversary of his episcopal ministry. You might be interested in: