Blessed Augustine in Russian theology of the 18th – early 20th centuries.

The famous theologian of the Latin tradition, Blessed Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, was and is very important for the Russian theological tradition. Despite the sharp distinction between the Catholic and Protestant traditions that occurred in the 16th and 17th centuries. was characterized by supra-confessional theological movements. Despite the diversity of these movements, they can be united under the common name of “Augustinianism.” This is explained by the fact that the anthropocentric tendencies of the era, involuntarily reminiscent of the ancient heresy of Pelagius, inevitably forced one to turn to the authority of the main fighter against Pelagianism - St. Augustine. In addition, since Augustine’s concept of Christian grace-filled love - caritas - stood at the center of his teaching about the Church and salvation, it was this that made it possible to overcome the one-sidedness of the questions that divided Catholics and Protestants: about salvation by works or faith. Finally, a characteristic feature and need of the time was a general appeal to the fathers, to the origins. As a result, at least three major intellectual and theological movements of the era emerged, one way or another in their starting points appealing to the authority of the author of the Confession: Jansenism and Fenelonism in Catholicism and Pietism in Protestantism. It was in them that answers were offered to the main question of the era: how is true Christianity possible in a de-churched secular world. All these movements, to one degree or another, influenced the Russian tradition, for the realities that appeared in our fatherland in the 18th century confronted the Russian Church with problems already familiar to Western Christianity. And just like in the West, St. Augustine was in demand in the Russian tradition. One of the first Russian Augustinians was the Right Reverend Theophan (Prokopovich), who can be considered the founder of Russian scientific theology. He is considered to be an “Orthodox Reformed”, however, as it seems that it would be much more correct to call him an Augustinian. Of course, it was Augustinianism, gleaned by the Right Reverend Theophan, apparently in the years of his Roman youth, that meant a lot for his theology, paradoxically coexisting with the humanistic paradigms of the era. In the Spiritual Regulations, a document that largely determined the development of “school” theology in Russia in the 18th century, St. Augustine is listed as one of the most important ancient teachers of the Church. Particularly noted are the writings of Blessed Augustine “on the Trinity Mystery” and “on the Divinity of the Son of God”, as well as “on original sin and on the grace of God”, which are necessary for the formation of the worldview of young theology, set out “in many books on the Pelagian”. This school training had results. Thus, Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, who studied Blessed Augustine at school, through the lectures of the Right Reverend Theophan and the works of the forerunner of Pietism, Johann Arndt, in his “True Christianity” largely follows the Augustinian motives of the latter, although he interprets them in his own way. The greatest Russian theologian, Saint Philaret of Moscow, did not ignore the ideas of Blessed Augustine and the Augustinian movements of the 17th century. It is in his legacy that we find the dogmatically impeccable reception of Fenelon’s teaching on pure love, the original transformation of the well-known triadological formula of the Bishop of Hippo and the original development of his ecclesiological ideas on the issue of the boundaries of the Church. No less important and significant was Augustine’s legacy for the “theology of the laity,” the rapid development of which is a characteristic feature of the Russian tradition of the 19th century. The influence of the theology of Blessed Augustine on the theological works of the Slavophiles was carried out both directly and through the writings of Blaise Pascal, who belonged to the Jansenist circle, and the researcher of the ecclesiology of the ancient Church I. Mohler. In their own way, certain features of the legacy of Blessed Augustine were refracted in the theological works of Saints Ignatius Brianchaninov, Theophan the Recluse and other significant authors of the era. In parallel, the process of scientific study of the works of St. Augustine was going on. Separate articles dedicated to Blessed Augustine appeared at the end of the 18th century - the first half of the 19th century, in the 1840-1850s, in connection with the emergence of a separate educational discipline “patristics” in theological academies, and “the doctrine of the Fathers of the Church” in theological seminaries, this process intensified. In the last decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries. theological, philosophical, church-historical studies directly dedicated to St. Augustine or related to him, formed a whole library. The attention of the authors was drawn to triadology, Christology, anthropology, sacramentology, psychology of the Bishop of Hippo, his relationship with contemporary theologians: Blessed Jerome and others. However, individual monographs, dissertations, and articles cannot be called a systematic study of the legacy of St. Augustine; this was only the beginning, but the implied continuation was not destined to be realized. Of course, for a wider acquaintance of the Russian reader with the theology of St. Augustine, a translation of his works was necessary. Although the first mentions of translations of individual treatises of St. Augustine into Russian date back to the 17th century, the tradition of “Russian Augustine” arose in the second half of the 18th century. In the 1860s. At the Kyiv Theological Academy, a project was launched to translate the works of St. Augustine into Russian, a language contemporary to that era. Translations were published from April 1864 in the “Proceedings of the Kyiv Theological Academy”, then in separate volumes. But the published ten-volume volume constitutes less than one tenth of the total volume of the works of Blessed Augustine. Therefore, at present, the question of translating the complete body of works of such an important author for Russian theological and philosophical thought into modern Russian is very urgent. In recent decades, the vast body of works of St. Augustine has again attracted the attention of Russian researchers: the depth and complexity of theological and philosophical thought require new understanding, and the reception of “Augustinism” in all its eras is also necessary. However, the main attention to the study of the Augustinian heritage is paid mainly by philosophers; for theologians this is a task. The project, implemented at the Scientific Center for the History of Theology and Theological Education, implies, first of all, the study of the legacy of Blessed Augustine in the Russian tradition, that is, his influence on the works of Russian theologians, as well as research dedicated to Blessed Augustine. The Scientific Center for the History of Theology and Theological Education also hopes to initiate the translation and publication of the complete corpus of the works of St. Augustine in Russian. Of course, the implementation of these prospects implies close cooperation with other Russian researchers and translators, as well as with European scientific centers - first of all, with the Roman Papal Patrol Institute "Augustinianum".