GLUBOKOVSKIJ, NIKCLAJ NIKANOPOVIĆ. — A distinguished Russian theologian, exegete, and historian (1863–1937), recognized as an authority of the first order among the “Orthodox” theologians.
Doctor of theology of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy, professor at the Ecclesiastical Academy and at the University of St. Petersburg, he was a corresponding member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and an honorary member of the Ecclesiastical Academies of Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan. He succeeded in leaving Russia in 1921; he stayed in Finland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia and taught for a short time at the University of Belgrade. From 1923 he lived in Sofia, where he became a professor at the University and where he died. He was counted among the teachers of the Orthodox Theological Institute of Paris.
G., a layman, was a representative of the old-style official Russian theology. A significant fact is that he, a professional theologian, refused to recognize Chomjakov, the theological leader of the Slavophiles, as an authentic theologian. Although rather traditional, in his research he depended much more on the Protestants than on the Catholics. He sought the union of Christians, but decisively rejected the primacy of the Pope.
Among his most important works in Russian: The Blessed Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus. His Life and Literary Activity, (2 vols., Moscow 1890); The Preaching of the Gospel by St. Paul the Apostle, According to Its Origin and Its Essence, (3 vols., St. Petersburg 1905–12). After the death of Prof. A. P. Lopuchin, from 1905 onward he continued, in a more scholarly manner, The Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia. He also wrote: Orthodoxy in its essence, in The Constructive Quarterly, 1913, pp. 282–305; 12 articles in Godinik, Annuaire de l'Université de Sofia, VI, Faculté de théologie, nos. 1–14, 1923–37, mostly in Bulgarian, and for the most part devoted to the Letter of St. Paul to the Hebrews; The Orthodox Church and Christian Union (ibid., 1 [1924], pp. 163–260); God the Word (an exegesis of the prologue of St. John), in Il pensiero ortodosso, I, Paris 1928, pp. 89–121; and The Humiliation of Christ and Our Salvation (an exegesis of Phil. 2:3–11), ibid., II, there 1930, pp. 86–101 (cf. B. Schultze, La nuova osteriologia russa II-III, in Orient. Christ. periodica, 12 [1946], pp. 130–36).