Javorskij, Stefan

JAVORSKIJ, STEFAN. — In Russian theology he represents the Catholic tendency as opposed to the Protestant one led by Feofan Prokopovich, favorite of Peter the Great. Born in southern Russia, he studied at Kiev, then, for that period as a Catholic, at the Jesuit Colleges in Lviv and Poznań. Having returned to the schism, he became a monk at Kiev, where he also taught and became prefect of the Academy. In 1700 he became metropolitan of Ryazan, and then patriarchal exarch in Moscow, where he established, on the model of that of Kiev, the Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy, teaching there for some time. J. accepted Peter's political reform, extolling his deeds, but he refused to accept his ecclesiastical reform and the interference of civil authorities in ecclesiastical affairs.

J.'s principal work is Kamen' very (originally written in Latin: Petra fidei), divided into 12 treatises, the most excellent of all the works written by the separated Easterners against Protestantism (it depends greatly on Bellarmine and Becanus). Other works of J. are the Epistola ad doctos sorbonicos de Ecclesiarum unione (1720, published in Germany), Signa adventus Antichristi et finis mundi (1703, against the Old Believers who taught that Peter was the Antichrist); Predicha (published in Moscow 1804-1805) and Lectiones theologiae dogmaticae (Kiev 1693-1697, which remained in manuscript). Classic is the Slavophile Jurij Samarin's dissertation on Feofan Prokopovich and S. J., written under the influence of A. S. Khomyakov.

Bernardo Schultze