PROKOPOVIĆ, FEOFAN (TROFANE). – Ecclesiastic and politician, adviser to Peter the Great, leading exponent of the Protestantizing tendency in the Russian Church and theology, b. in Kiev on 8 June 1691, d. on 8 September 1736.
Born to non-Catholic parents, educated in Kiev at the ecclesiastical academy, he studied in Poland, became a Catholic, entered the Order of St. Basil, and continued his studies (first literature and then theology) in Rome at the Greek College of St. Athanasius. On returning to his homeland, he abandoned the Catholic faith and henceforth became a determined opponent of everything Catholic, both in scholarship and in life. In 1707–11 he taught poetry, rhetoric, and theology at the Academy of Kiev. For the students he wrote the tragicomedy Vladimiro (for the purpose of “enlightenment” against superstition). In 1711 he became igumen and rector of the Academy. He was then summoned by Peter to Petersburg as a preacher and publicist (1716), appointed archbishop of Pskov (1718), and became Peter’s adviser and principal assistant in the “reform” of the Russian Church, that is, in subjecting it to the State. All the important acts of ecclesiastical legislation passed through the hands of P. He soon became the principal member of the Synod. In 1719–20 he composed, together with Peter, the “Ecclesiastical Regulation,” and in 1725 he transferred as titular to the archiepiscopal see of Novgorod. After the death of the Tsar (1725), to whom he was sincerely devoted, whose reforms he also praised in his sermons and in whose honor he wrote encomia, the situation changed for P.; but under Anna Ivanovna (1730–40) he again prevailed, though adapting himself and becoming, from an enlightened progressive, rather a conservative. As a theologian, P. is the father of Russian systematic theology; he separated dogmatic theology from moral theology. A friend of German Lutheran theologians, he introduced a Protestantizing doctrine into Russian theology, especially concerning Holy Scripture as the sole source of Revelation and justification by faith alone.
He wrote eight theological treatises in Latin, envisioning a complete course but leaving it unfinished. The treatises (except no. 8, written in 1716) were corrected, completed, and published by others. First complete edition: De processione Spiritus Sancti (Gotha 1772); Introductio in theologiam (Königsberg 1773); De Deo (there 1774); De Trinitate (there 1775); De creatione et providentia (there 1775); De homine innocente (Moscow 1776); De homine lapia (there 1776); De gratuita peccatoris per Christum iustificatione (Breslau 1779). The second complete edition, edited by S. Mislavskij, in 3 vols., was published in Leipzig in the years 1772–84 (vol. III was added by Mislavskij according to P.’s plan outlined in the prolegomena, and compiled by Protestant authors). In the division of dogmatic theology, P. depended on the Lutheran theologian I. E. Gerhard (Methodus studii theologici, Jena 1654). P. adopted the Protestant scholastics instead of the Catholic ones, against whom, especially St. Thomas and St. Robert Bellarmine, frequent insults are found in his works. P. had no successors in his theology until the second half of the eighteenth century.
He wrote other theological works, both in Latin and in Slavonic, among them: De iugo intolerabili (1712: on the controversy between Paul and Barnabas and the Judaizers); Apologia fidei (on 12 controversial questions); Apologia sacrarum reliquiarum (in contrast with P.’s usual views); First Instruction for Children (1720: in Slavonic, a catechism made obligatory by the Tsar in 1722, with a syllabary; it contains the Ten Commandments, the Pater, the Creed, and the Nine Beatitudes; it is Lutheranizing, for example, opposed to the cult of images); Booklet on Mixed Marriages (published in 1721 by order of the Tsar, for the religious freedom of the non-“Orthodox” party); Brief Christian Instruction (Slavonic; in dialogue form, for the young Tsar Peter II); Historical Disquisition on the Power of Christian Emperors (Petersburg 1721, Slavonic, defending the caesaropapism of the Ecclesiastical Regulation); The True Justification of Christians Rightly Baptized with Baptism by Infusion (1724; Slavonic); On the Mention of the Names of the Eastern Patriarchs in the Ecclesiastical Offices (no longer to be made in the independent Russian Church); Orations and Discourses (4 vols., Petersburg 1760–74); Examen Concilii
Florentini (lost; composed before 1714); Church History (also lost); On the Antichrist (unfinished: P. wished to prove, as certain Protestants had done earlier, that the Roman pontiff was the Antichrist).
Besides the course in dogmatic theology, his other principal work is the Ecclesiastical Regulation, of which the edition by C. Tondini (Paris 1874), inserted in Mansi, XXXVII, is notable (a French translation made from the Russian text, with an introduction and notes, together with the Latin translation printed in 1785 at Petersburg). The section dealing with instruction in schools, academies, and seminaries is important.