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[German Version] (Mar 6, 1874, Kiev – Mar 23, 1948, Clamart). The philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev was a prominent representative of the Russian religious and cultural renaissance in the early 20th century. He sought to achieve a synthesis of the Western European and Russian intellectual traditions on the basis of existential personalism. Born to an aristocratic …

[German Version] (c. 1440–1503) was, after A. Rublyov, the most important representative of the Moscow school of icon painting (Icons). In the 1460s and 1470s, he worked in the monastery of St. Pafnuty of Borovsk, then on the iconostasis and the decoration of the altar area of the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Kremlin in Moscow. After the end of the 14…

[German Version] (Aug 14, 1865, St. Petersburg – Dec 9, 1941, Paris), scholar of Romance languages, poet, art critic, and religious thinker. He attained Europe-wide renown with his trilogy Christos i Antichrist (1895–1904; ET: Christ and Antichrist, 1901) and his study Tolstoj i Dostoevskij ¶ (1900; ET: Tolstoi as a Man and Artist, with an Essay on Dostoievski, 1970), which were written on the basis of the religious philosophy notion of the “Third Testament” and led to the inception of the “new religious consciousness.” Large-scale projects for the re…

[German Version] (1313/1314 or 1321/1322 near Rostov on Don – Oct 25, 1392, in what is today Sergiev Posad near Moscow), one of the most revered saints of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was born to a boyar family and given the name Varfolomey at baptism. After Rostov was annexed to the principality of Moscow, he and his parents moved to Radonezh. Subsequently he founded a monastery 14 km away, today’s Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra. Initially he lived as a hermit, around whom a circle of disciples gra…

[German Version] (Aug 2, 1901, St. Petersburg – Sep 16, 1970, Paris), a prominent exponent of emigrant Russian theological thinking. After training in the cadet corps, he entered the Kiev Spiritual Academy in 1918, emigrated in 1920, and lived in Paris from 1923 on. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and theology at the Institut St. Serge, becoming a professor there in 1953. A…

[German Version] (Oct 8, 1823, Nadezhdino – Feb 8, 1886, Moscow), major representative of the “second wave” of Slavophilism. Besides his work as a writer, Aksakov was the editor of several leading Slavophile periodicals and newspapers. He turned against sociological nominalism and viewed the people as an integral organism. As the people's self-awareness increases, society (intelligence) arises; its most important feature is intellectual creativity, esp. in literature. Vladimir Ivanov Bibliography A.G. Dementyev & E.S. Kalmanovskii, “Vstutipel'naya …

[German Version] (18th to early 19th cent., St. Petersburg), one of the most revered Russian saints of the synodal period. Precise biographical data are lacking, including the dates of her birth and death. ¶ Her fame rests almost exclusively on demonstration of her effective intercession after her death. She lived in St. Petersburg and was married to an imperial chorister. Widowed at the age of 26, she lived the remaining 45 years of her life as a “fool for Christ” (Folly, Holy). After giving away all her possessions, she lived …

[German Version] 1. Sergey Nikolayevich (Aug 4, 1862, Ochtyrka – Oct 12, 1905, St. Petersburg), philosopher, professor, and rector of the University of Moscow (1905). Under the influence of the Slavophiles and V. Solovyov, he worked out a system of “concrete idealism.” The way he addressed the problem already reflected the efforts of Russian philosophy of religion at the start of the 20th century to overcome ways of thinking that were only abstract and intellectual. In his Osnovaniya idealizma (1896, “Foundations of Idealism”), Trubetskoy built his system not on abstract …

[German Version] A ciborium (Gk κιβώριον/ kibṓrion) is a type of canopy over the altar. It is made of solid material and usually rests on four pillars (see Liturgical vessels, fig. 6). Similar structures already existed in pre-Christian cultures and were especially erected over thrones and tombs to underline their sacral significance. Essential for the understanding of the ciborium's symbolism is its hemispherical form, which can resemble a pyramid or tent when viewed from the ou…

[German Version] I. City and Eparchy, Patriarchate – II. Spiritual Academy I. City and Eparchy, Patriarchate The earliest textual reference to Moscow dates from the year 1147. It was an independent principality from the second half of the 13th century onward and became the focus of Russian territorial concentration in the first half of the 14th century under the conditions of the Tatar rule (Russia). The transfer of the Russian metropolitan's seat to Moscow increased the city's importance. This process began …

[German Version] (Gk εἰκονοστάσις/ eikonostásis) refers to a barrier that separates the altar (III, 1.c) from the central section of the sanctuary. The development of Orthodox worship (II, 7) and its interpretation exerted essential influence on its structure and iconographic program. The early phase in the development of the iconostasis remains hypothetical in many respects. The ¶ period beginning in the 9th century with the victory of icon renerators (Veneration of images: VI) is marked by the appearance of sacred and liturgical forms that were inte…

[German Version] I. Catholicism – II. Orthodox Church I. Catholicism The practice of NT congregations attested in Jas 5:14f., that the elders of the congregation called upon the sick in their homes in order to pray over them and anoint them with oil (Anointing) so that the prayer could unfold its power to heal the body, to lift up the soul, and, if need be, to forgive sin (Sickness and healing: …

[German Version] I. Concept and Origins – II. Catholic Church – III. Orthodox Churches – IV. Protestant Church I. Concept and Origins Church dedication is the ceremony which commits a church building to its liturgical use ( dedicatio). It is first attested in Tyre (Eus. Hist. eccl. X 3f.); the translation of the relics of martyrs for the first celebration of the eucharist appears as early as the 4th century (Ambr. Epist. 22). Since the early Middle Ages, the dedication of the altar underwent a rich develop…

[German Version] I. Dogmatics – II. Ethics – III. Practical Theology I. Dogmatics 1. The Catholic Understanding The term “ecumene,” from the present passive participle of the Greek verb οἰκεῖν/ oikeín, “to dwell,” originally denoted the inhabited earth. The use of the term in Scripture is ambiguous: the OT (apolitically) in the sense of “world,” the NT, in addition to that, of the “earth” as the …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Church History – III. Dogmatics – IV. Practical Theology – V. Missiology I. Religious Studies Confession and absolution, expressive of the substantiality of guilt (I) and the impact of the spoken word with its magico-ritual power, are among the “most widespread means of structured confrontation of the ego with itself” (Hahn & Knapp, 7). They appear already in tribal societies (Kikuyu, Nuer, Acholi in East Africa) as part of purificati…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies In comparative religious studies, veneration of saints generally refers to the posthumous cultic veneration of a holy person more or less identifiable as a historical individual; it is centered at the place that preserves the saint’s mortal remains, thought to have miraculous powers. Occasionally veneration of living individuals is subsumed under the same category, but this extension results in a dubious diminution of terminological precision, since to this day no one …

[German Version] I. Religious Studies Examination of repentance from the perspective of religious studies must confront the problem that the term itself has no culturally neutral meaning. Many of the phenomena in other religions that Christians tend to call repentance appear in a different light when viewed in the context of different anthropological presuppositions, ¶ so that due weight must be given to the religious anthropology in question. Generally speaking, it is true to say that in almost all non-Christian religions the notion of repentance c…