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[German Version] (1757, Serpuchov, Russia – Dec 13, 1837, Spruce Island, Alaska). Herman entered the Trinity-St. Serge Hermitage near St. Petersburg at the age of 16 and transferred to Valaam Monastery in 1778. In 1793, the abbot sent him with seven other monks to Kodiak Island in the Gulf of Alaska to care for the Russian trappers and furriers there, but also in order to evangelize the native population. Apart from a few minor interruptions, the conduct of the Kodiak mission was effectively in hi…

[German Version] (Michael Triboles; c. 1470, Árta, Ípiros – Jan 21, 1556, Sergiyev Posad), major mediator of Greek theology to the church of Moscow, canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church at its millennial council on Jun 6, 1988. Born to an aristocratic family, Maksim grew up on Corfu; after studies at Italian universities, he entered the Dominican order in 1502 but in 1504 became a monk on Athos. In 1518, at the request of Grand Prince Vasily III, he was sent to Moscow to translate biblical and…

[German Version] (Fedor Kolyčev; 1507 – Dec 23, 1569, Tver’), metropolitan of Moscow. As boyar, Philip was involved in a conspiracy at the tsar’s court, but then escaped to Solovki monastery and became abbot there. In 1566 he was elevated to the position of metropolitan of Moscow, but soon fell out with Ivan IV Grozny because of the latter’s reign of terror. After he had publicly reproached Ivan in Uspensky cathedral and refused to bless him, Philip was deposed by a compliant church court, and on …

[German Version] Slavophiles are exponents of Russian intellectual and spiritual life; under the influence of Romanticism, since the early 19th century they have assigned the unique character of the Slavic people a critical role in deciding the future. They are opposed to the so-called “Westerners” who would unconditionally impose the heritage of the Western European Enlightenment. The question of Russia’s relationship to Europe was raised by P.Y. Chaadayev in his “Philosophical Letters,” which be…

[German Version] (Antonij; Mar 17, 1863, Vatagino – Aug 10, 1936, Belgrade) was a towering figure both as theologian (rector of the Spiritual Academies of Moscow [1890] and Kazan'; harsh critic of the Western theology of satisfaction) and as hierarch (1900 bishop of Ufa; 1902 bishop of Zhytomyr; 1914 archbishop of Kharkov; 1981 Metropolitan of Kiev). At the election of the Moscow Patriarch in 1917 he assembled the most votes, but fate decided otherwise. Forced to flee in the civil war, after 1920 he led the Russian Orthodox Church in exile. Peter Hauptmann Bibliography Manuil (Lemeshevsk…

[German Version] (Petro Mohyla; Petrus Mogilas; Petru Movilă; Dec 21/31, 1596, Suceava – Dec 22, 1646/ Jan 1, 1647, Kiev), metropolitan of Kiev (from 1633) and abbot of the Cave Monastery there (from 1627). He had become a monk there in 1625, after having had to abandon his attempts to regain rule over Moldavia, lost in 1607 by his father, Prince Simion Movilă. As the son of a Moldavian prince he had connections in Poland-Lithuania that favored his rise. With the confirmation by Vladislav IV of hi…

[German Version] (1st half of the 5th cent. – 502), king of Iberia (East Georgia). His byname, which means “wolf ’s head,” relates to the decoration on his helmet. After his accession c. 446, he pursued the goals of strengthening his royal authority, extending it throughout Georgia, and freeing Georgia from dependence on the Persian Sassanian Empire. He achieved these goals temporarily in 483. At the same time, he persuaded the patriarch of Antioch to consecrate his candidate Peter as catholicos a…

[German Version] ( Groznyj, better: the Harsh; Aug 25, 1530, Moscow – Mar 18, 1584, Moscow), was the first grand duke to be crowned tsar of all Russia in 1547. He laid the foundations of Russia's rise to a major power by pursuing a policy of territorial expansion in the east (conquest of Kazan in 1552 and of Astrakhan in 1554, beginning of the subjugation of Siberia in 1582), but also contributed to its ruin by engaging in unsuccessful wars (esp. for Livonia, 1558–1582) and implementing cruel measu…

[German Version] (Albert of Riga; 1165/1170, Bremen – Jan 17, 1229, Riga), of the ministerial line of Buxhöveden. A Bremen canon and scholaster, he was ordained the 3rd bishop of Livonia in 1199. In 1200 he was the first to sail with a crusader army to the Daugava estuary, where in 1201 he founded the city of Riga, in which he set t…

[German Version] I. The believers who, from 1653, were expelled from the Great Church because of their rejection of the liturgical reforms of the Moscow patriarch Nikon, gathered in their own communities in order to maintain the Old Russian forms of devotion laid down by the Moscow Hundred Chapter Synod of 1551. The authorities first called them “schismatics” (Raskol’niki), and later “Old Ritualists,” while for the people they were the Old Believers. They did not contest the necessity for correcti…

[German Version] (or Sohner; Dec 1572, Nuremberg – Sep 28, 1612, Altdorf, near Nuremberg), appointed district physician in Nuremberg in 1603 and professor of medicine at the Reichsstädische Akademie in Altdorf in 1605. In 1607/1608 he served as its rector. During an educational tour in 1598, he had been converted by Andreas Wojdowski and Christoph Ostorodt in Leiden to the theological views of their teacher F. Socinus; on his return to Altdorf, he promoted their ideas among his close friends. He w…

[German Version] I. Terminology – II. Catholic Catechisms – III. Orthodox Catechisms – IV. Protestant Catechisms – V. Catechetical Instruction I. Terminology Linguistically and semantically, the word catechism is derived from the Greek verb κατήχειν/ katḗchein, “to echo.” This etymology suggests a semantic connotation, according to which the transmission of the faith is fundamentally seen as a mediation of the content of the faith through personal testimony (cf. the Lat. personare, “to sound through”). Only when used in a transitive sense does κατήχειν acquire the meani…

[German Version] (Leont'ev; Jan 13, 1831, Kudinovo near Kaluga – Nov 12, 1891, Sergiev Posad), was initially a physician before entering the diplomatic service and finally becoming a censor. As a cultural philosopher, his worldview was shaped by aesthetic considerations. Beauty in the sense of diversity, power, and fullness was for him an objective fact. He thus became the advocate of Byzantine theocracy, ¶ aristocracy, and popular culture against democratic liberalism, petit-bourgeois attitudes, and egalitarianism. His return to the Orthodox faith following…

[German Version] I. City and Bishopric Tartu (Estonian; Ger. Dorpat, Russ. Yuryev) is the oldest city in Estonia (Baltic countries); with a population of 103,000 (2009), it is also the second largest. It was founded in 1224 by the Livonian Brothers of the Sword after their capture of an ancient fortress on the Emajogi, connecting Lake Võrtsjärv with Lake Peipus. Bishop Hermann, appointed as bishop for the Ests, established his residence in Tartu in 1224 and in 1228 began construction of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, in the 14th and 15th centuries the largest spec-¶ imen of sacred …

[German Version] (Warszawa), the capital of Poland, with a population of 1.71 million (2009), goes back to a trading settlement established in the 11th/12th century on the left bank of the Vistula; in 1413 it received Kulm rights. From 1406 to 1526, it was the official residence of the Piast dukes of Masovia. When the dynasty died out, Warsaw was incorporated into the crown of Poland. The Sejm met there for the first time in 1529; after 1569 it met there regularly, and as a result the royal court …

[German Version] (Aug 30, 1889, Vitebsk – Jul 25, 1946, Moscow), apologist and schismatic metropolitan. Originally a teacher and a military chaplain in World War I, in 1917 as archpriest of St. Petersburg and secretary of a leftist church organization he was already opposing the restoration of the Moscow patriarchate. When Patriarch Tikhon succumbed to house arrest, on May 18, 1923, Vvedensky and two ¶ other priests took over the patriarchal chancery, thus enabling the formation of the “supreme governing body” of the modernist “Living Church” movement. In rec…

[German Version] (pl. startsy) is the Russian equivalent to the Greek word γέρων/ gérōn; it denotes an experienced (and therefore usually elderly) ascetic, whose spiritual direction younger ascetics as well as Christians living in the world accept without question. The roots this phenomenon go back to Eastern monasticism in the Early Church. St. Anthony is the prototypical starets, but this form of spiritual direction did not fully come into its own until the late 18th century in Russia, when Paisius Velichkovsky left Athos for Moldavia with 60 discip…

[German Version] (1293, Moscow – Feb 12, 1378, Moscow), Metropolitan of Moscow, was a monk in the Epiphany monastery in Moscow at the age of 20 and was already involved in the administration of the Russian Metropolitanate at the age of 26. His appointment as “Metropolitan of Kiev and all Russia” was by his Greek predecessor, Feognost, in 1353 in Constantinople…

[German Version] (Polish: Warmia), as one of the four bishoprics established by the Orders of Germany in 1243 in Prussia and incorporated into the archdiocese of Riga in 1245/1246, initially encompassed the region between the River Elbing and Passarge and between Pregel and Angerapp. But only the region in which the bishop was also the ruler, comprising a third of the diocese, wa…

[German Version] (Grzegorz Paweł; c. 1526, Brzeziny – c. 1591, Raków), Polish theologian. After studies at Cracow, Königsberg (Kaliningrad), and Wittenberg, he turned from Lutheranism to Calvinism and finally became a radical Antitrinitarian. In 1551 he became a Reformed pastor in his place of birth; in 1556 he became one the seniors of the Reformed congregations of Lesser Poland and in 1558 a pastor in Krakow. In 1562 he began publishing attacks on the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. At the Diet of Piotrków in 1565, he broke with the Reformed ecclesia maior, thus becoming one of …