Feofan PROKOPOVYCH, “Architect of... Peter I’s Perestroika”

One of the most brilliant and significant personalities in the history of two countries, Ukraine and Russia, still remains in both of them somewhat in the shadow, at least for the broad strata of society and not just in the shadow but even in some disgrace. I have in mind Feofan Prokopovych, a native Kyivan, alumnus, then professor and rector of Kiev- Mohyla Academy, a founder of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg, scholar, writer, Moscow C hurch hierarch, an advisor to and a trusted lieutenant of Peter I, an erudite, a polyglot, and an orator.

This list of Prokopovych’s merits explains why this figure has never been venerated by Ukrainian patriots. Feofan Prokopovych is one of those so-called Little Russians who bound their destinies that of the Russian Empire, serving the latter in faith, truth, and with their talent. Energetic and ambitious people have always gravitated to the metropolis, to a broad field of activities, to popularity out of the bounds of their native province.

But why then Russia does not refer Prokopovych to the Pleiades of its best sons? An individual called “architect of Peter I’s perestroika?! ” One of the reasons is his origin: he was a foreigner, as ethnic Ukrainians were called then, an alien. What also enhanced mistrust towards hierarch Feofan was his erudition, which many thought provoked free thinking. Prokopovych was precisely like this. It is the Moscow Church that raised most claims against Feofan Prokopovych, a monk, an archpriest, and later an archbishop. For he was directly involved in Peter’s church reform taken negatively by most churchmen. Many clergymen considered Feofan almost a heretic and Uniate (not without reason, as we will see below). The attitude of the church toward the figure of Feofan Prokopovych has always cast a shadow on his memory, contributing to the image shaped by pre- Revolutionary Russian historians.

I am convinced, however, that Ukrainians should not repudiate their compatriot Prokopovych, his rich scholarly and literary heritage, and his uncommon personality molded in the atmosphere of the Kiev Mohyla Academy scholarly books. Let us recall the dramatic experience of the Jewish people: a large number of its great sons became cultural donors to other peoples and eminent figures of alien states. Many of them forgot their language and the customs of their ancestors. But, in spite of everything, the Jews are proud of such people as Einstein, Oistrakh, Feuchtwanger, Levitan, et al., and never forget they were Jewish. So let us throw away the prejudicial view of an individual who was the son of his, not our, time, and let us only keep in mind that he was our compatriot.

The man who would become Feofan Prokopovych was born somewhere between 1677 and 1681 (exact date is unknown) into the family of a Kyiv merchant named Tsereisky and was baptized as Yelyzar. Orphaned early, he was brought up by his maternal uncle Feofan Prokopovych (Prokopovych being the last name of Yelyzar’s mother), a rich merchant and also the elected rector of the Kiev- Mohyla Academy. When the nephew turned seven, the uncle sent him to the Kyiv Fraternity Monastery school. Three years later, Yelyzar was admitted to the academy, where the boy was soon in the focus of attention owing not only to his capabilities but also to his extraordinary thirst for knowledge. 1696 was a significant year in the life of this student: young Yelyzar went for graduate studies according to Mohyla Academy tradition to the West.

An interesting thing occurred at the beginning of this journey. Arriving at Volodymyr-Volynsky, Yelyzar converted from Orthodoxy to the Greek Catholic faith so as to be able to study in Catholic Rome and became a monk named Samiylo. Historians claim this was the usual thing done by all Kiev-Mohyla students who were going to study in Rome. This was possible thanks to a certain openness of the Kyiv Church which differed fundamentally from the Moscow one, where this kind of practice was absolutely inadmissible. It is also essential that this was done in order to meet a different world and broaden one’s horizons (Moscow hard core clergy demand even today that all ecumenical contacts with non-Orthodox Christians be cut).

Samiylo Tsereisky spent three years in Rome, at St. Athanasius College, studying, among other things, the philosophy of various epochs. The following entry in the college’s records is ample proof of his progress, “A philosophy student of great capabilities and highest achievements.” Brother Samiylo did not finish the course, though. Historians can only guess why “the Ruthenian monk ran away from the college with no apparent reason and amid great scandal.”

Leaving Rome, “the Ruthenian monk” walked home across the whole of Catholic and Protestant Europe. It took him a year to reach the Pochayivsky Monastery, where he regained Orthodoxy. In 1704 the former “Samiylo” took monastic vows in Kyiv, assuming the first and last names of Feofan Prokopovych, his uncle and educator. And as early as in 1705 he was a young professor at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy.

In his native Kyiv Prokopovych led an active public and scholarly life: he delivered lectures in several languages, wrote numerous essays, and showed himself as a true representative of the Ukrainian Enlightenment. In his publications, sermons, and lectures he came out against fanaticism, calls on people to rely on their reason, bitingly and even rabidly ridiculed superstition and ignorance, always preaching the indispensability of education for everyone irrespective of his social status.

Soon after, Feofan Prokopovych became quite a well-known personality. One of the things that prove this is that Tsar Peter I, when in Kyiv, noticed the young gifted professor and “brought him close to himself.” We must give Peter I his due: the great tsar could see, at first glance people distinguished by their erudition, audacity, and nonconformity. And in the confrontation between Peter I and the Ukrainian Cossacks led by Ivan Mazepa Feofan Prokopovych unconditionally took the Russian tsar’s side, condemning the rebels as robbers, wishful thinkers, and even traitors.

The tsar invited Prokopovych to move to Saint Petersburg and become “part of his team.” Yet, Feofan bided his time: he did not want to part with the academy, its library, its creative and free-thinking atmosphere, nor did he want to drop his scholastic pursuits. In 1712 he became rector of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, where he also taught many subjects from arithmetic to theology, with philosophy still remaining his favorite. He was an unsurpassed connoisseur of the philosophical doctrines of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, as well as Western European philosophers and scientists, especially Descartes, Spinoza, Galileo, and Kepler. Prokopovych thus endorsed a host of ideas not quite in line with the teaching of the church, for which he was accused of Protestantism, not without some reason.

In 1716, tired of waiting, Peter I categorically ordered Feofan to come to Saint Petersburg. This opened a new page in the life of the former Kiev-Mohyla Academy professor and rector: he became one of the tsar’s closest advisors on educational and church matters. But Prokopovych was not only an advisor; he personally drew up the innovations he proposed. Another function of his was to praise the tsar and theoretically justify his reforms. The eloquent Kyivan did this in his opuses, sermons, and “complimentary addresses,” thus developing the Russian version of the idea of “enlightened absolutism.” Of extraordinary success was his tragicomedy Vladimir, where the author portrayed the tsar under the name of Prince Volodymyr the Baptist and heaped scathing ridicule on those who rejected the reforms, depicting them as stupid and sinister pagan priests. Many nobles and clergymen recognized themselves in these characters, which, naturally, did not enlarge the number of the author’s friends, while the tsar would burst into Homeric laughter.

In Saint Petersburg, Prokopovych, archbishop of Novgorod and Velikiye Luki at the time, made friends with the educated elite, such people as Tatishchev, Kantemir, artist Matveyev, et al. He soon founded a philosophical and literary group, the so-called Learned Friends, which set forth a wealth of reform ideas. The former rector of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy actively promoted the establishment of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences and supported the organization of the departments of philosophy, mathematics, natural sciences, and research. Himself a philosophy devotee, Prokopovych still liked very much to conduct physical experiments with his own most advanced instruments, such as microscopes, a telescope, navigational aids, etc. Feofan Prokopovych wrote scholarly and philosophical works and the texts of his lectures in many languages: Old Church Slavonic, eighteenth century Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, German, English, French, Swedish, Latin, and Greek. Historian Tatishchev wrote later to his son about Prokopovych’s erudition, “Our Archbishop Prokopovych was so learned in the science of new philosophy and theology that nobody else could challenge him in Russia.” Historians also claim that Kyivan Feofan Prokopovych was the father of the Russian Enlightenment (after the belligerent poorly-educated Romans conquered the Greek cities, they brought crowds of slaves to Rome, among them many philosophers, writers, rhetoricians, architects, etc., which fact played a great role in developing Roman culture).

Feofan Prokopovych always in Kyiv and Saint Petersburg took care of talented young people, helping them by all means to get an education. One of his proteges was the young Lomonosov whom Prokopovych saved from being expelled from the Moscow Slavic Greek Latin Academy (founded, incidentally, in the mid-seventeenth century by foreigners from Kyiv). Lomonosov was to be expelled for having called himself a noble, which he was not. Prokopovych said on this occasion, “Don’t be afraid of anything. Even if the big Moscow church bell rings that you are an impostor, I’ll defend you.” And when some talented students were to be transferred from Moscow to the newly-established Academy in St. Petersburg, Prokopovych included Lomonosov in their group. He also recommended the young student continue his education in Kyiv and then go abroad.

Prokopovych opened, at his own expense, a school for poor and orphaned children in his Petersburg house, which produced several well-known Russian scholars and scientists. The most gifted pupils were sent by Prokopovych to the academy or abroad. A total 160 boys got an education there, studying rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, music, singing, painting, and crafts. Lessons went hand in hand with games and physical exercises. Feofan Prokopovych was also a pedagogue, with his Primer and First Reader for Youngsters being household textbooks for almost all the Slavic peoples plus the Georgians, Greeks, and Moldavians. It should be noted that a large number of Feofan Prokopovych’s works have reached us in the shape of his students’ (including those at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy) lecture synopses written in Latin (could many present-day students of the Kiev-Mohyla Academy cope with this task?). Prokopovych came into first conflict with church authorities back in Kyiv. That the conflict continued in Saint Petersburg is evidenced by, among other things, “The Feofan Prokopovych File” opened by the Secret Chancellery. He was accused of heresy, Protestantism, repudiation of dogmas, and contemptuous attitude toward Old Russian Orthodox piety. The file says, for example (according to an anonymous source), that Prokopovych would laughingly blaspheme the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra holy relics, saying, “Men dry-cured other men like them, worship them, and persuade other to do so. Isn’t this idolatry?”

Of especially sad consequences was Feofan Prokopovych’s participation in reforming the Russian Empire’s Orthodox Church organization. The Church Regulations he had drafted achieved the status of law in 1721, and it was on its basis that Peter I abolished the patriarchate and the institution of the patriarch. Thus the Russian Orthodox Church was fully subordinated to the secular state or, in fact, to the monarch, as it once was the case in the Byzantine Empire. Since then the Church was run by the Synod headed by a supreme procurer appointed by the tsar, while Feofan Prokopovych held the post of Synod vice president (significantly, national Orthodox churches of other countries officially recognized the Synod “as our beloved brother” according to the patriarch’s greeting formula). This was a terrible blow to the church hierarchy, also because church property, too, was subjected to secular authorities. The Petrine church system was abolished not by his successors (this was not done even by the recently canonized last Emperor Nicholas II) but by the 1917 Revolution. Secular historians think that the church reform of Peter and Feofan greatly contributed to the “liberation” of Russian science, scholarship, literature, and art from church influence.

The publications and reform ideas of Prokopovych have always been in the focus of polemics. His most rabid and influential antagonist was his Kiev-Mohyla Academy colleague, Metropolitan of Riazan and Murom, Stefan Yavorsky. All kinds of things – denunciations, libels, anonymous (“planted”) letters – were used to denigrate Prokopovych in the tsar’s eyes. Archbishop Feofan, it should be admitted, also endorsed the idea that the end justifies the means: he would defend himself with the same barbarian methods that his enemies applied. But he did it far more cleverly and, hence, far more effectively. Prokopovych mercilessly and cruelly persecuted opposition to Peter’s reform policies and rejection of the idea of absolute monarchy.

Prokopovych led an active public life on the Russian soil for nine years until Peter I died (it is known that Prokopovych delivered an emotional speech over the tsar’s coffin in Peter and Paul’s Cathedral, “What is this? Russians, what are we seeing, what are we doing? We are burying Peter the Great!”). After the death of his crowned protector, in the whirlwind of governmental changes, the enemies of Feofan raised their heads and became more active. He was even going to emigrate to Sweden. It was only his unusual composure, lucid mind, resourcefulness, and uncommon abilities at court intrigue that allowed him to keep his head on his shoulders. Feofan Prokopovych remained intact, although he no longer made any special impact on the Russian throne. Yet, he never returned to Kyiv.

Feofan Prokopovych died in 1736 in Novgorod, where he held the archiepiscopal chair. His last words were, “Oh, my head, my head, where will you, full of reason, lay to rest?”

In conclusion, let me recall a universally- known and even banal thing: a people unable to form a state of its own will always sacrifice its most talented children to a foreign Moloch. It is hard to say what here is the cause and the result: either a brain drain reduces the energy of state building or vice versa. In any case, the result is the same. Thus it makes no sense to condemn people like Bezborodko, Gogol, Riepin, Korolenko, and many thousands of others. It is better to do our best to keep current and future Prokopovyches from seeking a decent place for their activity in Moscow, New York, or somewhere in darkest Africa.