ABSTRACT
The influence of European culture as well as disputes between the Catholic and Protestant faiths were very important for the culture of late Medieval Russia. There were also fundamental changes in the tradition of preaching, which could show us the changes in social and sacred contexts of that time. The European concept of the New World existed for Russians; they represented the messianic idea of the “Russian New World” in the utopian project of colonization and orthodox Christianization of all the earth.
The most important person who was in touch with the religious changes and transformed them into theological debate was Stefan Yavorsky. He took a very favorable view of the Inquisition and the Pope. As a Catholic (Uniate), he studied at famous scholastic Catholic schools but later returned to Russian Orthodoxy in 1689. He followed the “Catholic” line by vigorously opposing Lutheran influences in the Russian Church. In his sermons, Yavorsky spoke in allegories about Peter I’s military victories and in vague terms about royal permissiveness and the depressing position of the Church in the Russian Empire. In the end, Yavorsky was forbidden to preach, but some of his books were published after the death of the Emperor and his own. In 1728, his famous anti-Protestant treatise Stone of Faith was published and ignited fierce debate. Russian Protestants, including people who were close to the Imperial Court, became dissatisfied with Yavorsky’s works. A subsequent anonymous pamphlet directed against the Stone of Faith, entitled Hammer on the Rock of Faith, appeared in 1731 and was probably written by friends of the next head of the synod, Theophan Prokopovich.
This paper explores the possibility that the iconographic program of the Peter and Paul Cathedral pulpit, which was decorated with strange images in the time of debates between the two worlds of the Catholic and Protestant parties in the Russian Church, was an encrypted and visualized dispute between Yavorsky and Prokopovich. Indeed, the pulpit of the Peter and Paul Cathedral displays the image of a divine hand with a hammer beating on the stone, which can refer to the pamphlet against Yavorsky’s Hammer on the Rock of Faith as well as to Jeremiah 23:29. At stake, of course, is the definition of the faith meant to colonize and Christianize the entire world.
