France (near Massalia, ie Marseilles) and also genetically related to worship.
Finally, in the messages of the elder Artemiy during his emigration to Volhynia (“Message to the Prince”), directed against the “eager” and anti-Trinitarians, the teachings of the Bogomils are clearly evident. Thus, according to Artemis, some heretics from his former environment recognize opposite two principles, considering the visible world a creation of the evil one.
It is no coincidence, given what has been said, that we find many parallels with Bogomilism in the ideas voiced by the “eager” in Novgorod and Moscow, as well as by the heretics Matthew Bashkin and Theodosius Kosoy. For their students is characterized by deviationin cosmogonic and natural issues, its ethical and philosophical interpretation, the use of anti-church argumentation and the very spirit of radical social doctrine.
In its most detailed form, the ideological system of the “eager” has come down to us in the views of Russian freethinkers. They criticized the institution of the church as servants of the antichrist (the state), denied the worship of the cross and icons, considering them idols that turn man away from the living God and true faith. Criticism of the veneration of icons was followed by the debunking of the idea of the God-manhood of Jesus Christ.
Being monotheists, heretics argued that God is one and the Trinity is the result of human invention. That is why the objects of worship that testified to Christian polytheism were denied. However, the teachings of Christ, especially his ethical commandments, which were seen as a direct continuation of the Mosaic Decathlon, were not rejected (actively using it in criticizing the moral decay of the clergy) and even followed the Eucharist, which was understood symbolically …
Thus, the teachings of the “eager” are, first of all, a significant deviation from the Orthodox Church norm. However, it was not completely anti-Christian. Thus, despite the special veneration of the Old Testament, heretics considered the New Testament necessary in the practical life of a person, tried to reconcile the precepts narrative essay topics of the first and second. Denying the divine inspiration of the writings of the church fathers, at the same time appealed to John Chrysostom, Basil the Great and some other Christian authorities.
This “gives the full right to regard the heresy of the ‘eager’ as one of the Christian faults, which had much in common with phenomena of this kind … both in the East and in the West, .. bearing the germs of future mental and religious-moral progress. “
Thus, the religious views of the “eager” absorbed the Bogomil ideological heritage, were genetically related to Christian rationalism, were influenced by Arab-Jewish translated literature. The idea of denying the God-manhood of Christ is based on the early Christian heretical model Arias. The “waited ones” did not see in Christ oneness equal in nature to God, but taught that Christ is the Son of God by grace as Moses, David and other prophets.
Therefore, they did not reject the Divine mission of Christ. To them, he was an earthly being who, through benevolence, rose to the point where God himself inhabited her. Christ, thus like God the Father, is His best creation. What Christ has accomplished, ordinary people can do. A mortal person, leading a righteous life, is able to deserve to be adopted by God and to become like Christ. Here, as we see, the humanistic idea of human self-worth, its natural dignity is actualized again.
The denials of the divine nature of Christ were directly associated with the ascending soteriological categories (immortality, resurrection), which required not only theological but also ethical understanding – through the notion of the meaning of life, the purpose of man, his search for moral self-improvement as a component of salvation. The latter in the teachings of the “eager” was superimposed on a rationalist basis, intersected with the idea of recognizability of the real world, the ability of a person to liken the feat and virtues of Christ.
This gradually affirmed the principle of free will, the understanding of man not as a passive link in the chain of superpersonal (church – God) community, but as an accomplice in the creation of the world and himself. Such a conclusion, in fact, saw in the teachings of the “eager” Orthodox polemicist of the fifteenth century. Archbishop Gennady, who led him out of Massilianism – a heretical current common in the V-VI centuries. in the south of France (near Massalia, ie Marseilles) and also genetically related to worship. Her followers shared the views of Pelagius *, who believed that salvation could be achieved through one’s own ethical choice, one’s will, and only then by divine grace.
The most developed form, which reflects the basic philosophical, ethical and social ideas of the Reformation movements of the Judaic type, is the teachings of Theodosius Kosy. Many freethinkers in Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine became his supporters, and therefore this doctrine, in fact, was a separate heretical-rationalist branch, which in historiography was called Feodosianism.
Biography and the early period of Kosy’s life in Russia, when his views were mostly formed, are known only in general terms. He came from slaves. He escaped from the Moscow boyar, was tonsured a monk in a monastery, where the abbot was a supporter of religious free thought, a learned theologian, Elder Artemis.
As a result of his heretical sermons, Kosy was arrested along with other freethinkers, but he fled, as Andriy of Hungary noted, “to the depths of Lithuania, where the voice of the Gospel sounded freer.” In 1556-1557 he was in Vilna with a group of like-minded people, then moved to Belarus (there is information about the stay of Koso, Artemis, Thomas and Vassian in Vitebsk). In the 70’s Kosoy “comrades” found refuge in Volhynia in the estates of nobles Kadian Chaplych, Fyodor Bokey and Vasyl Drevinsky. The year of Kosoy’s death is unknown, but according to the testimony of the zealous Orthodox Prince Andriy Kurbsky, in 1575 the freethinker was still alive.
The teachings of Theodosius Kosy are a logical conclusion of the previous heretical tradition in Eastern Europe of the 16th century, a qualitatively new stage in the development of religious rationalism, its transformation into a socio-philosophical system. And although Kosoy did not leave any of his own works (asserting the illegality of any writings after the Seventh Council and despising the practice of church traditions), Orthodox polemical literature is quite comprehensively introduced with the main principles of Feodosianism.
The most famous works directed directly against Theodosius Koso are considered to be Zinovy Otensky’s “Truths of the Testimony” (1566); “Word on the discovery of the relics of Nikita” (1565; attributed to Otensky, which, in turn, refutes L. Morozov); “The message is wordy” (60s of the XVI century; the question of authorship remains open); one of the messages of the elder Artemiy of the Volyn period – “Brother who stumbled and knew his wife” (c. 1560; according to S. Vilinsky, there were more letters of the elder to Kosy); letters and letters of Andriy Kurbsky (first of all, letters to the Pskov-Pechersk elder Vassian Muromtsev, 1564; letters to Kadian Chaplych of 1575-1576); a collection of 1569 from Korets in Volhynia (in particular, an excerpt from “The Word of the Nativity”). This group of sources should include Orthodox works directed not only against Theodosius Kosy, but also those that reproduce common to the heretical-rationalist currents of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. views, including Feodosianism.
These are Iosif Volotsky’s Enlightener, most of Artemiy’s epistles written in the Ukrainian-Belarusian lands (to Simon Budny, Ivan Zaretsky, Evstafiy Volovych, Prince Kurbsky, etc., dated to the 60s and 70s of the 16th century); anti-heretical work “Against the story of today’s ungodly heretics” (early second half of the sixteenth century.) and “Writing against the Lutherans” from a polemical collection made in the Supral Monastery (1578-1580).
The second group of sources are actually free-thinking works that came from the heretical-rationalist circle, although they are much smaller. These monuments reproduce ideas close to the teachings of the “eager” and Theodosius Kosy.
These are “The Laodicean Epistle” by Fyodor Kuritsyn, manuscript translations of Ivan the Black, “The Ladder of John the Ladder” and “The Hellenic Chronicler”; anonymous “Writing a letter”; “Letter of Polovtsian Ivan Smery to Prince Volodymyr the Great” (Galicia, 1960s), as well as a manuscript collection of sermons of Ukrainian-Belarusian origin recently introduced into scientific circulation by M. Dmitriev (dated 60s of the 16th century) from the collection of Yu. Yavorsky.
Among the mentioned sources, the teachings of Theodosius Kosy are most fully revealed by Zinoviy Otensky. He describes his conversation with the supporters of Kosy – two Kryloshan Gerasim and Athanasius and the layman Fedor, while proposing his ideological system of refutation of Theodosianism.
From the pages of his work “Truth Testimony” it becomes clear that Kosoy did not recognize the Trinity; He did not consider Jesus Christ to be heavenly, but only created: “The epistle of Paul the Apostle shows that there is one God and one intercessor for God and man – the man Jesus Christ.” Therefore, he denied the divine nature of Christ: “God to one being, not many. Christ is not a god, but a man and intercessor before God” is his main function.
The fact that God is one, Kosa taught his disciples, is already proved in the teaching of Moses. (According to Otensky, Theodosius read his sermon of monotheism from the Old Testament; the Orthodox author specifically focuses on works that the Theodosians considered true – the Book of Genesis, Solomon, the Book of Great and Small Prophets, the New Testament – the Gospels , the Acts of the Holy Apostles).
The fact that Jesus Christ was an ordinary man is evidenced by heretics, his biography, which contains a lot of fiction, one that does not lend itself to logic. Kosogo, for example, was astonished that God was incarnated “in the womb of a woman, and how it will be worthy for God to lie in such a place and pass through such a passage.” Freethinkers insisted on the absence in Christ of the qualities possessed by God, the inconsistency of the version of sacrifice and redemption with the concept of divine omnipotence.
Christ’s death for Kosy is another testimony of his human nature, for Christ, in spite of the biblical statement of the Incarnation, lived according to the ordinary laws of the human race, overcoming neither suffering nor death. “How is the image of a god in mankind, a man living equally, and abiding as from the beginning, also at the coming of Christ also a man abiding and living, being born and dying? Fir-trees by nature are healthy, people fall into illnesses and rot differently.
