Ideas and Ideals

The article describes the urgency of creating a scientific anthology dedicated to the Russian Old Believers. Russian Old Believers can be called one of the most important spiritual, social, economic and cultural phenomena in the history of Russia. Attention to the Old Believers intellectual heritage is relevant for clarifying the course of Russia's development in the world community of civilizations. Over the centuries of coexistence with the Russian Empire, the Old Believers developed their own counteractions to the Western path. Nowadays the Old Believers are an arsenal of spiritual, intellectual and cultural methods of resistance to Westernization, information capitalism and one-dimensional globalization The Old Believers developed mental mechanisms for sustainable development in the context of multipolar globalization, for the construction of a social state based on sovereign democracy. The anthology should include both basic Old Believer texts, as well as significant research and philosophical works about the Old Believers. A selection of Old Believer texts should illustrate the various trends of Old Believer thought in different epochs, to see the Old Believers as ideology, as a world view, as a mentality, as a way of life. The collection of texts on the Old Believership should give an objective picture of the place of the Ancient Orthodoxy in the history and present time of Russia. Editorial work should be based on a special methodology, so as not to perceive the Old Believers in an ethnographic or historical-museum format. Old Believers should be presented to the reader in the light of their current opportunities for building a new great culture.

A prominent Melkite writer Theodore Abu Qurrah, Bishop of Harran (c. 750 – c. 830) was the first Orthodox Christian author who used Arabic for his treatises. He was generally reputed both as a theologian, and a scholar well versed in philosophy. Nevertheless, the philosophical premises of his Trinitarian doctrine and Christology still remain unexplored. The article discusses two kinds of philosophical premises of Theodore’s theology: logical and ontological. Theodore divides all scientific terms and academic concepts into two groups: 1) philosophical and 2) logical names. Names of the general type such as “living being”, “human”, “horse”, and particular nonlogical ones (proper names as Paul, Jacob, John) are defined as philosophical, while such terms as “kind”, “type”, “nature”, “hypostasis”, etc. are specified as logical. According to Theodore, the crucial difference between these two types resides in the following: for philosophical type of names, the properties and definitions of more general names (concepts) are inherited by particular names; which is not true for logical names. In terms of logic, Abu Qurrah believes that the category of quantity is applicable only to logical names. Striving for the utmost accuracy of statements, he defended the theory of reference, which occurs only in one of the authors who preceded Theodore, St. Gregory of Nyssa. In terms of ontology, Theodore proceeds from the belief that the general is completely, without division and multiplication, presented in a particular (individual). Here, bringing out the conceptual differences between the hypostasis and the nature, he, meanwhile, denies that accidental attributes are origins of the hypostasis. Furthermore, the existence of particular substances (natures) seems to Theodore both logically and ontologically impossible. The ontology of the hypostasis, the fundamental principle of Theodore Abu Qurrah’s theology, seems similar to Byzantine diphysite tradition of 4^th – 8^th centuries (St. Leontius of Byzantium, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. John of Damascus).