Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2022 number

The article deals with the scientific problem of understanding by the Old Believers in the XVIII century the need to justify their right for resolving issues of dogmatic theology. The first generation of the Old Belief defenders formulated the idea that after starting the church reform in Russia the humanity found itself on the verge of a catastrophe, which was assumed by Christian eschatological teaching. The country was declared to be the last frontier that defended the world from the final conquest by the Antichrist. The Vyg coomunity took advantage of this historical scheme stating that the Antichrist reigned in Russia and only the community existence retained hope to continue the mankind history. Realizing themselves as keepers of the Russian Church traditions, the Vyg community understood that the absence of priests naturally led to the inevitable transformations of the religious life. The article shows that they focused gradually on describing, or rather, forming their own traditions. Under such situation, the Vyg community was forced both to formalize its own traditions and discuss complex theological issues to justify new rules for the community’s religious life. The religious leaders wrote works devoted to solving the problems of dogmatic theology. Certainly, it was not on creating a doctrine system, but only on trying to resolve some theological issues. The analysis of “The Dogmatic Book” content compiled in the Vyg Old Believers community, led to the conclusion that this collection made an attempt to present the Old Believers’ individual works as a part of Orthodox dogmatic theology. This book’s author (Khludov`s collection, State Historical Museum, no. 272) managed to sum up the Vyg community’s views on dogmatic theology characterizing the Old Belief features.