Zhurova Ludmila I.,
Doctor of Philology, Institute of History of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
The Tale of Fortune, the “Wheel of Luck”, in the Russian Publicistic Writing of the 16th Century (Starets Filofey, Maximus the Greek, Metropolitan Daniil)
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2020-2-1
The author analyzes the writings of ecclesiastical writers, who disproved the concepts of mantic astrology and propagated the Christian idea of Divine Providence as a righteous action aimed at the good of humans and at prevention of the evil and of the “absolute human rule”. In Moscow Rus, stargazing (astrology) was actively spread in the first decades of the 17th century by Nikolay Bulev. His writings contained a description of the wheel of fortune, the manifestation of the lucky fate, in the version of the German mediaeval tradition. It became a colorful reminiscence in the works of Maximus the Greek, and its variants became the subject of this study. In the early treatises against astrology, whichwere written in 1523 and included the epistle of the elder (“starets”) Filofey from the Pskov Eleazer Monastery to the grand-ducal scribe Misyur Munekhin and two epistles of the learned monk from Mount Athos to the Moscow diplomat Fyodor Ivanovich Karpov, who had interest in astrological knowledge, both authors, independently from each other, condemned the teaching of the Chaldeans and Hellenes, pagans who generated impious lies, the bitter chaff of which became mixed with the “wheat of the Orthodox Creed”. It is noteworthy that both writers named the fate using the word of the Greek origin ‘imarmenia’ (έίμαρμένη), and that marked the first statements of the Russian ecclesiastical authors about fortune. The four chapters of the author’s codes of Maximus the Greek written in the late 1540s – early 1550s are devoted to refutation of astrology. This study considers development of the intention of Maximus, describing the movement from the Latin concept of ‘fortuna’ to the Russian ‘wheel of luck’ and determining its functions in the authors’ messages and treatises. It seems to be important and promising to investigate three unpublished texts from the unique lifetime collection of works from the Russian State Library, fond 256, No. 264, related to interpretation of the song of Prophetess Anna (the First Book of the Kings, 2: 1–11), which served as the leitmotif of the anti-astrological series of writings of the learned Greek. There is no subject of the ‘wheel of fortune’ in the manuscripts of Metropolitan Daniel, but we can see a reference to that in the hierarch’s encyclical.
Publishing: 29/04/2020
How to cite: Zhurova L.I. The Tale of Fortune, the “Wheel of Luck”, in the Russian Publicistic Writing of the 16th Century (Starets Filofey, Maximus the Greek, Metropolitan Daniil) // Historical Courier, 2020, No. 2 (10), pp. 7–20. [Available online:] http://istkurier.ru/data/2020/ISTKURIER-2020-2-01.pdf
Links: Issue 2 2020
Keywords: mantic astrology; fortune; ‘the wheel of fortune’; message; treatise; starets Filofey; Maximus the Greek; Metropolitan Daniel