The Handbook for the Clergy (1988) as a Theological Patchwork in the Late Soviet Context
The Handbook for the Clergy (1988) as a Theological Patchwork in the Late Soviet Context

Summary/Abstract: In the middle of the 1980s, the political situation in the USSR allowed the Orthodox Church to set in motion a project for the creation of a text answering the question of what exactly a modern priest should be like. Officially, the responsibility for the realization of this project lay with the Publishing Department of the Russian Orthodox Church, but in fact a young specialist whose work had not been previously featured in a single official Church publication was selected for the task. Over the course of several years, this person succeeded in putting together a text of more than 700 pages in length. The over 40 chapters of this book, entitled A Handbook for the Clergy. Volume VIII. Pastoral Theology provided answers to key questions which a priest in the late Soviet period might encounter. However, the text was not the original work of the author: the book combined in its pages several dozen different sources, beginning with classic textbooks on pastoral theology and ending with the Soviet works on the culture of laughter in Ancient Rus’. The text of Volume VIII represented a sort of patchwork quilt of theological thought; in the act of sewing together the individual segments of this quilt, its compiler left traces which permit not only the original textual components of the work to be reconstructed, but also the author’s own ideas, which he strove to include in the text.

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