Византийские источники древнерусского богословия иконы — четьи тексты Торжества Православия
Byzantine sources of Old Russian theology of the icon - the abstract texts of the Triumph of Orthodoxy

Summary/Abstract: Medieval Russian theology of icons has been in the center of research for a long time, but curiously there were hardly any attempts made to investigate the sources of this particular literature: which texts of Byzantine apologists of icons were translated into Church Slavonic. In 1994 Čertorickaja published a catalogue of Church Slavonic homilies for liturgical feasts of movable church calendar in which there are 7 unidentified texts about the icons. After examining these texts the paper is in search of the sources of medieval Russian theological texts. One of the important results of this investigation was that the most famous writings of Byzantine apologists (e.g. De imaginibus of St. John Damascene and works of St. Theodore Studites) were not transleted into Slavonic and probably not even known in Medieval Rus. Instead, there were translations of less-known Byzantine anti-iconoclastic texts inserted in these liturgical collections such as the De sacris imaginibus contra Constantinum Caballinum of Pseudo-John Damascene and Epistulae ad Leonem Isaurum of Pope Gregory II. However, there were two other more interesting texts found, the Homilia de cruce et imaginibus contra haereticos of Patriarch Germanus of Constantinople and the so-called Mnogosložny Svitok – a “versio permixta” of the Epistula synodica ad Theophilum and the Epistula ad Theophilum – for which the Greek original cannot be found any more. So these Church Slavonic texts will bring an important contribution for Byzantine studies and textual critic as well.

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