On spanish influences on uniate and orthodox religious literature in Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth of 17th century: problem statement

Abstract

This article is an attempt at checking the hypothesis about the Spanish infl uence in religious literature of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealt of the 17th century. The examples dealt with are the Uniate instruction on the administration of the church sacraments (Russ. Наука о седми тайнах церковных) published in Vilnius in 1617/18 as part of Trebnik, and the fi rst printed Orthodox manual on moral theology Мир с Богом человеку (Kiev 1669). One of the sources for the fi rst text was the treatise Summa de Instructione Sacerdotum (also known as Summa casuum conscientiae) by the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Toledo (1534–1596); its basis was a course in moral theology at Collegium Romanum in Rome. The compilers of the Vilnius text made both literal translations of the Spanish text and paraphrases of separate fragments close to the Latin original. The also complemented the fragments taken from de Toledo with speculations on church rituals, quotations from patristic texts, statutes of ecumenical and local councils as well as from civil legal sources. Despite the fact that the Vilnius treatise emerged from Uniate circles, it came to be widely spread among the Orthodox, and it was by means of this text that certain fragments of de Toledo’s treatise found their way into Мир с Богом человеку. Taking this into account, it is clear that in the interpretation of the seven deadly sins and in the dissertation about alms the compilers made direct use of de Toledo’s treatise. Later, both texts came to be sources for the hand-written compilation on the sacraments by the Muscovite bookman Evfi my Chudovsky (Евфимий Чудовский), who thus contributed to the dissemination of de Toledo’s treatise in the Muscovite tradition as well.