“ELIAS GEVERI OF DAMASCUS” IN RUSSIAN STUDIES OF CHURCH HISTORY: A WITNESS TO THE TWO-FINGER SIGN OF THE CROSS IN A MEDIEVAL TREATISE ON DENOMINATIONS OF SYRIAN CHRISTIANITY

Abstract

The cultural heritage of Middle-Eastern Christianity was so influential in the rest of the Christian world that it frequently att racted the attention of scholars studying particular church traditions. It is not surprising, therefore, that Middle-Eastern Christian practices became an intriguing subject for historians of the origins of the Russian “Old Believers,” a movement which itself frequently referred to some MiddleEastern Christian practices as proofs of the truthfulness of its own tradition. One such episode invoking early Middle-Eastern evidence for making the sign of the cross deserves a special inquiry. In 1847, in the Colloquia of the Imperial Society for Russian History and Antiquities at the University of Moscow, Philaret Gumilevskiy (1805– 1866), who was then the bishop of Riga, published his study The Worship of the Russian Church in the Pre-Mongolian Period.1 Concerning the various ways of making the sign of the cross, bishop Philaret cited a Middle-Eastern Christian author who had touched on the subject in his treatise: “The Nestorian author Elias of Damascus who lived in the late ninth century, intending to reconcile the Syrian Monophysites with the Orthodox and the Nestorians, wrote as follows: ‘As to the fact that they do not agree with each other in making the sign of the cross, this is not an obstacle at all. Some of them, for instance, make the sign of the cross with one finger and move the hand from the left side of the body to the right. Others do it with two fingers, and do so from the right side to the