Providence and Power: The Political Thought of Feofan Prokopovich

Abstract

This paper analyses the political thought of Feofan Prokopovich in the context of emergence of Russian monarchism. The author studies the whole complex of Feofan’s writings, with an emphasis upon the most famous one of them, i.e. Pravda Voli Monarshei . The author strives to demonstrate that political philosophy of Pravda Voli Monarshei did not contain an unsolvable contradiction between the proclaimed absolute obedience of the subjects and the recognition of God as a source of any political power as Feofan never excluded Divine Providence from the list of actual political factors. Feofan’s later writings show the importance of Augustinian providentialism for the whole system of Feofan’s political ideas. This point is illustrated by means of comparison with J. Bossuet, the leading French preacher of the second half of the seventeenth century, who was writing under the strong influence of St. Augustine. Feofan’s providentialism, which postulates God as a source of any power, cannot be reduced (as L. Erren did) to the simple notion of covering up some sort of system of political election. However, Feofan was rather reluctant to deploy the providential arguments in the years of Peter’s reign and became much more willing to do so under Peter’s successors. The author concludes that the intellectual tools of political theology included not only providentialism but also the cult of a Godly monarch, which to a certain degree contradicted the providential understanding of politics. The author considers the complicated interaction of these intellectual tools to be equally important to the interaction of providentialism and the theory of social contract which was presented in Pravda Voli Monarshei .