Understanding Church History in monographs and thematic collections in the Ukrainian SSR in the second half of the 1980s.

Abstract

The subject of the study is the main directions of intellectual search in the field of church history among Ukrainian scientists of the second half of the 1980s, which were reflected in monographs and thematic collections. The Ukrainian national intelligentsia of the era of "perestroika" forms images of the Church, which will be actively interpreted in different approaches of one or another part of society to the construction of church life in Ukraine as an independent state. With the help of historical-genetic and ideographic methods, the publications of Ukrainian scientists of this period concerning the issues of understanding the role and place of the Church in the past and present of the country are analyzed. The analysis undertaken allows us to identify the ideological foundations of various trends in modern Ukrainian historiography concerning church history. The conclusions about the formation of several directions for understanding the church past of the country are substantiated. The first direction should be characterized by the desire to remove church-historical issues from the periphery of scientific research into a full-fledged sphere of scientific research. A separate group includes works whose authors, when considering the issues of the history of the Orthodox Church, largely relied on Marxist methodology and used characteristic scientific tools. Finally, representatives of the third direction are characterized by a focus on the ideological side of historical search and personal experience, which often prevailed over an objective scientific approach.