Hyacinth Karpinsky’s translation of the “Tractatus de Processione Spiritus Sancti” by Adam Zernikaw

Abstract

The anti-catholic Tractatus de Processione Spiritus Sancti by Adam Zernikaw was created in the late 17th century in Latin and was significant for interconfessional polemic between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church in the Russian Empire over the next centuries. In this paper we systematize information about the history of the tractate in Russia, including its significance for the Tractatus de Processione Spiritus Sancti by Theophan Prokopovich. Russian translations of Adam Zernikaw’s Tractatus are also considered. The earliest Russian translation was done in Kiev in the late 18th century by Hieronym Koptsevich into late Church Slavonic. In 1795, the Ober-Procurator Aleksei Musin-Pushkin commissioned Hyacinth Karpinsky to do another translation, this time into Russian, but the translator had died before the translation was finished. After that, the Synod ordered the members of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Censorship committee to finish it, but it became impossible due to Adam Zernikaw’s original Latin text getting mixed up with the Theophan Prokopovich’s work by the same name. Eventually, the first Russian publication of Tractatus de Processione Spiritus Sancti by Adam Zernikaw happened in 1902.

Using different manuscripts of Hyacinth Karpinsky’s Russian translation, we analyze the language edits made by the translator and make suggestions on specifics of the development of a style of Russian-language religious literature in late 18th  – early 19th  centuries.