The Verses about Sofei in the Stishnoi Prolog from the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome

Abstract

This article is a publication, with commentary, of the text about Divine Wisdom from the Stishnoi Prolog, a Synaxarium with verses. It was conserved in the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome (Slavo 5), now in the Vatican Library; the manuscript dates from the beginning of the 16th century, and it originates from Novgorod or Pskov. This codex is well known among Slavists, who have expressed various contradictory judgments about its content. A series of texts—verses and lives of saints—have no analogues in other manuscripts. The source also contains some strange errors, even absurdities. On fol. 185 prayer verses are entered without a title; in other words, they have no relation to any specific event of the Church calendar. The prayer consists mainly of quotations. The first part, which is the beginning of the Great Doxology, does not glorify the Trinity but rather it glorifies Sophia, using the Novgorod masculine form Sofei. The final part of the prayer quotes Ps 146:5 on the greatness of the Lord. The middle part is a free variation on the theme of the paths in Sir 24. A similar text is in one of the manuscripts of Euphrosynus of Beloozero. The prayer can be correlated with the controversy about the nature of Sophia that began in Novgorod at the turn of the 15th–16th centuries and that is most definitely reflected in a later work, the Authentic Story about What Is Sofei, the Wisdom of God. By selecting the “Lords” citations, the author of the prayer seems to argue against the tendency to identify Sophia with Our Lady. In the fragment using the motifs from Sirach, there are grammatical ambiguities that can be interpreted as a desire to avoid the use of the feminine in relation to Wisdom. The cultural status of this text can be compared with paraliturgical inscriptions from Novgorod studied by Tatiana Rozhdestvenskaya.