The Sermon to the Coenobitic Monastic Brotherhood: On the Formation of the Monastic Disciplinary Charter in Rus’

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of sources transmitting the Sermon to the Coenobitic Monastic Brotherhood and its spheres of influence. The article determines authentic copies of this text and considers several elements: charters of the founders of several Russian monasteries and lectures to the brotherhood of the coenobitic monasteries and to their new members. Authors of Old Russian disciplinary charters were guided by apostolic and patristic texts; these sources were used not in their original language but in translation. Quotations from these authoritative compositions were often incorporated into charters through other texts, both translated and Russian. In their borrowings, the authors of these charters also used material that had been borrowed by their predecessors, who relied on their own authoritative texts. The Sermon to the Coenobitic Monastic Brotherhood is known in the Russian manuscript tradition from the beginning of the 15th century. Among its sources, there are compositions by Basil of Caesarea, Ephrem the Syrian, and a certain anonymous author. The Sermon influenced the Charter of Cornelius of Komel and some texts from the starchestvo tradition. The Sermon to the Coenobitic Monastic Brotherhood functioned as a link, a bridge between the Byzantine and Russian tradition of the monastic disciplinary charter.