Iavorskii, Stefan

Iavorskii, Stefan 

(secular name, Simeon Ivanovich Iavorskii). Born 1658 in Iavorov, in what is now L’vov Oblast, Ukrainian SSR; died Nov. 27 (Dec. 8), 1722, in Moscow. Russian and Ukrainian conservative church figure, publicist, and preacher. President of the Slavonic-Greco-Latin Academy (1701).

The son of a petty nobleman, Iavorskii graduated from the Kiev Mogila Academy in 1684 and studied at higher theological schools in Vilnius, L’vov, Lublin, and Poznań. In 1687 he returned to Russia, where he took monastic vows in 1689 and was appointed locum tenens in place of the patriarch in 1700. Peter I, hoping to capitalize on the respect enjoyed by Iavorskii among the conservative circles of Russian society, appointed him president of the Synod in 1721. Iavorskii had no influence on synodal affairs, however. Opposed to Peter’s reforms, Iavorskii made veiled attacks in his sermons against the subordination of the church to secular authority; his views found expression in the treatise The Rock of Faith, which was written in 1718 and published in 1728.

REFERENCES

Samarin, Iu. F. “Stefan Iavorskii i Feofan Prokopovich.” Soch., vol. 5. Moscow, 1880.
Tabachnykov, I. A. “Z istorii filosofs’koi dumky v Kyevo-Mogylians’kii akademii pershoi polovyny XVIII st.” In Z istorii filosofs’koi dumky na Ukraini. Kiev, 1963.