Abstract:
This article deals with the problem of the dating and authorship of the Epistle of
Cornelius, a monk of the Snetogorsky monastery, to his spiritual son, the priest
Ivan, who decided to marry for a second time “for childbearing.” Nikolai I. Serebriansky
dated the Epistle to the 1590s (this dating also was shared by subsequent
researchers), based on the assertion that during the life of Ivan the Terrible, Cornelius
would hardly have dared to write that tsars who violate the laws of the Church
regarding the termination and conclusion of a second marriage would be punished
by the birth of an heir who “will trample everything and will be an initiator of every
evil deed.” The identification of the sources describing both the heir’s evil deeds
and other parts of the text allows us to refine the dating of the Epistle. Cornelius
finds arguments for the condemnation of his spiritual son’s decision to remarry not
only in Scripture but also in contemporary hagiographic and publicistic works that
date back to a period of time from the beginning of the 16th century to the 1540s:
the Life of Euphrosynus of Pskov (the Story about Halleluiah), no later than 1510; the
Epistle of Maximus the Greek to Fedor Karpov about Leviathan, dated between
1518 and 1525; the Epistle of Mark, patriarch of Jerusalem (from the Excerpt about the
Second Marriage of Grand Prince Vasily III), from the 1540s. Such a concentration of
works from a specific period of time suggests that the Epistle of Cornelius itself was
written at about the same time. Most likely, the Cornelius who is identified as the
author of the Epistle is the Cornelius listed as the former abbot of the Snetogorsky
monastery in the 1562 record inscribed in the Gospel manuscript from the collection
of the Russian State Library, f. 205, No. 29. Monk Cornelius could have written the
Epistle no earlier than in 1525 and no later than in 1562, when he was no longer
either a monk or the abbot of the Snetogorsky monastery.
