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.
