Churh life, educational and religious practices, and ideas of Ukrainian scholarly clergy in Kyivan sermons of Stefan Jaworskyi of 1690s

The preserved manuscripts of sermons (drafts-autographs) by the Kyivan intellectual StefanYavorskyi, written during the Ukrainian period of his life, have only recently attracted the attention of scholars. The goal of this research is to analyze these texts (more than 40 sermonsof the 1690s) as sources on the history of the Kyiv Metropolitanate in the late seventeenthcentury, primarily on events in church life, religious culture, and ideas. The research methodology consists of a critical, structural, and (if necessary) hermeneutical analysis of early modern sermons to assess and understand direct and hidden information and religious symbols.The scientific novelty of this paper rises from the fact that until resent time researchers havenot been interested in Yavorskyi’s sermons of the 1690s as a source of information for analyzing church and religious history (with the exception of several studies on the biographies ofrepresentatives of the Ukrainian educated clergy and their identity). Conclusions. The analyzed sermons clarify our knowledge about: the completion of the reconstruction of St. Peterand Paul Cathedral in Kyiv (it was already used for liturgical service in June 1696); the practiceof public theological debates at the Kyiv Mohyla Academy in the first half of the 1690s; the liturgical practices (Jaworskyi’s audience during the delivery of the sermons in cathedrals, thedegree of believers’ catechization, and the passions in the monastery Church of Epiphany); thecommitment of this Ukrainian intellectual to the concept of Maria Immaculata, as well as thewidely, though not quite consistently developed and supported by many analogies from sacredhistory topos of Kyiv as a sacred space (city, which has its own Sheep Gate and Bethesda, Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives and Bethany, the desert on the way to the Promised Land, Mt. Sinai and Mt. Tabor, the Cave of Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulcher, city, where Moses and theOld Testament patriarch Joseph, Elijah, and Jesus-like Theodosius of Caves acted, etc.).