The paradigm of church-state relations in the works of archbishop Feofan Prokopovich: from the Middle Ages to the Age of revolution

Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich is the main ideologue of the Petrine Era and the spokesman for the doctrine of the synodal reform of church government. The purpose of this article is to identify the place and significance of the beliefs of Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich in relation to a number of modern European teachings about the state and the Church. In the first part of the article, the authors formulate the characteristic features of the medieval model of church-state relations in the so-called “imperial” and “papal” versions. Then the history of the emergence of various theories of church-state relations, including “transitional” concepts, is traced and the distinctive features of the modern model are highlighted. The second part of the article examines the views of Archbishop Feofan Prokopovich about the nature of state power, primarily to reveal his relationship to the theory of “social contract” and his ecclesiological views, in which he actively used the terminology of natural law.