The epistle of elder Philotheus and some aspects of eastern christian ecclesiology

In the proposed article, the problematic of the Epistle of Philotheus is related both to its archetype - to the theory of translatio imperii and its biblical, differently interpreted, version in the prophet Daniel. The latter, in its interpretations, makes possible the rapprochement of the prophetic “eternal kingdom” - both with the “Church of the Saints”, thinking of it essentially eschatologically, and with the Roman Empire, since it fulfills the mission of “the servant of Christ’s building”. The duality of the interpretation of the “eternal kingdom” is also projected into the church-canonical sphere: while the church canons of the Empire era (the 3rd canon of the Second Ecumenical Council and the 28th of the Fourth) correlate the dignity of the Church (the so-called “prerogative of honor”) with the political position of the metropolis, an earlier ecclesiology (2nd century) formulates the concept of “catholicity”, according to which the Church, inseparably divided, is present “as in a foreign land” in each chronotope of its existence, with all its concreteness transcending the boundaries of earthly (including, of course, political) reality. The ecclesiology of the Epistle of Philotheus is contradictorily built between these two types of ideas about the Church, which in itself, as if incidentally, but inevitably increases the significance of the moral-religious criterion in the concept of the “Third Rome”.