By Anastasia Koskello
This year marks 120 years since the death of Professor Alexander Lopukhin (September 4, 1904).
But who is Alexander Lopukhin? The son of a large provincial priest, a late-onset prodigy who entered the Theological Academy at the age of 22 and nine years later was already the head of a department there? A tireless and successful editor of the Church Gazette and Christian Reading? A brilliant church publicist? All this is true, but above all, Lopukhin was an exceptional interpreter of the Holy Scriptures, and his main contribution to Russian culture was the Explanatory Bible – a unique and in some respects still unsurpassed masterpiece of exegesis (the science of interpreting the Bible).
Contemporaries rightly attributed to Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin the words of Blessed Jerome about Origen: “He managed to write as much in his lifetime as no one else could read.” There is no complete collection of his works, but if it were published, it would amount to dozens of volumes. Lopukhin himself, apparently, treated his incredible “productivity” ironically. Once, when he was already a professor at the St. Petersburg Theological Schools, he noted that it would be a good idea to collect all the books written by the academy’s employees in one cabinet – and immediately joked that “Lopukhin’s books” would take up all the space in the cabinet.
The central place in the legacy of this author is occupied by his famous “Explanatory Bible, or a commentary on all the books of the Holy Scriptures edited by A. P. Lopukhin” – the work of his whole life, unfinished by him, systematized and published by his students (1904-1913). (Alexander Pavlovich himself composed only the commentary on the Pentateuch of Moses, which is in volume I of the edition). To this day, “Lopukhin’s Bible” remains, alas, the only such detailed commentary on the biblical text in Russian.
Lopukhin’s excellent knowledge of English played a key role in his fate as a student. Thanks to this, after graduating from the academy, the 26-year-old Alexander Pavlovich was appointed a psaltery in the Orthodox Church at the Russian Embassy in New York, where he spent three years (1879-81). He carefully prepared for the trip: he read many of the books about America available in St. Petersburg. And soon after arriving overseas, he was literally speechless: America was not at all what they imagined it to be in Russia.
He expected to see a “spiritless West,” but he saw a Christian country.
In 1886, already as a professor, he devoted a series of public lectures to his American memories, which he then published in “Christian Reading,” and in 1888 published as a book “Life Across the Ocean.” These stories contain a wealth of curious information about American society in the second half of the 1880s. But perhaps the most interesting of all is Lopukhin’s view of Russian society, which is still relevant today.
It was in America that the scientist became convinced of how deeply Russia was “stuck” in the Age of Enlightenment, how poisoned Russian life was by pathetic speeches about the “triumph of scientific progress,” and how groundless the idea of religion as a primitive “atavism” of human culture was.
“The best and most powerful refutation of the frivolous theory of the temporary nature of religion can be found in the life of the American people,” Lopukhin says to everyone. “True progress does not contradict religion, but only strengthens it.” Alexander Lopukhin responds to the usual arguments of the Russian liberals of his time, who claim that “religion exists only because it is supported by the state” and that “positive science does not replace religion only because it is suppressed by the state.” Using the Americans as an example, he shows: these comparisons are false. “This people enjoys such political and religious freedom,” writes Lopukhin, “that for many peoples of the Old World it can only be a dream, and in the spread of education, in the degree of its cultural development, it has no rivals on the entire globe. Thanks to its complete freedom, this people could have long ago consigned religion with all its churches and hierarchies to the archives of eternity, and thanks to its development, it would have long ago been obliged to worship only the idols of positive science. And yet the life of this people presents a completely different picture. It can be said that religion nowhere enjoys such intense vitality as in America.”
Another significant difference between Americans and Russians, which Lopukhin discovered in New York, is the different attitude towards the Bible:
“Probably nowhere does the Bible have a more important social significance than in America.” The Bible, Lopukhin notes, “has entered the blood and flesh of American society.”
As an illustration of this fact, he enthusiastically describes the incredible public response to the publication of the new English translation of the New Testament in the United States. He cites statistics: even before the translation was published, 800,000 people had placed orders for the book. On the first day after publication, according to him, 300 thousand copies were sold, and on the second day – 200 thousand. Describing the publication of the new English-language Bible, which became the event of the year in America, Lopukhin involuntarily recalls the appearance of the Russian Synodal translation in 1876. “I do not have factual data to compare this public interest of Americans in the publication of a new translation of the New Testament with the public interest that was shown in Russia on the occasion of the publication of the first authorized translation of the Bible in Russian,” he writes, “but the very thought of such a comparison scares me…”
Are there many such people!? How to make Christianity in Russia become a determining factor in public life, the intelligentsia become believers, and the Bible become the most widely read book? It was over these questions that Alexander Pavlovich “struggled” until the end of his life.
Lopukhin realized that modern Russia is hardly able to maintain the level of biblical studies that existed in the West. That is why he made a wise choice – he became a popularizer and encyclopedist. His main task was to acquaint Russians with the latest achievements of world biblical science. The frequency with which, under Lopukhin, the publications of the Theological Academy published reviews of books by Western biblical scholars is amazing. The “popularity” of the “Explanatory Bible” was a conscious position of the professor. Lopukhin considered it unacceptable to shy away from the works of scholars just because they were non-Orthodox. He sincerely believed that against the backdrop of the spread of nihilism and atheism, interfaith polemics should recede into the background. “It is obvious that the time of the confessional struggle has passed and the time has come for a struggle between Christianity as a religious system and anti-Christianity as a product of the new time,” he wrote (“Christian Reading”, 1896, No. 1-2).
In fact, Lopukhin’s “Explanatory Bible” is also not a scientific, but an educational project. And initially it was published not as a separate volume, but as a free supplement to the magazine “Strannik” (since 1893 Lopukhin became its editor and publisher). Its genre itself can be considered a unique invention of Lopukhin. He supplemented the collection with historical commentaries on various fragments of the biblical text with “Orthodox content” – interpretations of the holy fathers. This seems to be the secret of the longevity of the “Explanatory Bible”: unlike most biblical works, which lose their relevance every year in the light of new discoveries of scientists, the patristic “backbone” of Lopukhin’s text cannot, by definition, become outdated.
First publication in Russian: Predanie.ru, No. 9, 2014.
We acknowledge The European Times for the information.
