Professor S. V. Troitsky and His Contribution to the Development of the Subject of the Church Canon Law at the Moscow Theological Academy

Abstract

The history of ecclesiastical law in Russian ecclesiastical schools is still waiting for its researcher. Its peculiarity is the fact that Russian canonists worked simultaneously in both spiritual and secular educational system, adopting not only the latter's methodology, but also, in general, its outlook. This refers, first of all, to such coryphaei of canonical science as A. S. Pavlov (Professor of Law at the Imperial Moscow University), N. S. Suvorov (Pavlov's successor in the chair), V. N. Beneshevich (who researched canonical sources as a professor at the (who studied canonical sources as a professor at St. Petersburg University and, for a time, at St. Petersburg Theological Academy). This is explained not so much by the inertia of the scholarly environment in ecclesiastical schools at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, as by the desire to fit canonics into the general context of legal conceptions of that era, which was reflected precisely in the activities of university professors.