This meeting continues a series of open discussions and practices within the Ukrainian-Swedish Forum. It is a platform, initiated by Sankt Ignatios College, for long-term dialogue and actions on Ukraine’s reconstruction and democratic post-war renewal, thereby building a shared Ukrainian-European horizon.

Orthodox theology of the early twenty-first century is undergoing a critical reassessment of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis — the paradigm that dominated Orthodox thought throughout the second half of the twentieth century. One of the most consequential legacies of this paradigm is a deeply biased view of the Kyivan theological tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was portrayed as the primary source of the “Westernization” and “pseudomorphosis” of Orthodox theology.

Contemporary scholars have compellingly demonstrated that this judgment was driven not by theological reasoning, but by political and historiosophical motivations far removed from the actual content of the Kyivan school. This opens before us an urgent task: freed from these imposed prejudices, to rediscover and genuinely engage with the theological substance of the Kyivan tradition on its own terms.

This lecture proposes to take a first step in this direction — to examine the Kyivan school of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries according to its own internal logic and to clarify its rightful place in the history of Orthodox theology.

Date: 14 April, 18.00 CET
Format: online

If you have any questions, please reach out to Yuliia Naidych.