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Orthodox Confession
St Peter Mogila, tr. Lodvel, 1762
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Among the many Orthodox Catechisms there is none more authoritative, none more comprehensive, than Peter Mogila’s Confessio Orthodoxa, which we here reproduce after an old English translation, only altering some archaisms in spelling and a few inexact expressions.
Peter Mogila, the son of Symeon Ivanovitch, hospodar of Wallachia, was raised in 1632 to the Metropolitan see of Kieff. He was a man distinguished by learning and piety, who made it the aim of his life to combat the doctrinal errors of Romanism and Calvinism. For this purpose he prepared, or rather revised, in a provincial synod (1640), assisted by three Bishops, a Catechism, whose author is said to have been Isaias Trophimovitch Koslovsky, Igumen (abbot) of a Kieff monastery. Subsequently the Synod of Jassy examined it, and in 1643 the four Patriarchs approved and recommended it as a safe and faithful guide for all Orthodox Christians.
Anglican and Protestant divines generally, seeing the agreement of our Catechism with expressions and doctrines of the Council of Trent, have denounced it as tainted with Latinism. But they forgot all the while what a large portion of Orthodox teaching the Latin Church had preserved, and how the common fight of the Greek and the Latin Churches against the inroad of Protestantism into the East and West could but welcome the points of contact between the two Churches. But the careful examination and approbation of the highest ecclesiastical authorities are a sure guarantee that our faith is here represented pure and untainted.
THE EDITOR.