Filofeĭ

Filofei (also rendered Philotheus or Filofey) was a Russian Orthodox monk of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, associated with the Spaso-Eleazarov Monastery (Yelizarov or Eleazarov Monastery) near Pskov in northwestern Rus'. Surviving sources give almost no reliable information about his family, place of birth, or the precise years of his birth and death; historians conventionally place his activity in the first decades of the sixteenth century, during the reign of Grand Prince Vasily III of Moscow and the final absorption of the formerly independent Pskov Republic into the Muscovite state in 1510. He is known to have served as hegumen of the monastery. He belonged to the celibate monastic estate and is not recorded as having married or had children.

Filofei’s historical importance rests on a small body of epistles rather than on high ecclesiastical office. The best-known letters, addressed to Vasily III and to the Pskov d’iak Misiur Munekhin, were composed in the 1510s–1520s. In them he set out the political-theological claim that Moscow had become the Third Rome: the first Rome had fallen into error, the second Rome (Constantinople) had fallen to the Ottomans in 1453, and Moscow now remained the last bastion of true Orthodoxy, with no fourth Rome to follow. The formula supplied an ideological charter for Muscovite rulers as guardians of the Orthodox oikoumene. Other writings attributed to him treat the calculation of Pascha, condemn astrology and Latin influence, and exhort the prince to uphold justice and piety.

His thought belongs to the broader world of early-sixteenth-century Russian monastic learning, contemporaneous with the disputes associated with Joseph of Volokolamsk and Nil Sorsky, though Filofei is not firmly assigned to either party. The Third Rome idea was later elaborated by other writers and entered imperial ideology, but Filofei himself remained an obscure provincial monk. He is not known to have been formally canonized, and no feast day or patronage is securely attached to him in the liturgical calendars of the Russian Orthodox Church. Details of his death and burial are unrecorded in the sources that preserve his letters; he is presumed to have died at his monastery in the Pskov region sometime in the mid-sixteenth century.