Trinitarian Dogmatic Florilegia on the Holy Spirit in Slavia Orthodoxa: A Preliminary Survey

The reception of Byzantine religious literature among the Slavs has long been characterized by a strong preference for ethical, spiritual, and hagiographical texts, while works of a more dogmatic or speculative nature were received with considerably less enthusiasm. As a result, the genre of dogmatic florilegia remains significantly less represented – and studied – compared to ascetical and exegetical ones (according to the well-known typology proposed by Richard 1950). Nevertheless, one category of dogmatic writings gained notable circulation in the Slavic world for specific historical reasons: the anti-Latin ones. Among these texts, alongside collections of materials from the early Byzantine polemic that circulated in the so-called polemical miscellanies – first studied by Popov in 1875 – there is a number of dogmatic florilegia on the Holy Trinity and the Holy Spirit, directly tied to the Filioque controversy, and thus disseminated throughout the Slavic world from the 13th to the 15th century, reaching Bulgaria, Serbia, Mount Athos, and – especially after the Council of Florence – the Rus’. This paper explores the Slavic reception and transmission of such Byzantine florilegia on the Holy Spirit, focusing on a selection of manuscripts containing patristic trinitarian anthologies, in order to identify their Greek sources or, when the source is unknown, to determine whether they are faithful translations of a lost Greek original or represent original Slavic compilations shaped by local theological and polemical needs. Special attention is also given to the identification and discussion of the translation of the various patristic excerpts preserved in these anthologies, also in comparison with full-text translations when available. The findings aim to shed light on the role of Slavic cultural centers in the transmission and reception of Byzantine doctrinal traditions, offering broader reflections on the opportunity to integrate Slavonic texts into ongoing comparative research on dogmatic florilegia, alongside recent advances in Syriac and Greek studies.