Filaret Gumilevsky

Filaret (Gumilevsky)

Archbishop Filaret (Филарет Гумилевский, born Dmitry Grigorievich Gumilevsky; 1805-1866) was the Russian Orthodox Bishop of Riga (1841-48), Archbishop of Kharkov (1848-59), and Archbishop of Chernigov (1859-66).

The son of a priest from the Shatsk district, Filaret is best known as a theologian and church historian.^[1] At the precocious age of 30 he was appointed Dean of the Moscow Theological Academy based in the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra.

During his tenure in Riga (1841-1848) the Governorate of Livonia saw a religious conversion movement, as a result of which more than one hundred thousand Estonian and Latvian peasants converted to Orthodoxy. He also established a school in Riga in February 1846, which grew four years later into a seminary (Latvian: Rīgas Garīgais seminārs).^[2]

His magnum opus is The History of the Russian Church (1847-48), the first complete and systematic outline of the evolution of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was seen as a clerical counterpart to Karamzin's great history of the Russian state and went through many reprints.^[3] This work was later revised and expanded by the likes of Macarius Bulgakov and Yevgeny Golubinsky.

Filaret Gumilevsky was a very popular prelate. He is buried in the Trinity Cathedral, Chernihiv. In 2009, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) recognized him as a saint for local veneration.^[4]

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