Sant'Ambrogio nella letteratura religiosa slava orientale del Sei e Settecento : per uno studio preliminare delle citazioni ambrosiane nell'omiletica rutena barocca

The aim of this study is to investigate the reception of Ambrose in the writings of three Ukrainian baroque preachers, viz. Ioannikij Galjatovs’kyj, Antonij Radyvylovs’kyj and Dimitrij Rostovskij. The method that has been adopted in the presentation of the results of our survey can be outlined as follows. First, we focused on the thematic aspects of the process of reception, which generally fall into two categories: 1. Exegetical themes, based on motives drawn from the Scriptures; 2. Philosophical-doctrinal themes. Furthermore, for all the writers which we examined we tried to determine whether an author made a direct or indirect usage of Ambrose’s oeuvre. Indirect use is generally to be ascribed to the influence of either exegetic Comments on the Bible, such as those of Cornelius A Lapide and Didacus de Baeza, or of emblematic literature produced in the West, such as Hemannus Hugo’s Pia desideria (1624). A second question to be addressed is how the intellectual and ecclesiastical context of the Ukrainian lands, whose distinctive features were pluriconfessionalism and the close ties to Western Renaissance and Baroque, influenced our authors in the way they made use of Ambrose, especially as far as the relationship between Orthodoxy and Catholicism is concerned.