Feofan Prokopovich
Russian bishop who signed the Spiritual Regulation of 1721 as bishop of Pskov and became a vice-president of the Synod it created. A historian of the Synod, writing in 1838, names him as the author of the Regulation.
Among the bishops who signed the Spiritual Regulation is Theophanes, bishop of “Pleskow”, that is, of Pskov. Its English translator, Thomas Consett, adds in a note of 1729 that this was Theophanes Procopovich, “a learned Prelate”, moved to Novgorod in 1725 and by then the chief archbishop of the country (Spiritual Regulation, signatures, with Consett’s note (p. 114)).
The Regulation itself names no author. A. N. Muravyov, an official of the Synod who wrote a history of the Russian church in 1838, says that its composition was committed to Theophanes, bishop of Pskov (Muravyov, History of the Church of Russia, p. 283), and that he was one of the two vice-presidents of the Synod at its opening (Muravyov, History of the Church of Russia, p. 284). See Peter the Great Replaces the Patriarch with the Holy Synod.
In the timeline
- 25 January 1721 (Old Style), firm datePeter the Great Replaces the Patriarch with the Holy Synod
In January 1721 (Old Style) Tsar Peter I puts the Russian church under a board of clergy sworn to him as its supreme judge. It takes the patriarch’s place and the name of Most Holy Synod, and in 1723 the patriarch of Constantinople recognises it.