The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

This article is an attempt to systematise the views of the prominent Russian ecclesiologist and canonist Nikolay Aksakov on the Tradition of the Church. Aksakov speaks of Tradition as the living and continuous self-consciousness of the Church – one and integral, identical throughout the ages. In his opinion, the task of theology is to identify the apostolic tradition of the Church among numerous ecclesiastical and human traditions. Aksakov’s scholarly work had the practical objective of achieving recognition that the life of the Church must be restored on the everlasting and unchanging canonical principles stemming from the apostolic tradition and bearing witness to the sobornal organization of the Church. Such restoration, according to Aksakov, could have taken place only by convening a Local Council, where the plenitude of the Orthodox Russian Church would have been reflected through the developed system of church representation.