The rational and emotional in the works by Simeon of Polotsk

The author examines the emotive strategy of Hieromonk Simeon of Polotsk in the context of the patristic doctrine of the image and Christian emotiology. In particular, it is noted that in patristic anthropology it is the image, but not the concept, that is considered the most productive tool of cognition; the sensory-emotional sphere of human existence is divided into «emotions of transformation», which contribute through catharsis to the deification of a person, and «emotions of suggestion», manipulatively suggesting the author's ideas to the recipient, the former being welcomed in artistic creation, the latter being condemned. From this point of view, baroque works, even while remaining in the circle of religious themes, demonstrate a secular attitude towards the sphere of emotions – the construction of manipulative emotiveness by rational methods. Such emotiveness secularizes as creativity itself, taking it beyond the boundaries of the Christian artistic canon: the spiritual nourishment of the reader (the task of Christian pedagogy) is replaced by aesthetic and intellectual pleasure (the task of barroque aesthetics and epistemology). Hieromonk Simeon Polotsky gives vivid examples of the rational construction of emotiveness in works of different genres and the secularization of creativity. The «Psaltir' rifmotvornaya» he transcribed provides the reader with the opportunity to turn the prayer rule into a home concert; in comedies, the refined emotiveness of poetic means is in disharmony with the poverty of meaning; in didactic verses the most emotive images contradict orthodoxy; the very image of the apostle-writer constructed by Simeon represents, in fact, a categorical punisher, morally humiliating and destroying anyone who does not meet the standard of a well-educated, socially correct, useful, and in this sense, a virtuous citizen of the fatherland, approved by the hieromonk. Constructed in various rational ways, the emotiveness of artistic images in the works of Simeon Polotsky is designed to convince the addressee of the unconditional correctness of the writer, which creates conditions for the formation of a new type of reader who perceives an artistic text not as a transmitter of Truth, but as a source of intellectual and aesthetic pleasure.