Everything has it's experts": expert review of old-believer's in the second half of the XIX century in the treatises of professor I.F. Nilsky

In the second half of the XIX century, the highest spiritual institutions of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan and Kiev went through significant changes in the research and educational spheres, in consequence a special branch of church history - "schismaticism" emerged. This branch was aimed to study the life and activities of the оМ-believers from the beginning of the church schism up to the Emperor Nicholas I modern orders on the civil and religious rights of the opposition confession. After the departments on the history and exposure of the church / Russian schism were opened at the theological academies, most of the church author's writings were focused on identifying the reasons and factors of the different understanding of church rites by official orthodoxy and old-belief. One of these writers was the professor of St. Petersburg Theological Academy I.F. Nilsky. Corpus of his works makes changes in the scientific understanding of church schism scientists the second half of the XIX century trackable, and in correlation with the biography of I.F. Nilsky it creates an important source for researching the processes of developing a scientific study of this topic. Using the methodology of a scientific biography compilation, which is aimed at establishing the historical context of the creation of scientific texts, the author comes to the following conclusions. Firstly, the scientific interests of I.F. Nilsky, which set the vector for the development of historical science in the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, focused on the examination of the old-believers teachings on antichrist and marriage. According to the scientist's suggestion, their development could help special missionaries in disputes with the old-believers, and in addition, contributed to the formation of a strategy for interaction between the old-believers and state apparatus, church authorities and the different layers of the population of the Russian Empire. Secondly, I.F. Nilsky's numerous reviews on the scientific works of secular and religious researchers of the history of the old-believers, show that the new church-historical discipline - "schismaticism", separated from the accusatory theology and became popular and socially relevant area of historical knowledge. The study of historical and polemic publications of that time and its critical reviews, gives an opportunity to track which hypotheses and theories were adopted in the scientific community, and which ideas failed because of insufficient reasoning. Accordingly, the scientific heritage of Professor I.F. Nilsky becomes a demonstrative example of the process of forming a qualitatively new specialist - an expert on church schism. His distinctive characteristic is a partial independence from the dominant church's critical attitude to oppositional confessions and beliefs, as well as the ability to abandon the stereotype of the cultural inadequacy of the old-believers. An important contribution of I.F. Nilsky in the formation of the community of experts is scientific communication with other church authors, reflected in the rarpus of his critical articles and reviews.

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