![«Книга о вірі» Захарії Копистенського, Київ, [1619–1620]](http://archivevam.com/cdn/shop/articles/0002-7102692595005463483.jpg?v=1793965990&width=3840)
In the early seventeenth century, Ukrainian scholars were locked in a fierce debate. After the Union of Brest, Orthodox writers produced treatise after treatise in defence of their faith against Catholic and Protestant polemic. Ostroh and Lviv already had their own polemical schools. What was missing was a book that would bring their experience together and answer every charge at once.
That book was the Book on Faith, printed by the Kyiv Caves Lavra press at the turn of 1619–1620. We look at it through a copy that survives in its period binding — with its ornaments, frames and the notes of readers who held it over the centuries.
Who wrote it
Zakhariia Kopystenskyi (1585–1627) was a scholar, publisher and archimandrite of the Kyiv Caves Monastery, and a staunch opponent of the Union of Brest. He prepared the Kyiv editions of the Homilies of John Chrysostom (1623–1624) and the Commentary on the Apocalypse (1625), and in 1627 the Lavra press issued Pamvo Berynda's Lexicon.
The Book on Faith summed up the work of the Ostroh and Lviv polemical schools and set the tone for Kyivan theological writing on the eve of the Petro Mohyla era. In historical importance it is the most significant polemical book of seventeenth-century Ukrainian printing.
How it was made
It is a substantial quarto (20.5 × 15.5 cm) of 626 pages, printed in two colours, black and red. The title page alone shows what the young Lavra press could do: the title, «Книга о вѣрѣ единой, святой, соборной, апостолской Церкве» (Book on the Faith of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church), is set in red and black within an engraved portal of columns, foliage, bunches of grapes, a mascaron above and small animals below.
Headpieces, initials, tailpieces
The book is lavishly decorated: 31 headpieces from 11 blocks, 27 tailpieces from 12 blocks, engraved initials and a border on the title page. Every page is framed by rules, with a separate margin for notes. The text is set in three typefaces.
The headpieces are more than ornament. Above the chapter on baptism the engraver cut a baptism scene among cherubs and scrolling foliage; above the section on the sacrament of Communion, the Crucifixion with figures on either side of the cross. Other headpieces are purely floral: flowers, vases, interlaced shoots. The initials vary too — one with a bird, one with a figure, one with a floral pattern — and the opening initial of the preface «Правовѣрным» is printed in red.
In a narrow column beside the text the printer placed printed notes: references to Scripture and the Church Fathers. The reader could see at once which authority stood behind each argument. For a polemical book this was the main weapon: an opponent had to argue not with Kopystenskyi but with the sources themselves.
Marginalia: traces of readers
The printed notes come from the author. But this copy also carries others, written by hand by those who owned and read it. These are what make an old volume unique: no two copies share the same notes.
The front pastedown is densely covered in cursive in several hands and inks. On one page, handwritten lines run right over an engraved tailpiece with a mascaron, and below, in large letters, is an ownership inscription in the old formula «Сїа книга… єсть…» ("This book belongs to…"), later struck through with a cross. Another note runs vertically down the left margin.
We do not attempt a word-for-word reading of these notes; that is a task for a palaeographer. Even unread, they show that the book did not sit on a shelf: it was read, it passed from hand to hand, and each owner left a mark.
Hieromonk Azariah
Kopystenskyi did not put his real name on the title page. The text ends with the printed signature «Ієромонахъ Азаріас» (Hieromonk Azariah), preceded by lines in which the author submits everything written to the judgement of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The reader's note on the front pastedown of our copy also names the author by this pseudonym, Azariah.
The copy
Our copy is preserved in its period binding of leather-covered boards, seventeenth century. It has been professionally restored: half of the title leaf has been rebuilt on paper of the same period, and small tears on a few pages have been repaired. No pages are missing.
Why this copy matters
This is a lifetime edition, printed while the author was alive. A complete copy in its period binding, with readers' notes on the pastedown and in the margins, is of exceptional historical and cultural value and of first-rank interest to collectors. It is an exceptional rarity.
