Abstract

One of the basic categories of religious consciousness, which has an inexhaustible spiritual-moral potential that is relevant to our times, is undoubtedly the category of holiness. To understand how it was rooted and developed on our native soil it is important to note that the Old Kievan and the later Ukrainian culture did not invent a separate or special theory of holiness, but rather borrowed it from the Old Testament and the Byzantine-Christian traditions. Yet, the concrete image of holiness that was formed on this theoretical foundation has very distinct unique features. To explain how the inherited general theoretical foundations of the image of holiness were absorbed into the cultural context of Kievan Rus' I shall try to determine which aspects of the traditional conception of holiness were predominant there