Metropolitan of Novgorod and Saint Petersburg, a major government figure, scholar, theologian, and philosopher, as well as famous homilist, Gavriil Petrov was one of the most prominent Russian church officials of the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet in the history of Russian literature and religion Gavriil remains to a large extent a paradoxical and equivocal personality. No other religious writer of the eighteenth century so consistently promoted the integration of Christian teachings with the ideology of the Enlightenment by asserting the unity of belief and rational thought, of Providence and natural law. The degree to which these views reflected the needs of the day, however, or how they fit into Gavriil's overall psychological makeup is unclear. One of the first and most important clergymen at the court of Catherine the Great, in his private life Gavriil was an ascetic who supported monasticism. His career took shape...