The aim of this article is to answer the question, “How Philaret Drozdov understood God’s holiness and human holiness and how both the ideas were displayed in his writings?” The research material constitutes selected homilies and a catechism. In the first place, the author discusses the definition of holiness and its understanding by the Orthodox Church with regard to the issue of deification. Also, he familiarizes the reader with the concept of holiness in its various aspects. Subsequently, the homilies and the catechism of Philaret Drozdov are analysed. The article shows the Moscow Metropolitan’s beliefs about the essence of human holiness as well as about the eschatological dimension of temporality and the pneumatological aspect of holiness, the issue of grace and a human seen as a vessel of God’s energy. The author proves that the Moscow Metropolitan continued in his works the traditions of the Church Fathers and creatively developed the most important assumptions of Orthodox anthropology and soteriology and, hence enriching Russian spiritual thought.

Although the Council‘s declaration Nostra aetate has been absorbed by the magisterium, there are new challenges suggesting its acknowledgement and further development. The document’s significance resides in its foundation on Romans 9-11 and in the fact that it has been promulgated at all, in spite of enormous resistance in the years ahead. No. 528 from the Catechism of the Catholic Church rises up out of various official statements with respect to this topic: The three wise men from Jesus’ Epiphany are typical representatives of the pagan religions who have to turn to the Jews in order to receive “from them the messianic promise”. This insight corrects a romanticizing pluralism of religions as it becomes manifest in the terminology of the three “Abrahamic religions”. A further development of Nostra aetate should include two aspects: Overcoming the narrowing down of Judaism and Christianity as a “religion” without refeRence to realities like “the land”, and, secondly, deepening the theological understanding of the referral of Christianity towards Judaism, particularly in connection with the term “People of God”.