Eight Essays on Russian Christianities (original) (raw)
Related papers
"Slavophile Religious Thought and the Dilemma of Russian Modernity" (2010)
Modern Intellectual History, 2010
Russian public opinion in the first half of the nineteenth century was buffeted by a complex of cultural, psychological, and historiosophical dilemmas that destabilized many conventions about Russia's place in universal history. This article examines one response to these dilemmas: the Slavophile reconfiguration of Eastern Christianity as a modern religion of theocentric freedom and moral progress. Drawing upon methods of contextual analysis, the article challenges the usual scholarly treatment of Slavophile religious thought as a vehicle to address extrahistorical concerns by placing the writings of A. S. Khomiakov and I. V. Kireevskii in the discursive and ideological framework in which they originated and operated. As such, the article considers the atheistic revolution in consciousness advocated by Russian Hegelians, the Schellingian proposition that human freedom and moral advancement were dependent upon the living God, P. Ia. Chaadaev's contention that a people's religious orientation determined its historical potential, and the Slavophile appropriation of Russia's dominant confession to resolve the problem of having attained historical consciousness in an age of historical stasis. *
Apology of Culture: Religion and Culture in Russian Thought
Artur Mrówczyński-Van Allen, Teresa Obolevitch, Paweł Rojek (red.), Apology of Culture. Religion and Culture in Russian Thought, Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications 2015, pp. 252, ISBN 978–1-4982–0398-2.
Contemporary philosophy and theology are ever more conscious of the fact that the model of relations between religion and culture developed in modernity is fundamentally flawed. e processes of the secularization of society, culture, and even religion are rooted in the dualistic vision of religion and culture introduced in the late Middle Ages. In seeking a way out, we need to explore domains of culture unaffected by Western European secular thinking.
It would be of little exaggeration to say that much of Russian discourse in the imperial and early émigré periods (circa 1721-1927) was informed by the lexicon, liturgy, and theology of Russian Orthodoxy. The Church's extensive educational system, whatever its many failings, trained thousands of clergy and hundreds of theologians who spoke to the faithful in various Russian Orthodox idioms that were then refracted in the conversations and cultural production of educated society (obrazovannoe obshchestvo). As members of that society began to engage contemporary European thought, they often did so from a selfconsciously Orthodox perspective cultivated at home, learned at church, and articulated in Orthodox print culture. Differences between the Russian people (narod) and the peoples of Europe and Asia were frequently cast as spiritual distinctions between true believers (pravoslavnye) and apostates or pagans, especially during periods of military conflict, which in turn were often experienced through an Orthodox matrix of biblical narrative, Church history, and liturgical commemoration. Imperial decrees, like the Emancipation Manifesto of 1861, were invested with the "Grace of God, " structured by the necessity of "Divine Providence, " and guided by "Divine assistance. " Sacraments of the Church, such as baptism and confession, generated specific notions of belonging among Orthodox believers and helped to shape their individual and collective psychologies. Orthodox liturgy, hesychastic piety, and monastic eldership (starchestvo) were imagined by some of Russia's most important authors, including N. V. Gogol' and F. M. Dostoevsky, to engender a type of religious disposition that could heal the fractured mind in an age thought to be marked by anomie. Even 3 k 4 m i c h e l s o n and k o r n b l at t of practice and institution shaped by time, place, culture, and personality that accurately reflects the historical reality of that confession. 1 Nearly a decade before this shift toward the study of Russian Orthodoxy and its institutions, scholars of Russian literature and intellectual history began to focus their attention on another aspect of religion in modern Russia, namely the religious philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the earliest developments in this regard in post-Soviet, English-language scholarship was the international Conference on Russian Religious Thought hosted by the University of Wisconsin in 1993. 2 That event brought together more than thirty historians, Slavists, theologians, and philosophers to discuss the spiritual categories, philosophical systems, literary heritages, and cultural influences of V. S. Solov' ev, S. N. Bulgakov, N. F. Fedorov, S. L. Frank, and P. A. Florenskii. The principal result of that conference was the publication of Russian Religious Thought, coedited by Judith Kornblatt and Richard Gustafson, in 1996. 3 That volume, which in many ways constitutes the foundation of and impetus behind this collection of essays, broadly applied a textual hermeneutics to the study of religious ideas and thinkers. The intent of Russian Religious Thought and similar studies that followed was to analyze representative texts for an array of largely extra-historical purposes: to illuminate how Russian religious philosophy engaged and can still address epistemological and ontological questions; to familiarize non-specialists with the seemingly alien content of Russia's religious culture; to put Russian religious thinkers in cross-confessional dialogue with some of the leading theologians of Western Christendom, while simultaneously complicating the basic categories of Protestant and Catholic thought; to demonstrate the universality of Russian religious terminology in the philosophical quest to express the absolute; and to identify currents in Russian thought that might help construct a usable past for contemporary Russia. 4 Despite this enthusiasm for Russian religious thought in the post-Soviet era, which has seen the publication of important monographs, articles, source collections, and English-language translations, 5 its impact on broader trends in the study of Russian history and culture has been minimal. This is especially true in regards to the turn in scholarship toward religious practice and institutions, which has almost entirely, and sometimes explicitly, disregarded Russian Orthodox theology, as well as the broader subject of Russian religious thought, as retrograde, elitist, or well-worn. 6 As such, our knowledge of how the theological tenets of Russian Orthodoxy informed the discursive patterns and ideological structures of Russian literary culture and intellectual history has not kept pace with advancements in studies about lived Orthodoxy or the Russian Church. 7
Multiple Religious Belonging: Russian Reflections
Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, 2020
, teaching modern world religions, Buddhism, interreligious dialogue, the phenomenology of religion and Christian mysticism. She is a Visiting Lecturer at the Academy of Art in Riga, specializing in Eastern Art. The field of her research is comparative hagiography, comparative mysticism and the comparative analysis of Christianity and Buddhism. She is interested also in the reception of Eastern religious ideas in the Western world and in modified Latvian animistic cults.
Respublica literaria. Vol. 4/2. , 2023
In the book by sister Teresa Obolevitch, Professor of the Krakow University, the formation and development of the two basic lines within Russian philosophy is shown, i.e., of Soloviev’s «all-unity» system and of Archpriest G. Florovsky’s «Neopatristic synthesis». The author tracks down their intertwinement up to the 21st-century works by S. S. Horuzhy. Like Fr. Thomas Merton, wide known in the West, Horuzhy also showed up a deep interest in Hesychasm, Zen and their spiritual practices and techniques. Prof. Obolevitch believes that Florovsky had not proposed clear-cut criteria for building up a Neo-patristic synthesis of the present-day Russian thought. Besides Horuzhy, no prominent adherents of this trend of thought are to be seen in the most recent history of Russian thought.