SLAVOPHILE RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND THE DILEMMA OF RUSSIAN MODERNITY, 1830–1860

2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
PATRICK LALLY MICHELSON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Religious Orientation ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Contextual Analysis ◽  
Moral Progress ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Universal History ◽  
Eastern Christianity

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.

scholarly journals The spaces of truth and cathedral window light

Literator ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-118
Author(s):  
G. Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Multiple Contexts ◽  
Western Development ◽  
Permanent Loss ◽  
The Church ◽  
Complex Expression

Major writers and painters of the Romantic period interpreted the church or cathedral in its organic and spiritual dimensions as a complex expression of a matured Christian civilization. Artists of the mid-nineteenth century continued to produce both secular and religious variations upon this established referentiality. Although divergent uses reciprocally reinforced the fascination for the central imagery of the church and its multiple contexts, they also came to suggest a deeper tension in Western development between what the church had meant in an earlier Europe and what it might mean for late modernity. The threat of a permanent loss of cultural values was an issue haunting Realist approaches. A crucial revision occurred when key Symbolist poets openly revived the first Romantic themes but treated them as contents available to a decidedly post-Romantic historical consciousness. There was an analogous revival of interest in the church as a culturally charged symbol in painting around the turn of the century. Although they might apply this poetic and pictorial heritage in strikingly different ways, writers of high Modernism such as Rilke, Proust, and Kafka understood its richness and importance.

The 13th Century Copto-Arabic Reception of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī: Al-Rashīd Abū l-Khayr Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s Risālat al-Bayān al-aẓhar fī l-radd ʿalā man yaqūlu bi-l-qaḍāʾ wa-l-qadar

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 143-169
Author(s):  
Gregor Schwarb
Keyword(s):  
Detrimental Effect ◽  
Human Agency ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
13Th Century ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Eastern Christianity

‭This article (re-)introduces Risālat al-Bayān al-aẓhar, a short and by all appearances unfinished treatise by the Coptic scholar al-Rashīd Abū l-Khayr Ibn al-Ṭayyib (d. after 1270), to exemplify the pivotal role played by the works of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī during the ‘Renaissance’ of Copto-Arabic literature in the 13th and 14th centuries. Rāzī’s œuvre left its mark on both content and form of systematic religious thought in Eastern Christianity. Whilst the Risāla is available in a partial edition since 1938, it has never been studied so far. As we shall see, Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s critique of Rāzī’s deterministic concept of human agency as outlined in the Muḥaṣṣal came in an attempt to counteract what he perceived as a detrimental effect of the mounting popularity which Rāzī’s works enjoyed among contemporaneous Christian readers. The critique is based on a rich patchwork of sources that is characteristic of 13th century Copto-Arabic encyclopaedism.‬

State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Fact or Fiction?

1983 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.W.J. Bartrip
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
State Regulation ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
The Third ◽  
The People ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Government Interference ◽  
Laissez Faire

The question of the degree of state intervention in nineteenth-century Britain has interested generations of scholars since the beginning of the present century. Did mid-nineteenth century England constitute an “age of laissez-faire” which gave way to an “age of collectivism,” or did an “age of mercantalism” merge into one of state regulation during which process, even in the early and mid-Victorian period, the state exercised considerable control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens? These are two of the questions over which there has been extended debate.The term laissez-faire has been employed in a variety of ways by different writers, by no means all of whom have troubled to define their understanding of the expression. Recently Professor Perkin has argued that during the nineteenth century two distinct meanings were attributed to it (and seven to the related, though antithetical, concept, collectivism!). For the purposes of this paper the term is taken to mean the philosophy, policy and, above all, the practice of minimal government interference in the economy.The most influential case for an “age of laissez-faire” was presented by Dicey in Law and Public Opinion. In this Dicey identified three overlapping legislative phases: Quiescence (1800-1830), Individualism (1825-1870), and Collectivism (1865-1900). The first consisted of an absence of legislation, the second of “constant” parliamentary activity to abolish restraints on individual freedom and the third of state intervention “for the purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people” at the expense of some loss of individual freedom.

Crime and Punishment

1901 ◽  
Vol 47 (198) ◽  
pp. 638-639
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
The Law ◽  
Real Danger

Dr. Robert Anderson, the Assistant Commissioner of Police in London, has written an article in the Nineteenth Century for February on “Our Absurd System of Punishing Crime.” He finds that there is an increase in “professional” crime which might be suppressed, and ought to be dealt with in a more intelligent way than at present. Dr. Anderson is of opinion that this real danger to the Commonwealth is mainly due to the lenient sentences which have become the rule consequent on the decrease of ordinary crime. In effect, he concludes that professional criminals should be deprived of the liberty they abuse, even for life. It is evident that the free discussion of these problems must precede any such changes in the law as Dr. Anderson and others advocate, and we trust that our Association will take its part in guiding public opinion on questions of such importance to the nation.

A counter voice: Gustave de Beaumont and the theory of national characters

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-116
Author(s):  
Michela Nacci
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Irish Question ◽  
First Time

Gustave de Beaumont was clearly a counter voice within the debate about national characters that engaged nineteenth-century French political thought. This was not the first time that Beaumont set himself apart for the originality of his convictions. For instance, on the Irish question, he did not take Ireland's part against England out of allegiance to the Catholicism of the Irish as opposed to the Anglicanism of the English (which was why most of French public opinion was for Ireland); rather, studying the issue led him to see the English presence in Ireland as a policy of oppression and discrimination.

Deification in the Long Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-81
Author(s):  
Ruth Coates
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Institutions Of Higher Education ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cultural Expressions ◽  
Russian Religious Thought ◽  
The Church

Chapter 2 sets out the history of the reception of deification in Russia in the long nineteenth century, drawing attention to the breadth and diversity of the theme’s manifestation, and pointing to the connections with inter-revolutionary religious thought. It examines how deification is understood variously in the spheres of monasticism, Orthodox institutions of higher education, and political culture. It identifies the novelist Fedor Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev as the most influential elite cultural expressions of the idea of deification, and the primary conduits through which Western European philosophical expressions of deification reach early twentieth-century Russian religious thought. Inspired by the anthropotheism of Feuerbach, and Stirner’s response to this, Dostoevsky brings to the fore the problem of illegitimate self-apotheosis, whilst Soloviev, in his philosophy of divine humanity, bequeaths deification to his successors both as this is understood by the church and in its iteration in German metaphysical idealism.

Alam

2018 ◽  
pp. 299-309
Author(s):  
Shreekant Kumar Chandan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Religious Thought

Shreekant Chandan shows how the seventeenth-century poet Alam projected Princāmā-e Muazzam as a rightful heir to Aurangzeb’s Mughal throne in his Shyāmsnehī by borrowing notions of ideal kingship from akhlāqī discourses current at the time. He considers general questions of agency and historical consciousness in the context of courtly society before exploring Dakhani influences on Alam’s religious thought and literary production, especially as found in his Sudāmā-carit. Alam lived in the Deccan during the closing decades of seventeenth century.

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