Tradition in the Russian Theological World
Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, Russian Christian thought developed a distinctive approach to the theology of tradition. Partly shaped by Romantic understandings of ‘participatory’ knowledge, but also utilizing some aspects of classical Orthodox ascetical theology, this view of tradition supported an Orthodox critique of both Western Catholic and Protestant theology and ecclesiology. Initially it was closely involved with the Slavophile ideal of organic community life and communal consciousness. In the hands of its foremost twentieth-century exponents (such as Florovsky and Lossky), it receives a more robust anchorage in patristic theology but is still bound up with a particular doctrine of the human person as relationally defined. The evolving model of tradition as ‘catholic consciousness’ is a good illustration of how Russian theology, both overtly and implicitly, creatively blends both an eclectic assortment of philosophical sources and a variety of traditional Eastern Christian categories of theological and spiritual analysis.