The Theological-Aesthetic Vision of Metropolitan Filaret

Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) belongs to the synodal period in Russian Orthodox theology, which offered unique opportunities. His theology is shaped partly by the pre-Petrine tradition of tight integration between church and state life based on the model of ‘sanctification’. Historical reality itself, including political structures and one’s social station, is sanctified and serves as a way to salvation. Traditionally, aesthetic elements, such as liturgical and temple aesthetics, as well as the aesthetics of ritual, play an important part in this model. Filaret’s theology is also shaped by the post-Petrine tradition of school theology, with its Western influences that favour the primacy of Scripture in theology. However, Filaret’s method of reading and interpreting Scripture is premodern in its nature. Filaret does not logically process or analyse the text but quasi-aesthetically ‘sees’ various structures and forms emerge from the text. What he ‘sees’ in Scriptures is the form of Christ’s personality whose striking traits affect the reader. Ultimately, this form leads to a revelation of the ‘circumvolution’ of divine glory in the world, which has its aesthetic aspect: at its initial stage, it radiates through the world as ‘beauty’. To the end, however, glory retains its similarity to aesthetic beauty in its ability to shine forth. Although divine glory is invisible, it does reveal itself in the temple in an almost visible and palpable way.

The Icon and Visual Arts During the Russian Religious Renaissance

This chapter begins from a simple observation, namely, that what has been called ‘the Russian religious renaissance of the twentieth century’ coincided in time with two important movements in the sphere of the visual arts. On the one hand, there was a sweeping revival of interest in the medieval icon at the beginning of the twentieth century, which left almost no sphere of cultural life untouched. On the other, in artistic terms, the whole period was largely defined by the advent of the Russian avant-garde. I would like to consider the junction at which these three developments overlapped, informed, influenced, even opposed and clashed with one another. According to the interpretation proposed here, it is the mixture and the coexistence of a revived Orthodoxy, a reawakened focus on the medieval artistic tradition, and the rise of avant-garde modernism that gave a unique flavour to early twentieth-century Russian culture. The debates on the function and the meaning of the icon in the period between the 1910s and the early 1920s ultimately suggested different answers to the problem of the role of religion in modernity.

Semyon Frank

Semyon Liudvigovich Frank was a proponent of ‘all-unity’, who sought to overcome the polarities in modern thought through a universal philosophical synthesis. Jewish by background, he was drawn to Marxism in his youth; but after some involvement in politics he grew disenchanted with the revolutionary movement. After 1905, he embarked on a career as a professional philosopher. He converted to Orthodoxy in 1912. Following deportation from Russia in 1922 he lived in Germany, France, and Britain. His main works of religious philosophy were written in emigration, although his underlying philosophical outlook was formed before the revolution. Most of the main themes in Christian theology were addressed in his work, even though theology was not his primary focus. Ontological questions were his main preoccupation. He saw his ideas as belonging to the Platonist tradition. His thinking was antinomian; following Nicholas of Cusa, he sought to demonstrate the ‘coincidence of opposites’. There was an apophatic tendency in his work, as well as an experiential emphasis. He saw evil as a kind of non-existent reality. He rejected charges of pantheism. There were echoes of Vladimir Soloviev’s thought in his writings, but this similarity only became clear to him after his philosophical system was formed. His outlook on the church was ecumenical, although he remained loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate. His social philosophy was personalistic and his political thought gradualist; he advocated a kind of Christian realism or humanism while warning against utopianism.

Sergius Bulgakov in Exile

In the course of two theological trilogies, Bulgakov expounds his sophiological worldview governed by one central theological intuition concerning the necessary correlativity of the divine and human worlds, Divine Sophia (Wisdom) superabounding in creatural Sophia essentially orientated to the glorification of the Creator. Undergirding all his thought is an acute intuition of the self-presence of the Absolute, Transcendent to all creatural being, the very fact of a ‘trans’ a ‘beyond’ necessarily entailing relation, ultimately rendering the Absolute a Being-for-us, love and the Godhead being at one. With the kenosis of the Divinity in the Incarnation one grasps how the apotheosis of humanity becomes possible, human being bearing the ‘cryptogram of Divinity’. Humanity’s full realization is at one with the Church, nothing human being alien to the Church at her core, the essential goodness of creation bespeaking the final transformation of all in the loving embrace of an All-Provident Creator.

Pavel Florensky: At the Boundary of Immanence and Transcendence

This chapter discusses four themes in the religious philosophy of Pavel Florensky (1882–1937): Georg Cantor’s mathematics, truth, philosophy of language, and the visual arts. Apart from Church doctrines, the key ideas that emerge in his work are ‘antinomy’, ‘discontinuity’, ‘actual infinity’ and ‘realism’. Deeply rooted in the Christian-Platonic tradition, Florensky is critical of rationalism, empiricism, Kantianism, and positivism. He anticipates postmodern insights in the sense that his worldview allows for synchronic difference as well as time and diachronic change. But unlike postmodern thought, which tends to interpret synchronic difference and the flux of time in terms of relativistic perspectivism and historicism, Florensky provides difference and change with a realist underpinning. And despite his emphasis on antinomicity and discontinuity in his conception of truth, he affirms the grandeur of reason and rejects irrationalism and fideism.

Tolstoy

This chapter surveys the paradoxes of Tolstoy’s religious worldview in five sections. The first section surveys the fiction: moments of grace in Tolstoy’s creative, aesthetically created worlds. The second is biographical, his so-called crisis years (1877–1885) and conversion to radical Christian anarchism, with its pivotal text What Then Must We Do? (1883–1886). The third is doctrinal: Tolstoy’s image of Jesus, whose assault on the Temple and ethically oriented parables are central to Tolstoy’s own rewriting and ‘harmonization’ of the Gospels. This discussion ends with the 1901 edict formally separating Tolstoy from the Russian Orthodox Church. The fourth section takes up Tolstoy’s 1886 treatise On Life (and its problematic vision of the afterlife). The conclusion briefly places Tolstoy among his fellow moral philosophers, especially Vladimir Soloviev, Vasily Zenkovsky, and Nicolas Berdyaev.

Slavophilism and the Origins of Russian Religious Philosophy

This chapter presents Slavophilism as having laid the foundations for the further development of Russian religious philosophy. The leading Slavophile thinkers in this respect were Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky. Two main principles guided their religious thought: the compatibility of faith and reason, and the defence of human freedom, dignity, and personhood. Their signature religious-philosophical concepts are sobornost, faithful or believing reason, and integral personhood. The chapter explores the different sources of their religious thought, prioritizing their own faith and religious experience. Khomiakov and Kireevsky were convinced that human beings, through integrating faith and reason and achieving spiritual wholeness, could apprehend reality in its ontological or noumenal depths, in a way that abstract rationalism could not. This intuition of being came to be hailed as the distinctive ontologism of Russian religious philosophy. It provided a foundation for the development of Russian philosophical personalism. The Slavophiles, especially through the concept of sobornost, also emphasized the communal nature of personhood: persons realize themselves through free and loving interaction with each other. For Khomiakov and Kireevsky, the ideal community was the Church.

The Influence of Russian Religious Thought on Western Theology in the Twentieth Century

This chapter canvasses the impact of Russian religious thought on major thinkers and movements in twentieth-century Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Noting the unique role played by the Russian emigration that emerged in the West following the Russian Civil War (1918–1920), the chapter assesses the influence of Russian Orthodox thinkers on six streams of modern Western theology: Karl Barth and Evangelical theology, liberal Protestantism, Anglicanism, Yves Congar and early Roman Catholic ecumenism, nouvelle théologie and ressourcement, and liberation theology. The chapter argues that the most important venues of Russian influence on Western theology were the Ecumenical Movement and the Second Vatican Council. The most eminent English-speaking theologians to engage deeply with Russian Orthodox thought in the twentieth century were Jaroslav Pelikan and Rowan Williams. The chapter concludes by noting the passion for East/West unity that inspired the Russians and their Western Christian partners in the twentieth-century dialogue.

Religious Thought and Experience in the Prison Camps

The development of religious thought has often been marked by discord and conflicts between religions (and/or individual religious thinkers) and the State, which at times led to the repression of individuals and or groups of people united by the same confession. The Russian case is fully in line with this unfortunate tradition: from Nikon’s schism to the repression against all religions under the Soviet regime, Russian religious thought has often developed in repressive conditions. However, the Russian case has one distinguishing feature, that is, the extensive use of prison camps by Russian and Soviet authorities from the nineteenth century onwards, which has had a direct effect on some religious thinkers. The social and historical-cultural peculiarities of both Tsarist camps and the Gulag have shaped some of those thinkers’ views (for instance, Dostoevsky’s intellectual path was deeply influenced by his experience in the camp). Drawing upon both primary and secondary sources, this chapter aims at showing how the experience of detention in a Russian/Soviet prison camp has influenced some Russian religious thinkers such as Dostoevsky, Florensky, and Karsavin. It will also point readers’ attention to some lesser-known contributions to religious thought by philosophers, poets, and writers.

Varieties of Neopatristics

The chapter argues that the twentieth-century neopatristic theologies were not purely historical exercises, but theologically motivated enterprises. More specifically, Georges Florovsky’s ‘neopatristic synthesis’ was a response to his ‘modernist’ predecessors, such as Pavel Florensky and Sergius Bulgakov. The organizing principle of Florovsky’s neopatristics was Chalcedonian Christology. In contrast, Vladimir Lossky’s reconstruction of ‘mystical theology’ had the vision of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory Palalmas as two focal points. It is argued that Alexander Schmemann’s liturgical theology may be likewise considered as a version of neopatristic theology with the emphasis on liturgical practice, and especially the eschatological dimension of the Eucharist, as the primary locus of theologizing. Thus, neopatristic theology cannot be regarded as a monolithic entity, but as a conglomerate of distinct theological visions, each with their own methods and organizing principles, which took as their inspiration the concept of a ‘return to the Church Fathers’ and creative appropriation of patristic heritage.