РУССКИЙ СПИРИТУАЛИЗМ КАК РЕЛИГИОЗНЫЙ ФЕНОМЕН ВТОРОЙ ПОЛОВИНЫ XIX - НАЧАЛА XX В.

Abstract

The aim of the article is to characterize Russian modern spiritualism movement as a religious phenomenon of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The article offers answers to the following questions: it meditates upon the relation of esoterism and religion in the debate about the religious nature of modern spiritualism; it proposes the necessary distinction between occultism and spiritualism in relation to the position of Christian spiritualists; it posits spiritualism as a phenomenon of both religious modernism and fundamentalism in the light of the conflict between the universalist oriented spiritualist metaphysics and the national oriented tradition; it asserts the typology of Russian Christian spiritualism and gives account of its connections/correlations/synthesis with orthodoxy as lived religion in the Russian Empire. The central thesis of the article suggests that Christian spiritualism should be researched in the context of Christian tradition, as a means of its religious renewal and, more broadly, as one of the Christian reformation movements