Поиски «истинного христианства» в истории русской религиозной мысли

Abstract

This article explores the meaning of the quest for true Christianity in Russian philosophy as well as their critique of the traditional church Christianity. Russian thinkers acknowledged traditional Christianity to be false mainly because of the introduction in it of Judaic elements which radically distorted the true teachings of Jesus Christ. These elements essentially were: the concept of an anthropomorphic God; the concept of Creation; and the concept of the Fall. Russian philosophers borrowed their critical attitude towards historical Christianity from the German philosophy of the early 19th century and primarily from Fichte’s late religious and philosophical teaching. The analysis of the Russian thinkers’ views allows us to assert that they considered as true Christianity the religious tradition that Church persecuted as a Gnostic heresy. In the Gnostic version of Christianity, God is understood as an apophatic Absolute, having no attributes; instead, God epitomizes the deep essence of man and manifests Himself in the earthly world in the form of human people. This article demonstrates that, in this case, the meaning of human life consists of the maximum complete realization of God through that life, and the meaning of the history of mankind lies in the construction of the kingdom of God on earth. In this regard, the philosophical ideas of Pyotr Chaadaev and Fyodor Dostoevsky are considered as the exact expression of this tradition of Gnostic Christianity. The analysis of their works, in fact, reveals that both thinkers criticized the religiosity of Church. Consequently, any debate on how close their views were to Catholicism or to Orthodoxy – and such debates certainly occupied a large place in contemporary literary research – is of very little importance for a real assessment of their views.