Bakhtin and the Orthodox Christian tradition

Abstract

This paper explores motifs from the Orthodox Christian tradition in the works of the famous Russian philosopher Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. The introduction offers a series of testimonies from the thinker?s personal life that confirm his affinity toward Christianity and Russian Orthodoxy, and the source of this affinity is linked to his ethnic origin, spiritual environment and the literary-philosophic tradition in which he was intellectually shaped. After presenting a few universal Christian ideas in his works - the comparison of the relationship between the author and the hero with the relationship between the Creator and His human creation, incarnation and the word (logos) - this paper points to the specifically Orthodox ideas in his writings. Those are: perichoresis or the mutual permeation of the two natures of Christ, the holiness of the body and the apophatic approach in theology, the buffoon as a fool for Christ?s sake, and communality as the essence of the existence of the Church. Finally, Bakhtin?s central idea, dialogism, is presented as a means used on the path toward divinization, or theosis, the basic characteristic of Christian spiritual life in the Orthodox East.