Coates , Ruth Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917 (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 337 another draft or buy another horse. One is inclined to second Blaisdell’s suspicion that ‘Tolstoy had more vitality while depressed than most of us do when we’re fine’ (p. 190). University of Exeter Muireann Maguire Coates, Ruth. Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2019. xi + 232 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £65.00. In the fall of 2011, as I was trying to settle on a topic for my first monograph, I mentioned to two colleagues that I might write a book about the idea of deification in late imperial Russia. My colleagues gently warned me away from the topic, suggesting that deification (obozhenie, sometimes obozhestvlenie) was too pervasive and too deeply ingrained in Russian Orthodox thought and culture to be captured in a single volume. Although I heeded their advice, Ruth Coates’s excellent new study, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905–1917, demonstrates that such a book can be written well, succinctly, and to great effect. But that is not all that Coates accomplishes here. By focusing on ‘the deification narrative’ (passim) of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florenskii, Coates establishes a historical fact that had escaped me a decade ago. Far from being pervasive and deeply ingrained, the concept and practice of deification became meaningful to a handful of Russian thinkers only in the last decades of the imperial period — that is, at a moment when Russian literary and intellectual culture was being reconfigured by a ‘diverse range of [modernist] sources’ (p. 4), such as Marxism, Symbolism and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, by renewed interest in Christian mysticism and philosophical idealism, and by millenarian and eschatological expectations that old Russia was coming to ‘a catastrophic end’ (p. 2), all of which, in the context of war and revolution, informed what Coates calls ‘the deification spectrum’ (p. 14) of Russian religious thought. This emphasis on historicity, contingency and variety is complemented by Coates’s awareness that deification had a fitful, almost accidental, provenance in imperial Russia, despite the fact that it had long resonated in patristic and Byzantine theology (ch. 1). It was some time in the mid nineteenth century, as part of a much larger translation and exegetical project spearheaded by the Metropolitan of Moscow, that the Greek term theosis entered the vernacular, and then only sporadically. The idea of deification initially remained within the confines of ecclesiastical and academic Orthodoxy, where it found some traction in sermons, speeches and studies about Christology, liturgy, SEER, 99, 2, APRIL 2021 338 sacramental theology and Christian anthropology, as well as in monastic practices of hesychasm, eldership (starchestvo) and asceticism (pp. 56–63). It also occasionally informed Russian myths about a sacred ruler (pp. 64–68). This exclusivity began to dissolve in the 1870s, when Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Solov´ev deployed variants of the deification narrative to resolve what they considered to be a host of social, political, epistemological and moral problems generated by philosophical materialism and revolutionary atheism (pp. 68–81). It was from this broad, highly variegated context that Merezhkovskii, in concert with Zinaida Gippius and Dmitrii Filosofov, developed his understanding of deification as the erotic practice of creative celibacy and the political practice of anarchic theocracy (ch. 3); that Berdiaev formulated an extra-ecclesial, mystical reading of deification as the creative task by which humans spiritualize material existence (ch. 4); that Bulgakov interpreted economic activity as the eschatological practice of deifying nature and matter (ch. 5); and that Florenskii grounded his eschatological vision of deified humanity in Orthodox asceticism and mysticism (ch. 6). What bound these divergent currents together were ‘their commitment to Christ as the risen Saviour of humankind’ (p. 14) and their shared desire to overcome biological death. It is difficult to find fault with Coates’s impressive account of how and why deification took the various forms it did in late imperial Russia. Nor can a brief review do justice to the vitality and complexity of the deification narrative developed by Merezhkovskii, Berdiaev, Bulgakov and Florenskii. Instead, I want to draw out some of the implications of Deification in Russian Religious Thought...