Deification in Russian Religious Thought

Abstract

Deification in Russian Religious Thought is a study of the reception of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) doctrine of deification by Russian religious thinkers of the immediate pre-revolutionary period. Deification is the metaphor that the Greek patristic tradition came to privilege in its articulation of the Christian concept of salvation: to be saved is to be deified, that is, to share in the divine attribute of immortality. The central thesis of this book is that between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Russian religious thinkers turned to deification in their search for a response to the imminent destruction of the Russian autocracy (and the social and religious order that supported it), that was commensurate with its perceived apocalyptic significance. Contextual chapters set out the parameters of the Greek patristic understanding of deification and the reception of the idea in nineteenth-century Russian religious culture, literature, and thought. Then, four major works by prominent thinkers of the Russian Religious Renaissance are analysed, demonstrating the salience of the deification theme and exploring the variety of forms of its expression. In these works by Merezhkovsky, Berdiaev, Bulgakov, and Florensky, deification is taken out of its original theological context and applied respectively to politics, creativity, economics, and asceticism: this is presented as a modernist endeavour. Nevertheless their common emphasis on deification as a project, a practice that should deliver the ontological transformation and immortalization of human beings, society, culture, and the material universe, whilst likewise modernist, is also what connects them to deification’s theological source.