Nationalist War Commentary as Russian Religious Thought: The Religious Intelligentsia's Politics of Providentialism

Abstract

Exploring the prominent role that the concept of Providence played in the worldview of Russian religious philosophers including Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Ern, Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, and the Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov, this article demonstrates that their Christian Providentialist thinking was inherently political. One significant expression of these intellectuals' “politics of Providentialism” was the controversial commentary they produced on the First World War, which must be confronted and construed as operating within the discourse of Russian religious philosophy. Examining the concept of Providence represents a new approach to the study of Russian religious philosophy as Christian ideology, one that highlights the social significance of Russian religious philosophy in late imperial Russian civil society and that allows us to situate Russian religious thought in international and interconfessional comparative perspective, as one part of a broader twentieth‐century European and American manifestation of politicized traditionalist Christianity that arose in response to the perceived cultural threat of nihilism.