Religious humanism in the Russian Silver Age

Abstract

In European history, originally denoted an intellectual and cultural movement, based on the study of Latin and Greek texts, that began in the Renaissance. There are secular humanists and religious humanists. The religious philosophers of the Russian Silver Age were humanists. Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovskii was a seminal thinker in the development of Russian religious humanism who posed many of its key themes. Merezhkovskii's search for a new faith began in the late 1880s and was an outgrowth of his loss of faith in Russian populism. The major tenets of Merezhkovskii's Christian humanism were the need for religious faith, the concepts of personhood and Godmanhood, the inadequacy of surrogate religions, and a forthcoming Third Revelation. Most religious humanists advocated an activist Christianity, one that would really transform the world. Many of them also linked human agency with creativity.