The Relationship between Faith and Knowledge in the Works of Mykhailo Maksymovych

Abstract

The paper deals with images of faith and knowledge in the works of Mykhailo Maksymovych, a famous botanist, folklorist, and historian of the 19th century and the first rector of the University of Saint Volodimir in Kyiv. Mykhailo Maksymovych’s way of solving the problem of the relationship between religion and science is analysed in the general context of the intellectual processes in Eastern Europe of the 19th century. The study is based on Mykhailo Maksymovych’s published works, memoirs, letters, and unpublished texts, held in the Institution of Manuscript at the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine (Kyiv). The methodological foundation is the approaches of the Cambridge School of Intellectual History, theorising on cultural memory and quantitative content analysis with MAXQDA-2022. The paper shows that Mykhailo Maksymovych’s attitude to the demarcation problem of knowledge and faith resulted from a combination of his personal religiosity and his fascination with the ideas of Friedrich Schelling. Mykhailo Maksymovych perceived the Bible as a relevant description of the “factual” dimension of human history. He represented the philosophy of the heart, widespread in Ukrainian intellectual life of that period. Maksymovych’s deep personal religiosity, combined with his theoretical ideas about the correlation between faith and knowledge, led him to the idea of Orthodox coherence between Russia and Ukraine. This was an actualisation of the early modern idea, elaborated in the Kyivan Synopsis of the late 17th century. Mykhailo Maksymovych actualised these ideas on the basis of Romanticism. Early modern ideas were close to Maksymovych’s consciousness because he was religious in the traditional Orthodox sense. Religious images of Ukraine in the works of Mykhailo Maksymovych were similar to the ideas of Konstantin Leontiev, a famous Russian conservative philosopher of the second half of the 19th century.