Abstract
ABSTRACT The article analyses the idealist dimension of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian religious thought as it appears in key works by Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900), Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) and Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948). Under the impact of Schelling in particular, these thinkers took religious experience and human consciousness as a starting point for their projects. On the one hand, the article shows that this had a very significant impact also on the way in which they approached classical religious themes. More specifically, it examines how the transmission of idealist philosophy from Western Europe to Russia led to a reinterpretation in the works of these thinkers of certain themes of the Orthodox heritage as well as everyday cultural practices. On the other hand, it points to significant parallels between Russian religious idealism and idealist theology in the West, most notably Paul Tillich. Thus, the transfer of ideas from its Schellingian origin to Russia becomes, the article claims, an example of universalisation, in this case of Shellingian idealism, through the active use and application of ideas and concepts in new contexts.
Highlights
The article analyses the idealist dimension of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian religious thought as it appears in key works by Vladimir Solov’ev (1853–1900), Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) and Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948)
The analysis below aims to contribute to the understanding of Russian religious thought as part of a broader transcultural nineteenth- and twentieth-century current of idealist theology, whose foundational text is the philosophy of Schelling
In order to explore this theme I will offer a reading of three classical works in Russian religious thought: Vladimir Solov’ev’s Lectures on Divine Humanity (1878), Sergei Bulgakov’s Philosophy of Economy (1912) and Nikolai Berdiaev’s The Meaning of Creativity (1916)
Summary
In 1919, at a meeting of the Kant Society in Berlin, Tillich read a lecture that bore the title ‘theology of culture’. 10 The published version has been regarded as ‘Tillich’s most important piece of writing’[11] and formulates arguably the main idea of his intellectual legacy. Depth, significance, culture is ‘theonomous’ – an expression of God understood as the unconditioned, or Being-itself.[14] Its ultimate goal is the ethical community, or the ‘church’ – a notion that for Tillich likewise includes the secular world. Tillich opens his 1919 speech by defining theology of culture as a Kulturwissenschaft. The focus is on explicit religious expressions and on the historical legacy of religion, i.e. the duration of the religious past into the present, for instance through the use of concepts of religious origin in new cultural situations. They were explicit about their confidence in the power of human thought in general to shape reality
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