Christian Mysticism Research Articles

Mrs. May’s Dark Night in Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf”

Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Greenleaf” was significantly influenced by her engagement with the notion of the “dark night of the soul,” which is closely associated with the Christian mysticism of St. John of the Cross. O’Connor became familiar with the dark night through her reading of Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism not long before the composition of “Greenleaf.” The story incorporates imagery from St. John’s poem “On a Dark Night” as well as its source text, the Song of Songs chapters 2 and 3. Mrs. May, the protagonist of “Greenleaf,” undergoes a somewhat ironized version of the dark night over the course of the narrative. Her ultimate experience of mystical union is conditioned and even produced by the story’s “sacralizing” use of free indirect discourse.

Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today

Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today

Analysis of water-related metaphors within the theme of religious harmony in Swami Vivekananda’s <i>Complete Works</i>

This article focuses on the metaphors employed by Swami Vivekananda. The aim was to explain otherwise abstruse philosophical principles within the Hindu school of thought, with especial emphasis on Swami Vivekananda’s version of Advaita Vedanta, which maintains that there is no duality of existence despite the appearance of such. Using conceptual metaphor theory as a framework, and corpus linguistics as a tool, the metaphors used in Vivekananda’s Complete Works have been explored and it is concluded that he more often than not draws on the water frame to explain concepts. This is contrary to mainstream Western religions, which seem to employ primarily the family frame to conceptualise God metaphorically; this is not so within Vivekananda’s Hinduism – though he does use the said frame. Hence, Vivekananda’s water-related metaphors are analysed here under various themes, and parallels are drawn between Christian mysticism and Vivekananda’s Hinduism, showing that there are significant similarities between these two influential traditions.

Esoteric Themes in the Artistic Works of Janina Kraupe

The purpose of this article is to present the character and art of Janina Kraupe, a renowned Polish painter influenced by esoteric thought. While Theosophical concepts constitute one of the most important inspirations in her life, she borrows the concept of universal evolution from Anthroposophy, and her artistic experiments with geometric forms and the symbolism of color are influenced by astrology, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism. Kraupe searches for a common ground in all these traditions, and her art is a synthesis of religious themes.

The Early Middle Ages of Samuel Beckett

Beckett's investigations in the history of philosophy are well represented in his notebooks of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which provide a close record of his reading in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, as well as in history, literature, and psychology. Numerous scholars – Daniella Caselli, Anthony Uhlmann, Dirk Van Hulle, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman among others – have carefully delineated the relationship between Beckett's note-taking and his deployment of philosophical sources in his literary texts. Whilst the focus quite rightly tends to fall on Beckett's absorption of Presocratic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophy, there are important strands of early medieval philosophy that find expression in his literary work. The philosophy notes housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, provide insights into Beckett's reading in medieval philosophy, drawing almost exclusively from Wilhelm Windelband's History of Philosophy. The epoch spanning from Augustine to Abelard saw central concepts in theology and metaphysics develop in sophistication, such as matters of divine identity and non-identity, the metaphysics of light, and the nature of sin. The influence of the Eastern Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Maximus the Confessor) on Western metaphysics finds expression in the figuration of light and its relation to knowing and unknowing. This eastern theological inflection is evident in the ‘Dream’ Notebook, where Beckett's notes demonstrate his careful reading of William Inge's Christian Mysticism. These influences are expressed most prominently in various themes and allusions in his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, and Watt. The formal experiments and narrative self-consciousness of these early novels also respond to the early medieval transformation of textual form, where the precarious post-classical fruits of learning were preserved in new modes of encyclopaedism, commentary, and annotation. Beckett's overt display of learning in his early novels was arguably a kind of intellectual and textual preservation. But the contest of ideas in his work subsequently became less one of intellectual history and more that of immanent thinking in the process of composition itself.

Teach Us how to Pray: A Review of New Books by Episcopal Women

Teach Us How to Pray: A Review of New Books by Episcopal WomenWearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God. By Lauren F. Winner. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015. 286 pp. $24.99 (cloth).A Lot of the Way Trees Were Walking: Poems from the Gospel of Mark. By Cynthia Briggs Kittredge. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015. xv + 100 pp. $15.00 (paper).Learning to Walk in the Dark. By Barbara Brown Taylor. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014. 200 pp. $24.99 (cloth).Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution. By Diana Butler Bass. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015. 323 pp. $26.99 (cloth).In Lukes Gospel, in the days when Jesus has set his face toward Jerusalem and has begun to tell his that he must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the religious leaders and be killed and then on the third day be raised, his closest circle of followers ask him to teach them how to He had just gone off by himself to a certain place to pray, alone with God, as was his spiritual practice. His followers notice, and when Jesus finishes praying, they confess to him their need to pray as he did: Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples (Luke 11:1).I like to think that, in that moment, Jesus learned something about his vocation. From the earliest days of his public ministry, Jesus had understood the purpose of his life and ministry to be about healing and proclaiming good news. After his discernment in the wilderness, he had returned to his hometown of Nazareth and stood up in the synagogue, full of the Holy Spirit, to reveal his mission. He would teach about the reign of God, what it was like and what it could be like on earth. He would proclaim that it was coming and already very near, especially for those most in need of it, the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the oppressed. He would help to bring about the reign of God by his preaching and by his healing of lepers and paralytics, blind and deaf people, and those possessed by demons. He would also help to usher in the reign by suffering and dying. But it may not have been until this moment of expressed need, desire, and perhaps some gentle critique by his of his leadership compared with that of his cousin John the Baptist that Jesus realized his mission also was to be a teacher of prayer.He himself was a man of prayer, in close relationship with God his Father. It is no coincidence that, in Luke's Gospel, Jesus is praying in the moment of his baptism, when the heavens open and the Holy Spirit descends upon him. His prayer and his power in the Spirit for mission are interwoven. His prayer emboldens and strengthens him for proclaiming and healing. But when he commissions his also to go forth into the villages to bring the good news and cure disease of every kind, Jesus may not have realized that they needed instruction in prayer for this ministry. They needed to know how to pray as he did. They needed a relationship with God as intimate as his. When his begin to learn that the mission of Jesus also will involve suffering and death, they become more aware of their need for prayer and beg Jesus to instruct them in nurturing intimacy with God. Lord, teach us to pray. And so Jesus does, starting with the suggestion that they address God with a name of tender endearment, one used by beloved children. Abba.Because Jesus instructed others in the art of prayer, teaching people how to pray is arguably one of the mission responsibilities of the Christian community. Not everyone within the community can be a teacher of prayer, for the Holy Spirit gives gifts for all kinds of different ministries. But some are so called.Interestingly, from the veiy earliest days of Christianity to now, women as well as men have significantly participated in this mission of Jesus, from the desert mothers and fathers, to Christian mystics of the medieval age, to spiritual directors and teachers of prayer in more recent times. …

ON THE «PROPFECIES» OF HELLEN WHITE AS MODELS OF LITERARY «VISIONS» AND FUNDAMENTAL BELIEVES OF ADVENTISM

Цель исследования – проанализировать пророчества Эллен Уайт о будущем, как образцы литературных видений и основы вероучения адвентизма. Особенно репрезен- тативны в этом смысле две её книги «Опыты и видения» и «Духовные дары», которые представляют жанр «литературных видений», восходящих к В. Легленду и Данте. В них формируются вероучительные концепты современного адвентизма. Методологической базой исследования послужили: исторический пласт религиоведения, онтопсихологии, культурологии. Междисциплинарный подход позволил философско-когнитивному ана- лизу пророческих текстов Эллен Уайт подняться до уровня научного и выявить в её пророческих видениях, образцы литературно-художественного творчества. В заключении делается вывод, что большую помощь в освоении этого эксклюзивного материала оказали духовные опыты христианских мистиков: Ефрема Сирина, В. Легленда, И. Флорского, Данте, Я. Бёме, Э. Сведенборга и т. д. Это далеко неполный ряд авторов, которых можно отнести к жанру литературных видений.

Exploring Lost Dimensions in Christian Mysticism: Opening to the Mystical edited by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013, pp. 242, £60.00, hbk - Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence edited by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013, pp. 256, £65.00, hbk

Exploring Lost Dimensions in Christian Mysticism: Opening to the Mystical edited by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013, pp. 242, £60.00, hbk - Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence edited by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore, Ashgate, Farnham, 2013, pp. 256, £65.00, hbk

Nadzieja powszechnego zbawienia jako postać Bożego Miłosierdzia

The article raises the issue of hope of universal salvation, which is not knowledge, certainty about the ultimate faith of man after death, but only hope based on God’s revelation contained in the Holy Bible. A Swiss Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988), undertook in the twentieth century the matter of hope for salvation. A Lublin ecumenist Waclaw Hryniewicz (born in 1936) has been dealing with this issue in Poland for many years. This article discusses synthetically the views of both theologians in a mutual relationship. Both of them refer to the Bible talking about God as love. Such an image of God is incompatible with the vision of eternal hell as a punishment without prospects for improvement and conversion of man. The argumentations concern the philosophical and theological nature of man as a being of freedom. It also refers to the testimonies of Christian mystics and saints in favour of hope of universal salvation. This idea is located in the concept and reality of God’s mercy and converges with it.

Мистика поэзии Геннадия Айги

The article reconstructs the development of mysticism in Aigi's works – both as a theme and a poetic form – from the perspective of structural hermeneutics and “poetics of knowledge”. The course of his mystical path shows the lyrical subject as a wise man whose path leads from mystical quest through recognition of the conditio humana and the limited nature of mystical experiences to Christian mysticism of silent prayer.

A Celebration of Living Theology: A Festschrift in Honour of Andrew Louth by Justin A. Mihoc and Leonard Aldea

Reviewed by: A Celebration of Living Theology: A Festschrift in Honour of Andrew Louth by Justin A. Mihoc and Leonard Aldea Robin Darling Young Justin A. Mihoc and Leonard Aldea A Celebration of Living Theology: A Festschrift in Honour of Andrew Louth London: Bloomsbury, 2014 Pp. 260. £70.00. Throughout his career, Andrew Louth has expertly and eloquently insisted that contemporary Christian theology must constantly draw from its sources in ancient and medieval works. His thesis on Karl Barth signaled an early interest in the crisis of modern theological thinking. Two books in the early 1980s made his position clear and encouraged many like-minded readers. The Origins of the [End Page 452] Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (1981) both diagnosed and attempted to overcome the “divorce” between mystical theology (which, for Louth, held priority) and dogmatic theology. Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (1983) employed Gadamer and other philosophers in its critique of the “historical-critical method” imposed by the Enlightenment, and proposed—based on a sympathetic reading of patristic authors and some modern philosophers—that theology is “the apprehension of the believing mind combined with a right state of the heart, to use Newman’s terms. It is tested and manifest in a life that lives close to the mystery of God in Christ, that preserves for all men a testimony to that mystery which is the object of our faith, and, so far as it is discerned, awakens in the heart a sense of wondering awe which is the light in which we see light” (147). Both works, and many subsequent monographs, articles and editions, established Louth as both a thoughtful and eloquent theological critic of modernity, a guide to the sympathetic reading of and guidance by the fathers of the church, and an heir to an earlier learned English divine, John Wesley. Thanks to his early works, Louth gained many admirers across the spectrum of Christian thinkers, particularly among those who valued the earlier proposals of Catholic ressourcement scholars such as Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou. His conversion to Russian Orthodoxy increased his appeal to Eastern Orthodox thinkers, as well. That rare scholar of early Christian texts who is also familiar with Byzantine theology and fully conversant with modern philosophical and theological works, his turn to Orthodoxy enabled this Festschrift. The book has five parts. Each one reflects Louth’s double concern—of examining in detail the development of particular thinkers or movements in eastern orthodox thought, and of engaging them to reflect critically upon contemporary views. For instance, in the first part, Thomas Graumann takes up the question of the Council of Ephesus’s nuanced reception of the Nicene Creed, while John Behr begins his essay entitled “Reading the Fathers Today” by following in the footsteps of Louth: regretting the limitations of the critical-historical, socially-contextualized reading of early Christian thinkers and proposing alternatively their appreciative reception based in the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion. Three essays treat the Byzantine period: Mary Cunningham traces the reception of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in eighth-century Byzantine theologians; Krastu Banev the expansion of thought on the themes of the church and the Virgin Mary in Byzantine psalmody and hymns; and Jane Baun surveys and recommends the neglected, “more modest lights” of Byzantine theology between the deaths of John of Damascus in 749 and Gregory Palamas in 1359. In the book’s third part, “Dialogue Between East and West,” a huge, 53-page essay by John Milbank compares the Christian reception of Platonism in eastern and western Christianity and resolves their apparently opposed views of final beatitude, while Augustine Casiday proposes Boethius was not merely a philosopher, but a theologian. Parts four and five of the book move to the modern period. In “Modern Theology,” Antoine Arjakovsky outlines alternative historiographies of Orthodoxy, particularly in light of the Orthodox school of Paris; Paul Gavrilyuk describes the relationship between Vladimir Lossky and Georges [End Page 453] Florovsky, both exiled Russians formed in the Parisian community and eager to represent Orthodoxy in and to the West. The final section is “The Future of Patristics”; in “Patristics after Neo-Patristics” Cyril Horovun allows...

Ecology and its Spiritual Significance: a Christian Reading

The present paper is based on the contention that there are two conceptions of the understanding of nature, nature as an object and nature as environment. The former understanding of nature is enhanced by instrumental rationality, which is said to be the cause of ecological crisis. It is shown in the paper that till the nineteenth century, Christian scholars and theologians have neither judged nature according to human utility (instrumental rationality) nor have they made earthly man as the measure of all things. They have considered man as a channel of grace for nature because man only can cast light into the world of nature through his active participation. This excellence was distinctively evident in some of the Christian saints, mystics, and theologians like Origen, Irenaeus, St. Bonaventure, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Aropagite, and St. Francis of Assisi. For them, nature was sacred and there was a definite disdain of the artificialities of sedentary life. According to them, species is the manifold ideas in the divine mind which at a particular cosmic moment have become imprinted in the corporeal world and retain their reality on other planes of existence. In a word, the present paper argues for re-inventing the spiritual significance of nature by the humanization of the cosmos and the cosmicization of the human because the foundations of Christian tradition were built on a relation among man, God, and the cosmos where the unity and multiplicity in nature is related to the concept of Trinity in Christianity as well as to the cosmic character of Christ.

L’excès cruciforme. Stanislas Breton et la théologie mystique chrétienne

This essay offers a reading of Stanislas Breton’s Deux mystiques de l’excès : J.-J. Surin et Maître Eckhart. It identifies three interrelated types of cruciform excess that appear in this book. “Cruciform excess” is a general name for certain permanently troubling and irreconciliable tensions that shape Christian (and other kinds of) mystical experience and that stand under the shadow of the cross. There is a polarity between the one and the many, a boundary-blurring relation between God and creation, and a struggle between the divine and the demonic. Breton’s discussion of these three types of cruciform excess manifests his distinctive contribution to philosophical and theological debates regarding the enduring significance of Christian mysticism today.

Transmissions and Transitions in Indian Oral Traditions: An Introduction

Transmissions and Transitions in Indian Oral Traditions: An Introduction Kirin Narayan To assemble a group is to invite conversation. The essays that come together in this special issue of Oral Tradition all arrive bearing insights cultivated through extended engagements with very different settings. Settling into this shared space, the essays speak resonantly to each other. They cluster around shared themes, circulate in paired dialogues, and also stand back to offer the others distinctive perspectives. Many special issues that this journal has hosted first emerged from a conference where participants met face-to-face and heard each other’s ideas. This set of contributors assembles together for the first time with the journal’s publication. I imagine that my fellow authors will be just as intrigued as I have been to learn what others have written, and to contemplate these six essays as a sociable group. I use this introductory space to offer notes on conversations that I perceive; a discerning reader will no doubt pick up on others. But first I need to establish the wider setting of the vast diversity of Indian oral traditions that stretches beyond these contributions, and indeed stretches beyond the boundaries of modern India into the Indian diaspora. The work of these six scholars cannot possibly convey the many regions, languages, religions, and genres of traditional performance that contribute to India’s cultural vibrancy. The many planes of differentiation within India offer the dynamic for variation set into motion when oral traditions move between regions. Power differentials also shed light on the standardization that occurs when dominant groups dictate tastes. Such dominance is variously embodied in the authoritative clout of Brahmanical or puranic Hindu texts and practices, the prestige of middle class values, and the mesmerizing power and spread of technological mediation. Especially since the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 and the growth of a vast middle class, oral traditions have been revalued through a middle-class lens—some traditions embraced with nostalgia, others discarded as outmoded. The push towards greater literacy in formally recognized languages over sometimes unwritten dialects has also meant that non-literate forms of knowledge carried in regional dialects can be seen as quaint and irrelevant. That approximately half of the population of about 1.28 billion is age 26 or younger means that traditions associated with the vanished life worlds of elders can be less captivating than contemporary cultural forms centered around youth’s concerns and carried by film, television, and the internet. The hard-won knowledge of lower caste specialists in ritual and oral tradition, as well as the informally communicated oral traditions of the poor, the nonliterate and the old, can seem detached from the goals of getting ahead amid increasing urbanization, industrialization, and the spread of technology. In terms of region, these essays mostly present oral traditions from sites in north India, in a big band stretching from Rajasthan towards Bengal--with the exception of Flueckiger’s fieldwork location in Andhra Pradesh and Prasad’s use of a story from Karnataka. The essays’ cultural resonances also extend beyond India with Prasad’s counterpoint between Shakespeare and Indian folktales and Friedlander’s description of how Kabir song traditions have been recast in the West. With languages, the group tilts towards Hindi and North Indian languages—with Flueckiger, working in Telugu, offering the exception. At the same time, the medium of English used to convey the authors’ thoughts about oral traditions and to discuss preexisting translations and scholarly literature is a reminder of the ways that the English language has since colonial times onwards become an aspect of Indian orality. In terms of religion, the contributions offer insights into the practices associated with Hinduism whether in localized variation or in pan-Indian standardization, though Friedlander’s account of the diverse audiences for Kabir illustrates how Kabir also belongs to Muslim and Sikh communities and is even appropriated by mystical Christianity. And in terms of folklore genres, the essays offer examples of myths, legends, folktales, songs and proverb. The essays at first glance fall into two groups: those that highlight oral traditions in the context of ritual life (Flueckiger, Gold, Sharma) and those that focus on the mutual...

Religious belief in a secular age: Literary modernism and Virginia Woolf'sMrs. Dalloway

This article explores Virginia Woolf's conflicted relationship with Christianity, namely, her avowed atheism and hostility to religious dogma, yet her openness to mystical experience and her use of the language of Christian mysticism in her writing. In particular, Woolf's critique of secularism in her novel Mrs. Dalloway remains open at some level to Christian beliefs and values. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique reveals the soul as a “sacred” space or “sanctuary,” and her allusions to Christ in the character of Septimus Smith, and less obviously Clarissa Dalloway, suggest yearning for answers to human suffering in a “godless” world. In the end, however, the modernist effort to “sacralize” human goodness does not resolve deeper theological issues at stake in the novel, which Christianity locates in the doctrine of the fall and God's redemptive work in Christ.

Bridging the Void: New Interpretations of Christian Mysticism and Mystical Theology

AbstractThere is currently a welcome intensification of interest in the contemporary theological significance of both historical traditions of mystical theology and twentieth‐century theories of mysticism. This review article surveys and evaluates the stimulating range of approaches to these two issues contained in the essays in these volumes. It suggests that the volumes make evident the difficulty of attempting to uncover an underlying conceptual unity in these two historically entangled but deeply different forms of thought. The historical and philosophical sophistication with which many of these essays reflect on these tensions, however, points towards fruitful lines of future enquiry.

Gender, mysticism, and enthusiasm in the British post-Reformation

The seventeenth century is seen as a watershed in the history of Western Christian mysticism, marking its development as a distinct ‘science’, and the separation of spheres distancing academic theology from spirituality, a divorce which clearly has gendered dimensions. This article explores that shift in the British context. First, it considers the resurgence of mystical currents in the turbulent crisis of authority in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. The conclusion is that gender played a central role in the Anglican-rationalist reaction against ‘enthusiasm’, and the pathologizing of mystical divinity as a form of melancholy. Second, there is discussion of the doctrine of revelation expounded by two female mystics (the Benedictine nun, Gertrude More, and the Franco-Flemish spiritualist, Antoinette Bourignon) and their supporters.

Augustine's Paradigm 'ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora' in the Western and Eastern Christian Mysticism

I argue that St. Augustine of Hippo was the first in the history of Christian spirituality who expressed a key tendency of Christian mysticism, which implies a gradual intellectual ascent of the human soul to God, consisting of the three main stages: external, internal, and supernal. In this ascent a Christian mystic proceeds from the knowledge of external beings to self-knowledge (from outward to inward), and from his inner self to direct mystical contemplation of God (from inward to higher). Similar doctrines may be found in the writings of the Greek Fathers (Great Cappadocians, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, etc.). Although there are many similarities in the overall doctrine and in particular details between them, it does not imply the direct impact of Augustine’s theological thought on the Greek Fathers but rather the influence of the Neoplatonic philosophy on both Western and Eastern Christianity, in particular, of Plotinus’ theory of intellectual cognition.

Michelangelo’s Christian Mysticism: Spirituality, Poetry, and Art in Sixteenth-Century Italy

In this book, Sarah Rolfe Prodan examines the spiritual poetry of Michelangelo in light of three contexts: the Catholic Reformation movement, Renaissance Augustinianism, and the tradition of Italian religious devotion. Prodan combines a literary, historical, and biographical approach to analyze the mystical constructs and conceits in Michelangelo's poems, thereby deepening our understanding of the artist's spiritual life in the context of Catholic Reform in the mid-sixteenth century. Prodan also demonstrates how Michelangelo's poetry is part of an Augustinian tradition that emphasizes mystical and moral evolution of the self. Examining such elements of early modern devotion as prayer, lauda singing, and the contemplation of religious images, Prodan provides a unique perspective on the subtleties of Michelangelo's approach to life and to art. Throughout, Prodan argues that Michelangelo's art can be more deeply understood when considered together with his poetry, which points to a spirituality that deeply informed all of his production.

The Divine Feminine in the Silver Age of Russian Culture and Beyond: Vladimir Soloviev, Vasily Rozanov and Dmitry Merezhkovsky

The so-called Silver Age of Russian culture saw a revived interest in unorthodox religious ideas and new ways of thinking about the divine. The religious philosophy of this era was influenced by three thinkers who stressed the importance of the Divine Feminine: philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, journalist Vasily Rozanov, and novelist Dmitry Merezhkovsky. While Soloviev’s “sophiology” was a Russian continuation of a long tradition of Christian mysticism, Rozanov overtly appealed to preChristian Pagan images of the Divine Feminine as necessary for modern humans, while Merezhkovsky envisioned a synthesis of Christian and Pagan views in his “Third Covenant” theology. Later in the twentieth century we see in Russia and among Russian émigrés new religious movements with a stress on images of the Divine Feminine, which could have been suggested by Silver Age religious philosophy (the Roerichs’ “Living Ethics,” Gleb Botkin’s Church of Aphrodite, Daniil Andreyev’s “Rose of the World,” and Russian and Ukrainian NRMs of the 1990s). The present essay outlines the main traits of the Divine Feminine as it formed among the three Silver Age philosophers, and how their ideas may have influenced Russian alternative religion.