After the February Revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church sought to reconstitute itself to allow broader participation of its clergy and laity in order to fulfill the aspirations of a Church reform ...movement that had begun around 1900. At the same time, the Church sought to avoid losing its traditional institutional authority in the eyes of believers. To accomplish this, broader participation had to be grounded in sobornost’ – a church ethos of traditional Orthodox catholicity or conciliarism – while avoiding political, secular, and revolutionary influences. Drawing on many church voices from 1917–1918, this paper sketches the efforts and ultimate success that the Russian Church achieved in reestablishing sobornost’ as its organizational and spiritual foundation. Specifically, it reveals how a revitalized diocesan church press, freed from pre-revolutionary censorship, expressed the widespread hopes that a conciliar church could be established through active participation of the clergy and laity, and ultimately through the convening of the long-anticipated All-Russian Church Council. Revolution in the church threatened the authority of the Holy Synod and the Preconciliar Committee that planned the Church Council. However, a significant yet relatively unknown episode – the August 1917 elections to the Council’s Presidium – as well as the writings of Sobor members themselves demonstrate how the Council succeeded in institutionalizing sobornost’ at the Council. Although this quality of sobornost’ expressed “unity in multiplicity,” it was neither quantitative nor geographical, and did not reflect class, estate, or political distinctions. Instead, it expressed a wholeness and communion of ideas that still allowed for vigorous debate.
This article analyzes the vision of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as a narrative riff on Kant’s three basic questions. The novel shows what it means to live out “What can I know?” “What ought ...we do?” and “What may we hope?” It argues that this approach, combined with a rejection of the modernist dichotomy of “faith vs. reason,” overcomes the problems many critics see in the text. Ivan lives out a “first critique materialism”; Zosima and Alyosha show how to live out a “revised second critique solidarity”; the evolution of Grushenka and Dmitri—both “different people” in the final third of the novel than they were earlier—demonstrates “what we may hope.” Dostoevsky does, despite some critics’ claims, offer realistic responses to Ivan’s profound challenges to faith in the often-excerpted chapters, “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor.” The essay suggests that the lessons the novel teaches are applicable in our own world, where grace is also fragile. Grace can be rejected, as it is by Ivan, yet also be found in and through flawed vessels like Zosima, Alyosha, Grushenka, and Dmitri.
In post-soviet Russia, sobornost’ has been a historic ideal and cultural resource that diverse actors have used in order to construct anew the nation’s dignity and status. This study analyses the ...promotion of the (imperial) culture of sobornost’ by Patriarch Kirill and Patriarch Alexy based on 36 speeches they delivered from 1993 to 2022 at the World Russian People’s Council, in a forum purposefully established to enhance the culture of sobornost’/solidarity in Russian society. The findings of a qualitative thematic analysis of the speeches identified common themes (such as ‘true historical path’), thematic changes (such as the adoption of geopolitical discourse on family), thematic emphases uniquely present at particular ‘times’ (such as at the EU enlargement of 2004), themes related to the promotion of sobornost’ at the level of the trans-national church, and its correlates—Russian state-civilization, globalization, and confrontation with the West. The findings demonstrate agreement in the messages of Patriarch Alexy and Patriarch Kirill as well as specific content and style that were articulated only by the latter. In the conclusion, we compare Kirill’s culture of sobornost’ with Roman Catholic synodality and with Russian 19th century applications of the same concept, and Kirill’s entrepreneurial construction of national identity from the perspective of glocalization.
The article briefly systematizes the main anthropological concepts of the past and present. In particular, dichotomous and trichotomous notions of the human constitution, characteristic of both ...antiquity and the Patristic era, are analyzed in detail. The author requalifies the triad of spirit — soul — body, which within Christian Anthropology is generally recognized as a vertical hierarchy, calling the triad instead the “horizontal” dimension of the human person. He also builds a “vertical” dimension, largely linked to Christian revelation, which he argues has been previously much undervalued, in this respect. The grounding of the “horizontal” dimension of the human person is based on the experience of philosophers, and Church fathers — theologians, liturgists and ascetics. The construction of the author’s hierarchical vertical line is based on the experience of Christian mystics, anthropologists and existentialists, and above all on the thought of N. A. Berdyaev. The “vertical” dimension implies a relationship between individuality, man’s ontological “face” (hypostasis) and Person (lichnost). The correlation of the two triads: 1) individuality — ontological ‘face’ — Person, and 2) spirit — soul — body, makes it possible to construct a three-dimensional representation generating a whole system of matrices that provide us with the opportunity to see the human person and human communities from various different angles. The approach presented here may serve as a basis for further theological and interdisciplinary anthropological research.
Nikolai Berdyaev’s Personalism Richard A. Hughes
International journal of Orthodox theology,
10/2015, Letnik:
6, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Odprti dostop
The author portrays Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev as a pioneer in Eastern Orthodox theology with his ideas of freedom and personality. After his deportation from the Soviet Union in 1922, ...Berdyaev expounded persona-lism in opposition to Western individualism and Marxist collecti-vism. Personality exists in the image and likeness of God, and it culminates in deification. He drew upon the Sobornost’ tradition of Russia and interpreted personality as a communion of love in contrast to reflective self-consciousness of the Augustinian tradition of Western theology.
Classical Eurasianism (yevraziystvo, 1921-late 1930s, not including Nikolai Gumilev) is a multifaceted set of teachings centered around ideas introduced by Nikolai S. Trubetskoy (1890-1938). Out of ...the multitudes of Russian emigrant thought, only classical Eurasianism offered a wholesome systematic answer to two basic questions: why did the revolutionary catastrophe of 1917 occur, and what path should Russia follow after it? This answer rests first and foremost on the teachings of Trubetskoy who, since his Europe and Humankind published in 1920, strongly opposed Eurocentrism providing a sophisticated theoretical argument for this conclusion, and insisted on Russia's returning to its self, to the inherent logic of its culture and its history. Classical Eurasianism elaborated the concept vsechelovecheskoye which had been introduced by Russian thinkers in the early nineteenth century in opposition to obshechelovecheskoye. Both notions point to the universality of the human mind, human culture, and human civilization; but there is a fundamental difference in logical vehicles used to arrive at the universal. The vsechelovecheskoye presupposes "gathering" logically diverse models without imposing any general restriction on them, while the obshechelovecheskoye is an understanding of the universal as grounded in the generic or general, which is well-known to the Western reader. A set of basic philosophic notions of classical Eurasianism related to vsechelovecheskoye include: sobornost', obshee delo (common work), demotia (direct rule of people), pravashiy otbor (ruling selection), pravda (verity), and others.
This article attempts to make a comparative analysis of the assessment of solidarity practices in the intellectual tradition in Russia and the West. In the foreign intellectual tradition, four ...paradigms are highlighted in the study of solidarity practices: sociological, philosophical, ideological and religious. The Russian intellectual tradition includes religious and ideological paradigms. In the West, sociology and philosophies have played a major role in the study of solidarity practices, in which scientific knowledge or normative knowledge has been developed and used to put social reality under control. In the Russian intellectual tradition, practices of solidarity have been given a moral or axiological dimension.
The paper examines the social philosophy of a prominent Russian thinker, Semen Frank with the aim of identifying its relations with general philosophical ideas, as well as with religious foundations ...of his thought. For these purposes, authors examine the basic concepts of Frank’s social philosophy in their interaction and connection. Based on the research, authors conclude that Frank built his social theory on the basis of the philosophy all-unity that gives primacy to the spiritual aspects of the social body over the material and empirical ones. The basic social concepts he develops are related with the two fundamental modes of the reality – ideal and empirical.
El artículo examina la filosofía social de un destacado pensador ruso, Semen Frank, con el objetivo de identificar sus relaciones con ideas filosóficas generales, así como con los fundamentos religiosos de su pensamiento. Para estos fines, los autores examinan los conceptos básicos de la filosofía social de Frank en su interacción y conexión. Con base en la investigación, los autores concluyen que Frank construyó su teoría social sobre la base de la filosofía de la unidad total que da primacía a los aspectos espirituales del cuerpo social sobre bases materiales y empíricas. Los conceptos sociales básicos que desarrolla están relacionados con los dos modos fundamentales de la realidad: ideal y empírico.
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