‘BREATHING THE SPIRIT WITH BOTH LUNGS’: DEIFICATION IN THE WORK OF VLADIMIR SOLOV'EV by Jeremy Pilch, Peeters, Leuven, 2018, pp. x + 249, €78.00, pbk.

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (1090) ◽  
pp. 744-746
Author(s):  
HYACINTHE DESTIVELLE
Keyword(s):  
2021 ◽  
pp. 21-156
Author(s):  
Anastasya G. Gacheva ◽  

The chapter analyses Fyodor Dostoevsky’s artistic theology within the context of the tradition of the moral interpretation of dogmas, which developed in Russia during the 19th and the first third of the 20th century. A typical feature of this tradition was the desire to bridge the gap between the temple and the outside of it, between dogmatics and ethics, making the truth of faith the rule of life. The Author shows the development of the idea of the unity of dogmas and commandments in the works of Aleksey Khomiakov, Ivan Kireevsky, Nikolay Fedorov, Vladimir Solov’ev, metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky), while simultaneously drawing parallels with Dostoevsky. The work takes into account Dostoevsky’s understanding of two main dogmas of Christianity: the dogma of Trinity and the two-natures dogma. The unconfused and inseparable unity of the Divine hypostases appears in Dostoevsky as an image of perfect interaction between personalities, a rule for social relations, a model of all-encompassing unity of humanity, where the right of personality is reconciled with the right of the whole. Two diary fragments dated 1864 — “Masha is lying on the table…” and “Socialism and Christianity” — are analyzed from the point of view of the Trinitarian question. Dostoevsky holds that when a personality moves towards another and enters in a relation “I” — “you”, considering the other as a face and not as a function, thus giving something to rather than taking something from the other, this personality realizes in his life the mystery of Trinity, professing it in deeds not only in words. Atomicity, antinomy, dualism are corruptions of the Trinitarian principle, while its realization is the idea of “an expanding family, a society-Church, a world that is temple. The Christology of Dostoevsky is analyzed. It is shown that Dostoevsky’s perception of Christ as “the ideal of man in flesh” should be understood not in the context of utopian thought, but as a manifestation of the idea of the deification of man, as expressed in the patristic aphorism: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God”. The essay shows how the assertion of the equality of Christ’s two natures, Divine and human, affects Dostoevsky’s anthropology and historiosophy. Views of the writer’s contemporaries, as well as of other 20th-Century philosophers and theologians who developed the idea of a moral interpretation of the dogma of Trinity and of the Divine-humanity of Christ (archimandrite Fedor (Bukharev), bishop Ioann (Sokolov), Nikolay Fedorov, Vladimir Solov’ev, archimandrite Antony (Khrapovitsky), Viktor Nesmelov, Sergey Bulgakov, Boris Vysheslavtsev, Nikolay Lossky, Aleksandr Gorsky, Mother Maria (Elizaveta Kuz’mina- Karavaeva)) are considered.


Author(s):  
Randall A. Poole

In 1911 the Moscow Psychological Society celebrated the accomplishments of Lev Lopatin, a major Russian idealist and personalist philosopher. Lopatin was lauded for his chairmanship of the Psychological Society, the oldest learned society ‘uniting the philosophical forces of Russia’, and for his contributions to Russian philosophy: to the critique of positivism, to the development of Russian philosophical language and the history of philosophy in Russia, to the defence of idealism through his theories of ‘creative causation’ and the soul’s substantiality, to philosophical psychology, and to the strength and independence of Russian philosophic culture. Twenty-five years earlier the appearance of the first volume of Lopatin’s main work, Polozhitel’nye zadachi filosofii (The Positive Tasks of Philosophy), was indeed a milestone in the philosophical revolt against positivism and the development of Russian neo-idealism. In this and subsequent works Lopatin advanced his ‘system of concrete spiritualism’. His idea of the person as an ontologically grounded spiritual entity relates him to Leibniz’s monadology, and he is regarded as one of the main representatives of ‘neo-Leibnizianism’ in Russia, following Aleksei Kozlov. Another source of his ideas was his long-time friend the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solov’ëv, despite certain philosophical differences between them.


Quaestio ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 391-394
Author(s):  
Frederic Tremblay
Keyword(s):  

Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanna Soojung Lim

In this essay, Susanna Soojung Lim examines the philosopher Vladimir Solov'ev's representation of China and Japan in his theory of Pan- Mongolism. Emerging at the disjuncture between Solov'ev's ecumenism and the geopolitical realities of contemporary history, Pan-Mongolism was a creation onto which the philosopher projected his anxiety and disillusionment at the failure of his vision. Lim begins by surveying Russian perceptions of East Asia before the 1850s and situating Solov'ev within the popular discourse of the “yellow peril.” Discussing how Solov'ev recapitulates previous notions of this east, she considers Pan-Mongolism in terms of an acute Russian response to the historical and cultural changes originating in China and Japan at a period when the modernization of these nations was challenging the existing relationship between, and indeed the very categories of, east and west. A hybrid construct shaped by Russian occidentalism as well as orientalism, Pan-Mongolism is an idea that reveals both the strength and weakness of Solov'ev's Utopian universalism.


Slavic Review ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Gaut

If my entire argument could fit under this rubric: Russia is a Christian nation andthereforeshould always act in a Christian way, my opponents’ argument can be expressed in the following formula: The Russian nation…is the only truly Christian nation, butnevertheless,it should act in a pagan way in all of its affairs.—Vladimir Solov'ev, Preface toThe National Question in Russia, Part II(1891)In the 1880s and 1890s, Vladimir Solov'ev worked out a Christian approach to nations and nationality, and a moral critique of nationalism, while waging a polemical battle against the Russian conservative nationalists of his day. His ideas emerged primarily from his own social gospel theology, but they were marked by both the Slavophile romanticism of his early career and the western liberalism of his later years. Solov'ev is most often treated as a philosopher, a mystic, or a literary figure, and as a result, his journalistic writings on nationalism and other topics have often been overlooked by scholars, even though they constitute at least a third of his published output.


1997 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt
Keyword(s):  

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