World religions. Рахимбергенова М.Х. - 37 стр.

siastical establishment than was Solovyov, yet they too pursued concerns that                A further effect of the Russians’ concern with the ethical dimension has
were religious and philosophical. The spiritual aspirations of the laity represent     been the relative paucity of reflection on legal structures and systems and their
a singularly important element in Russian religious philosophy, and the laity’s        role in social organization. That imbalance between the ethical and the legal has
fateful encounter in the mid-nineteenth century with west European secular             been referred to variously as ethical maximalism and legal nihilism, eticheskiy
ideas, radical socialism and utopianism was recorded in fictional form by Fedor        maximalism and pravovoy nigilism. It has numerous variants among religious
Dostoevskii (1821–1881), whose contribution to religious thought is likely to          and secular thinkers, notably among the Slavophiles, and rests upon the notion
endure longer than the influence of some Russian figures usually deemed theo-          that ethical imperatives can be understood by the innermost and vital side of the
logians and philosophers.                                                              human personality, whereas legal norms are imposed from outside and not in-
      Russian religious philosophy is distinctive in its reflections on All-Unity or   frequently conflict with the individual citizen’s intuition of what is morally ac-
Pan-Unity (Russian: vseedinstvo). Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, Pavel            ceptable. In their own different ways Dostoevskii and Tolstoy subscribed to this
Florensky, Semyon Frank (1877–1950) and Lev Karsavin (1882–1952) were                  understanding of the relationship between ethics and law, and their ideas on this
the philosophers most concerned with this area of speculation. Based on a close        subject could justifiably be cited as instances of ethical maximalism.
reading of a large body of esoteric literature, including the works of the seven-            Compared to philosophical traditions in other countries, the Russian tradi-
teenth-century German mystic Jakob Boehme, the Russian philosophers’ pur-              tion has placed relatively little emphasis upon epistemology as distinct from
pose was to express the interrelatedness and interdependence of all forms of ex-       other branches of philosophy. In part, this is because Russians tended to value a
istence. They recognized this insight as expressed in iconographic form within         broader synthesis of knowledge, in which faith also played a role, and worked
their own spiritual tradition, and sought means to articulate it in a coherent and     in the spirit of German philosophers such as Friedrich Schelling. The tendency
organic synthesis of theological, philosophical and scientific speculation. The        towards system-building was, however, firmly resisted by Lev Shestov, whose
title of Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of Truth (1914) reveals the           critical articles on Spinoza, Solovyov, Tolstoy and other figures put in question
spirit and scope of the enterprise.                                                    the very nature of the relationship between faith and reason and strongly denied
      For Solovyov, Bulgakov and Florensky in particular All-unity was closely         the applicability of reason to the domain of religion. Shestov brought out the
bound up with Sophia, the personification of DIVINE WISDOM, and the atten-             contrast by juxtaposing what he called the values of Athens and the values of
dant symbolism they traced in the mystical literature from which they drew in-         Jerusalem; he heavily favoured “the God of Abraham and Isaac” rather than the
spiration. Other thinkers in Russia (notably Semyon Frank) were less attracted         abstract “God” of the philosophers and system-builders.
to the Sophianic motif but nevertheless retained a strong emphasis upon the                  In the 1970s and 1980s, but especially since the demise of the Soviet Un-
interrelatedness and interdependence of all forms of life. Their Slavophile pre-       ion in 1991, there has been a very marked resurgence of interest among Rus-
cursors, and notably Alexei KHOMIAKOV (1804–1860), had underlined the                  sians in this entire tradition of religious-philosophical speculation. The early
importance in orthodox spirituality of sobornost, that is, the communality-in-         1990s have seen the publication in accessible editions of works by virtually all
freedom of believers in Christ.                                                        the noteworthy Russian philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
      Other prominent characteristics of Russian religious philosophy in the           Furthermore, this interest is reflected in scholarly and ecclesiastical journals. It
nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been its anthropocentric nature and,           remains to be seen whether this tradition of thought can or will become truly as-
arising from this, its preoccupation with the application of ethical principles at     similated by a wider public whose education was completed in the years of So-
all levels of the organization of society. This overriding concern has rendered        viet rule.
some philosophical schemes particularly susceptible to utopianism, but, on the
other hand, Russian philosophers have also proved able to discern the negative                                            Russian sects
aspects of utopian thinking. Nikolai BERDIAEV (1874-1948), whose works in                   Collective name conventionally given to a number of religious movements,
English, French and German translations reached a readership beyond his coun-          the oldest of which, the Khlysty or Khristovoverie, goes back to the seventeenth
try and his place of exile, achieved fame largely through his writings on the          century, the same period as the origin of the OLD BELIEVERS. Khlysty sought
false nature of secular utopias and of the social experiment then being con-           Christ’s spirit in the depths of their own souls rather than the rituals of the Or-
ducted in the Soviet Union.                                                            thodox Church, whose doctrine, traditions and authority they rejected, follow-
                                                                                       ing leaders they called “Christs”. In the early centuries Khlysty and other sec-

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