Religious and moral developments in Russian literature and philosophy

Although literary giants Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and religious philosophers Soloviev and Leontiev, shared no unified ideological platform, they all belonged to a group of intellectuals who opposed political radicalism and sharply criticized the inadequacies and shortcomings of materialism and positivism.

The revival of metaphysical Idealism in the 1880s is associated primarily with the name of Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), poet, theologian and mystic as well as the most systematic Russian philosopher. The Orthodox quest for wholeness, reflected in the Slavophile teaching, culminated in Soloviev’s work that attempted to demonstrate how faith and reason, religious belief and speculative philosophy all contribute to the inner unity of the intellectual world. Drawing extensively from both Eastern and Western intellectual and spiritual traditions, Soloviev managed to offer a truly remarkable philosophico-mystical synthesis of religion, philosophy and science. His aesthetics and

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theory of knowledge were inspired by Schelling, while his metaphysics and philosophy of history exhibited strong influence of Spinoza and Hegel. In his writings on Russia’s national destiny Soloviev spoke of the integration of the human spirit with God in history, but at the end of his life he abandoned this relatively optimistic view of historical process and formulated an apocalyptic vision of a historical disaster of cosmic proportions. Soloviev’s idea of ‘Godmanhood’ and his mystical visions of Sophia (‘divine wisdom’, or the World Soul), through which he attempted to articulate the common metaphysical ground of divine and created existence, laid foundation for the future development of Russian religious philosophy and gave rise to the school of Russian symbolist poets and thinkers of the early twentieth century. In contrast with contemporary revolutionaries, Soloviev believed in a liberal theocracy that would unite people under the spiritual rule of the Pope and the secular rule of the Russian Tsar.

The great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), opposed political radicalism from a perspective of what he saw as true Christianity, that is, the ideal of universal love, brotherhood and non-violent resistance to evil. The profound influence of Rousseau is evident in Tolstoy’s overall anti-intellectualist and anti-aristocratic world-view and his belief in the redeeming power of natural simplicity. He based his ethics on the idea of rational apprehension of duty combined with semireligious partaking in the high moral order of life. Paradoxically, one of the world’s greatest masters of fiction, Tolstoy in his late writings insistently placed his moral code over aesthetic values and even tried to modify his own creative activity in accordance with his rigid morality.

While Tolstoy tried to deprive religion of its mystical element and subordinate it to morality, the ethics and metaphysics of Feodor Dostoevsky (1821–81) remained firmly rooted in the tradition of Orthodox mysticism. Dostoevsky’s legendary novels explored tragedies and paradoxes of the human condition from various, often incommensurable, perspectives. He was also an active polemicist and, like Tolstoy, published numerous essays on the current social and political questions. His post-Siberian novels offered passionate and quite elaborate critique of the contemporary versions of utilitarianism, nihilism, revolutionary utopianism and scientific materialism. The origin of the existentialist philosophy is commonly traced back to Dostoevsky’s approach to the paradoxical nature of freedom and his penetrating critique of rationalism.

Konstantin Leontiev (1831–91), one of the most provocative nineteenth-century Russian thinkers, sharply criticized liberal egalitarianism as detrimental to culture and individuality, and detested the socialist and utilitarian preoccupation with the welfare of future generations that had to be achieved at the expense of concrete living individuals. Passionate aesthete and proponent of elitist culture, Leontiev viewed the processes of modernization and industrialization with great suspicion, a sentiment that both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy shared for quite different reasons. As a religious thinker, Leontiev rejected European ‘pseudo-Christianity’ and praised instead a Byzantine version of Christianity. Based on Leontiev’s wide-ranging critique of bourgeois complacency, anti-aestheticism and conformity, his views were often compared to those of NIETZSCHE (although his books were written two decades earlier than any of Nietzsche’s writings became known in Russia). Leontiev’s work also anticipated the twentieth-century critique of mass culture.

Not all religious Russian thinkers viewed modernization and advances of the natural sciences in a negative light. For example, in the writings of Nikolai Fedorov (1828–1903)

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one finds the curious mixture of a deeply religious world-view and enthusiastic belief in the unlimited future possibilities of technological progress. Prominent themes of Fedorov’s philosophy included the issues of human mortality and the possibility of universal salvation that he approached from a characteristically utopian perspective.

Religious and moral developments in Russian literature and philosophy