Ruth Coates has written a book that without exaggeration must be called a jewel. It is small – a short book; it concerns a brief period – ‘between the Revolutions’, as she puts it, from 1905 to 1917; it has a single topic, that of deification; it concerns four figures – one a composite figure she calls ‘the Merezhkovskys’ (Dmitry, his wife Zinaida Gippius and their friend Dmitry Filosofov), Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky; and for each of these figures she is concerned with a single book: Merezhkovsky's Tsar and revolution (1907); Berdyaev's The meaning of creativity (1916), Bulgakov's The philosophy of economy (1912) and Florensky's The pillar and ground of the truth (1914). This decision has the undoubted merit of achieving focus so far as the topic is concerned, though the focus falls more unevenly for the protagonists: this period was a high point for the Merezhkovskys’ religious thought, but the works of Berdyaev and Bulgakov that are discussed are early works, not necessarily typical of their thought as a whole, and Florensky's Pillar and ground is a unique case, since his being retained for his scientific abilities in the Soviet Union after the Revolution meant that his later thought is fragmentary and unpublished (save for scientific articles) and quite where the Pillar and ground stands in relation to his intellectual development is still much discussed. Nevertheless, focusing on a single topic and a brief, politically and culturally significant period enables Coates to explore the manifold facets to be seen in her ‘jewel’.

The way in which she introduces her central theme, deification, will contain surprises for many of her readers. She cites the opinion of Ivan Popov, professor of patristics at the Moscow Spiritual Academy, writing in 1906 that the ‘idea of deification … is completely forgotten in contemporary [Orthodox] theology’ (p. 3). Given the way in which deification has become in contemporary Orthodox theology virtually its single most distinctive doctrine, this will seem surprising to many. Coates begins by exploring the roots of this doctrine in, first of all, the Greek Fathers of the Church, and then in the ‘long nineteenth century’ of Russian religious thought. Her account of the Greek patristic doctrine of deification is dutiful and well-resourced (not a problem now with Norman Russell's two books). In her exploration of the long nineteenth century Coates casts her net wide, and draws in a variety of fish, some very strange. There is a succinct account of the so-called Philokalic revival, which, with its emphasis on the Jesus prayer and spiritual eldership, spearheaded monastic revival across Russia, as well as deepening lay piety; it saw deification as the goal of the spiritual life. The extraordinary programme of translation of patristic literature by the spiritual academies – intended not just for students at the academies, but for the reading public in general – also drew attention to the notion of deification (though interpreted in a ‘moralistic’ way?). Another notion of deification is found in the myth of the sacred ruler in official and folk culture (it is curious that the Greeks coined a word for deification, theosis, rather using the pagan term, apotheosis, used for the sacrality of the emperor); Coates argues that sacralisation of the tsar was intensified with Peter the Great's abolition of the patriarchate, thereby concentrating all sacral roles in the only sacred figure left, the tsar. Coates then discusses other dimensions of deification introduced by contemporary German philosophical developments: the human-god idea, rooted in Feuerbach, inspiring some of Dostoevsky's unsettling characters, and received by later Russian intellectuals, laced with insights drawn from Nietzsche; and the contrasting God-human ideal, drawing on notions in Schelling, and explored by Solov′ev. Coates mentions, too, in a couple of places what has been called the Russians’ ‘immortalisation project’, which took a bizarre form in the ‘common task’ of the resurrection of the ancestors in Nikolai Fedorov (who barely gets a mention in a footnote: p. 127 n. 68).

With this rich palette of forms of deification, Coates then embarks on her four protagonists. The Merezhkovskys are mostly concerned with political deification – developments of the sacral notion of earthly rule embodied in the tsar, which accelerated with the Petrine reforms. This is an immensely rich chapter, but also, in places, confusing. The concept of the tsar develops from Byzantine notions of the figure of the emperor, which leads into a minefield of possible misunderstandings, not all of which Coates avoids. Filosofov saw the foundations of what he called the ‘tsar-pope’ in the Byzantine emperor, whose sacral character was derived from his being anointed at his coronation. I do not doubt that Filosofov thought this, but he was wrong. Anointment, unction – though established in the West from the eighth century onwards – was not a feature of Byzantine imperial induction until after the fall of Constantinople to the crusaders in 1204. Links between Russian tsar and Byzantine emperor there certainly are, but often complicated, not to say muddled. The quasi-priestly role of the Byzantine emperor is not straightforward; the passage Coates cites from Dagron's authoritative Emperor and priest in support of the emperor's receiving communion as a priest suggests the opposite (pp. 95–6, with n. 55). Further confusion is caused by the fact that the ‘royal doors’ are, for the Greeks, the doors that lead from the narthex to the nave, whereas for the Russians they are the doors in the iconostasis that lead from the nave into the sanctuary: a potent source of confusion. Perhaps all this is not very relevant, as what matters is what the Russians thought they had received from the Byzantines. What is important is the account Coates gives of the sacral character of the tsar, derived from the Byzantines, and its ambivalent reception among the Russians, first as part of the myth of Moscow as ‘Third Rome’ (though recent scholarship draws attention to the biblical and messianic aspects of this myth, rather than its political overtones).

The chapter on Berdyaev focuses on his early work, The meaning of creativity, though drawing a good deal on his autobiography, Self-knowledge (Katharine Lampert's translation was originally called Dream and reality). In this work, Berdyaev puts forward an understanding of Christianity, now widely accepted among Orthodox theologians, which presents God's plan for the cosmos as unfolding from creation to deification, not so much of the individual as of the cosmos; his basic complaint against historical Christianity is that it has got stuck at redemption from sin. Coates expertly explores the roots of Berdyaev's thought in Jacob Boehme, which lends his thought a marked gnostic and esoteric character, his enthusiasm for Nietzsche, which provoked a strong reaction and his impatience with the ascetic strand in Christianity, not least in Orthodoxy.

Bulgakov began his academic life as an economist. His early work (though published in his early forties), The philosophy of economy, is a work of transition; Marxism and the critical (Kantian) idealism left behind, Bulgakov was turning increasingly to Christian ideas. Coates's exposition brings out how these new ideas were beginning to guide his thought, though I wonder if her guiding idea of a resurrective model of history, with a cycle of fall and redemption, in which life is bestowed on what is dead, is not premature here. This is the first of his works in which the notion of Wisdom, Sophia, appears, and it seems to me more central than Coates allows. For the work of bringing the created order to perfection – completing the work of the creator – is precisely the role of the biblical Sophia. From regarding the world around it as raw materials for human use and consumption, Bulgakov finds the idea of the human performing a sophianic role as enabling him to make sense of the human place in creation. Other influences – Schelling, the profound importance to Bulgakov of the Greek Fathers, not least Athanasius and Maximus – seem to me to fill out a sophianic model, which Coates leaves in the background.

To discuss Florensky's great and in many ways baffling work in thirty pages is a tall order, but Coates, with her clarity and succinctness, is well up to the task. Selective she has to be, but she has a rare gift for the essentials. In Florensky, unlike her protagonists so far, Coates find as emphasis on ascesis, both in recognising its essential role in deification, but also the importance for him of ascetic works – most frequently cited are Makarios the Great, Isaac the Syrian and Niketas Stethatos (the last somewhat of a surprise) – as well as Hermas's The shepherd and The way of a pilgrim, then gaining in popularity, but also living startsi, not least his own spiritual father, the elder Isidor. She also identifies those figures of greatest importance to Florensky: which will stimulate further reflection on the roots and method of his thought. There is, too, very helpful consideration of how Florensky analyses, in a way deeply traditional and strikingly original, human nature, and especially the human soul, making clear his close knowledge of Orthodox ascetic literature and his own fondness for etymology.

A short conclusion draws attention yet again to the importance of the Philokalic movement to the abiding significance of the notion of deification. This is a short work which will repay repeated reading. It will prove to be a landmark in our understanding of the manifold ways in which deification was interpreted in Russia's silver age.