In recent years the scholarship on religion in Russia has burgeoned, so a collection that aims to bring these findings together is timely and necessary. The three editors have done an excellent job in curating a volume containing forty essays, by forty different contributors, and should be commended for bringing together many of those who have led the turn towards Russian religion in history, philosophy, theology and literature.
After a short introduction from the editors, the book is divided into seven parts. The first part, ‘Historical Contexts’, contains four chapters, which trace State-Church relations and the nature of ‘lived religion’ from the first Christian missions to Rus’ to the post-Soviet religious resurgence. These chapters ably illustrate the richness of Russia's religious history, and the multiplicity of agents within it. Nadieszda Kizenko tells us that in the imperial era religious life was shaped by multi-confessional interaction and that, intellectually, the worlds of the fashionable St Petersburg salon and the ascetic hermit were closely connected (p. 26). Zoe Knox's excellent chapter on religious life in the Soviet era attests to the adaptability of faith among the laity, who were paradoxically empowered vis-à-vis the clergy by state policies, and who refused to accept any dichotomy between Communism and religion. Together these chapters show how recent research has broken down boundaries between religion and politics, laity and clergy, Church and intelligentsia. They open up vast vistas for the exploration of Russian religious thought as something that enveloped all social and ethnic groups in the lands occupied by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
Horizons become somewhat narrower in the remainder of the volume, which adheres to the editors’ limited definition of Russian religious thought as the work of ‘writers, artists, thinkers’ of the modern era, who addressed an educated public, and for whom religious thought emerged as a distinct dimension of cultural life (p. xxiii). This results in a focus on the long-standing pantheon of Russian religious philosophers. Part ii, ‘The Nineteenth Century’, contains chapters on Chaadaev, Slavophilism, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Soloviev. Parts iii, iv and v, ‘The Religious-Philosophical Renaissance, 1900–1922’, ‘Art in Russian Religious Thought’ and ‘Russian Religious Thought Abroad’, are mainly concerned with the famous thinkers of the ‘Silver Age’: Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdiaev, Pavel Florensky and others, the more fortunate of whom were exiled from the Soviet Union on the ‘Philosophy Steamer’ in 1922. A shorter part vi looks at ‘Religious Thought in Soviet Russia’, although its material extends to the twenty-first century, and the final part provides three over-arching ‘assessments’ in place of a conclusion.
To an extent, then, this volume reinforces a narrative of intellectual history that will be known to anyone who has read Frederick Copleston's Russian philosophy; but whereas Copleston offers an easily accessible introduction to the thought of each philosopher in turn, the Handbook's diverse chapters deal with particular aspects of this thought and explore the questions and concepts that unified these thinkers. This approach can assume quite a lot of background knowledge; this is not an introductory survey to the subject and it does lead to some repetition. Berdiaev and Bulgakov, for example, are afforded two chapters each, and a further four chapters devote significant attention to their ideas. Overall, however, a nuanced picture of the preoccupations of the Russian religious renaissance emerges. Most of the thinkers dealt with in the Handbook were of Russian Orthodox faith, but their ambivalent relationship to the retrogressive tsarist Church meant that their search for religious fulfilment was combined with a search for a form of Orthodoxy that could meet the challenges of modernity. Looking beyond the physical Church, they found an answer in a blend of Christian mysticism and philosophical idealism. This was about overcoming divisions: between God and man, between the Christian Churches of East and West, between faith and reason; a prevailing concern that is epitomised by Vladimir Soloviev's concept of ‘all-unity’. That so many of the chapters in this volume begin by discussing his impact confirms Soloviev's paramount position in the pantheon of Russian religious thought.
Each chapter offers a comprehensive survey of the existing literature, and provides some original analysis of the primary material. They are all of high quality and many demonstrate the wider significance of this field of research. Ana Siljak's chapter on Berdiaev's personalism stands out in this respect. Berdiaev, who began his intellectual journey as a Marxist, was equally repelled by the Caesaropapism of the Old Regime, and the materialism of liberals and Communists. He believed that human rights could only be established on the transcendent values of Christianity. His concern for the crisis of values and atomisation in modern society puts religious thought at the heart of an European intellectual history, from Max Weber to Hannah Arendt, that has been seen as secular. Equally striking, and disruptive of common assumptions, are those chapters that show the continuity and impact of Russian religious thought across the revolutionary divide. Rebecca Mitchell's chapter on ‘“Musical metaphysics” in late imperial Russia’ offers the compelling insight that pre-revolutionary ideas about the theurgic power of art led to the Bolsheviks’ interest in the transformative effect of music (p. 391). Martin Beisswenger's chapter on Lev Karsavin reveals that the revolution was followed by manifestations of ‘religious enthusiasm’, and Karsavin believed that the Bolsheviks expressed ‘certain basic religious ideals and quests of the Russian people’ (pp. 512–13).
Philosophy trumps theology in this volume, but the latter is not absent. There are useful chapters on Metropolitan Filaret by Oleg Bychkov, the Name-Glorifiers by Scott Kenworthy and neopatristics by Paul Gavrilyuk. Of course, the division between philosophy and theology would have been rejected by many of the thinkers represented in the book, and among the most interesting chapters are those that show the connection between the two. Patrick Lally Michelson, whose important research has done much to encourage the study of pre-revolutionary Orthodoxy, provides an excellent contribution on ‘Russian Orthodox thought in the Church's clerical academies’. These academies, which were established in the early nineteenth century, drove the patristic revival that inspired Russian religious philosophy, and the intellectual dynamism of their faculties and journals helped to shape not only Russian Orthodox thought, but perceptions of what it meant to be Russian and religious in educated society. The importance of this institutional development is confirmed by Ruth Coates's chapter ‘Theosis in early twentieth-century Russian religious thought’, which demonstrates that the Russian religious renaissance was the result of a coming together of theological developments in the academies with ‘modernist’ secular thought (p. 252).
Even accepting the editors’ limited definition of Russian religious thought, the collection is not comprehensive. As Kizenko notes in part i, women played an essential role in the Russian religious revival, but there are no contributions devoted to female religious practices or thinkers. Gippius, Skobtsova or Blavatsky would have made for interesting subjects. The focus on the figures of the religious renaissance might lead one to the conclusion that Russian religious thought was uniquely progressive. While the editors acknowledge in their introduction that the presence of anti-semitism is ‘an unavoidable topic in a collection such as this’ (p. xxiv), it is touched on only briefly in Dominic Rubin's illuminating chapter on ‘Judaism in Russian religious thought’. The importance of religion to the nationalist far right, both in the pre- and post-Soviet eras, is commented on by Knox in her examination of historical contexts, but is unexplored elsewhere.
This is, however, an important collection of essays, which will be of interest not only to scholars of Russia but to those interested in the encounter between religion and ‘modernity’ in general. It will make an exciting addition to undergraduate and graduate reading lists on the culture or history of Russia's ‘Silver Age’.
