This is the tenth book resulting from the “Krakow Meetings,” a series of annual conferences on Russian religious philosophy held in Poland since 2010. The current volume inaugurates Pickwick Publications’ Ex Oriente Lux series, which plans to publish future conference volumes. The book consists of an introduction and nineteen chapters. Some chapters are devoted to central concepts (modernity, secularism, post-secularism, personhood, divine-humanity, sophiology), others to Russian religious philosophers (Vladimir Solov΄ev, Viktor Nesmelov, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdiaev, Semen Frank, Pavel Florenskii, Georges Florovsky). The overall aim is to demonstrate that Russian religious thought is a valuable resource for understanding secular modernity and for moving beyond it to the “post-secular.” The volume has admirably met that goal. Most of the contributors are Polish or Russian scholars; the quality of the English prose varies but as a whole the volume is readable.

One of the problems with post-secularism is that it has multiple meanings, like secularism itself. To deal with these definitional and conceptual issues the contributors draw on leading social theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor. In his monumental book A Secular Age (2007), Taylor emphasizes one sense of secularism: the modern condition in which religious belief becomes a personal option, rather than being axiomatic and inevitable. A related sense of the term is separation of church and state, and more generally the delimitation of religion from other areas of human life (morality, philosophy, science, politics, economy, art); the recognition of the relative mutual autonomy of all these areas. In these senses secularism has often been seen as actually benefiting religion, since faith, according to this approach, comes from inner conviction and is incompatible with external coercion. Thus secularism has been closely associated with respect for freedom of conscience (the free inner recognition of ideals, truths, and values). Solov΄ev understood secularism in this way and gave it “a positive religious meaning,” as Konstantin Antonov writes in his chapter (36), among the best in the book. Berdiaev followed Solov΄ev in this respect, as other chapters also show (Olga Tabatadze deals specifically with his defense of freedom of conscience).

Of course secularism also has a quite different meaning: the marginalization of religion as something opposed to reason, science, progress, and modernity. Terms such as “secular humanism” generally imply an irreligious outlook or even atheism. Post-secularism has emerged mainly in response to the anti-religious senses of secularism. In general it maintains that religion is an essential aspect of being human, that it ought to be cultivated (even in the public sphere), and that it can legitimately provide a higher unity among the distinct spheres of intellectual, cultural, and social activity. Few post-secular theorists reject freedom of conscience, but many believe that relegating religion to the private sphere has led to its decline, and some wish to restore religion to all aspects of life, “that God may be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). The last position is associated with John Milbank and the “Radical Orthodoxy” movement, which is Augustinian in inspiration and has nothing specifically do to with Eastern Orthodoxy. Several contributors to this volume are sympathetic to it or some similar vision.

A dissenting voice to the vision of universal religious synthesis is Grigory Gutner, whose chapter, “Post-Secularity vs. All-Unity,” explores the various projects to restore wholeness to person and society after the fragmentation of Christendom and the modern secular division of thought and life into separate spheres. The Enlightenment project to forge a new wholeness through secular reason and science failed. But Gutner is also skeptical of religious projects at wholeness, though he respects the modern sophistication of Russian religious philosophers, even remarking, “they never deny liberal ideas of free personality and human dignity” (42). According to Gutner's conception, post-secularity rejects any kind of totality, whether based on scientific reason or religious faith. Rather it seeks complementarity and equality of discourses—the conditions of consensus, which “is not forever and about everything” (47).

In general the contributors to this volume are convinced of the truth of Christian theism. Their conviction is based largely on their philosophical understanding of human nature. In this respect they closely follow the Russian religious philosophers who are their subjects and who thought that religious experience was natural to human beings. Such experience comes in many varieties, but it involves consciousness of the infinite and absolute, or God. Accordingly, it is precisely persons who are capable of such experience and of self-determination. Several chapters of the book are devoted to Russian theories of personhood and theological anthropology, as expounded by such figures as Nesmelov, Bulgakov, Frank, and Sergey Khoruzhii. Other chapters are devoted to the closely related topic of Russian sophiology, especially in Bulgakov's thought, where Sophia designates the divine wisdom and love by which God created the world and gave it “personal” potential, or made it the matrix for the emergence and development of persons: “The hypostasizing energy of divine love, the uncreated life of God, is that out of which creation is drawn; while it is not a person or hypostasis, it is somehow ‘personalizing,’ it is the capacity of all being to be enfolded in love,” as Aaron Riches expresses it in his chapter (75). Following Milbank, the volume presents Russian sophiology as a rich resource for post-secularism.

Another such resource, more generally, is Russian “theological philosophy” as it developed from Ivan Kireevskii to Georges Florovsky. As Paweł Rojek explains in his long programmatic chapter, this approach to philosophy is grounded in religious experience and the faith that both comes from and deepens such experience. Theological philosophy takes religious experience as a legitimate source of truth about reality, which is precisely contrary to the scientistic claim that nothing can be determined to be true or real unless it is positively given in sensory experience and subject to the scientific method. This type of radical rejection of reductive positivism is itself a good way of conceptualizing post-secularism. Clarifying that is not the least of this volume's merits.