VOLUME ONE. FROM THE ORIGINS to the XIX century.

From the author

The present "Essays on the History of Russian Philosophy" do not pretend to be complete. A number of important links are omitted in them (for example, Gogol as a thinker, some Russian materialists and positivists, etc.). Nevertheless, the main historical milestones of Russian thought, as it seems to the author, are taken into account and are reflected in the book.

Readers now have at their disposal such thorough and encyclopedic works on the history of Russian thought as "The History of Russian Philosophy" by Father Vasily Zenkovsky and "History of Russian Philosophy" by N.O. Lossky.

Nevertheless, I believe that my modest "Essays" can be useful, at least as an additional aid. Firstly, because these essays are written in a more popular way.

Secondly, because I strive, sometimes even at the cost of a certain simplification, to outline more clearly the main lines of the development of Russian thought and to emphasize the historical logic of this development. I pursued more pedagogical and literary goals than research proper, although, of course, I had to do research as well.

This book is the first volume of my work. The book was born out of a desire to reconstruct the history of Russian thought in the twentieth century, and this volume should serve as an introduction to this history.   

The classification of thinkers is given in the book more on a social than purely philosophical basis. Being more of a philosopher than a historian by profession, I do not confine myself to social or historiosophical aspects, but give, albeit brief, expositions of the philosophical systems and ideas of Russian thinkers, even if their significance lies more in the social sphere. In the second volume, in the exposition of the teachings of such thinkers as Lossky, Frank, Berdyaev and others, this philosophical nucleus will naturally occupy a central place. In keeping with the proportions of space assigned to Russian thinkers, I try to take, so to speak, the middle line between the purely philosophical significance of a given thinker and the social significance of his ideas. To differentiate social, religious, and philosophical thought proper would mean to create a multi-volume work, and this contradicts my intention to write popular essays. The immediate impetus for the compilation of the "Essays" was the lectures on the history of Russian thought, which I had previously given at Georgetown University in Washington. Of course, these lectures have been radically revised for publication; New chapters have also been specially written.

Essay One. KIEVAN AND MUSCOVITE RUS

It is possible to speak seriously of Russian thought in the proper, philosophical-scientific sense of the word only since the 1840s, when Chaadaev first raised the question of the meaning of Russia's existence, and the Russian thinking intelligentsia was divided into two camps: Westernizers and Slavophiles. The influence of German idealist philosophy and the successes of Western science and technology had the main influence on the awakening of Russian thought. Awakening, for the free-thinking Voltairianism of the late eighteenth century was only a student rehash of the motifs of the Western Enlightenment philosophy.   In Ancient Rus', both Kievan and Muscovite, we see only pale hints of thought: Ancient Rus' knew neither theology nor philosophy, the element of abstract searching thought was alien to it.

Ancient Russia had its own artistic writing, where we can be proud not only of "The Word of Igor's Campaign"; it had a rich hagiographic literature ("Lives of the Saints"); such works of folk art as epics, as numerous "Tales" (about Misfortune, about Shemyakin's court, etc.) were popular among the people; the apocrypha were widespread; "spiritual poems"; finally, the first essay on Russian history, The Tale of Bygone Years, can be considered a unique historical document in terms of its truthfulness and patriotic spirit. We are not talking about such collections as the Pateriki, Smaragdy or Chetyi-Minei. The Discourse on Law and Grace" by the first Russian Metropolitan Hilarion (the era of Yaroslav the Wise) amazes with the harmony of the idea and lively eloquence. The sermons of Cyril of Turov are already constructed more artificially and ornately. About Clement Smolyatich, the chronicler reports that he "was a philosopher and wrote from Plato and Aristotle", but he did not go further than skilful maneuvering between the cited texts, and it would be difficult to expect more from that period. Everywhere on these, far from meager, monuments of ancient Russian culture are scattered the golden grains of folk and spiritual wisdom. But still, these are only grains. We do not see in them any ripe fruits of thought.

Meanwhile, it is high time to abandon talk about the "lack of culture" of Ancient Russia. The Russian people were able to defend their faith, their customs, their special position in all historical trials, when the long-suffering Russia, in the words of the historian Klyuchevsky, shielded Europe from the invasion of the Asian hordes and forged its statehood by slow and persistent sacrificial labor. The originality of Russian architecture also breaks through Byzantine influences, and Russian icon painting, which also originally imitated Byzantine models, found its vivid expression in the works of Novgorod and Suzdal masters. This iconography captures such heights of spiritual insights that Prince Yevgeny Trubetskoy called it "speculation in colors". Consequently, the reasons for the intellectual stagnation of Ancient Russia should be sought not in the lack of culture, but in the peculiar character of this culture. There were amazing spiritual insights, but this wisdom was mute, wordless. The face of Christ was perceived in its purest form, but the Russian Logos was mute. Historians have more than once puzzled over the riddle of the Old Russian Sphinx, full of wisdom, but tongue-tied in its expression. "There are many mysterious and incomprehensible things in the history of Russian thought," says Florovsky, "and above all, what does this too long and protracted silence mean? How can we explain this late and belated awakening of Russian thought?"  The historian Fedotov says: "It (Ancient Russia. — SL.) so stingy with words and so tongue-tied. It does not even know how to express the images of its saints in their unique originality, in their authentic Russian face, and drowns out the wondrous ear with the tares of translated Byzantine eloquence, empty and verbose..." "In the dirty and poor Paris of the thirteenth century, the battles of the scholastics thundered, and in the golden Kiev, shining with the mosaics of its churches, there was nothing but the monks who composed the chronicles and continents..."

The proximate cause of this mental muteness was already guessed by Chaadaev: while the Western peoples received enlightenment from Rome, which clothed Christian sermons in Hellenic and Latin forms, with its rich in thought tradition, we received Christianity from Byzantium, where rhetoric and the splendor of ritual often overshadowed thought. But this, in itself, could not serve as a sufficient basis for the muteness of Russian thought. After all, Byzantium is the heir of Ancient Greece, albeit Orthodox, and in Byzantium the impulse of thought was beating. An additional reason has to be sought in the legacy of Cyril and Methodius, in the fact that we received the Bible and the good news of the Gospel in the Macedonian dialect of the Old Bulgarian language, which was understandable to the people at that time. While the Bible in the West existed in Greek and, most of all, in Latin translation, our people could listen to the Word of God in Church Slavonic, which was very close to Old Russian dialects. This, of course, is an invaluable advantage, and this may be one of the reasons why the Russian people have taken the image of Christ so close to their hearts. It is not without reason that they say that just as the human soul is Christian by nature, so the Russian soul is Orthodox by nature. But this is also the true reason for the break from the traditions of classical antiquity. Western monks had to know the language of Virgil and thus unwittingly joined the ideas of Roman law and Hellenic philosophy. Old Russian scribes rarely knew Greek and invited learned Greeks and even more often Bulgarians and Serbs to translate. After all, in Western Europe, thought was awakened as a result of a long assimilation of the Hellenic-Roman cultural heritage. In Russia, however, there were no historical prerequisites for the awakening of conscious thought. Of course, there is always a silver lining, and mental muteness was redeemed by something else — the strictness of the ritual and its spiritualization. It is not without reason that Russian Orthodox worship is filled with such splendor and spirituality that Catholic worship, not to mention Protestant worship, seems to us, Russians, too cold and official. It was not for nothing that before Russian icons the people poured out their heartfelt religious fervor and their human torment. In ancient Russia there developed a true religious instinct, which sometimes protected against heresies better than the learned arguments of Western scholastics. In Russia, the so-called everyday confession developed, instead of refined theology. It is characteristic that in Russia there were no such sharp religious strife as distinguished the history of the West.