Faith and Science in Russian Orthodox Thought

For some people, there is apparently a conflict between what they conceive of as 'faith' on the one hand and 'science' on the other. This has always seemed to me to rest upon one, and likely several, mistakes, but for those who struggle with such questions a new book may help: Teresa Obolevitch, Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought (Oxford University Press, July 2019), 240pp.

Faith and Science in Russian Religious Thought provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between science and faith in Russian religious thought. Teresa Obolevitch offers a synthetic approach on the development of the problem throughout the whole history of Russian thought, starting from the medieval period and arriving in contemporary times. She considers the relationship between science and religion in the eighteenth century, the so-called academic philosophy of the 19th and 20th century, the thought of Peter Chaadaev, the Slavophiles, and in the most influential literature figures, such as Fedor Dostoevsky and Lev Tolstoy.

The volume also analyses two channels of the formation of philosophy in the context of the relationship between theology and science in Russia. The first is connected with the attempt to rationalize the truths of faith and is exemplified by Vladimir Soloviev and Nikolai Lossky; the second wtih the apophatic tradition is presented by Pavel Florensky and Semen Frank. The book then describes the relation to scientific knowledge in the thought of Lev Shestov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergius Bulgakov, and Alexei Losev as well as the original project of Russian Cosmism (on the examples of Nikolai Fedorov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Vladimir Vernadsky). Obolevitch presents the current state of the discussion on this topic by paying attention to the Neopatristic synthesis (Fr Georges Florovsky and his followers) and offers the brief comparative analyse of the relationship between science and religion from the Western and Russian perspectives.

Gleaming Silver Lights

Boris Jakim has emerged as the single-most prolific translator of East-Slavic theology today, having translated many of Sergius Bulgakov's books for Eerdmans over the last decade and more, including Relics and Miracles: Two Theological Essays, The Lamb of God (Bulgakov's Christology), The Comforter (Bulgakov's pneumatology), and a lovely collection of Bulgakov's theological orations, Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions for the Church Year. 

Jakim has also been involved in translating other prominent figures, including the great writer Dostoevsky's The Insulted and Injured as well as his Notes from the House of the Dead.

Additionally, other well-known Slavophiles have entered into English through Jakim, including Pavel Florensky's The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters and S.L. Frank's The Meaning of Life as well as his Light Shineth In Darkness: An Essay In Christian Ethics And Social Philosophy.

Late last year, Jakim complied and translated a new collection: The Brightest Lights of the Silver Age: Essays on Russian Religious Thinkers (Semantron Press, 2015), 244pp.

About this book we are told:

The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev set for himself the task of revealing to the western world the distinctive elements of Russian philosophy: its existential nature, eschatologism, religious anarchism, and preoccupation with the idea of Divine Humanity. In the present collection of essays (the first volume of Berdyaev’s essays ever to appear in English translation), he attempts to define “the new religious consciousness” as it emerged in Russia in the first decade of the 20th century. Berdyaev, like Merezhkovsky and Blok (among others), believed that the dawn of the new century would bring an end to the old atheistic and positivistic world-view and the beginning of a new era of the spirit. The other essays treat such figures as Tolstoy, Solovyov, Rozanov, Bely, Florensky, and Bulgakov--all of them giants of Russian religious thought.

“Nikolai Berdyaev’s essays, like his longer works, are always insightful, penetrating, passionate, committed--expressions of the whole person. They are as intensely alive now as when they were first written. In them Berdyaev enters into genuine dialogue with his fellow thinkers from the great period of Russian religious philosophy. We are indebted to Boris Jakim for the excellence of both the selection and the translation.”--RICHARD PEVEAR, translator of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov

“Nikolai Berdyaev managed to play two roles in the Russian religious renaissance of the twentieth century. He was a passionate participant in the movement, but also one of its astute critics. His genius in both roles is on full display in this collection of essays assembled and beautifully translated by Boris Jakim. Berdyaev’s portraits of his peers provide us with a concise, colorful, and deep-thinking compendium of all the main themes that occupied the Russian religious thinkers of his generation--the last generation to come of age in Russia before the Revolution of 1917. With the centennial of that great upheaval at hand, we can see more clearly than ever the relevance of revisiting religious-philosophical debates which, far from being over, retain their freshness as vehicles for thinking not just about the future of Russia but about the spiritual challenges facing the modern world.”--PAUL VALLIERE, author of Modern Russian Theology.

“Nikolai Berdyaev, the existentialist Russian philosopher of freedom and creativity, in this collection of selected essays on key figures representative of Russia’s Silver Age, is unabashed in both his praise and criticism of them. Lyrical is his style, his analyses are no less cogent and cutting at times. The translator, Boris Jakim, has taken careful pains in his effort to bring out the best in Berdyaev’s literary and social criticism as he discusses the thought of such notables as Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Solovyov, Vasily Rozanov, Lev Shestov, Alexander Blok, Pavel Florensky, and Sergius Bulgakov, along with a penetrating essay on theosophy and anthroposophy in Russia.”--ROBERT F. SLESINSKI, author of Pavel Florensky: A Metaphysics of Love

Russian Orthodoxy and Human Rights

In the spring issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, of which I am editor, we feature an article by Christopher Brenna on Orthodox approaches to the question of human rights. This is, as the author notes, a relatively new area for theological exploration. But the relationship of Orthodoxy and rights has been examined by sociologists and political scientists in a series of new books over the last decade, the newest of which, released just this spring, is by Kristina Stoeckl, a research associate in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of Vienna: The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (Routledge, 2014). I contacted her for an interview, and here are her thoughts:

AD: Tell us about your background and what led to the writing of The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights.

Kristina Stoeckl: In the preface of the book I reveal a piece of biographical background and my reasons for engaging in the topic of the Russian Orthodox Church and human rights. Readers of the preface will understand that I have a fairly traditional Catholic background which, in my academic work, has made me sensitive to the topic of religion in politics. They will also understand that the book is the work of a European political theorist who cannot but confront the towering paradigm of “postsecular society” expressed by Jürgen Habermas. I did not come to the topic of Russian Orthodoxy and human rights because I had a pre-determined interested in human rights as such; I was instead interested in the work of “translation” between religious content and secular norms. The Russian Orthodox debate on human rights appeared like a good example.  What readers of the preface will not find out is that I have an academic background in Russian and comparative literature and philosophy. I had the fortune to have very good teachers during my underground studies of Russian literature and philosophy at the University of Innsbruck in Austria: Fedor Dostoevskij, Vladimir Solov’ev, the philosophers of the Russian Silver Age, the generation of Soviet semioticians around Jurij Lotman, and later on also the religious thinkers of the Russian emigration were my early guiding lights for approaching Russian thought and culture. This background is much more evident in my first book and PhD-thesis entitled Community after Totalitarianism and published in 2008. This background explains why, despite all criticism of what the Russian Orthodox Church represents today, my approach to the Russian Orthodox tradition is sympathetic.


AD: Your first chapter notes the different responses to human rights discourse in modern Orthodoxy, from those very critical and dismissive to those who are more receptive. At the end of your chapter you note that the Russian Orthodox Church has adopted rather a middle position here--not totally dismissive, but not fully accepting, either. Why the middle position? 
 
KS: I call the Russian Orthodox Church’s a middle position, because it really stands for a response to the issue of human rights that steers mid-way between a complete rejection of human rights and acceptance. The Russian Orthodox Church published, in 2008, a document entitled “The Russian Orthodox Church’s Teaching on Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights”. This document fundamentally changed the position on human rights which the Church had explained eight years earlier in the “Basis of the Social Doctrine” in 2000 (in which human rights are rejected as a sign of apostasy), but it did not go all the way to accepting human rights as a legal instrument that should be fully endorsed and supported by the Church. Why did the Church adopt this middle position? In the book, I give several reasons: relevance - the Moscow Patriarchate recognized that it cannot continue to ignore or dismiss the topic in its internal and external relations; politics – the Moscow Patriarchate recognized that for having a voice in politics, it better speak the language of contemporary politics; soteriology – the Church understood very well that Orthodox believers live in secularized societies and ask from their Church to express itself and provide guiding lines on topics of contemporary relevance; and lastly individuals – the individual members of the Russian Orthodox Church involved in the working out of the document between 2006 and 2008 were not unanimous in their assessment of human rights, some wanted total dismissal, some wanted endorsement. The document is a compromise between these actors. It is important to be aware that the individual dynamics may since have changed. I am not sure whether today, in 2014, a new document on human rights of the Russian Orthodox Church would still occupy a middle-position or would not demonstrate a regress to earlier, dismissive positions.
 
AD: You also note in your first chapter that religious groups in a majority position tend to be less favourably disposed to human rights than to minority religious groups. Have you found, e.g., that Catholics or Jews or Muslims in Russia invoke human rights language more than their Russian Orthodox counterparts?

KS: In the book I note in the first and analyse in detail in the last chapter that majority religions tend to be less favourably disposed to human rights than minority religious groups, who invoke the right to religious freedom in order to assure their survival and flourishing. Minority religious groups need the protection of the international human rights regime where majority religions simply rely on traditional privileges. This dynamic is clearly visible in the Russian case, both in the debates around the 1997 law on religious freedom and in cases on religious freedom that have reached the European Court of Human Rights. It is, however, not unique to Russia. Also many Western European countries are in the process of discovering that they have become, due to immigration, religiously pluralistic societies where individual human rights trump the historical privileges of waning majority religions. I have not done systematic research on the way in which minority religious groups appeal to human rights, but I refer the interested reader to the work of my colleague Effie Fokas, who is conducting a long-term research project on precisely this point.  

AD: You note that post-1991, Russia had two very different paths before it, and in the end chose the path of "religious nationalism." What motivated that choice--was it purely an anti-Western spirit, or was there something positive to it?

KS: The two paths I mean are “religious nationalism” and “religious renewal”. A religious renewal would have required a thorough process of critical self-reflection, a laying open of the guilt which the Church had heaped upon itself during the decades of Soviet collaboration and a renewal of the Church in the spirit of religious dissidence. This did not happen; what we got instead was continuity and strengthening of the religious apparatus. I think this choice was motivated less by ideological reasons (anti- versus pro-Western) but mostly by pragmatic considerations. The religious nationalism promised more public echo, more political support, and it apparently convinced many Russians. At the same time, inside the leadership structure of the Church and on the level of parish communities pockets of liberal renewal continued and continue to exist. Was there something positive to the path of religious nationalism? I don’t think so, but inasmuch as I interpret it not as an ideological, but as a pragmatic development, the only positive element there was is that the official religious nationalism has left some space for alternative viewpoints to emerge, which enjoy less visibility, but continue to exist. I should also add that I feel this space is significantly narrower today than it was in the period I study in this book.

AD: You note in your second chapter that the 2000 document "Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church" was very much the product of the Department for External Church Relations, headed by now-Patriarch Kiril, who seems to have positioned himself somewhere between "liberals" and "zealots." Has he maintained that balance since taking over as patriarch?

Source: Mospat.ru

KS: This is the much debated question among scholars dealing with the Russian Orthodox Church! On the first glance, it would seem that Kirill has given up his middle-stance in favour of more fundamentalist positions. He has appointed some real hardliners to important positions inside the Church, for example Vsevolod Chaplin who became responsible for Church-Society Relations. Since 2009, when Kirill became Patriarch, we have also seen a number of events which have tipped the balance in favour of the zealots: for example the trial of the punk-band Pussy Riot, the legislation against “homosexual propaganda” and “offense of religious feelings.” But there are also examples to the contrary, like the relatively balanced stance which Kirill has assumed in the present crisis in Ukraine (which I have analysed elsewhere). Leaving aside for a moment the position of Patriarch Kirill and his successful or unsuccessful attempts to maintain an independent position for the Church, what is clear is that in foreign and also in Russian public perception, this independence has already been lost. The Moscow Patriarchate is now widely perceived to stand unconditionally on the side of Putin and in support of his anti-Western politics.

AD: You note that the history in the "Bases" document attempts to sketch out a very different lineage for any notion of human rights in Russia, away from Western history, and all the way back to Byzantium. Why is that? Why the constant effort to so vociferously differentiate itself from "the West"? 
 
KS: Not the entire “Bases of the Social Doctrine” document, but definitely its section on human rights conveys a strong Orthodox anti-Westernism that goes back to the Slavophiles and to Orthodox resentments against the Latin West. The paradoxical feature about this anti-Westernism is that it comes in a format that is influenced by “Latin” Christian models of theological reasoning. In my interviews for this book it became clear that the Russian Orthodox Church has learned (and wanted to learn) from Catholic and Protestant theologians in matters of social teaching: conferences were held, working groups were created, position-documents were exchanged. This also explains the deep disappointment about the “Human Rights Doctrine” expressed by the German Protestant Churches, an episode I explain in chapter 4 of the book. These Western theologians felt that they had been part of a real exchange and had accompanied the Russian Orthodox colleagues in a “learning process” – and then they saw that the Russian Orthodox Church had given the entire debate an anti-Western twist.   

AD: You note (p. 101) that the Church today has shifted away from "inward" focus (on church-state relations) to "outward" focus on issues of "society, family, and values." Does that reflect new-found strength in the Church? What are the risks for this strategy? And are Russian Orthodox Christians fully supportive of this shift or--to go back to your opening discussion of the Pussy Riot--are they generally more ambivalent? 

KS:Yes, I do believe that this reflects a new-found strength in the Church structure. For a large part of the 1990s and 2000s the Church was busy with sorting out its own matters: the restitution of Church property once confiscated by the Soviet state, the establishment of courses that teach Orthodox “culture” in public schools, the building up of a system of Orthodox military chaplaincy, etc. Under Patriarch Kirill the Church has now moved to issues of society, family, and values. It has taken a firm moral conservative stance on issues of life, sexuality and gender, and religious freedom. I argue in the book that this shift does not only come from inside the Russian Orthodox Church, but is also the result of cooperation between Russian Orthodox actors and traditionalist sections inside the Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical Churches. My feeling is that ordinary Russian believers feel somewhat puzzled by this shift. The remaking of post-Soviet Russia as the world’s leading nation that respects “traditional values” is deeply paradoxical.
 
AD: Your data (p. 106-07) revealed that "since 2008, representatives of the Church and the Russian government have pursued an active human rights agenda at international level, in particular in the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations." Clearly it seems to me that one area where we have recently seen evidence of this is Russia's support for Syria against US intervention in the on-going civil war. Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church claim to have been motivated here by their concern to protect the rights of fellow Orthodox Christians in Syria. What do you make of these arguments?
 
I have not followed the Church’s argumentation on Syria closely and I was not aware that Putin has motivated his support for Syria (and Russia’s veto-position in the UN Security Council) on grounds of intra-Orthodox solidarity. I would interpret this stance merely as a rhetorical tool to cover up what the Russian agenda really is about: preventing regime-change at all costs.
 
AD: In your opening, and then again in the conclusion of your book, you return to the idea of Charles Taylor in speaking of a "mutual fragilization" as taking place in the encounter between Russian Orthodoxy and modernity. Explain this for us a little bit. 
 
Charles Taylor's concept of “mutual fragilization” adds an important feature to the paradigm of the “post-secular”. Habermas’ notion of post-secular society confidently assumes that religious and secular actors may learn from each other for the good of society as a whole; mutual fragilization reminds us of the fact that getting to know the other better may not always result in greater understanding, but in greater insecurity and self-reflexivity. Insecurity and self-reflexivity are positive, because hardened-up and doubt-free identities can be very frightening, whether religious or secular. In the history of the Russian Orthodox tradition, the period of the Russian émigré-theologians Sergij Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky strikes me as an example of “mutual fragilization”, where both the Orthodox as well as some of their Western interlocutors were faced with the moral breakdown of their respective traditions (Bolshevism in the East, Fascism and Nazism in the West), recognized that they were facing similar questions, learned from another and enriched their respective standpoints through encounter with the other. In that particular case, the encounter resulted in the neo-patristic turn in theology, a point I have made in my book Community after Totalitarianism.
  
AD: Very interestingly for me in a theology department, you end your book by noting that you are not a theologian but a political scientist, but nevertheless "it is there--in theology--where the future trajectory of the encounter of Orthodoxy and modernity is being mapped out" (p.131). Why do you say that? Tell us a bit more about how you see this trajectory being mapped out.
 
KS: I have studied the Russian Orthodox intellectual tradition for many years now and I have covered important periods from Solov’ev and Dostoevskij to the émigré-theologians, to late Soviet dissidence and contemporary debates. My impression is that during all this history, the Russian Orthodox Church has found itself tied to the state, has actually actively tied itself to the state and has failed to give an independent response to society and the world. These responses have come from elsewhere inside and outside the Church, from theology and religious philosophy. Such voices also exist today and many of my Orthodox friends and colleagues understand themselves as engaged in precisely this endeavour. It is them that I had in mind when I wrote those pages, obviously with the hope that theology may at one point prevail over reasons of church-state relations. At the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna we organized a workshop on “Orthodox political theologies” earlier this year, where we brought together theologians from Russia, Western Europe and the United States. The aim of the publication that will come out of this meeting is precisely to take stock of the ways in which Orthodox theologians map out the relation between their churches and politics.
 
AD: Sum up what you hope the book accomplishes

KS: The book wants to make a contribution to contemporary debates on the compatibility of religious claims and secular norms. It wants to challenge the prevailing theories of religious-secular accommodation by studying a “difficult” case like the Russian Orthodox Church’s treatment of human rights. I may not have managed to give full answers in chapter 5 of this book, but I am confident that I raised relevant questions which I intend to explore further. The book also wants to offer a balanced account of the ideas and politics inside the Russian Orthodox Church. It wants to highlight one aspect that is frequently overlooked in research in this field, and that is the interactions and relatedness of the Russian Orthodox Church with religious actors outside Russia, its engagement on the level of international institutions and its external relations.

AD: What projects--books, articles--are you at work on now?
 
KS: Since finishing the book I have tried to work further on the theoretical questions that emerge from my Russian case study. I have made some preliminary considerations on what I perceive as “theology's blind spot” in contemporary theorizing of religion and politics here and I plan to develop these ideas further into a full-fledged theoretical contribution. I am also working on a project to study present-day Russian moral conservatism. You can follow my work on my website and at the IWM.

The Meaning of Life

Eerdmans has just sent me a copy of their latest book in the "Russian front" (as their publisher calls it):

S.L. Frank, The Meaning of Life, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), xvi+138pp. 

Frank, who died in 1950, was an outstanding Russian philosopher and critic of Marxism and Soviet communism. As with many of the Slavophiles, his philosophy and theology often blended together.

This present book was originally written in Russian and published there in 1925. It reflects Frank's bitter experience during the 1917 Russian Revolution and its horrific, bloody aftermath. The Revolution unleashed such massive suffering that Frank was led to write this book to try to make some sense of the meaning and purpose, if any, of suffering.

Boris Jakim, the leading translator of Russian religious though today, calls this book "the closest thing we have in the twenty-first century to the book of Job."

The book will be reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies by Robert Slesinski. 

Sophia and Slavophilia

The so-called Slavophiles continue to attract attention, and not merely among Eastern Christians or Russian historians. Anglicans like the influential John Milbank have been grappling with the Slavophiles for some time now. Two new books continue this exploration of their thought and its wide implications for church and society alike:

Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path (Cornell U Press, 2009), 256pp.

Three of Engelstein's seven chapters focus on the religious implications of the Slavophiles.



A second book has also come out from the same publisher:

Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Divine Sophia: the Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov.Annotated Translations by Boris Jakim, Judith Kornblatt, and Laury Magnus (Cornell UP, 2009), 320pp.

Slavophilia and Philosophy

Cambridge U. Press has just brought out an impressive-looking collection:

G.M. Hamburg and R.A. Poole, eds., A History of Russian Philosophy 1830-1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (CUP, 2010), 440pp. 


This book deals with what it calls "the great age of Russian philosophy" that includes the rise of the Slavophiles. In 18 chapters the main people, schools, and controversies of the period are covered. Much of the debate continues to resonate today as all cultures grapple with the meaning of human dignity, especially in the face of the many technological challenges of our age. I've asked the scholar and Ruthenian priest Robert Slesinski, who has published extensively on East-Slavic philosophers, especially Pavel Florensky, to review this for us in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011.

Revival in Bulgakov Studies

For some time now, Eerdmans has been commendably filling out what its publisher, William B. Eerdmans, Jr., calls “the Russian front” with translations into English of many major works of Orthodox theology. In doing so, Eerdmans has rendered a signal service to scholars and all others interested in Orthodox theology. They have been aided in this task by Boris Jakim and T. Allan Smith, both expert translators of theological Russian. I was recently asked to review the three most recent Bulgakov translations, and those reviews were published in the Wiley-Blackwell academic journal Reviews in Religion and Theology.


The first of the three I reviewed was The Burning Bush: On the Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God:

The second was The Lamb of God while the third was was Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions for the Church Year