Nationalist War Commentary as Russian Religious Thought: The Religious Intelligentsia's Politics of Providentialism

Abstract

Exploring the prominent role that the concept of Providence played in the worldview of Russian religious philosophers including Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Ern, Prince Evgenii Trubetskoi, and the Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov, this article demonstrates that their Christian Providentialist thinking was inherently political. One significant expression of these intellectuals' “politics of Providentialism” was the controversial commentary they produced on the First World War, which must be confronted and construed as operating within the discourse of Russian religious philosophy. Examining the concept of Providence represents a new approach to the study of Russian religious philosophy as Christian ideology, one that highlights the social significance of Russian religious philosophy in late imperial Russian civil society and that allows us to situate Russian religious thought in international and interconfessional comparative perspective, as one part of a broader twentieth-century European and American manifestation of politicized traditionalist Christianity that arose in response to the perceived cultural threat of nihilism.

Footnotes

• 1

  On imperialism see Nikolai Berdiaev, “Rossiia, Angliia i Germaniia,”Birzhevyia vedomosti, May 21, 1916.

• 2

  Berdiaev, “O dremliushchikh silakh cheloveka,”Utro Rossii, November 5, 1914. Prerevolutionary dates are given according to the Old Style calendar. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

• 3

  For example, Sergei Bulgakov's commentary on the war and the war itself are absent from Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy (Ithaca, 1997). Exceptions with respect to attention to war commentary include Heinrich A. Stammler, “Belyj's Conflict with Vjačeslav Ivanov over War and Revolution,” Slavic and East European Journal 18:3 (1974): 259–70; Ben Khellman [Ben Hellman], “Kogda vremia slavianofil'stvovalo. Russkie filosofy i pervaia mirovaia voina,” in Studia Russica Helsingiensia et Tartuensia, vol. 6, Problemy istorii russkoi literatury nachala XX veka, ed. L. Bliuking and P. Pesonena (Helsinki, 1989), 211–39; Brian Horowitz, “A Jewish-Christian Rift in 20th-Century Russian Philosophy: N. A. Berdiaev and M. O. Gershenzon,”Russian Review 53 (October 1994): 497–514; Philip Boobbyer, S. L. Frank: The Life and Work of a Russian Philosopher, 1877–1950 (Athens, OH, 1995); Ben Hellman, Poets of Hope and Despair: The Russian Symbolists in War and Revolution (1914–1918) (Helsinki, 1995); Kristiane Burchardi, Die Moskauer “Relgiös-Philosophische Vladimir-Solov'ev Gesellschaft” (1905–1918) (Wiesbaden, 1998); Evgenii Gollerbakh, K nezrimomu gradu: Religiozno-filosofskaia gruppa “Put’” (1910–1919) v poiskakh novoi russkoi identichnosti (St. Petersburg, 2000); Randall A. Poole, “Religion, War and Revolution: E. N. Trubetskoi's Liberal Construction of Russian National Identity, 1912–20,” Kritika 7:2 (2006): 195–240; Michał Bohun, Oczyszczenie przez burzę: Włodzimierz Ern i moskiewscy neosłowianofile wobec pierwszej wojny światowej (Cracow, 2008); and Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path (Ithaca, 2009).

• 4

  Donald Lowrie, Rebellious Prophet: A Life of Nicolai Berdyaev (New York, 1960), 141–42.

• 5

  Nicholas Berdyaev, War & the Christian Conscience (1936; reprint ed. London, 1938).

• 6

  Berdiaev, “Voina i vozrozhdenie,”Utro Rossii, August 17, 1914. See also idem, “Filosofskaia istina i intelligentskaia pravda,” in Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii, 2nd ed. (1909; reprint ed. Frankfurt, 1967), 21. Along with other religious philosophers, the Orthodox Church establishment, which embraced the war effort, also used this image (Engelstein, Slavophile Empire, 213–14). For relevant Biblical passages see I Peter 1:6–7; and Job 23:10.

• 7

  Langdon B. Gilkey, “The Concept of Providence in Contemporary Theology,” Journal of Religion 43:3 (1963): 171, 174, 191 n. 5.

• 8

  For comments on this contradiction (described as a contradiction between monism and dualism) see Anna Lisa Crone, Eros and Creativity in Russian Religious Renewal: The Philosophers and the Freudians (Boston, 2010), 138–40. For a late statement from Berdiaev on man's calling to fulfill the will of God see his O naznachenii cheloveka (1931; reprint ed. Moscow, 1993), 44–45.

• 9

  Brian Horowitz, “Vladimir Ern and Hryhorii Skovoroda: A Historian and His Philosophical Antithesis,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 22:1–2 (1997): 97.

• 10

  Vladimir Ern, “From Kant to Krupp” (1914), in his Mech i krest: Stat'i o sovremennykh sobytiiakh (Moscow, 1915), 31. For a description of the forum see Gollerbakh, K nezrimomu gradu, 249–55, including footnotes.

• 11

  Cf. Michael Meerson, “Put’ against Logos: The Critique of Kant and Neo-Kantianism by Russian Religious Philosophers in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” Studies in East European Thought 47:3–4 (1995): 227–29. On Russian anti-German sentiment see Richard Stites, “Days and Nights in Wartime Russia: Cultural Life, 1914–1917,” in European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918, ed. Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (Cambridge, England, 1999), 16–17. For a discussion of Russian nationalism in terms of “ressentiment” vis-à-vis the West see also Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 222–35.

• 12

  For examples, see the essays in Roshwald and Stites, European Culture in the Great War; and Michael Snape, “The Great War,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9, World Christianities c.1914–c.2000, ed. Hugh McLeod (Cambridge, England, 2006), 131–50. For more on patriotic expressions in Russia see also Hubertus Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, 1995).

• 13

  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York, 1987), 161–63. Cf. Greenfeld, Nationalism.

• 14

  Genevieve Lloyd, Providence Lost (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 3, 63–65, 94.

• 15

  Ibid., 240, 251, 292–95; Gilkey, “Concept of Providence,” 172.

• 16

  On “proto-nationalism” see E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England, 1992), 47–48, 68.

• 17

  Gilkey, “Concept of Providence,” 172.

• 18

  Lloyd, Providence Lost, 1.

• 19

  Scholarly attention may be beginning to emerge. See Thomas Albert Howard, “A ‘Religious Turn’ in Modern European Historiography?” Church History 75:1 (2006): 157–62;Rudy Koshar, “Where is Karl Barth in Modern European History?” Modern Intellectual History 5:2 (2008), 333–62; and Patrick Lally Michelson, “Slavophile Religious Thought and the Dilemma of Russian Modernity, 1830–1860,” Modern Intellectual History 7:2 (2010): 239–67. Michelson's piece is notable for its attention to the concept of Providence.

• 20

  Berdiaev, “K voprosu ob otnoshenii khristianstva k obshchestvennosti” (1907), in his Dukhovnyi krizis intelligentsii (1910; reprint ed. Moscow, 1998), 215.

• 21

  On Russian idealists as internal critics of the intelligentsia see William F. Woehrlin, “Introduction: Voices from Out of the Depths,” in Out of the Depths (De Profundis): A Collection of Articles on the Russian Revolution, ed. and trans. William F. Woehrlin (Irvine, CA, 1986), xviii–xix, xxvii. On the categories of religious intelligentsia and classical intelligentsia see G. M. Hamburg, “Russian Intelligentsias,” in A History of Russian Thought, ed. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord (Cambridge, England, 2010), 47, 52, 60–61.

• 22

  Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Dmitri Sergeevich Merezhkovsky and the Silver Age: The Development of a Revolutionary Mentality (The Hague, 1975).

• 23

  While the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society encompassed a range of viewpoints, it was a key organ for the Christian ideology explored in this article. Its top three presenters were Ern (16 presentations), Bulgakov (13), and Trubetskoi (12), who together gave nearly a third of the 126 known presentations. These numbers are derived from the tables in Burchardi, Die Moskauer “Relgiös-Philosophische Vladimir-Solov'ev Gesellschaft,” 366–82. In order to increase their reach, patriotic lectures and speeches organized by the Committee on War and Culture were published by I. D. Sytin in the Voina i kul'tura series.

• 24

  Russian religious philosophers understood positivism and most Neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy as nihilistic in the sense that both denied the accessibility of absolute truth. They believed the human mind's access to absolute truth was necessary for ethical behavior. Their use of the term nihilism was rarely confined to strands of Russian or European thought that defined themselves as nihilistic.

• 25

  S. Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy,”Russkaia mysl', 1914, no. 12:108–9.

• 26

  Ern, “Ot Kanta k Kruppu,” 34. Ern was not alone in invoking the image of an abscess or sore. See Berdiaev, “Voina i vozrozhdenie”; Berdiaev, “Mysli o prirode voiny,” in his Sud'ba Rossii: Opyty po psikhologii voiny i natsional'nosti (1918; reprint ed. Moscow, 1990), 178; and E. N. Trubetskoi, Voina i mirovaia zadacha Rossii (Moscow, 1915), 14. This short book is an expanded version of the speech Trubetskoi gave on October 6, 1914 (“Voina i mirovaia zadacha Rossii,”Russkaia mysl', 1914, no. 12:88–96).

• 27

  Evgenii Trubetskoi, “Vozvrashchenie k filosofii,” in Filosofskii sbornik L'vu Mikhailovichu Lopatinu k tridtsatiletiiu nauchno-pedagogicheskoi deiatel'nosti (Ot Moskovskago Psikhologicheskogo Obshchestva. 1881–1911) (Moscow, 1912), 9; Viacheslav Ivanov, “Vselenskoe delo,”Russkaia mysl', 1914, no. 12: 102, 104.

• 28

  Trubetskoi, “Vozvrashchenie k filosofii,” 8–9.

• 29

  Gilkey, “Concept of Providence,” 171.

• 30

  Ern, “Ostrie russko-pol'skikh otnoshenii,” in Mech i krest, 62. Sergei Bulgakov, “Ot avtora,” in his Dva grada: Issledovaniia o prirode obshchestvennykh idealov (1911; reprint ed. St. Petersburg, 1997), 12.

• 31

  Bulgakov, “Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo (Iz razmyshlenii o religioznoi prirode russkoi intelligentsii),” in Vekhi, 24.

• 32

  Berdiaev, “K voprosu ob otnoshenii khristianstva k obshchestvennosti,” 208–9.

• 33

  Trubetskoi, “Vozvrashchenie k filosofii,” 9.

• 34

  Ern, “Ideia katastroficheskogo progressa,” in his Bor'ba za Logos: Opyty filosofskie i kriticheksie (Moscow, 1911), 245.

• 35

  Berdiaev, “K voprosu ob otnoshenii khristianstva k obshchestvennosti,” 215.

• 36

  Ern, “Nechto o Logose, russkoi filosofii i nauchnosti,” in Bor'ba, 84. For a characterization of the Slavophile understanding of rationalism that was adopted by Ern, Berdiaev, and other religious intelligenty see Ana Siljak, “Between East and West: Hegel and the Origins of the Russian Dilemma,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62:2 (2001): 350–52.

• 37

  For God hardening Pharaoh's heart see Exodus 7:3, 13, 22; 8:15, 19, 32; 9:12, 34–35; 10:20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8, 17. For Pharaoh hardening his own heart see Exodus 8:15, 32; 9:34.

• 38

  Gilkey, “Concept of Providence,” 176.

• 39

  For examples of this claim see Ern, “Nechto o Logose,” 77; and Trubetskoi, Natsional'nyi vopros, Konstantinopol’ i Sviataia Sofiia (Publichnaia lektsiia) (Moscow, 1915), 21.

• 40

  Berdiaev, “Natsionalizm i antisemitizm pered sudom khristianskogo soznaniia,”Russkaia mysl', 1912, no. 2:126.

• 41

  On Soloviev's understanding of history in relation to cosmology see Randall A. Poole, “Vladimir Solov'ëv's Philosophical Anthropology: Autonomy, Dignity, Perfectibility,” in A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, ed. Gary M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (New York, 2010), 131–49. On Sophia, a concept further developed by Bulgakov in particular, see Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, ed., Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca, 2009); and the introduction to Bulgakov, Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household, ed. and trans. Catherine Evtuhov (New Haven, 2000).

• 42

  V. Ern, “Priroda mysli,”Bogoslovskii vestnik, 1913, no. 5:115. This was the final installment of a three-part essay (ibid., 1913, no. 3:500–531; and no. 4:800–843 [hereafter Ern, “Priroda mysli,” pt. 1, pt. 2, or pt. 3]). On the doctrine see Timothy (Bishop Kallistos) Ware, The Orthodox Church (London, 1997), 231–38.

• 43

  Ivanov, “O znachenii Vl. Solov'eva v sud'bakh” nashego religioznago soznaniia,” in Sbornik pervyi o Vladimire Solov'eve (Moscow, 1911), 38.

• 44

  Ern, “Priroda mysli,” pt. 2:808. See also the entire subsection “Ontologicheskii kharakter istiny” (ibid., 804–16).

• 45

  Ibid., 837–41.

• 46

  Edith W. Clowes, “The Limits of Discourse: Solov'ev's Language of Syzygy and the Project of Thinking Total-Unity,”Slavic Review 55 (Autumn 1996): 552–66.

• 47

  Ern, “Priroda mysli,” pt. 2:804–5. On Eros see also ibid., pt. 3:114–15; and Ern, “Razmyshlenie o pragmatizme” and “Priroda filosofskago somneniia,” both in Ern, Bor'ba, 24–25 and 70, respectively.

• 48

  Val.[entin] Sventsitskii, Khristianskoe Bratstvo Bor'by i ego programma (Moscow, 1906), 21.

• 49

  Trubetskoi, “Vladimir Solov'ev i ego delo,” in Sbornik pervyi o Vladimire Solov'eve, 83–84.

• 50

  Ern, “Ideia katastroficheskago progressa,” 260.

• 51

  S. N. Bulgakov, Voina i russkoe samosoznanie (Publichnaia lektsiia) (Moscow, 1915), 57–58; Ern, Vremia slavianofil'stvuet: Voina, Germaniia, Evropa i Rossiia (Moscow, 1915).

• 52

  Bulgakov, “Rodine,”Utro Rossii, August 5, 1914.

• 53

  Ern, “Mech i krest (vmesto predisloviia),” in Mech i krest, 6.

• 54

  Ern, “I na zemli mir. 25. dekabria,” in Mech i krest, 66.

• 55

  Berdiaev, “Voina i vozrozhdenie.”

• 56

  Trubetskoi, Voina i mirovaia zadacha Rossii, 3–6, 7, 17. There is a strong echo here of the main themes of Dostoevsky's famous 1880 Pushkin speech. See “Pushkin (Ocherk),” in F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia (St. Petersburg, 1999), 668–78. When Trubetskoi wrote this, Bulgaria had not yet aligned itself with the Central Powers. Thus he could still hope the Entente would manage to reconcile Serbia with Bulgaria and unite the Slavs against Germany.

• 57

  For studies that emphasize Russian religious philosophers’ interpretation of the rise of Soviet power as divine punishment see Christian Gottlieb, Dilemmas of Reaction in Leninist Russia: The Christian Response to the Revolution in the Works of N. A. Berdyaev, 1917–1924 (Odense, Denmark, 2003); and Bryn Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans: Diplomacy, Theology, and the Politics of Interwar Ecumenism (Notre Dame, 2010), 34–35.

• 58

  Trubetskoi, “Novoe iazychestvo i ego ‘ognennyia slova': Otvet D. D. Muretovu,”Russkaia mysl', 1916, no. 6:94.

• 59

  Trubetskoi, “Voina i mirovaia zadacha Rossii,” 90; idem, Natsional'nyi vopros, 4–5, 19.

• 60

  Trubetskoi, Natsional'nyi vopros, 19–23; idem, “Voina i mirovaia zadacha Rossii,” 90–96.

• 61

  Trubetskoi, Natsional'nyi vopros, 5, 12–17.

• 62

  Poole, “Religion, War and Revolution,” 212.

• 63

  Trubetskoi, Natsional'nyi vopros, 9.

• 64

  Poole, “Religion, War and Revolution,” 213.

• 65

  On Struve and national liberalism see Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (Cambridge, MA, 1980).

• 66

  Berdiaev, “Natsionalizm i antisemitizm,” 125, editorial footnote.

• 67

  Bulgakov, “Tri idei,”Russkaia mysl', 1913, no. 2:149. The reference is to Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30).

• 68

  Bulgakov, “Tri idei,” 149.

• 69

  Bulgakov, “Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo,” 25–26, 37.

• 70

  Andrew R. Murphy, Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (Oxford, 2009), 7–9, 38, 47.

• 71

  On imperial unity see, for example, Ern, “Velikoe v malom,” in Mech i krest, 14; and Bulgakov, “Rodine.” On revival in Europe see, for example, Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy,” 111–14; and Ern, Vremia slavianofil'stvuet, 16–20. The war did lead to an immediate upsurge in religious observance. See Snape, “The Great War”; and Annette Becker, War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930, trans. Helen McPhail (Oxford, 1998).

• 72

  To take just a few examples, see Berdiaev, “Religioznaia sud'ba evreistva,”Khristianskaia mysl', 1916, no. 4:126; Trubetskoi, Natsional'nyi vopros, 29–31; Ern, “I na zemli mir,” 65–66; Ivanov, “Vselenskoe delo,” 105; and Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy,” 115.

• 73

  Murphy, Prodigal Nation, 38.

• 74

  Bulgakov, Voina i russkoe samosoznanie, 57–58.

• 75

  For examples of references to Europe as the prodigal son see Ern, Vremia slavianofil'stvuet, 31–36; and Bulgakov, “Russkie dumy,” 111. Ern had previously described “the abstract humanism of modern philosophy” as the prodigal son (“Priroda mysli,” pt. 2:842–43).

• 76

  Berdiaev, “Filosofskaia istina i intelligentskaia pravda,” 19n., 21–22, 22n.

• 77

  Trubetskoi, “Vozvrashchenie k filosofii,” 7–9.

• 78

  Ern, “Priroda mysli,” pt. 1:519.

• 79

  F. M. Dostoevskii, Idiot: Roman v chetyrekh chastiakh (1868) (Moscow, 1960), 604.

• 80

  For Berdiaev's atypical (and temporary) embrace of the term nationalism see his “K sporu mezhdu kn. E. N. Trubetskim i D. D. Muretovym,”Russkaia mysl', 1916, no. 8:45; and Berdiaev, “Natsionalizm i messianizm” and “Natsionalizm i imperializm,” both in his Sud'ba Rossii, 102–9 and 110–16, respectively. The religious intelligentsia generally followed Soloviev's distinction between narodnost' as positive and natsionalizm as negative, on which see Greg Gaut, “Can a Christian be a Nationalist? Vladimir Solov'ev's Critique of Nationalism,”Slavic Review 57 (Spring 1998): 77–94; and Poole, “Religion, War and Revolution,” 215.

• 81

  For a few remarks on Ern's philosophy of Logism see N. O. Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy (London, 1952), 328.

• 82

  Ern, “Nechto o Logose,” 90–91.

• 83

  Berdiaev, “Natsionalizm i antisemitizm,” 128, 132, 139.

• 84

  Bulgakov, “Na vyborakh (Iz dnevnika),”Russkaia mysl', 1912, no. 11:191.

• 85

  Ern, “Kul'turnoe neponimanie: Otvet S. L. Franku,” in his Bor'ba, 134. For Ern's declaration that the Gospel forbade Christian participation in war see his “Khristianskoe otnoshenie k sobstvennosti,” Voprosy zhizni 1:9 (1905): 367.

• 86

  Berdiaev, “Voina i vozrozhdenie.”

• 87

  Bulgakov, “Ot avtora,” 12–13.

• 88

  Bulgakov, “Tri idei,” 146.

• 89

  Bulgakov, “Otvet V. P. Sokolovu,”Russkaia mysl', 1913, no. 7:113.

• 90

  V. P. Sokolov, “Otkrytoe pis'mo S. N. Bulgakovu,”Russkaia mysl', 1913, no. 7:108.

• 91

  Khellman, “Kogda vremia slavianofil'stvovalo,” 233.

• 92

  Bulgakov, “Na piru bogov,” in Iz glubiny: Sbornik statei o russkoi revoliutsii (Moscow, 1918), 80.

• 93

  Notably in Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle, 16, 153, 246. The classic work that introduced the term is H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York, 1958).

• 94

  Gilkey, “Concept of Providence,” 172.

• 95

  Cf. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson, “Introduction,” in Russian Religious Thought, ed. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson (Madison, 1996), 4.

• 96

  On Lewis see John Beversluis, C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion, rev. ed. (Amherst, 2007). On Barth see Koshar, “Where is Karl Barth?” On the use of the press for religious-ideological purposes in the nineteenth century see the essays in Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, England, 2003).

• 97

  See especially Geffert, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans; and Matthew Miller, “A Hunger for Books: The American YMCA Press and Russian Readers,” Religion, State and Society 38:1 (2010): 53–73.