Beyond Modernity

Russian Religious Philosophy and Post-Secularism

Mrowczynski-Van Allen, Obolevitch

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498239783
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Post-secularism is the fundamental evidence of the end of modernity. Modernity, as sleeping reason in Francisco Goya's painting, realizes that, although it thought that it was awake, it was producing monsters. We try to analyze post-secular philosophy from the point of view of Russian religious thought. We believe that such philosophers as Vladimir Soloviev, Pavel Florensky, Sergey Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Georges Florovsky, and Semen Frank may be helpful for understanding and overcoming post-secular order. Their unique views on the relations between religion and philosophy, science, and social life are apparently missing in the current Western debates. It seems to us that Russian religious philosophy becomes surprisingly up-to-date and attractive in the contemporary world. We hope that the present volume will be a significant step forward in the inclusion of the heritage of Russian religious philosophy in contemporary debates.

part i

General Overview

1

Aspects of the Russian Tradition of Philosophical-Theological Synthesis in the Post-Secular Context

Georges Florovsky, Sergey Bulgakov, Alain Badiou, and the “Theology Dwarf”21

Artur Mrówczyński-Van Allen

Sebastián Montiel Gómez

Mrówczyński-Van Allen & MontielAspects of Synthesis

In the famous first few paragraphs of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin recalled the story that was told about a machine built to play chess in such a way that it was able to respond to every move made by an opponent with a countermove that would ensure it would win the game. It looked like a puppet in Turkish dress, holding a water pipe in its mouth and seated before the chessboard, which was placed on a large table. A system of mirrors gave spectators the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. But in fact a hunchbacked dwarf who was an expert chess player sat inside, guiding the puppet’s hands with strings. Benjamin concluded that we can conceive of a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet we call “historical materialism” is to win every time. It could easily be a match for anyone, if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.22

In our opinion, this quote from Benjamin allows us to define the term “post-secular” in a very illustrative way. Here we will allow ourselves to expand the meaning of the term somewhat, applying it not only to a type of philosophy but to the predominant school of thought characteristic of our era. We believe this will help us sketch out some features of the philosophical-theological synthesis that is paradigmatic for the Russian Orthodox tradition, and begin to appreciate the topicality thereof, as it offers important suggestions for articulating contemporary Christian thought. In so doing, we hope to contribute something new to the conversation that started a few years ago.23

To this end, we will discuss some elements of the proposal made by the most representative, in our opinion, post-secular thinker, Alain Badiou, as well as aspects of Fr. Sergey Bulgakov’s and Fr. Georges Florovsky’s thought. Finally, we hope to discover what role is played today by the “dwarf” described by Benjamin.

The Post-Secular

There is no need to provide a detailed explanation here of what the terms “secular” and “post-secular” are understood to mean in the Western and Russian spheres. Some years have already gone by since Aleksandr Kyrlezhev’s and Aleksandr Zhuravskiy’s articles were published in the journal Kontinent.24 And in an interview granted to the newspaper Izvestiya in 2009, Patriarch Cyril commented in no uncertain terms that today’s society is not called “post-secular” for nothing.25 These two clear points illustrate the traditional attention with which the modern world is observed and analyzed from Russia. Given this attention, here we will only allow ourselves to briefly outline the concept of “post-secular” and the interpretation that we propose.

At the end of the twentieth century, “post-secular philosophy” was still spoken of as a branch of modern philosophy born out of the criticism and crisis of metaphysics that addressed questions about the relationship between religion (the religious realm) and philosophy, between the sacred and the secular. Some time later, Jürgen Habermas defined it as a type of theory in which one of the central problems was the issue of the presence of religion in modern Western societies, which he already called “post-secular.”26 In the twenties Frank Rosenzweig’s insight had already pointed at this type of thought.27 Debates on the relationship between philosophy and religion have clearly led the way forward; one example is the renowned debate that emerged from the famous conference on “Christian philosophy” that took place on March 21, 1931 in the Societé Française de Philosophie.28 What became increasingly clear were the two essential questions that post-secular philosophy had to address, namely: “how to interpret modernity” and “what place does or should religion occupy in this modernity?” Thinkers with such varied positions as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida, and Alain Badiou are among the philosophers who have tried to tackle these questions. The debate central to the philosophy of the past few decades on the character of the secular in modernity shows us that the secularization has not been as total as we might imagine. For example, in his work A Secular Age, Charles Tayler presents an option for interpreting secularity in which secularization implies the establishment of new conditions for religious convictions.29 This process necessarily entailed working out a specific way of thinking, the characteristics of which are described by Msgr. Javier Martínez in his essay Beyond Secular Reason.30

In our opinion, what differentiates the secular age from the post-secular one is that in the latter we have discovered that in the former, there were in fact certain theologies (or crypto-theologies) hidden behind all of the secular philosophies. That is to say, the post-secular era does not consist so much in an apparent recovery of the positions of the religions but in the recovery of the awareness that all thought is in some way theological.

Fr. Sergey Bulgakov

From the outset we want to note that sophiology is not among the aspects of Fr. Sergey Bulgakov’s thought that we will discuss herein. This is due to the simple reason that we do not feel that we have enough knowledge of the issue to do so; however, we agree with the assessment made by Natalia Vaganova in the prologue to her exceptional book, namely, that it is possible that we simply have not discovered the extent to which we could find Fr. Bulgakov’s sophiology necessary.31

What we can affirm is that Bulgakov’s sophiology was the result of an intense quest to respond to dualism. From the time he published his first texts critical of Marxism in 1904 (From Marxism to Idealism) through the period in which he returned to the Orthodox faith and was ordained as a priest, this question became one of the fundamental issues in his work, finding expression in the text Unfading Light (1916). According to Lev Zander, this work includes a sort of summary of philosophical problems drawn up in the light of the Bulgakov’s characteristic religious-philosophical perspective.32 In the first sentence of the prologue itself, Bulgakov writes, “In these miscellanies, I would like to display in philosophical thought or to incarnate in speculation some religious contemplations connected with a life in Orthodoxy,”33 and over the course of the book he analyzes the way religion and its relationship with dogmas, miracles, philosophy, apophatic theology, anthropological questions, history, theocracy, and eschatology, are understood. Without a doubt, all of the elements of this work are held together by a clear rejection of dualism, of the separation between the natural and the supernatural, between the immanent and the transcendent, between God and creation. Thus experience appears as a central point in his philosophical-theological reflection, while at the same time, as Leonid Vasilienko explains in his Introduction to Russian Religious Philosophy, he clearly ties it to Tradition and dogmatics.34 Vasilienko indicates that according to Fr. Bulgakov, faith needs dogma, as for him, “dogma is the formula of that which is identified by faith as transcendent existence.”35

We can find the follow-up to the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Introduction: “Abel, where is your Brother Cain?”
• Part One: General Overview
• Part Two: Systematic Studies
• Part Three: Historical Focuses