The Thinking Reed

The first, and perhaps the most important, of the Russian religious philosophers was V. Solovev, who asserted that in modern times the divine spirit lay rather with unbelievers than with believers. Solovev, of course, was never a supporter of the Russian autocracy and his ideas can properly be called the Christian justification of the political opponents of the official Orthodox state. Solovev’s attitude to the socialists was very contradictory, but he considered it impossible either to denounce them (they were right to attack modern capitalism) or to unite with them (they put forward a positive programme which was unacceptable to him).76 From this one can easily conclude that whether or not the political ideas of the Lefts were correct, Solovev’s philosophy justified destructive activity directed against the old order. According to his logic the Narodovoltsy, the Marxists and all those atheistic socialists were bearers of the divine spirit. Consequently, even the terrorist acts of the Social-Revolutionaries could be justified morally. True, Solovev did not draw that conclusion, but Merezhkovsky did it for him. A present-day Soviet thinker of the ‘new right’, M. Agursky (who is probably the most profound theoretician of that tendency) was quite justified, in his own way, when he remarked maliciously that ‘Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Hippius rejected Bolshevism, without recognizing that it was their own godchild.’77

In Merezhkovsky’s opinion, the revolution had to come down from the sociopolitical plane ‘into the religious depths, which, however, include that plane as well, just as the third dimension includes the second.’78 Political emancipation must be combined with spiritual, religious renewal — that was Merezhkovsky’s basic idea, which determined his political sympathies and antipathies and explains his disagreement with the subsequent Bolshevik revolution, which was absolutely alien to the Christian renaissance. However, was not the Bolshevik ideology itself a peculiar sort of atheist or, rather, anti-God religiosity? ‘Up to now,’ wrote Merezhkovsky, ‘revolution has been the religion of the Russian intelligentsia. It is not a long step from this to religion becoming revolution.’79 Something like that did happen, perhaps, but the only revolutionary religiosity proved, in practice, to be the atheistic variety.80 Was Merezhkovsky mistaken, though, in his prophecies? Perhaps in this case, too, he ‘failed to recognize his own godchild’?

We can appreciate the difficulties of official Soviet historians of social thought when they try to depict such pronouncements as ‘reactionary’. In the end, for example, V.A. Kuvakin,81 in his book on Russian religious philosophy published by the Mysl' publishing house, is obliged to write: ‘In the period when it came into being, the “new religious consciousness” represented a conservative camp only in the person of V. Rozanov.’82 The specific nature of Kuvakin’s language, of course, enables him to speak of a whole ‘camp’ consisting of one man. But it becomes clear that in this case, too, one cannot get by without a reservation, since Rozanov ‘was close to Merezhkovsky in some points of his modernistic religious programme’.83 Actually, Rozanov’s religious utopianism was to a large extent simply outside the realm of politics. He could be called conservative, or even reactionary, only if he had not been so remote from life. Rozanov’s dream was to ‘extinguish the political bonfire’ completely,84 not to bring about the triumph of any particular political ideas. His immediate interests lay in another direction altogether — the field of religious reform. Furthermore, his criticism of the official Church (and even of Christianity itself) was radical enough to create a fairly large audience for him among the Russian intelligentsia.

Before the beginning of the twentieth century idealist philosophy was not very popular in intellectual circles. In Vekhi Berdyaev admitted that ‘the Russian intelligentsia did not read or know Solovev: it failed to recognize him as its own.’85 It was Rozanov and Merezhkovsky together who in 1901 made the first attempt to reconcile religion and the intelligentsia, by organizing meetings to discuss religion and philosophy. The aim of such a reconciliation, however, was to bring about a modernization of the Orthodox Church itself, which in its current form could offer no attraction to the intelligentsia. The official Church’s attitude to this initiative was extremely unfriendly, for ‘Orthodox conformism’ came under sharp criticism in these meetings. The intelligenty put questions to the church dignitaries which the latter could not and did not want to answer. ‘These religious and philosophical gatherings were interesting principally for the questions that were asked rather than for the answers that were given,’ Berdyaev recalled.86