Russia

Neo -Byzantine in the eyes of author

https://www.unz.com/article/russias-neo-byzantinism/

What is Russia? How does Russia define herself, and how does she conceive of her relationship to Europe? Specifically, from what tradition do Russia’s current ruling elites draw their vision of Russian civilization? I wanted to learn about the Russian thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the Russians themselves have rediscovered since the fall of Communism, and who are said to have a strong influence on Vladimir Putin and his entourage. Here is what I found.

Let’s start, quite logically, with three authors whose books were offered by Vladimir Putin to governors and members of his United Russia party for the New Year 2014 (see here and here):

• Vladimir Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good

• Nikolai Berdyaev ‘s The Philosophy of Inequality

• Ivan Ilyin’s Our Tasks

All three authors are deeply religious and patriotic, and as such committed to Russian Orthodoxy. All three are passionate about Russia, and hold her as “an original and independent civilization,” in the terms used by Vladimir Putin in his October 27, 2022 speech at the Valdai Forum.

Soloviev or Solovyov (1853-1900) was a poet, philosopher, theologian and mystic, specially known for his “Sophiology”, a theory of Wisdom as the Feminine World Principle, which Soloviev encountered mystically (I have mentioned it in an earlier article). His book The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy, written in 1897, is an attempt to found moral values on a scientific basis, by showing that they are anchored in three impulses of the mind common to all peoples: shame, pity and reverence. Shame causes us not to identify with our base instincts, and manifests itself in modesty; pity is compassion for our equals; reverence, which is the foundation of social hierarchy and religion, is love for superior beings. I will not dwell on this book, which, unlike the other two, does not have a strong political dimension.

Nicolas Berdyaev (1874-1948) is one of the most accessible Russian philosophers, especially to French readers, because he lived in France and died there, and most of his writings have been translated. He contributed to introduce other like-minded Russian thinkers like Konstantin Leontiev or Alexis Khomiakov, whom I will talk about later. His book The Philosophy of Inequality: Letters to my Contempters Concerning Social Philosophy, written in 1918, is a harsh critique of the paradigms of Western political thought. Berdyaev has a mystical and supernatural conception of power: “The principle of power, he writes, is entirely irrational. … no one in the world has ever submitted to any power for rational reasons.” Power is always personal. That is why democracy — the Rousseauist utopia of the sovereignty of the people — is a lie. “Since the creation of the world, it is always the minority which has governed, which governs and which will govern. … The only question is whether it is the better or the worse minority that governs.” The government of the best, that is to say aristocracy in the proper sense, is “a higher principle of social life, the only utopia worthy of man.” The triumph of democratism “represents the greatest danger to human progress, to the qualitative elevation of human nature.”[1] It is the worship of an empty idea, the deification of human arbitrariness.

Ivan Ilyin (1884-1954) is the political thinker most often mentioned as having an influence on Putin. Arrested six times by the Bolsheviks, he was finally exiled in 1922 by Lenin, on the famous “philosophers’ ships” among 160 other intellectuals, including Berdyaev. Like Berdyaev, Ilyin saw Soviet Communism as inherently evil, because of its metaphysical materialism and destruction of religious life. In the opening pages of On Resistance to Evil by Force (a critic of the pacifism of Tolstoy and his disciples, and a message to the “White warriors, bearers of the Orthodox sword”, written in 1925), Ilyin writes:

As a result of a long brewing process, evil has now managed to free itself from all internal divisions and external obstacles, show its face, spread its wings, utter its goals, muster its forces, realize its ways and means; moreover, it has openly legitimated itself, formulated its dogmas and canons, praised its own no longer hidden disposition, and revealed to the world its spiritual nature. Nothing equivalent or equal to this has been seen in the history of humanity, at least as far as can be remembered…..more at link above