Monday, January 10, 2005
SOPHIOLOGY AND COMMUNISM
This Orthodox website seems to indicate that Sophiology was held more in the hands of the Russian Diaspora than within Russia itself:
The proud mind could not agree that up to now it had stood on a false path. There arose strivings to make Christian teaching agree with the previous views and ideas of the converts. Therefore there was a whole series of new religious-philosophical currents, often completely foreign to Church teaching. Of these currents, especially widespread was Sophiology, which is founded on the recognition of the value of man in himself and expresses the psychology of the intellectual class.
Sophiology as a doctrine is known to a comparatively small group of people, and very few actually subscribe to it openly. But a significant part of the Intellectual class of the emigration is spiritually akin to it, for the psychology of Sophiology is the worship of man, who is no longer the humble slave of God, but is himself a small god who has no need to be blindly submissive to the Lord God. A feeling of refined pride bound up with faith in the possibility for a man to live by his own wisdom, is very characteristic of many people who are "cultural" in the modern sense, who place above everything else the conclusions of their own minds and do not desire to be in everything submissive to the teaching of the Church, looking upon it favorably in a condescending way. Thanks to this the Russian Church Abroad has been struck by a series of schisms which have caused it harm up until now and have drawn away into themselves even a part of the hierarchy.
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This Rutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry doesn't address the idea of a communist component of Sophiology, but it does speak of "All-Unity" which is a component of Sophiology, apparently.
Russian religious philosophers tended to see themselves as prophets, pointing the way to the regeneration of human societies through the spiritual transformation of individuals. Vladimir Solov’ëv (regarded by many Russians as their greatest philosopher) believed that his country’s mission was to bring into being the Kingdom of God on Earth in the form of a liberal theocracy, which would integrate knowledge and social practice and unite the human race under the spiritual rule of the Pope and the secular rule of the Russian tsar. His metaphysics of ‘All-Unity’ was a dominant force in the revival of religious and idealist philosophy in Russia in the early twentieth century, inspiring an entire generation of thinkers who sought to reinterpret Christian dogma in ways that emphasized the links of spiritual culture and religious faith with institutional and social reform, and progress in all other aspects of human endeavour. Among them were leading Russian émigré philosophers after 1917, such as Semën Frank, Bulgakov (who sought to create a new culture in which Orthodox Christianity would infuse every area of Russian life), Berdiaev (who was strongly influenced by the messianic motifs in Solov’ëv), and Hessen, who offered a Neo-Kantian and Westernist interpretation of the notion of ‘All-Unity’.
It appears that "All-Unity" is not only a Sophiological but also a Russian philosophical concept. It turned out to be a dead end in Google, however.
