Paul Ladouceur

Russian religious thought originated in the mid-nineteenth century and reached an apogee in the decades preceding World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, a movement known as the Russian religious renaissance. Almost all the leading figures of the religious renaissance went into exile, and several, especially Nicolas Berdyaev and Sergius Bulgakov, produced their most significant works in the years prior to World War II. But after the war, the mode of philosophical and theological reflection that they represented declined rapidly. This article advances five principal reasons for this decline: the exile situation itself; the difficulty in communicating the major themes of Russian religious thought beyond the Russian context; fundamental problems in religious thought; the passing of generations; and the emergence of an alternative, more patristically- and liturgically-based theology. Despite the decline of religious thought, many of its basic ideas have carried forward into the neopatristic mode of Orthodox theology.

Russian Religious ought on the Eve of the Russian Revolution

In the decade preceding the Russian Revolution of 1918, the Russian religious renaissance¹ had reached a certain maturity, marked by several major publications. The collective book Vekhi (Signposts) (1909) contains contributions by seven leading representatives of the Russian religious renaissance, including four former Marxist philosophers who had returned to Christianity: Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948), Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944), Simeon Frank (1877–1954), and Peter Struve (1870–1944).² In the words of Simeon Frank, Vekhi ‘asserted the necessity of a religious foundation for any consistent philosophy of life, and at the same time sharply criticised the revolutionary and maximalist tendencies of the radically-minded Russian intelligentsia.’