Man is created in the image of God. In his personal consciousness man possesses the image of the divine persons; as a member of the human race he possesses the image of the union of the three persons, he is conscious of himself not only as I, but as thou and as we. —Sergei Bulgakov
St. Petersburg -
Not only by finding Elena but with all the other arrangements, Open Christianity really came through. This conference, the one that Konstantin Ivanov and I had only dreamed about a year ago, couldn’t have gotten off to a better start: well-attended by over a hundred persons, including professors from Leningrad University.
When Konstantin greeted me and introduced Elena, he told me how delighted he was that George Kline and Andrzej Walicki, two of the world’s leading scholars on Russian philosophy, were among the ten Americans that I’d managed to recruit. He also said that he’d have supper with me tomorrow. Then he’d tell me about progress on renovating their building and on publishing my book.
The hall we met in could hardly have been more elegant: a great two-story-high ballroom in an ornate eighteenth-century mansion, now home to the Institute for the Study of Art. It was a fine venue for what we’d billed as “The First US-USSR Conference on the Recovery of the Russian Philosophical Tradition.” As planned with Konstantin last fall, part 1 of the conference would be three days here, and then part 2 would be three days in
Our visit here during these cataclysmic events, feels like 1917 in reverse: the revolution unraveling right before our eyes. Today, in fact, Leningrad changed its name back to St. Petersburg.
Since I’d arrived almost an hour early, Elena had been able to read my paper and clarify the few questions she had. I’d titled it “The Promise of Russian Philosophy,” and I’m sure my audience thought that I’d written it for this event. But that was far from the case. Instead, quite brazenly, I simply used large segments from the first chapter of my little samizdat book Between East and West, the book Open Christianity plans to publish, the one I’ve been handing out here since 1983, and the one I began as an article for Esprit in the Paris of 1948.
Promptly at
(I’ll provide below just two selections from it: the opening and a section about Kireevsky.)
The Essence of Russian Philosophy
According to Alexei Losev (1893-1988), Russian philosophy, which first emerged in the early 19th century, has concentrated on questions of the spirit, man’s destiny, and his relation to God. It is based on the Logos or word, as opposed to the Western reliance on Ratio or reason. With that distinction in mind, I think it is possible to discern a thread that runs from Alexei Khomyakov (1804-1860) to Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), a focus on the powers of the spirit made manifest as speech, as the living word. Let me briefly trace that thread.
Khomyakov might be called
Khomyakov’s friend Ivan Kireevsky (1806-1856), in his “The Possibility and Necessity of New Principles in Philosophy” (1856), wrote that four different “faculties” give us access to the whole truth. I’ll comment on those faculties, which seem related to four different kinds of language, toward the middle of this paper.
Drawing on his two Slavophile predecessors, Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) suggested that the word worked in man to make him a partner of God. In his 1877 “Lectures on Divine Humanity,” Solovyov said that the Logos, the word, was “the active unifying principle” in establishing the great human society, to which he gave the name “Sophia.”
Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) welcomed Solovyov’s interpretation of “Divine Humanity,” but perceived the word and man’s relation to God in a less idealistic and more conditional way. He saw the word made manifest as spirit, “the divine principle” which man carries within himself “creatively and actively.” He anticipated a post-theological and post-scientific “third age” of the spirit when “a new anthropology will be made known and the religious meaning of human creativity will be recognized.”
When Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) wrote his famous The Pillar and Foundation of Truth, it was received with reservations by Berdyaev, who called it “stylized Orthodoxy.” However, Florensky seems to be going beyond dogmatism when he describes the word in terms of a “dialogic action,” one which changes us into different grammatical persons. The word of love, addressed to each of us as thou, he says, moves us to realize ourselves as a subject, I, and later to recognizing ourselves objectively as he. He said that this action of the word in us could be seen as reflecting the three persons of the Trinity.
Florensky’s friend Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944) made a similar formulation, relating the three persons of the Trinity to the grammatical persons of I, thou, and we.
As a young man, Bakhtin not only read and admired Florensky but also formed much of his own thinking in discussion groups that pursued Florensky’s goal of synthesizing all human experience, including the religious. Undoubtedly his early concern with religion and philosophy explains why Bakhtin’s literary criticism always serves the larger purpose of articulating a philosophy based on the word, specifically on the principle of dialogue. For him “life by its very nature is dialogic.”
Bakhtin says that, to get beyond the narrow analytical concerns of contemporary linguistics, we need a new discipline, one which would be animated by the dialogical principle. His proposed “metalinguistics” would interpret the life of the word as it moves through history, society, and each one of us. He described us as living at the center of a “chronotope” of two different times, past and future, and two different “spaces,” an inner and an outer. (His “chronotope” is from the Greek chronos for time and topos for space.)
The Spirit as the Creative Word
In retrospect, we can see that what had been relatively abstract and idealistic understandings of spirit and word in the earlier Russian philosophers had become, in Bakhtin, quite concrete. There is a progressive development, an increasing appeal to our ordinary experience of speech, as we move from Khomyakov's “word of truth,” to Kireevsky’s “four faculties,” to Solovyov’s “active unifying principle” of Logos, to Berdyaev’s “divine principle” of spirit, to Florensky’s “dialogic action,” and finally to Bakhtin’s “dialogical principle.”
That progress, I think, can be described as an increasing realization that what the church, in the first millennium, had described as the Holy Spirit can be recognized today as a universal creative principle, the action of spirit in all persons. And this spirit, which once had seemed expressed as a divine Logos can now be recognized as the creative word, the flow of life-giving speech between individuals and from generation to generation.
(The next section of the paper described how the Western dialogical thinkers, and particularly Eugen, were working toward a dialogical method. I then took up Kireevsky’s work, as follows.)
Kireevsky’s Integral Knowledge
Among Eastern thinkers, Ivan Kireevsky, in particular, can be seen as an early prophet of a dialogical method, one that would address human concerns.
In his “The Possibility and Necessity of New Principles in Philosophy” (1856), he wrote that there are four “faculties” through which we apprehend the truth. Besides our “abstract logical capacity,” there are “the promptings of aesthetic thought,” “the ruling loves of the heart,” and “the voice of ecstatic feeling.” “[Man] should constantly seek, in the depths of his soul, that inner root of understanding where all the separate faculties unite in one living whole of spiritual vision.”
Such a vision, Kireevsky said, could lead to “integral knowledge.” Because he supplemented reason’s abstract logic with three other “faculties,” I think we can describe Kireevsky as proposing a “supra-rational” approach to understanding the truth about anything, be it in the realm of the spirit or in more mundane matters.
Without too great a stretch of the imagination, one can see how Bakhtin’s chronotope and Rosenstock-Huessy’s Cross of Reality are prefigured in Kireevsky’s four faculties. Our “abstract logical capacity” pertains to how we deal with the outer world; “the promptings of aesthetic thought” pertains to the impressions and feelings in our inner self; “the ruling loves of the heart” pertains to our love for what we’ve inherited from the past; and “the voice of ecstatic feeling” pertains to the future imperatives to which we feel called to respond.
When I finished my paper there was a flurry of questions. Then Konstantin announced we’d break for lunch. Among those who came forward to talk with me was an Orthodox priest, perhaps in his mid-forties. Father Benjamin, whose thin, ascetic face and piercing eyes gave him an appropriately Christlike look, turned out to be the vice rector of the
After lunch I decided to take a break; I set off on a walk around the spacious square in front of our conference building.
I felt a great relief; I’d finally gotten it all out in public. The scholars who listened to me this morning undoubtedly assumed it was the result of some recent research on Bakhtin, Eugen and their predecessors. But I knew it had very different origins. That paper, that chapter 1 of my samizdat, really summed up ideas I’d been nourishing since the 1940s—and especially since St. Sergius in
On a more upbeat note, I told him the MacArthur Foundation had given us twenty thousand dollars last January, to fund that business management program we’re starting with Nikolai Shmelev. In fact, our
We’ve also heard that MacArthur is likely to fund a second Solovyov Society conference at
At
Refounding the Solovyov Society
At
The Bakhtin Connection
Dear Mr. Gardner!
Dr. Sergei Horujy, you spoke to him in September in
I am now the head of the
So, I’d be delighted to cooperate, and to receive any papers on Bakhtin within philosophical discourse. It is really of great significance, and besides, I am sure the “Bakhtin problem” is closely connected with cultural relations between
So, dear Mr. Gardner, I’d be happy if you respond.
I’m an adjunct professor at the
Yours sincerely,
Vitaly Makhlin
Just as I finished reading over that letter,
When we got to Vitaly’s,
As I hung up my coat, I glanced at a box under his hall table. It contained the typescript of a book in German: Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption! Vitaly saw me staring dumbfounded at the box. “Yes, I expect to translate that into Russian,” he said.
“I didn’t know anybody in
Vitaly then invited me into his kitchen where he warmed up some chicken. He thanked me for mailing him, last December, the first chapter of Between East and West. He liked how I’d developed the point that Russian philosophy was based on language itself, on Logos, the “word,” while Western philosophy was based on Ratio or reason.
We went on to discuss how Open Christianity had translated Between East and West into Russian. I presented him with a copy of the whole book in English, still in its spiral-bound format, and he started looking through it right away.
“I certainly look forward to reading this, Mr. Gardner,” he said. “We Russians love samizdats.”
I asked him to call me “Clint,” then gave him the short version of my years pursuing Eugen and Franz, Berdyaev and Solovyov—through the war, Paris, Berlin, founding Shopping International, next Argo, and finally Bridges for Peace.
Then Vitaly told me the fascinating story of how Bakhtin was “discovered.” There were three young scholars at the Gorky Institute who’d begun reading some of his work in the late 1950s, but they thought he was no longer alive. When they learned he was, they visited him in
“Well, this story of an ‘unknown’ scholar suddenly achieving worldwide acclaim is certainly poignant for me,” I said. “I can’t get over how academia today is so excited by your Mikhail but practically ignores my Eugen.”
“And why do you think that is?” Vitaly asked.
“I can think of several reasons, but one stands out. The fact that he’s such an articulate Christian makes him quite unacceptable to the academic mind. Writing on language, he identifies speech with the Holy Spirit. And his writings on history and sociology, full of references to Christianity, are equally ‘suspect,’ applauded only by an Auden or a Niebuhr.”
“Why, that really surprises me,” said Vitaly. “Of course, here the regime silenced anyone who took Christianity seriously—as they arrested Bakhtin in 1929. But it never had occurred to me that Western academia would silence writers for that same offense. Fascinating.”
We went on to discuss our current writing efforts. I told him that I’d begun working on a book that would focus on presenting the Cross of Reality. I was thinking of titling it Beyond Belief: Discovering Christianity’s New Paradigm.
“That’s a challenging title,” Vitaly said. “I hope you’ll send me a copy when it’s done. I’m doing some writing on Western thinkers whose ideas about language resemble Bakhtin’s. And, speaking of books, have others written about Rosenstock-Huessy?”
I told him about Hal Stahmer’s 1968 book “Speak That I May See Thee!”: The Religious Significance of Language, which introduced Eugen and several other speech-thinkers, as he called them. I also told him about the several international conferences on Eugen’s work, the first of which was convened in 1982 by Darrol Bryant, a professor of religion at the
Vitaly then asked me if I’d found any American thinkers who’d developed the idea of a Cross of Reality. I replied that I hadn’t, but sometimes I’d find one who seemed to intuit it. For example, Ken Wilber divides consciousness into four quadrants and discusses the relationship of our grammatical persons to each of them. I could imagine that he and his readers would find Eugen congenial.
I realized we’d not have much time to discuss the third man on our agenda: Franz Rosenzweig. Still, we gave it a shot. I told Vitaly how I once discussed The Star with Franz’s son Rafael at his home in
“As I see it,” said Vitaly, “the Star is misunderstood as a contribution to Jewish thought. It’s really meant to introduce new thinking, beyond the frameworks of religion and philosophy. Franz said that himself.”
“Exactly,” I replied. “A good way of understanding what Eugen and Franz were doing is to see how they differed from Karl Barth. Like that great Christian theologian, they wanted to get away from the 19th century’s watered-down ‘liberal’ theology. But, unlike him, they did not do this by simply reasserting the power of the word as found in the Bible. Instead, they pointed to the power of the word in each generation and in every tradition. Eugen put his differences with Barth very simply when he wrote: ‘Karl Barth and the dialectical theologians say that God appeared only once.’”
As I’d feared, our time for Rosenzweig had been too short. When
It was an important book, he said. He thought that the coincidences between Bakhtin and Eugen were simply astonishing. It wasn’t only that they both conceived of a chronotope, a time-space model that reflects the patterns of speech. Beyond that, both of them described language as a social phenomenon—and distinguished themselves sharply from the school of linguistic analysis which had dominated language studies from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Next I told Vitaly about the Solovyov Society’s third conference here in March 1993. Would he help us organize a Bakhtin session at it? He said that he’d be delighted to.
Finally, I sprang a big question. I asked him if he’d be willing to gather a group of Russian scholars to translate Out of Revolution. Of course, Argo would pay for this. Vitaly said he’d have to think about that, but in principle he liked the idea.
The Bakhtin connection has borne fruit beyond my wildest imagining.
Sergei Averintsev at the
I’d been looking forward to meeting Averintsev ever since that evening in 1983—the evening with the fan dancers in Leningrad—when Father Jonathan had told me he knew of only one successor to Berdyaev in Russia today, only one outstanding religious intellectual—and this was Averintsev.
Fortunately, Gorbachev and then Yeltsin have recognized his stature. He’s vice chairman of the Russian Cultural Fund and a member of the parliament. But, from my point of view, there are two striking things about him: first, he knew Bakhtin and edited some of his works; second, he got my little samizdat from Stanislav Djimbinov, a Gorky Institute friend of mine, who hoped Averintsev might be willing to write an introduction for it. Despite being quite ill, he took the time to read it. Then, much to my delight, last spring he told Nauka he’d do an introduction.
However, as I learned last July, when Averintsev had been unable to attend our
From
At
When our borscht was served, my luncheon companion suggested he say grace. As we raised our heads, I realized he was just how you’d imagine a member of the intelligentsia. With straight black hair slicked back, his thick, round glasses gave his wan face just the right owlish air.
As sturgeon followed the borscht, I started sandwiching in bits of business. First, I took from my briefcase a copy of Between East and West and inscribed it for him.
“Thank you, Mr. Gardner,” he said, as he glanced through it. “When Stanislav Djimbinov gave this to me in typescript, I read it quite enthusiastically. I especially liked the way you see Bakhtin as an heir of Florensky and our 19th century philosophers.”
We went on to discuss the Solovyov Society, and he said he’d be glad to join it. Then I told him how well last year’s conference at
“I’m pleasantly surprised to learn that a
“Actually, I’m surprised myself,” I replied. “Fortunately, we have a lot of well-connected people in
“And what did he say? Was he Orthodox himself?”
“No, he’s an old friend of mine, and he’s a Congregationalist. But Fred admires how the Eastern Church has preserved a more integrated view of matter and spirit than the Western. He told our seminar that the East followed the teaching of the second-century theologian Irenaeus, with his view that Adam and Eve were innocent children who couldn’t have realized what would happen if they ate that apple. From two different interpretations of that ancient myth, two spiritualities arose. In the West, through Augustine and then Calvin, matter, and especially the human body, seemed to be ‘fallen,’ while in the East, matter—in nature and the body—was seen as the necessary bearer of spirit, not inherently bad at all. That’s a more holistic understanding.”
Averintsev nodded his agreement with Fred’s point and then asked about the speakers at the
“And how was that question answered?” asked Averintsev.
“Not very well, as I recall. Though I’d have said that Khomyakov’s presentation of sobornost was a reforming principle, one that was never really understood beyond intellectual circles—and never actually realized in your society. And William James stood for more than pragmatism—as you’ll recall I said in my samizdat.”
“That’s certainly true about Khomyakov and James,” Averintsev agreed.
Finally, I told him about our Society’s fourth conference, planned for
Sasha Pigalev in
I replied that I’d never heard of him.
“Well, just last month he sent us an article about Rosenstock-Huessy. We’re thinking of publishing it. Would you like to talk to him? We have his telephone number.”
A moment later, Professor Pigalev was on the line, and I asked if he’d read my Between East and West.
“No, I haven’t,’ he replied. “I learned about Rosenstock-Huessy in an article by a German sociologist, Dietmar Kamper. That was over a year ago. Since then I’ve been able to get his books on microfilm from the Lenin Library in
“Were there any Russian thinkers who prepared you for Rosenstock-Huessy?’ I asked.
“Yes, Sergei Bulgakov. I’ve been reading his work for some years, quite enthusiastically.”
As Professor Pigalev and I wrapped up our conversation, I promised to write him. Thanking Anashvili profusely for this unexpected new contact, I left two copies of my book with him and headed for my next appointment.
Why in the world would the Lenin Library have Eugen’s works on microfilm? Might Yuri Zamoshkin have been responsible for that?
And Bulgakov! Now the founder of the first Solovyov Society as well as
An Orthodox Imprimatur
Then this morning I went to Moscow University Press to see if they’d consider publishing Out of Revolution here—since the translation team that Vitaly had organized last year was likely to complete the job within a month or so. They’d be glad to, they said. The main reason for their enthusiasm, it turned out, was that they’d recently published a book by my old friend Harold Berman,
A lot of good news for two days. But the best news Vitaly gave me today was that The Way of Orthodoxy has printed my paper “The Promise of Russian Philosophy” exactly as it was in Chapter 1 of Between East and West. Of course, that’s also the same text I used for my paper at our first Solovyov Society conference in 1991; and close to that article I’d begun to draft for Esprit in 1948. Talk about recycling your writing!
Since The Way of Orthodoxy is published by the educational department of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Moscow Patriarchate, I felt as if I’d suddenly acquired an imprimatur. Sometimes I wonder if my ruminations on Christianity aren’t heretical, but here’s some evidence that they may be Orthodox with a capital O.
It turned out that I was in the midst of a heart attack, so I’ve spent the last seven days here in
Now I’m thinking about what I learned from Nelly Motroshilova on June 21, when I greeted her and the other Russians on their arrival from the airport. She took me aside and spoke in a low voice, with great feeling.
“Clint, you remember Yuri Zamoshkin who led that first Bridges for Peace delegation you invited in spring of 1983?”
“Of course, I remember him,” I replied. “I’ve seldom met a scholar with such broad interests and so good at overcoming ideological walls.”
“Well, I wanted you to know that he was my husband, and that he passed away three years ago. I recently found your address card among the things he’d saved from many trips abroad.”
I felt a surge of emotion and embraced Nelly. Now I knew who Yuri meant when he told me he had colleagues who disagreed with him, ones who thought that
“Thank you for telling me about you and Yuri,” I said to Nelly. “We’ll have to get together when I come to
To continue, click: Chapter 11 Metanomics - A Higher Sociology