Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917

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Ruth Coates (Senior Lecturer, Department of Russian Studies, School of Modern Languages,, Senior Lecturer, Department of Russian Studies, School of Modern Languages,, University of Bristol)

Deification in Russian Religious Thought

Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917

Ruth Coates (Senior Lecturer, Department of Russian Studies, School of Modern Languages,, Senior Lecturer, Department of Russian Studies, School of Modern Languages,, University of Bristol)

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English

Oxford University Press
26 September 2019

Deification in Russian Religious Thought considers the reception of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) doctrine of deification by Russian religious thinkers of the immediate pre-revolutionary period. Deification is the metaphor that the Greek patristic tradition came to privilege in its articulation of the Christian concept of salvation: to be saved is to be deified, that is, to share in the divine attribute of immortality. In the Christian narrative of the Orthodox Church 'God became human so that humans might become gods'. Ruth Coates shows that between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 Russian religious thinkers turned to deification in their search for a commensurate response to the apocalyptic dimension of the universally anticipated destruction of the Russian autocracy and the social and religious order that supported it.

Focusing on major works by four prominent thinkers of the Russian Religious Renaissance--Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nikolai Berdiaev, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florensky--Coates demonstrates the salience of the deification theme and explores the variety of forms of its expression. She argues that the reception of deification in this period is shaped by the discourse of early Russian cultural modernism, and informed not only by theology, but also by nineteenth-century currents in Russian religious culture and German philosophy, particularly as these are received by the novelist Fedor Dostoevsky and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev. In the works that are analysed, deification is taken out of its original theological context and applied respectively to politics, creativity, economics, and asceticism. At the same time, all the thinkers represented in the book view deification as a project: a practice that should deliver the total transformation and immortalisation of human beings, society, culture, and the material universe, and this is what connects them to deification's theological source.

By: Ruth Coates (Senior Lecturer Department of Russian Studies School of Modern Languages Senior Lecturer Department of Russian Studies School of Modern Languages University of Bristol)
Imprint: Oxford University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 224mm, Width: 141mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 416g
ISBN: 9780198836230
ISBN 10: 0198836236
Pages: 246
Publication Date: 26 September 2019
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Ruth Coates is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Bristol. She held a Laming Junior Fellowship from Queen's College Oxford, then Temporary Lectureships at the University of Manchester and the School of Slavonic Studies in London. She is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author (1998) and co-editor of Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On (with Robin Aizlewood; 2013).

Reviews for Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917

Ruth Coates has written a book that without exaggeration must be called a jewel ... This is a short work which will repay repeated reading. It will prove to be a landmark in our understanding of the manifold ways in which deification was interpreted in Russia's silver age. * Andrew Louth, Journal of Ecclesiastical History * It is difficult to find fault with Coates's impressive account of how and why deification took the various forms it did in late imperial Russia. * Patrick Lally Michelson, Indiana University, Slavonic and East European Review *