An opus with this title based on all the riches of the world's best libraries could have become a great philosophical and historical generalization of Russian life.
Then again perhaps somebody somewhere is engaged in something like that.
But - who knows? Who will hear? Where is Assyria? Where is China?
In our original era, there are even fewer means of real communication on Earth than during the Great Silk Road.
And the book depositories of half the world are magically sealed better than Jamshid's tomb ... *
We can only hail in the thicket and wonder. Backwoods!
But what thicket and what backwoods!
It is worth taking some time to clear this out and to understand how we have got that far...
There are two lines of our life, so to speak, that emerged long ago, long before reforms of Peter the Great.
Their controversy had already been expressed by the dispute between Neil Sorsky and Joseph Volotsky within the Russian Orthodox church. But these lines can be traced back through the ages, almost to the very beginning ...
From the first steps Russia was developing under a two-fold influence: Varangian and Byzantine.The first served the state, political economy, the external order of life, that is, civilization; the second fostered the spirit, that is, promoted culture. **
Quite naturally, initially there had been no collision between them and there could not have been any.Each of them did its part: the Varangian helped to strengthen the borders, the Greek taught literacy and God.And the people being taught, apparently, harmoniously perceived this division of labor, and hardly anyone then could have thought of opposing Western teaching and native principles.Well, it's ought to have been- should a young offshoot oppose its parent tree?
As the state and the church grew, their claim for power over a man was becoming increasingly persistent. Since there had not been science as a separate entity, the authority of the church as the only source of education was unshakable. However, the tasks of the state and the church are still different, and therefore, their interaction was not always mutually beneficial.Their interpenetration led to the added complexity and strengthening of the state (and the church as a part of it) and never enhanced the role of the church as a spiritual leader. Because a church based on the state is already a state.The state, on the other hand, is the ruler of external life and has nothing to do with the spiritual domain.
It can only understand spirituality as a theoretical expression of the state, its ideas and concerns, that is, thinking about the external, social life of a person. In addition, God, as the highest moral legislator, is the state's annoying and powerful competitor for power over the human soul (an individual soul is interesting for the state only as a means to achieve common goals).Therefore, as soon as a scientific tool capable of "binding and resolving" by means of the reason itself (rational logic is the only level of reason available for social thinking), as well as of its complete devotion to the state-civilization, not caring about morality, appears on the horizon, the state seizes on this opportunity to get rid of God and build itself into the criterion of morality. This is the deep sense of what outwardly occurs as secularization (although it is not, of course, reducible to anti-godhood).
And its beginning is actually the crack that opened up in the church under the influence of the state in ancient times. The single source of enlightenment split into two streams - the spiritual and the state ones, which subsequently resulted in the same two lines.It may be for that reason that Sergius of Radonezh and his disciples were leaving for the north, to the forests, far from the capital, from secular pastors burdened with politics, from the vanities of the growing Moscow civilization ...
The idea of the Third Rome, utterly political and secular, was not able to enhance dignity of the Russian Church and its depth. On the contrary, this idea marks the transformation of the Byzantine spiritual principle in Russia into the Varangian one.
Ivan the Terrible, tracing the origin of his dynasty through the Germans to the Romans, served the same Varangian principle of an exceptional civilization. St. Philip, who as we can say using modern lingo, fought for human rights, fell victim to Ivan the Terrible - in his person morality, for the first time, it seems, in Russian history was destroyed precisely for its essence, which contradicted politics.The life and death of St. Philip is a deeply cultural phenomenon.It was an attempt at a truly spiritual opposition of the true church to the inhuman pressure of the state.
The Third Rome, having won in the minds, dried up the font of church enlightenment, and by the time Russia received its patriarch, it had ceased to develop morally, locked in national self-esteem and tranquility ...
This Roman-Varangian foundation, leading to the growth of the state-civilization, periodically destroying the work of its own hands due to its blindness, can only conditionally be called a line of enlightenment - rather in the purely negative sense with regard to the genuine, spiritual, enlightenment, which, pressed by the state, or, at best case, unnoticed by it, continued its semi-ghostly life in monasteries, in hermitages, in icon painting.
Fresh trickles from the Renaissance West sometimes penetrated through art ...
However, alas, these were mainly yesterday's ideas and lifestyle - the times have approached when it was only possible to conquer the world not by retirement from it but by the mental processing of the innovations and temptations of the New Age.
But who knew about this?And hatred of "Hellenic wisdom" universally united both politicians and hermits of the Russian Church.
The first to move was the Leviathan of the Orthodox state thrusted forward in the Time of Troubles.It was also engulfed by the general Vagrangian course of the European civilization as it had to arm itself, to fortify itself and to defend itself - all on a new level.
Russian tsars began to pay closer attention to the West, ponder, get acquainted, introduce ...
"Hellenic wisdom" threatened to sneak in through the window of civilization.
The church, feeling itself deceived by circumstances, backward, and losing its authority, began to worry, and remembered its Byzantine homeland.
It decided to humble its autocephalous pride and to put everything, especially books, in order.This resulted in an ambiguous and feeble Nikon's reform.
The only unintentionally positive result it produced was splitting (raskol), which revealed significant fresh forces of people in Russia thirsting for unfeigned faith, loyalty, and firmness in principles and traditions, that is, that which determines the face of the nation.
But, alas, these were still too undeveloped forces, the outburst of a dark, stiff-necked people, similar to the one whom Moses led out of Egypt. And Jesus of this people still more resembled Jehovah than Christ. And Avvakum's autobiography is only a historical document, but not a fact of enlightenment and culture.
Therefore, when Peter dragged Russia further along the Varangian path, the enlightenment only enhanced the corresponding line serving civilization, the secular line, the subject of which is, first of all, economy and technology; science is the main expression form of this enlightenment.
Peter himself was, as befits a student of the German Quarter, religious in a Protestant manner, that is, ignoring ritualism, he understood the significance of the Gospel teaching for the education of a cultured person. He strove to ensure that the educated priesthood multiplied in Russia, so that the word of God would become more accessible to common people.But in order to carry out a cultural revolution in Russia, equal to the civilizing one that he had accomplished, so that spiritual and humanitarian knowledge would approach the people just as new weapons, crafts, and clothing approached them, the Russian tsar would have had to combine in himself two great people: Peter the Great and Martin Luther ...A great cultural figure, however, needs education more than anyone else.
Alas, until the end of his life Peter I publicly regretted his lack of education.
Nevertheless, some elements of culture flowed from the West along Peter's path; although in strangers' interpretation, they were not created by our own souls but we should not forget that they too are the descendants of those ideas, with which we were once baptized ...
Lagging behind due to well-known (and nevertheless, becoming much clearer in our century) reasons, Russia seven hundred years later again turned out to be a young student in the family of European nations.The time of this second baptism can hardly be called lucky. Europe itself, Europe of rococo, classicism and platitudinous scientific materialism could no longer give Russia an example of a completely thoughtful attitude to the common human past. Europe schematically imitated antiquity, Russia sought to imitate Europe ...
Meanwhile, the successes achieved by the sciences of Modern Age turned Europe's head, and it was already preparing to get rid of God, giving him, at best, the place on a low rung on the ladder of progress.In full sail, it rushed to positivism - the last stage of the decay in the renaissance humanism.Here the transitional figure is Hegel.
There is still God in him, but the advance of this God is too objective, there is a large independent dialectic in Him, but this God is completely devoid of the subjective dialectic of God-human communication, of an intimate connection with man. This God is orphaned in His majesty, like Sabaoth before creation, and man is an orphan on earth, no longer distinguishing God from the laws of nature. No covenants are possible between them.
They are disunited, and if Hegel hopes that this God, transformed into the level of the absolute spirit, is protection, law, and purpose for man, he is mistaken, and a person who agrees with Hegel on this is already a positivist, that is, a believer in that the very empirical, temporary, momentary existence of a person contains in itself an exhaustive meaning/purpose of life.
Thus, Hegel, advocating the substantial beginning in human life, the concept of which first dawned in the minds of the ancients as a desire for immortality and purpose and then was developed by the fathers of Christianity in communion with God, comes to the complete opposite - to recognizing the domination of gray everyday life over us.
And if, defending Hegel, we say that his rational reality is not empiricism but the reality reflecting developed forms of the absolute spirit living in our consciousness, then we will not move a single step off a standstill.
This statement, as in the case of Plato's ideas, hovering in and of themselves, can please a dry reason but not a living suffering mind-heart that is continuously obsessed by the vile routine in the realm of politics.
(Somewhere in "Aesthetics" Hegel cites Napoleon's aphorism, the essence of which is that politics in the present world is tantamount to the Fate in the world of antiquity.
It is splendidly formulated but as fate is synonymous with death, politics is its servant; and humanity, emerging from childhood, will have to treat it accordingly and destroy it.)
The founder of the political economy bible, having set right his teacher who (or rather whose reason) had been put on his head, found in him an excellent support for his civilizing doctrine.
Culture, however, was not allowed to approach the new building. For its origins are in another, original, Bible.And culture without God is like a man without a head.
Now just a couple of words about Hegel. Completing his system, engulfed in the ardor of complacent universalism, he did not notice (or, on the contrary, he noticed and was very happy) how he traced everything that is under the sun and moon, and even more so on the earth around man, to the absolute spirit.
Thus, the difference between the external and the internal in a person's life became formal for him, since the content of both was the same absolute spirit.
The human corporeal (material, physical) and spiritual (ideal, immaterial) worlds lost their fundamental difference from each other, their independence and freedom, that is, there occurred that mixing, merging, nondiscrimination of culture (inner life) and civilization (outer life) that actually is the essence of positivism and its variety - historical materialism.
After Hegel, the paths of European thought diverge as from a crossroads. Some, like Kierkegaard, keenly grasped the soullessness of the great system and, recoiling, dreamed of reviving the Christian God in His purity. Others, like Schopenhauer, tried to compensate for the lack of personality in Hegelianism with the Buddhist solipsism of self-contained contemplation.The third, like Nietzsche, personified a scream against positivism as such, taking the protest to the extreme - coming from the other end to idolatry of the same empirical existence, so dear to positivism. Still others, like Marx, happily seized on the system, dissecting from it the logical perpetuum mobile and introducing it into political affairs.
In the shortest possible time - during the nineteenth century - Russia had to comprehend the vast European experience. Russia, of course, could not live through this experience of many centuries, concentrated in the advanced phenomena of thought in several compressed decades - so far she was only allowed to comprehend it.
Therefore, the 19th century of Russia is predominantly a century of thought, the golden age of classical Russian culture, which formed the face of the nation. By the end of the century, this face had acquired a planetwide expression. Tolstoy, Soloviev, Dostoevsky, Fedorov, and after them others accomplished that work on the philosophical assimilation of the history of mankind, and hence the development of their own, Russian, original view of the world *, about which Venevitinov dreamed in the 1820s, the lack of which in Russia obsessed Chaadaev.
The latter, however, must be ranked first among the great Russian philosophers.
He justified his name (Peter is the Greek for "stone") - he was precisely the cornerstone, on which the new Russian thought is based. He just heralded the beginning of Russian philosophy as his younger friend signified the beginning of Russian poetry.
Their dispute about Russian history was, as, apparently, and always happens with disputes, based on a mutual misunderstanding.Chaadaev stated that the world's internal life, spirituality, ideas had been still poorly expressed in Russia, and Pushkin answered him that Russia had a rich and interesting political history. Chaadaev spoke about the cultural vacuum, and Pushkin admired the successes of the Russian (Peter I!) civilization.
This, perhaps, reflected the difference between the types of vision. The poet's aesthetic outlook perceived the history of the fatherland as a wonderful material for future creations, and the ethical gaze of the thinker found a void therein, in which it was impossible to live, which urgently needed to be filled in order for a thinker to breathe ...
I dare say, although the following idea may appear blasphemous from the viewpoint of our century, that after all, even when the argument, as I had mentioned, was based on mutual misunderstanding, when different things were implied and the disputants spoke different languages, it is possible to establish in the end who was right.
Right is the one who is closer to the truth, and closer to the truth is the one whose view is higher and the subject is broader.
Which of these two great people is right? Chaadaev, of course. He was spiritually more mature than Pushkin, just as a true Christian is more mature than a pagan. Actually, this was literally a dispute between a Christian and a pagan ...
Turning to look at Christian mother Europe, the smartest of Russians saw there a growing Varangian wave of sword and science; it was joyless for them to observe this, and so the "Russian idea" was born, the Russian god was recalled, pilgrimages were made to hermitages and deserts, the old concept stating "Moscow is the Third Rome" was coming back.This was actually a logical mistake, for no nation has the right to a monopoly on a Christian God who is essentially universal. But it was a seductive dream that through us the world will be saved and renewed ...
This is how Russian culture lived at the end of the golden age, backlooking and clinging to the ancient springs-oasises, miraculously preserved on the territory of the developing empire - these springs could no longer nourish the soul of the century with their decrepit grace, but they beckoned, reminded, inspired, involuntarily preparing the thinking for heroism of transformation.
As the empire was drawn further and further into the general European Varangian course, and along with appeal of culture the voice of civilization in the Russian enlightenment grew stronger. It became apparent as far back as in the childish disputes between Westernizers and Slavophiles.
Both sides suffered from one-sidedness and did not notice that each of them stood for a part of the whole common to them. This common whole is Europe but the Westerners saw therein only civilization, and the Slavophiles forgot that the "Russian God" is the same European Christ, and, it seems, did not understand that the revival of a universal God could not be the work of one people, just a national priority.
The dispute proved to be irreconcilable. Perhaps nowhere has the antagonism between civilization and culture been as sharp as in Russia. The matter was complicated by the property confrontation between the ruling "cultural" class, that is, the civilized nobility, which first of all gained access to both culture, and the disempowered uncivilized masses of the common people.
Culture, even in the heads of intellectuals, was identified with wealth. The internal was perceived as equal to the external.In Russian social consciousness, culture began to be replaced by civilization, that is, material culture.
The sporting gesture of the Russian nobleman, ashamed of his wealth before the people, already contained the embryo of admiration for civilization and betrayal of culture.
Interestingly, Russian intellectuals (raznochintsy) not belonging to gentry and having none of the latter's material wealth and with regard to the creature comforts in their possession almost undistinguishable from the common people, nevertheless, adopted this gesture from the nobility.
Here we deal, so to speak, with the purely theoretical shame for the culture common people are devoid of. Civilizing striving was reinforced by diminishing the value of culture. Culture, which was partly a consequence and expression of inequality, was claimed to be almost the cause of it.
Thus, by the end of the golden age, when Russian culture was at its zenith, the trend that saw the primary task in the civilization of Russia swept into power in Russian society. The Bolshevists, having made a breakthrough since 1917, completed the civilizing work of Peter the Great, at the same time killing the spirit of the Peter and Pushkin culture. The dispute between the two lines in Russian education ended with the victory of civilization. Culture, or what little (if anything) remained of it, went underground.
It is an involuntary enemy of the new state, for in it the memory of God, with whom the new civilization is irreconcilable, is dormant.
And just recall tremendous promises Russian culture held at the beginning of the 20-th century! What seeds it scattered on the ground in the decades to come!
Seeds rejected by their native rocky soil ...
So, maybe now is the time for those who is still cherishing the sense of culture to start bringing together the pure thought of Russia of the last century and the deeds of this one (the twentieth century is mainly a century of deeds).
Indeed, in the twentieth century Russia had lived through several European centuries, gaining the very experience that it had lacked a hundred years ago.
The results of this bringing together can move forward the whole world.
September 2-12, 1984
SOME NOTES AFTERWARDS
Time brings about changes we have to take into account. It is now quite clear that the Russian-Bolshevist version of civilization turned out to be short-lived and unviable precisely because of its fundamental anticulturalism. Militant atheism took up arms against the very essence of an individual's personal life - stirring up hatred for God, it directly led to the paralysis of spiritual freedom and inner life. The very nature of man is rebelling against turning him into an automaton, so the life of civilization based on the strangulation of culture quickly exhausted.The conflict of culture and civilization from the violent, imposed by communism, political aspect is now passing to the eternal, as it should be, metaphysical paradigm, that is, the paradigm corresponding to the dispute between matter and spirit.
Culture comes out of the underground in order to carry out its mission regardless of the fluctuations of civilization reflected in politics.
Politics is squirreling around the new and old forms of civilization
At the same time, supporters of the obsolete form usually confuse people, posing as saviors of spiritual culture, while they only perceive the external, material, shell of culture, hindering the renewal of internal culture (a large negative role here is played by failure in the mass consciousness of even our educated people to distinguish between the concepts of culture and civilization).
This is also what is done by nationalism, which by its pagan nature understands culture only from the outside, i.e. materialistically, therefore, seeing it only local, but not universal, culture separating, but not uniting the people of the planet.
NOTES
* The reader should not be surprised at some inconsistency of the author's intonation with the present day, since the article was written some time before that day. In addition, the day may ... end, and deep historical changes do not take place in one day, as you know.
**Despite the methodological similarity of this article to Spengler's scheme, the author sees no prospects for understanding culture in the Spengler spirit, which had developed under the influence of the growing German nationalism. Spengler's closed cultures, growing and falling like leaves and fruit, do nothing for the development of the planetary consciousness we need today. These cultures are just local and temporary clothes on the human spirit while we are interested precisely in its eternal, universal human essence, independent of national, racial, and other natural differences. Today the national is becoming geography and biology, that is, a natural-historical factor. The biologism of interethnic wars can now be confirmed not only by ethnology, but also by ethology. If we pragmatically paraphrase the great formula of Nicholas Roerich - "culture is reverence for light" - then culture in the modern sense will be: respect for reason and service to it.
***The originality and greatness of the national world outlook do not consist in the fact that, having risen to the heights of the spirit, one should get deaf to a foreign-language thought, but in that these heights of the spirit should coincide with the universal height, where all national differences merge in the simple and great light of the original goals.
A nation that has turned away from the primary source of culture and dogmatically reads from the fashionable textbook of this century loses its originality, i.e. independence, and the more it loses it, the more inclined it is to withdraw into national self-consciousness, hoping in this way to be saved. But since the primary source of culture, and with it the concept of spiritual life, had been lost, the spiritual culture is gradually substituted for the material one. The people wishing to regain its integrity as a nation without turning to world culture (How can we turn to it? - First of all, by rereading the Russian heights of world culture. This means reading Chaadaev not as a critic of tsarism, but as a critic of Russia. This is to read Tolstoy not only as a mirror of the Russian revolution, but also as a religious thinker. This is to read Dostoevsky not only as an Orthodox statesman, but also as a new Christian. This is to read Fedorov not as a cosmist, but as the father of the coming Christianity. And so on and so forth) is thrown back in its development.
This threatens us. The total materialistic education and upbringing that we have received over the past decades is one of the main reasons for the growing nationalism of our days.