Orthodox electronic library. Alexey Khomyakov: philosopher of Russian identity He is known as a Russian writer, public figure, one of the main ideologists of the Slavophiles
31. General characteristics and basic ideas of Slavophilism (Fr. Khomyakov, I. Kireevsky).
Slavophilism as a movement of social thought appeared in the early 1840s. Its ideologists were writers and philosophers A.S. Khomyakov, brothers I.V. and P.V. Kireevsky, K.S. and I.S. Aksakovs, Yu.F. Samarin et al.
The efforts of the Slavophiles were aimed at developing a Christian worldview based on the teachings of the fathers of the Eastern Church and Orthodoxy in the original form that the Russian people gave it. They overly idealized Russia's political past and the Russian national character. Slavophiles highly valued the original features of Russian culture and argued that Russian political and social life had developed and would develop along its own path, different from the path of Western peoples. In their opinion, Russia is called upon to heal Western Europe with the spirit of Orthodoxy and Russian social ideals, as well as to help Europe resolve its internal and external political problems in accordance with Christian principles.
Philosophical views of Khomyakov A.S.
Among ideological sources of Khomyakov’s Slavophilism, Orthodoxy stands out most fully, within the framework of which the idea of the religious-messianic role of the Russian people was formulated. At the beginning of his career, the thinker was significantly influenced by German philosophy, especially the philosophy of Schelling. Theological ideas, for example, of the French traditionalists (de Maistre, Chateaubriand, etc.) also had a certain influence on him.
Although not formally affiliated with any of the philosophical schools, he especially strongly criticized materialism, characterizing it as a “decline of the philosophical spirit.” The starting point in his philosophical analysis was the position that “the world appears to the mind as a substance in space and as the force of its time».
Comparing two ways of comprehending the world: scientific (“through arguments”) and artistic (“mysterious clairvoyance”), he gives preference to the second.
Combining Orthodoxy and philosophy, A.S. Khomyakov came to the idea that true knowledge is inaccessible to an individual mind, divorced from faith and the church. Such knowledge is flawed and incomplete. Only “living knowledge” based on Faith and Love can reveal the truth. A.S. Khomyakov was a consistent opponent of rationalism. The basis of his theory of knowledge is the principle of "conciliarity" " Sobornost is a special type of collectivism. This is church collectivism. The interest of A.S. is connected with it as a spiritual unity. Khomyakov to the community as a social entity. The thinker defended the spiritual freedom of the individual, which should not be encroached upon by the state; his ideal was a “republic in the realm of the spirit.” Later, Slavophilism evolved in the direction of nationalism and political conservatism.
The first main feature of Khomyakov's philosophical work is that he proceeded from church consciousness when constructing a philosophical system.
Anthropology is, for Khomyakov, a mediator between theology and philosophy. From the doctrine of the Church, Khomyakov deduces the doctrine of personality, which decisively rejects so-called individualism. “An individual personality,” writes Khomyakov, “is complete powerlessness and internal irreconcilable discord.” Only in a living and morally healthy connection with the social whole does a person acquire his strength; for Khomyakov, a person, in order to reveal himself in fullness and strength, must be connected with the Church. Khomyakov criticized the one-sided nature of Western culture. He is a religious philosopher and theologian. Combining Orthodoxy and philosophy, A.S. Khomyakov came to the idea that true knowledge is inaccessible to an individual mind, divorced from faith and the church. Such knowledge is flawed and incomplete. Only “living knowledge” based on Faith and Love can reveal the truth. A.S. Khomyakov was a consistent opponent of rationalism. The basis of his theory of knowledge is the principle of “conciliarity”. Sobornost is a special type of collectivism. This is church collectivism. The interest of A.S. is connected with it as a spiritual unity. Khomyakov to the community as a social entity. The thinker defended the spiritual freedom of the individual, which should not be encroached upon by the state; his ideal was a “republic in the realm of the spirit.” Later, Slavophilism evolved in the direction of nationalism and political conservatism.
Philosophy of Kireevsky I.V.
Kireevsky received a good education at home under the guidance of the romantic poet Zhukovsky.
Kireyevsky is a champion of Slavophilism and a representative of its philosophy. He saw the departure from religious principles and the loss of spiritual integrity as the source of the crisis of the European Enlightenment. He considered the task of original Russian philosophy to be the reworking of the advanced philosophy of the West in the spirit of the teachings of Eastern patristics. Kireevsky's works were first published in 1861 in 2 volumes.
The idea of the integrity of spiritual life occupies a dominant place in Kireevsky. Exactly “whole thinking” allows the individual and society to avoid the false choice between ignorance, which leads to “the deviation of the mind and heart from true beliefs,” and logical thinking, which can distract a person from everything important in the world. The second danger for modern man, if he does not achieve the integrity of consciousness, is especially relevant, Kireyevsky believed, for the cult of corporeality and the cult of material production, being justified in rationalistic philosophy, leads to the spiritual enslavement of man. Only a change in “basic beliefs”, “a change in the spirit and direction of philosophy” can fundamentally change the situation.
He was a true philosopher and never hampered the work of reason in any way, but his concept of reason as an organ of cognition was entirely determined by the in-depth understanding of it that developed in Christianity. Kireevsky in his religious life really lived not only with religious thought, but also with religious feeling; his entire personality, his entire spiritual world were permeated with rays of religious consciousness. The opposition between truly Christian enlightenment and rationalism is truly the axis around which Kireevsky’s mental work revolves. But this is not the opposition of “faith” and “reason” - namely, two systems of enlightenment. He sought spiritual and ideological integrity, without separating philosophical consciousness from theological (but decisively distinguished revelation from human thinking). This idea of integrity was not only an ideal for him, but he also saw in it the basis for the construction of reason. It was in this regard that Kireyevsky raised the question of the relationship between faith and reason - only their internal unity was for him the key to the whole and all-encompassing truth. For Kireevsky, this teaching is connected with patristic anthropology. Kireyevsky’s entire construction is based on the distinction between “external” and “internal” man - this is the primordial Christian anthropological dualism. From “natural” reason one must generally “ascend” to spiritual reason.
Origin and first years of life
Alexey Stepanovich Khomyakov was born on May 1, 1804 in Moscow on Ordynka. Through his father and mother, nee Kireyevskaya, he belonged to the old Russian nobility. Alexey Stepanovich himself knew his ancestors for two hundred years and kept in his memory the legends about his grandfather's antiquity. Khomyakov’s biographers note that all of his ancestors were native Russian people and history does not know that the Khomyakovs ever became related to foreigners.
An important fact in the history of the Khomyakov family is connected with the origin of their land wealth. In the middle of the 18th century, landowner Kirill Ivanovich Khomyakov lived near Tula. Having buried his wife and only daughter, in his old age he remained the lonely owner of a large fortune. He did not want the estates to go away from the Khomyakov family after his death, but he wanted his peasants to fall into the power of a good man. Having gathered a secular gathering, Kirill Ivanovich gave the peasants the freedom to choose the landowner they wanted, as long as he was from the Khomyakov family. The peasants sent walkers to look for the worthy Khomyakov. Upon their return, the meeting by general council chose Kirill Ivanovich’s cousin, the young guards sergeant Fyodor Stepanovich Khomyakov, a very poor man, as their host. Kirill Ivanovich invited him to his place and, having gotten to know him better, he was convinced of the correctness of his worldly choice - his heir was a kind and reasonable person. The old man bequeathed his entire fortune to him and soon died calmly, confident that his peasants remained in the right hands. The modest young landowner, having become the owner of a large fortune, brought exemplary order to his estate. He was the great-grandfather of Alexei Stepanovich.
Family memories of this origin of land wealth influenced the spiritual appearance of A.S. Khomyakov, determining his attitude to people’s life, to people’s gatherings and to the origin of land ownership. Khomyakov always believed that his land wealth was transferred to him by a people's meeting, that he was elected by the people, who entrusted him with owning the land, that the land belonged to the people and the owner was only entrusted with managing the land for the common good. At the same time, he developed a special trust in the collective life of the people, in the decisions of the people's gathering. He felt a blood connection with the people and a blood connection with the ancestors.
Khomyakov's father was a typical Russian landowner, a member of the English Club, an educated man, but full of lordly shortcomings and weaknesses. Mother was a religious woman with a strong character. Together with their father, the Khomyakovs followed the European enlightenment, and with their mother they adhered to their native traditions, expressed in the life of the Church and folk life. It was the mother, being the first educator of her son, who instilled in him extremely strict, almost ascetic moral rules and deep religiosity throughout his life.
The noble nobility surrounded Khomyakov from a young age. Among the acquaintances of the family and Alexei Stepanovich himself were ministers, governors, generals, chief prosecutors of the Synod, as well as Decembrists, scientists, journalists and writers. Neighbors on the Khomyakovs' estates in the Tula, Smolensk and Ryazan provinces were the Muravyovs, Raevskys, Elagins, Uvarovs, Panins and others. Khomyakov had family ties with many of them. For example, his paternal grandmother was a relative of Count Paskevich and Griboyedov. Khomyakov himself married the sister of the poet N.M. Yazykova.
As a child, Alexey Stepanovich studied Latin with the abbot Boivin, who lived in the Khomyakovs’ house. A student once noticed a typo in a papal bull and asked the abbot how he could consider the pope infallible when he made spelling mistakes. This fact is characteristic of the fact that Khomyakov began his polemic against Catholicism early.
When the Moscow house of the Khomyakovs burned down during the Napoleonic invasion, the family lived in the village for some time, and at the beginning of 1815 they moved to St. Petersburg. In the capital, the Khomyakov brothers felt as if they were in a pagan city, where they could be forced to change their faith. They firmly decided it would be better to suffer torment than to accept someone else's law.
The teacher of Russian literature for young Khomyakov and his brother Fyodor was the writer A.A. Gendre, friend of Griboyedov. He probably introduced his students to the ideas of the Griboyedov-Katenin circle, among which the fundamental ones were patriotism, originality of art, nationality, and adherence to national traditions in ideology and everyday life.
In 1817 the family returned to Moscow. The Khomyakov brothers took lessons from university professors, which allowed Alexei Stepanovich to enter the university’s mathematics department and graduate. The young Khomyakovs became friends in Moscow with the Venevitinov brothers. In 1819, fifteen-year-old Khomyakov translated Tacitus’s “Germania”. An excerpt from the translation was published in the Proceedings of the Society of Literature Lovers at Moscow University. This is Khomyakov’s first publication; the introductory article to it is full of ideas of tyranny, patriotism, and civic valor.
When the Khomyakov brothers reached the appropriate age, their mother, Maria Alexandrovna, called her sons to her and expressed her view that a man, like a girl, should maintain his chastity until marriage. She took an oath with the young man that they would not have sex with any woman before marriage. In case of violation of the oath, she refused to bless her sons.
Military service A.S. Khomyakova
In 1822, his father took eighteen-year-old Alexei Stepanovich to the Astrakhan cuirassier regiment under the command of Count Osten-Sacken, who left his memories of Khomyakov. “In physical, moral and spiritual education,” recalled Osten-Sacken, “Khomyakov was almost alone. His education was amazingly excellent, and in my entire life I have never seen anything like it in my youth. What a sublime direction his poetry had! He was not carried away by the direction of the century in sensual poetry. Everything about him is moral, spiritual, sublime. He rode perfectly. Jumped over obstacles as high as a man. He fought very well on espadrons. He possessed willpower not like a young man, but like a man, seasoned by experience. He strictly fulfilled all fasts according to the charter of the Orthodox Church and attended all services on holidays and Sundays... He did not allow himself to wear clothes made of thin cloth outside of services, even at home, and rejected permission to wear tin cuirasses instead of half-pound iron ones, despite his small stature and seemingly weakly built. Regarding patience and enduring physical pain, he possessed extremely Spartan qualities.”
A year later, Khomyakov joined the Life Guards cavalry regiment, which took part in the uprising on December 14, 1825, and lived in St. Petersburg for about two years. Here he entered literary circles. The young poet’s first poems were published in the anthologies of Ryleev and Bestuzhev “Polar Star”. Being a convinced opponent of any violent changes, Khomyakov was not keen on the Decembrist movement; it seemed to him non-national. His daughter Maria Alekseevna left the following memories: “Alexei Stepanovich, during his service in St. Petersburg, was familiar with the guards youth, from which almost all the Decembrists came, and he himself said that he probably would have been under investigation if he had not accidentally been in this winter in Paris, where he studied painting. He attended meetings with Ryleev very often and refuted the political opinions of him and A.I. Odoevsky, insisting that any military rebellion in itself is immoral.” Khomyakova’s fellow soldier, whose name remained unknown, wrote about this in more detail: “Ryleev was an oracle in this society. His sermons were listened to with greed and trust. There was only one topic - the need for a constitution and a coup through troops. Events in Spain and Riego's exploits were the subject of conversation. Among these people there often appeared a young officer with an unusually lively mind. He did not want to agree with the opinion prevailing in this society, and constantly insisted that of all revolutions, the most lawless is a military revolution. One day, late in the autumn evening, he had a heated argument with Ryleev on this subject. The meaning of the young officer’s words was: “You want a military revolution. But what is an army? This is a collection of people whom the people armed at their own expense and to whom they entrusted to defend themselves. What kind of truth will there be if these people, contrary to their purpose, begin to dispose of the people arbitrarily and become superior to them? An angry Ryleev ran home in the evening. Prince Odoevsky was tired of this opponent of the revolution, assuring him that he was not a liberal at all and only wanted to replace autocracy with the tyranny of an armed minority. This man is A.S. Khomyakov".
In mid-1825, Khomyakov, having asked for an indefinite leave, went abroad for almost two years. He traveled around Europe, lived in Paris, visiting its museums, libraries and exhibitions. In the appearance of France, Khomyakov saw a concentration of all the negative qualities of Western European bourgeois civilization. He will always contrast revolutionary France with England as a country of stable social and moral traditions.
In 1828-1829 A.S. Khomyakov took part in the Russian-Turkish war, to which he went as part of a hussar regiment as an adjutant to General Prince Modatov. According to contemporaries, Alexey Stepanovich was distinguished by his courage.
Diversity of interests of A.S. Khomyakova
Nikolai Berdyaev characterizes A.S. Khomyakov, first of all, as a typical landowner, a kind Russian gentleman, a good owner, organically connected with the land and people. Khomyakov is a wonderful hunter, a specialist in various breeds of canine dogs. He has an article about hunting and dogs. He invented a gun that shot further than ordinary guns, invented a seeder, for which he received a patent from England, found a cure for cholera, set up a distillery, and treated peasants. Khomyakov is a universal person, unusually gifted. This Russian landowner - practical, businesslike, hunter and technician, dog lover and homeopath - was a remarkable theologian of the Orthodox Church, philosopher, philologist, historian, poet and publicist.
One of the main traits of his character is his love of freedom. His whole life was imbued with a hatred of coercion and violence and a belief in organic freedom. He saw Russia's mission primarily in the fact that it must reveal the secret of freedom to the Western world. The love of freedom excluded the possibility of public service for Khomyakov.
Khomyakov was a rich Russian gentleman and did not know dependence on his superiors and literary work. He wrote only out of inspiration. According to Berdyaev, Alexey Stepanovich wrote, by the way, writing was not the main thing in his life. An equally important role in his life was played by farming, hunting, inventions, projects to improve the life of peasants, family concerns, and painting. Khomyakov had an amazing memory. He was able to look through many books in one day, quoted what he read from memory, and wrote without reference.
In 1836, Khomyakov married Ekaterina Mikhailovna Yazykova, the poet’s sister, and was happy in his family life. Ekaterina Mikhailovna came from an old family of Simbirsk nobles. Left without a father at an early age, she lived with her mother, who led a secluded life, did not go anywhere and received only relatives and closest neighbors. The young woman grew up in silence and solitude. The young girl's entire life was spent in church, in home worship, and in caring for her mother. She received an almost monastic upbringing and was distinguished by the high qualities of her religious soul. From early youth, the Simbirsk conscientious judge Nikolai Aleksandrovich Motovilov was in love with her, who later served a lot, according to the word of the Monk Seraphim of Sarov, at the Diveyevo monastery.
Khomyakov is often called a knight of the Orthodox Church, ready to defend it at any moment in his life. “Khomyakov was born into the light of God religiously prepared, ecclesiastical, firm,” wrote N. Berdyaev, “and throughout his life he carried his faith and his loyalty. He was always pious, always an Orthodox Christian. There was no revolution, no change and no betrayal in him. He is the only person of his era who was not subjected to the general craze for Hegel’s philosophy, who did not subordinate his faith to philosophy. Clarity of church consciousness accompanies him throughout his life. All his life he observed all the rituals, fasted, was not afraid to be funny in the eyes of an indifferent and indifferent society... Calmly, firmly, confidently, Khomyakov carried his Orthodox faith through his entire life, never doubted, never wished for more, never aspired his gaze into the mysterious distance. He lived religiously, in the Church every day, lived every day, without a sense of catastrophism, without horror and horror. He lived in the present, sanctified by the Orthodox faith, he lived organically.”
Khomyakov can be called the spiritual leader of the Slavophil movement. Other Slavophiles sought and found from him a solution to their religious doubts, their hesitations on the question of the Church. All seekers and doubters came to his village, talked with him day and night, and left him strengthened and directed towards the church path. Among the Slavophiles there was no other person so ecclesiastical, firm and faithful.
The last years of A.S.’s life Khomyakova
On January 26, 1852, after a short illness, Ekaterina Mikhailovna Khomyakova died, leaving seven children. She was only thirty-five years old.
The death of his wife made a decisive turning point in Khomyakov’s life: “Even those who did not know him very closely could notice that from that moment his ability to get carried away with anything that was not directly related to his calling had cooled. He no longer gave himself free rein in anything. Apparently, he retained his former cheerfulness and sociability, but the memory of his wife and the thought of death did not leave him... His life was divided into two. During the day he worked, read, talked, minded his own business, and gave himself to everyone who cared about him. But when night came and everything around him settled down and fell silent, another time began for him... Since I lived with him in Ivanovsky, wrote Yu.F. Samarin. “Several guests came to see him, so all the rooms were occupied, and he moved my bed to himself. After dinner, after long conversations, enlivened by his inexhaustible gaiety, we lay down, extinguished the candles, and I fell asleep. Long after midnight I woke up from some talking in the room. The morning dawn barely illuminated it. Without moving or uttering a voice, I began to peer and listen. He was kneeling in front of his traveling icon. His hands were folded in a cross on the chair cushion, his head rested on his hands. I could hear suppressed sobs. This continued until the morning. Of course, I pretended to be asleep. The next day he came out to us cheerful and vigorous, with his usual good-natured laugh. From a person who accompanied him everywhere, I heard that this was repeated almost every night...”
Excerpt “From the notes of Yu.F. Samarina" is perhaps the only evidence of Khomyakov’s inner life. “There was no person in the world who was so disgusted and uncharacteristic of being carried away by his own sensations and yielding clarity of consciousness to nervous irritation,” Samarin wrote about Khomyakov. - His inner life was distinguished by sobriety - this was the predominant feature of his piety. He was even afraid of tenderness, knowing that a person is too inclined to take credit for every earthly feeling, every shed tear; and when tenderness came over him, he deliberately doused himself with a stream of cold mockery, so as not to allow his soul to evaporate in ethereal impulses and to direct all its strength again to business...”
Alexey Stepanovich Khomyakov died of cholera on his Ryazan estate on September 23, 1860. The last minutes of his life speak of his strong character and firmness of faith, as evidenced by his neighbor on the estate, Leonid Matveevich Muromtsev. When Muromtsev came to Khomyakov and asked what was wrong with him, Alexey Stepanovich replied: “Nothing special, you have to die. Very bad. Strange thing! I have cured so many people, but I cannot cure myself.” According to Muromtsev, “in this voice there was not a shadow of regret or fear, but a deep conviction that there was no outcome.” “I think it’s superfluous to count,” recalls Muromtsev, “how many dozens of times I begged him to take my medicine, sent for the doctor and, therefore, how many times he answered in the negative and at the same time took something out of the camp first aid kit.” veratrum, That mercutium. About one o'clock in the afternoon, seeing that the patient's strength was losing, I suggested that he receive unction. He accepted my proposal with a joyful smile, saying: “Very, very glad.” During the entire time of the sacrament, he held a candle in his hands, repeated the prayer in a whisper and made the sign of the cross.” After some time, it seemed to Muromtsev that Alexei Stepanovich was feeling better. “Really good, look how you have warmed up and your eyes have brightened.” To which Khomyakov replied: “And tomorrow it will be so bright!” These were his last words. A few seconds before his death, he firmly and quite consciously made the sign of the cross.
Teachings of A.S. Khomyakov about the Church
A.S. Khomyakov as a theologian
Biographer A.S. Khomyakova V.Z. Zavitnevich notes that Khomyakov’s authority as a theologian among Slavophiles was so high that his opinion served them as a criterion for testing their own opinions. The awakening of religious consciousness in Russian society prompted us to seek answers to many vital questions in the teachings of the Orthodox Church. The very insignificant theological literature available at that time could not answer these questions due to the fact that it was just in its infancy and pursued completely different tasks. Acquaintance with patristic literature was difficult for those newly turning to this literature, which at that time was little studied and poorly systematized. To understand it, according to Zavitnevich, it was necessary to be well-read not only in primary sources but also in the existing Western theological and historical literature, which should be treated with caution. A.S. Khomyakov, with his enormous horizons, with his deep philosophical mind, with his church upbringing and way of life, was under these conditions, according to Zavitnevich’s description, “a real treasure,” his theological worldview was developed on the basis of a broad and comprehensive study of Christianity, including paternal, writing, and it, having developed into a complete system, into “a whole direction,” as K.S. Aksakov, constituted that solid scientific fund from which one could draw with a generous hand, satisfying all needs. “Here,” wrote Zavitnevich, “is the root of faith in the high authority of Khomyakov, here is the main reason for the hopes pinned on him.”
Analysis of Khomyakov’s correspondence with A.I. Koshelev, Yu.F. Samarin, K.S. Aksakov identifies two main theological problems to which Khomyakov paid special attention: this is the question of the Church and the relationship of Orthodoxy to other faiths.
Khomyakov's firm conviction in the impossibility of salvation outside the Orthodox Church and that among Christian denominations only the Orthodox Church is the true Body of Christ, was accepted by some of his contemporaries and later researchers as a lack of religious tolerance. It is obvious that the question of religious tolerance is artificial and even irrelevant. The essence is not in tolerance, but in truth.
Faithful student and follower of Khomyakov Yu.F. Samarin sees the strength of his theology in “complete freedom in religious consciousness.” “Khomyakov not only valued his faith,” Samarin wrote, “but at the same time he had undoubted confidence in its strength; that’s why he wasn’t afraid of anything for her, and because he wasn’t afraid, he always looked at everything with all his eyes, never closed them at anything, didn’t brush aside anything and didn’t bend his soul in front of his consciousness. Completely free, that is, completely truthful in his conviction, he demanded the same freedom, the same right to be truthful for everyone... He valued faith as truth, and not as satisfaction for himself, in addition to and regardless of its truth. The very idea that some mixture of lies or untruths could grow so firmly into the truth that it was necessary, in the interests of truth, to spare this lie and untruths, outraged and offended him more than anything, and he persecuted this type of unconscious cowardice or conscious pharisaism in all its manifestations with merciless irony. He had the boldness of faith." Samarin defined Khomyakov’s teaching on the Church, which grew out of this sense of faith, in the following words: “I recognize, submit, submit - therefore, I do not believe. The Church offers only faith, evokes only faith in a person’s soul and is not content with anything less; in other words, it accepts only free people into its bosom. Whoever brings her slavish recognition without believing in her is not in the Church and not from the Church... The Church is not a doctrine, not a system and not an institution. The Church is a living organism of truth and love, or, more precisely, truth and love as an organism.” According to N.A. Berdyaev, the soul of Khomyakov’s theology is the concept of “love,” which he perceived as a category of knowledge and as a Divine gift that ensures knowledge of unconditional truth.
Samarin, speaking about the so-called school theology of the last century, notes its defensive nature, since, fighting off Catholic and Protestant attacks, it fell into submission to the actions and methods of its opponents, and therefore considered issues in their Western formulation, thereby accepting the lies that hidden in the very formulation of questions and in their solution. The Orthodox school itself gradually bifurcated into anti-Latin and anti-Protestant. Western rationalism penetrated into the Orthodox school and remained there in the form of a scientific frame for the dogmas of faith, in the form of evidence, interpretations and conclusions. Thus, for almost two centuries, the polemics between the two Orthodox schools and Western faiths lasted, accompanied by their internal polemics among themselves. According to Samarin, the Latin theology of Feofan Prokopovich and the “Stone of Faith” by Stefan Yavorsky can be recognized as the most complete and distinct expression of these schools.
“Khomyakov,” we read from Yu. Samarin, “was the first to look at Latinism and Protestantism from the Church, therefore, from above; that’s why he could identify them.” “A view from the Church” became possible only because Khomyakov, according to the student’s definition, “lived in the Church.” Living in the Church, according to Samarin, means the following: “First, to have in oneself an undoubted conviction that the Church is not only something, not only something useful or even necessary, but actually that very thing and everything that is what she pretends to be, that is, the appearance on earth of unalloyed truth and indestructible truth; further, this means: to completely and completely freely subordinate one’s will to the law that governs the Church; finally, this means: to feel like a living part of a living whole that calls itself the Church, and to place your spiritual communion with this whole above everything else in the world.”
“Thanks to Khomyakov,” Samarin wrote, “we see the Church differently: a living organism of truth, entrusted to mutual love, and outside the Church logical knowledge, detached from the moral principle, that is, rationalism, in two moments of its development, namely: reason grasping at the ghost of truth and giving freedom into slavery to external authority is Latinism, and reason seeking self-made truth and sacrificing unity to subjective sincerity is Protestantism.”
Samarin believed that Khomyakov opened a new era in the history of the Orthodox theological school, and even proposed calling him a teacher of the Church. He highly appreciated the theological merits of Khomyakov and Berdyaev: “The great significance of Khomyakov is that he was a free Orthodox Christian, he felt freely in the Church, he freely defended the Church. There is no scholasticism in him, no class-selfish attitude towards the Church. There is no trace of the seminary spirit in his theology. There is nothing official or official in Khomyakov’s theology... He was the first to overcome school-scholastic theology... Only Khomyakov was the first Russian Orthodox theologian who thought independently and independently related to Western thought. Khomyakov’s theology expressed the religious experience of the Russian people, the living experience of the Orthodox East, and not school formalism, which is always dead... He is the founder of Russian theology.”
"The Church is One"
Most of the theological works of A.S. Khomyakov are of a critical and polemical nature. The largest theological work was written in the form of letters to Palmer, whom he tried to convert to Orthodoxy.
A presentation of the Orthodox teaching about the Church without polemics and direct criticism of Catholicism and Protestantism is contained in the article “The Church is One.” Khomyakov wrote: “The Church is not a plurality of persons in their individuality, but the unity of God’s grace living in a multitude of rational creatures submitting to grace... The unity of the Church is not imaginary, not allegorical, but true and essential, like the unity of numerous members in a living body " “The visible, or earthly, Church lives in perfect communion and unity with the entire church body, the head of which is Christ. She has within herself the indwelling Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit in all their vital fullness, but not in the fullness of their manifestations, for she does not create and knows completely, but as much as God pleases.” “The Spirit of God, living in the Church, ruling it and making it wise, appears in it in many ways: in Scripture, Tradition and in deeds, for the Church that creates the works of God is the same Church that preserves Tradition and wrote Scripture. It is not persons or multitudes of persons in the Church who keep Tradition and write, but the Spirit of God, living in the totality of the Church... Neither Scripture, nor Tradition, nor deeds are incomprehensible to anyone living outside the Church. Inside the Church, to those who abid and are connected to the spirit of the Church, their unity is obvious by the grace living in it... You understand the Scripture at what time you keep the Tradition and at what time you do deeds that are pleasing to the wisdom living in you. But the wisdom that lives in you is not given to you personally, but to you as a member of the Church, and is given to you in part, without completely destroying your personal lie; given to the Church in the fullness of truth and without any admixture of lies. Therefore, do not judge the Church, but obey her, so that wisdom is not taken away from you.” “This confession (Creed) is understandable, just like the whole life of the Spirit, only to a believer and a member of the Church. It contains secrets inaccessible to an inquisitive mind and revealed only to God Himself and to those to whom God reveals them for internal and living, and not dead and external knowledge.” “We must understand that it is not faith, nor hope, nor love that saves (for will faith in reason, or hope in the world, or love for the flesh save?), but it is the object of faith that saves. Do you believe in Christ - by Christ you will be saved in faith; if you believe in the Church, you are saved by the Church; “If you believe in the sacraments of Christ, you are saved by them, for Christ is our God in the Church and the sacraments.” “We know when one of us falls, he falls alone, but no one is saved alone. The one who is saved is saved in the Church as a member of it in unity with all other members.” “Love and unity are supreme; love is expressed in a variety of ways: by deed, prayer and spiritual song. The Church blesses all these expressions of love. If you cannot express your love for God in words, but express it with a visible image, that is, an icon, does the Church judge you? No, but he judges the one who condemns you, for he condemns your love.”
Archimandrite Georgy (Shestun),Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences, professor, academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, head of the interuniversity department of Orthodox pedagogy and psychology of the Samara Orthodox Theological Seminary, rector of the Trans-Volga Monastery in honor of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross of the Lord, rector of the Trinity-Sergius Metochion in Samara
Literature
1. Berdyaev N.A. Collected works. T. 5. - Paris: YMKA PRESS, 1997. - P. 33.
2. Ibid. - pp. 34-36.
3. Khomyakov A.S. About old and new: Articles and essays. - M.: “Sovremennik”, 1988. - (Library “For Lovers of Russian Literature”). - P. 11.
4. Berdyaev N.A. Collected works. T. 5. - Paris: YMKA PRESS, 1997. - P. 45.
5. Ibid. - pp. 37-28.
6. Khomyakov A.S. About old and new: Articles and essays. - M.: “Sovremennik”, 1988. - (Library “For Lovers of Russian Literature”). - P. 13.
7. Ibid. - P. 13.
8. Berdyaev N.A. Collected works. T. 5. - Paris: YMKA PRESS, 1997. - pp. 39-40.
9. Ibid. - pp. 54-55.
10. Voropaev V. “I have a desire to be resolved and be with Christ...”: Gogol’s death as his testament to his descendants. // Literary studies. - 1998. - 3-4. - P. 119.
11. Berdyaev N.A. Collected works. T. 5. - Paris: YMKA PRESS, 1997. - pp. 56-57.
12. Voropaev V. “I have a desire to be resolved and to be with Christ...”: Gogol’s death as his testament to his descendants. // Literary studies. - 1998. - 3-4. - pp. 121-122.
13. Berdyaev N.A. Collected works. T. 5. - Paris: YMKA PRESS, 1997. - pp. 64-65.
14. Zavitnevich V.Z. Alexey Stepanovich Khomyakov. // Proceedings of the Kyiv Theological Academy. T. 2. Book. 2. - 1901.- pp. 985-986.
15. Samarin Yu.F. Preface. // Literary studies. - 1991. - 5-6. - P. 137.
16. Ibid. - pp. 138-139.
17. Berdyaev N.A. Collected works. T. 5. - Paris: YMKA PRESS, 1997. - pp. 75, 81.
18. Samarin Yu.F. Preface. // Literary studies. - 1991. - 5-6. - pp. 140-141.
19. Ibid. - P. 142.
20. Ibid. - P. 135.
21. Ibid. - P. 143.
22. Berdyaev N.A. Collected works. T. 5. - Paris: YMKA PRESS, 1997. - pp. 72-73.
23. Khomyakov A.S. Works in 2 volumes. T. 2. - M.: Moscow Philosophical Foundation. Publishing house "Medium", 1994. - P. 5.
24. Ibid. - P. 5.
25. Ibid. - P. 8.
26. Ibid. - P. 11.
27. Ibid. - P. 18.
28. Ibid. - P. 19.
Russian thought began to assimilate Khomyakov’s legacy long after his death - and only towards the end of the 19th century, when his main works were published, albeit in relative completeness, when the storms of the “sixties” revolution had passed and Russian religious philosophy began to take shape, did the real the scale of this figure of a Moscow debater, who sported a zipun and a murmolka in Europeanized salons. But even here, in later understanding, there were paradoxes.
At the end of the last century, the outstanding Russian historian K.N. Bestuzhev-Ryumin exclaimed: “It is a shame and disgrace to the Russian land that the Dog Playground (where Khomyakov lived) is still not called Khomyakovskaya in Moscow and his statue does not stand on it. Khomyakov! Yes, in our mental sphere only Lomonosov and Pushkin are equal to him!”
Exclaiming like this, the historian of the past could not imagine the possibilities of future “shame and disgrace.” The Dog Playground in Moscow will never again be called Khomyakovskaya - for the simple reason that only a few Muscovites can now indicate where this very Dog Playground was, which disappeared during the next reconstruction. The house, which was a remarkable monument of urban architecture, has not survived either. In 1918, in this house, through the efforts of Khomyakov’s daughter, Marya Alekseevna, the “Museum of the Forties” was organized. Ten years later, the museum was closed, the manuscripts, books and some of the things were transferred to the State Historical Museum (where they are mostly still not disassembled), and many things simply “floated away” to thrift stores... In 1976, Soviet researcher V.I. Kuleshov, in his book “Slavophiles and Russian Literature,” cited the above words of the historian as an example of “unnecessary apologetics.”
Before the revolution, the collected works of Khomyakov were published three times (the last, in eight weighty volumes, was published in 1900-1910 and was repeatedly reprinted and expanded), monographic studies about him by L. Vladimirov and V. Lyaskovsky were published. V. Zavitnevich, N. Berdyaev, B. Shcheglov, P. Florensky... After the revolution, only a collection of Khomyakov’s poetic heritage appeared (1969) and his selected literary critical articles (1988) - both publications prepared by B. F. Egorov. Over the past forty years, at least two dozen books dedicated to Khomyakov have been published in the West (among them are remarkable studies by N. Lossky and N. Ryazanovsky, L. Shapiro and E. Thaden, E. Müller and A. Valitsky)... And we are still Since then, as Khomyakov liked to say, “we hear silence.”
Alexey Stepanovich Khomyakov was born in Moscow, on Ordynka, in the parish of Yegor, in Vspolye, on the day of the prophet Jeremiah, May 1, 1804.
He came from an old Russian noble family, in which both his grandfather’s letters and family stories “two hundred years into the depths of antiquity” were sacredly preserved. About the ancestors, who for a long time, since the 15th century, since the time of Vasily III, faithfully served the Moscow sovereigns as hunters and solicitors. About his great-grandfather, Fyodor Stepanovich Khomyakov, who, by the will of fate, became the owner of rich Tula estates not somehow, but by the verdict of the peasant “peace”...
His father, Stepan Aleksandrovich Khomyakov, was a European-educated, capable man and an ardent Anglomaniac, one of the founders of the Moscow English Club. His mother, Marya Alekseevna, née Kireevskaya, was a well-known defender of patriarchal and Orthodox foundations in Moscow and, according to her son, played a decisive role in his moral development.
The future Slavophile studied and was raised mainly at home, in his family: in the Tula estate of Bogucharovo, in Smolensk Lipitsa, in Moscow, in St. Petersburg (the family lived there in the winter of 1814-1815, while the Moscow house on Petrovka, which burned down during the Napoleonic invasion, was being rebuilt) . Among his first teachers were the French abbot Boivin, the Greek Arbe, AA. Zhandre (a friend of Griboyedov, who was Khomyakov’s relative), Moscow “Doctor of Literature” AD. Glagolev, professor of mathematics P. S. Shchepkin (second cousin of the great actor). Already in early childhood, Khomyakov’s remarkable and versatile abilities were revealed; He seems to be studying foreign languages, fencing, mathematics, and literature with equal success. His first actual literary work dates back to 1819: a translation of Tacitus’s “Germany” (later published in the “Proceedings of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature at Moscow University”).
The memoirs of his contemporaries depict Khomyakov as a young man as an ardent and independent man, burning with the desire for achievement. Either he is preparing to “revolt the Slavs,” or in the winter of 1821 he flees from his parents’ home to war in Greece: to help the “Hellenes” who rebelled against the Turkish yoke. The sixteen-year-old Greek freedom fighter was, however, intercepted at the first Moscow outpost...
In the spring of 1822, his father took Alexei to military service in the Astrakhan Cuirassier Regiment, and in the fall he transferred him to the capital’s Life Guards Cavalry Regiment, in which he served (as a standard cadet, then as a cornet) until the spring of 1825, after which he retired “at home circumstances”, went to Paris “to improve in painting”...
Khomyakov tried to serve a second time in 1828-29: with the rank of headquarters captain of the Belarusian Hussar Regiment, he participated in the Balkan War with the Turks, in the siege of the Shumla fortress, fought quite successfully and even received Anna in the buttonhole, Anna with a bow and Vladimir of the 4th degree , - but he chose to retire and then until the end of his days he remained a “private” person, independent of either “the authorities” or “the people”...
He spent the last 30 years of his life quite monotonously: in the winters he lived in Moscow, in the summers - in estates; several times he “went out” to St. Petersburg, Kiev, Tiflis (to the grave of his brother Fyodor, comrade-in-arms and colleague of Griboyedov, who died in the Caucasus in 1829); in 1847 he made another trip to Europe, stopping briefly in England. In the summer of 1836, he married Ekaterina Mikhailovna Yazykova, the sister of the famous poet, and had four sons and five daughters with her. The two eldest sons, Stepan and Fyodor, died in infancy from diphtheria - Khomyakov’s poem “To the Children” (“It happened, in the deep midnight hour...”, 1839), one of the most heartfelt in Russian lyrics, is dedicated to this sad event.
Actually, this position of a “non-employee person”, found by Khomyakov for himself at the age of 25, determined many of the features of his philosophical and ethical quests, in which the simplest everyday concepts played a system-forming role: an individual, family, clan, father and mother, children and adults... On their basis, all the general - and also very simple - categories of his system were formed: tribe, people, faith, history, God, church... The interconnection of such “diverse” concepts was also defined very naturally: “I don’t believe the love for that people who is alien to the family, and there is no love for humanity in those who are alien to the people” (“Conversation in the Moscow Region”, 1856).
This same inner freedom determined Khomyakov’s spiritual appearance. By definition P-A. Florensky, he was “chaste in expressing his inner life, and even to the point of secrecy, completely whole, and proud of his integrity, not allowing himself to reflect on himself.” The primordial freedom of the village landowners, independence from the authorities, from literary work, from current politics - all this gave a special focus to his search for an ideal life for a person in general and for a Russian person in particular. The search for inner freedom led Khomyakov to the beginnings of that teaching, which later received the inaccurate name of Slavophilism.
Berdyaev considered the fact of the birth of the Slavophil ideology as a phenomenon of national significance: “Slavophilism is the first attempt at our self-awareness, our first independent ideology. Russian existence continued for a thousand years, but Russian self-awareness began only from the time when Ivan Kireevsky and Alexey Khomyakov boldly raised the question of what Russia is, what is its essence, its calling and place in the world.” In Berdyaev’s book “A. S. Khomyakov” (Moscow, 1912), this thesis is detailed, and the members of the Slavophile circle are represented by “the first Russian Europeans” who, having gone through the school of European philosophizing, having “been ill” with Schellingism and Hegelianism, tried to create the foundations of an independent, properly Russian philosophy. It all started with the fact that in the winter of 1839 Khomyakov wrote and read in one of the Moscow salons the article “On the Old and the New.” In it, for the first time, the initial question was isolated about the relationship between the “old” and the “new” in the life of Russian society, about the possibility of combining “law” and “custom” in it. At the same time, the composition of the article is deliberately paradoxical. The thesis: “Russian antiquity was an inexhaustible treasure of all truth and all good” is immediately refuted by a whole set of negative factors of pre-Petrine life. The antithesis: “Nothing good or fruitful existed in the previous life of Russia” is also refuted, and by no less positive factors. Synthesis: the picture of “the original beauty of society, connecting the patriarchal nature of regional life with the deep meaning of the state, representing a moral and Christian face” - becomes the reason for posing new, and also difficult, problems...
Khomyakov’s article sounded like a challenge and seemed like a kind of gauntlet that 6bLAo needed to lift. Ivan Vasilievich Kireevsky accepted the challenge: in his response article he proposed a different formulation of the problem. It is not a matter of what is better, “old” or “new”; we “necessarily must assume something third, which should arise from the mutual struggle of warring principles...”. And how in this third “to correlate the triumph of rationalism” (a consequence of Western influence)” and the “inner spiritual mind” of Russia? “The destruction of life” occurred precisely because of the inconsistency of these principles. But at the same time, to return the “Russian element” forcibly - “was It would be funny if it weren’t harmful”...
But its oblivion also leads to the constant and rapid “extermination of remaining forms”...
Already in this initial dispute, the fundamental ideas of Russian Slavophilism were contained in a “collapsed” form: the affirmation of a special path of historical development of Russia; the search for its special mission in relation to the West and East; attention to the common people - the custodians of the primordial principles of Russian life; interest in the past and present of the “consanguineous” Slavic peoples, etc.
The circle that soon formed around the two founders was very small, but strong and stable: its unity was based on family ties, similar upbringing and education (all prominent Slavophiles in their youth were associated with Moscow and its university), the correspondence of the main ones born in cruel disputes of beliefs. I. V. Kireevsky was mainly engaged in philosophy and aesthetics; K. S. Aksakov and YES. Valuev - Russian history and literature, Yu. F. Samarin - domestic politics and the peasant question, A. I. Koshelev - economics and finance, P. V. Kireevsky - folklore... Khomyakov, in this circle, was distinguished by the special versatility of his interests and activities, - but primarily devoted his activities to the development of the historiosophical and religious concept of Slavophilism.
“The mind of the century requires a completely new philosophy of history,” said P. Ya. Chaadaev at the turn of the 1820s-30s, referring to the objective tendency of Russian social consciousness. The historiosophical concepts and constructions that emerged in the next decade (usually adopted from the ideas of German and French romantic historiography) turned out to be not only an urgent need for purely scientific knowledge, but also a living social need of a particular moment. The very concept of philosophy of history turned out to be very polysemantic: within its limits were understood the philosophical, social, and ideological approaches to history. It was about developing the most general theoretical principles of the historical process, and these principles were understood in a complex, comprehensive manner. When N.V. Stankevich wrote in 1825: “I study history, but it is attractive to me as a huge philosophical task,” then in this case the “philosophical” task was presented as a universal process of social, ethical, psychological knowledge of the historical movement, which inevitably manifests itself differently in each new period, but which, with the same inevitability, conceals within itself a certain hidden law, “order”; Having learned this order, it will be possible to find comprehensive answers to almost all questions of historical existence.
A “philosophical” problem of this kind arose already in the well-known polemic of the 1820s about Karamzin’s “History of the Russian State.” This controversy covered almost all circles of the creative intelligentsia of Russia, and one of the main questions that it posed was the question of the position of the historian in his relation to the past, of the admissibility of an “artistic”, “passionate” approach to history.
In the second half of the 1830s, Khomyakov set himself a similar type of task. The material for his search was world history. Khomyakov understood the complexity of the task - and this determined two fundamental principles of his work: a focus on incompleteness (“I will never finish it,” “I don’t think about printing it during my lifetime…”) and on visible unprofessionalism, “not necessary.” The latter were emphasized even by the “everyday” title of the entire extensive work that was given by Gogol: having accidentally read the name of Semiramis in Khomyakov’s notes, Gogol loudly announced: “Alexey Stepanovich writes Semiramis!”
The apparent amateurism of the research, it would seem, is beyond doubt. “Semiramis,” which was written with some interruptions for about 20 years and amounted to three voluminous volumes, completely preserved the style and features of “home” conversations in the Slavophile circle: there are no quotations in it, almost no indications of sources (and as such Khomyakov kept in mind hundreds historical, philosophical and theological works), some facts are presented inaccurately, some comparisons (especially etymological) are clearly superficial and random. However, Khomyakov’s “amateur” position does not come from a lack of information or from an inability to work professionally. In a series of starting theses, Khomyakov states: mainstream historical science is not able to determine the internal, real reasons for the movement of history - therefore, this should be done by an amateur in a free search for theses and their evidence and in a form “detached from purely scientific nature.”
In parallel with the actual historiosophical version of Semiramis, its journalistic version was created - a series of articles “in the unreadable Moskvityanin”: “Letter to St. Petersburg about the exhibition” (1843), “Letter to St. Petersburg regarding the railway” (1844), “ The opinion of foreigners about Russia" (1845), "The opinion of Russians about foreigners" (1846), "On the possibility of a Russian art school" (1847), "England" (1848), "About Humboldt" (1848) and some others. Khomyakov explained their actual journalistic goal in one of his letters: “I wanted, I had to express a cherished thought that I had carried within me since childhood and which for a long time seemed strange and wild even to my close friends. This idea is that no matter how much each of us loves Russia, we all, as a society, are its constant enemies... because we are foreigners, because we are masters of our serf compatriots, because we fool the people and at the same time deprive ourselves of the opportunity true enlightenment..."
The same journalistic subtext underlay the ideological orientation of Babylon, where the author set the task of “presenting the theory of nationalism as opposed to the theory of humanitarianism.” At the same time, the “theory of nationalism” when applied to world history reveals unexpected difficulties.
Outwardly, Khomyakov’s historiosophical constructions seem simple. Of the three possible “divisions of humanity” (“by tribes”, “by states” and “by faiths”) the most significant is the last one, but in order to understand the faith of the people in all its aspects, it is necessary to study the primary stage of national science: “tribes” ”, concentrating the “physiology” of a given people. Analyzing the initial movements of the tribes, Khomyakov comes to the conclusion: “Each people had its own exclusive passion...”, that is, it was mono-verse.
Considering the “exceptional passion” of ancient peoples, Khomyakov identifies two antinomic elements that determined the appearance of the initial existence of people on Earth: “conquering peoples” and “agricultural peoples.” In its further development, this antinomy was complicated by many options, but Khomyakov thinks of the development of world history as a unique realization of the dramatic conflict of two opposing spiritual “principles.” At the same time, he calls the beginning associated with the “agricultural” element Iranism, and the opposite “conquering” principle - Kushiteism. The spiritual history of mankind appears as a multivariate struggle between “Iranianism” and “Kushitism”. At the same time, Khomyakov does not at all impose the eventual outline of world history on the identified antinomy, and the antinomy “Iranianism” - “Kushiticism” is not at all built on a unilinear principle: “good” - “bad” "
As V. Solovyov accurately noted, Khomyakov (unlike N. Danilevsky) recognizes “the solidarity of all humanity.” Even Friedrich Schlegel divided humanity into two genetically hostile races: Cainites (expressors of the carnal will) and Sephites (representatives of the divine will). Following him, Khomyakov presented the antinomy of “carnal” and “spiritual” in the form of a dramatized historical chronicle.
The symbol of faith in the elements of “Iranianism” is a deity in the form of a freely creative personality. “Kushiteism” contrasts this symbol of freedom with the element of necessity. According to this antithetical pair (freedom - necessity), in “Cushitic” religions (the most striking of them are pantheistic religions: Buddhism, Shaivism, etc.), the main symbol becomes the Snake (associated with fertility, earth and water, female or male productive force, time , wisdom, etc.). “Iranian” mythology is hostile to the Snake: Hercules defeats the Hydra, Apollo-Python, Vishnu-Dragon...
The basis of “Cushitic” beliefs is the worship of “religious materialism” and the “fetishes” of faith: prayer is perceived as a “spell” given from above, a ritual as “witchcraft,” etc. The basis of “Iranism” is the proclamation of the freedom of faith that exists “within " each person. Accordingly, “Kushitism” is especially clearly manifested in the “material” arts - painting and architecture; “Iranianness” is in literature and music. The element of “Kushitism” is analysis and rationalism; “Iranianism” tends toward a synthetic, undivided acceptance of the world. Both types of national psychology thus turn out to be equally natural.
The incompatibility of “tribes” and “faiths” also gives rise to antinomies in the public consciousness and social life of different peoples. “Kushiteism,” based on necessity (and, accordingly, lack of freedom), gives rise to a conditional community of people—the state. All “Cushitic” civilizations are remarkable precisely as strong state formations: Babylon, Egypt, China, South India. “Iranism” proclaims a natural union, a free civilization of people, and therefore is rarely formalized into strong state entities. Therefore, “Iranian” civilizations are weak and unstable, while “Kushitic” ones are strong and less susceptible to external influences. Therefore, there is “the inevitable triumph of the Kushite teachings” and “the gradual fall of Iranianism,” manifested in the external movement of world history.
If there is an admixture of “Kushitism” in “Iranianness,” the latter will certainly win. Spiritual freedom must be absolute; any concession to necessity leads to the death of spiritual freedom. Khomyakov illustrates this process by analyzing the history of Ancient Greece and Rome, the history of the victory of “Kushitism” among the originally “Iranian” peoples of the European North... The emergence of Christianity represented a heroic attempt to resist global “Kushitism,” which in Christian countries passed “into the logic of philosophical schools.” And the Hegelianism denied by Khomyakov became a kind of triumph of “Kushitism” in the nineteenth century.
N. Berdyaev called the antinomy “Iranianism” - “Kushiteism” “the most remarkable idea of Khomyakov, the one closest to genius.” N. Ryazanovsky directly compared it with the features of the “spontaneous dialectics” of its creator: “The conflict between Iranianism and Cushiteism, between the religion of freedom and the religion of necessity is, of course, the key to Slavophile ideology, if only we consider it from the right angle: as a conflict within the individual Khomyakov himself, and not as a struggle between two parts of humanity throughout world history,” In fact, Khomyakov did not at all try to connect truth with one “Iranian” principle, and untruth with one “Kushitic” one. In Semiramis, he persistently used precisely these two, purely conventional, terms, without dividing them or replacing them with any unambiguous ones, without allowing a purely axiological approach: which is better, “Iranianism” or “Kushiteism”? Khomyakov can only talk about what is dearer and closer to himself - and in this sense, “Semiramis” becomes both a scientific and an artistic work: “You need poetry to learn history...”
However, in a detailed justification of this “historical contradiction”, and in the subsequent review of world history (which was carried out by Khomyakov “from Abraham” to the turn of the 1st-11th millennia), the author considers tyranny” and “Kushitism” as a kind of “ciphers” that are not can be reduced either to rational categories (freedom and necessity) or to symbolic concepts (“Snake” and “Anti-snake”). Comprehension of these concepts is possible, according to Khomyakov, only by appealing to “transcendental” intuition, to faith. It is in this sense that Khomyakov, as L.P. Karsavin noted, “was the first to reveal the essence of the historical process in the religious process.”
The concept of “faith” in Khomyakov’s ideas is much broader than the concept of “religion”: it becomes a concentrated expression of the sought-after “spirit of life” of the “believing” people: for there are no “non-believing” peoples, and even atheism (“nihilism”) is considered in this case as one of the types of religion (“modified pantheism”). It was “faith” that determined the historical fate of a particular people, shaped “the measure of enlightenment, the nature of enlightenment and its sources.” One-elemental “primitive peoples” began their existence with an initial faith, which turned out to be a unique expression of a relatively unchanged folk psychology. All its further development and even the change of religion takes place under the influence of this “first principle.”
“Christianity,” writes Khomyakov, “for all its purity, with its sublimity above every human personality, takes on different forms among the Slav, the Roman, or the Teuton.” This happens precisely because the “individuality” of the initial beliefs of different peoples leaves an imprint on the later perceived perfect religion. Consequently, religion cannot be considered only in its official interpretation. The totality of folk beliefs and convictions is often not reflected either in “verbal monuments” or in “stone monuments” and can be understood “solely by looking at the entire life of a people, at its complete historical development.” It was this extremely broad concept that Khomyakov revealed in his theological works, which, due to censorship conditions, could only be published abroad.
When discussing Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc., Khomyakov started from “faith” as a multi-valued phenomenon.
Firstly, there is no “pure” faith (as well as a people in its “primitive form”); Consequently, religion can be an expression of the “spirit of life” of a people only conditionally and accepted as a kind of abstraction that has modifications and layers that are removed only with “life knowledge” (that is, with a specific, intuitive comprehension of the truth, opposite to rational knowledge).
Secondly, faith is a multifaceted hypostasis. It has its own “official” aspect, which, if not living separately, is at least sufficiently separated from the “folk” aspect; “Most religions are nothing more than opinion disguised as faith.” Meanwhile, “the character of the deity is more or less consistent with the character of the people who worship him” - therefore, not only faith creates a people, but also a people creates faith, and precisely the kind that corresponds to the creative capabilities of its spirit.
Thirdly, the existence of faith simultaneously in its “official” and in its “folk” versions leads to a characteristic contradiction. While religious doctrine “receives a one-sided development of markedness” with the development of history, “the most crude worship” of the material attributes of religion develops among the people. “The highest minds in society reach little by little the worship of thought, knowledge, unconditional and indefinite being, and finally to the self-destruction of thought, to nihilism; and at the same time the people reach fetishism along another ladder.” These “scissors” in the spiritual history of the people thus become a reflection of the social contradictions themselves: the “higher” and “lower” among the people depart from the sought-after “spirituality” along different “ladders”.
Therefore, the basis of the philosopher’s positive program was the search for ways to recreate spirituality while realizing the original “essence” of each people, which can only be determined by understanding the laws and factors of the original folk faith. “Nihilism”, as well as “fetishism,” lead to a moral impasse, the way out of which (both within the elements of “Iranism” and in “Kushiteism”) lies in the awareness of the common historical paths of further unified movement forward. Thus, progress turns out to be impossible without “retrospectively” - this is another of Khomyakov’s “paradoxes”.
“Khomyakov,” noted L. Karsavin, “of course, is not a specialist scientist, but he is not an amateur either. One can now laugh at many of its etymologies. But we should not forget that the linguists of his time were no different from him in this... Of course, the famous “Semiramis” is outdated in many ways (no more, however, than Hegel’s “philosophy of history”). But Khomyakov’s understanding of the tasks and methods of history, his exceptional ability to reveal the dialectical connection between the most diverse phenomena put him above most contemporary historians, not to mention theorists of historical science.”
The comparison between Khomyakov and Hegel that flashes here is not accidental. In the historiosophical constructions of both philosophers one can find many echoes: Hegel spoke about modern Germany as the highest manifestation of the Absolute; Khomyakov represented Russia and the Slavs as the “chosen” people; The Hegelian antinomy of the “Iranian” “principle of light” and the “Egyptian” “principle of mystery”, etc. is also built in the spirit of contrasting “Iranianism” and “Kushitism”. Other comparisons are also possible. One can, for example, declare Khomyakov the “father” of Nietzscheanism, for long before Nietzsche he pointed to the “Apollo” and “Dionysus” principles as the main elements of Greek spiritual culture: “Dionysos of Kushite and Apollo of Iran represent such opposite types that an impartial researcher cannot derive them from the same religious system...” But this kind of correspondence only emphasizes the uniqueness of Khomyakov the philosopher.
Coming from artistic intuition and “life history,” which he sought to make elements of scientific knowledge, Khomyakov tried to combine two different and, in essence, incompatible sources: early patristics and the ideas of Western romanticism and Western natural philosophy. And in this connection, he was able to reconcile the irreconcilable: the organic principle of interpretation of spiritual phenomena is obvious not only in Khomyakov’s ecclesiology, but also in his secular philosophy, in his political, social and economic articles. It was this principle that formed the basis of his ideas of gradual social development and conservatism; it was he who revealed the correspondence of the Slavophile worldview to the pan-European movement of philosophical romanticism, which managed to unite such heterogeneous categories as “integrity of spirit”, “completeness of perception”, “organic social development”, etc. d. Khomyakovsky’s “turn” of these ideas, in essence, comes down to the well-known formula presented in the memoirs of A.I. Koshelev: “Khomyakov was the first to be imbued with the historical spirit of the people and their history and showed us our real needs and requirements, our national properties and that a goal to which we must strive."
Khomyakov was familiar and friendly with many outstanding people of his era: Pushkin and Gogol, Lermontov and Venevitinov, Aksakov and Odoevsky, Chaadaev and Granovsky, Shevyrev and Pogodin, Belinsky and Herzen, Samarin and Yazykov, Bartenev and Hilferding... In his early youth, he became a polemicist with Ryleev, proving to the leader of the Decembrists the injustice of the “military revolution” he was planning and accusing him of striving for the “tyranny of an armed minority.” In his mature years, he polemicized a lot with Westerners and Hegelians, one of whom, Herzen, who did not agree with his opponent, however, wrote on December 21, 1842: “I was glad for this dispute: I could in some way test my strength,” it’s worth any training to measure up against such a fighter...” In the 50s, Khomyakov became a kind of symbol of the philosophical thought of “conservative Moscow,” unshakable, unshakable and invariably in opposition to the government, to revolutionaries trying to overthrow him by force, to liberals striving for “ golden mean...
Endowed by nature with powerful health, he died almost “like Bazarov.” In September 1860, he went to his Ryazan estates, where, in particular, he worked on curing peasants of cholera. He became infected himself and died on the evening of September 23 in his village of Ivanovskoye. He left behind a number of journalistic articles on a variety of issues, several French brochures of theological content and many manuscripts, partially analyzed and published by his students.
Khomyakov's legacy has not yet been fully mastered. Moreover: a complete scientific analysis, for example, of “Semiramis” - analysis of the argumentation presented in it, verification of facts and historical explanations, thesis by thesis - is almost impossible to carry out at this stage of historical science. And the matter here rests mainly on subjective factors: the encyclopedic knowledge of the author, who easily drew parallels from the most different times and peoples; the widest use of data from related disciplines: history, linguistics, patristics, geography, folklore, etc.; lack of indications of sources, which can scare off the most conscientious researcher; the “planned” unfinished work and, accordingly, the underdevelopment of many even basic premises... At the same time, intuition (in the terminology of the romantics, “poetry” as the ability to directly grasp the true living reality) becomes not only the main way of knowing the subject (history), but also the main component of that , which is the main thing in the subject of knowledge - faith.
Such “inclusiveness” and at the same time the subjectivity of the researcher brings Khomyakov’s works closer to works of art. Thus, “Semiramis” is not only a search for the “truth of historical ideas”, embodied in a certain artistic concept. And this concept, in turn, turns out to be almost elusive: historical, linguistic, mythological, folklore, theological facts are intertwined here, forming a complex, difficult to separate and extremely deep whole...
A detailed study of Khomyakov’s heritage (as well as the Slavophile heritage in general) is a matter for the future. But even now, “against the backdrop” of his remarkable works, it becomes clear how narrow the traditional interpretations of Slavophilism are as a movement that solved only the problem of the historical fate of Russia, the relationship between the “Russian” and “Western” paths of development and subordinated its internal structure only to these issues. Even now, Slavophilism is considered as an ideology that has self-organized around the “Russia-West” problem (to which all the various statements supposedly come down). Even to this day, Slavophile ideas are considered within a priori postulated, stable and already “mythologized” pairs with a pre-known answer (“Russia” is good, “West” is bad; “past” is organic, “present” is artificial, etc. ). But such interpretations not only narrow, but simply weaken ^^ - “dsts.
The best refutation of these interpretations is in a careful reference to those original Khomyakov “paradoxes” with which, according to Herzen, began, “a turning point in Russian thought.”
At the end of Perestroika, Orthodox society was faced with a task that was not entirely typical for it. It would seem that the years of persecution had passed, there was no longer a need to hide crosses on the body, just as there was no need to go to church, looking around the “gardens.” Moreover, the Holy Scriptures, previously bought from speculators for two salaries, could already be obtained completely free of charge from numerous visiting missionaries. And the wise and sedate newly-deceased with the young and active newly-deceased regularly appeared on the blue screens of Central Television.
But at the same time, serious differences began to appear among the Orthodox, concerning not only and not so much purely intra-church issues. Many people have a need for open socio-political reflection (and for others, activity), refracted through the prism of the Orthodox worldview. However, this is precisely what became the basis for dividing socially reflective believers into several “camps,” the key of which, by analogy with political ones, are usually called “liberal” and “conservative.”
Of course, there are persistent cliches, according to which church “liberals” read Berdyaev in unison and, thinking about ecumenism and the translation of divine services into Russian, and “conservatives” pray to the portraits of Pobedonostsev and Tikhomirov (of course, without reading them), dreaming of Autocracy, Nationality and disgrace (or even better - destruction) of heretics and infidels - have little to do with reality. On the other hand, the main trends, in general, have been identified correctly - Christian-universalist and Orthodox-originalist, although the foundations of both have a very distant relationship with “liberalism” and “conservatism”.
And it is on the latter that today I would like to dwell in a little more detail, without going into the details of the disagreements, but having examined one of the sources of the originalist movement in Orthodox social and historiosophical thought - the Slavophil movement of the mid-nineteenth century, known to most from school. I will do this using the example of one of its founders - the great Russian thinker Alexei Stepanovich Khomyakov, whose 150th anniversary we are celebrating today.
Alexey Khomyakov was born on May 1 (13), 1804 in the family of a representative of an ancient noble family (the roots of the Khomyakovs go back to the 16th century, although, according to some sources, the family itself is much older), a retired lieutenant of the guards. Stepan Khomyakov, according to the description of his contemporaries, did not at all adhere to the pochvennik worldview, but, on the contrary, was a passionate Anglomaniac and was even one of the founders of the famous English Club in Moscow. However, another passion possessed him much more powerfully - father A.S. Khomyakova was obsessed with playing cards and, as a result, in his own club, he lost almost his entire family fortune, more than a million rubles. After this, as Sergei Khoruzhy aptly notes in his book “Modern Problems of the Orthodox World Outlook,” “... a gender revolution took place in the family: the philosopher’s mother, Maria Alekseevna Kireevskaya, a lady of a strong, imperious, proud character, removed her husband from running affairs and became the head herself Houses".
It cannot be said that this “revolution” had a negative impact on the formation of young Alexei, who eventually received an excellent education, which allowed 15-year-old Khomyakov to translate Tacitus’s essay “Germany” from Latin in 1819 (an excerpt from the translation was published 2 years later in Proceedings Society of Lovers of Russian Literature" at Moscow University). And already at the age of 17, Alexey passed the exam for the degree of Candidate of Mathematical Sciences at Moscow University. Of course, the historical degree did not quite correspond to the modern one, but here Khomyakov can only be compared with the “idol” of the “Orthodox universalists” Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov. The latter was approved for a candidate’s degree “only” at the age of 20.
But this is far from the most surprising thing in the initial period of Khomyakov’s biography. As a result, without becoming a mathematician, the young candidate of sciences entered military service (first in the Astrakhan cuirassier regiment, but a year later he transferred to St. Petersburg to the Horse Guards, where he became interested in poetry - the young poet’s first poems were published in the almanac of Ryleev and Bestuzhev "Polar Star"). But in 1825, without waiting for the Decembrist rebellion, in which Khomyakov’s close acquaintances also took part, the young lieutenant left in 1825, going abroad.
Far from his homeland, Alexey Khomyakov, who had previously become close to the circle of “lyubomudrov”, actively studied German classical philosophy (mainly I. Kant, I. G. Fichte and F. V. Schelling), was engaged in painting, and also wrote a historical drama "Ermak". And here it is very important to note that in the worldview of the young thinker at that time, Western philosophical influences were quite organically combined with deep Orthodox religiosity and sincere patriotism. As his personal friend, another Slavophile of the “first wave” Alexander Koshelev, would later write in his memoirs about Khomyakov: “I knew Khomyakov for 37 years, and his basic beliefs in 1823 remained the same in 1860.”
In 1828-1829, Khomyakov, out of patriotic motives, voluntarily took part in (he took part in battles in the Belarusian Hussar Regiment, and was awarded for bravery and courage). At the end of the war A.S. Khomyakov retired, deciding to take up farming on his estates in the Tula, Ryazan and Smolensk provinces, as well as literary work. One of the first works of the 30s was the second historical drama “Dmitry the Pretender”. However, I will not dwell on the dramatic and poetic creativity of the thinker, but will move directly to his socio-political, historiosophical and theological creativity, which brought A.S. Khomyakov is world famous.
During the 30s of the 19th century, the thinker developed a coherent system of views, which somewhat later critics would call “Slavophilism,” a term that the early Slavophiles themselves used extremely rarely. The result of Khomyakov’s ideological evolution was his writing of the article “On the Old and the New,” which was not initially intended for publication and was read in the winter of 1838-1839. on one of the “environments” of I.V. Kireevsky in Moscow. It was in this work that Khomyakov identified the key themes of further discussions between Slavophiles and Westerners: “Which is better, old or new Russia? How many alien elements have entered its current organization?.. Has it lost many of its fundamental principles, and were these principles such that we should regret them and try to resurrect them?”
I will not go into the details of the intra-Slavophile polemic that arose after Khomyakov read this article, I will only note that another outstanding founder of Slavophilism, the owner of the above-mentioned “environments”, Ivan Kireevsky, wrote a detailed answer to it. I believe that those readers who have already completed the first half of my essay would be interested in getting acquainted with both texts, not in retelling.
Alexey Khomyakov outlined his historiosophical views in a unique work for that time, “Semiramis,” which, alas, was still unfinished, but at the same time the thinker’s largest creation in terms of volume. In “Semiramis,” the thinker made an attempt to systematically present the meaning of world history, an attempt that at that time was comparable only to Hegel’s “Philosophy of History.”
Khomyakov’s history is presented in the form of a centuries-old struggle between two opposing spiritual principles, which he named after the names of two ancient civilizations, “Iranian” and “Kushitic.” The first of them is a symbol of freedom of spirit, the second is “the predominance of material necessity.” At the same time, A.S. himself Khomyakov did not absolutize this or that principle, but noted the relativity of this division, believing that “History no longer knows pure tribes. History also does not know pure religions.” And at the same time, the thinker considered the Russian people to be the only people who preserved the Iranian cultural and religious type until the 19th century. At the same time, while criticizing the West, Alexey Khomyakov did not at all idealize the Russian past, although he hoped for the “resurrection of Ancient Rus'”, which preserved the Orthodox ideal.
And it is precisely on conciliarity, as one of the key categories of Khomyakov’s philosophical and theological creativity (moreover, he was the first to introduce this category into Russian philosophical discourse), that it is worth dwelling in a little more detail, since it is conciliarity, in the opinion of the thinker, that lies the basis of Russian identity. Of course, the conciliar ideal itself is not initially purely public, social, but is based on the religious principle contained in the ninth, ecclesiological, member “”: “[I believe] in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” But, based on precisely this ideal, in Khomyakov’s opinion, a social vertical should be built (or, to be more precise, “descended”) - the blessed organic unity of the believing people on the basis of the Orthodox faith. In this case, in addition to Khomyakov’s historiosophical works, there is his extremely important text of the 40s, published only in 1864, that is, after the author’s death. This is a relatively small article, “The Church is One,” in which Khomyakov catechetically outlined his own vision of the Church as a living organism: “The Church is not a multitude of persons in their personal individuality, but the unity of God’s grace, living in a multitude of rational creatures that submit to grace.”
At the same time, it is very important to note that at the core of his criticism of the West, or, more precisely, Western society, Khomyakov touches on a very important epistemological point: rejecting Western rationalism from, in fact, intuitionist positions (again, the “Cushitic” principle), the thinker substantiates the need for an integral knowledge (the so-called “life science”), the source of which is also conciliarity (“a set of thoughts connected by love”). At the same time, Khomyakov quite rightly identifies as the basis for the Western rejection of “living knowledge,” which, starting from pre-schismatic times (in particular, St. Augustine), followed a purely rationalistic path.
Criticizing Catholicism, Khomyakov noted in the latter such a significant drawback as the unlimited dominance of the hierarchy. From the point of view of the thinker, the fact that the Western church has actually turned into an institution of power is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of Christian teaching. On the other hand, Western Protestantism is even more contrary to the Christian ideal, since it is a departure from the apostolic and patristic canons and a manifestation of extreme religious individualism.
And at the same time, A.S. Khomyakov cannot be called a conservative thinker. Thus, he was a consistent supporter of reforming Russia, in some aspects more radical than some Western liberals. At the same time, while remaining a Slavophile, he was an opponent of the Westernized ideal of the “rule of law”, rightly considering the basis of social life not law, but morality. At the same time, like many liberals, he advocated the liberation of peasants with land (which was a very radical judgment for that time), and also spoke out against censorship and for freedom of speech and press.
On this basis, Nikolai Berdyaev eventually even came to such a paradoxical conclusion as: “Khomyakov was, in essence, a liberal and democrat with a populist and anti-state tint.” However, the categorical nature of this judgment remained on the conscience of the talented, but very often contradictory and inconsistent author (who, by the way, did not condemn Khomyakov at all, but, on the contrary, “protected” him from largely justified criticism from the outside).
And at the same time, A.S. himself Khomyakov, of course, considered the Orthodox monarchy the only acceptable form of government for Russia, although at the same time he advocated the convening of the “Zemsky Sobor”, pinning on it the hope of resolving the contradiction between “power” and “land” that arose in Russia as a result of Peter’s Westernizing reforms I.
Unfortunately, Khomyakov did not live such a long life, and therefore was unable to answer many questions that were asked to him after his death. The thinker died exclusively as a Christian. While treating peasants during a cholera epidemic, he became infected and very quickly the disease broke him. Alexei Stepanovich died on September 23 (October 5), 1860 in his ancestral village of Speshnevo-Ivanovsky, after which his ashes were transported to Moscow and buried in the cemetery of the St. Danilov Monastery.
In 1931, Khomyakov’s ashes were transferred to the Novodevichy cemetery. And, according to some sources, when the body of Alexei Stepanovich was exhumed, it turned out to be incorrupt. Although this alone, of course, is not a basis for canonization, the need for which was discussed several years ago by some researchers of the life and work of this great Russian philosopher.
Alexey Stepanovich Khomyakov (May 1 (May 13) 1804 - September 23 (October 5) 1860) - Russian poet, artist, publicist, theologian, philosopher, founder of early Slavophilism, corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Alexey Khomyakov was born in Moscow on Ordynka into an old noble family. Received home education. In 1821 he passed the exam for the degree of candidate of mathematical sciences at Moscow University. He published very actively (poems, translations). In 1822, Khomyakov was assigned to military service, first in the Astrakhan Cuirassier Regiment, and a year later he was transferred to St. Petersburg to the Horse Guards. In 1825 he left the service, went abroad, took up painting, and wrote the historical drama “Ermak”. In 1828-1829, Khomyakov took part in the Russian-Turkish war, after which he retired and went to his estate, deciding to take up farming. Collaborates with various magazines.
In 1836 he married the sister of the poet Yazykov, Ekaterina Mikhailovna. In the article “On the Old and the New” (1839), he puts forward the main theoretical principles of Slavophilism. In 1838, he began work on his main historical and philosophical work, “Notes on World History.” In 1847 Khomyakov visited Germany.
Since 1850, he paid special attention to religious issues and the history of Russian Orthodoxy. For Khomyakov, socialism and capitalism were equally negative offspring of Western decadence. The West was unable to solve the spiritual problems of humanity; it became carried away by competition and neglected cooperation. In his words: “Rome maintained unity at the cost of freedom, and Protestants gained freedom at the cost of unity.” He considered the monarchy the only acceptable form of government for Russia, advocated the convening of the “Zemsky Sobor”, pinning on it the hope of resolving the contradiction between “power” and “land” that arose in Russia as a result of the reforms of Peter I.
While treating peasants during a cholera epidemic, he fell ill. He died on September 23 (October 5), 1860 in the village of Speshnevo-Ivanovsky, Ryazan province (now in the Lipetsk region). He was buried in the Danilov Monastery next to Yazykov and Gogol. During Soviet times, the ashes of all three were reburied at the new Novodevichy cemetery.
The fundamental work “Notes on World History” (Semiramis) remained unfinished, but journal articles were preserved. The material world seemed to Khomyakov to be only an external expression of the freely creating spirit (God), and the material factors of social development were its external manifestations. History is the process of gradual manifestation of the fullness of the spirit in the social life of mankind. Each nation in its development expresses one side or another of the absolute. Accordingly, the history of a people was a process of manifestation in its social life of a certain primary idea inherent in it. Each people had its own special substance, “beginning”.
The philosophy of A. S. Khomyakov was based on providentialism. The historical development of each people was predetermined by the absolute. However, in its development, a people, for one reason or another, may deviate from it and fail to fulfill the “mission” assigned to it.
The understanding of the Slavophiles (including A.S. Khomyakov) of the process of historical development of a particular people as a gradual manifestation of its “beginning” had two undeniable advantages. Firstly, such an approach implied a desire to understand the meaning of the history of the people. Secondly, it forced us to pay special attention to the specifics of people's life (it was the Slavophiles who were the first to pay serious attention to such a fundamental phenomenon of Russian reality as the rural community).
