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Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Thinking Orthodox in modern Russia: culture, history, context

Thinking Orthodox in modern Russia: culture, history, context, edited by Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Komblatt, Madison WI, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014, xii + 303 pp., US$30.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-299-29894-4Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context, edited by Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Komblatt, is a compilation of articles demonstrating the range of scholarship that is now available on the history of Russian Orthodox thought. Conceived as a successor volume to Russian Religious Thought, edited by Komblatt and Richard F. Gustafson in 1996 and published by the same press, this book expands the study of the subject beyond the religious philosophers of the late nineteenth century, to include representatives of the clergy, of the theological academies, and of educated society. Emphasizing the role of contingency and the importance of context, it reveals the breadth of ways that modern Russians engaged in theological reflection. The editors explain, "Orthodox churchmen, academic theologians, and lay Orthodox thinkers interacted with each other and the contexts around them much more frequently, and deeply, than has been previously acknowledged" (20).The volume is divided into three loosely constructed sections, the first of which illuminates the perspective of various individuals who worked within the context of the Church establishment. Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter shows how the teachings of enlightened churchmen like metropolitan of Moscow Platon (Levshin, 1737-1812), served as bridges between European Enlightenment culture and educated Russian society in the eighteenth century (46). Drawing on the cult of Tsarevich Dimitrii of Uglich, Platon's sermons elaborated on the relationship between happiness and human suffering as he sought to interpret the everyday struggles of life in the modern world. Heather J. Coleman examines the internal mission of the Orthodox Church to the Russian people as "a major site for the Church's engagement with modern society" (65). Through the writings of the anti-sectarian missionary Dmitrii I. Bogoliubov, she explores how he came to understand the Russian soul as historically constructed and how his missionary activity led him into an emerging advocacy for the freedom of conscience in early twentieth-century Russia (67). In his study of the Name-Glorifiers (Imiaslavie) controversy, in which the Russian monks on Mount Athos battled with the Holy Synod over the relationship between the name of God and God himself, Scott M. Kenworthy overturns traditional interpretations that have set scholastic academic theology up against the mystical theology associated with the Eastern Church Fathers. Looking at the work of Archbishop Nikon (Rozhdestvenskii, 1851-1918), Kenworthy suggests that he was both a representative of Church authority with its close alignment to the state, but also an advocate of asceticism and mysticism. He reframes the debate as an argument over religious authority and in particular whether the authority to speak on behalf of the Church rested with the Church hierarchy, its theologians, or those "who had direct experience of spiritual things" (86).The second section of the book looks at the intellectual culture within the four spiritual academies of the Russian Orthodox Church. Sean Gillen places the thought of V. D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov (1828-1891) within the European discourse of theism. In doing so, he demonstrates the development of rational religion within the Moscow Spiritual Academy (124) and interprets it as an example of how Orthodox thought shaped the various ways that nineteenth-century Russians imagined the future of their empire. Vera Shevzov looks at the debate over the relationship between faith and science as it related to the particular question of miracles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …