Theosis in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Religious Thought

The chapter argues that the Greek patristic doctrine of theosis (‘becoming god’ or ‘making god’) was a dominant theme of late imperial Russian religious thought, in which it served as a response to the acutely felt anticipation of the imminent collapse of the Russian political and social order. Theosis is defined as a metaphor for salvation that emphasizes the process, as much as the goal, of assimilation to God, and which can be viewed as a narrative encompassing the entire economy of salvation as well as a doctrine narrowly conceived. It is argued that lay Russian religious thinkers accessed the concept of theosis through diverse channels that included the patristic translation project and related scholarship of Russia’s Theological Academies, the still vital tradition of spiritual eldership and the pathway to personal transfiguration by the divine energies set out in the Dobrotoliubie, and the philosophy of divine humanity of the nineteenth-century religious philosopher Vladimir Solov’ev. Three seminal early twentieth-century treatments of theosis are analysed: Sergei Bulgakov’s Philosophy of Economy (1912), Nikolai Berdyaev’s Meaning of Creativity (1916), and Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914). These reveal the ‘modernist’ approach typical of the period, that is, engagement of theosis in dialogue with diverse intellectual contexts including German metaphysical idealism (Bulgakov), Symbolism and the theosophy of Jakob Böhme (Berdyaev), on the one hand, and, in the case of Florensky, engagement of the formal experimentalism of modernism in the service of a defence of Orthodox mystical asceticism.