This paper by Randall A. Poole was presented at the Northwestern University Research Initiative in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought Conference celebrating Gary Saul Morson in April 2024.
I began to study Saul Morson’s work in the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student at the University of Notre Dame. His 1993 essay, “Prosaic Bakhtin: Landmarks, Anti-Intelligentsialism, and the Russian Counter-Tradition,” left a deep impression on me.[1] In 1991, in one of my first conference papers, I explored certain connections between Bakhtin and Vekhi or Landmarks, a famous collection of philosophical articles about the Russian intelligentsia published in 1909.[2] With his characteristic generosity Saul gave me a reference in his essay, but that’s not the only reason it made such an impression on me, though certainly the reference was a special moment for a young graduate student. What I valued most was his notion of the Russian counter-tradition, a liberal and humane alternative to autocracy and radicalism. This theme has been central to his work. In a 2009 essay, he wrote, “I believe that the philosophies of the Russian counter-tradition constitute Russia’s greatest contribution to world thought.”[3] These philosophies, developed in Russian literature and thought, far transcend Russia: they are of universal human significance and have fundamentally deepened our self-understanding and our understanding of reality.
Vekhi is a trenchant and incisive critique of the worldview of the nineteenth-century radical Russian intelligentsia. It is a classic work of the Russian counter-tradition, which it helped to define. That’s why Saul has paid so much attention to it, most recently in Wonder Confronts Certainty, where it is one of his most important sources. While the main burden of Vekhi is critique, it also lays out the main positive principles of the Russian intellectual counter-tradition, which I will call open humanism, in contrast to the closed humanism of the Russian intelligentsia. Closed humanism was not confined to Russian thought. It also describes characteristic features of mainstream Western humanism. Thus open humanism is not only a Russian intellectual counter-tradition. We can all learn from it.
Very few works in the history of Russian thought have had as much impact as Vekhi. As Saul put it, “If ever a book caused a scandal in prerevolutionary Russia, this was it.”[4] Within a year it went through five editions and evoked hundreds of reviews and commentaries, including three book-length responses. It has been translated into English twice. Four of the seven contributors to the volume were well on their way to becoming renowned Russian thinkers. Peter Struve (1870–1944) was an economist, political and social theorist, and in general a scholar of encyclopedic breadth. He organized the Russian Liberation Movement that culminated in the Revolution of 1905. Nikolai Berdiaev (1874–1948), Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), and Semyon Frank (1877–1950) were philosophers who achieved worldwide fame after they were deported to Europe in 1922. Berdiaev had the widest readership. Bulgakov was perhaps the greatest Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century. Frank has been called the “most outstanding” of all Russian philosophers.[5] The four thinkers were briefly Marxists before turning to metaphysical idealism and religious philosophy. Their Marxists beginnings gave them an inside perspective on the intelligentsia’s mentality, which they mercilessly critiqued in Vekhi.
These four thinkers, together with one other Vekhi author, the legal and social theorist Bogdan Kistiakovsky (1868–1920), contributed to Vekhi’s predecessor volume, Problems of Idealism, which was published in 1902. It is another classic work of the Russian counter-tradition. My edition of the volume was published in 2003 in Yale’s book series “Russian Literature and Thought,” which Saul edited.[6] At about the same time the series also published works by Boris Chicherin (1828–1904) and Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900), the two greatest philosophers of nineteenth-century Russia and intellectual pillars of the Russian counter-tradition. The Chicherin edition was produced by the eminent Russian historian Gary Hamburg.[7] In his foreword to the volume, Saul wrote, “the Russian liberal tradition has something to teach us because it often proceeded from premises different from Western counterparts.” In particular, beginning with Chicherin, “it turned to versions of idealism. Liberalism was also derived from a revival of religion, which provided a basis, as materialism apparently could not, for the doctrine of the infinite worth of each individual soul and person.”[8] That doctrine, human dignity, is the core of the Russian counter-tradition of open humanism.[9] Following Chicherin and Soloviev, the contributors to Problems of Idealism and Vekhi thought that idealism provided the best philosophical support for a genuine, open humanism and for its close ally, liberalism. In 1905 Struve wrote an essay with Semyon Frank on the philosophy of culture. In it they offer a defense of humanism, “by which we mean idealism, a faith in absolute values which is linked with faith in humanity and its creative tasks on earth.”[10]
To understand the Russian intellectual counter-tradition, we need to take a closer look at the Russian tradition. In Wonder Confronts Certainty, Saul refers to Tibor Szamuely’s classic study, The Russian Tradition (1974).[11] Szamuely identifies two sides of the tradition: the autocracy and the revolutionary intelligentsia. The autocratic side of the tradition is deeply entrenched and to this day has sadly remained the fundamental fact of Russian political history, with few breaks since Ivan the Terrible. One important feature of Russian autocracy has been its (ongoing) subordination and instrumentalization of the Russian Orthodox Church for its own ideological purposes, chiefly to bolster its legitimacy and power by presenting itself as protector of the faith and even as an agent of salvation. The revolutionary side of the Russian tradition developed in the nineteenth century with the rise of the radical intelligentsia, whose ideology bore the deep imprint of its opposition to the autocracy and its persecution by the tsarist police. As Nikolai Berdiaev put it in Vekhi, “An obsolete despotism deformed the intelligentsia’s soul, enslaving it not just externally but internally as well.”[12]
The Russian intelligentsia saw its mission as overthrowing the autocracy and serving the broadly human purposes of freedom, progress, and the realization of human potential or at least of happiness. Thus its ideology was a type of humanism. Its humanism was atheistic, the intelligentsia having concluded from the autocracy that religion was an instrument of oppression.[13] Its humanism was oriented to human aggregates or even abstractions, the Russian people or humanity as a whole or its most representative classes, not to individual persons. It took the form of socialism, and in pursuing its grand purposes the radical intelligentsia paid as little respect to individual freedom, dignity, and rights as did the autocracy. The socialist future was seen as qualitatively higher than any preceding state, “humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,” as Friedrich Engels put it.[14] This vision of the emancipation of humanity, notwithstanding the intelligentsia’s atheism, recalled religious hopes of salvation. So exalted an end seemed to justify virtually any means to achieve it, including extreme violence.
The Russian intelligentsia typically assumed there were natural, historical laws that underpinned its humanistic purposes and guaranteed their realization, either inevitably or once conditions were right. Human progress was held to be a natural law, operating independently of human will or at least alongside it. This was a very widespread if not universal belief among intellectuals not only in Russia, but throughout Europe and America. Closed humanism smuggled in or imputed human values to the natural world: it naturalized human values to make their realization automatic, a consequence of historical necessity unfolding on its own accord, rather than a matter of moral aspiration and achievement. This strange amalgam, the modern idea of progress, was central to the belief system of the Russian intelligentsia. More generally, it has had an enormous role in European intellectual history since the Enlightenment.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, this intellectual tradition was withering under powerful assaults by the Russian counter-tradition of open humanism. Though it was becoming outmoded, the Bolsheviks embraced it completely as their ideology. After they took power in 1917, they imposed it on Russia for the next seventy years and exported it to Asia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. They propped up a dying intellectual tradition in order to make it the instrument of mass dying.
With this background, let me now turn to Vekhi in more detail. The contributors identified the following main elements of the radical intelligentsia’s ideology: materialism, atheism, utilitarianism, environmentalism, socialism, revolutionism, and terrorism. They all agreed that the constituent feature was the rejection of objective, absolute values or ideals. One such value is truth. In the opening chapter Berdiaev observed that the radical intelligentsia rejected truth as an autonomous, intrinsic value and instead took a utilitarian approach to it, subordinating it to the interests of the people. He wrote that the intelligentsia’s motto was: let truth perish, if the people will live better and be happier (6). It was considered almost immoral to study philosophy, for two reasons: first, it was regarded as selfish and suggested indifference to the plight of peasants and workers, and second it was even positively harmful because philosophy, especially metaphysics, was associated with religion, which everyone knew to be an instrument of tsarist oppression. The intelligentsia approached not only philosophy but all learning in a “subjective” or instrumental way, according to utilitarian criteria of their social value.
Morson especially admires Semyon Frank’s Vekhi essay, which bears the title, “The Ethic of Nihilism: A Characterization of the Russian Intelligentsia’s Moral Outlook.” Frank uses the term “nihilism” to refer to “the denial or non-recognition of absolute (objective) values” (136). The result of this rejection is two-fold: first, the creation of false absolutes or idols, the ascribing of absolute significance to one or another relative value or interest (fanaticism, in other words), and second the intelligentsia’s “moralism,” by which everything is judged according to the utilitarian criterion (and false absolute) of the people’s happiness. Frank notes that this particular false absolute, popular welfare, gave the whole intelligentsia a populist spirit, even among those who, like the Marxists, opposed populism in the specific Russian sense of the term. In the 1870s populism inspired genuinely altruistic service to the real needs of the people, which was perfectly admirable. Relatively soon, however, altruistic populism was displaced by a very different approach that existed alongside it and had earlier origins in the history of the intelligentsia. Frank calls this approach “the religion of the absolute achievement of the people’s happiness” (140). Once the intelligentsia became intoxicated by the idea that its mission was universal salvation, it could not but, in Frank’s words, “scorn and condemn prosaic, unending activity of the kind that is guided by direct altruistic sentiment” (143). Such activity now seemed “a harmful waste of time and energy on petty, useless concerns, a betrayal of all mankind and its eternal salvation for the sake of a few individuals close at hand” (142).
The idea that modern ideologies such as socialism were political religions, secularized versions of millenarianism and eschatology, was a very important insight by Frank and other Russian idealist philosophers.[15] As early as 1878 Vladimir Soloviev wrote that socialism and positivism were substitutes for “rejected Gods.”[16] Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov appeared within a few years. Ivan tells his brother Alyosha that when Russian guys like them happen to meet in a tavern, their conversation will inevitably turn to the eternal questions “of the existence of God and immortality. And [Ivan continues] those who do not believe in God talk of socialism and anarchism, of the transformation of humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes down to the same, they’re the same questions turned inside out.”[17] This is the passage with which Saul begins Wonder Confronts Certainty.[18]
Sergei Bulgakov pursues this theme in both Problems of Idealism and Vekhi. “Basic Problems of the Theory of Progress” is his spectacular opening chapter to the first volume. He begins with a straightforward refutation of positivism: the idea of the absolute (whether in the form of morality, religion, or metaphysics) cannot be derived from the positive data of sense experience (the positivist criterion of reality), and yet it is intrinsic to human consciousness and cannot be eradicated.[19] Positivist attempts to deny the absolute lead only to unconscious metaphysics, since it then enters into thought as “contraband”—it is smuggled in under the guise of scientific, historical, social or other concepts—rather than being openly recognized and justified before reason (96, 107). The result is that the relative and absolute are distorted and conflated with each other.
The best example of such distortion and conflation is the modern theory of progress. According to Bulgakov, it turns out to be a pseudo-scientific, secular “religion of progress” because it posits a perfect human future which obviously is not “positively given” but reflects human longing for the absolute and borrows from traditional religious notions of salvation and the Kingdom of God. At the same time, “it wants to inspire confidence in the certain advent of this future kingdom through science,” with its prescribed ability to identify presumptive laws of history and predict their necessary course (92–93). Thus the theory of progress promises not only a perfect (though utterly unverifiable) future, but that it will come about “externally” through historical necessity, not through inner human self-determination and striving toward absolute ideals. Progress, Bulgakov stressed, depends on human beings freely and actively working to bring it about; it is not, he wrote, “a law of historical development, but a moral task” (111).[20]
Bulgakov’s Vekhi essay, “Heroism and Asceticism: Reflections on the Religious Nature of the Russian Intelligentsia,” is a classic analysis of the intelligentsia’s political religions.[21] Repeating Ivan Karamazov, Bulgakov notes that Russian atheism is a type of religious mentality, “only inside out.” From its naïve faith in science and progress, the intelligentsia gave itself the heroic mission of the “external salvation of mankind,” which rested on “an arrogant view of the people as an object of salvation” (39, 43). Clearly this was not outright atheism, if there is such a thing, but what Bulgakov calls, again following Dostoevsky, the religion of man-godhood, deriving from the Feuerbachian humanism that played so essential a role in the formation of such paradigmatic intelligentsia figures as Vissarion Belinskii (1811–1848), Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), and Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889).[22] Though it was a contradictory position, Russian revolutionaries saw themselves as agents of historical necessity. History was realizing its purposes through them, which explains their heroism and maximalism.
Bulgakov and the other Vekhi authors stressed the environmentalism of the intelligentsia’s outlook: evil, strife, human problems in general were consequences of a flawed social organization that somehow had diverged from the natural course of development. The heroic task, then, was to bring society back into conformity with natural and historical laws by correcting or destroying external defects such as oppressive social structures and artificial inequalities. Since the end result will be universal human happiness and perfectibility, all means were permitted in carrying out this task. In his Vekhi essay, Semyon Frank draws out the consequences of this type of thinking with particular force. The Russian socialist revolutionary, he writes, does not love living people, only the idea of future human happiness. The revolutionist divides everyone into victims of the world’s evil, whom he pities, or perpetrators of that evil, the privileged, whom he hates. Hatred for enemies of the people is his motive force. This hatred breeds destruction and violence, and the revolutionist becomes a terrorist (143–145). Saul characterizes it as “metaphysical hatred.”[23]
The searing critique of closed humanism that the contributors to Vekhi leveled against the radical intelligentsia rested on their understanding of the positive principles of open humanism. What were these? Let me suggest three. First and most important was their idea of human personhood, of what it means to be a person. Bulgakov put it succinctly in writing, “the absence of a correct doctrine of personhood is the intelligentsia’s chief weakness” (34). He and the other Vekhi philosophers were idealists. For them idealism meant first of all an idealist, and specifically Kantian, conception of human nature. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant lays out his core concept of self-determination, or more precisely ideal self-determination, which he also called the autonomy of the will. He understood human reason as having an astonishing dual power, theoretical and practical: first, the capacity to recognize or posit absolute ideals such as truth and the good, and, second, the capacity to determine the will according to such ideals (free will in the higher, positive sense of the term). He regarded ideal self-determination as the quintessential human quality—what it means to be human or to be a person. Chicherin and Soloviev adopted Kant’s conception of human nature around 1880 and made it an important basis of the further development of Russian idealism.[24] In Vekhi, Berdiaev extolls Russian concrete idealism, “concrete” because of its emphasis on personhood and human dignity, not abstract Hegelian absolute spirit (13).
Relying on their idealist conception of human nature, Vekhi’s criticism of closed humanism is devastating: by rejecting absolute ideals, by collapsing them into an immanent process of necessary historical development, closed humanism undermines the very foundation of personhood. Inner self-determination is replaced by external determination. Human beings, instead of being ends-in-themselves, become the means of external historical development. They cease to be persons. The difference between open and closed humanism could hardly be more stark. The Vekhi authors all agreed that closed humanism destroys human freedom and responsibility, and also the possibility of personal achievement, self-perfection, creativity, and progress, all of which depend on ideal self-determination.
The second positive principle of Vekhi’s open humanism was its receptiveness, or openness, to the metaphysical, theistic implications of personhood. Ideal self-determination refutes materialism or naturalism in two ways. First, the absolute ideals which drive it are a priori ideals of reason; they cannot be found in positive sense data. Second, free will is the power to override external determination by sensible-empirical causes. Refuting naturalism is not the same as proving theism, which remains a matter of faith, but the capacity for ideal self-determination is a reasonable ground for theistic belief. Kant himself thought so and thus arrived at the metaphysical postulates of the soul’s immortality and the existence of God. The Vekhi philosophers followed him. Semyon Frank famously concludes the volume with his call for religious humanism, with his conviction that the human opens up toward the divine (155).[25] Religious humanism works the other way, too. In Prosaics and Other Provocations, Saul refers to a recent development or extension of process theology called “open theism.” Its position, in contrast to classical theism, is that God is not “unmoved” by human choices and experiences but affected by them—that God is open to the human.[26] Of course, open humanism is not necessarily theistic; it can remain agnostic and full of wonder, to borrow from the title of Saul’s most recent book.
The third positive principle of open humanism, more implicit than explicit in Vekhi, is that inner, personal human experience is truth-bearing. Closed humanism trends toward scientism, which holds that only the natural sciences, relying on the scientific method, yield truth. According to this view, the only type of human experience that counts for truth is publicly verifiable empirical experience, concerned with the impersonal, external physical world. This claim greatly diminishes the epistemic value of the humanities, which study the personal, inner world of self-consciousness and experience, thought and value, and belief and meaning. Open humanism affirms the truthfulness of the humanities and maintains that the knowledge that comes from the personal world is no less revealing about the nature of reality than the knowledge that comes from the impersonal world.[27] Morson has richly developed this third principle of open humanism in prosaics, which has sought to rescue ordinary, everyday human experience from ideological reduction and distortion precisely because it values human experience, in its full range, as a source of truth. Prosaics highlights the everyday, but ordinary human experience is never quite ordinary because it is the experience of persons. Moral, religious, and aesthetic experience tells us not only about the persons who have them; it also tells us something about the type of reality in which persons, mind and spirit, can emerge.
Language and literature are, of course, central to prosaics. Inner human experience is private and cannot be externally observed; it takes shape through language and through language it can be communicated, interpreted, and understood. With narrative, we connect our experiences into meaningful wholes. It is an essential human way of knowing, the way the humanities seek to understand human experience and meaning. In his vast work on Russian literature and literary theory, including Narrative and Freedom, Saul explores the ways narrative and literature can be true to human experience and thus preserve the truth of human experience.
With that let me turn to my conclusion. Berdiaev, Bulgakov, Struve, and Frank were among the many Russian thinkers whom Lenin deported in 1922. Berdiaev arrived in Paris in 1925. There he met the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), whose wife, Raissa Oumançoff (1883–1960) was Russian. Berdiaev and Maritain became friends and leaders, together with Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), of the interwar philosophical movement known as personalism, which holds that persons are the highest form of reality and its supreme value. It was a new version of the Russian “concrete idealism” that Berdiaev had celebrated in Vekhi. Beginning in 1938, Maritain turned personalism into a powerful philosophy of human rights and went on to become one of the intellectual architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[28] Russian concrete idealism had all along been a philosophy of human rights, ever since Chicherin and Soloviev fifty years earlier.[29] But in the twentieth century, with Communist rule in Russia and with many of Russia’s leading idealist and religious philosophers in European exile, it turned out that the Russian intellectual counter-tradition of open humanism had the most influence in the West, not least of all on the history of human rights. In The Destiny of Man (1931, French trans. 1935), Berdiaev wrote, “The only political principle which is connected with absolute truth is the principle of the subjective rights of the human person, of the freedom of spirit, of conscience, of thought and speech.”[30] The convergence between the long-standing Russian idealist defense of human rights and the new Catholic personalistic defense was an important moment in twentieth-century intellectual history.
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The Russian counter-tradition of open humanism, which Saul Morson has done so much to help us understand and appreciate, is the center of our work in the Northwestern University Research Initiative in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought. Your support would be greatly appreciated and will help us to build upon Saul’s rich intellectual legacy for Northwestern and the world.
[1] Gary Saul Morson, “Prosaic Bakhtin: Landmarks, Anti-Intelligentsialism, and the Russian Counter-Tradition,” Common Knowledge, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 35–74.
[2] Vekhi/Landmarks: A Collection of Articles about the Russian Intelligentsia, trans. and ed. Marshall S. Shatz and Judith E. Zimmerman (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).
[3] Gary Saul Morson, “The Intelligentsia and its Critics,” A Companion to Russian History, ed. Abbott Gleason (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2009), 273. See also Gary Saul Morson, “Tradition and Counter-Tradition: The Radical Intelligentsia and Classical Russian Literature,” A History of Russian Thought, ed. William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 141–168.
[4] Gary Saul Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023), 71.
[5] V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, trans. George L. Kline, 2 vols. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1953), vol. 2: 853.
[6] Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy, trans., ed., and intro. Randall A. Poole (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).
[7] Liberty, Equality, and the Market: Essays by B. N. Chicherin, ed. and trans. G. M. Hamburg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
[8] Gary Saul Morson, “Why Read Chicherin,” in Liberty, Equality, and the Market: Essays by B. N. Chicherin, xi.
[9] The development of a distinctive Russian tradition of philosophical humanism focused on the defense of human dignity is the main theme of A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, ed. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[10] P. B. Struve and S. L. Frank, “Ocherki filosofii kul’tury,” pt. 1, “Chto takoe kul’tura?” Poliarnaia zvezda, no. 2 (1905): 115. As quoted and cited in Aileen M. Kelly, “Which Signposts?” in her Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers between Necessity and Chance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 175.
[11] Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty, 75. Tibor Szamuely, The Russian Tradition, ed. and intro. Robert Conquest (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1974).
[12] Nikolai Berdiaev, “Philosophical Verity and Intelligentsia Truth,” Vekhi/Landmarks, 15. Subsequent page references to Vekhi cited parenthetically in the text.
[13] Thus the Russian autocracy was a powerful structural factor behind the rise of atheism in Russia. The intelligentsia embraced atheism not so much for philosophical reasons but as a heroic means to attain freedom from the twin oppressors of church and state. Victoria Frede has explored this dynamic in her book, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).
[14] This famous phrase originally occurred in Anti-Dühring (1878) and subsequently in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880). See Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 1978), 716.
[15] See Randall A. Poole, “Russian Political Theology in an Age of Revolution,” in Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On, ed. Robin Aizlewood and Ruth Coates (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 146–169.
[16] Vladimir Solovyov, Lectures on Divine Humanity, trans. Peter Zouboff, rev. and ed. Boris Jakim (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1995), 2.
[17] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book V: “Pro and Contra,” Chapter 3: “The Brothers Make Friends.” Constance Garnett translation.
[18] Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty, 3.
[19] Problems of Idealism, 85–89. Subsequent page references cited parenthetically in the text.
[20] For further analysis of this essay, see Poole, “Russian Political Theology in an Age of Revolution,” 156–158, and Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology. Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000), 231–236.
[21] For further analysis of this essay, see Poole, “Russian Political Theology in an Age of Revolution,” 161–163, and Valliere, Modern Russian Theology, 244–251.
[22] Bulgakov devoted two substantial articles to Feuerbach: “Religiia chelovekobozhiia u L. Feierbakha” (“The Religion of Man-godhood in L. Feuerbach”) (1905) and “Karl Marks kak religioznyi tip” (“Karl Marx as a Religious Type”) (1906), both reprinted in Sergei Bulgakov, Dva grada: issledovaniia o prirode obshchestvennykh idealov, 2 vols. (Moscow: Put’, 1911), vol. 1: 1–105. The second essay has been published in English: Karl Marx as a Religious Type: His Relation to the Religion of Anthropotheism of L. Feuerbach, trans. Luba Barna, ed. Virgil R. Lang, and intro. Donald W. Treadgold (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979). For analysis, see Catherine Evtuhov, The Cross and the Sickle: Sergei Bulgakov and the Fate of Russian Religious Philosophy, 1890–1920 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 101–114.
[23] Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty, 158–161.
[24] Randall A. Poole, “The Liberalism of Russian Religious Idealism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, ed. Caryl Emerson, George Pattison, and Randall A. Poole (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), 258–264.
[25] The conviction that personhood, being human, has theistic metaphysical implications remained precious to Frank for the rest of his life. In his last book he wrote, “If the human being is aware of himself as a person, i.e., as a being generically distinct from all external objective existence and transcending it in depth, primacy and significance, if he feels like an exile having no true home in this world—that means that he has a home in another sphere of being,” the sphere, that is, of ultimate reality. “The apprehension of the reality of God is, thus, immanently given in the apprehension of my own being as a person.” S. L. Frank, Reality and Man: An Essay in the Metaphysics of Human Nature, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York, NY: Taplinger Publishing Co., 1966), 104, 106 (translation modified).
[26] Gary Saul Morson, Prosaics and Other Provocations: Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 80–82.
[27] Keith Ward, The Big Questions in Science and Religion (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), 167–190.
[28] His 1936 treatise, Integral Humanism, is a profound exposition of his philosophy of Christian personalism, but Maritain had not yet turned that philosophy into an explicit defense of human rights. But two years later, directly under the influence of Pope Pius XI’s March 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris, Maritain wrote: “the rights of the human person . . . must be recognized and guaranteed in such a way that an organic democracy should be by essence the city of the rights of the person.” See Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics, ed. Mortimer J. Adler (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1940), 109–110. This book contains the text of nine lectures delivered in the United States in the autumn of 1938. Maritain also refers here to the “personalist conception of democracy,” which is “first of all determined by the idea of the common good, of human rights and of concrete liberty” (87). It is based on “the integral humanism of the person, open to that which surpasses it and leads it to achievement” (89). In 1942 Maritain published The Rights of Man and Natural Law, which set the French philosopher on the path to become, in Samuel Moyn’s estimation, “the premier postwar philosopher of human rights,” indeed “the most prominent thinker of any kind across the world to champion rights in the postwar moment.” Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origin of Human Rights,” Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 87, 90. In 1947 Maritain (then the French ambassador to the Vatican) chaired the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophical Principles of the Rights of Man. Earlier the UN Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, had directed UNESCO to undertake research in support of its work on an international bill of rights.
[29] In Vekhi, Bogdan Kistiakovsky’s essay, “In Defense of Law: The Intelligentsia and Legal Consciousness,” offers an explicit defense of human rights. Kistiakovsky extolls the ideal of the “legal person,” that is, the person under the rule of law, “the person disciplined by law and by a stable legal order, and the person endowed with all rights and freely enjoying them” (96). On Kistiakovsky and Vekhi, see Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 374–403.
[30] Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), 198.