Versions of this paper were presented at the following international symposiums: Russian Literature, Philosophy, and Religious Thought in a Time of Catastrophe, Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP), Lisbon, Portugal, March 2023, and Russian Literature and Philosophical Thought: Religion, Nationalism and Dissidence, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil, November 2022. Written by Randall Poole:
In this paper I will argue that the Moscow Patriarchate’s current conception of human rights is deeply flawed. In order to provide a frame of reference, let me begin with the normative concept of human rights.
Human rights belong to every human being by virtue of their humanity. The source or ground of human rights is widely held to be human dignity, the inherent or intrinsic worth of being human. One authoritative statement is the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), which specifies that human rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.” The source of human rights can also be identified as personhood, because persons bear, again, an inherent worth or dignity. Inherent or intrinsic worth tends to imply exceptional worth, indeed unconditional, infinite, or absolute worth. The “sacredness of the person” is another way of putting it. Let me refer to recognition of the intrinsic, infinite worth of the human person as the integral concept of human dignity.
While the source of human rights is generally taken to be human dignity, the source or ground of human dignity is a difficult problem in human-rights theory. Logically there are two possibilities: sources within human nature, such as reason and free will, or a source external to human nature, namely God. The first approach is capacities-based while the second is sometimes referred to as “divine-conferral.” Even a human-capacities approach may well have metaphysical or theistic implications, since the dual power of reason to recognize or posit infinite ideals and to determine the will according to them—Kantian “ideal self-determination”—seems to refute naturalism.
Let me stress one important and perhaps obvious point: The purpose of human rights is first of all protective: the protection of the individual human person against external threats, typically against groups or collectivities, including state, church, and society, because groups are capable of wielding vast power against the individual person. By protecting the person against external threats, human rights are basic to the self-realization of human potential, since individual security is of course a basic condition of self-realization. So-called second-generation human rights seek to provide the social and economic conditions, such as health care and education. Recognition that individuals are the first subjects of human rights does not, of course, imply any atomistic conception of human nature, since it is clear that persons, to flourish, require various types of human communities. Human rights are often described as “liberal.” This attribution is correct, so long as liberalism is understood in its classic sense, which underscores free will as the very core of personhood and hence the priority of individual freedom and its protection.
Now let us compare the normative concept of human rights to the position of the Moscow Patriarchate, which position should not, of course, be identified with everyone within the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The patriarchate’s conception of human rights was elaborated between 2000 and 2008 and is contained in three key documents: The Basis of the Social Doctrine of the Russian Orthodox Church (2000), The Orthodox Declaration on the Dignity and Rights of Man of the World Russian People’s Council (2006), and The Russian Orthodox Church’s Basic Doctrine on Human Dignity, Freedom, and Rights (2008)—all available online in English translation.[1] The two main institutions involved in working out the official position of the Russian Orthodox Church on human rights was the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of External Church Relations and the World Russian People’s Council. The World Russian People’s Council was founded in 1993 and is a type civil-society or public organization for the Russian Church. It is headed by the Moscow patriarch, housed within the Danilov Monastery, and has special consultative status at the UN. The key figure in the Russian Church’s conception of human rights was and is Kirill (Gundiaev), who served as Metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad and head of the Department of External Church Relations until 2009, when he became patriarch.
All three documents present Russia as a unique civilization. The point is to contrast Russia to the West and to suggest that Russia needs its own conception of human rights. Right away this is a problematic point of view since human rights are universal by their very nature, based upon claims about what is due to human beings as such. The 2006 Declaration refers to a “conflict of civilizations” but the 2008 Basic Doctrine on Human Rights softens this position to one of co-existence and even cooperation. For the purposes of justifying the need for a Russian conception of human rights, the Moscow Patriarchate claims that modern Western thought and culture are dominated by two strains: liberal individualism and secular humanism. Since human rights were born in the West, the argument is that these cultural peculiarities shaped their appearance and invalidate their claim to universality. Russia culture, by contrast, is said to prioritize communal values and religion. The Basic Doctrine on Human Rights states: “Human right should not contradict love for one’s homeland and neighbors. [. . .] One’s human rights cannot be set against the values and interests of one’s homeland, community, and family.” It needs to be made clear that this position directly counters the very idea of human rights, the purpose of which is to protect the individual person against groups such as “one’s homeland.” Closely related to the idea that collective or community rights are higher than individual ones is the priority ROC puts on “traditional values,” a highly subjective category.
The Moscow patriarchate contends that human rights reflect not only Western individualism but also secular humanism, generally equated with either atheism or indifference to religion. According to Kirill, humans rights are a product of the Enlightenment’s “pagan” anthropocentrism, which traces its roots to the Renaissance.[2] Since Russian values are, by contrast, religious (or so they are presented), Russia needs a religious conception of human rights. Kirill recognizes the centrality of the concept of human dignity for human rights, but he has revised it in a way that he thinks better reflects Russia’s religious culture. In fact the revision comes very close to destroying the very concept of human dignity, at least the integral concept of it as I defined it above.
The frame of reference for the Moscow patriarchate’s religious conception of human rights is Genesis 1:26, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The verse is the foundational Biblical source of the concept of human dignity in the Judeo-Christian tradition as a whole. For example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that, “The dignity of the human person is rooted in his/her creation in the image and likeness of God.” Greek patristic theology, in particular, gave Genesis 1:26 a powerful dynamic interpretation: human beings are created in God’s image, but we must assimilate to God’s likeness by our own efforts. The “image” signifies the divine ideal and the “likeness” the human capacity for self-determination and perfectibility according to the image. This theological anthropology made its way to Italy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and decisively shaped Renaissance humanism, which was a profoundly religious humanism and not, as Kirill mistakenly says, an early form of Western “pagan” anthropocentrism.[3]
It might be expected that the Moscow patriarchate would follow Greek patristic theology on the meaning of “the image and likeness.” In fact, it takes a very different approach. The image of God is still understood to be the “indelible” source or foundation of human dignity or worth, but such dignity is now made dependent on the likeness to God, interpreted to mean “a dignified life,” not in the sense of providing the material means necessary for a life consistent with fundamental human dignity, but rather in a subjective moralistic sense. The first chapter of the 2008 Basic Doctrine on Human Rights states: “A morally undignified life does not ruin the God-given dignity ontologically but darkens it so much as to make it hardly discernible.” However, the chapter concludes, “According to the Orthodox tradition, a human being preserves his God-given dignity and grows in it only if he lives in accordance with moral norms because these norms express the primordial and therefore authentic human nature not darkened by sin. Thus there is a direct link between human dignity and morality.” By “moral norms,” it is clear that the patriarch means “traditional values.” The 2006 Declaration of the World Russian People’s Council was even more direct: “It is by doing good that the human being gains dignity. Thus we distinguish between human worth and dignity. Worth is given, while dignity is acquired.” These various statements are ambiguous and equivocal on a matter, human dignity, where there ought to be no ambiguity or equivocation—because the consequences can be deadly, as Russia’s war on Ukraine makes abundantly clear.
Apart from the equivocation over whether human dignity is indelible or can be forfeited by “a morally undignified life,” let me make one other point. Kirill is correct in maintaining that “there is a direct link between human dignity and morality,” but not in the way he intends. I mentioned earlier the sources of human dignity are a complex theoretical problem, but one succinct solution is to say that the source of human dignity is the potential to do good. Everyone has that potential, even those who have done very little or possibly no good, and even those who have done a great deal of evil. No one can forfeit their human dignity, which is grounded in one’s moral and spiritual potential. Emphatically, it is not the result of moral or spiritual achievement. One can violate or betray their own human dignity, be true to it, or strive ever more to fulfill it, but one cannot forfeit it. Kirill’s language is imprecise at best and pays too little attention to many centuries of theological and philosophical reflection on the meaning of human dignity.
In a current and astute essay, Nathaniel Wood suggests that Kirill uses human dignity in two different senses: as the foundation of human rights—which is the typical understanding—and as itself a right, “the right to a dignified life.”[4] Because of the valence of the concept of human dignity, this move in effect makes the right to a dignified life the supreme human right, which the patriarch can then use to attack the very idea of human rights, since they are liberal in their very conception, that is, their fundamental purpose is to preserve individual freedom and equality under the rule of law. It is true that some people will misuse that freedom to lead an “undignified life,” but that is the price of the much greater benefit of human rights, which is that they give everyone the opportunity to realize their human potential by securing their life and freedom against those who would violate them, against those, it must be said, like Kirill himself. Referring to Kirill’s infamous sermon this past Forgiveness Sunday, just two weeks after Putin’s fall-scale invasion of Ukraine, Wood writes: “It is perhaps telling that, amidst war, the ‘undignified’ lives of [gay] pride paraders apparently weighed more heavily on the patriarch’s mind than did the dignity of children huddled in bomb shelters.”[5]
Kirill is not the only Christian thinker today who fails to recognize the meaning and purpose of human rights and who mistakenly thinks they are the product of an individualism that discounts the value of community and of a secular humanism that is indifferent or hostile to religion. Other Christian critics of human rights include John Millbank and William Cavanaugh and, among Orthodox, Christos Yannaras and Vigen Guroian.[6] But possibly Kirill might be expected to know better because he is Russian, and therefore has first-hand familiarity with the dangers of autocracy. As Russian and as Orthodox, he might also be expected to know that his country produced a very powerful religious-idealist defense of human rights, to which we now turn in the second part of my paper.[7]
Nineteenth-century Russia’s two greatest philosophers were Boris Chicherin (1828–1904) and Vladimir Soloviev (1853–1900). They advanced an idealist conception of human nature that formed one of the basic frameworks for the further development of Russian religious-philosophical thought in the twentieth century. According to this (essentially Kantian) conception, human beings are persons by virtue of their reason, which has a remarkable dual power: first, to recognize or posit absolute ideals (e.g., truth, the good, and beauty), and, second, to determine the will according to them.[8] Russian philosophers identified this capacity for “ideal self-determination” (as Sergei Trubetskoi called it) as the core of personhood and as the source of human dignity and of human rights.[9] They also believed that it defeated naturalism—the absolute ideals of consciousness invalidated positivism, while free will refuted physical determinism—and thus entailed a theistic metaphysics. Precisely this belief is what made them religious idealists.[10]
Boris Chicherin defined reason as consciousness of the absolute, not in a specifically Hegelian sense but rather in a more general sense: “Reason is the conscious recognition of absolute universal principles and laws, and as such contains the infinite.”[11] Through free will, human beings are capable of self-determination according to these ideals. Chicherin closely followed Kant in thinking that the “supreme dignity” of man consists in this capacity, as he affirmed in his masterpiece, Philosophy of Right, published in 1900.[12] Like Kant, he considered practical reason (autonomy or self-determination) to be the ground of personhood: “Freedom of the will constitutes . . . the basic definition of man as a rational being. Precisely because of this is he recognized as a person [litso] and are rights ascribed to him.”[13]
In a significant passage in Philosophy of Right, Chicherin summarizes the nature and properties of personhood, emphasizing its intrinsic dignity:
The source of this supreme dignity of the human being and of all the demands flowing from it consists in the fact that he carries in himself consciousness of the Absolute, that is, this source lies precisely in the metaphysical nature of the subject, which raises it above the whole physical world and makes it a being having value in itself and demanding respect. In religious language this is expressed in the saying that we are created in the image and likeness of God.[14]
The “image and likeness” of God was a powerful metaphor for human dignity for other Russian religious idealists as well.
Vladimir Soloviev is generally regarded as Russia’s greatest religious philosopher. In his version of the Russian idealist conception of human nature, human beings combine in themselves three principles: the absolute or divine principle, the material principle, and (between them) the distinctively human principle, which is rational autonomy or the capacity for self-determination.[15] Together the divine and human principles form “divine humanity” (Bogochelovechestvo), the central concept of Soloviev’s religious philosophy.[16] It is the free human realization of the divine principle in ourselves and in the world—deification or, to use the patristic term, theōsis. Bogochelovechestvo is, in short, the divine-human project of building the Kingdom of God. Soloviev followed Kant in thinking that the kingdom of God could come only through the kingdom of ends, Kant’s famous ideal of a moral order whose members respect each other as persons or ends-in-themselves.[17]
In his entry on lichnost’ or personhood for the Brogaus-Efron encyclopedia, Soloviev wrote: “Human personhood has in principle an unconditional dignity, upon which are based its inviolable rights.”[18] His most powerful and systematic defense of human dignity is Justification of the Good (1897), one of the great modern works of moral and religious philosophy. In it he said that our consciousness of infinite, divine perfection (the absolute) is the “image” of God in us, while our striving for infinite perfectibility according to this ideal is our “likeness” to God. This “double infinity” of the image and likeness of God belongs to everyone. “It is in this,” he affirms, “that the absolute significance, dignity, and worth of human personhood consist, and this is the basis of its inalienable rights.”[19] In another passage, he wrote: “The absolute value of man is based, as we know, upon the possibility inherent in his reason and his will of infinitely approaching perfection or, according to the patristic expression, the possibility of becoming divine (theōsis).”[20]
The legacies of Chicherin and Soloviev inspired the seminal work Problems of Idealism, which appeared in 1902, on the eve of the Russian Liberation Movement that would culminate in the Russian revolution of 1905. Problems of Idealism advanced a powerful theory of liberalism, understood as a normative political philosophy based on human dignity and human rights.[21] The project was planned by Peter Struve, who had just completed his evolution from Marxism to idealism, and by Pavel Novgorodtsev, a legal philosopher at Moscow University.
In 1901, as he was planning Problems of Idealism, Struve published one of his most remarkable essays (and dedicated it to Soloviev), “What is True Nationalism?”[22] For him, any true nationalism must rest on true liberalism, or on recognition of the intrinsic value of the person. He extols the Kantian principle of human dignity through individual self-determination, stating that it ought to be the moral foundation of any just social or political order.[23] The fullest realization of personhood requires, in turn, the guarantee of individual rights: “The idea and practice of such rights, in our view, reveal all the deep philosophical meaning and all the enormous practical significance of the remarkable doctrine of natural law, lying at the basis of all true liberalism.” Natural law is absolute, “rooted in the ethical concept of the person and its self-realization, and serving as the measure of all positive law.”[24] True liberalism demands “recognition of the inalienable rights of the person,” which rights cannot be trumped by any higher national or state values. Thus it is “also the only form of true nationalism.”[25]
Those words ought to be remembered by the advocates of “Russkii mir,” the nationalist ideology elaborated and espoused by Patriarch Kirill.
Struve’s own contribution to Problems of Idealism did not directly address the topic of natural or human rights, but other contributions did. Novgorodtsev devoted his (masterful) chapter to the revival of natural law. He contrasts the medieval conception of natural law (which tended to identify it with the will of God) to its modern meaning, which is the inalienable rights of the person. Echoing Struve, he wrote, “Natural law is the expression of the autonomous, absolute significance of the person, a significance that must belong to it in any political system. In this respect natural law is more than a demand for better legislation: it represents the protest of the person against state absolutism, reminding us of the unconditional moral basis that is the only proper foundation of society and the state.”[26]
Nikolai Berdiaev also contributed to Problems of Idealism. In one passage he wrote: “Legal and political progress is nothing other than the realization and guaranteeing of the absolute natural rights of man, which need no historical sanction, because these rights are the immediate expression of the moral law, given before any experience.”[27]
Berdiaev was one of the many Russian religious idealists and other prominent intellectuals who were expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922. He settled in Paris and became perhaps the most widely read Russian philosopher. Together with Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950) and Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), he galvanized the interwar philosophical movement known as personalism. Today personalism is recognized as a whole philosophical worldview with a rich history, plausibly tracing its origins to the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity: three persons in one God. As a philosophical doctrine, personalism holds that persons are rational, moral, creative, and spiritual beings who bear an intrinsic worth or dignity and who are the very center of reality: its ontological center (persons are the highest form of reality), its axiological center (persons are the supreme value in reality), and its epistemological center (through persons reality is intelligible). Though the term “personalism” was not commonly used by Russian philosophers before Berdiaev, it has been appropriated by historians of Russian thought to describe a deep feature of the Russian religious-philosophical tradition.
Recently personalism has attracted a lot of attention because of its connection with the twentieth-century history of human rights. In his ironically titled 2015 book, Christian Human Rights, the intellectual historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn shows how personalism formed the philosophical framework for the elaboration of human rights in the 1940s, culminating of course with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.[28] The main figure in this history is the great Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. 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. That step was taken in 1940 with his article, “The Conquest of Freedom,” with its glowing passages on the true city of human rights.[29] In 1942 came The Rights of Man and Natural Law, which set the French philosopher on the path to become, in 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.”[30] He was one of the intellectual architects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and chaired the UNESCO Committee on the Philosophical Principles of the Rights of Man which met in 1947.
In The Rights of Man and Natural Law, Maritain identifies four principles of a genuinely free society or democracy, all directly from his 1936 treatise: personalism, communalism, pluralism, and theism. Personalism remains paramount. Let me quote an especially significant and beautiful passage: “The worth of the person, his liberty, his rights arise from the order of naturally sacred things which bear upon them the imprint of the Father of Being and which have in him the goal of their movement. A person possesses absolute dignity because he is in direct relationship with the Absolute, in which alone he can find his complete fulfillment.” In short, “the person is a spiritual whole made for the Absolute.”[31]
Maritain’s Christian tradition was French, Catholic, and Thomistic. But he knew about and was close to the Russian Christian tradition, first of all through his Russian-born wife Raissa (Oumançoff) but also through the Russian religious-philosophical emigration in Paris, in which he was immersed. In arguing that Christian personalism was the conceptual grounding for human rights in the 1940s, Moyn refers to the “émigré Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, who brought to the West an old Russian tradition of religious personalism.”[32] Berdiaev and Maritain became friends after the Russian religious philosopher moved to Paris in 1925. Berdiaev’s wife Lydia was a Russian Catholic, like Raissa and another Russian émigré in their circle, Helen Iswolsky, who was the daughter of the former tsarist foreign minister and ambassador to France. They were all friends; Jacques and Helen seemed especially close. In 1942, a year after fleeing France, Helen published an important memoir, Light Before Dusk: A Russian Catholic in France, 1923-1941. The “light” was Christian humanism, before the “dusk” of the Nazi invasion. Maritain wrote the foreword to the book and celebrated Iswolsky for her Christian humanism, love of freedom, and sense of human rights. Her memoir presents Christian humanism as a joint project of Maritain and the Russian religious philosophers. She names Vladimir Soloviev “the precursor of the Christian humanism of our times” and calls him her “great master.”[33]
* * *
It remains a matter of historical research to determine whether or to what extent Maritain’s familiarity with Russian religious thought influenced the development of his Christian personalism into a theory of human rights, so consequential a moment in twentieth-century intellectual history. But it is beyond question that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, decades before Maritain and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Russian religious idealism (which might otherwise be called Russian Christian personalism) produced a robust and theoretically sophisticated defense of human dignity and of human rights. It is shameful that Patriarch Kirill has renounced this rich intellectual and spiritual tradition, one of the most precious in the history of Russian thought. I said earlier that the source of human dignity is the potential to do good. Like everyone, Patriarch Kirill has that potential, and it is well past time for him to start doing good by using his high offices to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Randall A. Poole is Professor of Intellectual History at the College of St. Scholastica, co-director of the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought, and a fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University School of Law. He is the translator and editor of Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy (2003) and co-editor of five other volumes: A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity (2010, 2013), Religious Freedom in Modern Russia (2018), The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2020), Evgenii Trubetskoi: Icon and Philosophy (2021), and Law and the Christian Tradition in Modern Russia (2022). He is also the author of many articles and book chapters on Russian intellectual history, philosophy, and religion.
Image: Ilia Repin, Volga Barge Haulers 1870-3
[1] See also Kristina Stoeckl, The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (Routledge, 2014); Lauri Mälksoo, “The Human Rights Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church and its Patriarch Kirill I: A Critical Appraisal,” in Russia and European Human-Rights Law: The Rise of the Civilizational Argument, ed. Lauri Mälksoo (Brill, 2014); and Paul Ladouceur, “A Theology of Human Rights in an Orthodox Perspective,” Canopy Forum (Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University School of Law), 11 July 2022 (online). Ladouceur’s account is incisive and highly critical of the Moscow Patriarchate’s position. For a valuable historical perspective, focusing on the twentieth century, see Paul Valliere, “Russian Orthodoxy and Human Rights,” Religious Diversity and Human Rights, ed. Irene Bloom, J. Paul Martin and Wayne L. Proudfoot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 278–312.
[2] “The Circumstances of Modern Life: Liberalism, Traditionalism and Moral Values of a Uniting Europe” (1999), in Kirill of Moscow, Freedom and Responsibility: A Search for Harmony—Human Rights and Personal Dignity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2011).
[3] See Randall A. Poole, “The True Meaning of Humanism: Religion and Human Values,” The Montréal Review: Books, Art, Culture (September 2021, online) and Filosofskii zhurnal (The Philosophical Journal) (Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), vol. 12, no. 1 (2019), 17–33, esp. 26–28.
[4] Nathaniel Wood, “Theosis and Human Rights: Two Orthodox Approaches,” in Eastern Christian Approaches to Philosophy, ed. James Siemens and Joshua Matthan Brown (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), esp. 310–315.
[5] Wood, 315.
[6] See Aristotle Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).
[7] For further details see my essays: “The Liberalism of Russian Religious Idealism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, ed. Caryl Emerson, George Pattison, and Randall A. Poole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 255–276; and “Integral Humanisms: Jacques Maritain, Vladimir Soloviev, and the History of Human Rights,” Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta: Filosofiia i konfliktologiia (St. Petersburg University Review: Philosophy and Conflict Studies), vol. 35, no. 1 (2019), 92–106.
[8] Kant’s most influential exposition of his idealist conception of human nature is Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). For a recent edition, see Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, intro. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[9] S. N. Trubetskoi, “O prirode chelovecheskogo soznaniia” (1889–1991), in Sobranie sochinenii Kn. Sergeia Nikolaevicha Trubetskogo, ed. L. M. Lopatin (Moscow: Tipografiia G. Lissnera i D. Sobko, 1908), vol. 2: 108; S. N. Trubetskoi, “Psikhologicheskii determinizm i nravstvennaia svoboda” (1894), in Sobranie sochinenii Kn. Sergeia Nikolaevicha Trubetskogo, vol. 2: 121.
[10] This group included Sergei Trubetskoi, Evgenii Trubetskoi, Pavel Novgorodtsev, Sergei Kotliarevskii, Peter Struve, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Semyon Frank.
[11] Liberty, Equality, and the Market: Essays by B. N. Chicherin, edited and translated by G. M. Hamburg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 360.
[12] B. N. Chicherin, Filosofiia prava (Moscow: Kushnerov, 1900), 176. He also writes, “The whole moral dignity of man is based on the free fulfillment of the [moral] law” (31).
[13] Chicherin, Filosofiia prava, 53.
[14] Chicherin, Filosofiia prava, 55.
[15] See Randall A. Poole, “Vladimir Solov’ëv’s Philosophical Anthropology: Autonomy, Dignity, Perfectibility,” in A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity, ed. G. M. Hamburg and Randall A. Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131–149.
[16] For a study of the concept in Russian religious thought, see Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, and Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000).
[17] For further development, see my essay, “Kant and the Kingdom of Ends in Russian Religious Thought (Vladimir Solov’ev),” in Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context, edited by Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 215–234.
[18] Quoted by Richard S. Wortman, The Power of Language and Rhetoric in Russian Political History: Charismatic Words from the 18th to the 21st Centuries (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 109 (translation modified).
[19] Vladimir Solovyov, The Justification of the Good: An Essay on Moral Philosophy, trans. Natalie A. Duddington, ed. and annotated Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 176 (translation modified); see also at 152.
[20] Solovyov, The Justification of the Good, 296.
[21] Problems of Idealism: Essays in Russian Social Philosophy, ed. and trans. Randall A. Poole (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
[22] P. Borisov [Struve], “V chem zhe istinnyi natsionalizm?” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 12: 4, kn. 59 (1901): 493–528; reprinted in his collection of articles, Na raznye temy (St. Petersburg, 1902), 526–555. For analysis see Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 300–307.
[23] P. Borisov [Struve], “V chem zhe istinnyi natsionalizm?” 503, 504, 511, 520.
[24] Ibid., 507 (italics Struve’s).
[25] Ibid., 512. Struve later reversed himself on this position. In his famous 1908 essay, “Great Russia,” he advanced a Darwinian conception of the state as a “special organism” that lived by its own supreme laws of existence (such as the striving for power) and that was not subject to any higher law. See P. B. Struve, “Velikaia Rossiia: Iz razmyshlenii o probleme russkogo mogushchestva,” Russkaia mysl’, vol. 29 (January 1908): 143–157. For analysis see Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Right, 1905–1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 88–92.
[26] P. I. Novgorodtsev, “Ethical Idealism in the Philosophy of Law (On the Question of the Revival of Natural Law),” in Problems of Idealism, 313.
[27] N. A. Berdiaev, “The Ethical Problem in the Light of Philosophical Idealism,” in Problems of Idealism, 178.
[28] Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
[29] Maritain, “The Conquest of Freedom,” The Education of Man: The Educational Philosophy of Jacques Maritain, ed. Donald and Idealla Gallagher (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962), 159–179.
[30] Samuel Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origin of Human Rights,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. S.-L. Hoffman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 87, 90.
[31] Jacques Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, in Maritain, Christianity and Democracy. The Rights of Man and Natural Law, trans. D. C. Anson, intro. D. A. Gallagher (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2011), 67, 112.
[32] Moyn, “Personalism, Community, and the Origin of Human Rights,” 87.
[33] Helen Iswolsky, Light Before Dusk: A Russian Catholic in France, 1923–1941 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942), 91; Iswolsky, No Time to Grieve: An Autobiographical Journey (Philadelphia: The Winchell Company, 1985), 282.