Lev Platonovich Karsavin was born in 1882. His father was a ballet dancer; sister - world famous ballerina Tamara Karsavina; he also attended ballet school as a child. L.P. Karsavin received his higher education at St. Petersburg University, where he specialized in medieval Western European history and eventually took the department of history. In 1922 he was expelled from Russia by the Soviet government. After that he was a professor at the university in Kovno in Lithuania, and then in Vilna, where he currently lives.

Karsavin's main works: “Essays on Italian religious life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries”, 1912; "The Foundations of Medieval Religion in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries" (mainly on Italy), 1915; “Saligia, or Brief Instruction on God, the Universe, Man, Evil and the Seven Deadly Sins”, Petrograd, 1919; "East, West and the Russian Idea", 1922; "Roman Catholicism", 19222; "Medieval culture"; “Life in monasteries in the Middle Ages”; “On Doubt, Science and Faith”; “Church, personality and state”; "Dialogues", 1923; "Giordano Bruno", 1923; “Holy Fathers and Teachers of the Church (exposition of Orthodoxy in their works)”, 1926; "Philosophy of History", Berlin, 1923; “On Beginnings”, Berlin, 1925; “On Personality”, Kovno, 1929; "Poem about Death."

Karsavin, like Frank, relies on the philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa and builds his philosophical system on the concept of the absolute as unity and coinsibentia oppositorum (unity or coincidence of the opposite). “Absoluteness is higher than our understanding, higher than our concept of the absolute, which is posited in necessary opposition to the relative” (“Philosophy of History,” 72 et seq.). He affirms “the concept of true absoluteness as a perfect unity, absoluteness - “God, Creator, Redeemer and Perfector - with the “other” that it creates out of nothing” (351). This “other”, i.e. created being, and in particular each personality that makes up its part, can be absolutized and become a perfect unity” containing all time and all space, because the absolute is absolute goodness, which is completely embodied in creatures.

Since the creature is not sufficiently prepared to perceive absolute good, it retains its character of contracted unity, empirical existence, limited in time and space. Absolute goodness does not abandon its creature even in this pitiful state: “... through the infusion of God, this self-limitation of man in his insufficiency becomes a divine moment”; it is redeemed and “realized” in the God-man (358). From here Karsavin distinguishes four meanings of all-unity: “1) Divinity as an absolute perfect all-unity; 2) an improved or deified (absolutized) created unity, different from God in that when it exists, there is no God, and it itself is “nothing” that has become God; 3) completed or contracted created unity, striving for its improvement as an ideal or absolute task and through it to merge with God - to become God and perish in God; 4) incomplete created all-unity, i.e. relative multi-unity, all-unity becoming perfect through its completion, or the moment of all-unity in its limitation.”

Karsavin argues that his religious metaphysics goes beyond the opposition between theism and pantheism. It differs from pantheism because it recognizes the creation of the world from nothing and the limited nature of created entities, as well as the eternal, unchanging existence of God (351), But the creation of the world from nothing does not mean for Karsavin that God created something different from myself. “It is usually assumed,” he says, “that God creates a certain something, a certain reality, which, being derivative, is completely different from Him, and that something is in harmony with God or lacking this harmony” (“On Principles,” 37 ). Karsavin rejects such a positive something. “Besides God and without God there is no “me,” absolutely not,” he says. “By myself and in myself I do not exist. But because I think and have will, I exist, that is, because I feel in God and become God, I stand face to face with him as another substratum of his divine content, so inseparable from him that without him, besides him, in my own personality, I am nothing, I do not exist” (37).

Karsavin believes that the creation of the universe is a theophany or epiphany. In himself, as an eternal unchanging principle, God is incomprehensible; in this aspect, he is a subject of negative theology, a divine nothingness, inexpressible in ideas; limiting himself, he realizes self-creation as a divine becoming, as a relative something (20), which is realized in the form of space and time and becomes knowable (42). But it should be remembered that “this something is nothing,” since it is different from God (20).

In the book “On Principles” Karsavin develops his system as follows: the creation of the world is a theophany; the absolute transfers itself to the “other,” which is absolute nothing, but, perceiving the divine content, becomes a created something,” “a second subject” (45). However, one should not think that the created subject is endowed with creative power even in the sense that he is capable of creating his own life activity. “The creature,” says Karsavin, “cannot create out of nothing; only God himself creates” (39). “It is our every thought, feeling, desire or action that is nothing other than God, and we cannot help but see in them anything other than God” (20). Although the entire content of the created subject and his entire life are affirmed as divine, nevertheless it cannot be said about the subject that he is God.

In reality, Karsavin speaks of the free generation of creatures. “The creation of me by God out of nothing is at the same time my own free self-generation” (“On Principles”, 37).

After the creation of limited subjects, the absolute transmits itself to them. The self-alienation of the absolute is an expression of its omnibenevolence, thanks to which the limitedly created world can become infinite and deified through a process that represents in some way the divine circle: “At first (not in the sense of time) only God; then God, limiting and destroying himself in his self-estrangement in creation; God is the Creator, limited by his creation, and the creature becoming God in its self-affirmation. Further, only the creature who completely becomes God, All-Goodness and therefore “again” only God, who restores himself in and through the creature and who was restored by him” (48).

The pantheistic character of Karsavin’s system is revealed in the fact that in it the relationship between God and the cosmic process is in some way a game of God with himself, “Since the creature is also God, God, in the self-estrangement of himself from the creature, receives back from it and in it what he gives it to her. He fulfills himself to the extent that he empties himself. He actively empties and destroys himself as God in creation; the creature is actively restoring it. And since the creature is also God, his active restoration of God is also his active self-restoration” (39).

Karsavin distinguishes his system from pantheism by pointing out that, from his point of view, every creature is not God, since, having “nothing” as its basis, creatures are limited, transitory, subject to change, while God, the Absolute, is eternal and unchangeable (“Philosophy of History”, 351),

However, it must be kept in mind that every created entity is a manifestation of God: all created contents arise through God's self-alienation, so that not only are our good thoughts, feelings, desires and actions divine, but also “our anger, envy and hatred are divine; not only bliss, but suffering is also divine. Otherwise, God would not be all-unity and some other evil Deity would exist, which is an absurd, impious assumption” (“On Principles,” 21). Thus, the idea of ​​unity as a truly comprehensive principle influenced the solution of all problems for Karsavin. Like many other Russian philosophers - Vladimir Solovyov, Father Sergius Bulgakov, S. Frank - Karsavin suggests that if something, even a created something, were ontologically external to God, then it would limit God. Therefore, Karsavin insistently asserts that God is unity, and creation is nothingness (7). He anticipates the objection that God is not an absolute in the sense of being correlative with the relative and therefore in a relationship of mutual dependence with the relative. He knew about the existence of philosophers who recognize God as the superabsolute and argue that nothing external can limit him. But Karsavin proves that if God were not all-unity, then another, third... tenth God could exist next to him (8).

In his exploration of divine reality and the sphere of created existence, Karsavin discovers the trinity everywhere. He bases this concept on the doctrine of the absolute as an all-encompassing unity; if he discovers a principle that determines the opposition of another principle, then he shows that both principles enter into a relation of opposition through the negation of the original unity and the separation of one from the other; separation leads to the struggle for reunification and to the establishment of the unity of opposites.

Karsavin proves the trinity of God using various methods: analyzing God as truth, then as love and as all-goodness. Thus, for example, in love he discovers the elements of: I) self-affirmation, which requires complete possession of the beloved being (destructive love); 2) self-sacrifice (sacrificial love); 3) resurrection in it. All these studies lead to the study of the main, decisive problem - the connection between indeterminability and definability. As the first, incomprehensible, truly all-encompassing unity, there is indefinability; as the second, it is determinability, the opposite of indetermination, and as the third, it is their reunion. Thus, the Trinity and the dogma of the Trinity constitute the basis and the most luminous truth of the Christian worldview.

In Karsavin's book “On Personality,” the doctrine of the unity of opposites is applied not only to the divine trinity, but also to each individual, as it improves itself and achieves deification.

According to Karsavin’s definition, personality is “a concrete-spiritual, bodily-spiritual definite essence, one of a kind, irreplaceable and multifaceted” (2). The unity of personality is its spirituality, and plurality is its bodily nature.

Since the unity of personality is the unity of plurality, personality is “wholly spiritual and wholly corporeal” (143). In its simple corporeality, i.e. in its plurality, it is a given, a necessity, and in its spirituality it overcomes necessity and is self-determination, i.e. freedom. The relativity of these definitions shows that personality contains “something higher than its unity, freedom and necessity, namely “personally itself” (4). The principle of personality as such is indefinable (37), it is ousia, essence in relation to a certain initial unity - the Father, to a self-divided unity - the Son and to a unity that reunites itself - the Holy Spirit.

The principle of personality is indefinable, since determination is possible only when there is division; it underlies a certain primary unity of the personality, correlative with its self-division and, further, with its self-unification. Thus, in the absolute, the indefinable original unity is trinity; in theological language it is ousia; a certain original unity is the Father, a self-divided unity is the Son, a self-reunifying unity is the Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity, one in Three Persons (39).

The divine trinity is, strictly speaking, a unique personal being (85); it reveals and defines itself mainly in the second hypostasis, the Logos, which, as self-division, is the body of the Holy Trinity (145).

In the book “On Principles,” Karsavin writes that the created self is 1) the original unity, 2) its division into subject and object, and 3) their reunification in consciousness (99). Reunion achieved through knowledge is not complete; there is less connection than separation. We are aware of this incompleteness, and therefore it seems to us that our existence and self-consciousness are “something unreal, something like a dream” (103). To realize this illusory nature of someone’s existence means to define him from the point of view of a higher being; This implies that in addition to my lower being, I also possess a higher being, namely, I represent that perfect unity that I possess in the God-man. As soon as we cease to concentrate on our lower being, as soon as we become empty, “conscious of our insignificance, we see God in our self-consciousness, and all our self-consciousness, all our knowledge as a whole becomes a spiritual prayer, the enjoyment of which increases in accordance with our humility" (108).

In this higher aspect of ourselves we are all in all space and all time, and in the lower aspect we are reduced to a limited moment in time, appearing and disappearing, and to a limited position in space.

The theory according to which my self has an all-spatial aspect assumes that a particle of my body, leaving me and becoming an element of the body of another being, does not leave me at all: “Imprinted by me, it is my own self and remains in all-time and all-spatial reality.” me" always and everywhere, although it also becomes something else - the world as a whole" (139).

In the book “On Personality,” Karsavin developed his doctrine of the created self. Strictly speaking, a creature is not a person: it was created by God out of nothing, as a free - that is, self-generated from nothing - indefinable substrate and does not establish anything in itself; with the assimilation of the divine “content” she becomes a person for the first time. Since the creature receives all its content through participation in the Logos, the integrity of the created world is a theophany (85, 175). Sin and imperfection of the creature mean that a person is not sufficiently endowed with goodness, that his assimilation of divine content is incomplete. “Having the beginning of its existence in God and in itself, the creature immediately begins to concentrate in itself, replacing humility with pride,” and desires the impossible - to become a part of being, instead of striving for the fullness of being; but “what is impossible for man is possible for God; God fulfills the absurd desire of the creature” and, respecting her freedom, gave her half-existence, half-non-existence, as she desired, incomplete death and incomplete life, the evil infinity of decay (195 et seq.). This incomplete life is a consequence of our laziness and inertia, which prevent us from assimilating the fullness of the divine being sent to us by God in his sacrificial love. Our repentance can be correctly expressed by the words: “I was not willing enough” to receive the divine being into ourselves. This sinful “weakness” is not a special strength. Karsavin says that to believe this would be Manichaean; weakness is simply an unwillingness to assimilate God (35 et seq.). Sin as guilt is always accompanied by sin as suffering, which is both punishment for guilt and its atonement (30). Repentance of someone for his guilt is not, strictly speaking, self-condemnation: it consists of condemnation by the action of a “Higher Principle”, and not of my own self (23). And indeed; in the self-condemnation of someone, theophany contrasts one thing with another, the greater with the small, that which symbolizes the fullness of the Divine with that which is less complete: “We condemn ourselves for incomplete comprehension of God” (34 et seq.).

Karsavin considers all evil as the incompleteness of theophany. Thus, pride is an attempt to assert oneself in one’s own self; insofar as it exists, it is a theophany (49), because “possession is a reflection of the possession of everything in God,” but it suffers from incompleteness; a proud man is a stupid thief (51), he wants to possess everything, he is greedy and greedy, but he does not at all achieve the possessions in God that belong to the self, who truly desires to possess everything, that is, “who wants everything, including and God, possessed the gifts which he possesses” (52).

From this concept of evil, Karsavin concludes that the path to improvement is “not in the fight against some non-existent evil, but in the fullness of our love for God and with God” (68). “Judge not,” the Lord teaches (68); do not separate one from the other through condemnation, and “in overcoming weakness you will understand that there is no evil” (69). “Do not resist evil, for there is no evil,” but “do good,” see in what is called evil “a faint flicker of good, and fan this little flame until it lights up the whole world” (69). Know “only good, for there is no evil” (75). “Perhaps it will fall to your lot to protect the weak through violence, to save a life by killing the guilty” (70). “I think that God sends such a test only to people who have no understanding” (71), “There are such things as just murder and just war,” admits Karsavin. However, when solving this issue in real life it is necessary to beware of the voice of the Antichrist (72).

The imperfection of a creature may be such that it will have only rudimentary personal existence (animals) or even just potential personal existence (things) (“On Personality,” 127). The perfection of the individual depends on his complete assimilation of the divine nature, that is, on his achievement of deification. Ontological consistency in process. the self-sacrifice of God for the sake of creation and the self-sacrifice of creation for the sake of God consists of the following: “In the beginning - only God; then - the dying God and the born creature; further - only creation instead of God; then - the dying creature and the ascending God; further - again only God. But with all the “firsts”, “then” and “all at the same time”: God is also the God-man” (161).

The unity between God and man in the divine hypostasis is made possible thanks to the incarnation of the Logos, which consists in the fact that he freely becomes imperfect, striving not for imperfection as such, but only for its existential aspect, in other words, for imperfection, like suffering and death without guilt (224). Since the humanity of Christ is not external to his personality, but “inside it,” the suffering and death of Christ is a divine tragedy, despite the resurrection; and indeed even patripassionism (the doctrine that the Father suffers as much as the Son) contains a grain of truth (192).

The creature deified through prayer" is the true God, but this does not yet lead to a pantheistic identification of God and the world: there is a very significant ontological difference between "not, arising from is, and after is" and "is, appearing after not and following from not" (160).

Karsavin has an interesting theory of corporeality, which he defines as multiplicity in a self-divided personality, conditioned by the definiteness of the self. This determination necessarily “brings my body into relation with other bodies, not through their external correlative position or contact, but through their mutual penetration and mutual fusion. My body contains corporeality external to it, and external corporeality contains me. Everything that I recognize, remember or even imagine is my corporeality, although not only mine, but also external to me. The whole world, while remaining a corporeality external to me, also becomes my corporeality” (128).

With the help of this theory, Karsavin, true to his principle of the unity of opposites, overcomes the difference between phenomenalism and intuitionism (79 et seq.). For him, the whole world, external in relation to the individual body of an imperfect personality, is to some extent also his body, but only “external” (131 et seq.); he seeks to use this concept to explain such things as psychometry, embodiment in a concrete form of sensitivity, etc. He explains the presence of sensation in amputated members by the fact that parts and particles of the body, separated from it, do not yet lose all connection with it ( 130). Consequently, Karsavin argues that the question of the way the body is positioned is not indifferent to us. The materialist curses himself when his error is discovered, when his body is to be burned and reduced to ashes in accordance with the latest technology of the gloomy crematorium.

The difference between the imperfect and the perfect personality lies in the fact that the former has both individual and outer body, while in the second her entire external body is fused with her individual body (134).

Karsavin’s “Philosophy of History” is an extremely valuable work. In it, Karsavin formulates the basic principles of historical existence and considers the question of “the place and meaning of the historical in the world, both in general and in relation to absolute existence” (5). He believes that “the highest goal of historical thinking is to comprehend the entire cosmos, the entire created unity, as a single developing subject” (77). History, in the narrow sense of the term, studies “the development of humanity as a single all-spatial and all-time subject” (75).

By “development” Karsavin understands a process in which some “whole” (organism, mental life) is constantly changing, “constantly becoming qualitatively different, while becoming occurs from within, from oneself, and not through additions from something outside” (10 ).

The constancy of development shows that the developing object does not consist of separate parts, of atoms, but forms a single subject, which does not differ from its development, but is real in it and therefore all-time, all-spatial, all-qualitative, all-encompassing (11). (Karsavin rejects the idea of ​​substance as a principle distinct from process.)

A subject of this kind is a potentially comprehensive personality, even any qualitative aspect of which is a “contracted total unity.” The development of a subject is a transition from one of its aspects to another, conditioned by the dialectical nature of the subject itself” and not by external influence.

Karsavin rejects external relations in the sphere of historical existence. From his point of view, every historical individual (personality, family, nation, etc.) is in itself a universal whole in one of its only, unique aspects: thus, the sphere of historical existence consists of subjects that mutually penetrate each other and , however, developing freely, since each of them contains everything in embryonic form and there are no external relations between them. This will lead to the conclusion that they are important for the methodology of history. Thus, Karsavin rejects the concept of causality in historical research, considering it as an external influence. If two nations or two peoples influence each other in the course of their development, this is possible only due to the fact that they constitute aspects of the supreme subject that contains them (culture, humanity, cosmos). Consequently, what is “alien” to a nation is in a sense “its” own; so that development occurs continuously and dialectically from the idea of ​​the nation, the I does not appear as a mosaic from external influences on it (64).

Karsavin believes that the influence of nature on the life of the people is not an external influence: the nature of the country, like all material elements of existence (for example, clothing, the size of individual land plots, etc.), influences the historical process not as such, not as taken in isolation, but only insofar as it is reflected in consciousness and transformed into a socio-psychic element (95-100). This is possible because nature, like humanity, is the individualization of a higher subject - the macrocosm; truly it is less complete” than humanity, but, nevertheless, through this higher subject it forms part of the intellect of man (347).

Karsavin’s argument that “everything new in the historical process always arises from non-existence, otherwise it would not be new” (237) is of great importance for historical methodologies. By virtue of this argument, Karsavin rejects a genetic explanation that reduces the new to the recombination of the old, as is done, for example, in the attempt to “derive” Christianity from the “synthesis of Jewish and Hellenistic culture” (180). For Karsavin, the conflict between individualizing and generalizing methods in history is not irreconcilable, since for him universality means the individualization of a higher subject in a plurality of lower subjects, the universal itself is a certain concrete individual; it is “not abstract, not isolated from its concrete expressions” (191).

Some historical objects can definitely be placed in a hierarchical order one after the other; such are, for example, the individual, the family, the nation, civilization (Indian, Greek, Roman, European, etc.), humanity, the world. Karsavin believes that the following periods can be distinguished in the empirical development of any historical individuality: 1) the potential unity of the historical personality - “the transition from non-existence to being”; 2) initially differentiated unity, i.e. division into elements, a weakening of unity, but not noticeable, since “elements easily transform into one another”, are mutually replaced and in this sense have the character of “superorganic individualities”; 3) organic unity, in other words, a period of functional limitation and comparative stability of individual traits; 4) degeneration of organic unity into systematic unity, and then its destruction through disintegration (211 et seq.).

The goal of development is the realization of the cosmic unity of the creature as an absolute individuality. We have already seen that in the empirical world this goal is unattainable; it is realized in a super-empirical order, since the absolute, as absolute goodness, transmits itself completely to the world,” saves the world through incarnation and makes it perfect. Thus, the entire historical process is divinely human. Perfection is not the chronological end of development; from the point of view of the imperfect subject, the ideal is always before him and is eternally realized “in an infinite number of individuations, but this does not in the least prevent the ideal from also being some kind of reality, higher than the aspect of becoming which it contains, or higher than the empirical historical process. In unity, “at any point, formation and completion, improvement and perfection coincide” (86 et seq.).

Thus, Karsavin’s concept of development differs sharply from the positivist concept of progress. In total unity, any moment of development is recognized as qualitatively equivalent to any other, and not one is considered simply as a means or stage of transition to a decisive end; empirically, moments have different values ​​according to the degree to which the total unity is revealed in them. The history of any individual contains the moment of the most full disclosure unity, which is the apogee of its development. The criterion for determining the moment of this apogee can be found by examining the religious character of a given individual, bearing in mind his “specific attitude to the absolute” (to truth, virtue, beauty). Because the historical development as a whole is a divine human process, the criterion of its approach to the ideal is to be found in the person who most fully expresses the absolute in the empirical sphere, namely Jesus. The entire history of mankind is “the empirical formation and death of the earthly Christian Church” (214). Therefore, historical science must be religious and, moreover, Orthodox (175, 356).

Karsavin formulates his theory about the relationship of the church to the state in a pamphlet entitled "Church, Personality and State". The Church is the body of Christ, the perfection of the world saved by the Son of God (3). By becoming a church, the world freely transforms itself. The community of the church is not universality, but conciliarity - togetherness (5). “One in all and in agreement with all,” that is, a loving, harmonized unity of many expressions of truth (6). The Church is a comprehensive personality containing the harmonious personalities of the local and national churches (7 et seq.).

The state is the necessary self-organization of the sinful world. If the state strives for the truths and ideals of the church, then it is a Christian state (12). Since man and the state are sinful, acts of violence, punishment, and war are inevitable, but they still remain sin; they can be overcome through union with Christ (13). But to refuse war, counting on a miracle, means to tempt God and commit a serious crime, endangering citizens and posterity (14). Tolstoy's absolute “non-resistance to evil through violence” proves a lack of understanding of the imperfection of the world. Avoiding the use of violence in the fight against evil means truly indirectly and hypocritically resisting through violence, since another people wages wars and persecutes criminals, and I leave it to everyone else to do this, while remaining on the sidelines. Only a person suffering from evil has the right not to resist it through violence, which is not non-resistance, but self-sacrifice as best remedy victories (28). A world striving for perfection contains internal contradictions that lead to tragic conflicts (30).

The state must strive to become a person within the church, but empirically it is only to a small extent Christian (67). The Church does not bless the activity of the state as such, which is partly even sinful in nature, but blesses only the virtuous in it; for example, the church prays for the Christ-loving army. In wartime, the church prays for the triumph of divine justice, and not for empirical victory over the enemy. So, for example, the prayer services of the intercessor of our Mother of God, so beloved in Russia, are associated with the miracle that led to the victory of the Greeks over the Russians (19).

Karsavin speaks about the absurdity of the modern idea of ​​separation of church and state: 1) a state separated from the church would come to the religion of humanity, or to self-deification, or to relativism; 2) such separation is impossible, since the state has true, potentially Christian ideals. It is necessary to establish boundaries between the activities of church and state. The task of the church is to insist that states be freely improved for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, to condemn evil, to bless good, but not to take part in political leadership. The state must ensure independence for the church in the sphere of its own activities - theological, educational, moral, missionary, liturgical; the church should have the right to condemn injustice, have the right to property, but it should not receive economic support from the state or use state power to persecute heretics; the state must protect the church against aggressive propaganda (23). Harmony between church and state is the ideal relationship between them.

In his brochure “East, West and the Russian Idea,” Karsavin examines the problem of the peculiarity of the Russian spirit; the Russian people, he says, are peoples united in multitude, subordinate to the Great Russian nation (7). Russian people will become great in the future they must build. They are great in what they have already done - in their state organization, spiritual culture, church, science, art (23).

According to Karsavin, an essential feature of the Russian people is their religiosity, which includes militant atheism (15). To reveal the central idea of ​​Russian religiosity, he compares the East, the West and Russia and also distinguishes between three ways of understanding the absolute or God in relation to the world - theistic, pantheistic and Christian (18). By "East" he means the non-Christian civilizations of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Greek and Roman naturalism, as well as peoples at the stage of barbarism (17); The West and Russia are the civilized Christian world. Theism for Karsavin means the doctrine that God goes beyond the world and is in an external relationship to it (18). Karsavin calls pantheism the view according to which the Divine is immanent in the world: it is, however, not the world as such, which is divine, but only the “true essence of everything” (26 et seq.) in indefinite potentiality without individual differentiation (the teachings of Taoism, Buddhism , Brahmanism). Christianity is the doctrine of absolute trinity as the principle of all-unity, irreducible to the undifferentiated potentiality of all things, which takes place in pantheism (31).

Christian teaching believes that the relative is different from the absolute and at the same time constitutes unity with it; everything actual is divine - and this is theophany; the creature perceives God in itself (32). This kind of interpretation of Christianity, says Karsavin, is sometimes considered pantheism. Christianity affirms the absolute value of the individual in its concrete realization; it promotes the further development of culture and recognizes the goal of life as universal transformation and resurrection (35 et seq.),

Religion in the West, which includes in its doctrine the dogma of filioque, that is, the doctrine of the appearance of the Holy Spirit from both the Father and the Son, contains a distortion of the main basis of Christianity. Indeed, such a teaching assumes that the Holy Spirit appears “from that in which the Father and the Son are one”; in this case there is a special unity of the Father and the Son, not in substance or personality, but in the superpersonal. It follows that the Holy Spirit is inferior to the Father and the Son, but this means “Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.” But, apart from the Holy Spirit, creation cannot be deified; therefore, the disparagement of the Holy Spirit leads to the disparagement of Christ in his humanity and to the idea that empirical existence cannot be completely deified or become an absolute. Thus, an insurmountable barrier is placed between the absolute and the relative; cognition is recognized as limited (41). If a person admits the weakness of his mind and will, he needs undoubted truth on earth and an invincible earthly church; from here arises the earthly organization of the church in the form of a hierarchical monarchy with the Pope at its head, who has secular power (46). Further, this leads to the denial of heavenly life, to a focus on worldly well-being, to the prosperity of technology, capitalism, imperialism and, finally, to relativism and self-destruction (47 et seq.).

In Eastern Christianity, that is, in Orthodoxy, which did not accept any new dogmas after the seventh ecumenical council, there is no gap between the absolute and the relative (54). The relative can be completely deified and transformed into the absolute; there are no limits to knowledge; knowledge is not only thought, but also “living faith,” the unity of thought and activity; therefore, the problem that split the West into Catholicism and Protestantism does not arise (55). Atonement is not a legal restoration of rights achieved by the sacrifice of oneself by Christ. Repentance, from the point of view of Orthodoxy, is a transformation of the entire personality, and not an equivalent compensation for sin with an appropriate amount of good work. Therefore, indulgences and the doctrine of purgatory are impossible for Orthodoxy (56). Orthodoxy is cosmic, and this is expressed in Orthodox icons through the symbolism of color, the symbolism of cosmic life.

The struggle against empiricism and rationalism and interest in metaphysical problems is a characteristic feature of Russian thought (57). Russian fiction is “heroic in nature.” In Russian foreign policy, from the time of the Holy Alliance to the present, the ideological element has been brought to the fore (58). The Russian ideal is the mutual penetration of church and state (70). But the church represents the unity of humanity as a whole. Since the church is divided into Western and Eastern, we must wait for the reunification of the churches before we begin to carry out our common task(70 et seq.). Meanwhile, the task of Russian culture is to “actualize the potential that has been preserved since the 18th century,” to perceive the potentialities actualized by the West (“Europeanization”), and to complete these potentialities based on their own principles. The reunification of churches is not just a formal act, but a union of cultures that is already taking place imperceptibly (73).

The disadvantage of Russian Orthodoxy is its passivity and inactivity; much of what is valuable in it represents only a “tendency towards development” (58). Russians “contemplate the Absolute through the haze of dreams” (59). “Confidence in future deification makes the present sterile.” The ideal is not achieved through “partial reforms and isolated efforts (62), and Russians always want to act in the name of some absolute or rise to the level of the absolute.” If a Russian doubts the absolute ideal, he may fall into complete indifference to everything or even become rude; he is "capable of moving from incredible law-abidingness to the most unbridled rebellion." In his desire for the infinite, the Russian is afraid of definitions as limitations; This is where the Russian genius of transformation comes from (79).

Karsavin's system is a form of pantheism. He views the absolute as an all-encompassing unity. Criticizing the concept of unity in the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov and Father Sergius Bulgakov, I pointed out that God is a super-systematic principle of creation of the world system as something ontologically external to him. God does not subsequently become limited by being, because the relation of limitation is possible only between homogeneous objects. Karsavin says that if God is not all-unity, then there may be another, third... tenth God besides him. This objection is unpersuasive. We necessarily come to the concept of God as a super-systematic principle that determines the existence of the world system with its actual and possible content. The universal system, together with the super-systematic principle, God, contains everything that Karsavin includes in his concept of unity.

Just as the all-unity of God is unique, he, as a super-systematic principle, is unique along with the universe as his basis. When Karsavin says that along with such a God there could exist a second, third... tenth God, I ask him where he will find a second, third... tenth universe that will force us to recognize the existence of a second, and third... and tenth God. No one can point to such universes; therefore, the recognition of many gods is an arbitrary flight of fancy.

Karsavin distinguishes his system from pantheism by pointing to his theory of the creation of being; but he himself explains that God creates something positive that has its own nature. The created essence is, in his opinion, nothing to which the absolute gives itself, and since this nothing receives divine content, it becomes a “created something,” a “second subject.” This is a completely unsatisfactory attempt to avoid pantheism; nothing is an empty vessel that can be filled with something or, even less, exhibit pride, which prevents it from perceiving the fullness of the divine life. This explains why in his system, as Karsavin himself says, the creature is not, strictly speaking, a person; it receives all its content from the divine unity and does not create anything itself, so that the entire created world, according to Karsavin, is a theophany (85, 175). The concept of theophany can also be found in the theistic system, but there it means the manifestation of God in his works, namely in his created entities, ontologically distinct from himself, the existence of which nevertheless testifies to the fact that God exists as their creator. For Karsavin, the word “theophany” means something else, namely the manifestation of God in creation in the sense that all the positive content of creation is the content of divine existence; creation, since it is something ontologically identical with God, is also, in any case, part of divine existence.

Criticizing the teaching of Father Sergius Bulgakov, I pointed out that pantheism is logically untenable. In Karsavin’s system, his logical inconsistency becomes especially clear, since he attributes absolutely everything real to God, taking creation simply as nothing. Like all forms of pantheism, Karsavin's system fails to explain the freedom of created beings in the sense of their independence from God and even their proud opposition to him. By freedom, Karsavin simply understands self-founding or self-determined existence. Karsavin's system also cannot give a satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of evil and its nature. To be consistent,” Karsavin limits himself to understanding evil and the imperfection of creation as simply the incompleteness of good. This interpretation is sharply opposed to the real nature of evil, the content of which, such as personal hatred, is often completely impossible to reduce to insufficient love. It is not surprising, therefore, that Karsavin denies the existence of the devil; if he did not deny it, he would have to admit that God realizes the theophany, which consists in God’s hatred of Himself.

Karsavin is a personalist. He views any entity as either potentially personal, or embryonically personal (animals), or actually personal. He believes that the cultural units of a nation and humanity are harmonious individuals. Each of these personalities, however, is one and the same unity, although “limited” in each of them in a different way. Therefore, he has no concept of true eternal individual uniqueness as an absolute value: the whole development consists in the fact that the created entity, existing along with God, becomes God, and at the end of the development there is “again only one God.” Karsavin rejects the concept of the subject as an individual substance, that is, as a superspatial, supertemporal and, therefore, eternal agent. And this is not surprising, since such a concept would conflict with his pantheistic monism. He wants to replace the superspatial and supertemporal with the all-spatial and all-time; this means that for him the world consists entirely of events, that is, of temporal and spatio-temporal processes, although an entity that has reached the highest stage of being realizes these processes at all times and in all spaces. It is not difficult to show that the concept of being in all space and in all time cannot explain certain aspects of the world that become understandable from the point of view that I, in other words, the substantial agent, is supra-spatial and supra-temporal. Any event lasts in time, even if it occurs only in one second, and occupies space, even if it is only one millimeter and consists of an infinite number of segments that are external to each other. There can only be one whole, provided that it is created by a supra-temporal and supra-spatial agent who unites it. Even the perception of such a temporal process as melody as something happening in time requires that it be understood immediately as a single whole - and this is possible only because the perceiving subject is timeless.

These objections to some of the basic tenets of Karsavin's philosophy should not be an obstacle to recognizing the significant value of a number of his teachings, such as, for example, his concept of history, harmonious personality, the divine human process and the independent development of every essence, the external and individual body, etc. . P.

Lev Platonovich Karsavin

Of all the great Russian thinkers who created their own philosophical systems, Lev Platonovich Karsavin, perhaps, to this day remains the most unfamiliar figure in his homeland. For a phenomenon of such magnitude to be so unknown - even in comparison with other philosophers, whose work was also not allowed to reach us, say, Florensky or Berdyaev - requires solid reasons.

All this is true - and yet it is no longer possible to postpone the study of Karsavin’s work. Seriously and for a long time returning to the heritage of Russian thought, we must think about the intricacies of Karsavin’s path - and be able to see in them the result of the philosopher’s relationship with his time.

This work is not easy to understand, and many would probably prefer something simpler to it: reading about the life of our philosophers, about the heyday of Russian culture and its subsequent defeat, about the disasters of emigration... But this, alas, is not enough today. The spiritual revival that we hope for Russia, which this philosophical series is designed to serve, requires real deliverance from old dogmas, requires effort and work. Last but not least, we now have to revive the dangerously weakened and undermined skills of independent thinking. And it is unlikely that anything will be more useful for this purpose than a thoughtful reading of the works of Lev Platonovich Karsavin, a Russian philosopher who was born in 1882 in the city of St. Petersburg, died in 1952 from tuberculosis in the Abez subpolar camp, near Inta.

Unlike many senior comrades in Russian religious philosophy (Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Frank, etc.), Karsavin did not experience a radical change of beliefs, a deep crisis or turning point along his path. In his youth, it seems, he did not have even a short period of interest in social and political activity, although until recently among the Russian intelligentsia it was almost impossible to avoid such a period. The social atmosphere was changing. Science and culture acquired new attractiveness, where a powerful upsurge emerged in many areas at once. Karsavin’s generation included participants in the symbolic movement, creators of new painting, philosophers who from the very beginning sought not only (or even not so much) to preach certain truths, but also to master the method, to sophisticated professionalism: Florensky, Ilyin, Shpet, Stepun. And his own inclinations from an early age were directed towards the scientific field.

“Already in the senior classes of the gymnasium, a future scientist was clearly visible in him,” writes his famous sister, the famous ballerina Tamara Karsavina, in her memoirs. (These memoirs, “Theater Street,” written by her in English, were published in translation in 1971, although, alas, most of the references to her brother were released at the same time). The brother and sister were the only children, and in the family there was a clear separation of the paternal and maternal lines. Tamara, Tata, was a “daddy’s girl”, subject special attention father, following in his footsteps: Platon Konstantinovich Karsavin (1854-1922) was a famous dancer of the Mariinsky Theater, a student of the luminary of the St. Petersburg ballet Marius Petipa. And Lev “took after his mother”: she was prone to reflection, serious reading, kept French notebooks of her “Thoughts and Sayings,” and, more importantly, she was the cousin of A. S. Khomyakov, the famous philosopher and founder of Slavophilism. This glorious relationship meant a lot to her; she believed and hoped that Leo, through her, had inherited something of the talents of his great relative and in the future would be his successor. These expectations were justified: Karsavin’s philosophy is indeed connected with Khomyakov by many strong threads...

Having graduated from high school with a gold medal, then from the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, Karsavin became a medievalist historian, one of a large galaxy of students of H. M. Grevs, “the most brilliant of all,” as he later said. His area of ​​expertise is religious movements in Italy and France during the late Middle Ages. Having received a two-year business trip abroad after graduating from university, he engaged in painstaking research in the libraries and archives of these countries - on the history of Franciscan monasticism, as well as the heresies of the Waldenses and Cathars. The results of these studies were two large essays - “Essays on religious life in Italy of the 12th–13th centuries” (1912) and “Fundamentals of medieval religiosity in the 12th–13th centuries, mainly in Italy” (1915). But if the first of them fully corresponds to the usual type of major historical monograph, then the second no longer fits into this type. Today we would say that this work, as well as Karsavin’s articles adjacent to it, belong not to history, but to cultural studies. Although here we have before us an abundance of facts, living concrete material, all this now occupies the author not in itself: his problem is the reconstruction of medieval man and his world. By identifying and analyzing the structures of the medieval way of life, thinking, and psyche, he strives with their help to see the picture of the past not in a flat, factual way, but three-dimensionally, in its internal logic. And on this path, he largely anticipates both the approach and conclusions of future cultural studies, for the first time introducing into consideration those layers of material and those problems that will become the subject of keen interest of researchers around the world half a century later, in the 60s and 70s. All this pioneering activity of his is unfairly forgotten now, and the republication of his most important historical works is the clear duty of our historians.

At the same time, cultural studies is only an intermediate stage in Karsavin’s creative evolution. The further he goes, the more strongly the philosophical cast of his thoughts is reflected; and, continually expanding the horizon of his thoughts, he turns to common problems historical knowledge and method, to the philosophy of history - steadily approaching the field of pure metaphysics. At the same time, two more important themes appeared in his works to remain for a long time - religious and national. Their appearance is associated with both internal and external factors. There is no doubt that even earlier, without yet becoming themes of creativity, they were present in the circle of Karsavin’s thoughts: for these are constant themes of Russian thought, and first of all the themes of Slavophilism, the themes of Khomyakov, with whose memory, “in the shadow” of which Karsavin grew up since childhood. When the fateful revolutionary years began, the topic of the fate of Russia naturally came to the surface, and in its modern guise - as a topic about the meaning and prospects of the revolution - it became one of the pressing working topics. Already in the first of the works dedicated to it, “East, West and the Russian Idea” (Pg., 1922), Karsavin affirms the creative and popular nature of the revolution, caustically polemicizing with the pessimists who buried the country, among the many of whom Gorky was then: “Is it expected or not?” Does a great future await us Russians? “I, contrary to the competent opinion of the Russian writer A. M. Peshkov, believe that yes, and that it is necessary to create it.”

But, on the other hand, it was impossible for him to comprehend what was happening outside of a religious approach, religious categories. The modern theme led to the religious theme - the second of the new themes mentioned. The appeal to her was also facilitated by the fact that in the new Russia the church, from the former semi-official institution, immediately became oppressed and persecuted. Karsavin was a freedom-loving and rebellious man, ready to resist any dictate, always preferring to move against the tide. And if before, while accepting the foundations of the Christian worldview, he at the same time called himself a freethinker and seemed far from the role of a theologian and preacher, then after the revolution he became a professor at the Theological Institute and read sermons in Petrograd churches. At the same time, he published his first work not on the topic of history, giving it the deliberately pious title “Saligia or ... soulful reflection on God, the world, man, evil and the seven deadly sins” (Pg., 1919) and from the very first lines choosing style of spiritual conversation: “Dear reader, I am turning to you in the hope that you believe in God, feel His breath and hear His voice speaking in your soul. And if my hope is not deceived, let us think together about the thoughts I have written down...” There was a challenge here - and it did not go unnoticed. In the magazines “Print and Revolution”, “Under the Banner of Marxism” and others, reviews of Karsavin’s works appear that leave nothing to be desired in terms of a crushing rebuff to ideological machinations.

“Medieval fanatic”, “scientific obscurantist”, “sweet-tongued preaching of clericalism”, “nonsense”, “senseless theories”... - such assessments greet Karsavin and his work in these reviews. And in the light of this subtle criticism, we are not surprised by Karsavin’s message in one letter, which he wrote in the summer of 1922: “... I foresee the imminent inevitability of falling silent in our press.” The prediction expressed here very soon came true: already in the fall of the same year, Karsavin had to not only “shut up in our press,” but also leave the borders of his homeland. Together with a large group of 150–200 people, which included the most prominent representatives of non-Marxist thought and the non-Bolshevik public (such as Pomgol, cooperation, the independent press), he was deported to Germany.

The event of the expulsion of scientists is still awaiting its analysis. It would be very necessary today to restore its details and assess the full scale of its consequences for Russian culture and for the social atmosphere. Here we will only say that for Karsavin, as for most of those expelled, the expulsion was a heavy blow. He was a principled opponent of the act of emigration and, once in the West, he never ceased to emphasize: “... the history of Russia is made there, not here.” He also spoke about the meaninglessness and emptiness that emigrant existence brings with it; and long before “Run” M. Bulgakov cited as their symbol and most shining example establishment of cockroach races in Constantinople.

His life in exile followed the typical emigrant geography - Berlin, then Paris - and proceeded in no less typical emigrant ordeals (including an episode when Lev Platonovich tried to be an extra at a film studio, and the director who saw him immediately offered him the role of... a professor philosophy. In appearance, by the way, he very much resembled Vladimir Solovyov). Circumstances changed in 1928, when Kaunas University in Lithuania invited him to take the chair of general history. Lithuania firmly became his home - here he remained until his arrest in 1949.

Meanwhile, during these same stormy and tense twenties, even before relative stability was achieved in Lithuania, he completely managed to develop his philosophical system. It is important to look closely at its origins, at the soil on which it arose - this will largely explain its features to us. As we have already said, Karsavin approached philosophy from historical issues, which continuously evolved in depth and breadth for him, from the study of specific phenomena to reflection on the structure and meaning of history. Invariably and firmly, these reflections were built on him in a religious vein, on the basis of the Christian worldview. Therefore, it is completely natural that his first significant philosophical work was the experience of Christian philosophy of history. Immediately after his expulsion, he published in Berlin a large monograph, “Philosophy of History,” written in Russia.

In the system of philosophical views, the philosophy of history is one of the special sections; the central, core section is ontology, the doctrine of being and the Absolute. Nevertheless, certain ontological positions also clearly emerge from Karsavin’s book. They clearly show that his philosophical thought moves in line with the Russian metaphysics of unity, the foundations of which were laid by Khomyakov and Vladimir Solovyov.

The metaphysics of unity is the main, if not the only, original philosophical movement that arose in Russia. Following Khomyakov and Solovyov, the most prominent Russian philosophers, creators of independent philosophical systems, belonged to it; E. Trubetskoy, P. Florensky, S. Bulgakov, S. Frank, N. Lossky. Their systems are very different and do not at all form one narrow school; but what they have in common is that they all have at their core the concept or, rather, the symbol of unity. The essence of this concept is not so easy to convey in a popular article. What is unity? This is a certain ideal structure or harmonious mode of being, when it is structured as a perfect unity of a multitude: in the totality of its elements, each is identical to the whole, and hence to every other element. It is clear that this description is contradictory: how can a part be identical to the whole? That is why unity is not an ordinary concept that can be given a complete, logically correct definition. This is an inexhaustible object of philosophical reflection, into which, like other fundamental realities of philosophical experience, philosophy ponders endlessly, reveals it in new terms and fundamental aspects, but cannot fully express its antinomic nature. Starting from antiquity, when the philosophical mind wanted to convey the method of organization, the principle of the structure of perfect being, it invariably came to unity; and Russian religious philosophy is an organic continuation and creative development of this ancient tradition.

Karsavin's philosophy was created by the last of the systems of Russian metaphysics of unity. Like any great thinker, this position for him did not mean an advantage (the opportunity to move in a well-trodden channel, relying on the ideas of predecessors), but, on the contrary, a source of difficulties, because there was a danger of being secondary, dependent, unoriginal. And like any great thinker, he managed to overcome these difficulties. Karsavin’s system is distinguished by its striking independence, introducing a number of fundamentally new aspects into the tradition. From the very beginning, Karsavin, from the very beginning, took a new, in his own approach to solving the initial problem of any system of all-unity: where can we see the main prototype, so to speak, the basic model of all-unity, as a certain principle of organization of existence? Predecessors - Soloviev, Florensky and others - considered the “world in God” as such a model: nothing more than the ancient “world of ideas” of Plato’s philosophy, adapted to the concepts of the Christian era - interpreted as the totality of the Creator’s plans for all things and phenomena. Karsavin is looking for other models, more specific, closer to local reality. In addition, the very intuition about unity receives significant development and enrichment from him. The principle of unity characterizes reality in its static aspect - as a kind of existence. Karsavin, as a historian, always tended to see reality dynamically, under the sign of development, process; and these aspects of it were not sufficiently reflected in the principle of unity. Therefore, in addition to this principle, he introduces another - the universal principle of becoming, changing reality. This principle is “trinity,” or a set of three consubstantial, but mutually ordered steps, which Karsavin usually calls “primary unity - separation - reunification” and which are described as some (any) unity, having gone through self-separation, again self-reunites. The reader here will, of course, immediately remember the famous triad of Hegel’s dialectics: thesis - antithesis - synthesis. The rapprochement of the two triads is quite legitimate, but it should be clarified: Hegel’s philosophy is only the final link of an ancient chain of philosophical systems, coming from antiquity, from the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus, based on the principle of the triad as a universal principle of existential dynamics. And in this chain, Karsavin brings his concept of trinity closer not so much to the Hegelian triad (like most Russian philosophers, starting with Khomyakov, he felt the Hegelian pathos of self-sufficient abstract thinking alien to himself), but rather to the ideas of one of Hegel’s main predecessors, the famous Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa ( 1401 - 1464). But the more important point is the connection between the two principles. Karsavin subordinates all-unity to the trinity, including it in the three-stage process of separation-reunion: for him all-unity is like an “instant cross-section” of the trinity, the principle of the structure of a separating-reuniting unity at any stage, “at any moment” (although we must remember that the entire three-stage process does not necessarily flow in time).

As a result, Karsavin’s philosophy turns out to be no longer just another of the “systems of total unity.” It is based on a richer, tightly knit ontological structure of two interrelated principles: the principle of trinity, which describes the dynamics of reality, and the principle of unity, which describes its statics. It is for this integral structure that he searches for the “basic model” that we spoke about above; and it is not surprising that it turns out to be different from the “peace in God” of previous systems. The final solution was not found immediately. Karsavin’s three main philosophical works - “Philosophy of History” (1923), “On Principles” (1925), “On Personality” (1929) - reflect the three stages of his search.

Naturally, in “Philosophy of History” he tries on his philosophical intuitions against historical reality and finds here that the historical process, and along with it the mental process, the element of life of consciousness, is subject to the principles of trinity and unity. Then the scope of application of the principles expands: in “On Principles”, both fundamental subjects of metaphysics, the Absolute (God) and the created world, are already described on their basis. Space. In this book, Karsavin for the first time presents his views as a new integral system of religious philosophy. But the application of the principle of unity, as well as the principle of the triad, to the doctrine of God and the world in itself was not something new and did not provide any original “basic model” of the ontological structure. Such a model was put forward by Karsavin only at the next stage, in the book “On Personality.” This is his main work, the final synthesis of his philosophical thought. The book is based on a key idea: the ontological structure of the trinity-all-unity is realized in the individual, describes the structure and life of the individual. Thanks to this idea, the metaphysics of all-unity perceived and prioritized the concept of personality; and this transformation of it into a philosophy of personality is the most important thing that Karsavin contributed to our old tradition of unity.

Of course, here we have before us the Christian philosophy of personality. In accordance with the tenets of Christianity, Karsavin’s concept of personality is applied primarily not to man, but to God. Man is a personality only imperfectly, embryonically; but the goal and meaning of his life is to become familiar with the fullness of divine existence, and therefore, to become a true personality, “personification,” as Karsavin writes. It is easy to perceive the consonance of these ideas with our usual ideas about personality. Karsavin astutely notes that according to these ideas, personality for a person is an object of aspiration rather than. possession: something that I and everyone else would like to be, but, alas, we may not be. Thus, our modern concepts betray their religious origin: the desire of a secularized person to be a person is the fading light of the Christian ideal of deification, the desire and duty of man to become God. And this entire circle of Karsavin’s thoughts and constructions, without a doubt, still retains value and interest, constituting a relevant, even topical part, of his philosophical heritage. The problem of personality today is one of our key spiritual problems.

Let us return in conclusion to the personality and fate of the philosopher. In 1940, he moved from Kaunas to Vilnius following the university and, after the end of the war, resumed teaching there. However, he did not have long to remain a professor. In 1945–1946, he was allowed to teach a single course, aesthetics, and then he was completely removed from teaching. For two years he still worked as the director of the Art Museum in Vilnius - and an arrest followed. After the investigation and trial, in the fall of 1950, he was transferred to Abez, a disabled camp near the vast complex of Inta camps: in the investigative prison he developed a tuberculosis process.

Looking at the fate of a real thinker, one always gets the impression that its features bear the imprint of his spirit, the external is subordinate to the internal. Karsavin was a paradoxical thinker. He was attracted to paradoxes, and he generously equipped both his philosophical constructions and his conversation with them. This was clearly conveyed to his biography - it is full of paradoxes no less than his masterly “spirals of thought” (his favorite expression). The last, tragic period is no exception. Imprisonment in the camp brought a spark, a rise in his creativity - isn’t this a paradox?! In less than two years in the Abezi barracks, he created no less than ten works, including a statement of the essence, the quintessence of his philosophy in the form of... a wreath of sonnets and a cycle of terzas. Of course, these works are not large in volume, but the depth and sharpness of thought in them do not betray him at all. And one more thing, no less surprising. The camp also became the period in his life about which we know in more detail and most of all. The main reason for this is this: in the camp he met the Apprentice.

A. A. Vaneev (1922–1985) was far from an ordinary person. A talented engineer who came to the camp very young and became a believing Christian there, he passionately devoted himself to spiritual teaching and, having found it with Karsavin, forever remained faithful to the teacher and his system. “I have never met a person who was so immersed in the world of his teacher’s ideas,” a former fellow prisoner, an Austrian philosopher, writes about him. - Karsavin was his mentor in history, philosophy, religion, Latin and Greek... and Plato’s Academy itself could not have had a more grateful student... He could recite Karsavin’s camp works by heart for hours. But at the same time he was not only full of his words, read or heard; after Karsavin’s death, he continued to develop his thoughts and complete his metaphysical system.” A. A, Vaneev left his camp memories “Two years in Abezi”. However, only a few meager phrases speak about the author himself, about his life. In the center of the memories is Lev Platonovich Karsavin. So - word to the Student.

“... Having rested, Karsavin found time when he could work. After breakfast he sat half-sitting in bed. His legs bent at the knees and a piece of plywood on them served him as a music stand. He sharpened his pencil with a piece of glass, slowly drew lines on a sheet of paper and wrote in a straight, thin handwriting that slightly showed trembling in his hand. He wrote almost without correction, interrupting his work only to sharpen his pencil or line another sheet. First of all, a Wreath of Sonnets was written down, composed as a keepsake in a remand prison... Having finished working on the Sonnets, Karsavin continued the poetic expression of his ideas in Terzin, after which he wrote a Commentary on his poems... The time favorable for work was short-lived. At about 11 o'clock the medical rounds began. Then Karsavin put everything that related to written work into the nightstand, read if there was anything to read, talked... and in general spent the rest of the day the same way as everyone else did. The people around him saw him as an eccentric old man who wrote out of idleness or out of habit.”

“In everything that Karsavin said, I was attracted by a certain special, previously unknown, essentiality of understanding. Karsavin knew how to speak without imposing himself at all. He spoke about things that were most serious to him as if he treated them somewhat jokingly. And while he was speaking, the restrained, affectionate half-smile on his face and the diamond reflection in the warm blackness of his eyes seemed to remove the distance between him and his interlocutor. When he went deeper into himself, his gaze acquired concentration, did not withdraw into himself, but passed right through the surroundings, as if beyond the limits of the visible. It’s the same in what he wrote... Our “here” became transparent for him, but never illusory. This is precisely Karsavin’s method of spiritual work. In his speculations, the world remains itself and does not lose anything, but is subject to new understanding.”

But the philosopher's days were already numbered. His tuberculosis is rapidly progressing, and the names of the parts in the Memoirs are the stages of his descent through the steps of the camp medical system: Hospital - Semi-hospital - Isolation facility for the hopeless. The last hours were approaching.

“When I came the next day, Karsavin told me in a cheerful voice:

A priest, a Lithuanian, came to see me. I confessed to him in Lithuanian. You see how God decided to arrange it through you.

Karsavin lay on his back, his hands on top of the blanket. In the cut of his unbuttoned shirt, I saw that on his chest lay two crosses - one was mine, lead, and the second was black, glittering with a miniature crucifix. I was surprised and asked:

Why are there two crosses on you?

He looked at me a little guiltily.

It was Sventonis, he said, who came after confession. He congratulated me and wanted to give me a cross. I didn't mind so as not to upset him. Let there be two.

With regard to Karsavin, East and West seemed ready to put aside their differences.”

Karsavin died on July 20, 1952. In his last days There were two relatives with him: in addition to A. A. Vaneev, Vladas Shimkunas, a Lithuanian doctor who worked as a pathologist in the camp hospital. This last detail is connected with a striking episode with which we will end our story.

“Šimkunas came because he had something in mind and wanted me to help him. Here's the thing. As Šimkūnas said, those who died in the camp are buried in unmarked graves, each with only a peg with a conventional number. Such identification marks are short-lived, and it is impossible to subsequently determine who is buried where. And sooner or later the time will come when they will remember Karsavin and, perhaps, want to find his remains. There is a simple way for Karsavin’s ashes to be identified. When they perform an autopsy on Karsavin’s body, they need to put a hermetically sealed bottle with a note inside the insides, which would say who Karsavin is. Šimkūnas wanted me to write this note.”

“I did not immediately answer Shimkunas, because my feelings seemed to be split in two from his words. There was something monstrous in his proposal, in all this thoughtfulness. On the other hand, there was something touching about the same thing. The situation did not allow for a monument with a proper inscription to be erected on Karsavin’s grave, as we would have liked. Instead of a monument, Šimkūnas proposed that a secret epitaph be written, intended to lie buried with the person to whom it was dedicated... I accepted Šimkūnas’ idea and agreed to his proposal.

“I’ll write,” I said, “but I need to collect my thoughts.” Whether this note is ever found or not, I am forever responsible for every word.”

“With my mental vision and hearing, I recalled meetings with Karsavin, and his voice, and his words, and our walks along the gorge between the coal embankment and the wall of the hospital barracks. And finally, the last farewell to him this morning in the morgue... What should I write? Words were needed that would express the significance of Karsavin’s personality and that would be words of farewell to him. This is what the secret epitaph came out like, as far as I remember. “Lev Platonovich Karsavin, historian and religious thinker. In 1882 he was born in St. Petersburg. In 1952, while imprisoned in a regime camp, he died of milliary tuberculosis. L.P. Karsavin spoke and wrote about the Triple-One God, Who in His incomprehensibility reveals Himself to us, so that through Christ we might know in the Creator the Father who gives birth to us. And that God, overcoming Himself with love, suffers our sufferings with us and in us, so that we too may be in Him and in the unity of the Son of God we may possess the fullness of love and freedom. And that we must recognize our very imperfection and the burden of our fate as an absolute goal. By comprehending this, we already have a part in the victory over death through death. Farewell, dear teacher. The grief of separation from you cannot be expressed in words. But we also await our time in the hope of being where sorrow is transformed into eternal joy.”

“A little later after I finished writing, Šimkunas came. I handed him a sheet of text. Shimkunas read slowly and, apparently, mentally weighing every word. Finally he said that, in his opinion, what was written was, in general, what was needed.

He had a dark glass bottle in advance. Having rolled the sheet with the secret epitaph into a tight roll, Šimkūnas put this roll into the bottle and, in front of me, tightly closed the bottle with a screw cap.”

“In the act of autopsy, in this act of medical necromania, the bottle... was inserted into the cut up corpse. From this moment and forever, Karsavin’s ashes contain a monument, the glass shell of which is able to resist rotting and decomposition, preserving the words written - not in gold letters on stone, but in ordinary ink on paper - of a certificate about a person whose remains are buried in the ground of an unmarked grave.”

Let us think about this story: through the gloomy grotesqueness of camp life, something else shines through here. Among Russian philosophers we will more than once encounter a mystical intuition that the fate of the body after death is not indifferent to the fate of a person and carries a mysterious meaning. Both Fedorov and Florensky spoke about this, but perhaps most decisively - Karsavin. He taught that there is no separate “soul” at all, that the personality appears as an indivisible wholeness in its entire destiny, both temporary and eternal. But what does “secret epitaph” mean? The condensed formula of the philosopher's thought remained merged with his ashes; and spiritual-physical unity in a certain sense is not broken by death. In a truly inscrutable way, Karsavin’s death confirms his teaching: the true death of a philosopher.

“The cemetery where Karsavin is buried is located away from the village. It consists of many mounds on which no one's name is written. Around the cemetery there is flat, monotonous tundra, featureless land. Most of all there is sky here. Clear blue, with transparent white clouds, covers you from all sides with the beauty of heaven, making up for the poverty of the earth.”

S. S. Khoruzhy

From the book Faith in the Crucible of Doubt. Orthodoxy and Russian literature in the 17th-20th centuries. author Dunaev Mikhail Mikhailovich

Andrei Platonovich Platonov Andrei Platonovich Platonov (Klimentov; 1899–1951) entered literature, balancing on the edge of socialist realism. Revolutionary romance, in any case, was very attractive to him. But a writer with such a unique vision of the world could never

From the book Saligia. Noctes Petropolitanae (collection) author Karsavin Lev Platonovich

Lev Karsavin Saligia

From the book Theology of Personality author Team of authors

Lev Karsavin. Personality as the fullness of being and Orthodox thought 1. All-unity and personalism: Karsavin, in comparison with his contemporaries, Karsavin can be called a philosopher of personalism and all-unity. In this article I want to show the uniqueness of Karsavin's philosophy with

From the author's book

1. All-unity and personalism: Karsavin, in comparison with Karsavin’s contemporaries, can be called a philosopher of personalism and all-unity. In this article I want to show the uniqueness of Karsavin’s philosophy from a historical point of view - in comparison with his contemporaries, as well as with

Lev Platonovich Karsavin (December 1 (13), 1882, St. Petersburg, Russian empire July 12, 1952, Abez, Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR) Russian religious philosopher, medievalist historian, poet. Contents 1 Early years 2 Emigration 3 Lithuania ... Wikipedia

- (1882 1952) philosopher, theologian, medievalist historian, cultural scientist. Graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University (1901 1906); in 1910 1912 he worked in the archives and libraries of France and Italy, the result was the writing of a master’s thesis... ... Philosophical Encyclopedia

Karsavin, Lev Platonovich historian. Born in 1882, he completed a course at the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University, receiving a gold medal for the essay Sidonius Apollinaris, as a representative of the culture of the 5th century (part of this work... ... Biographical Dictionary

- (1882 1952) Russian religious philosopher and medievalist historian. Brother of T. P. Karsavina. In 1922 he was expelled abroad; professor at universities in Kaunas (since 1928) and Vilnius (1940-46). Works on medieval Italy, philosophy of history, philosophy of personality... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Russian religious philosopher and medievalist historian, student of I. M. Grevs. Brother of T. P. Karsavina. Received history education at St. Petersburg University. Professor of History... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia

Karsavin, Lev Platonovich- KARSAVIN Lev Platonovich (1882 1952), Russian religious philosopher and historian of medieval culture. Brother T.P. Karsavina. In 1922 he was sent abroad. He taught in Kaunas (from 1928) and Vilnius (1940-46). Based on the principle of unity of V.S.... ... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary

- (1882 1952), religious philosopher and medievalist historian. Brother of T. P. Karsavina. In 1922 he was sent abroad. Lived in Berlin, from 1926 in Paris, participated in the “Eurasian movement”. Professor at universities in Kaunas (since 1928) and Vilnius (1940 1946). In 1946... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

Philosopher, medievalist historian, cultural scientist, poet. Genus. in St. Petersburg, in the family of a choreographer. In 1906 he graduated from history. Philol. ft Petersburg. un ta. Sent abroad, worked in libraries and archives in France and Italy (1910... ... Large biographical encyclopedia

Karsavin Lev Platonovich- (1882 1952) historian, medievalist, religious. philosopher and poet. Genus. in St. Petersburg, to the theater. family (one of his sisters is the famous ballerina Tamara Karsavina). Graduated in 1906. Philol. ft Petersburg. un ta. After graduating from university, he worked in Germany, in 1909 10 and 1912 22... ... Russian humanitarian encyclopedic dictionary

KARSAVIN, Lev Platonovich- (1882 1952) Russian Christian thinker. Graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. In 1913 he defended his master's thesis “Essays on religious life in Italy in the 12th-13th centuries.” In 1916, the defense took place... ... Aesthetics. encyclopedic Dictionary

Southwestern Rus'

§ 32. Principalities of Volyn and Galicia; their connection

At the same time as in the north-east of Rus' the Principality of Suzdal, on the southwestern outskirts of the Russian land they began to develop and grow rich Volyn and Galician lands, united around 1200 into one strong principality.

The Volyn land with the main city of Vladimir Volynsky occupied places along the right bank of the Western Bug and extended through the upper reaches of Pripyat to the Southern Bug. It received its name from the ancient city of Volyn and the tribe of Volynians (Buzhans, Dulebs) that inhabited it. Since ancient times it was subordinated to the Kyiv princes. From the middle of the 12th century. it formed its own princely line - the senior Monomakhovichs. Famous prince Izyaslav Mstislavich(§18) was founded in Volyn and Kyiv mined from here. From here Kyiv and his son searched Mstislav Izyaslavich . Thus, the Volyn princes, like their brothers and uncles, the younger Suzdal Monomakhovichs, acquired a permanent “fatherland” in Volyn and wanted to annex old Kyiv to it. Son of Mstislav Izyaslavich Roman Mstislavich was especially lucky: after a long struggle, he not only managed to take possession of Kiev, where he began to keep princes at his side, but also managed to acquire neighboring Volyn Principality of Galicia.

The Galician principality consisted of two parts: mountainous and flat. The mountainous part was located on the eastern slopes of the Carpathians and the main city was Galich on the river. Dniester The flat part extended to the north, to the Western Bug, and was called “Cherven cities”, named after the ancient city of Cherven with its suburbs. As a distant outskirts of the Russian land, the Galician land was not attractive to the princes. The Poles had claims to the Cherven cities and more than once took them away from Rus'. The Carpathian highlands were not far from the hostile Ugrians; The restless steppe was close from there. Therefore, the Kyiv princes sent young princes to the Cherven cities, who did not have a unit in other places in Rus'. At the end of the 11th century, by resolution of the Lyubech Congress, the great-grandsons of Yaroslav the Wise, outcasts Vasilko and Volodar, were placed there.

Since then, the Galician outskirts have turned into a special principality. Son of Volodar Volodimirko (d. 1152) united all its cities under his sovereign power and made the capital of the Principality of Galich. He expanded the borders of his possessions, attracted new settlers, settled on his lands prisoners taken in the wars with Kiev and the mornings. In relation to his principality, he played the same role that Yuri Dolgoruky played in the Suzdal region: he was its first organizer. Crafty and cruel, Volodimirko did not leave a good memory. As an example of Volodymyr’s cunning and deceit, the chronicler cites his response to one ambassador when he reminded the prince of the sanctity of the kiss of the cross. “And what should we do to create this small cross?” – Volodimirko said with a grin. The work of unification and strengthening of the Galician principality that he began was continued by his son Yaroslav (nicknamed Osmomysl ). During his long reign (1152–1187), Galich achieved great external power. The influx of settlers into the Galician region then came not only from the east, from Rus', but also from the west, from Hungary and Poland. The fertility of the region attracted the population there; Galich's position between Western Europe and Russia contributed to the development of its trade and the prosperity of its cities. The talented Yaroslav skillfully took advantage of favorable circumstances and raised his principality to great heights. “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” rightly places Yaroslav in importance next to Vsevolod the Big Nest. They were at that time the strongest princes in Rus'.

After the death of Yaroslav Osmomysl, unrest began in Galich and the line of Galician princes ended there. The Volyn prince took possession of the Galician reign Roman Mstislavich (1199), and thus Volyn and Galich united into one significant state. Although the unrest continued after the death of Roman (1205), his state did not disintegrate, but achieved even greater power during the reign of Roman’s son, Prince Daniil Romanovich (§37).

As in the northeast, in Suzdal Rus', the rise of princely power took place depending on the rapid settlement of the region by Russian settlers, and in the southwest the Volyn and Galician princes became strong and influential due to the fact that their lands began to be filled with arrivals from different sides. But the position of the Galician-Volyn princes was more difficult and dangerous than the position of the Suzdal princes. Firstly, Volyn and Galich had as their neighbors not weak foreigners (as was the case in Suzdal), but strong and warlike peoples: Ugrians, Poles and Lithuanians. Moreover, the steppe enemies of Rus' - the Polovtsians - were also close. Therefore, the Volyn and Galician princes had to always think about protecting their possessions from the north and west, from the Ugric and Polish kings, and not just from the south - from Polovtsians. In addition, in their political enterprises, these princes themselves were accustomed to using the help of the same Ugrians, Lithuanians and Poles, if they were not at war with them at that moment. Thus, foreign forces inevitably interfered in Volyn-Galician affairs and, if necessary, were ready to seize these principalities into their power (which, as we will see, they later succeeded). Secondly, public life in Volyn, and especially in Galich, it developed in such a way that, next to the princely autocracy, a strong aristocracy arose there in the form of the princely boyars, the senior squad, which, together with the princes, destroyed the significance of the city veche meetings, and then began to influence the princes themselves. Even such smart and talented princes as Yaroslav Osmomysl and Roman had to reckon with the boyars’ self-will. Prince Roman tried to break the boyars with open persecution, saying that “you can’t crush the bees - you can’t eat honey.” However, the boyars were not exterminated by Roman and after Roman took an active part in the unrest, along with external enemies, weakening the strength of the Galician and Volyn lands.