Sutton - Epstein's Interpretation of Religion

JONATHAN SUTTON

‘MINIMAL RELIGION’ AND MIKHAIL EPSTEIN’S

INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION IN LATE-SOVIET

AND POST-SOVIET RUSSIA*

ABSTRACT. This is an examination of two essays on minimal religion byMikhail Epstein (1982 and 1999), assessing the usefulness of the term‘minimal religion’ for the analysis of religion in contemporary Russia.

KEY WORDS: negative (apophatic) theology, incarnational theology,mass atheism, religious consciousness, the unconscious, ‘new Middle Ages,’Berdyaev, theomorphism, angelism, religious pluralism, monofideism, reli-gious education, domestication

1999 saw the publication in English of an essay which MikhailEpstein had written in 1982. At the end of the 90s he used theoccasion of editing a book on Russian postmodernism con-siderably to extend the ideas contained in his first essay. Myintention, here, is to examine both essays and, in doing so, toassess the usefulness of his term ‘minimal religion’ as an

* An adapted version of a paper delivered at the School of Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies (SSEES), University of London, on 8 December, 2003. Note

regarding Mikhail Epstein’s use of the words ‘religion,’ ‘religiosity’ and ‘spirituality:’Epstein uses the word ‘religion’ to signify ‘mainstream,’ church-based manifestationsof religion and also the institutional, hierarchical structures related to those. Al-though in English usage the word ‘religiosity’ has negative connotations – signifying

either a superficially felt religious sentiment or a somehow false and insincereexpression of religious feeling, intended for outward show – Epstein appears to usethe term entirely neutrally. For him it simply serves as a synonym for the word

‘spirituality’. In the two essays examined in the present article the word ‘spirituality’signifies the whole inner spiritual life and aspirations of the individual and her/hisreflection on an ethical way of living, whether the person concerned is a committed,

church-going believer, or someone engaged in a personal spiritual or philosophicalquest for meaning, or else someone who has experienced what Epstein refers to as‘the wilderness’ of the Soviet years and has learnt of a spiritual dimension to life

through that formative experience.

Studies in East European Thought (2006) 58:107–135 � Springer 2006DOI 10.1007/s11212-005-4625-7

analytical tool for understanding religion in late-Soviet andpost-Soviet Russia.1

I find Epstein’s essays particularly rich in ideas, metaphorsand useful categories for the analysis of religious phenomena.In this I am not alone. For instance, at the 2003 annual con-ference of the British Association for Slavonic and EastEuropean Studies (BASEES), Professor Malcolm Jones (Not-tingham) gave a paper on Dostoevsky in the course of which hecited Epstein’s idea that a progression from apophatic theologyto mass atheism to minimal religion is a distinctive and fun-damentally important feature of Russian culture. In due courseI shall return to that progression, for it lies at the heart ofEpstein’s second essay.

To my mind the religious scene in post-Soviet Russia is somulti-layered and complex that in order even to begin tounderstand it we need to avail ourselves of all the possible cate-gories, terminology, paradigms, workingmodels and provisionalhypotheses which commentators on the subject are prepared tooffer. Some categories exhaust their usefulness quite quickly, orat least it soon becomes clear that they need to be reassessed andmodified in the light of newly emerging sociological and otherevidence. For example, the late Jane Ellis gave a paper even be-fore the ‘post-Soviet’ era had got properly underway. In it shegave a very detailed account of the reasons why the term ‘reli-gious renaissance’ could be used in relation to late-Soviet Russiaonly if accompanied by a host of qualifications and reservations,whose sheer number made the term itself close to unusable.

I believe that in the two essays which I examine, here,Mikhail Epstein offers us a cluster of categories, images andmetaphors, whose suggestive power is likely to render themuseful for some time to come. Even if it turns out that wecannot accept every single element in his composite picture of‘minimal religion,’ following his line of argument itself consti-tutes a rewarding ‘thought experiment.’

At least one feature of minimal religion in ‘post-atheist’Russia has a counterpart in the religious life of Western Eur-ope, namely a very widespread distrust towards the institu-tional forms and structures of religion. Be that as it may,

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Epstein seems to wish to concentrate on the specifics of Russianculture, on the various deep-lying factors which, according tohim, brought about a progression from apophatic theology tomass atheism to minimal religion. At one point he describesminimal religion as ‘an internal impulse, a state of spirit or adisposition of mind.’2 So, is he out to provide the description ofa particular mindset or analysis of the society where such amindset is dominant? Is he actually engaging with questionspertaining to spirituality rather than to organised religion andchurch structures? Almost at the very end of the much longersecond essay Epstein writes as follows:

The very concept of spirituality seems strange and dated in the postmodernage, requiring theoretical revitalization. By de-emphasizing the category of‘spirituality’ postmodern theory demonstrates its own limitations and pointsto the need for a new, broader paradigm of thought. The Russian post-atheistexperience is valuable not only because it can be related to certain postmoderntheological speculations that undermine the representability of God, but alsobecause it leads beyond the conceptual framework of postmodernism byrestoring the meaning of such an ‘obsolete’ category as spirituality.3

In his discussion of Russia’s ‘post-atheist’ spirituality Epsteinseeks to rule out emphatically any possibility of a return to some‘pre-atheistic’ ordering of religious life and reflection. On the firstpage of his first essay he provides the following analogy:

… [But] the process of spiritual revival could not be frozen at this merely‘reconstructive’stage. Like the European Renaissance of the fourteenth tosixteenth centuries, which brought something completely new to Europeancivilization while appearing to be a return to antiquity, the Russianpost-atheist renaissance revealed new aspects irreducible to the restorationof pre-revolutionary religious traditions. This development did not takeplace inside the churches, in the cradle of tradition, but in ‘mundane’spiritual life and in contemporary thought.4

Epstein’s first essay affirms, very valuably, that the immediatecircle of an individual’s family and friends should be viewedas the eminent locus for spirituality and ethical action. This‘fits’ with current sociological evidence affirming the obviousdurability and importance of ‘informal networks’ in Russiansociety today. However, there is the further culturally telling

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point, stressed by Epstein, namely, that for Russians thisorientation towards one’s own immediate circle constitutes avery welcome, and also necessary, departure from the far lesssustaining ethos of ‘love for the distant one,’ which was soforcefully promoted by official Soviet ideology. It is self-defeating to expect individuals to be universal in their ethicalresponsiveness and responsibility. Far better to afford themscope to mark out a limited and immediate territory withinwhich to act responsibly and ethically. This, furthermore, is anapproach which implies the efficacy of grassroots socialactivism. Epstein writes:

The ideals of universal brotherhood and equality, which have inspiredmodern thought since the Enlightenment, were usurped and compromisedby abstract atheistic humanism. From the atheistic point of view the uni-versal goals of humanity could ultimately be achieved through the sacrificeof particular individuals or even classes (tsars, capitalists, landowners,priests, conservatives, etc.) that were regarded as obstacles to the commongood. Atheism introduced the ethical imperative of love for ‘the distantone.’ In practice this meant, for example, that a Soviet citizen should feelmore compassion for the suffering nations of Africa than for his ownneighbours incarcerated in a concentration camp. The distancing from one’sneighbours certainly had nothing to do with the Christian commandments...In the spirit of religious minimalism no human being claims to be universalin his / her ethical responsiveness and responsibility. Instead, each individualis dedicated to the sanctification of his immediate vicinity, which he thenattempts to widen. The space of the minimalist church grows out of thatpoint occupied by each individual in the centre of his neighbourhood, untilit reaches its maximum, which is coextensive with communality.5

Epstein is anxious to dispel the impression that his version ofminimal religion amounts to pantheism. In his first essay headmits that, potentially, it comes very close indeed to panthe-ism, even – in his words – to ‘a pantheism that borders onatheism’ (see below). I find his explanation of this point espe-cially valuable, for, in further describing minimal religion hegoes on to describe a sensibility which is at one and the sametime religious and aesthetic. His explanation reads as follows:

As minimal religion spreads into the theological field, the specific object oftheology becomes the particular. Each individual and each thing, in its

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singularity and particularity, becomes a kind of revelation about God. Whatwe know about Him better than anything else is that he is One or, perhaps,oneness itself. Hence theology becomes an investigation of the unique, theunrepeatable, which is manifested in every thing as ‘the image and likeness ofGod.’ Certainly this kind of theology runs the risk of becoming a pantheismthat borders on atheism: if God is in everything, then He is in nothing. Min-imalist theology, however, eschews pantheist assumptions. God is not ineverything but in each thing, in the eachness of every thing. He is in that whichdistinguishes one thing fromanother.God is not in the continuity of things butin their discontinuity. It is in separating one thing from another, in grasping itsuniqueness in the universe, that we reveal its theological aspect, its likeness toGod. In ancient Hebrew the very word that bears the concept of the holy,‘kadesh,’ literally means ‘separation’ and distinction.’6

As we shall see, in the longer, second essay Epstein takes up anddevelops the aesthetic strand of reflection to which he alludes sobriefly in the first. Short though it is, the first essay contains aplethora of images designed to convey the spirit of minimalreligion. It is a ‘poor’ religion, being wholly free of possessions,buildings, rituals and doctrines7; what it does have is ‘a rela-tionship with God – which is in the here and now;’8 in Epstein’swords, it ‘begins from zero and has apparently no tradition.’9

Also, it ‘addresses itself to the ironies and paradoxes of Reve-lation.’10 It ‘has no prophets, nor any single Revelation, eitherwritten or oral.’11

A key aspect of Epstein’s minimal religion is that it waspreceded by – and by its very nature it had to be preceded by –the decades-long experience of Soviet mass atheism. If, afterthose seven decades, a theology or religious sensibility has re-emerged in Russia, one is entitled to use the image of resur-rection. Epstein puts it this way:

The new type of spirituality is born from the demise of mass atheism andwas impossible before it. The theology of resurrection presupposes anintensification of faith, a theistic explication and assimilation of atheism, notjust a return to a pre-atheist position.12

Mindful that the first essay was written in 1982, a year whichheld so very little expectation of social change in the SovietUnion, I cite the following lines:


The strength and the weakness of this ‘poor’ religion is in the adverb ‘al-most.’ It has almost no concrete forms of expression, but it participates inalmost everything, providing a meaningful tension to our weakened, igno-minious lives. For, in the face of the general demise of all meaning –pragmatic, aesthetic and ethical – it is this barely radiating religious meaningthat can justify the most elementary acts of existence.13

Epstein reinforces his point by alluding to an even earlier per-iod of material poverty, that is, to the Russia of 1921, and healso introduces, at this point, the subject of poverty of meaning:

In 1921 Osip Mandel’shtam wrote that under post-revolutionary conditionsalmost everyone was unintentionally becoming Christian. The impoverish-ment of material life was such that the only way to live was by equating lifewith spirit ... Mandel’shtam’s diagnosis is correct and penetrating. However,poverty is not only a question of material scarcity, but of a deficit inmeaning. Every object taken from mundane Soviet reality was so hack-neyed, and its meaning impoverished to such a degree of transparency, thatit seemed to radiate with transcendence. Due to the fact that life had lost itsself-sufficient cultural and pragmatic validity, religion did not have to di-vorce itself from life. Simply to live was already an act of faith. Such a faithcould not be eradicated since its temple was in almost every home. And itcould be practised both by those attending the old houses of worship and bythose who came directly to ‘minimal faith.’14

The pared down, minimal religion of which Epstein writes is‘not the last link in the chain of secularization, but, perhaps, thebeginning of a new cycle of religious history.’15 Epstein’s sec-ond essay takes much further the point regarding transition to anew stage of religious history. There he argues that minimalreligion is a direct product of the unprecedented phenomenonof Soviet mass atheism, and, as becomes clear, he traces Sovietmass atheism itself back to the Orthodox Church’s way ofnegative or apophatic expression in relation to God.

Before passing on to the fuller argumentation of the secondessay, two further points need to be made regarding the firstessay. Firstly, Epstein considers nineteenth- and twentieth-century man’s very potent sense of the absence of God, Hisdisappearance, His withdrawal or ‘revelation through non-revelation’ (our sense or experience of God as Deus Abscond-itus). A particularly important aspect of his term ‘minimal

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religion,’ as he applies it to ‘post-atheist’ society, is its capacityto read God’s absence positively:

Post-atheism accepts this ‘disappearance’ of God, but interprets it as a signof His authenticity rather than as evidence of His ‘absence.’16

My second point relates to the very striking two final pages ofEpstein’s original essay on minimal religion: he continues to beconcerned with that which imparts religious meaning to ourwords and our everyday life. He concludes his essay with apowerful metaphor, that of a God listening to us in active si-lence. Here Epstein’s reflections on contemporary forms ofreligion or spirituality reach far beyond the Soviet, purely‘Russian,’ cultural setting. His closing observations address theplight of all generations coming in the wake of Nietzsche’sclaim regarding the ‘death of God.’ Epstein calls us all ‘theorphaned children’ 17 who have been faced with the need tolearn a hard lesson regarding the absence of God. The meta-phor of listening is presented in the following way:

It is not the Word which is holy now, but rather Listening and Hearing. Godhas been silent for many centuries, and because no new verbal revelationsappeared, rumours were generated about His absence or death, providing afoundation for atheism. In the post-atheist era we have begun to understandthat God’s silence is a way of His listening to us, His attention to our words… It is time for human beings to reply to God, to respond to His word. Thisis what constitutes the uniqueness of the current situation. Having lostcontact with the word of God for a long period of time, many people nowfind themselves in the presence of Divine Listening: not loud-voicedprophets speaking in the name of God, but many ordinary people who feelas if Someone were listening to their words, as if they were speaking ‘intoHis ears’ (to use an expression from the Book of Psalms). Hearing is the lastrealm that cannot be colonized by the reifying force of atheism … Minimalreligion has nothing to say on behalf of God, but it is open to and aware ofGod’s hearing. In the face of this hearing, one does not speak about God,one speaks to God.18

Epstein offers post-atheist spirituality as offering a positive,sustaining alternative to the traditional churches and denomi-nations, the churches of God’s voice, as he calls them. Also, hesees in that spirituality a better way forward than is provided by


agnostic, existentialist and atheistic challenges to God’s silence.19

He ends his first essay with the following emphatic affirmationof the significance of that spirituality:

…It is a feeling of responsibility arising from the belief that God is silentbecause He is listening to us. God’s hearing is what gives to our ‘human, alltoo human’ words their ‘minimal’ religious dimension. It is minimal becausethe contents of our words are purely human, articulating the profanity anddullness of everyday life. What imparts a religious meaning to them is nottheir source and contents, the personality of the communicator, but thepersonality of the Addressee of this communication. Not who, but toWhom. God’s capacity and willingness to hear us before the judgment ismade is what gives ‘human’ meaning to God’s silence and religious meaningto our ordinary utterances.20

I have quoted the first essay at some length because it containsin concentrated form so many of the ideas which Epsteinrevisited in the second essay, published seventeen years later.The first essay presents a case for there being, in the late Sovietyears, an intimate and necessary link between minimal religionand the mass atheism which preceded it. The later essay offers ayet larger and more striking (indeed, paradoxical) claim,namely that Soviet mass atheism had its roots and origin inOrthodox theology. In its theology Orthodox Christianitygreatly values the negative way of alluding to God which, Ep-stein holds, amounts to a resistance to the consideration of Hispositive attributes. Theologians of the Orthodox Church havelong felt disposed to keep in mind, and be guided by, negativeformulations of the nature of God. Guided, in large part, by thewritings of Dionysius the Areopagite (as in his The DivineNames), they have felt that in this way they are more reliablyable to suggest the transcendence of God, His radical ‘out-stripping’ of all positive categories and qualities which we mightbe inclined to attribute to Him.21 Epstein considers that inRussia this way of ‘theologising’ acquired a greatly heightenedcultural significance. He assigns to negative theology an abso-lutely decisive influence upon subsequent developments in thereligious life of the Russian people.

Using the cultural paradigm of ‘consciousness’ and ‘theunconscious’ and applying it to the sphere of religious

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phenomena, Epstein’s second essay seeks to establish that whattook place in the Soviet era was a full-scale reversal of thenormal relationship between these two spheres of the psyche.Religious consciousness was repressed and excluded, andit came to occupy the sphere of the unconscious. To quoteEpstein:

What is commonly understood by the term ‘unconscious’ is the sphere ofprimal drives and vital instincts, which the religious consciousness seeks torepress and eliminate. However, what was repressed and excluded duringthe Soviet epoch was precisely religious consciousness, which occupied thesphere of the unconscious in place of the baser instincts of hate, aggression,cruelty and destruction, ousted from it, transformed into consciousness andpromoted into ideological doctrine.22

Epstein sought to investigate the mechanisms at work here, andhe arrived at an explanatory model which assigns a centralshaping role to negative theology. On his account, the way inwhich Russia received negative theology from Byzantium and,particularly, its deep assimilation within the hierarchy of Rus-sian religious values23, actually contributed to the very repres-sion of religious consciousness. Epstein writes:

Under the pressure of censorship – in both the social and psychoanalyticmeaning of the term – the religious unconscious acquired new depth duringthe Soviet period. However, the repression of religious consciousness wasnot imposed from outside alone, by an external force. This repression wasrooted in the very heart of the religious and theological tradition dominantin Eastern Christianity and particularly in Russia. It is by no means anaccident that the huge religious repressions and the rise of mass atheismtook place within this cultural domain. This is because, ever since theByzantine period, Eastern Christianity has been home to the tradition ofapophatic or negative theology.24

Epstein holds that in Russia apophatic theology adopted a veryextreme form which, in time, led to ‘a retrograde renunciationand avoidance of knowledge’ and ‘an anti-intellectual stance’25:

The opposition to knowledge of, and thought about, God – gnoseomachy –drove faith into the unconscious, clearing the way for the conscious cult ofscience, revolution and social ideals … Faith is plunged into the sphere ofnon-knowing about its own subject and about itself, while in atheism this


non-knowing evolves into a militant ignorance and deliberate rejection ofGod. It is in this sense that Soviet atheism can be regarded as the para-doxical development of apophatic theology, as its logical next step, leadingto the erasure of its ‘theistic’ and ‘theological’ components… That whichserves to purify faith in apophatic theology becomes the negation of faith inatheism, and it is difficult to define logically where extreme apophaticismends and nihilism and atheism begin.26

If consciousness operates through the use of positive terms andattributes, then it would seem that negative theology can haveno purchase at all on the conscious mind. In that case, how canand does Epstein defend his claim that in Russia negativetheology exerted so large and decisive an influence? Precisely byasserting that ‘the locus of faith is transferred to the un-conscious, and all positive sources of knowledge are extin-guished and dispersed in its dark abysses.’27

Epstein seeks to support his account of the matter by ref-erence to an eighteenth-century icon depicting St John theEvangelist. The particular icon to which Epstein refers bearsthe title ‘John the Evangelist in Silence.’ With his right handJohn holds open his Gospel at the first page and with his lefthand he makes the sign of silence over his lips. Epstein readsthese gestures in the following way:

… John’s left hand is raised to his lips, as if to make the sign of silence over thewords themselves, sealing them with the mark of the inexpressible. At firstglance the meaning of these gestures might seem contradictory: the right handreveals ‘theWord,’ while the left hand conceals it. But this is the very paradoxof negative theology: it is because ‘the Word was God’ that it must be enun-ciated in silence. All other words may be uttered: only this one mysteriousWord must remain unuttered, through which everything came to be.28

Epstein reminds his readers that John the Evangelist was alsothe author of The Apocalypse and that there, in The Apocalypse,we find not only a foretelling of the end of the created order,but also a foretelling of ‘the extinction of its visible and tangibleforms.’29 This latter point, regarding the extinction of the cre-ated order’s visible and tangible forms, is given fuller treatmentin the third section of Epstein’s essay. It links directly with hisunderstanding of a new post-atheist aesthetic, to which subjectI shall return.

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Drawing on critical reflections in George Florovsky’s classicwork Ways of Russian Theology (Puti russkogo bogoslovija),Epstein suggests Russians took up negative theology in such anextreme way that, in effect, they arrived at the point of anunhealthy ‘anti-theology.’ On his account, in Russia theologyas a discipline was far less valued as an expression of religiousfaith than use of the Jesus Prayer or participation in the DivineLiturgy. Epstein comments:

Even when, on occasion, Russian theology claimed its right to speak aboutGod, it uses as its inspiration the very tradition that denied the possibility ofspeaking about God.30

The burden of Epstein’s thesis is contained in the followingpassage:

We are not in a position to pursue all the lines of development of theapophatic theological tradition, but they very clearly lead us to the Russiannihilism of the nineteenth century and the atheism of the twentieth, in whichnegative theology becomes the negation of theism itself. God is transposedbeyond the region of knowledge as such, and all predicates of being attachedto the notion of God are rejected. This dark and unhealthy side of apo-phaticism has been part of Russian theology throughout its entire history.31

At this point it would be useful for me to mention theremaining claims which Epstein makes, regarding Russianculture and the extent of negative theology’s formative influ-ence upon it. There are three claims:

1. The apophatic approach is perfectly well suited to the reli-gious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism, and inthose traditions it entails neither a flight from knowledge ortruth, nor a rejection of religion as such;32

2. In Christianity there is a complete and problematic dis-junction between negative theology and the theology sur-rounding the Incarnation of Christ, the result of whichdisjunction is that negative theology was bound to give riseto atheism;

3. Apophaticism contains the seed of atheism, but – conversely –atheism also contains the seed of apophaticism. ‘‘That is,atheism retains its own unconscious theology.’’33 ‘The


religious’ makes its presence felt in culture, in a number ofoblique, hidden or partially hidden ways.

The first of these three points is very noteworthy, but it goes farbeyond the scope of the present paper. Epstein mentions thegood ‘fit’ between apophatic reflection and the religious tradi-tions of the Far East principally so as to highlight what hebelieves to be a problematic relationship between apophatictheology and incarnational theology.

Here I will consider Points 2 and 3, starting with Point 3because I can deal with it more briefly. Of the three pointsaddressed by Epstein in this part of his essay, the third onestrikes me as being by far the most convincing. I can veryreadily accept Epstein’s claim that ‘the religious’ makes itselffelt in the very society which had sought so comprehensively toban it. I find myself in full agreement with him when he writes:‘The atheistic society literally seethes with religious allusions,symbols, references, substitutions and transformations.’34 Iremember this very point being addressed by Sergej Averintsevin spring 1996 at a conference in Oxford, where one participantin the discussion referred to the secular nature of Soviet society.Averintsev reacted almost angrily, affirming that the experienceof living in Soviet society in no way resembled that of living in asecular society. He cited two things in support of this: firstly,the prevalence of religious symbols and allusions and, secondly,the absolutization of certain values, even if they were not inthemselves religious values.

The second of the three points listed above is certainly besetwith problems. Discussion of that point alone could fill anentire paper, and it would need a qualified theologian to pro-vide a full refutation of Epstein’s argument regarding the al-leged disjunction or tension between negative theology andincarnational theology. I will confine myself to a few remarkson this point, at the same time expressing my view that on thisparticular point Epstein is fundamentally wrong.

I feel inclined to ask the following: How can one account forthe very emergence and growth of negative theology within theheart of the Christian tradition if it really was as incompatiblewith the Incarnation of Christ as Epstein clearly takes it to be?

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In support of my view that on this specific point Epstein ismistaken I offer three items of evidence. Firstly, MeisterEckhart (c. 1260–1327), whose theology is accepted as one ofthe foremost West European examples of apophatic reflection,uses imagery in his sermons which relies entirely upon theIncarnation of Christ. Indeed, his central metaphor for theprocess of spiritual transformation is incarnational: ‘bringingabout the Eternal Birth of the Son in the soul.’ This incarna-tional language appears in the opening words of the very firstsermon in the three-volume edition of sermons and treatisestranslated by Walshe:

Here, in time, we are celebrating the eternal birth which God the Fatherbore and bears unceasingly in eternity, because this same birth is now bornin time, in human nature. St Augustine says: ‘‘What does it avail me thatthis birth is always happening if it does not happen in me? That it shouldhappen in me is what matters.’’ We shall therefore speak of this birth, ofhow it may take place in us and be consummated in the virtuous soul,whenever God the Father speaks His Eternal Word in the perfect soul.35

Secondly, there is a poem by the poet and priest R.S. Thomas(1913–2000) entitled Via Negativa. It is just one of many poemsexpressing Thomas’s enduring preoccupation with the apo-phatic approach to God. This brief poem clearly expresses anawareness of the resonant absence of God. It reads as follows:

Why no! I never thought other thanThat God is that great absenceIn our lives, the empty silenceWithin, the place where we goSeeking, not in hope toArrive or find. He keeps the intersticesIn our knowledge, the darknessBetween stars. His are the echoesWe follow, the footprints he has justLeft. We put our hands inHis side hoping to findIt warm. We look at peopleAnd places as though He had lookedAt them, too; but miss the reflection.36


If Epstein is inclined to regard negative theology as not beingChristocentric, as being mainly oriented towards the imper-sonal and the abstract realms of speculation, towards anexclusive focus upon what Eckhart calls ‘the Godhead’ ratherthan towards ‘the personal’ and the history of Christ on earth,then Thomas’s poem shows how it is possible to bring togethernegative theology on the one hand and keen awareness of theIncarnation of Christ on the other hand. I am thinking par-ticularly of the words ‘We put our hands in His side, hoping tofind it warm.’

The third item of evidence for the mistakenness of Epstein’sstatements regarding negative theology and incarnational the-ology comes from the theologian and philosopher AleksandrFilonenko of Khar’kov State University. Filonenko has manypositive things to say about Epstein’s two essays and findsdiscussion of matters there very stimulating.37 But he holdsthat, with regard to this particular point, Epstein proceeds onthe basis of a misunderstanding. As Filonenko explains it,Epstein is not comparing like with like. Incarnational theology‘is about’ something other than negative theology. Incarna-tional theology has to do, above all, with God’s action in rela-tion to us, that is, sending His Son down to us. Negativetheology ‘has to do’ with something other than that, in the sensethat the focus of negative theology is, precisely, our action orour understanding, in relation to God. So, if Epstein has detecteda fundamental ‘mismatch’ between these two forms or expres-sions of theology, he is, in a sense, right to do so, inasmuch asthey set out to affirm what are actually different orders of truth.Where he is wrong is in concluding that this ‘mismatch’ con-stitutes a fundamental and damaging flaw at the very heart ofthe Christian tradition. The way in which he contrasts Bud-dhism, Hinduism and Taoism to Christianity on this point andaffirms the coherence and consistency of those religious tradi-tions suggests that Epstein does indeed regard the Christiantradition either has having lost, or else as never having had, thedegree of coherence and inner consistency which he quite cor-rectly discerns within Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism.

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Thus, in the course of examining Epstein’s model of a pro-gression from apophatic theology to mass atheism to minimalreligion, we find that at least one part of his central argument isflawed. Twice he asserts that, given the central beliefs of theChristian tradition, negative theology had to lead to atheism:

Since apophatic theology still remains a Christian theology, it cannot denythe positive manifestation of God in the image of His Son sent in flesh andblood to expiate the sins of man. But precisely because Christian revelationis essentially positive, and even iconic – that is, it is revealed in the fullness ofthe human personality of Christ – the development of negative theology inChristianity had to lead to atheism.38

Within the Christian tradition, issuing from the fullness of the Incarnationof God, the development of the negative moment in the knowledge of thedivine is at first directed towards the cleansing of faith from idolatry andpagan superstitions. However, it ends by falling outside the framework ofthe knowledge of God-man, and leads to atheism.39

The remaining four sections of Epstein’s later essay containnumerous inter-linking ideas and trains of thought, and I shallproceed to discussion of the most noteworthy of those.

In the second section Epstein employs Nikolaj Berdyaev’s no-tion of ‘the New Middle Ages’ (novoe srednevekov’e) and seekssupport from his dual emphasis on historical periods and on theparticular cultural significance of periods of transition. Thissection also links with the fifth and final section, on minimalreligion, where Epstein refers to three significant manifestationsof spirituality in post-atheistic society, as follows:

a/ an Orthodox revival, with the attempted return of Russiansociety to its pre-atheistic beliefs;

b/ neo-paganism;c/ minimal religion.40

According to Epstein, for each of these three strands of spiri-tuality one can find an emblematic figure from the great age ofRussia’s religious philosophers: these are, respectively: PavelFlorensky, Vasilij Rozanov and Nikolaj Berdyaev.41 Interest-ingly, each of these figures is viewed critically, or at least warily,


by mainstream Orthodox theologians and Church leaders. DidEpstein make a deliberate point of choosing emblematic figureswho, from the official viewpoint of the Russian OrthodoxChurch, have, at best, a mixed reputation? In choosing them,was he as much concerned with retrievers of values as he waswith innovators and iconoclasts?

Epstein makes use of Berdyaev’s concept of ‘the New MiddleAges,’ elaborated by him in 1924 in a book bearing that title.42

Epstein considers ‘the New Middle Ages’ in relation to con-temporary secularization and also to atheism. He juxtaposesatheism and secularization in the following way:

The difference lies in the fact that atheism, as a rule, transfers the energyof its negation into the affirmation of a new earthly hierarchy, replacingthe heavenly one … Secularization is slower to come to this process oftransfer of faith and the replacement of its transcendental object. It doesnot use the new copper and bronze idols to cover up the gaping heavens.Rather, it leaves the void empty, without substituting it with a quasi-faith,and through this facilitates the flooding of the unconscious with religiousspirit.43

Epstein endeavours to ‘see how secularization can facilitate aregeneration of faith and its purification from the idols ofconsciousness.’44 He alludes to (and himself seems to value)non-self-affirming and oblique expressions of faith, be it in theliterary works of Mandel’shtam and Pasternak or in the theo-retical reflections of Bakhtin and A.F. Losev. In this connectionhe also invokes the authority of Dietrich Bonhoeffer45 and KarlBarth:

Karl Barth stresses that it is precisely the unconscious nature of religion thatcan serve to assure its authenticity: it is what it is when it does not knowwhat it is.46

For me this brings to mind Lawrence Durrell’s assertion inClea, the final volume of his Alexandria Quartet, first publishedin 1960:

… The struggle is always for greater consciousness. But alas! Civilizationsdie in the measure that they become conscious of themselves. They realise,

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they lose heart, the propulsion of the unconscious motive is no longerthere.47

Like Barth, Durrell is concerned with authenticity in the self-expression of our civilization and in civilizational values andpractices.

For Epstein the stance of deliberate reticence regardingreligious matters has enormous cultural import:

… This tendency to avoid the use of God’s name, this refusal to engage intheological apologetics, declarative confessions of faith and religiousinstruction is characteristic of twentieth-century spirituality.48

Epstein invokes Berdyaev’s thesis that with the twentieth centurythe world has entered ‘a new Middle Ages.’ Following a generalexhaustion or depletion of the values of modern civilization –that is, of humanism, individualism and secular culture – the timehas arrived ‘when the movement away fromGod has ended, andthe movement towards God has begun.’49 Here, in this new anddistinctive cultural period, according to Berdyaev, ‘Knowledge,morality, art, government and the economy should becomereligious, but freely and from inside, not by compulsion and fromoutside.’50 This is strikingly close to the desideratum of VladimirSolov’ev (as set out in his major work on moral philosophyJustification of the Good, 1897, and other earlier works). In effect,Berdyaev simply carries forward Solov’ev’s emphasis upon thewholly free shaping of knowledge, morality, art, government andthe economy by religion, upon the lack of compulsion and thelack of imposition of religion ‘from outside.’

Epstein appears to accept quite uncritically Berdyaev’s sug-gestion that ‘the new Middle Ages’ are characterised by thislack of compulsion. In relation to secularization Epstein makesthe following noteworthy observation:

The ‘new medievalism’ does not suspend the process of secularization, butimparts a religious dimension to it.51

At this point he again takes up the question of the interplaybetween human consciousness and the unconscious, as follows:


The essential point is that the religious dimension alienates itself fromhuman consciousness in the course of secularization, assuming forms of theunconscious which transcend the scope and level of human individuality. Itwas not only individual consciousness that freed itself from religiosity inthe course of modernity. Religiosity itself freed itself from individualconsciousness and now appears as something alienated, issuing from a non-individual unconscious … What should perhaps be the chief concern of thetheology of the ‘new Middle Ages’ is the assimilation of the religious meaningof alienation. [Epstein’s italics].52

The issue becomes this: how to read positively the distancing ofthe Divine from the human. Unfortunately, Epstein’s discus-sion of a transition from ‘the scope and level of human indi-viduality’ to a stage ‘issuing from a non-individualunconscious’ becomes extremely opaque (see pp. 362–365 inparticular). He may, here, have wished to do justice to thoseperiods in human history when collective expressions of reli-gious feeling predominated over individual religious con-sciousness, but this is not at all clear. His argument might havebenefited from a fuller and more explicit discussion of thephenomenon of individualism and, also, a consideration ofwhich particular historical periods he associates with the pre-dominance of individual consciousness in the expression ofreligious feeling, be it in Renaissance art or elsewhere.

Epstein’s appeal to Berdyaev reflects his apparent opennessto the exceedingly schematic readings of cultural history forwhich the latter was known. If this section of his essay is lesslucid than its other sections, this may be as much due toshortcomings in Berdyaev’s account of matters as to short-comings or lack of clarity in Epstein’s own account. He con-cludes this section of his essay with the following extremely richand thought-provoking suggestion regarding alienation:

Perhaps it is time to realise that alienation is not just the guilt and curse ofman, but a form of judgment about him, a form of his preparation for theencounter with God. [My italics – JS]53

Epstein’s first essay on minimal religion contains but an ob-lique, glancing reference to aesthetics. In the third section of hislonger essay he takes up the subject again, and to very potent

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effect. To summarise briefly: Epstein views art and literature asspheres of activity where ‘the religious unconscious can anddoes find expression.’54 On his account, the great and valuablecultural achievement of artists in a post-atheist environment is,precisely, to undermine the notion of the representability ofGod. In that way they successfully counteract our tendency toconfuse God Himself and images of God, to reify those images.Epstein draws attention to the way in which contemporaryartists in Russia – and presumably elsewhere too – deliberatelyemploy trivial and ephemeral motifs because these manifestlycannot be mistaken for images of God. Epstein writes:

Theomorphism reveals and simultaneously conceals the Divine in the object,and through this de-reifies the image of God Himself. This explains why, incontemporary theomorphic art, the objects selected for representation are sofar removed from the Divine – trivia, toys, mechanisms, insects, naturalphenomena with little ‘aesthetic’ appeal, and ‘low’ cultural phenomena.These objects seem to be the least appropriate to ‘bear witness’ to God;rather, they indicate His presence through His absence, as in apophatictheology. In these objects we recognise the traces of God with surprise, butthanks to the irony that accompanies such inadequate representation, we areprevented from confusing these trivial objects with God Himself … Theleast adequate images are the most ‘truthful’ since they bear witness to theimpossibility of representing an authentic image of God.55

Epstein proposes that ‘theomorphism’ is a far more fitting termto apply to ‘the new Middle Ages’ than the terms ‘theocentrism’or ‘theocracy’ since ‘it alone imparts to all things and all createdworks the form of the Other, of the absent God, of the religiousunconscious.’56 He cites Mandel’shtam’s and Pasternak’s po-etry as two particular instances of theomorphism, drawingspecial attention to Pasternak’s poetry ‘… with its emphasis onthe transitional and the miraculous, and its visions of the divinechaos of the universe, where spirituality flashes like sparks fromthe most ordinary things.’57 This echoes an important passagein Epstein’s earlier essay, where he alluded to the ‘eachness’ inevery thing, that which sets the thing apart as unique in theuniverse and valuable, and which thereby reflects its theologicalaspect, its ‘likeness’ to God.


Berdyaev and his concept of ‘the new Middle Ages’ are al-most as prominent in this section of Epstein’s essay as in theprevious section. Like Berdyaev, Epstein is certainly given tocultural analysis on the large scale, for instance in the followingpassage:

… Thus the irony of negativity progressively underlies the order of humanassertions about God. In this sense, the entire history of Western religiositycan be understood as a transition from positivity to negativity, from affir-mative to apophatic modes of theological reflection, increasingly advancingthe least congruent images of God and eventually falling into silence aboutHim. Paganism was the most positive in its identification of God with visibleobjects of nature. Postmodernism embraces the pole of negativity, the ex-treme de-objectification of God.58

According to Epstein, Soviet atheism ‘was still a product of thetransitional period from humanism to the new Middle Ages.’59

And even further back lay the atheism of the nineteenth century:

The atheism of the nineteenth century, inherited by Soviet culture, was stillinfected with the pathos of militant humanism and collectivism. It assailedGod with unseemly questions and demagoguery, which are unacceptable inpolite society. God was asked to account for the injustices of this world, andto suffer and tremble before the mighty attacks of the revolutionary masses,storming the Heavens.60

Epstein notes how, in the new Middle Ages, conscious religi-osity is not given full and free expression:

The very forms of God-Absence are no less strict, coercive and alienatingthan the corresponding forms of God-worship in the ‘old’ Middle Ages.Conscious religiosity is just as vigorously expelled from contemporary cul-ture as the protest against religious dogmas was quashed in the MiddleAges. God has no place in culture. He should not be anywhere – not as aname or a commandment, neither as a prohibition or as an injunction. Anyconsciously religious element in a contemporary text is inevitably taken asdated or rhetorical, or simply as bad taste.61

The inner logic of Epstein’s argument is sustained in his re-marks on the aesthetics of the ‘new Middle Ages:’ artistsdeliberately resort to themes and images, whose very transienceand ephemerality guard against any possible confusion between

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God Himself and images of God. Their consciously ‘low’ cul-tural value itself serves as a guarantor of authenticity. Theartistic image already implies and embraces its own destruction,just as faith immediately implies the possibility of its opposite,non-faith.62 In effect, religion and art, in the new forms whichthey adopt, themselves become ‘part of a discussion at the outerlimits of their meaning, encompassing both atheism and anti-art.’63 Art ‘wrestles with’ that which is unrepresentable, and bydoing so, teaches or otherwise induces us to ‘read between thelines, between the lives.’64 In a wholly unexpected and surprisingway, the following passage from Lawrence Durrell’s Cleaexpresses a religiously non-aligned stance such as Epstein ap-pears to argue for, being both creative and deeply celebratory,and yet appropriately reticent regarding the Author of creation:

… Good art points, like a man too ill to speak, like a baby! But if instead offollowing the direction it indicates you take it for a thing in itself, having somesort of absolute value, or as a thesis upon something which can be para-phrased, surely you miss the point; you lose yourself at once among thebarren abstractions of the critic? Try to tell yourself that its fundamentalobject was only to invoke the ultimate healing silence – and that the sym-bolism contained in form and pattern is only a frame of reference throughwhich, as in amirror, one may glimpse the idea of a universe at rest, a universein love with itself. Then, like a babe in arms you will ‘milk the universe atevery breath!’ We must learn to read between the lines, between the lives.65

In the relatively brief fourth section of Epstein’s 1999 essay hefocuses upon the recent, amply-recorded growth of belief inangels, especially in the United States. It is not a phenomenonlinked exclusively to the late-Soviet and post-Soviet culturalspace. In Epstein’s view a belief in angels exhibits certain featuresof a ‘postmodern’ mindset and, as the conditions for the growthof this belief are favourable, we should not be surprised by it.

Epstein’s thesis, here, is that ‘the figure of the angel is a keyimage in postmodern spirituality’66 and, secondly, that post-modern spirituality itself ‘has escaped monotheistic religiositybut does not dare return to polytheism.’67

Angels occupy an intermediate position between the Divineand the human. They represent the Other (the Stranger), ‘thepurest form of God-presence in the absence of God Himself.’68


Their new cultural significance follows on from the theocen-trism of the Middle Ages and the anthropocentrism ofmodernity, whose most negative fruits were, respectively, theInquisition and Auschwitz. Angels appear to answer a need for

an intermediary link in the spiritual hierarchy, one that is not so other-worldly as to deny the taste for earthly life, but not so worldly as to losetouch with a higher mode of existence.’69

Epstein uses the new growth in the belief in angels as a generalmetaphor for religious belief in its post-modern phase or idiom.The phenomenon of angels, he argues, presents us with a choicebetween religious pluralism and the possibility of a return topolytheism (neo-paganism). First of all, angels suggest a plu-rality of transcendental worlds:

Angelism is a sort of heavenly pluralism. It is the religion of postmodernity,which affirms the multiplicity of equally valid and self-valuable spiritualpathways in place of a single truth and a single ruling canon … Angelism is anew transcendental adventure of the Western spirit, seeking pluralism notonly as an empirical phenomenon in its cultural and political life, but as theultimate revelation of the diversity of spiritual worlds.70

Epstein then considers the following question: if pluralism is adesirable condition, why isn’t a full return to pagan polytheismalso possible? In his answer to that question he stresses thatpaganism is backward-looking, not forward-looking (‘It does notlook ahead, beyond monotheism and atheism’)71 and highlightsthe contrast between a desire for a trace of the Divine on the onehand, and a desire for its fleshly presence, on the other:

Paganism sacralizes the originary forces of nature and can act in concertwith ecological and neo-fascist movements. But it scarcely touches the nerveof the new religiosity, born of the death of God and not of His transfor-mation into Pan or a Naiad. Polytheism cannot bring true satisfaction to thecontemporary mind that quests for a trace of the Divine rather than itsfleshly presence.72

In Epstein’s view openness to a belief in angels is very under-standable in people who have ‘severed [their] connection withthe ground of tradition:’

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The contemporary individual recognizes himself in angels because he, too,has severed his connection with the ground of tradition and is flying inwho-knows-what direction.73

Angels appear as ‘messengers without a Message,’ beings whoseorigin is neither clear, nor susceptible to explanation.74 Epsteinevokes this lack of firm, dependable ground by means of asingularly astute reference to language and grammar:

Angelism can be expressed as the construction of faith in the subjunctivemood, following the demise of faith in the indicative and imperative moods,which stood for what was essentially true and what ought to be. The reli-gious mind in this hypothetical modality thus moves along the thin lineseparating thesis and antithesis, faith and non-faith, avoiding taking sidesand finding their synthesis impossible.75

Whereas Epstein’s reflections on angelism apply to thepostmodern situation generally, the fifth and final section of theessay returns us to the specifics of religious trends incontemporary Russia. This becomes immediately clear in hisdescription of neo-paganism, for there he highlights three sig-nificant elements within the movement: ecological concerns,militant patriotism and ‘Orthodox Christianity interpreted inthe pagan spirit, as a special branch of Christianity, intimatelyconnected to Russia’s state and military apparatus and its God-bearing people.’76

Epstein rehearses some of the arguments set out in his ori-ginal essay of 1982. He also offers us the useful term‘monofideism:’

Atheism had used the diversity of religions to argue for the relativity ofreligion. Consequently, the demise of atheism signalled the return to thesimplest, virtually empty and infinite form of monotheism and monofideism.If God is One, then faith must be one.77

He argues that in time ‘minimal believers’ do tend to join aspecific religious tradition, but they are deeply marked by theirforegoing experience of the void, of having lived in a wastelandor wilderness, an experience which endows them with a spirit ofopenness not available to them elsewhere or by any othermeans:


… After having experienced this resonant space of the void, of the wilderness,of the ‘darkness upon the face of the deep,’ s/he preserves this new feeling ofopenness forever. It is there, in a wasteland of spirit, without any prepara-tions, baptisms and catechisms, that God suddenly grabs hold of him.78

The fertile land/wasteland analogy is also linked by Epstein tothe whole question of the firm demarcation of religious differ-ences and to the deliberate removal of those differences, in thevastly different contexts which Soviet society and post-Sovietsociety rendered necessary:

Just as the division among farmers’ holdings were destroyed duringcollectivization, turning fertile land into wasteland, so the confessionaldivisions were also erased. This prepared the post-Soviet wasteland not onlyfor a revival of the old traditions, but also for a renewal of the religiousconsciousness as such, capable of transcending historically establishedboundaries.79

Just before I come to my conclusion I will mention one featureof post-atheist society which lies outside the range of questionsaddressed by Epstein, namely education and, specifically, reli-gious education. In the two essays which I have examined here,the absence of any discussion of education (apart from onepassing reference) is itself quite striking.

In this final section of his essay Epstein stresses that ‘minimalreligion’ amounts to – or facilitates – trans-denominationalreligious reflection. That type of reflection does seem to accordwith sociological evidence regarding the distrust which so manypeople today feel in relation to organised religion, churchstructures and hierarchies.80 One particular fear which I haverelates to the sphere of education. It might prove to be the casethat, with people’s new readiness and freedom to go beyonddenominational boundaries and to strive for new unity, newtotalities (‘new, non-totalitarian, non-violent totalities’ as Ep-stein puts it),81 education could become the locus for a pro-foundly negative phenomenon. I have in mind religious studiesand theology as academic subjects in higher education. I believethat this new Epsteinian environment could bring with it thedomestication of religious studies and theology, that is to say, adrastic reduction or blunting of their innate capacity to pose

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awkward, insistent and paradigm-challenging questions. It isquite possible that this environment could make for blandnessand lack of substance. Indeed, I believe that the process ofdomestication is already underway. In the course of fieldworkon religious education, which I carried out in the RussianFederation and Ukraine during 1993 and 1994 I found evidenceof the process, and it took three forms:

1. a widespread tendency to use abstract or euphemistic termssuch as ‘common human values’ (obshchechelovecheskietsennosti) rather than to embark on the analysis of explicitlyreligious categories;

2. a marked inclination, on the part of lecturers, to restrictthemselves to methodologies from the social sciences;

3. a concomitant resistance to the idea of treating ‘religiousstudies’ (Russ. religievedenie, Ukr. religieznavstvo) as a fullyfledged subject in the humanities.82

It seems to me that the combined effect of these three specificfactors has already led to the creation of an environment withinRussian and Ukrainian higher education where, in some insti-tutions, open-ended, challenging lines of enquiry are notencouraged. This, I believe, goes directly against the innatecapacity of both religious studies and theology to generatecreative, transformative reflection and to develop soundmethodologies adequate to that task.

CONCLUSION

It seems to me that Mikhail Epstein has very much to say onthe subject of spirituality and religion in present-day Russia,and, clearly, he has long been concerned with the deep-lyingprocesses which bring about certain culturally importantreversals and substitutions, both in values and in practices. Thisin itself would be sufficient reason to read his two essays onminimal religion, even if one doesn’t go along with all of theclaims he makes in them. As it is, I believe that his essays enrichour cultural understanding of Russia in the late-Soviet andpost-Soviet periods. Drawing his evidence from the history of


religion, from theology, history and literature, Epstein hassought to give us a composite picture of the spiritual strivings ofcitizens who grew up and were educated in a certain, specificsociety, whose very way of functioning placed people inhistorically unprecedented conditions, conditions which stillrequire and merit analysis. The Bolshevik experiment in massatheism was unprecedented, especially in terms of its scale andduration. Epstein insists on its uniqueness, and he makes agenerally convincing case for that.

NOTES

1 Epstein, Mikhail. N., Genis, Alexander A., Vladiv-Glover, SlobodankaM., Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture(Berghahn Books, New York/Oxford, 1999): see Epstein, ‘Minimal Reli-gion,’ pp. 163–171, and ‘Post-Atheism: From Apophatic Theology to‘‘Minimal Religion’’’ pp. 345–393.2 Epstein, p. 381.3 p. 387.4 pp. 163–164.5 p. 167.6 p. 168.7 pp. 164–165.8 p. 165.9 p. 165.

10 p. 165.11 p. 169.12 p. 164.13 p. 166.14 p. 166.15 p. 164.16 p. 165. On this point, see also: Boeve, Lieven, Interrupting Tradition: AnEssay on Christian Faith in a Postmodern Context (Louvain, Peeters Press/W.B. Eerdmans, 2003), ‘Louvain Theological and Pastoral Monographs,’No. 30 : ‘… It is striking, moreover, that the negative is no longer associatedexistentially with the dark night of the modern man and woman who [are]desperately in search of meaning. God’s very incomprehensibility is nowvalued as a positive element.’17 p. 164.18 pp. 169–170.19 p. 170.20 p. 170.

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21 On negative theology see: Lossky, Vladimir, Theologie Negative et Con-naissance de Dieu chez Maitre Eckhart (Paris, J. Vrin, 1960); Sutton,Jonathan, The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov: Towards aReassessment (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press/New York, St. Martin’s Press,1988), pp. 11–14; Turner, Denys, The Darkness of God: Negativity inChristian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Boeve, Lieven,‘Negative Theology: God’s Interruption of Christian Master Narratives,’chapter VIII in Boeve, L., Interrupting Tradition, pp. 147–162.22 Epstein, pp. 345–346.23 p. 349.24 p. 347.25 p. 351.26 pp. 351/353.27 p. 348.28 p. 349.29 p. 348.30 p. 349–350.31 p. 351.32 p. 355.33 p. 355.34 p. 355.35 Sermons and Treatises of Meister Eckhart, translated by Maurice O’C.Walshe, 3 vols., (Shaftesbury, Dorset/Rockport, Massachusetts, ElementBooks Ltd, 1987) Vol. I, p. 1.36 Thomas, R.S., in his collection of poems H’m, (Basingstoke, MacmillanPress, 1972),16. Note, also D.Z. Phillips’s study R.S. Thomas: Poet of theHidden God (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1986).37 In conversations with the present author.38 Epstein, pp. 353–354.39 p. 355.40 pp. 380–381.41 p. 387.42 Berdyaev, Nikolaj A., Novoe srednevekov’e: Razmyshleniya osud’be Rossiii Evropy (The New Middle Ages: Reflections on the Destiny of Russia andEurope), 1923. Given as 1924 by Epstein: see his Endnote 32.43 Epstein, p. 357.44 p. 357.45 p. 361.46 p. 358.47 Durrell, Lawrence, Clea, (fourth novel of The Alexandria Quartet) fromChapter III, ‘My Conversations with Brother Ass’ (London, Faber andFaber, 1968 edition), pp. 76448 Epstein, p. 359.49 p. 362.50 p. 362.


51 p. 362.52 pp. 362–363.53 p. 365.54 pp. 355–356.55 pp. 367–368.56 p. 366.57 p. 367.58 p. 368.59 pp. 369–370.60 p. 369.61 p. 370. See also, Sutton, Jonathan, Traditions in New Freedom: Chris-tianity and Higher Education in Russia and Ukraine Today (Nottingham,Bramcote Press, 1996), pp. 76–77 and 92, citing Ioann Ekonomtsevand Borys Gudziak, representatives of the Russian Orthodox and Greek-Catholic communities respectively, on the need for strengthening the bondsbetween religion and contemporary culture.62 Epstein, p. 371.63 p. 372.64 Durrell, Lawrence, Clea, p. 763.65 Clea, p. 763 Note also: George Steiner views us as ‘guests of creation,’ arole which obliges us to question what we find as well as to enjoy andcelebrate it in the spirit of Lawrence Durrell. The final two sentences ofSteiner’s Grammars of Creation read as follows: ‘We have long been, I be-lieve we still are, guests of creation. We owe to our host the courtesy ofquestioning.’ (London, Faber and Faber, 2001), pp. 28166 Epstein, p. 372.67 p. 375.68 p. 372.69 p. 373.70 p. 375.71 p. 376.72 p. 376; see also p. 380.73 p. 376.74 p. 377.75 p. 377.76 p. 380.77 p. 386.78 p. 386.79 pp. 381–382.80 On the Church as ‘‘the least distrusted’’ institution in post-Soviet society,see Sutton, Jonathan, ‘‘Institut naymen’shego nedoveriya,’’ in NG-Religii,the Religion Supplement of the national newspaper Nezavisimaja gazeta, 29May, 1997, p. 2.81 Epstein, p. 389.82 Sutton, Traditions in New Freedom, (1996), especially chapters 2 and 3.

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Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies,School of Modern Languages and CulturesUniversity of LeedsLS2 9JT, LeedsUKE-mail: [email protected]


Sutton - Epstein's Interpretation of Religion

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