Theology Bridging East and West During the “Long Nineteenth Century"

Semyon Frank (1877–1950) is considered by Vasily Zenkovsky to be Russia’s greatest philosopher and played an important role in introducing Friedrich Schleiermacher to Russia by translating his work Über die Religion. Although Frank’s ties to Eastern Orthodoxy and German Idealism are important for understanding his anthropology, his intellectual connection with Schleiermacher is essential for grasping certain aspects of his thought. This paper argues that Frank’s later works show significant intellectual links with Schleiermacher’s theological anthropology. His Russian translation of Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion influenced his later ideas about human identity, religious consciousness, and aesthetics—elements he saw as vital to understanding the core of humanity. This paper aims to explore the flow of ideas from the West to the East, particularly those originating from German theologians such as Schleiermacher.

This paper examines the reception of Friedrich Nietzsche in the Russian religious philosophy of S. L. Frank, arguing that the Christian theological transformation of Nietzschean themes—such as individual freedom, heroism, self-overcoming, and moral creativity—played a formative role in Frank's account of bogochelovechestvo (Godmanhood) and its function in constituting human personality. Building on existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s reception by Russian thinkers such as Berdyaev, the paper traces how Frank’s thought Christianized Nietzsche’s Übermensch and incorporated it into a Solovievan metaphysics of divine-human communion, giving the idea new spiritual significance in relation to the Orthodox doctrine of deification/theosis. The paper argues that recovering this Nietzschean current in Frank’s thought offers resources for developing a more robustly individualist Orthodox personalism and linking individual agency to deification. 

The nineteenth century witnessed a renewed turn toward ecclesiology in both Roman Catholic and Orthodox theology. In this shift, the Church was understood not as one aspect of Christian life but as the primary locus of Christian existence and theological tradition. This paper places Alexei Khomiakov and Johann Adam Möhler in dialogue. I highlight their shared conviction that the Church is an organism of living unity rather than a rational mechanism. Through Khomiakov’s sobornost and Möhler’s Einheit, both theologians ground ecclesiology christologically and present the Church as the living union of Christ’s Body. I examine their account of the relationship between the Church’s historical visibility and its participation in the Mystical Body, noting their distinction—without separation—between visible and invisible expressions. I argue that their parallel visions anticipate ressourcement ecclesiology, while also exhibiting romantic and universalizing tendencies that shape their legacy in later thinkers such as Florovsky and de Lubac.

This paper investigates the relationship between Schelling’s philosophy and Russian personalism. By examining Pavel Florensky’s formulation of personhood, I will demonstrate how the language of Orthodox spirituality, with particular focus on asceticism, was key for the critical appropriation of Schelling’s thought. Both Schelling and his Orthodox readers were keen to uphold an account of the person as irreducible to the thing-like categories of concepts. But, I argue, Florensky dramatically reconfigured Schelling’s positive solutions by appealing to a theological conception of God’s essence as love and an understanding of asceticism as the practice by which one comes to appropriate this loving essence as the very content of one’s own life. By tightly identifying this kind of ascetic practitioner with the “restrainers of rationality,” Florensky transposed Schelling’s personalist insights into an Orthodox Christian key.