N.A. Berdyaev and the Intellectual History of Orthodoxy: Preliminary Observations

Abstract

The article develops methodological foundations for the academic study of the relationship of N. A. Berdyaev’s philosophy with Orthodox theology and the Orthodox Church. It is demonstrated that the existing research on the topic “Berdyaev and Orthodoxy” due to the lack of a refl exive development of research methodology tend to be reduced to evaluating Berdyaev’s position based on a scholar’s religious views. On the contrary, a proposed comprehensive approach of intellectual history allows working with the history of the discourse about Orthodoxy not normatively, but descriptively. Within the framework of this approach, the word “Orthodoxy” can be considered, in terms of H. Lübbe’s idea of “struggle for naming”, as a concept the meaning of which is a matter of a political struggle. In this case, Berdyaev’s texts, in which the philosopher uses different ways to talk about Orthodoxy, can be regarded as not contradictory and ‘paradoxical’, but as a set of the philosopher’s discursive strategies used by him in the framework of the ideological struggle within the discourse about religion.