On Spiritual Unity

On Spiritual Unity: A Slavophile Reader

This unique volume gathers together for the first time the religious and philosophical writings of the founders of Russian religious philosophy, Aleksei Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky. Both began their intellectual careers in the literary world during the 1820s. Khomiakov was for many years best known as a poet of the Pushkin school, while Kireevsky was well known as an original literary critic. The texts collected here make available to Western readers two of Russia’s great gifts to world thought: the philosophical concepts of sobornost (community, universality, wholeness, ecumenicity) and integral knowledge, which overcomes the subject/object dichotomy, making sobornost possible. Based on the primacy of the heart, the spiritual wholeness of the human being, and the cognitive will, integral knowing moves beyond rationality to union with the object of knowledge in knowing. On Spiritual Unity provides not only a fascinating introduction to Russian religious philosophy, but more than that a profound, meditative text for anyone concerned with human and spiritual unity. Also included in this collection are two responses to Slavophile ideas by the prominent Russian philosophers Pavel Florensky and Nikolai Berdiaev.

About the Author

Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov was a Russian theologian, philosopher, poet and amateur artist. He co-founded the Slavophile movement along with Ivan Kireyevsky, and he became one of its most distinguished theoreticians. His son Nikolay Khomyakov was a speaker of the State Duma.

Robert Bird (1969-2020) was professor of Russian literature and film at the University of Chicago. He was the author of books on Fyodor Dostoevsky, Viacheslav Ivanov, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and published widely on the aesthetics of Russian modernism.