Towards the Spiritual Convergence of America and Russia: American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community, and the Potent Alchemy of National Characteristics

Kireyevsky did not simply reject the West [146]; indeed, he revered it in many ways. But he did not feel that Western Man, Western society or Western civilization was a healthy example for Russia to try to follow. (Here he differed strongly, of course, from the so-called “Westerners” in Russia.) Russia must pursue its own unique historical direction of development. As a culture and civilization — with its own traditions, customs, moral order, its own history, and individual and social-psychology; it must look to itself for answers to the problems and conditions of man and civilization. Russia can learn, selectively, to benefit from ways in the West; but it must try to avoid the decay and degradation present in Western culture, morality and society, which they saw to be due to the lack of those very social principles which they claimed to find prevalent in their own culture and history (e.g. the traditional, communal “mir”).

The Slavophile image of society was deeply imbued with the Christian Orthodoxy of the East, from both the Second and Third Romes. [147] This “vertical”-veridical comprehension of Man, society and life — one they held to permeate the best of the traditions, history and life of the people of Russia — contributed much towards distinguishing Russia from the West. In holding such a religious interpretive position, as an essential aspect of their idea of Russia’s uniqueness, the Slavophiles could not but find deep social malaise in the growing secularity in the life of the West.

It is important to recognize — especially in regard to the arguments in this work — that when Kireyevsky, and others with views similar to his, sought to define their uniqueness; they looked especially towards a tradition, a heritage of religion, which was itself much older than even the Slavic settlement of that region eventually called “Russia”. In turning toward the religious, the Orthodox life of “Holy Russia” — in attempting to define their distinctiveness from Europe — they were not embracing some merely racial, ethnic or national characteristics. They were reaching, for self-definition, into a religious, “vertical” comprehension of human existence; one which was far older than even their own peoples’ historical existence. In this sense they were — and so it was seen by some of them-, as “Holy Russia”, as Orthodox Russia, the special bearer of this profound religious tradition. By defining themselves with these ideas, which reached back beyond themselves into the deepest spiritual sources and heritage of Occidental Man, they were thereby binding their own souls, history, and future destiny, to that of all the other societies, civilizations and cultures whose spiritual traditions sourced in the same religion of Man as in Christianity. In this way they were (and are) relatives, kinsmen, to the secular heirs of Medieval Christendom, which faced them in the peoples and cultures of the nineteenth century West.

To the degree that “vertical” answers are sought — as they are in this work — in this hyper-“horizontal” age, we must consider how Russia, the peoples and nations of Europe, and the Americas, are kindred, spiritually, to this deep, common heritage of Man in Christianity.