The idea of god-building in the history of Russian thought

Abstract

The article reviews the idea of God-building in the ranks of the Bolshevik party in the early twentieth century, as well as in Russian thought. The main principles of this idea are atheism, humanism, and rationalism. For the first time God-building is analyzed not only as innerparty strife, but as a possible way to solve the traditional puzzles of God-world, transcendentimmanent, and religious-social relationships. On the one hand, the context for its emergence was social Christianity (as a compromise of the God-world problem), and on the other,the number of attempts by certain Narodniks to employ the religious form of cognition for the liberation movement. The rise of God-building and related ideas is directly connected with the extraordinary social circumstances of the early twentieth century in Russia (a decade of Narodniks, the revolutionary situation of the beginning of the century, and the 1905 revolution), when secular humanism was especially popular. The article analyses the philosophical foundations and main principles (atheism, scientism, and egalitarianism) of the “New Religion” of the prominent Narodnik Bervi-Flerovskii, who is considered the direct ancestor of God-building ideas that he proposed as a mindset for those who support progressive development in Russia. Further, a distinction between Bervi-Flerovskii’s “philosophy of communism” and God-building of Gorkii and Lunacharskii is emphasised. The assertion is that the Godbuilding ideas of Gorkii and Lunacharskii revealed the pseudo-religious content of Marxism.