The Concept of Perfection in Lev Karsavin’s Religious Metaphysics

ABSTRACT

This article examines the concept of the perfect, a key idea in Lev P. Karsavin’s metaphysics that largely determines his understanding of personhood and its ontological status. The associated concept of the perfect person develops throughout the entire philosophical period of the thinker’s work, from his Philosophy of History to his treatise “On Perfection,” written in the last year of his life in the Abez’ camps. In this article, I argue that the concept of perfection is the main structural element in Karsavin’s religious–philosophical system, making it ontologically full and complete. I believe the Christian idea of the perfection of man in God, philosophical variations of which Karsavin finds in Nicholas of Cusa’s system of total unity and Vladimir Solovyov’s idea of Godmanhood, is both the initial intellectual intuition and the ontological premise of the thinker’s metaphysical constructions. His religious–philosophical work has a continuity with Russian culture’s spiritual tradition, where patristic thought of man considers the ideal to be the spiritual transcendence of the person in his striving toward the Perfect God. This evangelic idea turns out to be the central binding element both of Karsavin’s Christian personology and of his metaphysics of history, which is resolved in a metaphysical vein.

KEYWORDS:

• concept of perfection
• improvement
• God
• man
• personhood
• transcendence
• Christian personalism
• metaphysics of history

Notes

Notes have been renumbered for this edition.—Ed.

1. V.S. Solov’ev [Solovyov], Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 8 (St. Petersburg: Knigoizdatel’skoe Tovarishchestvo “Prosveshchenie,” 1914), p. 548.

2. Three words etymologically related in Russian are woven throughout this article, and especially throughout Karsavin’s work: sovershenie (perfection), usovershenie (perfecting), and usovershenstvovanie (the process of perfecting, rendered here as “improvement”). The need for a different term in English requires losing some of Karsavin’s semantic intensity.—Trans.

3. L.P. Karsavin, “O sovershenstve,” trs. A. Kovtun, Boloslovskie trudy, 2004, vol. 39, p. 293. The treatise was originally written in Lithuanian. S.S. Khoruzhii was responsible for publication and commentary on the first translation from the Lithuanian.

4. His student and executor, A.A. Vaneev, testified to Karsavin’s ongoing creative work at the camp. See A.A. Vaneev, Dva goda v Abezi. V pamiat’ o L.P. Karsavine (Brussels: Zhizn’ s Bogom, 1990).

5. Khoruzhii [Horujy] notes that the philosophical–theological treatise occupies a special place in Karsavin’s legacy. It is a “thoughtful, concise presentation of the most important ideas of his metaphysics, but from a new angle that we do not find in his earlier works: here, the concept of perfection, perfectio, is made the supreme concept, or principle, of his entire philosophical system.” See Karsavin, “O sovershenstve,” p. 270. On the particular features of Karsavin’s personalism, see also Yu.B. Melikh, Personalizm L.P. Karsavina i evropeiskaia filosofiia (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2003).

6. Karsavin, “O sovershenstve,” p. 290.

7. Ibid., p. 292.

8. See O.T. Ermishin, “Istoriosofiia L.P. Karsavina: mezhdu istoriei kul’tury i metafizikoi,” Vestnik Moskovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta kul’tury i iskusstv, 2019, no. 4 (90; July–August), pp. 29–36; Iu.N. Mal’gina, “‘Ideal’noe srednevekov’e’ L.P. Karsavina: medievistika i filosofiia istorii,” Vestnik Rossiiskogo universiteta druzhby narodov, Series: Filosofiia, 2012, no. 4, pp. 161–169.

9. V.I. Povilaitis, “Filosofiia vseedinstva: ot Solov’eva k Karsavinu,” Solov’evskie issledovaniia, 2003, Vol. 7: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “Rossiia i Evropa v XXI veke i nasledie V.S. Solov’eva (k 150-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia), 11–12 aprelia 2003 g.,” pp. 102–103.

10. Karsavin, “O sovershenstve,” p. 286.

11. L.P. Karsavin, Sv. otsy i uchitelia Tserkvi (raskrytie Pravoslaviia v ikh tvoreniiakh) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo MGU, 1994), p. 13.

12. Ibid., p. 15.

13. L.P. Karsavin, “Pis’mo A Vetteru. 16 aprelia 1940 g.,” in N. Gavriushin, “Perepiska A. Vettera s L. Karsavinym,” Simvol, 1994, no. 31, p. 159.

14. O.A. Zhukova, Filosofiia russkoi kul’tury. Metafizicheskaia perpsektiva cheloveka i istorii (Moscow: Soglasie, 2017), p. 16.

15. A.M. Panchenko, Ia emigriroval v Drevniuiu Rus’. Russiia: istoriia i kul’tura (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo zhurnala “zvezda,” 2005), pp. 21–23; G.V. Florovskii, Puti russkogo bogosloviia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1983), p. 1.

16. V.V. Zen’kovskii, Sobranie sochinenii: v 2 t., vol. 2: O pravoslavii i religioznoi kul’tury (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2008), pp. 104, 109–123; V.N. Zakharov, “Pravoslavnye aspekty etnopoetiki russkoi literatury,” in Evangel’skii tekst v russkoi literatury XVIII-XX vekov, vol. 2 (Petrozavodsk, 1998), p. 6.

17. See S. Duglas, “K voprosu o filosofskikh istokakh bespredmetnogo iskusstva,” in Malevich. Khudozhnik i teoretik (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1990), pp. 57–58; D.V. Sarab’ianov, “Russkii avangard pered litsom religiozno-filosofskoi mysli,” Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia, 1993, no. 1, pp. 7–19.

18. I.A. Il’in has emphasized the unique features of the experience of aesthetic and moral comprehension of Christian truths in Russian culture. See I.A. Il’in, Sobranie sochinenii: v 10 t., vol. 6, book III, pp. 60–61. D.S. Likhachev discussed this in a similar way. See D.S. Likhachev, “Rossiia,” On zhe. Vospominaniia. Razdum’ia. Raboty raznykh let: v 3 t. vol. 2 (St. Petersburg: ARS, 2006), pp. 19–20.

19. We can clearly see this trend in religiously oriented or “theurgical” aesthetics. See V.V. Bychkov, Russkaia teurgicheskaia estetika (Moscow: Ladomir, 2007), p. 7.

20. L.P. Karsavin, Filosofiia istorii (St. Petersburg: Komplekt, 1993), pp. 88–89.

21. Ibid., p. 89.

22. O.A. Zhukova, Opyt o russkoi kul’ture. Filosofiia istorii, literatury i iskusstva (Moscow: Soglasie, 2019), p. 211.

23. Among the nearly two dozen works written in Abez’, this text is distinguished by its calm narrative tone, close to the style of Latin treatises, and by its discursive elaboration of arguments based on Western scholastic and early Renaissance philosophical tradition that Karsavin knew very well.

24. Karsavin, “O sovershenstve,” p. 284.

25. Ibid. (“Diminish,” umalit’sia, is also the word used, in its noun form umalenie, in the Church Slavonic translation of kenosis.—Trans.)

26. “Vision,” uzrenie, is an implied act of the eyes, while “speculation,” literally umozrenie or “mind-vision,” necessarily involves the mind.—Trans.

27. See P.N. Miliukov, Glavnye techeniia russkoi istoricheskoi mysli (St. Petersburg, 1913), p. 327; M.O. Gershenzon, “P.Ia. Chaadaev. Zhizn’ i myshlenie,” in M.O. Gershenzon, Izbrannoe. Griboedovskaia Moskva, vol. 1 (Moscow: 2000), p. 421.

28. V.V. Zen’kovskii, Istoriia russkoi filosofii: v 2 t. (Leningrad: EGO, 1991), vol. 2, part 2, pp. 150–151.

29. L.P. Karsavin, O lichnosti (Kaunas: Fakul’tet Gumanitarnykh Nauk, 1929), p. 2.

30. Ibid., p. 143.

31. Ibid., p. 77.

32. Ibid., p. 170.