After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russians, in search of an identity to unify their still vast country, are reevaluating a movement of the 1920s, Eurasianism. Why is Eurasianism attracting Russian attention again today? The main reason may be that Eurasianism, in designing an idealistic State system, took into account the unique spiritual, cultural and psychological factors of Russian history. This paper aims to make clear the spiritual foundations of Eurasianist thought.
Eurasianism views the Orthodox Church as a spiritual foundation able to unite the whole Eurasian world. However, could the Orthodox Church really provide a common spiritual foundation for the vast cultural range of the various Ural-Altaic ethnics? To this question Eurasianists answer: “The ideal of Orthodoxy is a
symphonic, organic and sobor-like unity of various religions.” The expression
sobor-like unity derives from the Russian theological term
sobornost, which signifies the central concept of the Orthodox Church, whereby the individual shares corporate life and unity, while retaining personal freedom.
With this concept of
sobornost they insist that the aim of Orthodoxy is not to erase the individuality of each pagan religion and Russianize it, but to create a symphonic world made up of various sounds. In support for this position, they say that there exists some similarity between the spirituality of Orthodoxy and some Eurasian pagan religions, including Buddhism.
This similarity could be summed up in terms of the contiguity of the pantheism of religions such as Buddhism and the panentheistic tendency of Orthodoxy. Panentheism is the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the entire universe. The Orthodox Church, which does not draw a sharp boundary between Nature and Grace, (a characteristic marvelously described in the words of Elder Zosima in the
The Brothers Karamazov, ) is indeed panentheistic.
When Eurasianists explain the peculiarity of their own culture and of the State system plan based on it, they use the key-concept
symphonic personality (lichnost) .
Lichnost is often translated as
personality or
individual, but this notion, which is obviously influenced by Orthodox ideas, is quite different from the usual Western meaning of
individual. In Orthodoxy
lichnost (the real personal Self) can be achieved only when it is opened to the
whole, so it does not oppose the
whole, rather it is enriched by it.
The society of symphonic personalities is an idealistic organic united whole of plurality. However, Eurasianists also insist that it is a society where various levels of symphonic personalities are
hierarchically united. This suggests that the smallest unit of
lichnost, which is individual, might have the least autonomic value of itself. Berdyaev severely criticized the idea of symphonic personality, considering it a metaphysical foundation for human slavery.
When we read the Eurasian project of a new State governing system named“iheocracy, ”we have to agree with Berdyaev's criticism of the“utopian etatism.”This is because“iheocracy”reminds us of theocracy on the one hand, and of the Soviet totalitarian system on the other.
The idea of the symphonic personality comes from the idealism of
sobornost and the tradition of philosophy of Unitotality. Eurasianists, in order to overcome the defects of both individualism and totalitarianism, eagerly searched for the symphonic unitotal community, but we have to say that the too hasty attempt to realize it“here and now”on earth, without due consideration of the moral cultivation of each individual, generates a serious danger of Utopianism.
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