printThe 'Sobornost':
from the History of Russian Religious Social Thought
Golovic R.
Ph.D. Assist. Prof., Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Montenegro, Niksic, Montenegro madjo.golovic@gmail.com
Golovic R. The 'Sobornost': from the History of Russian Religious Social Thought. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2020. No 5. P. 121-125
The principle of ‘sobornost’ expresses the syncretic and organic union of freedom and unity in communication between people, as well as their attitude towards society, nature, God and the world as a whole, and it essentially determines the Russian Orthodox culture. The spirit of ‘sobornost’ represents the inner harmonious unity and communication of personality based on love. It is the guarantee of the personality’s autonomy and the saving corrective to each non-blessed and totalitarian pretension of the community (collective, state, and society) to depersonalize and subjugate it. As a result of such spiritual experience, the Russian culture avoided the extremes of individualism and collectivism that form the core of Western rationalist culture to which the principle of ‘sobornost’ remained alien. The perspective of ‘sobornost’ is the key to understanding the Russian religious, artistic, philosophical and sociological tradition. The idea of ‘sobornost’ is a general metaphysical principle of not only thinking, singing and acting but also conditio sine qua non of the knowledge, morals, and faith of the Russian person. The intention to view the attitude of a person towards God and his/her position in the cosmos in a complete way as the unity in diversity (the ideal of cosmic ‘sobornost’) and the tendency to unite truth, goodness and beauty, knowledge and faith, thoughts and feelings synthetically and concretely (whole spirit, believing opinion and integral knowledge) represent the leitmotif of all spiritual creativity, beginning with Metropolitan of Kiev Hilarion, then Andrei Rublev, Pushkin, Khomyakov, Kireyevsky, Dostoyevsky, Tyutchev, Solovyov, Berdyaev, S. Trubetskoy, Frank, Sorokin, Ilyin, Panarin, and Semushkin.
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