Russia's Two Enlightenments: The Philokalia and the Accommodation of Reason in Ivan Kireevskii and Pavel Florenskii

The article examines key works by the Russian religious thinkers Ivan Kireevskii and Pavel Florenskii in the context of the challenges posed by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the traditional sacramental-mystical foundations of Russian Orthodox belief. It argues that, in contradistinction to attempts by some Church intellectuals to accommodate Enlightenment ideas and values within traditional Orthodox belief along the lines of the Western religious Enlightenment, others sought to challenge religious rationalism and defend a distinctive concept of Orthodox Enlightenment by drawing on the theology of Orthodox mysticism as articulated in the ascetic literature collected in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century editions of the Philokalia. Kireevskii and Florenskii are seen as the most prominent representatives of this trend.