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Deification in Russian Religious Thought and the Limits of the Human
19 October 2020, 6:00 pm
Join us for this event with Dr Ruth Coates as part of the Russian Studies Seminar Series
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
SSEES
Location
-
Online
Amidst the revolutionary upheavals in early 20th-century Russia, religious thinkers were inspired by the concept of deification in their efforts to articulate a hopeful human response to the looming prospect of cultural, political, and social collapse. They sought to re-imagine this ancient doctrine, elaborated by the Greek Fathers of the Christian Church, for their own times, and creatively applied it to a range of spheres of human activity, including politics, economics, creative endeavour, and personal conduct. The question at the centre of their project is a compelling one: what are the limits of the human? Their work engages with this vital question from the positive and the negative point of view: human potential, on the one hand, and human limitations, on the other. In her presentation Ruth Coates will explore the idea of deification in both aspects, drawing on Greek patristic theology and the nineteenth-century philosophical trends that shaped the way in which Russian thinkers received deification.
This event will be held on zoom, registration is free but essential.
About the Speaker
Dr Ruth Coates
at University of Bristol,
About the speaker
Dr Ruth Coates (BA Modern Languages, Bristol; DPhil Oxford) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Russian Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. Her work focuses on the interface between Russian religious culture and Russian thought. She is the author of Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author (CUP, 1998) and co-editor of The Emancipation of Russian Christianity (Edwin Mellen, 1995) and Landmarks Revisited: The Vekhi Symposium 100 Years On (Academic Studies Press, 2013). Her most recent book, Deification in Russian Religious Thought: Between the Revolutions, 1905-1917 (OUP, 2019) is a study of the reception of the Greek patristic doctrine of deification in late imperial Russian religious thought, with a focus on works by D. Merezhkovsky, N. Berdiaev, S. Bulgakov, and P. Florensky.