God-Seeking, God-Building, and the New Religious Consciousness

Abstract

While the Russian Orthodox Church provided a distinct and oppositional pole to Lenin’s atheistic materialism, the tension between religion and modernity played itself out more ambiguously among Russian intelligentsia circles. God-seekers, often adherents of what was at the time called the ‘New Religious Consciousness’ and what would later be reconstituted as the ‘Russian Religious Renaissance’, moved from secular vantage points to dialogue with, and (for some) acceptance of, a religious worldview. Meanwhile, a variety of Bolshevik luminaries, including Alexander Bogdanov, Anatolii Lunacharskii, and V. A. Rudnev (aka Bazarov), collected at Maksim Gor’kii’s villa on Capri and came to represent a more decidedly atheistic perspective. It employed heavy religious symbolism and reinterpretation and became known as God-building. These two perspectives emerged as competing interpretations of the interplay between religion and modernity before the revolution. Only later, during the post-revolutionary period, were they reified as antithetical positions—first by émigré philosophers, then by Cold War theorists. This trajectory followed Nikolai Berdiaev’s assertion that Russian revolutionary thought contained deeply religious roots. However, God-building and God-seeking can also be imagined as creative attempts to combine religion and modernity, which inhabit a spectrum between the poles of established religion and atheistic materialism.