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C H A P T E R T H R E E Bogovidenie Orthodox Vision and the Odes A fundamental structural problem of monotheism concerns the knowability of God. If God is by definition a perfect and absolute being, existing on a transcendent level that is inaccessible to human beings, how can He be known or communicate with us? On the one hand, there are the various miraculous forms of revelation, either through special intermediaries (angels, messengers, prophets, or, like Jesus, an incarnation into human flesh) or via more or less direct encounters, through natural or supernatural phenomena (floods, pillars of fire, burning bushes, dreams, visions, special signs) and God’s direct speech. However, apart from miraculous revelations of transcendent truth, how may this truth be known in a world that in the eighteenth century came increasingly to be seen as ruled by fixed, impersonal laws of nature that, by definition, exclude the very possibility of the miraculous? The focus of the chapters that follow is an exploration of the various Eastern Orthodox approaches to this problem that underlay Russian attitudes toward sight. Often in Orthodoxy, the divine is revealed or described in terms of vision. The very word for theology—bogoslovie, literally, “words about God”—may sometimes be replaced by bogovidenie, “vision of God” or “divine sight.”1 In various trends in Orthodoxy as well as in their reflections in secular literature, the character of God-vision may differ significantly; these are not necessarily exclusive types of seeing, but often imply different levels of knowing, and in literary terms are connected to different genres and their attendant philosophical positions. One of the most striking aspects of Lomonosov’s odes, something that led the way for eighteenth-century Russian culture as a whole, is their overriding optimism, an overpowering image of Russia’s new and anticipated Bogovidenie 65 greatness, which, as explored in the previous chapter, was expressed in terms of looking and being seen. The odes’ jubilation embraced not only Russia’s visible entry “onto the stage of political peoples,” but also its acquisition of a “style,” a voice, a literature, and even of existence itself. Odes replayed and amplified the revelatory core of the Petrine scenario, which recalled Russia’s conversion to Christianity and the creation of mankind “from nonexistence” in Genesis. This ocularcentric faith stemmed from the odes’ profound roots in the Orthodox tradition, which was active on deep levels of cultural memory and value-producing cultural mechanisms. In theological terms, the odes reiterate the bliss of divine revelation. Lomonosov’s odes are not only full of references to the Bible and other sacred Christian texts, but also are arguably deeply indebted to mystical Orthodox thought concerning the nature of revelation and divine vision.2 This discussion of mystical Orthodox thought is based on the works of St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) and the tradition elaborated by his twentieth-century interpreters, the so-called “neo-Palamite” theologians, who have elaborated on the special Orthodox view of divine vision.3 Writing in Greek, Palamas offered an explanation and justification of the mystical experience of seeing God, one whose full acceptance in the Orthodox East marked a doctrinal divide with the Latin west.4 Although probably unacquainted with Palamas’s writings, Lomonosov had graduated from the Moscow Slaviano-Greco-Latin Academy and had a solid grounding in Orthodox theological heritage as perceived in the eighteenth century.5 The argument here is not that Lomonosov knew of Palamas, or even that he was necessarily consciously aware of the Orthodox theology of light, but that it nevertheless pervades his poetic vision. “The threefold division of the spiritual life” in Orthodoxy commonly distinguishes between the practice of virtue; the knowledge or contemplation of created things (both material and immaterial); and the knowledge or contemplation of God.6 These may also be seen as steps in spiritual ascent. The second stage, the contemplation of created things, will be examined in chapter 5, in the context of the Enlightenment tradition of “physicotheology.” Palamas was concerned with the third and highest kind of sight, what Kallistos ware (after Evagrius Ponticus, student of Origen) calls “theology in the strict sense . . . the unmediated knowledge of God.”7 Knowing God involves overcoming the seeming contradiction between God’s necessarily “absolute incomprehensibility” and the possibility of direct, unmediated understanding that Palamas insisted was experienced on a daily basis by saints—what Vladimir Lossky refers to as “the accessibility of the inaccessible nature.”8 Because God is fundamentally unknowable, attempts...

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