Orthodox Enlightenments

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Was there an Orthodox Enlightenment? In recent years, a quiet revolution in scholarship has shifted emphasis from familiar themes of Romanticism and Christianity to the interplay of faith and reason in eighteenth-century Russia and Ukraine, as well as in the larger Orthodox world. Our panel brings together scholars who have made significant inroads in the history of the Orthodox church, lay piety, the play of ideas, and intersections of “indigenous” understandings of prosveshchenie with winds blowing from Paris, Halle, Uppsala, and Kyiv, in the still less studied eighteenth century. We turn our attention to sources that have been hiding in plain view – most notably, sermons – to try to understand the religious and philosophical sensibilities not only of the Catherinian and Petrine eras, but also the elusive age of Empress Elizabeth (1741-61). Was secularization a continuous arc from Feofan Prokopovych’s Spiritual Regulation to Catherine’s 1764 decree? Is there a regional specificity (Baltic, Ukrainian, even Urals and Siberian) to Enlightenment currents at the easternmost reaches of Europe?

Sub Unit

• History: 1800-1900

Chair

• Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter, California State Polytechnic U

Papers

• Seeing Double: Prokopovych and Hobbes - Andrey Ivanov, U of Wisconsin-Platteville

• 'A Russian Fléchier': Gedeon (Krinovskii) in the Elizabethan Cultural World. - Catherine Evtuhov, Columbia U

• Pushkin and Orthodox Enlightenment: A Reading of 'Unbelief' [Безверие] (1817) - Gary Michael Hamburg, Claremont McKenna College

Discussant

• Nadieszda Kizenko, SUNY Albany