Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 18141914 [Hardcover]

During Russia's late imperial period, Orthodox churchmen, professionally trained theologians, and an array of social commentators sought to give meaning to Russian history and its supposed backwardness. Many found that meaning in asceticism. For some, ascetic religiosity prevented Russia from achieving its historical destiny. For others, it was the means by which the Russian people would realize the kingdom of God, thereby saving Holy Russia and the world from the satanic forces of the West.

Patrick Lally Michelson's intellectual history of asceticism in Russian Orthodox thought traces the development of these competing arguments from the early nineteenth century to the early months of World War I. He demonstrates that this discourse was an imaginative interpretation of lived Orthodoxy, primarily meant to satisfy the ideological needs of Russian thinkers and Orthodox intellectuals as they responded to the socioeconomic, political, and cultural challenges of modernity.

As the cultural and ideological foundations of imperial Russia were threatened by forces of modernity, an array of Orthodox churchmen, theologians, and lay thinkers turned to asceticism, hoping to ensure the coming Kingdom of God promised to the Russian nation.

Impressive in its analytical breadth and astute in its interpretive depth, this is an engaging, lucid, and original contribution to the history of modern Russian thought and modern Orthodoxy. Vera Shevzov, Smith College

Reading this extraordinary book is like having missing pieces of a puzzle click together at last. Actors normally examined separatelyradical socialists, theological academies, hermits, great writers, bureaucrats, lay intellectualsemerge as part of the same religious culture that placed asceticism at the center of discourse and practice in imperial Russia's defining century. Nadieszda Kizenko, University at Albany, SUNY

Michelson's groundbreaking study of discourses on al3U