Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2021)
Church as a “subject of cognition” in philosophical and apologetic thought of V. V. Zenkovsky
Abstract
The article attempts to reconstruct the epistemological concept of Archpriest V. V. Zenkovsky, highlighting what place the philosopher's idea of the Church occupies in them and revealing their apologetic orientation. It is shown that the topic of the Church ("church reason» in comparison with the individual reason) is included by Zenkovsky in the context of the apologetic problems of faith and knowledge, as it is evidenced by the lecture notes of the 1940s and 50s. It is revealed that Zenkovsky emphasizes the supra-individual, transcendental, conciliar (soborniy) nature of cognition, but questions the existing concepts of a unified subject of reason: "formal" concepts ("epistemological subject" by G. Rickert, "conciliar consciousness" by S. Trubetskoy) require clarification of their ontological sense. The subject of reason must be thought of as universal, single, but at the same time multi-hypostatic (holding the idea of a multitude of empirical consciousnesses). Such a subject of reason, according to Zenkovsky, is the Church, understood as a consubstantial multi-hypostatic humanity and representing "natural conciliarity (sobornost)". The idea of God-manhood also solves, according to Zenkovsky, the question of "epistemological coordination" (N. Lossky), since "the unity of the subject and the object is realized only in the One who, being human (the "subject of knowledge"), is at the same time God — the Creator of being (the object)." The article shows the connection of Zenkovsky's constructions, in which the philosopher distinguishes between the historical Church and "the Church in the metaphysical sense", with the concepts of S. L. Frank, as well as the difference between the concepts of God-manhood in Zenkovsky and V. Solovyov. It is analyzed that in the epistemological constructions of Zenkovsky, the teachings of A. S. Khomyakov (on the Church) and S. N. Trubetskoy (on the conciliar nature of consciousness) are closed and complete each other. The conclusion is proposed that Zenkovsky's epistemological constructions have an apologetic orientation: concepts that do not resort to the data of Christian Revelation leave some essential questions of the theory of knowledge unanswered. The idea of the Church and the data of the Christian Revelation represent, according to Zenkovsky, a "philosophical benefit".
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