The motive of brotherhood in A. S. Khomyakov’s works

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of actualizing the motive of brotherhood in various spheres of A. S. Khomyakov’s works, identifying the relationships between the ecclesiological theory of the fraternal unity of the church community as “the grace of mutual love”, the epistemological concept of fraternal communication as a condition of true knowledge and images of fraternal unity in poetic creativity. The reasons for the lack of clarity in the religious and philosophical constructions of A. Khomyakov of the principles of the relationship between natural (universal, national, peasant-communal, family, friendly) and supernatural, grace-filled unity for the description of which A. Khomyakov uses the same conceptual-figurative system, are considered. Correlations are discovered between the ambiguous ontological status of fraternal Christian unity in the conceptual constructions of A. Khomyakov and the stability of plant and water images in his poetry, associated with the motives of the accumulation of mysterious forces and their sudden breakthrough, going back, on the one hand, to «organic» theories characteristic of romantics, and on the other hand, to folkmythological ideas.

Keywords

• theology
• russian religious philosophy
• fraternal community
• christian unity
• catholicity
• church
• unity
• slavs
• knowledge
• slavophilism
• romanticism
• poetry