Worldview of Evgeny Trubetskoy as evidenced by his Master's Dissertation "Worldview of St. Augustine"

Abstract

The master’s dissertation of prince Yevgeny Trubetskoy “Worldview of St. Augustine”, which was written in 1891, became a notable event in Russian studies of Augustine. The aim of Trubetsoy was to carry out detailed and unbiased research and to draw a conclusion about the place and role of St. Augustine in the history of Western civilisation. The main point of his research is that St. Augustine should rather be regarded as the father of the “Latin idea” than father of the church in a broad sense. This is due to the fact that Augustine extremely strictly followed the judicial understanding of the evangelical doctrine and forceful arrangement of church life. Attentive reading of the disseration suggests that the main source of the core of Trubetskoy’s conclusions were studies of his elder friend, Vladimir Solovyev. But the major interest in this case is that we can trace a parallelism between the inner evolution of St. Augustine (as it is refl ected in Trubetskoy’s dissertation) and Solovyev, who at the end of the 1880s experienced fondness for Catholicism and was developing the idea of the reunion of the churches. The article also duscusses the hypothesis that this parallelism was not accidental but made up a signifi cant part of Trubetskoy’s plan and back-infl uenced his reading of St. Augustine’s texts.

Keywords

• St. Augustine
• Yevgeny Trubetskoy
• Vladimir Solovyev
• the Latin idea
• A. S. Homyakov
• Godmanhood
• grace and freedom