"Philosophy of Culture" by G.V. Florovsky in the early years (1920s) of the European creative period.

Dubonosov Aleksandr Aleksandrovich ORCID: 0000-0001-9500-6242 Graduate Student, Faculty of Theology, St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University for Humanities 142 Lenin Avenue, Tula, Tula region, 300026, Russia s.dubonosov@bk.ru

Georgy Vasilyevich Florovsky lived and worked at a crucial time. After the events of the revolution, many intellectuals were forced to leave Russia. Already in exile, thinkers actively asked questions about the causes of the disaster and ways to overcome the rift and crisis. Florovsky was a direct participant in the disputes on these issues. Within the framework of the Eurasianism movement, G.V. Florovsky presented his own program to overcome the crisis, considering the only possible way to transform culture.

The author of the monograph "G.V. Florovsky as a philosopher and historian of Russian thought" A.V. Chernyaev in one of the articles notes that Georgy Vasilyevich was significantly influenced by the philosophical constructions of Slavophiles and Eurasians, some of whose philosophical and cultural attitudes he inherited, and some "rethought and criticized, but one way or another, they were reflected in his works, whether in the form of affirmation or denial"^{[1, p. 241]}. Another researcher, K.B. Ermishina, emphasizes that "the problem of culture in the work of G.V.Florovsky can be considered central, since it was through the prism of cultural centrism that he considered public life and the work of individual thinkers"^{[2, p. 255]}. K.B. Ermishina shows that in the work of G.V. Florovsky two can be traced The understanding of the phenomenon of culture is one "early", which developed in the 20s (and was strongly influenced by "romantic" philosophy) and "later", which developed after the 1930s, focused on the religious (Christian) tradition.

Based on the two chronologically consistent understandings of the phenomenon of culture in the philosophy of Georgy Vasilyevich highlighted by K.B. Ermishina, this work attempts to reveal the polemical subtext of the philosophy of culture of G.V. Florovsky that was developing in the 1920s. The relevance of the work consists in a comparative analysis of some key provisions for the philosophy of G.V. Florovsky, such as the idea of "universal culture" and "cultural creativity", with the ideas of the Slavophile N.Y. Danilevsky and the leader of Eurasianism N. S. Trubetskoy.

G.V. Florovsky often expressed his philosophical views on culture through the comprehension and criticism of the ideas of the Russian thinkers who preceded him and their ideas about culture. In particular, in his articles G.V. Florovsky refers to the "early" (I.V. Kireevsky, A.S. Khomyakov) and "late" Slavophiles (N.Ya. Danilevsky). And since this polemical component was important in the process of forming G.V. Florovsky's philosophy of culture, for a better understanding of the "polemical background" we will turn to a brief analysis of the views of N.Y. Danilevsky and N.S. Trubetskoy, since it was their views that Georgy Vasilyevich criticized. 

The teachings of N.Y. Danilevsky were close, and in places coincided, with the teachings of Eurasianism that were formed in the 20s. N.Ya. Danilevsky, as is known, was the author of the theory of cultural and historical types, the main position of which is the assertion that history is a set of "life cycles" of original, independent cultural and historical types (civilizations). The specific basis of the cultural and historical type is the original principles that manifest themselves in the sphere of nationality and are not transmitted to other cultural and historical types. At the same time, cultural evolution is also underway in the direction from the initial ethnographic state of the people to the state and civilized. N.Ya. Danilevsky drew an analogy between the cultures of individual peoples and biological organisms that are born, go through certain stages of development – childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age and, finally, die; another organism takes the place of the lost culture -culture. Therefore, for N.Y. Danilevsky, humanity as such and universal human culture is only an abstraction that exists in the mind of an individual: "the concept of the universal not only has nothing real and valid in itself, but it is already, more closely, below the concept of the tribal"^{[3, 122]}. For N.Y. Danilevsky, "there is no universal human civilization and cannot exist – because it would only be an impossible and undesirable completeness" ^{[3, 124]}.

It is noteworthy that the position of one of the leaders of Eurasianism, N.S. Trubetskoy, is very close to Danilevsky's views on the problem of "universal culture", although the question of N.Y. Danilevsky's direct influence on N.S. Trubetskoy still remains debatable.

Both N.Y. Danilevsky and N.S. Trubetskoy sharply opposed the very concept of "universal", whether it be culture or civilization. Thus, in the book "Europe and Humanity" published in 1921, N.S. Trubetskoy wrote that "... the words "humanity", "universal human civilization" and others are extremely inaccurate expressions and that very specific ethnographic concepts are hidden behind them" ^{[4, 59]}.

N.S. Trubetskoy defined culture as a system of cultural values. So, he wrote: "by 'cultural value' we mean any expedient creation of a person that has become the common property of his compatriots: it can be a rule of law, an artistic work, a technical device, and a scientific or philosophical position – since all these things meet certain physical or spiritual needs or are accepted by all or part of representatives to meet these needs of this people"^{[4, 83]}.

Any culture, according to N.S. Trubetskoy, consists of "bottoms" and "tops". He called "Nizami" cultural values that are characteristic of the masses. These values have no individual characteristics and are elementary in nature. The "tops" of culture have a complicated character and meet the needs of the intellectual and ruling elite. With the natural development of society, there is a constant exchange of cultural values between the masses and the elite. The exchange of values is a sign of a viable culture. But when the exchange of cultural values between the "upper" and "lower" is disrupted, a cultural crisis occurs in society.

It should be noted that N.S. Trubetskoy is more characterized by a view of culture as a semiological system (since N.S. Trubetskoy himself was, first of all, a linguist) than as a "biological organism" – this metaphor, as we remember, was used by N.Ya. Danilevsky. However, despite this difference, both N.Y. Danilevsky and N.S. Trubetskoy nevertheless expressed very similar ideas. N.S. Trubetskoy denied the claims of European culture to the status of universal human culture, since for him, as for N.Y. Danilevsky, it is impossible to "fully introduce the whole people to a culture created by another people."

N.S. Trubetskoy argued that universal human values, that is, values created by one people or a group of close peoples, cannot, without significant changes, pass into the culture of other peoples and become their organic part, and then become the common heritage of all mankind. Therefore, there can be no universal human culture. Instead, there are different peoples and their national cultures.

These ideas, expressed by N.S. Trubetskoy in 1921, formed the basis of the Eurasian ideology, and were subsequently developed and supplemented by both N.S. Trubetskoy himself and P.N. Savitsky, one of the first participants in the Eurasian circle, to which G.V. Florovsky joined. Later, N.S. Trubetskoy, in a letter to G.V. Florovsky, recalled that from the very beginning there was disagreement between them: "Remember how Eurasianism began. We started by arguing about "Europe and Humanity", about a book that is clearly unacceptable to you"^{[5, p. 120]}.

In his early works, G.V. Florovsky, unlike N.S. Trubetskoy and N.Ya. Danilevsky, did not give a clear and precise description of his concept of culture. Recognizing the ambiguity of the concept, G.V. Florovsky understood culture as a fairly wide field of semantic meanings associated with human activity. Later, he identified two key understandings of culture, which apparently originated in the early "European" years. G.V. Florovsky writes: "On the one hand, 'culture' is a specific position or orientation of individuals or human groups, through which we distinguish a 'civilized' society from a 'primitive' one. It is both a system of goals and tasks, and a system of habits. On the other hand, culture is a system of values produced and accumulated in the creative process of history. These "values" seek to obtain a semi-independent existence, i.e., not to depend on the creative effort that gave rise to them or discovered them." ^{[6, p.652]}

Thus, as A. P. Glazkov notes, G.V. Florovsky "designates two basic understandings of culture, which can be simplified as follows: 1) culture is a system of goals and tasks; 2) culture is a system of values"^{[7, p. 132]}.

In the "early" stage of the formation of his philosophy of culture, G.F. Florovsky built it rather "negatively", using "repulsion" from ideas that he considered false and wrong. Thus, G.V. Florovsky did not agree with the ideas of N.Y. Danilevsky and N.S. Trubetskoy, as he openly wrote in the article "Eternal and Transitory in the teaching of Russian Slavophiles" (1921): "Like Danilevsky, he [N.S. Trubetskoy – A.D.] proceeds from sociological facts. Culture is the fruit of racial and national tradition, and its continuity, the purity, so to speak, of the cultural and historical line, is the first condition for spiritual vitality. And hence, therefore, they are all equivalent. In other words, there is no universally binding culture, there can be absolutely no higher culture, "universal" in the exact sense of the word, standing above racial, national and historical divisions"^{[8, 47]}. G.V. Florovsky considers this idea to be false. For him, culture is creatively carried out only by individuals who do not depend on the environment, on chance, or on other circumstances. Creativity is motivated solely by processes coming from the depths of the soul: the reassessment of values, the search for eternal foundations of existence, religious impulses.

It should be noted here that G.V. Florovsky, criticizing the views of N.Y. Danilevsky and N.S. Trubetskoy, often polemicized only with certain aspects of their philosophical ideas, sometimes losing sight of some essential points. G.V. Florovsky called his point of view on culture "ethical", he defined the point of view of N.Y. Danilevsky and N.S. Trubetskoy as "anthropological". Anthropological cultural studies for G.V. Florovsky proclaims determinism, the dependence of culture and creativity on the environment, ethnicity, nationality, historical events. G.V. Florovsky believed that N.S. Trubetskoy, following N.Ya. Danilevsky and rejecting "universal" principles, plunges culture itself into the unreliable element of nationalism, thereby limiting the human personality and its vocation for cultural creativity.

At the end of the article on Slavophiles, G.V. Florovsky argued that "only on the basis of universal, certainly universally valid principles is a genuine culture possible, and the national task of the Slavs can only lie in actively turning themselves to the service of values that will be chosen for the highest good in a free feat of thought and faith. And in this sense, even national self-denial is a genuine self-affirmation of nationality, a higher manifestation of national independence than submissive adherence to paternal precepts. The denial of the "world-historical" path is a step towards nihilism, towards the complete dissolution of values, due in facts, in cash, i.e., ultimately, to the abolition of the category of value in general"^{[8, 49]}.

However, despite his obvious disagreement with the cultural views of N.S. Trubetskoy, G.V. Florovsky takes part in the Eurasian movement, being the author of several articles in the first Eurasian collections. As K.B. Ermishina notes: "Trubetskoy, it seems, did not fully understand the radicality of Florovsky's attitudes, since the latter's ecclesiastical and theological rhetoric distracted Trubetskoy from the essence of the matter"^{[2, p. 259]}. Defining the vector of Eurasian development, G.V. Florovsky wrote: "I think I will not be mistaken if I define the starting point from which the whole system of our statements develops as the primacy of culture over the public" ^{[8, 124]}. "Cultural and philosophical reflection" seemed to Georgy Vasilyevich to be a more urgent matter than a political struggle, since this struggle does not guarantee the preservation of living creativity as an incentive to create culture: "the will to create will be overshadowed by the malice of the day, inner impoverishment and spiritual death will become inevitable <...>...to drive cultural and philosophical questions into the patterns of political tactics would be tantamount to spiritual suicide" ^{[8, 125-126]}.

In the interval between the publication of the first and second Eurasian collections, G.V. Florovsky wrote the pamphlet Dostoevsky and Europe (1921), in which Georgy Vasilyevich, analyzing the work of the Russian writer, develops his views on the philosophy of culture and on the problem of "universal culture" through the prism of the problematic of relations between Russia and Europe.

G.V. Florovsky finds contradictory (at first glance) judgments about Europe in the work of the great Russian writer. On the one hand, the writer called Europe a "second homeland" for the Russian people, and on the other hand, he strongly emphasized the strangeness of Europe and the need to separate from it. The inconsistency of these judgments is eliminated when G.V. Florovsky turns to the analysis of the philosophical and cultural content of F.M. Dostoevsky's views.

Arguing that the cultural achievements of the European world are very diverse, G.V. Florovsky, following F.M. Dostoevsky, proposes to distinguish between culture and everyday life. Thus, European culture is defined as a universal human culture that exists above peoples and ethnic groups: "The "European" ideas are in fact not only Europe, although they were born and developed on "European" soil and in "European" guise. Neither Euripides, Ovid, nor Goethe belong to Europe alone: their significance and significance lies precisely in the fact that they are larger than Europe, that belonging to Europe is accidental for them"^{[9, 331]}. European life, as opposed to culture, does not possess "universal humanity", since life is those historical forms that the life of individual European peoples acquires. Unlike universal human culture, everyday life as a form belongs to one particular people.

It can be argued that G.V. Florovsky made this distinction between culture and everyday life, including for polemical purposes, as an alternative concept to the ideas of N.Y. Danilevsky and N.S. Trubetskoy. If the latter, without recognizing the possibility of the existence of a "universal culture", criticized "Europeanization" as a deliberately negative process, then for Florovsky, recognizing the possibility of a "universal culture" opened up opportunities for cultural creativity, both at the personal and national levels.

G.V. Florovsky also addresses the topic of philosophy of culture in the article "On non-historical peoples", which was included in the first Eurasian collection "Exodus to the East". In it, G.V. Florovsky develops an understanding of the phenomenon of culture as a creative process, using the binary "culture–life" and contrasting the dynamic development of culture – life as a "frozen" form of culture. G.V. Florovsky emphasizes that "culture cannot be learned, it cannot be "assimilated", "adopted", "inherited", it can only be created, created by the free exertion of individual forces... When historical "mutations" cease, the unforeseen emergence of new forms of existence, then culture dies, and one stagnant way of life remains. And life is indeed inherited"^{[8, pp. 93-94]}.

Thus, as A.V. Chernyaev points out: "the key concept of Florovsky's philosophy of culture, as well as his philosophy of history, is creativity, the comprehension of which... It also clearly has a vital, naturalistic coloring. On the scale of culture, creativity is carried out and finds its continuation thanks to tradition"^{[10, p. 81]}. G.V. Florovsky writes that "The tradition of culture is intangible and insubstantial. Her powers are mystical inter–individual interactions. Its threads intersect in the unknown recesses of the human creative spirit... But these cultural connections are not comprehended by reason, not by discursive analysis. And the feeling that thickens the centuries in a single moment. <...> The ideals and premonitions of the future revealed in intimate contemplations become a genuine incentive for cultural creativity and life..." ^{[8, pp. 102-103]}.

Thus, further developing the idea of culture as a creative process, in another work "On Righteous and Sinful Patriotism" G.V. Florovsky formulated the thesis that the true greatness of the country lies in cultural creativity and the national spirit, which constitute the essence of righteous patriotism. "We are faced with a creative and creative task – the task of building a religious culture on the solid ground of the Orthodox Church and in unswerving adherence to the devoted precepts of the father" ^{[8, p. 161]}. In these words, Georgy Vasilyevich's movement is clearly expressed from purely philosophical optics, through which the phenomenon of culture is considered, to religious optics, which raises the question of religious creativity in its relation to cultural. The emphasis on the religious component in the process of cultural creativity served as one of the catalysts for Georgy Vasilyevich's departure from the Eurasian movement.

G.V. Florovsky outlined his vision of ideological differences with the Eurasians in a letter to N.S. Trubetskoy: "The meaning of my substantive deviation from the "European" You are portraying incorrectly. I do not claim that only church (religious] issues are relevant, and therefore I do not consider myself obliged to “leave the world” and take monastic vows. I say something completely different: for me, church issues are the first and main ones, if you want, yes, the only ones, but in the sense that they include everything and everything. Therefore, it is necessary to start with them ... Culture must grow from the church... The West is a Latin protest [ante] “country” and as such must be overcome – religiously. Russia has a religious task. This does not mean that it is not necessary to build a culture. But culture must be built religiously. And if I “object” to the Eurasians, being one of them myself, it is because I see in them an inclination... to go into worldly work… It is unacceptable to remain unconscious, “artisanal" Orthodox. Russian Russians need to experience, to feel the right [glorious] past – Vis [Antiy] and Russian – to feel the Russian fate as the right [glorious] fate – otherwise you inevitably fall into Manilovism or Nozdrevism"^{[5, p. 127]}.

Since G.V. Florovsky saw the "primacy of culture over the public" as the basis of Eurasianism, the gradual fascination of Eurasians with the public and political issues led to the fact that G.V. Florovsky left the movement.

The final break with the Eurasian ideology was expressed by G.V. Florovsky in the article "The Eurasian Temptation", where he criticized the "morphological" attitude to culture, "religious relativism" and "tilt to Asia" characteristic of the Eurasian doctrine.

In another work, he argued that Eurasianism "in its original form of development was an experience of cultural, philosophical and religious-philosophical identification of modernity," and in this sense continued the themes of the Russian philosophical tradition. However, subsequently, the movement "abandoned the initial confession of the "primacy of culture over politics"", as a result of which the idea of Orthodox culture, "by its universal nature", "cannot be placed within the framework of the positive sociological relativism that inspired the concept of N. N. Trubetskoy" ^{[11, p. 30]}.

Thus, it can be said that the defining feature of the formation of G.V. Florovsky's philosophy of culture in the 1920s was a constant polemical subtext. According to the ideas of the "early" period of G.V. Florovsky's work, culture contains certain goals and values, and is not just an abstract form of creative activity. Culture, as noted above, should be oriented towards restoring a proper understanding of the world of life, which is "universal" or "universal" in nature.

In the late period of his work, as the researchers note, G.V. Florovsky supplemented his philosophy of culture with the "theory of cyclic renessances", which helped him: "culturologically to found the concept of neopatristic synthesis, at the center of which is just the idea of reviving a spiritual and cultural paradigm that has long since descended from the historical scene"^{[10, pp. 82-83]} And although The "philosophy of culture", outlined by G.V. Florovsky in the early period of his work, did not receive proper conceptual expression, being formed mainly as a response to the cultural ideas of other thinkers, subsequently it received its development in religious refraction, becoming G.V. Florovsky's "theology of culture".