Religious Symbol in Theological Thinking of P. Tillich and S. Averintsev

Abstract

Starting from the idea of the hermeneutical turn as a key moment in Christian thought of the twentieth century, the article hypothesises that the demand for the concept of religious symbol was connected with the increased attention to the problem of meaning. The author, without pretending to a comprehensive and systematic study of the issue, offers a comparative “case study” based on an examination of the texts of the German-American Protestant theologian P. Tillich and the Russian researcher of Eastern Christian culture S. Averintsev. After an exposition of the problem and a brief characterisation of the sources, eight positions are formulated, in relation to each of which the selected texts are further compared. As a result, the similarities and differences of the considered positions are revealed. On the one hand, what is common is the basic idea of the inevitability and necessity of the symbolic character of religious language. On the other hand, the similarities are found in some particular aspects – in highlighting the anthropological conditions of religious symbolism (the need for creative effort and transpersonality), as well as in the difficulties in the face of traditional orthodoxy. The features of difference, predictably caused by the confessional affiliation of the authors, are reduced to the contradiction between the “kulturprotestant” logocentrism and the mystical historicism characteristic of Orthodoxy, as well as to the polemics about the necessity and possibility of explicating the meanings behind religious symbols. On this basis it becomes possible to point to a general tendency to overcome metaphysical premises in hermeneutical strategies, which had lost their intellectual attraction by the twentieth century. The article concludes with some remarks about possible intellectual reactions to the concepts outlined by traditional Christian orthodoxy, thus re-actualising the potential of hermeneutic thinking.