Divine Laws and Miracles of Nature: Natural Theology of the Russian modern spiritualist Movement in the late XIXth – early XXth century

Abstract

Russian spiritualism movement of the 19th – early 20th century remains an understudied area of current scientific research. Its philosophical and theological aspects deserve more attention due to its marginal role on the epistemological borders between science and religion. The article aims to reveal the Russian spiritualists’ vision of the relationship between God and nature and for the first time overviews and analyses debates in Russian spiritualism about the problems of the philosophy of religion. The article considers spiritualists’ insight in the essence of “miracle” and “law”, interpretation of evolution as a teleological process; evaluation of different Divine Attributes and their role in theological criticism, and also spiritualists’ solution to the Problem of Evil and Suffering. The natural theology of modern spiritualism constitutes part of the general intellectual movement aimed to bring into harmony both scientific and religious worldviews in the second half of the 19th century. Works of both foreign and Russian spiritualists demonstrate that the sacralization of laws and “naturalization” of miracles were used by spiritualists to preserve the religious worldview at the time when monism and evolutionism established itself as the central ontological and main historical programmes in natural science. Still, the detailed analysis of philosophical aspects of Russian spiritualism challenges its widely-known characteristic as “synthesis” of science and religion and its simplistic characterization as being pantheistic in its nature. The article for the first time puts emphasis on the theistic current in Russian spiritualism and also highlights the key theme of its interaction with Russian philosophical thought – the survival of human personality. It encourages discussions on the role of engagement between spiritualistic movement and Russian religious philosophy at the turn of the 19th сentury.