Averintsev and the paschal joy. On the perception of byzantine Christianity in some later works of the thinker

In some later articles of his, published in English and Russian, as well as in the monograph on Vjacheslav Ivanov, Sergei S. Averintsev has singled out some basic features of the Byzantine Orthodoxy, such as its ontological character, the Paschal joy, liturgical experience of rejoicing and deep tenderness, which used to be caused by the communication with the Holy Virgin in prayer, and the central meaning of icon, which transmits to us the human Face of our Lord Jesus Christ. We also analyze such Averintsev’s concepts from the nineties of the 20th century, as “Christian geopolitics”; such-kind ruminations go back to the tradition of Byzantine and European conservative philosophy (Th. Carlyle, and - partially - Theodore Metochites). This Averintsev’s conception, which phenomenologically describes in the most subtle way the Byzantine piety from within, is juxtaposed to the outer, Barock-like description of the Byzantine religiosity produced by Hans-Georg Beck, the great German scholar putting his emphasis upon the problem of the Byzantine imaginary. We underscore Averintsev’s continuity in thought with Vjacheslav I. Ivanov and Nicholas S. Trubetzkoy.