Как возможна софиология культуры: к герменевтическому синтезу

How a Sophiology of Culture is Possible: to Hermeneutic Synthesis

This article presents the project of a “sophiology of culture” – an innovative methodological framework for analyzing the production of meaning within contemporary cultural spaces. By re-examining the legacy of Russian Sophiology (as developed by Vladimir Solovyov, rev. Paul Florensky, and rev. Sergij Bulgakov), the authors reconceptualize it from a theological system into an active hermeneutic tool. Classical Russian Sophiology, formulated in response to three defining challenges of modernity – (a) the search for unity within catastrophic history, (b) the overcoming of “abstract principles” in cognition, and (c) the problem of infinite regress in justification (ad infinitum) – was largely discarded. Yet, its core questions were never fully resolved. Today, these very questions find renewed purchase: (a) the historical challenge is reformulated as the search for immanent coherence within turbulent cultural processes; (b) the problem of concreteness is addressed through the analysis of “gestures of mercy” within cultural practice; (c) the dilemma of justification is overcome through performative methods of “linking.” Through a case study of the debate between Vladimir Bibikhin and Olga Sedakova regarding Pushkin’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan, the article demonstrates how sophiological categories can decipher the immanent logic and ethical laws of an artistic world, thereby providing compelling contemporary answers to all three original challenges. In conclusion, building on new ontological perspectives, the authors formulate a tripartite model for a twenty-first-century sophiology of culture. This model integrates an analytics of immanent coherence in complex systems, an ethics of the merciful gesture, and a focus on performativity, offering a powerful framework for analyzing the dynamic coherence of culture in an era of fragmentation, digitalization, and new global challenges.