Meeting place: soul. The concepts of personality and nationality in the context of "enigma of man"

The article is devoted to the insufficiently studied direction of Russian thought, which saw the main task of philosophy in the comprehension of the actual human in man. From the point of view of the considered representatives of this direction (P. E. Astafiev, V. I. Nesmelov, V. A. Snegirev), humanity (humanitas) of a person is most convincingly expressed in his predisposition to the perception of revelation, in the presence of «natural soil of God-knowledge» in It. It is shown that these thinkers unanimously considered the inner (soul) world of man as this “soil”. The fundamental property of this world is its active and conscious character. In the process of consciousness development, self-consciousness, the top of which is the idea of a free-intelligent person, is forming. It is the awareness of oneself as a person that makes it possible for man to pass to the idea of a divine Person, but at the same time to the “enigma of man”, “to the contradiction between the conditional being of man and the image of unconditional being in man”. It is noted that the most famous in this regard, the teaching of V. I. Nesmelov is the development of the views of his teacher V. A. Snegirev on the “ideal of a perfect person”. In conclusion, the article touches on the special position of P. E. Astafiev, for whom the fullness of spiritual life is associated with the conjugation in it of a person’s personality and his national nature (nationality). The General conclusion of the article is that the “enigma of man” is, in fact, a touchstone for equal and fruitful cooperation between philosophy and theology.