New religious consciousness and neo-Christianity (the St. Petersburg Religious and Philosophical Society in 1907-1909: discussions on the content of new religious consciousness)

The Religious and Philosophical Society began its work in St. Petersburg in 1907. Tis was an atempt to restore the work of the Religious and Philosophical Discussion Group of 1901-1903, during the course of which the ideology of the “new religious consciousness” was born. Tis event was formative for this religious movement in Russia. Te newest stage in the existence of the St. Petersburg Religious and Philosophical Society was related to a schism within this religious movement and the emergence of an opposition, which disagreed with the position that the new religious consciousness in Russia should take into consideration the metaphysics of “Neo-Christianity”. A series of papers have been dedicated to studying the role of social ethics and metaphysics of the New Religious Consciousness in the process of the modernization of the Church and traditional religious consciousness planned by the religious intelligentsia. In 1907- 1909, the St. Petersburg Religious and Philosophical Society held discussions about the extent to which the doctrine formulated by D. Merezhkovsky and his associates was appropriate for the religious consciousness of the modern period. Te goal of this paper is to establish the structure and the participants of this discussion and to determine the features that both united and divided the New Religious Consciousness and the “Neo-Christianity” that created it.