Republicanism in the Christian-Liberal Thought of Russia in the XIX – Early XX Century

The relevance of the paper is determined by the need to study the history of public thought from the position of various methodological principles. The concept of “republicanism”, which is relatively new for Russian science, is used to study the peculiarities of ideological and political life of Russia at different stages of its development. The article is devoted to the history of Christian liberalism, which, while being an essential part of the Russian liberal movement of the 19th – early 20th centuries, did not represent a consolidated political force. Within the framework of the Christian liberal tradition, a special understanding of freedom was formed, based on the ideals of spiritual revival of the individual and society. The identifi cation of republican issues in the concepts of thinkers who are commonly associated with the history of Russian Christian liberalism seems to be a productive approach that allows us to determine the specifi cs of the movement under study. Most attention is paid to the analysis of the views of the ideologists of the “new religious consciousness” Z.N. Gippius and D.S. Merezhkovsky, who created an original holistic theory within the framework of the Christian liberal tradition. The article is based on a comparison of the views of Christian liberals with republican principles, the idea of which is embedded in the classical works of republicanism theorists and actualized by modern authors in works devoted to the development of republican tradition in Russia. The results of the study have shown that Christian liberalism as a direction of Russian public thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries, on the one hand, met the fundamental ideas of republicanism, on the other hand, placed these ideas in the religious dimension, considering the values of freedom and civic virtue as priority components of the spiritual perfection of personality and society.