Russian religious philosophy of the XIX - first half of the XX centuries in the context of the history of religion: from religious conversion to cultural criticism and confessionalization

The article is devoted to the study of the possibility of interpreting the Russian religious philosophy of the XIX - first half of the XX centuries as a problem of the history of religion and a religious phenomenon. The study recognizes the great importance of the philosophical aspect of Russian religious philosophy. But it is considered as part of the religious process characteristic for modern civilization. It is proposed to consider the views of Russian religious philosophers as the “religiosity of intellectuals” associated with the phenomenon of religious conversion. Secondly, the analysis of the concept of the genesis of Russian religious philosophy from Romanticism is proposed. Russian religious philosophy appears here mainly as a recurrent neoRomanticism, which is a reaction to the strengthening of modern rationalization within the framework of the “Enlightenment project”. The insufficiency of explaining the genesis of Russian religious philosophy from Romanticism and understanding it as neo-Romanticism is revealed. For this purpose, it is proposed to consider Romanticism and Russian religious philosophy as a cultural critique of modern civilization, focused on such values as innovation, rationality, standardization and desacralization of the world. At the same time, the article shows that cultural criticism is an organic component of modern civilization, even if it is directed against modernization. Moreover, it is proposed, following J. Ritter, O. Marquard and H. Lubbe’s compensatory theory of modernity, to consider cultural criticism as one of the ways to compensate for the non-historicity and rationalism of modernization processes. This allows us to consider the Russian religious philosophy of the XIX - first half of the XX centuries as a compensation for the loss of historical connection with the irrational and unique past. And in the framework of this approach, Russian religious philosophy is seen as initiating a process similar to the process of confessionalization, which assumes a clear designation of its ideological boundaries to indicate other variants of cultural criticism as alien “political theologies”. And it is proposed to define this as a phenomenon associated with desecularization, which is defined as the goal of Russian religious philosophy as a whole.