Volume 61, 2018
Philosophy of Religion
Evgeny Arinin
Pages 13-18
Philosophy of Religion and Religious Studies in Russia
Case of “Religiovedenie”
The Scientific and Philosophical (“non-Orthodoxy”) researches of religion in Russia as well as in Europe begin in XIX century. In additions of that time for the name of the new and special sphere of the scientific interest, the common European terms “the History of Religion” and “the Science of Religion” were used. The Russian term “religiovedenie” for the first time was used in 1908 (by Leo Tolstoy) and 1932 (in the preface of the book edited by A. T. Luckachevski). The authors of the edition in 1932 had already opposed their “harmonious successive dialectal – materialism theory of religion by the Marx-Engels-Lenin” to alien “bourgeois religious studies”. Then the given term was practically forgotten till 1960. Dmitry Ugrinovich, the author of the first monograph in Russian, including the term “religiovedenie” (1973), opposed the “Bourgeois Religious Studies” and “Marxist Religiovedenie” (‘Marxist Scientific Philosophy of Religion’). In the “post-communist” Russia there appeared and spread a great number of new approaches in Religious Studies and Philosophy of Religion: “Comparative Studies”, “Exclusive-Holistic” (‘Orthodoxy Religious Studies’, ‘Esoterically Religious Studies’, etc.) and “Dialogue” (‘Meta-Theology’, ‘General Theory of Religion’, etc.).