In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch claims that the Russian Orthodox Christian Church was theologically more open towards the ideas of October than its Western counterpart. The remark is intriguing, but Bloch does not offer any detailed explanation except to say that Orthodoxy considers the revelation “unconcluded.” This article is an attempt to provide a slightly more detailed background to Bloch’s remark and present some elements of Orthodox Christianity and its utopianism by way of comparative critical hermeneutics, a method (...) that looks at the interpretative differences between Orthodox and Western Christianity with respect to some basic shared dogmas and their de-alienating and alienating effects. (shrink)

In January 1917 on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the 1905 massacre that sparked the first Russian revolution, Lenin gave a speech at a meeting of young workers in the Zurich People's House. In that speech he claimed that the 1905 events were a prologue to a wider European revolution that, he believed, would inevitably happen given the horrors and suffering caused by World War I.1 Lenin's words were to a degree prophetic because, only a month and a half later, (...) a revolution of sorts did happen spontaneously and without apparent leadership, but again in Russia. A year and one more revolution later, Russia's industry was in the hands of workers' councils, and the Bolsheviks were running the... (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Christianity is a religion with deep utopian undercurrents that find their articulation in narratives about a utopian past, a dystopian present and a utopian future. The natural world is also part of this utopian trend, most prominently in the form of the lost Garden of Eden. While both Western and Eastern Orthodox Christianity recognize nature as part of this past utopia, their views regarding its role in the dystopian present, the future utopian condition as well as the path toward it, (...) significantly differ, leading to quite different responses to the current ecological crisis. For Western Christianity, ecological questions are a matter of ethics, while for the Eastern Orthodox they are an ontological issue. Utilizing Bloch's ideas about "educated hope" and the distinction between abstract and concrete utopias, the article discusses these different positions and their possibility to change believers' attitudes toward nature and align their behavior with that of environmentalism and ecology. (shrink)