The Divine Feminine in the Silver Age of Russian Culture and Beyond: Vladimir Soloviev, Vasily Rozanov and Dmitry Merezhkovsky

The so-called Silver Age of Russian culture saw a revived interest in unorthodox religious ideas and new ways of thinking about the divine. The religious philosophy of this era was influenced by three thinkers who stressed the importance of the Divine Feminine: philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, journalist Vasily Rozanov, and novelist Dmitry Merezhkovsky. While Soloviev’s “sophiology” was a Russian continuation of a long tradition of Christian mysticism, Rozanov overtly appealed to preChristian Pagan images of the Divine Feminine as necessary for modern humans, while Merezhkovsky envisioned a synthesis of Christian and Pagan views in his “Third Covenant” theology. Later in the twentieth century we see in Russia and among Russian émigrés new religious movements with a stress on images of the Divine Feminine, which could have been suggested by Silver Age religious philosophy (the Roerichs’ “Living Ethics,” Gleb Botkin’s Church of Aphrodite, Daniil Andreyev’s “Rose of the World,” and Russian and Ukrainian NRMs of the 1990s). The present essay outlines the main traits of the Divine Feminine as it formed among the three Silver Age philosophers, and how their ideas may have influenced Russian alternative religion.