“Kabbalah as a Special Type of Religious Consciousness”. Speech by Boris Stolpner at the Moscow Religious and Philosophical Society in Memory of Vladimir Solovyov

Abstract

The ideological foundations of Judaism and Jewish thought rarely became the subjects of special discussion among the philosophers of the Russian Silver Age. Archival documents, which are published for the first time in this article, refer to such a rare case when the greatest Russian thinkers of that time – P.A. Florensky, S.N. Bulgakov, V.I. Ivanov and others – publicly discussed the essence of Jewish mysticism at a special meeting of the philosophical society. Boris Stolpner's report "Kabbalah as a Special Type of Religious Consciousness", read in April 1914, caused a lively discussion, the content of which we can get acquainted with due to the accidentally preserved notes of Sergei Durylin. The publication of these materials will significantly expand our understanding of the interest in Jewish thought among Russian philosophers of the early twentieth century.