Christian personalism in Russian thought of the 19th and 20th centuries

This article by Olivier Clément offers a panoramic study of Christian personalism in Russian thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in Russia and in the Orthodox diaspora. Adopting a historical and synthetic approach, the author traces two convergent movements: the response to the ecumenical challenge, which leads to a conceptualization of patristic intuitions on the person-in-communion, and the response to the challenge of reductive modernity, illustrated in particular by Dostoevsky. The central idea is that Russian thought accomplished, drawing on the Fathers of the fourth century, the decisive transition from the concept of person applied to the Trinity toward a coherent personalist anthropology. The major theological contribution lies in the highlighting of figures such as Nesmelov, Florensky, Bulgakov, Berdyaev, Lossky, and Evdokimov, who developed a vision of the human person as irreducible, meta-ontological, and grounded in Trinitarian communion.