Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy

Prince Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy (1863-1905) was Russian religious philosopher.

Biography

As a teenager, Trubetskoy was an adherent of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill. Later he became disappointed with both and turned to Schopenhauer. Study of his philosophy led Trubetskoy to a conclusion that Schopenhauer's pessimism was the result of denial of God. Trubetskoy himself described this dilemma the following way: "Either God exists or life is not worth living". He became Orthodox christian and adherent of Slavophiles, his beliefs at that time are substantially influenced by writings of Aleksey Khomyakov. In 1885 Trubetskoy graduated from the Moscow University, but he continued to work there until his death lecturing in philosophy. In 1886 he became acquainted with Vladimir Solovyov, another philosopher who held largely the same views about religion as Trubetskoy and was his close friend. In 1890 Trubetskoy became Professor of philosophy in the Moscow University, later he played significant role in Russian liberal movement. In 1905 he was appointed rector of the Moscow University, but died just a month later of the brain haemorrage.

Trubetskoy's brother Evgeny Nikolaevich (1863-1920) was also a philosopher, Professor of the Moscow University, who largely shared Trubetskoy's beliefs. Evgeny Trubetskoy died in the Crimea when he was trying to emigrate.

Works and beliefs

Working in the same field as Solovyov, Trubetskoy sought to establish philosophical base for Orthodox Christian Weltanschauung which would be equally rooted in faith and ratio. In 1890 he defended his Master's thesis "Metaphisics in Ancient Greece" in which he argued that the Holy Scripture and Christian theology largely stemmed directly from the idealistic philosophy of Ancient Greece.

Religious beliefs of Trubetskoy are sometimes defined as Christocentrism. In other words the Christianity and the Church are incarnation of the personality of Jesus in the human society which convey His teachings to people. These views are set forth in the major Trubetskoy's work "The Teaching on Logos". Trubetskoy believed that the personality of Christ, which combined human and divine conscience, was the crucial problem for the understanding of all aspects of the Christianity. He viewed Christianity not as a solely ethic teaching but the one which is can be perceived and understood exclusively through revelation. This viewpoint differed both from the official doctrine of the Orthodox Church and from beliefs of liberal intellectuals who reduced the Christianity to ethics.