Evgeny Trubetskoy as a Researcher of the Religious and Philosophical Heritage of St. Augustine

Abstract

The article examines E.N. Trubetskoy’s reception of the religious and philosophical heritage of Aurelius Augustine, in the framework of his study of the formation of Western Christianity medieval religious and social ideal in the writings of the teachers Latin Church of the fifth century and Catholic authors of the eleventh century. The author determines the prin¬cipal problems that Trubetskoy wanted to highlight in his 1892 master's thesis on Saint Augustine. The philosopher intended to analyze the main life milestones of becoming Augustine as a great Christian apologist, to show the key mistakes of a dogmatic nature committed by foreign researchers of Augustine. Another original task of Trubetskoy was to show the continuity of special ideas of Augustine from the achieve¬ments of the Roman jurisprudence. Finally, with its explicit task, he was going to demon¬strate the significance of Au¬gustine's personality as the “father of medieval theocracy”. It is possible to conclude that the interest of the Russian philosopher in the legacy of the Bishop of Hippo was formed mainly under the influence of the figure of V.S. Solovyov and his project of “free theoc¬racy”. The paper also emphasizes contemporary assessments of the place of Trubetskoy's mono¬graph among domestic historical studies about the father of the Western Church. For the first time his correspondence of the 80-90s with Sergei N. Trubetskoy is revealed in the context of Evgeny Trubetskoy's work on the “Worldview of St. Augustine”. It refers to the new edition of the “Philosophical correspondence of the Trubetskoy brothers” prepared by K.B. Ermishina. This correspondence allows us not only to note important details about the goals and progress of Trubetskoy's re¬search, but also to find out his elder brother’s attitude towards him.