Most people think Greece and Russia are different worlds. In fact a straight line runs between them, and it is almost two thousand years long. This is not a route about influence — it is a route about a living fire handed on. Everyone in this chain received something from the one before and passed it further — sometimes across a century, sometimes through a translation into another language, sometimes through personal spiritual experience. The route runs from a Greek philosopher to an Orthodox priest murdered in 2013 — and shows that this is one unbroken tradition.
Plato's teaching is the point from which almost every modern philosophical idea has come. His idea that the visible world is the shadow of an invisible one, that true reality is immaterial and eternal, that the soul strives toward the Good as toward its source — that idea proved remarkably compatible with Christianity. Not by accident: the Fathers of the Church read Plato and used his language to speak of God, the soul and eternity.
Plotinus lived in Rome in the third century and carried Plato to the limit: there is the One — the absolute fullness of being out of which everything pours forth. The soul can return to it through inner purification and contemplation. This is mysticism — but strict mysticism, philosophically equipped. The Cappadocian Fathers took this language and baptized it: the One became the Trinity, emanation became creation, ascent became prayer.
Gregory of Nyssa is the great mystic of the fourth century. His book "The Life of Moses" is the first systematic description of the mystical path: from the visible to the invisible, from knowledge to unknowing, from images to silence. He introduced the notion that became the key to all Orthodox spirituality: epektasis — eternal movement forward. God is infinite, and the meeting with Him is not a finale but an endless increase. Blessedness is not rest, but eternal newness.
John of Damascus lived in Damascus at the court of the caliphate — a Christian theologian in an Islamic state. He did what no one had done before him: he took the whole of Orthodox theology and systematized it with the help of Aristotelian logic. His "Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith" is an Orthodox Summa Theologiae written five hundred years before Thomas Aquinas. Through him Greek philosophy became the flesh of Orthodox theology.
In the tenth century Symeon the New Theologian did what seemed impossible: he said that the mystical experience of God — the divine light, the direct presence — is open to everyone. Not to monks only. Not to saints only. To everyone who seeks. This was a revolution inside the Church: theology not as an academy but as living experience. His hymns are the poetry of a man who has seen the light and is trying to describe it.
In 1351 a council in Constantinople took the decision that divided the Christian world for good: the position of Palamas prevailed. God is knowable — not in His essence, but in His uncreated energies. The light of Tabor that the apostles saw on the mountain of the Transfiguration is neither a symbol nor an allegory. It is a reality open to the one who prays. The West chose scholasticism. The East chose hesychasm. These are different paths to God — and different civilizations.
Solovyov is the first Russian philosopher of world stature. He took the whole of Western philosophy from Plato to Hegel, read the Fathers of the Church, and created a system: Godmanhood. History moves toward the reunion of God and man. The Church is called to become the bearer of that unity. He dreamed of the reunion of the Churches — and was called "the Russian Origen." Through him the Palamite tradition and German idealism met in Russian thought.
Berdyaev closed the circle. From Plato through Constantinople, through hesychasm, through Russian religious thought — he arrived at the idea that binds the whole chain together: man is created in the image of the Creator, and his chief calling is creation. Not reason, not morality, not social usefulness — but the creative act as a way of sharing in God's own being. He carried this idea out of Soviet Russia in 1922 — and wrote about it to the end of his life in Paris exile.
Pavel Adelgeim is the last link in this chain. An Orthodox priest who had been through the camps, who lost a leg, and who spent his whole life defending the freedom of the Church against state control. He read Berdyaev and the Fathers of the Church — trying to put their ideas into practice rather than leave them as theory. In 2013 he was killed. Plato, Plotinus, Gregory, John of Damascus, Symeon, Palamas, Solovyov, Berdyaev — and a man who lived all this out in the twentieth century, at the cost of his life. This is one unbroken tradition.
What, in the end, does Russia think about God — and how does that answer differ from the Western one?