Revolution as the sleep of reason: the total reduction of ideas

Abstract

In his article, the author poses the question, one of the most important for understanding the catastrophes of the twentieth century: how and why the sun of mind rolled over the world (as expressed by A. Koestler). The rejection of reason meant the rejection of the Christian pathos of life. Since the end of the nineteenth century, God, light and mind were not in favor across Europe. The light of reason was addressed to all people, but the elect who assimilated it were few. And then the whole history of mankind, we see with what incredible eff ort these chosen mobs pull to the light. In the twentieth century. there was a so-called ‘uprising of the masses’, accompanied by the destruction of Christianity and the elite, carriers of the mind. But this fall in ideas began with the Russian revolution of 1917. In an era when the world of Russia and the West broke, when after two monstrous wars everything was lost, when Auschwitz and Kolyma (where atrocities were happening that are possible only in horrible dreams) erased all the centuries-old attempts of humanism, when the monsters born from sleep of reason seemed to defeat the world forever, there was still a gap. As the Russian philosopher Fyodor Stepun wrote, Christianity called upon all of us, young and old, healthy and sick, rich in talents and poor in spirit, to such a great transfi guration of the world, before which the wildest dreams of a revolutionary reorganization of human life fall apart. Only this requires spiritual eff ort. But the elect have always been few. However, it is they who carry the light into the world.