Deification and Political Theology

Abstract

Chapter 3 analyses the essay collection Tsar and Revolution (1907) as a collective project aimed at establishing the historical origins and enduring contemporary relevance of the Russian autocracy’s religious mystique for the purpose of arguing that the Russian revolution must be religious in nature if it is to succeed in countering and overcoming the religious underpinnings of tsarism. By engaging their analysis with the work of the Russian semioticians Lotman, Uspensky, and Zhivov on the sacralization of the Russian tsar, the chapter demonstrates the soundness of the Merezhkovskys’ grasp of the phenomenon. It shows how they view this through the prism of deification, specifically the illegitimate form of self-apotheosis that was condemned by Russian Old Belief and later by Dostoevsky and Soloviev: true deification, for the Merezkovskys, means the deification of the whole people of Christ in the millennium that the Revolution will inaugurate, overthrowing the false tsar-god.