The Religious Philosophers - A Parallel Appropriation of Hegel (1874-1922)

Kai Froeb2026

This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.

Alongside the Marxist line, a second, parallel tradition of Hegel appropriation existed in Russia: religious philosophy, founded by Vladimir Solovyov and culminating in the “religious renaissance” of the early twentieth century.

Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900): Hegel and Sophia

Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov was the son of the important historian Sergei Solovyov. His intellectual development underwent a characteristic transformation: as a schoolboy he became, under the influence of Büchner and Moleschott, a materialist—he even threw the icons out of his room. But he soon turned to German idealism, studied Khomyakov, Schelling, and Hegel, and in 1874 earned his doctorate with a work on “The Crisis of Western Philosophy.”[1]

Solovyov’s reception of Hegel was peculiar: he adopted the dialectical method but applied it to religious content. His central concept was “Sophia”—divine wisdom as the mediating instance between God and world. This conception of Sophia combined Hegelian dialectic with Orthodox theology and mystical tradition into an idiosyncratic synthesis that exerted enormous influence on Russian religious philosophy in the twentieth century.[2]

The “Religious Renaissance” (1900-1922)

After Solovyov’s death (1900), a broad movement of religious philosophy unfolded, receiving Hegel in various ways:

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) came from Marxism to religious philosophy. His philosophy of freedom combined Hegelian dialectic with Dostoevsky’s existentialism. Berdyaev emphasized “creative freedom” as the core of the human being—a position that departed from Hegel’s concept of reason but preserved his emphasis on the self-movement of spirit.

Sergei Bulgakov (1871-1944) underwent a similar development from Marxism to Orthodoxy. His sophiology further developed Solovyov’s approaches and combined them with economic theory—a peculiar attempt to interpret Hegel’s “objective spirit” religiously.

Semyon Frank (1877-1950) developed a “philosophy of all-unity” that combined Hegel with Nicholas of Cusa and Plotinus. His epistemology emphasized the “supra-logical” unity of being—a position that critically took up Hegel’s logic but relativized its claims.

Pavel Florensky (1882-1937) was perhaps the most original of these thinkers: a priest, mathematician, engineer, and philosopher in one person. His The Pillar and Ground of the Truth (1914) developed an antinomic logic that took up Hegelian dialectic but turned it against “panlogism.” Florensky was shot in the Gulag in 1937—a fate he shared with many Soviet philosophers.

The “Philosophers’ Ship” (1922) and Emigration

In 1922, more than 160 intellectuals—including Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Frank, and many others—were expelled from Soviet Russia on the so-called “Philosophers’ Ship.” This expulsion ended religious philosophy in Russia for seventy years. In exile (Paris, Prague, Berlin), the émigrés continued their work, but without institutional footing and without access to the Russian public.

Religious philosophy thus became a “parallel history” of the Russian reception of Hegel—developed by people who read the same texts as the Marxists but drew different conclusions. Their Hegel was the thinker of “absolute spirit,” not of “objective spirit”; the philosopher of religion, not of revolution.

Systematic Assessment

What the religious philosophers recognized:

They recognized the limits of the materialist reduction of Hegel. Hegel’s system cannot be reduced to an “objective dialectic of nature”—it essentially contains moments of subjectivity, reflection, and spirit that were lost in Diamat (dialectical materialism). The religious philosophers preserved this dimension, even if they translated it into theological categories.

What they missed:

The religious philosophers tended to give up Hegel’s systematic claim. The “supra-logical unity” in Frank, the “creative freedom” in Berdyaev, the “antinomy” in Florensky—all of this relativized the claim to validity of logic in favor of religious intuition or existential decision. The tension between system and existence, which Hegel sought to mediate dialectically, was in the religious philosophers often resolved in favor of existence.

The two lines of the Russian reception of Hegel—the Marxist and the religious—rarely touched. Both read the same Hegel, but they read him with different questions and arrived at different answers. Only after 1991, with the opening of Russia, did a dialogue between the two traditions become possible. It is still in its early stages.

17.7.1 Lenin (1870-1924) - The Third Generation and the Marxist Appropriation

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) stands for a third generation of Russian Hegel reception—qualitatively different from the first two:

  1. The Lyubomudry (1823-1830): Schellingian phase, religiously motivated
  2. The Stankevich Circle (1831-1840): Systematic study of Hegel, but political split
  3. Lenin (from 1895): Marxist appropriation under materialist premises
The Two Readings of Hegel - Biographical Overview

Lenin read Hegel intensively twice, with radically different results:

First reading (1895-96): During his Siberian exile, Lenin studied Hegel for the first time. He was at this time strongly shaped by Georgi Plekhanov’s materialist interpretation of Hegel. The formula “putting Hegel back on his feet” (Marx) determined his understanding. Dialectic appeared as a useful “method” that could be separated from the “idealist system.”[3]

Second reading (1914-16): In Swiss exile during the First World War, Lenin returned to reading Hegel—this time intensively and systematically. In the Bern cantonal library he worked through the Science of Logic. His notes—later published as the “Philosophical Notebooks” (1929)—show a radically deepened understanding.[4]

The Decisive Insight: Logic as Epistemology

Lenin’s central insight from the second reading was revolutionary:

“It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!”[5]

This self-critique meant: the whole Marxist tradition—including Lenin himself in his first phase—had not understood its own methodological foundations. The “materialist inversion” of Hegel was not sufficient—one had to work through the Logic as logic in order to grasp the dialectical method.

Lenin formulated:

“Dialectics = logic + epistemology”[6]

This meant: Hegel’s logic is not merely “philosophy of nature” (as with Engels), but an explication of the structures of cognition itself. The categories—being, essence, concept—are simultaneously ontological and epistemological categories.

Philosophical Assessment: Between Understanding and Reduction

From the perspective of the Hegel interpretation underlying this work, an ambivalence in Lenin’s position emerges:[7]

What Lenin grasped (and many Marxists before him had not grasped):

  1. The processuality of truth: truth is not a static result, but a living process of self-unfolding (corresponds to: theoretical + practical idea)
  2. The self-movement of the categories: logic develops not through external application, but through inner necessity (corresponds to: self-application)
  3. The unity of logic and history: logical development corresponds to the historical development of cognition (corresponds to: performative reconstruction)

What Lenin missed (through materialist predetermination):

  1. The limited absoluteness: Lenin wanted to read the Logic as “objective dialectic of reality”—but Hegel’s Logic recognizes its own limits (it is NOT nature, but must pass over into nature)[8]
  2. The intersubjective presupposition: Logic performatively presupposes the “You”—Lenin did not recognize this (it is missing from the “16 elements of dialectic”)[9]
  3. The openness of method: Lenin systematized dialectic into “16 elements”—but thereby threatened to schematize it again (against his own warning: “dialectic is not a formula”)
Systematic Significance and Outlook

Lenin’s “Philosophical Notebooks” mark a turning point in the Marxist reception of Hegel: for the first time, a Marxist theorist of stature recognized that the “materialist inversion” of Hegel does not suffice. Logic itself had to be worked through.

This insight came too late to shape Soviet philosophy. The “Philosophical Notebooks” were published only in 1929—five years after Lenin’s death, during the beginning of Stalinization. Lenin’s most subtle insights remained an episode.

For a detailed philosophical evaluation of the “Philosophical Notebooks,” see Chapter 45.1. There the following questions are systematically treated:

  • Lenin’s “16 elements of dialectic” in detail
  • The reception by Lukács and the Frankfurt School
  • The question of “objective” versus “subjective” dialectic
  • Leninism as “vulgar-materialist reduction” or “dialectical practice”?

  1. On the biography: Wikipedia article “Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov”; Thomas Nemeth: The Early Solov’ëv and His Quest for Metaphysics, Springer, 2014. ↩︎

  2. On the doctrine of Sophia: Martin George: Mystische und religiöse Erfahrung im Denken Vladimir Solov’evs, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988. ↩︎

  3. On Lenin’s early reading of Hegel, cf. Georg Lukács: Lenin. Studie über den Zusammenhang seiner Gedanken, Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1967, pp. 38-45. ↩︎

  4. The complete “Philosophical Notebooks” in: V.I. Lenin: Werke, Vol. 38, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964. ↩︎

  5. Lenin: Philosophical Notebooks, in: Werke, Vol. 38, p. 165. ↩︎

  6. Lenin: Philosophical Notebooks, in: Werke, Vol. 38, p. 171. ↩︎

  7. This ambivalence is elaborated in detail in Chapter 21.1. The classification given here is deliberately kept brief. ↩︎

  8. Cf. Froeb 2025, ch. 22.5: “The logically limited absoluteness.” Logic recognizes three limits: (1) it presupposes the You, (2) it does not know the concrete world, (3) it knows about its own limitation. ↩︎

  9. The fourth fundamental operation (recognition) is explicitly developed in the logic interpretation (Froeb 2025, ch. 22.2). Lenin grasped aspects of this in his emphasis on “practice,” but not as a systematic moment of logic itself. ↩︎