CHAPTER SEVEN

CHRISTIANIZING FREUDIAN SUBLIMATION VIA JUNG: VYSHESLAVTSEV’S TURN TO C.G. JUNG

Th e Why and the How: Biographical Sketch of B.P. Vysheslavtsev

One of the most important thinkers of the Christian philosophical movement centered around the journal Put’ (, 1925–1940), Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev (1877–1954) was the Russian religious thinker most knowledgeable of and actively engaged with psychoanalytic thought in general and Jungian analytical psychology, in particular. Despite his signal importance for modern Russian religious thought, Vysheslavtsev is much less well known than the other Russian thinkers treated here, thus a brief biographical sketch is in order.287 Born in Moscow in 1877, he received his law degree from Moscow University in 1899. Aft er a brief period of legal practice, he abandoned the Law to study legal under Professor Pavel Novgorodtsev, aft er which he was appointed Professor of Law at his Alma Mater. Receiving the Russian doctorate in 1908, he was sent to Germany to do further philosophical research. Aft er periods in , Heidelberg and Paris, he settled at the University of Marburg where he defended his dissertation “Th e Ethics of Fichte” in 1914 (published in Moscow in Russian that same year). He received a Chair in the History of Political Th ought at Moscow University in 1916, and taught philosophy simul- taneously at the Moscow Commercial Institute. Openly opposed to and the Bolshevik Revolution, he lost his professorship in 1917 and was expelled from in 1922 in the

287 Th e fullest biographical articles on Boris Vysheslavtsev are S.A. Levitsky, “Boris Pavlovich Vysheslavtsev” in Boris Vysheslavtsev. Sochineniia. Fikosofskaia nishcheta marksizma (Moscow, Raritet, 1995), pp. 5–12; V.V. Sapov, “Filosof preobrazhennogo Erosa,” in Vysheslavtsev B.P. Etika preobrazhennogo Erosa (Moskva: Respublika, 1994), pp. 5–12; Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy, pp. 385–387; V.V. Zen’kovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, II, 814–819; Arjakovsky, pp. 675–677 and passim. Th ere are la- cunae and sometimes confl icting data in the biographical sketches of Vysheslavtsev. Arjakovsky’s is the best researched sketch and it confi rms data of the other main bio- graphical sources. Th e letter from Vysheslavtsev to E. Medtner (in Russian Metner) is quoted in V.V. Sapov, p. 9. Th e letter is in the Manuscript Division of the Russian State Library. Fund 167, K13. christianizing freudian sublimation via jung 189 now famous group of intellectuals Lenin permitted to leave at that time. Along with Nikolai Berdyaev he re-opened Th e Academy of Religious Philosophy in Berlin in 1924 (closed down in Moscow by the ) which was relocated to Paris shortly thereaft er. From 1925 he was Berdyaev’s right hand man as main co-editor of the journal Put’ (1925– 1940), one of the most illustrious periodicals in the entire history of Russian journalism. Teaching moral philosophy at the St. Sergius Th eological Institute in Paris, Vysheslavtsev was a leader in the Russian Christian Student Movement and Christian ecumenical movements in general. In the latter capacity he traveled and lectured widely through- out Europe in the interwar period and met a host of leading intellectu- als including André Malraux, Rudolph Otto, , Jacques Maritain, and most importantly, Carl Gustav Jung. Vysheslavtsev was the editor and preparer of the second, third, and fourth volumes of Jung’s works translated into Russian, a project he took over from Russian Jungian Emily K. Medtner upon the latter’s death. In a letter to Medtner of February 9, 1936 he wrote: “Th ere is something even beyond psychology that links me to Jung […] it lies in pure philosophy (in dialectics) and in a sense of the limits of psychol- ogy and anthropology. I would not want to speak about this publicly without talking to Jung about it fi rst.” In 1937 he published an article “Zwei Wege der Erlosung” (Two Paths to Salvation) in Jung’s celebrated Eranos Jahrbuch.288 shall discuss that article below in our demon- stration of why and how Vysheslavtsev brought Jung to bear on Freudian sublimation and on the entire religious tradition we are dealing with here. Vysheslavtsev is the author of the most psychoanalytical Christian theory of and therefore the pivotal fi gure in the fate of Freudian sublimation in Russian religious thought, whose contribution crowns and completes the tradition that we have set out here. Vysheslavtsev is pivotal fi rstly because he knew Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, Baudouin and Coué better than almost all other of a religious persuasion, saw the genius of their work and admired them. In his dialectic intellectual approach, he used traditional Orthodox Christianity with its defective theory of man as his thesis, the Freudian unconscious and Freudian sublimation as their antithesis, and then

288 Boris Vysheslawtseff , “Zwei Wege der Erlosung,” in Eranos Jahrbuch, 1936 (Zürich: Rhein Verlag, 1957), pp. 287–329.