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Volltext // Exemplar mit der Signatur: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- Pol.g. 930

The article is devoted to the problem of the attitude of the Italian traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola to Christianity and neo-spiritualism. This task is solved on the basis of the comparative historical method of studying the works of Evola of different years and their assessment by researchers. Priority attention is paid to the analysis of the work "The Mask and Face of Contemporary Spiritualism" that was first published in Russian in 2020. The present work is considered in the context of all Evola's work, especially the works published in Russia recently. The question is raised about personalism in Evola's metaphysics. The essence of his criticism of psychoanalysis, spiritualism, theosophy, anthroposophy, primitivism, Satanism, some magical organizations and other forms of "new religiosity" is revealed. In the paper the traditional scheme of opposing the early, middle and late periods of Evola's work according to the criterion of his attitude to Christianity is contested. It is shown that from the early 1930s to the early 1970s his assessment of Christianity was invariably ambivalent and contradictory, although the emphasis on the positive aspects had been gradually increased. The problem of dualism in Christianity and the differences between the early Church, medieval Catholicism and the Aggiornamento of the twentieth century are examined in detail. The main conclusion of our investigation is that Evola, in spite of his personal antipathies to the Christian doctrine, was constantly forced to admit the possibility of a full-fledged spiritual realization of a person within the Catholic and Orthodox Churches and to act as an ally of Catholicism against all forms of neo-spiritualism and neo-paganism.

The article analyzes and compares two interpretations of the "social question" and the ways of solving it as they are offered in the works of N.A. Berdyaev and S.L. Frank. A particular attention is paid to the connection between the "social question" and the problem of "Christian socialism". While acknowledging the general importance of the social issues for the Christian mindset, both philosophers traced the origin of social injustice to the human nature rather than to the social structure. In both interpretations, in fact, the value of social justice is inferior in its hierarchal status to the value of Christian love. However, while they both rejected the socialist utopia of a "paradise on Earth" and the idea of a "Christian socialism", Berdyaev and Frank radically diverged in their interpretation and assessment of socialism as a social system. This article highlights the fact that Berdyaev combines a criticism of the ideological claims concerning atheistic and materialist socialism with an uncritical acceptance of a number of socialist ideologies (e.g. "class struggle" and "exploitation") and assumptions. Unlike Berdyaev, in interpreting the "social issue" Frank tended to distance himself from both classical liberalism (with its notions of private property, freedom, and state) and from socialism, which he considered as another ideological extremity. Frank's social philosophy treats the thesis that the socialist system is more consistent and successful than others in tackling the "social issue" as an empirically dubious assumption. On the contrary, Berdyaev took this thesis for granted and used it as the starting point of his reasoning. This divergence, along with the fact that the same key terms were often used by the two philosophers in different (ideological) meanings, partly accounts for their differences in the interpretation of the "social question" and in the assessment of socialism.