Although the Slovene academic environment is not known for its systematic knowledge of Eastern Christianity, Franc Grivec (1878–1963), a theologian and historian, a long-time professor at the Faculty of Theology in Ljubljana, stands out as a notable exception in this field. A significant part of his published work is dedicated to the reception of the two mutually intertwined dimensions of the Russian culture: the history of the Orthodox Church on the East Slavic territory, and the famous religious thinkers of the nineteenth century (Aleksey Khomyakov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Solovyov). By doing so, this author aimed to contribute to the intellectual development of the Uniate movement within the Catholic Church of his time, in which he claimed the Catholic Slavs, i.e., Slovenes included, to be irreplaceable mediators between the West and the East. Grivec brings attention to the turning point in Russian history that took place in the time of the Emperor Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Moscow Patriarchate was abolished and consequently the Church was made subordinate to the state. This weakened its intellectual and social power which was partly restored only with the cultural revival in the nineteenth century. Here, Grivec devotes his deepest endeavours to Solovyov as the advocate of synthesis between the Papal authority and salvific mission of the Russian nation. In the case of Khomyakov, he stresses that his greatness is in “the ideal fusion of religious thought and decisively religious life,” while he portrays Dostoyevsky as “the most profound psychologist among Russian writers.
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