Fourteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Writer and religious thinker Dmitrii Merezhkovskii (1866–1941) addressed an image of the ancient personification of fate – Greek Moirai (Ancient Greek: μοῖραι) and Roman Parcae – throughout his entire oeuvre. The aim of this paper is to analyze his definition of the deity given in the critical essay ‘Calderon’ (1891): Moira is characterized as a beginningless and unknowable tripartite Being, in which the luminous multitude of Olympian gods disappears and resolves itself into a divine Unit. In the same place, ancient tragedy is defined as a liturgy in praise of the Fate, which rules worlds. Comparative analysis allows us to consider The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, as a main source of these definitions. It is proved that emphasizing the attributes of the Christian god while speculating about the essence of the pagan deity is an early manifestation of the Merezhkovskii’s concept of a “new religious consciousness”, according to which the Third Testament Kingdom is a synthesis of paganism and Christianity.