Introduction

Alexander Lopukhin

Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin (1852–1904) was one of the most industrious biblical scholars and church writers of the late imperial Russian Church. He was born in the village of Mityakino, in the Saratov region, the son of a priest, and took his first schooling in the Saratov theological seminary before entering the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1878. What set him apart even as a student was an unusual reach beyond the borders of Russian ecclesiastical learning. He read Western languages with fluency, followed the theological and philosophical debates of Europe and the English-speaking world as they unfolded, and had already placed dozens of articles in the Saint Petersburg journal Church Herald before he had finished his own course.

That outward-facing curiosity shaped his whole career. From 1879 he served for a few years as a reader at the Russian embassy church in New York, an experience that produced his early studies of religious life in America and his master’s dissertation on Roman Catholicism in the United States. His years in the English-speaking world left him permanently attentive to its religious and philosophical debates, and it is no accident that the present essay grew out of an English periodical controversy. Returning to Saint Petersburg, he taught first as professor of comparative theology and then, from 1885 until his death, as professor of ancient civil history at the Academy. Alongside his teaching he became one of the great editors of Russian church journalism: from 1892 he edited both Christian Reading and the Church Herald, and from 1893 he took over the popular monthly The Wanderer. For years he kept up a running “foreign chronicle” that reported Western scholarship, controversy, and church news to a Russian readership.

Lopukhin’s enduring monument is the vast Explanatory Bible—a verse-by-verse commentary on the whole of Scripture that he conceived, organized, and edited, and which appeared in volumes after his death. He also launched the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia. He wrote as an Orthodox layman and scholar, and his contemporaries prized in his work the way he lit up events “from the standpoint of an Orthodox theologian.” A gifted and prolific journalist as well as a scholar, he signed his shorter pieces sometimes with his own name and sometimes under pen names. For the present essay he used the pseudonym A. Mityakin—drawn, fittingly, from the name of the village where he was born. He died in 1904 and was buried in the Nikolskoe Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

This short essay belongs to Lopukhin the journalist rather than Lopukhin the commentator on Scripture. It appeared in 1895, under the Mityakin pseudonym, as one of his review-articles introducing Western intellectual currents to a Russian audience—and, characteristically, weighing them against the Christian faith. Its Russian title may be rendered “Agnosticism as a Worldview, after Max Müller,” and the “after Max Müller” is the key to its design. The piece is not a freestanding treatise of Lopukhin’s own; it is a framed presentation of a single, recent, and much-noticed statement by one of the most celebrated scholars of the age.

The occasion was precise. In December 1894 the German-born Oxford orientalist Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900)—founder of the comparative study of religion, editor of the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East, and among the best-known men of learning in Europe—published a brief article in the influential London review The Nineteenth Century under the title “Why I am not an Agnostic.” He had been asked to contribute to a symposium in an agnostic journal on the question “Why do I lead a moral life,” and had declined, explaining in this article why he would not stand under the agnostic banner. Lopukhin judged the piece so remarkable—nothing less than the philosophical confession of a famous secular scholar—that he set out to bring its substance to Russian readers.

The essay’s purpose, then, is apologetic in the older and broader sense: to show educated Russians, many of whom followed every turn of Western thought as a point of honor, that agnosticism was not the settled verdict of advanced learning it claimed to be. Lopukhin frames the translation with an opening diagnosis of agnosticism and a brief closing reflection, but for most of its length he lets Müller speak, rendering his argument into Russian with only slight abridgement. The result is a small, deliberate act of intellectual mediation between the English-speaking debate and the Russian reader.

The Argument

Lopukhin opens by placing agnosticism historically. In the West, and increasingly in Russia through the wide popularity of Herbert Spencer, a worldview had spread that took its name from the Greek for “not knowing.” The term itself was a recent coinage—introduced a generation earlier by Thomas Henry Huxley to name the stance of one who holds that certain ultimate questions cannot be answered—and Spencer had given it a philosophy, opening his First Principles with the doctrine of an all-encompassing “Unknowable” behind the world of appearances. Its premise is that the human mind, by its very constitution, cannot reach the essence of things but only their outward appearance as it strikes the senses. Since God, the soul, and the whole spiritual order lie precisely in that inaccessible realm of essences, agnosticism concludes that such questions must simply be set aside as beyond us. Lopukhin reads this not as a stable philosophy but as a transitional stage—a retreat from a collapsed materialism. Crude materialism had denied that things have any essence at all, and fell apart the moment it was pressed. Its former adherents, unwilling to embrace idealism, took refuge in a halfway position: no longer denying that a supersensible world exists, but declaring it unknowable. That halfway house is agnosticism, and it appeals, Lopukhin suggests, to those who have outgrown materialism but still lack the courage to bow openly before the Christian view of the world.

Against this backdrop he turns the floor over to Müller, and the heart of the essay is Müller’s own reasoning. Müller begins by insisting that the word be defined. If “agnostic” means only the denial of Gnosticism—the systems of Cerinthus, Valentinus, or Marcion—then of course he is no Gnostic, but that is a trivial sense. If it means the recognition that all the objects of our knowledge are phenomena, then this is nothing new at all: it is, he argues, almost a truism, and the whole history of philosophy is one long commentary on the line between what we can and cannot know. Socrates knew only that he knew nothing; the Greeks named this frank confession of ignorance and the suspension of judgment that goes with it; the medieval schools called it learned ignorance, docta ignorantia; and Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason, at last gave it rigorous demonstration. In this sense every serious philosopher has been an “agnostic,” and there is no novelty in the nineteenth century’s claim.

Yet Müller will not take the name, and he gives two reasons that carry the argument beyond agnosticism. The first turns on the very word “phenomenon.” An appearance is always the appearance of something; to say that a thing appears is to affirm that there is something which appears. Behind the phenomenal stands what philosophy calls the noumenal or the real—and our minds cannot help positing it, because certain necessary forms of thought, as Kant showed, are built into knowing itself. We see only one face of the moon, yet we know with a certainty no repetition of experience could give that the other side is there; in the same way we cannot think at all without submitting to the law of cause. If every particular object points beyond itself to a force that manifests in it, then the whole universe points to a force that manifests throughout it—a power we might call unknowable, but might equally call the best known of all, since every scrap of our knowledge is the study of its manifestations. That it is, we know; what it is in itself lies beyond us.

The second step is more decisive still. Müller finds in the world not merely a hidden force but an all-pervading reason—order, law, logos. The Greeks glimpsed it when Anaxagoras first named mind, nous, at work in nature; Plato saw the true kinds of things as eternal ideas, thoughts standing behind their appearances. Chance has been dethroned in every serious inquiry, and neither natural selection nor the struggle for existence can account for the rational structure that looks back at us through nature and calls for recognition from the reason within us. Here Müller reaches his climax. If nature is the manifestation of thought, then the Christian may say with full right, in the words of the fourth Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos.” Müller knows our language for these things is metaphor—Father, Son, Person are figures we must not press to the letter—but the reality they point to is not nothing; it is the very object of all our knowing. And so he closes with a deliberate reversal: if agnosticism means denying an eternal Reason that pervades the natural and moral world, then he is no agnostic but a “Gnostic,” a humble follower of the greatest minds of the race, from Plato and the author of the fourth Gospel to Kant and Hegel. Lopukhin adds only a sentence: these conclusions strike a decisive blow at agnosticism and meet the eternal truths revealed in the Word of God, which are the possession of every rationally believing Christian.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The interest of this little essay lies in the unlikeliness of its chief witness. Lopukhin is not answering agnosticism in his own name with the arguments of the Church; he is presenting a famous scholar of comparative religion—a man of no ecclesiastical brief, admired precisely by the cultivated skeptics he addresses—who reasons his own way out of agnosticism and arrives at the threshold of the Christian confession of the Logos. The apologetic force is in that route. A worldview that presents itself as the natural conclusion of modern learning is shown to be, by the testimony of one of learning’s great representatives, neither modern nor conclusive.

It is worth being honest about what Müller does and does not establish, and Lopukhin’s framing is careful here. Müller argues as a philosopher and historian of religion, not as a dogmatic theologian. His path runs through Kant’s account of knowledge and the idealist tradition to a reasoned theism—a conviction that mind and reason stand behind the order of nature. That is not yet the full Christian creed, and Müller himself keeps his language guarded and metaphorical. What Lopukhin welcomes is the convergence: that a rigorous, secular, comparative intelligence, following the facts of consciousness and the demands of reason as far as they will go, cannot rest in the agnostic’s shrug but is driven to acknowledge an eternal Reason at the heart of things—the Logos of John’s Gospel. For the believing reader the essay offers reassurance that faith and honest inquiry are not enemies, and that the confession “In the beginning was the Word” answers a question the agnostic can neither escape nor resolve.

The essay also fairly represents the position it opposes. Agnosticism is given its due as a serious response to a real difficulty—the genuine limits of human knowledge—and not caricatured as mere indifference. Its dignity, Müller grants, is the dignity of Socrates and of Kant. What he denies is that recognizing the limits of knowledge requires denying the reality that lies behind appearances, or the reason that pervades them. That distinction—between a humble acknowledgment of what we cannot know and a dogmatic refusal to affirm what we can—is the quiet center of the whole piece.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents Lopukhin’s essay in a fresh, modern English translation made from the Russian text he published in 1895 under the pseudonym A. Mityakin. Because the essay is itself a framed translation—Lopukhin’s own Russian rendering of Max Müller’s English article, set between his opening and closing commentary—a word about its layered character is owed to the reader. The English given here follows Lopukhin’s Russian throughout, including the central section where he renders and lightly abridges Müller. It therefore reflects Müller’s argument as Lopukhin presented it to Russian readers, rather than reproducing the exact wording of Müller’s original English article in The Nineteenth Century. Readers who wish to consult Müller’s own text will find it among his collected Last Essays.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the author is named in the traditional manner as the Church and his contemporaries received him—Alexander Lopukhin, scholar and layman—with the pseudonym noted as a matter of record rather than used to obscure his authorship. The translator is credited as translator, never as author. The English has been modernized for clarity and readability, and citations and numbering are given in the ordinary modern style. Nothing has been added to Lopukhin’s argument; the aim throughout has been to let his brief, pointed piece of Christian apologetic journalism reach a new readership as directly as it once reached his own.

Suggestions for Reading

The essay is short and moves quickly, but it rewards a reader who keeps its structure in view. Lopukhin’s own voice frames the piece only at the opening and the close; the long central stretch is Müller thinking aloud. It helps to read the first paragraphs as the setting of a problem—what agnosticism is, and why it spread—and then to follow Müller’s two decisive turns: first, that every appearance implies something that appears, and second, that the order of nature implies a reason behind it. The argument is philosophical and assumes a passing acquaintance with a few names—Socrates, Kant, Anaxagoras, Plato—but its conclusion needs no special training to feel. Readers who come to the last page will find the whole essay gathered into a single sentence from the Gospel of John, and will understand why a Russian biblical scholar thought a short English article worth carrying home.