A general analysis of causality in the Christian philosophy of archpriest Basil Zen’kovski

Abstract

The article examines archpriest Basil Zen’kovski’s concept of causality, found in the first part of his early work “the problem of psychological causality”, which was defended by him in 1914 as a masters dissertation and was destined to answer the question of implementing the category of causality in psychology. The author shows, that the understanding of causality as a “creative building process” is closely connected to the main metaphysical and theological concepts of the thinker and is in fact at the core of the metaphysic of archpriest Basil Zenkovski and defines the main direction of his theology. The author analyzes the connection between cause and time, as well as cause and the ideal, according to archpriest Basil. According to the his own results and the instructions of father Basil himself the author reconstructs the scholarly plan of Zenkovski, who divides his research into a logical, gnoseological and ontological aspect, and in each of the three aspects there are three objects: concept, law and the principle of causality. Notwithstanding the orderly structure of the original plan, which assumed a strict nine-part structure for the first part, where each of the three objects must be regarded in each of three objects, nevertheless, the author of the publication points out its obvious artificial character and lack of compatibility with the contents. For this reason father Basil lays out his though according to his own auctorial plan, which seems to him to be more natural.