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Archpriest Pavel Svetlov (1861–1941) is the most prominent representative of Orthodox apologetics in the late 19th — early 20th centuries. He was professor at the University of St. Vladimir in Kiev, a distinguished theologian and essay writer, the author of more than 100 published works and a large number of never-published manuscripts. Until now, his works have not yet become the topic of academic research. This article makes public for the fi rst time several unpublished essays of Pavel Svetlov from his personal archive (1916–1917) which pertain to his understanding of theomachy and atheism as “the religion of deifi ed man” (человекобожество). He believed that this phenomenon is an attempt to elevate and glorify human beings through the “abating” of God. He associated it with the “fashion” for “atheistic humanism” that embraced the European intellectual world. Pavel Svetlov criticised various atheistic conceptions for decades, from the time of his paper on philosophy of religion of L. Feuerbach in 1885. In his later works, he wrote that religiosity is rooted in human nature. Svetlov believed that “absolute” atheism is “almost impossible” for man, so in refusing Christ intelligentsia creates idols such as abstract concepts of ‘human’, ‘humanity’, ‘people’, ‘science’, ‘Communism’. In these manuscripts, as well as in his publications of 1916–1917, Svetlov analyses religious-philosophical quests and “divine creativity” (боготворчество) of the Russian intelligentsia in the early 20th century. He calls Nikolai Berdiaev and Leonid Andreev clear-cut representatives of ‘individualistic theomachy’.

The aim of this article is to study the moral and philosophical principles of F. M. Dostoevsky in his attitude to Catholicism. The chronological borders of the article comprise the period when the brothers Dostoevsky edited the journals Vremya (“Time”, 1861–1863) and Epokha (“Epoch”, 1864‒1865). Dostoevsky’s interest in Catholic issues, which occupies such an important place in the writer’s historiosophical system, is associated during this period with a key topic, which in the relevant historiography came to be termed the “Roman Question”. It deals with a prolonged political crisis in the relationship between the Catholic Church and the united Italian state, caused by the annexation by the latter of the independent Papal state and, as a result, the liquidation of the secular power of the Roman pontifi ces, which took place in 1871 and led, ultimately, to the convocation of the First Vatican Council and the proclamation of the dogmata of papal primacy and papal infallibility. The “Roman Question” was frequently refl ected in the materials of the journals “Time” and “Epoch”, the articles of which discussed important aspects of the issue, including theological and moral problems of the boundaries of the secular and ecclesiastical authority of the Roman pontifex, personal features and policies of Pope Pius IX, the role of the Jesuits in the formation and active “promotion” of the ideology of ultramontanism in the churchpolitical agenda, as well as some very questionable, from a moral point of view, methods of missionary work of the Catholic Church during this period, in particular, the “case of the boy Cohen”. The materials of the study suggest that as early as the 1860s, F. M. Dostoevsky had shaped, both in his essays and in materials of his journals, all the main themes of his later anti-Catholic polemic that was to be refl ected in his epistolary and essayistic legacy (“Writer’s Diary”) as well as in his novels (“Idiot”, “Demons”, “Brothers Karamazov”).