THE CHRISTOLOGY OF A. N. RADISHCHEV.

This article argues that, in the Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790) and across his broader oeuvre, eighteenth-century Russia's most sophisticated thinker, Aleksandr Radishchev, formulates a major reinterpretation of Jesus Christ. Participating in the broad Enlightenment effort to reimagine religious belief generally and Christianity's central figure more specifically, Radishchev places a new understanding of Christ at the heart of his moral philosophy. He identifies Jesus's teaching of compassionate love for others as the foundation of all virtue, opposing it to both Old Testament legalism and Russian positive law. However, he locates this true voice of divinity not in revelation or human institutions, but in the individual conscience as a universal impulse that each person must choose to follow. Radishchev's Jesus thereby becomes not the incarnate Son, but the prophet of moral autonomy who invites every human being to become God-like in ethical judgment and intellectual accomplishment. Radishchev nevertheless eschews the stereotypical Enlightenment insistence on Jesus's humanity by updating the Orthodox idea of theosis or unification with the deity: he retains Christ the Logos as the underlying structure of the universe, in which humans participate through their intellectual and moral pursuits. Yet Radishchev's perhaps most original contribution to Enlightenment Christology lies in his focus on form: his Christ's human and divine natures fade away to become literary devices, furnishing patterns of characterization and conceptualization that affirm the power of literature to express philosophical truths inaccessible to institutionalized, dogmatic religion. In dialogue with the work of numerous Enlightenment thinkers, Radi - shchev's moral and literary Christ also paves the way for nineteenth-century Russia's novelistic rewritings of Jesus for the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]