CHOMJAKOV, Alexiei Stepanovič. - Born in 1804, died in 1860, one of the most prominent representatives of Slavophilism, a Russian national movement that saw salvation, progress, and the full development of Russia in a return to the ancient national customs prior to Peter the Great. Slavophilism was religious and Christian in inspiration, in opposition to Westernism, which was dependent on secularized Western Europe. C. was a highly versatile genius: poet, inventor, sociologist, philosopher (developing the themes of his friend Ivan Kirejevskij) and especially the first great lay theologian of Russia. His followers considered him the father of the modern Russian Church.
He particularly developed the concept of the Church as a community of unity, freedom, and love. Catholicism, he argued, would have renounced love, preferring its own opinions to those of its Eastern brethren, and would possess unity without freedom; Protestantism, logically deriving from Catholicism, would have freedom without unity; the synthesis of unity, freedom, and charity would be found only in the Eastern Church. Among other things, he denied the essential difference between the teaching and learning Church and the existence of external authority within the Church. Fundamental, moreover, is his assertion that integral knowledge depends on love and presupposes fraternal union with others within the Church. Among Russians separated from Rome, C.'s influence is steadily increasing.
Complete works in Russian: 8 vols., Moscow 1900 ff. (some volumes in several editions). C.'s theology was hindered by the censorship of Tsarist Russia. He published his polemical writings against the Catholic Church in French (A. S. Chomjakoff, L'Eglise latine et le protestantisme au point de vue de l'Eglise d'Orient, Lausanne and Vevey 1872). His correspondence with the Anglican Palmer (who later became Catholic) is found in W. J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church during the last fifty years, I (London 1895).