CHOMJAKOV, ALEXIEI STEPANOVIĆ. – Born in 1804, died in 1860, one of the most prominent representatives of Slavophilism, a Russian national movement that saw the salvation, progress, and possibility of Russia’s full development in a return to the ancient national customs predating Peter the Great. Slavophilism is religious and Christian in inspiration, in opposition to Occidentalism, which depended on a secularized West. C. was a highly versatile genius: poet, inventor, sociologist, philosopher (developing the themes of his friend Ivan Kirejevskij), and especially the first great Russian lay theologian. His followers regarded him as the father of the modern Russian Church.
He developed above all the concept of the Church as a community of unity, freedom, and love. Catholicism, he held, would have repudiated love, preferring its own opinions to those of the brethren of the East, and would possess unity without freedom; Protestantism, deriving logically from Catholicism, would have freedom without unity; the synthesis of unity, freedom, and charity would be found only in the Church of the East. Among other things, he denies the essential difference between the teaching and learning Church and the existence of an external authority in the Church. Fundamental, moreover, is the assertion that integral knowledge depends on love and presupposes fraternal union with others in the Church. C.’s influence is continually increasing among the Russians separated from Rome.
Complete works in Russian: 8 vols., Moscow 1900 ff. (some volumes in several editions). C.’s theology was obstructed by the censorship of tsarist Russia. He published his polemical writings against the Catholic Church in French (A. S. Chomjakov, 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 a Catholic) is found in W. J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church during the last fifty years, I (London 1895).