Alexey Losev and Sergey Horuzhiy: Ontological and Anthropological Approach to the Consideration of Human Nature

The article deals with two different religious approaches to human nature on the example of the philosophical systems of Alexey Losev and Sergey Horuzhiy. Alexey Losev's system is not really aimed at clarifying anthropology; nevertheless, few ideas about it can be extracted from his works. This article will examine these ideas in the light of contemporary views on Christian anthropology (or personology). Sergey Horuzhiy's ideas, on the contrary, are fundamentally anthropocentric; moreover, they are in dispute with the ideas of Losev, among others. If the Losev system is based primarily on ontology and considers man in the light of some variation of Christian Neoplatonism, where man is a part of the microcosm, then Horuzhiy, criticising this view, emphasises that such an approach, even called Christian, is by and large pagan and was destroyed by the emergence of the Christian approach to man, but historically incorrectly articulated, as the very fact of the development of Christian philosophy from the original pagan conceptual system is erroneous. An alternative approach to considering the nature of man in the light of Christianity is called by him "synergistic anthropology," based on the ideas of both St. Gr. Palamas and twentieth-century thinkers (especially Michel Foucault). It will be stressed that in Losev's system the most important place is given to God and the God-world connection, while in Horuzhiy's system it is given only to man (in perspective, to the deified man, the God-man), since from his point of view Christianity opposes pagan cosmocentrism in a fundamental way, suggesting the idea of the practice of theosis.