Sobornost


Sobornost Russian: Собо́рность, IPA:  "Spiritual community of many jointly alive people" is a term used for example by Ivan Kireyevsky together with Aleksey Khomyakov, to underline the need for co-operation between people, at the expense of individualism, on the basis that the opposing groups focus on what is common between them. Khomyakov believed the West was progressively losing its unity because it was embracing Aristotle and his established individualism. Kireyevsky believed that Hegel and Aristotle represented the same ideal of unity.

Khomyakov and Kireyevsky originally used the term sobor to designate co-operation within the Russian obshchina, united by a variety of common convictions and Eastern Orthodox values, as opposed to the cult of individualism in the West. The term "sobor" in Russian has office co-related meanings: a "sobor" is the diocesan bishop's "cathedral church"; a "sobor" is also a churchly "gathering" or "assemblage" or "council" reflecting the concept of the Church as an "ecclesium" ἐκκλησία; in secular civil Russian historical usage is the national "Zemsky Sobor" and various "local/местное" landed or urban "sobors". Khomyakov's concept of the "catholicity" of the Church as "universality", in contrast to that of Rome, reflects the perspective from the root-meaning of the word "liturgy" λειτουργία, meaning "work of the gathered people".

Concept


Sobornost is in contrast to the image of adelfikos. As is expressed by Kireyevsky's definition of sobornost: "The wholeness of society, combined with the personal independence and the individual diversity of the citizens, is possible only on the precondition of a free subordination of separate persons to absolute values and in their free creativeness founded on love of the whole, love of the Church, love of their nation and state, and so on.