The quest for Peter Abelards: medievalism and the pre-Mongol Rus’s “Intellectual silence” thesis

Abstract

Seeing through the lens of Medievalism, this article consists of a critique of the famous “intellectual silence”, a concept created by the Russian theologian and historian Georges Florovsky. This notion asserts that the Rus (modern-day Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine) in the pre-Mongol or Kyivan period (11th-13th centuries) was culturally inferior to the so-called contemporary “Medieval West” for allegedly not producing any “intellectual material”, favoring metaphysical contemplation over “rationality”. After reviewing the historiography supporting this perspective, I will attempt to demonstrate that such idea comes from a vision that reinforces the idealization of an intellectually developed western past that acts as a counterpoint to a backwards Rus tied to a concept of western superiority. I also state that the concept of “intellectual silence” particularly denies the History of the Rusian Church a dynamic historical process, freezing it in time and transforming its historical agents into individuals without historicity.

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