Some Comments Concerning Murvar's "Messianism in Russia: Religious and Revolutionary"

The article presents comments on social thinker, Vatro Murvar's paper "Messianism in Russia: Religious and Revolutionary." Murvar does nor give us a formal definition of messianism, but in the course of his analysis he nonetheless provides a clear delimitation of the term. Briefly, what he means by messianism is a social movement which exhibits certain doctrinal traits namely (a) millennialism, (b) twain cosmogony with a corresponding division of humanity into the children of light and darkness, and (c) collectivism and/or monism. Murvar proposes, and proceeds to demonstrate that the two sets of Russian messianism-religious and revolutionary-have many similar, if not identical, characteristics. The religious-revolutionary dichotomy should therefore be replaced by the old religious-secular one and revolutionism or politics should be recognized as a separate dimension. A division of millenarian movements into religious and revolutionary (political) categories generates an analysis which obfuscates on the conceptual level the potential presence of political elements in religious movements. Conversely, the distinction also obfuscates the presence of religious elements in revolutionary messianisms.