Anagogical Exegesis: The Theological Roots of Russian Hermeneutics

This chapter explores the development of the anagogical method in biblical exegesis in the Russian spiritual academies of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries (particularly with reference to Metropolitan Platon and his school), and explores its significance to an understanding of later Russian ‘secular’ thought in the work of Vissarion Belinsky. In so doing, it identifies a common hermeneutic that argues for continuity in the Russian handling of the interaction between reader and text.