TWO PATHS OF FAITH. ON THE QUESTION OF THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF F.M. DOSTOYEVSKY AND L.N. TOLSTOY

The paper deals with consideration of approaches to definition of the phenomenon of religious faith. Modern determination of faith relies on semantics of the term and a number of significant aspects, which historically determined the contents of religious belief understood by representatives of the Russian philosophy. Many ideas raised by fiction gained further development and specification and acted as a powerful impulse of evolution of the Russian philosophical thought. In this work the authors address two most outstanding and authoritative figures of the national imaginative and philosophical thought - F.M. Dostoyevsky and L.N. Tolstoy. Tolstoy recognizes the sense of faith regardless of its object. His faith is “the force of life”, knowledge of sense of human life, and means of finding of this sense. It is completely rational and can choose any, even not religious principle, as an object of faith. For Dostoyevsky, faith is a gift sent from above, otherworldly and independent of human. His belief is irrational; it is valuable in itself and for the sake of itself, as only faith is able to answer the last, “accursed questions”.