History knows of no absolute beginnings. To place the emergence of Afanas′ev, and his distinctive theological sensibility, in their appropriate context, it is necessary, therefore, to investigate the background of Russian theology and, in particular, its ideas of the Church. Three aspects of this background are of relevance – indeed, these three aspects together constitute this background. And they are: the learned Scholasticism which formed the official theological tradition of the great pre-revolutionary Academies; the Slavophile movement of the nineteenth century; and that variegated, brilliant, efflorescence of original theologising which marked the closing decades of the Tsardom, here referred to as the ‘fin de siècle revival’. In the context of the present work, there can be no question of offering a precis of all Russian theology: by such a grand standard, what follows would be hopelessly inadequate. The aim is, rather, to present the main lines of its historic development, and to identify those features of the Russian theological tradition which throw light on the peculiar problems, and special opportunities, that faced the theologians of the twentiethcentury Diaspora – most notably in their thinking about the Church.

The theological world of the Russian Orthodox Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – on the eve, that is to say, of its cataclysmic dispersion – was full of life. Pride of place must go, in a description of that world, to the historically minded Scholastic theology of the Russian Academies.