About the book: 1999 / The monograph of the famous philosopher, culturologist, art critic V.V. Bychkov is a unique study of the formation, development and existence of Christian culture in throughout the almost two-thousand-year period of its existence from the point of view of artistic and aesthetic consciousness on the material of the Eastern Christian (Orthodox) area: patristics, Byzantium, southern Slavs, Ancient Rus', Russia of modern times. The book analyzes a combination of such phenomena as Christian symbolism (understanding of image, symbol, allegory, sign), antinomianism, concepts of spiritual eros, creation and creativity, beauty and art; actualization of the space-time continuum in art; Much attention is paid to such phenomena as the icon (its theology, philosophy, artistic language), the aesthetics of asceticism, the liturgical synthesis of the arts, etc. The first volume is devoted to early Christianity and Byzantium. The second covers Christian culture from the baptism of the southern and eastern Slavs to the 20th century. The transformation of the main paradigms of Christian culture among Russian religious writers and thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries in such cultural movements of the “Silver Age” as symbolism, avant-garde, and neo-Orthodoxy is traced. Along with traditional problems for Christianity, attention is paid to such debatable issues as sophia, conciliarity, theurgy, the newest ideas about the symbol, etc..