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Some Principles of the  Church of Perpetual Life

A Brief Introduction to Prophet Nikolai Fedorov

 

Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1828-1903), one of Russia’s most original thinkers, lived at a time of intense intellectual controversies, artistic creativity and scientific ‘take-off’ in Russia.

 

Yet it was also a time of growing worldwide militarism when increasingly lethal weapons were being developed, of civic strife, of labor unrest in the rapidly industrializing countries of the West, and of revolutionary rumblings in Russia.

 

Fedorov was deeply distressed by this state of discord and lack of brotherly feeling, which was bringing so much misery to the common people. How could brotherhood be achieved? Would it be possible to divert human energies from wars and dissension towards measures for protecting mankind against natural disasters such as floods, droughts, earthquakes and hurricanes, and to transform nature from ‘a temporary enemy into an eternal friend’?

 

Fedorov believed that if the causes of disunity, discord and war were elucidated and a common purpose found to divert human energies away from dissensions towards a common goal of overwhelming importance to all human beings, it would fire their imaginations, enlist all their energies and bring about universal cooperation. This goal, of concern to all, was nothing less than to rationalize the blind forces of nature ‘which bring famine, disease and death’. Since death is a natural phenomenon it, too, could and should be overcome by ‘knowledge and action’.

 

According to Fedorov, God had not created mortals. Death was the penalty inflicted by nature for man’s slothful ignorance and discord. Some doctrines of Fedorov”

 

  • Man is an active creature and will always act.

 

  • If man does not know what to do, he will do what he should not do.

 

  • Man will cease doing what he should not do only when he knows what to do.

 

  • Man will give his energies to a cause when he regards it as duty.

 

  • Mankind will stop fighting when enough of society acknowledges it as possible, and therefore obligatory, to redirect energies now squandered on wars and relentless bickering towards the act of universal salvation.

 

 

This duty, this Common Task, this universally accepted ‘project’, was to regulate the forces of nature, in order to defeat death. Fedorov’s views were based on his faith in science and human reason.

 

Fedorov, who was a deeply religious man, believed the world had been created by God for some purpose and that man, endowed with reason and consciousness, had a divine mission to accomplish.

 

The spectacular advances of modern science such as the landing of men on the moon, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and so on, make many ideas put forward by Fedorov in the nineteenth century sound less extravagant than they seemed to his contemporaries. Indeed, it is increasingly felt that humanity is taking over from nature the course of evolution and the fate of the planet Earth.

 

To put Fedorov’s prophetic wisdom in perspective, much of the famine that so troubled Fedorov during the 19th Century has since been eradicated by improved agriculture technology, despite world population exponentially increasing. Even though Fedorov died in 1903, he interacted with individuals who later became pioneers in conceiving the use of rocket devices to probe space---years before Wilbur and Orville Wright proved that a heavier than air craft could even fly.

 

The many fascinating works of Nikolai Fedorov will be studied and disseminated at the Church of Perpetual Life in Hollywood, Florida.