favour of the intuitive" by means of exploiting what the author termed as "spirituality of a symbol," seeing the latter as a perfect means of describing Reality, otherwise unfathomable. Only through a symbol, according to Merezhkovsky, one could get to an object's deeper meaning, whereas (quoting, as he did, Tyutchev) "thought, whilst being spoken, turns a lie": According to scholar D.Churakov, Merezhkovsky, pronouncing "the death of metaphysics" and putting forward the idea that only language of symbols could be an adequate instrument for discovering the modern world's pattern of meanings, was unwillingly following Auguste Comte, the difference being that the latter was employing these ideas in scientific fields, while the former proposed to use them in literature and criticism. The Third Testament Merezhkovsky's next and most fundamental step ahead as a self-styled modernist philosophy leader was taken in tandem with his young intellectual wife Zinaida Gippius who from the first days of their meeting started generating new ideas for her husband to develop. Thus the Third Testament theory was born, or rather revived, transplanted from its Middle Ages Italian origins into the early 20th century's Russian ambience. It was the Third Testament that formed the basis of the early 20th-century Russian New Religious Consciousness movement which in turn kick started the Religious-Philosophical Society into action, again Gippius producing basic ideas for her husband to formulate. Borrowing the original idea from Joachim of Fiore, a 12th-century theologist, Merezhkovskys created and developed their own concept of man's full-circle religious evolution. In it the Bible was seen as a starting point with God having taken two steps towards Man, for the latter to respond with the third, logically conclusive one. According to Merezhkovsky, the First (Divine Father's) and the Second (Divine Son's) Testaments could be seen only as preliminary steps towards the Third one, that of the Holy Ghost. With the first maintaining the Law of God and the second – the Grace of God, what the third Testament should do is bring Liberation to the human race; the First Testament revealing God's power as the gospel Truth, the Second transforming the gospel Truth into Love, the Third translating Love into Liberation. In this last Kingdom "pronounced and heard will be – the final, never before revealed name of the coming one: God the Liberator," according to the author. Merezhkovsky saw the Third Testament as a synthesis of the two original revelations: that