History & overview · every faith gets one
Resurrect the dead — all of them — and then find somewhere to put them.
The doctrine of a Moscow librarian who held that death is not a law of nature but a failure of human coordination, and that the single task uniting the species is the literal, bodily resurrection of every human being who has ever died, achieved by science. Space travel enters the system as a housing problem. Fyodorov published almost nothing in his lifetime; the people who listened to him included Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the teenage autodidact who became the theorist of Soviet rocketry.
Why it is filed this way
A philosophy with the shape of a religion and no congregation to hold it. Fyodorov founded nothing, ordained nobody and refused to publish; what he produced was a task, addressed to everyone, with no institution to carry it. The Biocosmists of the 1920s tried to organise it and were shut down. It is filed as a philosophy because that is all it ever managed to be, not because it lacked religious ambition.
The movement was suppressed or absorbed under the Soviets and Fyodorov's book was hard to obtain for decades. Interest revived strongly in Russia after 1991 and cosmism is now a live subject in Russian scholarship and international art exhibitions, but there is no body practising it.
The founding
Fyodorov worked for decades as a librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum in Moscow, lived on almost nothing, gave his salary away, and taught by conversation rather than publication. His articles were collected and printed by two disciples after his death, appearing as Filosofiya obshchego dela — The Philosophy of the Common Task — in 1906 and 1913.
Its founding is bound to Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov — 1906 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A universe that is not finished, and which humanity is obliged to complete.
The divine. Fyodorov was an Orthodox Christian and did not remove God from the system. What he removed was the waiting: resurrection remains the promise, but it is reassigned from divine action to human labour, on the argument that a God who commands us to love our fathers cannot mean us to leave them dead. Later cosmists dropped the theology and kept the programme, which is why this line ends up on a page of creeds without a god..
Death and after. No afterlife, and no need for one — the dead are to be restored to this world, in their bodies, by their descendants..