The article attempts to find methodological grounds suitable for the study of the transcendental meaning of the history of culture. The authors proceed from the premise that the transcendent meaning of the history of culture becomes the meaning of the life of the bearers of this culture. Therefore, the theoretical task of searching for the transcendent meaning of culture is also an existential task. To discover the transcendent meaning of Russian culture the authors use the method of analyzing the sources of the conflict of interpretations of the historical meaning of culture. The object of analysis is the image of Russian culture as it was formed in the Russian philosophical literature of the 19th-20th centuries. In accordance with this image, the transcendent meaning of Russian culture is manifested in a series of immanent historical borrowings: Greco-Roman, Tatar-Mongolian, Western European. As a result of the analysis of the conflict of interpretations of Greco-Roman (Byzantine) borrowings the authors formulate a variant of the transcendent meaning of Russian culture in the form in which it is present in this conflict of interpretations. And this transcendent meaning of Russian culture has the form of a transcendent response to the transcendent historical challenge. The methodological foundations of the research are the L. P. Karsavin's concept of symphonic personality, the idea of the historical purpose of culture (V. S. Solovyov, L. P. Karsavin, G. V. Florovsky), description of the “Byzantine” core of Russian culture (K. N. Leontiev), as well as the methodology of analyzing the reception of the medieval Roman heritage by the cultures of Eastern European countries, this methodology was formed in modern Byzantine studies.