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Download Article (PDF) Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 289 5th International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2018) The Transmission of the Orthodox Spiritual Tradition in Russian Culture and Beyond Svetlana Tokareva Iliya Dikarev Department of Philosophy Law Faculty Law Faculty Volgograd State University Volgograd State University Volgograd, Russia 400062 Volgograd, Russia 400062 E-mail: [email protected]. E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] Abstract—The authors of the article review the channels of distorting the Orthodox tradition. Despite this, these types transmitting the Orthodox tradition. The peculiarities of provide an understanding of the Orthodox meanings and maintaining the Orthodox tradition in the Russian and values, shared by all the members of the cultural community, Western cultures are being analyzed with special attention and prevent the fragmentation of the living space of the given to speech practices with church-religious genres and bearers of the Orthodox tradition. fiction being of key importance. The authors analyze the established link between Russian literature and the Orthodox The transmission of the Orthodox tradition in a culturally tradition. The influence of religious globalization and religious alien environment experiences a destructive influence of syncretism on the transmission of the Orthodox tradition is religious globalization, lacking everyday speech practices revealed. and folklore, therefore, the transmission is carried out largely through fiction and sermons with sermon being the leading Keywords—religious tradition; Orthodoxy; spirituality; genre of religious discourse, providing verbal registration of Hesychasm; fiction typical situations of social interactions. A sermon is an influencing speech, based on a long historical tradition and I. INTRODUCTION aimed at clarifying the doctrinal content and instructing the Social and humanitarian knowledge in contemporary believers. In modern conditions, sermons may be spread not Russian society is experiencing a kind of “religious only through the direct interaction of the communicators but Renaissance” rooted in the post-Soviet era. This Renaissance also through media due to the expansion of indirect of a kind draws the attention to a number of researchers. communication and the replacement of book culture with Since speech practices are among the major channels used electronic transmission of information. for cultural and religious transmission, the interest in this Despite sermon and fiction sharing some communicative issue also touches the fields of language and communication, features (e.g., high requirements for the personality of the including linguistics, literary studies, and philosophy. preacher and the writer, perceived as spiritual mentors), a The transmission of the Orthodox tradition occurs both sermon demands a specific set of communicators, while inside and outside the Orthodox Russian World. In the fiction is designed for the widest audience possible. The former case, the preservation of tradition is carried out in its sermon’s edifying function is supported by its status entirety and includes sacred and ritual elements, institutional character and the obligatory presence in its structure the forms and patterns of religious behavior, as well as spiritual informative and narrative parts accompanied by the practices of the “living” religious experience. The interpretation [2]. Since the genre of a sermon is institutional, transmission of the Orthodox tradition uses a system of there are pre-set communicators and communicative speech practices with the produced texts being “a speech environment, material and communicative sphere, text correlate of socio-cultural practices of actual construction corpus and non-vernal inclusions. Such substantiation allows and transmission of tradition” [1]. The peculiarity of the limiting the destructive influence of the alien cultural Orthodox sphere of concepts is reflected in religious environment (including the secular one). literature and journalism, sermons, fiction, folklore, and On the contrary, artistic expression offers an opportunity everyday linguistic consciousness. Within each genre, the for assimilation of spiritual traditions in their native (i.e. forms of statements are determined by the speaker’s producing) culture and beyond it, in the alien environment intentions, draw on the cultural traditions, consider the lacking the necessary connotations. A writer describes and connotations and implicit background knowledge of the specializes religious practice, shaping it and weaving into the communicators and their social, cultural and psychological plot and the lives of the characters, into their personality. characteristics. At the same time, each of the aforementioned Thanks to this technique and to the reproduction of the types of speech practices boasts genre-defining factors of religious practices in a cultural context of the works of art, a Copyright © 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). 749 Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 289 reader experiences and assimilates the embedded symbolic system of values. As a result, we may come across the values. statements that “there is a newly understood Christianity” in the later works of Leo Tolstoy, “representing a kind of II. TRANSMISSION OF THE ORTHODOX TRADITION IN spiritual ecumenism”. There are also contradictory RUSSIAN CULTURE evaluations of the works of Nikolai Leskov: at one point he’s declared “a genuine Christian”, showing the Orthodox The most important channel for the transmission of the understanding of righteousness, and at some other point he is Orthodox traditions in Russian culture is Russian literature, seen as an Old Believer, bringing together in his righteous which has always been heavily invested in the spiritual life characters the traits of the “Russian dissenters” – Molokans, of man. Russian literature originally emerged as a spiritual Doukhobors, Shtundists (Leskov indeed didn’t consider them and religious one. The 17th-century attempts to isolate to be sectarians) [6] [7]. Russian culture from faith didn’t lead to profound changes in the culture’s core, and the literature retained its connection Also, the characters’ actions are subject to contradictory with Orthodoxy and Evangelical preaching in all subsequent interpretations. The researchers, basing on ordinary everyday periods of its development including the Soviet one [3]. The ideas about the possible and impossible, real and unreal, form and extent of the Christian traditions’ presence in evaluate the characters’ actions as unmotivated, exaggerated, Russian literature differ. The church-religious genres accuse writers of deviating from the principles of realism [8]. prevailed in old Russian literature, with the topics, the Indeed, when a writer describes the spiritual (and not only narrative, and the author’s image subjected to strictly literary psychological or emotional) life of a person, “the reality of and aesthetic etiquette. However, this system was God’s presence”, the very nature of human actions and ideas dismounted by the 17th century. With the church-religious about what is possible, changes dramatically [9]. What is real genres interacting with secular fiction, Russian literature for the mystically oriented consciousness, is a retreat from underwent novelization, expressed in the increased interest to realism and a hyperbole for a secular science-minded a person’s inner world and psychological motives behind his individual. In this regard, some researchers propose to action, and in the emergence of entertaining elements and evaluate the reality and fiction in the literary works of a fictional characters in the works, depicting household. church-religious genre from the standpoint of a “spiritual realism” [10] [11], inherent to the writers, “gravitating to One of the major channels for transmitting the Orthodox Orthodoxy” [12]. tradition was the distribution of works intended for individual pious reading. Of special interest is “The Way of a The significance of Russian fiction for the maintenance Pilgrim”, the late 19th-century literary landmark of the of the Orthodox tradition is due to its “Christocentrism” [13], Russian ascetic writing [4]. The third edition, edited and preserved even in case of deviation from the letter and intent prepared for printing in 1884 by Theophan the Recluse of Church sources. These deviations were sometimes quite (Govorov), received wide circulation in the Russian Empire. significant. For example, the researchers point out to the The literary classic was later complemented by Elder substitution of holiness by morality, the disappointment in Macarius of Optina’s (Ivanov) “A Warning to Those who the Church and the assertion of the possibility of salvation in Read Spiritual Paternal Books and Wish to Undergo the it in the works of Leo Tolstoy and Nikolai Leskov. Intelligent Jesus Prayer” [5], describing the risks of self- If we compare mechanically the corpus of literary texts assertive strive to a contemplative life. with the Orthodox dogma, none of the fiction texts is to be Spiritual literature is designed to convey the sacred considered fully consistent with the Orthodox dogma. The meaning of the Orthodox faith and its mystical practices to presence of the Christian tradition
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