Translation of the article into English
S.V. Savchenko: Toward the Problem of Using the Concepts of "Sueverie" and "Two-Faith" in Historical Studies
When studying peasant religiosity of the 19th century, historiography still relies on the verbal means and forms of description used by priests, missionaries, officials, ethnographers and intellectuals of the pre-revolutionary period. We are talking about "ritualism," "two-faith" and "superstition," with the help of which both secular and church intellectuals seemed to detach themselves from the object of description, identifying themselves with an elitist, rational, "high" culture, devoid of these shortcomings of the common people's culture. Peasant religiosity is defined as shallow, ceremonial, formal, pagan or semi-pagan. Paganism is essentialized as something eternal and unchangeable. The "incomprehensibility" of the people is expressed in the idea of the pralogic nature of thought processes in peasant heads. In general, the primitivization of the peasants was intended to justify the great enlightenment mission of those who led the people to happiness. The categories "paganism," "ritualism," "superstition," "two-faith," and others are relics of the era of the dominance of dogmatic theology over historical religious studies, when dogmatics extended its axiology, ontology, and criteria of classification (what is true and false, what is true and untrue, good and evil, etc.) to various spheres of humanitarian cognition.
Basic Text.
Be that as it may, the use of explicitly evaluative categories as analytic language, needs serious argumentation, as pointed out as early as E. Evans-Pritchard [1]. Indeed, "superstition is an evaluative, everyday term that has not been used by researchers of religious phenomena for a long time" [2]. K. Girtz in his semiotic interpretation of cultural phenomena proceeded from the fact that the term "superstition" is excluded from scientific discourse and left to polemicists [3, P. 232]. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the usual analytical scheme "folk superstitious religiosity - official canonical religiosity", separating the people and the church elite - is unsuccessful, there are too many social facts outside its boundaries. As E.B. Smilyanskaya, "any definitions on the social basis have long since not withstood criticism. Belief in the magical was inherent in the religious beliefs of all strata of society" [4]. Therefore, another binary model is more correct. It contrasts everyday religious practice, in which the whole spiritual corporation of clerics and laity can participate, and codified religion of synodal edicts, general church canons and theological treatises. At the same time, the learned authors of these treatises could share the same picture of the world in everyday life as the masses of superstitious laymen, but behind the desk, in the consistory, or behind the seminary pulpit, they were the bearers of official Orthodoxy.
Accusations of peasants in ritualism, which have become an element of good tone since the nineteenth century, rarely provoke critical reflection, although the problem is too complex to get rid of it with general phrases that all peasants were "rite believers" [5]. What explains the frequent use of this term with a clearly negative connotation? Probably, it is connected with the intellectuals' condemnation of the belief in the power of ritual and ritual, with the "abomination of matter": according to the widespread stereotype, the quality of spiritual content increases in the measure of deprivation of its bodily form. This peculiarity of the consciousness of educated society was once pointed out by F.M. Dostoevsky in his parable about the jug and the precious world. Christianity was artificially spiritualized, from it was removed the belief that the material world in a transformed and sanctified form will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. The term "ritualized peasants" may also reflect stereotypes of the perception of their peasants as analogous to savages who see the form, are able to reproduce it in the smallest detail, like adherents of primitive kargo-cults, but are incapable of comprehending the content.
The word "superstition" is not terminological; it cannot be used as a scientific concept because it is overloaded with religious axiology. Whoever it comes from, it is assumed that the one who uses it either professes the true faith (as he understands it) or considers any faith to be vanity and false. Superstition is an evaluative category of Orthodox theology, which denounces the false beliefs of its parishioners, but the modern historian, together with the missionaries of the 19th century, writing about peasant superstitions, finds himself in a "time trap". Synodal historian S.G. Runkevich defined the program of Alexander I's religious policy, putting it into the mouth of the tsar's tutor Lagarp. "It is necessary to recreate public education and thereby prepare new generations a different way of thinking, free from prejudice, degrading human dignity ... To exterminate people's ignorance, the ruler must give freedom of speech to writers, and they will expose false opinions with logical arguments and dispel them irresistible force of ridicule" [6, P. 10]. Using the concepts of "superstition" and "prejudice" to characterize peasant religious beliefs, we thus take the side of the imperial government and missionary denouncers. Within the confines of strictly scientific discourse, it is impossible to determine who is misguided and superstitious and who is a true believer, to evaluate the ontological attributes of faith. This is not the task of the historian, but of the theologian. The other extreme is that a number of authors sympathize with superstitions, finding in them evidence of cordocentrism, the uniqueness of the folk soul, etc. This is essentially the same approach, only with a deliberately opposite assessment.
The epistemological value of "bigotry" as a concept is no less problematic than "superstition", although it finds support among some scientists [7; 8, P. 363-364]. According to A. V. Mikhailyuk, "the traditional term "two-faith", despite its conventionality, adequately reflects the state of folk religiosity", because it is not about "formal external connection of two religions, but about their close intertwining, internal synthesis" [9, P. 85]. [9, С. 85]. The point is that modernity and archaism were indeed intertwined in the minds of specific people and determined their behavioral response, but the constant reference to paganism as the second component of folk religiosity ("remnant") is a simplification. It is impossible to prove that folk religious beliefs and practices had only two components, not three, four or more, and their pre-Christian genealogy is also unprovable.
According to the correct remark of A.S. Lavrov, "in culture nothing is a vestige, everything is lived or does not exist" [10, P. 86] [10, С. 86]. In other words, this "relic" fulfilled a certain social and symbolic function in the system in which it was embedded. What historians usually mean by "paganism" is not a relic of the ancient pre-Christian world, but a constantly operating cultural mechanism for the production of sacred objects (material things, ideas, values, deified persons), extra-Christian, even extra-monotheistic, religious practices and ideas. Not everything that is difficult to attribute to Orthodoxy in the liturgical, canonical, or theological sense should be defined as paganism. It is necessary to take into account the influence of the city, fiction, which penetrated into the village and "folklorized" in the process of secondary signification, the sphere of circulation of mass rumors, the spread of the press, whose messages were sometimes quite original retold to their fellow villagers by peasant literati, political ideas of intellectuals, specifically assimilated by the peasants, etc. [11]
Thus, the concept of superstition and bigotry within the framework of the study of peasant religiosity of the late XIX - early XX century is unproductive. It terminologically preserves the worldview of the people at the dawn of Old Russian history, when the old paganism and the new Christianity fought among themselves. Strictly speaking, it is impossible to speak of two-faith when there is no practice of parallel functioning of Christian and pagan religious cult (the analogy with the veneration of saints is false and groundless). Information about true two-faith can be found in Old Russian monuments of literature. For example, in the "Word about the right faith" of the XI century condemns the practice of complicity of newly baptized Christians in the religious cult of the pagan gods Perun and Svarog, behind which, according to the Christian scribe, are demons [12, P. 162]. In the XIX century there is nothing like that.
Conclusion and conclusions.
So, in the article the questions of expediency of application of the concepts "superstition" and "two-faith" as analytical categories were considered. The following conclusions were obtained:
1. the use of these concepts in modern research is unjustified, since they are far from analytical neutrality, are ideologically biased, publicistic, confessionally labeled and, in a sense, pejorative;
2. the origin of the studied concepts is directly related to the era of dominance of dogmatic theology over historical religious studies, as they semantically embody the metaphysical and unscientific division of religious beliefs into "true" and "false";
3. their application in modern historical works is based on a very superficial study of popular religiosity and is connected with its stereotypical perception as a two-component cultural formation (Orthodoxy and paganism); such reductionism is not a solution to the problem, but evidence of unwillingness to solve it;
4. a binary model that contrasts not Orthodoxy and paganism ("true faith" and "superstition"), but everyday religious practices and codified official religion seems to be more successful;
5. folk religion is a multi-layered phenomenon that cannot be reduced to two components, especially since the ancient pagan genealogy of certain religious traditions and beliefs cannot be traced and verified by scientific methods.
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