The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church (1880-1905)

Abstract

For most of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church in the post-emancipation era was dismissed as a handmaiden of the state, a moribund institution, a purveyor of empty rituals, increasingly isolated and irrelevant in the context of industrial modernization and secularization. The last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the Church among cultural and social historians of late imperial Russia. Gregory Freeze has recently observed that in its preoccupation with social and political factors in the revolutionary process, the traditional historiography has "ignored its cultural and especially religious dimensions; apart from examining the ideology of the intelligentsia, it has otherwise discounted the role of culture, especially in configuring popular perception and behavior."1 Seeking to redress the balance, Freeze contends: "the Russian Orthodox Church, without question, provided one of the major cultural dynamics in the Russian pre-Revolution ... it claimed a strong hold over the faithful ... and subjected the laity to a constant barrage of liturgies, sermons, publications, and religious instruction in schools."2 [End Page 451] The present article addresses a narrow but important component of this religious discourse: the stigmatization of religious dissent. Alarmed by the growth of sectarianism in post-emancipation Russia, the servitors of spiritual purity increasingly drew on languages of illness and contagion to illustrate the scale and nature of the threat to the Church. Here I discuss the Church's representation of religious dissent not to make a case for its role in "configuring popular perception and behavior"—although that role is by no means discounted—but to explore the ways in which discursive innovations within the Church both reflected and creatively appropriated significant contemporary developments in secular understandings of the social order and the threats posed to it by the spread of moral deviance. Languages of illness and contagion have historically formed a stable part of the lexica of European churches in their attempts to stigmatize religious dissenters, and I make no claims for particularity in the existence of this language in Russian Orthodoxy.3 What does appear particular to Russia is the persistence of this preoccupation with the purity of faith right into the 20th century and its coexistence with the secular, scientific languages of epidemiology, psychology, and psychiatry. The church authorities drew on these disciplines to emphasize the contagious properties of religious deviance. In so doing, they increasingly moved away from a traditional insistence on the virtues of therapeutics, understood as pastoral care, to calls for a prophylactic quarantining of the infected in the interests of collective health. Such a strategy would inevitably require the intervention of the state as it lay beyond the institutional capacities of the Church. Anxious therefore to encourage the expansion of the state's involvement in the persecution of the sectarians, leading church figures sought to stress the intimate relationship between religious and political dissent through a secular language of criminal deviance that stressed their fundamental equivalence. Not only were the state authorities uniquely capable of dealing with the sectarian threat, but they also could not afford, any more than the Church could, to ignore it. Thus the medicalization of religious deviance in late 19th-century Orthodox discourse constituted part of a sustained campaign to summon the secular arm of the state to crush the sectarian movements. On the very eve of the religious liberalization of 1905, the Church's secularization of its rhetoric paradoxically illustrated a reinvigoration of traditional concerns with spiritual and moral purity as the foundation of a secure socio-political order. The Church's resort to medical and secular remedies in the campaign against spiritual nonconformity leads us at the end of this article to reconsider the links between religion and revolution, Orthodoxy and Bolshevism, a disputed issue that has long been debated but has recently been addressed by a...