The sacredness of history as a subject of theoretical discussions and socio-cultural practice

Abstract

The subject of the study is the correlation between the variants of relation to the sacred as a phenomenon of perception of the past and the practical embodiments of these modalities in various sociocultural forms. As a methodological basis, the principle of separation of history (historical science) and collective memory, implemented in "memory studies", in particular, by M. Hvalbvaks and P. Nora, was used. The original application of this principle in this study made it possible to establish two interdependencies between internally differentiated value-ideological attitudes (secular/sacred) regarding the historical past and their objectifications in the norms of law and the scientific ethos, the features of the education and education system, in the development of art. The secular assessment of sacred involves its elimination from the field of being, the mechanisms of spiritual development of the past, and finds expression either in the use of strict, formalized tools of historical knowledge, in the requirement of maximum deideologization of the latter, or in such a relation to the past, in which it turns into a material of subjective interpretations. In the opposite setting, the sacred is understood as a necessary and irreparable part of collective memory, the source of which in one interpretation is the transcendental plan of being, and in the other - the transcendental universals of culture. This installation turns out to be an obstacle to the complete elimination of sacred and from the practice of specialized historical knowledge, which finds normative expression in the integration of theological discourse into the structure of scientific knowledge.