Popular Orthodoxy Research Articles

The policy of territorial reorganization of church parishes in the Olonets region in the second half of the 18th – early 19th century

The article presents the results of the study of the reasons and the realization of the policy of territorial reorganization of parishes in Olonets uyezd, the goals and basic principles of which were formulated at the legislative level in the XVIII century. The effort to support the clergy of the tiny “monastic” parishes that emerged after the secularization reform of 1764 prompted the diocesan authorities to closure small parishes and reorganize parishes with large number of households. The reorganization of parishes that had taken in the late 1760s and 1810s were not systematic, however had ambivalent effects. On the one hand, the bishops began to solve ongoing problems on the delimitation of a group of vast parishes boundaries. On the other hand, they could not attain improvements in the welfare of the clergy and the maintenance of churches at the proper level. Furthermore the liquidation of economically incapable parishes without proper attention to the spiritual life of local communities resulted in the flourishing of the popular orthodoxy and the strengthening of the Old Believers positions.

Праздник русской березки: советское инсценирование концепта тринитаризма

This paper is focused on the means of transforming Trinity Sunday and attempts to “reinvent” this festival into the Russian Birch festival. In late 50s of the 20th century in a burst of the anticlerical campaign, the Soviet festival committees were concerned with creating new secular rituals, and anti-religious analogues of festivals, which would be able to get rid of ingrained “popular Orthodoxy”. The modes of performing the meaningful core of Trinity Sunday are a subject of this research, and theatrical and methodological scenario-based experience in holding the Russian Birch festival is an object. This research is based on numerous methodological guidelines, scenarios, reviews, and transcripts of relevant committees, which made it possible to shed light on complicated processes of generating a new festival. This paper represents the way, in which heroic and plot and compositional framework of original Trinity Sunday was being substituted. This research results in the following: in spite of the anticlerical position being declared, which had constituted the basis for the substitution of Trinity Sunday for the Russian Birch festival, in fact, the newly “invented” festival duplicated the basic functions and elements of the trinitarian concept and was within the framework of Trinity Sunday in terms of archetype. Moreover, the association with commemoration of the dead appropriate to Trinity was reflected in a cult of a heroic death of a soldier of the Soviet Army and updating of other cultural agendas.

Kesksed looduslikud pühapaigad Eesti kagunurgas

Differently from most of Estonia, in the south-easternmost peripheries of the country – in the western border areas of Setomaa, as well as in the eastern and southern borderlands of Võrumaa – it is possible to distinguish sacred sites of regional meaning, i.e. those where popular religious assemblies related to offering took place on holidays. In the Orthodox Seto culture area where medieval way of life survived until the 1920s, such sites are represented by the sacral complex of Miikse (offering stone, healing stream, cemetery hill, formerly also sacred oak and spring), St Anne’s stone (Annekivi) in Pelsi and Päevapööramise mägi (‘The Hill Where the Sun Turns’) in Hinniala village. Two major Orthodox religious centres of Setomaa have been founded on pre-Christian sacred sites. The church of Saatse was preceded by a sacred pine tree. On the site of the famous monastery of Pechory (Petseri) there was probably a large sacral complex of a sacred hill with a grove and cave, as well as a sacred spring and offering stone. The site of religious assemblies called Bohomola mägi (‘The hill of praying to God’) was located somewhere on the forested borderlands of the Lutheran province of Livonia and the Orthodox province of Pskov, being attended by peasants from both regions. In Lutheran areas where the modernization of culture started since the 1850s and 1860s already, folkloric evidence is fragmentary and has preserved more poorly. There sites of popular assemblies related to offering on holidays are known from Viitina Vana-mõisa, Villa, Viitka, Paidra, Kuutsi and Linte, and a sacred site of central importance was located also on God’s hill of Vana-Laitsna (presently Vēclaicene municipality in Latvia). Most of these the sites lie in the extreme peripheries of medieval parishes – the churches of Räpina, Vastseliina and Hargla were founded only in the 17th century The hinterlands of regional holiday assemblies probably correspond to regional identity units based of village groups called “corners” (nulk, kolk). Judging by the location of regional assembly sites of central meaning, their influence radius stretched until 6–10 kilometres. However, the system was not of symmetric character: some sites evidently had larger hinterlands than others and the hinterlands may also have been overlapped. The religious gatherings were often related to the solstices in the natural calendar or church holidays replacing them. Existing data give evidence of the intertwining of pre-Christian and Christian elements, especially in the Orthodox areas. In some cases the assembly tradition at sacred natural site has been transformed into local church holidays on the name days of the sanctuary. The strong and long-term preservation of tradition in some holy places of Setomaa results from their association with Christianity and pilgrimages inherent in popular Orthodoxy.

The Biblical Theme in the Historical Monographs of Georgy P. Fedotov

The article stresses that Georgy P. Fedotov's systematic reference to the Bible enabled him in his historical monographs (Abelard, St. Filipp Metropolitan of Moscow, Saints of Ancient Russia, Spiritual Poems ) to reconstruct the spiritual reality of past eras and symbolically perceive the present. Fedotov intended to know The Gospel in History, Russian religiosity, exploring it on the material of hagiographies of saints, spiritual poems, folk faith, apocrypha, and prologues. Fedotov considered the history of Russian culture in terms of a "living chain," an integral phenomenon existing due to the Holy Scriptures and Holy Tradition. However, "The sacred tradition of the Church is included in the general stream of historical tradition, all complex, always muddy, human weaving truth and falsehood." Fedotov raised the question of the relationship between scientific criticism and biblical exegetics: how can we reconcile exegetics of sacred texts, which assume that the Bible is an inspired book, and historical criticism, which by its very nature cannot share such a position, being aimed at comprehending objective historical reality? He solved it convincingly practically through hermeneutic religious analysis of hagiographic monuments and spiritual verses. In his Spiritual Poems Fedotov explores folklore material compared to biblical texts, hagiographies, and apocrypha, to comprehend the peculiarity of religious "Weltanschauung" and popular orthodoxy. In spiritual verses, there was a transformation of biblical images (Christ, the Virgin Mary, the Last Judgment) under the influence of folk faith with pagan features. In folklore texts, Fedotov reveals how Christ, from savior and redeemer, turns into a king and dreadful judge. The image of the Mother of God merges in the popular consciousness with the image of the mother earth, suffering from people. Eschatological prophecies are based on impressions from icons, frescoes, and lubok pictures. Fedotov's historical monographs illuminate various aspects of Russian religious consciousness regarding Holy Scripture, considering dogmatic biblical exegetics and historical criticism. All the mentioned facts allow us to assert that Fedotov was the leading secular biblical scholar of the Russian diaspora.

СТАНОВЛЕНИЕ РЕЛИГИОЗНОГО СОЗНАНИЯ Н. А. НЕКРАСОВА

The problem of N. A. Nekrasov's religiosity, especially its biographical aspect, has not been studied well. As for the sources of information about the dogma of Orthodoxy, in his poetic texts Nekrasov shows considerable awareness of spiritual issues, as they are addressed by the church and the Holy Fathers of the Church. The poet is interested in Orthodox hagiography. His source of information could be, first of all, the so-called popular Orthodoxy. The question remains open about the formation of Nekrasov's religiosity at an early age, about the nature of his spiritual disposition. This article attempts, on the one hand, to present a complete picture of the religious life of the Nekrasov family, which is currently available to us from isolated fragments, and, on the other, to understand the role of his mother, Elena Alexandrovna, as well as the accompanying factors that influenced the primary organization of his religious aspirations. The author suggests that the religious and general romantic mood of the poet’s worldview, inherited from his mother are inseparable. There is no doubt that the high civic pathos of Nekrasov's poetry, developed under the influence of the poet's revolutionary democratic environment, was formed on the childhood basis of a «holy», romantic religious outlook and the perception of life as care for the weak and disadvantaged – in which the main role was played by Nekrasov's mother. The protest pathos of Nekrasov's poetry acquires an unconventional meaning because subjectively, in the poet's own mind, it grows directly out of the ideals of the Gospel.

Похоронный фольклорно-этнографический комплекс как обрядовый текст (на примере локальной эрзя-мордовской традиции сибирского бытования)

Within the framework of popular Orthodoxy in the 20 th century, there were and still exist types of funeral and memorial practices, in which Church and folksy elements are fused. The analytical description of the funerary folklore-ethnographic complex proposed in the article is based on field records in the Erzya-Mordovian villages of the Zalesovsky district of the Altai territory in the period from 2008 to 2017. The characteristic of the local ritual tradition is presented based on the analysis of a large array of oral stories of participants of the ritual. These oral sources are evidence that allows get an idea about the opinions of informants, carriers of the tradition about death, sin, moral norms and ritual rules, about the general principles of the funeral rite, its structure, and the actional, personal, spatial, temporal, subject, verbal and musical components of the complex. As a result of the research, the authors come to the conclusion that the local funeral ritual can be considered as a single multi-layered text, in which different types of cultural models are organically combined and interact: archaic folk and Christian, oral and written.

Sport, Alcohol and Women: An Emerging Research Agenda

ABSTRACTThis article describes an emerging research agenda for defining the relationship between women, sport and alcohol as a feminist issue. Characterised as a “holy trinity”, the relationship between sport, drinking, particularly heavy drinking, and masculinity remains a popular orthodoxy. While not disputing the enduring and influential symbolic, economic, political and cultural power relations between men, sport and alcohol, the article argues that our proclivity towards framing drinking and sport through the lens of “hegemonic masculinity” gives rise to a theoretical and empirical silence when it comes to research on women, sport and alcohol in the Australian context and beyond. We interrogate four key interrelated research problems for feminist scholars of sport: i) the framing of sport-related drinking as hegemonic masculinity; ii) the need for new theoretical/conceptual/analytical frameworks that have emerged from the framing of women’s relationship to alcohol as invariably problematic; iii) a recognition that sport-related drinking for women is as pleasurable and problematic as it is for men; and iv) the relationship between sport and alcohol relative to a growing emphasis on cultural and gender diversity in Australian sport.

A Living Law: Divorce Contracts in Early Modern Russia

GEORGE DANDIN: Ah! I give it up altogether, and I can see no help for it. When one has married, as I have done, a wicked wife, the best step which one can take is to go and throw ones self into the water, head foremost. --Moliere The historiographical reconstruction of early modern Muscovite divorce and remarriage law and practices was initiated at the end of the 19th century by Russian legal historians as an erudite prerequisite to the study of modern Russian family law or, alternatively, as a part of comparative law studies. (1) All but abandoned for many decades, it was resumed not long ago from a different and broader perspective. Gregory Freeze and Daniel Kaiser were the first to introduce the analysis of marriage law and practices into two distinct, though connected, discussions about, first, the place and role of Orthodoxy in different strata of early modern Russian society and, second, the evolution of the extent and efficiency of church and state control over the tsar's subjects. The evidence about divorce and remarriage practices collected by Freeze tends to reinforce his general argument that, at least at the popular level, Orthodoxy exerted but weak spiritual authority, while the church was unable to monitor its adherents effectively until the 1760s. (2) Kaiser uses the same kind of material to argue, on the contrary, that the majority of Muscovite Christians had appropriated fundamental elements of Christian practice by the 17th century, while the church administration was far from impotent before parishioners. (3) This contradiction suggests that citing divorce and remarriage practices in broader discussions of religiosity may be premature, for our source base remains insufficient: we simply do not have a coherent picture of practices either locally or across the entire empire. The present article aims to enrich this source base, focusing on a practice of divorcing by contract without the intervention of the church court. It synthesizes preceding research on so-called divorce letters (razvodnoe pis 'mo, otpusknaia gramota, svobodnoe pis 'mo, zapis') and adds a proportionally significant number of newly discovered contracts, which allows us to take a step forward in elaborating a more complete and, in fact, a more consensual picture. On the one hand, the material presented in this article corroborates and enhances the vision of severe limitations upon the power of the church courts to control divorce and remarriage among the provincial populace. On the other hand, the same materials show that divorcing outside the church institutions did not automatically indicate the rejection of Christian rules or values. Men and women who chose to divorce by contract did not exhibit less formal respect for Orthodox principles than those who duly subjected themselves to episcopal authority. The study of divorce and remarriage practices throughout the medieval and early modern Christian world encounters serious difficulties due to the lack of sources. Deeply influenced by the church doctrine of indissolubility of marriage, Catholic societies, and even Protestant ones (despite the Reformists' rejection of the sacramental status of matrimony), do not constitute propitious contexts for the study of these practices, for when they existed, people tended to hide them. (4) Eastern Slavic Christendom presents a somewhat different case. Here a relatively liberal Byzantine marriage law prevailed for a very long time. In certain countries it continued to function well into the 19th century. (5) In Russia, the authorities started to develop an uncompromising church doctrine and powerful law enforcement mechanisms in the 1720s, and progressively transformed their divorce and remarriage policy into one of the most draconian in Europe. But prior to this shift, the tsar's subjects, in contrast to Western Christians, did not have an especially strong incentive either to repress a need for divorce and remarriage or to conceal these practices. …

Traditional religious culture, popular and official orthodoxy

Revitalisation of official orthodoxy is a process running in parallel with the revitalisation of popular orthodoxy and popular religiousness, where the supremacy of one over the other depends on a number of factors, social and political circumstances and cultural preferences. Reception and interpretation of the Orthodox church massages reflect in the approximation of the committed church-going believers to the ecclesial orthodoxy, while most declarative believers adopt, understand and interpret the orthodox learning, church rules, rituals, ethic norms and the importance of religion in everyday life in their own individual ways.

The Ethical Values of <em>Narodnoe Pravoslavie</em>: Traditional Near-Death Experiences and Fedotov

In 1935 the emigre scholar G. P. Fedotov published an analysis of the ethical values of popular Russian Orthodoxy, basing his conclusions on the genre of dukhovnye stikhi (lit. spiritual verses). These religious songs were performed before the Revolution by the blind itinerant singers known as the kaleki or kaliki perekhozhie [Fedotov 1935/1991].(2) For Fedotov the key features of folk Orthodoxy (narodnoe pravoslavie) were the emphasis on life as suffering, the profound sinfulness of man, the belief in the power of Christian love and the attachment to Mother Earth (Mat’ syra zemlia) and maternal values in general, with their supreme embodiment in the Mother of God. His view has proved highly influential outside Russia, largely through its distillation in the opening chapter of volume one of The Russian Religious Mind [Fedotov 1946]. Fedotov’s influence has perhaps been reinforced by the coincidences between his own concept of folk Orthodoxy and key aspects of Dostoevskii’s view of the people (narod), itself based to a considerable extent on the writer’s reading of the dukhovnye stikhi [Ivanits 2002; Wigzell 2002b:28-31].(3) In Russia where Fedotov’s work began to appear only in 1989, his views have had less impact, while, among folklorists, there is a new interest in and awareness of the complexities of folk ethics [Belova 2002]. In this essay I question the validity of Fedotov’s analysis for popular Orthodoxy as a whole by examinng another of the genres of religious folklore, the type of vision known as the obmiranie. So unfamiliar is the obmiranie, except to some folklorists and traditional Orthodox believers, that a definition would seem in order. The term obmirat’, self-evidently linked to umirat’ (to die), refers both to the state of falling into/being in a coma as well as to the narrative account of what is seen during a coma, that is, essentially a near-death experience. To this day among traditional believers (official Orthodox or Old Believers) in rural Russia as in other Orthodox Slavic countries, the near-death experience is generally believed to consist of a journey to the world beyond the grave.(4) Here the subject most commonly meets relatives, sees the torments of hell and learns the date of his or her own death. Obviously these narratives represent a continuation of early and medieval Christian tradition (Dante’s Divine Comedy is the supreme literary example.) Visits to the world beyond the grave were traditionally experienced not only during coma but also as dreams, or, when awake, as visions, but in Orthodox Slavic countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such visions are linked primarily with a coma or unusually prolonged and deep sleep. Indeed, it is traditionally assumed that anyone in this state will visit the afterlife, and in particular hell. During the vision, even when heaven is mentioned, the specific virtues of the blessed are not. Consequently, the ethical emphases of the obmiranie have to be judged largely from the sins mentioned, whether those of categories of sinners, or specific people known to the visionary, including his or her own moral failings. Within the Byzantino-Slavic Orthodox tradition considerable differences exist between accounts of visits to heaven and hell, allowing the visionary to select

Conceptualizing religious discourse in the work of Fëdor Dostoevskij

I interpret Dostoevskij’s religious concepts in terms of mythogenesis and mythopoesis. Dostoevskij’s religious concepts arose on the basis both of his personal emotional experience and of the discourse of popular Orthodoxy. They demonstrate the antinomial nature of Russian spirituality, and are typified by his conception of the family, which illustrates the communal basis of the individual personality. The antimomial idea of the family is most fully developed in Dostoevskij’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which the four models of fatherhood correspond to Isaac the Syrian’s concepts of physical, spiritual, mental and divine fatherhood.

L'archimandrite Naum et les « naumovcy » comme quintessence du phénomène contemporain du starčestvo

The Naum archimandrite and "naumovtsy" as the quintessence of the contemporary starchestvo phenomenon The starchestvo, an informal religious practice in the Russian Orthodox Church, is a phenomenon that, parallel to official theological doctrines, fits into a system of practices and beliefs called "popular Orthodoxy". This practice is far from homogeneous. The influence of spiritual fathers is of overriding importance. Officially belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church, these priests exercise an influence (recognized by the episcopate itself) over the faithful and the clergy. They have set up their own system of Church administration. By concentrating on one example, the Naum archimandrite (Bajborodin), the relations between the starets and his disciples are studied so as to analyze both his influence on Church activities, even in the political and social fields, and the psychological mechanisms used to rule over followers.

Operation ‘Surgeon’ and Britain's post-war exploitation of Nazi German aeronautics

After 1945, Allied acquisition of intelligence on Nazi Germany's wartime aeronautical innovations became one of the most important immediate post-war aims. From July 1945 to July 1947, Operation ‘Surgeon’ became the focus of British efforts to exploit Nazi aeronautical advances. The objectives of the operation were the evacuation of state-of-the-art equipment from aeronautical research institutes and the recruitment of high-grade aviation experts for postwar work in Britain. This article analyzes the conduct and results of Operation ‘Surgeon’. The limited literature on this topic has fuelled a popular orthodoxy which holds that the UK intelligence effort and policies to recruit German defence scientists were classic examples of the ‘British disease’, or a more general inability to exploit a technological opportunity that was harnessed so effectively by the other victorious Allies. Drawing on the experience of Operation ‘Surgeon’, the article challenges this orthodoxy that has dominated the historiography of Britain's intellectual reparations from the Third Reich.

Le mot smert' [la mort] dans le folklore religieux russe

The word «smerť » in Russian religious folklore. The article studies the three «hypostasis» of Death (as an event, a figure, a condition), the semantic fields to which the word smerť belongs, the importance of Christian and pagan traditions in different folklore genre (spiritual poems ; bylin as and funeral laments ; duhobor psalms). Even in the genre where popular orthodoxy predominates, pagan and magical elements can be observed.

Popular Orthodoxy, Official Church and State in Finnish Border Karelia before World War II

Popular Orthodoxy, Official Church and State in Finnish Border Karelia before World War II

Neural spine elongation in dinosaurs: sailbacks or buffalo-backs?

Several dinosaurs, notablyOuranosaurusandSpinosaurus,have vertebral columns marked by prominent arrays of elongated neural spines. Using pelycosaurian sailbacks likeDimetrodonas analogies, popular orthodoxy holds that the tall spines served as supporting struts for dorsal sails of purported thermoregulatory function, especially heat dissipation in tropical climates. It is argued here that the neural spines ofOuranosaurus, Spinosaurus,and several other long-spined dinosaurs favor bison-like humps rather than sails: 1) in functional morphology and relative elongation they are dissimilar to pelycosaur spines but homoplastically converge on the spines of high-withered ungulates; 2) the usefulness of a sail in thermoregulation has been exaggerated—in large tetrapods it would have been fairly efficient as a thermal amplifier but ineffective as a radiator; hence large sail-bearing dinosaurs in open tropical climates are improbable; 3) the insulation properties of humps favor gigantothermy, the most likely thermobiological model for large dinosaurs.Dinosaur humps are probable adaptations for: 1) energy storage, maintenance of gigantothermy, and heat-shielding in unshaded habitats; 2) long-distance migration from feeding to nesting grounds across terrains of variable productivity; and 3) lipid conservation for production of large clutches of eggs at the nesting site. Because sacral, caudal, or dorsal humps were relatively common traits among certain groups, the fashionably anorexic image of many large dinosaurs must be emended.

Brancusi and popular Orthodoxy

Brancusi et l'orthodoxie populaire Une étude anthropologique du paysan roumain au début du XXe siècle, illustrée par l'œuvre de Brancusi, révèle une orthodoxie populaire, syncrétisme religieux où se mêlent orthodoxie dogmatique et ritualisme populaire. L'analyse du monument aux morts de la première guerre mondiale de Tirgu-Jiu permet de décoder dans celui-ci deux sortes de messages, selon les deux registres de l'orthodoxie dogmatique et populaire. Cette dernière, structurée sur un modèle érotico-thanatique peut être identifiée ici sous la forme de deux grands rituels : "la noce du mort" et les "aumônes du temps de la vie", utilisables aussi pour une meilleure compréhension de la biographie de Brancusi.

Simon Fish, William Tyndale, and Sir Thomas More's ‘Lutheran Conspiracy’

As Sir Thomas More reflected upon the religious atmosphere during the first months of 1528, he could not conceal his dismay that the situation was steadily deteriorating. Indeed, he thought the popular orthodoxy so weak that any ‘senseless clown’ could gain wide support for an attack on the Church. Within the year, Simon Fish's Supplication of the Beggars had made More a prophet, forcing the busy new chancellor of England to reply to Fish with The Supplycacyon of soulys. Historians have hesitated to label Fish senseless or a clown, for the tremendous impact of his short tract upon Henry vm and the English Reformation is generally recognised. While it is manifest that the Supplication was a rabble-rousing piece of anti-clericalism, perhaps another measure should be taken of Fish before closing off the subject of his significance from discussion. Specifically, if evidence should place Fish and his writings within that group identified with William Tyndale, more credence would be lent to chancellor More's repeated assertions that a number of ‘evangelicall brethren’ existed to propagate Tyndale's beliefs.