Shapoval Yu.V.
Religious values: religious analysis (on the example of Judaism, Christianity, Islam)
In modern secular society, the dominant trend in relation to religious values ​​has been their erosion and misunderstanding of their essence. The processes of profanization, ethicization, politicization and commercialization of religion are projected onto religious values, which are reduced to ethical standards of behavior, equated to universal human values, and in the worst case, become a means in a political game or an instrument of material enrichment. The manipulation of religious values ​​for one’s own purposes has become a widespread phenomenon, as we see in the example extremist organizations using religious slogans, or pseudo-religious organizations that, under the guise of religious values, pursue commercial goals. The postmodern game, which breaks signifier and signified, form and content, appearance and essence, has also drawn religious values ​​into its whirlpool, which become a convenient form for completely non-religious content. Therefore, an adequate definition of religious values, which would make it possible to distinguish them from a pseudo-religious surrogate, is of particular relevance and significance today. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to identify the essence and content of religious values, without which it is impossible to raise the question of their dialogue with secular values.

To achieve this goal, it is important to choose an adequate research path. The logic of our research involves revealing the following aspects. Firstly, it is necessary to identify the main formative principle of religious values, which constitutes them and distinguishes them from other values. This principle will be the criterion of value position in the religious sphere. Of course, this essential principle will also give direction to our research. Secondly, the values ​​we are considering are religious, therefore, they should be studied in the context of religion, and not in isolation from it. In our opinion, the reason for the vagueness and uncertainty of the very concept of religious values ​​seems to be the desire to explore their essence and content not in a religious context, but in any other context: political, psychological, social, cultural. Thirdly, a more holistic view of religious values, and not simply listing them, is provided, in our opinion, by a religious picture of the world, which, of course, is value-based.

The essential feature of religious values ​​is, first of all, their ontology. This was very well revealed in his concept by P. Sorokin, characterizing an ideational culture with the religious values ​​fundamental to it. According to him, “1) reality is understood as a non-perceptible, immaterial, imperishable Being; 2) goals and needs are mainly spiritual; 3) the degree of their satisfaction is maximum and at the highest level; 4) the way to satisfy or realize them is the voluntary minimization of most physical needs...” M. Heidegger also notes the existentiality of religious values, saying that after their overthrow in Western culture, the truth of being became impenetrable, and metaphysics was replaced by the philosophy of subjectivity. The principle of Being, as opposed to changeable becoming, is fundamental to religious values. The principle of Being in religion is expressed in the existence of God, who is transcendent, unchanging, eternal, all being is derived from it and is supported by it. This is especially clearly expressed in revealed religions, which are based on Revelation, in which God reveals himself to people and, with his signs, commandments, and messages from top to bottom, orders all existence, including the natural world, human society, and the life of every person. In Christianity God says “Let there be”, in Islam “Be!” and the world is brought into existence.

The principle of Being as eternal and unchanging is manifested in that deep connection between word and being, which is characteristic of religion. The fundamental role of the Word in the creation of being is indicated by the Holy Scriptures. The Gospel of John begins with the words: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). In the Koran: “He is the One who created the heavens and the earth for the sake of truth. On that day He will say: “Be!” - and it will come true. His Word is the truth...” (Quran 6, 73). God is the Word and is the Truth is indicated in the sacred books. Thus, the Word ascends to God and produces the truth of being. Consequently, naming things is revealing the truth of their existence or indicating this truth.

In this context, it is interesting to turn to the Father of the Church - Gregory of Nyssa, who in his short work “On what the name and title “Christian” means” affirms the fundamentality of the principle of Being for a religious person. To bear the name “Christian” means to be a Christian, and to be a Christian necessarily involves “imitation of the Divine nature.” God is separated from man and the nature of God is inaccessible to human knowledge, but the names of Christ reveal the image of perfect existence that must be followed. Saint Gregory cites such names of Christ as wisdom, truth, goodness, salvation, strength, firmness, peace, purification and others. The logic of the holy father is as follows: if Christ is also called a stone, then this name requires from us firmness in a virtuous life.

In Islam we also find a provision about the 99 names of Allah, which he revealed to humanity: “Allah has the most wonderful names. Therefore, call upon Him through them and leave those who deviate from the truth regarding His names" (Quran 7, 180). For a Muslim, it is necessary that “he has true faith in Allah, maintains a strong connection with Him, constantly remembers Him and trusts in Him...”. All suras of the Koran, except one, and the words of a Muslim begin with the “remembrance” of the name of Allah - “In the name of Allah, the Gracious and the Merciful.” Hence, the special position of the Koran, which is the word of Allah given in revelation to the Prophet Muhammad. The deepest connection between name and being was studied and revealed in their works by Russian thinkers, name-glorifiers P.A. Florensky, father Sergius Bulgakov, A.F. Losev. Even the representative of postmodernism, J. Derrida, turns to this topic at the end of his life in connection with the search for traces of Being in the world.

Thus, the names of God indicate the truth of existence and, accordingly, religious values. God is truth, goodness, beauty, wisdom, strength, love, light, life, salvation. Everything that is part of God is valuable and must be imitated.

P. Sorokin, in addition to the principle of Being for religious values, points to the priority of the spiritual. Indeed, especially in revealed religions, divine existence does not merge with the sensory, earthly world, but is supersensible, transcendental, spiritual. Consequently, religious values ​​presuppose a certain structure of existence, namely a metaphysical picture of the world, in which there is a sensory and supersensible world, which is the beginning, foundation and end of the first. In religion, a hierarchy of the world is built in which the higher spiritual layers are subordinated to the lower material layers. Hierarchy is a stepwise structure of the world, determined by the degree of closeness to God. Dionysius the Areopagite in his work Corpus Areopagiticum vividly describes this ladder principle of the structure of the world. The goal of the hierarchy is “possible assimilation to God and union with Him.” The love of God for the created world and the love of the world for its Creator, striving for the unity of all being in God, is the basis of order and order, hierarchy. Love, which connects and unites the world and God, appears in Dionysius, as in Gregory of Nyssa, as a fundamental ontological principle and, accordingly, the highest value. The principle of hierarchy is refracted in the structure of man as a bodily-mental-spiritual being, in which the strict subordination of the lower layers to the higher spiritual levels must be observed. Moreover, hierarchy permeates both the church organization and the heavenly world itself.

Thus, the principle of Being is the formative element of religious values, since here we come from God (the fullness of being) to values, and not vice versa. Therefore, religious values ​​rooted in the divine eternal, unchanging and incorruptible being are absolute, eternal and incorruptible. In a situation with “local values”, in which values ​​lose their ontological basis, it is not being that gives value, but values ​​that are superimposed on being, being begins to be assessed by certain criteria: the interests and needs of the subject, national interests, the interests of all humanity and other interests. Of course, all of these interests are constantly changing; accordingly, “local values” cannot be designated as eternal and unchanging.

To adequately understand religious values, one must turn to religion itself, since all other contexts are external to them. Unfortunately, in modern humanities, an eclectic approach to religious values ​​has become widespread, according to which an arbitrary selection of them is made and further adaptation to political or any other goals. The path of eclecticism is a very dangerous path, since it leads, for example, to such formations as “political Islam.” We are increasingly striving to adapt religion and religious values ​​to the needs of modern man and society, forgetting that, in fact, these values ​​are eternal, and our needs are changeable and transitory. Accordingly, human needs should have such an absolute reference point as religious values, and not vice versa.

Based on this, religious values ​​must first be considered on their “internal territory” (M. Bakhtin), that is, in religion, in order to determine the unchangeable core of the religious tradition, values, and areas where points of contact are possible, even dialogue with secular values.

Religion appears as a person’s relationship with God, who is the Creator and support of the world. First of all, we note that a religious attitude is essential for a person in the sense that it expresses “the primordial yearning of the spirit, the desire to comprehend the incomprehensible, to express the inexpressible, the thirst for the Infinite, the love of God.” In this context, religion appears as a phenomenon deeply inherent in man and, therefore, religion will exist as long as man exists. Based on this, the attempts of positivists, in particular O. Comte, to define religion as a certain theological stage of human development, which will be replaced by a positivist stage, seem unjustified. Also unconvincing today is the point of view of S. Freud, who considered religion to be a manifestation of infantilism, a stage of childhood development of humanity, which will be overcome in the future. Our position is close to the point of view of K.G. Jung, for whom religion is rooted in the archetypal unconscious layer of the human psyche, that is, deeply inherent in man.

The religious attitude becomes clearer if we go from the word “religare” itself, which means to bind, connect. In this context, V. Soloviev understands religion: “Religion is the connection between man and the world with the unconditional beginning and focus of all things.” The meaning and purpose of any religion is the desire for unity with God.

The religious unity of a person with God requires a free search on the part of a person, which presupposes aspiration and turning towards the object of his faith. In religion, the entire spiritual-mental-physical being of a person is turned towards God. This is expressed in the phenomenon of faith. Faith is a state of extreme interest, capture by the ultimate, infinite, unconditional; it is based on the experience of the sacred in the finite. Accordingly, fundamental to religion is the religious experience in which a person experiences God as Presence (M. Buber), as spiritual evidence (I.A. Ilyin). In this sense, the definition of P.A. is very accurate. Florensky: “Religion is our life in God and God in us.”

Living religious experience is personal, in which a person stands alone before God and bears personal responsibility for his decisions and deeds, for his faith as a whole. S. Kierkegaard pointed out that in religious terms a person is important as a unique and inimitable existence, a person as such, and not in his social dimensions. The next important feature of religious experience is the involvement of the whole human being in it. I.A. Ilyin, who was engaged in the study of religious experience, notes: “But it is not enough to see and perceive the divine Object: one must accept It with the last depths of the heart, involve in this acceptance the power of consciousness, will and reason and give this experience fateful power and significance in personal life.” Religious experience is the ontology of human development, since it requires “spiritual self-construction” from him. Religion completely transforms a person; moreover, the old person dies in order for a renewed person to be born - “a new spiritual personality in man.” The main distinguishing feature of this personality is the “organic integrity of the spirit,” which overcomes the internal gaps and splits of faith and reason, heart and mind, intellect and contemplation, heart and will, will and conscience, faith and deeds, and many others. Religious experience brings order to the chaos of a person’s inner world and builds a hierarchy of the human being. At the head of this hierarchy is the human spirit, to which all other levels are subordinate. A religious person is a whole person who has achieved “inner unity and unity” of all the components of the human being.

If we summarize numerous psychological studies of transpersonal experiences in religious experience, we can say that here the deep layers of the human being are actualized, leading him beyond the limited self-consciousness of the Self to an all-encompassing being. K. G. Jung designates these layers with the concept “archetypal,” and S.L. Frank – “We” layer. Man masters his instinctive unconscious nature, which is gradually permeated by the spirit and submits to it. The spiritual center becomes decisive and directing. Therefore, “religion as the reunification of man with God, as the sphere of human development towards God, is the true sphere of spiritual development.”

Spiritual strength, spiritual activity and spiritual responsibility become characteristics of human existence. Religion is a great claim to Truth, but also a great responsibility. I.A. Ilyin writes: “This claim obliges; it obliges even more than any other claim.” This is a responsibility to oneself, since religious faith determines a person’s entire life and, ultimately, his salvation or destruction. This is responsibility before God: “The believer is responsible before God for what he believes in his heart, what he confesses with his lips and what he does with his deeds.” Religious faith makes a person responsible to all other people for the authenticity and sincerity of his faith, for the substantive thoroughness of his faith, for the deeds of his faith. Therefore, a religious attitude is a responsible, obligatory act.

Of course, as shown above, religious experience represents the foundation of religion as a person’s relationship with God. However, religious experience, profound and practically inexpressible, must be guided by dogmas approved by the Church, otherwise it would be devoid of reliability and objectivity, would be “a mixture of true and false, real and illusory, it would be “mysticism” in the bad sense of the word.” For modern secular consciousness, dogmas appear as something abstract, and dogmatic differences between religions as something insignificant and easily overcome. In fact, for religion itself, dogmas are the expression and defense of revealed truth. It is dogmas that protect the core of faith, outline the circle of faith, the internal territory of religion. Dogmatic statements crystallized, as a rule, in a complex, sometimes dramatic struggle with various kinds of heresies, and represent “a generally valid definition of Truth by the Church.” Dogmas contain an indication of the true path and methods of unity of man with God in a given religion. Based on this, a dogmatic concession, and even more so a refusal of dogma for religion, is a betrayal of faith, a betrayal of the Truth, which destroys religion from the inside.

Unlike personal religious experience, dogmatic definitions are an area of ​​​​common faith preserved by the Church. Only a single Church can preserve the fullness of the Truth; only “the entire “church people” are able to immaculately preserve and implement, i.e. and reveal this Truth."

V.N. Lossky in his works emphasized the deep connection that exists between religious experience and the dogmas developed and preserved by dogmatic theology. He writes: “Nevertheless, spiritual life and dogma, mysticism and theology are inseparably linked in the life of the Church.” If this connection weakens or breaks, then the foundations of religion are undermined.

However, it may be objected that in such revealed religions as Judaism and Islam there is no dogma and church organization as in Christianity. Indeed, there is no dogma as a principle of faith approved by the institutional structures of the Church, in particular, Ecumenical or local Councils, in Judaism and Islam. Moreover, membership in the Jewish community does not depend on the acceptance of dogmatic tenets, but by birth. Often in the works of Western scholars comparing the Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam are presented as religions in which not orthodoxy, as in Christianity, dominates, but orthopraxy, that is, behavior and correct observance of rituals. Western researcher B. Louis writes: “The truth of Islam is determined not so much by orthodoxy, but by orthopraxy. What matters is what a Muslim does, not what he believes." In Judaism, priority is also given to human behavior and the fulfillment of God's Commandments.

Despite all of the above, in Judaism and Islam there are theological definitions that express the principles of faith, developed by the most authoritative people in the field of religion. The medieval Jewish thinker Maimonides formulated thirteen principles of faith, another medieval rabbi Yosef Albo reduced them to three: faith in God, in the divinity of the Torah, in rewards and punishments. In Islam, such definitions, which form the foundation of faith, are tawhid (monotheism) and the five pillars of Islam. In addition, in Judaism there is a rabbinic tradition that deals with theological issues, and in Islam there is kalam and Islamic philosophy. Since the middle of the 8th century, various ideological currents of Islam - Sunnis, Shiites, Kharijites, Mu'tazilites, Murjiites - have been discussing issues of doctrine. First, this is a question of power, then directly problems of faith, then the problem of predestination and controversy over the essence of God and his attributes. A detailed picture of these disputes was presented in their works by Kazakh researchers of Islamic culture and philosophy G.G. Solovyova, G.K. Kurmangalieva, N.L. Seytakhmetova, M.S. Burabaev and others. They showed, using the example of al-Farabi, that medieval Islamic philosophy “expresses Islamic monotheistic religiosity...” and rationally substantiates the Quranic provisions on the unity and uniqueness of God. Thus, Judaism and Islam also contain pillars of faith that express and protect its fundamental principles.

Thus, religion as a person’s relationship with God and the desire for unity with Him presupposes a deep connection between religious experience and dogmatic definitions preserved by the religious community. In unity with religious experience, dogma, an important role in a person’s communication with God belongs to a religious cult, including worship, sacraments, fasts, religious holidays, rituals, and prayers. Religious cult is essentially symbolic, that is, it contains a combination of an external visible symbol with an internal spiritual grace, pointing to divine reality. Thanks to this symbolism, religious actions unite the heavenly and earthly worlds, through which the religious community becomes involved in God. Without exaggeration, we can say that in a religious cult there is a meeting of heaven and earth. Therefore, one cannot talk about a religious cult, about religious rituals as something external and insignificant for faith, since through it the invisible world becomes present for believers in earthly reality. Accordingly, for the Abrahamic religions, religious cult is of fundamental importance. For example, as the Orthodox theologian Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia points out: “The Orthodox approach to religion is essentially a liturgical approach: it implies the inclusion of religious doctrine in the context of worship.” In Islam, five-fold prayer, prayer is one of the pillars of faith, as Muhammad Ali Al-Hashimi writes, “prayer is the support of religion, and he who strengthens this support strengthens the religion itself, but he who abandons it destroys this religion.”

So, religious experience, dogma and religious cult represent the “internal territory” of faith, its fundamental foundations, the rejection of which is tantamount to a rejection of faith. It is important to note that the spiritual development of a person, moral values, the moral dimension that we find in religion and to which secular society turns today are the spiritual fruits of this core of religion. As Kazakh researcher A.G. emphasizes. Kosichenko “spiritual development is placed in the confession in the context of the essence of faith...”.

Modern secular humanities, even religious studies, when studying spiritual and moral values ​​rooted in religion, consider cultural-historical, sociocultural, socio-political, ethnic aspects, but not religion itself. This methodological approach leads to a distorted picture, according to which individual ideas and values ​​can be taken out of the religious context and transferred to another sphere, other contexts. For example, medieval Islamic philosophy in Soviet science was studied outside of Islamic doctrine, with emphasis placed on non-religious factors. At the present stage, scientists need to turn to the position of theologians and religious philosophers, which was very well expressed by V.N. Lossky: “We could never understand the spiritual aspect of any life if we did not take into account the dogmatic teaching that lies at its basis. One must accept things as they are, and not try to explain the difference in spiritual life in the West and the East by reasons of an ethnic or cultural nature, when we are talking about the most important reason - the dogmatic difference.” We have given a detailed quotation in order to emphasize that a methodological approach is needed that, when studying religious phenomena, would take into account religion itself, its essential foundations, and not explain religion based on non-religious factors, which also need to be taken into account, but not given priority. No constructive dialogue between secular values ​​and religious values ​​can take place until religion is considered as a holistic phenomenon in the unity of all its aspects: religious experience, dogma, cult, religious ethics and axiology.

Thus, religious values ​​are rooted in religion and it is impossible to reduce them to secular ethics, since outside of man’s relationship with God, ethics loses the absolute criterion of good and evil, which is God and always remains at risk of relativization. As we indicated, all other criteria are relative, since they do not ascend to the eternal, unchanging Being, but descend to the formation of being, constantly changing.

The fundamental religious value, arising from the very understanding of religion as a person’s desire for unity with God, is love. The love of the created world for God and God for the world is the source of all other religious values. Love for one's neighbor, goodness, truth, wisdom, mercy, compassion, generosity, justice and others are derived from this highest value. In the religions of revelation, love acts as an ontological principle leading to the unity of all existence, love is also the main epistemological principle, since God is revealed only to the gaze that loves Him, love also appears as a great ethical principle. In Judaism, one of the fundamental concepts is the agave as God's love for man. This love is understood in three terms. Chesed as the ontological love of the Creator for His creation. Rachamim as the moral love of the Father for his children. Tzedek as the desire to earn God’s love and find deserved love. In Christianity, love as agape characterizes God himself. Here are the famous words of the Apostle John: “Beloved! Let us love one another, because love is from God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:7,8). And in Islam, within the framework of Sufism, love in the three indicated aspects is a fundamental concept, and the Sufis themselves, according to the vivid statement of the Sufi poet Navoi: “They can be called lovers of God and beloved of Him, they can be considered desiring the Lord and desired by Him.”

Striving to become like God, a person makes love the organizing principle of his life as a whole, in all its aspects, including social. Church Father John Chrysostom writes: “We can become like God if we love everyone, even our enemies... If we love Christ, we will not do anything that can offend Him, but we will prove our love by deeds.” This aspect was noticed by M. Weber in his sociology of religion, when he showed the interconnection of religious ethics concerned with salvation human soul and human social practice. He comes to the conclusion: “The rational elements of religion, its “teaching” - the Indian doctrine of karma, the Calvinist belief in predestination, Lutheran justification by faith, the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments - have an internal pattern, and stemming from the nature of ideas about God and the “picture of the world” The rational religious pragmatics of salvation leads, under certain circumstances, to far-reaching consequences in the formation of practical life behavior.” We have given this long quotation because it contains an indication of the sphere in which religion and religious values ​​come into contact with the social world, with secular values. This is an area of ​​social ethics, the formation of which is or may be influenced by religious values. For religion, socio-ethical contexts represent an external boundary, peripheral compared to the “inner territory”. However, life in the world in accordance with religious values ​​is significant for the salvation of a person’s soul, and, consequently, for religion. Accordingly, we can talk about the economic ethics of religions, about its place in society, about its relations with the state.

A believer, who is an internally unified and integral person, is called to implement religious values ​​in all spheres of his life. They are part of the natural attitude of a person’s consciousness and predetermine all his actions. Religion is not aimed at exacerbating the separation of God and the world, but, on the contrary, to bring them, if possible, to unity, basing everything in God. Religious phenomena themselves are dual, symbolic, that is, they are internally addressed to the transcendental world, and externally, in their image, they are immanent in the earthly world and participate in its life. Of course, religious values ​​are based on a person’s relationship to God, but through a religious relationship they are addressed to a specific person who lives in society. In our opinion, the presented understanding of religion and religious values ​​makes possible their dialogue and interaction with secular society and secular values.

In addition, religion carries out its mission in a certain cultural and historical world and in relation to a person who is the bearer of a cultural tradition. Although religion cannot be reduced to any form of culture, it often acts as the “leaven of too many and different cultures” or even civilization. Religious values ​​are organically woven into the fabric of the national culture of a people or a number of peoples in the event of the emergence of civilization. Religion becomes a culture-forming factor, the keeper of national traditions, the soul of national culture. The classic of religious studies M. Muller believed that there is a “close connection between language, religion and nationality.” In history we observe the interrelation, mutual influence, interaction of national and religious values. Religion influences culture, but culture also influences religion, although the “internal territory” of religion that we have designated remains unchanged. As a result, religion acquires special features. For example, Islam in Kazakhstan differs from Islam on the Arabian Peninsula, where it originated, or Russian Orthodoxy differs from Greek Orthodoxy.

Thus, having examined religious values ​​in the context of religion itself as a person’s relationship with God, we came to the conclusion that the determining factor in this regard is the desire for unity with God, which is expressed by love in the ontological, epistemological and moral sense. Love appears in religion as the highest value. In terms of the possibility of interaction between religion, religious values ​​and secular values, in religion as a holistic phenomenon we have identified the “internal territory”, the fundamental foundations of faith that cannot be changed. This includes, firstly, religious experience as a living relationship - a meeting of a person with God, a space of dialogue between a person and God. Secondly, dogmatic definitions expressing and protecting the foundation of faith. Thirdly, religious cult, through which a religious community establishes its relationship with God. These relationships are mediated symbolically through objects of worship, worship, and liturgy. The cult side is essential for every religion, “for religion should allow the believer to contemplate the “holy” - which is achieved through cult actions.” In addition to this unchangeable core, religion has outer boundaries where dialogue and interaction with secular values ​​is quite possible. This is the social aspect of the existence of religion, for example social ethics. In addition, the cultural and historical aspect of religion, within the framework of which interaction with the culture of a particular people is carried out.

The religious picture of the world presupposes, first of all, an understanding of the beginning of the world, its nature, and existential status. The religions of the Abrahamic tradition affirm the creation of the world by God “out of nothing” (ex nihilo), that is, creationism. It should be noted that in the religions under consideration, the creation of the world by God out of nothing is not just one of the statements, but a dogma of faith, without revealing which it is impossible to understand the essence of religion. All the talk about the fact that the natural scientific discoveries of evolution, Big Bang refute the creation of the world by God are absurd, since religion speaks of creation on a phenomenological plane. This means that its goal is not to reveal the laws of development of the Universe, but to show the meaning and meaning of the entire existing Universe and especially human life. For religion, what is important is not just the fact of the world’s existence, but the possibility of its meaningful existence.

Let's take a closer look at the creation of the world. At the beginning of the world there was God, nothing existed outside of God, God created everything - time, space, matter, the world as a whole, man. Further, creation is an act of the Divine will, and not an outpouring of the Divine essence. As the Russian religious philosopher V.N. writes. Lossky: “Creation is a free act, a gift of God. For the Divine being, it is not determined by any “internal necessity.” The freedom of God brought into being all of existence and endowed it with such qualities as order, purposefulness, and love. Thus, the world is defined as created, dependent on God, the world does not have its own foundation, for the created world the constitutive relation is the relation to God, without which it is reduced to nothing (nihilo). The meaning of the dogma of creation was expressed very correctly by one of the leading theologians of our time, Hans Küng: “Creation “out of nothing” is a philosophical and theological expression, meaning that the world and man, as well as space and time, owe their existence to God alone and to no other reason... The Bible expresses the conviction that the world is fundamentally dependent on God as the creator and sustainer of all existence and always remains so.” In the Quran, this idea is expressed not only through the creation of the world by Allah (halq), but also through the power of Allah (amr, malakut) over the existing world: “To Him belongs what is in the heavens, and what is on earth, and what is between them, and what is under the ground" (Quran 20: 6). Researcher M.B. Piotrovsky emphasizes: “This power continues what was started during creation, it constantly supports the movement of the stars, the flow of waters, the birth of fruits, animals and people.” Religion places man, starting from creation, in a space of meaning and life, and provides a meaningful basis for his existence. Therefore, you should not focus on the parallels between natural scientific discoveries and the Holy books (the Bible, the Koran), or look for scientifically provable truths in them. Here again we quote the words of Hans Küng: “The interpretation of the Bible should not find the grain of what is scientifically demonstrable, but what is necessary for faith and life.” Physicist Werner Heisenberg believed that the symbolic language of religion is “a language that allows us to somehow talk about the interconnection of the world as a whole, discerned behind the phenomena, without which we could not develop any ethics or morality” [Cit. according to 23, p.149]. The creation of the world by God affirms the basis of the values ​​of everything that exists and the meaning of everything that exists.

In this context, the Eastern Church Fathers interpret the words of St. John the Theologian: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). In the beginning there was the Word - the Logos, and the Word is a manifestation, a revelation of the Father, that is, the Son of God - the hypostasis of the Most Holy Trinity. In fact, the Word-Logos-Son of God gives meaning to all existence. This finds expression in Christian Orthodox theology, where the prevailing belief is that each creature has its own logos - “essential meaning”, and Logos - “the meaning of meanings”. The Eastern Fathers of the Church used the “ideas” of Plato, but overcame the dualism inherent in his concept, as well as the position of Western Christian theology, coming from St. Augustine, that ideas are the thoughts of God, contained in the very being of God as definitions of the essence and cause of all created things. The Greek church fathers believed that His essence exceeds ideas, the ideas of all things are contained in His will, and not in the Divine essence itself. Thus, Orthodox theology affirms the novelty and originality of the created world, which is not simply a bad copy of God. Ideas here are the living word of God, an expression of His creative will, they denote the mode of participation of created being in Divine energies. The logos of a thing is the norm of its existence and the path to its transformation. In all that has been said, it is important for us to constantly emphasize in religions the meaningfulness and value of existence. Accordingly, the next most important concept characterizing religion is teleology, that is, orientation towards purpose and meaning.

The very steps of creation - the Sixth Day - indicate its purpose and meaning. As rightly noted by V.N. Lossky: “These six days are symbols of the days of our week - rather hierarchical than chronological. Separating from each other the elements created simultaneously on the first day, they define the concentric circles of existence, in the center of which stands man, as their potential completion.” The same idea is expressed by a modern researcher of theological issues A. Nesteruk, speaking about “the opportunity to establish the meaning of creation laid down by God in his plan for salvation.” That is, the history of human salvation through the incarnation of the Logos in Christ and the resurrection of Christ was initially an element of the Divine plan. Thus, the creation of the world is deeply connected with the creation of man and the event of the incarnation of the Son of God. Moreover, from the beginning of the creation of the world, the eschatological perspective of everything that happens is clearly visible - the direction towards the end. Already creation is an eschatological act, then the incarnation of the Son (Word) of God gives the vector of movement of the entire historical process towards the establishment of the Kingdom of God, which in the Christian religion means achieving unity with God by involving the entire creation in the process of deification. We also find an eschatological orientation in the Koran, in which “mentions of creation also serve as a confirmation of the possibility of the coming judgment, when all people will be resurrected and appear before Allah, their creator and judge.” Consequently, eschatology is the next fundamental characteristic of religion as a person’s relationship to God.

Summarizing all that has been said, we formulate the following conclusions. The dogma of the creation of the world by God out of nothing states the following. The first is the transcendence and at the same time the immanence of God to the world. After all, God created the world and in Him the world finds its foundation. The second is the order and unity of creation, and most importantly the value of everything created, all things. Here the value of all created matter is affirmed, which cannot be destroyed with impunity. God Himself created it and said it was good. Accordingly, when in the Bible we find that God gave the earth to man and declared, “Fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion...” (Gen. 1:28), this does not mean exploiting the earth, but cultivating and tending it. To “have dominion” over animals means to be responsible for them, and to “name” animals means to understand their essence. Our position regarding the creation of the world coincides with the point of view of the modern theologian G. Küng: “Belief in creation does not add anything to the ability to manage the world, which has been infinitely enriched by natural science; this belief does not provide any natural science information. But faith in creation gives a person - especially in an era of rapidly occurring scientific, economic, cultural and political revolutions leading to a departure from his roots and a loss of guidelines - the ability to navigate the world. It allows a person to discover meaning in life and in the process of evolution, it can give him a measure for his activities and the last guarantees in this vast, vast universe." The main conclusion from the dogma of creation is that man and the world have meaning and value, they are not chaos, not nothing, but creations of God. This statement defines the ethics of a person’s relationship to the world. Firstly, to respect people as our equals before God, and secondly, to respect and protect the rest of the non-human world. Faith in God the Creator allows us to perceive our responsibility for other people and the world around us, because man is “the deputy of Allah” (Koran 2: 30), his deputy on earth. The third fundamental conclusion from the dogma of creation is the dignity of man. Man is the image and likeness of God, he is placed above all other creations as a ruler.

Let us turn to the doctrine of man in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These religions created a theology of man. First, a few comments need to be made. As the Orthodox theologian P. Evdokimov notes, in order to adequately understand the doctrine of man in Christianity, it is necessary to abandon the dualism of soul and body and the thesis of their conflict. These religions view man as a multi-level, hierarchical, but holistic being, uniting all plans and elements of man in the spirit. The conflict that accompanies human existence is transferred to a completely different perspective, namely “the thought of the Creator, His desires oppose the desires of the creature, holiness to the sinful state, the norm to perversion, freedom to necessity.” Thus, the central problem of religious anthropology is human freedom.

The beginning of religious teaching about man is the creation of man by God. That is, God sets the nature of man. IN Old Testament, in the book of Genesis, God created man on the sixth day in his own image and likeness and said that “every good thing” was created. In the Jewish spiritual tradition of the Agade, part of the Talmud, the creation of man is described as follows: “From all ends of the earth, specks of dust flew down, particles of that dust into which the Lord breathed a life-giving principle, a living and immortal soul” (Sang., 38). Man is created in the image and likeness of God. In the very creation of man lies his dual nature: the body consists of “dust of the earth” and the soul, which God breathed into man. The word “Adam”, on the one hand, is derived from the word “adama” - earth (human body). On the other hand, from the word “Adame” - “I become like” God, this embodies the supernatural principle of man. Thus, man is twofold: an immortal soul and a mortal body.

Christianity continues this line and the central position of this religion is the postulate - man is the image and likeness of God. The Eastern Orthodox tradition of Christianity emphasizes the divine element human nature- the image of God. In short, the Image of God is the divine in man. The Eastern Church Father Saint Athanasius the Great emphasizes the ontological nature of communion with the deity, and creation means communion. This is where man’s ability to know God originates, which is understood as cognition-communion. Holy Father Gregory of Nyssa noted: “For the first dispensation of man was in imitation of the likeness of God...”. He points to the godlikeness of the human soul, which can be compared to a mirror reflecting the Prototype. Gregory of Nyssa goes further in revealing this concept. The image of God points us to the level of the unknowable, hidden in man - the mystery of man. This mysterious ability of a person to freely define himself, make a choice, make any decision based on himself is freedom. The Divine Personality is free and man as an image and likeness is a person and freedom. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “... he was the image and likeness of the Power that reigns over everything that exists, and therefore in his free will he was similar to the one who freely rules over everything, not submitting to any external necessity, but acting at his own discretion, as it seems to him , choosing better and arbitrarily what he pleases” [Cit. according to 28, p.196]. In general, if we summarize patristic theology, we can come to the following conclusion. An image is not a part of a person, but the whole totality of a person. The image is expressed in the hierarchical structure of man with his spiritual life in the center, with the priority of the spiritual. In Judaism and Islam, the Law prohibits the creation of man-made images, since the image is understood dynamically and realistically. The image evokes the real presence of the one it represents.

Image is the objective basis of a human being, it means “to be created in the image.” But there is also a similarity, which leads to the need to act, to exist in the image. The image manifests itself and acts through subjective similarity. This position is explained by Saint Gregory Palamas: “In his being, in his image, man is superior to the angels, but precisely in his likeness he is lower, because it is unstable...and after the Fall we rejected the likeness, but did not lose being in the image” [Cit. according to 26, p.123]. Thus, the thesis about “man as the image and likeness of God” leads us to an understanding of the human personality in religion. Christianity uses the terms prosopon and hypostasis to reveal the concept of personality. Both terms refer to the face, but emphasize different aspects. Prosopon is human self-awareness, which follows natural evolution. Hypostasis, on the contrary, expresses the openness and aspiration of the human being beyond its limits - towards God. Personality is a body-soul-spirit complex, a center, the life principle of which is hypostasis. In this sense, the secret of personality is in its overcoming itself, in transcending to God.

Hypostasis points us to the incomprehensible depth of the human personality in which the meeting with God takes place. Orthodoxy speaks of union with God, which leads to the deification of man, to the God-man. Sufism, as a mystical tradition of Islam, affirms the possibility of merging with the Divine. This depth is indicated by the heart symbol. In particular, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali writes: “If the heart becomes pure, then perhaps the Truth will appear to it...” The heart is a place of divine habitation, an organ of knowledge of God as communion with God. A person is determined by the content of his heart. Love for God can dwell in the heart, or in the depths of his heart a person can say “there is no God.” Therefore, the heart is not simply the emotional center of the human being, it is the seat of all the faculties of the human spirit. The heart has hierarchical primacy in the structure of the human being.

So, religious anthropology views man as an integral, hierarchical being with a center - a heart, which brings together all the abilities of the human spirit. Hierarchy always presupposes subordination. Accordingly, in a religious worldview, priority is given to the spiritual layers, to which the mental and physical layers must be subordinated. At the same time, the value of the body and soul is not rejected; on the contrary, the Apostle Paul reminds us that “the body is the Temple of God,” and Muhammad in his hadiths speaks of the need to take care of one’s own body. The question is what will become the content of the human heart, what will a person be guided by love for God or love for himself. This is already the result of his choice.

Man as a god-like being, as a person – a divine person – is constituted by freedom. Therefore, the central theme of religious anthropology, regardless of the form of religion, is always human freedom. But, not just an abstract concept of human freedom, but in the aspect of the relationship of human will to God's will. Accordingly, the next position of religious anthropology is the fall of man, the theme of sin, which goes to the problem of the origin of evil in the world - theodicy. On the one hand, a person in a religious worldview is an ontologically rooted being, rooted in a Supreme reality that surpasses him. The attribution of human existence to this Supreme Value gives dignity and lasting value to man himself. On the other hand, religious anthropology points to the damaged nature of man caused by the Fall. If initially, as the image and likeness of God, man is an ontologically rooted integral being, then a sinful man is a fragmented man who has lost his integrity, closed in his own self, dominated by “disorder, chaos, confusion of ontological layers.”

The religious understanding of freedom comes from two premises: on the one hand, from the recognition of the dignity of man, on the other hand, from the recognition of his sinfulness. When the philosopher E. Levinas explores the uniqueness of the Jewish spiritual tradition, he comes to the conclusion about the “difficult freedom” of man in Judaism. Firstly, Judaism as a monotheistic religion removes a person from the power of the magical, sacred, which dominated a person and predetermined his life. As E. Levinas notes: “The sacred that envelops and carries me away is violence.” Judaism as a monotheistic religion affirms human independence and the possibility of a personal relationship with God, “face to face.” Throughout the Tanakh - the Hebrew Bible - God talks to people, and people talk to God. Thus, a dialogical relationship develops between God and people, which is a form of genuine communication. To communicate, according to E. Levinas, means to see the face of another, and to see a face means to affirm oneself personally, because the face is not just a set of physiognomic details, but a new dimension of the human being. In this dimension, “being is not simply closed in its form: it opens, establishes itself in depth and reveals itself in this openness in some way personally.” For M. Buber, the “I - You” relationship is the basis of genuine communication, in which the other is understood not as an object, but as a unique, irreplaceable existence. The relationship with the Other as “I – ​​You” leads to the formation of a person’s self-awareness.

A. Men shares the same point of view. He notes that after the Torah was given to Moses: “From now on, the history of religion will not only be the history of longing, longing and searching, but will become the history of the Covenant,

In the summer of 1893, the publisher of the magazine “Ethische Kultur”, the founder of the “Ethical Society for the Promotion of Social and Ethical Reforms”, professor at the University of Berlin G. von Gizycki addressed L. N. Tolstoy with a letter, asking the writer to answer a number of questions, including there was also this one: “Do you believe in the possibility of morality independent of religion?” Tolstoy became interested in the task assigned to him and formulated his vision of the problem in his work “Religion and Morality.”

More than a hundred years later, this little story from the life of the great writer has a continuation. In 2010, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the international Knowledge Foundation announced an open competition of philosophical treatises on the topic “Is morality possible, independent of religion?” Its future participants were asked to answer the question once asked to Tolstoy, taking into account the changes that have taken place in the world and modern sociocultural realities. About 250 works from Russia and Russian abroad were submitted to the competition.

The author of this book had the opportunity to participate in that competition with the essay “Secular and theonomous types of morality: a comparative cultural-anthropological analysis” and even be among the winners. Below is the text of this work.

Incorrectness of Professor G. von Gizycki's question

In more than a hundred years that have passed since L. N. Tolstoy wrote his small treatise “Religion and Morality,” his compatriots not only have not moved forward in understanding the problems raised in it, but, on the contrary, have been thrown back to the positions from which these questions are presented even more complex, confusing and intractable than during the life of the Yasnaya Polyana sage. What has remained in the past is that insight, that refinement of existential reflection that was a feature of Russian thought of the Silver Age and allowed it to penetrate into the depths of the most complex spiritual and moral problems.

During the twentieth century, something irreparable happened: the nation lost a significant part of the intellectual potential that it had accumulated by the end of the Silver Age. The authorities acquired the habit of treating the people in accordance with the recipes not of legal cooperation, but of domination-subordination, and the people they led found themselves immersed for a whole century in a state where it became almost impossible for the majority to live according to the laws of honor and dignity, and only a few dared to do so. Faith and morality have devalued to such an extent that people who possess them find themselves in the position of inconvenient nonconformists who do not fit into the usual sociomoral landscape and cause either genuine amazement or irritation of those around them. The catastrophic state of spirituality has ceased to frighten anyone, just as the gloomy forecasts for the future of the nation, which is declining at an alarming rate, losing a million of its citizens every year and having very vague ideas about possible ways out of the demographic and spiritual impasses, have ceased to frighten.

And so, in these conditions, eternal questions are again put on the agenda, which must be answered first of all to ourselves and, first of all, because it is impossible for a person, society, or state to live a normal, civilized life without knowing the answers to them. . You can, of course, turn everything into another intellectual game of solving ancient ethical problems inherited from the times of classical moral philosophy, and thereby compete with its luminaries in ingenuity and wit. This path seems tempting, and the current postmodern era is pushing us towards it, tempting us with the easy, non-committal playful unpretentiousness of this option. However, the same spirit of postmodernity (and in this it should be given its due) also offers another path - the path of a completely serious and responsible deconstruction of the semantic substructures that constitute the rational basis for the question of Professor G. von Gizycki addressed to L. N. Tolstoy: “Is it possible to have morality independent of religion?” This second path allows us to perceive this questioning not as an abstract theoretical fragment of the philosophical “bead game”, but as a pressing existential problem of our today’s existence, which has a number of theoretical dimensions of a metaphysical, ethical, theological, sociocultural, and anthropological nature.

Strictly speaking, the formulation of G. Gizycki’s question can hardly be considered correct, since it seems to initially place morality independent of religion, that is, secular morality, not in the semantic space of basic philosophical categories possibilities And reality, but exclusively only in the semantic context of one concept possibilities. And this looks, at least, strange, since secular morality has long been not a project with a probabilistic, problematic futurology, but the most real of realities.

We can say that the question of the possibility of non-religious morality is largely rhetorical in nature, since the socio-historical and individual-empirical experience of many generations of people indicates the undoubted possibility of the existence of secular morality. The Western world in recent centuries has developed predominantly in a secular direction, and at present its achievements along this path serve as perhaps the main arguments in favor of the legitimacy of the strategy of non-religious development of society, civilization and culture.

This question was obviously legitimate at the dawn of civilization, when they were asked by the first generations of intellectual sages who were thinking about the path that humanity should take in order for its social history to be successful and its spiritual life to be as productive as possible - the path, say, proposed the godless initiators of the Babylonian pandemonium, or the path of Moses, who entered into a covenant with God and tried to unswervingly fulfill all the commandments? But today, as well as in the time of L. Tolstoy, G. Gizycki’s question smacks of the spirit of educational rhetoric. Very appropriate in working with high school students and students with the aim of training the culture of their humanitarian thinking, it is hardly legitimate in an academic environment, since we cannot talk about possibilities the existence of something that has long been reality. Secular morality, independent of religion, ignoring transcendental reality, placing God outside the brackets of all its definitions and prescriptions, has existed for centuries and even millennia. Already such an ancient text as the Bible indicates the existence of people with a secular consciousness: “...They lied against the Lord and said: He does not exist” (Jer. 5:12) or: “The fool said in his heart: “There is no God” (Ps. 13, 1). And although in these judgments about the ancient bearers of secular consciousness there is a powerful evaluative component (characterizing them as liars and madmen), this does not prevent us from noting their ascertaining nature. The biblical text really states: people who deny God, but at the same time adhere, albeit very weakly, to some of their own, "independent of religion" sociomoral norms existed in the archaic world. And although they were the exception rather than the rule, ancient society somehow tolerated their existence, did not consider them overly dangerous criminals, did not take them into custody, and only in some cases, in the presence of additional aggravating circumstances, isolated or executed them. Many of them lived long lives, “ate bread without calling on the Lord,” gave birth and raised children, and participated in the public life of their peoples and states.

Thus, moral consciousness, independent of religion, is the oldest of sociocultural givens, an undoubted reality. Professor Gizycki's question would probably hit the bull's eye if it weren't about possibilities existence of morality free from religion, but about the degree of its productivity in conditions modern civilization. Tolstoy, however, did not attach any importance to this incorrectness of the question posed, easily grasping its true essence. This incorrectness also does not prevent us from thinking about what spiritual, social, and cultural consequences entail both morality independent of religion and morality based on religion.

It is impossible not to notice that Giżycki’s question introduces consciousness into the semantic space of antinomy, where the thesis states: “Morality independent of religion is possible” and the antithesis reads: “Morality independent of religion is impossible”. On its basis, in turn, another antinomy can be formed: “ Secular morality has the right to exist” (thesis) - “Secular morality has no right to exist” (antithesis). And this is a different mode of reflection, transferring discussions about religion and morality from the semantic plane of the categories of possibility and reality into the polarized discursive space of ethical and deviantological categories due And undue where there are endless ideological and ideological battles between atheists and believers. Each side has its own picture of the world, and with it a related cultural tradition-paradigm: in one case anthropocentric, and in the other - theocentric. The reflective mind has the ability to join only one of the poles. At the same time, he cannot act by casting lots, but must carry out rather labor-intensive analytical work of weighing both thesis and antithesis on the scales of reflection, examining the semantic, axiological and normative components of each, identifying the possible consequences that each choice option is fraught with, including including existential consequences for the individual and sociocultural consequences for society.

Both antinomies, with all the ambiguity of their value-orientation functions, have one undeniable advantage: they open up a perspective for modern humanitarian thinking that, say, twenty-five years ago, was hidden from Russian philosophical and ethical thought. Caught in the snare of atheism, languishing in them and losing spiritual, intellectual strength, isolated from antinomic spheres of this kind, wherever equally there were worldview theses and antitheses with such different semantic orientations, normative colors and axiological perspectives, she finally found the freedom of intellectual excursions into the most diverse areas of what is and what should be. And the right to take advantage of the fullness of intellectual freedom is today no longer so much an opportunity as duty professional philosophical and ethical consciousness.

Secularization of morality as a sociocultural reality

Both religious and secular morality have their own sociocultural traditions. Behind the first is a large, long-lasting one, lasting thousands of years, behind the second is a relatively short one, lasting only a few centuries. Secular morality differs from morality in the religious rooting of its structures not in the absolute immutability of the transcendental world of higher transcendences, but in the earthly reality of this world, where all forms of what is and should be stamped with variability and relativity. The historical transformation of religious morality into secular, as a result of which personal unbelief became not the exception, but the rule, and non-believers turned from a small social group into a gigantic mass of atheists-god-fighters, meant that in the eyes of the latter, the religious tradition lost its authority and attractiveness, religious experience and religious motivation lost its attractiveness, faith was crowded out of consciousness by stereotypes of a scientific-atheistic world interpretation with their characteristic strategy of refusal to recognize the transcendental dimension of existence, culture and morality.

To a non-religious consciousness, the historical process of secularization of culture and morality appears to be purely positive, progressive and desirable. When it welcomes such a course of events and openly rejoices at it, then most often the metaphorical logic of naturalistic assimilation of this process to the organic maturation of a person is included: they say, the naive youth of the human race with its illusions and fantasies is replaced by the time of maturity, the ability to look soberly and sensibly at world. And it must be admitted that this logic of reasoning works almost irresistibly in a huge number of cases. The name of God, the concept of faith, the authority of the church immediately lose their former significance, fade and begin to be considered as something transitory, doomed to give way to things more serious and important, which cannot be compared with the old fantasies and prejudices inherited from long-vanished generations . The atheistic mind deprives religious and theological ideas of legitimacy and deprives them of the right to occupy their rightful place in the discursive space of modern intellectual life. Like, just as an adult should not be like a green youth, so mature humanity should not amuse itself with children's fairy tales about the creation of the world, the Tower of Babel, the great flood, etc., when more and more super-serious problems are approaching from all sides, requiring gigantic intellectual and material costs, extremely responsible decisions and urgent actions.

The secularization of morality was greatly facilitated by changes in the social structure of society. If the main institutional pillar supporting religious morality has always been the church, then the state and society (civil society) have served and continue to serve as the institutional forms that ensure the existence of secular morality. The fact that in the modern world the authority of the state and civil society significantly exceeds the authority of the church, and the quantitative superiority of atheists over believers is a socio-statistical reality both in Western countries and in Russia, has resulted in the real superiority of secular moral systems over religious moral systems.

Modern

The peculiarity of secularism is that within the cultural spaces it protects, spiritual experience associated with absolute values ​​and the highest meanings of existence is almost not produced or multiplied. Modernity, which gave birth to militant atheism, this most severe and merciless form of secularism, allowed for the annihilation of spirituality, unprecedented in its destructive power. As a result, the postmodern consciousness that replaced it found itself in a state of depressing spiritual exhaustion. Little suitable for reproducing higher meanings and values, it plunged mainly into entertaining, often frankly frivolous games with heterogeneous semantic figures and axiological forms. Not having enough of them in its own creative economy, it began to turn to past cultural eras, remove them from there and enjoy them, often showing remarkable ingenuity.

Postmodernism turned out to be heterogeneous in the quality and direction of the ideas that exist under its guise. Without delving into the details of their substantive differentiation, we can say that in the entire postmodern socio-humanitarian discourse two main directions are visible. The first is the aggressive fight against God inherited from the modern era, preaching ideological nihilism and methodological anarchism. In these manifestations, postmodernity is nothing more than late modern, striving wherever the modernist consciousness managed to say only “a”, declare both “b” and “c”, etc., that is, to finish what his “parent” did not manage to do, to dot all the “i”s . Such postmodernism continues to be in open opposition to the classical spiritual heritage in its biblical Christian version. The only thing that distinguishes it from modernism is a higher degree of sophistication and refinement of its reflections, more subtle, often simply filigree strategies of intellectual terror directed against everything in which signs of absolute meanings, unconditional values ​​and universal moral and ethical norms are seen. And in this sense, late modernity/postmodernity looks like a purely negative paradigm, whose purpose is to introduce the “torn” and “unhappy” consciousness of the modern intellectual into a state of twilight and even greater spiritual eclipse.

However, fortunately, this highway is not the only one in postmodern discourse. It is accompanied or, more precisely, opposed by another, directed in a completely different direction. Its representatives are confident that the postmodern world is gradually parting with secularism and entering a post-secular era. They are convinced that modernism has managed to destroy everything that could be destroyed in the spiritual world of modern man. And, just as in fine art it is impossible to move beyond a “black square on a white background,” much less a “black square on a black background” or a “white square on a white background,” so in an epoch-making spiritual situation the only possible saving path is - this is a turn back to absolute values ​​and meanings, similar to the return of the prodigal son to his once abandoned father's house. Of course, this is not a readiness to literally move backwards, but an invitation to re-evaluate the intellectual achievements of modernity and stop admiring its picturesque “squares” and musical cacophonies, free yourself from the dark spell of the principles of methodological atheism and anarchism, put everything in its place, call nonsense nonsense, emptiness emptiness , and darkness is darkness. That is, to move forward into new spiritual perspectives, but not on the basis of extremely relativized conventions, reduced cultural meanings, spiritually depleted quasi-values ​​of modernity, but with the help of good, first-class values ​​and meanings available in the spiritual baggage of humanity, although pushed aside by modernism to the far corner of the world spiritual economy. By turning to them, a postmodern person gets the opportunity to demonstrate not the inertia and routineness of thinking, but its quality, which N. Berdyaev once called “noble fidelity to the past.”

Thus, within the current cultural era, the competition between the decentered and theocentric models of the world continues, and the agonies of the paradigms of secularism and theism continue. And in this, strictly speaking, there is nothing new or unusual, since the mentality behind the rival parties has always existed, starting from the biblical times of the dialogue between Eve and the serpent tempting her. There is, in fact, an eternal, enduring antithesis, a global and at the same time deeply personal conflict, about which it is said: “There the devil and God are fighting, and the battlefield is human hearts.” The inner worlds of millions of people, along with the cultural spaces of a number of civilizations, have been such fields of spiritual battles for thousands of years. The modern space of culture continues to remain the same field, together with the discourses of various socio-humanitarian disciplines included in it - philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, cultural studies, art history, literary criticism, psychology, jurisprudence, sociology, etc.

If we talk about the normative value field of morality/morality, then it has almost never been something single and integral. And today it is fragmented along very different lines and directions, and its division into religious and secular morality is one of the fundamental divisions. Neither one nor the other can be ignored or discounted. Neither one nor the other lends itself to unambiguous assessments and does not fit into the confines of a black-and-white evaluation palette. The reasons for this ambiguity lie not only in the content of systems of secular and religious morality, but also in man himself - in the anthropological features of his being, in the inescapable contradictions of his social and spiritual existence, in his ineradicable tendency with depressing regularity to burn what he worshiped and to worship that , which he previously burned, in his easily flaring readiness to both belittle the high and elevate the base and in many other ways...

A modern person can either rejoice in the fact that for millions of people morality and religion find themselves on opposite sides of the “mainstream” of current life, or they can complain about this circumstance. Both mentalities are natural, completely understandable reactions to this reality. The first type of reactions, as mentioned above, is due to the fact that this process is placed in the context of the categories of the dynamic logic of the maturation of the human race, as if gradually freeing itself from the naive illusions of childhood and adolescence. Various social collisions, shocks, crises, catastrophes in this case look like just a consequence of certain processes that are not directly related to the topic of distancing morality from religion.

The second type of reactions presupposes a different intellectual attitude, where the same process of distance, detachment, alienation of morality from religion is considered in deviantological categories, i.e. it is assessed as macrohistorical, geocultural deviation, which has as its direct consequences countless different harmful social, cultural, and spiritual transformations.

God's Universe and the Guttenberg Galaxy: Humanitarian Methodologies of Inclusion and Exclusivity

The discursive spaces formed by the descriptive-analytical efforts of atheist scientists and Christian scientists form two significantly different intellectual worlds. But despite all the dissimilarities in the spiritual experience that feeds them, despite the obvious differences in their ideological foundations, analytical methods, and languages, they are not strangers to each other. They have a lot in common, and first of all, they are brought together by their interest in the same object - moral and ethical reality in all the fullness of its socio-historical manifestations, in all the axiological diversity of its forms, in all the polyphonic diversity of its meanings.

The problem of the relationship between religion and morality is interesting not only because of the complexity of its epistemological structure. Giving rise to reflection on very subtle matters, it also has a purely spiritual value, since it introduces analytical consciousness into a significantly expanded intellectual space, into an incredibly expanded sphere of cultural meanings.

Position inclusivity, including God in the pictures of the universe and culture, and the position exclusivity, excluding God from the cultural-symbolic “Guttenberg Galaxy” entail the emergence of two types of moral consciousness, radically different from each other, having different ontological, axiological and normative foundations, dissimilar motivational structures, and non-coinciding existential vectors. In a similar way, the rational constructions of theoretical reflections built on top of them also form significantly different methodologies of philosophical and ethical knowledge. Here, with striking clarity, it is revealed how the nature of the scientist’s personal relationship with God changes the entire structure of his analytical thinking, for which the acceptance of the world by reason is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for building a relationship with him that is complete in his eyes. And only faith brings the desired balance to these relationships. Inclusiveness complicates the structure of the worldview, expands and deepens its content, takes it out of the closed areas of secularly oriented naturalism, atheistic sociologism and mundane-empirical anthropologism into the boundlessness of the theocentric picture of the cultural-symbolic world. It makes it possible to analyze social and moral reality not as closed, autonomous and self-sufficient, but as being in direct relationship with transcendental reality, with the endless world of the absolute and inescapable.

The methodology of exclusivity is based on the act of removing God from the core of the world order, denying the order of things approved by God, and with it systems of absolute meanings, values ​​and norms, universal constants of truth, goodness and beauty. This act, through which a person “declares willfulness,” acts as a determining ideological determinant, under the direct influence of which modern philosophical and ethical consciousness continues to exist. The methodology of exclusivity he uses, which desacralizes morality, decenters the world of moral values ​​and norms, and rejects everything that bears the stamp of transcendence, carries a fairly strong reductive spirit. In extreme cases, as was the case, for example, during the reign of Soviet militant atheism, the content of scientific and theoretical constructions of professional humanities scholars often reached such a degree of simplification that their texts turned into simple tracings of not too intricate constructions of state ideology with its idea complete extinction of religion.

In other cases, it comes to paradoxes. When secular consciousness believes that the foundations of its discursive structures are of a “premiseless” nature, based on some completely “pure” fundamental principle, not mixed with any of the existing religious and cultural traditions, then this desire to actually rely on the world-contemplative emptiness is portrayed as something positive, valuable, innovative. This emptiness itself is understood in two ways: on the one hand, it is the Universe in which there is no God and is left to itself, and on the other hand, it is a person not bound by any spiritual traditions, not burdened by burdensome religious experience. It turns out that the homeless Universe and the internally emasculated person constitute the necessary and sufficient ontological-anthropological basis for rational thinking, capable of demonstrating unprecedented autonomy. However, one cannot help but see that in such cases, secular consciousness, instead of gaining freedom of intellectual research, falls into just another dependence of the most banal nature - it turns out to be a captive of relativism and reductionism. The break with the world of absolutes turns for him into subordination either to external state-ideological engagements, or to the whims of such a customer as the pragmatic mind, which is inclined to become dependent on the flat constructs of neo-positivist, neo-Darwinian, neo-Marxist, neo-Freudian and other interpretations.

In fairness, it should be admitted that in the scientific world of the modern era there were always analysts who were not attracted to the slightest degree by positivism, materialism, Marxism, and atheism. Convinced that the affinity of science, philosophy, ethics with theology does not harm them at all, but, on the contrary, gives theoretical thought a special axiological coloring, introduces it into a sublime spiritual register, they attached special importance to such a cultural context in which extensive philosophical reasoning is impossible about anything base or unnatural, be it the desecration of shrines, the passions of Sodom, or metaphysical walks through landfills and cemeteries. In such a discursive space, a climate of voluntary moral and ethical self-censorship appears as if by itself. Discursive studies unfold strictly within the limits of religious and moral self-restraints that scientists impose on themselves, and which, with their disciplinary essence, go back to the old, but not aging biblical commandments. The latter helped and continue to help theoretical consciousness to discern significant connections with the universal whole, in which transcendental reality is not supplanted by anyone, but takes its ontologically legitimate place, where the unshakable principles of the axiological hierarchy dominate, where religious values ​​and theological meanings are not banished to the periphery of intellectual life, but are at its forefront. The subjective determinant of this position has always been the personal faith of the scientist, which allowed him to assign any discursive material a place corresponding to its nature within the theocentric picture of the world.

When the ideological sword categorically cut off from axiological-normative integrity "religion-morality" the first half, this turned the works of Russian humanities scholars into texts that amazed and depressed serious readers with their spiritual poverty. Today, these works with excessively simplified conceptual structures are practically not in scientific demand, since it is quite difficult to glean anything valuable from them for understanding the essence of human morality. Their current destiny is to exist as exhibits of a museum of intellectual history, where they resemble dried out, lifeless herbariums, cut off from the nutritious, life-giving soil and no longer giving much to the mind and heart of the modern connoisseur of philosophical and ethical studies.

The sad fact is that to this day, the methodology of exclusivity, as a rule, is accompanied by personal unbelief, religious ignorance, and theological illiteracy of atheist humanities, depriving them of the opportunity to creatively fully participate in the discussion of issues of interaction between religion and morality. Moreover, the attitude of secular consciousness to God, to the theocentric picture of the world, religion, church, faith and believers in other cases is openly resentmental character .

In the basic semantics of the concept ressentiment, meaning a complex of negative emotions, feelings, passions and attitudes that have converged at one point, intertwined into one knot, several basic content elements are recorded:

the reactivity of resentmental experiences, which are a psychological response (reaction) to the actions of external forces that had the nature of an obvious or imagined encroachment on the status and dignity of the subject of these experiences;

the negativity of resentmental feelings that have the appearance of vulnerability, indignation, indignation and carry a message of obvious hostility towards those responsible for its occurrence;

the ability of resentmental experiences to move to the epicenter of the individual “I”, as a result of which the latter is deprived of internal balance and tranquility; resentment is incompatible with the harmony of the inner world, deforms the personal “I”, gives the individual worldview, the entire system of value orientations of the individual, an autodestructive character;

systems of values, meanings, norms, and assessments of a positive, moral nature cannot be based on ressentiment; only their antipodes grow from it - systems of perverse axiological constructions that lead individuals and masses through a series of destructive actions into existential dead ends.

This semantic complex sheds additional light on the attitude of secular consciousness to subjects of religious morality, to spiritual traditions, values ​​and norms that are significant for those, to God, religion, and faith. From the standpoint of the atheistic mind, believing scientists, if they try to theoretically substantiate a traditionalist-oriented worldview and their right to it, have the appearance of odious, irritating and angry retrogrades, who dare in the “post-Christian era” in the conditions of “post-Christian civilization” to encroach on the authority of the truly scientific, i.e. i.e. a secular worldview. In such cases, the object of “vindictive” negativism is both the thousand-year-old spiritual tradition of religious worldview itself, as well as everything connected with it, and all those who demonstrate their involvement in it. To recognize its legitimacy, the atheistic consciousness does not have enough spiritual strength and calm self-confidence, and it finds itself in the grip of resentmental moods of varying strength - from arrogant disdain to open aggressiveness. Such resentmental charge, which hollows out and disorients humanitarian thought, has an extremely negative impact on its development and its creative productivity.

One of the confirmations that Scheler, with his concept of ressentiment-grudge, felt the pain point of modern secular morality and atheistically oriented ethical thought, can be considered the position of the Dutch scientist A. Hautepen, who pointed out the existence "vindictive agnosis" consisting in a decisive renunciation of God by all those who see in Christianity exclusively a religion of fear, guilt and shame and believe that all this only poisons the lives of people. In such cases, God, the theocentric picture of the world, religious meanings and values, which once had enormous power over minds and to this day retain it, although no longer on the same scale, appear as deserving exclusively negative attitude towards themselves objects of rancor, as realities that cause irritation in some cases, and outright bitterness in others.

One of the characteristic features of this attitude is that it is difficult to get rid of; it sits like a thorn in the consciousness, constantly disturbs it, brings into it a heavy anxiety, which makes itself felt every time images of God and ideas about the sacred emerge within it, or when it collides with persons who defend religious values.

As for the methodology of inclusiveness, it assumes that in the picture peace there's room for God, in the picture society- For religion, and in the model person, human subjectivity and individual morality - for faith. To the two forms of morality that are legitimate in the eyes of the bearer of secular consciousness, autonomous and heteronomous, a third is added - theonomous, based on transcendental, sacred, absolute, unconditional foundations .

Philosophical and ethical theory does not suffer any damage from such an expansion of the subject space; on the contrary, the problematic horizons are expanded and the theoretical language of researchers is significantly enriched. This is all the more important because the language of secular moral and ethical consciousness has always suffered from the limitations and even poverty of its descriptive and analytical constructions in comparison with the language of theonomous consciousness. “By erasing God from thinking, we lose various mental images associated with the special, incomprehensible and incalculable properties of life. If we get rid of the concept of "God", we have no words left for blessing and curse, necessity and happiness, origin and destiny, devotion and love. At the same time, even the most talented artistic descriptions cannot replace the reference to God and the divine.”

Word God - This, of course, is not a linguistic metaphor that refers thought to poorly defined areas of religious and ethical meanings, to the vaguely inexpressible semantic fields of theonomous ethics. For theonomous consciousness, God is a subject possessing the properties of the ultimate existential, capable of radically transforming not only the strategies of ethical thinking and social and moral behavior, but also, ultimately, the trajectory of human destiny.

No one is allowed to slip beyond the boundaries of the binary opposition “faith - unbelief” and beyond the antinomy that accompanies it: “I believe that there is a God” - “I believe that there is no God”. There is no worldview of this type that would allow one to rise above them. This circumstance can be perceived as a basic cultural-historical axiom, to whose rigid normative essence all consciousness, including moral and ethical, is subject. It is pointless to argue with the fact of its existence and unconditional effectiveness, because behind it there are two ontological absolutes, the first of which is God, personifying the power of absolute, irresistible obligation present in the world, and the second - Human, endowed with freedom of expression, freedom of choice, the right to recognize or not recognize the existence of this force, to obey or not to obey its imperatives. And from this follows a number of problems of epistemological comparative science, which prescribes comparing the quality, degree of truth, analytical depth and other properties of philosophical and ethical knowledge produced by researchers who recognize the existence of God and their colleagues who deny His existence.

When P. Ricoeur in his work “The Conflict of Interpretations” argued that understanding is impossible without faith, then he, in essence, did not say anything new. This position occupied a strong place in the consciousness of people for many centuries of the Christian era and was hardly disputed by anyone until the Age of Enlightenment. And only in the context of the widespread spread of methodological atheism did it sound like a kind of challenge, and its supporters began to look like nonconformists. But be that as it may, this thesis actually contains a statement that encroaches on the authority of secular scientific consciousness, undermining its usual feelings of self-confidence and self-sufficiency. Humanists whose professional duty is to don't cry or laugh, but understand, are unlikely to agree with anyone’s attempts to somehow limit their ability to understand what is happening within the limits of life reality. Meanwhile, Ricoeur’s thesis clearly points to the cognitive limitations of methodological atheism, to the defectiveness of that model of humanitarian knowledge where personal unbelief dominates and sets the tone in building search epistemological strategies. The same thesis, slightly reformulated, could look like this: Without faith, only misunderstanding is possible the essence of the most important realities of human spiritual and moral existence.

Secular moral consciousness: autonomy and heteronomy

In a secular society, it is considered a sign of good manners to criticize religious morality and the positions of its bearers, and to defend them means to be branded as a conservative of a bad kind. Secular moral and ethical consciousness, which readily discusses the autonomous and heteronomous forms of morality, rarely puts on a par with them the third form - theonomous, which has religious foundations. Meanwhile, the requirement for an ontological completeness of the picture of what is and what should be requires remembering and taking into account that such fundamental ontologies as personality, society and God are based not on two, but three moral and ethical paradigms - autonomous, heteronomous and theonomous,

Autonomous moral consciousness has, as a rule, a secular nature. It is guided by the normative requirements of the cultural-civilizational system, which, however, can be so organically integrated into the individual “I” that the subject begins to consider them his internal property. However, the properties of these requirements can be very different, as well as the degree of their integration. Submission to them acts for the individual as an act of free internal preference, and as a result, the impression arises that moral consciousness “self-legislates,” that is, it determines for itself models and strategies of proper behavior. A person chooses one line or another social behavior as most corresponding to his spiritual essence and maintains the integrity of his being and his personality by centering all the meanings, values ​​and norms that interest him around his own “I”. At the same time, one of the main features of his position is his distance from all forms of religiosity, in which he sees a threat of possible attacks on his autonomy.

For the subject-bearer of autonomous moral consciousness, it is important that freedom and liberation are words with the same root, where the first denotes a state, and the second a process, and where secular morality is the result of the liberation of a person from those dependencies and responsibilities that would be assigned to him by the universal God, socially charged religion and personal faith. He is not satisfied with systems of religious morality, where human freedom is limited by the will of God and the authority of the church. He prefers to live with the knowledge that his own freedom is not constrained by anything and is not regulated by anyone. For him, the source of morality is man, and the basis of a moral position is his own “I”. He does not need God, since God for him is nothing more than an illusion, an obsessive phantom, a specter, a product of human thinking, with which one can, if desired, , be taken into account, but which can also be neglected. Secularization in his eyes is the process of cleansing the human mind from the ghosts that clog the culture and, above all, from the most important thing among them - God. He is ready to take seriously only the products of pure reason, free from any connections with transcendental reality with its dubious, in his opinion, representatives that do not stand up to rational criticism. The boundlessness of his inherent rationalism protects him from religious awe before the depths of existence and from metaphysical fear before the mysteries of non-existence.

The mental activity of autonomous moral consciousness is based on principle of agnosticism, allowing to eliminate all problems associated with transcendental reality outside the discursive space as something that is not rationally verifiable and therefore unnecessary. It includes all theologically based moral and ethical systems with their thousand-year experience of existence as such “excesses”. In cases where verification procedures are beyond its capabilities or seem unnecessary, it is content to rely on its own subjective-personal basis as secular faith in the self-sufficiency of the individual “I”, in the absence of prerequisites for strategies of moral self-determination, in the unlimited possibilities of choice in the world of meanings, norms and values. It is assumed that human subjectivity, closed in on itself, relying exclusively on itself, drawing strength primarily from itself, is the strongest and most reliable guarantor of highly moral behavior of an individual in society. At the same time, it remains little clear what spiritual resources ensure highly moral behavior of a person, what are the guarantors of their inexhaustibility, what are the limits of their strength, and much more.

The conviction that “the individual is primary, and society is secondary,” that God, religion, church, faith are obstacles that prevent a person from taking full responsibility for what is happening in the world, for his actions and deeds, prevents autonomous moral consciousness from noticing that all these rational attitudes significantly narrow the space of individual freedom, including intellectual and spiritual, transform freedom into something that is by no means full-fledged, but truncated and therefore vulnerable.

There is a widespread opinion that secularism indicates a sufficiently high degree of maturity of human consciousness, freedom of thinking, that it becomes possible only in conditions when the individual spirit recognizes itself as strong enough to cope with the social, moral and other problems that beset it. There is some truth in this. But the difficulty is that sometimes it is not easy to determine where true spiritual and moral maturity is present, and where only the illusion of self-sufficiency, frivolous arrogance and proud conceit prevail.

Is this why the idea of ​​autonomous morality plays into the hands, strange as it may sound, of authoritarian-totalitarian regimes? These regimes mercilessly expose the disappointing truth that an individual, pathetically insisting on his right to self-legislate and rely only on his internal ethical principles, turns out to be an extremely fragile creature to withstand the brutal onslaught of a state monster. Secular man discovers his powerlessness in the face of the daily threat of persecution, prison, suffering and death. His moral autonomy gives him too little in extreme, borderline situations, and protects him too little from exorbitant moral and psychological overloads. Isn't that why it's disproportionate? big number refined intellectuals, recognized intellectuals, famous scientists, talented writers, gifted artists, at the sight of the social bulk of the cannibal regime threatening to swallow them up, abandoned their main weapon - the moral law within themselves, forgot about the starry sky above them, abandoned their beliefs and principles and spiritually perished, surrendering to the enemy, moving into his camp, completely forgetting about their autonomous morality, exchanging it for the saving adaptive principles of heteronomous, corporate morality, manufactured in the ideological kitchen of the political regime.

The tragic experience of the 20th century testifies: the fragile structures of autonomous morality easily broke down in the extreme circumstances of the most difficult trials, and therefore, in the dungeons of the Gulag, most often the most persistent ones were not intelligent, non-God-believing bearers of autonomous moral consciousness, but believing Christians, whose morality was theonomic in nature, having support not in herself, but in God and faith. This sad experience gives grounds for the disappointing conclusion that the system of autonomous morality, highly extolled since the time of Kant by subtle connoisseurs of secular spirituality, has not been able to maintain its pedestal. Autonomous moral consciousness turned out to be a prisoner of self-deception, the essence of which lies in a number of fundamental substitutions, the main one of which was that what was relative in nature - the individual “I”, with its limitations, variability, and weakness, was elevated to the status of an absolute. Attempts to absolutize the relative were initially doomed to failure, but it took gigantic socio-historical upheavals on a geopolitical scale for the failure of the Kantian project to become obvious.

The Kantian model of secular ethical reflection did not live up to the hopes placed on it, which, with all its attempts to dive into the depths of “transcendentality” and “a priori”, did not achieve the desired results - it could not offer real practical help to the weak human “I” so that it would exorbitant socio-psychological overload was firmly held at the level of high moral requirements. Filled with secularity, this negative emptiness of God-denial, she, like an inflated balloon, was never able to reach the required metaphysical depths, and therefore, to comprehend the true essence of morality and freedom.

Another type of secular morality, which has a heteronomous nature, prescribes the individual to act primarily as a representative of a certain social community, be it a clan, a nation, a state, a class, a party, a corporation, a collective, a group, etc. The source of morality here is a specific a social system or one of its local subsystems, endowed with superpersonal power, the ability to subjugate a person to its power.

Heteronomous morality presupposes the development of adaptive qualities in an individual, ensuring his willingness to put the interests of the community above his own and the ability to socially reunite with it into a single whole. At the same time, moral norms may remain something external for her and even contradict her internal aspirations. However, sacrificing his moral autonomy, the right of spiritual self-determination, a person receives in return significant compensation - the consciousness that the strength of the community becomes his property, many times greater than his own strengths and capabilities. As a “part of the whole”, well fitted to the system, the subject of heteronomous morality is predisposed, first of all, to adaptive-corporatist, contingent forms of social activity that support the existence of the system. It is characterized by that special type of denial of God, when God, religion, faith are rejected not so much because of ideological motives and ideological convictions, but because in the internal space of a socially engaged “I”, completely immersed in the everyday bustle of active social life and forced to quickly respond to all the demands of the external environment, there is simply no room left for thoughts about something sublime, “mountainous”. A mature, socially established person, firmly on his feet, rarely has free time to think about the absolute value-normative foundations of social existence. His “I” prefers to make do with what gives him involvement in everyday life. All necessary meanings are drawn from the social space of an atheistic state and secular society. And there is no need to make any special efforts to extract these meanings, since they remain, as they say, on the surface and are offered by the social system so energetically, imposed with such pressure that it is almost impossible to dodge or close them.

Within those forms of heteronomous moral consciousness that have a secular orientation, there is no place for absolute norms based on transcendental, unconditional foundations, but comprehensive relativism dominates. Categorical and merciless, he, at the same time, is internally contradictory, since he is always ready at any moment to raise any of the values, any of the normative instructions, any of the principles to the absolute, if they are beneficial to the system. But as soon as the system-community begins to decay, and its normative-disciplinary dictate weakens, relativism immediately turns against it. Rapidly spreading, it fills the entire space of the decrepit system and thereby ensures the transformation of the foundations of heteronomous morality into anything, even openly cynical apologies for nihilism and permissiveness.

Moral Consequences of the Neopagan Renaissance

Despite the fact that secularism deserves a critical attitude towards itself, one should still give it its due: it realized the attempts of the human mind to deconstruct the logic of the history of Western and Russian worlds, which over a long series of centuries moved in the direction set by the triad of civilizational and cultural paradigms, marked by the words “Athens-Rome-Jerusalem”. Secular consciousness tried, and not unsuccessfully, to direct the course of history into a new direction, where the influence of the cultural traditions of the pagan civilizations of Athens and Rome increased, and at the same time the influence of Jerusalem, i.e., the biblical-Christian heritage, weakened. This was accompanied by the deconstruction of the entire structure of social, cultural, spiritual life and, ultimately, a radical “correction” of the human personality, who wished to “settle on new foundations,” the most important of which was secularism, which promises a person unprecedented emancipation and freedom in all spheres of spiritual and practical activities.

Secular consciousness has convinced itself that it lives in a disenchanted, desacralized world, and it is little embarrassed by the fact that the desacralization it has carried out is imaginary, that the world has remained an arena for the interaction of sacred and profane principles, with the only difference that the place of those expelled by atheists God was occupied by dark, demonic forces and their henchmen. After all, after Nietzsche’s statement that “God is dead,” no one claimed that the devil also died. Denial of God was not complemented by denial of the Devil. The Prince of Darkness remained alive in secular culture and morality. Therefore, for the modern era, Heraclitus’ maxim “Everything is full of demons” turned out to be quite true. And “everything” is the world of this world, including the worlds of what is and what should be, civilization and culture, politics and morality, and much more. The dark sphere that Dostoevsky depicted in the novel “Demons” has expanded sharply and powerfully - the sphere of immoralism disguised as morality, the sphere of permissiveness camouflaged as serving higher interests.

A characteristic feature of modern secularization, which casts doubt on its sociocultural value and indicates that it is not a process of parting with religiosity as such, is its orientation against Christianity, but not against paganism, giving it the appearance of a process de-Christianization culture, but not at all as a process of it depaganization. Countless forms of pagan and neo-pagan superstitions are not debunked in it, but, on the contrary, are purposefully cultivated and intensively promoted. Modern media widely cover the activities of all kinds of astrologers, sorcerers, magicians, wise men, and shamans. And since paganism does not require moral behavior from a person indifferent to truth, goodness and justice, does not know what is called moral perfection, since pagan idols are not personifications of high spirituality, true life, moral purity, then the process paganization social and cultural life entails an increasing spread of stereotypes of immoral behavior. So, for example, pagan cults have always encouraged sexual promiscuity and even sacralized it, practicing temple, cult prostitution. When today individual scientists, lawyers and public figures say that there is nothing wrong in legalizing prostitution and creating a network of brothels, and point to ritual prostitution in Phenicia, Sumer, Babylon as civilizational precedents, they forget that this there were pagan civilizations. Biblical ethics and Mosaic law are uncompromising in all matters relating to any form of prostitution and categorically prohibit it. The Gospel teaching follows the same path, advocating healthy sexual, family and marriage morality. When modern disputants advocate the legalization of brothels, appealing not to biblical-Christian, but to pagan values, they do this for the reason that they feel themselves living inside the culture of a neo-pagan renaissance, where sexual promiscuity is presented as a completely acceptable reality , which does not carry a negative connotation. The common slogan “sexual revolution” in these cases only obscures the true essence of the matter, pointing to an explosion of sexual immoralism, but not highlighting its causes and neo-pagan nature.

The element of xenophobia is extremely powerfully represented in paganism, which also turns it into a serious obstacle to the spiritual and moral recovery of the nation. In traditional ethnic communities, far from monotheism, the habit of thinking in terms of “friends or strangers” and hostility towards “strangers” were instilled from childhood and reinforced in the process of socialization. In modern multinational, multi-confessional states, where bearers of different faiths are forced to coexist and constantly interact in solving common social problems, xenophobia is especially dangerous. Against the backdrop of ignoring its deep pagan nature, calls for tolerance and the development of democratic institutions look like ineffective declarations. Equally, they have little effect where the anti-xenophobic, solidaristic potential of Christianity is ignored. The Gospel idea of ​​the spiritual brotherhood of all people who believe in Christ, together with the model of moral relations, for which the differences between Greeks and Jews, free and slaves, rich and poor, near and far, are not essential, is especially valuable for the era of globalization, since it appeals to fraternal relations not only between individuals, but also between peoples and states. And this is already a level of socio-ethical thinking to which neo-pagan consciousness is never able to rise to, under any circumstances. He does not have access to not only the New Testament, but also the Old Testament understanding that all people, despite the diversity of anthropological, psychological, social and other qualities, are children of common ancestors, representatives of the same type, that each of the people is the image and likeness of God . Those states and those moral and legal systems where anti-xenophobic argumentation is based not only on rational-secular arguments, but also on the deep power of the biblical-Christian spiritual tradition, have a much greater chance of successfully keeping the elements of xenophobia in obedience.

The present century is a time of fierce struggle between paganism and atheism against Christianity. In modern Russia, the process of spreading neopaganism is especially active. Even in the USSR, this was largely facilitated by the policies of the authorities. Consider the fact that Marshal M. Tukhachevsky hatched a project to recognize paganism as an official state ideology. Stalinism, however, chose a more subtle and insidious form of neo-pagan renaissance. If we remember that paganism is characterized by interest, first of all, in the generic, swarm beginning of human existence, and for Christianity, which opened the path of salvation not to the race, but to the individual, the individual-personal principle has always been in the first place, then the internal consonance of the communitarian Soviet ideology with the spirit becomes clear paganism. In the hierarchy of social, political, moral and ethical values, priority was given not to the free human personality, but to the impersonal swarm principle. And this gradually created nutritious social soil for the revival and spread of pagan mentalities, which turned out to be much more viable than Soviet ideological constructs. And today, neo-paganism, in alliance with atheism, actively opposes both Christianity and the spiritual revival and moral improvement of the nation. This is facilitated by the era of late modernity itself, which turned out to be in many ways consonant with the spirit of paganism, encouraging any attempts to combine the ideological relics of the antediluvian archaic with modern cultural forms. The modernist-oriented consciousness is not at all worried about the fact that, as a result, exclusively chimerical creations arise that do not brighten the modern cultural space, but darken, pollute and desecrate it.

This is how the old truth once again declares itself that not all religiosity contributes to the development and strengthening of the moral foundations of human society, that there are also its forms from which it is better for morality to be independent, and for a person to stay away.

Religious consciousness and theonomous morality

Whether we like it or not, we have to admit that secular models of autonomous and heteronomous morality and the philosophical and ethical theories that support them did not withstand the severe tests to which the civilization of Russian-Soviet modernity subjected them. These theories cannot cope with the overloads that have befallen them under post-Soviet conditions. In the current situation, neither the principles of methodological agnosticism, nor, especially, the principles of methodological anarchism, so dear to the hearts of modern intellectuals in the humanities, can save us. Is this why the searching glances of analysts began to, as it were, involuntarily rush towards that residual semantic and value-normative constructions that the modern world inherited from the eras of Christian classics?

One of the features of the modern situation is that today there has been an actual reshuffle in the relationship between conservatism and innovation: attempts to substantiate the legitimacy of moral autonomy and heteronomy by means of methodological atheism already look like something colored in the tones of conservatism. This is how the postmodernist trend makes itself felt, testifying to the saturation of cultural consciousness with the delights of modernist relativism and reductionism and, at the same time, to the reviving sympathy for the worlds of the absolute and unconditional.

Supporters of godless conservatism can still attach a certain attractiveness to their methodological constructions if they themselves are likeable, sharp-thinking and well-written intellectuals. But their efforts are unlikely to bear any significant theoretical and social fruit, both due to the nihilistic nature of atheism and because of its direct involvement in the historical cataclysms of the twentieth century, incomparable in their gloom and destructiveness.

The spiritual experience that man gained in the era of modernity and the transition to postmodernity increasingly convinces us that without relying on sacred foundations, the human spirit cannot live a normal, full-fledged creative life. Outside of these foundations, all creative attempts of the theoretical mind lead to the appearance of either poor simulacra or frightening chimeras. Modern theoretical consciousness has to reckon with the fact that a social person is also a religious person, that is, driven not only by material and physical needs and socio-pragmatic interests, but also by motives of a religious and spiritual nature. In truth, scientists who remember this have always existed. In Russia at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. thinkers of this type made up a whole galaxy of brilliant analysts. However, the catastrophic development of social events destroyed this generation and interrupted the process of development of theonomous moral philosophy based on religious and theological foundations.

Theonomic moral and ethical consciousness is characterized by be guided by imperatives of a sacred nature, concentrated in sacred texts. If we talk about theonomic consciousness Christian type, then it takes as the basis for all its motivational, analytical and other actions the biblical value-normative system, based on the Old Testament decalogue and the ethical precepts of the New Testament. All movements of theonomic ethical thought are contextualized into a theocentrically organized system of sociomoral reality, subject to a strict hierarchy of biblical meanings, values ​​and norms, and firmly connected with the centuries-old intellectual experience of Christian social and moral theology.

The theonomic orientation of moral and ethical consciousness suggests that the energy of the religious spirit is capable of acting as a causal factor, as powerful force, initiating significant shifts and changes in the social practice of small and large human communities. In the internal space of such consciousness, religiosity is transformed into sociality, into its various, including moral, ethical, motivational and behavioral forms.

For theonomous consciousness, God is the main explanatory and normative principle of all the vicissitudes of the spiritual and practical activities of individuals and communities. It is convinced that God cannot be excluded from culture and morality, that one can only stop thinking about Him and focus on His requirements, but the very fact of His presence in all spheres of human existence will remain unchanged and ineradicable. It proceeds from the fact that the call to observe religious and moral norms comes not from people, not from society, but from God, and the church, clergy, religiously oriented media only participate in voicing this call, act as mediators of religious communication, being included in the chain, connecting personality and God.

The main institutional basis of theonomous morality is the church. One of the areas of her activity is to help people correct the anthropologically and socially determined moral deformations to which they are subject in everyday life. Unable to free themselves from them, overcome them on their own, and gain spiritual freedom from sin, they receive support from the church and from the spiritual resources it has at its disposal. The Church performs a number of functions of a social and spiritual nature, giving a person the opportunity both at a young, mature and old age to lead a full spiritual life. It helps believers maintain their spiritual and physical health, provides the necessary social circle, satisfies spiritual needs, answers troubling existential questions, and provides social support to the elderly, sick, and disabled.

Theonomic consciousness is subdivided within itself into a number of types, the specific features of which depend on the influence of many specific historical, social, political and other factors. The most obvious of the existing typologies has developed historically in the form of a triadic division of all Christians into Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants. In Russia, due to historical circumstances, Orthodox Christians predominate, while Catholics and Protestants are on the periphery of the Russian confessional space.

There have always been two types of Catholics in Russia. The first are those whose religious affiliation was a family tradition due to national or clan continuity. The second are those Orthodox believers who were somehow attracted to Catholicism, and this attraction turned out to be so significant for them that it resulted in a transition. In the 19th century Representatives of such aristocratic families as the Volkonskys, Golitsyns, Gagarins, Golovins, and Tolstoys became Catholics. P. Ya. Chaadaev, V. S. Pecherin, M. S. Lunin, Vl. gravitated towards Catholicism. S. Solovyov, in our time the writer Venedikt Erofeev and others. Catholicism attracted them as a means of allowing Russia to overcome cultural and political isolation from Europe and helping to restore the unity of Christian civilization. They were attracted by the independence of the Catholic Church from state dictatorship, the respect of Catholics for the personal principle, as well as that characteristic isolation of the individual “I” from the general “we”, which is not articulated in Orthodoxy. They gave Catholics credit for their ability to value their civil rights and their ability to assert their freedoms.

N.A. Berdyaev noted that in Catholicism there is a lot of “human effort to rise up, to stretch out,” that it stimulates human activity, both spiritual and practical, while Orthodoxy somewhat holds it back. And in our time, S. S. Averintsev, being an Orthodox believer, who thought a lot in the same comparative vein, once noticed that when you read Catholic books on moral theology, you are amazed at how detailed the boundaries of a neighbor’s right to his personal secrets are stipulated there , not subject to disclosure, completely civilized “fences” are erected around the territories of individual existence, and the word “agreement”, “contract” is very often used when talking about ways to streamline interpersonal relationships.

By 1917, there were 10.5 million Catholics in Russia, there were over 5 thousand Catholic churches and chapels, in which 4.3 thousand Catholic priests served. The entire territory of the country was divided into 12 dioceses (dioceses). After 1917, when Poland and the Baltic countries gained state independence, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus moved away from Russia, the number of Catholics decreased significantly and in 1922 amounted to 1.5 million people. Currently, there are just over 300 thousand of them left in Russia.

As for Protestants, there are currently about 1.5 million of them in Russia. Like Russian Catholics, they find in their alternative model of Christianity something that Orthodoxy cannot give them. Once upon a time, during the era of the Reformation, the moral and legal component and, first of all, the idea of ​​moral dignity and personal freedom were very clearly represented in the teachings of Luther and his followers. In subsequent centuries, Protestantism played an important role in Europe in the legal provision of freedom of religion. For example, in 1598, the Edict of Nantes was adopted - a decree of the French king Henry IV, which secured the right of an individual to profess Protestantism in a Catholic state. As a result, Protestants (Huguenots) gained not only freedom of worship, but also access to all government positions.

In pre-revolutionary Russia, Protestants, as bearers of a heterodox, i.e., alternative religion to Orthodoxy, were not only excluded from social and political life, but were also subject to infringement of their civil rights and freedoms. At the end of the 19th century. there were special orders from the Ministry of Internal Affairs ordering the use of measures such as imprisonment and exile against Protestants. Periods of temporary relaxation, as a rule, were followed by periods of direct anti-Protestant persecution. And this despite the fact that Protestants have never shown the slightest hostility either to the state authorities or to the Orthodox Church.

As for the statistical data on Orthodox believers, they are very heterogeneous, since they are directly dependent on the criteria used by researchers (ethnicity, religious self-identification, church affiliation, etc.). These data range from 80% to 5%, i.e. from 110 million to 7 million Russians. Thus, Filatov S.B. and Lunkin R.N. claim that it is the most common (especially among religious figures) ethnic criterion. Its essence is that all Russians (about 116 million), all Ukrainians (3 million), Belarusians (0.8 million), as well as a number of small nationalities living in Russia are declared Orthodox. As a result, if we follow the data of the 2002 All-Russian Census, it turns out that there are about 120 million Orthodox Christians in the country. Within the total number of Russian Orthodox Christians were both Russian Catholics and Russian Protestants.

All Russian Spaniards, Italians, Cubans, Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, etc. were classified as Catholics. There were 500 - 600 thousand of them. There were 14 million ethnic Muslims. All Russian Jews (230 thousand) were declared to be professing Judaism. All Buryats (445 thousand), Kalmyks (174 thousand), and Tuvans (243 thousand) were classified as Buddhists. In total there were about 900 thousand Buddhists. It is noteworthy that all Russian atheists disappeared inside all these figures .

Another approach is to use criteria for religious self-identification. Here, the individual self-assessment of a person as a believer belonging to a particular denomination is taken as a basis. This is discovered through surveys. In light of this approach, only up to 82% of Russians (from 70 to 85 million) called themselves Orthodox. About 1 million people called themselves Catholics, i.e. more than when using the ethnic principle, since Russians who consider themselves Catholics were added to them. Among 230 thousand Jews there were only 8% Judaists, 25% Christians of various denominations, 2% Buddhists, 23% atheists. There are up to 1.5 million Old Believers in modern Russia, more than 1.5 million Protestants, 6 to 9 million Muslims, more than 0.5 million Buddhists.

Criterion for church affiliation(“churchedness”), which is used mainly by Western sociologists, gives another picture. The question is asked: “Were you at the service last Sunday?” In the USA, up to 50% of respondents answer “yes”. In Russia it is useless to put it, because there are negligibly few positive answers. We have to ask the question: “Do you attend worship services once a month or more often?” Positive responses - 5 - 10%. In light of this criterion, according to various sources, there are only 2 to 10% of Orthodox Christians in the country, i.e., from 3 to 15 million.

Some researchers propose using a methodology based on the dynamics of refined indicators of religiosity. Thus, in the late 1980s, initial surveys showed that among those surveyed, 84% called themselves Orthodox and only 5% called themselves atheists. However, subsequent studies using questions clarifying the religious status of Russians revealed that of the total number of those who call themselves Orthodox, only 42% called themselves believers in God, 24% believe in an afterlife, and only 7% go to church at least once once a month. Thus, only 7% of Russians can be considered real, i.e., church-going Christians.

Without delving into rather controversial statistical issues that require special attention, we can say that in any case, Russian Christians are a social community of impressive scale, which is an integral part of Russian civil society, including millions of citizens, with thousands of church parishes organizing religious life Russians. This huge community has its own television channels, radio stations, publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and libraries, which participate in the cultural, social, religious and civil life of the country, and conduct spiritual, educational and social work.

Those who are part of the multi-million community of Russian Christians have their own, special treatment to a compendium of spiritual meanings, values ​​and norms that form the core of culture, and they are to a very small extent satisfied with that philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, psychological and other humanitarian literature that is based on the secular foundations of personal unbelief and state atheism. When, for example, in this literature secular, autonomous morality and the ethical theories that correlate with it are identified with humanism of the highest standard, Christians recognize this as a misunderstanding. For them, what is said on the first pages is true. books of Genesis, affirming such a high status of a person, higher than which nothing can be conceived - the status image and likeness of God. In their opinion, no humanists could ever dream of such a high assessment of a person.

A characteristic feature of theonomous morality, almost unnoticed by its opponents, is that it does not abolish either heteronomy or autonomy, especially if both are of a religious nature. Thus, heteronomy with its inherent power of sociality, the power of tradition, the dictates of conventions, is quite impressively represented in the Old Testament concept of the Law as an external force forcing a person to proper behavior. The idea of ​​moral autonomy is, in essence, the Gospel concept of the Good News. According to the Gospel, God calls to the individual and offers him, although tempting, a difficult path of moral freedom and responsibility. It opens up a new spiritual field for man, limitless in its creative possibilities. At the same time, God does not impose, but only offers, and the right of choice and free spiritual self-determination belongs to man. Both this right and this freedom are the spiritual gifts of the Creator to his creation. Their purpose is to help a person reveal his own gifts, abilities, talents, rise with their help to the proper spiritual height and, staying at it, without sliding, without sliding, without falling down, live his earthly life.

Moral autonomy and heteronomy appear in the Bible not as self-sufficient and self-sufficient ethical paradigms, but as mediating links in the spiritual chain that connects man with God. And in their unique unity with theonomy, the fullness of the moral existence of the individual arises, clearly aware of the impossibility of his existence not only without freedom of spiritual self-determination and a responsible attitude to external sociocultural requirements, but also without sensitive attention to the imperatives emanating from God.

Three determinative trends, set by the transcendental God, the social system and the spiritually independent person, form an extremely complex picture of the moral existence of a person in its content and semantic configuration, for whom it is important to build the correct hierarchy of these three modes. For religious consciousness, unconditional primacy is given to the mode of theonomy. As for the modes of heteronomy and autonomy, their position relative to each other can change. Thus, within the Judeo-Christian tradition, two models of their relationship have long been defined - Old Testament, Jewish with its inherent priority of heteronomy over autonomy and New Testament, Christian with the priority of moral autonomy over heteronomy. But in any case, an internal balance of three normative vectors is established: the binding imperativeness of theonomy, together with the restraining pressure of the principles of moral heteronomy, is balanced by a sense of internal freedom, a consciousness of spiritual autonomy. This autonomy is of a very special nature and bears little resemblance to its secular sister. It is characterized by the individual’s reliance not only on his own spiritual powers, but also on ideological postulates of an absolute nature, rooted in the theocentric model of the world. She realizes the possibilities of free choice, relying not on the arbitrariness of her own aspirations, but on balanced strategies of biblical wisdom, rooted in the transcendental world of the absolute. It is this rootedness that gives rise to that amazingly productive existential synthesis of spiritual freedom and highest wisdom, which no moral and ethical system of a secular nature can compete with.

Secularism, which broke this integrity, gave moral heteronomy and autonomy a self-sufficient character, contrasting them both with each other and with the principles of moral theonomy. Open systems meanings, norms and values ​​turned into normative-axiological corpuscles and began to resemble some closed semantic monads. And this seriously deformed the overall picture of the moral world within which historical man existed and modern man lives.

Therefore, the regrets of supporters of secular morality regarding the weakening of its positions in a society that is slowly unfolding to embark on a course of post-secular development are hardly appropriate. The bold attacks of the “secularists” on those in whom they see their antipodes are hardly worthy of sympathy. Neither nostalgic sighs regarding such bygone forms of moral heteronomy as Soviet collectivism, nor regrets about the disappearance of generations of sophisticated atheist intellectuals who professed personal moral autonomy, change the current state of affairs, when practically the only reliable subject of morality becomes a person for whom autonomy , heteronomy and theonomy represent a single, inseparable whole. If this is a believer, then he accepts into his “I” impulses from all three determinants. If this is an unbeliever, then, taking into account the sources of heteronomy and autonomy, he is forced to react to the influence of the transcendental trend, building a protective system from the constructs of ideological atheism in order to protect himself from the unacceptable influences of a spiritual tradition alien to him. In such cases, this tradition, expelled at the door, invades, as they say, through the window, and then theoretically untenable explanations of a certain kind appear: they say, “for me God is the state” (quasi-heteronomy) or “God exists inside me, in my soul" (quasi-autonomy).

The historical dynamics of the spiritual development of the human race provides grounds for the paradigms of theonomy, heteronomy and autonomy, which separated from each other at some stage, to unite again into the integrity of a single, internally consistent ethical system. There are not only geocultural, but also anthropocultural prerequisites for this. One of them is that a spiritually mature person cannot fully exist within the framework of any one ethical paradigm. Even being inside pure theonomy is impossible, since the highest imperatives, the biblical commandments, enter inside the human “I” in accordance with the principle of heteronomy, that is, through communicative connections with many other people and social institutions, the most important of which in this case is the church. This stay is also impossible outside the scope of the principle of moral autonomy, since only a spiritually mature person, filled with self-esteem, is able to freely accept and responsibly follow moral commandments that have transcendental foundations.

Pure heteronomy is also impossible, since it is not able to cross out either the objective, ontological connections of man with transcendental reality, or the equally objective, ontologically immutable fact of the existence of individual human subjectivity.

And, of course, pure moral autonomy is also impossible, since the individual “I” is never, under any circumstances, a spiritually self-sufficient reality, completely independent of external influences of a social and transcendental nature.

Ethical anthropology: ages of human life and types of morality

The undoubted fact that Russian Christian churches are predominantly dominated by elderly people of retirement age has a characteristic semantic connotation that brings theoretical consciousness to the level of socio-anthropological reflection. Notable in this fact that many of these parishioners were not Christians either in their youth or in their mature years. For the time being, religiosity was alien to them; faith could not enter their hearts and take root in them. But life is structured in such a way that sooner or later, under the influence of the accumulating experience of loss, suffering, and disappointment, its very dynamics pushed them to new spiritual frontiers. It turned out that existential questions about the meaning of the life lived and its fruits, as well as the associated thoughts about responsibility, guilt, punishment, death and immortality, which previously seemed to be the subject of abstract thoughts only by philosophers, are capable of becoming actualized and acquiring a special, exclusively personal significance even for those who are accustomed to consider themselves atheists. In other cases, all this is woven together into a complex tangle of insoluble contradictions that can give rise to something like that “Arzamas horror” that the night consciousness of L. Tolstoy once experienced. A person, as if against his will, is drawn into a circle of completely new problems, previously almost unknown to him, against the background of which familiar meanings are relegated to the background, and old values ​​fade. This is how a new time of life announces itself, when, as has long been said, the time comes to think about both your soul and God. Almost nothing remains of the former social ambitions and fervent projects. All kinds of barriers that have fenced off man from God for a long time are deteriorating and beginning to collapse. And then God, not inclined to violate the moral sovereignty of the individual and invade her world against her will, calmly enters through the opened gap into the human heart. And this heart, suffering from thoughts of approaching death, from despondency, not knowing how to get rid of the pre-final depression that sucks the soul, thirsting for hope, love and immortality, finds itself in a state where the readiness to accept God awakens in it, since it feels the irresistible effectiveness consolations coming from Him.

Humanities scholars, writers, and publicists tend to exaggerate the strength of a person’s inclination toward moral autonomy and the extent of his compliance with the principles of moral heteronomy. This happens because in their field of vision there are most often people of young and mature age, captured by the flow of external social life, involved in it headlong. But human existence is not limited to youth and maturity. The fullness of a life lived, its fullness of socially and spiritually significant content also presupposes a meaningful, spiritually rich old age. Unfortunately, in the Russian mass consciousness, old people most often look like social pariahs, representing almost no interest to society, but only burdening it. Meanwhile, old age, by its very anthropological and spiritual essence, is that period of life when a person, almost to the maximum extent, comes into contact with the most pressing existential questions. Even the initial, just awakened, youthful concern with questions of the meaning of life, death and immortality appears against the background of the experience of a lived life as something very vague and formless. For youth, non-existence and eternity seem to be something almost unreal, but for old age they have very concrete and often even menacing signs in their tangibility. Between these two age models of existential concern, it is not so much the temporal gap as the semantic one that is important. The final era of life, to a greater extent than all others, predisposes a person to oscillate between unbelief and faith to choose in favor of the latter in order to give absolute values ​​and norms an incomparably more significant place than before in his life.

A comparative analysis of the main types of morality leads to a number of comparisons of an ethical and anthropological nature, indicating their connection with the natural, age-related logic of human existence. It almost involuntarily suggests a comparison of three moral and ethical paradigms with three periods of life - youth, maturity and old age, when the spirit of moral autonomy can well be called the youthful spirit, the spirit of moral heteronomy corresponds to the state of maturity, and the spirit of moral theonomy corresponds to the state of old age, wise by life experience.

In the position of moral autonomy, in the individual’s desire to consider himself the creator of meanings and values, the legislator of the norms of his own behavior, in the arrogant readiness to manage in moral life on his own, without resorting to either the help of society or the patronage of God, there is indeed much that resembles the daring youthful enthusiasm Coming out of the childhood pre-moral state, the youthful consciousness, overcome by egocentric moods and, at the same time, forced to reckon with external social demands, finds in the principles of moral autonomy something like a temporary compromise between one and the other, between “I want” and “I have to”, between freedom and duty and therefore willingly accepts these principles. It is extremely tempting for him to have an endless field of possibilities, when he can choose any source and any basis for his life position. Filled with youthful ambitions, it is confident that it is capable of bearing the burden of responsibility on its own, without resorting to anyone’s help. Seeing the source of life's meanings and the basis of life's values ​​in its "I", it considers it strong enough to withstand the pressure of any external opposition.

Having reached a state of social maturity, a person discovers that strategies for spiritual self-elevation through positioning one’s moral autonomy no longer promise significant social fruits. Having plunged headlong into active practical life, which requires complete adaptation to its requirements, large expenditures of spiritual and physical strength, maximum dedication, promising in return success, recognition, career advancement, he gradually moves to the position of heteronomous morality, which, in his opinion, represents the optimal adaptive means.

However, sooner or later, maturity gives way to the next age phase, old age, when many of the habitual orientations and attachments that previously firmly attached the individual to social institutions with their normative systems weaken, when new, existentially loaded questions of a finalistic nature inevitably approach, indicating the inevitable approach of death. As we cross the threshold of retirement age, the pressure of the social environment weakens, and under these conditions, everything that was previously squeezed, trampled, pushed to the periphery of spiritual life begins to revive, sprout, straighten, and come to the fore. And here it is discovered that to maintain the internal integrity of one’s “I”, one’s worldview, neither egocentric-autonomous nor sociocentric-heteronomous systems of moral values ​​are sufficient. They somehow spontaneously lose a significant share of their former attractiveness. In a variety of different, sometimes completely unexpected ways, things begin to enter into a person that previously seemed unimportant, having nothing to do with him - thoughts about the possibility of further existence beyond the boundaries of earthly life, about God and the salvation and immortality granted by Him. Having previously seemed like idle fictions, groundless fantasies, they suddenly appear in a completely different light, begin to attract attention more and more and force us to think about everything connected with them. And the older a person gets, the more he manifests a tendency to further delve into the world of these issues, and the need to maintain this questioning spiritual mood within himself intensifies. And since for thousands of years there have been spiritual practices and religious-church institutions that help people navigate this very difficult path, guiding their quests, people turn to them with a readiness that they have not previously felt in themselves. At the same time, he may be surprised to discover that he does not experience feelings of rejection and rejection towards these institutions. On the contrary, he readily enters a new phase of spiritual life for him, reminiscent of something like secondary socialization, when he has to learn, as it were, anew, to discover for himself a world of new truths, previously hidden, but which, as it turns out, have extreme significance, bringing new meaning to his declining life, illuminating it with new light, giving hope, driving away despondency and fear of the future. The individual “I”, as it were, climbs to a new level and discovers before itself an unusually expanded horizon of existence, along with spiritual bridges thrown from atheism to theism, from the market to the temple, from unbelief to faith, from earthly to heavenly, from time to eternity.

Metanoia of this kind is usually accompanied by a fundamental reassessment of values ​​and even a reformatting of some ideas about one’s own identity. In this process of forming a new spiritual order with a different configuration of life meanings, perhaps the most important choice in a person’s life is realized, to which he has been moving all his life and which over the years has been constantly pushed aside by the pragmatics of socially oriented personal claims. Preserving both love for oneself and attachment to the surrounding social world, remaining in it, without fencing oneself off from it with a wall, a person chooses salvation and immortality, promised by God to everyone who believes in Him, as the strategic goal of existence. And just as old age, leaving behind the years of youth and maturity, does not abolish those values ​​that formed the meaningful core of these eras of life, so faith, together with moral theonomy, does not cross out the values ​​of autonomy and heteronomy. These values ​​acquire a new quality, becoming incomparably more spiritual than the previous ones. Autonomy and heteronomy turn out to be steps that lead the individual to moral theonomy. Without dissolving or disappearing in the latter, they find their completion in it. Something like a spiritual synthesis arises, where three types of responsibility are united: in addition to responsibility to oneself and society, responsibility to God is also added. The individual “I” acquires spiritual integrity and completeness because it comes to wisdom with her inherent depth of understanding of the world, life and people.

Such a transition is always made as a result of a conscious, free choice and cannot be considered either an act of human capitulation before the threat of non-existence, or evidence of his humiliation, since the choice is made in favor not of the lower, but of the higher. Those who demand that a person remain an atheist until the end of his life and remain in positions of secular moral autonomy/heteronomy are merciless towards him. They assign him the extremely unenviable fate of a creature who, in old age, already possessing a relatively small reserve of physical strength, is doomed to look spiritually weak, arousing pity and sympathy from those around him. The position of faith and moral theonomy allows the individual to maintain spiritual freedom and moral dignity in old age, moreover, illuminated by the light of that highest wisdom, which is drawn from the source called Holy Scripture.

Summary

The coexistence of three types of morality, three varieties of moral culture, theonomous, heteronomous and autonomous, forms not so much a bizarre mosaic of concepts, images and symbols, but polyphonic world semantic, value and normative structures. Each of these types is a whole symbolic universe with its own special language, its own hierarchy of meanings and values, setting its own special direction for a person’s thinking, feelings, behavior, and entire life. Each testifies to one thing: the spiritual and moral existence of a person is not without foundation and is based on important principles worthy of the most serious and respectful attitude towards oneself - God, society and the individual “I”. Each of these ontologies has its own deontology And axiology, combining prescriptiveness with attractiveness. From the moment the ability for ethical reflection awakens, a person finds himself in this deontological-axiological “triangle”, where he, with the undoubted influence of the social environment and the presence of his own spiritual activity, shows the ability to make selective preferences, builds for himself one or another hierarchical alignment, assigning each of the ontologies, God, society and personality, its place, elevating one of them to the status of a dominant, and placing the other two in a subordinate position.

The world history of civilizations and cultures shows that there are no forces in society that could completely and forever destroy religion and morality. Macrosocial systems are known that, having survived the era of God-denial and state immoralism, were forced to return to the ideas of restoring the rights of both religious pictures of the world and regulatory systems of universal moral principles. There are even more known cases when individual people, both outstanding and little-known, having gone through the trials of unbelief, ultimately broke out into the spiritual space, where the world of moral absolutes opened up to them. Their moral worlds, previously “independent of religion,” came into contact with the world of theonomonic prescriptions and, becoming “dependent on religion,” were spiritually illuminated and transformed.

Of course, not every person is able to move to the position of moral theonomy. The dynamics of age-related changes in themselves do not guarantee such a transition. Here, tenacious stereotypes of social ideologies, which, as a rule, have a secular orientation, can become an insurmountable barrier blocking the anthropological trend and the innermost needs of the human spirit. However, this is a topic for another conversation...

Notes

Due to the limited volume of this text, the author is forced to abstract from the tradition of distinguishing the concepts of morality and ethics and use them as synonyms. This scientific tradition, which has existed in secular moral philosophy since the time of Hegel, currently has a set of different conceptual figures. In the eyes of the author, one of the most acceptable distinctions is the following: morality is a value-normative sphere where a person acts as a natural, generic being, connected by universal connections with the universe, nature, the entire human race; morality is a value-normative sphere where a person appears as a social subject, connected by a system of interdependencies with a number of specific, local communities within which he resides and with which he interacts. However, this topic requires a separate detailed discussion.

In this case, the concept ressentiment although not new, but at the same time not too widespread, it requires some explanation. Scientific-theoretical neologism introduced by M. Scheler ressentiment goes back to the French word “ressentiment” (“grudge”), which he took as a basis, as he himself explained, due to the fact that he did not find a satisfactory analogue in his native German language. This concept dominates Scheler’s work “On Ressentiment and Moral Evaluation. A Study on the Pathology of Culture,” published in 1912, and somewhat later published by the author under the changed title “Ressentiment in the Structure of Morals” (Scheler M. Vom Umsturz der Werte. Gessamelte Werke. Bd. 3/Hrsg. Von Maria Scheler. Bern: A Francke AG Verlag, 1972). In Russia, the work “Ressentiment in the structure of morals” was first published in the Sociological Journal (1997, No. 4).

See: Religion in the mass consciousness of post-Soviet Russia. Ed. K. Kaarianainen and D. E. Furman. M. - St. Petersburg, 2000; Religious associations of the Russian Federation. M., 1996.

X. Religious values ​​in the modern world

Even in ancient times, man realized that everything in the material world is changeable, temporary, contradictory, transitory, and came to the conviction that there must be another reality associated with eternity. The human spirit does not want to put up with finitude, mortality, the limitations of its existence and seeks the foundation of its existence in eternity. This need is satisfied by religion.

Religion- a special type of spiritual and practical activity, representing an inextricable unity of worldview, experience and action, and based on belief in the supernatural. Attempts to understand the essence, origin, and purpose of religion accompany the entire history of human thought. The whole variety of studies of religion can be reduced to two approaches: understanding religion as a purely earthly phenomenon and understanding it as a form of connection between man and God. This leads to the question: are the supernatural world and God an absolute fiction of man or is some kind of real being reflected in them?

The amazing tenacity with which most of humanity believes in the existence of God is amazing. People have a persistent need for the Absolute, for the ultimate reality, with which a person has a belief in God, an afterlife, an immortal soul - three ideas that form the basis of most religions. Religion in rational terms can only be understood from the outside. The richness of the content of religion is always closed to non-believers, since religion is associated with faith in a reality that is not directly perceived.

Theologians believe that God is the limitless and absolute spirit in whom all things have their origin, driving force and completion. Man, with the help of his spirit, is capable of limited knowledge of truth, goodness and beauty. But if a person can cognize them in a limited form, then they must exist in their completeness and absoluteness. Absolute Truth, Absolute Good and Absolute Beauty - this is God.

The spirit manifests itself in various qualities: love, friendship, mercy, hatred, malice. God is the embodiment of the highest spiritual qualities, the highest perfection, therefore believers turn to him as a person. Chief among these qualities is love. In his letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says that all human deeds done without love are nothing. Love aims at the Good. Only with love they strive to give more than to take, love is unselfish, constant, “love is long-suffering, merciful, love does not envy, love does not exalt itself, is not proud, does not act outrageously, does not seek its own, is not irritated, does not think evil, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

Even in ancient times, when creating tools and all kinds of goods, man understood that he created them thanks to his mind. Surrounding a person the world amazed him with its complexity, diversity, organization, order, logic and expediency, harmony. This suggested that the world also has Reason, but nature, according to Hegel, is “petrified reason.” God as a spirit is not known either by empirical methods or by rational thinking. You can approach it only in an irrational way, plunging into your inner world through faith, prayer, fasting, observing rituals, and living a righteous life.

Believers are convinced that man is capable of communication, unity with God, and that God helps people through grace. The fact that faith and spirit are capable of working miracles has been known since ancient times. Faith helps a person to live, cope with difficulties, overcome adversity, troubles, and illnesses. Faith increases a person's strength tenfold, gives courage in the face of danger, and in some incomprehensible way influences the human body and material processes. Secular faith also plays a big role in a person’s life. However, faith in man, in science, in progress, in secular ideals, in one’s own strengths and one’s infallibility very often leads to nowhere or to tragedy. Only faith in God, in the highest meaning of life, can protect a person and society from wanderings and shocks, theologians believe.

As for another idea - the immortality of the soul, it is known that spirit, consciousness is a reality different from matter, it does not contain anything material and does not obey the laws of the physical world. It is known that a person is not born with consciousness, it is, as it were, connected to it in the process of life, therefore, it can be assumed that consciousness does not die along with the body. As for the afterlife, life and death are two sides of a single existence. For such a being there is no death.

Man lives in the material and spiritual worlds. At one pole of his existence, in the material world - everything is individual, concrete, changeable, contradictory, temporary - everything here is mortal and transitory. In the spiritual world, taken from the perspective of the general, purpose, meaning, purpose, there is no death, no destruction, everything remains in eternity. There is a lot in religion that is fantastic, naive, and erroneous, but to consider that it does not reflect anything, that this is purely illusory knowledge, would be even greater naivety and a mistake.

Religion fulfills many functions: ideological, communicative, integrating, educational. Particularly noteworthy is the normative function of religion. God is the source and guarantor of morality. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” demands the first Old Testament commandment. God should be the main value of a person, since he is the absolute Truth, Good and Beauty. Holy Scripture warns man not to make idols for himself. If instead of God, other values ​​are put in first place - money, power, communism, the market - then nothing good will come of it.

The position of religion in the modern world is contradictory and it is clearly impossible to assess its role, possibilities and prospects. It can definitely be said that the process of secularization of public consciousness continues, as a result of which religion is losing its former influence on the life of society and the individual.

The position of religion is decisively influenced by two forces - science and politics. Science has not supplanted religion, but it has caused profound changes in religious consciousness - in the understanding of God, the world and man. Science contributed to what M. Weber called the desacralization, the “de-enchantment” of the world: phenomena of nature and society receive a natural explanation without reference to the intervention of God.

However, having solved many problems of knowing the world, science has pushed the boundary of knowledge to even more complex philosophical problems. Science has created an objective picture of the world, devoid of purpose, meaning, spirit, without giving an answer to the fundamental questions of existence. Scientific and technological progress, its social and spiritual consequences indicate that science and technology alone, without a spiritual component, religion, morality, do not provide solutions to problems.

The world, which relied in everything on the human mind, became entangled in contradictions, strife, and found itself in the grip of violence. In the conditions of modern civilization and postmodern culture, in which the pluralistic approach has become decisive, everything has become torn, blurred and uncertain and, nevertheless, has a right to exist.

In these conditions, many turn with hope to religion, to God as the only support in human life, proclaiming absolute and eternal values.

S.D. Lebedev

Belgorod 2003

The attempt at a comparative analysis of secular and religious cultural systems undertaken in this work requires a fairly serious preliminary study of the conceptual apparatus, which we carried out in previous work. Below we present its most important methodological provisions.

1. From the point of view of a systemic sociological view of culture, its interpretation as social knowledge seems most adequate, since it is social knowledge that seems to be the system-forming aspect of culture, considered in its real mode social functioning.

2. Culture is characterized by systemic properties. As the main systemic properties of culture, the properties of a “big system”, an open and dissipative system and a self-organizing system should be noted. The systemic properties of culture (social knowledge) are explained from the standpoint of the nuclear-spherical approach, which considers the system as a dialectical unity of its constituent nuclear and peripheral spheres.

3. The nature of the phenomenon as a “large system” presupposes the uneven distribution of structural connections in it. From the standpoint of the nuclear-spherical approach, structural connections are concentrated mainly in the core of the system, from where they spread to a greater or lesser extent to the periphery of the system. The core of social knowledge is some generally accepted universal concept, while its periphery is represented by the structures of everyday and special meanings derived from them. This core reflects a certain priority sphere of objective reality for the subject (“reality-value”) and, thus, forms the structure of relevance of his “life world.” The universal concept, which constitutes the potential core of social knowledge, performs ideological functions in society.

4. The core of the system assumes the presence of constitutional and dynamic substructures. The stable constitutional part of the socio-cognitive core is formed by conceptualizations of an axiological nature (values), while its changeable dynamic part is formed by values ​​of an epistemological nature (ideas).

5. The openness of the social knowledge system is manifested in the ability of its conceptual core to “exchange meanings” with the external environment. The dissipation of social knowledge consists in the conceptual assimilation, legitimization by its nuclear structure of “additional” semantic aspects inherent in peripheral structures, and the dispersion (entropy) of those semantic aspects that are not consistent with its “nuclear concept”. Self-organization of social knowledge presupposes the formation of a peripheral substructure of its systemic conceptual core, uniting around it the periphery of “private” meanings through their socio-cultural sanctioning - legitimization.

6. We tend to see the influence of the ideals that organize and direct it as an attractor of social knowledge. The ideal is understood as an integral social-cognitive structure, which is the semantic quintessence of the system of social knowledge. In the structure of the ideal, three levels are distinguished: the level of rational manifestations (ideologies), the level of the prevailing methods of justification (type of rationality) and the level of the initial way of experiencing being by the subject (basic myth).

7. The role of a system-forming factor in culture is the balance of ideals and stereotypes, which ensures the synergy of the development of culture as a whole, not allowing it to cross the line of eclecticism. This balance appears to be maintained in the depths of social consciousness and psychology, mainly at the level of civilizational and national self-identification of people and groups.

The next step in theoretical research is a comparative analysis of the social-cognitive foundations of secular and religious cultural systems in order to clarify their common properties and specifics.

The concepts of “secular and religious”. Before talking about the specifics of religious and secular cultures in terms of their socio-cognitive content, it is necessary to clarify the semantic content of the categorical concepts of “secular” and “religious” for our study.

The concept “religious” is derived from the concept “religion”. As for the latter, modern scientific literature presents a number of significantly different definitions of religion, depending on the specifics of the religious studies discipline from the perspective of which religion is considered in each specific case. As with the concept of “culture,” these definitions are extremely difficult to reduce to one universal definition. For this reason, for now we will limit ourselves to an abstract definition of “religious” as directly related to religion, in order to concretize it a little later, in relation to the specifics of the subject and method of our research.

As for the concept of “secular,” its scientific definition seems to be a rather difficult task. According to V.I. Dahl, in Russian “secular” means “relating to the light (world) in various meanings, earthly, worldly, vain; or civilian. Secular power is the opposite of spiritual... the clergy, white, not monastic, is the opposite of black. Social pleasures, noisy, sensual." In special religious studies, sociological and philosophical publications (including dictionaries and reference books), a substantive analysis of the concept “secular” is, as a rule, absent. Where we are talking about the secular, the authors usually limit themselves to an intuitive interpretation of this concept, without translating it into a rational-logical plane.

The following can definitely be said in this regard: a) the concept of “secular” (as well as its synonym – the concept of “secular”) is almost always used as a paired opposition in relation to the concept of “religious”; b) this concept is defined predominantly negatively, starting from the concept “religious” on the principle of “by contradiction”; c) the content of this concept is quite complex and internally contradictory, since it covers, depending on the context, a fairly wide range of heterogeneous phenomena.

Thus, there is reason to assert that the semantic content of the “secular” is based on the definition of its specific relationship to the “religious”.

Without going into the intricacies of etymological and philosophical analysis, the consideration of which is beyond the scope of this work, we note that in general, in the context of European social thought of the XYIII-XX centuries. We can distinguish three main interpretations of the essence of the secular, differing in the degree of their “rigidity”:

A) secular as counter-religious. It assumes an obvious or hidden ideological opposition to secular religion. According to this interpretation, only that content that is associated with the active denial of religious content and the affirmation of its alternatives can be classified as “secular.” This interpretation originates during the period of formation and establishment of secular culture, when the latter fought to defend its existence and the right to autonomy from religious interpretations of reality that restrained and sometimes blocked its development. An example of a classic situation, which is characterized by this interpretation of the secular, is given by the ideocratic Soviet society with its total ideology of atheism, when, in the words of Academician L.N. Mitrokhin, “secular and religious worldviews were considered as “light” and “darkness”, as two mutually exclusive views of the world, isomorphic to the counterposition “socialism-capitalism”, expressed by the principle “who is not with us is against us.”

B) secular as irreligious. This is a softened and broader interpretation of the concept of “secular”, which does not necessarily imply the presence of an active counter-religious element in its content, but maintains the principle of distancing from religion. It represents a kind of liberalized version of the interpretation of the secular as counter-religious. In accordance with this interpretation, only those contents that cannot be classified as “religious” in the same context can be classified as “secular”, and vice versa.

C) secular as non-religious. This is the broadest and ideologically neutral, but more radical from a philosophical point of view, interpretation of the principle of secularism. It presupposes the independence of the secular principle from religion. In the light of this interpretation, “secular” can be classified as content that is characterized not so much by the objective absence or subjective denial of the property of religiosity, but by the property of “secularism” as a certain positive quality.

It should be noted that the above definitions imply not only “quantitative”, but also qualitative differences their corresponding versions of the concept “secular”. The first two of them are based on an excess of subjective, ideological perception of the “religious - secular” relationship. The consequence of this is the objective dependence of the meaning of the concept “secular”, interpreted in this context, on the meaning of the concept “religious”, its ontological “secondaryness” in relation to the religious. “Secular”, firstly, appears here as a derivative of “religious”, and secondly, it carries a predominantly negative semantic load.

In contrast to the first two definitions, the third definition assumes a more detached and unbiased and, therefore, more objective, philosophical and scientific approach to the relationship between the secular and the religious. In the context of this approach, “secularism” takes on its own meaning, implying the absence of negative dependence on religion. It should be noted that, in essence, only the last interpretation puts the concepts of “religious” and “secular” on an equal footing, since it presupposes that the secular has its own, autonomous ontological basis, which is not reducible to the ontological basis of the religious. Based on this, this interpretation conveys its own positive content to the greatest extent to the secular, without making this content in any way dependent on the religious content. Accordingly, in the context of this interpretation, a particular phenomenon can be characterized as secular, regardless of whether it is at the same time religious, and vice versa. In other words, this interpretation of the secular suggests the possibility of combining the properties of religiosity and secularism. The extent to which and under what conditions such a combination is possible is a question that requires special research, which will be the subject of the next chapter of this monograph.

The third approach has clear conceptual advantages over the first two. Firstly, it seems to be the most objective, since it is the most removed from the ideological scheme of rigid dual opposition. Secondly, it does not exclude, but potentially includes the first two approaches as its own special aspects. According to him, the secular can be antagonistic to the religious or exclude religiosity, but not necessarily and not always. Finally, thirdly, it most corresponds to the nature of the modern sociocultural situation, when the boundaries of the secular and religious are often blurred and conditional. Therefore, in the future we will take as the basis for the concept of “secular” the third definition, which presupposes the interpretation of the secular as a non-religious principle, independent of religion.

In this regard, such an important concept for the sociology of religion as secularization requires comment.

Based on our accepted concept of the secular, which presupposes its substantial nature, secularization has two sides: “negative” – the displacement from human life and destruction of religious spiritual and cultural content, and “positive” – the filling of human life with autonomous, non-religious, strictly secular content. Within the framework of the first or second interpretation of the relationship between the secular and the religious (see above), both of these sides of the secularization process seem to be strictly interconnected and practically indistinguishable: as much as “will be lost” from the religious content of a culture, so much will “gain” in its secular sphere, and vice versa. If we adhere to the third interpretation, then these two sides of secularization seem to be connected very flexibly and indirectly. The accumulation and complication or destruction and simplification of secular cultural content may not affect the religious content, and under certain conditions can cause not only the opposite, but also similar effects in the sphere of the latter. The same is true for the reverse situation. In other words, secular and religious culture can develop not only competitively, but also “in parallel” and even synergistically.

In this coordinate system, the religious and the secular form autonomous, largely parallel socio-cognitive spaces in culture. So, for example, a simple, “mechanical” replacement of secular semantic content with religious content does not necessarily imply progress in the religious wing of culture, since the displacement or destruction of secular semantic structures in itself does not yet cause the development, growth and complication of an array of knowledge of a religious nature. This requires additional factors. In the same way, the development of a secular body of social knowledge does not yet mean the “automatic” displacement of religious socio-cognitive structures from public consciousness, but allows, to one degree or another, the possibility of their synthesis with secular structures. The development of one creates only one of the prerequisites for the displacement and degradation of the other, and this precondition can “work” in the opposite direction if the second culture is able to respond to the challenge by integrating best properties first.

Thus, if we understand the secular as “non-religious” and, accordingly, consider secular cultural content as substantially independent and not related to religion, then secularization appears before us as a complex two-way process, far from unambiguous from a religious or counter-religious point of view.

In order to fill these schemes with real content in relation to the process of secular-religious interaction, one should take into account the fundamental difference in the socio-cognitive organization of religious and secular cultures. We believe that the basis of this difference is the principle of structural and content asymmetry of cultural systems of religious and secular types. Next, we will sequentially consider its content and structural aspects.

Content asymmetry of religious and secular cultures. If “religious” and “secular” are considered not as designations of abstract entities, but as alternative predicates of culture, then culture, classified as religious or secular, must, one way or another, be defined through some qualitative characteristics of the main content of culture - in this case, through the qualitative characteristics of social knowledge.

Static aspect. The initial key to understanding the specifics of religious and secular cultures is provided by the categories “sacred” and “secular.”

The category of “sacred” (sacral), coupled with its opposition – the category of “secular” (profane) is one of the most important content-functional constants of culture. Its significance is exceptionally great, since outside the categories “sacred - profane” and the corresponding hierarchical differentiation of cultural content, the very existence of culture becomes problematic. The proverb “a holy place is never empty” is quite true here. As M. Eliade points out, “the sacred and the profane are two ways of being in the world, two situations of existence accepted by man in the course of history... the sacred and profane modes of existence indicate the difference in the position occupied by man in the Cosmos.” At the same time, “the sacred manifests itself as a reality of a completely different order, different from the “natural” reality... it manifests itself, reveals itself as something completely different from the mundane.”

It should be noted that in classical religious literature (R. Otto, M. Eliade), as can be seen from the above quote, the sacred is often brought closer to and even identified with the concept of the supernatural. However, in reality the meaning of these two concepts is significantly different. “The supernatural and the sacred,” P. Berger rightly notes, “are closely related phenomena; historically it can be assumed that the experience of the second is rooted in the experience of the first. But it is analytically important to distinguish between these two types of experience. One can imagine their relationship as two intersecting but not coinciding circles of human experience (my italics – S.L.).”

As for the “supernatural,” in terms of content, it, apparently, is also a constant of culture, since none of the known cultures of the past or present has ever done and does not do completely without any ideas about the supernatural. However, the constant nature of the supernatural does not relate to its functional side: in functional terms, the supernatural can act in culture both in the role of the sacred and perform other, less significant cultural functions - for example, serve as the theme of folklore, act as the subject of philosophical research, etc.

“Empirically speaking,” Berger writes in this regard, “what is usually called religion includes a set of attitudes, beliefs and actions associated with two types of experience - the experience of the supernatural and the experience of the sacred.”

Based on this, the “life world” of the ideal type of religious culture is characterized as predominantly supersensible and super-rational, and the “life world” of the ideal type of secular culture is characterized as predominantly sensual-rational. Consequently, the main “fabric” of culture of a religious nature is formed by knowledge about the transcendental, otherworldly and beyond, while the “fabric” of culture of a secular nature is knowledge of “earthly”, mainly material existence.

However, within culture as a “large”, dissipative and self-organizing system, there is differentiation into nuclear and peripheral spheres. Therefore, since the sacred can be defined as some highest value (supervalue), crowning the axiological hierarchy of culture and giving its sanction to all other values, then this key difference can be legitimately correlated, first of all, with the core socio-cognitive structures of religious and secular cultures. It is the core of religious culture that correlates with the realm of the supernatural, while the core of secular culture correlates with the realm of the “natural.” As for the periphery, in its objective dimension it is the same in both cultures and relates mainly to the sphere of “earthly” reality.

Thus, the nuclear concept of social knowledge always correlates with a certain priority sphere of the realities of the “life world” of the social subject and presupposes the presence in the objective dimension of this “life world” of very real and specific (and not conditional and illusory) values.

In accordance with the definition of P. Berger and taking into account the above, by “religious culture” we will further mean, first of all, universal socio-cognitive education, the main content (conceptual core) of which is focused on those realities of the “life world” that combine properties of the supernatural and sacred. Consequently, in contrast to it, secular culture in its main content should be oriented either towards those realities that are not associated with the supernatural, or at those that are not associated with the sacred. The latter option is eliminated, since the sacred, by definition, has a place in any culture. Thus, secular culture can be defined, first of all, as a culture that is not oriented towards the priority of the supernatural.

Based on the above, to designate the corresponding versions of culture, it is legitimate to use the following “working” definitions:

Religious culture is a type of culture in which supernatural reality acts as the sacred; in such a culture, the sacred is either itself characterized by supernatural properties, or implies a direct sanction from some supernatural principle;

Secular culture is a type of culture in which the sacred does not have the properties of the supernatural and does not necessarily require the sanction of a supernatural principle, based on an alternative ontological and socio-cognitive basis.

Thus, both the supernatural and the sacred are present in the socio-cognitive dimension of almost every actually existing culture. At the same time, the content-functional combination of the supernatural and the sacred is a “variable quantity”. The categories “sacred - profane” and “supernatural - sensual” are characterized not by a constant, but by a variable relationship. This is expressed in the fact that secular culture, “bracketing” the reality of the supernatural, introduces a substantial hierarchy into the context of sensory reality itself. The content of the category of the sacred varies in different cultural contexts: this role can be played by both the supernatural and the “natural” principle (to which, of course, individual qualities of the supernatural are subjectively imparted). In other words, the objective and corresponding socio-cognitive content, which in culture has the status of sacred, can be of both a supernatural (religious) and other (secular) nature. In the first case we are talking about religious culture, in the second – about secular culture.

In accordance with the nature of the priority reality, culture develops “organs of cognition” adequate to this latter. The properties of “reality-value” determine the nature of the ways of comprehending it (the nature of rationality in culture) and, indirectly, the content and structure of the social knowledge that reflects it. The opposite statement is equally true: the methods of comprehending reality and the social knowledge accumulated in their mainstream, if they are sufficiently adequate, are always oriented towards this sphere of reality and are coherent with it. Cognitive representations will reflect the properties of the priority reality, imperatives will flow from it, and values ​​will directly or indirectly correlate with it.

All of the above makes it possible to correlate (to a first approximation) a typical religious culture with the ideational culture of P.A. Sorokin, and a typical secular culture with a sensual culture. As for idealistic (integral) culture, from our point of view it should be considered as a cultural system that combines the properties of religious and secular.

Based on this, the fundamental feature of religious culture is that it comprehends not one, but two substantially different layers of existence: the supernatural, transcendental on the one hand, and the sensual, material, “earthly” on the other hand. Without this synthesis with the “worldly” principle, religion will not be able to become itself, i.e. a truly operating system of transcendental values ​​and meanings that determines the life of a social subject. However, in reality there is no paradox here. There is a kind of ontological “gap” between the transcendental and “earthly” spheres of reality - they do not transition into each other smoothly, but abruptly, abruptly, and there are practically no intermediate diffuse zones between them. Therefore, the main, central problem of any religion has always been the determination of the principle of correlating the transcendental change of being (“Heaven”) that has been revealed to it with the usual “worldly” dimension of being (“earth”). In itself, the sacred attitude of religion, which performs the function of the “hard core” of a religious system, is cognitively highly specialized - in the sense that it is focused on the “social construction” of the reality of a transcendental, absolute order, while the reality of the material-ideal plane remains on the periphery and beyond his field of vision.

Meanwhile, objectively, this sphere of reality does not lose any of its relevance in religious culture. Life itself imperiously demands from religion the solution of a whole series of issues that are formally far from purely religious interests - about the attitude to the family, the state, the economy, creativity, everyday life, etc. Religious feeling and religious thought can resolve these issues negatively, i.e. in the vein of “escape from the world,” but they cannot get around them. Therefore, religion most often does not so much reinvent its life world, building it “from scratch,” as it reinterprets in a new way already established cultural values ​​and ideas that it finds “in place” in the socio-cultural environment in which it is established. Although, of course, this does not exclude genuine meaning-making as the generation of qualitatively new values ​​and knowledge within the semantic framework of a given religion.

From the point of view of secular culture, taken as a principle, religious reality itself is irrelevant, since secular culture is not oriented towards it and does not have the ability to adequately judge the sphere of supernatural realities. Its “life world” is represented almost exclusively by the “earthly” reality of the material-ideal plane, in which such a culture seeks and finds for itself both the sacred and the profane.

Thus, the substantive aspect of the asymmetry of secular and religious cultures lies in the fact that the center of attention of secular culture is the reality of one type - the material-ideal reality of a natural property, while religious culture focuses on realities of different types - supernatural and natural, trying to throw between them a conceptual “bridge” connecting both into a single system of relations.

Structural asymmetry of religious and secular cultures. Universal and multiverse principles of self-organization of social knowledge. If we translate the discussion about the relationship between Sorokin’s types of cultural systems and the religious-secular alternative into the “plane” of the cultural ideal, then in this regard the most important point for us is the fact that as religious (transcendental) orientation intensifies in a culture, the “index” consistently increases in it ideationalism” - and, on the contrary, as culture reorients toward the sensory world, this indicator decreases. This manifests itself at all three levels of the cultural ideal as a socio-cognitive formation.

At the conceptual, ideological and worldview level, the ideational nature of culture presupposes the totality of the “life world” of the subject, a community of ideological principles, protected by the unshakable authority of tradition. The weakening of ideationalism and the growth of sensuality introduces a moment of pluralism into culture (since the same “facts” can confirm different concepts) and, as a consequence, a conflict of interpretations.

At the level of the prevailing methods of justification and logical conceptualization (the level of the type of rationality), the ideational nature of culture presupposes an exceptionally high role and “specific weight” of synthetic methods of comprehending truth, the main of which is mystical intuition. And, on the contrary, as the sensory orientation of a culture strengthens, the role and “specific weight” of analytical, differentiating methods of cognition also grow in it.

Finally, at the level of the basic myth of a culture, its ideality presupposes the unity of the fundamental aspects of the worldview and worldview of all subjects-bearers of a given culture. A decrease in the level of ideationalism of culture gradually transfers the “focus of social consent” from the sphere of sacred beliefs to the sphere of rational reasoning and then to the sphere of empirical facts, and therefore the deep foundations of the ideal are ultimately recognized as a “private matter” of the group and/or the individual (the principle “ freedom of conscience"). Unity is achieved to a large extent by an external, conventional method (“social contract”).

Consequently, it can be stated that religious reality, comprehended mainly through mystical intuition, has a “monistic” character in the limit, while the reality of a material property, comprehended mainly by the sensual way, in the limit, on the contrary, has a “pluralistic” character.

All this leads us to assume that the very principles of self-organization that determine the architectonics of the system core and, accordingly, the general nature of the structure of social knowledge that underlies secular and religious cultures are significantly different. We have designated this difference by the term “structural asymmetry” of religious and secular cultural systems. According to the concept of structural asymmetry, social knowledge, which forms the basis of religious culture, tends to self-organize according to the “classical” principle of a semantic (symbolic) universe. As for social knowledge, which forms the basis of secular culture, its self-organization is carried out according to a principle that, in a certain sense, is the opposite of universality. The latter can be designated as the principle of a semantic (symbolic) multiverse. The universe and multiverse, therefore, act as ideal types of religious and secular cultures or, in other words, the ultimate attractors that form these types of cultural systems.

A cultural system formed “under the sign” of religion is ideally monocentric. Her “life world” is total. Such a culture ultimately gravitates toward a single initial and final supervalue, which is represented by some intuitively and mystically comprehended transcendental reality. P.A. Florensky, characterizing culture in general from theological positions, actually gave an excellent example of the definition of religious culture itself: “kultura - that which is constantly split off from the cult - as if the germination of the cult, its shoots, its side stems. Shrines are the primary creation of man; cultural values ​​are derivatives of the cult, like the peeling husk of the cult, like the dry skin of a bulbous plant.” This principle is expressed most consistently and logically in classical monotheism, where all cultural values ​​and meanings ultimately come down to the initial and final existential unity - God: “I am the beginning and the end, alpha and omega.” The hierarchy of values ​​here is completely absorbed by the religious sacral attitude, due to which all categories of such a culture ultimately converge at one point and, thus, the entire socio-cognitive system of religious culture is formed according to the principle of the classical pyramid. This implies the totality of mature religious cultures: in their context, everything - at least, all more or less important moments of human life - should, if possible, be correlated with the super-value of God (or another sacred supernatural principle), and receive divine sanction.

On the contrary, secular culture gravitates towards a polycentric system-structural organization. This means that the single universal supervalue in the image and likeness of the religious supervalue in it is initially weakened or completely absent. According to H. Cox, “the values ​​of a secularized person are desacralized, deprived of any claim to unconditional and final significance (my italics - S.L.). Now values ​​are just what a certain social group at a certain time and place considers good. These are no longer values, but rather assessments.” The same should be attributed not only to values, but also to other integrative social-cognitive structures. This makes the system of secular culture more flexible and, in some sense, more viable in the dynamic conditions of the modern, rapidly changing world. Secular culture will retain its structure, even if, for one reason or another, its content changes significantly - for example, if the traditional modernist values ​​of reason and scientific technology are replaced by quasi-religious values ​​of magic and mysticism. It can be said about secular culture that ideally there is no single content center common to its entire socio-cognitive space. Therefore, in its content aspect, the systemic core of secular culture presupposes the coexistence of several or even many complementary centers, each of which specializes in understanding and social regulation of a certain sphere of socio-cultural life. At the same time, none of these spheres can claim the status of some absolute or priority that legitimizes other spheres. Therefore, the hierarchy of secular cultural values ​​itself does not form a single pyramid, unless we are talking about a totalitarian system of culture.

This explains why it is characteristic of religious culture that each religion and confession forms its own cultural system, distinct from others and opposed to all other confessions. And, on the contrary, why, in the context of secular culture, the most different, sometimes contradictory worldviews and ideologies are united into a common system, being, as it were, many and, by and large, equivalent variants of one specific type of attitude to reality.

The second characteristic of an ideal secular culture, which fundamentally distinguishes it from an ideal religious culture, is its diffuse nature. A typical religious cultural system is, by and large, static and has fairly clear boundaries. If necessary, it is relatively easy to trace where the border lies, for example, between Christian and Islamic cultures. Secular culture is characterized by relative “transparency of borders” and dynamism: the super-values ​​of its constituent ideologies and worldviews constantly collide, intersect, “shuffle”, and none of them, as a rule, captures the entire secular cultural space. An ideal secular culture, in comparison with a religious one, resembles a boiling cauldron, where nothing is absolutely stable, everything is amorphous and, by and large, potentially equivalent. In its “pure” version – i.e. in the absence of all even indirect influences from ideological supervalues, secular culture would have the appearance of a kaleidoscope of an infinite number of infinitely different subcultures, demonstrating the most bizarre combinations of values ​​and knowledge, but extremely unstable.

A close resemblance to such a limiting state of cultural space is the modern discourse of postmodernism. The real state of secular culture in Western countries also shows a clear tendency towards it. Modern Western culture is clearly illustrated by the passage of J. Habermas, according to which today “the communication structures of the public, dominated by and absorbed by the mass media, are so oriented towards the passive, entertaining and privatized use of information that coherent, i.e. holistic, patterns of interpretation ( at least of medium range) simply cannot form anymore.” The once integral cultural space of Western civilization, therefore, is increasingly differentiated and diversified, fragmenting into a pluralistic set of opinions and judgments.

However, the “pendulum of culture” is steadily shifting, and a moment comes when the intermediate stage, regardless of its integral or eclectic nature, passes into the third, “sensual” phase of socio-cultural development. This type of cultural supersystem is the most familiar and familiar to us, since it is to it (more precisely, to its descending, “overmature” phase) that Sorokin attributes the Euro-American civilization of the twentieth century. Its striking sign is the rapid secularization as a “retreat” of total religious systems and the growth and development of autonomous enclaves of a “secular” nature that emerged at the previous stage. Secular norms and institutions become decisive in public life. The slogan of this culture is “Here and now!” Its cornerstones are empirical science, technology, secular ideology and “human, all too human,” in the words of F. Nietzsche, ethical and legal norms.

This pathos of “sensual” culture determines a new direction in the search for the initial and final truth, which is now seen on the earthly paths of scientific knowledge of the “physical and biological properties of reality.” Stimulated by this fundamentally idealistic (and somewhere in the depths, even ideational) impulse, sensual science reaches previously unimaginable heights and scales, becoming the highest and best achievement, a kind of “face” of a culture of the sensual type. The same applies to the field of engineering and technology. At the same time, in the sphere of scientific thought itself there are hidden processes of strengthening the pragmatic, utilitarian aspect, increasing the value of “use” and decreasing the value of “truth”, which ultimately leads it to a general crisis. A similar fate befalls morality, art, public authority, law and other important areas of sensory culture. Ultimately, the cultural supersystem, based on the sensual principle, gives way to a culture of the “ideational” type, and the cycle, if it is not broken, begins all over again.

Thus, the Sorokin cycle diagram can be interpreted as follows:

Ideational (religious) culture – emphasis on the monistic reality of the supernatural – the determining influence of a simple attractor – the “dogmatic imperative” of social knowledge – social-cognitive monocentrism;

Sensual (secular) culture –§ emphasis on the pluralistic reality of the material world – the determining influence of the strange attractor – the “heretical imperative” of social knowledge – socio-cognitive polycentrism;

Idealistic (integral) culture§ – a combination of monistic and pluralistic properties of reality – the equilibrium of simple and strange attractors – a balanced state of social knowledge – a hierarchy of social-cognitive centers: a common center in combination with several “specialized” centers subordinate to it.

The logic of the development of secular culture. The differences between cultural systems are “concentrated” mainly at the level of their nuclear elements, which we consider as the ideologies that “center” them. At the same time, ideology is understood quite broadly; Thus, it “can be fixed in the form of one systematized teaching, as is the case, for example, in the case of the great religions and Marxism-Leninism, or it can remain unsystematized, scattered across numerous and heterogeneous texts so that it cannot be presented in the form of a single systematized teaching seems to be a very difficult matter, as is the case, for example, in modern Western countries. Mixed options between these extremes are possible."

Accordingly, in a religious culture, the core of the system of social knowledge forms a complex of sacred texts of the religion that is accepted by the social subject as the culture-forming basis. As for secular culture, the situation here does not seem so clear-cut. Some secular cultures have a similar core. This applies, first of all, to socio-cultural systems of an “ideocratic” nature, where the canon of the dominant socio-political ideology (which, as Paul Tillich showed, can be considered as a quasi-religious formation) acts in this capacity. Such a secular culture is characterized by a pronounced sacred core and tends to be “monostylistic”, in accordance with the terminology of L.G. Ionina, type of culture.

In a pluralistic secular culture there is no obvious core of this kind. However, from our point of view, this is not a sufficient basis for declaring a secular culture of a pluralistic type to be a fundamentally non-systemic education, as L.G. does. Ionin, and thereby equate it with a loosely integrated conglomerate of worldly culture. Rather, on the contrary, it should be considered as a system of a more complex type than the “classical” monocentric system. It has its own logic of development, which, as we will try to show below, is by no means reduced to a simple collapse and return of the cultural system to a mundane (everyday) state.

Secular and worldly. In this regard, a line of demarcation should be drawn between the concepts of “secular” and “secular”. These terms, both in everyday life and in science, are most often used as synonyms. In some cases, this may be justified, but not always, since, from the point of view of our theoretical model, the semantic fields of the corresponding concepts intersect, but do not coincide. In the light of our concept, what is common in the character of secular and secular cultures is the identity of the corresponding “life world”, the primary zone of relevance (i.e. “reality-value”) of which is formed by the realities of the “earthly”, material-ideal plane, and the realities supernatural, religious and mystical planes are pushed into zones of relative or complete irrelevance.

The fundamental difference between secular and secular cultures is rooted in the fact that at the level of the socio-cognitive dimension, secular culture, taken as an ideal type, is characterized by a weak degree of integration. It does not have an immanent nuclear structure that conceptually integrates it as a systemic whole, and its unity is based only on tradition. Accordingly, “simply worldly” culture will be characterized as a rather amorphous set of certain meanings, united in the consciousness of a social subject mainly “mechanically” and capable of functioning autonomously, without any religious or other legitimization. An objective prerequisite for the existence of this type of culture is a certain fragmentation and particularism of social institutions, as discussed above. On the contrary, secular culture is characterized by the presence of such a nuclear structure and therefore has the properties of a system, although, as already mentioned, a system of a special type. As a system, it is characterized by significant resistance to external influences and a fairly developed cultural self-awareness. In the light of an evolutionary perspective, the difference between secular and secular cultures can be seen as the degree of maturity of a particular cultural type, as the difference between successive stages in the process of cultural self-organization.

In the light of social-cognitive methodology, these concepts acquire the following content:

Worldly§ culture is the sum of everyday and specialized social knowledge derived from it, taken in its autonomous existence;

Secular culture is a systemic social-cognitive education that integrates worldly knowledge on the basis of a universal concept immanent to the “world” (i.e., not having supernatural content).

Thus, we consider the symbolic multiverse as the “ideal type” of secular culture, and the symbolic universe as the “ideal type” of religious culture (in reality, both are represented wide range intermediate states).

Development of secular culture and secularization. Based on the above, it can be argued that, in accordance with the laws of sociocultural dynamics of P.A. Sorokin, secular culture logically goes through a number of successive stages of development. First, it experiences a kind of “incubation period” of its evolution in the bosom of religious culture (ideational period). This refers to the so-called stage. “active-ideational” culture. Then, having taken shape and emerging from a latent state, for some time it is in a state of symbiosis with it, complementing and balancing religious values ​​and ideas with values ​​and ideas “from this world” (integral period). Finally, left to its own devices, it gradually evolves to more and more mundane, material and utilitarian values ​​and ideals and, in the end, degrades (the sensory period) and is reintegrated under the auspices of new, again religious in its core, values.

Here we should recall the concept of the famous American sociologist of religion G.P. Becker, who identified two main types of secular society: a “principled” secular society, which is characterized by the fact that it still retains, with certain reservations, the sacred nature of its principles (i.e., it is based on some generally valid sacred socio-cognitive core - S.L. .), and an “extremely secular” society that recognizes the instrumental effectiveness of actions as the only limitation. If we imagine these socio-cultural types as two phases of the logical development of secular culture, this concept is fully consistent with the hypothesis of the cyclical (self-oscillating) mode of cultural evolution by Sorokin - Bransky.

This evolutionary logic, in our opinion, testifies not only to the relative “moral instability” of secular culture, which is often emphasized by religious authors, but also to the greater internal dynamism of a secular culture, due to which, firstly, it is capable of adapting to a wide variety of conditions. value and worldview systems, acting as a nuclear ideological concept, and, secondly, is capable of changing them independently. It should be noted, however, that “in a free state” the vector of these changes is ultimately directed towards reducing values ​​to the sensory sphere and their complete relativization. In its essence, secular culture is kaleidoscopic, and this property manifests itself the brighter and more directly, the more the formative action of the religious attractor of its development weakens and becomes clouded and the action of the secular attractor itself intensifies and becomes more “pure”.

The change from the cultural era of religious culture to the cultural era of secular culture is usually designated by the term “secularization.” Different researchers put different meanings into this concept. Thus, T. Parsons defines it as “the fact that any body oriented culturally rather than socially has lost its legitimate power to prescribe values ​​to society and monitor mandatory compliance with norms; in this sense, we can say that society has undergone secularization. Values ​​are still rooted in religious soil. But religion is organized in a pluralistic and private way." From the point of view of P. Berger, “by secularization we understand the process of liberation of certain spheres of society and culture from the domination of religious institutions and symbols. If we are talking about institutions and societies related to the modern history of the West, then here, of course, secularization is manifested in the loss by the Christian Church of areas previously under its control or influence: in the separation of church and state, in the expropriation of church landholdings, in the liberation of the educational system from the power of church authorities. But if we are talking about culture and symbols, then secularization means something more than a social-structural process. It influences the entirety of cultural life and ideas. It can be observed in the decline in the role of religious themes in art, philosophy and literature, and, most importantly, in the development of science as an autonomous, purely secular view of the world. Moreover, in this case we mean that the process of secularization also has subjective side. Just as there is a secularization of society and culture, there is also a secularization of consciousness. Simply put, this means that the modern West is producing more and more individuals who do not use religious interpretations in their relationship to the world and to themselves.” According to H. Cox, “now “secularization” means the disappearance of the indispensable religious conditionality of the symbols on which culture is built.” D. Bell believes that “In the course of the development and differentiation of modern society - we call this process secularization - the social world of religion has shrunk; more and more, religion turned into a personal conviction, which was accepted or rejected, but not in the sense of fate, but as a matter of will, reason or something else... When this succeeds, the religious way of understanding the world becomes ethical and aesthetic - and inevitably weak and anemic ". Modern domestic religious studies understands secularization as “a social and mental process, as a result of which the most important spheres of social life, culture and human consciousness are freed from the power of institutions and symbols of religion... in which various areas of human life cease to be experienced as sacred, and begin to be perceived as independent in relation to to the norms and institutions of religion."

Modernity and postmodernity as stages of cultural secularization. In the light of our methodological approach, secularization is not only and, perhaps, not so much the “diminution” and displacement of religious culture from public life, but rather the growth, development and establishment of secular culture in society. Researchers who have studied the processes of socio-cultural secularization often associate them with such concepts as “multiplying choice,” relativization, and disintegration. The motive of diversification, the disintegration of the whole and absolute into the plural and relative can be traced in various theories and ideas about the secularization process.

In the scientific literature, secularization is considered in close connection with another, more general socio-cultural process - modernization. At the same time, in recent decades there has been more and more talk about the onset of the next stage of cultural development, called “postmodern”. At the same time, the latter’s attitude towards secularization is debatable. We, however, are inclined to believe that the processes of secularization of culture and, on the other hand, the processes of its modernization-postmodernization are extremely close in a number of key parameters, and that there is reason to consider them in the closest connection with each other.

From a comparative perspective, the “cultural projects” of modernity and postmodernity are characterized by the following features.

1) Constructivism as the artificial creation of cultural “metadiscourses” of human social existence; as noted by L.V. Skvortsov, “the culture of Modernity (New Time) believed that the hierarchy of man-made things that make up the artificial world and the established social hierarchy were objective”;

2) Unification of symbols and realities of the “life world”, based on strict “monism”, formalization and unambiguity (homogeneity) of their socio-cognitive interpretations;

3) “Disenchantment” of the world; according to the definition of M. Weber, this term is understood as “increasing intellectualization and rationalization,” meaning “the knowledge of something or the belief that a person can always find out this (the conditions of his life - S.L.) as soon as he wants, that there is no mysterious and unpredictable forces interfering in his life, that he can - in principle - through rational calculation master all things" ;

4) Objectification of subjective reality, understood as “realization”, the embodiment in real social space and time of various ideal “projects”;

5) Subjectivity, understood in the sense of the cult of human reason and rationality as the final authority of truth and values; it comes from “individualistic rationalism, which does not accept the established system of metaphysics and is ready to change the hypothesis if new facts and experience do not fit into the old scheme.”

Postmodern:

1) Deconstruction; as noted by Yu.N. Davydov, the concept of “deconstruction” is a key concept of postmodern ideology - the philosophical movements of postmodernism. Deconstruction manifests itself in the falsification and overthrow of any “metadiscourses” – i.e. ultimately, any structures of meaning that generalize and integrate social knowledge, resulting in the progressive disintegration of the cultural whole;

2) The ambiguity of symbols and realities of the “life world”, the pluralism of their interpretations; this is “a culture of diversity that does not have a single center and preferred meaning, when meanings are created in the course of action, and all created meanings are equal in status”;

3) The growth of esotericism – the so-called. “new opacity” (“new lack of visibility”, “new darkness”); this is due to the fact that the postmodern paradigm “stands in principle against rational constructions as limiting the freedom of the human “I”;

4) “Virtualization” of reality; the term “virtualization” in this case means the subjective imparting to the realities of the “life world” of the properties of spatial inversion, temporal reversibility and arbitrariness of their structure-forming parameters;

5) Elimination of the subject; at the heart of this process is the “massification” of consciousness, leading to the replacement of personality with individuality, “face” (R. Guardini) and, ultimately, to the dissolution of human individuality in the impersonal “collective”, “unconscious”, “transcendental”, etc. P.

Thus, the characteristic properties of the cultural situations of modernity and postmodernity allow us to see that modernity, in comparison with postmodernity, seems to retain a number of essential features inherent in pre-modern (traditional, religious) cultures. At the same time, it already contains potential postmodern intentions, thus being, as it were, an intermediate, transitional stage from “classical” traditional (religious) culture to postmodern culture. “The paradox of modernity,” notes A. Panarin in this regard, “is that in sociocultural and psychological terms it feeds on traditionality, requires a certain set of traditional virtues... bourgeois society really owes its successes to the arsenal of a disciplinary pre-bourgeois culture, personified by the patriarchal family, the church and the army."

From the above schematic comparison of modernity and postmodernity, one can see that the latter is more consistent with the ideal type of secular culture that we described above. At the same time, traditional religious culture cannot immediately move to a postmodern state - this requires an intermediate phase, the function of which is performed by modernity. In the light of our approach, based on the existence of a self-oscillating rhythm of cultural development, which is caused by a dynamic “pulsating” combination of integrating and differentiating attractors, postmodernity seems to be a natural stage in the development of a secular cultural situation, replacing modernity. Thus, the full cycle of changing integrating and differentiating attractors is described by the triad “religious culture - modernity - postmodernity”.

Based on this, we consider the socio-cultural development of society at the stage of the predominant influence of a differentiating attractor as a movement from the state of traditional culture through modern culture to the postmodern state, which corresponds to the progressive transformation of a culture of a religious type into a culture of a secular type. Thus, secularization occurs in two stages, associated with the progressive devaluation and erosion of the “big” ideas underlying the culture. The first (modernist) stage is associated with the destruction in culture of the socio-cognitive correlate of the supernatural. The second (postmodern) stage is the destruction of the socio-cognitive correlate of the sacred.

Historical logic of secularization in Western culture. Thus, based on the cyclical model of sociocultural dynamics of Sorokin-Bransky, the cultural periods of modernity and postmodernity in Western (Euro-American) civilizational history can be presented as two successive stages of a single global process of cultural secularization. Western culture, which has shaped over the course of last centuries its development, the “classical” model of secularization can serve as an example of the purest and most consistent evolution of a cultural system under the influence of a differentiating attractor of development. A detailed and thorough analysis of this process is the topic of a separate special study in the philosophy of culture, which goes beyond the scope and content of this work. Below we will give an extremely general and schematic outline reconstructing the main stages of this process.

Traditional culture. The “original” religious Christian culture, which Europe inherited from the Middle Ages, has, as is typical for a mature religious culture, a total character. This is expressed as follows. According to the outstanding Russian medievalist historian A.Ya. Gurevich, faith in God “was for medieval man not a hypothesis at all, but a postulate, the most urgent need of his entire vision of the world and moral consciousness; he was unable to explain the world and navigate in it. That was - for the people of the Middle Ages - the highest truth around which all their ideas and ideas were grouped, the truth with which their cultural and social values ​​were correlated, the final regulatory principle of the entire picture of the world of the era (my italics - S.L.) ". According to another famous medievalist, cultural philosopher R. Guardini, in this culture “Both as a whole and in each of its elements, it (the world) is the image of God. The rank and value of every being is determined by the degree to which it reflects God. Various areas of existence are correlated with each other and form an order of being: inanimate, plant, animal. In man and his life, the entire universe is reassembled to unfold a new order: the order of the microcosm in all the fullness of its stages and significances.”

The system of social knowledge that took shape under the influence of this ideal formed a world that “was small, understandable and conveniently observable” to such an extent that “it was pleasant and easy to look around and reproduce it as a whole - completely without a trace.” Such a system of social knowledge, corresponding to the classical medieval and, more broadly, traditional religious cultural cosmos, is an example of the purest and most typical symbolic universe with its monocentrism, cultural monostylism and an integrative ideal common to the entire society.

This social-cognitive system determined life situation Western European civilization for almost ten centuries (from the YI to the XIY centuries inclusive). Then, for reasons the analysis of which is not within the scope of this study, this holistic, fundamentally religious culture enters a period of radical transformation and, as a system-forming factor in society, gradually gives way to a culture of a new type - a secular culture that reached maturity during the modern period.

Modern culture. “Historically, the beginning of modernity is usually identified with the industrial revolution (separation of the economic system), the emergence (or separation) of the bourgeois-democratic state, with the bourgeois Enlightenment and the beginning of the natural sciences characteristic of the New Age.” However, at the heart of modernization lies a fundamental shift in the structures of the “lifeworld” of the cultural system, which began several centuries earlier. As a result of this shift, as Z. Bauman writes, “around the end of the XYI century. in Western Europe... a harmonious and holistic picture of the world began to collapse (in England, this process occurred in the period after the reign of Elizabeth I). Since the number of people who did not fit neatly into any of the established cells of the “divine chain of being” (and therefore the volume of efforts that were made to classify them into strictly defined, carefully guarded positions) increased sharply, since, naturally, the the pace of legislative activity, in particular, codes were adopted regulating even those areas of life that from time immemorial were left to their own devices (my italics - S.L.); In addition, special bodies were created to supervise, supervise and protect the rules, to prevent violations and neutralize criminals. Social differences and inequalities became the subject of analysis, deliberate planning and goal-setting, and, finally, conscious, organized and specialized efforts (italics mine - S.L.) ".

Here we see a number of key moments in the fundamental transformation of the “life world” of Western European culture, which consists in the emergence of qualitatively new zones of relevance for a religious-type culture. As P. Berger figuratively put it in this regard, in the process of this transformation “the hidden backbone of “society” was exposed, and a special world of motives and forces appeared before our eyes, which cannot be explained within the framework of the official interpretation of social reality.” These motives and forces were represented by secular (worldly) realities, such as: new social categories of people, a more complex system of social differences and inequality and new legal relations corresponding to all this, etc. These aspects of social reality did not fit into the framework of the categories of traditional religious culture, but at the same time urgently demanded comprehension, an urgent “emission of meanings” that would cover the conceptual deficit of existing social knowledge. All these realities, previously located within the boundaries of a zone of relative or even complete irrelevance of medieval cultural universes and not representing an independent “reality-value” in the eyes of society, suddenly acquire paramount vital significance for it. They imperiously invade the hitherto unshakable hierarchy semantic meanings and begin to threaten the very existence of the cultural cosmos of civilization, formed by the realities of the “life world” of the Middle Ages.

Understanding and legitimizing new subject-object aspects from the standpoint of the sacred core of culture with the aim of integrating them into the traditional symbolic universe for some time gives a “linear effect.” New realities are more or less successfully incorporated into the old “life world”. However, there comes a time when new wine bursts old wineskins. Intermediate semantic subuniverses - legal, political, humanitarian, natural science, etc., growing due to more and more new legitimations, gradually acquire autonomy. They no longer fit either objectively or subjectively into the “life world” of medieval man, which was “not only very small, but also very monotonous, despite the apparent diversity.” And from this moment on, the development of the entire system of social knowledge turns onto a different path, acquiring a non-linear character, from the standpoint of the traditional universe.

The main difference between the new evolutionary stage of cultural development and its development in the previous phase of the cycle is the fundamental diversification of the socio-cognitive (semantic) core of culture. It is this property that Jürgen Habermas, following M. Weber, considers to be the defining feature of modernity:

“According to Weber, cultural modernity is characterized by the fact that the substantial mind expressed in religious and metaphysical images of the world is divided into three moments, which only formally (through argumentative justification) can be held together (my italics - S.L.). Since the images of the world had disintegrated and traditional problems could now be interpreted only from the specific angle of truth, normative correctness, authenticity (or beauty), that is, they could be discussed as issues of knowledge, justice and taste, Modern times came to the isolation of the value spheres of science, morality and art ".

This division of the single and integral core of the original universal culture into three autonomous and mutually “opaque”, although by inertia still preserving the stylistic unity of symbolic subuniverses, was finally formalized and fixed (legitimized) in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. It marked the beginning of an irreversible process of further qualitative fragmentation of the cultural space. However, for at least two more centuries in Europe, the action of the new (secular) attractor of cultural evolution was balanced by the opposition of the old (religious) attractor. This manifests itself not only on the external, superficial level in the form of maintaining the authority and formal priority of religion in all major spheres of human life, but also on the internal level of latent socio-cultural processes. As rightly noted in this regard by A.S. Panarin, “modernity was at war with religious faith, but its idols - progress, equality, freedom - themselves testified to the transformed forms of religious faith and religious inspiration.”

Hence the duality and well-known “inconsistency” of the cultural situation of modernity: while throwing a radical challenge to the traditions of the past, at the same time it does not completely deny the principle of traditions as such and actively shapes its own traditionality. Although stylistic pluralism is already emerging and maturing in the depths of the modernist tradition, cultural universals still dominate each new style. Therefore, although the “life worlds” of various subjects of modern culture acquire a certain “opacity” for the subjects-bearers of other “life worlds”, this happens not so much due to cultural esotericism (the complexity and “exoticism” of the corresponding symbol structures), which has not yet had time to develop, how much due to another factor, which can be called “social esotericism”. The latter is based on a complex of social filters that regulate the social selection of strangers by each subject for their “assimilation” (socialization) or rejection (segregation). The fragmentation and emergence of new socio-cognitive enclaves retains their status as “subuniverses” of a single universe of knowledge, since they still remain within the boundaries of a certain comprehensive cultural tradition.

Thus, in general, the secular culture of modernity, as well as the classical religious culture, is based on a cognitive structure of the pyramidal type, crowned by the supervalue of some sacred relationship and presupposing the integration of legitimizing and legitimizing cognitive structures in the form of a total “metanarrative”. At the same time, this sacred relationship is no longer unconditional, but artificial, “socially constructed,” conventional in nature. “The culture of Modernity (New Time) believed that the hierarchy of man-made things that make up the artificial world and the established social hierarchy were objective.” This circumstance potentially relativizes it, actually moving the historical arrows of cultural evolution onto the path of a differentiating attractor. Therefore, the era of modernity is actually a compromise between the weakening ideological values, ideas and imperatives of traditional culture and the sensual relativism of postmodernism ripening in its depths.

Postmodern culture. Ultimately, at a certain historical moment, the unstable balance of modernity is disrupted. In the sphere of ideals, a decisive, cardinal shift occurs towards increasing the influence of the secular attractor, and culture moves into a state called postmodernity. From this moment, from the point of view of the concept we are developing, the second and ultimate stage of development of the secular cultural system begins. At this stage, culture is gradually and steadily losing the unity of tradition, which is dissociating to the state of a mosaic aggregate of various life styles. “Meta-narratives” break down into individual elements, the relationship of which to each other is increasingly deconstructed. At its extreme point, the postmodern dehierarchization of culture strives to achieve the absolute limit of the “divisibility” of cultural space. In practice, this means moving to the point beyond which it becomes impossible for a culture to represent and support any kind of sociality, since a culture in this state is no longer capable of producing adequate knowledge, or any serious and stable values ​​and sufficiently strong corresponding values. imperatives of social action.

The achievement of such a state by a culture means the impossibility of its further existence in real social space and in real historical time. According to the Sorokin-Bransky cyclical principle, upon reaching or in view of the imminent historical prospects of such disintegration of the cultural system, one of two things should happen. Either the social system will cease to exist together with culture, or it will radically change its “cultural program”, and a gradually intensifying process of cultural and, as a consequence, social integration will come into play. However, in any case, the tendency of cultural differentiation must reach a point where a real threat to the existence of society arises.

Specificity of the system-forming factor in religious and secular cultures. In accordance with the synergetic view of the cultural system, the “alpha and omega” specifics of religious and secular cultural systems should be sought in the features of their system-forming factor, which, in turn, are closely related to the type of dominant ideal characteristic of each of them.

When comparing the three main cultural types discussed above (traditional, modernist and postmodernist), the fundamental difference in their basic mythologies is striking. As mentioned above, traditional religious culture was based on the idea of ​​the absolute and, therefore, obligatory nature of the values ​​of the hierarchy of the Universe, and modern culture believed that such was the hierarchy of things created by man and an artificially established social hierarchy. As for postmodern culture, it “considers the individual’s choice in a given specific situation". What ideal can correspond to each of them?

The dominant type of ideal of traditional (respective religious) culture has been studied quite well. Its classic conceptual expression in Christian culture is the idea of ​​the Heavenly (God's) City, an imperfect reflection of which is the Earthly City. The dominant type of ideal of modernist culture is very close in this regard to the ideal of traditional culture, with the difference that the “location” of the sacred in it is generally transferred “to earth”, to the sphere of idealistic values, such as: progress, enlightenment, science, religion , philosophy, humanism, state, etc. This is due to a fundamental change at the level of patterns of rationality, which change from mystical-intuitive to logical-rational and aesthetic.

The dominant type of ideal of secular postmodern culture, corresponding to the imperative of “absolute choice” or, in the words of P. Berger, the “heretical imperative”, has been less studied and therefore deserves more detailed consideration here.

The unique feature of this culture is that, according to J. Habermas, “The fragmented everyday consciousness of consumers with leisure hinders the formation of an ideology of the classical type, but it itself has become the dominant form of ideology (my italics - S.L.).” This contradiction is constitutive of the postmodern cultural situation. As G. Rohrmoser notes, “all postmodern movements advocate the release of pluralism. And they do this with the same total claim with which ideologists previously spoke in their projects of unity. But today pluralism and the denial of unity mean approximately the same thing as omnivorousness. Omnivorousness implies that anarchism is now becoming the style-forming principle, so to speak, of living cultures. If you ask what actually lies behind the principle of the infinite variety of life cultures, which we today glorify as the further development of freedom, then it should be noted: all this is nothing more than the anarchization of culture (my italics - S.L.). ...now anarchism is the fundamental principle according to which we practice freedom - in the political, social, cultural and religious spheres - as a pluralization of lifestyles."

The “life world” of postmodern society and man at first glance appears chaotic and unsystematic, since no positive idea is obviously capable of acting here as a “common semantic denominator.” However, this chaos and unsystematic nature have a fundamental, “directional” character and have their own logic and meaning. All this indicates that there must be a certain meta-ideologeme that paradoxically “centers” this very centrifugal tendency, giving the highest sanction to precisely this type of cultural creativity.

In postmodern culture, as mentioned above, the classical social-cognitive core, based on a single positive ideal, is gradually dissolved, and nuclear functions seem to be taken over by a certain set of unwritten rules and ideas, which are characterized by the fact that they carry mostly “negative” content. The general principle of this non-classical “meta-ideology” is the radical negation of any meta-ideology. This principle can manifest itself in different ways, both in constructive and destructive ideological forms: in non-violation of the freedom of others to think and act according to their own understanding (the ideology of tolerance), in skepticism, nihilism, ideological relativism, etc. Accordingly, the dominant ideal of postmodern culture can be characterized as a “radical pluralist” ideal: any views, principles and worldviews are accepted here as “private”, conditional and “one of many”. This noticeably undermines the “passionarity” of specific styles and the ideologies that center them, but at the same time frees up a huge amount of creative energy for the “construction” of a huge number of the latter, replacing each other in an ever-accelerating and growing flow.

Philosophers of the postmodernist trend came closest to defining the system-forming factor of “radically secular” culture. Summarizing their research, Yu.N. Davydov notes that “postmodernism, “by definition,” is nothing more than the final self-affirmation of man in his hopeless finitude - in front of the (tightly closed from him) face of “absolute “Height,” some anonymous “Supreme”: transcendental impersonality, which therefore and above all persons who are denied her own person (my italics - S.L.). “The Most High”, who finds himself, according to the statement of J. Derrida, “on the other side of the heights.” This, so to speak, is ideationalism with the opposite sign, implying not just the passive entropy of the ideational potentials of a cultural system to the zero level of some “pure” everyday life, but the active “social construction” of culture in the key of increasing dispersion and diversification of its nuclear structure. Logically, it is precisely this kind of worldview that can inspire postmodern cultural creativity, the main guideline of which is the arbitrariness of individual and “post-individual” choice. Behind the modernist “heretical imperative” and the postmodernist imperative of life as a game and a game as life that replaces it, there is, in poetic words, “a shadow that has neither a face nor a name.”

This absolute separation of the sacred “image” from earthly reality, from man and from the world in both meanings of the word, makes, ultimately, impossible either the spontaneous emergence or the purposeful social construction of any stable semantic hierarchy of earthly existence. However, by itself it is not able to stop cultural creativity as such, and as a result, the latter gradually degenerates into what one of the modern Russian cultural philosophers called “magical games on a horizontal plane.” The quality and depth here are increasingly inferior to the quantity and volume of social knowledge produced, with all the ensuing consequences for the culture itself, society and the individual.

Historical logic of postmodernization in Western culture.

To summarize, we can identify several main modes of secularization of culture in line with its movement from the state of traditional (religious) through modernity to postmodernity. We will present them in the sequence in which they flow from one another.

1. Diversification of culture. On the one hand, there is a “disintegration of metadiscourse”, when almost all “big ideas” that perform the function of supporting structures of the universe in traditional and modernist cultures are subjected to decisive skepticism and denial. On the other hand, liberation from their total semantics initiates the processes of cultural creativity at the “cellular” level. From the general cultural cosmos, more and more new “subuniverses” are constantly emerging, associated with professions, hobbies, “informal” communication between people, etc., and the degree of autonomy of these life worlds from the “big” societal universe and the degree of their mutual “opacity” (esotericism) is increasing all the time. There is both intensive and, predominantly, extensive growth in the body of social knowledge. In contrast to the cumulative growth characteristic of previous phases (extensive in traditional and intensive in modernist culture), here it “explodes” in all directions at once.

2. Increasing relativization of cultural meanings (styles, ideals, ideologies). As a result of diversification, culture comes into an unstable state. The hierarchy of meanings that previously stabilized cultural dynamics collapses, resulting in all of them receiving “equal opportunities.” According to A. Toffler, “subcultures multiply at an ever-increasing pace and die one by one to make room for more and more new subcultures. There is a metabolic process occurring in the circulation of society, and it is accelerating in the same way as other aspects of social interaction are accelerating.”

3. The situation of “excess culture”. As a result of relativization, a situation of “overproduction” and excessive accumulation of cultural mass arises. Much more cultural meanings, styles and forms emerge than can be demanded and “digested” by the existing structures of sociality. Ultimately, this leads to the fact that the flow of cultural content blocks, undermines, blurs and relativizes social foundations. The process moves to a more fundamental level of “hard” social facts.

4. Diversification and relativization of the main social subject – the bearer of culture. Similar processes are initiated at the level social interactions. Traditional society is characterized by “fixed” classes, sanctified by the authority of religion, and the stable corporations that make them up. Modern societies form equally global “classes” and their constituent stable groups, differing in occupation and property status. Now they are dissociating. In their place, a huge number of relatively small groups appear, emerging randomly and spontaneously, demonstrating an unprecedented qualitative diversity of life styles. They are increasingly relativized, and the group is reduced to the individual, who remains the last stable “support” of the representative process. Logically, this should be followed by a stage of diversification of the subject at the personal level and the extinction of culture and society.

In accordance with the degree of differentiation (diversification) of the socio-cultural system under the influence of the secular, differentiating attractor of its development, we distinguish three conventional forms of secular culture corresponding to different stages of the logical evolution of postmodernity: “early”, “mature” and “late” postmodernity. Schematically, these stages correspond to three stages of successive diversification of the array of social knowledge: diversification at the societal level; diversification at the group level; diversification at the personal level.

A general sketch of the three stages of cultural postmodernization as “ideal types” is offered below.

1) “Early” postmodern. We associate its beginning with the moment when the unity of tradition characteristic of modern culture on the scale of society is eroded, and the cultural style becomes the main systemic “unit” of culture. At this stage of development of secular culture, the main subjects of cultural representation are social groups formed according to style, the number of which is constantly increasing. Each such group, “professing” its own style, creates its own original subculture. However, cultural styles, despite the sharp increase in their number, predominantly retain connections with the original way of life of a person. The boundaries of each style coincide with the boundaries of the “life world” and, accordingly, with the boundaries of the specific socio-cognitive universe of a certain social group. Thus, style in the context of early postmodernity represents the real, and not the virtual, “life world” of its carriers and is perceived by them as a Durkheimian social fact, as a given, as an objective “life form.” Therefore, each cultural style in the context of early postmodernity, as it were, reproduces “modernity in miniature”, proceeding not so much from the arbitrary attitude of the subject’s consciousness, but from the objective conditions of his life. “Early postmodern” is a kind of continuation of the modernist “cultural program”, differing from it mainly in the “extensive”, quantitative increase in stylistic diversity.

In accordance with the process of stylistic diversification of culture, the underlying social knowledge is diversified. In place of a single semantic universe gravitating towards the totality, a pluralistic structure is formed from many autonomous enclaves that are in very ambiguous relationships with each other. “In developed industrial societies, with their enormous economic surpluses, which allow a huge number of individuals to devote all their time to even the most obscure pursuits, competition between many semantic subuniverses becomes the normal state of affairs.” At the same time, this competition is, as a rule, much milder in nature than the competition characteristic of the total class ideologies of modernity. We associate this with the latent growth in social psychology of the feeling of the relativity of extremely multiplied versions of social knowledge. “Probably,” Berger and Luckmann note in this regard, “the latter also have some ideological functions, but the direct conflict between ideologies here ... is replaced by varying degrees of tolerance and even cooperation.”

In this regard, the authors who speak today about the “end of ideology” are right in the sense that modern (postmodern) society no longer generates and, apparently, is not capable of generating a “big ideology” characteristic of the sociocultural situation of modernity. Rather, it tends to give rise to many “small” (in terms of subject matter, social-scale and socio-temporal terms) ideologies, each of which occupies its own niche in the socio-cultural space and does not claim universal and absolute status.

However, stylistic pluralism in early postmodern conditions does not yet mean equality between different versions of reality. Thus, “...most modern societies are pluralistic. This means that in them there is a certain central universe, taken for granted as such, and various private universes (my italics - S.L.), coexisting with each other and being in a state of mutual adaptation.” The mentioned “central universe” occupies this place not only due to its quantitative dominance over the others; on the contrary, its very quantitative predominance is due to the fact that it accumulates and preserves a complex of socio-cognitive cultural universals (values, norms, worldviews, symbolic structures, etc.), inherited by culture from the modern era and connecting individual subcultures into an integral structure. Consequently, the conventional stage of development of secular culture, designated by us as early postmodernity, is characterized by the “parallel” coexistence of many very heterogeneous “life worlds” in a common socio-cultural space. These “life worlds” exist within the framework of various cultural styles and corresponding versions of social knowledge, separated by fairly rigid social “partitions”. However, their very “parallel” coexistence is supported by the still existing core of cultural universals, which none of the new style subcultures completely breaks with.

Thus, the secular culture of early postmodernity corresponds to a qualitatively new stage of socio-cultural diversification, which involves the establishment of a polystylistic nature of the cultural space of society. As such, it is characterized by the “parallel” existence of a sufficiently large number of life styles and their corresponding autonomous symbolic universes. These latter still, by inertia, retain a number of cultural universals as a “common denominator”, but are already losing a single sacred core in the sense in which it is characteristic of religious culture and secular culture of the modern period. In fact, early modern culture represents a transitional type from a socio-cognitive universe to a socio-cognitive multiverse.

2) Mature postmodern. At this stage of development of secular culture, the process of fragmentation of socio-cultural space moves to the next qualitative level. It is here, in our opinion, that the main social subject of cultural representation becomes not so much a group as an individual. Group connections retain their importance, but they become more and more mobile and short-term, more and more “soft” and, as a result, more and more conditional. Increasing social mobility and technical communication capabilities make a person’s transition from group to group and, accordingly, from culture to culture more frequent and easier.

A characteristic, if not defining, feature of mature postmodernity is the growing external contradiction between two trends: the growth of cultural esotericism and the relativization of the social-cognitive content of styles and ideologies.

On the one hand, mature postmodernism is characterized by the development of a trend that emerged on the eve of modernity. It lies in the fact that private, special areas of social knowledge, growing and becoming more complex, are increasingly separated both from each other and from the “original” meanings of everyday life. Ultimately, the spontaneous processes of cultural self-organization occurring within them transform these expert subuniverses into autonomous universes, localized within the corresponding social (primarily professional) groups. “The increasing number and complexity of these subuniverses make them increasingly inaccessible to the understanding of non-specialists. They become esoteric enclaves, "hermetically sealed" (in the sense that they are associated primarily with the Hermetic system of secret knowledge) to all but those initiated into these secrets. In connection with the increasing independence of subuniverses, special problems of legitimation arise for both the initiated and the uninitiated,” note P. Berger and T. Luckman. Here group esotericism moves from a predominantly social status to a strictly cultural status, when various cultural codes lose their mutual coherence.

On the other hand, at the stage of mature postmodernity there is a relativization of social knowledge. It is associated with the devaluation of the content of life style. At one time, A. Toffler paid considerable attention to this phenomenon. “As we move towards super-industrialism,” he notes, “we find people adopting and discarding lifestyles at a rate that would have unsettled the people of previous generations. Life style itself also becomes temporary.” The reason for this phenomenon is, according to L.G. Ionin, is that “style and man are separated. As a result of the stylistic differentiation of modern culture, the world of styles, that is, the world of expressive possibilities, became objectified, acquired an existence independent of man, and lost its original connection with the certainty of life, the certainty of the expressed content (my italics - S.L.).” In other words, now behind the style there is no longer the real way of life of its social bearer and the corresponding constant “subuniverse” of social knowledge. Style is increasingly detached from its socio-institutional and socio-cognitive roots, gradually turning into a rather superficial complex of symbols that is relatively easy to assimilate and just as easy to change to another.

Thus, at this stage of the secularization of culture, it becomes not only possible, but also commonplace, for a consistent change of several cultural styles throughout a person’s individual biography. Ultimately, this leads to the fact that style in its original meaning of a constant “form of life” is actually replaced by stylization – a “style game”, which itself becomes a kind of life style on a fairly wide social scale. One of the striking manifestations of cultural stylization is the practice of the so-called. cultural staging (L.G. Ionin), emerging at the stage of early postmodernity. In the context of mature postmodernity, such stagings turn out for their participants to be a sequential change throughout the individual biography of a number of different, arbitrarily chosen “life worlds.” In addition, at the level of individual consciousness and lifestyle of a “postmodern person,” a special life practice of “juggling styles” is spreading, which finally turns into alienated and publicly accessible stereotypical mental “masks.” We can say that the “playing person” of J. Huizinga turns into a new variety at the second stage of postmodernization - the “playing person”.

Both processes, for all their external inconsistency, have common roots. They are associated with the rapid erosion of cultural universals, the set of which is becoming less and less defined and is being interpreted more and more arbitrarily. Now “no one really knows what to expect from a ruler, a parent, a cultured person, or who should be considered normal sexually. In each case, numerous experts are turned to for clarification...” In our opinion, it is at the stage of mature postmodernity that the final transition from a “principled” secular society to the “extremely secular” society of G.P. takes place. Becker.

All these processes give rise to a dramatic situation when different versions of social knowledge systematically collide in the consciousness of the same social subject. One of them always comes from the “original” way of life, and the other is associated with the next resocialization of the individual in the context of the next artificially cultivated style. As Berger and Luckman rightly note, the “subworlds” internalized in the process of secondary socialization mainly represent partial realities (italics mine - S.L.), in contrast to the “basic world” acquired in the process of primary socialization.” For this reason, they cannot completely displace and restructure a person’s basic “life world,” but they are quite capable of “shattering” it. With frequent changes in cultural identification, an erosion of the original matrix of sociality, acquired by a person in the process of his upbringing in childhood, inevitably occurs. Therefore, the natural result of the redefinition of styles, which has become a regular practice and has assumed a mass scale, is the mutual devaluation and relativization of all cognitive universes included in this process, including the primary ones. This situation is extremely accurately illustrated by the words of the American sociologist Harvey Cox: “secular man is aware that the symbols through which he perceives the world, and the system of values ​​by which he is guided when making decisions, are generated by specific historical events and are therefore limited and partial.”

Here we come to a fundamental moment in the evolution of secular culture, when postmodernity wins it “completely and completely.” The growth of esotericism, which was previously restrained and neutralized by the core of cultural universals, in conditions of a shortage of the latter threatens anomie and the collapse of social ties. However, postmodernity finds a kind of unconventional, paradoxical way to solve this problem. In a mature postmodern situation, the social system includes a kind of emergency compensation mechanism centrifugal processes. It does not try (except in rare cases) to fight esotericism, opposing it with positive cultural universals that are rapidly being relativized, but, on the contrary, in every possible way supports and stimulates the processes of “social construction” of new and new styles through the “style factory” - the media.

The search for one’s own style (and, accordingly, the search for simple and stable definitions of reality) is a natural socio-psychological reaction of a person to an excessively enlarged and complicated “life world”. However, the very mass practice of stylistic redefinition (especially repeated) relativizes any styles and any social-cognitive concepts. Treating them as unconditional foundations is becoming increasingly difficult and, finally, impossible. Such a relative state of consciousness, spreading on a mass scale, from our point of view, is one of the main reasons for the spread of attitudes of skepticism and nihilism, when any “generalizing” meanings that integrate everyday life are no longer taken seriously. In turn, skeptical and nihilistic social sentiments further strengthen the tendency towards the erosion of all the remaining “common denominators” remaining from the former core of the socio-cognitive universe. The result is a “crisis of overproduction” and a radical devaluation of any ideas and ideologies. The quality of the latter is finally replaced by quantity, and the effect of stability is achieved by constantly changing unstable “support points”.

Thus, mature postmodernity embodies the multiverse principle of self-organization of culture in its most developed and vibrant form. This is a “serious”, authentic postmodern, which, in the words of L.K. Zybailov and V.A. Shapinsky, “does not yet issue a license for chaotization, but presents a wide selection of differentiations.” However, he already reveals symptoms of the coming decline and degradation of secular culture. The hierarchy of cognitive subuniverses is leveled; the common sacred core of values, knowledge and behavioral imperatives is completely eroded. The only counterbalance that prevents the seemingly inevitable fragmentation of society is the relativization of any generalizing meanings, which ultimately lose all “passionarity.” As K. Manheim noted, “the secularization of social forces contributed to a greater diversity of human experience, the introduction of ideas of spontaneity and experimentalism into the minds, as well as a constant process of revaluation of values. Ultimately, however, this enormous diversity of experience, and the fact that competing value systems mutually destroyed each other, led to the neutralization of values ​​altogether." As a result, Western culture found itself in a situation where “truths are scattered across many universes of discourses, they can no longer be hierarchized,” and only due to the inertia of traditional-modernist thinking, “in each of these discourses we persistently search for insights that could convince everyone.” .

3) Late postmodern. This is a hypothetical stage in the development of secular culture, not yet reached by any of the modern societies. At this stage, the diversification of cultural and social space should presumably reach its limit, turning into its destruction. The action of the differentiating attractor here is practically not balanced by any significant integration on the scale of society. At this stage, according to the forecast of P.A. Sorokin, “the sensory supersystem of our culture will increasingly resemble a “place of cultural dumping,” filled with a disorderly mass of elements devoid of unity and individuality. Having turned into such a bazaar, it will become a victim of random forces that make it more of a “historical object” than a self-governing and living subject.”

Here the boundaries between cultural styles and the corresponding socio-cognitive universes, already conditional and fluid, are completely blurred. The state of culture corresponding to late postmodernity presupposes the apotheosis of polysemy. However, this polysemy, due to the fact that any stable hierarchization of meanings is objectively impossible, turns into its opposite - a state of semantic leveling. At the stage of late postmodernity, a simultaneous combination at the level of both mass and individual consciousness of incommensurable meanings characteristic of different cultural styles and cognitive systems becomes the norm. We can say that the process of fragmentation of the social subject here moves to the sub-individual level, now destroying any stable foundations of its cultural self-identification. The distinction between individual and mass consciousness is practically erased.

Thus, late postmodernity represents the last logical stage of disintegration of the semantic core of culture, which extends to its everyday periphery. At this stage, even the instrumental, technological efficiency of actions—the last “common denominator” that ensures their sociality—becomes problematic. “Postmodernist propaganda of polysemy - that knowledge that evades the verdicts of experience, testifies to the last, final stage of the process of secularization.” As a result of the “mixing of languages” of social knowledge on a societal scale, a stylistic and cognitive leveling of the “life world” occurs, its, in the words of Konstantin Leontiev, “secondary mixing simplification.” Here, individual and mass consciousness becomes no longer able to adequately reflect reality, since its “organ of reflection” - the system of social knowledge and social rationality - is practically deconstructed. In its extreme form, this state is identical to “schizophrenia of consciousness,” when absolutely incompatible and mutually exclusive (incoherent) meanings can be simultaneously present in it. Postmodernity, having reached the third stage of its development, which represents its logical conclusion, actually represents the beginning of the end of culture, society and personality.

So, according to our concept, the process of secularization of culture involves several main phases, which are characterized by different ratios of the power of influence on culture between integrating (“religious”) and differentiating (“secular”) attractors. This relationship develops in the direction of weakening the first and strengthening the second. These phases of secularization correspond to different levels of self-organization of secular culture: the initial increase in cognitive diversity and, as a consequence, the complication of the socio-cultural system (which corresponds to the conventional stages of modernity and early postmodernity) later, through the “culmination phase” of mature postmodernity, turns into its opposite - into simplification and leveling of culture (late postmodern). The first and second stages are characterized by a quantitative increase in the body of social knowledge, which in general, i.e. within the framework of the cultural system at all levels of the social subject - from societal to individual-personal - it still retains the properties of the universe, although differentiating processes are gaining strength. At the third stage, conventionally designated by us as “mature postmodernity,” a radical qualitative transformation occurs, during which secular culture clearly reveals the properties of a pluralistic polycentric formation “embedded” in it. This is due to a fundamental change in the system-forming factor of culture. Here the universe of social knowledge finally turns into a multiverse, the cultural and ideological core of which is falsified, turning into an “anti-core”. Finally, the fourth stage marks a kind of “heat death” of culture as a result of the complete dehierarchization of the underlying social knowledge, destroying not only ideological but also everyday conceptual structures. Here, the preservation of society and personality is possible only with a radical renewal of the “cultural program.”

Specifics of Russian secular culture. However, it seems to us that the “classical” (linear) model of cultural secularization outlined above is not the only one, and in relation to other, “non-Western” socio-cultural conditions, it is necessary to develop alternative models. This also applies to Russia, whose specificity in this area, in our opinion, is quite pronounced. In this regard, it is of interest to compare the “cultural matrices” of Russian and modern Western societies. An example of this kind of comparative analysis in the context of the study of Soviet civilization is presented, in particular, in the works Russian political scientist and historian S.G. Kara-Murza.

This researcher defines Soviet society (resp. Russian culture of the Soviet period) as traditional and, in this regard, “ideocratic.” Ideocratic society, as characterized by S.G. Kara-Murza, there is “a complex, hierarchically constructed structure that rests on several sacred, unshakable ideas-symbols and on relationships of authority.” Such a culture has enormous spiritual potential, but in its own way is very vulnerable, since the loss of respect for authorities and symbols means death for it. For example, if the enemy manages to build into these ideas “viruses” that destroy them (as happened with late Soviet society), then his victory is assured. Relations of domination through violence in themselves cannot save such a sociocultural system, since the violence itself in it “must be legitimized by the same ideas-symbols.”

On the contrary, Western, or “civil” society, compared to traditional society, has a fundamentally changed cultural matrix. It is characterized as a society “consisting of individual atoms, connected by countless threads of their interests. This society is simple and inseparable, like mold, like a colony of bacteria.” Accordingly, blows to some points (ideas, meanings) do not cause much damage to the whole; only “local holes and gaps” are formed. But this fabric is difficult to withstand “molecular” blows to the interests of everyone (for example, economic difficulties). Thus, for the internal stability of society, sacred ideas and beliefs are not required here, “you just need to control the “fan of desires” of the entire colony in such a way that large social blocs with incompatible, opposing desires do not arise.” With this task, according to S.G. Kara-Murza, in modern Western society, consciousness manipulation technologies are successfully used.

In this regard, Western society at the present stage of development naturally gives rise to a completely new type of culture in history - mosaic. “If earlier, in the era of humanitarian culture, the body of knowledge and ideas was an ordered, hierarchically constructed whole, possessing a “skeleton” of basic subjects, main themes and “eternal questions”, now, in modern society, culture has crumbled into a mosaic of random, bad related and poorly structured concepts. A society living in the flow of such a culture is sometimes called a “democracy of noise.”

The quintessence of the fundamental difference between the Russian and Western (Euro-American) socio-cultural systems formulated here can be expressed, in Sorokin’s language, through the concept of a measure of the ideationality of culture. Apparently, the “ideational reserves” of Russian culture, due to its historical and genetic characteristics, differ significantly from the corresponding indicators of Western cultures. Due to the “neo-traditionalist” nature of our social structure, Russian culture can be characterized in terms of P.A. Sorokina as “more ideational” compared to Western-type culture. This determines both our attraction to ideocracy and the predominance of a collectivist mentality over an individualistic one, as well as the significantly greater conservatism and traditionalism characteristic of Russian civilization in comparison with the Western civilization of the New and especially the Modern era.

Several conclusions follow from these considerations. Firstly, the “democracy of noise”, or mosaic culture, which is one of the main manifestations of mature postmodern culture, represents a natural and logical phase in the development of the Western socio-cultural system. This is consistent with the conclusions we reached in our previous analysis. Secondly, for the domestic socio-cultural system, incl. and at the present stage of its development, this condition is not only not natural, but also deeply contraindicated, because incompatible with the Russian “cultural code”. Thirdly, based on this, the Russian version of cultural secularization - in this case, postmodernization - should differ significantly from the Western one.

Logically, postmodernism in Russia suggests two possibilities:

or destruction of the cultural-ideological core with further progressive destruction of the entire sociocultural system as such,

or a change in the basic ideological concept (as happened after the revolution of 1917) to one that more closely meets the requirements of the moment. In this case, this implies greater scope for stylistic diversification on the periphery of the system with sufficient immunity of the system core against it.

The second option is possible provided that the new core can integrate and “tame” postmodern impulses of cultural development, legitimizing the growth of diversity in the semantic horizon of unity. Only in this way, by establishing a “one-way connection” between the stable core and the intensively differentiated periphery of social knowledge, is it possible for a sufficiently long time historical period channel these impulses in a socially constructive, or at least safe, direction.

Accordingly, the differentiating ideal should not replace the integrating ideal, as happens in the West, but should be incorporated into it. The integrative cultural ideal, therefore, must use the energy of the opposite process (differentiation) to strengthen itself; it must, to use the term of sailing, “go close-hauled,” against the wind, using opposite direction carrier flow. In other words, our culture must find a path to a fundamentally new degree of synthesis of integrating and differentiating attractors of cultural development and begin to function in the mode of integration and differentiation simultaneously. This fundamental synthesis of tradition and modernity is perhaps the worldwide mission of Russian civilization at the present stage of world development.

Diagnosis of the state of the sociocultural system in Russia. In the light of the above, it seems to us that modern (post-Soviet) Russian society is experiencing a state that, in the light of the above reasoning, can be designated as “catastrophic postmodernity.” Our current sociocultural sphere is characterized by a number of essential features of postmodernity, which arose as a result or consequence of the catastrophic changes that occurred in the country in the 90s. These phenomena are analyzed and summarized, in particular, in the works of N. Kozin, A.V. Mironov and I.F. Kefeli. These include:

1) “the ideological decentralization of consciousness, which, living by the forms of its objectification, on this basis decenters and chaotizes the entire fabric of Russian sociality. As a result, it turns out to be nothing: in it everything becomes possible, because the consciousness that lives and objectifies itself in Russia does not experience any value and semantic restrictions.”

2) “proclamation of the absolute relativity and even virtuality of any hierarchy and any values, even moral ones. Moreover,” notes N. Kozin, “in the field of culture in general, an attempt was made to invert and transform values ​​into anti-values, and anti-values ​​into basic, hitherto “hidden” values.”

3) “The demolition of old ideological foundations did not at all mean the approval of a new, more progressive and adequate social reality ideological doctrine.” As a result, on the contrary, a situation of “ideological absurdity or, to use physical analogies, an ideological vacuum” reigned. ... Public consciousness, being deprived of ideology and ideological imperatives, turns into a rushing consciousness, into a consciousness “without a rudder and without sails” in the space of its own history.”

4) “Loss of moral, political, ideological guidelines... deformation of value systems for good, truth, justice, honor, dignity, etc. Ideological disorientation has become a mass phenomenon, especially among young people.”

5) “the rupture of a single spiritual space and the loss of national consensus on basic values, which have become the subject of public debate and have lost the status of “absolute guidelines.”

6) “So, there is confusion in the minds, in the public consciousness, a loss of ideological guidelines, a search for ideological renewal. The situation is further complicated by the fact that the spiritual disorientation of the population of our country, political-ideological disappointment and apathy are associated with the unexpectedly rapid collapse of another social myth - this time the anti-communist, “liberal-democratic” one.

These characteristics, which today have become a “common place” for publications on the topic of the socio-political and cultural situation in Russia, provide a certain basis for considering this situation postmodernist. At the same time, in contrast to the “natural” and steadily developing Western postmodernity, this postmodernity is extreme, since it is not the result of the gradual evolution of the cultural and ideological core of Russian society, but the result of its abrupt, largely artificial breakdown.

In relation to the “classical” model of socio-cultural postmodernization, the current situation in Russia does not fit into any typological scheme, since it combines features of both all three stages of postmodernity, as well as traditional and modernist society. However, in a number of respects it is closest to the “early postmodern” type.

Firstly, in social-projective terms, it represents a kind of intermediate state between the socio-cultural situation of modernity (Soviet society, from which we are “moving away” today) and mature postmodernity (Western societies, towards which the “post-Soviet project” of Russian development is oriented ).

Secondly, there are good reasons to believe that, despite the chaotic nature of the processes occurring on the surface, the very cultural matrix of Russian civilization as such has undergone only partial erosion. This is evidenced by the very urgent need of Russian society for a common idea that consolidates and stabilizes it, which today does not raise doubts among researchers of the most diverse political orientations.

In this regard, modern Russian postmodernity in the form in which it takes place in last years, is fundamentally unstable, while Western postmodernity, on the contrary, is “linear”, progressive and, as such, must exhaust itself in the process of development and reach its logical conclusion. This leads to completely different types of fundamental needs of the Russian and Western civilizational sociocultural systems at the stage of their “postmodernization.” The Western system, completely caught up in the mainstream of the “strange attractor,” has developed its own unique mechanisms of stabilization in the conditions of stable disequilibrium of the progressive evolution of postmodernity. The Russian system must adapt to the latter in a different way, preserving the “core” and reaching a new level and method of synthesis of order and chaos. To paraphrase a well-known saying, we can say that in this case “what is healthy for a German is death for a Russian.”

Thus, to a certain extent simplifying the situation, we can say that the socio-cultural situation in Russia at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st centuries represents an intermediate type between the original traditionalist version of modernity (the “Soviet project”) and the mature postmodernity that characterizes modern Western societies . Structurally, it is closest to “early postmodernism,” the phase of which Western culture went through in the 40s-70s. XX century. However, unlike the Western one, the current Russian postmodernity is non-classical in nature, which is expressed in its catastrophic nature and the “nonlinear” dynamics of its development.

Conclusion. So, summarizing the contents of this chapter, we focus on the following key points:

1. The concepts of “secular” and “religious” in the generally accepted discourse form a pair, while “secular” can be understood in three ways: as counter-religious, as non-religious and as non-religious.

2. Of the three main interpretations of “secular”, the most objective, conceptually “capacious” and most relevant to the modern socio-cultural situation seems to be the last one, which interprets “secular” as a non-religious principle. This interpretation assumes that secular culture has its own, autonomous content, which cannot be derived from religion and is not connected with it.

3. The socio-cognitive content of religious and secular cultures is reflected in the theory of sociocultural dynamics by P.A. Sorokin, in the light of which religious culture corresponds to the priority of supernatural reality and the corresponding structures of knowledge, and secular culture - the priority of sensory reality and the corresponding structures of knowledge.

4. Secular and religious cultures are characterized by structural and content asymmetry in relation to each other. In terms of content, the conceptual core of religious culture is focused on the relationship between supernatural and sensory reality (with the unconditional priority of the first), while the core of secular culture is almost completely focused on the sensory world. In structural terms, religious culture gravitates towards a universal (pyramidal) one, while secular culture tends towards a multiverse model of self-organization.

5. In the dynamics of the historical process at its different levels, there is a cyclical change in the dominance of religious and secular cultures, subject to a self-oscillating regime, which is associated with the alternation of the determining influence of the integrating and differentiating attractors of social knowledge. The latter are played by social (cultural) ideals.

6. The system-forming factor of secular culture is the balance of “analytical” and “synthetic” ideals with the predominance of the influence of the former. An important role here is played by the imperative of “radical plurality”, which, with the secularization (postmodernization) of culture, manifests itself more and more clearly. The basis of the corresponding type of ideal is the experience of sacred existence as “transcendent impersonality”, absolutely divorced from man and the world, creating for a person a subjective situation of hopeless finitude.

7. In its “classical” (Western) version, the secular cultural system naturally passes through two main stages, corresponding to the periods of modernity and postmodernity. Moreover, the latter, in turn, can be logically divided into “early”, “mature” and “late” postmodernity, in accordance with the degree and nature of socio-cultural diversification. The first is characterized by the combination and struggle of system-forming factors of an integrating and differentiating type, “by inertia” preserving a common sacred core. The second is marked by the victory of the ideal of “radical plurality” and represents the highest flowering of postmodernity as a culture of diversity of choice. Finally, the third represents a hypothetical stage of decline and decay of the cultural system due to the erosion of society and the individual.

8. Modern Russian society is experiencing a phase that, in light of the above typology, is closest to the state of “early postmodernity,” which is an intermediate state between the socio-cultural situation of modernity and mature postmodernity. At the same time, in contrast to the “natural” and stable Western postmodernity, our modern postmodernity is extreme, fundamentally unstable and reversible. This is due to the “increased ideationalism” of Russian culture compared to the culture of Western civilization, due to which the natural state for it is the ideocratic form, and postmodernization tendencies must be compensated by a universal cultural core of the classical type.

Bibliography

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In recent years, many philosophers and theologians have said that modern society is ceasing to be secular and is becoming post-secular. Alexander Kyrlezhev, an employee of the secretariat of the Synodal Biblical and Theological Commission, told Pravmir about what a post-secular society is and what is characteristic of it.

- Alexander Ivanovich, what is a post-secular society?

- This concept came into wide use about ten years ago, mainly thanks to the authoritative German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, a theorist of European democracy. However, the concept of “postsecular” has not yet acquired a clear meaning. It remains vague and ambiguous.

Middle Ages and recent times

Anti-clerical people who are rather afraid of religion see this concept as a return to the Middle Ages, and this scares them. They considered the process of secularization that began during the Enlightenment to be irreversible and unequivocally positive, and any hint of an increase in the role of religion in public life seemed to them a return to archaism and obscurantism.

On the other hand, one priest, when he heard about a post-secular society, suggested that it was something eschatological. An educated priest, not a simple rural priest! Religious consciousness is also characterized by an understanding of secularization as an irreversible process, only with a minus sign, and the dominance of secularism for some religious people can only end with the end of the century.

In the medieval world, religion permeated all social and cultural life, human consciousness, but then it began to be ousted from the generally significant space (I’m talking now only about Christian civilization; in other cultures the history is completely different). This process lasted for more than one century, but in the 20th century, religion really lost its social significance and ceased to be an authoritative authority that has a decisive influence on various spheres of human life, individual and social.

Religion never dies

The term “post-secular society” indicates that the opposite process is now taking place - the return of religion to the public, public, media sphere. This is obvious even if you just follow the news - the number of religious stories has been constantly increasing over the past 10–15 years. It is not yet clear what these new processes will lead to. Of course, there can be no talk of any return to the Middle Ages simply because history does not move backwards.

Sometimes another term is used - desecularization. It was introduced by the prominent American sociologist Peter Berger, who in the 1960s was one of the theorists and researchers of secularization in America. By the end of the last century, he revised his views, and in 1999, a sensational book entitled “Desecularization of the World” with his programmatic article was published under his editorship. One phrase from that article is still quoted by everyone today: “The modern world is as fiercely religious as it has always been.” The point is that religion has not died and is not dying, if you look globally - at the whole world.

I repeat, it is difficult to say what this process will lead to. Secularization was not just a historical process, but first of all a project that was based on certain ideas and aimed at building a new, non-religious world. Desecularization and the formation of a post-secular society is not a project, but an objective process taking place before our eyes, the specific consequences of which we cannot predict. We can only state a fact - religion is returning to public space.

Theology of the Death of God

In this regard, I would like to draw your attention to one important point. The peak of secularization in the Western world occurred in the mid-20th century. Secular culture won, science had almost absolute authority as the source of the final truth in everything. In America, the “theology of the death of God” arose - now some of the authors have been translated into Russian. These theologians, Protestant Christians, considered it a fait accompli that, in a social and cultural sense, “God is dead” and that theology must now be based on this fact.

Catholics never stated this, but the Second Vatican Council, held in the 1960s, was guided by the idea of ​​agiornamento - bringing religion to the present day, its maximum modernization.

Even earlier, the European Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann proposed a project to demythologize the New Testament. An admirer of the early Heidegger, he gave an existentialist interpretation of the Gospel. Since the miracles described there are impossible from a scientific point of view, then there is no need to believe in them, but we should only talk about the ultimate, decisive choice that a person makes in the face of God. The general idea was that the Church needed to free itself from the archaic, recognizing the victory of the new scientific-secular picture of the world.

Secularization: after victory

Several decades have passed and everything has changed dramatically. On the one hand, the authority of science has wavered - today few people consider it the ultimate truth, forcing all aspects of human life to be assessed using scientific criteria.

Now society completely normalizes the situation when an educated, pragmatic person, including a scientist, is also religious. Or, from a Christian point of view, superstitious - for example, if he reads horoscopes in magazines or takes a child to a healer when medicine is powerless to help him.

The difference between faith and superstition is a separate and, so to speak, intra-religious topic. I just want to draw attention to the fact that the conflict between the rational-scientific view of the world and the “irrational”-religious (or para-religious) has disappeared for a significant part of society.

On the other hand, over the past 15 years, classical sociological theories of secularization have been subjected to increasingly harsh criticism, almost to the point of destruction, so that these theories have only a few ardent adherents left. We are talking primarily about Europe, where secularization, understood as an integral part of modernization, really happened and won.

America never fit into the theory of secularization and was considered a strange exception that was specially studied. This is an advanced country in the field of science, economics, innovation, but it has always remained very religious. About 40 percent of the US population are members of some kind of religious community. The Americans always connected this, which violated the harmony of the theory. But for Europe, the theory of secularization was suitable, because Europe itself was implementing secularization, which, I repeat, was not just a process, but also a project.

- Post-secularization is not a project, but an objective process? What predetermined him?

In the socio-political space, attitudes towards religion have been changed by two factors: globalization and the emergence of political Islam. People are no longer isolated in their national cultures and countries; they live in a common, global information space. This applies to both the West and the East. It is important here to pay attention to what has happened in the Muslim world in recent decades.

Political Islam and the crisis of new European rationalism

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Arab world was dominated by a model of pan-Arabism and Arab secular nationalism, sometimes with socialist overtones. A typical example is Egypt. At the turn of the 1970s–1980s, a change in this paradigm occurred: political Islam appeared - a project of Islamic resistance to the Western secular world. The key moment is the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Then there was the resistance of the Afghan Mujahideen to the Soviet invasion, and after the September 11 terrorist attack in New York it became obvious that religion and politics cannot be separated.

If we talk about changes in the “European” cultural space, political scientist and sociologist Leonid Ionin wrote wonderfully about this in 2005 in the article “The New Magical Age” (published in the journal “Logos”) - about the crisis of new European rationalism... Philosophical rationalism gave birth to the Enlightenment, science, the scientific picture of the world. But man is not a strictly rational being, which has always been understood not only by theologians, but also by philosophers and especially artists.

Therefore, a change of direction could not help but occur in the cultural-historical process, and it did occur. Various forms of the irrational returned to life, the authority of rationalism, including scientific, began to decline. Religion, including not only traditional confessions, but also new religious and para-religious movements (such as New Age or ufology), began to return to the cultural space, and this also gives rise to talk about a post-secular society.

Today, sociologists of religion pay attention to the special significance of the phenomenon of so-called “spirituality”, which is a new manifestation of religiosity.

Secular Europe?

In Russia, religion returned to the public space for other reasons - persecution stopped, atheism ceased to be a state ideology. Can modern Russian society be called post-secular?

Undoubtedly, we just need to understand that since Soviet secularization was very different from Western Europe, our post-secularism is different. European secularization is not the destruction of religion. The anti-church excesses of the French Revolution were only an episode of European secularization.

Enlightenment philosophers and their followers were confident that religion would die a natural death thanks to progress, but secularization in the West essentially amounted to the movement of religion from the public to the private sphere. Being religious is your own business, but you should not interfere with it in society, in politics, in education.

The main principle became the principle of separation of Church and state, which, however, was never fully implemented in practice anywhere. Even in the most secular Western country - France - the state financed some Catholic schools and other religious projects. Many people are still outraged by this, but there has never been a complete separation of Church and state. Now Western scientists are writing entire studies about this.

In Germany there is a church tax, that is, the Germans know that part of the taxes they pay to the state is transferred by the state to the Church. At the same time, the German Churches, Evangelical and Catholic, have always been engaged in active social work. To a much smaller extent than the state, but the state delegated part of its social activities to them.

In Italy, the Catholic Church ceased to be a state only in the eighties of the last century, and in some northern Protestant countries - Norway, Denmark, Great Britain - the Church is still not separated from the state. This does not mean that there is no freedom of conscience and that secularization has not occurred there - these are precisely the countries that are the most secularized - but the strict separation of Church and state has remained the ideal of secularism as a project.

In the USSR, secularization was carried out harshly and violently, because the Bolsheviks understood that religion was hostile to their communist project. They did not succeed in completely destroying it, but there was no question of any religious education, of the possibility for a young or mature person to make a conscious choice between faith and unbelief, although formally, on paper, freedom of conscience existed.

But it existed only on paper. Soviet state atheism sought to squeeze out religion not only from public life (which it completely succeeded), but also from private life, from consciousness itself, and this is its main difference from Western secularism - in the West no one encroached on a person’s private life.

The fruits of state atheism

The fruits of state atheism are obvious - still in Russia the percentage of actively practicing believers is less than in Western European countries, not to mention America. Not only Soviet people, but also those who grew up in post-Soviet Russia are, for the most part, religiously ignorant. And at the same time, today our secularists are protesting against what has always been the norm in Western secular countries: against introducing schoolchildren to the basics of religion, against priests in the army.

I remember how, back in the “deep” Soviet times, when I was studying at the seminary, I came across a directory of the American Orthodox Church. Among other things, it contained two or three pages with photographs of... officers. These were Orthodox chaplains of the American army, who, like army chaplains of other faiths, wear military uniforms.

This is the American reality, but the point, of course, is not in appearance, but in the fact that although Orthodoxy is far from the main religion in the United States, there are Orthodox chaplains in the American army. For us, this turns out to be a problem, because many see the very fact of the existence of army priests as an attack on the secularism of the state, an attempt at clericalization.

In America, a priest in the army is in no way a manifestation of post-secularism. There, such a manifestation was the statement of George W. Bush, a “born again” Protestant Christian, about the need to go on a “crusade” against Islamic terrorism.

And in Russia, even the processes of returning to cultural and social life such things that have always been present in the life of Western secular societies turn out to be post-secular. Russian society is rightly considered very secular, which is a consequence of Soviet atheistic secularization, but today it is gradually becoming post-secular - in the sense of the return of religion to the public sphere.

Is religion coming back?

- If I understand you correctly, post-secularity does not necessarily lead to a revival of religiosity?

Of course not. We are talking specifically about the emergence of religion from the ghetto of privacy and its return to the life of society. Let's return to the Islamic world. The population there has always been religious, but in the second half of the 20th century, as already mentioned, many Muslim countries were politically built on the principle of secular European states, and sometimes with a socialist orientation. But then this secular project was replaced by another - the project of political Islam.

It turned out to be a strange symbiosis. Some formal Western democratic procedures remain, and a Europeanized intellectual elite still exists, but elements of Islam penetrate to varying degrees into political ideology, legislation, and public perceptions. In the Muslim world, desecularization occurs in the zone of secularization.

A typical example in this case is Turkey, which at one time experienced harsh Kemalist secularization (its ideologist and practitioner was the first President of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk). This has no direct relation to religiosity, because it never left the Muslim world. Ideas about the structure of society, the state, and everyday behavior are changing. They are changing before our eyes, and we don’t yet know what will come of it in the future.

The same thing happens in the Christian world. In the 1990s, when active criticism of the theory of secularization began in sociological science, the main idea of ​​this criticism was that, so to speak, there is no full-fledged secularization because there is no radical decline in religiosity in society - this is clearly seen in the example of America. The classical theory of secularization assumed an inevitable and steady decline in religiosity with progressive development.

At one time he said: “What a strange paradox! America is the most religious and at the same time the most secular country.” He meant that almost half of Americans are not just religious, but practicing believers, and culture, education, the state are separated from religion, that is, the percentage of believers is high, and society is secular.

Of course, in Europe this percentage is significantly lower. But here’s what’s significant: when the classical theory of secularization reigned, America was considered a strange exception, and now, when the post-secular view is asserted, on the contrary - it is secular Europe that is seen as an exception compared to the rest of the world, where religiosity remains relatively high.

Cultural identification or religion?

The degree of religiosity and the difference in its forms is another topic that is not strictly linked to secularization. Some tend to idealize the Middle Ages as an era of universal religiosity, but historians show that this was not the case. Both in Europe and in Russia, not everyone went to church regularly; among the common people, Christian religiosity coexisted with pagan beliefs and practices, and so on.

But from the point of view of the theory of secularization, the Middle Ages were truly a religious era, because the Church occupied an important place in the social structure and the state was religious. Then it became secular, but this is not due to the level of religiosity, but to the fact that religion was pushed out of the public sphere into the private one.

Post-secular society is characterized not by the growth of religiosity, but by the return of religion to the public sphere. An excellent example from our reality is sociological surveys about religion. In recent years, 70–80 percent of participants in such surveys call themselves Orthodox, but about half of them do not believe in God, and many others have very vague ideas about Orthodoxy.

It is significant that both secularists and church people react to the results of these opinion polls in approximately the same way. “You see, this is not a religion at all!” the secularists exclaim. "Horrible! What kind of Orthodox are they who don’t believe in God,” zealous Orthodox Christians lament.

Not always. Some church people refer to the results of these surveys as irrefutable proof that our society is Orthodox.

I think that truly church-going Orthodox cannot be pleased with such results of opinion polls, and they agree with their opponents in the idea of ​​religion as a conscious, deep, practical and theoretical involvement in their confessional tradition, in the life of the Church.

But such an idea of ​​religion was created (more precisely, imposed) precisely in the era of secularization: there is “pure religion,” and such manifestations of religiosity as cultural identification, memory of the past are bracketed as something insufficient, to true religion not relevant.

Believe but don't practice

Practice but don't believe

In fact, religiosity manifests itself in very different ways. Modern English sociologist of religion Grace Davey introduced the following formulation: believing without belonging - faith without belonging to any religious community. She studied this phenomenon.

Accordingly, the reverse formula arose: belonging without believing- belonging to a religious tradition, to a confession without active conscious faith. Another major sociologist, Danielle Hervieu-Léger, studied modern forms of religiosity characteristic of secular Western Europe, in particular, in such a secular country as her native France. It turns out that there are a lot of religious manifestations that form an important part of the life of people who are formally non-religious, that is, not practicing believers.

And another term was introduced by Grace Davey: vicarious religion - substitute religion. It means that secular, non-religious Europeans seem to delegate the execution of religious functions to the Church, the clergy, and a small number of active believers.

That is, secular people practically do not go to church, do not pray, but through the clergy and believers they feel involved in religious life. And if, for example, Catholic churches, monasteries and other “religious objects” are removed from secular France, absolutely secular people will feel that they are missing something very important. Although in a weak form, religious memory lives in them.

Explore grandmothers

But let's return to Russia. Sociological surveys about religiosity have been conducted since the nineties, and they are conducted by secular sociologists who, as a rule, do not like religious “obscurantism.” And they ask respondents questions to determine how many “real” Orthodox are there - who pray every day, go to church at least once a month, read the Bible, know the Creed, dogmas.

Surveys have shown and continue to show that there are very few such Orthodox Christians - “real” ones, at most two or three percent. But let’s take the Soviet situation, that is, the Church in Soviet times. There are few churches and grandmothers go to them, mostly very simple, poorly educated. It was precisely these grandmothers who were perhaps the main real believers in the Soviet years.

And if these grandmothers had been examined then, had there been such an opportunity, it would have turned out something like the following: many of them believe that the Trinity is the Savior, the Mother of God and St. Nicholas the Pleasant, some read something from the Gospel, but most only heard it at the service in Church Slavonic, the Creed has been learned and sung, but it is unlikely that they fully understand...

While on the train, I involuntarily overheard a conversation between two such grandmothers. “What a sin - I washed it on Kazanskaya!”, one of them lamented. But it was these people who filled the churches in Soviet times, who kept the faith in spite of the godless authorities. For them it was a deep inner need. And if we start examining them according to today’s strict sociological criteria, it turns out that they are “fake believers.”

A sign of a post-secular society or a missionary challenge?

I want to say that there are many manifestations of religiosity, and the post-secular approach allows us to see the diversity of these manifestations. In contrast to the secular approach, including secular religious studies, which imposes a rigid scheme: religion is outside culture, outside society, only in the private sphere, and a real believer is religiously educated, with deep faith, consistent in his behavior, etc., in general, superman. And all the rest are wrong.

Those who today call themselves Orthodox and do not believe in God represent a huge “missionary field” for the Church. People feel that they belong to the church tradition, but they do not yet have a living relationship with God. For the Church this is a missionary challenge. Another thing is that making consistent Christians out of nominal Orthodox Christians is not an easy task. But it has always been like this.

And from the point of view of sociology, this is precisely one of the signs of a post-secular society, when a non-religious person, for some reason, mostly not selfish, identifies himself with a specific religious tradition that is part of his culture.

Orthodox atheists

At one time I talked a lot with religious scholar Academician Lev Nikolaevich Mitrokhin, and after his death I even edited a book about him. From his youth he was a classic “scientific atheist,” and in post-Soviet times he told me: “I can say about myself the same thing that Lukashenko said: I am an Orthodox atheist.”

His colleagues, who remained in a sense “scientific atheists,” condemned him and said that he was deviating into fideism. And many Orthodox Christians insisted that no matter how the former “scientific atheists” tried to “cling on” to religion, they are still enemies for us, meaning, among other things. In fact, he was an intelligent and honest man, he tried to comprehend new processes with the intellectual means at his disposal, and his own philosophical concept of religion was very original and interesting.

A person’s spiritual path continues until death, and the completion of this path is always a mystery, revealed only to God. In the Middle Ages, everyone received some kind of religious education, they always had the opportunity to take the path of religious, spiritual life, but not everyone did this, especially from a young age. In Soviet secular society, people, as a rule, had nowhere to obtain at least minimal knowledge about religion in order to spiritually self-determinate.

Today such information is available, and many people feel a cultural connection to the religious tradition. Not only Christian. There are representatives of Muslim nations who are not religious, but identify themselves with Islam, or secular Jews who perceive Judaism as their religious and spiritual tradition.

There may come a time in the life of every person when he consciously turns to a tradition related to himself and begins to master it spiritually and practically. Many people do this, sooner or later.

Religion as a chain of memory

- What is the religious situation in the West today, how does it differ from Russia?

You probably remember that, despite numerous requests and demands from Western Christians, the developers of the European Constitution (which, by the way, failed) never included in it a clause on Christianity as one of the foundations of European culture and civilization. This, of course, is the “machinations” of secularists, the knights of the Enlightenment.

But the religious situation in Europe is gradually changing, and it is primarily Muslims who are changing it. There are more and more of them there, their families are mostly large, they live in entire enclaves and do not accept the secular paradigm. The religious component is manifested both in their way of life and in the requirement to regulate communal and individual life by Islamic law. It is Muslim immigrants and their children who are today changing the status of Europe as the most secular region in the world.

And Europeans are reacting to this. When Switzerland held a referendum on the construction of minarets, more than half of the citizens voted against it. Of course, they defended first of all their cultural landscape, but in this case - precisely its religious component, which is part of their historical memory.

One of the books I have already mentioned by Hervieu-Léger is called: “La religion pour mémoire”, in the English translation “Religion as a Chain of Memory” - religion as a chain of memory. This chain is present in such religious forms that do not correspond to the rigid concept of religion as conscious and active involvement in tradition, but this is also religiosity, albeit a unique, modern one.

And remember the recent case in Italy. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the claim of radical secularist Soile Lautsi and ruled that crucifixes should be removed from Italian public schools. Italian resistance was massive. It was not the Church that resisted, but ordinary citizens: employees, businessmen, even some humanists protested.

People felt that there was an attack on their way of life, and they went out to demonstrations and rallies. The Italian government, in cooperation with several other countries, including Greece and Russia, appealed the decision, and the European Court eventually overturned it.

It is unlikely that secular Europeans are becoming actively religious - this has not happened yet. But there is a public reaction, which can be called post-secular, to attempts by active groups of secularists to continue secularization, bringing it to such absurdities as, for example, a ban on wearing religious symbols, in particular crosses. People defend religion as part of their cultural landscape and part of their inner world. The Italian state, given these sentiments, in this case opposed rigid secularism.

In Russia, as in the former Soviet republics and former socialist countries, the situation is different. People from school, if not from kindergarten, were drilled into the atheistic-materialistic idea of ​​the world, and even as part of the “only true” teaching, and then this teaching got so tired that many began to look for another, equally comprehensive teaching, and often in this search they came to the Church. This is happening today, when there is no longer a single, all-explaining ideology.

- Poland, even in communist times, was not de facto an atheist country.

Recently, in the New Year’s issue of the magazine “Expert” with the general title “Postsecular World”, an interesting article about Poland was published. The author writes that during the years of communism, the Catholic Church had great authority in Poland, there was pathos “we, Catholics, are against the communists,” a huge number of people, including young people, went to churches, the Church was really in opposition, supporting Solidarity.

Now the function of a force consolidating society against ideological occupiers has disappeared; the Church, on the contrary, actively participates in public life and even imposes its own norms, and some young people are beginning to resist. Especially those who are for extreme European liberalism - same-sex marriage, legalization of marijuana. They not only do not go to churches, but actively oppose the Church. There is a crisis of the authority of the Church in Poland.

In Russia it is a different story. In Soviet times, besides grandmothers, only a few people went to church, but today many, often very successful people, go to church: businessmen, generals, athletes, artists, musicians... But at the same time, many are afraid of clericalization like fire - they remember the Soviet era, and it seems to them that the place of communist ideology will be occupied by a new comprehensive violent ideology, Orthodox.

That is why we also have anti-clerical sentiments. However, church life is not only being revived after secularization “in the Soviet way,” but is also developing, acquiring new, previously unknown directions and forms and entering a wide public space.

These are parallel processes - ongoing secularization and a counter process of desecularization. History continues, and only the future will show what this “post-secular society” will be like. A society, the process of formation of which - in disputes and conflicts - occurs before our eyes and with our participation.

Interviewed by Leonid Vinogradov

Alexander Kirlezhev born in 1957 in Moscow. Graduated from the Moscow State Institute of Culture, Moscow Theological Seminary.

He worked for the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, published theological literature, and wrote articles on religious and social topics, which were collected in the book The Power of the Church (2003). One of the authors of the New Philosophical Encyclopedia. He taught at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, at the Department of Religious Studies of the Russian Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation.

Member of the editorial board and regular author of the Continent magazine. Employee of the Secretariat of the Synodal Biblical and Theological Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church. Scientific editor of the religious studies journal “State, Religion, Church in Russia and Abroad”, updated in 2012, published by RANEPA.