The medicalization of religious deviance in the Russian orthodox church (1880-1905)

Kritika

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 451-482

  Beer, Daniel ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33744757309     PISSN: 1531023X     EISSN: 15385000     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/kri.2004.0035     Document Type: Review

References (92)

1. Gregory L. Freeze, "Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia," Journal of'Modern History 68 (June 1996): 308
2. see Laura Engelstein, "Paradigms, Pathologies, and Other Clues to Russian Spiritual Culture: Some Post-Soviet Thoughts," Slavic Review 57, 4 (1998): 864-77
3. and Simon Dixon, "How Holy Was Holy Russia? Rediscovering Russian Religion," in Reinterpreting Russia, ed. Geoffrey Hosking and Robert Service (London: Arnold, 1999), 21-39
4. See, for example, Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (New York: Harbor Press, 1955)
5. Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia's Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 5, 7
6. Gregory L. Freeze, The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), xxxvi
7. Freeze, "The Rechristianization of Russia: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750-1850," Studia Slavica Finlandensia 7 (1990): 118
8. J. Eugene Clay, "Orthodox Missionaries and 'Orthodox Heretics' in Russia, 1886-1917," in Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Tolerance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Robert P. Geraci and Michael Khodarkovsky (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 38
9. Glennys Young, Power and the Sacred in Revolutionary Russia: Religions Activists in the Village (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 17
10. Nadieszda Kizenko, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 210-14, 226-27
11. See Byrnes, Pobedonostsev: His Life and Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 181
12. Edmund Heier, Religious Schism in the Russian Aristocracy, 1860-1900: Radstockism and Pashkovism (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), 143
13. Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ev, Sobranie sochinenii, 2nd ed., 10 vols. (St. Petersburg: Prosveshchenie, 1911-14), vol. 5, 423
14. and Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy, 137-38
15. For a discussion of these forms of religious instruction
16. see Chris J. Chulos, "Peasant Religion in Post-Emancipation Russia: Voronezh Province, 1880-1917," 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1994), vol. 1, 115-16
17. Freeze, "The Rechristianization of Russia," 117
18. See Weber, Die russische Orthodoxie im Aufbruch, 229-56
19. Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, ed. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird (Cresrwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1974), 100
20. Jean-Claude Larchet, Therapeutique des maladies spirituelles: Une introduction à la tradition ascitique de l'Eglise orthodoxe, 3rd ed. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997), 9
21. See also Paul Evdokimov, "La sainteté dans la tradition de l'Église orthodoxe," Contacts 73-74 (1971): 119-99
22. and Stanley Samuel Harakas, "The Eastern Orthodox Tradition," in Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 146-72
23. Larchet, Thérapeutique des maladies, 11. The Orthodox Church's self-definition as the body of Christ has its origins in the New Testament. In his epistles to the Corinthians, St. Paul employs the term somacr;ma, or body, for the bread received in the Eucharist and for the community of the church, referring to both of these as "the body of Christ" (1 Corinthians 10:16). The metaphorical power of these representations was undoubtedly reinvigorated in the 1830s and the 1840s in Russia under the impact of German idealism, with its repeated use of organismic imagery to validate the primacy and autonomy of communities and states. The progress of organismic ideas is most clearly and consistently traceable through the political theories of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) (F. W. Coker, Organismic Theories of the State: Nineteenth-Century Interpretations of the State as an Organism or as a Person [New York: Longmans, 1910], 9-11). Subsequently, Russian church leaders such as Filaret Drozdov, the metropolitan of Moscow from 1826 to 1867 and one of the most influential churchmen of the 19th century, made repeated references to the Epistles to propagate the image of the Orthodox Church in bodily metaphorics intended to stress its cohesion and unity: "On the basis of the word of God, I conceive of the ecumenical Church as a 'unified' great 'body.' Jesus Christ is to it both like a 'heart' or the source of life and like the 'Head' or the governing wisdom ⋯ . In this visible 'form' [obraz] or the 'visible Church' stands the 'invisible body of Christ'" (Metropolitan Filaret [Vasilii Mikhailovich Drozdov] of Moscow, Slova i rechi, 5 vols. [Moscow: A. I. Mamontov, 1873-85], vol. 2, 131-32). In his celebrated essay, first published in 1864, "The Church Is One" [Tserkov' odna], Aleksei Stepanovich Khomiakov (1804-60), one of the most respected theoreticians of the Slavophile movement and an influential theologian, also described the Church in these terms: "The unity of the Church is unchanging, not allegorical, but truthful and essential like the unity of several members in a living body⋯. The visible Church, or the Church on earth, lives in perfect communion and unity with the whole body of the Church, the head of which is Christ" (Khomiakov, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols. [Moscow: Universitetskaia tipografiia, 1873-1914], vol. 2, 3). The essay was first published as "Tserkov'" in Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no. 3 (1864): 233-58. The use of bodily metaphors to represent the Church was so prevalent in the 19th century that by 1894 it warranted a sizable study
24. see Daniel Todes, "From Radicalism to Scientific Convention: Biological Psychology in Russia from Sechenov to Pavlov" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1981)
25. and Torsten Riiting, Pavlov und der Neue Mensch: Diskurse über Disziplinierung in Sowjetrussland (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2002), 72-76. On Mechnikov's life and work
26. see Alexander S. Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1861-1917 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 111-29
27. see Erwin H. Ackerknecht, RudolfVirchow: Doctor, Statesman, Anthropologist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981)
28. Pavel Runovskii, "Prichiny nashikh nedugov," RDSP, no. 18 (April 1880): 2-3
29. N. D., "O bor'be s sovremennym neveriem," RDSP, no. 7 (February 1884): 142-43
30. N. D., "Vrach dukhovnyi i vrach telesnyi," RDSP, no. 17 (April 1886): 505
31. "Bor'ba pastyria Tserkvi s sueveriem," RDSP, no. 11 (March 1889): 431
32. Desiatiletie Odesskogo Sviato-Andreevskogo Bratstva, uchrezhdemwgo pri Odesskoi Dukhovnoi Seminarii (Odessa: Sviato-Andreevskoe Bratstvo, 1891), 179
33. N. D., "O bor'be s sovremennym neveriem," 143
34. Ibid
35. Freeze, "The Rechristianization of Russia," 107
36. "Zametki pravoslavnogo obozreniia," Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, no. 17 (May 1865): 13
37. F. Chtyrkin, "Po povodu mer protiv rasprostraneniia shtundy v odnoi iz eparkhii," Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 47 (1880): 10
38. Iona Moiseevich Atamanskii, "Pravoslavnyi sviashchennik v prikhode zarazhennom shtundizmom i vozvrashchenie dvukh shtundistok v lono sv. Tserkvi," Khersonskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti, no. 9 (1891): 246-65
39. Pavel Kozitskii, "O prichinakh pripiatstvuiushchikh uspeshnoi bor'be so shtundizmom," Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 21 (1891): 323
40. Glennys Young has noted that the reports of the Holy Synod "implicitly portrayed Old Belief as a disease" in her article "'Into Church Matters': Lay Identity, Rural Parish Life, and Popular Politics in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, 1864-1928," Russian History 23, 1-4 (1996): 379
41. See, for example, "Vtoroi missionerskii s"ezd v Moskve," Pribavleniia k tserkovnym vedomostiam, no. 29 (1891): 963-69
42. and Il'ia Mikhailovich Gromoglasov, "Tretii Vserossiiskii Missionerskii S"ezd: Fakty i vpechatleniia," Bogoslovskii vestnik, no. 10 (1897): 114-49
43. Nikolai Ivanovich Ivanovskii, "Obshchie zadachi i kharakter deiatel'nosti missionerskogo s"ezda," Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1 (August 1897): 618. For further comparisons of the missionary congresses with medical consultations
44. see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
45. and Robert A. Nye, "Degeneration and the Medical Model of Cultural Crisis in the French Belle Époque," in Political Symbolism in Modern Europe, ed. Seymour Drescher, David Sabean, and Allan Sharlin (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982), 19-41
46. See, for example, Lev Aleksandrovich Tikhomirov, "Konets veka," Russkoe obozrenie 23 (September 1893): 368-81
47. Vladimir Viktorovich Lesevich, "Ekskursii v oblast' psikhiatrii: O psikhicheskom vyrozhdenii," Russkaia mysl', no. 2 (1887): 1-34
48. The speed and enthusiasm with which missionary leaders were able to appropriate, however imperfectly, these new secular theories is perhaps in part explained by the uncommonly high level of education that many of them had. Clay has noted that the rules for missionaries adopted in 1888 specified a preference for academy graduates: "In many respects, the missionary was a travelling seminary professor-and in many [respects,] professors served as missionaries." Clay, "Orthodox Missionaries," 42
49. See, for example, Augustine, City of God against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 581
50. Vladimir Nikolaevich Terletskii, "K voprosu ob izuchenii sektantstva," in Deianiia 3-go Vserossiiskogo Missionerskogo S"ezda, ed. Skvortsov, 91
51. See for example, Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France: The Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984)
52. and Suzanna Barrows, Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)
53. Gustav LeBon, Psychologic des foules (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1895). LeBon was one of the leading French sociologists of the belle époque and wrote widely on mass psychology. Gabriel Tarde-Les lois de l'imitation, étude sociologique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1890)-became known for his writings on criminology and social science while a magistrate in provincial France. His prolific output during the 1890s eventually brought him to the chair of modern philosophy at the College de France (1900). Both French authors were widely translated into Russian. Viktor Khrisanfovich Kandinskii-Obshcheponiatnye psikhologicheskie etiudi (Moscow: A. Lang, 1881)-a graduate of Moscow University, worked as a surgeon at the St. Nicholas Hospital in St. Petersburg. He wrote several works on mental illness in both Russian and German. Petr Narkizovich Obninskii, "Contagion morale i kholernye bezporiadki," Zhurnalgrazlidanskogo i ugolovnogo prava, no. 1 (1893): 1-14
54. see Alexandre Metraux, "French Crowd Psychology: Between Theory and Ideology," in The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought, ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash (New York: Praeger, 1982), 276-99
55. Vladimir Alekseevich Alekseev and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Maslin, Russkaia sotsial' fiaiafilosofiia kontsa XlX-nachala XX veka: Psikhologicheskaia shkola (Moscow: Issledovatel'skii tsentr, 1992)
56. and David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 83-91. For a discussion of these theories and their impact on the understanding of social and moral deviance in late imperial Russia, see chap. 2 of my "'The Hygiene of Souls.'"
57. Vasilii Fedorovich Pevnitskii, "Deiatel'nost' pastyria Tserkvi po ispolneniiu dolga vrachevaniia nravstvennykh nedugovsvoei pastvy," RDSP, no. 8 (February 1890): 204
58. Trudy Kievskoi Dukhovnoi Akademii (Kiev: Tipografiia Kievskoi Akademii, 1888): 79
59. "Bor'ba s raskolom i sektantstvom," RDSP, no. 16 (April 1900): 379
60. Ivan AJekseevich Sikorskii, "Psikhopatizm v srede zazhivo-zamurovannykh nasel'nikov raskolnich'ikh tiraspol 'skikh skitov," Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1 (November 1897): 937-61
61. Ivan A. Sikorskii, Epidemicheskie vol'nye smerti i stnertotibiistva v Ternovskie Khutora (Kiev: Voprosy nervno-psikhicheskoi meditsiny, 1897)
62. Ivan A. Sikorskii, Psikhopaticheskaia epidemiia 1892 goda v Kievskoi gtibernii (Kiev: Universitet Sviatogo Vladimira V. I. Zavadzkogo, 1893)
63. Sikorskii, "Psikhopatizm v srede zazhivo-zamurovannykh nasel'nikov," 1090
64. See Iakobii, "Religiozno-psikhicheskie epidemii," Vestnik Evropy, no. 10 (1903): 119-20
65. and Nikolai Petrovich Kutepov, "K voprosu o merakh dlia bor'by s sektantstvom," Tserkovnyi vestnik, no. 27 (1894): 436
66. Vasilii M. Skvortsov, "K predstoiashchemu vserossiiskomu missionerskomu s"ezdu v Kazane," Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1 (May 1897): 351-52
67. Reginald E. Zelnik, "'To the Unaccustomed Eye': Religion and Irreligion in the Experience of St. Petersburg Workers in the 1870s," Russian History 16, 2-4 (1989): 305
68. See Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatim, i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998), 635
69. Arkhimandrit (Archimandrite) Pavel, Kratkie izvcstiia o sushchestvuiushchikh v raskole sektakh (Moscow: Bratstvo Sv. Petra Mitropolita, 1888), 84
70. Evgenii A. Rakhmanin, Khristianskie razmyshleniia (Derpt': Shnakenburg, 1892), 14-15
71. "Nashi obshchestvennye nedugi," RDSP, no. 16 (April 1881): 414-15
72. "Vragi bogomateri i russkogo tsarstva," RDSP, no. 19 (May 1898): 25-29
73. Episkop Meletii, "Iz perezhitogo," Missionerskoe obozrenie, pt. 1 (August 1897): 635
74. Episkop Aleksei, Religiozno-ratsionalisticbeskoe dvizlienie, 425
75. See Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. 51-54, 70-71, 91-93. But Nicholas B. Breyfogle has argued that the sympathy for sectarians in government circles actually increased after their loyal and useful involvement in the states military campaigns in the Crimea (1853-56) and the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78): "following their resettlement to Transcaucasia, the sectarian-settlers began ⋯ to fulfill many of the needs and goals of the tsarist empire-building project in the region, not least of which was in the military arena ⋯ The categorization of religious dissenters as political liabilities and untrustworthy subjects was joined by a positive estimation of them as model Russian colonists" (Nicholas B. Breyfogle, "Caught in the Crossfire? Russian Sectarians in the Caucasian Theater of War, 1853-56 and 1877-78," Kritika 2, 4 [2001]: 742). Such newfound appreciation of the sectarians only served further to dismay the Church
76. See John S. Curtiss, Church and State in Russia: The Last Years of the Empire, 1900-1917 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 319
77. Johannes Chrysostomus, "Die russische Orthodoxie angesichts der zeitgenössischen sozialen Stromungen am Vorabend der Revolution von 1917," Ostkirchliche Studien 17 (1968): 297-314
78. Vladimir Karlovich Sabler, O mirnoi bor'be s sotsializmom, 2 vols. (Sergiev Posad: Sviataia Troitskaia-Sergievaia Lavra, 1911)
79. and A. I. Baby, "Bor'ba pravoslavnoi tserkvi s nauchnym sotsializmom v Moldavii v kontse XlX-nachale XX veka," Izvestiia Akademii nauk Moldavskoi SSR: Seriia obshchestvennykh nauk, no. 1 (1968): 20-30
80. Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov, "Geroizm i podvizhnichestvo (Iz razmyshlenii o religioznoi prirode russkoi intelligentsii)," Vekhil lz glubiny (Moscow: Pravda, 1991), 31-72
81. René Fülöp-Miller, The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia, trans. F. S. Flint and D. F. Tait (London: G. B. Putnam's Sons, 1927), German ed. 1926
82. Engelstein, "Paradigms, Pathologies," 867. In addition to those discussed above, such works also include Claudio Sergio Ingerflom, "Communistes contres castrats (1929-1930): Les enjeux du conflit," in Nikolaï Volkov, La secte des castrats, ed. Michel Desgranges and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995), xi-lxiii
83. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Sotd of Russia: Masochism and the Cult of Suffering (New York: New York University Press, 1995)
84. Aleksandr Etkind, "Russkie skoptsy: Opyt istorii," Zvezda, no. 4 (1995): 131-63
85. Etkind, Khlyst, 676. By contrast, Igal Halfin sees the origins of Bolshevik millenarism not in prerevolutionary Russian religious culture but rather in the eschatological schema of Western Marxism
86. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 228. Kharkhordin identifies as an important part of Dostoevski's religious vision the potential for the Orthodox Church to "completely supplant the secular state and its use of the means of violence by bringing church means of influence to regulate all terrains of human life⋯. Paradoxically, the Russian Revolution may have tried translating the Dostoevsky project into reality."
87. See his "Civil Society and Orthodox Christianity," Europe-Asia Studies 50, 6 (1998): 957
88. See Pretty, "The Saints of the Revolution: Political Activists in 1890s Ivanovo-Voznesensk and the Path of Most Resistance," Slavic Review 54, 2 (1995): 281
89. and Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (New York: Athenaeum, 1974), 218, orig. 1965
90. Gregory L. Freeze, "The Wages of Sin: The Decline of Public Penance in Imperial Russia," in Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, ed. Stephen K. Batalden (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 53-82
91. See Rüting, Pavlov undder Nette Mensch
92. Engelsteins review of the renewed interest in Russian religion and its interaction with the forces of revolution offers a salient critique of such analyses (although she does not specifically address the work of Kharkhordin): "To be true to our own postmodern locations, we might hesitate, in sum, before reducing the specificity of historical events to the effects of timeless abstractions, like 'the Utopian mentality' or the collective 'Freudian psyche. We might pause, in our disillusionment with tired forms of explanation, before attributing the course of these events to the influence of metaphors invented by intellectuals like ourselves" (Engelstein, "Paradigms, Pathologies," 877)