The Temple and the Rite: Social Functions of the Sacred by Davydov I.P.

Abstract

The book under review was published in 2021 and its title can be translated as The Temple and the Rite: Social Functions of the Sacred. It became a result of fifteen years of work conducted by Doctor of Philosophy Ivan Pavlovich Davydov. Epistemology and methodology of religious science, problems of myth and rite, as well as the issues of religious art, are central to his research. The basic method used by I. P. Davydov is structural functionalism and the theoretical base he applies is the philosophy of Postmodernism represented by the names of G. Bataille, R. Caillois, J. Kristeva, M. Foucault, M. Blanchot. The book is divided into two main parts. In the first part I. P. Davydov focuses on theoretical issues: the concept of transgression in the philosophy of Postmodernism, definition of the term religion, description of the functions of religion, and specification of the myth-ritual concept. The author introduces his original method of functional analysis of archetypal images of the collective unconscious. In the second part of the book, the author deals with the study of Christian hymnography, iconography, and architecture through the prism of the method mentioned above. It can be regarded as an attempt to substantiate and verify the theoretical constructions of the first part by analyzing the empirical material of religious art. This part of the research serves to illustrate the practical application of the author’s method. Here the author defines major religious concepts, such as semiotics of sacred spaces, iconography, iconology, and icon, from the position of religious studies and philosophy and substantiates their scientific importance. We may conclude that this work in light of the latitude of the problems raised in it can be useful for the wide range of researchers working not only in the field of religious studies but also in the other fields of knowledge: anthropology, cultural studies, art history, psychoanalysis, etc. The readers can acquaint themselves with the method of functional analysis in the first part of the book and adapt it to their research, using the examples from the second part of the book as the patterns.