Вестник Православного Свято-Тихоновского гуманитарного университета: Серия I. Богословие, философия (Dec 2020)
Religious procession as an experience of religious identification
Abstract
This article deals with the experience of the pedestrian pilgrimage of Velikoretsky Procession as a factor in strengthening the religious identity of a person. The research methodology is based on an interdisciplinary approach. Empirical data has been obtained during in-depth interviews with pilgrims who are regular church goers and has been analysed from the point of view of the infl uence of the procession on the development of their religious identity. The article studies the structure of the consciousness of believers by means of a phenomenological analysis which uses fi ndings of F. Heiler’s phenomenology of religion. F. Heiler’s method of “concentric circles” and his reconstruction of the structure of the sacred world have led to the conclusion that the intentionality of the consciousness of pilgrims is connected with the perception of institutional aspects of Velikoretsky tradition. Participation in the procession is viewed by pilgrims as a “breakthrough of reality”, since the sacred world of the procession is contrasted with everyday life and everyday routine. There is a close relationship between attitudes towards religious objects and religious self-determination of the individual. Despite the fact that most participants in the procession pay much attention to external sides of religiosity, when they plunge into the practice of the procession, they begin to think more deeply about specifi c issues of faith, sin, redemption, practical morality. This leads them to experience unity with the sacred and religious self-knowledge. The experience of the religious procession contributes to the emotional intensifi cation of their sense of belonging to Orthodoxy. Analysis of the interviews showed that pilgrims describe the events of the procession and religious attributes not so much on the basis of “eye evidence”, but rather on the basis of mental constructs. It is the intentionality of the consciousness of believers that determines the perception of sacred objects. Their content is connected with the rational and mystical aspects of religious ideas of the pilgrims. The movement from the institutional elements of religion (the world of external manifestations of the sacred) to the rational (i.e. to the holy in the world of spiritual ideas) and, fi nally, to the mystical dimension of holiness allows one to use not only the sociological inventory but also philosophical methods in the study of religious identity.
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