Anathema: Transformation of the genre in the secular and postsecular eras

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to give an outline of those multilateral changes which the speech genre of anathema has undergone in Russian culture of the XIX–XXI centuries, and to shed light on the causes of these changes. Since anathema belongs to sacred performatives, whose pragmatic success directly depends on a set of metaphysical views peculiar to the Middle Ages, the fate of their entire subsystem in the conditions of global spiritual shifts of Modern and Postmodern eras is traced by means of an example of that genre. It is proved that, although anathema has not gone out of use in the Russian Church, it has undergone genre conservation in one direction and hybridization in another, as well as a serious theological rethinking. This latter process began after the excommunication of Leo Tolstoy (1901), the event that had an extraordinary resonance in the early twentieth century. In connection with it, “The Definition of the Holy Synod” is analyzed. It was the main performative which created that event and became a new milestone in the genre history of the Russian-Orthodox anathema. It is shown that this, as well as subsequent documents of that type, were determined in its genre specificity by the contemporary worldview context, the memory of the genre and a number of secondary factors. 

Keywords

• sacred performatives
• felicity conditions
• hybrid genre forms
• excommunication of l. tolstoy
• secularization