A “Monastery in the World”: The Cultural Meaning of a Concept

Abstract

The center of our attention in the present study is the concept of monastyr’ v miru “monastery in the world,” which became a set expression the late 19th – early 20th century Russian literature and religious philosophy. The emergence of this concept in the discourse of the epoch witnesses to a new manner of demarcation of the spaces of the “church” and the “world,” and we shall reveal this intellectual transformation through the contextual analysis of the mentioned set phrase. We apply an interdisciplinary approach, thus the article analyzes not only literary, but also religious material. The concept “monastery in the world” filled a gap in the language and was accountable for describing new reality in social and intellectual life at the boundary between the societal and religious ideas and practices. The first what we see in sources is an ambitious and accusatory rhetoric of expansion of the monastery to the realm of worldly life, that in the second half of the 19th century has lost its Christian groundings. However, the opposite type of rhetoric — that of defense of the symbolic monastery walls from the evil worldly expansion — comes soon. This strategy became especially current during the revolutionary turbulence, when clergy and laity envisage the “world” as a power destroying the walls of the symbolic monastery — Christian communities, souls of Christians or their religious way of life.

Keywords

• monastery in the world
• russian orthodoxy
• rhetoric strategies
• intellectual history
• fyodor dostoevsky
• literature of the silver age
• russian revolution