Task for Practice seminar №2

Ex.1 Analyze these ideas of G.Florovsky about different cultures:

 

As a matter of fact, the question of the relationship between Christianity and Culture is never discussed in abstracto, just in this generalized form, or, in any case, it should not be so discussed. The culture about which one speaks is always a particular culture. The concept of " Culture" with which one operates is always situation-conditioned, i.e. derived from the actual experience one has, in his own particular culture, which one may cherish or abhor, or else it is an imaginary concept, " another culture, " an ideal, about which one dreams and speculates. Even when the question is put in general terms, concrete impressions or wants can be always detected. When " Culture" is resisted or denied by Christians, it is always a definite historical formation which is taken to be representative of the idea. In our own days it would be the mechanized or " Capitalistic" civilization, inwardly secularized and therefore estranged from any religion. In the ancient times it was the pagan Graeco-Roman civilization. The starting point in both cases is the immediate impression of clash and conflict, and of practical incompatibility of divergent structures, which diverge basically in spirit or inspiration.

The early Christians were facing a particular civilization, that of the Roman and Hellenistic world. It was about this civilization that they spoke, it was about this concrete " system of values" that they were critical and uneasy. This civilization, moreover, was itself changing and unstable at that time, and was, in fact, involved in a desperate struggle and crisis. The situation was complex and confused. The modern historian cannot escape antinomy in his interpretation of this early Christian epoch, and one cannot expect more coherence in the interpretation given by the contemporaries. It is obvious that this Hellenistic civilization was in a certain sense ripe or prepared for " conversion, " and can even be regarded itself, again in a certain sense, as a kind of the Praeparatio Evangelica, and the contemporaries were aware of this situation. Already St. Paul had suggested this, and the Apologists of the second century and early Alexandrinians did not hesitate to refer to Socrates and Heraclitus, and indeed Plato, as forerunners of Christianity. On the other hand, they were aware, no less than we are now, of a radical tension between this culture and their message, and the opponents were conscious of this tension, also. The Ancient World resisted conversion, because it meant a radical change and break with its tradition in many respects. We can see now both the tension and continuity between " the Classical" and " the Christian." Contemporaries, of course, could not see it in the same perspective as we do, because they could not anticipate the future. If they were critical of " culture, " they meant precisely the culture of their own time, and this culture was both alien and inimical to the Gospel…

The cautious or even negative attitude of early Christians toward philosophy, toward art, including both painting and music, and especially toward the art of rhetorics, can be fully understood only in the concrete historical context. The whole structure of the existing culture was determined and permeated by a wrong and false faith. One has to admit that certain historical forms of culture are incompatible with the Christian attitude toward life, and therefore must be rejected or avoided. But this does not yet pre-judge the further question, whether a Christian culture is possible and desirable. In our own days, one may, or rather should, be sharply critical of our contemporary civilization, and even be inclined to welcome its collapse, but this does not prove that civilization as such should be damned and cursed, and that Christians should return to barbarism or primitivism.

As a matter of fact, Christianity accepted the challenge of the Hellenistic and Roman culture, and ultimately a Christian Civilization emerged. It is true that this rise of Christian Culture has been strongly censured in modern times as an " acute Hellenization" of Christianity, in which the purity and simplicity of the Evangelical or Biblical faith is alleged to have been lost. Many in our own days are quite " iconoclastic" with regard to culture en bloc, or at least to certain fields of culture, such as " Philosophy" (equated with " sophistics") or Art, repudiated as a subtle idolatry, in the name of Christian faith. But, on the other hand, we have to face the age-long accumulation of genuine human values in the cultural process, undertaken and carried in the spirit of Christian obedience and dedication to the truth of God.

What is important in this case is that the Ancient Culture proved to be plastic enough to admit of an inner " transfiguration." Or, in other words, Christians proved that it was possible to re-orient the cultural process, without lapsing into a pre-cultural state, to re-shape the cultural fabric in a new spirit. The same process which has been variously described as a " Hellenization of Christianity" can be construed rather as a " Christianization of Hellenism." Hellenism was, as it were, dissected by the Sword of the Spirit, was polarized and divided, and a " Christian Hellenism" was created. Of course, " Hellenism" was ambiguous and, as it were, double-faced. And certain of the Hellenistic revivals in the history of the European thought and life have been rather pagan revivals, calling for caution and strictures. It is enough to mention the ambiguities of the Renaissance, and in later times just Goethe or Nietzsche. But it would be unfair to ignore the existence of another Hellenism, already initiated in the Age of the Fathers, both Greek and Latin, and creatively continued through the Middle Ages and the Modern times. What is really decisive in this connection is that " Hellenism" has been really changed. One can be too quick in discovering " Hellenic accretions" in the fabric of Christian life, and at the same time quite negligent and oblivious of the facts of this " transfiguration."

(Excerpts from an article by G.Florovsky “Faith and culture”)

 

Ex.2 Analyze these ideas of S.Kara-Murza about different cultures:

European civilization and European mode of thinking have been waging a struggle against traditional archaic societies for more than three centuries. Fragile, unprotected cultures of these societies in most instances turned out to be incompetitive in economic and military terms. They perished and their peoples were dying out or were remelted in the ethnic melting pot. Only a few big civilizations managed to erect cultural, idological or military barriers (iron curtains of various types) and to survive and initiate their own modernization programs without destroying traditional cultural structures. First of all these are Japan, China, India and Russia. At present original societies are recovering and gaining strength also in other regions.

I would like to focus here on the tragic experience of Russia which was the scene of revolutionary modernization under the slogan of progress and freedom twice in this century. In 1917 the revolution was carried out under the banners of radical ideology of industrial civilization, i.e., Marxism. Now at the close of the century it is going on under the banners of equally radical branch of liberalism.

In both cases academic community plays a very active role in the revolution and science serves a basis to establish the legitimacy of the revolutionary political, economic and social order. I leave out the declared goals and ideals of perestroyka. We take that these goals, such as democracy, freedom, human rights, are noble. But a revolution that did not proclaim noble goals is not known to history! Nevertheless these concepts are ideograms. They do not express fundamental values but acquire meaning depending on the context whereas the context is represented by actions with respect to real conditions in which people and the world exist.

Although ideologies (Marxism and liberalism) of the two Russian revolutions seem to be in strong opposition to each other, actually they are based on the same fundamental postulates regarding the picture of the world, nature, man, society and state. They are structurally hostile to a traditional society. Therefore, it is no wonder that the matrices of ideological postulates and actions of the 1917 revolution and perestroyka are remarkably similar and offer an opportunity to study the conflict of two types of civilization close to the experimental mode. In both cases this conflict turns out to be the nationl catastrophe for Russia. After 1917 it was overcome though through heavy shocks and sacrifices and basic world outlook structures were recovered and a strong impetus for development was generated. Social conditions have changed now (society has become much more complex and urban) and the technology of revolution has become radically different (destruction of cultural structures in the first place instead of social ones). It looks like the catastrophe is much more grave and is leading to the ruin of development potential and, probably, to complete breakup.

The clear-cut diagnosis of the Russian intellectuals, the beautiful but sick subculture, was made at the end of previous century by Dostoevsky and after the 1917 revolution by Russian philosophers. This is a cultural hybrid of deep religious and painful moral feeling of archaic Russia with ideals and scientific ideology of the West, the hybrid unknown at that time both in the West and in the East. Today in the course of perestroyka we are being convinced that congenital deseases of the Russian intellectuals have manifested themselves with much more power (but also with many important mutations). And again the intellectuals, this favorite child and the driving force of revolution, are being prepared to become its food.

Comparative analysis of both experiments on Russia leaves much to be said about vulnerable points of traditional society, about sufferings that are endured by a person brought up in such society when radical liberalization and atomization occur in it, about processes generated in chaotic conditions when cultural and economic structures are going to ruin. Through the prism of ecological thinking it is clearly seen how social technologies generated by the technomorphic paradigm when applied to the traditional society cause not only destruction of great values (such as peasant's culture, for example) but also create unknown dangers on the global scale.

Taking the USSR as an example we can observe what unforseeable consequences may result once such harmless systems as arts and science are broken. We witness how in youth counterculture violence and terrorism free of ideology are glorified in a brilliant poetic form. Who could predict what will become of the " red brigades" in the former USSR and how will they collaborate with radical movements of the first and the third world? We also witness the emergence of a new social entity: an unemployed marginal scientist nursing the idea of social revenge. According to forecasts of the Ministry of Labor 2.5 million people from the R& D sector will loose their jobs in 1992. Who could claim to be aware of the way of thinking and behavior pattern of this social group unknown to the world? The West senses a danger only due to 50 thousand researchers working on nuclear weapons becoming marginal. This danger is ridiculously small as compared to the revenge tools that are in posession of unemployed chemists, molecular biologists and virologists.

As a matter of fact, Western civilization has not yet recognized that it faces the real dilemma: either to reject destruction and find a way to coexist with traditional societies and even to enter into some kind of symbiosis with them or to be ready to instantly and ruthlessly destroy vast numbers of people. The " Desert Storm" is just a smallscale experiment but we do not know yet how it affected the mentality of the Western intellectual elite.

Perestroyka is a largerscale experiment but in this instance we until now only observe a senseless rejoice at the sight of the crushed " Empire of Evil". This is a triumph of the technomorphic mode of thinking, this is a way to continuing simplification of the world, to the end of history. This way leads to illness and degradation of the human ecosystem and there is a rather high probability that this way will be chosen.
We could only desire and hope that the instinct of selfpreservation and a natural religious organ which is still present in most inhabitants of the Earth will direct us to the road of preserving and increasing variety of the human ecosystem variety of ethnic groups, cultures, State and economic systems. (Excerpts from an article by S.Kara-Murza, Science, Ideology and traditional society: towards hew ecology of humankind. // " Towards Eco-Ethics. The Proceedings of the third UNESCO Science and Culture Forum. Belem, Brasil 5-10 April 1992". UNESCO PRESS, 1993. P. 68-69.)