The article considers the role that the images of the saints play in the discourses of war and violence in contemporary Russian Orthodoxy, primarily among Orthodox nationalists, parish subculture and movements of 2012–2018. Taking Mark Juergensmeyer’s concept of “cosmic war”, the authors examine the images of the saints as the personifications of the sacred that express certain meanings in the context of the symbolic struggle between good and evil. The saints establish the sacred cosmos, protect it, purify it, and sacrifice themselves for its sake, and their examples is used both in constructing the narrative and performing of the militant-minded believers. In the article, the images of the saints are classified into four categories: warrior-rulers, purifying rulers, protectors of faith, and soldiers martyrs. Particular attention is paid to the role of saints in legitimizing real wars, public conflicts and rallies against the demonstration of “blasphemous” films, exhibitions and performances. The authors conclude that these personifications constitute an autonomous source of authority that makes “militancy” the feature of the tradition, and that the image of a particular saint is highly variable, being able to legitimize violence to a greater or lesser extent depending on the character of a group.

A seriality of traumatic experience of the Orthodox temples attenders inspires an analysis the problem with a focus on surplus informal negative sanctions on the part of church staff towards church-attenders. Informal negative sanctions repertoire includes both verbal (comments, rebukes) and kinetic (interruption of private space or physical displacement away the trajectory of locomotion) pretenses. The main question of the paper investigates the structure of sacral space: how does its geometry provokes constant conflicts. A configuration of the Orthodox churches’ sacral space (in particularly, in the main cathedrals of S-Petersburg Metropolis of the Russian Orthodox Church) due to a high altar bar, predestinating trajectories of locomotion and direction of attenders’ sight, provides a shortage of acoustic and visual attenders’ involvement into a worship-service. A redistribution of these loci between churchgoers creates a main drama of their mutual attendance during a liturgy. Outside of liturgy a trajectory of visitors as a rule synchronizes with a running along a church perimeter, i.e. the belt of tangible objects (icons flanked by candlesticks, reliquaries) – mediators of sacral communication. Though even thinly populated, a church place forces attenders find themselves in condition of a space shortage, so far as a trajectory of their locomotion is near to be interrupted by church staff, controlling both an appearance of visitors, their potential invasion into loci with unobvious lines and a correspondence their actions to a set of rules with a high degree of implicitness.

A collision in this case is provokes by a functional ambiguity, when a church, represented as a religious facility aimed public worships, in a break between services acts both a space for private requires or individual prayer, and as a commercial institute for religiously marked items selling, and sometimes as a museum-concert complex targeted leisure pastime. An extra well of a sacred space collisions is an insider parish status asymmetry, when an activity of catechism is occupied not by clerics or catechists, but by elder ladies with a superstitious behavior as their peculiarity.

The article discusses the hypothesis of the emergence of Russian Neo-Paganism from right-wing conservative political Orthodoxy because of radicalization through the strengthening of its anti-Semitic component. Relationships and common elements of the worldview that united the first neo-pagan ideologues A.M. Ivanov (Skuratov), V.N. Emelyanov, A.A. Dobrovolsky and the Orthodox far right are traced. Based on some facts of their biographies, the article suggests the possible reasons for their radicalization and distancing from both Orthodox conservatives and liberal dissidents.

The main reason for the radicalization of the anti-Semitic discourse of the Neo-Pagans is its biologization, which partly continued the tradition of pre-revolutionary thought, but also introduced some ideas that stemmed from the ethnological primordialism that prevailed in Soviet scholarship. “Jewry” thus defined became an eternal and unchanging destructive force in history, and Christianity that arose in its midst became an instrument for the destruction of “Aryan” cultures.

The formation of the “image of the enemy” in the first neo-pagan ideologists’s works is considered in this article through the prism of Rene Girard’s concept of “texts of persecution”. Conclusions are drawn regarding their structure based on the mythological logic and the fundamental role in the formation of the neo-pagan worldview.

The article is concerned with the interpretation of the history of demoniac possession in the city ofLoudunin visual culture (cinema). In the XVII century, Jeanne de Angers, the abbess of the Ursuline monastery in the city ofLoudun, accused the local priest Urbein Grandier that he sent demons and obsession upon the abode. Father Grandier was executed by burning, Jeanne de Angers got rid of the possession of 7 demons a few years later. But the very fact of a woman’s victory over a man attracts not only the attention of researchers, but also writers, artists and musicians. Grandier was accounted to be a victim, and Jeanne de Angers was demonized. In the middle of the XX century two movies about the Loudun possessed were produced in which the problem of violence, demoniac possession and sacrifi got new sounding through interpretation of concepts “evil”, “love”, “loneliness”. Both characters were declared as victims, not just one of them – Jeanne de Angers or the Father Urbein Grandier. The thirst for love and the struggle against loneliness oppose the prohibition to feel and act outside the established doctrinal boundaries. Forcibly suppressed, but so natural desire, fi becomes lust, and then transforms into violence. Religion, on the other hand, pushes them out into the sphere of personal choice. This article makes an attempt to trace the changes in the representation of violence in the history of the Loudun possessed in artistic culture: from pure violence directed against the devil and his accomplice-priest through the separation of “grains from chaff (nuns are evil, and the priest is victim) to the idea of “church system that generates a situation is evil, and its members (although they make terrible mistakes) are victims”. This transformation of representation coincided with a visual revolution, and we can assume that this is due to a separation from the narrativisation of the plot to attraction the observer (viewer) to its performativity. Evil and sacred become ambivalent, and violence, although condemned, but also poetized at the same time.

This article presents an analysis of the way videogame “Cultist Simulator” by Weather Factory represents religious believers. I try to include this project in a wider context created by the ways in which different mainstream games portray religion and its followers. Main hypothesis is following: in many cases representation of religion is based around strict dualism between secular sphere, strongly associated with individualism and pursuit of personal happiness, and religious space which tries to strip any character of its individuality and uniqueness, and, ultimately, to dehumanize him. Cultist simulator, while retaining this base conflict between “human” secular space and “inhuman” religious world presents quite different approach. In this game, religion becomes the way for character and, through him, his player to express his own individuality.

The article is a review of the book by anthropologist and theologian Rene Girard “Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre”. The author examines the key ideas of the book in their relation to earlier works of Girard. Girard’s interpretation of the book “On war” by Carl von Clausewitz is also analyzed. It is suggested that Clausewitz acts for Girard not as a philosopher of war, but rather as a prophet of the mimetic theory of Girard himself.

(trans. Zygmont A., Shapovalova E.) 

• Couplets chantés dans le Temple de la Liberté, le jour de l’Apothéose des Bustes de Marat, et Le Pelletier
• Hymne en l’honneur de Lepeletier at de Marat 
• Aux Manes de Marat 
• Aux Manes de Lepeletier .