Alexey Muravyov: “This is a substitution in which they try to squeeze secular space into the narrow framework of church tasks”

A historian of Christianity, head of the Middle Eastern section of the School of Oriental Studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Alexey Muravyov, commented on the creation of a dissertation council in theology for the SOVA Center.

Discussions about the creation of a dissertation council in theology have been going on for quite a long time, somewhere since the early 2000s, when attempts began to be actively made to introduce something like the Law of God into the school, so this is an old story associated with the idea of ​​reviving Orthodoxy. It was a whole series of projects that implied that a return to the elements of a religious society would either save Russia or take it onto some new path. In general, the idea of ​​saving the Yeltsin regime through its Orthodoxization. It all looks rather anachronistic.

To be honest, I don’t really understand who the beneficiary of this initiative is. It can be assumed that graduates of theological schools who begin to receive secular degrees and accreditations. Those graduates who obviously either do not want to work in the church or cannot find work there. The second option is people who want to study theology, but do not belong to church educational institutions, and such discouncil gives them the opportunity to legalize their aspirations. That is, there are two problems here: the status problem and the problem of logging out of the system. Theologians who find themselves in the secular space want to be the same candidates and doctors of science as, say, biologists and physicists. The status of church educational institutions in our country is quite low, it is a closed system, essentially subcultural, and people want to have some kind of decent appearance. It should be noted, however, that secular university theology, all these bachelor's and master's degrees, have not become widespread, and there are not very many applicants for these areas. In Moscow there is the Orthodox St. Tikhon's University for the Humanities, in St. Petersburg there is the Russian Christian Academy for the Humanities - and what else? Perhaps, apart from these two educational institutions, you can’t name anything, at least I don’t see any others.

In addition, we, as always, are moving in the opposite direction from global trends. In Europe and America, theology was initially part of the university curriculum, and then it was removed from there. My academic activities are largely connected not only with Moscow State University and the Higher School of Economics, but also with Princeton University. Princeton was one of the first universities to take theology outside the university and create a theological seminary. In general, we have a very out-of-date system for awarding degrees, in which there is a Higher Attestation Commission that stamps these degrees. We see that there are a lot of problems associated with this - Dissernet now regularly tells us about this. Although in our country, at the very beginning of Dmitry Medvedev’s reign, attempts were made to reform the system: they declared that the Higher Attestation Commission would be abolished and scientific councils would be created at universities that would begin to award degrees. For the outside world, a degree from a certain educational institution is a line in the ranking: if you have a degree from Moscow State University and you are applying for some job, and a person with a degree from the University of Vasyuki is applying along with you, then your degree is rated higher than his. And if it is known that at his university a degree is given for money, then it will not be quoted at all. We have a mossy centralized structure of the Higher Attestation Commission, which can be ordered - let’s organize a council on greening the Moon tomorrow, and there will be a council on greening the Moon.

In general, speaking from the point of view of the structure of our culture, theology, or theology, does not occupy the place in it that it occupies in the West. We essentially have no tradition of theology. In the West, theology shaped the transition of religious discourse from the sphere of preaching to the sphere of intellectual reflection. This began in the period of late antiquity and finally took hold in the Middle Ages. But in our country, essentially speaking, the religious never went beyond the limits of preaching. In theological seminaries and academies there were attempts to follow the Western course, but it was a little forced and did not develop into a serious trend. We have a history of religion, a history of patristics, but we cannot call it theology in the full sense of the word.

Theology, as a rule, has apologetic or polemical tasks, which are answered using the methods of philosophy. It solves not scientific problems - this is not a study where there is a hypothesis and conclusions - but much narrower ones: to refute the arguments of some heretic or to prove some theological position in a polemic with someone. That is, the tasks are religious, not scientific. There is another problem - the problem of subject and object. Let's say, in biology, in order to study living organisms, you need to have some absolute point, evolutionary teaching or cellular theory, which gives you the opportunity to abstract from the level of reasoning of a living organism and its tasks. For the same purpose, there is the science of religious studies, which abstracts from religious problems in order to reason about religious phenomena. Religious studies does not set the task of studying the religious world from the inside; it sets the task of making an object out of it and studying it.

And theology formulates religious tasks as internal tasks, and solves them as internal ones. Therefore, strictly speaking, its natural place is in church educational institutions. In the West now it happens that some church, Anglican, or Presbyterian, or Catholic, sets religious studies tasks in its educational institutions, or sets theological tasks, but at the same time uses the language of religious studies - then religious studies flows into theology and vice versa. The main question here is why this is being done, who is the customer: the church needs this - in its own field, please. But some religious figures here say: abolish religious studies, because it is atheism, and instead let’s do theology. Some people call this obscurantism or clericalization, but, in my opinion, these are the wrong words - it is simply a substitution in which they try to squeeze the secular space into the narrow framework of church tasks. It didn't work and won't work.