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РОССИЙСКОЕ ОБЩЕСТВО В XXI СТОЛЕТИИ
DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2023-32-4-56-70
yflK 1:304.5
The Compensatory Function of Religious Institutions in the Society's Institutional Matrix
P.A. BARAKHVOSTOV*
*Pavel A. Barakhvostov - PhD in Political Science, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science; Associate Professor, Belarusian State Economic University, Minsk, Republic of Belarus, barakhvostov@yandex.by, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8943-5980
Citation: Barakhvostov P.A. (2023) The Compensatory Function of Religious Institutions in the Society's Institutional Matrix. Mir Rossii, vol. 32, no 4, pp. 56-70. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2023-32-4-56-70
Abstract
This paper tests the hypothesis of the immanent compensatory nature of religious institutions in socio-cultural systems. The methodological basis of the research is the neo-institutional approach supplemented with the theory of institutional matrices.
The case of Russia, with a dominating X-type institutional matrix, is employed to demonstrate the compensatory function performed by Orthodox Christianity from the very moment of its adoption.
The decentralization of the Orthodox Church, the existence of deposits upon entering a monastery, the absence of monastic orders with their rigid system of command and control, the presence of wandering monks, holy fools, and fraternities demonstrated the dominance of Y-matrix institutions in the organization of religious life in the pre-Petrine period. In this way, religious institutions compensated for the highly centralized nature of Russian society, where X-matrix institutions were dominant. Peter the Great's reform, aimed at restructuring church life according to the Western model, deformed the important compensatory function of religious institutions. As a result, it sparked social resentment that manifested itself in the spread of religious sectarianism, namely, the long-lived and ineradicable Russian sect, the Khlysts. The Khlyst sect was an organization dominated by Y-matrix institutional forms in economic, political, and ideological terms. It split from the Orthodox Church, which was undergoing a transformation to the X-matrix type. However, having become a complementary institution in the structure of the religion of the Russian state, the Khlyst sect was unable to fully ensure a compensatory function or to smooth out the institutional imbalance in the entire Russian society on the eve of the Russian revolutions.
The function of religious institutions in Y-matrix societies is also considered. It is shown that the Catholic Church, having a rigid hierarchy and strict discipline, initially had the characteristics inherent in X-type sociocultural institutions. However, the excessive enforcement of redistributive
The article was received in March 2023.
institutions in the sociocultural domain spurred the emergence of the compensatory religious movement of Catharism (and one of its branches—Albigensianism). With the decomposition of Feudalism and centralization (strengthening of X-type political institutions in the matrix), the rigid structure of the Catholic Church weakened and transformed, which led to the foundation of Jansenism, denying free will and calling for the fostering of redistributive elements within religion.
The appearance of different branches of Protestantism is related to different political institutional forms in Western countries. Lutheranism arose and spread in the principalities of Germany and supplemented German absolutism with its mild doctrinal structure. In the development of Lutheranism, the compensatory function of religion is manifested, striving to restore the institutional balance in German society, which at that time was skewed towards X-type institutions. Calvinism, with its more rigid doctrine, originated in Switzerland, which was a republic where Y-type institutions dominated the economic and political spheres. Through the spread of Calvinism, religion tried to compensate for the consequences of the active spread of market economy institutions and federal political institutions in the society, in order to strengthen national consolidation.
Thus, religious institutions perform a compensatory function in the process of social transformation flanked with the emergence of new economic and/or political institutions: if the latter are market, redistributive religious institutions arise, and vice versa. Due to the utmost importance of religion, this bears witness to the impossibility of unifying the entire institutional environment market-wise or redistribution-wise. As long as political ideology is ontologically a phenomenon analogous to religion, in any liberal democratic system (market type) sooner or later sizeable forces exhibiting antiliberal trends (redistributive type) will form, and vice versa.
Keywords: institutional environment, institutional matrix, market institutions, redistributive institutions, sect, religion
Introduction
Various countries on various continents have been going through decades of intense economic, political, and social transformation, which drastically adds to the topicality of studying the formation and evolution of societal institutional frameworks. In this respect, the theory of institutional matrices is of particular interest [Kirdina 2014; Kirdina-Chandler 2017; Nowakowski 2013; Bednar 2018; Dzvinchuk et al. 2020; Ahmad, Hall 2023; Barakhvostov 2022]. It relies on three fundamental ideas: the dichotomy of economic system types (redistributive and market) formulated by Polanyi [Polanyi 1957]; Parsons's structural functionalism [Parsons 1991] that implies the integrity of society, or, in other words, the congruency of its subsytems; and the effect of social memory investigated by Wittfogel [Wittfogel 1963], Assmann [Assmann 2004], Gumilev [Gumilev 2000] etc., which make the social-economic development of society dependent on primary social forms.
According to the theory of institutional matrices, society may be perceived as a system of interconnected and interdependent subsystems—economic, political, and socio-cultural/ideological. Each of them serves a certain social function: the economic domain sustains the receipt of resources for the society's livelihood, the political one manages society to help it successfully achieve its goals, and the
socio-cultural/ideological one forms the basis for communication and transmits social norms between generations. The whole system is regulated through a complex set of institutions, understood in the widest sense as the rules of the game that determine the direction of social activity [North 1991]. Among the latter, basic institutions forming the institutional matrix stand out—"innate, historically sustainable, and constantly reproducing itself historical invariants that let society survive, keep its integrity, and evolve in its material medium" [Kirdina 2014, p. 56]. Basic institutions pile up into matrices which are a sort of social memory card. These matrices may be of one of two alternative types: X or Y. Below is a description of the key institutions of these matrices [Kirdina 2014, pp. 360-381], seen as essential to this research.
The basic economic institutions of the X-type matrix are institutions of the redistributive economy: public property (ownership of all production resources and the products obtained from their usage by society as a whole via creation of centralized structures); redistribution which includes the accumulation of products coming from individual producers as part of common property, coordination by the Center of the movement of economic streams, and redistribution by the Center of resources and products for further production and consumption; in other words, coordination is the prime mechanism of interaction for participants of economic activity, which necessitates mandatory involvement of the Center; and service labor [Bessonova 1993], which is the obligation and right of citizens to work at objects of common property and qualify for a corresponding share of material and non-material goods necessary for their own living and reproduction.
The basic political institutions in the X-type matrix are a unitary (unitarily centralized) political organization in which territorial units are co-subject to one center, vertical relations prevail over horizontal ones, and political power is uniform everywhere; the hierarchy of power headed by the Center laying out the rules and responsibilities for lower levels of power and providing them with material and financial resources; appointment (instead of election) as the way of filling vacant seats in the system of public administration; complaints (through the whole hierarchy upward) as a mechanism of feedback.
In the socio-cultural/ideological domain, the basic institutions of the X-type matrix are a communitarian outlook acknowledging the community's rights and interests over those of an individual, i.e., the dominance of "We over Me"; egalitarianism, or the striving for a social structure based on universal equality, defined as the equal duty to fulfill social tasks and equal access to public goods; order, or the principle of arrangement of public life, which is ingrained in the public consciousness and stipulates the intertwining of social subjects and the need for discipline and austerity (the restriction of individual choice) for the benefit of all.
The Y-type matrix has the following basic economic institutions: private property, implying that independent individual owners have full rights to possess, use, and administer their own property; exchange, or sale-purchase, a two-way movement of goods between economic subjects with the aim of mutual benefit; profit as a means of feedback and a mechanism of self-regulation of the market economy; wage labor as the main form of work activity under conditions of private property; competition of economic subjects for the resources needed and for remuneration for their work.
The basic political institutions of the Y-type matrix are federative political organizations, in which political structures and state entities are built from the grassroots
level up; a clear distinction in competences between the federal and regional powers; the possibility of distinctions in the organization of the systems of administration in different territorial units; the prevalence of horizontal relations over vertical ones between the regions and the federal center; elections as the way of recruitment for administrative posts at all levels; self-administration and subsidiarity, the principle that holds that territorial units of lower levels need to form administrative bodies of higher levels based on mutual agreement and transfer to them all the material and financial resources necessary for their functioning while the rights of lesser territorial units keep their priority with regard to the larger territorial bodies formed by them.
The key socio-cultural institution in the Y-type matrix is an individualist ideology. The interests and rights of individuals have unconditional superiority and are assumed as more valuable compared to the need to maintain social unity. The characteristics of such an ideology are individualism, or the principle of social action according to which individuals make choices based on their urge to get individual benefit, their interests are admitted superior in social relations, individual choice is prioritized over social responsibilities; freedom as the autonomy of individuals and the independence of their actions over those of other people, non-interference in the affairs of others; stratification, or the perception that any social structure relies on inequality.
Basic institutions manifest themselves in mobile, plastic, ever-changing institutional forms [Kirdina 2014, p. 59].
One of the crucial features of social systems is the co-existence of both types of matrices on principles of dominance-complementariness [Kirdina 2014, p. 74]. The institutions of the dominant matrix condition the social identity of individual societies, whereas the institutions of the complementary matrix ensure the sustainability of the social system and mitigate crises when the dominant institutions cannot efficiently function. In cooperation with the dominant institutions, the complementary ones foster the balanced development of one social domain or another, of all its institutions.
The object of this research is religion, which constitutes the response of people to the unknown and the primordial form of exploring the world. Carl Gustav Jung opined that religion underpins individuation of the self [Jung 1960]. Individuation unites two dialectically linked psychological features: first, self-awareness through opposition to society, inherent in every human being; second, the search of one's rightful place in this society, reflecting the need to remain an integral part of it.
Being an essential part of culture and of the institutional structure, religion may be analyzed using the theory of institutional matrices. This theory underpins the methodology of this research. Such an approach permits the detailed exploration of the interaction of different institutional forms of religious life in different countries and in different historical periods. Due to its important place in the social structure and its unwavering impact on the social life of a multitude of countries over the course of centuries, religion (or, more specifically, religious institutions) may act as a supplementary compensatory mechanism helping create a more balanced institutional evolution of society overall. This paper studies this compensatory function of religion, i.e., mitigating institutional disbalances in the economic, political, and socio-cultural/ideological domains. The compensatory function of religion is thereby the subject of this research.
The paper employs a historical analysis of the development of various religious institutional forms.
The Compensatory Function of Religious Institutions1 in Countries with the X-type Institutional Matrix
Russia is a classic example of a country with a dominating X-type institutional matrix. In the primary formation of society, owing to the geographical peculiarities of Rus, institutions of the X-type matrix soon came to prevail. The harsh Russian climate, which enjoys only a short warm period (no longer than five months), and soils of low fertility have never been favorable to agricultural activities. The need to tame nature and work in the impulsive mobilization mode along with a low surplus product (approximately three collected grains to one sown, which is 1.7 less than in Western Europe [Milov 1998, p. 554]) and high economic risks in agriculture led to collective labor under a single administrative body performing the collection-accumulation-redistribution of the final product to alleviate the disastrous consequences of possible bad harvests. Moreover, the geopolitical position of Russian lands at an Occident-Orient crossroads necessitated the establishment of a solid system of security. As a result, redistributive economic institutions, a centralized hierarchy of political power, and a communitarian ideology were cemented.
The Tartar-Mongol yoke2 was not particularly beneficial for the proliferation of Y-type matrix institutions, as it enforced a highly centralized (albeit intricate) style of government based on jarligs, a style that mixed Oriental servility before the central governing body with relative autonomy and, to a certain degree, arbitrariness in all affairs except taxation at the local level.
These distinctive features of the formation of the Russian institutional framework rendered its characteristics similar to those found in hydraulic societies [Wittfogel 1963], yet the density of hydraulic institutions was lower than in the East due to the bureaucratic machine being less rigid and ramified, which was a result of the impulsive character of labor on the part of Russians and of control on the part of Tartars. Later historical periods did not refute but absorbed those institutional phenomena, strengthening the dominance of X-type matrix institutions.
In the medieval West, the Church guided people through the post-Roman chaos of civil administration, which turned Catholicism into an extremely stiff structure with unconditional subordination, while Russian Orthodoxy, evolving against the background of ever-consolidating civil authorities, did not follow suit. On the contrary, the Russian state built a centralized political system of dominance and subjugation, while the Russian church tried to preserve a certain amount of democracy within itself. From the outset, the underpinning of Orthodoxy had been decentralization since the power of the patriarch could never be compared with that of the Pope. Thus, the patriarch Nikon, who sought to become head of the Universal Orthodox Church, referred Moscow to as a New Jerusalem, and assigned the leading role to himself above the Tsar [Zhidkov et al. 2017], was ousted from the Patriarchy and clergy by the court of the Local Council of the Russian Church in 1666.
1 Here and later across the text the term religious institution is employed in the narrowest sense, i.e. as a concrete religious institutional form.
2 The term yoke vis-à-vis Russia-Golden Horde relations was coined in 1479 by the Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz, the author of a Polish-centric history of Eastern Europe which emphasized the inability of Russian princes to counter Tartar-Mongol raids. Present-day cliometrics gives ambivalent assessments of the severity of the yoke, underscoring the positive effects of that era on the genesis of Muscovy.
A point of contention had always been the issue of church property, in particular, that of monasteries. The turn of the 15th and 16th centuries witnessed conflict between two influential streams within the Russian Church: the possessors (partisans of a church that enriched itself in order to be able to fulfill its functioning, attract more people, and engage in philanthropy) and the nonpossessors, who voiced the duty of monks to earn their own living and condemned the loan-sharking of monasteries and their contribution to the transformation of peasants into serfs and, eventually, slaves. At the Church Council of 1503, the possessors inflicted a decisive defeat on the nonpossessors, and Orthodox monasteries later morphed into rich landowners, receiving fiefs from the state and individuals as a result of donations, purchase, or the execution of testaments. This provided them with some economic independence from the state and was proof of the absence of a rigid hierarchy in the church structure. In other words, the economic life of monasteries relied on a rare equilibrium of redistributive (fiefs) and market (purchase) institutions. The instance of market and (reasonably) democratic forms of church organization were the so-called deposits for persons wishing to be admitted to monasteries, legalized by the Stoglav Council of 1551. In particular, princes and boyars, whose deposit into the monastery budget was sufficiently large, could strike an agreement with the abbot according to which the deposit-giver was allowed to live in the monastery for the rest of his days without the obligation to follow the monastery rules: he could eat meals in his own cell, not in the company of other monks, have servants, receive visitors, etc.
It should be noted that, in contrast to Catholicism, Orthodox monks have never formed monastic orders. Apart from the Catholic ones, only Greek Catholic orders are known (the Basilians), i.e., those that emerged through institutional transplantation.
Another distinction was the phenomenon of wandering monks. Errantry opened new horizons and unearthed hidden abilities. The wanderer came across unknown customs and cultures which changed his worldview for good. Wandering monks were open-minded in political and religious matters and effectively uncontrolled by the church administration and the state.
Among the wandering monks, holy fools stood out. They voluntarily chose to conceal their abilities and pretended to be devoid of virtues in order to condemn the world for getting rid of those virtues [Vinogradov, Ivanov 2005]. Such a phenomenon, originating from Byzantium, was widespread in Russian lands in the 16th-17th centuries. A holy fool could with impunity accuse anyone without regard to social status—from a beggar to the tsar. Anecdotal evidence holds that in 1570, during Lent, Ivan the Terrible came to Pskov to repeat the carnage he had recently initiated in Novgorod. After a church service, he asked to be blessed by Nicholas of Pskov, a local holy fool. Upon meeting the tsar, the fool handed him a cut of raw meat. Ivan the Terrible protested: "I am a Christian and do not eat meat during Lent." "But it is human blood that you drink", replied Nicholas. The tsar not only left the fool unpunished but did away with his plans.3
The phenomenon offraternities, initially taking the form of festivities of Orthodox flock during Christian holidays is also of interest. At the dinner table, fraternities decided on important issues, which may be regarded as a manifestation of self-administration. In Novgorod and Pskov, fraternities gained the right to judge their members for minor offences committed during the celebration.
3 Blessed Nicholas of Pskov. Russian Orthodox Church. Available at: http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/909446.html, accessed 10.03.2023 (in Russian).
The decentralization of the Orthodox Church, the existence of deposits upon admission to monasteries, the absence of monastic orders with strict discipline and control, and the phenomena of wandering monks, holy fools, and fraternities demonstrated the dominance of Y-type matrix institutions in Russian religious life before Peter the Great. Religious institutions thereby played a compensatory role to the highly centralized Russian society, where X-type matrix institutions prevailed.4
However, in the Russian imperial period, religion ceased to fulfill such a function, as the very institutional religious framework changed to lean on the total dominance of X-type matrix institutions. This was due to the church reform inaugurated by Peter the Great [Polyantseva 2015]. The starting point of the reform may be seen in the reinstatement in 1701 of the previously disbanded Monastryskii (Monastery) Prikaz, which, after a series of imperial decrees, exerted a decisive influence on church life. For instance, the Prikaz was granted the right to control taxation on church and monastery property. However, the measures undertaken did not suffice, and the Patriarchy was subsequently substituted with the Holy Synod, supervised by an OberProsecutor. Through this functionary, the head of the Russian state became head of the Russian Church, just like Henry VIII in England. From then on, the main sources of canon law for the Russian Church were imperial decrees and resolutions of the Holy Synod signed by the emperor. The Church was deprived of any semblance of democracy, and its functioning had to serve state interests only, a clear example of which was the notorious 1722 Synod resolution prescribing priests to break the seal of confession [Bezhanidze 2020]. In 1721-1722 church ranks were aligned with those in the Table of Ranks5, meaning that priests were seen as tantamount to state officials.
Monasteries, too, suffered a huge blow. Before Peter the Great, communities were allowed to decide on the establishment of a church or a monastery on their own, being autonomous in these issues; after Peter's reform the Synod's permission was required. Peter the Great himself considered monks as mere freeloaders, a meaningless and useless estate6.
As a consequence, the number of monks from 1724 to the end of the reign of the Empress Anna (1740), who endorsed Peter's policies in this domain, halved [Tsypin 2006, p. 113]. After 1701, monks were forbidden have paper and ink in their cells. Unprecedented measures were taken against wandering monks: transfer from one monastery to another was banned; church dignitaries pledged an oath to counteract errantry; clergymen had to capture wandering monks and send them to their superiors; a special police force was created to search for wandering monks.
Another attack on monasteries and monks was carried out with the 1764 Manifest proclaiming the secularization of church lands,7 according to which all the manors
4 The aversion to any hierarchy is reflected in the Orthodox doctrine itself: Orthodox Christians, in contrast to Catholics, reject the dogma of the Purgatory and the well-structured three-level vertical composition of the afterlife. To the clear orderliness of the Occidental faith, where St. Thomas Aquinas proved the existence of God with logical syllogisms, Orthodox Christians oppose irrationality and mysticism.
5 The Table of Ranks was a legislative act approved on January 24 (February 4), 1722 by Peter I. The Table of Ranks established a system of military, civil and court ranks, their correlation, the procedure for perfoming public service, as well as the sequence of rank changes in the Russian Empire.
6 Emperor Decree to the Synod "Decision on monasteries of January 31, 1724". Available at: http://www.bibliotekar.ru/2-8-99-11-cerkovnaya-reforma-petra-1/3.htm, accessed 17.03.2023 (in Russian)
7 The Manifest on the Secularization of Monastic Lands of February 29, 1764. Diletant.media. Available at: https://diletant.media/articles/39425498/, accessed 10.03.2023 (in Russian).
belonging to the Holy Synod, monasteries, and parishes were passed to the Collegium of Estates. Church institutions were deprived of the right to run estates. Peasants living there were obliged to pay a poll tax of 1.5 rubles each to the treasury, instead of corvée and quitrent. In the meantime, the maintenance of church institutions was entrusted to the state (through the Collegium of Estates), and to that end special monastery staffing was created.
Peter's church reform, designed to remodel church life after the Western (catholic) model, maimed the crucial compensatory function that Orthodoxy performed for a society with dominating X-type matrix institutions. The social and religious resentment born out of the reforms turned into the proliferation of sectarianism. Jean-Paul Sartre once said: "A person has a hole in his soul the size of God, and everyone fills it as best he can."8 The Russian protest against centralized Orthodoxy engendered the emergence and development of the most long-lived and ineradicable Russian sect - the Khlysts.
Pre-Petrine Russian Orthodoxy was rarely faced with sectarianism, only having to deal with the Judaizers at the end of the 15th century and the Old Believers in the 17th century, who appeared for different reasons. The emergence of the Khlysts, persecuted for the first time in the 1710s, may thus be directly linked with Peter's reforms.
In its doctrine, the Khlyst sect was unique [Berman 2020]. In contrast to other sectarians, the Khlysts pretended to adhere to Orthodoxy: they continued to go to church but at the same time took part in special gatherings—radenii (from the Russian radost -joy). The central element of radenii was whirling: participants whirled until they dropped, shouting prophesies, and, akin to the suffering Christ, flagellated themselves in a custom that gave the name to the entire movement (khlyst in Russian means a whip). The Khlysts found a way to cultivate ecstasy, understood as the introduction to one's own divine nature which brings freedom. The Khlysts' doctrine relied on two unexpected commandments: 1) sin is redeemed through sin, i.e., you need to sin to such a Rabelaisian extent that sin starts to disgust you (later, however, the Khlysts turned to preaching temperance and austerity), 2) each Khlyst, through spiritual practice, can become a Christ or a Virgin Mary.
The Khlyst sect, which by 1917 had penetrated all layers of Russian society up to the higher nobility, was the result of Peter's rationalization of Russian Orthodoxy and the almost military hierarchy of its church framework. In reaction to the verticality and officialdom of state Orthodoxy, the Khlysts had a free, horizontal network of arks (sect communities), irrational, mystic faith, and attempts to distance themselves (including via endorsement of revolutionary movements) from official state structures (other sects acted in a similar fashion).
In light of the theory of institutional matrices, the Khlyst sect, appeared after the attempt to reorganize the Orthodox church along to X-type, from economic, political, and ideological standpoints is associated with institutions of Y-type matrix. However, becoming a complementary institution within the religious framework of the Russian state, overall it did not manage to ensure the compensatory function of religious institutions in order to alleviate the institutional disbalance in Russian society on the eve of the Russian Revolution.
8 Cited after: Discourse of the Metropolitan of Vladivostok and the Littoral Region at the plenary session of the regional stage of the XXXI International Christmas Educational Readings "Global Challenges of Modernity and the Spiritual Choice of Man" (2022). VladivostokDiocese ofthe Russian Orthodox Church, December 14, 2022.Available at: https://www.vladivostok-eparhia.ru/blagovest/publikazii/?id=30904, accessed 17.03.2023 (in Russian).
The Compensatory Function
of Religious Institutions in Countries with the Y-type Institutional Matrix
The division of Christianity into Orthodoxy and Catholicism was finalized in 1054. Yet the differences between these branches as separate institutional forms of Christianity had been accruing since the fall of the Western Roman Empire owing to diverse socio-economic conditions under which the churches of the West and the East evolved. The bureaucracy of the early medieval kingdoms was far less powerful than that of Byzantium. For example, only Italy in the early Middle Ages saw several essentially distinct states: the Gothic Kingdom, the Exarchate of Ravenna, and the Kingdom of the Lombards. The sole unchanging force here was the Church. The bishops of Rome began to be seen not only as superior to kings but in no way inferior to emperors. The first example is thought to have been given by Ambrose of Milan at the end of the 4th century, who got the emperor Theodosius the Great to publicly kneel before him to seek his pardon.
The independence of the Catholic Church from the power of mundane rulers led to filioque, a dogma that discriminates Catholicism from Orthodoxy. In Catholicism, the sources of the Holy Spirit are the Father and the Son simultaneously, whereas in Orthodoxy the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son. That means that Catholicism acknowledges two equal poles of power—the monarch and the Pope. In Orthodoxy, patriarchs and metropolitans are one step lower than monarchs.
The Eucharist, the central Christian rite, also has doctrinal differences in these two branches of Christianity. In Orthodoxy, during communion believers are given bread and wine, while in Catholicism wine is reserved for the clergy. Catholicism maintains that without the clergy believers cannot be redeemed and any contact with God needs the church as an intermediary. Thus, Catholicism substantiates the need to build a hierarchical system through which a person contacts God
Under conditions of decentralization, decline of statehood, and steep economic recession [Maddison 2006, pp. 33-34], the Roman Catholic Church, performing a compensatory function in Western Europe, turned into a crucial socio-cultural institution. The beginning of the 2nd millennium was marked by unseen reforms that implemented X-type matrix institutions in Catholicism. One of those reforms was the pledge of celibacy for all clergymen, introduced by Gregory VII.9 From then on, a member of the clergy had nothing except for the Church and his flock: no family, no-one to inherit property, if he possessed any, which was deemed to extinguish the very need for property; the interests ofthe Church (and society) were placed higher than the interests of an individual. To put it another way, celibacy promotes a worldview in which the idea of supraindividual (collective) values is prioritized.
Mendicant orders emerged. Each of them had its own rigid structure, strict rules determining the lifestyle of their members in great detail: monks were banned from having private property and their whole life was subordinate to the interests of the order [Mazzorin, Minniti 1999; Seredinin 2018].
Apart from mendicant orders, other types of monastic communities existed, e.g., the Camaldolese hermits, created by St Romuald, who thought the Rule of St Benedict to be too mild. The main features ofthe Camaldolese lifestyle were strict fasts for all monks without exemption, a vow of silence, nightly readings, extreme practices of mortifying
9 In Orthodoxy, celibacy exists only for the so-called regular clergy.
the flesh (e.g., wearing a hairshirt) with the aim of fostering austerity and rejecting earthly joys. In some monasteries (such as in Kaunas, Lithuania) Camaldolese monks were obliged to sleep in coffins to never forget about death.
These features of Catholicism meant the inauguration into Western religious structures of lifestyles based on the priority of collective rights and interests over those of the individual; of perceptions of a social structure founded on social equality (in need to perform duties); of the socially accepted necessity to subjugate one's interests to the demands of the order; and of the abandonment of private property. It can be deduced that these X-type matrix institutions came to form the foundation of Catholic religious life.
The unrestricted strengthening of the church together with the imposition of such institutions, the apogee of which came under Innocent III, could not but lead to the emergence within religion itself of complementary institutions. The manifestation of this tendency may be found in Catharism (and one of its offshoots, Albigensianism), which flourished in the 12th-13th centuries. Its core idea is the coexistence of two equal essences (good and evil) and the free will of humanity to choose between them. Thus, the members of this religious movement stood up for freedom as autonomy and the independence of the actions of social subjects from the actions of others. At that, the Albigensians adhered to absolute dualism [Osokin 2015], i.e., they believed in two independent gods, had an organized religious framework and their specific hierarchy modeled after Orthodox autonomous churches, which, in contrast to the Roman Church, implied the possibility of horizontal links.
The weakening of feudalism in Western Europe fostered nationalist sentiment. Nations began to see the Pope either as an ally or a foe, depending on the side he aligned with in feudal wars, instead of considering him a common father. The relocation of Popes from Rome and their subsequent Avignon captivity also had a sizeable impact. Avignon Popes, their cardinals, and subordinates, were for the most part French. They depended on the king of France for protection and income. Moreover, the taxes paid to the papacy at that time were often appropriated by the king in order to finance his military exploits. All that repulsed other rulers and nations, especially Germany and England.
The waning of feudalism also made way for policies of national centralization. France, hitherto consisting of a group of virtually independent provinces, united into one kingdom; the same changes befell Spain after the dynastic union of Castille and Aragon and the fall of the Moors in Granada. England saw the establishment of absolutism under the Tudors. As a result of centralization, the kings of France, Spain, and England, like German princes, entertained the thought of gaining full sovereignty over their lands. Monarchs started to attack the structure of the Catholic Church by appointing bishops (as if they were state officials) on their own, leaving to the Pope only the right to formally agree to such appointments, which took place, for instance, in the cases of cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin.
The voices against the transgressions of the clergy and the dictatorial authority of the Pope grew increasingly louder. In this respect, the Hussite movement professed the democratization of the church. They wanted to break ties with Rome and come under the auspices of the Patriarch of Constantinople, as the Orthodox model of church organization was closer to their ideal.
The decomposition of the feudal system led to Catholicism losing its rigid framework. It was forced to loosen the centralized redistributive elements in its structure. At that time, the Society of Jesus emerged. In contrast to other monastic orders, a Jesuit was allowed
to live the life of an ordinary man, which implied the individualization of their consciousness, the weakening of the domination of "We over Me", the growth of the role of individual choice compared to social responsibilities, relative freedom as independence of action from the action of other priests. Overall, the organization and rules of this religious order may be considered as the introduction of Y-type matrix institutions into the institutional framework of the church. This provoked the rise of Jansenism, which accused the Jesuits of being too mild and erroneous in the assumption that people are free to choose between sin and virtue. According to the Jesuit doctrine, people are redeemed through their actions. The Jansenites demanded a return to the doctrine of St. Augustine, who stated that God singles out in advance those to be redeemed, meaning that freedom of choice is an utter illusion: you may do what you want but God has already decided on who will be admitted to Heaven [McManners 1975]. One may interpret the demands of the Jansenites as a pursuit of strengthening X-type matrix elements in the ideology of the church.
The crisis of Catholicism in the 16th century also resulted in the emergence of Protestant movements of Lutheranism and Calvinism. Lutheranism originated from and spread in German principalities, supplementing German absolutism with its soft doctrinal structure. Martin Luther furthered the principle of regal superiority, according to which king or prince needed to be accepted as head of the church on his territory and the ultimate source of canon law. An essential provision of Lutheranism is the recognition of freedom and the absence of predestination (God knows all but predestines nothing). Priests are only professionals of a special kind, in no way superior to others. In the development of Lutheranism, the compensatory function of religion was manifested, as it tried to resume the institutional balance in German society, which had tipped towards X-type matrix institutions.
Calvinism (emerging as the result of a schism within Lutheranism), with its stricter doctrine, appeared in Switzerland, which was a republic where Y-type matrix institutions dominated in the economic and political domain. Calvinism accepts the doctrine of predestination (the life of man and the world, their redemption or condemnation are predestined by God's will) but has some views of its own: it rejects the necessity of rites (during church service, there is no music, no candles, no icons, or sculptures). One may cautiously suggest that through the proliferation of Calvinism (apart from Switzerland, it spread, for example, in Scotland, which was also a political entity with a deeply ingrained democratic tradition) religion attempted to compensate for the consequences of the active development of market economic relations and federative political institutions, for the sake of national consolidation.
We have covered only a small part of Western European history, but the evolution of these countries, in which the domination of the Y-type institutional matrix is characteristic, provides us with clear examples of the manifestations of the compensatory function of religion in matters of mitigating the consequences of institutional disbalances.
Conclusion
This research shows that religious institutions, being a crucial part of the socio-cultural system of society, may be structurally presented as a dynamic combination of forms characteristic of X-type and Y-type matrices. Over the course of history, their ratio
changes in relation to endogenous and exogenous factors of the evolution of religious life. It is simultaneously shown that religious institutions can fulfill a compensatory function necessary for the sustainable development of society. If the institutional balance shifts in the economic or political domain towards the dominance of X-type matrix institutions, religious institutions strengthen within themselves institutional forms characteristic of the Y-type matrix, and vice versa. Thereby social disbalances are reduced.
As political ideology is ontologically a phenomenon analogous to religion, in any liberal democratic Y-type system sooner or later considerable forces campaigning against liberal democracy and possessing elements of X-type matrix institutions will form, and vice versa. That is the dialectic of the sociocultural domain, which the state has to take into account.
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Компенсаторная функция религиозных институтов в институциональной матрице общества
П.А. БАРАХВОСТОВ*
*Павел Александрович Барахвостов - кандидат политических наук, доцент, кафедра политологии, Белорусский государственный экономический университет, Минск, Республика Беларусь, barakhvostov@yandex.by, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8943-5980
Цитирование: Barakhvostov P.A. (2023) The Compensatory Function of Religious Institutions in the Society's Institutional Matrix. Mir Rossii, vol. 32, no 4, pp. 56-70. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2023-32-4-56-70
Аннотация
Целью настоящей работы является доказательство гипотезы об имманентной компенсаторной природе религиозных институтов в социокультурной системе. Методологическую
Статья поступила в редакцию в марте 2023 г.
Компенсаторная функция религиозных институтов в институциональной матрице общества
основу исследования составляет неоинституциональный подход, дополненный теорией институциональных матриц.
Исследование показало, что религиозные институты в структурном отношении могут быть представлены как динамичное сочетание институциональных форм Х- и Y-типа. На протяжении истории их соотношение меняется: при смещении институциональных балансов в экономической или политической сферах в пользу излишнего доминирования институтов Х-матрицы религиозные институты усиливают в своей структуре формы, характерные для Y-матрицы, и наоборот. Вывод продемонстрирован российским и зарубежным опытом в эволюции религиозных институциональных форм.
В допетровский период на Руси имело место доминирование религиозных институтов Y-типа, что проявлялось в децентрализации православной церкви, существовании вкладов и вкупов при поступлении в монастырь, отсутствии монашеских орденов с их жесткой системой управления. Тем самым религиозные институты компенсировали высокоцентрализованный характер русского общества, где доминировали институты Х-матрицы. Петровская реформа, направленная на перестройку религиозной жизни по западному образцу, деформировала компенсаторную функцию религии. Возникший социальный религиозный протест против «централизованного православия» вылился в распространение секты хлыстов, в экономическом, политическом и идеологическом отношении представлявшей собой организацию с доминированием Y-институциональных форм.
В западноевропейских обществах с доминированием институтов ¥-типа католическая церковь с ее жесткой иерархией и дисциплиной изначально обладала характеристиками, присущими социокультурным институтам Х-типа. Однако чрезмерное укрепление последних стимулировало появление религиозного движения катаризма (и его ветви - альбигойцев), обладавшего признаками институциональных форм Y-типа. С разложением феодализма и усилением централизации (укреплением политических институтов Х-типа) жесткая структура католической церкви ослабла и трансформировалась по Y-типу, что привело к появлению янсенизма, призывающего к укреплению институциональных форм Х-типа в организации религиозной жизни.
Таким образом, показано, что религиозные институты выполняют необходимую для устойчивого развития общества компенсаторную функцию, направленную на сглаживание возникающих институциональных дисбалансов.
Ключевые слова: институциональная среда, институциональная матрица, рыночные институты, редистрибутивные институты, сектантство, религия
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