Folk Orthodoxy


Folk Orthodoxy is the folk religion and syncretic elements present in the Eastern Orthodox communities. It is a subgroup of folk Christianity, similar to Folk Catholicism. Peasants incorporated many pre-Christian beliefs and observances, including coordinating feast days with agricultural life.
Folk orthodoxy has developed from an interpretation of rituals, sacred texts, and characters from the Bible. In folk orthodoxy, religious syncretism coexists with Christian doctrine and elements of pre-Christian pagan beliefs. According to historian and ethnologist Sergei Anatolievich Shtyrkov, the boundary between canonical and folk orthodoxy is not clear or constant; it is drawn by religious institutions such as the Russian Orthodox Church.

Dual faith

The Russian-language term appeared during the Middle Ages, used in sermons directed against Christians who continued to worship pagan deities. Dvoeverie refers to the conflict between two religious systems: paganism and Christianity. The term religious syncretism, on the other hand, implies a set of blended beliefs.
The phenomenon of "dual faith" originated in the Christian Church. In early Christianity, the church denounced non-canonical religious practices. In the fourth-century Eastern Roman Empire, Asterius of Amasia opposed the celebration of calends in his sermons. Basil the Great denounced his Christian contemporaries for practicing grave-site commemoration, which took on characteristics often seen during the pagan festival Lupercalia. In the Western Roman Empire, Church Fathers also denounced some Christians for practicing the remnants of pagan customs.
Elements of dual faith inhere in several Christian cultures. One example is All Souls' Day and All Hallow's Eve. Halloween is an ancient Celtic pagan holiday commemorating ancestors, similar to the Christian feast-day All Saints' Day. A number of Christian cultures celebrate Carnival before Great Lent, which preserves pre-Christian customs, thus combining pagan and Christian customs.
In Russia, this concept appears with the church's opposition to paganism. According to The word of a certain Christ-lover and zealot for the right faith:

Criticism

According to philologist Viktor Zhivov, the synthesis of pagan and Christian cultural elements is typical of all European cultures; dual faith is not unique to Russian spirituality.
American researcher Eve Levin believes that a significant part of medieval Russian folk orthodoxy has Christian origins. Levin cites Paraskevi of Iconium, who was considered a Christian replacement for the goddess Mokosh in folk religion.
Ethnographer writes, "Since the nineteenth century, we have been quite convinced that it is worth stripping off the pagan rites superimposed, in a thin layer, the Christian colors, so that the features of ancient pagan beliefs are revealed."
Strakhov disagrees; according to his monograph, The Night Before Christmas: "Under the 'pagan' appearance of a rite or belief, there is often a quite Christian basis."
Folklorist writes:
According to historian Vladimir Petrukhin, there was no pagan worldview separate from the Christian one in medieval Russia; the people perceived themselves as Christians. Customs considered relics of paganism had a literary origin or belonged to the secular culture of the time.
Folklorist , noting the primitive nature of dual faith, proposed the term troeverie. The third component of the worldview of the Russian middle ages was the folk, "non-canonical" culture of Byzantium, the Balkans, and Europe, which arrived in Russia with Christianity in the form of skomorokhs, Foolishness for Christ, and koliada. The concept of "triple faith" has also been applied by and Anna A. Zabiyako to the mixture of Russian folk-beliefs with those of other cultures such as Chinese folk religion.

Slavic traditions

Formation

The spread of Christian teachings in Russia influenced the people's mythopoetic worldview and folk orthodoxy became part of Russian culture, preserving these traditions. Russia's original Slavic beliefs, woven into folk orthodoxy, differed in a number of ways from the official religion. Nikolai Semyonovich Gordienko, following Boris Rybakov, believed that, in Russia, "there has been a long, centuries-long, coexistence of Byzantine Christianity with Slavic paganism: at first as separate faith systems functioning in parallel, and then—up to the present—as two components of a single Christian religious-celebrity complex, called Russian Orthodoxy." According to Gordienko, dual faith was formally overcome by Russian Orthodoxy through accommodation: "Byzantine Christianity did not eliminate Slavic paganism from the consciousness and everyday life of the peoples of our country, but rather assimilated it by including pagan beliefs and rituals in its belief-cultural complex." The non-canonical culture of the Balkans and Byzantium was also an influence, as were the Finno-Ugric, Scandinavian, Baltic and Iranian peoples bordering the East Slavs. This fact calls into question the adequacy of the term "Dvoeverie" in relation to "non-canonical" beliefs. However, some authors, relying on already outdated studies, point to the "leading" role of Slavic paganism in "folk orthodoxy".
In itself, "folk orthodoxy" is a dynamic form in which both archetypal mythopoetic ideas and orthodox canons are combined. According to historian Vladimir Petrukhin:
Another follower of the concept of dual faith, Igor Froyanov noted the more pagan nature of society, especially the peasantry in Russia up to the 14th and 15th centuries, an analysis that relies primarily on the B. A. Rybakov's hypotheses, as well as the nature of warfare, the tradition of drunken feasts before the prince, and other indirect signs. However, only one or two mentions of Rusali, are found in the birch bark charters. Even accusations of "witchcraft", which is not necessarily synonymous to "paganism", are found in no more than two of more than four-hundred and fifty deciphered documents. In contrast, the use of the orthodox calendar to describe the agricultural cycle of work appears in the 13th century and points to the spread of Christianity at that time. By the end of the 14th century, peasants generally refer to themselves as "Christians", which emphasizes their assimilation of Christian identity. Urban dwellers begin to identify themselves as Christians no later than the 12th century.

The Trinity

Mixed-hypostatic icons of the Trinity were borrowed from Catholic countries. In Russia, they were officially banned because they contradicted the canon. Such icons did not reflect Russian folk beliefs but were a subject of folk religion. Popular orthodoxy is a social and cultural phenomenon. It developed gradually with the spread of Christianity in Russia. At first, "the masses had to at least minimally master the ritual and dogmatic foundations of the new religion."
The people's ideas about God and the Trinity generally coincided with the Christian doctrine: God is the Creator, Provider, and Judge of the world; God is one and in three persons. Already the more specific question of the essence of the trinity put the peasantry in a stalemate. Thus, the conception of the trinity was essentially reduced to the belief of the existence of three separate persons of the Trinity:
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the studies of people's perceptions of God undertaken by the church author Alexei Popov concluded that:
By the 19th century, Russian peasants had not yet mastered the basic dogma of Christianity about the trinity. In explaining this fact, church authors referred to the peasants' lack of Christian education.
The theological-dogmatic category of the trinity was found to be reinterpreted on a domestic level. In the research literature, this phenomenon is associated with the coincidence Pentecost and the cycle of ancient Slavic Green week feasts. The associative-integrative nature of medieval thinking and the entire folk culture manifested itself in the perception of the trinity as Mother of God. In oral poetry, the trinity was perceived as the Mother of God, which is reflected, in particular, in some Green week songs with the famous opening "Bless, Trinity-Mother of God...", sung as early as the second half of the 19th century. This image of the Holy Trinity found expression in iconography as well. This is an example of everyday folk myth-making, which filtered the Christian dogma through the prism of pagan concepts. A. N. Veselovsky wrote: "Thus a whole new world of fantastic images had to be created, in which Christianity participated only in materials and names, while the content and the very construction came out pagan."

Peasant influences

The peculiar intertwining of superstition with Christian doctrine is explained by the fact that peasants were attracted to Christianity not for its dogma, but for its purely external, ceremonial qualities. According to Archbishop Macarius Bulgakov, author of the multi-volume History of the Russian Church, many of the Christians practically remained pagans: they performed the rites of the holy church but retained their parents' customs and beliefs.
Popular religiosity differed from, and even opposed, official Christianity. At the same time, the church accepted some folk worship and cults and adjusted its teachings. For example, the popular cult of the Virgin Mary was, by the 12th century, supported by the church. Under the influence of popular veneration of "holy poverty" and notions of social justice, by the 12th century the emphasis of veneration shifts from the cult of the formidable God the Father, and Christ-Pantocrator, as rulers of the world, to the cult of Christ-Redeemer.
Domestic orthodoxy is a peculiar "edition" of the Christian religion. It was created by the peasantry, and condemned by the Church. Christian religion, as asserted by clergy, could not penetrate the depths Russian village life and, having taken the form of agrarian and domestic beliefs, domestic orthodoxy was the source and the foundation of the appearance of superstitious representations, magic, and peculiar interpretations of the real world.
As far back as the 19th century, it was noted that Christian holidays were celebrated by the people as kudes—rituals that were "rude" and "dirty" and received the church's most serious condemnation. In the early 20th century, it was said that:
According to some researchers, folk religious ideas should not be understood as two-faith—"layering and parallel existence of the old and the new", not as a haphazard formation consisting of the pagan cultural layer proper and the later ecclesiastical overlays—and as "people's monotheism", a holistic worldview that does not divide into paganism and Christianity, but forms an integral, though fluid, and, in some cases, somewhat contradictory system.
In the USSR, the question of everyday orthodoxy as a functioning system and as a socio-cultural and socio-historical phenomenon remained insufficiently studied.