Autopoiesis of The Discourse of Religious Tolerance (Early Intercultural Communication in the 19th Century)

Abstract

The problem of religious tolerance is becoming increasingly relevant both for the Russian Federation and the modern world as a whole, since not only the media, but also academic publications inform us almost every day about conflicts between religious communities on a local and global scale. This article examines a number of new aspects of the phenomenon of religious tolerance that are revealed when it is described as an autopoiesis of a specific intercultural communicative discourse. This specific discourse is explicitly presented in the texts of the 19^th century and later that are included in the database of the academic linguistic resource National Corpus of the Russian Language. The texts manifest special forms of implicit tolerance, which is created, developed and transformed in the global context of intercultural communication, which seeks to distribute the true (“genuine,” “normative”) and superstitious (“false,” “forbidden”). Starting with the most ancient texts, superstitious is intended to mark the difference between the permissible (“tolerable,” “ridiculed”) and the unconditionally forbidden (“dangerous,” “intolerable”). The development of communication from the most ancient face-to-face communication to written forms in urban cultures and mass media images of global reality contributes to the formation of an imperial understanding of local features in modern culture. A number of texts from the Russian history of the 19^th century show us in detail the development of discourse of tolerance in a dialectic with the discourse of intolerance. This much is evident from the era of the creation of the Holly Alliance by Alexander I, in which Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Lutherans were proclaimed one Christian people, to the protective triad of Uvarov and national romanticism, which sought not only to distance itself from everything different, but also to enter into a multifaceted intercultural dialogue. This development placed issues concerning true and superstition within the framework of the science of religion that was emerging at the same time. The methodological basis for the description of the material is Niklas Luhmann’s perspective concept, which allows us to consider true and superstitious as distinctions that are formed in the process of autopoiesis of religion as a social subsystem. Special attention is paid to some historical moments of the formation of the prerequisites for the religious policy of the Russian Empire in the 19^th century, formed in the era of the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian state, where some aspects of the phenomenon are highlighted, which can be designated as proto-imperial religious tolerance.