On the critical reception of religious literary criticism

Abstract

This article attempts to analyze the modern critical reception of the religious approach ("theological and dogmatic", "confessional (Orthodox) approach") to the study of Russian literature. Author considers the genesis of the term "religious literature", its relationship to the definition of "religious philosophy", as well as the question of its functioning in the modern humanitarian science. The author reveals the continuity of religious philology with philosophical and literary tradition of the late XIX-XX centuries. The author indicates the methodological heterogeneity of "religious philology", where two independent approaches coexist: theologico-dogmatic and philological ones. The author considers the debate about the specificity of the subject area of the religious literary studies and peculiarities of the interpretational model, which allows to analyze the Russian literature objectively from the Orthodox point of view. Among the most significant trends of modern religious philology are the following: analysis of literary material in an interdisciplinary way, including the use of biblical hermeneutics methods; shifting the emphasis from the question of the degree of religiosity of the author to the problem of functioning of religious codes in the artistic system, their transformation both at individual author and at general cultural level. The analysis of critical judgments on "religious literary studies" is presented in the "pro et contra" format (S. Bocharova, M. Dunayev, I. Esaulova and others).