This paper was part of the opening roundtable celebrating Mikhail Epstein at the Inaugural Conference of the Northwestern University Research Initiative for the Study of Russian Philosophy and Religious Thought which took place at the Northwestern University, April 2023. The roundtable included Alyssa deBlasio, Randall A. Poole, Victoria Juharyan, and the author of this paper, Caryl Emerson.
My talk this morning is only a road map, but for our time and place this is, I believe, an important road. It follows one thread of Mikhail Epstein’s thought, which was 40 years in the making: what he calls minimal religion, or “poor faith” [бедная вера]—the shape and fate of religious belief as it emerged after several generations of Soviet mass atheism.
The thread begins in Moscow in 1982, with an essay that Epstein wrote on Russia’s “post-atheist” condition. At the time it was impossible to publish such a piece of investigative sociology, but Epstein, ever alert to alternative genres, was simultaneously passing the idea through a fictional filter. By the early 1990s, he had produced a quasi-fictive documentary novel under the title “The New Sectarianism.”[1]
In 1996, with censorship abolished along with the USSR, Epstein’s “Post-Atheism, or Poor Religion” finally appeared in the Russian journal Oktyabr’.[2] Two years earlier, the Russian-language émigré publishing house Ermitazh had brought out Epstein’s Faith and Image. The Religious Unconscious in 20th-century Russian Culture (1994), in which both faith (religious consciousness) and image (poetry and visual art) were traced to Russian Orthodox apophatic theology; in a stunning inversion of the Freudian psychoanalytic model, Epstein argued that religion during the Soviet period could not be seen as some punitive Superego, intent on repressing our humane parts, but was itself repressed, driven into the unconscious—while the primal aggressiveness of the Id was explicitly celebrated as class struggle.[3] By 1999, these accounts of a repressed but reviving minimal religion had moved into English, in two “cultural manifestos” tucked away in a volume titled Russian Postmodernism.[4] Finally, in 2013, the idea burst out again at book length as Religion After Atheism: New Potentials for Theology, now enriched with a chapter on “atheism within theocracy (on the Antichrist),” as well as discussions of religion and science, the theology of the Void, and the theology of the person.[5] These ideas continue to be updated and anthologized in English, most recently in 2019, often as part of a larger global “postsecular” moment.[6]
Then came the pandemic, and in 2022 the invasion of Ukraine. Official religious policy in Putin’s Russia, which had been scary for a decade but only occasionally making headlines in Western media, suddenly took an unignorably brutal, ugly turn. In 2023, Epstein responded to the crisis with two new books. One, titled From the Bible to the Pandemic,[7] is gentle, inventive, even hopeful; the other—The Russian Anti-World. Politics on the Verge of Apocalypse [8]—is dark and angry. Minimal Religion had become maximal in the most destructive way; “poor faith” had again become mean, aggressive, and rich.
♦
So that’s the beginning and (for now) the end of the road. Along this route, Epstein maps out Soviet Russia’s “religious unconscious”—repressed and then re-surfacing, in Epstein’s memorable image, like “a crooked pitiable shoot pushing up like a blade of grass through concrete.”[9] To talk about this process, Epstein adopts different intonations. He is playful and pluralist in the 1980s, with approaching glasnost. He is hopeful in the 1990s, a chaotic and criminal decade but one that is still fluid; state archives are being opened, information can compete with disinformation. By the 2010s, Epstein has become more anxious (especially after the seizure of Crimea in 2014 and the reimposition of censorship in Russia in 2015). And today, of course, he is horrified.
For this talk, I’ll introduce Epstein’s huge, fertile, 40-year-long idea through snippets of his publications related to the themes of this conference.
The first question: What is “poor” or “minimal” religion, that curious outgrowth of a failed atheist state? The second: What is its understanding of God, or the Divine principle? And third: How does Epstein support this idea through a “theology of personality” [or of personhood: Теология личности]? In this third realm, parallels can be found with Randall Poole’s work on humanist religions, and Gary Saul Morson on prosaics.
Hovering over it all is the umbrella-question: Where are we now, as Бед- [poor] religion threatens to become again БОГ-ат [Godly, rich] . . . and as the “maximal” religion of Putin’s war machine grinds on?
So to begin with the first question.
Epstein sees three options overall for a post-atheistic society of Russia’s sort, where free, diverse religious expression was criminalized for seventy years.
First and most nostalgically is a return to the traditional confessions and churches (the prototype here, perhaps surprisingly, is Pavel Florensky). Then come those thinkers or practitioners who, in quest of a new synthesis, tap into pre-Christian options such as neopaganism, ecological earth-and-fertility worship (after the manner of Vasily Rozanov). Lastly is what Epstein considers the “modernist” tendency: multiple new “minimal” religions (speculations in the style of Nicolas Berdiaev and other philosopher-aesthetes).
This third modernist option is what fascinates Epstein. It is a stripped-down “religion as such” / религия как таковая—a slogan recalling the “word as such” / слово как таковое, of the irreverent early Formalists. No conventions, no taboos, no Scripture, no grammatical rules or rites. All the pomp and baggage of organized religion had either been co-opted by the atheistic State, or else in the natural course of generations, simply lost. What matters now is a thirst for God and the freedom to seek God. This rejection of religarchy (the authority invested in religious power structures) went hand in hand with the Humble, the Personal, the Poor.
♦
But—we must ask —did a post-Soviet movement for religion-as-such really happen? Epstein insists that it did. Although many “minimal believers” eventually returned to established churches, “Poor Faith,” at least among the urban intellectuals, was for real. And to give it maximum multi-voicedness, Epstein wrote a novel, Новое Сектантство.
The book features a fictive authorial persona, one Professor of Scientific Atheism, Raisa Omarovna Gibaydulina, who drew on her fieldwork among these new sectarians to produce a “reference manual.”
According to Gibaydulina, the collapse of a grandiose, abstract idea-system generated a passion for what was modest, intimate, and tangible.These new faiths included: Everyday sects such as Foodniks and Thingwrights, Philistine sects such as “Folls” (Fools) and “Provs” (Provincials); Nationalist and Eurasian sects like the “Red Horde” (this brand of believer is no joke today); Atheist and Doomsday sects, surprisingly benevolent and full of do-gooders on the ground. And then, of course, Pushkin.
Are these really “religions,” or just cults? Epstein, in his own name, insists they are not cults. His reasons are marvelously inventive and moving. He argues that only when all religion has been criminalized, after the bitter harvest of state-imposed atheism, can a genuine, naïve thirst for God arise. And this thirst is best slaked by being attached to intimate, personalized matter.
It is characteristic of Epstein’s polyphonic temperament, however, that he gives full range to all possible refutations of himself—and of his fictive creations. To the reader’s benefit, these two categories of reality interact with equal rights to exist. One small example:
Professor Gibaydulina wrote her reference manual in 1994. Two years later, Epstein draws on it—albeit only partially—for his essay on “Poor Faith” in the journal Oktyabr’. Then Gibaydulina respectfully submits to the journal a Letter to the Editor critiquing Epstein’s essay. Epstein, she writes, “made up a new religion out of his own head.” His examples are too theoretical, coming as they do from the isolated urban intelligentsia and representing its “last gasp.” Data from her field studies in the Russian countryside (undertaken for the Institute of Atheism) suggest a different, far less clever and less articulate popular religion: simply the worship of poverty, Бед and not Бог, which is all that the Russian common people have ever known. The editors of Oktyabr’ forwarded the letter to Epstein for comment, but it was never published: Gibaydulina died of heart failure in April 1997.[10]
♦
It fair to say that Epstein did not write a satire. He respects Gibaydulina, who gathers her facts with precision and a sinking heart.
Nor did he write a fantasy. Gibaydulina had a real-life prototype, Zulfia Abdulkhakovna Tazhurizina, who died in 2022 (here’s the Wikipedia entry on her; she was an accomplished scholar with an enormous curriculum vitae stretching over half-a-century):
Tazhurizina appears in the Epilogue to Новое Сектантство as a close friend of Gibaydulina’s; the two women are doubles. Again, it is very much Epstein’s style and generosity to appreciate them both.
As Epstein wrote me, in February of this year [2023]:
“In the early 2000s, while in Moscow, I met her [Tazhurizina], she invited me to her apartment and… was glad to accept my book as a gift. She even seriously took some of the works I attributed to Gibaydulina as her own. She was still teaching at MGU and was extremely kind and open with me…” (MNE to CE, 6 Feb 2023).
If, as attested by these two late-Soviet-era scholars of post-atheism R. O. Gibaydulina and Z. A. Tazhurizina, popular religion in Russia is the realm of believers who pray not to БОГ- but to БЕД-, then we are on the brink of our second theme.
♦
In poor faith or minimal religion, what is the understanding of God, or the Divine principle?
Here’s the basic idea, as laid out in an early text by Epstein from 1982, “Minimal Religion”:
Atheism introduced the ethical imperative of love for the ‘distant one’ [abstract in time and space]—but in religious minimalism, no human being claims to be universal in their ethical responsiveness and responsibility. Instead, one concentrates on immediate surroundings [ближнемыслие, ближнечувствие, ‘neighborhood thinking’, a ‘feeling for what is near’].
Theology thus becomes an investigation of the unique, the unrepeatable and the particular. God is in the eachness of every thing [«в каждости всех вещей»[11]], in that which distinguishes one thing from another… God is the source and force of individuation, and the “Godlikeness of any entity is equal to its singularity, its irreducibility to any general principle or abstract quality.”
Epstein then goes on to suggest that Maximalist theology strives for generalizations, first principles, the Absolute, the obligation to “Speak the Universal Word.” Minimalist theology, in contrast, shifts the focus from “Speaking the Authoritative Word” to Listening and Hearing.
God might have spoken at one time—but now, mostly He’s listening. And He’d like us, too, to stop preaching and start listening.
This is a tricky part of Epstein’s thought, and he knows it.
On the one hand, it is healthy to concentrate on the immediate, the particular, the close-by and tangible. Revere what one knows. Interact with it. Give it a Face.
On the other hand, the tradition of negative theology in Russian Orthodoxy—an apophatic approach to God as the “Ultimate Unknowable”—encourages a “thoughtlessness about God,” a willful “non-knowledge” that borders on denial and thus achieves precisely the opposite, pushing the very idea of God into a “religious unconscious.”
This repressed energy fuels nihilism and terrorism.
So: the atheistic turn was not only the work of Nietzsche, or Darwin, or Karl Marx. It was prepared for by a tradition of Russian religious thought.
This “dark and unhealthy side of apophaticism” will come up again, with Randall Poole (in connection with Semyon Frank) and Brad Underwood (in connection with Nikolai Gogol).
We now move to our third and final theme, the relation between this controversial minimalist image of God, and личность, or “personality.”
♦
Here too, only one snippet is sampled, from Part 7 of Religion after Atheism, published in 2013. We’re in the realm of the “modernizing” (Romantic, idealistic, aesthetic, speculative) religious thinkers: Bulgakov, Berdyaev, and one concealed side of Mikhail Bakhtin.
With apologies for a crude paraphrase of Epstein’s discussion, here are the bare bones of his argument.
Experience is irreducibly individual, subjective, and thus an “I” is unavoidable. The world is made up of multiple ‘I’s, each of which strives, in a disciplined and logically coherent manner, to grasp its limits and potentials. And just as natural scientists are correct to seek a supra-object to ground their method—that is, to generate impersonal rules—so does humanistic studies strive to seek a supra-subject to generate personalist rules. This сверхсубъект is Absolute personality, or God.
The world, therefore, is a mix of What and Who. Both are necessary, each is valid, each has its own disciplinary constraints.
“What-ness” [чтойность] stands against “who-ness” [ктойность]
And if “It is”—оно есть—gives rise to истина, and to the natural or естественные науки, then “I am”—я есмь—gives rise to what Epstein calls есмина, the evolving, shifting Truth of the “I” in a world of other ‘I’s—with its own science, «есмественные» науки.
That’s Epstein’s trademark inventive wordplay—but also, it seems to me, at core profound. To connect this chart with “minimal religion,” I will expand on Epstein from hints gathered from elsewhere in his work.
An idea is always at risk to become a “what,” a thing. The tell-tale sign of what-ness is getting bigger, maximalizing the message, hooking up with power.
Who-ness, in contrast, always emphasizes limits, doubts, and modesty.
Ideas will expose their tender, vulnerable, harmless sides—but only if they stay flexible, small, porous, and satisfied with being no more than a part of the Whole.
A properly functioning person, in short, shares something with a properly-functioning idea: this Bakhtin got right.
Take even the immensely important idea of the existence of God.
In his Religion after Atheism (pp. 354-55), Epstein urges us not to confuse “theo-personalism” with two superficially look-alike concepts, “personification” and “personal experience.” The latter seeks its evidence in supranatural visions, miracles, the voices of angels; the former, in externalizing God as some 3rd-person entity who directs or inspects global processes.
But personalism should not require some surrogate empirical evidence. It cannot reify, and it does not mimic the stability or materialized authority of things.
Thus, to sum up:
In the context of a religious quest, personalism is not ‘personification’. The power of the “I” remains modest, particular, flexible, open, in the present—and it is willing to listen and hear, not only to talk.
For nowadays, God is a troubled concept. Omniscience has been outsourced to technology (search engines, chatbots, AI), and so have spontaneity and miracles. Perhaps God would be more present if approached in a more timid and tentative way.
This, it seems, is Epstein’s overall message. Minimal religion might be “poor,” but it is not weak, emotionally or conceptually. In fact, in his chapter for the Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity Epstein provides 32 theses on it, all bending toward WHO, not WHAT.
And what does it matter, says Epstein, if “poor faith” attaches itself to everyday material things, domestic spaces, homegrown rituals, eccentric behavior, beloved poets—as do those ecstatic sectarians described in Cries in the New Wilderness?
At least those things exist. So much in the idea-system of Communism did not exist.
Beginning small and tangible, Epstein concludes, is still a healthier, more human route to faith than the maximalist one.
So, now to conclude this road map on Where We are Now on the Russian front—which is surrounded, drowned, in the maximalists.
♦
These are the two books that Epstein published in 2023.
Taking the darker one first.
Over the past three years, in various public forums as well as in his massive two-volume history (for Bloomsbury Academic) of Russian philosophy from the death of Stalin to the end of the USSR,[12] Epstein has been increasingly critical of—then wary of, then frightened of—what he calls Russian Ideocracy.
Soviet-Russian “ideocracy” is the logical paradox of a utopian, materialist, atheist state run not by finite matter or sensible feedback loops, and not by the reality of finite human beings and their needs, but by pure Platonic Ideas.
An ideocracy is not limited to the 20th century Communist experiment, of course. But the Russian instance has been singularly well-documented, over a long period. Much is being made today of the continuity between Muscovite, Imperial, Communist, and post-Communist governments.[13]
Русский антимир/The Russian Anti-World is one long appalled mediation on the destructive no-exit of the present war and how Putin, and Putinism, has “maximalized” it.
In the opening chapters, everything that we are accustomed to seeing as value in the norms of personal or diplomatic behavior is inverted, negated, emptied out—in a sort of “apophaticism gone beserk.”
Negative identity. Anti-morphosis; global Underground. Anti-socium
The Void. The Territorial Curse. Anti-Time. Anti-Life. Necrocracy. The Anti-moral (“Bobok” and panphobia). Anti-Being. Ontocide. Anti-Personhood. Anti-Value. Russian studies and Nothing studies.
The book contains chapters on Language and Power: Why we are in Ukraine, When will Putin’s reign end… and includes a chronicle of landmark events, beginning in December 2021 (Putin’s ultimatum to the West, that it not allow Eastern European nations into NATO)—right up to Russia’s mass mobilization.
Its final entry is a wistful one: wouldn’t it be good if international politics could follow the Golden Rule? [pp. 224-25]
Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you—or at the very least: Don’t do to others… what you don’t want done to yourself.
Mikhail Epstein is here, he can fill you in—but let me stress the impression I got from his book The Russian Anti-World, as part of my thoughts about his Minimal Religion.
Take an idea, even a neutral one like Time, Life, Being—bloat it up, attach power to it—and it will go bad.
It will lose the force of a person, and gain the force of a mechanical thing.
But why, Epstein asks, should any idea be more admired… the more purely or more strongly it is applied?
Why not admire an idea for its limits, its doubts, its tenderness, its pity, its lopsidedness?
That’s the spirit of the second book.
♦
It has seven sections: The Bible, Life, Reason, The Human Being, The Pandemic, Ethics, Hope.
Under ETHICS there is a section on “Minimalist Ethics: Why is it better to not do evil, than to do good?” [Минималистическая этика. Почему лучше не делать зла, чем делать добро?]
The argument is, at base, a Tolstoyan one… and it struck me that here is an ethical counterpart to minimal religion, or poor faith: Above all, don’t do harm. And only then, attempt the good.
But I’d like to leave you with an image that is discussed in the subsequent chapter, because it is one of my favorite in all of Epstein’s work.
It has to do with the Golden Rule applied not in politics—as it was at the end of The Russian Antiworld—but in personal relations.
The chapter is titled: From the Golden Rule to the Diamond Rule: the ethics of the Gift, the ethics of Differentiation [От золотого правила к алмазному. Этика дара и различия]
The Golden Rule has impressive Biblical resonance: “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” But this formula assumes a symmetry and the sameness of all persons. So better to go not with mirror-reflections through a clear pane of glass, but with facets. And this more modest, more precious mandate results in the Diamond Rule:
“Do that which others need and which no one else can do in your place.”
It’s a minimal idea, but with maximal traction, and universally applicable as long as there is differentiated life.
♦
Caryl Emerson is the A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. Her scholarship has focused on the Russian classics (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky), Mikhail Bakhtin, and Russian music, opera and theater. Recent projects include the Russian modernist Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887-1950), the allegorical-historical novelist Vladimir Sharov (1952-2018), the creative bond between the Russian émigré composer Arthur Lourié and the French Neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, and the co-editing, with George Pattison and Randall A. Poole, of The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought (2020).
Image: Henryk Siemiradzki, Kupala Night 1892
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[1] Михаил Эпштейн, Новое Сектантство. Типы религиозно-философских умонастроений в России (1970-1980-е годы), 2nd edition ИД-«Бахрах-М», Москва, 2005. Originally published 1993-94, it masquerades as a quasi-fictive, classified “reference manual” [Справочное пособие] authored in 1985 by R. O. Gibaydulina, Professor of Scientific Atheism. This multi-layered text was expertly translated by Eve Adler as Mikhail N. Epstein, Cries in the New Wilderness. The New Sectarianism: Reference Manual (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002).
[2] «Постатеизм, или Бедная религия», Октябрь, номер 9 (1996).
[3] Михаил Эпштейн, Вера и образ. Религиозное бессознательное в русской культуре 20-го века (Tenafly NJ: Hermitage Publishers, 1994).
[4] See the two essays by Mikhail Epstein, Ch. 12, “Minimal Religion,” 163-71, and Ch. 21, “Post-Atheism: From Apophatic Theology to ‘Minimal Religion’,” in Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism. New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (Berghahn Books, New York-Oxford, 1999). A revised second edition of the book appeared in 2016, also from Berghahn Books, where Ch. 12 has become 13 and Ch. 21 now 23. Epstein gives the date of composition of “Minimal Religion” as 1982.
[5] Михаил Эпштейн, Религия после Атеизма: Новые возможности теологии. Москва, АСТ-Пресс издательский дом, 2013.
[6] Mikhail Epstein, “Postatheism and the phenomenon of minimal religion in Russia,” in The Routledge Handbook of Postsecularity, ed. Justin Beaumont (London and New York: Routledge, 2019): 73-85.
[7] Михаил Эпштейн, От Библии до пандемии: Поиск ценностей в мире катастроф. Москва-Санкт-Петербург, 2023.
[8] Михаил Эпштейн, Русский антимир. Политика на грани апокалипсиса. Franc-Tieur USA, 2023.
[9] Quote occurs in Epstein, “Minimal Religion” (1999) p. 165; revised edition (2016), p. 229.
[10] This contretemps by Gibaydulina is found on pp. 199-203 in Cries in the New Wilderness, pp. 194-99 in Новое сектантство.
[11] This is the phrase Epstein uses in his 1996 Oktyabr’ essay, which incorporates in its entirety his unpublished 1982 article.
[12] The two paired volumes are: Mikhail Epstein, The Phoenix of Philosophy. Russian Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953-1991) (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019); Mikhail Epstein, Ideas Against Ideocracy. Non-Marxist Thought of the Late Soviet Period (1953-1991).
[13] These books appear at an alarming rate. For prescient outsiderly and insiderly perspectives in this year alone, see Russia’s War on Everybody: And what It Means for You, by the British security expert Keir Giles (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), and the recent English translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s Frieden oder Krieg (2019) as My Russia. War or Peace? (Riverrun Books UK, 2023).
Глибоко вдячний за глибокі думки. Епштейн — віват!