Alienation from the culture : interpretative dilemmas : on the example of the old believers

After G.W.F. Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit and Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity, the issue of alienation is considered to be a significant object of study. Sociology - which attempts to dominate studies on this concept - is a discipline which rather single-mindedly interprets the phenomena rooted in the religious reality, and one should not rely solely on its analyses. By the same token, semiotics should be treated with similar distrust, even though the impact of Old Believers on the development of Russian culture is widely emphasised in the works of Russian semioticians. The reason for that stems from the claim for being a universal method - which hence is forced to refer to a universal object - that semiotics has shared; the mentioned object has been culture. The idea of subsuming phenomena of different categories under a common denominator in the course of interpretation has led to a situation in which the semiotic means have turned to be but metaphors, even though semioticians have argued for their ontological statues. Precisely this aspect should be noted, as it proves that semiotics - with its universalist claims - appears to blur the boundaries between sociological stratum, and the one oriented towards philosophy and theology. From the point of view expressed by Orthodox Christianity, the true tragic alienation relies not on the distance separating one from culture and society, but rather on the one which detaches one from God - the creator of being. The case of Old Believers exemplifies a convoluted situation, as the bone of contention has been provided by liturgy, which is, in other words, the space in which a human being encounters God. If, therefore, this issue is related to culture, then it is so precisely through its metaphysical aspect. Neither sociology nor philosophy - and even not semiotics, recently withdrawing from cultural studies, which it used to dominate - has been capable of interpreting the phenomenon of Old Believers as thoroughly as theology and history of Church. Relying on the scientist methodology, the former group of disciplines has not included such significant aspects of the culture of Orthodox Christianity as anthropology, dogmatics, state theology, or liturgics. Without those aspects, any attempt which aims at explaining the issue of Old Believers happens to be inaccurate.