Revolution as a Cultural Institute

The author of this article analyzes the concept of “revolution” and “revolutionism” in the contemporary culture. He defines the latter as one of the most important cultural institutions of modernity and regards it as a continuous and constitutive process in the New Age society, though acting most of the time in a latent form. Although the boundaries of the concept of revolution are extremely broad today, any study inevitably raises the question of the typology of revolutionary processes, to which the orthodox thought could provide an independent answer. Revolutions can be divided into two types. The first type is political revolutions, a change of political regimes. The second includes systemic revolutions, which lead to a change in the global cultural model. The revolution as a historical phenomenon, along with the subject of colonization, emerges from the Enlightenment and Reformation discourses, which replaced the Christian idea of the catechization of peoples. This led to the revolution becoming a reference point for a society that gravitated toward a radical reconstruction of institutions and identities and which was willing to pay a high moral price for it. Attention is paid to the quasi-religious foundations of revolutionary thought and revolutionary action. The results show that a modern society is a society with horizontal dynamics of development, and its social upheavals, often taking a radical revolutionary format, can only use Christian symbolism to disguise non-Christian content. The Soviet culture reproduced elements of religious practice because the new government clearly wanted to create its own rituals, as the deep religiousness of the people called for it. The main objective of this article is to structure and briefly describe the semantics of revolutionism, in which the eschatological, mystery and psychological aspects are highlighted, and the revolutionary ritual of sacrifice is examined. The author concludes that the authentic and truly spiritual alternative to the revolutionary constructivism of modern society includes the religious transformation of a man, as well as theosis and cosmotheosis, which can also change the existing social model.

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