Evgeny Arinirt

Religion as an "Autopoietic System" in the Works of Niklas Luhmann

Evgeny Arinin - Head of Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Vladimir State University, Russia, eiarinin@mail.ru

The article deals with understanding of religion within the theory of "autopoietic systems" of Niklas Luhmann. Religion acts as a continuous, renewable "control over the border with the unknown", as "a knowledge of the mysterious". Three typological and historical forms of religion are identified in Luhmann's theory: the magical-mythological tradition of early societies; a dichotomous differentiation of "Great Tradition/little tradition" in the period of great imperial civilizations; and current forms of religiosity in modern and postmodern "differentiated society".

Keywords: Niklas Luhmann, concept of religion, differentiation, autopoietic system.

Introduction

The mystery of religion and the impossibility of formulating strict scientific definitions of its "essence" and "nature" have been repeatedly noted by researchers.1 The paradox of the fundamental nature of faith and religiosity, in contrast to rational knowledge and science proper, is that "not only is every type of faith inaccessible to anyone but its professed believers, but faith itself is beyond understanding

1. Saler, B. (1993) Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologist, Transcendent Natives and Unbounded Categories, pp. 1 - 26. Berghahn Books; Arinin E. I. Philosophy of Religion. Principles of essential analysis. Arkhangelsk: Publishing House of the Pomeranian State University, 1998. pp. 225-243; Saler, V. (2009) Understanding Religion: Selected Essays, pp. 3-30. Walter de Gruyter.

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as such"2. At the same time, in modern Russian mass media and everyday consciousness, "religion" is often contrasted as a tradition of religion, for example, the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) - "other faiths", " sects "(especially "totalitarian sects"), "new religious movements", "destructive cults", etc.3 This kind of semantics brings us back to the level of mass understanding of the world, recorded in the dictionary B. Dahl (1882), where the word "religion" was very briefly defined as "faith, spiritual faith, confession, worship of God, or basic spiritual beliefs", while the word "faith" was represented by an order of magnitude higher developed semantics, including such meanings as "confidence, conviction, firm consciousness, the concept of self-determination". or spiritual; // belief; the absence of any doubt or hesitation about the existence and essence of God; unconditional recognition of the truths revealed by God; / / the totality of the teaching accepted by the people, religion, confession, law (God's, church's, spiritual), religion, church, spiritual brotherhood; / / confidence, firm hope, hope, expectation; / / oath, oath; / / hunting, desire, intention, aspiration; // ...religion, confession, faith recognized by any people, religion; / / the image of God-worship according to the teaching and rites."4. Similar groups of meanings are also recorded in the Dictionary of the Russian language of the XI-XVII centuries 5.

This situation is explained by the history of the word "religion", which, according to etymological studies, relatively recently (since the XVIII century) came to the Russian language from Polish, being used in the pan-European meaning of "due" and officially-state, legitimately-compulsory "religion" and "piety"6. Ya. Krotov believes that the subject-

2. Bleeker, C.J. (1971) "Epilegomena", Historia religionum 2: 646 - 647.

Kapterov I. Ya 3. "Destructive, totalitarian" and further everywhere. http://jhwww.narod.ru/anti20.html [accessed from 06.09.2013].

4. Religion / / Dal V. Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo yazyka [Explanatory dictionary of the Living Great Russian language], vol. 4. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo inostrannykh i natsional'nykh slovarei, 1955. pp. 90-91; Vera // Dal V. Tolkovyi slovar zhivogo velikorusskogo yazyka [Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language], vol. 1. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo inostrannykh i natsional'nykh slovarei, 1955. p. 331 - 333.

5. Faith //Dictionary of the Russian language of the XI-XVII centuries. Issue 2 (V-Vologda), Moscow: Nauka Publ., 1975, pp. 79-80.

Chernykh P. Ya 6. Istoriko-etymologicheskiy slovar sovremennogo russkogo yazyka [Historical and etymological dictionary of the modern Russian language], Moscow, 1993, vol. 2, p. 109. Etymological Dictionary of the Russian language, Moscow, 1971, vol. 3, p. 466.

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the term religion or the word "religiosity" (which is not yet in V. Dahl's dictionary), which is distinguished from" religion " as an objective social phenomenon, "entered the Russian language only recently, only in the XIX century", reflecting a special phenomenon that manifested itself as a result of "a huge spiritual revolution that took place during the transition from the Middle Ages by the new time", when religion as a social institution began to lose its impersonal and state-enforced character, having lost the power support of political authorities, and then it turned out that it "needs support in the souls of people"7.

In Europe, this division was established in the age of Enlightenment, when J. J. Rousseau (1762) wrote that "religion, considered in its relation to society, which is either general or private, can also be divided into two types, namely: the religion of a person and the religion of a citizen", while "the first-without without temples, without altars, without rites, limited to a purely internal worship of the Most High God and eternal moral obligations-this is the pure and simple religion of the Gospel, true theism, what can be called a natural divine right. While the second, introduced in one country, gives its gods, its special patrons-patrons; it has its dogmas, its rites, its external cult, established by law; with the exception of the only nation that follows it, all for it are infidels, strangers, barbarians; it propagates the idea of the duties and rights of man. beyond the places where her altars stand. " 8 In the 19th century, M. Muller, the" father of modern religious studies", also called for a distinction between two meanings of the word "religion", the first of which expresses the characteristics of Judaism, Christianity or Hinduism as teachings "transmitted through oral tradition or canonical books", while the second-the very ability to "believe, regardless of all historical religions" the desire to comprehend the Infinite, which underlies the later and more formal "creeds", the outer shell of religion. Muller spoke of " elements of este-

Krotov Ya. About 7. religiosity. From a Christian point of view// Radio Liberty. 05.03.2000 [http://www.svoboda.org/programs/Christ/2000/Christ.030500.asp, accessed from 06.09.2013].

8. Rousseau, J.-J. (1922) Du contract social, ou principles du droit politique, p. 332-333. Paris [rus. ed.: Rousseau J. J. On the social contract or the beginning of political law/Translated from French. Frenkel, edited by A. K. Jivelegov//Religion and society. A textbook on the Sociology of Religion, Moscow, 1996, p. 44].

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of the highest," pure "or" revealed "religions, as well as of the lowest," idolatrous "or" corrupt "religions.9
Historically, in European culvtura, the term "religion" referred to both ancient polytheism and Christian trinitarian monotheism; both objectively existing mass confessions, jurisdictions, and confessions ("churches"," schismatics", and" sects") that are explicated in universal theological systems, and to the deeply intimate and very poorly expressed in the word, the experience of a unique subjective aspiration to God, the Sacred, the Beginning of Being; both to objective phenomena, empirical phenomena, and to their theoretical essence, universal foundations.10 At the same time, humanity has always tried in one way or another to "explain religion", to define its "essence", "nature" or "specificity", which inevitably gave rise to forms of reductionism, that is, to reduce it to what it is not.

In this regard, it is important to consider some aspects of understanding the phenomenon of religion from the standpoint of the theory of "autopoietic" (self-producing) systems by Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998), many of whose works have already become the property of Russian science, but have not yet been applied to expand the methodological horizon of religious studies 11. A. F. Filippov believes that "there have been very few sociologists of this magnitude since the Second World War, and nothing predicts the appearance of figureheads in the near future."-

Muller F. M.9 . Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four lectures delivered at the Royal Institute of London in February-March 1870/Translated from English, foreword and comments by E. S. Elbakyan. Edited by A. N. Krasnikov, Moscow: Knizhny dom "Universitet"; Vysshaya shkola Publ., 2002, pp. 20-21.

Arinin E. I. 10. Filosofiya religii [Philosophy of Religion]. Principles of essential analysis. pp. 17, 225-243.

Luhman N. 11. Differentiation, Moscow: Logos, 2006, p. 10; Filippov A. F. Luhman Niklas// Modern Western Philosophy: dictionary. Filippov A. F. Sotsial'no-filosofskie kontseptsii Niklas Luhmann [Social and philosophical concepts of Niklas Luhmann]. 1983. N2. pp. 177-184; Poskonina O. V. Niklas Luhmann on the political and legal subsystems of society. Izhevsk: Udm Publishing House. Litvinova O. A. Sistema i okruzhayushchaya sreda sotsiologii Niklas Luhmann [System and Environment of Niklas Luhmann's Sociology], Moscow: Alfa-M, 2007, p. 5. Antonovsky A. Yu. Niklas Luhmann: Epistemological introduction to the theory of Social Systems], Moscow: IF RAS, 2007, p. 76. Nazarchuk A.V. Uchenie Niklas Luhmann o kommunikatsii [on communication], Moscow, 2012, p. 224; Vorontsova E. Teologicheskaya rekeptsiya sotsiologii religii Niklas Luhmann [Theological reception of the Sociology of Religion by Niklas Luhmann]//Materials of the seminar "Sociology of Religion" at PSTU [http://socrel.pstgu. ru/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/WP_2010-07. pdf, accessed 06.09.2013] and others.

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it is not even equal, but at least only comparable to him in talent and productivity " 12.

The problem of religious specifics

A number of articles and two monographs are devoted to the peculiarities of religion in the legacy of N. Luhmann, partially translated into English, but not in Russian 13. The task of detailed, detailed and painstaking religious studies analysis of these monographs, with rare exceptions, has been waiting for its enthusiasts for about forty years, which may be explained by the complexity of reception of Luhmann's terminology, combining sociology with natural science, cybernetics, and systems theory. In Russia, A.V. Nazarchuk briefly considered Lumanov's idea of religion, while E. V. Nazarchuk briefly considered the concept of religion. Vorontsova reveals a number of aspects of the theological reception of his works 14. Our publication refers both to the noted originals (especially to the 1977 monograph) and to his other works containing reflections on religion, which will allow us to present relatively correctly those aspects of his concept that focus on understanding the general nature and typologization of religion, presenting them in the context of the ideas of Russian religious studies.

In Russian literature, religion was often defined as "faith, God-consciousness or consciousness of one's relationship to God and the invisible world" (1876) or, later, "faith in the supernatural", as, for example, in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1975), where religion was interpreted as "worldview and attitude..., which are based on the belief in existence... some form of the supernatural"15. This kind of view went back to the works of anthropologists, especially L. Levy-Bruhl, although

Filippov A. F. 12. In memory of Niklas Luhmann. http://www.fidel-kastro.ru/sociologia/luman/fillipov_luhmann.htm [accessed from 06.09.2013].

13. Luhmann, N. (1977) Funktion der Religion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp; Luhmann, N. (2000) Die Religion der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp; Luhmann, N. (1984) Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Societies. New York/Toronto: Mellen Press; Luhmann, N. (2013). A Systems Theory of Religion/Ed. by Andre Kieserling, transl. by DavidA. Brenner with Adrian Hermann. Stanford University Press.

Nazarchuk A.V. 14. Niklas Luhmann's Teaching on Communication, pp. 170-172. Theological reception of the Sociology of Religion by Niklas Luhmann.

15. Religion//Gogotsky S. S. Philosophical dictionary (1876). SPb: Publishing House "Troyanov's Path", ed. Roscha Akademii Partnership, 2009, p. 182; Garadzha V. I. Religion //Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya [The Great Soviet Encyclopedia]. Vol. 21. Moscow: Sovetskaya entsiklopediya, 1975, p. 629.

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The term "supernatural" was criticized, for example, by Yu. A. Levada, who wrote that the concept itself is "an extrapolation of modern religious and philosophical categories to primitive consciousness", and A.D. Sukhov, who rightly noted that "not every belief in the supernatural is a religion", since the concept of "faith in the supernatural" is not a religion. the "supernatural" is much broader, including such phenomena as "mantic", "spiritualism", "astrology " and"idealism" 16.

The reduction of religion to "belief in the supernatural" remained widespread in Russian publications until the 90s of the XX century, while in world science the understanding of religion at the beginning of the XX century began to shift towards a more universal concept of " sacred (sacred)", which began to denote the fundamental content that brings Christianity and Buddhism closer together or Islam with Hinduism, Judaism, magic, shamanism, mantique, etc. Thus, E. Durkheim, R. Otto and M. Eliade accepted "the division of the world into two areas - the profane and the sacred, which are placed in the position of antagonists by religious consciousness", while the most important feature of the "sacred" proper was its "inviolability", "separateness", and"forbidden" nature, "taboo" as a collective institution 17. This term, for example, is used in both E. Benveniste's philological reconstructions and the definition of religion in the modern Russian-language Catholic Encyclopedia, which states that "religion" is "a system of beliefs, emotions and actions related to a special-sacred-reality, that is, one that is opposed to ordinary reality(profane, mundane) and is considered as fundamentally incomprehensible and not at the disposal of a person, as such a reality on which his whole life depends and which gives meaning to his existence " 18. In the Russian religious studies literature, these

16. Levy-Bruhl, L. (1931) Le surnaturel et la nature dans la mentalite primitive [рус. Levi-Bruhl L. Supernatural in primitive thinking, Moscow, 1937]; Levada Yu. A. Social nature of Religion, Moscow: Nauka, 1965, p. 72; Sukhov A.D. Religion as a social phenomenon, Moscow, 1973, pp. 50-53.

Zabiyako A. P. 17. The sacred/New Philosophical Encyclopedia, vol. 3. Moscow: Mysl, 2010. pp. 482-483; Poskonina O. V. Niklas Luhmann on the political and legal subsystems of society. p. 124.

Benveniste E. 18. Slovar ' indo-evropeiskikh sotsial'nykh terminov [Dictionary of Indo-European social terms]. S. Stepanov, Moscow: Progress-Univers, 1998, pp. 343-344, 421; Gorelov A. Religion// Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 4. Moscow: Franciscans Publishing House, 2011, p. 128.

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These views became widespread only after perestroika at the end of the 20th century.

K. Levi-Strauss pointed out the need to monitor the change in scientific ideas themselves, noting that " scientists, under the guise of scientific objectivity, unconsciously sought to present the studied people - whether they were talking about mental illnesses or the so - called "primitive people" - as more specific than they really are... by radically separating the terms, the researcher is in danger of not understanding their genesis. " 20 Today, in the Russian culture represented in the literature and on the Internet, "religious studies" refers to itself as a lot of "projects" that, with a certain degree of convention, can be grouped into at least three areas: confessional, esoteric and scientific-academic. 21
Confessional religious studies presents the views of specific countries on the religious diversity of the world, as a rule, from the standpoint of apologetic-doctrinal differentiation of the latter into "true and false" religions, while the latter seeks to present this diversity as a form of "inter-religion of the future" from the standpoint of "occult qualification", which makes it possible to carry out an unprecedented "living" synthesis of " science, philosophy and Higher Knowledge"22. The third, strictly scientific tradition, suggests that the description of religion should be based not so much on the terms of self-description (doctrines, "theologies") of religious (or" esoteric") associations, but on a special" metalanguage " of the second order, detached from the most immediate religious life. As F. emphasized: Stolz, "in this language, phenomena (which were originally expressed in the proper context of the symbolic system) are reconstructed once again... for that,

Zabiyako A. P. 19. Svyatoe [Holy] / / Religious studies: An encyclopedia dictionary. Moscow: Akademicheskiy proekt Publ., 2006, p. 962. Religion // The newest dictionary of Religious Studies / Author - comp. O. K. Sadovnikov, G. V. Zgursky; edited by S. N. Smolensky. Rostov-on-Don: Feniks Publ., 2010, p. 325.

Levi-Strauss K. 20. Primeval thinking, Moscow: Respublika Publ., 1994, pp. 38, 39, 106.

Arinin E. I., Markova N. M. 21. Religious studies as a "school of tolerance" in modern Russia//Svecha-2011. Vladimir: VlSU, 2011. p. 48-49; Arinin E. I. Vopros o proiskhozhdenii i sovremennom razvitii rossiiskogo religiovedeniya [The question of the origin and modern development of Russian religious studies]//Scientific notes of the Oryol State University. Humanities and Social Sciences series. 2011. N 1. С. 93 - 97; Arinin, E. (2013) "Religion, Theology and Science in Russia", European Journal of Science and Theology 9 (3): 119 - 128.

Pankin S. 22. Osnovy religiovedeniya [Fundamentals of Religious studies]. Penza: Zolotoe sechenie Publ., 2011, pp. 13-15.

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23. Thus, scientific and academic religious studies always represent a certain reduction of "empirical religion" to the terms of the theoretical (sociological, psychological, historical, etc.) model, providing a conceptual fixation of complex, ambiguous and multidimensional reality in the categories of universal and universal knowledge.

N. Luhmann's methodological approach, called "operational constructivism", proceeds from the fact that "assumes the world not in the form of a certain object, but phenomenologically-as a horizon", that is, "as unattainable", in the light of which "there is no other possibility, except for one-to construct reality and, if necessary, to observe observers in how they construct reality"24. Luhmann's theory seeks to "observe observers" by showing that each observer is himself a part of the world he observes, which raises the problem of how "the world can observe itself", since any observation presupposes a system that observes the external environment, i.e. based on the distinction between "observer" and"environment" 25. This aporia is solved through the formation of a system of binary codes that transform the uncertainty of the environment into " contingency formulas "(reductions, generalizations to "internal eventfulness", "autopoieticness", self-organization, self-mediation), which guarantee the maintenance of a certain unity, in contrast to approaches where "religion" is understood not from within itself, but is reduced to external ones for it, phenomena are understood as "belief in the supernatural" (arising when it is compared with "nature", "natural", "science"), or " metaphysical necessities "(generated when it is compared with "free will", "spontaneity", "arbitrariness", ethics and morality), when multiple and dynamically changing functional relationships "help systems observe themselves, orient themselves in relation to each other, and refine their system functions." 26
23. Stolz, F. (1988) Grundzugeder Religionswissenschaft, s. 320. Gottingen.

Luhmann N. 24. Reality of mass media/Translated from German by A. Yu. Antonovsky, Moscow: "Canon+" ROOI "Rehabilitation", 2012, p. 17.

Niklas Luhmann: an epistemological introduction to the theory of social systems. p. 7.

26. Luhmann, N. Funktion der Religion, s. 201; Nazarchuka, V. Theoretical and political views of Niklas Luhmann // Personal website of A. V. Nazarchuk [http://www.

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Luhmann identifies three types of relationships present in any system: function (the relationship of a subsystem to the system as a whole), service (the relationship to other subsystems) , and reflection (the relationship to oneself)27. The function in the religious subsystem acts as a" church "in the spirit of E. Durkheim, that is, not as an institution or organization, but as a ritual and spontaneous communication"about faith". Services act as "diaconia", that is, as "communication" about "eternal questions" that cannot be solved in other subsystems, while self-reflection is formed as " theology "("dogmatics"), which acts as an identification of a religious subsystem in the face of different environments, similar to logic in a scientific system28. the uncertainty of a particular personal identity leads to a dogmatic certainty that corresponds to the zeitgeist 29.

The autonomy of any system, that is, the boundaries that separate it from the world, is defined, according to Luhmann, by a binary code that is designed to distinguish between "true/false", while the following true statement can be attached to the statement, since everyone is always interested in "truth" (knowledge), and not "untruth" (delusion). The tradition of Russian science for most of the 20th century to oppose "knowledge" (science) to "faith" (religion), especially "belief in the supernatural", in the framework of the Luhmann concept is the desire of one subsystem to call itself only "truth", throwing religion into the realm of "obscurantism", "opium", "deception" or,more precisely, "deception". at best, "illusions", "dying superstructure form", "remnants". Only in the last twenty-five years (since 1988) have works begun to be openly published that, on the one hand, recognize religion as its own "truth", which differs from the actual " scientific "one, and, on the other hand, see elements of" religion "and" scientific Marxist - Leninist philosophy "and ideology in the very phenomenon of the former" scientific Marxist-Leninist philosophy " and ideology. "faith", which implies the need to refer to concepts that are similar to the ideas of N. N. Tolstoy. Luhmann's research opens up a broader methodological horizon for analyzing the phenomena of "religion", "science", "knowledge" , etc.

In Luhmann's concept, we see that the term "religion" is not considered in the context of opposition to believers/Neva-

nazarchuk.com/articles/articlel4.html, accessed from 06.09.2013].

27. Luhmann, N. Funktion der Religion, s. 54.

28. Ibid., s. 56 - 58.

29. Ibid., s. 176.

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true believers/of little faith, etc., but from a more neutral and objective position of "observing them as observers". Indeed, on the one hand, religious studies seeks to find something common to all those cultural and historical phenomena that are called the word "religion", while etymology convincingly shows that the word "religion" itself was absent from the dictionary of the Indo-European language, appearing in a specific Latin culture as "true worship" in opposition to "superstition" (alien religions)30. Science always constructs its own" metalanguage", including religious studies, where the word" religion " is transformed into a term with a special meaning.

N. Luhmann finds such a meaning for the term "religion" that allows it to appear in a special and extremely broad meaning, covering not only the specific historical Roman and European phenomena mentioned above, denoted by the word religio, but also the oldest (original, basic, anthropological, psychological) symbolic systems that differentiated together with humanity itself. performing the function of turning the frightening uncertainty of the world into the certainty of ritual and mythological and theological representation: "Religion is formed as the first attempt to assign a place to the unreliable in the reliable-even if we are talking about a few bones in a man's house, which can be used to identify and propitiate ancestors "31. Religion is described by him as" 're-entry' (reverse entry, return, re-entry) differences between the known and the unknown within the known", they magically "watch over the border with the unknown" 32.

The specific nature of religion, like any subsystem, consists in a special transformation of the complexity of the environment, which is unknown, indefinable and indefinite, into something definable and definite.33 The appearance of the word itself, which denoted "secret", "incomprehensible", that is, that which "resists language", expressed the need to label the very sphere of the unknown, incomprehensible and, accordingly, dangerous, that is, with absolute necessity needing a name.-

Benveniste E. 30. Slovar ' indo-evropeiskikh sotsial'nykh terminov [Dictionary of Indo-European social terms]. Yu. S. Stepanov, Moscow: Progress-Univers, 1998, pp. 343-344, 394-402.

Luhman N. 31. Differentiation. p. 61.

32. Ibid., pp. 64, 61-62.

33. Luhmann, N. Funktion der Religion, ss. 20, 37.

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name and designation. Language symbolically assimilates the world, and, accordingly, what is not named turns out to be "non-existent", but humanity somehow "marked" this "unnamed", which turned out to be possible, since even "resistance to language can only be carried out through language itself" 34. Religion, according to its fundamental and functional status in the social system, it turns out not to be the "opium of the people", "superstructure over the basis", " ideology "or" set of superstitions", but a particularly significant reality, comparable to such integral aspects of human nature as morality, language and media, acting as " the most elementary means of communication... because of the application of the language code to communication itself", that is, precisely as a symbolization of the very" need to keep a secret "and" communication about the incomprehensible", that is, as communication about what refuses to" communicate", to manifest, to be defined, while remaining exactly"secret" 35. N. Luhmann explained the paradox of the very possibility of "knowledge about the unknowable", which, by its very definition, is impossible, since it seeks to know what is recognized as fundamentally unknowable - the "nature" of the secret, sacred, divine, and "the sacred cannot be found in nature, it is constituted as a mystery", that is, religion expresses "the mystery of "being a person in the world as a "connection with the initial", which is "'religio' in the broadest sense of the word, in whatever cultural forms it may appear " 36. Luhmann writes: "In its origins, religion is best understood by interpreting it as a kind of semantics and practice that deals with the distinction between something familiar and unfamiliar," while "this distinction is understood as a division of the world, carried out without understanding that it is different for each observer, settlement or genus." Indeed, other people's mythical traditions and cult practices were perceived primarily as "alien" and therefore "false", as "fairy tales"," tall tales", but not as "myths", "sublime and sacred stories", which" in general " only philosophers began to think about much later in civilization,

34. Luhmann N. Reality of mass media/Translated from German by A. Yu. Antonovsky, Moscow: "Canon+" ROOI "Rehabilitation", 2012, p. 153.

Nazarchuk A.V. 35. Uchenie Niklas Luhmann o kommunikatsii [Niklas Luhmann's Teaching on Communication], Moscow, 2012, p. 170.

36. Kniga 2: Media kommunikatsii [Book 2: Media Communications]/Translated from German by A. Glukhov and O. Nikiforov, Moscow: Logos Publishing House, 2011, pp. 250, 248-249.

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For example, Plato, just as only chemistry, which understands them as "oxidation processes", could see the unity of the rusting of a nail and the burning of a torch. The word "religion" itself, as etymology shows, appears in Latin initially only in the sense of "internal disposition to start a new choice", and not as a more familiar designation for a set of beliefs and cult practices as a single whole, which arises only in the era of the birth of Christianity. "Religion makes the unknown manifest in the familiar, it makes accessible its inaccessibility", it formulates the foundations of a particular social system, each of which "sees itself surrounded by the space and time of the unknown" 37.

The visual embodiment of such a unique "contact with the mysterious" back in Soviet times can be called the "threshold of the room" in the famous "Stalker" by A. Tarkovsky. In both modern and ancient cultures, this "secret" as incomprehensible, incomprehensible, and incomprehensible required the exclusion of critical-empirical verification, since only "through keeping it secret are arbitrariness and possible frivolity in dealing with non-empirical knowledge limited - that is, the probability of being deceived decreases" 38.

Such ideas were the basis of the theory of "religion as deception" that was widespread in antiquity, although religion itself constantly and quite seriously distances itself from what can be considered "deception" or "focus". The understanding of religion in" Stalker "is radically different from the "theory of deception" and definitions that reduced religion only to "belief in the supernatural"; in" Stalker " the characters, finding themselves on the border with the unknown, do not dare to cross the threshold of the "room"; here the experience of "surveillance of the border with the unknown" is stunningly clearly and dramatically visualized. unknown". Luhmann's definition captures this fact, opening up completely new perspectives for religious studies, much broader than they are opened by the above-mentioned term " sacred (sacred)".

The continuity of religious systems is based on the understanding of the true as "traditionally secret", directly related to the "original" symbols and rituals, the meaning of which consisted precisely in their pedantically confirmed "secrecy".

Luhman N. 37. Book 2: Media Communications, p. 249.

38. Ibid., p. 251.

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Forms of historical existence of religion

Religion, which for Luhmann acts as an "autopoietic" (self-reproducing) system, is characterized by "self-reference" (if in science one empirical or logical truth refers to others, then in religion traditional myths and rituals are transmitted as strictly observed "their true tradition") and "foreign reference". The foreign reference refers to the "other", although this "other" is as this system sees it, and for religion it can be assumed that these are from ancient times, on the one hand, "traditions of strangers", called "fairy tales", "fictions" or "superstitions", but, on the other hand, as "traditions of strangers". anthropological research shows an area of intuitively separable "empirical-practical" activity, "profane culture"," routine-everyday "life, a kind of" protoscience", common sense and life experience. We can talk about the proximity of these ideas to the concept of B. Malinowski, who wrote about three co-existing forms of human culture-magic (mastery through coercion of "mysterious forces"), religion (mastery through trusting gifts and the worship of "spirits" or "gods") and science (mastery of the "profane"), while " magic and religion are not just doctrines or philosophies"not just systems of mental beliefs, but specific behaviors, pragmatic attitudes based equally on common sense, feeling, and will"; these are "ways of acting, belief systems, social phenomena, and personal experiences" that form the eternal dimensions of a person's relationship with the world.39 Unlike O. Comte or J. R. R. Tolkien. He did not construct the evolutionary schemes "theology - metaphysics - science" or "magic - religion - science", which are clearly or implicitly present in many modern publications on religious studies, but presented these concepts as mutually conditioned differentiations, eternal and co-existing dimensions of human existence in the world.

Luhmann relies on anthropological evidence that ancient societies are differentiated not into believers/heretics or believers/non-believers, but into "knowing/not knowing", when "essential - requiring its preservation-knowledge of society, knowledge of sacred things are allowed", for example ," only the husband-

Malinovsky B. 39. Magic. Science. Religion/Translated from English. Вступ. articles by R. Redfield et al., Refl. Book, 1998, p. 26; Malinovsky B. K. Sacral and profane in the life of a "primitive man" / / Disput. 1992. N3. pp. 42-43.

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ranks, and only after passing the seven-step initiation ritual, so that in conditions of high mortality, only a small part of the population... It is possible to say that two binary systems of symbolic coding are initially differentiated, one of which ("protoscience") symbolizes empirical and pragmatic "knowledge about everyday reality", while the other ("proto-religion") - non-empirical "knowledge about the secret", while both of them are authoritative they oppose the frivolity of the "uninitiated" - "children", "strangers" and " tricksters "(fools, cunning deceivers).

A. V. Nazarchuk notes that "religion is directly connected with the very foundations of observation", occupying "the invisible "unmarkedplace", the blind spot that occurs when observing the world", focusing "in this place the last horizon of the world", giving "it a transcendent meaning" 41. Continuity of empirical (protoscience) and non-empirical knowledge It is based on the binary understanding of the nature of their specialized and differentiating "truth" as adherence (reproducible practice) in the first case to the subtleties of empirical data on the features of reality phenomena, while in the second-to the "traditional" one, directly related to the "original" symbols and rituals, the meaning of which consisted and consists precisely in their use. pedantically claimed "secrecy". Any "ritualization", according to Luhmann, "translates external uncertainties into internal schematism, it cannot vary and therefore neutralizes the ability to deceive, lie, deviate behavior" 42. In this approach, "breaking rituals is not considered an oddity, a quirk, a joke, but a dangerous mistake; but instead of starting reflection, the mistake is suppressed." 43
The differentiation of "proto-religion" and "protoscience" is formed at the level of "first-order observation", along with which stands out "observation after observation", that is, "second-order observation", or "wisdom" and " morality "(more precisely, "proto-moral"), traditionally attributed to the older generation, " initiates". Later, with the invention of writing, they form symbols of "normativity".

Luhman N. 40. Book 2: Media Communications. p. 250.

Nazarchuk A.V. 41. Niklas Luhmann's Teaching on Communication, p. 170.

Luhman N. 42. Social systems. Essay on General Theory, St. Petersburg: Nauka Publ., 2007, p. 251.

43. Ibid., p. 586.

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and descriptions that are formed "on the basis of selected positions" of sages, priests, aristocrats, etc., that is, "distinguished forms of life" 44. The possession of such "knowledge" separates a person from life in continuous relations of everyday direct communication, since it, possession, "always exists in the form of a chain, obliges to excessively long exposition and it distracts attention from the interaction partners. " 45
"Protoscience", "proto-religion "and" proto-moral " act as functional subsystems that base "any operation on the distinction between two values - just on binary code - and thereby ensure that there is always such a connecting communication that can cause a transition to the opposite value", that is, what is accepted As a "tradition", it can serve as a new statement of the question of its authenticity or its absence ("impiety", "blasphemy"), that is, "what seemed true may need to be revised with new data or theories".46 One can, somewhat simplifying the terms of N. Luhmann, talk about the three original sources of knowledge. "codes of truth", that is, "the truth of the eternally secret", "the truth of the eternally moral" and "the truth of the eternally natural", when the pedantry of magicians was supplemented by the pedantry of the wisdom of elders (priests, kings) and pragmatists-experimenters, thanks to which successive traditions of three types are formed, where " truths are interrelated, and errors, on the contrary, separately " 47.

Luhmann notes the formation and change of functions of religion in social evolution, distinguishing three typologically specific forms: archaic segmented societies, where communication is limited to oral relations of face-to-face interaction in independent groups; stratified societies (in the limit - empire), where there is a differentiation of "high/low tradition", and modern "traditional religion".differentiated society" ("society of societies"), where religion itself is transformed into a specialized"autopoietic system".

Ancient communities, where everyone personally knew another tribesman and remembered their ancestors, are replaced by space-time ones

Luhman N. 44. Reality of mass media. p. 147.

Luhmann N. 45. Differentiation, p. 168.

46. Ibid., p. 176.

Luhmann N. 47. Sotsial'nye sistemy [Social systems], pp. 95-96.
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civilisations, where special importance belongs to the invention and dissemination of writing, which "immensely expanded the communicative potential of society and brought it beyond the interaction of those directly present, and therefore beyond the control of specific systems of interaction" 48. Urban culture creates a new image of religion as a symbolic system capable of unifying diverse tribal traditions into a "mysterious" one. participation in the gods or God, "the true and highest order of existence, the sacred cosmos, the hierarchy of the invisible", while the very name of God is "kept secret", as well as "formulas by which one can justify one's right" to relate to Him, " since their presentation would lead to an open dispute about this right"49. Historically, this was manifested in well-known attempts to construct new, rational-universalist religious doctrines, in the light of which the former beliefs and rituals begin to appear as "pseudo-religions" ("superstitions"), and there are confrontations between "magicians", "kings" and "priests"themselves. There are "stratified societies" that "honor their specifically human structure, isolate themselves from the world of animals and primitive people", and " the basis of this distinction is based on the following principles:.. a religiously cosmologically grounded semantic continuum " 50. Well-known legal prohibitions on witchcraft are introduced, that is, ancient forms of semantics and practices of dealing with the "mysterious". A "self-critical semantics" is emerging in civilization, appearing "in Israel in the form of prophecies, in Greece in the form of a new kind of writing-based quest for knowledge", but in "both cases in a second-order form of observation that is not tied to established positions: observation of observations".51 There is a periodically escalating experience of the collapse of norms and traditions in sometimes extremely "risky forms of preaching or doctrinarianism", which formed new attitudes to the worldview (naturalism and atheism of philosophers)52. Numerous "theologies" are created, including natural philosophy ones, and the differentiation of religion/superstition (piety/neche) begins to be established.-

Luhman N. V. Vlast ' [Power] / Translated from German by A. Yu. Antonovsky, Moscow: Praxis, 2001, p. 15.
Luhman N. 49. Book 2: Media Communications, p. 252.

50. Luhmann N. Differentiation. p. 31.

51. Ibid., p. 93.

Luhman N. 52. Reality of mass media. p. 59.

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injustice), to which the emerging legal system responds with courts on charges of impiety, atheism, blasphemy and blasphemy 53.

The specificity of the highest manifestations of this stage of" great empires " was that they "have the opportunity to perceive themselves as the center of the earth, and everything else as the periphery", when, for example, "China even in the middle of the XIX century considered itself the only "Celestial Empire", and not, for example, one 54. At the same time, "most of the inhabitants of such great empires did not seem to know that they were living in an empire at all, "since" imperial ideologies, such as China's Confucianism or the world's written religions, remained largely unknown or well-known only in popular terms; and the representatives of the bureaucratic elites were also hardly interested in what was going on in the minds of ordinary people."55 It is "a bureaucracy that officially sees itself as a center, divided into departments, that forms the visible structure of the empire and takes on its religious or ethical self-description." 56
There are cultural phenomena that are directly similar to the Latin religio, especially in its medieval imperial-Christian-ecclesiastical originality, when a historical precedent arose, as a result of which, until the XX century inclusive, in most countries of the world it was "common to consider an active religion as the foundation of stability in society", while "compulsion to religious monotony" was "ubiquitous character"57. A specifically European phenomenon of religio has emerged as the compulsory involvement of individuals and entire regional communities, which is affirmed by the full power of the State

Paradoxes of ancient atheism: Problems and opinions//Disput. 1992-N 1. P. 36-37; Andreev Yu. V. The price of freedom and harmony. A few strokes to the portrait of the Greek civilization. St. Petersburg: Alethea, 1998. pp. 306-308.

Luhmann N. 54. Differentiation. p. 87.

55. Ibid., p. 88.

56. Ibid., p. 91.

United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief as a factor in Protecting Religious Freedom//Freedom of conscience in Russia: historical and modern aspects: a collection of articles. Issue 3. Moscow: Russian Association of Religious Researchers, 2006, p. 6.

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("humanity") to the legal forms of understanding the highest order of being, as a personal and intimate sense of presence in a meaningful, ordered and integral world, in a sacred cosmos that saves from chaos and death, that is, as a unique way of being in eternity, as a majestic, strong and bright form of real piety, an ancient and exalted ideal the unity of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness in relation to authentic being (Being), inevitably mysterious and eluding unambiguous definitions that would allow this authenticity to be manipulated.

Monotheism was the logical result of the symbolization of the transcendent, with God acting as the" observer " of religion. 58 It is God who determines what is sacred, what is profane, what is sinful, what is righteous, what is pure, and what is impure, acting as the transcendent observer of all observations and introspection, while remaining invisible.59 Religion differs from other semantic systems by doubling reality, since it presents for observation what is real in a narrower sense, that is, what is in the physical world, and what is not-that is, the sacred 60.

The separation of "own" from "alien" is defined by a code that is expressed in the religious subsystem through the opposition "true/false", understood in the context of the distinction "immanent/transcendent", since it is from the transcendent that we get the religious meaning when considering observations in this world 61. Unlike the observing person, who can observe the world and himself, but not how he observes himself and the world, since you can not get out of yourself and look at yourself from the outside, God is considered to be "omniscient", he can observe himself, which determines the difference between immanent and transcendent 62. In the subsystem of religion, a person is on the side of the immanent, but is involved in the transcendent, in which what happens in the immanent world is interpreted. God, on the other hand, is on the side of the transcendent, but partakes of the immanent.

58. Luhmann, N.Funktion der Religion, s. 38; Luhmann, N. Die Religion der Gesellschaft, s. 24.

59. Luhmann, N. Die Religion der Gesellschaft, s. 28.

60. Ibid., s. 60.

61. Ibid., s. 77.

62. Ibid., s. 325.

63. Ibid., s. 84.

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In general, at the stage of great empires "semantics... It is divided into High Tradition and little tradition, as well as a stepwise folk/urban continuum " 64. In the Roman Empire, there is a unique monotheistic-trinitarian religious picture of the world, when "the attitude to God, which is attached to every experience and action, acted as a hidden self-reference of the social system", while "it was believed that without God's help, nothing goes well", on the basis of which "social and moral requirements were established", while "religious freedom" was established. semantics was not formulated as a self-reference of society; it was (and still is) formulated as an external reference, as transcendence. " 65 Christian trinitarian dogmatics has become a form of legitimate "orthodox" self-description of the " catholic ecclesia "as an exclusive jurisdiction that allows one to separate one's own from the other," theology " is autonomized as the formation of dogmatic certainty.

The disintegration of the" catholic ecclesia "into opposing" jurisdictions", the emergence of strict" jurisdictional-confessional exclusivism", the development of international trade, the formation of nationalism, and the emergence of a capitalist economy inevitably led to what P. Berger called a" crisis of plausibility " in religion as a jurisdictional institution. Under these conditions, "subjectively, the average person tends to be unsure about the foundations of religion", and " objectively, he is faced with a wide variety of religious and other forces that offer definitions of reality, which are fighting among themselves to convert him to their faith or, at least, for his attention, and none of them is valid." force him into submission. " 66
N. Luhmann wrote that historically," the policy of territorial states... - and moreover, under the shadow of the magnificently staged conflict between the emperor and the Pope and the internal church conflict of Ecumenical councils - has acquired a remarkable independence from religious issues", and " territorial relations between the two countries have become increasingly independent.-

Luhman N. 64. Differentiation. p. 90.

Luhmann N. 65. Sotsial'nye sistemy [Social systems], p. 595.

Yudin A. 66. Introduction// Orthodoxy and Catholicism: from confrontation to dialogue. Anthology/Compiled by. Yudin, M.: Biblical and Theological Institute of St. Andrew the Apostle, 2001, pp. 67-68; Berger P. Religion and the problem of persuasiveness// An inviolable supply. 2003. N6 (32) [http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2003/6/berger.html, accessed from 06.09.2013].

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the courts send envoys to observe ecumenical councils and increasingly view religious disputes as political issues and even political chances"67. Luhmann believes that "printing has been contributing to this en masse, that is, since the mid-sixteenth century", when "science is also distancing itself from religion-for example, through an emphatically filled concept of nature, through scandalous conflicts (Copernicus, Galileo) , and through the use of freedom for the sake of skepticism and inquisitive innovation", while this " law is actively used for many problems arising from such development, for example... as a public right for the transition to religious tolerance - and because it was able to provide such services, the right becomes more independent in relation to political power"68.

During this period, "if religion tends to violent clashes in order to prove or inspire the right faith, then it has to find a political advocate; politics gradually distances itself more and more from waging religious wars" 69. The connection between religiosity and aggressiveness leads to the fact that " the latter must be regulated ecclesiastically and politically or subjectively directed to the inner world human rights in the form of rigorous demands", as a result of which "even religion becomes a differentiated system" 70.

Luhmann describes this crucial epoch as follows: the idea proposed since the seventeenth century was initially that "the basis of order must be in the hidden and unknowable. Latency is a necessary condition for order. The hand that controls everything remains invisible. The threads on which everything hangs are fixed at an unthinkable height. Thanks to the cunning of the mind, the motives of actions are unintentionally ordered. Metaphors of this kind were at the same time compromise proposals for religions that in their own way exalt the indefinite, define and formulate it, but society could not choose one of several religions, it lacked unknowability in general. At least it was clearly and correctly noticed. In fact, to ensure that-

Luhmann N. 67. Differentiation, pp. 135-136.

68. Ibid., pp. 135-136.

69. Ibid., p. 143.

70. Ibid., pp. 142-143.

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It is precisely in this socio-cultural context that "philosophy of religion" and "religious studies", the science of religion, and the study of the diversity of cultural forms of presentation of the "unknowable"arise.

The spread of printing "forces the development of an additional technique, namely literacy techniques", and "this skill can no longer be limited to the topics of certain functional systems", since "those who can read the Bible can also read pamphlets of religious polemics, newspapers, novels", and " now the economy regulates what printed products can be produced and used in the production of books." sold out", and other forms of communication lose their previous control over society 72. In such conditions "religion and politics... they are trying (more or less unsuccessfully) to defend themselves with the help of censorship or the threat of fines, " but "this requires decisive criteria that no longer come from a general worldview, but must develop in a functionally specific way... and change, if necessary, in the religious, political and legal systems " 73.

Under such conditions, religion is functionally weakened, since most of its functions, in addition to transcending, are given to other social systems. However, the rejection of social control and political power provides new opportunities for unlocking the potential of religion.74 According to Luhmann, religion as a system can be fully revealed only in a postmodern situation. Religion responds to human needs and contributes to the system of social competencies by observing the unobservable ("blind spots") and the ever-open questions of the "ultimate meaning of being" 75.

This leads to the fact that today it is "the individual who presents himself as the starting point for what seems appropriate for his faith, reason,and membership in organizations." 76 As one of the authors wrote back in the early Modern era,

Luhmann N. 71. Sotsial'nye sistemy [Social systems], p. 176.

Luhmann N. 72. Differentiation. p. 149.

73. Ibid., p. 149.

74. Luhmann, N. Die Religion der Gesellschaft, s. 147.

75. Ibid., s. 42.

Luhmann N. 76. Differentiation. p. 157.

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"there is no Church, every part of which so appeals to my Mind, whose Statutes, Ordinances, and Customs seem so much in harmony with reason, and are so much in proportion to my personal Piety, as that in which I put my Faith, as the Church of England; I swear to believe in her Faith, and therefore I am bound to believe in her Faith. I have a double obligation to subscribe to its Statutes and comply with its Regulations. Whatever else-matters of no concern to me-I observe according to the rules of my private reason, or the attitude and character of my Piety; not believing in this, because Luther affirmed it, and not condemning this, because Calvin denounced it ... (1643)"77.

The destruction of previous forms of religious unity leads to the emergence of concepts of "individual exclusivity", which lead to the loss of identity, the loss of natural community, which begins to be understood only as a "scheme": "I was created unlike anyone I have ever seen; I dare to believe that I was created to be unlike anyone who exists. If I'm not better, at least I'm different. " 78 Society invents the problem of the" social self "or" identity "that" a fragmentary, turbulent, chaotic individual must become (or claim to become) in order for others to become something that he is in his own self... it is not " 79. A contemporary culture is emerging where "no one can actually know who they are, but must discover whether their own projections are being recognized." 80 The loss of" certainty "inevitably leads to" unclassifiability", including"jurisdictional" 81.

Even J. V. Goethe made fun of the attempts of a firm and strict classification (identification) from the standpoint of the principle of rationalism, which, in the spirit of the taxonomy of Karl Linnaeus, sought to distribute individuals into categories - "Christian", "Lutheran", "pietist", "atheist", "pantheist", etc., and it was believed that, similar to "the same plant... if it could not simultaneously appear" under different headings, then in the same way " it turned out to be an undesirable violation of the co-

Luhmann N. 77. Differentiation. pp. 169-170.

Luhmann N. 78. Reality of mass media. p. 195.

79. Ibid., p. 195.

Luhmann N. 80. Differentiation. p. 41.

81. Luhmann, N. Funktion der Religion, s. 29 - 30.

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and philosophers who, in retaliation, were given a special and, if I may say so, punitive heading of "eclecticism" " 82. Reality from a new perspective appears flexible, dynamic and changeable, where any "framework" begins to be understood as conditional coarsening.

The destruction of the medieval religious sense of supreme unity leads to the emergence of new "ersatz ideas" when "in the XVIII century. from Scotland to Poland, "patriots" are emerging", and "the nineteenth century is turning to nationalism", but all these " new forms that seek to perceive society again in a politically centered way, are failing because of the state itself or, more precisely, because of the territorial segmentation of the political system of a society that has now become irrevocably global"83. In the eighteenth century, Luhmann notes, "with the departure from the religious justification of the world, the denominational segmentation of religion, and the failure of religious fanaticism movements, morals are increasingly being hoped for," the social itself is beginning to be defined "in terms of morality." 84 Shaftesbury tried to " put the ridiculous as a test in the service of a morality based on natural reason." this, however, failed in the long run, since the "ridiculous" appears as "the hidden enemy of morality, because it partly competes with it" 85.

Science, scientific knowledge, which stands out as an independent subsystem of society, as N. Luhmann notes, "makes a person unfit for life at court, since it always exists in the form of a chain, obliges an excessively lengthy presentation and distracts attention from the partners in interaction" 86. Science creates its own and currently dominant tradition, where 87 Luhmann notes that historically "the fact that the world of everyday life, the world of life, folklore, etc. can be presented in the form of scientific concepts" becomes clear only in the 19th century " along with the collapse of the metaphysical constructions of the world and the beginning of the search for other foundations for the "re" observation-

Svasyan K. A. 82. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Moscow: Mysl, 1989, p. 71.

Luhmann N. 83. Differentiation. p. 160.

Luhmann N. 84. Sotsial'nye sistemy [Social systems], p. 314.

85. Ibid., pp. 315, 314.

Luhmann N. 86. Differentiation. p. 168.

Luhmann N. 87. Sotsial'nye sistemy [Social systems], pp. 95-96.
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This is when a" modern, post-theological science" is formed, when "we know that you can only fly by plane, and not on a magic carpet" 88.

In different sciences, N. Luhmann notes, there are "numerous culturally proven opportunities for correcting misconceptions", in addition, " since the time of Marx and Freud, opportunities for self-suspicion have been opening up... understanding that we are motivated by latent interests or motives", and "for these purposes, society acquires "critical" intellectuals and therapists. However, this (suspicion of latent interests and motives) is only a condition for correcting actual operations, and therefore prospects for the future, while in operations of actual modernity it is impossible to distinguish between the world as it is and the world as it is observed. " 89
In such a broad cultural and historical context, it is precisely the "mass media" that emerged in the sixteenth century, even before modern science, that appear as "news production organizations" (or "weekly deceptions to extract money"), and " the true mass media interests only within very limited limits, which are seriously different from the restrictive conditions scientific research"90. Today, society acts as a "differentiated" society, where everyone participates in several subsystems and the defining element is not the pagan/orthodox, orthodox/heretics, elite/mob, clergy/laity, educated/profane, experts/amateurs, geniuses/crowd, etc. demarcations, but the inevitable internal complexity of each citizen due to involvement in these processes. people cannot be divided into functional systems in such a way that each of them belongs to only one system, that is, they would participate only in law, but not in economics, only in politics, but not in the educational system.91
This process is internally contradictory, and even " from the first protests against the Enlightenment of reason at the end of the XVIII century . all along, it was assumed that it harms latent areas for which no Enlightenment is unbearable, " while "such clearly

Luhmann N. 88. Reality of Mass media, pp. 132, 150.

89. Ibid., p. 25.

90. Ibid., pp. 51, 53.

Luhmann N. 91. Differentiation. p. 171.

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irrational formations, such as religion (for the lower classes) and taste (for the upper classes), were praised because of their temporal advantages, that is, at least in this respect, they were understood functionally", although it was realized that "functional analysis is not capable of serving religious truth", which is "beyond its control", and the result was It is a very controversial call to "protect any stable religion, even if it is already absurd, as long as there is nothing to replace it" 92.

The resulting differentiated global society, or Luhmann's "society of society", has become a system where "the condition for communication is disunity ... the more compartments in the ship, the harder it is to flood it, the less communication, the less conflicts", while "conflicts themselves are institutionalized and used as the most important conditions for system dynamics in already isolated areas". part of society", when "scientists argue with scientists, and politicians argue with politicians, but somehow they can't argue with each other" 93. In such circumstances, "those who are truth-oriented in communication (an ordering tool for scientific communication and scientific texts) are not able to understand those who are faith-oriented as the reference point of religious texts, but it is precisely because of this constitutive separation that scientists are no longer burned at the stake, and believers are not excluded from society as imbeciles." 94 Functional systems ' relationships to each other may involve "destruction - to the extent that they depend on each other - but not instruction"95. This new "discourse-differentiated society" is immune to conflict precisely because a collapse in one sphere - say, in religious communication (inter - religious conflicts) or in art (the rejection of beauty as a criterion for a work of art and, accordingly, the basis of aesthetic communication and the object for aesthetic texts) - no longer leads to a collapse in many other spheres. all other areas of social communication, as was typical for traditional undifferentiated social networks.

Luhmann N. 92. Sotsial'nye sistemy [Social systems], p. 453.

Obshchestvo kak obshchestvo i razdoschenie [Society as communication and separation] / / Luhman N. Differentiatsiya, Moscow: Logos, 2006, pp. 307, 241.

94. Ibid., p. 313.

Luhmann N. 95. Differentiation. p. 179.

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societies where everything criminal - ugly - false - poor - unloved - unhealthy - godless was identified " 96.

In such a society, pluralism and a variety of interpretations of even one's own religion are established as "fluctuations in modes that are attractive to individuals" 97. In response to them, "various kinds of fundamentalisms are developing", when "you can make a statement: this is my world, we think this is right", and "the resistance that you encounter in this case acts more as a reinforcing motive, it can contribute to radicalization and does not lead to doubts in reality".98. Luhmann draws attention to the fact that "fundamentalisms are new phenomena of recent decades and that we are not talking about" deeply rooted "traditional feelings, but about the success of persuasion on the part of intellectuals, among whom we can assume that there is an identification problem", and "unlike the "enthusiasm" of the older model, this is not necessary neither rely on divine inspiration, nor give in to the opposite statement about illusory / reality/", but "it is enough to fuse one's own view of reality with one's own identity and establish it as a projection", since "reality no longer requires consensus"99.

Conclusion

Let us briefly summarize the contribution that Niklas Luhmann made to the understanding of religion as a social subsystem.

First, Luhmann formulated the definition of the term "religion", which allows combining the data of anthropology, psychology, history and sociology of religion, qualifying religion as a universal anthropological and psychological phenomenon of the communicative paradox:" the need to keep a secret"," surveillance of the unknown","communication about the incomprehensible".

Secondly, Luhmann presented the typology of religions through the prism of changing communicative means: from " interaction to-

Society as communication and separation, p. 314.

Luhmann N. 97. Differentiation. p. 241.

Luhmann N. 98. Reality of mass media. p. 162

99. Ibid., p. 162.

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tsom-to-person", to the era of the "invention of writing" in civilizations and, finally, to the era of the dominance of "media" in a modern differentiated society.

Third, he showed the peculiarities of the modern" identity crisis", including the religious ("jurisdictional") one, since "no one can actually know who he is, but must discover whether his own projections meet with recognition" in a society where differentiation itself makes consensus impossible.

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