Eggert, M. and Holscher, L. (eds) (2013) Religion and Secularity. Transformations and Transfers of Religions Discourses in Europe and Asia. Leiden & Boston: Brill. - 286 p.

Collection " Religion and secularity. Transformations and Displacements of Religious Discourses in Europe and Asia " was published in the series "Dynamics in the History of Religions" by the well-known Dutch publishing house Brill, specializing in the publication of literature in the humanities and social sciences (as the fourth issue 1). The editors were two professors at Ruhr University Bochum, Marion Eggert (majoring in Korean studies) and Lucian Helyper (majoring in new history). The book belongs to the latest literature,

which is dedicated to the discussion of secularization and secularism. But in this case, we are not talking about theorizing within the framework of sociology or political philosophy, but about specific cultural and cross-cultural studies, about analyzing certain "cases". The editors describe their approach as sociohistorical and semantic. They proceed from the fact that "secularization has been and remains a powerful force in many societies, both in Europe and abroad, but in each cultural and social context it has a different meaning" (p. 2). The articles in the collection focus on individual countries/cultures, with a particular focus on the relevant context. discourse ("we consider concepts as concepts that represent social relations").

1. Предыдущие выпуски серии: Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks (2010); Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe (2011); Purity and the Forming of Religious Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism (2012).

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structures"). At the same time, the general research perspective is set by attention to how ideas about "religion" and "secularism" move between Europe and Asia - in both directions (p. 4).

The first article, "The Influence of Foreign Knowledge on eighteenth - century European Secularism" by Heiner Retz, sets the tone, and is another argument against "Eurocentrism". The main thesis of the author is: "The European Enlightenment is as much a product of European history as it is a reflection of cross-cultural dynamics" (p. 9). To confirm this thesis, he draws attention to the fact that the main elements of the enlightenment ideological complex - naturalism, rationalism, autonomy and secularism as such-are one of the most important sources of knowledge about Confucius and Confucianism, brought to the West by Christian missionaries. Retz cites many European thinkers, beginning with Pierre Bayle, who admired the secular character of" Chinese wisdom " or, conversely, opposed it or tried to reconcile it with the religious view of the world and man through the idea of "natural religion". Among those who have discussed the "Chinese theme" are Leibniz, Pascal, Francois Quesnay, William Temple, Isaac Vossius, Matthew Tyndall, Hume, Voltaire, and especially Christian Wolff, with his Oratio de Sinarum philosophy practica lecture of 1721. The author believes that Wolf's strategic goal was to replace the" external reasons " of religion, which the Chinese "never paid attention to", with "internal reasons, the source of which is the nature of human action in itself" (p. 24). In this regard, Retz polemically reproaches Charles Taylor for not paying attention to the Chinese influence on European secularism: "According to Charles Taylor, who does not mention either Wolf or his possible Chinese inspirers, the disclosure of the inner human sources of the desire for good (benevolence) is one of the greatest achievements of our (!) civilization and the charter of modern unbelief." and, more than that, a crucial turning point for the secular age."2. It is obvious that the enlightened cosmopolitans had a much broader view of "our civilization" than the modern Canadian philosopher" (p. 24).

2. Reference to: Taylor, Ch. (2007) A Secular Age, p. 257. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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The author's conclusion is: "Without any doubt, sinophilia and anti-religious or anti-church radicalism of the Enlightenment are closely related, although not in all authors" (p. 26).

Lucian Heliner, in his article "The Religious and the Secular: Semantic Reconfigurations in the Religious Sphere of Germany from the eighteenth to the Twentieth Century," shows, first of all, from German material, that the current understanding of these categories - as correlative and mutually exclusive - was established only in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that extrapolating such an understanding to earlier historical periods, in essence, illegal. Moreover, "in Germany, only after the Second World War did the dichotomy of 'religious' and 'secular' spread in the wider public space, creating the possibility for institutions, people, and mentalities to be either religious or secular" (p. 36).

The author traces the evolution of the German word weltlich: it acquires an anti-religious meaning (along with the term sakular) only when, at the very end of the 19th century, it moves from the old spiritual / secular dichotomy (geistlich/weltlich), in which these terms are not antagonistic, but complementary, to the new religious / secular dichotomy. "Where previously it was a question of the interaction of church and state, spiritual and secular views of the world, hostility is now being established-first on the part of freethinkers and socialists, and later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, also on the part of liberals and conservatives" (p. 41). Fichte and Hegel, who could be considered "atheists" from the point of view of Orthodox Christianity, were not yet "secularists" in the later, radically anti-religious sense. And even the most left-wing authors (Marx, Buchner, Haeckel) did not use the word weltlich or the term Weltlichkeit (secularism) to express their anti-religious position, "because it was used not in a negative pietistic sense, but in a positive Hegelian one" (p. 44).

This situation changed only in 1891 - in connection with the so-called Erfurt school reform program put forward by the Social Democrats, which assumed the creation of a weltliche Schule (secular school) without any presence of religion in it. At the same time, the implementation of such a program (and the corresponding discourse) was postponed for a long time: "Until the 1960s, the usual type of shko-

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In the German primary education system, there was a Konfessionsschule (confessional school) run by the ecclesiastical authorities" (p. 51). After the Second World War, at the peak of secularization (1950-1970), a different semantic shift also occurs - in this case, in the religious (Christian) environment itself. For a number of German theologians (not without the influence of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's idea of "irreligious Christianity"), the negative meaning of secularization is replaced by a positive meaning: a kind of "secular religion" or "religious secularism" appears (p.53). However, the theological attempt to find a place for religion in a totally secular world, abandoning the anti-secularist position, did not lead to a new stable relationship between religious and secular, remaining only one of the options. The author refers to the German Catholic theologian Eugen Bieser, who argued back in 1986 that secularization had reached its apogee, ushering in the post-secular era (p. 55). The new semantic situation, from the author's point of view, consists in the fact that now the antagonism of "religious" and "secular" is replaced by a division within the religious itself: "In this paradigm, secular religiosity can be associated with liberal political positions and opposed to fundamentalist religiosity" (ibid.).
Sylvie Legrand, in her article "The emergence of the concept of laicite in 19th-century France", also draws attention to the fact that most historians and sociologists use this term retrospectively when talking about key events in the history of Republicanism, starting with the Great French Revolution. However, the word itself is a neologism, and the date of his birth is known: November 8, 1871 (p. 63). The term arises in connection with the process of secularization of primary education as the final stage of institutional differentiation. Speaking about the driving forces of this process, which took place in the last third of the XIX century, the author points out three interpretations of laicite - religious, a-religious and anti-religious, the general basis of which was anti-clericalism. At the same time, a significant role was played by the religious understanding of laicite, which was based on neo-Kantianism, spiritualism and liberal Protestantism (including the Morale independante movement, whose representatives just introduced the term in 1871). It was about decon-

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a professionalized moral education in the Republican spirit, which not only did not exclude, but also presupposed the education of a certain kind of religious feelings.

According to the author, the term laicite (as well as laique in the definition given in the Constitution of the French Republic) can ultimately be understood in the broad sense of state neutrality, respect for freedom of conscience and religion, as well as the separation of political and religious spheres. At the same time, in the French context, this term has become a marker not only of a certain positive ideology, but also of a kind of "civil religion in French", that is, it has acquired a sacred connotation. The emotional controversy surrounding the concept of laicite continues in the latest situation, and voices are already being heard in favor of "laicizing laicite" (p. 74).

Thematically, the" European "part of the collection is completed by Volkhard Krech's article" Secularization, disenchantment or something in between? Methodological considerations and empirical observations concerning a controversial historical idea". The author undertakes to test the "strong" version of the theory of secularization, which assumes the progressive process of religion's loss of its significance and at the limit of its complete disappearance, using statistical data for the last decades, using the example of Germany. The results are quite interesting. "Although church membership is falling, there is evidence that interest in genuinely religious acts (in this case, communion) is increasing." "General religiosity and religious beliefs are common to 55 percent of the population, and this indicator has not changed in the last twenty years" (p. 104). In addition, the volume of popular religious literature published has been growing over the past decade. The general conclusion of the author is as follows: "We can say that secularization is an ambivalent process with two directions. From the point of view of the modern concept of religion, it is interpreted as a process in which the importance of religion in society decreases. At the same time, secularization strengthens the position of religion in society, since it gives it a special sphere in which it performs its specific function " (p. 105).

Of the twelve articles in the collection, only four discussed above are devoted to European countries. The rest include Israel, Turkey, Iran, Sri Lanka, Japan, and China

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and Korea. And the more we move geographically and culturally away from the European context, the more complex, or rather more specific, the relationship between religious and secular becomes.

Yochi Fischer, in his article "The concepts of "religion" and "secularism" in Hebrew and their presence in the social and political life of Israel," points out the complex process of forming this conceptual dichotomy in the language itself, because the religious specificity of Judaism does not imply the opposition of the sacred and profane. On the contrary, religion in this case "contains the secular, that is, the worldly, as its element" and " aims to sanctify the secular... giving religious meaning to every aspect of everyday life" (p. 111). Therefore, the specific term "religion" (dat) appears only in the context of modern Jewish critical thought. At the same time, the opposite term hiloni (meaning secular) appears: first, at the end of the XIX century, within the framework of Zionism, and then, as an element of everyday public language, in the 1950s in the newly formed Jewish state. At the same time, the word itself has a theological origin (hiloni - one who is not a priest).

It is interesting that although from the very beginning of the history of modern Israel religion occupied an important place in the state and politicians focused on the balance of interests between religious (dati) and non-religious (hiloni) citizens, the dati/hiloni dichotomy itself, that is, the juxtaposition of two mutually exclusive categories, began to be present in the texts of party-political agreements only in 1960- 2000s (p. 121). The author claims that the goal that many Zionist pioneers set for themselves, namely the formation of a new, "purely" secular identity, was never achieved. Today, this leads to a shift towards what can be called Israeli "post-secularism." This is reflected, in particular, in the emergence of groups and organizations that study Judaism "in a pluralistic way" and even include liturgical elements in this process (joint prayers, festive and other rites). The author considers it possible to bring such phenomena under the category of "belonging without believing "with the corresponding clarification - in relation to Judaism:"belonging without strict observance of religious law". Thus, the third generation of Israelis is trying to restore the "chain of memory" (D. Hervier-

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Leger) - the "chain of memory" that was broken with the emergence of Zionism, in order to connect those who are now living with the Jewish tradition, in which there is no division between religious and secular. In conclusion, the author writes: "Many researchers portray Israeli society as divided into religious and secular. This division is often described in terms of a struggle, or Kulturkampf, for control of the public sphere. Indeed, in Israel, in comparison with other "secular" countries, religion occupies a very important place in the public sphere. However, to understand the complexity of the Israeli situation, one must go beyond the dichotomy of the secular and the religious" (p. 127).

Anat Lapidot-Firilla, in his article "The concept of laiklik and its introduction to public discourse in Turkey", argues with the widespread view that Kemalist secularism was a consistent modernist project of the Turkish elites, namely, "an attempt to break with the religious past and move towards the Western view of progress." The author believes that this view is not just inaccurate - it "makes it difficult to understand Turkish secularism in its various forms and in different historical periods" (p. 132).

The concept of laiklik comes from the French laicite, but appears only after the end of the empire, and the corresponding principle was introduced into the Turkish Constitution only a year before Ataturk's death, in 1937. It is not entirely clear why, unlike Hebrew and Arabic, the term "secularism"was not found to correspond in Turkish. Perhaps the reason is that laiklik was primarily used in the areas of law, administration, and education. The author notes that Turkish secularism is a consequence of the reform of religious laws, which, however, was aimed not at rejecting religion, but at purifying these laws from " popular beliefs alien to Islam." In other words, the process of "Laiklikization" in Kemalist Turkey was not negative (anti-religious), but positive - in line with the formation of a new Turkish identity and, accordingly, the "honing" of religion (in particular, in the framework of de-Arabization), they fought with key Islamic texts and ulama, and also established a strict regime of relations between the two countries. religion and politics, which assumed the hierarchical primacy of the latter in the person of the state.-

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endowment institutions. There is a synergy between nationalism and religion. Moreover, during the Second World War and in the post-war period, there was direct discrimination against religious minorities (taxes, military service), so that only Muslims of the officially recognized Hanafi madhhab turned out to be full citizens. General conclusion of the author: "In the case of Turkey, we can talk about such an amorphous cultural and judicial-administrative aspects of the state, which does not allow us to separate the process of nation-building from religious ideas, language and social practices" (p. 151). Two articles are devoted to the Japanese context: "Japanese Discovery of 'Secularization' at Home and Abroad (1870-1945) "by Hans Martin Kramer and "Discursive Formations around' Religious Freedom 'in Modern Japan: Religion, Shinto, the Emperor's Institute" by Unichi Isome. Without going into historical and linguistic details here (for lack of space), we will give only the generalizing statements of the second author: "The word religion was unknown to Japanese society before the beginning of the modern period and did not arise spontaneously among the Japanese themselves. It appeared as a result of contact with the West and under external pressure from the Western great powers, who demanded freedom in the interests of Christianity, that is, it was introduced into Japanese society from the outside" (p. 221). "The dichotomy between public and private, which came from the West along with the word shukyd [religion], referring to the inner world of a person, as well as the dichotomous concept of religious and secular, were established in the process of colonization. Religion in the private sphere was opposed to public secularism without religion" (p. 223). However, the persistence of "Shintoism and the emperor's institution" in Japanese society indicates a refusal to fully accept the modern Western understanding of religion. They have become public morality as the necessary foundation of a modern national state... As religion became a public morality and penetrated the public sphere, the term obviously lost its private Protestant meaning and became a designation of public religion. Thus Shintoism and the Emperor's institution relativized the modern dichotomy of religious and secular, deviating from it" (p. 229).

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Chen Hsiyian's article "The Transformation of Confucianism into a Religion and the Reorientation of the Confucian Tradition in Modern China"is devoted to the twists and turns associated with various interpretations of Confucianism in Republican China. Attempts to reinvigorate Confucianism through its "religification" in accordance with Western discourse ultimately failed The story of these attempts, which the author tells, shows the conflict between the European concept of religion and the Chinese cultural matrix: this conflict was a consequence of Western "intellectual violence" and gave rise to the paradoxical phenomenon of the Chinese religion of the "human way", which is opposed to the "human way". religions of the "divine way".

Unfortunately, we have to leave out of this review the other most interesting case studies included in the collection under consideration, namely Sven Bretfeld's articles "Equality in Hierarchy: Secularism and the Protection of Religions in Sri Lanka", Yang Sukman's "Historical Formation of the Religious/Secular Dichotomy in Modern Korea", and Nahid Motsafari's "The History of the Religious / Secular Dichotomy in Modern Korea".Civic Piety: A Vision of Secularism in Constitutional Iran." We refer the interested reader to the texts themselves (recognizing that in this case, most likely, there is some residual Eurocentrism of the reviewer, who paid much more attention to European contexts than to Asian ones).

What is the main value of the work done by the authors and editors of this collection? The value lies in contextualizing the theoretical approaches that currently dominate the study of religion and secularism. Many authors refer to the works of Ch. Taylor, H. Casanova, T. Asad, relying on their concepts, and sometimes, on the contrary (as we have seen), entering into polemics with them. This seems to be very fruitful: the new theoretical framework sets and encourages concrete research, which in turn corrects and saturates with facts - historical and linguistic-the process of achieving a new understanding of religious and secular and their relations-both on a global scale and in local contexts. In this case, it is the works of historians presented in the reviewed book that are of particular importance-

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regional experts, without whose input any theories run the risk of remaining only "groundless speculations".

In other words, even in the interdisciplinary studies that those who try to deal with the concepts of "religion" and "secularism" are now doomed to, globalization gives rise to glocalization. Eurocentrism sets the initial optics, which we have to abandon in order to discover cultural and religious specifics, which are recognized, however, only by contrast, that is, against the background of the original global-European optics (since there is no other universal optics yet). In this sense, the collective monograph under consideration is an important step forward in the scientific and academic movement towards a new retrospective vision of religion/secularism, defined by this "glocal" perspective.

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