Bodies like bright stars: Saints and relics in orthodox Russia, 1860s--1920s.

While scholarship has traditionally dismissed Russian Orthodoxy either as an otherworldly faith of mystical contemplation or as an impediment to social action, this dissertation argues that Orthodoxy was instead an active, indeed proactive, faith grounded in the needs and realities of everyday life. While the late imperial church celebrated saints as paragons of virtue and piety whose lives were to be emulated in the search for salvation, ordinary believers cultivated a more direct and (literally) hands-on relationship with their heavenly protectors by visiting saintly graves, kissing their miracle-working relics [moshchi], and making pledges to repay the saints for miracles rendered. Ordinary believers actively sought out the assistance of the saints for mundane and worldly matters, and were more likely to pray to them for help in the quotidian concerns of health and home than for the salvation of their souls. In seeking miracles at the shrines of the saints and undertaking pilgrimages to their holy relics, Russian Orthodox believers also used their faith to cope with new problems engendered by Russia's passage to modernity---problems of unemployment, the rupture of the traditional family, and economic insecurity. Thus, far from being an anachronistic vestige of pre-modern religious practices, the cult of the saints proved remarkably adept at lending itself to innovation and improvisation amidst the complexities of political, economic, and social modernization and retained its relevance in the daily lives of believers during an age of supposed secularization. After the Bolshevik Revolution, officials at the People's Commissariat of Justice attempted to discredit the cult of the saints and the Russian Orthodox religion by launching a campaign to exhume holy relics. The campaign enjoyed limited success, however, for while Soviet publicists and antireligious agitators preached the impossibility of bodily incorruptibility and pointed to wrecked and ruined relics as the best proof for their arguments, ordinary believers were largely unresponsive to such logic. In the minds of the Orthodox faithful, a saint was still a saint, even if he had been exhumed and even if his relics were corrupted, so long as he continued to produce miracles and bestow help on the living.Ph.D.European historyModern historyPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyReligious historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124414/2/3138160.pd