Eugene Rashkovsky - Director, Center for Religious and Russian Emigre Literature, M. Rudomino Russian Library of Foreign Literature, Moscow, Russia, rashkov@rambler.ru

Eugene Rashkovsky is mostly known for his studies in history of culture, comparative study of civilizations, historiography and history of science. In his interview to the,Journal E. Rashkovsky speaks about the interaction between religion and science, which he understands as being a relationship of "conflicting complementarity". He believes that Christianity played an important stimulating role in the genesis of Western science.

Keywords: science and religion, Christianity, scientific revolution, science studies, history of science.

Evgeny Borisovich, hello. First, my question will be extremely general - how do you imagine the relationship between science and religion? Is there an inevitable conflict between them, can they reach mutual understanding or at least not be hostile to each other, for example, by delineating the areas of their interests?

Evgeny Rashkovsky. When for many, many centuries such a burning and burning question about the relationship between science and religion has been raised, then in public life and thought, in philosophical thought, in journalism, in the crowd, there are, in my opinion, two main misconceptions: the first misconception is associated with the categorical, absolute opposition of science and religion, and the second misconception is related to the absolute opposition of science and religion. It is connected with the absolute identification of science and religion. Here is such, say, absolute identification, I often met, for example, while studying the history of the origin of the Russian language.-

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cultural studies in the Islamic world. In my opinion, the ratio between them is completely different.

Between science and religion there is a certain conflict," thievish " complementarity. By the way, perhaps not only quantum physics or the theory of functional asymmetry of the human brain opens up a new approach to this problem, but also the study of the traditional philosophy of the Ancient Far East with its conflicting and at the same time harmonious complementarity of such existential principles as Yin and Yang. very important, defining structures and meanings of human thinking. Both science and religion must be two dissimilar forms of human intellectuality that do not exist without each other.

At the heart of science is the need for human life and thought to justify the existence of an objective world through the laws of thought itself, supported of course by experimental observation; and our gift of thought summarizes, organizes, and generalizes these observations. Religion, like a qualitatively different form of human intellectuality, has a different nature. Religion is connected with the eternal human need to penetrate the inner symbolic space, which forms the immutable context of both the inner life of a person, and communication between people, and the very presence of a person in the Universe. Perhaps Carl Gustav Jung described this space somewhat mechanically in his study of archetypes.

Although I think we in Russia have a deeper approach to this problem, which I associate with the legacy of the Russian philosopher Yakov Emmanuelovich Golosovker, with his teaching on semantic images. If Jung's archetypes, these basic symbolic "units" of the inner space of a person, twist and turn a person as they want, then Golosovker's meaningful, internal creative freedom of a person in relation to these "units" is very important - meaning is broken.

Behind this conflicting complementarity there are some basic, fundamental structures of human ontology or, if you prefer, philosophical-antro-

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a semi-logical reality, because the objective world, in which each of us is interested, and intimate human subjectivity are still not exchanged for each other. At the same time, in culture, in psychology, in thinking, in the self-realization of a person, they, as it were, do not live without each other. Rather, they are in creative and dialectical contradiction, although to understand this circumstance, I think, you need to eat a pound of intellectual and vital salt.

So, one of the historical problems was and is the populist abuse of the dipoles of objective intellectuality and subjective religiosity. This memory is very fresh among people of my generation, and many of us have experienced fierce anti-religious persecution by the communist, atheist regime. Now, I fear, in the Islamic world and - to a much lesser extent - in the Orthodox world, and I think in other worlds, there is a galvanization of the inquisitorial persecution of human intelligence.

In particular, these persecutions are directed against the right of the intellect to distortions: after all, creative people are always "twists". They always pay for new discoveries - in science, in art, and maybe even in social creativity - they always pay with distortions, as Marx, Freud, Nikolai Vavilov, and many other great people paid.

What is the lesson for us of the dipole of objective science, which easily turns into populist atheism, and subjective religiosity, which, when institutionalized, easily turns into inquisitorial persecution? I think that a lot depends on self-discipline, as well as the culture and humanity of the most developed part of the intelligentsia and clergy. For those who base their life not on opportunistic interests or self-aggrandizement (remember how Stanislavsky said-love art, not yourself in art), I would say-love the truth, not yourself in truth-seeking. Apparently, people who love the truth, and not their own perishable ambitions, should carry the idea of respect for each other and understanding the uniqueness of both themselves and other people both in our civil society and in our state environment.

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There is an opinion that science is a unique European phenomenon that formed the foundations of Western Art Nouveau culture and influenced the world around Europe. Do you agree with this point of view and, if so, how would you explain such specifics?

Still, if we talk about the scientific revolution, then the first scientific revolution, apparently, is connected with the creation of the principles of autonomous rational science. Piama Pavlovna Gaidenko connects such a creation with the names of Ptolemy, Euclid, and Hippocrates.

A serious and socially irreversible scientific revolution, of course, is primarily associated with the period of European history after the Renaissance, and here, for me personally, one of the key figures is Descartes with his cogito, that is, the idea of self - observing thinking that underlies scientific and philosophical discourses. Now, however, I am more and more surprised and simply shrug my shoulders at how much the Cartesian cogito depends on the previous Catholic cultural tradition, and, above all, on St. Augustine's reflections on his religious experience. Without this religious self-knowledge, the religious cogitatio of Augustine, the Catholic scholar Descartes would not have formed his cogito. And it is not by chance that Descartes, when he formulated the great maxim "I think, therefore I am" (not "I exist", as we translate it, but "I am"!), the maxim that thinking is a confirmation of being and my participation in being, he spent the whole night, as they say,trying to find a way out of it. I knelt in front of the statue of the Virgin Mary.

So, after all, real scientific revolutions, and not particular scientific discoveries, are connected with the self-knowledge of science, and this self-knowledge of science has historically been closely linked with the experience of Christian critical introspection, which is rooted in patristics, in the culture of Christian confession, and even in the experience of the Liturgy.

A special issue of our journal is devoted primarily to the "Western" scientific tradition. You have written several books about science studies in the East. Can we talk about some Eastern or, for example, Russian scientific specifics?

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For me, the problem of Russian complicity in, excuse me, the Euro-Atlantic creative world is particularly clear and important. For example, if we talk about the current multi-valued electronic and information revolution, it seems to me that Russians have played a significant role in it, because, say, the idea of combinatorics of ideas and things has long occupied Russian scientists. Without this amazing intuition, it is difficult to imagine the periodic table of elements of Mendeleev, Vavilov's law of homological series, and the works of modern linguistics and semiotics based on the ideas of Jacobson, Eichenbaum, Shklovsky, and Lotman. And how many Russian migrants, from Sikorsky and Muromtsev to the current creators of computer networks or the theory of gas turbines, have created in the United States!

At the same time, it should be borne in mind that Russian culture, whether post - Petrine or creative, is a unique but integral part of European culture. It is no coincidence that for Einstein the most important extra-scientific stimuli of his physical thinking were, first, Mozart's music and, second, Dostoevsky's prose. I do not want, of course, to breed Russian pride, I just thank fate for the fact that I am a compatriot of the Vl. Solovyov and Dostoevsky, for being the youngest contemporary of Lotman and Sakharov, and almost the same age-5 years apart-as Alexander's father, who did so much to clarify the problems I have just mentioned.

(In general, I will note in parentheses, the conflict between the innovative and creative nature of post-Petrine Russian culture and the authoritarian nature of Russian sociality runs like a red, bloody thread, a "red wheel" through our history...).

The peoples of the Far East and India are now doing a great deal for modern science, but without the Euro-American-Russian heritage and intellectual incentive, I cannot imagine these successes. Another thing is that this incentive has found its way to the very talented peoples of South Asia and the Far East. And it is interesting that they did not abandon their heritage, but entered into some kind of creative synthesis with Europe; it is not by chance that Heisenberg in one of his lectures said that the basics of quantum mechanics are perceived more easily by Japanese students than by European ones, because

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Far Eastern students have an idea of the mutual complementarity of the cosmic elements Yin and Yang.

If we speak in terms of historical-scientific, or historical-scientific terms, then Russia, Poland, and the Slavic world as a whole have done a lot for science and for science studies. The Slavic world is part of the Euro-Atlantic spiritual area, Christian or, if you prefer, post-Christian. As I have already said, both Christian culture and introspection have largely created a science that proceeds not only from the objective world or from our ideas about the objective world, but also from the conscious correlation of the knowing subject with the objective world. This is the crown, the core of all the issues we are discussing.

At the same time, I do not want to belittle the achievements of the peoples of the Ancient East and Greece. Many historians of science have noticed that Hellenic science arose at the juncture of Egyptian and Babylonian mathematical and industrial empiricism and the free philosophical thought of the Greeks. But I repeat once again that this Cartesian, Christian moment in science is very important and I am afraid that such a rapid de-Christianization of European, Euro-American-Russian heads and hearts, which I am now witnessing, will later hurt science. Because critical introspection, which has arisen and continues to arise in the depths of Christian spiritual experience, has always nourished and nourishes science.

You say that religion has played a positive role in the development of Western science. However, since about the 1970s, many researchers have criticized Western science for its technicality, authoritarianism, and unjustified claims to the possession of truth. At the same time, they often criticize the Christian origins of science, for example, they say that Christianity, which has formed a certain attitude to nature, is responsible for the environmental problems of our time. How would you explain such critical evaluations?

It's good to be strong in the back of your mind, and also feed on superficial generalizations...

In recent years, I have fallen a little behind the problems of science, switching to the problems of religion.-

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I'm a witch, but I have to say this. In the 1970s and 1990s, I had to deal with a whole stream of revealing literature on this subject and, I think, there is a lot of opportunistic stuff in it. I understand, of course, that the history of Christian peoples is not idyllic, but where have you ever seen idyllic stories?

It should be borne in mind that even our great philosopher Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev, as the most important component of the history of the West, identified an amazing and very dramatic passion for ideas. The world of ideas, however, has been no less real to Europeans since Plato and the Bible than, say, the world of government for China or the world of spiritual meditation for India. The fact that the people of Europe could drink a cup of hemlock for the sake of this world of ideas, climb a cross or a bonfire, go to prisons and camps is a very important part of European development. And the Russian one, too, because the quiet heroism of many Soviet-Russian scientists (physicists, cyberneticists, biologists, geneticists, doctors, historians, philologists, art historians, theologians), heroism in spite of massive repression, poverty and harassment is a well - known feature of our history.

Therefore, probably, as I have already noted, without" bends " neither creativity, nor creative impulses - whether we like it or not-does not happen. For new meanings cannot adapt to established beliefs and institutions. But perhaps it is a deeper, rather than journalistically superficial, insight into the history of science and, in particular, into the ever-unsaid religious premises of scientific creativity (reverence, gratitude, compassion, self-dissatisfaction). it will also serve its purpose for the cause of its humanization.

Interviewed by V. Razdiakonov

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