Phenomenon and concept of canon: from canonical form to "creativity spirit" in Christianity

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Relevance of this work is explained by the fact that issues concerning the preservation and transfer of spiritual values, evolution of spiritual traditions are most urgent and priority in modern humanitarian knowledge. In particular, all varieties of Orthodox liturgical singing, their revival and "new life" in contemporary compositional and performing environment generate great interest. Particular significance is related to the issues of systematization of individual areas of the liturgical and singing tradition, as well as the tradition of liturgical singing in general. All this explains the growing interest in the Orthodox singing tradition © Osadchaya S., 2018 in humanitarian, in particular, cultural thought and reinforces its importance as a subject of musicological research. Moreover, many principles of formation and development of the canons in this tradition, figurative and semantic purpose of its iconic structures are deeper revealed in the context of musicological research. If we turn to the experience of people who, in the opinion of the Orthodox Church, have attained the highest degrees of spiritual development, and to the experience of saints, you can see that they followed the church, the life in the cult. In other words, their path primarily presented the life inside the church rite.

Statement of basic materials. Following the traditions of Byzantine culture, Orthodoxy formed in the territories of Kievan Rus combines the inclination to philosophical consideration of religion on the one hand, and high appreciation of the rite importance on the other hand. Florensky noted, "along with the developed theosophy, where the relations between the Divine Persons are discovered in philosophical terms, between the characters of Jesus Christ, the Church concept, salvation, immortality, etc., deep respect in Eastern religiosity is paid for the rite, so that its performance is placed side by side and even higher than the performance of moral testaments" [8]. In other words, the rite compliance in sanctuary and all details is becoming one of the main concerns of the church. This close attention extends to the singing side of the rite, especially to the fulfillment of all rituals related to birth, marriage and the death of a person. Thus, the distinctive feature of the Orthodox attitude to the Church is the preponderance of participation in the cult and ritual of any moralistic actions: direct participation in the church life is much more important than the dry study of the book-related sacred service. The cult and the Orthodox ritual, in its turn, pay exceptional attention to the most important moments of a person's life: "birth, death, marriage occur before the face of God and are blessed with sacraments and divine services".

The system of rituals forms a closed whole, in which the replacement of one rite by another is impossible, since such a replacement will certainly shake the foundations of the entire system. "It is impossible to change the organ in the body arbitrarily and replace it with the same one, but of a different type, because with this change all the others must also change accordingly" [9]. In the cult, on the way of the ascent from the earthly to the heavenly, the rite is understood by Florensky as the gradualness of the dying of the earth, and on the way of the descent of the heavenly to the earthly as the embodiment in the earthly. In the rite there is no statics, it is full of movement, interpenetration and interaction. But there is another kind of constant movement in the cult, in which constant ascension to the empyreal and condescension to the remote takes place.

The concept of holiness has a lower pole and an upper pole, and in our consciousness it moves between these poles, rising up and descending back. The concept of holiness is like a ladder: nonentity peace exception election cleansing redemption Light God. Witnesses play a special role in this "ladder" movement. Florensky points out that witness and martyrdom in Christian understanding are words and phenomena of one root, which explains the importance of testimony in the New Testament. In this connection, the motif of holiness re-emerges: martyrs saints and vice versa. Endeavor of life is always martyrdom; sacred witnesses are needed. It needs conductors, in the transfer, in the certificate: presence of testimonium makes the sacred certified [6].

In addition, semantic meaning of the translations of the Greek word рартид, which in Greek means "witness", in the Church Slavonic sounds like a "martyr", can be divided into two groups. In some texts, in рартид emphasis is made on "expression, affirmation of truth", in other texts on "suffering and death". This duality of translations reveals the peculiarity of this Greek word, based on (or could) three roots, namely: рар shine, рарfight, рєр have a thought, remember. All these semantic traces find their reflection in the word рартид witness, martyr. Florensky speaks of two forces of manifestation outside and inside. "Testimony of truth is radiance. But in order to testify to the truth, we must fight, conquering the darkness of ignorance and lies: the witness is a fighter and, spiritually, he is a winner. In the struggle, it is necessary not only to inflict, but also to receive attacks, and therefore to suffer, struggle, languish, and even die "[9, 363]. This is how Father Paul calls witnessing power manifestation beyond. In order to testify from the inner side, a witness-martyr "must have witnessed truth", be "a keeper of truth, a bearer of truth," in other words, "objective truth makes us remember about ourselves and powerfully leads a person, who knew it to testify about it". [9].

Culture as a memory brings special symbols, which are the product of the need to protect against death, overcoming the short duration of a human life. Thus, O. Mandelstam argued that "the power of culture is in misunderstanding death" [5]. Culture in its memorial and protective function becomes a means of permanent prolongation of life of the human race by creating special time criteria. In this connection, Lotman quotes D. Likhachev's words about the formation in medieval art of such a conception of time in which "...the past was somewhere ahead, at the beginning of events, a number of which did not correspond to the perceiving subject. "Back" events were events of the present or the future. "Back inheritance" is an inheritance that remains from the deceased, this is, the last thing that connected him to us. "Front glory" is glory of the remote past, "first" times, "back glory" is the glory of the last deeds "[2]. Thus, time was perceived as flowing from the past to the future and changing in places in these two temporal cutoffs of culture; the past acts as the main value dimension of cultural experience, and a memorial tendency turned toward becomes the expression of "the deep memory" of culture, marks the eternal, timeless in the forms of collective cultural consciousness as the only form of immortality accessible to a human being [2].

Symbolic foundations of liturgical activity are determined by the fact that the service is carried out as Plato's "remembering" that there is "something profoundly intimate, something long familiar" [9]. It is older than us and our parents, older than humanity, older than the world itself; so it involves "tacit prayer" the essence of intelligent prayer. The service was as if not composed, but open, found. "Orthodoxy has absorbed the beauty of the world treasure and freed it from shell: we have a clean, threshed and reared, grain of religions, the very essence of humanity" [9]. It is particularly remarkable that the Semitic triliteral root denoting to remember, to recollect, when translated into Russian, basically means "to call in the cult." Thus, the notion of mindfulness turns out to be "no more than a reflex of a cult memorial, and memory, in general, is application to man of what is actually related to God, for He Alone intrinsically remembers the true meaning of the word" [10].

"What did the prudent robber ask of the cross? "Remember me, Lord, when you come in Your Kingdom," asks to be remembered, and only "(Luke 23, 42) [10]. The robber asks to be remembered not here on earth, he humbly asks to be remembered in the Kingdom of God. In other words, he does not ask for salvation for the body he hopes for salvation of his soul. At his request, God replies: "I verily say unto thee, day thou shalt be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). Thus, "being remembered" by the Lord is the same as "being in paradise". "To be in paradise" is to exist in eternal memory, as a consequence, to have eternal existence and an eternal memory of God: without the mindfulness of God we die, but our mindfulness of God is most possible through the mindfulness of God about us". Therefore, on the basis of the foregoing, it can be concluded that the eternal memory of God about us and us about God converges and is realized in the eternal memory of the Church, in which God exists and man can be.

Based on the provisions of the works of Father Pavel Florensky, we can distinguish a number of concepts that are directly relevant to the liturgical and singing tradition and reveal the concept of "music of divine worship", which allows us to define the Orthodox singing tradition as " a self-increasing logo". The goal of art, understood as the totality of all art manifestations, Florensky sees the overcoming of "naturalistic cortex of chance" and the formation of "universal and valid in reality". In other words, the goal of any art (beaux) is the desire to transform reality. This kind of activity applied to the church arts can be fully realized only in the cult. The very concept of cult by Florensky can be singled out as one of the most issues important for correct understanding of what "music of divine worship" is. Florensky defines the cult as an isolated part of reality, where the immanent and transcendental, temporal and eternal, perishable and incorruptible meet. Perhaps this "meeting" is clearly expressed in the music culture in general, but it gets the most expressiveness in the "music of worship," which is called "concentrated experience." It is typical for "music of worship" to concentrate all the settings of Orthodox worship, which in their essence have always been "cultcentric". "The true reality in relation, to which there can be a speech about self-determination, is one: it is an implemented meaning or a meaningful reality, it is the embodied Logos and it is a cult" [9].

The most important and necessary condition for the existence of the temple action as a single organism is the presence of the canon. Florensky considers one of the most vital tasks to comprehend the essence and the meaning of the canon, but the necessary condition for this is involvement in it. "The immediate task is to comprehend the meaning of the canon, from within to penetrate it as into the condensed mind of mankind" [7]. A true artist, according to Florensky, wants not something for himself, not the creation of something selfishly individual at all costs, a true artist seeks to create a truly beautiful, "objectively beautiful", that is, "artistically embodied truth of things". Provided that this is really true, the value of the work, according to Florensky, will be established by itself. The true work can only be in the general flow of all-human history; deliberately invented by the true is not, that is, it is not canonical. Acceptance of the canon is a feeling of inseparable connection with humanity, and the consciousness of the inheritance of all those treasures that were created by past generations of creators. "Verified and purified by the cathedral of peoples and generations" [7], the most valuable and true was fixed in the canon. Consequently, the canon can really be called "a compressed mind of humanity".

A significant part of secular historians and "positivistic theologians," according to Florensky, are prone to perceive "the usual conservatism typical of the Church, the old retention of the usual forms and methods" in the norms of ecclesiastical consciousness [7]; this, however, according to Florensky, is a manifestation of a misunderstanding of both church conservatism and a lack of understanding of the essence of artistic creativity. For canon art has never been a hindrance, and "difficult canonical forms in all branches of art have always been just a dime, on which insignificant fractures and real talents were torn down" [7]. Father Pavel Florensky underlines that the canonical form liberates creative individuality and creative energy of an artist: "requirements of the canonical form or, more precisely, the gift from humanity to the artist of the canonical form is liberation, not constraint" [7]. Thus, through the canon acceptance humanity is made to connect and comprehend the truth, verified and purified by the cathedral of peoples and generations. Therefore, "the music of worship" does not seek to create something individually-personal, its goal is to create "an artistically embodied truth of things", which can live fully only as a part of a single body of the temple action. The canonical form of "music of worship" was formed and crystallized by age-old tradition, inside the life of the canon and under its direct influence. Moreover, the church-cantatory canon represents a special area of relationship between words and melodies: the form of the canticle cannot be separated from its spiritual content.

Reflections on the ways of development of Christian culture, the correlation of canonical rules and the cult life can also be found in the works of I. Ilyin, in particular, in the work "Foundations of Christian Culture" [1]. Ilyin considers the whole history of Christianity as "a single and great search for Christian culture" [1], emphasizing that this is "a great search," in which, there certainly are extreme views on what Christian culture is. "Some are ready to reject the material culture in the name of Christ and the very world within which it is created; and others are ready to receive too much material and carnal, even lose the Divine Spirit "[1].

Conclusions. Thus, the spirit of Christianity is the spirit of living creative content, where content, not form, becomes paramount. However, this should be understood not as an opposition or a contrast, but in the sense that the predominance of "an empty, abstract, self-sufficient form, devoid of saturating it and sanctifying its content is categorically rejected. Consequently, the law in Christianity "is not swept aside, but filled with a living and deep content of the spirit, so that" the form ceases to be "a form," but becomes a living way of a meaningful life, virtue, art, knowledge the fullness and richness of cultural life" [1].

1. Ilin, I. (2004). Fundamentals of Christian Culture. St.Petersburg [in Russian].

2. Lotman, J. (2001) Semiosphere. St.Petersburg [in Russian].

3. Osadcha, S. (2008). Liturgical nature of the Orthodox liturgical chants: the cultural aspect. Musical art, 8, 78-86. Donetsk: South-East [in Ukrainian].

4. Osadcha, S. (2010) Religious and temple culture as a factor of the modern humanitarian system. Spiritual culture of Ukraine: traditions and modernity, 85, 51-63. Kiev [in Ukrainian].

5. Samoylenko, A. (2002). Musicology and methodology of humanitarian knowledge. The problem of dialogue: Monograph. Odessa: Astroprint [in Russian].

6. Florensky, P. (1972). From the theological heritage. Theological works, 9, 85-248. Moscow [in Russian].

7. Florensky, P. (2001). Iconostasis. Moscow: Ast [in Russian].

8. Florensky, P. (2001). Orthodoxy Moscow: Ast [in Russian].

9. Florensky, P. (2004). Philosophy of the cult. Moscow [in Russian].

10. Florensky, P. (2003). The pillar and ground of the truth: Experience Orthodox theodicy. Moscow: AST Publishing House [in Russian].

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