A MYSTICAL FORM OF IDEALIZATION, WITH ELEMENTS OF THE THEITIZATION OF GENDER IN V.V. ROZANOV

Abstract. This article discusses one of the most curious works of the Russian writer and philosopher V.V. Rozanov. "Men of the Moonlight." His uniqueness as a researcher of sexual psyche made the society to look closely at the phenomenon known for centuries, which is a problem of physiological nature and at the same time associated with religious feelings. The position, revealed in his work, of people of the "third sex", the development of the concept of the androgynous characteristic of personality, borrowed from Plato and distinguished from a number of other thinkers in the tradition of sex metaphysics - O. Weininger, Berdyaev, etc.

Keywords: gender, Christianity, masculine, feminine, antinomies, "selfhood", androgynous feature of personality, seedless.

Questions that are "eternal" for the history of world culture: the questions of ontology of being, problems of gender and their comprehension, become a priority for almost every cultural community of Russian and West-European civilizations until the end of the 19th century.

Artistic stylistics was gaining undeniable leadership over philosophical attempts to introduce this topic into discourse. By the beginning of the 20th century, the problem of gender was becoming a key issue in the work of a number of thinkers. Thustraditional religious-philosophical and psychoanalytic theories and interpretations of the problem of gender and their impact on the socio-cultural context of the era began to emerge.

The formation of Russian religious philosophy of gender is associated with the names of many researchers, a paradoxical figure among them was Vasily Vasilievich Rozanov (1856-1919), one of the most gifted writers, but for all his uniqueness, his thoughts were not often used in historical and philosophical analysis of his contemporaries.

Among the works, literary critics and publicists, which were devoted to various concepts of the thinker's heritage, including the problem of sex, were written during the life of the philosopher: N.A. Berdyaev, L.S. Volzhsky, E.F. Hollerbach, N.G. Drozdov, A.A. Izmailov, D.S. Merezhkovsky, N.K. Mikhailovsky, V.P. Sventitsky, Zh. B. Severak, A.F. Selivachev, V.S. Solovyov, M.M. Tareyev, D.V. Filosofov and others.

When discussing the work of V.V. Rozanov. It is never easy to choose a concise definition. His work is almost impossible to classify and decompose into elements. In an effort to answer the question, "Who is Rozanov?" - thinker, artist, writer - one thing is certain, you can find everything in his ideology. Berdyaev called Rozanov: "a stylistic genius," the phenomenon of Rozanov's writings is striking in its own idleness, conformism, indifference to good and evil, infidelity, the absolute absence of moral character and spiritual grounding. Berdyaev wrote: "Rozanov is a kind of primal biology, experienced as mysticism. Rozanov is not afraid of contradictions, because biology is not afraid of contradictions, only logic is afraid of them. He is ready to deny on the next page what he said on the previous page, and remains in the integrity of the vital, not logical process,[1] " Berdyaev's quote is ideal (προπαιδέυω) to Rozanov.

Rozanov's contradictory views, or as he himself put it: paradoxical antinomies - "Life comes from 'unstable equilibria. He looked at everything through the prism of subjectivism, joking that he was like Schopenhauer: he believed that only through antinomies can we know the truth: "The truth is in the contradictions. There is no truth in theses, even if all the wise men were to gather together to compose them.[18, p. 58] " Despite the peculiarities of his thinking, no one doubted his sincerity. He made himself known when he began to deal with the problems of family, sex and marriage, gradually his ideological treatises began to gain popularity. Important works here include: "The Dark Face. Metaphysics of Christianity" (1911) and "People of the Moonlight. The Metaphysics of Christianity."

Rozanov was beloved by his followers for his philosophy of life," he was occupied with questions of sex, Christianity, Judaism, and paganism, the theme of personal history flowed into the universal. [14, p. 140]

In his critical views, V. Rozanov drew attention to some discrepancies in the understanding of sex in the biblical account and even in New Testament doctrine, gradually delving into the theme of Christianity as such. Later D.S. Merezhkovsky, in his memoirs, would call him the "Russian Nietzsche," a primordial nugget in his anti-Christian essence, when he would be understood, he would outshine even L.N. Tolstoy in his formidability.5 In one of his most anti-Christian works in spirit, People of the Moonlight, V.V. [11] In one of his most antichristian works, Rozanov writes, "Lutheranism, which rejected monasticism, lost with it all its metaphysics, because monasticism alone constitutes the entire metaphysics of Christianity. [17, p. 103 ] Rozanov contrasts Christ and the world, the dilemma between marriage without Christ and celibacy in Christ was a stumbling block for V.V. Rozanov between Orthodoxy and paganism, even somewhat existentially. Rozanov was also dissatisfied with the Orthodox Church's rather ambivalent attitude toward marriage. On the one hand, it blessed marriage. On the other hand, it praised virginity over marriage. This contradiction was pointed out by the thinker, who was convinced that celibacy could not be worshipped and marriage blessed at the same time. It must be said, though, that there was no complete clarity on this question, not only from him, but also from most Orthodox thinkers (not only non-church, but also church thinkers). However, the philosopher points out the shortcomings of Christianity for the sake of another living religion, for the sake of another church, because there is no society without a temple and God. Therefore, V.V. Rozanov can speak not only of physics and metaphysics, but also of mystical sex. "The connection of sex with God is greater than the connection of the mind with God, even than the connection of the conscience with God..."[20, p. 45] he argues. 

According to Rozanov, sex is our soul. Man, says Rozanov- а human being is a transformation of gender.  Each individual has his own spiritual origin. He called gender a "sacred mystery," sacred to him being the family, the birth of children, he seeks to reveal the mystical depth inherent in these phenomena.

A human being is a transformation of gender.  Each individual has his own spiritual origin. He called gender a "sacred mystery," sacred to him being the family, the birth of children, he seeks to reveal the mystical depth inherent in these phenomena.

The orthodox doctrine of the church had gone into denial of the origin of life, and sexual intercourse was considered a sinful fall -V.V. Rozanov opposed such a questionable theory. In his interesting study "People of the Moonlight", Rozanov put a special meaning in matters relating to gender, unlike Freud, for the Russian philosopher sex is not the basis of religion, but the conclusion of the spiritual and psychological characteristics of men and women, based on their physiological origins. Rozanov derives a kind of categorization, calling it bifurcation for an adequate descriptor of sex. On the one hand, to structure the self of this or that person (male or female) on the corporeal-empirical level, and on the other, to define it as an ideal entity (Rozanov's "selfhood"). Thus, in "People of the Moonlight" V. Rozanov notes: "I keep stumbling to say in the old way 'God,' when long ago I should have said Gods; for there are two of them, Elo-gim, not Elo-ahh (singular). It is time to leave this theological misunderstanding behind. There are two Gods-the masculine side of him and the feminine side of him. This latter is that "Eternal Femininity," the world femininity, which has now begun to be spoken of everywhere. [11] What is distinctive is Rozanov's attitude toward the sexuality of the feminine, which, from his point of view, is equivalent to the masculine. In one of his letters of 1911, he himself wrote of himself: "I am more of a girl than a man..." (Vasily Vasilyevich Vassilyevich, "I am a man"). (Vasily Vasilievich, husband and father of a family, was referring, of course, to the inner world and psychology.) The Austrian philosopher O. Weininger, who also built his gender theories, wrote that Jews are usually hated by those who understand them too well from the inside, feel "Jewish" in themselves, even without being Jewish themselves, hence it follows that it is the feminine man who is more inclined to hate women. Because of the shame of his psychological "femininity."

In an attempt to destroy the hated psychological femininity, he takes his anger from the inside outward to actual physical women and all things feminine. О. Weininger, in his famous work Sex and Character, writes the following: "Sexual differentiation is never quite complete. All features of the male sex, though in a weak, barely developed state, can also be found in the female sex; and conversely, all the sexual characteristics of woman in their totality are also contained in man, though in a very unformed form... There are innumerable transitional degrees between man and woman, the so-called 'intermediate sexual forms.'" The fundamental difference between Rozanov's gender attitude and others presented in the work of Solovyov, Bulgakov, and other Russian thinkers. For Rozanov introduces a metaphysics of sensuality in the sphere of the problem of the "masculine" and the "feminine. While in the understanding of other adherents of the Platonic tradition the attraction to the "eternal feminine" is always on the other side of sexuality and corporeality. It is also worth mentioning the androgynous peculiarity of personality, the concept of which V. Rozanov borrowed. Rozanov borrowed it from Plato, it had a wide resonance among domestic philosophers of that time. And here again we stumble upon the uniqueness of his idea of splitting gender into two categories, but, Losev criticized him, for the lack of definition and not fully realized statement of the problem[17, p. 244]. "Adam, 'in the image of God created,'" writes V.V. Rozanov, "was in the hidden fullness of his Adamo Eve, both male and (in potentia) female, who were divided, and this - was the creation of Eve, by whom, as we know, the creation of new creatures ended. "There will be no more new things." Eve was the last newness in the world, the last and final newness. Thus the complexity of the metaphysics of gender and bisexuality was conceived by God and androgyny. However, the affirmation of the bisexuality of the human soul, removing this problem, generates new ones, the "oscillation" of male and female in their natural existence of persons of the so-called "third sex", as well as the phenomenon of homosexuality, which is contrary to Christian teachings.

The writer is annoyed, and more often horrified, by the pressure of a moral law restricting sexuality. The pernicious power of the seedless impulse comes from Christianity: the secret praise of ascesis and celibacy, "pure" monasticism and virginity. Christianity set its own assessments of what is "good" and what is "bad." It was the "men of the moonlight"-scopians by birth, sodomites-by nature "seedless," elevating their anomaly to an ideal that created the metaphysics of Christianity, which, according to Rozanov, lies in the tomb, death and monasticism. To summarize Rozanov's conceptual views, Christianity contributed to the emergence of the "third sex," from Rozanov's point of view sodomites are as human as anyone else. Society can make them good or evil. But at the same time, sodomites considered themselves people of the future, despite the fact that they are despised by society.