“Russian style” God: on some reasons that determined the peculiarity of religious veneration in folk orthodoxy

The article examines the peculiarities of the folk Orthodox worship of God associated with the manifestation of pre-Christian features in the spiritual culture for a number of Slavic peoples. The author addresses the problem of ontological bipolarity, which is expressed in people’s ideas about possible ways of gaining wellbeing inter alia through the acceptability of turning to “alternative” spiritual practices explicitly condemned by the Church (witchcraft, divination, extrasensory perception). According to the researcher, the preservation of worldview elements of the pre-Christian era contributed to the formation of a specific attitude to this topic on Slavic soil. The article gives a short guide to the history of Indo-European religious vocabulary that expresses the concept of God. The author reveals the functional specifics of the ancient god Dyaus and demonstrates the linguistic heritage that it left in Indo-European cultures that both preserved its “divine status” and eventually did not attribute it religious significance, which is notably typical for the Slavic cultural area. Slavic features are traced on the basis of the etymological analysis of the root *bogand its cognates in modern languages and their dialects, which demonstrate that the idea of receiving benefits was not associated in the minds of the ancient Slavs with the idea of their universal supra-world source and did not imply a moral dimension. The author supports his own observations with interesting linguistic facts, illustrating them with examples from folklore, with sociology data and evidences from his own pastoral experiences. Showing the mutual influence of language and reasoning, the researcher argues that the etymological background of the concept denoting the deity inevitably affects the formation of the world perception peculiarities and the development of the key worldview and religious ideas in the spiritual life of the people.