nikolay smirnov, elements of immanentism in russia — review
smirnov sets on a quest to track how russian peasants remained pagan past supposed orthodoxy, but gets entangled in a giant web of poor analogies about how marxism is alchemical
i-ii. sacred matter
the double belief section is the strongest in this work because immanentism is actually researched as visible in practice and therefore allows for the reader and even the author himself to draw conclusions about the level of connectivity between the narrative argument and empirical reality of that time. damp mother earth, confession to earth and sectarian anti-hierarchy all give smirnov an archive of sacred materiality and confirm his argument. one subtle detail is that a coexistence of different ideologies in one place is often times, especially for an immanentist and ascetic society of russia, more of a unification and smoothing down of various aspects of an ideology rather than the full-blown orwellian social contradiction that smirnov may attempt to pull from western europe's handbook.
a lot if not the majority of smirnov's literature comes from russian texts, including his main sources in golubinsky, uspensky and rybakov. one way of experiencing and confirming the scholarly rotation of the text is to machnically translate and then encounter them in varied form, but another more convinient way is to simply read his claims through english originals or english translations, such as "the russian orthodox church" by jane ellis, "russian cosmism" by boris groys and most importantly "the occult in russian and soviet culture" by rosenthal and glatzer.
even though smirnov is focusing more in this essay on how exactly immanence can proliferate or try to capture transcendental ideals, in his other work for e-flux "shaman, schismatic, necromancer" he traces the actual confrontation between science and religion much more cleanly. in a much similar, almost exactly symmetrical manner to the previous quotes, he writes in that work: "priestless denominations were quite diverse and continually transforming. many of them incorporated elements of paganism, comprising a hybrid popular religion, opposed to official orthodoxy in religious as well as social aspects. in his writer’s diary, fyodor dostoevsky referred to it as “the people’s orthodoxy” or the horizontal church, as opposed to the hierarchical “orthodoxy of the elites.”
the article goes on to continue to analyze both instances of religious anti-hierarchy during the soviet collapse and even recent instances of religious radicalism, but the two central claims the text makes are that 1) popular religion was far less orthodox than official russia claimed, where investigations revealed hybrid folk beliefs, pagan elements, and anti-hierarchical social ideals, and that 2) socialism found local resonance in russia not because of its import from the west but because popular religion already contained collectivist and anti-hierarchical tendencies that allowed it to happen in this way. both of these ideas have merit, since on the one hand, smirnov traces exactly how this development makes sense not only through the dukhobors which were both defend by anarchists and marxists and showed how situated religious cults rejected compulsory military service, but also through the old believers who only made sense of capitalism through the tendency to collectivize the commons.
there are elements of this questioning of "double belief" (unification of religious ideology) as a sort of historical process of compromise between new religious authority, original folk custom and imported western ideology in the work under review as well, where smirnov shows us how the russian public itself continously re-fuzes or re-inserts its own customs back into whatever religious or political authority wants to question its own existence. smirnov writes "as early as the eleventh century, monasteries were issuing “sermons” directed against pagan beliefs and rites practiced among the people and parish clergy. by the nineteenth century, however, the romantic nationalism of the slavophiles had recast double belief in a positive light, as a distinctive feature of russian vernacular culture."
in this exact same way, a lot of anthony vanchu's readings of platonov which are present in rosenthal's work on the russian occult mentioned above directly correspond to what is written in the text by smirnov when it comes to the question of exactly how russian peasants conceived of religious experience in the advent of science. vanchu's basic idea is that science demystifies religion and magic, but then science itself becomes remystified as magical, initiatory, prophetic, and transformative by the people living there. in smirnov's text, he writes "according to golubinsky, the christianity of the aristocracy was radically transcendent, and strove rather to reject, overcome, and displace anything material (profane, bodily, sensuous), while aspiring to a supermundane spirituality (a transcendent god). popular religion, on the other hand, gravitated toward immanentism. in this regard, the schism between the immanent and the transcendent took hold within the russian orthodox church itself, corresponding with the already existing divide between the “white” and “black” clergy."
vanchu writes: "they turn first to the village priest, who leads a procession behind an icon of the virgin mary in an attempt to induce rain. though these efforts have been to no avail, the narrator reports, the villagers continue to pursue them, perhaps because no other options occur to them. since one of the promises of communism is a better life, however, the village leaders eventually petition the government for help."
even though this is written in a way that shows a narrative progression into scientific establishment, and even if the text later shows how religious conversion only remystifies science rather than demystifying religion, the implication is that even though the procession with the icon fails, and even though the villagers continue it because it is the worldview they have due to the fact that belief systems don't disappear just because they stop working materially – what a lot of the text really implies is that custom itself exists for entirely seperate reasons than conversion, belief, ideological reasoning or ultimately instrumental value. this fact will later help us locate exactly where smirnov makes this cruical and hasty jump into analogizing marxism into the occult.
what's most important to realize about smirnov's works is that they sits in a position where they both understand exactly how russian peasants, workers and ideologues convert cultural narratives into pseudoreligious comfort, he also happens to believe that this practice itself blends into a wider not just ability but calling to do so, one that essentially characterizes russian popular sovereignty, as evidenced by his heavy focus on political revolt, such as the raskol, and the metaphysical denial of state-authority, where religious dissent surfaces through politics or through heresy when its directly blocked.
smirnov even explicitly argues in the third chapter that "it is no coincidence that the roots of positivist science in modern europe stretch back to alchemy. at the outset, alchemy craved two things: power over the forces of nature, and immortality." and in the second, he says: "heeding soloviev’s call for a “universal” or ecumenical religion, florensky asserts that sophia is united in marriage with beauty, truth, and goodness (aesthetics, knowledge, and ethics): thus art, science, and practice are fused into one. soloviev’s dichotomy of the ideal and fallen sophia is transformed into a distinction between a “pre-world entity” and a “quantity constructed in the world,” i.e., the blueprint for a transformation and the world being transformed."
what this does is it transfers scientific vision into an immanentist project that at its root has the exact same desires as and ambitions as not christian, but earthly christian divine calling (turned ambition). even worse, this call for immortality is transferred into the same indirect and machinic immortality that science would later propose during positivism. one cruical thing that smirnov doesn't do (partially because his narrative aligns with his own ideology, and more broadly with fedorov's christian universalist call to resurrect dead matter back into life and christianize its subjects) is precisely establish those variations that make western instrumental rationality distant metaphysically instead of just analogically from his argument.
however, the absence of this link doesn't mean that there is a general absence of this line of thought, because the idea that art, science and practice all fuze into one another would be an idea the western world would vehemently oppose in practice and even usually in theory. and even though unlike the third chapter, the analogies in this one remain indirect and historically non-supplanted, this doesn't mean that we cant simply rule out the basic reality that smirnov doesn't indeed necessitate this claim that science is a remystified religious inquiry. yet, not only does vanchu allow us to see exactly where peasants did in fact seperate scientific epistemology from scientific opportunism and scientific practice, but through his analysis of platonov allows us withdraw exactly those same assumptions that are made, and then analyze whether the assumptions hold up with a more general theory of religious analogy (that is to say, even vanshu's own assumptions must be considered)
in a certain sense, smirnov can even be seen as consistently considering a type of inflicted dual-perspective (hierarchy, order, transcendence, political soveregnity) vs (immanence, folk unity, immanence communal gathering -> that reveals itself to secretly be both what allows the former "stronger power" to exist but also as that which secretly at any point can decide to subsume that former power into its lens. in this same way, the conceptual distinction between alchemy, science, politics, art and technology isn't necessarily questioned as hard as it is in sinological writings such as greenspan's analysis where ti yong becomes a genuine problem of integration for china, but rather, russia becomes this superior force that essentially subsumes various ideologies and entire disciplines like science, alchemy and marxism into its folk-immanent gnostic vision.
the subchapter "the engineer as prophet and magus" states very early on: "indeed, this story reads much like the memoir of a faithful servant who dutifully goes to the provinces simply to solve a public works problem. his narrative does, however, hint at a mystification of technology, for the villagers relate to it as to religion, another outside force that can counteract the forces of nature and have a profound effect on their welfare. in each case they must rely on an intermediary or initiate, either a priest or an engineer." vanchu is quick to assert various other facts about the peasants, including the fact that the engineer is a bricolagist rather than a proper scientific engineer, who makes use of whatever he can, that his "prophesy" is instrumentally usable, that the village peasants want the benefits of science without having to learn how to do it themselves (and this should supposedly inspire nationalist narratives towards education more strictly)
yet, there are various laden assumptions throughout this very text too that subtly draw on that very same issue of russian immanetism that becomes explicit in smirnov's work. vanchu says: "like fedorov, platonov's hero seeks mastery of the material world to subdue the blind force (slepaia sila) of nature. the sharing and application of knowledge and technology, which constitutes fedorov's common task (obshchee delo), would then benefit all and serve as the basis for building a new society." this exact same line, a classic federovian ideal where knowledge and technology serve not only a communal aim but an aim that is supposed to simultaneously transfer both epistemology through alchemy and ontology through economy nearly mirrors the same lines that smirnov drops about him in the work under review: "this was already evident to bulgakov, who viewed fedorov’s ideas as a manifestation of economism and magism, which represent two different forms of pure immanentism. moreover, according to bulgakov, “fedorov’s teaching is precisely what marx had but vaguely dreamed of,” “a magical-economic kingdom of this world.”"
at the level of basic narrative, a few things become clear from the way the political intruige is positioned. vanchu writes: "the power of science stands like a tower, and the babylon of old with its lizards and droughts will be destroyed by man's knowing hand. it is not we who created god's unfortunate world, but we will finish building it. . . . the communist's reason sleeps not and no one will deflect his hand. on the contrary, he will subject the whole earth entirely to scientific influence." on the basic reading, he argues that the intentional biblical imagery is due to the communist party needing to convince the russian folk that they will actually help them fight off against the enviornment and nature's dangerous.
but on a more advanced reading, it becomes curious how you can reconcile this under smirnov's view, because smirnov himself would argue that the nature of anything imported in russia including marxism becomes this auto-gnosticized parable, or in a sense, the retrospection serves to complete the religious story the peasants require, or even, narratively scaffold the former into the latter, allowing the people to retrieve fallen matter into a story of self-actualization that at its heart seeks gnostic immortality. all of these implications naturally arise when you question whether the reason for this inclusion is practical, analogous, functional, mythical or simply narratively supplanted.
furthermore, the way the engineer operates in plekhanov's story holds with him a lot of basic operational assumptions. vanchu says about him in a too-authorial voice: "as these people pass, he finally fulfills his role as prophet, telling an elderly bystander that only science and human labor, not the magic of otherworldly forces, can bring the necessary relief from the ravages of natural forces. his words read like a fragment from a sovietized gospel a la fedorov: "better not to pray to anyone, granny. nature hears neither words nor prayers; it fears only reason and work" the question remains, is the engineer a prophet because the felt epistemological disconnect of the new forces he brings naturally carry with them the gap that the folk people fulfill with further remystifications (as further evidenced by his supposedly pragmatic orientation) or is the engineer a prophet because he carries with him a type of form-of-learning that, instead of having different characteristics than religion (fully learnable, much easily spreadable, much faster immediate social benefit, functionality) contains in it the locus of a religious fundamentalism that, as bulgakov would be seen arguing about marxism, replaces the subject of religious need but not the fact of its desire.
if the former interpretation is true, then smirnov would be smuggling with himself a reading of atheism that intentionally positions it as religious in so far as it has shared characteristics with known religious narratives rather than a functional role that plays the same one as religion. whereas, if the latter is true, jewish gnositicism cant actually be reconciled with russian immanentism strictly speaking. vanshu instead gives us a practical reading stripped of philosophical problematics: "yet it is hard to believe that platonov intended to show the narod as primitive and uneducable. it seems most likely that he wished here to dramatize the backwardness of the countryside and the gap between the educated and uneducated. this interpretation fits well with the notion of platonov as a writer influenced by fedorovian thinking, for one of fedorov's main themes was that this gap needed to be closed as quickly as possible".
vanshu ends on the note that platonov did this in order to advance a theory of education, and maybe to argue against federovian cosmic immediacy. yet, the way vanshu himself portrays the engineer at the end is quite ironic: "he leaves with the knowledge that in completing his mission, he has converted at least a few people to his way of thinking. now it is time for him to move on and continue his work of spreading the word: "i walked alone in the dark field, young, poor and at peace. one of my life's tasks had been accomplished". this portrayal of the engineer as atheist never locates smirnov's reading due to the fact that smirnov's sophiology turns scientific instrumentality (not necessarily reason, as per bulgakov's own fair complaints) into religious narrative only when a teleology to connect them is present.
it is not unfair to say that scientific instrumentality is a type of religion that, when in its spreading of knowledge, it makes use of not just the metaphor but reality of convergence. what would be unfair is to connect it with gnosticism on any grounds, given that the engineer has no teleological principle. his mission to save the village from the water has a hint of cynicism in it, a belief that the village people don't just have false idols but that their idols are getting in the way of their ability to do simple things like control the flow of water. this is then not a divine mission at all, and the transformative power of "prophecy" turns the engineer into a simple travelling merchant who has unlocked a particular kind of skill or craft, much like travelling merchants who historically could disable any narrative contamination of practical endeavour.
as an example, you could turn to barrel makers, known as coopers.
for centuries they were absolutely indispensable to global civilization in regards to stuff like food storage, wine, shipping and so on, but the civilization layer never created a mythology out of them or even subsumed a lot of their actions into a basic cultural artifact or script or abstractive layer simply because what contained them was seen practically as so fundamentally instrumental and simultaneously as so much fuller than whatever the shipment itself contained that they took on the most basic anonymous layer of infrastructural imagery. only once commodities arrive did packaging get an ideological hit. in this sense, if you read platonov's engineer as a travelling merchant who thinks of his own craft the way coopers through of barrel-making, then calling the spreading of his skill as "barrelmaking" is quite ironic, especially given that his actions dont resemble something much different than the way we deal with, say, electricians in todays age.
to connect the criticism of smirnov with vanchu more directly, simply take a look at how vanchu talks about the question of science as a form of magic: "science and technology in a sense became a new type of wizardry, with the engineer and craftsman its new prophets and priests. the traces of the occult stem from the fact that science and technology are attempts to understand the often hidden workings of the world of matter and to exert influence over it, goals that can prove elusive to the uninitiated." the funny thing is that together with writings like this, he's also just as quick to label this same engineer's actions as "he uses the magic of his technological knowledge (which, properly speaking, is not magic at all) to overcome the blind forces of nature". to an extent, it remains unclear whether russians themselves in their interpretations of their own history have managed to eliminate their own form of double-belief, the one that at the same time forces them to analogize the atheism of science with the occultism of religion, whilst at the same time somehow allowing them to speak of scientific activity itself as an already-subsumed metaphor for religious or divine wizardry.
in fact, this wizardry is reeled in through vanchu's reading of shaginian's portrayal of class war quite literally, where vanchu actually makes the exact same distinction between black and white politics as smirnov does in his own writing when he says: "those involved in capitalism's nefarious black magic come from the outside, and are shown as hideous monsters who meet their end at the hands of the red army. shaginian uses the occult, then, as the ground on which (ideological) good and evil meet and do battle, although the outcome, given the novel's cultural context, can never seriously be in doubt." this portrayal of religious necessity is the same portrayal that vanchu attaches to the engineer, yet the political underlayer is quite secular in comparison to any form of possible divinity you could try to locate in it.
smirnov's description of sophia is quite telling in this regard: "sophia is damp mother earth, physical matter-mother, i.e., at once the womb and the tomb of every creature—the magna mater venerated by the ancients. sophia is the dual foundation of the world, its ideal entelechy and potentiality for such a transformation contained in both physical matter and in anima mundi, “the universal organizing principle of the world … sought by the latest speculative philosophy.”" it is not an issue that sophia's dualism inhabits both a cosmic and ambitious ideal and at the same time an immanent political-folk grounding. nor is it an issue that the alchemical reading under fedorov's influence requires us to actually transform matter. rather, this reading is a sort parallel, a dual comparative hinge that extrapolates, or rather presents to us, the parodic ease through which russian immanentism manages to weaponize the distinction between a cosmic morality and a practical morality, a fundamental human enviornmental need and a fundamental human self-transformation, the very practical rehabilitation of fallen matter and the personal narrative through which the cosmos attempts to seek or draw out this same matter, and ultimately, practical need and theoretical perspective itself to an extent.
in a way, the continuum itself reveals not just its own broader tendency but a kind of latent perversion, fedorov and bulgakov's cosmism looks like it was inspired by the same western science that never actually cared about what they wanted it to be, and this same inspiration they have of it was not only never able to be instrumentalized, but it looks ill compared even to their very own people, they needed to upgrade themselves to even comprehend western ideology the way they needed for their own ends, but even those ends didnt arrive as an inspiration tied to their own practice or ambition
iii. marxist self-realization of humankind as alchemic magnum opus
bulgakov locates in marx's controversy with bauer over the jewish question this quote: "since the existence of religion is connected with the existence of some deficiency (mangels), we must seek the cause of this deficiency within the very essence of the state. for us, religion is not anymore the cause but only a display of a secular (weltlichen) limitation." how could such a writing ever be thought to be "replacing" religion with a materialist ideology as bulgakov states marx is doing? bulgakov seems to think that marx turns feuerbach’s idea that god is a projection of humanity into a type of revolutionary practice where religion must be destroyed on a fundamental social level so that the proletariat becomes the historical agent of atheism.
yet there is a contradiction in bulgakov's own writings on this. take a look at what he quotes marx as saying regarding the dissolution of religion: "the religious reflections of the real world can, in general, disappear only when the conditions of the people’s practical everyday lives will offer them completely clear and reasonable attitudes of man towards man and nature. the social process of life, i.e., the materialistic process of production, will throw off the mystic view only when, as the product of freely united people, it comes under their conscious and systematic control."
bulgakov essentially claims that marx is a type of feuerbachian anthropotheism converted into social practice, essentially one that "repeats positions adopted from feuerbach" and that as a dogma that doesn't raise scientific questions but simply leads to asserted answers "makes political economy the science of all sciences". he also claims that marx renounces his own jewish identity for a fundamental universal abstraction where man is generalized, denounced and mediated against his own mission. he even claims that since marx is a political economist, hiw osn universalization of his discipline directly serves his aim.
yet, there is a difference between a religion as functionally impacting a certain mode of existence, religion as replacing a social necessity for mankind, and religion actually being equivalent not just teleologically or analogically but retrospectively or "essentially" to ideology. (the very sample example bulgakov quotes through hegel in the book explains how commodities mediating social values actually corresponds nicely to adopting a protestant and deist identity)
smirnov says about marx: "as evidenced by bulgakov’s work karl marx as a religious type, the marxist project was at times received as a project of the sacralization of natural, material, and social conditions—an immanentist project of a very specific kind. perhaps this could be accounted for in part by the fact that marx’s ideas dovetailed with an enthusiastic view of double belief as the foundation of popular religiosity." for smirnov, double belief is about two seperate belief systems that intertwine in a way that fuzes elements of both, but that can push their mutual adoption in an area that contradicts parts of both functionally, or push one in an entirely opposite philosophical direction that corresponds to the already functional nature of the other, for example, turning christianity immanent from its transcendental root in various aspects if it coheres with existing pagan or animist practices.
bulgakov's claim is more specific than smirnov's. bulgakov essentially claims that marxism is not merely immanentism but rather a false religion of human self-divinization that destroys personhood in the name of collective emancipation. yet simultaneously, bulgakov attempts to expound upon it as a type of atheism that tries to lack religiosity but fails to do so. on the one hand he claims that "marx’s entire doctrine resulted from his basic religious motive; from his militant atheism; from his economic materialism; from the propagation of class hatred a outrance [to the utmost]; from his negation of universal values and norms compulsory for all, beyond class interest" but on another hand, labels the essential consequence of this drive as "making it a key to all kinds of “ideologies’ i.e., to the whole spiritual life of mankind."
even though bulgakov himself is pretty consistent about the fact that marx is nothing but areligious in his own belief, that doesn't mean he doesn't believe that religiosity itself is an essential drive, which reopens the question of whether historical mateiralism is supposed to be a solvent of religion. and even though this isnt a total contradiction, the fusing of religion as an ontological inspiration and religion as a set of practices into the same turn confuses what bulgakov actually thinks is religious about it. yet, even though smirnov quotes bulgakov to supplant him later through marx and validate the connection, he himself views marxism not as failed religion but as "an alchemical unconscious, popularly religious holy family of russian immanentism that is a retrospective political gnosticism" in this exact brutal phrasing.
so what does marx have to say about this? again, in bulgakov, we find the answer already there: "the critique of heaven changes into a critique of the earth; the critique of religion, into a critique of the law; the critique of theology, into a critique of politics ... the weapon of critique, of course, cannot replace the critique of weapons. the material power must be overthrown by material power, but the theory also becomes a material power once it seizes the masses." what is this if not a transposition that empties the functional signficance of the religious drive rather than supplanting it? marx works through analogy neither to create an atheism that destroys religious desire as bulgakov implies, nor to create an atheism that mimics gnostic immanence as smirnov directly argues.
instead, he creates an analogy that at is base is in fact anthropotheic as bulgakov argues, but a type of anthropotheism that displaces the value of theism. marx says that although the critique is originally inspired by the transcendent value of religious principles, it both emerges from material power and displaces other forms of material power. marx's analogy neither displaces religion nor transforms it, it simply rids it of its significance entirely and replaces its existence (rather than its function, position or value) with economy. or rather, better said, marx doesn't replace religion with economy as a new sacred object. but rather relocates the explanation of religion into economy and social practice as mediated by the law and social relations.
cyril smith may argue otherwise, claiming that what marx really supplants isn't an economization of religion but rather a de-hierarchialization of religious opportunity, where doctrine (a seperation between teacher and student) and theory (a seperation of epistemic apperance and a theoretical drive on one hand vs. the ability to interfere with the world no matter your class position on another) themselves are surpassed. cyril claims: "karl marx is not an atheist, merely saying ‘no’ where religion says ‘yes’. his fight against all mystification preserves its truth and makes it available to everybody." yet, if cyril claims that marx is the ultimate demystifier, and even though mystification does not have a direct correlation with all religious possibility, the very act of creating a realm of access for a generalized, total human activity in fact does remove the element of theological distance needed to experience aspects of the supernatural as a theologically manifested force. forces themselves, when they turn into forces we are capable of controlling, don't magically remove all forces, but simply change our orientation, or the amount of attention we pay on the type of forces we decide to get involved in.
yet at the same time, if an economization really does surpass the occult in marx, then how come smirnov believes that double belief is present in marx? for this to be the case, marx's ideology would have to structurally contain within it not just traces but entire functions of theological concepts. smirnov sets out to briefly prove this in this article, but since the article is originally about double belief in general, he can only spare us a few lines. he repeatedly blatantly argues that marxism can be read as alchemical due to its imagery and due to its vague correlation with the gnostic demiurge "the material world was created not by god, but by a demiurge (the main archon, “yaldabaoth”); evangelion-light (gnosis-knowledge) rouses the “spiritual” people (“pneumatics”), who, having destroyed the malevolent world, reunite with god, i.e., overcome alienation".
this basic narrative is transposed through marxism by the simple idea that since marx "anticipates and entails a revolution", that the simple idea of a transformation of people in light of a change that is supposed to get them closer to an ideal state is enough to supplant this narrative. in many cases this is true, since alienation in the hegelian sense does carry a religious charge about the ages of the world and history as a testament, which smirnov correctly describes as "the process of self-realization and the various stages of economic history—such as the emergence of commodity exchange or the development of the value-form—may well be read as a description of a global socio-alchemical opus magnum"
but in many ways it is not, since the demiruge, the light, the neoplatonic destruction of the world, and the overcoming don't just not happen through theological frameworks, but happen in a way where the overcoming replaces rather than ascends the substrate that it is targetting. in marx's imagination, this substrate is replaced by changing social roles, removing forms of interaction with the world and changing them with others, reorienting value at the social level and so on, all of which is achieved not just politically but generally, as an entire field of mobalization is applied on top of an economy that is already in the "hands" (direct epistemic relation) of the people.
smirnov argues that "external alchemy (transmutation of matter) is inseparable from internal alchemy (transfiguration of consciousness)" yet to prove this, a statement such as "there are those who believe that marx inherited the heretical-hermetic tradition from hegel, whose speculative philosophy could be connected to hermetic mysticism" doesn't only not suffice, but pushes us into speculations about the boehme connection. not only that, but for marx of course consciousness was not to be transfigured but to be gained, and transmutation didn't happen through the aristotelian substance layer but through the german-imperial machinic layer, the one mediating access to the technology.
in many ways, russian immanentism could at times instrumentalize this view of technology or turn it into its own form of mysticism as argued earlier, but a lot of this happens to be handwaving. the handwaving is evident in a literalized analogy "with humankind taking the role of the collective alchemist and the historical process itself as the great work. the objective of any magisterium is self-creation, i.e., power over one’s own fate." where power over ones fate is seen as proof of a testimential or providential vision rather than simply the ability to impact social outcomes, a much more general layer of consideration.
fate itself even when transposed into sociological functions is such a general idea that when applied historically takes on the character of a passive historical process that itself happens in the vision of an image or ideal rather than the ability to actually experience fate as a direct consequence of a spiritual connection, one evidently missing in marx. the issue ultimately here isn't that marxism does not replace the hidden variables behind why people take up religion anthropologically, but the more specific question of how much marx's theories are a direct correlate to theological visions that themselves remain simultaneously immanent, mystical and functionally theodocial.
to truly understand what is an analogy and what is a functional similarity for smirnov in marx, another work, "marx, the alchemist" by "the order of sophianic marxists" a name that very much recalls or could potentially be related to smirnov's own project, could answer this question. in this paper, the order writes: "all discrepancies between the actual holy humanus and his virtual intended state are but “external obstacles,” “punishments” of the lowest world, which must be cast off by means of the gnostic/hermetic revolution. this is the starting point of marx’s distinctive soteriology: as far as gnosticism is concerned, the inferior determined world is so corrupted and turned upside down that it is impossible for the people to free themselves from its punishments and the malign power of its rulers"
even though it is true that alienation and self-activity do in fact call to the image of the gnostic fallen matter "spiritual substance has fallen into the state of matter, but that it is to be found everywhere" and that the demiurge himself is like the capitalist state in marx that mediates between human's self-realization "the world of matter and determination is said to be in the hands of the demiurge and the archons, malicious and imperfect rulers", yet the equivalence is both an analogous and functional one, since even if alienation carries the idea of liberating from the alien mediator and achieving freedom in self-actualization: 1) the subject-object positionalities and base-superstructure fits are not equivocable across the pairs (marx fights objects, gnostics fight subjects, marx replaces subjects, gnostics replace fallen matter) 2) the method of liberation doesnt pass the matter-idea ontological subdivide (marx never deals with archetypes and divinity but only reflects on the "divinity" already located within the permutated fragment of the commodity
furthermore, 3) the antihuman element in marx is an abstracted social relation, whereas the antihuman element is a literal alien mediator in gnosticism that is inhuman as a fact of the world rather than as something that replaces self expression. in a sense, marx’s alien power is generated by social practice whereas gnostic alien power precedes and imprisons social practice. 4) this actually hosts the religious contradiction in marx, since when he clearly states "only this feeling, which vanished from the world with the greeks, and under christianity disappeared into the blue mist of the heavens, can again transform society into a community of human" he clearly refers to the blue mist of the heavens in the christian and by extension gnostic world not as the existence of the demiurge ontologically, but its existence conceptually - that would cloud the actual alienated liberation of mankind.
the order writes: "consequently, according to marx, man’s essence as universality (gemeinwesen) demands realization and purification: it is at once given (as the fallen, dismembered holy humanus) and posited (as the reassembled and purified anthropos)." and again "the true essence of man—in the gnostic/hermetic tradition, as well as in marx—is not his “fallen,” actual determined state, but the free anthropos, the man-god. marx uses the term gemeinwesen to denote authentic human nature, i.e., man’s all-unity, or in the language of russian religious philosophy, his sobornost’ (fellowship)."
in many ways, this is the single best correlation, since unlike self-actualization which posits the fallen ontological state as correlated to a totally alien intimate or personalized encounter with a being (which is a slightly larger reach), the idea that fellowship corresponds with comradeship in light of the idea of a god-man or an anthropos that self-liberates its own order is accurate not only with bulgakov's marxist atheist reading but with the wider impression that marx unites in man his own self-actualization in both the hegelian way and in the overcoming of political alienation.
yet, mind you, the alienation and self-actualization analogies are actually the strongest that the order makes, the remaining analogies are actually substantially wekaer. the entire chapter marx as alchemist should be evaluated seperately, however for our sake now, the brief drop in quality should be evaluated alongside the more general premise that smirnov (along with the order's) own ideas about what marxism should be are correlated posteriori to marx as a part of a russian cosmicalist (or immanet sophiologist) tradition that works backwards through historical ideas to arrive to a justification of a fanfictional sophianic theatre.
the marx section fails because smirnov attributes to marx what his own archive more plausibly shows happening to marxism in russia as noted above. in this same way, the order along with smirnov appear to be heightening and deliberately remythologizing marxism as a gnostic-hermetic alchemy rather than discovering in marxism any functional correspondence to tolder traditions.
take as an example the orders equivocation between marixan value and helena and the philosophers stone. the order does a deliberately obfuscated analogy whereby helen is "found in a tyrian brothel", and where her savior who is "upstanding" (which echoes their earlier gnostic reading where humanity "upstands" against fallen nature) who later receives the hope of salvation (being rescued from the metaphorical brothel or alienated state?) which is equivated with a "marxian authentic emancipation" whereby the "helen-value" is revealed to really be an alchemical "byproduct" where the "savior" (marx) dissolves through critical discourse the supposed oneness of value into its three forms and shows that through the accumulation of capital, an "essentialization" of consumption (gnostic death) reveals the presence of an invisible substance that transcends the "alienated state of the philosophers stone".
this entire paragraph is an attempt to retrofit marx's otherwise simple process of abstraction, which thousands of philosophers historically have been doing and are capable of doing, into the idea that since an assumption of concrete nature is revealed to consist of abstractions, that this somehow reveals an essence that connects this concept to a narrative that results in its inevitable gnostic undertone? then, instead of explaining exactly how this retrofitting ties in to marx's narrative, they defend it under the guise that a gnostic semiosis according to verniere already includes a mythologization “for an authentic, correct inversion of the mental process, reason must to a certain extent be based on myth", one that the order apparently wants to achieve through analogizing instead of through literary analysis.
the analogizing itself would not strictly be a problem if it was either conceptually development or genuienly located as a narrative comparison with similarities, if it wasnt tied to a retroffiting that attempts to frame marxist discourse in its entirety as connected to a discipline. the essential issue here is that both smirnov and the order cannot truly distinguish religious analogy, religious function, religious genealogy, and religious replacement. the issue for smirnov is that his otherwise interesting concept of re-secularization or a rediscovery of conceptual weight is supplanted by an unrelated narrative that "various kinds of immanentism, including some perfectly secular varieties, evince a distinct dialectic: the emancipation from the transcendent principle is accompanied by a manifest (or implicit) sacralization of the immanent world.", which, as an observation should not suddenly gain the right to position the entire marxist discourse as somehow latent to a russian immanent tradition.