Traditional Christian confessions — for example, in Catholicism or in Orthodoxy — in scholarly literature, in modern legislation, or at the level of everyday consciousness, are understood primarily as clerical corporations. This corporate reading of modern Christianity also influences the understanding of the phenomenon of religion itself, as it happens, for example, in the famous essay on the “field of religion” by P. Bourdieu. This reading also determines the perception of Christianity as a historical phenomenon as well, which, within the framework of such a representation, appears as a corporation at every moment of its historical existence. This article argues that a “clerical corporation” is not a form of social organization that was originally inherent in Christianity, but a historical phenomenon that embraces various confessional contexts at different times. In particular, the emergence of a clerical corporation is fixed within the framework of an asynchronous comparative perspective relying on the examples of Western European Catholicism of the 11th — 13th centuries, and Russian Orthodoxy of the 17th — 18th centuries.
Emergence of the Clerical Corporation in Western Europe (11–13th Centuries) and in Russia (17–18th Centuries)
