Towards confessional unity: Bulgarian struggle with a difference

Abstrakt

The paper raises the question of the relationship between the notions of nation and religion in modern Bulgarian culture from the point of view of intellectual history and the history of concepts. It proposes to broaden the field of view by interpreting the idea of religious unity from the perspective of the structures of utopian thinking. Various texts of the Bulgarian intellectuals from 19th and 20th centuries that are devoted to the ideal of national unification by means of confessional unification are brought up in order to historicize and contextualize meanings and discursive practices aimed at annihilating religious differences. The analysis is focused on two concepts/ideas “confession” and “politics.” It is conducted in terms of “the monastic utopia” and “the utopia of politics” by Jerzy Szacki, which seems to have great potential for capturing the ways in which the Orthodox tradition manifests itself in the conditions of local modernity.