Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today (Studies in the History of Religions)

REAPPRAISING D Ü R K H E I M FOR T H E STUDY AND T E A C H I N G O F RELIGION TODAY

NUMEN BOOK SERIES STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS EDITED BY

WJ. H A N E G R A A F F

VOLUME

' / 6 8 V

XCII

REAPPRAISING DÜRKHEIM FOR THE STUDY AND TEACHING OF RELIGION TODAY EDITED BY

T H O M A S A. I D I N O P U L O S AND

BRIAN C. W I L S O N

BRILL LEIDEN · BOSTON • KÖLN 2002

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufinahme

Reappraising Dürkheim for the study and teaching of religion today / ed. by Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson. Leiden ; Boston; Köln : BrilL 2002 (Studies in the history of religions ; Vol. 92) ISBN 90 04-12339-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Catologing-in-Publication Data is also available

ISSN ISBN

0169-8834 90 04 12339 3

© Copyright 2002 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permissionfromthe publisher. Authorization to photocopy itemsfor internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriatefees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. P R I N T E D IN T H E N E T H E R L A N D S

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Preface 1 T h e Strengths and Weaknesses of Durkheim's Methodology for the Study and Teaching of Religion THOMAS A. IDINOPULOS

vii ix 1

2 T h e Creation of H u m a n Behavior: Reconciling Dürkheim and the Study of Religion WILLIAM E. PADEN

15

3 Secularism and the Sacred: Is T h e r e Really Something Called "Secular Religion"? W. WATTS MILLER

27

4 Pragmatism and Protestantism in the Development of Durkheim's Sociology of Religion ROBER T ALUN JONES

45

5 Robertson Smith's Influence on Durkheim's T h e o r y of Myth and Ritual ROBERT A. SEGAL

59

6 Dürkheim, K a n t and the Social Construction of the Categories TONY EDWARDS

73

7 T h e Durkheimians and the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes: An Overview JOHN I. BROOKS III

85

8 Dürkheim, J u d a i s m and the Afterlife IVAN STRENSKI

111

9 Dürkheim and Early Christianity JAMES CONSTANTINE HANGES

143

10. Altars and Chalkstones: The Anomalous Case of Puritan Sacred Space in Light of Durkheim's Theory of Ritual

163

BRIAN C . WILSON

Select Bibliography

183

Index of Names Index of Subjects

187 189

LIST O F C O N T R I B U T O R S

John I. Brooks III

Department of Government and History Fayetteville State University Fayetteville, North Carolina 28301-4298

Tony Edwards

Department of Religious Studies University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260

James Constantine Hanges Department of Comparative Religion Miami University Oxford, Ohio 45056 Thomas A. Idinopulos

Department of Comparative Religion Miami University Oxford, Ohio 45056

Robert Alun Jones

Religious Studies, History, and Sociology University of Illinois Urbana, Illinois 61801

William E. Paden

Department of Religion University of Vermont Burlington, Vermont 05405

Robert A. Segal

Department of Religious Studies Lancaster University Lancaster United Kingdom LAI 4YG

Ivan Strenski

Department of Religious Studies University of California Riverside, California 92521

W. Watts Miller

Department of Sociology University of Bristol Bristol United Kingdom BS8 1UQ,

Brian C. Wilson

Department of Comparative Religion Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008

PREFACE

There is every reason to reappraise Emile Durkheim's thought for the study and teaching of religion today. For any such reappraisal will show how Durkheim's theory isolates religion as a distinct energy or power in h u m a n life, and thus allows us to appreciate the value, meaning, and truth of religion in human life. Thereby we also come to a more precise knowledge of the working of religion in society. Durkheim's methodology makes us understand what it is to pioneer the study of religion empirically, sociologically, with a claim to the social scientific precision and clarity about a subject usually consigned to the humanities. T o appreciate an empirically-based study of religion we should begin with the admission that many of us professors of religious studies take the opposite approach. Most of us professors and many of our students tend towards what we might call the vertical approach towards teaching religion. T h e vertical approach assumes that religion consists of beliefs and rituals, whose root meaning is connected to the existence of a transcendent divine object. We need not always specify the transcendent divine object. It can be spirit, soul, demon, gods, or the God of the monotheistic religions. Vertical teaching of religion boils down to interpreting religious symbols and myths, recounting the history of the religious community, and describing the cardinal "truths of faith"—all of which teaching is in one way or another intended to convey the meaning of the transcendent or spiritual or supernatural being. Vertical teaching of religion does not seek to demonstrate and justify the existence of the transcendent "other." T h e "other" is the mysterious, unexplainable, supernatural realm of gods, spirits, souls, demons, gods, and God, which realm must remain unexplained. T h e best vertical teaching of religion can do is to bestow some sort of intellectual or intelligible status on the transcendent "other" by using words like revelation, hierophany, theophany, epiphany. For the most part then religion, under the vertical teaching approach, is understood to be a stimulus-and-response dynamism. T h e transcendent "other" provides revelations or impulses or communications or emanations, to which h u m a n beings respond. Religion consists of the various forms taken by the human response. T h u s vertical teaching of religion is largely directed toward understanding of the transcendent "other" by the data of religious experience and expression. T h e all-important

implication of vertical teacing of religion is that religious experience and expression are sui generis, unique in meaning, a meaning bestowed on them by a transcendent being. The great virtue of Emile Durkheim's magisterial book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, is to challenge vertical teaching about religion. The Elementary Forms does this by abolishing the understanding of religion as a stimulus-and-response mechanism. Religion is a dynamism or force to Durkheim's way of thinking, but that force is entirely human and social and earthly, and does not incorporate a reference to a transcendent or supernatural "other." Whether or not Dürkheim was atheistic in personal outlook, doesn't finally matter. The more important point is that he was "methodologically atheistic" in defining the concept of the sacred and employing the sacred to understand religion in relation to society. This meant for Dürkheim that there is no transcendent realm of spirits, souls, and gods to which one can refer in understanding the dynamics of the sacred. Religion is functionally defined as "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden...." 1 It seems that it was precisely because of his "methodological atheism" that Dürkheim strove all the harder to understand the real and positive benefits bestowed by religion on human beings. He saw those benefits in the way that religion works to establish, unify, and sustain human society, and to thwart egoistic tendencies that harm human beings in their relations to others. In dismissing the notion of a religious response to a transcendent divine object, and concentrating his attention on the actual workings of religion in human society, Durkheim's understanding of religion was sociological, scientific, and horizontal. According to this understanding, religion's function, purpose, and meaning are to be found in promoting human solidarity. T o achieve that goal religion exercises the vital function of separating the sacred from the profane. Without that separation, and without the dominant value of the sacred in human life, human beings would disrupt community by succumbing to their egoistic tendencies. There was and will always be considerable debate about what Dürkheim meant by his notion of the sacred, as there is debate about his concept of society. What is clear is that he thought of the sacred as a non-theistic or humanistic moral value necessary to the organization and sound functioning of society. When the sacred reinforces laws, norms, duties, and obligations, then social order is possible and civi-

1

Emile Dürkheim, 77te Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 44.

lized society replaces chaotic individualism. Through the sacred, h u m a n beings are made to feel that they belong to each other. This intimate connection between sacredness and society it seems, also gave Dürkheim his clue in understanding of the ultimate origins and development of religion. It may not matter if Durkheim's study of Australian primitive society gave him his idea of the sacred-society connection, or if that connection came earlier from his own reading of the philosophy of Kant and Feurbach. T h e important point is that he saw the role of the sacred in society powerfully evidenced in the totemistic practices of the Australian Arunta clansmen. These practices Dürkheim took to be the earliest, most elementary forms of human religious life on earth. Whether in fact they are so is also secondary. More important is the wealth of insights about religion in human life that are yielded by Durkheim's actual analysis of the Arunta. Dürkheim did not study the Arunta solely to advance his knowledge of Australian tribal totemism; he did so because he was convinced that in achieving a correct understanding of totemism, he could gain a better understanding of later, so-called advanced religions. He was convinced that the totemic principle, which involved the separation of sacred from profane, continued through the history of religions, and shaped the monotheistic religions ofJudaism, Christianity, and Islam. In this respect Dürkheim did not subscribe to an evolutionary conception of religious history. For him the elementary totemic forms of the religious life are essential or structural forms, manifested in a variety of ways by a host of different religions. For Dürkheim the dominant idea of religious history is not change but rather continuity from totemism through polytheism to monotheism. Durkheim's principle concepts—"totemic principle," "totemic emblem," "collective representation," "sacred/profane," "collective effervescence"—show that Durkheim's purpose in The Elementary Forms was as much philosophical as sociological. He wanted not simply to describe religious behavior but to account for it, to explain it. This meant that he was led in his reading to search for the reality upon which religion is based. For this reason Dürkheim went to pains in the early part of his book to establish the philosophical or conceptual basis of his sociological method for understanding religion. O u t of his philosophical reflections came the notion of the "sociology of knowledge." He argues, for example, that the ideas of time, space, genus, cause, and personality are constructed from "social elements." But then quickly adds that "this should not lead us to conclude that they are stripped of all objective value." "Quite the contrary," he says, "their social origin leads one indeed to suppose that

they are not without foundation in the nature of things." 2 Dürkheim can say this is because he regards not religion but society to be a reality sui generis. Whether or not the unique particularity of society can be philosophically defended we leave to others to determine. (To some it might seem more a dogmatic than a rational assertion). What we find impressive and compelling as a guide for the study and teaching of religion is Durkheim's own scholarly example: T o search for and develop ideas like society, sacred/profane, etc., that give conceptual weight and direction to the analysis of religious data. In offering this collection of essays on Durkheim's sociology of religion we aim to conduct a reappraisal of this seminal thinker, whose theory of religion is as indispensable today, as it was when he first propounded it a century ago. The opening essays by Thomas A. Idinopulos and Wiliam E. Paden directly address the validity or usefulness of Durkheim's methodology for the study and teaching of religion. Idinopulos finds that Dürkheim provides a large and comprehensive framework for not only interpreting the meaning of religious behavior (what it is) but also explaining it (why it is). Durkheim's methods of religious sociology were carried out in his study of the Australian Arunta aboriginal clansmen. What the methods show is that perhaps Dürkheim went too far in his efforts to account for the religion of the Arunta. A purely functional account of transcendent meaning or being, certainly yields insights about the social context in which human awareness of sacredness occurs. However, a purely functional account tends to equate sacredness with society, and leave unexplained the powerful energy which rises from collective effervescence or "the sacred principle" which, as Dürkheim tells us, "comes to the surface in certain determined cases," and seems (contrary to Durkheim's stated methodology) to resemble a spiritual supernatural object. William Paden argues that Durkheim's reductionism is misunderstood. Today, in a post-theological age, scholars of religion do not find it necessary to oppose Durkheim's reductionistic and sociological conception of the sacred with the theory of religion as advanced by the Rumanian scholar, Mircea Eliade. Today it is possible to reconcile the social and the religious. Dürkheim never wavered in his rejection of any supernatural explanation of religion, but he also never doubted that "religion represented powerful and enduring realities." What Paden's study shows is that if Durkheim's conception of religion is at root social, "then the social is moral and religious" as well. This way of reading

2

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 18.

Durkheim's conception of religion makes it possible to recognize the parallel between the methodology of Dürkheim and that of Eliade. For both thinkers accept the view that human beings are "participants in an endless series of mythically and ritually constructed worlds, the contents and contours of which are informed by the way sacred ob jects function for participants and interact with their lives." Both thinkers were occupied not with the sacred as a "reified divine object" but rather with the notion of homo religiosus that "forms behavioral systems out of the category of sacrality." In an important sentence Paden reaches the conclusion that "there is more humanism in Dürkheim than we can see when pigeon-holing him as a reductionist, just as there is more humanism in Eliade than is visible when categorizing him as a theologian." VV. Watts Miller begins his own essay with what seems to be a common agreement with Professor Paden and others in this volume that the equation of the sacred with society is an "oversimplified" and "distorted" view of Durkheim's thinking. Miller goes on to note that society has been characterized by an anti-religious secular attitude ever since the French Revolution. Yet Dürkheim contended that religion lies at the heart of social and moral life. This leads Watts Miller to ask if a "secular religion," in the Durkheimin sense of those words, is possible. T h e answer is yes, if we retain a sense of the sacred. According to Watts Miller, the modern transfer of sacrality from god to man, involves a scaling down "to the world of the semi-sacred." What is the semi-sacred? Miller provides graphic illustration of the semi-sacred by citing the phenomenon of sacrality which hovers over a person. This occurred when real corpses were substituted for dummies to achieve greater verisimilitude in automobile crash tests. When knowledge of the test reached the public there was an immediate and negative outcry. T h e public's sense of the sacred was aroused. " T h e sacredness centered round the person spread from the living to the dead. T h e deceased body is a symbol of the once alive person.... It is a relic, a sacred thing." Miller concludes that "respect for the dead reinforces respect for the living and everyone's dignity. It is an essential part of an environment of the sacred centered round the person." This environment of the sacred or semi-sacred, this "secular religion" so called, seems to be what Dürkheim thought was possible in this increasingly materialistic and secular age. T h e important influence of Robertson Smith on Emile Durkheim's sociology of religion is the subject of the next two essays by Robert Alun Jones and Robert A. Segal. Smith's theory of ritual sacrifice not only played a formative role in shaping Durkheim's thinking about the meaning of the ritual practices of Australian aborigines, but also shaped the discipline of sociology itself. Jones argues that one of the

ideas that influenced Durkheim's The Elementally Forms of Religious Life, was the "dynamogenic" quality of religion. This referred to the quality of religion to provide a sense of confidence and strength in a human being that leads to practical action. This idea, taken over from Robertson Smith, leads Dürkheim to the idea of the mutual dependence of gods and society: for just as gods are dependent on human society for their existence, so human societies are dependent on gods for their moral and religious ideals. Jones makes it clear that Dürkheim underwent a development in his thinking about religion from an early simplistic conception of religion as "lacking any explanatory power"; that religion, like law and morality, should be understood in terms of coercion and constraint. What changed Dürkheim in his thinking was reading the works of Robertson Smith and his school. What focused Durkheim's attention was Smith's central idea that the explanation of ritual lies in the "joyous, communal meal in which the god and his worshippers shared in the consumption of a sacrificial animal." Smith's notion of sacrifice led Dürkheim in turn to the idea of totemism, the basis of his (Durkheim's) "dynamogenic" theory of religion. In a concluding statement Jones traces Durkheim's "dynamogenic" theory of religion back through Robertson Smith's ideas to the earlier influence on Smith of the psychologist William James and the nineteenth-century Protestant theologian Albrecht Ritschl. Robert A. Segal is concerned to show in what ways Dürkheim was influenced by Robertson Smith and in what ways Dürkheim went beyond Smith. Smith's developmental schema for understanding the origins of religion was influential long after the death of this renowned Scotsman. "According to his schema religion evolves ritual (first stage) to myth, which arises to explain ritual; in the third stage," myth branches out beyond ritual into "larger religious speculation" and the effort "to order the modey variety of local worships and beliefs." At this point myths verge on philosophy, cosmology, politics and poetry. Eventually myths become allegories and serve to defend one's religion against rivals. Finally in the fourth and final stage myths become tied to theology and therefore to creed. At this point creed directs religion, the way ritual once did. Smith was a pioneer in the myth-ritualist theory of religion because he was, as Segal says, the first to argue that myths must be understood in terms of ritual. While acknowledging the indebtedness of Dürkheim to Smith, contemporary scholars disagree over precisely what that debt was. The debt was elaborated by the English scholar E. E. EvansPritchard who identifies four cardinal ideas that came from Smith: "that primitive religion is a clan and that the cult is totemic ... that the

god of the cult is the clan divinized and that totemism is the most elementary or primitive, and in that sense original, form of religion." T o this list we can add Smith's influence on Durkheim's conception of the inextricable connection between the sacred and society. But it is the ways in which Dürkheim went beyond Smith that showed the characteristic and original turn of his mind. For Smith ritual precedes myth; Dürkheim saw the two as interrelated, and where the personally religious Smith believed that humans worship gods, the personally irreligious Dürkheim believed that humans create the gods they worship. In this regard, Dürkheim, as Segal notes, went far beyond Smith in "sociologizing" the function of communion, which for Dürkheim serves to strengthen the bond among members of society and only seemingly the bond between members and god. Tony Edwards has utilized the concepts of formal logic and analytic philosophy to write a tough-minded paper criticizing one of the central arguments of The Elementary Forms, namely that society is the source of the basic categories of human thought. Durkheim's "sociology of knowledge" in Edwards' opinion creates a dilemma. For Durkheim's "categories [space, time, class, etc.] are concepts, and concepts both are and are not subject to time and change. They are subject to time and change or else society would have no part in forming them.... But they are also beyond time and change or else they would not be concepts." And this appears to contradict Durkheim's view that the categories are socially constructed. In the effort to resolve the dilemma, Dürkheim lapses into incoherence, says Edwards. This is no small criticism. For if Dürkheim cannot logically defend the conceptual categories which are the foundation of his sociology of religion, then his theory of religion is weakened. What is also weakened is Durkheim's claim that religion lies at the beginnings of both philosophy and science. But does Edwards have a case logically and philosophically against Durkheim's sociology of knowledge? T h e question should not be answered without carefully scrutinizing Edward's arguments in view of the complex thesis about society and knowledge presented in the opening pages of The Elementary Forms. J o h n I. Brook Ill's essay on " T h e Durkheimians and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes" and Ivan Strenski's piece, "Dürkheim, Judaism and the Afterlife," introduce us to the rich and often contentious intellectual society in which Dürkheim did his writing, defended his theories of religion, and looked for ways to acquire academic appointments for his collaborators. According to Jones, through his journal Année Sociologique Dürkheim "sought to build a concrete foundation for his vision of sociology." It is in the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, devoted to religious studies, where

the most prominent Durkheimians taught and sought to advance their master's theories of the sociology of religion. It was not always easy for Dürkheim and his two closest collaborators, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert. Opposition came from Auguste Sabatier and the French Protestant historians of religion. The root problem is known to every American department of religious studies. Whereas the Durkheimians gravitated toward the "exotic" religions of "uncivilized peoples" of the ancient Near East and the "primitives" of Micronesia, the Protestant scholars, disdaining primitives, were devoted to the study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the religions of "literate peoples." There were competing methodological problems as well. The Protestant scholars, influenced by Ernest Renan and the newer methods of rationally-based Higher Criticism of the Bible, were leery of the concentration on ritual sacrifice and totemism contained in the theories of Dürkheim and his colleagues. And there were theological differences too. The Protestants argued that the differences between the world's religions could be explained by the link (asserted by Albert Réville) "uniting the human spirit to the mysterious spirit of which he recognizes the dominion over the world and over himself and to which he loves to feel himself united." Not surprisingly the universal assumption of the Protestants was that "Christian Europe represented the pinnacle of civilization." In sharp contrast to the psychologically and theologically oriented Protestant scholars, Dürkheim proposed to make religious study truly scientific by interpreting the origins and meaning of religion through its social matrix. Rejecting the evolutionary approach of the Protestant school for whom religion is defined in terms of a distinct religious sentiment, Dürkheim insisted that "religious ritual is as universal as religious belief and hence must be included in [religion's] definition." In his definition he stressed the obligatory or necessarily social character of religious origins. The definition was: "The phenomena called religious consist of obligatory beliefs connected with definite practices related to objects given in these beliefs." The publication of books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French Jewry by Aubéry (1962) and Bourdrel (1974), and the recent appearance in English of Ivan Strenski's Dürkheim and the Jews of France, make it possible to assess to what degree Durkheim's Jewishness played a significant role in his thinking about society and religion, two subjects about which he felt and thought deeply. 3 The answer is not 3 Pierre Aubéry, Milieux juifs de la France contemporaine à travers leurs écrivains (Paris: Pion, 1962); Philippe Bourdrel, Histoire des Juifs de France (Paris: A. Michel, 1974); Ivan Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

very much. T h e issue of Dürkheim and his Jewishness was neatly summed up by the Durkheimian scholar, VV.S.F. Pickering who wrote in his magisterial study, Durkheim's Sociology of Religion, "[Dürkheim] presented himself not so much as a Jew, who had guiltily rejected the faith and practice of his forebearers, but as an enlightened, intellectual European liberal.... He wanted to be accepted for what he was—an intellectual and a devoted son of France and in particular an ardent supporter of the Third Republic...." 4 We are fortunate to have in Strenski's contribution to this volume a fascinating consideration of Durkheim's Jewishness in connection with religious belief in the afterlife. This was not just a routine reflection on the part of Dürkheim. For in the aftermath of the millions killed in the First World War, a collective grief seized the French people. Many intellectuals were drawn to spiritualism or spiritism as ways to maintain continuity with the past and to honor a sense of obligation to the dead. O n e of those was Durkheim's son-in-law, Marcel Mauss, a distinguished scholar in his own right, a rationalist and an atheist, who was driven to spiritualism by his experience in T h e Great War. As Strenski shows, Dürkheim did not similarly succumb to spiritualism. Upon hearing the news of his son Andre's death, Dürkheim in his own grief actually turned away from religion, writing: "I know that religions are there and that their practices are rich in experience ... but their wisdom is crude ... nothing resembling ritual practices has been of use to me or been effective to me." T h e essays by James Constantine Hanges and Brian C. Wilson apply central concepts of Durkeim's sociology of religion to major religious systems. Hanges devotes his attention to the question of the development out ofJudaism of early Christianity; and Wilson is preoccupied with explaining how American Puritan religion which began with an anti-sacramental disdain of formalized worship places should develop into a religion with a traditional sense of sacred space. According to Hanges, one of the most important of Durkheim's principles is the way in which society tends to fragment or segment itself. Certainly this is true of the way in which Christianity arose out of Judaism. Dürkheim helps to understand this as analogous to the way in which the "single clan breaks into multiple clans over time." Further we should expect "social fragmentation to find religious expression within the newly-formed community." But the larger question is why Christianity did not segment into merely a Jewish sect, but

4 W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim's Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 18.

continued to segment into a religion separate and distinct from Judaism. We may never have the answer to that question but, following Durkheim's methods, we gain a new appreciation as to the dynamics of this development. Dürkheim attributes the segmentation of the clan to "natural wear and tear of time." When the clan divides, not only does the universe divide also but "divine, beings must be reclassified." Further the appropriated sub-totem becomes a principal totem by changing circumstances or social development. Hanges notes that Dürkheim regarded myth to be the main cause of accounting for the difference between the newly emergent clan and the maternal clan: "Myth answers the question, 'how are we not them?'" Hanges' explanation of the emergence of Christianity from its Jewish matrix follows accordingly; through segmentation of the phratry, one clan dividing from another, and through a different myth, a new principal totem to replace the old sub-totem. It is the unifying role of symbols in social groups which shows the explanatory efficacy of Durkheim's sociology of religion in explaining Christian origins. T o explain Christian origins, the Durkheimian method calls for examining not the historical person of Jesus but the social nature of the earliest Jesus groups. How then did Christianity emerge from Judaism? "Collective representation" says Hanges, following Durkheim's methodology. Hanges elaborates, "Jesus, the faithful servant of God and the law given by God through Moses, having been appropriated by a growing affiliation of individuals among followers for whom Moses is not determinative, and having been emancipated from the symbolic universe of his own Judaism, becomes the Christ, the symbolic Jesus who stands independent from Moses and the Mosaic law and in whom the new community images itself." Of course this evolution from Jesus to Christ did not happen mechanically or immediately. It required the unique theological genius of Paul, as Hanges shows in his effort to carry out a "Durkheimian experiment" in explaining the origins of the Christian religion. Brian C. Wilson begins by noting that the early American Puritans rejected the reality of sacred space and were anti-sacramental in the tradition of Calvin and Zwingli. Yet despite efforts to prevent it, Puritan sacred space eventually appeared in New England. Wilson turns to Durkheim's theory of ritual to explain this seeming anomaly. This theory allows us to "understand the historical inevitability of the Puritans' return to sacred space in the New World." Part of the explanation lies in the ambiguity with which Dürkheim used the notion of sacred space. He wrote of the sacred in a functional definition as that which is the polar opposite to the profane, the for-

bidden; but he also thought of the sacred as a sort of "divine electricity" an external, supernatural power, which suggests the more traditional western notion of the sacred as the "presence of the sacred or supernatural power." Dürkheim uses the two senses of the sacred interchangeably, without explaining the difference. Wilson is convinced that a relationship between the two, the traditional sacred and the "Durkheimian functional sacred," exists. What demonstrates this relationship is the evolution of the perception of sacred space in the development of American Puritan religion. As Wilson shows the early Puritans equated sacramentalism with idolatry. Spatial anti-sacramentalism was represented in the "mundane nature" of the Puritan meetinghouse, named to differentiate them from consecrated church buildings. While the meetinghouse was not considered sacred space it nevertheless "became a highly charged symbolic space" resembling the traditional sacred space which formed part of Durkheim's ambiguous definition of the sacred. Wilson concludes that "Puritan sacred space illustrates well the causal relationship between collective effervescence interpreted as the traditional sacred and the 'Durkheimian' sacred." T h e importance of Emile Durkheim's legacy for the academic study of religion continues unabated into the twenty-first century. T h e editors of Reappraising Dürkheim feel that the following chapters illustrate some of the more interesting facets of that legacy and its relevance to the wide range of inquiry engaged in by scholars of religion today. It is our hope that this volume will encourage further sholarly discussion and debate of this seminal figure and his ideas. Many hands are employed in the creation of a volume like Reappraising Dürkheim, and the editors would like to thank all those who helped us with this project. We would especially like to extend our thanks to Wouter J . Hanegraaff, Mattie Kuiper, and Ivo Romein of Brill for their support, patience, and hard work, and to Cybelle T. Shattuck for her aid in the final preparation of this manuscript. T h o m a s A. Idinopulos Brian C. Wilson

CHAPTER ONE T H E STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF DURKHEIM'S M E T H O D O L O G Y FOR THE STUDY AND TEACHING OF RELIGION T h o m a s A. Idinopulos

I begin on a personal note. I read Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life late in life, with a sense of excitement about learning something truly important and simultaneously regretting all those years when I presumed to talk and write about religion without knowing the ideas of this great thinker. T h a n k God for good colleagues. I was forced (or shamed) to begin my reading of Dürkheim because of my departmental colleague, Professor Wayne Elzey. Elzey had been teaching Durkheim's The Elementary Forms for several years in a course on m a j o r methodologists of religious study that included Rudolph Otto, Mircea Eliade, Sigmund Freud, and M a x Weber. T h e importance of all these thinkers was borne in upon me when I began to see through Elzey that the study of religion could only be preliminary and provisional if it was merely an historical-descriptive report of recognized "facts." A larger conceptual framework was needed for interpreting and explaining religious meaning. O n e way to speak of that framework is to say that describing religious behavior in a historical context fulfills one half of the scholarly responsibility, which can only then be completed by an explanation of the root realities and expressed meanings which give life and direction to every religious community. A simpler way to understand this interpretive framework is to say that description of behavior cries out for explanation of meaning. O f course the scholarly tasks of describing, interpreting, and explaining go on simultaneously. Nothing better shows this than the first hundred pages of The Elementary Forms, where Dürkheim deals with the most important methodological questions about interpreting religion. After that he commences his study of the totemic religion of the Australian Arunta with the confidence that he will not only describe how the Arunta practice their rituals, but why they hold certain beliefs and why they engage in their rites. In other words, he will explain their religion. Would that all of us in our study of religion first set forth our meth-

ods of study and then engaged in historical description with the intention of explaining religious behavior. In my own academic work I think I always knew that describing something was not enough. And that any significant and useful account of something had to go beyond or through description to achieve meaning. And further that the process of "going through" was the process of interpretation, of explanation, of giving an account. And even further that any such account relied upon formulating and critically evaluating large ideas. And finally that any sound understanding of the religious behavior of a community is not achieved through description alone, but only by an effective employment of explanatory ideas. That's the rub: explanatory ideas. Dürkheim has given us in The Elementary Forms an abundance of explanatory ideas. And for that reason alone Durkheim's book will remain for generations to come a valuable resource for the study and teaching of religion. The last question is how well do these ideas actually succeed at explaining the meaning of the religious behavior of the Arunta? On that question I defer to the anthropologists who divide on the validity of Durkheim's study.1 What interests me is the validity of the methodology that Dürkheim developed to understand Australian totemism and other religions. I'd like to examine various aspects o f t h a t methodology in the following sections of this paper. The Missing Object Dürkheim writes that "religion is something eminently social."2 And we should add the words "exclusively social." Thus, in rejecting any and all references to a transcendent divine object, Durkheim's sociological method is vulnerable to the charge of reductionism, that is, of boiling down the uniqueness and wholeness of religion into a false, meager, and non-representative residue, called society. It seems to me that this charge is half-right and half-wrong, for the following reasons. In The Elementary Forms Dürkheim makes a convincing case that religion is a genuine phenomenon and not an illusion when religion is understood as a function of social behavior. The nexus between religion and society means that beliefs and mythologies and rituals are not delusory; they must be studied as important sources of insight about human beings in their communal relations. In this regard 1 See VV. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim's Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) for a comprehensive study of Durkheim's critics. 2 Emile Dürkheim, The Elementaiy Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Collier Macmillan Publisher), p. 22.

Dürkheim separated himself from those other reductionists—Marx, Mueller, Tylor and Freud—who judged religion to be a delusion. In recognizing that religion is rooted in a social reality, Dürkheim intellectually legitimized the study of religion and gave direction to how that study should be conducted. We should not underestimate the importance of concepts like totemic emblem, sacred/profane, collective representation, and effervescence. For with such concepts we are able to study religion as an actual, even necessary, aspect of the wider complex reality we call society. In more practical terms this means that any student of religion can profitably research the religious dimension of all sorts of organizations, institutions, groups, or movements explicitly religious or not. For Dürkheim teaches us that the religious dimension is a matter of recognizing where and how the sacred comes to be separated from the profane, and how that separation is expressed symbolically at all levels of our social experience. Personally I can say that the reading of Durkheim's account of the Arunta made me appreciate even more how the Greek Orthodox religion into which I was born was above all a "social religion," where every symbol seemed to refer back to the community in its faith and ideals and sense of destiny. I could even argue that the icons so venerated in Orthodox worship function as sacred totems, communal emblems, assuring the members of their solidarity with each other, and further giving them a common sense of the boundary that separates the sacred world from the profane. Where Dürkheim tended toward reductionism had to do with the streak of scientific positivism and rationalism in his thinking. For all his appreciation of religion, his rejection of any and all superempirical or supernatural meaning resulted in a faulty conception of the religious phenomenon. O n e cannot quarrel with Durkheim's atheistic rejection of deity or transcendent divine powers, for that is a matter of personal attitude or belief. T h e mistake was in making his atheism a part of his method. For he then passed judgment on religious belief. Consider the following statement: It is certain that they [religions] are mistaken in regard to the real nature of things: science has proved it. The modes of action which they counsel or prescribe to men can therefore rarely have useful effects: it is not by lustrations that the sick are cured nor by sacrifices and chants that the crops are made to grow.3

3

Cited in Pickering, Durkheim's Sociology of Religion, p. 206.

However Dürkheim was not prepared to agree that religion was devoid of truth. How could there not be any truth in religion when religion had persisted long after the advent of science? But how to understand the source of religious truth? Dürkheim found his answer mainly through the principles of sociology, but also partly through psychology, for he could see that a man who believed in God could deal with his problems in life more confidently than if he had no such belief at all. And certainly any examination of ritual shows that those who actively participate in sacred ceremonies feel stronger for doing so. The conclusion Dürkheim drew was that the truth of religion was not spiritual or supernatural but a truth about human beings in their relationships. In reaching this conclusion Dürkheim was prepared to study the religious phenomenon entirely from the side of the experiencing subject. In so doing he actually skews the phenomenon. For the religious phenomenon consists of both subject and object. A believer is only a believer because he has something to believe. That "something" may not actually exist. But as the object-side of the religious phenomenon it cannot be removed or dismissed or ignored. Not if the phenomenon of belief is to remain recognizable. 4 Sometimes under Durkheim's sociological analysis religion seems to lose its recognizable character. For when religion becomes the sacred, and the sacred turns out to be society, the phenomenon of religion appears to be obliterated. And this is ironic. For Dürkheim sets out in the first page of The Elementary Forms to understand the "religious nature of man" only to launch into an analysis in which the central concepts are developed to demonstrate that religion is in essence social behavior. The Importance of Tylor and. Mueller It is clear from the space given to E.B. Tylor and Max Mueller in the The Elementary Forms how important these thinkers were to Dürkheim. Durkheim's sociological explanation of religion seems to have been developed in dialogue with the animistic account of religion's origins set forth by Ε. B. Tylor, and the naturistic theory of Max Mueller.

4 G.E.M. Anscome argues that the "intentional object" is present in every phenomenon; but that "intentional object" should be distinguished from the "material object," which may or may not exist. G.E.M. Anscome, "The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature," in Analytical Philosophy, second series, edited by R. J. Butler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), pp. 158-80. I was helped to see Anscome's point by Michael Idinopulos, Ph.D. Philosophy, University of California at Berkeley.

What Dürkheim wanted to counter through sociology was the commonly held opinion of both Tylor and Mueller that religion arose from experiences that were self-deluding. In the case of animism the delusion was that the common experience of dreaming gave rise to the belief in the soul as a reality independent of the body. T h e delusion with regard to naturism was that through a disease of language h u m a n beings mistakenly began to believe that the forces of nature— sun, sea, storm, wind, fire, etc.—were deities. T h e assumption of both Tylor and Mueller is that both animism and naturism were born in a time of h u m a n ignorance, before a scientific and truer accounts of nature existed. Their common conclusion was that religious belief would and should disappear when a sufficient number of human beings were educated according to the teachings of science. Dürkheim had no quarrel with some of the conclusions reached by Tylor and Mueller. He was prepared to allow that both animism and naturism were in some ways sound theories of religion, if not of primitive religions, then of religions in later stages of development. What Dürkheim was not prepared to concede was that religion was a delusion of h u m a n beings living in a time of pre-scientific ignorance. For how can religion be a delusion when the Arunta clan organizes and sustains itself in the face of famine and flood, hunts with skill, fights its wars with courage, confronts and accepts death, all in a society that emotionally draws strength from totemic beliefs and rituals? T h e answer is that religion is not founded on a delusion, any more than society is founded on a delusion. Further, if, as Tylor and Mueller contend, religion arose in a period of ignorance about the physical world, then religion should have declined in the years that followed the advent of experimental science. But that did not happen. When the history of ideas is closely examined, it will be seen that religion provided the very intuitions and insights from which both philosophy and science sprang. Dürkheim vigorously rejected the arguments advanced by Tylor and Mueller that the origins of religion are to be found in the human response to what is mysterious, powerful, awesome, and unknown in nature. In Durkheim's judgment, religion in its beginnings was not a response to nature but rather a process of organizing society and sustaining it through the separation of sacred from profane. Rather than be the h u m a n response to "great cosmic phenomena" (which may be more descriptive of religion at a later stage of development), religion in its beginnings was based on what was close-at-hand and utterly familiar. Not surprisingly then, the sacred totems of Australian clans are not awesome and mysterious beasts, but rather simple ordinary creatures like ants and grubs.

In Durkheim's view scientific facts about nature cannot invalidate religion, because religion is based on the real facts of social organization and experience. By virtue of separating sacred from profane, human beings are shown what they must shun and what they can embrace, what is good and evil, right and wrong, and thereby given a deepened sense of personal worth in relation to their own community. Dürkheim writes: "...while the totemic principle is a totemic force, it is also a moral power ... every religion is also a means of enabling men to face the world with greater confidence." 5 Further it was Durkheim's argument that what arouses the sense of the sacred in human beings was not the discontinuities in nature, eclipses, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and so on, but just the opposite. It was the regularities of nature and the things closest at hand that aroused in human beings a sense of things sacred. "We misunderstand what the religious sentiment really is, if we confound it with every impression of admiration and surprise." 6 Thus does Dürkheim remove religion from the realm of the startling, unique, and gradiose. Religion does not arise through the sensation of "being overwhelmed" by mysterious and awesome nature. The primitive does not have this experience. Quite the opposite. He believes that in the performance of his rituals he is given broad powers over nature. He does not stand in fear of the vague power, the mana, which pervades so much of his life; rather he possesses it. He does not shrink before his gods but rather feels them to be his friendly companions. Religion is not a Lie When Dürkheim writes at the outset of his book that "a human institution cannot rest upon error and a lie,"7 he is pointing to what in his own mind is the bedrock of all judgment on reality, namely collective or social experience. And since for Dürkheim primitive religious behavior is manifestly social behavior, primitive religion is rooted in reality. Now to my way of thinking, this proposition, the real is the social, is a very curious conception of reality. I can accept the notion that religion has a social aspect to it; but I balk at the notion that religious meaning is exhausted in the social, or that religious meaning is real

5 6 7

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 219. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 103. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 14.

meaning because and only because religion is rooted in the reality of the social. For that seems to ignore, if not actually discount, the factor of the individual's religious experience. What place do the solitarily religious, the saints, ascetics and monks, have in Durkheim's schema of religion? Dürkheim also seems to ignore the anti-social religiosity of dissent and protest as we find it in the Hebrew prophets, Martin Luther, Soren Kierkegaard, and so many others. O n e wonders that for all their totemistically-based solidarity, would not the Arunta which Dürkheim studied also have had their protesters and dissenters? The Life Force Dürkheim contends that behind Arunta religion is the clan, and within the clan there is a commonly felt impulse to preserve and protect all its members, and to enhance their lives on earth. T o accomplish these goals the Arunta need to maintain contact with the life force, the mana or wakan. Contact with this force is maintained through religion, specifically the clan totem, the animal or plant, whose emblem puts the clan in direct contact with the life force. What is the religion of totemism? Dürkheim answers: ...totemism is the religion, not of such and such animals or men or images, but of an anonymous and impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded with any of them. ... [I]t is the god adored by each totemic cult. Yet it is an impersonal god, without name or history, immanent in the world and diffused in an innumerable multitude of things. [...] This is what the totem really consist in: it is only the material form under which the imagination represents this immaterial substance, this energy diffused through all sorts of heterogeneous things, which alone is the real object of the cult.8 The totem is the means by which an individual is put into relations with this source of energy; if the totem has any powers, it is because it incarnates the wakan. If a man who violated the interdictions protecting his totem is struck by sickness or death, it is because this mysterious force against which he has thus set himself, that is, the wakan, reacts against him.... 9 O n a more intimate level the clansman who has the totem of the bear becomes in his own mind the bear. T h e bear is his alter ego. 10 T h e bear communicates its power to the clansman and acts as patron and protector to him. T h e totemic animal or plant is a religious represen8 9 10

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 217. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 224. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 185.

tative once it becomes the clan's emblem or Hag. At this point the religious representative becomes the clan's collective representative. The collective label also has a religious character. For it is through the totemic emblem that things are classified as sacred or profane. The totemic emblem, not the actual animal or plant represented, contains the power of the sacred, "[1]mages of totemic beings are more sacred than the beings themselves." 11 The totemic emblem will be engraved on the instruments (the churinga, nurtunja, and waninga) used by the Arunta in their sacred ceremonies. The religious rituals performed by the Arunta clansmen are ways of dramatizing and solidifying the clan under the totemic emblem or flag. In addition the performance of the ritual is necessary to convince the clansmen that they possess mana and are in continuing communion with the life force. In many ways the totemic emblem exercises a necessary and beneficial utility for the clan. In a society based on exogamy, the totem is needed for social identification, making it possible to know who belongs and does not belong to the clan. 12 Most importantly totemism contains a cosmology that connects the clan members to the wider world of their experience. The totemic emblem is extended into nature, making it clear what is sacred and what profane in the surrounding world. In fact every known thing in the world is classified under a totem (e.g. man and rain have in them the crow totem). This means that there is little or nothing in the world which in the eyes of an aborigine "does not receive to some degree something of a religious character." 13 Durkheim's insight was that the wider extension of the totemic principle helps us to understand the deification of nature as a later development in the history of religions. He writes: "When, in the religions, which later came into being, the gods properly so-called appear, each of them will be set over a special category of natural phenomena, this one over the sea, that one over the air, another over the harvest or over fruits...." 14 Thus the gods are the linear descendants of totems. Rather than being the offspring of nature's elemental powers, the gods, in Durkheim's view, are part of a principle of social classification, which is used by human beings to put order into life and nature. Whether ultimately right or wrong about the origins of nature's gods, Dürkheim has given us an alternative way of understanding the 11 12 13 14

Dürkheim, Dürkheim, Dürkheim, Dürkheim,

The Elementary Forms, p. 156. The Elementary Forms, pp. 127, 162. The Elementary Forms, p. 179. The Elementary Forms, p. 179.

development from totemism to polytheism, and therefore a useful new tool in the teaching of comparative religion. Just as the totemic principle seems to arise from a natural human impulse, so, too, the h u m a n capacity to organize socially and cosmically seems to be a natural impulse. Dürkheim writes that the "men of the clan and the things which are classified in it form by their union a solid system, all of whose parts are unified and vibrate sympathetically." 15 T h e clan totemic system is at bottom moral, providing the basis for "close family feeling." In arguing that at the heart of Arunta religion is the totemic principle of the sacred/profane dichotomy, and that this totemic principle is grounded in the social reality of the clan, Dürkheim has given us a distinct method for studying and teaching religion. If we are to follow Dürkheim we are to understand by religion "an eminendy social thing." He elaborates: "Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are designed to excite, maintain or recreate certain mental states in these groups." 16 T h e great positive value of religion is that through its symbols, mythic beliefs, and rituals human life on earth is enhanced. In that respect, but only in that respect, religion is not a lie. It is rooted in reality, the social reality of human life on earth. For this reason Dürkheim can say So when we commence the study of primitive religions, it is with the assurance that they hold to reality and express it... The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social... In reality, then, there are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion: all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human experience.17 Sacred and Profane For Dürkheim the heart of religion is the sacred-profane dichotomy. T o appreciate that dichotomy it is important to clarify the concept of religion. T o begin with, the word, religion, is our word; it is not a word that most peoples, including "primitives" would use. 18 T h e word, religion, is our modern word for the very good reason that the

15

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 175. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 22. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, γρ. 14-15. Ifi My appreciation for the ambiguities of religion, word and practice, were gained from Wilfred Cantwell Smith's excellent study, The Meaning and End of Religion (New York: New American Library Mentor Books, 1964). le

17

sheer differentiation of functions and roles in modern life forces us to distinguish between politics, labor, commerce, leisure, art, religion, etc. The word, religion, acquired its own distinct meaning when the forces of secularization became so dominant in western culture that religious belief and practice became distinctiy human acts. For once secularity became fully evident in society it was possible to speak by contrast of the religious way of life. Now it is obvious that in an earlier period of human development, when there was little, if any, specialization or secularization, the word, religion, would have no meaning. There is no distinctly religious way of thinking and behaving when the ritualistic expressions of a people are intimately interwoven with their society. Nor can we speak of a religion when mythology and ritual touch communal organization, family relations, hunting, building and planting, cooking and eating, play, language and art. Certainly this interweaving of religion with everything else in life was true of archaic peoples. It seems to me that Dürkheim ignores or minimizes this interweaving by his insistence that the sacred, as the social value, is totally exclusive of the profane, which is located in individualistic impulses and acts. Durkheim's penchant for thinking of religion functionally leads him to isolate religion as playing a distinct role in society with an appropriate meaning. But the evidence of anthropologists about archaic religious people suggests a mixture of sacred and profane, social and individual elements in their daily lives.19 Also our awareness of the so-called civil religion in modern society suggests that human beings in modern times, no more than in ancient times, could separate sacred from profane, the social from the individual. For is it not true that our most intense human experiences—child bearing, falling in love, killing, the act of dying—seem to straddle the line separating sacred from profane? Here I am reminded of those extraordinary paintings of saints by El Greco, whose depiction of mystical rapture was said to have been influenced by his perception of the look on the human face at the moment of sexual orgasm. The Limits of our Knowledge Durkheim's love for classification and categorization leads him to another methodological problem. In writing of the Australian Arunta, he presumed to write about a people whose totemistic religion he 19

For criticism of Durkheim's dichotomy of sacred from profane, see R. M. Brendt and C. H. Brendt, Man, Land, and Myth in North Australia (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1970).

judged to be the primary source of all religion. T h e reason is that Dürkheim took the data about the primitive way of life of the Arunta aborigine, who just happens to live in modern times, to be a faithful reflection of the way of life of archaic peoples thousands of years ago. In Durkheim's mind there was a differentiation of religion from the primitives to the more complex religions of Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity. But in the case of the Arunta there was no evolution. There was only an unbroken connection that allowed Dürkheim to speculate on the ultimate origins of religion (totemism) and the essential meaning of religion (the sacred/profane dichotomy). But can we accept the assumption that the twentieth-century Arunta, allowing for their "primitive" way of life, are faithful representatives of ancient peoples? Can we devise methods of study that allow us to take religious practices of one period of time as a basis for judgments about religious practices at a vastly earlier period of time? Can we really expect to see the world as "primitives" see it? It seems to me that the interweaving of religion with all other aspects of life, so evident in "primitive" cultures, make it also difficult for us to assume that we can grasp the "meaning" of totemistic practices wherever we find them. When an Australian aborigine eats kangaroo in a sacred meal and feels he becomes the kangaroo, we on the outside studying religion can say that the eating of the kangaroo has reinforced the aborigine's sense of a totemic relationship to that animal. But I doubt that we can know what "meaning" that event of eating holds for him or what meaning the totemic emblem of the kangaroo has. This is simply to say that while Dürkheim has given us a vocabulary of the sacred to speak of primitive religion, we cannot be certain of what the "sacred" means to the aborigine himself, if it means anything at all. Horace Friess and Herbert Schneider had a correct understanding of this problem when they wrote: " T h e interpretation of primitive religions [is] very difficult and tentative, for in making them intelligible to ourselves, we may be doing them such violence as to make them absurd from the primitive point of view." 20

Homo Religiosus Given his view that religion is "the product of social causes," one would have thought that Dürkheim would resist the concept of homo religiosus, as that concept was later developed by Rudolph Otto,

20 Horace Friess and Herbert Schneider, Religion in Various Cultures (New York, 1932), p. 13.

Joachim Wach, and Mircea Eliade. He explicitly denies that religion is an "innate given." But the ambivalence in his thinking seems to allow that the sacred seems to function as an innate religious power that waits for a social context in which to express itself. This is how he puts it: "...there is something in man which holds profane things at a distance and which possesses a religious power; in other words, the human organism conceals within its depths a sacred principle, which visibly comes to the surface in certain determined cases." 21 Dürkheim understood the sacred to be a social reality; but his language betrays a sense that the sacred transcends society as an independent value, with a distinct meaning. The sacred works to "set things apart," which are then made objects of reverence. Thus the sacred appears to be a singular force, even perhaps a metaphysical entity, which is manifested through social patterns of human living, but remains independent of them. Dürkheim deliberately defined the sacred in a functional way as the social force which demarcates the profane, the locus of the individual. He did so, it seems to me, to convince his readers that the sacred was not to be thought of as a transcendent divine entity. He further contended that in totemism there is no thought of spiritual beings, deities, or divinities. Totemism is solely a social system, a beneficial way of organizing society. Since totemism is the simplest social system we know of, Dürkheim concluded that in totemism is to be found the origin of human religion. The human capacity to demarcate sacred from profane leads to the rise of the religious sentiment in humanity. 22 And we the readers of his powerful book remain unconvinced. For the sacred comes forth in The Elementary Forms as an utterly unique force in society, the force to organize, morally judge, and give emotionally charged meaning to society. In that regard the sacred seems indeed to stand above society as a transcendent divine power. To be sure, the sacred is not God or a god in Durkheim's methodology. But his way of thinking about the sacred tends to suggest that he could not simply limit himself to the language of functionalism ("setting things apart"). The sacred began to acquire the status of a metaphysical entity. Effervescence Effervescence was Durkheim's way of explaining the group emotional phenomenon. When individuals collect under the totem emblem, and

21 22

Dürkheim, The Elementaiy Forms, p. 161. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 195.

then become further aroused through song and dance and display of the sacred churinga, nuruntja, and bull roarers, a new, different, and distinctly religious reality comes into being. In this state of exaltation, the individual feels like a new being; he feels carried away by an external power, and transported into a special world. T h e old rules no longer apply in this new world; men give up their wives to members of other tribes. New paint is put on the body. T h e use of liquor encourages strange new dances. Dürkheim describes this transport as leaving the h u m d r u m world of the profane for the immensely more exciting and utterly different world of the sacred: "...it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born." 2 3 According to Dürkheim the Last Supper of Christ was an effervescent event, giving rise to new ideas, a new feeling about ideals, contained in the expressions over bread and wine: "This is my body ... this is my blood." 24 What is that idea? Durkheim's answer is to point to the clan emblem (not the animal or plant from which the emblem is drawn) which has functioned to emotionally unify and direct clan energies. T h e clan and its emblem act on its members to awaken within them the idea of external force, the mana, which dominates and exalts them. Dürkheim with real insight speaks of the contagious emotional effects of the clan emblem or symbol. This contagion is much more complete when the symbol is something simple, definite and easily representable, while the thing symbolized is difficult to hold in mind. Surely here is a crucial point of psychology about the workings of religious symbols. For consider that the Christian crucifixion works vasdy more powerfully as a symbol than as an event itself—that which had to be an ugly and squalid event of the strangulation or suffocation of a man suspended on a scaffold. T h e power of symbols lies precisely in their collectivizing or generalizing effects. T h e clan emblem provides the sacred symbol, but sacredness extends to the animal or plant itself, which cannot be killed or eaten. It is through effervescence and the totemic principle that Dürkheim is able to explain how society achieves moral ascendancy over its members, compelling them to obey rules and norms that might otherwise resist. Like Freud, Dürkheim recognized the moral force of religion: "[Religion is] like the womb from which come all the leading germs of human civilization." 25 Religion is a fundamentally conservative force to enhance the values of society, stability, law, government, 23 24 25

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 250. Pickering, Durkheim's Soaology of Religion, p. 393. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 255.

authority, responsibility, and to thwart the chaotic energies of instinct and individualism. What is the religious or sacred force? For Dürkheim it can only be "the sentiment inspired by the group in its members." 26 That sentiment is projected outside and fixed upon some object which thus becomes sacred. The key word is "becomes." Things acquire sacrality through human behavior, or have sacrality superadded or imposed upon them. Nothing is intrinsically divine or sacred or religious in Durkheim's sociology of religion. But I have raised enough questions about both the strengths and weaknesses of Durkheim's methodology to question whether Dürkheim could remain consistently sociological in explaining the meaning of religion in human life.

26

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 261.

CHAFfER TWO

T H E CREATION O F HUMAN BEHAVIOR: RECONCILING D Ü R K H E I M AND T H E STUDY OF RELIGION William E. Paden

Some will be astonished, perhaps, to see me connecting the highest forms of the human mind with society. The cause seems quite humble as compared to the value we attribute to the effect. So great is the distance between the world of the senses and appetites on the one hand, and the world of reason and morality on the other, that it seems the second could have been added to the first only by an act of creation. But to attribute to society this dominant role in the origin of our nature is not to deny that creation.' Previous generations of religion scholars eschewed what they took to be Durkheim's reductionism and read The Elementaiy Forms accordingly. Students were directed to the notorious quote about the god and society being "one and the same" 2 ; were given the section from the introductory chapter about all religious life being divided into two realms, and assured the idea was empirically wrong; and were warned of the danger of the idea that religion arises out of group effervescence. Neglect was also an option: Joachim Wach's classic, Sociology of Religion (1949), mentioned Dürkheim only once in passing and then only in order to warn against the "positivism" of confusing religious and social values. 3 And a standard account of the history of comparative religion concludes its description of Dürkheim in this way: Although widely read, Dürkheim was so dominated by the desire to explain away the phenomenon of religion that his theories about the origins of religion are of little consequence. His failure to accept mankind's belief in the actual existence of an unseen supernatural order—a failure in which he was to have many followers—led him into serious errors of interpretation....The student of comparative religion will, perhaps, read him less in order to acquire a knowledge

1 Emile Dürkheim, The Elementaiy Forms of Religious Life, translated by Karen Fields (New York: T h e Free Press, 1995), p. 447. 2 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 208. 3 Joachim Wach, The Sociology of Religion (Chicago: T h e University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 5.

of either the nature of religion or the thorny problem of the origins of religion, than to learn something of the standing of these theories in turn-of-the-century France.4 Here the matter has more or less stood. Dürkheim just seemed unacceptable. But times have changed, and the way we read the past is changing. The idea of the social formation of religion, far from being something of a tabued theory among religiously oriented scholars, has gradually come into its own in a post-theological age. At first, the return of the social came quietly through the influence on religious studies of neoDurkheimians like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Peter Berger and Robert Bellah, and then with a certain vengeance through the challenges of cultural studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and the general aftermath of Foucauldian thought. Elsewhere I have described the original standoff with sociological reductionism as a kind of Cold War. 5 The Berlin Wall of religious studies amounted to a methodological bulwark against the likes of Dürkheim. In the 60s and 70s, preserving religious ideology had its cultural function, 6 for to accept the reduction of religion to social categories would seemingly have meant accepting a non-religious worldview and ignoring the spiritual values and creativity of religious traditions. Dürkheim, in short, was a threat to religion, as well as a threat to methodology. Like the political barrier in Europe, by the late 80s this religious wall was being dismantled and reconciliations explored. The study of religion was becoming "socialized." In the post-Eliadean generation, sociologies of knowledge constituted an intellectual environment in secular academia. And as the phenomenological approach once gave academic credibility to religious studies by virtue of its presumed objectivity, its cross-cultural perspective, and its bracketing of metaphysics, so now historians of religion also learned to make their sub-

4 Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, 2nd edition (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986), p. 86. 5 "Durkheim's Revenge: Transformations and Ironies in the American History of Religions Tradition During the Cold War," in Iva Dolezalova, Luther H. Martin, and Dalibor Papousek, eds., The Academic Study of Religion During the Cold War, East and West (New York: Peter Lang Press, 2001), pp. 253-65. Some of the formulations in the present article draw from that paper. 6 As thoroughly described by Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), and Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

ject more consistent with the sociologically oriented environment of the times that deemed knowledges and cultures to be humanly produced and negotiated. Thus, at a time when the conceptual terms of the "history of religions" are undergoing modifications, I address here some ways of reconceiving and recontextualizing certain Durkheimian ideas. With distance now on the Eliadean tradition and with a fuller historical perspective on Durkheim's thought, I will suggest that there are emergent contexts for reading the two traditions in relation to each other and for recognizing points of convergence beyond the religiously constructed opposition of "the sacred" and its reductions. Reconciling the Dichotomy of the Social and the Religious T h e first issue to address is the old but now tired opposition, "religious vs. social," the original and primary obstruction to appropriating Durkheim's work. O n the one hand, Dürkheim certainly intended to create an alternative to those explanations of religion that relied on superhuman forces—and the same may be said for all social science and all science, by definition, then and now. O n the other hand, there was another alternative that he declined, and it is his response to this second, rejected alternative that is insufficiently appreciated by religionists. T h e approach he so adamantly opposed was the rationalist view that reduced religious life to projections of illusory belief and pre-scientific thought forms. By contrast, Dürkheim labored to show that religion represented very powerful and enduring realities. It is a central irony of Dürkheim criticism that what he is accused of, namely not attributing "reality" to religion, is the very thing he so thoroughly denied. A central aim of The Elementary Forms was to show that religious forces are real, and he states that the book's purpose was to "comprehend the religious nature of man, that is, to reveal a fundamental and permanent part of humanity." 7 Thus, within his particular ideological horizon, Durkheim's only choices were 1) to explain religion in terms of the supernatural, 2) to explain religion as an illusory epiphenomenon of a materialist or rationalist worldview, which denied the validity of religion, or 3) to explain religion as an expression of society and thus a fact and form of culture as important as any of the activities and products of civilization, including morality, science, law and the arts.

7

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 1.

In Durkheim's vocabulary, "society" was not the lower term by which higher forms of culture were to be explained, but an allembracing category for the matrix of human behavior—as enormous and rich a concept as was "nature" for a natural scientist. Indeed, it represented "the most powerful collection of physical and moral forces that we can observe in nature." 8 Society is then a process of innovation, self-transformation and creative power, the "consciousness of consciousnesses." 9 It is where notions of totality and world originate. 10 Dürkheim does not so much think he is reducing religion to society as he is enlarging the idea of society to include its religious nature and its proclivity to form and create responses to objects and values deemed sacred. There is an interesting circularity here: society is itself defined largely in moral and religious terms. If religion is social, then the social is moral and religious. Society generates all the great forms of culture, any of which may come to have lives of their own. Knowledges, arts, and conscious life are social activities and representations. As well, and pertinent to the viewpoint of this essay, systems of sacred objects evolve their own kinds of ritual and mythic behaviors and classifications. They form worlds of time, space, cosmology. They form systems of authority, inspiration, communication, respect, and relationship linked with the objects. Once generated, religious ideas set in motion a world of patterned negotiation between sacred and profane, attraction and repulsion, communion and interdiction, purity and impurity, and this world gains a kind of "independence," following its own laws.11 Society perceives itself through such self-positing languages and systems. Sacredness is a property of society itself. It involves behaviors irreducible to any other kind of social domain. 12 Critics of the notion of "the sui generis nature of the sacred" should understand that the idea is not just a theological invention but also a formulation used by social scientists prior to Eliade and Rudolf Otto. 13 Dürkheim could easily refer to "those sui generis sensations of which religion is made," 14 or the 8

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 447. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 447, 445. 10 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 443. 11 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 426. 12 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 34-39. 13 For many references to the sui generis character of social facts, see Dürkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, edited by Steven Lukes, translated by W.D. Halls (New York: The Free Press, 1982). 14 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 421. 9

"sui generis" character of respect for religious objects, 15 or write that a "special emotion gives it [the sacred object] the reality it has." 16 Dürkheim did not need to reduce religion to society, because society already was religious. Durkheim's schema not only provides for an account of that from which religion is formed but also allows for the notion that religion is itself formative. While it was not Durkheim's particular interpretive focus, the dialectic of phases of the "social construction of reality" described by Luckmann and Berger is consistent with Durkheim's "society." 17 Those phases not only include the social externalization of reality, but the subsequent ontologization, internalization, and recreation of it. Religion is not just "from" society; it makes and remakes it. We think with the language of our times, and Dürkheim even took some of his language about the equivalency of kinship and religion from W. Robertson Smith. I find it revealing that the scandalous phrases that most offended religionists in The Ekmentary Forms were apparently borrowed, as was so much else, from that Protestant scholar. For example, and this is Smith not Dürkheim, The Religion of the Semites (first published 1887) reads: Indeed in a religion based on kinship, where the god and his worshippers are of one stock, the principle of sanctity and that of kinship are identical. The sanctity of a kinsman's life and the sanctity of the godhead are not two things, but one; for ultimately the only thing that is sacred is the common tribal life, or the common blood which is identified with the life. Whatever being partakes in this life is holy, and its holiness may be described indifferendy, as participation in the divine life and nature, or as participation in the kindred blood.18 Similar formulations by Smith are common. 1 9 Textual influences aside, it is also notable that when Dürkheim wrote, "Thus, if the totem is the symbol of both the god and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the same?,"

15

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 58. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 328. 17 For a summary of this process see Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), ch. 1. 18 W. Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), p. 289. 19 For example: "From this point of view the natural solidarity of the god and his worshippers, which has been already enlarged upon as characteristic of antique religion, at once becomes intelligible; the indissoluble bond that unites men to their god is the same bond of blood-fellowship which in early society is the one binding link between man and man, and the one sacred principle of moral obligation" (Smith, The Religion of the Semites, p. 53). 16

he had already explained in the preceding section of the book that he was using the word "god" figuratively,20 or as a metaphor for the totemic principle, 21 also symbolized by "mana." In modern times, neo-Durkheimians have played a mediating role with religious studies. Scholars like Mary Douglas and Victor Turner accepted the cultural importance and reality of religion and were nonthreatening to religionists. Their "reductions" were not to the nonreligious but to conceptualizations about the structures, functions and processes of religion. As "macro" reductions, 22 they reduced upward to superordinate sociological categorizations where the wholes explain the parts rather than downward to cynical dismissals or theories of illusion. Like Dürkheim, they seemed to authorize religion as a viable form of culture. Moreover, the question of metaphysical truth had become largely irrelevant. Many religionists found new allies here. "Society" was becoming less a reified entity and more a site for studying actions, roles, and structures. The notion of humans as participants or insiders in sociocultural systems was becoming an assumption shared by historians of religion. Even apart from the issue of whether "religious" and "social" are only artificially separate categories, reduction has by now become accepted as the necessary process of all knowledge and conceptualization. All thought reduces, forming generalizations that inevitably select out only certain generic features of particulars, ignoring other features. All concepts are reductions. Thus, historians of religion realized that they too were reducing their subject matter to certain themes and patterns. Reduction has ceased to be a term of reproach. Convergences I would argue that the above considerations—suggesting, among other things, that "religion/social" is a dubious bifurcation—provide an interesting way of reading the relationship between Dürkheim and Eliade. A salient parallelism between the two is the concept of humans as participants in an endless series of mythically and ritually constructed worlds, the contents and contours of which are formed by cultural 20

"Taking the word 'god' in a very broad sense, one could say that it is the god that each totemic cult worships. But it is an impersonal god, without name..." (Dürkheim, The Elementaiy Forms, p. 191). 21 "This species is the sacred thing. It incarnates what I was led to call, in a metaphorical sense, the totemic deity" (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 345). 22 The term is Ivan Strenski's, in his "Reducrion Without Tears," in Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan, eds., Religion and Reductionism: Essays on Eliade, Segal and the Challenge of the Social Sciencesfor the Study ofReligion (Leiden: Brill, 1996), p. 98.

environments and the dynamics of which are informed by the way sacred objects function for participants and interact with their lives. Although Dürkheim and Eliade obviously contextualized their description of these worlds in different ideological discourses, they were both occupied with how homo religiosus forms behavioral systems out of the category of sacrality. Here, "the sacred" is not a reified, divine object, but rather objects of any kind upon which superhuman value has been placed and around which mythic and ritual worlds form. 23 Several of Eliade's concepts are themselves part of an inheritance from the French School. 24 Though he eschewed what he took to be anti-religious constructivism, there is an undercurrent of a particular kind of structuralism in his writings. T h e central Eliadean notion of multiple universes constructed by sacred time and space, by mythic histories, by cosmologies and geographies, and by renewals of the world and "the Great Time" through collective festivals, is from the French tradition. 25 This locates portions of Eliade's work more on the

2:1 Here I obviously differ from the common opinion about Eliade which typically reduces him to a theologian. I would argue that the sacred for Eliade is primarily (though not exclusively) a value found in objects, rather than a reified, independent reality. As if that is not heretical enough, I would also maintain that his notions about "studying religion at its own level" do not mean that scholars need to assert or intuit a metaphysical reality, but rather that they need to identify the specific, characteristic kinds of objects and responses to them engaged by religious people. I have elaborated on some of this in "The Concept of World Habitation: Eliadean Linkages with a New Comparativism," in Bryan Rennie, ed., Changing Religious Worlds: The Meaning and End ofMircea Eliade (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000), pp. 249-59. 24 Guilford Dudley III had pointed out some of this connection years ago in his Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and His Critics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977). 25 A French genealogy links Eliade to the Durkheimians by way of his admiration for Roger Caillois's work (L'Homme et le Sacré, first published 1939), the sponsorship of Georges Dumézil, and the writings of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (Dumézil had been his student). Dumézil, for example, edited and wrote a preface to Eliade's Traité d'histoire des religions (1949), even making the point there that the study of the sacred had already progressed from ideas about mana to the notion of religion as a system, an "explication du monde" ("Preface de Georges Dumézil," in Mircea Eliade, Traité d'historie des religions [Paris: Editions Payot, 1949], p. 5). Dumézil, following Mauss and Hubert, had expanded on the concepts of mythic time and space, "the Great Time," festivals as "openings" onto mythic time, and so forth (Cf. his "Temps et Mythes," in Recherches Philosophiques, vol. 5 [1935-36], pp. 235-51). Caillois's book, a neo-Durkheimian synthesis which seems to be a source of many of Eliade's formulations, is available in English as Man and the Sacred, translated by M. Barash (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959). Eliade says he knew Caillois "quite well" and "I used his books and articles and quoted from them a great deal" (Cf. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], translated by Derek Coltman, p. 91 ). A full study of Eliade's French connection would be desirable.

side of post-Durkheimian anthropology than on that of Protestant religious phenomenologies. Indeed, recognizing the French connection would allow us to see Eliade not merely as the voice of the religionizing era but also a nexus of transition, a watershed, in a way that the phenomenologists were not, between an older religiously oriented religious studies and a newer, secular and more "socialized" approach. 26 Eliade of course did not see the Durkheimian connection quite as I am suggesting it here, since he gave conventional meaning to the word "social" and thus voiced the standard rhetoric distinguishing a social "conditioning" of religion and the more threatening idea that religion is "created" by the social. His few references to Dürkheim typically focus on criticizing the idea of social origins. "Sociogenesis" he says, "like any other 'genesis,' cannot explain the functions of an existential symbolism" 27 ; and "One must distinguish between Durkheim's pertinent analyses of certain aspects of Australian and other archaic religions, which are extremely valuable, and his general theory of the social origin of religion." 28 If within the rhetorical strategies of the Cold War fear of the Other we were conditioned to perceive Dürkheim and Eliade as enemies facing each other on a batdefield, today it is the commonality that I find more intriguing. Where the one used the language of social matrix and the other the language of mythic tradition, in either case religion was understood as a received symbolic universe. For each, religion was a form of culture with a distinctive life of its own; for each, a primary function of myth—and one of the elementary forms of religious life—is to supply foundational and empowering cultural archetypes for its participants. Moreover, for each, "world" was not a given, a priori, referent but a symbolic schema, a product of the modes through which it is apprehended. 29 World comes in historical versions, describing varieties of life space. World is not here an objectivity to which all knowledge must correspond, but a structure of experience and language. For neither Dürkheim nor Eliade do religious worlds tell us the way the world 26

Cf. Paden, "Durkheim's Revenge." Mircea Eliade, The Quest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 158. 28 Mircea Eliade, Australian Religions: An Introduction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 20-21, η 32. 29 For an overview of the concept of "world" see William Paden, "World," in Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds., Guide to the Study of Religion (New York: London, 2000), pp. 334-47. See also my Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion, 2nd edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), which attempted to combine the insights of Dürkheim and Eliade regarding the construction of religious worlds. 27

is, but rather they tell us a way the world is—to employ Nelson Goodman's distinction. 30 While no one would ignore the overt differences between the hermeneutics of Eliade's eclectic anthropology and Durkheim's moralistic positivism, we would do well not to separate them into radically different metaphysical camps. T h e referent of religion for Eliade is not the divine but "sacred worlds" and "creations of the h u m a n spirit." 31 He likened religious worlds more to the "creations" of artists than to any foundational truths. 32 He advocated a "philosophical anthropology." 3 3 For his part, Dürkheim is more than just a sociologist. He is a moralist who refers to the "religious nature of man," 3 4 speaks of how the powers that religions bring into play are "above all, spiritual," 35 and admits explicitly to a Jamesian appreciation of the powerful function of religious experience for the participant. 3 6 There is more humanism in Dürkheim than we can see when pigeon-holing him as a reductionist, just as there is more humanism in Eliade than is visible when categorizing him as a theologian. I find it instructive to read backward to Dürkheim by way of Eliade as well as the other way around. Beyond the Dürkheim/Eliade Dichotomy Ultimately, we may find productive readings of both figures within any context or set of comparisons we choose. As in the parallax effect, the change in the position of the objects results from changes in the position or direction from which they are viewed. Here, I choose to view Durkheim's and Eliade's descriptions of religious life within a broad concept of h u m a n behaviors. T h e religious behavior described by both theorists no longer needs to be explained in the language either of turn-of-the-century sociology or of mid-century religious hermeneutics. Each, in attempting to show the special "social" or "sacred" nature of religion, created unnecessary discontinuities with h u m a n behavior in 30

Nelson Goodman, Problems and Objects (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), p.

31. 31

Eliade, The Quest, pp. 6-7. Eliade, The Quest, pp. 5-7. 33 Eliade, The Qmst, pp. 9-10. 34 Dur\ihe\m, The Elementary Forms, p. I. 35 Dürkheim,The Elementary Forms, p. 422. 36 Dürkheim,The Elementary Forms, p. 420, for an explicit reference to William James. See also pp. 350, 364. 32

the state of nature. While Dürkheim tried to find a place for social facts apart from biological reductions, and while Eliade wanted to find a place for religious facts apart from sociological reductions, I am going to assume that both of these ways of dividing up reality, while having some temporary academic, analytic value, are also limited. Rather, a turn towards a new naturalism that avoids the dichotomy of religious vs. social will accommodate the contributions of both scholars. 37 This would be an approach that allows religious "creations" to be acknowledged as activities of the naturally evolving world. 38 Behavior is an enormous category, as wide as nature herself, as broad as all forms of social and cultural life. Human behavior is not limited to eating and sleeping, or to evolutionary traces of aggression or homemaking. All civilization is behavior, all language, all sociality, all acts of meaning-attribution. Indeed, the following are but a few universals of sociocultural behavior: 39 forming bonds and loyalties with a kinship group, ranking people within a group, learning reciprocities of cooperative relationships, making and following rules, defending/protecting group order, punishing infractions of order, socializing the young, recognizing social authority, endowing certain objects with superhuman status or inviolability, constructing pasts and reciting sacred histories, passing on cultural prototypes for imitation, regenerating social values by performing periodic rites and festivals, dignifying important occasions and roles with ritual behavior, classifying and mapping the universe, attributing significance to events and objects, modifying states of consciousness, disciplining the mind and body to effect certain results and kinds of fitness.40 The Durkheimian project contributed to understanding the role of religion in all of these, and the Eliadean project to many of them. Certainly many of the

37 Roy A. Rappaport's Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) would be one example of this "turn." 38 Notably, the resources of sociobiology have yet to be joined with Durkheimian sociology and history of religions theory. An impressive beginning is found in Luther Martin's paper linking the religious and ritual concepts of kinship solidarity (including constructed or fictive kinship) with sociobiological theories of kin-selection (e.g. those of William Hamilton) and showing ways of reading historical religious traditions through that approach. See his "Comparativism and Sociobiological Theory," Numen 48:3 (July 2001), pp. 290-308. 39 The most helpful survey of the anthropological notion of universal human behaviors, with extensive annotated bibliography, is Donald Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991). 40 This notion of behavioral universals and their relevance for comparativism is examined in my "Universals Revisited: Human Behaviors and Cultural Contents," Numen 48:3 (July 2001), pp. 276-89.

generic forms of human behavior described above are exemplified in their most inventive and intensified ways in their historical, religious versions. Worldmaking counts among the universal h u m a n behaviors and, ethologically speaking, religious worldmaking is one of myriad, biodiverse forms of world habitation. Eliade expressed a fascination with these forms and ontologies which he likened to the universes of artists. Dürkheim was more sober here, realizing that religious worlds as such are neither wonderful nor wrong but simply reflect any of the sacred values humans choose to express, healthy or not. 41 While practitioners of religious cultures are not generally conscious that they are participants in such an etically or generically conceived h u m a n "behavior," the latter concept does not take away from the internal meanings of their worlds and performances, any more than the reduction "water" cancels out the "significance" or "meaning" of swimming or boating to the swimmer or boater. While "behavior" is clearly an outsider's term, it does not deny the insider's role and immersion in it. T h e description of meanings-to-the-insider continues to be an ethnographic challenge and phenomenological ideal. In all this, sacredness needs to be looked at as a form of behavior, as did Dürkheim. 4 2 Both Dürkheim and Eliade would agree that sacredness is a characteristic of an object or state that correlates with certain behavioral attitudes and practices—stances and protocols that are appropriate for contact with or participation in that object or state. Objects deemed sacred may include superhuman beings, or some representation of them like a symbol, place, time, or status, but behavioral worlds build around these. At the same time, while Eliade did not pay much attention to the exact relation of behaviors to sacred objects, Dürkheim did, though in a limited way. Following Frazer and Robertson Smith, Dürkheim based the idea of the sacred on that of tabu but broadened it to refer to a dynamic that regulates all religious behavior. T h e latter enterprise, as he showed brilliantly in his little-read chapter on " T h e Negative Cult," includes all the ways people approach sacred objects and states by modifying or eradicating the "profane" elements in their

41

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 423. And as W. Richard Comstock urged in "A Behavioral Approach to the Sacred: Category Formation in Religious Studies," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, X L I X / 4 (December, 1981), pp. 625-43. Comstock righdy argued that Durkheim's sacred/profane distinction referred more to the regulation of behavior than to a metaphysical dualism. 42

lives,43 a reading of the concept of sacred/profane that has considerable applicability. Moreover, there are additional ways of conceiving sacrality in relation to behavior, particularly the idea of behaviors that maintain states and conditions of inviolable, sanctioned social order, and I have tried to describe some of those in a previous volume in this series.44 In so repositioning the creations of religious behavior—where "creation" can connote originative act and source, product, and the product's effect—religion scholars will not only find new colleagues in the sciences but will also gain confidence that they have something to add to the knowledges of the world outside their traditional, self-enclosed hermeneutical domains. Toward that end, Durkheim's work is indispensable.

43

Dürkheim, The Elementaiy Forms, pp. 303-29. This section, much neglected, counteracts the otherwise common view that Dürkheim believes all religions divide the world into two watertight components, the sacred and the profane. He is quite clear here about the transformational character of sacred and profane, where the profane state can become sacred through the metamorphic force of purification, and where the very purpose of ritual is to link sacred and profane realms. I address some of this issue in "Before 'The Sacred' Became Theological: Dürkheim and Reductionism," in Idinopulos and Yonan, eds., Religion and Reductionism, pp. 198-210. 44 Cf. William E. Paden, "Sacrality as Integrity: 'Sacred Order' as a Model for Describing Religious Worlds," in Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan, eds., The Sacred and its Scholars: Comparative Methodologies for the Study of Pnmaiy Religious Data (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 3-18.

CHAPTER THREE

S E C U L A R I S M AND T H E SACRED: IS T H E R E REALLY S O M E T H I N G CALLED "SECULAR RELIGION"? W. Watts Miller

Secularism involves, whatever else, a worldview that gives up on gods, souls, supernatural powers, an afterlife, etc. T h a t is, it gives up on beliefs to do with religion in a core traditional sense. This is why secularism and religion can seem opposites and the idea of a secular religion a contradiction in terms. T h e idea has certainly run into hostility, from secular-minded people critical of religion as well as from religious-minded people critical of secularism. Its origins go back at least to the French Revolution. It was taken up by various individuals and groups during the nineteenth century, especially in France. Later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it found one of its most influential and thoughtful advocates in Dürkheim. Indeed, in modern sociology it is above all with him that the idea is associated. What, then, is his case for a secular religion? Dürkheim questioned the view, common among his fellow secularists, that religion can be replaced by enlightened ethics. He insisted, instead, that religion lies at the heart of social and moral life. So how can it survive the rise of secularism in the modern western world and the disappearance of God from many of our lives and many of our institutions? T h e key to the problem is the survival of a sense of the sacred. In the conclusion to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he asks what is eternal in religion and says it is faith and the cult. 1 This can be expanded to beliefs, symbols, rites and practices that have a special authority. But what permeates all these and invests them with a same, special authority? T h e answer, implicit in the definition of religion at the beginning of The Elementaiy Forms, is a sense of the sacred. 2 In exploring the issue of a secular religion, it is therefore important to be clear about the sacred's meaning and significance in Durkheim's work. It is especially important to be clear about his idea of a modern 1 Emile Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Karen Fields (New York, The Free Press, 1995), p. 432. 2 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 44.

transfer of sacrality from god to man. For there has been a failure to recognize what this involves. Contrary to the impression given by his "orthodox" interpreters, there is not just a transfer of something that remains the same. There is a transformation of the nature of the sacred itself. It necessarily scales down. And it dramatically scales down, to what I shall discuss, against "orthodox" Durkheimianism, as a world of the semi-sacred. The Modern Transfer of Sacrality A traditional religious idea is that God is transcendent, set above all other things and going beyond them. Dürkheim took over the idea in his understanding of the sacred. Indeed, he saw the sacred's transcendence, set above other things and going beyond them, as one of its main defining characteristics. But if we give up on God, what can replace him as transcendent? Is it society? A standard textbook view is that Dürkheim equated the sacred with society, and an often-quoted remark of his is that God symbolizes society.3 But the view oversimplifies to the point of distortion. In the same discussion as the remark about society's symbolization by God, a key argument is that modern society sacralizes man. 4 Dürkheim repeatedly insisted, here and elsewhere, that the modern center of the sacred is the human person. 5 Thus although, here and elsewhere, he always saw society in some shape or form as the source of the sacred, this is not the same as the sacred itself. The modern social world constructs the sacred round the person. Traditional social worlds construct it round God. It is true that the modern center of the sacred can be filled out as the person in a society of persons—just as a traditional center of the sacred can be filled out as God and his kingdom. It is still the case that the sacred does not simply equal society. Indeed, it is the idea of the person that helps to define and constitute modern society, just as ideas of God help to define and constitute traditional societies. As a social symbolism, ideas of God are not a mere varnish that can be stripped off to leave a way of life the same. They are an integral part of the way of

3

52.

4

Emile Dürkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1974), p.

Dürkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, pp. 37, 53, 58. See, especially, Emile Dürkheim, Suicide (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1951), p. 334; Emile Dürkheim, Moral Education (New York: The Free Press, 1961), p. 107; Emile Dürkheim, "Individualism and the Intellectuals," in Dürkheim on Religion, edited by W. S. F. Pickering (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), pp. 61-62. 5

life, and qualify as the kind of ideas that Dürkheim discussed as "mythological truths." 6 These are social constructions, but in the sense both that they are socially formed and that they are socially formative. They help to create a social world, so that it is impossible to define and talk meaningfully about a society without reference to these core ideas, symbols and representations, which help to make it the particular kind of society it is. A switch from the sacred symbolism of God and his kingdom cannot just be to "society." It must be to another sacred symbolism and set of core, socially constitutive mythological truths. Yet why must it be a switch from God to the person? It is certainly the case that Dürkheim saw society, in any shape or form, as transcendent in relation to the individual. But it is also the case that he very much distinguished the individual from the person. And this is while linking them in an argument about modern society in which it is the person that offers transcendence in relation to the individual and that therefore qualifies as a modern center of the sacred. Dürkheim insisted that we still very much need identities as members of particular groups. However, this is in a context in which our two fundamental identities in the modern social world are as an individual and as a person. Identity as an individual is about all our differences, which make each of us distinct. Identity as a person is about a same h u m a n dignity, which every one of us shares. It is this idea that Dürkheim saw as the only possibility, in a modern, large-scale, plural world, of a common faith. And it is this idea that he saw as transcendent, setting the person above other things and going beyond all our differences as individuals and as members of particular groups. 7 But if it then qualifies as the modern center of the sacred, it is important to emphasize that it is not just the whole of the sacred or the sum total of what he called "sacred things." T h e idea of the person spreads an aura of the sacred on to individuals—or rather, all individuals. Indeed, a basic underlying argument is not only that a cult of the person is necessary for this but that it is one of the jobs it is there to do. It is misguided just to emphasize differences, to sneer at humanism, and to attack " m a n " in favor of "men." Without attachment to the abstract idea of the person, there could not be respect for the individual—that is, all individuals—or even the m o d e m movement of opinion aspiring to and demanding this. 6

Emile Dürkheim, Pragmatism and Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 86-91. 7 See Dürkheim, "Individualism and the Intellectuals," pp. 66-67.

Thus one way in which the person might be like God is if it is the primary sacred—or, in Durkheim's words, "the sacred thing par excellence." 8 However, another way is if it is then a sacred thing at the center of a whole environment of sacred things, in a transfer of its sacredness on to them. A faith centered round the idea of the person transfers sacrality first and foremost on to persons. But this is also on to personalities—a key though often overlooked term of Durkheim's that links the individual and the person, and helps to overcome the dualism between them. In attacking ideas of the individual as a radically separate self, he emphasized development as a particular, distinct, individual personality, attached to others in particular relationships and milieux but also to a wider society and to the abstract universalizing idea of the person. It is through the transcendence of the person that in the end sacrality spreads on to the individual, or rather, to each and every one of us as an individual personality. 9 Yet what is at stake in insisting on the person as "sacred" and the center of a "faith" and a "cult," rather than just as a key ethical value? In part it is about mobilization of a modern sense of the sacred against traditional attitudes that put down whole groups, classes and castes and that form a powerful, entrenched obstacle to recognition and treatment of their members as persons. But as much as anything the issues arise within modern individualism itself, and one of Durkheim's main worries is with a utilitarian, economistic approach to life. Jesus drove the moneylenders out of the temple. Utilitarian, economistic doctrine brings them back in. Indeed, it destroys the temple itself. It leaves nothing sacred in making everything commensurable—all brought within a same common scale to score a particular number of points, and, as in this case, all brought down to a matter of interest and its calculation. It treats individuals as if "things," in that it applies across the board and without a notion of the person as an incommensurable, transcendent value, above price and beyond calculation. Dürkheim called its approach to life "sordid." 10 But it is this in a double way, in its impact on the feelings both of negative respect and of positive attachment that he saw as two essential sides of the sacred. 11 In a utilitarian world the individual loses the protection that

8

Dürkheim, Moral Education, p. 107. For a discussion, see W. Watts Miller, Dürkheim, Morals and Modernity (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), pp. 95-110. 10 Dürkheim, "Individualism and the Intellectuals," p. 60, but where his reference to a sordid or grubby commercialism ('commercialisme mesquin') is simply translated as a narrow commercialism. 11 Dürkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, pp. 36-37, 44-45, 48. 9

comes with respect for persons and a set of not to be broken taboos that creates round them an aura of inviolability. At the same time the mentality of constant, across the board calculation instrumentalizes relationships, to separate us from each other in these and freeze out warmth, attachment and communion. Emphasis on attachment forms an important part of Durkheim's objections to another doctrine. Libertarianism, in contrast with a utilitarian approach, very much invokes respect for persons and their rights. Yet it conjures this out of philosophical thin air, and assumes a society of individuals who manage to respect one another without feeling an identity with one another. Dürkheim insisted on feelings of respect that are collective, deep-rooted and with the force of religious taboos rather than mere ethical principles. But he also insisted that feelings of respect are bound up with feelings of concern and commitment. 12 These different yet interlinked emotions are part of the pluralism of the sacred, embedded in a cult of the person, with its sense of a wall round each of us and at the same time of identity. 13 So is it a secular religion? An important example might be discussed as the American crashed dead bodies case. 14 In line with utilitarianism it seemed right, in the interests of the living, to test the safety of automobiles by crashing them not just with dummies but with real human dead bodies. In line with libertarianism it seemed to satisfy respect for persons to have the consent either of relatives of the deceased or, when alive, of the deceased themselves. But on becoming public knowledge the tests had to be stopped, due to the outcry at smashing dead humans to smithereens. T h e outcry ran into criticism from philosophers as "irrational." This fails to understand it, and is symptomatic of a profound blindness to the sacred. A sense of the dignity of the person forms an irreducible core of the sense of the sacredness of the person. This does not mean that an idea of human dignity excludes other concerns, notably freedom and welfare. But it is not the same as either of these, and eludes attempts to define it just in terms of them. It also has complex links with feelings of respect and attachment, and, like them, takes us to the pluralism of

12 Dürkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, and Emile Dürkheim, The Division of labor in Society (New York, Macmillan, 1933), pp. 121 -22. 13 For an interesting discussion of this in the case of sex and the sacred, see Emile Dürkheim, Essays on Morals and Religion, edited by VV. S. F. Pickering (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 140-48. 14 For a report of the case, see D. Lamb, Organ Transplants and Ethics (New York: Roudedge, 1990), pp. 122-25.

the sacred. A sense of the dignity of the person cannot be the sole but has to be a central value in a sense of the sacredness of the person. So another way of seeing utilitarianism as a logic of disenchantment is that it destroys the plurality of concerns kept in play by the sacred. It is an ideology. It invokes a particular monolithic principle that wins out all the time and that arranges everything into a neat, consistent, supposedly "rational" system. It remains wedded to this logic, even in the conflict between different versions over whether the single supreme principle should be formulated in terms of interest, or welfare, or happiness, or desire, etc. But libertarianism also turns into an ideology in invoking the principle that unless there is violation of someone else's rights, consenting adults may do what they like. Then this can cover suicide, prostitution and in fact any other casual sex, as well as any other trade in bodies and bodily parts—even slavery if really voluntary—just as it can cover crashing the dead or for that matter eating them (again, with prior consent). There is no end to the list, since nothing in the internal logic of libertarianism stops the principle from going through in case after case. It is as sordid as utilitarianism and undermines what its own principle is meant to be about, respect for persons. It erodes the idea of human dignity, not least in eroding taboos, bound up with this, against degradation and debasement. These set limits to what may be done, which do not just equate with consent. Indeed, more effectively than any philosophical formula, they help to constitute and define the sense of dignity itself, with the aura of the sacred it creates round the person. It is very much part of this that, as in the American public's outcry at smashing up human remains, the sacredness centered round the person spreads from the living to the dead. The deceased body is a symbol of the once alive person. But it is not just a symbol. It is a "relic," a sacred thing. The relic is one of many cases of a type of symbol that is also a sacred thing. This involves a process in which a symbol becomes a sacred thing itself through a transfer of value on to it from the sacred thing that it stands for and represents. Dürkheim stressed how social life is made possible only by "a vast symbolism."1"' He especially stressed the role and importance of the type of symbols that have just been described, and that I have discussed elsewhere as "icons." 16 They include relics, shrines, totems, the Statue of Liberty, the Stars and Stripes, etc. "There is no active faith, however secular, that does not have these"—or as he in fact said, to tease rationalists, "that does

15 16

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 233. Watts Miller, Dürkheim, Morals and Modernity, pp. 237-39.

not have its fetishes." 17 For the trouble with "fetishism" is that it is so often a mere term of abuse. It is put to work to sneer at and dismiss the whole process in which value spreads out from its source, transfers on to symbols, and converts these into sacred things. But a basic Durkheimian point is that whether God or man is the primary value it has to be as a sacred thing at the center of a vast symbolism and environment of sacred things. This involves the pluralism of the sacred, in which whether God or man is the primary value it is both one and manifold, and in which the plurality of concerns takes concrete form in the plurality of particular symbols that constitute a whole, overall sacred environment. But it also involves the way in which sacredness flows out from the center yet at the same time flows back in again. An abstract idea of the sacred might spread on to particular symbols and indeed a whole environment of them. In turn, however, these do not just express an already formed sense of the sacred. They help to define, develop, reinforce and sustain it. So in sum it is not the case that feelings of outrage at crashing dead h u m a n bodies are "irrational." They are logical. For they draw on and mobilize the logic of the sacred. And they do this in a number of ways. A flow of sacrality from the person to the remains and reminders of persons is inherent within the workings of the logic. But so is a flow back again, to the living. Thus feelings of respect for the dead are intelligible within the logic as feelings that really are about the dead. It is misguided to try to represent them as all about the needs and interests of the living. Either this is another expression of secular rationalism or it plays into its hands. But respect for the dead at the same time reinforces respect for the living, and everyone's h u m a n dignity. It is an essential part of an environment of the sacred centered round the person.

Secularism and the Logic of the Sacred Durkhcim's search for a new secular religion can be defended, as in the discussion so far, in two main ways. O n e is to criticize rationalist alternatives. T h e other is to identify key aspects of the sacred that it is necessary to look for in modern society, and that it is in fact possible to find. But this also lays the basis for identifying problems with the idea of a secular religion. Secularism is above all a modern western development, arising in the context of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Indeed, it is

17

Dürkheim, Sociology· and Philosophy, p. 87.

sometimes argued that secularism is built into the internal logic and dynamic ofJudeo-Christianity. 18 The argument emphasizes a tendency to see God as a remote figure, withdrawn from the world he created and leaving us to get on with our lives in it. The difficulty with this, however, is also a difficulty for a secular religion. Mainstream western ideas of God do not see him as withdrawn. They see him as immanent and transcendent. God is immanent, the ground of our being, a source of support to us in the here and now, a basis of hope for this world and not just for the next, a presence within our lives that makes possible their transformation. God is transcendent, set above the limited human world he governs, enthroned at the center of an ideal life to come and involving in all this, in limited human attempts to understand him, a sense of the infinite and absolute. The difficulty, then, for a secular religion is what happens in it to the sacredness represented by the immanence and transcendence of God. How can this stay the same in a switch on to the person and a society of persons? Perhaps there is less of a problem with immanence and seeing development as a person as a possibility within all of us, in and through society as the ground of our being. Yet this does not really work. It leaves out ideas of the infinite and absolute that are involved in God's immanence as the ground of our being, and that are at the core of his transcendence. Indeed, given Durkheim's own position, it is impossible to continue with these ideas in a relocation of the sacred round the person—or, for that matter, in its relocation round society. From his early work on, he opposed ideas of a human power, even a collective power, to change the world at will, or to acquire a complete mastery and knowledge of things,19 or to arrive one day at Utopia.20 He opposed ideas, in other words, of a God-like omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence. His consistent, underlying position stresses human finitude and limits, and at the same time stresses attempts at understanding and at social reform as a never-ending effort. 21 The position has 18

E.g., "Christianity proves to have been a religion for departing from religion," M. Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 4; or, "secularization is the inner logic ofJudeo-Christian monotheism," C. Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 42. 19 See, e.g., Emile Dürkheim, Montesquieu/Quid Secundatus (Oxford: Dürkheim Press, 1997), pp. 11-22, 78-79; and Dürkheim, Moral Education, pp. 116-18, 257-65. 20 See, e.g., the anti-utopian argument in Emile Dürkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 97-102. 21 "There is and there will always be a free field open to our efforts," Dürkheim, The Division ofLabor, p. 344. It should be emphasized that Dürkheim opposed attempts to identify permanent, exact limits to human knowledge and endeavor. It is part of human finitude that we lack a God-like power to do this.

clear implications for a secular religion. Yet they are often obscured in Durkheimian writing and commentary, 22 and even by Dürkheim himself.23 So let us spell them out. God become man is not man become God. T h e death of God does not reveal our own superhumanity but reconfirms our finitude. It is impossible for transcendence to stay the same in switching from God and his kingdom to the person and a society of persons. It necessarily scales down. And it is a dramatic scaling down. H o w can the disappearance of infinite, absolute transcendence count as anything else? So in a way secular religion is about replacement of the full-blown sacred with a world, instead, of the semi-sacred. This contrasts with most other interpretations. These offer a choice in which either there is a secular continuation of the sacred in more or less full-blown form or it erodes to the point of collapse. Michel Maffesoli and Pierre Nora are two of the most interesting neoDurkheimian writers today. But while one has a version of an orthodox Durkheimian line, the other comes up with its almost direct opposite. Maffesoli sees a "veritable re-enchantment" of the world. 24 Nora sees only traces, shadows and "fleeting incursions" of the sacred. 25 It is important to stress an alternative, which fits with Durkheim's own underlying position, in the idea of the semi-sacred. As already discussed, it has to do with the impact on transcendence—and immanence—of the disappearance of an infinite, absolute God. But there is a similar impact on incommensurability and the difference between the sacred and other things that Dürkheim called a "logical chasm." 26 This cannot be the same when the sacred is the person, or a society of persons, rather than a God set so dramatically apart from other things in his infinitude and totality. However, a Durkheimian logic of the sacred involves at least four main elements—transcendence, incommensurability, pluralism and a whole sacred environment. So we must go on from transcendence and 22 They are obscured, it now seems to me, in my own book, Dürkheim, Morals and Modernity. T h e same is the case with, e.g., M. Cladis, A Communitarian Defense of Liberalism: Émile Dürkheim and Contemporary Social Theory (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1992) and D. Nielsen, Three Faces of God: Society, Religion and the Categories of Totality in the Philosophy of Emile Dürkheim (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999). 23 E.g., in the rhetoric about man as a new god in Suicide and "Individualism and the Intellectuals," but not in the discussion of the person as a new center of the sacred in Moral Education. 24 Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes (London: Sage, 1996), p. 28. 25 Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 7. 26 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 37, but where 'logical void' rather than 'logical gulf or 'logical chasm' is chosen to translate 'vide logique.'

incommensurability to ask what happens in the other, just as crucial cases of pluralism and a sacred environment. In fact, these are the cases explored by Nora and Maffesoli. But Maffesoli's main concern is with the sacred's pluralism. Nora's is with the rites and symbols of a sacred environment. Yet why should there be a "veritable re-enchantment" in one of these cases, and only traces of the sacred in the other? Might they not converge with each other, and with the other cases, in the semi-sacred? Nora very much challenges traditional mainstream Durkheimian ideas of a secular religion. For his concern is with the same aspects of it as them, ritual and symbolism. Thus where they see the rituals of a more or less nourishing secular religion, he sees what are nowadays empty shells of the sacred, "the rituals of a ritual-less society."27 A good example of the traditional mainstream view is the study of American deathways by Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington. 28 This has to do with one of the most important types of ritual of all, the rites of passage from one status to another at various points of life such as birth, coming of age and marriage, but, not least, death. Indeed, the authors see American rites of passage at death, rather than at marriage, etc., as a central part of an American secular religion. One of their reasons is that these involve—compared, say, with American ceremonies of marriage—a greater sense of the sacred. But it is also because of what they claim is a remarkable similarity throughout American society in the patterns and key stages of the death rite, in which "its most important icon, the embalmed corpse, presides in impassive benevolence" and condenses in a peaceful image "basic values of life."29 The ritual centered round a once living person's intact, tranquil body ties up with the outcry at smashing the dead to smithereens. And both cases pass various Durkheimian tests as instances of the sacred. It is important to oppose indiscriminate ideas of the sacred that find it almost anywhere in our society—even in the "religion" of a materialistic, market-driven consumerism. But it is also important to ask about the sort of sacredness that is involved in its genuine modern instances, and, further, to enquire about the existence of an overall sacred environment. What might happen in a move from traditional religion is a change not only to a semi-sacredness of things but in the nature of a

27

Nora, Realms ofMemory, vol. 1, p. 7. Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, "American Deathways," in their Celebrations ofDeath, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), pp. 191214. 29 Metcalf and Huntington, "American Deathways," p. 214. 28

whole, vast, sacred milieu. O n e possibility is that such a milieu just disappears, even though items and instances of the sacred remain— the rituals, in a way, of a ritual-less society. Another possibility, however, is that there still is a sort of overall sacred environment, only it is limited and shrunken. It does not run through and dominate the whole of life. It has its symbols. But, on the one hand, none of these has the power and centrality of the cross. Nor, on the other, do they come complete with a whole calendar of sacred times, a whole topography of sacred places, a whole legendary of prophets, martyrs, missionaries, aposdes, saints... Metcalf and Huntington concede that in modern America traditionally important rites of passage have lost the sacredness that continues to surround death. Yet they still argue as if America is a sacred realm—a more or less full-blown, all-encompassing sacred milieu. They remark that an anthropologist visiting it from Borneo would readily identify an indigenous religion, on a par with the one studied in Durkheim's The Elementary Forms?0 Part of the point of the remark is the implicit reference to Robert Hertz—a key member of Durkheim's group—and his now classic essay on death and the sacred in Borneo. 31 This leads up to their reference to Dürkheim himself and his masterpiece on the sacred in Australia. T h e message is the same, that Americans also live in a sacred realm, when they go on to invoke what is often seen as mainstream Durkheimian writing and cite Lloyd Warner and Robert Bellah on an American secular religion. 32 But, as already suggested, this is about the sacred in the suburbs. It is not about a whole, vast, all-pervasive sacred environment. Indeed, it tends to be seen in terms of just one main type of ritual (whereas The Elementaiy Forms identifies four). This can include rites of passage at death. For it is the ritual and symbolism of commemoration. And it is the subject of the monumental collection edited by Nora, Realms of Memory.33 It is important to bring out an argument in which the work's original French tide is also its key theme and idea of lieux de mémoire. This is in a contrast with milieux de mémoire. It is possible to translate lieux de 30

Metcalf and Huntington, "American Deathways," p. 210. Robert Hertz, "A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death," in his Death and the Right Hand (London: Cohen and West, 1960), pp. 27-86. 32 See W. L. Warner, The Lining and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic life ofAmericans (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), and R. N. Bellah, "Civil Religion in America," Daedalus, 96 (1967), pp. 1-22. 33 Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory, 3 vols. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996-1998)—translated, reorganized and abridged from Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vols. (Paris, Gallimard, 1984-1992). 31

mémoire as sites of memory, milieux de mémoire as environments of memory. The argument, then, is that there has been an explosion of symbolic sites of memory because there has been a disappearance of real living environments of memory. In these, a social group's members are in regular contact, share stories about day to day as well as more out of the ordinary experiences, and know about one another's personalities, relationships and life-histories. Sites of memory have to do, instead, with how there can be solidarity among a mass of mutually anonymous individuals. They are a route, in our large-scale world, to what has been called a "community of strangers." 34 They help to create among us a shared identity in the present through a ritual, mythological and symbolic creation and re-creation of a shared past. In exploring this process in modern France, Nora has broadened out his original idea of lieux de mémoire. It still includes particular, especially significant ritual-symbolic items, such as the cock, Notre Dame, 14 July, the Tour de France. But it also includes basic ritual-symbolic models, such as the land and the cathedral. And it very much involves shared discourses of conflict and division, such as north-south, leftright, secular-Catholic. Some sites of memory may be in obvious decay. There is a continuation and proliferation of others in what Nora says has become, nowadays, an "era of commemoration." 3 5 At the same time he believes that the life has gone out of them. They were once part of a more or less flourishing secular religion in France. Now they are just vestiges of the sacred. Why? A fundamental reason is what he sees as a breakdown in "the solidarity of past and future." 36 There has been a deconstruction of the mythological environment in which rites of commemoration are also rites of hope. For there has been a deconstruction of history as a chronicle of the nation and as an epic of human struggle, endeavor and progress. And there has not been a development of a new narrative that re-unites two core elements of a shared social and moral identity—remembrance, but also, in a will to go on living together, vision and hope. But is this a situation confined to Nora's France? An English example of how the life has gone out of lieux de mémoire concerns William Blake's hymn about the building of a New Jerusalem. It is still sung every year in London's Albert Hall on the Last Night of the Proms. But it is in a fervor without faith. It brings tears to the eyes, only it is in 34 In the study of modern blood giving by Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971). 35 Nora, Realms ofMemory, vol. 3, p. 609. 36 Nora, Realms ofMemory, vol. 3, p. 634.

a mixture of nostalgia, camp, "post-modernism" and pastiche. What about America? Even here, according to one of its leading contemporary theorists, Richard Rorty, there has been a loss of hope and there is a desperate need to renew and revive it.37 Yet all he has to offer is a sort of contingent, finger-crossing hope—which relies on luck, and so is just another expression of a breakdown in the solidarity of past and future. He has given up completely on grand narrative—which is the only way of restoring this solidarity and of renewing the sacred in rites of commemoration that are at the same time rites of hope. Of course, it remains open to debate what feelings of hope there are nowadays in societies such as America, France and England. There might not be quite the collapse of idealism and vision that is sometimes suggested. But to the extent that these are secular societies, they are at most semi-sacred worlds even when stories of hope and overarching mythic narratives still flourish in them. A move away from the full-blown sacred of an infinite, absolute God entails a transformation of the nature and basis of hope, as well as of any mythic narrative. Indeed, it is the same change that introduces the thoroughly secular idea of luck—as against fate, divine will, grace and providence. But the secular idea of luck also works against and undermines secular grand narrative. This is in any case already scaled down from the grander mythological environment that roots hope in God, and that transcends fleeting stories of progress with an epic of the eternal. Like Hertz, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss were core members of Durkheim's group. And the work of all three develops a sense of the ritual, mythological and symbolic structures that constitute a fullblown sacred environment. The secular religion of modern "orthodox" Durkheimianism is just not in the same league. It has already been noted that Hertz's focus on rites of passage at death is within the background of a whole sacred realm. In what is now another anthropological classic, he brought out how the pre-eminence of the right hand is part of a vast symbolic structure where dualisms pile up and interlock with one another—right-left, above-below, day-night, goodevil' etc.—and which is "the order that governs and maintains the universe." 38 It may be an exaggeration to say that these "ancient religious ideas ... are today in full retreat." 39 But it makes the point that

37 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 3e Robert Hertz, "The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity," in Death and the Right Hand, p. 110. 39 Hertz, "The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand," p. 113.

the cosmic order in which the right hand's pre-eminence had its place survives, at most, as a shrunken symbolism. A similar conclusion can be drawn from Hubert's Essay on Time.w Indeed it is his key idea of an overall time environment that has been behind my development, here, of the idea of an overall sacred environment. A basic point about a full-blown sacred time environment is how it governs the whole of time. Its calendar interprets all parts of time and determines their significance (whether as more sacred or as more routine and profane). It organizes them in terms of especially critical sacred dates that separate and mark out durations, yet that also link them. But it is not in terms of a single linear series of times, or a single repeating cycle of them, let alone a single this-worldly rather than supernatural order of time. Its critical dates—such as Easter— link multiple series, cycles and orders of durations, in a narrative of the eternal across which the sacred can be distributed, dispersed and reproduced "while remaining unalterably identical." 41 Mauss collaborated with Hubert on a study of sacrifice,42 and worked away for much of his life on an unfinished study of prayer. 43 Both prayer and sacrifice are central traditional religious rites. But it might be wondered how they can have any meaningful equivalents in a secular religion. Who or what is there to pray to? Why offer up a sacrificial victim and scapegoat? In fact, as already indicated, ideas of a secular religion tend to concentrate on rituals of commemoration. They do not enquire too much about the rite of prayer or the rite of sacrifice. 44 Mauss's best known study, however, is on the gift.45 There seems less difficulty with this, since it is possible to identify a wide range of different types and cases of the gift in modern society.4fi But the question that can now be pressed is if we live in an overall gift

40 Henri Hubert, Essay on Time: A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic (Oxford: Dürkheim Press, 1999). 41 Hubert, Essay on Time, p. 78. For a discussion, see W. Watts Miller, "Durkheimian Time," Time and Society, 9:1 (2000): 5-20. 42 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (London: Cohen and West, 1964). 43 Marcel Mauss, Essay on Prayer (Oxford: Dürkheim Press, forthcoming). 44 For an exception which helps to prove the rule, see C. Marvin and D. W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 45 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen and West, 1954). 46 Mauss, The Gift. See also Titmuss, The Gift Relationship, and I. Silber, "Modern Philanthropy: Reassessing the Viability of a Maussian Perspective," in W.James and N. J. Allen, eds., Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), pp. 134-50.

environment, itself part of a sacred environment and comparable with the worlds Mauss described. Even in his emphasis on the importance of the gift and its modern renewal, his own answer is that the sacred realms where it once flourished do not have a modern counterpart. Yet it would be mistaken, at this point, to write off Maffesoli and his claim that there is a "veritable re-enchantment" of the world. T h e claim does not stand up—but as much as anything because it is undermined by his own arguments. It is important to bring out why. For his concerns take us to crucial aspects of the sacred and of a modern search for this. They have less to do with an environment of ritual, myth and symbolism. They have more to do with the plural energies, emotions, ideals and transformative power of the sacred. They especially take us to Durkheim's fundamental interest in the sacred as sociality, indeed as the interpersonal bonding and attachment of communion. Maffesoli sees a radical power conflict in modern society, for it is between two quite different kinds of power. O n e is the power, or puissance, of sociality and the sacred. T h e other is the power, or pouvoir, of apparatuses, organizations and institutions. This is the power at work in the regime of the disciplinary society analyzed by Michel Foucault 47 —the philosopher of hopelessness, as he has been called by Rorty. 48 But if it is a world without hope, it is also a world of disenchantment, without even vestiges of the sacred. A reason for the originality and importance of Maffesoli's The Time of the Tubes is that it offers one of the most effective neo-Durkheimian lines of response to Foucault (though it never mentions him). T h u s an obvious yet often overlooked fact about the Australia of The Elementaiy Forms is that it does not have institutions such as the state. Maffesoli is unerringly right to identify the sacred with the effervescent, bottom-up power of sociality, rather than with the organizing, top-down power of machines and apparatuses. 49 It is true that Dürkheim held on to high ideals about the state. Indeed, his last published article was on " T h e Politics of the Future." 5 " But his work is also concerned with a deep-rooted modern political malaise, 51 and

47

See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1979). " Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 37. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes, pp. 31-53. 50 Emile Dürkheim, "La Politique du Demain," IM Dépêche de Toulouse, 17 April 1917, reprinted, with a commentary by J. Mergy, in Durkheimian Studies/Eludes durkheimiennes, n.s. 5 (1999), pp. 1-12. 51 Emile Dürkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 92-106, and the 2nd, 1902 preface to The Division of Labor, pp. 1-31. 4

4B

involves a somber hope against hope in the possibility of developing an ethical commonwealth of persons. His worries about the state carry over nowadays in a widespread disillusionment with it, expressed in the work, not only of Foucault, but Maffesoli. The Time of the Tribes does not offer any hope at all for a commonwealth of persons. It places hope, instead, in a running underground battle in which the power of sociality and the sacred continues to resist the power of institutions, so that this never wins out with the grim, crushing success of a regime of the disciplinary society. But the corollary is that the embattled, underground puissance of the sacred never wins out either, and so there cannot be a "veritable re-enchantment" of the world. There is no return to Durkheim's Australia, or to the sacred kingdoms of Hubert's Essay on Time, or to the mystique of a republic that long ago vanished in Nora's France and that has become distinctly tarnished in contemporary, post-Bellah America. Maffesoli's concern with the struggle of puissance against pouvoir again involves a kind of hope against hope. A view, which is common, just ignores all this in just seeing him as "optimistic." If it has a basis, it has to do with another issue. This returns us to the sacred itself and its pluralism and ambivalence. But it is not so much about the ambivalence, already discussed, involving feelings of respect, distance and inviolable, not to be transgressed boundaries as against feelings of community and communion. It is about the ambivalence in which the sacred is both divine and demonic and unleashes energies that are enormously creative but also hate-filled and destructive. Dürkheim stresses, in a remark on the French Revolution, how its collective ferment transformed the ordinary mediocre individual—"into hero or butcher." 52 But in fact his work usually emphasizes the creative side of collective ferment and the sacred. Maffesoli does the same in his emphasis on what he calls the "social divine." 53 So is he naïve and optimistic, since he does not dwell on what we might call the "social demonic"? In another comment on the Revolution, Dürkheim observes how in that time of civil strife and collective enthusiasm one killed others as readily as oneself, and there was a devaluation of the individual personality. 54 Yet he saw the Revolution, with its martyrs and apostles, as a crucial formative moment in the growth of modern ideals, and above all of a new sense of the sacred, centered round the person. So it 52

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 213, but where 'executioner' rather than 'butcher' is chosen to translate 'bourreau.' 53 Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes, p. 38. 54 Dürkheim, Suicide, p. 228.

is vital to understand a paradox, or at any rate a tension, which is at the heart of his views about a new secular religion, and which carries over into the work of Maffesoli. This is that the modern transfer of sacrality on to the person depends, and continues to depend, on times of collective assembly and effervescence that can devalue or even overwhelm the individual personality. T h e n they can generate worries from within the ethic of the person itself that see them, not as creative, but as destructive and demonic. Put another way, it is not difficult from the standpoint of the ethic to identify cases of collective ferment—Nuremberg Rallies, Old South lynch mobs, Bosnian ethnic cleansing—which involve the sacred as the pure, full-blooded demonic. But it is a liberal "rationalist" delusion to imagine that it is possible to create, develop and sustain a faith centered round the person without any reliance on the puissance of sociality—with the risks and dangers it entails. And it is naïve to try to rely, instead, on genteel ceremonies of the sacred purged of all ambivalence and any trace of the demonic. This links with another tension built into the modern sacred. Dürkheim stresses the sacred's emotive, dionysian side—especially in his concern with times of collective ferment, whether in Australia or in the French Revolution. But he also stresses a more rational and restrained, apollonian side—especially in his endorsement of the ideal of autonomy as at the core of the modern cult of the person. Maffesoli's The Time of the Tribes, in its very title as well as in its overall argument, emphasizes the emotive and dionysian. In contrast, and like talk of a commonwealth or a republic of persons, talk of a society of persons emphasizes the rational and apollonian. Yet even if Maffesoli has given up on hope for a commonwealth of persons, he is still very much concerned, in a way, with a society of persons. So perhaps an idea to take up, develop and explore is of "tribes of persons." It helps to capture the set of tensions and ambivalences at work in the modern sacred.

Conclusion There is still something that needs to be brought out about a secular religion. T o the extent that this exists in modern western societies, it is alongside a whole variety of old and new "conventional" religions— conventional in the sense that they involve belief in a spirituality not just of this world but of another, transcendent realm. However, the point is not just that it co-exists with these. It has an active input into them. At the same time it depends on and lives off them. O n the one hand, a modern sense of the sacredness of the person

creates pressures on conventional religions to work out how to accommodate, apply and interpret it in their own ways. Examples include the status of women in Islam and of untouchables in Hinduism, especially in the context in which these are both part of the modern western religious scene (though not just in this context). O n the other hand, the secular sacred—or semi-sacred—lives off conventional religions in that they involve ideas of the infinite. For these are a necessary part of ideas, including secular ideas, of human finitude. It is of especial interest to consider the case of Buddhism, which again is now part of the modern western religious scene. It has a key role in the argument of The Elementary Forms, and it may be, as Dürkheim insists, that it shows how a religion can do without ideas of a god or of gods, although it has every sense of the sacred, the incommensurable and the transcendent. 55 But this still very much involves, in Buddhism, a sense of the infinite that altogether transcends the ordinary human realm—as in the case, in the western god-centered religious tradition, of Christianity itself. Indeed, in its complete transcendence, any idea and sense of the infinite is "religious." A secular religion ceases to be secular, the more it incorporates some sort of genuine feeling for the idea. Even if it does not, it still needs to live off some such spirituality in the environment around it, in order to give meaning to its own ideas of our limited, unsuperhuman world. The cathedral, for example, is not necessarily just a place of huddled worshippers that has become a mass tourist site.56 It is perhaps one of the most important ways in which secular lives can experience a fleeting incursion of the infinite.

55 56

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 28-30. See A. Vauchez, "The Cathedral," in Nora, Realms ofMemory, vol. 2, pp. 67-68.

CHAPTER FOUR P R A G M A T I S M A N D P R O T E S T A N T I S M IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF DURKHEIM'S SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION Robert Alun Jones

In 1986, I published an article that focused on the influence of James Frazer and Robertson Smith in the development of Durkheim's sociology of religion. In most respects, the argument presented there is one that I would still defend. But the intervening years have seen substantial advances in Dürkheim scholarship, and my own ideas—both about Dürkheim and about the historiography of social theory 1 — have changed as well. As a consequence, I'll take advantage of this essay to publicly re-think my earlier views, beginning with a brief summary o f t h a t argument and then proceeding to ways in which it might, to good effect, be reconceived. Part One T h e 1986 article began with a brief account of the two ideas that, as Dürkheim explained to his colleagues in the Société française de philosophie, 2 "dominated" Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912). T h e first, which was emphasized only in the book's Conclusion, was the "dynamogenic" quality of religion—i.e., its power to provide, not a kind knowledge, but a sense of confidence, strength, and enthusiasm that leads to practical action. 3 Such practical effects are realized, of course, only if the god is represented in the minds of believers with sufficient strength "for the representation [représentation] that expresses them to be efficacious" 4 —a qualification that yielded

1 Both types of change are reflected in Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Dürkheim 's Social Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 2 See Emile Dürkheim, "Contribution to discussion of: The Problem of Religion and the Duality of H u m a n Nature" (February 4, 1913), translated by Robert Alun Jones and W. Paul Vogt, in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present, edited by Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long (Greenwich, C T : J A I Press, Inc, 1984), pp. 1-62. 3 Dürkheim, "Contribution to discussion of: T h e Problem of Religion," pp. 4-5. 4 Dürkheim, "Contribution to discussion of: T h e Problem of Religion," p. 6.

Durkheim's conviction that the gods (society) depend on men (individuals) for their existence even as men (individuals) depend upon the gods (society) for the best attributes of themselves. T h e second idea was the "duality of h u m a n nature"—i.e., the religious distinction between body and soul, llesh and spirit, later expressed more philosophically in the Cartesian and Kantian distinctions between sensations and concepts, and between sensible appetites and moral actions. Dürkheim emphasized that these were not simply distinctions, but profound oppositions—e.g., our concepts "do violence to" our sensations, our moral actions "offend" our instincts and inclinations, yielding Pascal's monstre de contradiction, a h u m a n nature divided against itself. 5 In Les Formes élémentaires, of course, Dürkheim had insisted that this dichotomous vocabulary merely translated the more primitive opposition between sacred and profane resulting from the "dynamogenic" quality of religious experience—i.e., as we have seen, society cannot exist without penetrating individual minds, and in doing so elevates the individual above himself; the individual is thus composed of two different "beings," the first derived from our physical organism, and the second from society; and the opposition between the two is inevitable, for the first reflects physical sensations and appetites for which the individual demands satisfaction, while the second gives rise to reason and moral action, without which society is impossible. For Dürkheim, these were the dominant ideas of Les Formes élémentaires', and my purpose fifteen years ago was to trace their development over the course of Durkheim's earlier work. Reviewing these writings, I eventually concluded that, while the second idea—the "duality of human nature"—had been a feature of Durkheimian sociological theory at least as early as De la division du travail social ( 1893), it would not be conjoined with Durkheim's sociology of religion until much later; that Claude Lévi-Strauss was quite right to emphasize Durkheim's mistrust of ethnography (by contrast to the historical documents exploited throughout De la division du travail social) at least beyond Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (1895);6 that Dürkheim could not have become familiar with totemism as early as or in the manner suggested by

5

Dürkheim, "Contribution to discussion of: The Problem of Religion," p. 8. Claude Lévy-Strauss, Structural Arithropology (Volume II) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 44-48; see Emile Dürkheim, "The Rules of Sociological Method," in The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method, edited by Steven Lukes (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan [1895] 1982), pp. 28163, p. 154. 6

Mauss 7 and, in any case, that his genuine interest in that mysterious institution emerged only much later; that throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Dürkheim largely denied to religion any independent explanatory power, insisting that it was "limited to acknowledging facts without producing them"; 8 that he largely ignored questions about the nature of religious experience, suggesting instead that religion- like law and morality—should be understood in the rather stark terms of externality, coercion, regulation, and constraint; and that, on the whole, Steven Lukes was thus quite right to characterize Durkheim's early view of religion as "largely formal and rather simpliste."9 Quite naturally, this led me to Durkheim's lecture course on religion at Bordeaux (1894-5), during which he—again, by his own later (1907) testimony —"for the first time found the means of tackling the study of religion sociologically," a "revelation" born of his reading of the works "of Robertson Smith and his school." 10 But here, just as light seemed about to dawn, the provenance of Durkheim's sociology of religion only became more obscure. For if Robertson Smith was indeed the source of Durkheim's "dynamogenic" conception of religion, there is no evidence of this in the years immediately following 1895. What one does find—in Le Suicide (1897), in the first two volumes of l'Année sociologique (1898-99), and in Durkheim's essay "De la définition des

7 Marcel Mauss ("Notices biographiques," Année sociologique 2:n.s. [1927]: 3-9) suggested that during the first six months of his leave-of-absence from the Lycée de SaintQuentin (1885-86), Dürkheim renewed his friendship with Lucien Herr, the philosopher and Librarian of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. Herr is said to have then brought Durkheim's attention to the Encyclopedia Britannica article "Totemism," written by Frazer; but the Britannica article appeared only in Volume XIII of the ninth edition (1888), and even the book-length edition published in Edinburgh by Adam and Charles Black appeared only in October, 1887. 8 Emile Dürkheim, "Herbert Spencer—Ecclesiastical Institutions: being Part VI of the Principles of Sociology," in Dürkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, edited by W. S. F. Pickering (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1886] 1975), pp. 12-23, pp. 20-21. 9 Steven Lukes, Émile Dürkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Penguin Books [Peregrine Edition], [1972] 1988), p. 240. 10 Emile Dürkheim, "Lettres au Directeur de la Revue néo-scolastique," Revue néoscolastique 14 (1907): 606-7, 612-14; p. 613. In 1905-7, the Catholic philosophy journal Revue néo-scolastique published a series of articles by the Belgian priest Simon Deploige attacking Durkheim's elevation of "society" to a power superior to that of the individual. Dürkheim responded in a series of letters to the editor, and it is from these that this now famous passage is taken. Deploige's articles were subsequently published as Le Conflit de la morale et la sociologie (1911). Durkheim's hostile review of that work in l'Année sociologique contains a similar reference to "all that we owe to Robertson Smith and to the works of the ethnographers of England and America" (Emile Dürkheim, "Deploige, Simon. Le Conflit de la morale et de la sociologie," Année sociologique 12 (1913): 326-28, p. 326).

phénomènes religieux" (1899)—is a rapidly growing interest in ethnography and a simultaneous embracement of the views of Smith's friend and protégé, James Frazer—and particularly the latter's conception of taboo, which Dürkheim seems to have viewed as an extension of the arguments of Fustel de Coulanges' La Cité antique (1864), as well as the idea of sympathetic magic." These conceptions, however, were largely rationalist and utilitarian, and thus fundamentally antithetical to the more irrationalist, sociological treatment of religion found in Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites ( 1889; 2nd ed., 1894).12 Yet Dürkheim seems to have ignored Smith through the last years of the nineteenth century, while adopting a Frazerian vocabulary to describe the consequences of his growing interest in ethnography. The turning point in Durkheim's sociology of religion, therefore, came only in the early twentieth century, to be announced in a seemingly interminable essay entitled "Sur le totémisme" (1902). But to understand the significance of this essay, some things about Robertson Smith and Frazer—as well as their rather odd relationship—will have to be understood. In his Lectures, Smith had attacked earlier studies of ancient religion for seeking a primitive "creed" or "dogma" of which religious practices were the expression, arguing instead that ancient religions were a matter of "fixed traditional practices" to which everyone unconsciously conformed. Smith thus rejected both of the prevailing rationalist interpretations of myth—i.e., the "euhemerist" description of myths as distorted accounts of real persons and events, as well as E. B. Tylor's "cognitionist" account of primitive philosophers attempting to explain natural phenomena—insisting instead that rituals were "natural growths," and myths the subsequent, "artificial" efforts to explain them. 13 This "ritualist" interpretation of myth 14 was in turn linked to

11 On Dürkheim and Fustel, see Robert Alun Jones, "Dürkheim and La Cité antique: An Essay on the Origins of Durkheim's Sociology of Religion" in Emile Dürkheim: Sociologist and Moralist, edited by Stephen P. Turner (London and New York: Routledge 1993), pp. 25-51. 12 See a more detailed comparison of Frazer and Smith in Robert Alun Jones, "Robertson Smith and James Frazer on Religion: Two Traditions in British Social Anthropology," in Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology, edited by George W. Stocking, Jr. (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 31-58. 13 William Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions, 2nd edition (New York: Schocken, [1894]' 1972), pp. 18-19. 14 Smith's "ritual theory of myth" inspired a group of classicists known as the "Cambridge ritualists" (e.g., Jane Ellen Harrison, F. M. Cornford, A. B. Cook, and Gilbert Murray), as well as literary figures like T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce (see John B. Vickery, 77le Literary Impact of The Golden Bough [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973]).

Smith's more powerful (and extremely sociological) conception of a "natural religious community"—i.e., one to which each person belonged simply by birth and socialization, regardless of choice, and to which gods belonged as well. Just as a primitive man was born into fixed, obligatory relations of kinship with other men, therefore, he was also born into such a relationship with his god, and religion was always a public, communal institution, having little to do with private individual beliefs. 15 This explains Smith's answer to "the central problem of ancient religion"—i.e., the origin and meaning of sacrifice. Rejecting Tylor's theory that the earliest sacrifices were "gifts" presented to a potentially hostile deity, Smith argued instead that the earliest religious rituals were joyous, communal meals in which the god and his worshippers shared in the consumption of a sacrificial animal, and thus affirmed and reaffirmed the bonds of kinship. 16 Finally, when Smith added to this the argument that the victim itself was a kinsman, was sacred, and was thus a totem, the result was his single, most powerful idea—i.e., the theory of a primitive totemic sacrament. 17 As fellow-Scots at Cambridge, Smith and Frazer were close—e.g., it was under Smith's editorial guidance that Frazer wrote the first survey of the anthropological literature on totemism, 18 and the first edition of The Golden Bough (1890) was not only dedicated to Smith but pronounced him the source of the central idea o f t h a t work—i.e., the conception of the slain god-man-king. 19 But Frazer had been lured from the classics to anthropology, not by Smith, but by Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), and what Evans-Pritchard said about Tylor might equally apply to Frazer—i.e., that he "wished to show that primitive religion was rational, that it arose from observations, however inadequate, and from logical deductions from them, however faulty; that it constituted a crude natural philosophy." 20 Writing to J . S. Black on November 27, 1889, therefore, Frazer observed that Smith, "influenced probably by his deeply religious nature," had underestimated

15

Smith, The Religion of the Semites, pp. 90, 264. Smith, The Religion of the Semites, p. 255. Smith, The Religion of the Semites, p. 313. As co-editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, it was Smith who commissioned Frazer to write the important essays "Taboo" and "Totemism" for the twenty-third volume (1888). When Frazer—as so often—let his materials expand beyond editorial constraints, A & C. Black agreed to publish the more comprehensive survey as a short book, titled Totemism (1887). 19 James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (London: Macmillan, 1890), I, pp. x-xi. 20 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1965), p. 26. 16 17

the role of fear while over emphasizing that of benevolent emotions in the earliest religions: "Hence his view of sacrifice as mainly a form of communion with the deity instead of a mode of propitiating him and averting his anger"—of which the latter was, to Frazer, the "substantially correct" view.21 Until 1902, however, Dürkheim and his followers seem to have been almost oblivious to these differences, referring indiscriminately to "Robertson Smith and his school," the "English [sic] school of anthropology," or the "Smith-Frazer" system;22 and where distinctions were to be made, it was Frazer's (negative) notion of taboo—not Smith's (more positive) communion theory of sacrifice—that held Durkheim's interest. The pivotal event, therefore, seems to have been a letter written to Frazer by the Australian ethnographer Baldwin Spencer on July 12, 1897, in which Spencer described an Arunta ritual called the intichiuma. Spencer suggested that the purpose of the rite was to ensure the multiplication of the animals and plants of the totemic species; and Frazer quickly agreed, arguing in the second edition of The Golden Bough (1900) that it was not properly "religious" at all, but an utterly rational, utilitarian system of cooperative magic, analogous to the periodic rites of the vegetation-spirit of European peasants. Frazer denied the universality of totemism as well as its longundisputed connection with exogamy (views to which Dürkheim had committed himselfjust one year earlier), insisted that some of society's most powerful interdictions had been rationally and purposefully constructed following an earlier period of permissiveness, and argued that the function of totemism—which he also took to be its sufficient explanation—was economic. 23 This was sufficient to arouse Dürkheim from his dogmatic slumbers. T h e argument of "Sur le totémisme" (1902) was thus a concerted effort to preserve Smith's earlier theory of totemism against Frazer and Spencer's utilitarian interpretation of the new Australian 21 John Sutherland Black and George Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912), p. 518. 22 The Durkheimians frequently spoke of an "English" or "anthropological" school in contrast to both the French and German "philological" schools. Its origins were traced to Spencer's evolutionary views, and its members (Smith included) were roundly criticized before 1900 as committed to "psychologistic" explanations. Among its putative members, Smith, McLennan, Frazer, and Lang were, of course, Scottish rather than English. 23 This was Frazer's second theory of totemism. The first was an extension of Tylor's animism—i.e., periodic absences of the soul from the body (e.g., during dreams) implied a risk, and this could be reduced by depositing the spirit in the body of an animal—which was thus rendered "sacred" (Frazer, The Golden Bough, II, pp. 296-7).

evidence, and its strategy was an appeal to evolution—i.e., an insistence that the Arunta, however primitive and isolated, were the result of "indigenous evolution," and that their institutions were thus the "perversion" of earlier, quite different forms. Where the accounts of the Arunta themselves contradicted this argument, Dürkheim appealed to the ritual theory of myth—i.e., far from being "accurate historical testimony," these Arunta traditions were understood as myths invented by the primitive imagination to account for current practices. 24 Most important, Dürkheim reaffirmed the older notion of a primitive totemic sacrament,—not in the magical sense proposed by Frazer—but in the genuinely mystical and religious sense originally intended by Smith himself; and just as Smith had emphasized the worshippers' "joyous confidence in their god," Dürkheim quite self-consciously shifted his attention from negative practices (e.g., taboos, abstentions, interdictions, etc.) to the more positive aspects of the cult (e.g., prestations, communal sacrifices, feasts, dances, etc.). 25 Because my approach to the history of social theory has consistently been post-Kuhnian and historicist, there were two things about "Sur le totémisme" that I found particularly striking. T h e first was that it seemed to exemplify the Duhem-Quine thesis—i.e., that scientific knowledge is an interconnected network of propositions within which any unanticipated experimental observation can always, at least in principle, be accommodated by appropriate adjustments. Durkheim's own "adjustment" was an appeal to evolution, which allowed him to use the same evidence cited by Frazer—e.g., the consubstantiality of the clan member and his totem—to precisely the opposite effect, and with considerable success. 26 Second, the decisive element in Durkheim's new theory of religion was not new evidence, nor the application of a new method, nor even the introduction of a new concept or idea, but rather the application of an old idea—Smith's notion of a mystical, totemic sacrament—to a new context or situation. This struck me as similar to what representatives of the "Strong Programme" in the history and sociology of science had already called the "articulation of exemplars"—i.e., the understanding of some new, "unsolved" aspect of a scientific field as analogous to some older, better understood aspect, enabling scientists to import conceptual

24

Emile Dürkheim, "Sur le totémisme," Année sociologique 5 ( 1902): 82-121 ; pp. 95-

25

Smith, Tlie Religion of the Semites, p. 255; Dürkheim, "Sur le totémisme," pp. 112-

26

Dürkheim, "Sur le totémisme," pp. 90-98.

98.

resources ("exemplars") from one part of the field to another. 27 In this case, the result was Durkheim's "dynamogenic" quality of religion— i.e., its capacity to inspire "joyous confidence," to lift believers above themselves, to provide a concrete source of social action—and one of the two "dominant" ideas of Les Formes élémentaires. Part Two As already indicated, I still believe that this account of the development of Durkheim's sociology of religion is defensible. Since the mid1980s, however, my knowledge of the larger context of Durkheim's work has grown, and my views on the historiography of social theory have changed as well. The residual pragmatism implicit in my postKuhnian attraction to the Strong Programme, for example, has expanded into a more or less complete embracement of the views of Richard Rorty. 28 Where I earlier spoke of Dürkheim as engaged in the "articulation" of an "exemplar," therefore, I now see him more as someone trying to cobble together a vocabulary for describing religious beliefs and practices—one that might prove useful to his own concrete interests and purposes. This was certainly the case with his earlier, "social realist" vocabulary. From the mid-1880s until the late 1890s, Dürkheim sought to articulate a way of speaking about social phenomena comme des choses—i.e., as real, concrete things, subject to the laws of nature and discoverable by scientific reason. The adversary here was the conceptual apparatus of Cartesian rationalism—the birth-right and mother's milk of every French écolier,lyçéenand normalien—in which complexity was consistently reduced to simplicity, the concrete to the abstract, observation and experience to logic and reasoning, and things to ideas. Such a vocabulary, Dürkheim acknowledged, was admirably suited to the mechanical, mathematical certainties of the seventeenth

27 See Barry Barnes, T. S. Kuhn and Social Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 26-40; Andrew Pickering, "Interests and Analogies," in Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, edited by Barry Barnes and David Edge (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 125-46, pp. 125-6. 28 See, for example, Richard Rorty, "Method, Social Science, and Social Hope," in Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980), edited by Richard Rorty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 191-210; Richard Rorty, "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres," in Philosophy in History, edited by R. Rorty, J. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 49-75; and Richard Rorty, "Private Irony and Liberal Hope," in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, edited by Richard Rorty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 73-95.

century; but it failed completely in face of the social and ethical demands of advanced industrial societies. In an age of individualism, egoism, and anomie, it was essential that the institutions of the Third French Republic become the primary focus of citizens' duties and obligations; and no mental construct—no Cartesian idée claire et simple—could become the object of such unqualified allegiance. "It would be absurd," Dürkheim explained, "to sacrifice the real, concrete, and living being that we are to a purely verbal artifact. We can only dedicate ourselves to society if we see in it a moral power more elevated than ourselves." 29 Like Plato in the early Socratic dialogues, therefore, Dürkheim was pointing to a state of incoherence in the moral language of his culture, and trying to replace it with metaphors more adequate to the needs of his own society. This wasn't Durkheim's project from the very start. O n the contrary, André Lalande's recently discovered lecture notes from Durkheim's philosophy course at the Lyçée de Sens (1883-4) make it clear not simply that Dürkheim had not yet embraced social realism, but that he was seemingly innocent of sociological sensibilities altogether. 30 This underscores the importance of Durkheim's visit to Berlin, Marburg, and Leipzig in 1885 and 1886, where he was exposed to German political economy, jurisprudence, and the experimental psychology and ethics of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). By the time he returned, Dürkheim had begun to construct the vocabulary that would inform L'Evolution pédagogique en France (1838) and L'Education morale (1925), and which was already discernible in the Latin thesis on Montesquieu (1892) as well as De la division du travail social (1893) and Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (1895). When Les Règles—in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair—embroiled Dürkheim in his acrimonious dispute with Gabriel T a r d e (1843-1904), Dürkheim revisited the works of Rousseau, developing a lecture courses on Le Contrat social that was instrumental in forging the powerfully realist language of L· Suicide (1897).31 Within this context, it is hardly surprising that Dürkheim would be more interested in Frazer's notion of taboo than in Smith's mystical totemic sacrament. For a taboo is a social interdiction or prohibition, an imposition of society upon its individual members that evokes the language of externality and constraint; and the

29 Emile Dürkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education (New York: The Free Press [1925] 1961), p." 257. 30 See Emile Dürkheim, Cours de philosophie fait au Lycée de sens (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Manuscript 2351, 1884). 31 This paragraph is a thumbnail sketch of the argument presented in Jones, The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism.

powerful Frazerian image of the dying god-man-king sacrificing his life for the good of society—the very type of altruistic suicide—must have been irresistible. At the same time, the vocabulary of social realism always embodied a precarious tension, if not a downright conflict, between its two recurrent metaphors. The first of these, already emphasized, described society as not only "similar to" nature, but as itself a real, natural thing, a part of nature and subject to its laws. But the second metaphor insisted that society is a particular, distinctive part of nature, a reality sui generis, irreducible to the laws discovered by psychologists or biologists. The first was always vulnerable to the criticism that it explained social phenomena by referring to non-social (e.g., psychological and biological) causes, and the second to the charge that sociology was not a "science" at all. According to his audience, interests, and purposes, therefore, Durkheim's metaphorical description of society as embodying external, regulative forces—epitomized in his study of suicide—had to be balanced with his depiction of society as the source of positive, collective ideals, and his success in doing so is not the least respectful measure of his achievement. 32 And shortly after the turn of the century, responding to Frazer's interpretation of Spencer and Gillen's ethnography of Australian totemism, it seems clear that Dürkheim began casting about for a language that might do greater justice to the capacity of religion to inspire a sense of confidence, strength, and enthusiasm leading to social action. The "dynamogenic quality of religion" is so singular a phrase as to invite an inquiry into its source. Its origin seems to lie in the work of the French psychologist Charles Féré (1852-1907), a student of Charcot and later collaborator with Binet who, in Sensation et mouvement (1887) described some experiments that attracted the interest of William James. Féré was interested in the effect of sensory stimuli on muscular activity, and arranged a series of experiments in which a "self-registering dynamometer"—i.e., a device for measuring mechanical force—was used to measure the strength of the muscular contractions of a subject's hand under a variety of different stimuli. Ordinarily, James reported in Principles of Psychology ( 1890), the maximum strength remained relatively constant from day to day; but if the subject received a "sensorial impression" simultaneously with the contraction, the strength of the contraction typically increased—a reinforcing effect that quickly received the name of "dynamogeny." James was particularly impressed by the large variety of stimuli—e.g., heat,

32

Jones, The Development ofDurkheim's Social Realism, pp. 5-6.

cold, pricking, itching, faradic (discontinuous) stimulation of the skin, lights of particular colors, musical notes proportional to their loudness and height, odors and tastes, etc.— all seem to have this "dynamogenic" quality whereby the subject was unconsciously, and quite literally, "made stronger." 33 For James—as for Dürkheim—these experiments had obvious significance for our understanding of religion phenomena. In the eighth lecture of The Varieties ofReligious Experience (1902)—not surprisingly the first of three dealing specifically with the psychology of religious conversion—James described the young St. Augustine as a classic example of what he called a "discordant personality" or "divided self." T h e story is familiar to every reader of the Confessions (c. 400)—e.g., his Christian mother and pagan father, his physical migrations from Carthage to Rome and Milan, his intellectual migrations from Manicheanism to skepticism to neo-Platonism, which left his "inner self... a house divided against itself," and finally the famous, decisive event in the garden at Milan, where he heard the child's voice say "Sume, lege" (take and read) and, opening the Bible at random, read the passage that seemed divinely sent to relieve his spiritual conflict. 34 "There could be no more perfect description of the divided will," J a m e s observed, "when the higher wishes lack just that last acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity, of dynamogenic quality (to use the slang of the psychologists), that enables them to burst their shell, and make irruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendencies forever." 35 And even if such conversion experiences can be explained naturalistically, James went on to argue, we should assess them pragmatically, in terms of what he called their "value" or "fruits for life." 36 This "dynamogenic quality of religion"—as Dürkheim explained to his colleagues in the Société française de philosophie in 1913— could be emphasized only in the Conclusion of Les Formes élémentaires. But there is no mistaking it when it at last makes its appearance: "The believer who has communicated with his god," Dürkheim now emphasized, "is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger." 37 At the same

33 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume II (New York: Dover Publications, Inc [1890] 1918), pp. 379-80. 34 St. Augustine, The Confessions (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1961), pp. 170, 177-8. 35 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: New American Library, [1902] 1958), p. 145; emphasis added. 36 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 191. 37 Emile Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: T h e Free Press [1912] 1915), p. 464; emphasis original.

time, there should be little doubt about its source: "Together with a recent apologist of the faith," Dürkheim added, referring explicitly to The Varieties of Religious Experience, we admit that these religious beliefs rest upon a specific experience whose demonstrative value is, in one sense, not one bit inferior to that of scientific experiments, though different from them. We, too, think that "a tree is known by its fruits," and that fertility is the best proof of what the roots are worth.38 My (slightly revised) argument might thus be summarized in three observations: first, despite his 1907 statement about the "revelation" of 1894-95, Durkheim's sociology of religion continued to emphasize its negative, regulatory function, for which Frazer's notion of taboo was a useful vehicle; second, it was only in 1902—in the face of Frazer's rationalist, utilitarian interpretation of Spencer and Gillen's Australian evidence—that Dürkheim embraced Smith's more positive, sociological theory of a mystical, totemic sacrament; and third, it was later still—in the Conclusion of Les Formes élémentaires—that Dürkheim adopted the language of James' Principles of Psychology ( 1890) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) to speak of religion as a pragmatic source of action. But if Smith and James thus provided the language on which Dürkheim drew for his later sociological theory of religion, on what was Smith himself drawing? This is an intriguing question, for in the context of nineteenth-century Free Church orthodoxy, Smith is an anomalous figure—brilliant, creative, heterodox—and possessed of a powerfully sociological theory of religion seemingly without antecedents or disciples. The answer, I think, is to be found not in social science, but in theology, for Smith was a disciple of the greatest liberal Protestant theologian of the late nineteenth century, Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89). An early disciple and eventually the most famous apostate of the Tübingen School, Ritschl spent his years at Bonn (1846-64) and Göttingen (1864-89) working out a distinctively Lutheran via media between rationalism and romanticism, which was embodied in his great work, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung {?> vols., 1870-74). Like Schleiermacher, Ritschl believed that the rational validation of Christian truth—e.g., the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments—was impossible, and also that the starting point of all 38

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 465. Not that Dürkheim was in any serious sense a pragmatist; on the contrary, his lecture course on pragmatism at the Sorbonne (1913-14) was designed to distance himself—and his students—from pragmatists, and particularly from James.

Christian theology lay in personal experience. T o Ritschl, however, Schleiermacher's emphasis on emotional disposition as the foundation of Christian faith seemed perilously subjectivist, leaving the believer without assurance that he was in contact with a reality above and beyond himself. Ritschl's corrective was to begin, not with "religious consciousness" per se, but rather with history—i.e., with the religious consciousness of the early Christian community—which he considered unique and irreducible to social or psychological causes. Finally, dismissing Schleiermacher's famous description of Christian faith as a feeling of absolute dependence, Ritschl argued instead that true religion brings a sense of freedom—one based not on the emotions but on our conative (i.e., willful, effortful) faculties. T h e common element in all religions, Ritschl thus insisted, is essentially ethical and pragmatic—i.e., the sense of the mastery of nature, both within and beyond ourselves. 39 This meant that it was insufficient to focus solely on revelation (e.g., what Jesus said about the forgiveness of sins, justification, reconciliation), for it was equally important to understand how that revelation was received; and it also meant that Christian theology was grounded, not in the individual consciousness, but in the concrete events of revelatory history as experienced by the earliest Christian community. 4 0 Finally, even this historical process of reconstructing the consciousness of the early Christian community was insufficient, for the precise identification of the sense in which the specifically Christian revelation and consciousness were unique and superior could only be achieved by comparing them with those found in other religions. 41 This was the theological door through which Robertson Smith's comparative, sociological understanding of the religion of the Semites would make its controversial entrance. Visiting Göttingen just months before the publication of the first volume of Die christliche Lehre, Smith had clearly listened to Ritschl present these arguments before he read them, writing to his father that he had "never heard anything so interesting on a theological subject." 42 As an example, Smith described Ritschl's distinction between church and sect—i.e., the latter merely the sum of saved individuals, but the former existing prior to and transcending the individual as the very condition of his salvation, and the only context within which the grace of God can be effective. Return-

39 Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine (Clifton, NJ: Reference Book Publishers, [1870-74] 1966), pp. 205-12. 4,1 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, pp. 1, 27, 138-9. 41 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, p. 8. 42 Black and Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith, pp. 111-13.

ing to Aberdeen in late August, 1869, Smith began to introduce Ritschlian theology into his public talks, lectures, and writings—a path that led directly to his being charged with heresy by the Free Church, dismissal from his chair, migration to Cambridge where he met and befriended Frazer, and eventually to his classic Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889; 2nd ed., 1894). Conclusion Within this brief space, these extensions to my argument of the mid1980s must remain merely suggestive. But they do point the way to further investigations that might be undertaken with a reasonable expectation of reward. The fact that Dürkheim considered the "dynamogenic" quality of religion to be so central and important a part of Les Formes élémentaires, combined with its source in the writings of William James, should encourage those who have been interested in Durkheim's relationship to pragmatism. Dürkheim, of course, was not a pragmatist; but the similarity of his later views on religion to the arguments ofJames and Dewey, together with his concerted effort to establish his distance from them, is a topic which should attract further, more detailed attention. Second, even my very brief account of Ritschlian theology should inspire curiosity among those whose interest in the history of sociological theory extends to Max Weber as well as Dürkheim. This is not coincidental, for Ritschlian theology provided a substantial element in the context within which Weber's sociology of religion was conceived. 43 This in turn might open broader investigations into the relationship between the scientific study of religion and liberal Protestantism generally.

43

See W. R. Ward, "Max Weber and the Lutherans," in Max Weber and His Contemporaries, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), pp. 203-14; pp. 203-10.

C H A P T E R FIVE

R O B E R T S O N SMITH'S INFLUENCE ON DURKHEIM'S THEORY OF MYTH AND RITUAL Robert A. Segal Robertson Smith on Myth and Ritual In the first lecture of his 1889 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites the Scottish biblicist and Arabist William Robertson Smith (1846-94) pioneered the myth and ritual, or "myth-ritualist," theory: the theory that myth and ritual work hand in hand. Smith begins by warning against the anachronistic "modern habit... to look at religion from the side of belief rather than of practice." 1 He attributes that habit to perennial controversies within branches of Christianity over dogma, "even where the immediate point of difference has been one of ritual." 2 "Thus within Christendom the study of religion has meant mainly the study of Christian beliefs, and instruction in religion has habitually begun with the creed ...." 3 Smith objects to the emphasis on belief not in the study of modern religion but in the study of ancient, or "antique," religion. Rather than blithely assuming that "here also our first business is to search for a creed, and find in it the key to ritual and practice," one should look first for the ritual, which will then unlock the creed. In fact, Smith cautions against even expecting to find a creed, for "the antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices." 4 Smith grants that ancients doubdess performed rituals for some reason: "No doubt men will not habitually follow certain practices without attaching a meaning to them.""' But he claims that the meaning was secondary and could even fluctuate: "as a rule we find that while the practice was rigorously fixed, the meaning attached to it was extremely vague, and the same

1 William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, First Series, 1 st edition (Edinburgh: Black, 1889), p. 17. 2 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 17. 3 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 17. 4 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 18. 5 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 18.

rite was explained by different people in different ways, without any question of orthodoxy or heterodoxy arising in consequence." 6 In classical Greece, for example, certain things were done at a temple, and people were agreed that it would be impious not to do them. But if you had asked why they were done, you would probably have had several mutually exclusive explanations from different persons, and no one would have thought it a matter of the least religious importance which of these you chose to adopt.7 Moreover, the explanations given for a ritual did not stir strong feelings. Rather than formal declarations of belief—creeds—the various explanations were stories, or myths, which simply described "the circumstances under which the rite first came to be established, by the command or by the direct example of the god." 8 "The rite, in short, was connected not with a dogma [i.e., creed] but with a myth." 9 "In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma ...." 10 At the same time ritual was much more important in ancient religion than myth. Ritual was obligatory, myth optional: strictly speaking, this mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers. The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper; but he was often offered a choice of several accounts of the same thing, and provided that he fulfilled the ritual with accuracy, no one cared what he believed about its origin." Consequently, Smith spurns the attention conventionally accorded not only creed but also myth in ancient religion: "mythology ought not to take the prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths." 12 Smith goes as far as to declare that "ritual and practical usage were, strictly speaking, the sum total of ancient religions. Religion in primitive times was not a system of belief with practical applications; it was a body of fixed traditional practices, to which every member of society conformed as a matter of course." 13 As he says of myth, so he says of 6

Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 18. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 18. 8 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 18. 9 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 18. 10 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 18. 11 Smith, lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 19. 12 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 19. 13 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 21. 7

belief in general: it provided a rationale for ritual but was not the cause of ritual. Rather than the application of belief, ritual spurred belief: "Men would not be men if they agreed to do certain things without having a reason for their actions; but in ancient religion the reason was not first formulated as a doctrine and then expressed in practice, but conversely, practice preceded doctrinal theory." 14 Smith maintains that in ancient religion, ritual not merely was more important than myth but outright produced myth: "[1]n almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth ...," 15 Deriving a ritual from a myth would require accepting as true the mythic explanation of the origin of the ritual, which the myth typically attributes to the supernatural deed of a god. Because not even "the boldest [modern] mythologist" considers a myth "a narrative of real occurrences," "the myth is no explanation of the origin of the ritual ...," 16 O n the contrary, the ritual is far more likely the explanation of the myth. Smith contends that myth arose once the reason for a ritual had somehow been forgotten: Now by far the largest part of the myths of antique religions are connected with the ritual of particular shrines, or with the religious observances of particular tribes and districts. In all such cases it is probable, in most cases it is certain, that the myth is merely the explanation of a religious usage; and ordinarily it is such an explanation as could not have arisen till the original sense of the usage had more or less fallen into oblivion.17 Myth was superfluous as long as the reason for the ritual remained clear. Only once the reason was lost was myth created to explain and perhaps to justify the ritual. Smith allows for the subsequent development of myth. According to his scheme, in the first stage of religion there exists ritual alone. In the second stage, myth arises to explain ritual. In the third stage, which is still ancient, myth branches out beyond ritual and "exhibit [s] the beginnings of larger religious speculation, or of an attempt to systematise and reduce to order the modey variety of local worships and beliefs."18 Yet even here Smith is unwilling to grant myths much clout in religion. For in this stage myths get categorized as part of philosophy, politics, and poetry rather' than of religion "pure and simple." 19 Myths here

14 15 16 17 18 19

Smith, Smith, Smith, Smith, Smith, Smith,

Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 21. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 19. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, pp. 19-20. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 19. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 20. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 20.

are either products of early philosophy, reflecting on the nature of the universe; or they are political in scope, being designed to supply a thread of union between the various worships of groups, originally distinct, which have been united into one social or political organism; or, finally, they are due to the free play of epic imagination.20 Myths now become allegories and serve to defend one's religion against rivals: In the struggle of heathenism with scepticism on the one hand and Christianity on the other, the supporters of the old traditional religion were driven to search for ideas of a modern cast, which they could represent as the true inner meaning of the traditional rites. To this end they laid hold of the old myths, and applied to them an allegorical system of interpretation.21 Myths now become tied to theology and therefore to creed. In the fourth and final stage of religion—the modern stage—there are no longer any myths. Yet rather than a reversion to the initial stage of sheer rituals, there is now creed, which becomes more important than ritual. Creed now directs religion, the way ritual once did. Smith was the pioneering myth-ritualist because he was the first to argue that myths must be understood in relation to rituals. The relationship by no means requires that myths and rituals be equal in importance. For Smith, ritual is conspicuously more important than myth, which he calls "secondary." 22 He proposes the myth-ritualist theory to explain myth, not ritual. Myth depends on ritual, even if ritual comes to depend on myth. Without ritual, there would be no myth, whether or not without myth there would cease to be ritual. The far greater emphasis that Smith accords ritual in the Lectures on the Religion of the Semites evinces the greater importance he grants it. After presenting the ritualist theory of myth in the first lecture of the First Series of the Lectures, he tends no more to myth and concentrates wholly on rituals and the institutions tied to them. Not until the last lecture of the Third Series of the lectures, the notes for which have only recendy been discovered and published, does he return at all to myth. There he considers myth on its own, apart from ritual, and discusses the ideas of God in pagan and biblical creation myths. In effect, he approaches myth from the standpoint of the third of his stages of mythological development. 23

20

Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 20. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 20. 22 Smith, lectures on the Religion of the Semites, p. 20. 23 See William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Third Series, edited by John Day (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), pp. 96-112. 21

Robert Smith's Influence on Durkheim's Theory of Ritual Influence is always hard to determine. It may be direct or indirect, immediate or long-term, conscious or unconscious, individual or collective. T h e older approach of historians of ideas was to appeal to common themes in the works themselves. T h e more rigorous contemporary approach, practiced by historians of disciplines like J o h n Pocock, Quentin Skinner, George Stocking, and Robert Alun Jones, insists on evidence of contact between the writer and the would-be source. It is not enough to show that the ideas in the work of the writer are akin to those in the work of the purported source. It is not enough even to show that the ideas in the work of the writer were in the air. O n e must demonstrate that the writer knew the source proposed. T h a t Smith was a key influence on Durkheim's theory of religion as a whole is not in dispute. In two letters published in 1907 in the Catholic journal La Revue néo-scholastique, Dürkheim denied the charge, made by Simon Deploige in a series of articles in the journal, that he had taken his ideas from the German Wilhelm Wundt. O n the contrary, replied Dürkheim in the second letter, the real source of his ideas was English-speaking: il est qui j'aurais chez Wundt l'idée que la religion est la matrice des idées morales, juridiques etc. C'est en 1887 que je lus Wundt: or c'est seulement en 1895 que j'eus le sentiment net du rôle capital joué par la religion dans la vie sociale. C'est en cettee année que, pour la première fois, je trouvai le moyen d'aborder sociologiquement l'étude de la religion. Ce fut pour moi une révélation. Ce cours de 1895 marque une ligne de démarcation dans le développement de ma pensée si bien que toute mes recherches antérieures durent être reprises à nouveux frais pour être mises en harmonie avec ces vues nouvelles. L'Ethik de Wundt, lue huit ans auparavant, n'était pour rien dans ce changement d'orientation. Il était du tout antieraux études d'historié trauvaux de Robertson Smith et de son école.24 As scholars continually lament, Dürkheim never disclosed what the révélation from Smith was. T h e tantalizingly elusive statement of indebtedness to Smith is the equivalent in Durkheimian scholarship of Fermat's Last Theorem. Even though all scholars are aware of Durkheim's statement of indebtedness, they differ over what Dürkheim owed to Smith. Some have credited Smith with much influence. Steven Lukes, contrasting 24 Emile Dürkheim, "Lettres au Director de la Revue néo-scholastique," La Revue néoscholastique 14 (1907): 606-7, 612-14; p. 613. See also Durkheim's review ofDeploige's Le Conflit de la morale et de la sociologie in L'Année sociologique 17 (1913): 326-28.

the "thinness and inconclusiveness" of Durkheim's analysis of religion prior to his encounter with Smith, maintains that Smith offered Dürkheim a sociological alternative to the psychological theories of religion then prevalent. 25 Ε. E. Evans-Pritchard, while confining himself to totemism, names four "cardinal ideas" of Durkheim's that came from Smith: "that primitive religion is a clan cult and that the cult is totemic, ...that the god of the clan is the clan itself divinized, and that totemism is the most elementary or primitive, and in that sense original, form of religion known to us." 26 T. O. Beidelman, a student of Evans-Pritchard's, maintains that "Dürkheim was profoundly influenced by Smith, and although critical of some of Smith's views, integrated many into a powerful and persuasive overall view of culture and society."27 T o Smith, Beidelman, like many others, attributes Durkheim's generalizing from the study of a single society, his focus on ritual and specifically on sacrifice, his characterization of sacrifice as joyous, his characterization of the sacred as "ambiguous", his rigid opposition between religion and magic, and his firm association of religion with the social and of magic with the anti-social. But Beidelman, also like others, notes, for example, that Dürkheim refused to deny the expiatory side of sacrifice. More broadly, as Beidelman puts it, where Smith equated "whatever was sacred with what was social," for the "irreligious" Dürkheim "what was social must therefore be sacred." 28 Other scholars are more cautious. W. S. F. Pickering is prepared to credit Smith with most of the same aspects of Durkheim's theory of religion as Beidelman: Durkheim's reliance on a single society as the basis for generalization, his stress on the ambiguous nature of the sacred, his distinction between religion and magic, his association of religion with the social and of magic with the anti-social, his emphasis on sacrifice, and his characterization of sacrifice as in part an act of communion. But Pickering also points out how critical of Smith's view of sacrifice Dürkheim was, and not just because for Dürkheim sacrifice is expiatory as well as communal. Furthermore, Pickering names parts of Durkheim's theory of religion that have nothing to do with Smith, such as the epistemological status of religion and the develop-

25

See Steven Lukes, Emile Dürkheim (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin,

[1973] 1975), pp. 237-40. 26

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1965), p. 56. 27

T. O. Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 58. 28 Beidelman, IT Robertson Smith, p. 64.

ment of science out of religion. Most important, Pickering, in contrast to Beidelman, asserts that "whereas Smith gave prominence to ritual over belief, Dürkheim was ambivalent about it" and overall "holds that beliefs have primacy over ritual." 29 And Pickering underscores the impossibility of knowing just what the "revelation" from Smith was. Even more wary than Pickering of according unqualified influence to Smith is Jeffrey Alexander, who stresses changes in Durkheim's views púor to the "revelation"—above all, the shift toward an affective view of the way society inculcates itself in members. For Alexander, Smith confirmed more than changed Durkheim's views. T h e "eagerness" with which Dürkheim received Smith's work "could only have corresponded to the striking similarities between Smith's work and his own new direction." Smith enabled Dürkheim to "begin to reinterpret his shifting understanding in the explicitly religious terms that Smith provided." For Alexander, in contrast to Pickering, Dürkheim deems rituals more significant than beliefs and derived that view from Smith. From Smith, Dürkheim also took the view that rituals serve to foment communion with god rather than to placate god. These ideas led Dürkheim to see that "the affective association he [Dürkheim] had already placed at the center of society could be read also as a kind of religious rite."30 In other words, devotion to a society matches devotion to a religion. Like Pickering, Alexander is as insistent on the differences between Durkheim's and Smith's views as on the similarities. Where for Smith religious rituals are primarily communions with god, though also with worshipers, for Dürkheim they are communions with worshipers—god serving only to represent society. Where for Smith ritual precedes myth, for Dürkheim, according to Alexander, "belief and practice were interrelated ... in every moment of religious life." 31 Where for Smith humans worship god, for Dürkheim humans create the god they worship. T h e scholar most skeptical of the revelation of 1895 is Robert Alun Jones, who argues that by "Robertson Smith and his school" ("Robertson Smith et de son école") Dürkheim really meant less Smith than Frazer and that Scots like Smith and Frazer were lumped together with others to constitute an "English" anthropological school vis-à-vis a French or German philosophical school—this despite the

29 See W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim's Sociology of Religion (London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 65. 30 Jeffrey C. Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), II, p. 485. 31 Alexander, Theoretical Logic in Sociology, p. 486.

fact that Smith's approach was the opposite of Frazer's and that Smith's sociological approach was the opposite of the predominandy "English"—better, British—psychological approach opposed by Dürkheim himself. Jones grants that Dürkheim was strongly influenced by Smith, but not till after 1899. The influence is pervasive by the time of the 1906-07 lectures on the origin of religion at the Sorbonne—"the transcript of which reads like a rough draft of Durkheim's classic of 1912," The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.32 Jones is open to the array of standard possible points of influence, such as the distinction between magic and religion, the ambiguity of the sacred, totemism as the earliest stage of religion, the centrality of ritual, the communal function of sacrifice, and the linkage between myth and religion. Jones emphasizes most "Durkheim's increasingly eudaemonic conception of religious forces, in sharp contrast to his earlier view of religion in terms of externality and constraint." 33 For the Dürkheim influenced by Smith, one obeys God out of love rather than out of duty or fear, and the key religious feeling is that of joy rather than of guilt. If Jones is right in his dating, then there should be a conspicuous divide between Durkheim's important article of 1899, which is often assumed to be a prelude to The Elementary Forms, and The Elementary Forms itself.

Durkheim's "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux" In his 1907 letter to La Revue néo-scholastique Dürkheim singles out the year 1895 because it refers to the year (really years) of lectures at Bordeaux on religion. No notes of those lectures survive.34 One subsequent leading statement by Dürkheim is his 1899 article in L'Année sociologique on "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux." While Dürkheim never mentions Smith, who in fact is mentioned only once in passing prior to the 1912 The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,35 one can still look for evidence of Smith's influence. As in the book, so in the article, Dürkheim is preoccupied with the definition of religion—as the title of the article suggests! He rejects the 32

Robert Alun Jones, "Dürkheim, Frazer, and Smith: The Role of Analogies and Exemplars in the Development of Durkheim's Sociology of Religion," American Journal of Sociology 98 (1986): 596-627; p. 603. 33 Jones, "Dürkheim, Frazer, and Smith," p. 618. 3+ So Lukes, Emile Dürkheim, p. 238; Jones, "Dürkheim, Frazer, and Smith," p. 603 n. 16. 35 In his article "Sur le totémisme" (.L'Année sociologique 5 [1902]: 82-121), Dürkheim refers to totemic "sacrifices by effusions of blood (in Smith's sense)" (translated by Robert Alun Jones, History of Sociology 5 [1985], p. 114).

same kinds of psychological and theological definitions as in the book, elevates rituals to the same status as beliefs, and insists on the presence of both in every religion. He uses the concept of "representations," under which fall beliefs, though in much less developed a fashion than in the book. While allowing for private religion rather than, as in the book, equating private religion with magic rather than religion, he deems it secondary and derivative. In both article and book, full religion means public religion. As in the book, so here, religion involves the sacred vis-à-vis the profane rather than the supernatural vis-à-vis the natural or the divine vis-à-vis the human, though the concept of the sacred, like that of representations, is far less developed than in the book. But in contrast to the book, in the article the primary religious feeling is that of obligation and coercion rather than that of dependence and awe: "what characterizes religious beliefs and practices alike is that they are obligatory." 31 ' He does state that " T h e state of perpetual dependence in which we find ourselves in the face of society inspires in us a feeling of religious awe." 37 But he proceeds to enlist these feelings in service to obedience: "Thus, society dictates to the believer the dogmas he must uphold and the rites he must observe ,..."3(! Missing from the article, which, after all, is concerned with only the proper definition of religion, is any explanation of religion. Dürkheim says that, not how, society instills in its members the sense of obligation. There is no mention of any gathering of society or of any experience of the power of society—matters so central to the book. Most conspicuously, Dürkheim uses no ethnographic material. He mentions totemism in passing but offers no example of religion in its elementary form or in any other one. He does mention some myths, though thereby presumably not all, as collective rather than private because they are "traditions which the individual finds ready-made and to which he respectfully conforms his thought." 3 9 How close to Smith is Dürkheim in the article? Where for Smith the key religious sentiment is one of community, for Dürkheim the key religious sentiment is one of obligation and, as a means to it, of dependence. Where for Smith ritual in primitive religion is independent of belief and is more important than belief, for Dürkheim the two work

36 Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," L'Année sociologique 2 (1899), pp. 1-28, translated by Jacqueline Redding and YV. S. F. Pickering, in Dürkheim on Religion, edited by VV. S. F. Pickering (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 93. 37 Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," p. 93. 38 Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," p. 93. 39 Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," p. 90.

together and are of equal importance. True, Dürkheim does note the existence of totemic rituals that antedate beliefs. Sounding like Smith, he even maintains that the belief in an eponymous ancestor of the clan, "far from ... being the very basis of totemism, ... has only been invented after the event, to allow man to explain to himself a system of practices already in existence." 40 But he rejects the view that religion is chiefly composed of rituals and not of beliefs. In fact, he distinguishes religious practices from moral and legal ones on exactly the grounds that beliefs underlie religious practices. Rather than either beliefs alone or practices alone, religion is composed of both: "Religion is not exclusively either an obligatory philosophy, or a practical discipline: it is both one and the other at the same time. Thought and action are closely linked to the point of being inseparable." 41 He defines religious phenomena as "consisting] in obligatory beliefs, connected with clearly defined practices which are related to given objects of those beliefs." 42 Clearly, Durkheim's position is far from Smith's. Dürkheim insists on the same inseparability and equality of myth and ritual. "It seems clear," he asserts, "that there can be no ritual without myth," and "it seems equally unlikely that there should be myths which are not dependent on some rite or other." He does grant that "in less advanced religions, rites are already developed and definite when myths are still very rudimentary," but he does not thereby grant that rituals antedate myths. Between myths and rituals "there is a very close connection." 43 Again, Durkheim's view is far from Smith's. 44 Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Throughout The Elementary Forms Dürkheim proclaims his indebtedness to Smith on a host of topics. Among them are the distinction between magic, which is private and anti-social, and religion, which is collective and conspicuously socializing;45 the importance of totemism 40

Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," p. 85. Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," p. 92. 42 Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," p. 93. 43 Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," p. 99 n. 25. 44 Dürkheim wonders whether those who put ritual prior to myth have in mind "more highly developed and more or less systematized religious représentations," which would understandably seem to arise later. But then "another word is needed to designate simpler religious représentations, distinguishable from myths proper by reason of their greater simplicity" (Dürkheim, "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux," p. 99 n. 25). Rituals would presuppose rather than antedate these simpler representations. 45 See Emile Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms ofthe Religious Life, translated by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: The Free Pressé [1915] 1965), pp. 57-61, esp. p. 61 n. 62. 41

for understanding religion; the kinship between the totem and the members of the clan; the centrality to totemism of sacrifice, which in its earliest form is the eating of the totem; the communal function of primitive sacrifice; 46 and the "ambiguous"—-better, ambivalent— nature of the sacred, which is not only pure, or holy, but also impure, or unclean. 47 Dürkheim by no means always accepts Smith's position. For example, he argues that the function of primitive sacrifice is that of tribute as well as that of communion. 4 8 He also goes far beyond Smith—for example, in "sociologizing" the function of communion, which for Dürkheim serves to strengthen the bond among members of society and only seemingly the bond between members and god. 49 What of the influence of Smith on Durkheim's view of myth, on which he never cites Smith? T o begin with, how important is myth and, more generally, belief for Dürkheim? Scholars disagree. Dürkheim defines religion as a set of both beliefs and rituals, thereby implying that, if not myths in particular, then at least beliefs in general are equal to rituals in importance: "A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them." 5 0 Dürkheim devotes Book 2 of The Elementary Forms to totemic beliefs and Book 3 to totemic rituals. He opens Book 2 with the statement that "Since every religion is made up of intellectual conceptions and ritual practices, we must deal successively with the beliefs and rites which compose the totemic religion." 51 He even adds that beliefs and rituals "are too closely connected with each other to allow of any radical separation." 52 Yet sometimes Dürkheim states that beliefs give rise to rituals, which, as the expression of beliefs, would be less fundamental than beliefs: "In principle, the cult is derived from the beliefs ...." 53 Is it only by accident that Book 2 (beliefs) precedes Book 3 (rituals)? Other times Dürkheim states that rituals give rise to beliefs: The theorists who have undertaken to explain religion in rational terms have generally seen in it before all else a system of ideas, corresponding to some determined object.... In any case, it was the concep46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

See Dürkheim, 77« Elementaiy Forms, pp. See Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. See Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. See Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 62. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 121. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 121. Dürkheim, The Elementaiy Forms, p. 121.

109,377-92. 455-61. 377-89. 389-92.

tions and beliefs which were considered as the essential elements of religion. As for the rites, from this point of view they appear to be only an external translation, contingent and material, of these internal states which alone pass as having any intrinsic value.... But the believers, the men who lead the religious life and have a direct sensation of what it really is, object to this way of regarding it, saying that it does not correspond to their daily experience.... [I]t is readily seen how that group of regularly repeated acts which form the cult get their importance. In fact, whoever has really practised a religion knows very well that it is the cult which gives rise to these impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his beliefs.54 When, in surveying prior definitions of religion, Dürkheim rejects religion defined as belief in gods, he does so in part on the grounds that "there are many rites which are completely independent of all idea [sic] of gods or spiritual beings." 55 What James Frazer calls magic rather than religion—those rituals that work automatically, without appeal to any gods—Dürkheim places within religion: "In every cult there are practices which act by themselves, by a virtue which is their own, without the intervention of any god between the individual who practises the rite and the end sought after." 56 In short, "there are rites without gods, and even rites from which gods are derived." 57 Most often, Dürkheim implies that no matter which element, beliefs or rituals, comes first, it is shaped by whichever comes second: "In principle, the cult is derived from the beliefs, yet it reacts upon them .... O n the other hand, there are beliefs which are clearly manifested only through the rites which express them." 58 T o whatever degree Dürkheim gives priority to rituals in primitive religion, he follows the pioneering trail of Smith, even if Smith, unlike Dürkheim, would reverse the priority in the case of modern religion. More important, Dürkheim follows the lead of Smith simply in connecting beliefs to rituals. For the heart of myth-ritualism is the linkage of belief to practice. If Dürkheim breaks utterly with Smith in giving as much attention to belief as to ritual in primitive religion, he adheres wholly to Smith in giving far more attention to ritual than to myth. Indeed, myth gets minimal attention. Far from being granted a book or even section of its own in The Elementary Forms, it is mentioned only in passing.

54 55 56 57 58

Dürkheim, Dürkheim, Dürkheim, Dürkheim, Dürkheim,

The Elementary Forms, pp. 463-64. The Elementary Forms, p. 49. The Elementary Forms, p. 50. The Elementary Forms, p. 50. The Elementary Forms, p. 121.

When Dürkheim mentions myth, he sometimes follows those who, like Edward Tylor, deem ritual either the expression or the application of myth. Appealing to common sense, Dürkheim observes that without myth there would be no ritual because myth describes the character and behavior of the gods that ritual presupposes. Myth, he states, "is one of the essential elements of the religious life." 59 Consequendy, If the myth were withdrawn from religion, it would be necessary to withdraw the rite also; for the rites are generally addressed to definite personalities who have a name, a character, determined attributes and a history, and they vary according to the manner in which these personalities are conceived. The cult rendered to a divinity depends upon the character attributed to him; and it is the myth which determines this character. Very frequently, the rite is nothing more than the myth put in action; the Christian communion is inseparable from the myth of the Last Supper, from which it derives all its meaning.60 In making ritual dependent on myth, not merely once ritual has lost its rationale but from the outset, Dürkheim could not stand further from Smith. Other times, however, Dürkheim takes the opposite view and follows Smith. Now myth is dependent on ritual, which it arises to explain, and even arises to explain only once the ritual is no longer understood: "the myth is frequendy modelled after the rite in order to account for it, especially when its sense is no longer apparent." 61 "In general," writes Dürkheim, the "object" of myths "is to interpret existing rites rather than to commemorate past events; they are an explanation of the present much more than a history" 62 —this contrary to the position known as euhemerism. Even though Dürkheim does not cite Smith here, the notion that myth explains ritual, not to say ritual no longer understood, could have come only from Smith. Other myth-ritualists, such as Frazer, propose a different linkage between myth and ritual. For Frazer, myth is not an ex post facto explanation of ritual, as for Smith and here Dürkheim, but instead the concurrent accompaniment of ritual. The history of the myth-ritualist theory after Smith was to elevate myth to a status equal to that of ritual.63 Among theorists of myth-ritualism, Smith alone subordinates myth to ritual as severely as Dürkheim does here, and subordinates it in the way that Dürkheim does.

59

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 100-101. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 101. 61 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 121. 62 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 152. 63 See my introduction to The Myth and Ritual Theory (Oxford and Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 3-7. 60

Yet it would be going too far to type Dürkheim a myth-ritualist of any kind, let alone of Smith's particular kind. For all Durkheim's invocation of myth-ritualism in the passages cited, he is not, like Smith, claiming that all myths stem from rituals or even that all myths are connected to rituals. Above all, he is simply not preoccupied with the issue of the relationship between myths and rituals. At most, he is preoccupied with ritual as the heart of religion, not with ritual tied to myth as the heart of religion. Dürkheim is other than a myth-ritualist not because he may be more interested in rituals than in myths—so is Smith—but because he is only marginally interested in the relationship of rituals to myths.

C H A F I ' E R SIX

D Ü R K H E I M , KANT AND T H E SOCIAL C O N S T R U C T I O N OF THE CATEGORIES Tony Edwards

In his introduction to The Elementaiy Forms of Religious Life, Dürkheim presents one of the central arguments of that work. He says that religion is the source of the basic categories of human thought, and that society is the source of religion. He concludes, therefore, that society is the source of the basic categories of human thought. Given his broad and heterogeneous notion of "category," this means that time, space, class, number, cause, substance and personality are all social constructions. This is one of the major claims of The Elementaiy Forms, and one of the most influential. I shall argue, however, that it is incoherent, and that this incoherence is reflected in Durkheim's attempts to avoid the horns of a dilemma. I shall begin by characterizing the dilemma in Durkheim's own terms, then restate it in terms that are more Kantian. I For Dürkheim, categories are concepts, and concepts both are and are not subject to time and change. They are subject to time and change, or else society could have no part in forming them: society is an entity whose whole career takes place within time and change. But they are also beyond time and change, or else they would not be concepts. As he says in the Conclusion, The concept ... is as if [comme] outside time and change; it is withdrawn [soustrait] from all this disturbance; one might say that it is in a different region of the mind, a region more serene and calm.1 This appears to contradict his view that the categories are socially constructed, but the qualification ("as if') and the comparatives 1 The Elementary Forms of Religious Ufe, translated by Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 434f. Translation altered. French edition: Les Formes ÉlémenUtires de la Vie Religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie, 5th edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968).

("more serene and calm") indicate that he is actually seeking a middle ground that is neither within nor outside time. This is confirmed by the way the passage continues: [The concept] does not move of itself, by an internal and spontaneous evolution; on the contrary, it resists change. It is a way of thinking that, at each moment of time, is fixed and crystallized. In so far as it is what it ought to be, it is immutable. If it changes, it is not because it is in its nature to change; it is because we have discovered some imperfection in it; it is because it needs to be rectified.2 "[The concept] does not move of itself," but apparently it moves, and thus is subject to time and change. "It resists change," but it must be within time and change in order to put up the resistance. It is "fixed and crystallized," but "at each moment of time." So why doesn't he simply say that concepts are subject to time and change? He can't. If he said this, then he would have to admit that the categories are subject to time and change. And he can't admit that the categories are subject to time and change, because if he did so then he would be implying that the categories lack the universality and necessity that are essential to them. His problem is similar to one he sees in the classical empiricists: [Under the conditions described by the empiricists,] to bring reason back to experience causes it to disappear, for it is to reduce the universality and necessity which characterize it to pure appearance, to an illusion which may be useful practically, but which corresponds to nothing in things; consequently it is to deny all objective reality to the logical life, whose regulation and organization is the function of the categories. Classical empiricism leads to irrationalism; perhaps it would even be fitting to designate it by that name. 3 Dürkheim sees the empiricists' difficulty fairly clearly, but he doesn't see his own. Any account that replaces universality and necessity with particularity and contingency "reduces" universality and necessity "to pure appearance"—and any account that treats the categories as subject to time and change replaces universality and necessity with particularity and contingency. Since Durkheim's account treats the cate-

2

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 435. Translation altered. Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms. Translation altered. "[R]eason," Dürkheim says on p. 13, "is nothing other than the fundamental categories taken together"; accordingly, what he says here of reason applies to the categories as well. Note also that although for Dürkheim the regulation and organization of the logical life is the function of the categories, he does not indicate the exact relation between the categories and logic. He does hold, however, that both the categories and the principles of logic are universal and necessary. 3

gories as subject to time and change, it too reduces universality and necessity to pure appearance. We can see from these troubles that Dürkheim is on the horns of a dilemma. If he treats concepts as entities that are not subject to time and change, then there can be no sociology of concepts (and thus no sociology of the categories)—for sociology deals only with what is subject to time and change. O n the other hand, if he treats concepts as entities that are subject to time and change, then again there can be no sociology of concepts (and thus no sociology of the categories)—for what such a sociology discusses will not really be concepts. Of course, he could take the position that concepts are beyond time and change, but representations are not; there can certainly be a sociology of representations. But if he did this, then he would no longer be engaged in the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge involves concepts, not just representations. Dürkheim does not understand his dilemma, but he does consider that he might not be able to explain the categories entirely. Accordingly, he sometimes hedges his bets by taking the position that social conditions contribute to the categories "at least in part." Indeed, he says this even of the principle of contradiction: These variations through which the rule that seems to govern our present logic has passed in history show that, far from being inscribed from eternity in the mental constitution of man, it depends at least in part upon factors that are historical, and hence social.4 Here again he is looking for a third alternative where there is none. His confusion appears to be due to the ambiguity between causal and logical senses of "depends upon factors." Dependency upon social factors is causal, not logical. If the principle of contradiction were to depend at least in part on social factors, then it would have to be subject at least in part to causality, and thus subject at least in part to particular and contingent factors. But if it were subject to such factors at all, then to some extent it too would be particular and contingent, and thus to some extent it too would be neither universal nor necessary. But this makes no sense. A principle or category can't be "somewhat universal," or "largely necessary." If a principle or category is universal or necessary at all, then it is universal or necessary without qualification. It follows that although formulations of the principle of contradiction may depend in part on social factors, the principle itself may not. 5

4

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, \>. 12. Translation altered. See Objection 6 in section IV, and the response. Notice that the distinction between form and content that is used of the categories there cannot be used for the principle of contradiction and other logical principles. Logic is all form. 5

II After considering Durkheim's dilemma for a while, one might conclude that it isn't just his problem, but everyone's. After all, it may seem that the principle of sufficient reason is a sound principle, and therefore that, like everything else that exists, the categories have a complete explanation. 6 Considered in this light, it is hard to see where Dürkheim could have gone wrong. How could he possibly be mistaken in seeking an explanation of the categories? Isn't the principle of sufficient reason true? Aren't the categories and the principle of contradiction things that exist? But Dürkheim is not seeking just any old explanation; he is seeking an explanation that is sociological and therefore causal. Since his intended explanation is causal, he implicitly conceives of the explananda as subject to time and change. He therefore implicitly conceives of them as lacking universality and necessity. Thus he is mistaken in seeking the sort of explanation in which the categories are conceived as subject to time and change. Moreover, it seems that he is mistaken only in that respect: it seems that if he had sought an explanation in which the categories were not conceived as subject to time and change, then he would not have been faced with his dilemma. Plausible as it may seem, this diagnosis is only half true. It is true that Dürkheim is mistaken in seeking the sort of explanation in which the categories are conceived as subject to time and change, but false that he would not have been faced with his dilemma if he had instead sought an explanation in which the categories were not conceived as subject to time and change. If he had sought the latter sort of explanation, he would still have been making the mistake that produces his dilemma: he would still have been trying to explain the universality and necessity of the categories by making an appeal to the way things are. This mistake is—or is like 7 —trying to infer an "ought" from an "is." Durkheim's dilemma, therefore, was more basic than the diagnosis above suggests. If he conceived the universality and necessity of the categories as facts, then he could not explain them successfully, for universality and necessity are not facts. But if he did not conceive the universality and necessity of the categories as facts, then again he could not explain them successfully, for a sound explanation requires

6 William L. Rowe writes, "We may state [the principle of sufficient reason]...as the principle that there must be an explanation (a) ofthe existence ofany being, and (b) ofany positive fact whatever" (Philosophy of Religion [Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1993], p.

20). 7

See Objection 5 in section IV, and the response.

a valid inference from explanans to explanandum. 8 An inference from "is" to "ought" is not a valid inference. 9 Ill In order to see Durkheim's dilemma at this deeper level, it will help to consider a passage from Kant. In his Logic Kant writes: Some logicians presuppose psychological principles in logic. But to bring such principles into logic is as absurd as taking morality from life. If we took the principles from psychology, i.e. from observations about our understanding, we would merely see how thinking occurs and how it is under manifold hindrances and conditions; this would therefore lead to the cognition of merely contingent laws. In logic, however, the question is not one of contingent but of necessary rules, not how we think, but how we ought to think. The rules of logic, therefore, must be taken not from the contingent but from the necessary use of the understanding, which one finds, without any psychology, in oneself. In logic we do not want to know how the understanding is and thinks, and how it hitherto has proceeded in thinking, but how it ought to proceed in thinking. Logic shall teach us the right use of the understanding, i.e. the one that agrees with itself.10

8 " [ T ] h e attack on deducibility drawn from the occurrence of approximations does not imply that there are no deductive relations between explanans and explanandum. T h e situation is rather this. Given a descriptive statement D in the domain of the explanandum, it is usually the case that the statement Ε of an acceptable explanans does not entail D, but rather Dt, where D is a statement in the domain of the explanandum and only 'approximately equivalent' to D. For Ε to be acceptable it is necessary that there be a deductive relation between Ε and D, and that D should come to be recognized as a more acceptable description in the domain of the explanandum than D" (Mary Hesse, "The Explanatory Function of Metaphor," in her Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980], p. 121). The inference that interests us here is the deductive relation between Ε and D, not the nondeductive relation between Ε and D. Notice that although we see a flaw in Durkheim's project when we construe Durkheim's explanations deductively, if we construe them nondeductively—e.g., as probabilistic functional explanations—the flaw is still worse. The inference from the explanans to the explanandum is weaker, and still yields only an "is"—the "ought" remains unexplained (See Wesley Salmon, "Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Science," in his Causality and Explanation [New York: Oxford, 1998], p. 40). In the rest of this paper, then, I shall assume the deductive interpretation. The deductive interpretation provides only a weak case that a sociologist can explain the universality and necessity of the categories, but it provides the strongest case available. 9 Of course, we can imagine a Dürkheim whose explanations of universality and necessity would infer "ought" from "ought," but that Dürkheim would be too unlike the author of The Elementary Forms to be relevant here. 10 Logic, translated by Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 16.

Here we find Kant drawing the same contrast between necessity and contingency that we have seen Dürkheim take up later. Moreover, much as Dürkheim argues that necessity is reduced to pure appearance in a classical empiricist conception of reason, Kant argues that necessity cannot be represented in a psychological understanding of logic." Yet there is a further feature of Kant's argument: he understands logic on analogy with morality. In his view, necessity is to condngency as "ought" is to "is." Just as a moral "ought" cannot be derived from any "is," so the necessity of logic cannot be derived from the contingency of human thought-processes. Thus Kant appears to be invoking Hume's argument that "ought" cannot be derived from "is." As Hume puts it: In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz'd to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observ'd and explain'd; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded that this small attention wou'd subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relation of objects, nor is perceiv'd by reason.12 Hume is right: attempts to derive "ought" from "is" are non sequiturs. Apparent exceptions merely include "ought" judgments as unstated premises. Kant's point, then, is that inferring "ought" from "is" is as invalid for the "oughts" and "is's" of thinking as it is for the "oughts" and "is's" of moral action. Just as lying would be wrong even if all people ' 1 There is a large literature on "psychologism," and it includes some references to "sociologism" as well. I have avoided the first term in this paper because, as Martin Kusch has shown, there is very little agreement about what it means. I have avoided the second term because it proposes an analogy to the first, and therefore could be useful only if there were already agreement on the first. See Martin Kusch, Psychologism (London: Routledge, 1995). 12 A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 469.

were liars, so the principle of contradiction would be valid even if all people were habitually inconsistent. Kant's point can be applied to Durkheim's project. Durkheim's sociology of the categories can be taken in two ways—as an attempt to explain "is's" by "is's," and as an attempt to explain "oughts" by "is's." T h e former is possible; the latter is not. Because explanations are inferences, the former involves inferences from "is" to "is," which are licit; the latter involves inferences from "is" to "ought," which are not. Thus, although an attempt to explain an "is" by an "is" need not result in a non sequitur, an attempt to explain an "ought" by an "is" will necessarily do so. Accordingly, it follows from Kant's position that Dürkheim is right when he attempts to explain the development, formulation or use of the categories, but wrong when he tries to explain their necessity or universality. Necessity is the binding character of the categories, and for Kant that binding character is an "ought"; universality is the relevance of the categories, and for Kant that relevance too is an "ought." As Kant conceives them, then, necessity and universality escape the net, not only of sociological explanation, but of any explanation in terms of what is the case. IV I believe the Kantian interpretation of Durkheim's dilemma is basically correct, but I also recognize that it can easily be misunderstood. It will be useful, therefore, to consider some objections in which typical misunderstandings make their appearance. Objection 1: There is a complete explanation for each thing that exists; therefore, either "oughts" don't exist or there are complete explanations for them. Now such explanations will derive "oughts"from "is's." Therefore, either "oughts" don't exist or valid inferencesfrom "is" to "ought" can be made. This is an interesting objection. Note that I can't answer it simply by saying that "oughts" exist outside the realm of empirical phenomena and are therefore exempt from the principle of sufficient reason. T h e principle of sufficient reason extends to anything that exists at all. I won't try to refute the principle of sufficient reason here. 13 Rather, I will point out that not every explanation that would fulfill the principle of sufficient reason derives an "is" from an "is" or an "ought" from an "is"; some such explanations derive an "ought" from an "ought."

13

I believe, however, that only anomalies stand in need of explanation. Not everything that exists is an anomaly.

In other words, it is not a condition of the principle of sufficient reason that the explanans it calls for be an "is." The objection therefore fails. Objection 2: The account given in sections II and III implies that "oughts" exist, and therefore that "oughts" are "is's." If "oughts" are "is's," then they are not "oughts" at all—which is absurd. The argument in this objection is invalid: in implying that "oughts" exist, I am not implying that "oughts" are "is's." This can be seen from the following: (a) One ought to eschew contradiction, (b) There exists a proposition, "One ought to eschew contradiction," and (c) Some people accept the proposition, "One ought to eschew contradiction." (a) does not follow from (b) or (c), and therefore the "ought" in (a) is neither identical to nor follows from the "is" of (b) or the "is" of (c). In this sense, then, the "ought" of (a) is not an "is," and cannot be assimilated to an "is." Thus the argument in the objection doesn't follow. (Note too that no explanation of (b) or (c) entails an explanation of (a). Although we might explain that and why (b) or (c) is true, and this might accidentally provide insight into the truth or falsity of (a), there is nothing in the logic of the situation that assures us of this.) Objection 3: We all assume a distinction between concepts and the objects of which these concepts are predicated, and this distinction results in confusion when we try to talk about concepts themselves: in such talk, concepts appear as objects, even though this shouldn't be possible. Given this bewildering state of affairs, it isn't clear that Dürkheim is wrong to seek sociological explanations of these strange "objects." This bewildering state of affairs has come to be known as "the concept horse problem." The concept horse problem was raised by Benno Kerry against Gottlob Frege's theory of concepts. 14 Kerry held that Frege's version of the distinction between concept and object gave rise to the paradox, "The concept horse is not a concept." The paradox is that, since "the concept horse" functions as the subject of the proposition, it must be an object, not a concept, and yet since that subject is "The concept horse," it must be a concept as well. The concept horse problem can be solved, and therefore lends no 14 See Gottlob Frege, "On Concept and Object," in The Frege Reader, edited by Michael Beaney (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). See also Joan VVeiner, Frege (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 105-16, as well as her Frege in Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 246-56.

support to Durkheim's project. " T h e concept horse is not a concept" is only paradoxical if we fail to observe the distinction between mention and use. If "horse" is mentioned in " T h e concept horse is not a concept," then this expression is equivalent to "'Horse' is not a concept." T h e latter sentence is well-formed but false, for "horse" is indeed a concept in the Fregean sense of the term. O n the other hand, if "horse" is used in " T h e concept horse is not a concept," then this expression is equivalent to "Horse is not a concept." Here the latter expression makes no sense, for, as a concept, "horse" cannot function in the role of an object. Thus the paradox of " T h e concept horse is not a concept" comes from thinking of "the concept horse" as performing two mutually exclusive duties at once: mentioning "horse" and using "horse." It is only if we mistakenly take "the concept horse" as performing both duties at once that we can think that " T h e concept horse is not a concept" is both meaningful and true, and it is only if we think it both meaningful and true that we can conceive this expression as a challenge to Frege's distinction between concept and object. 15 Thus, there is indeed a problem with our talk about concepts and objects, but it has been solved. Objection 4: The is/ ought distinction cannot be used to characterize the necessity of concepts. If we say, "A bachelor lives at 222 Jackson Street," part of the meaning of the proposition is "An unmarried person lives at 222 Jackson Street." But that meaning depends on the assumption "All bachelors are unmarried." Now on the account given in sections II and III, "All bachelors are unmarried" is a necessary truth that stipulates how "bachelor" is to be understood. It is therefore to be counted as an "ought"judgment. But it seems that I have just said that this "ought"judgment is implicit in the meaning of the "is" judgment "A bachelor lives at 222 Jackson Street. " Accordingly, it seems that "A bachelor lives at 222 Jackson Street" isn't purely an "is"judgment at all, but rather a conjunction of "is" and "ought"judgments. Moreover, it seems that every possible "is"judgment will be such a conjunction, since every possible "is" judgment appeals to the "oughts" of the concepts it uses. But if every possible "is" judgment is a conjunction of "is" and "ought"judgments, then no "is"judgment is possible that does not imply an "ought" judgment. Thus the distinction between "is" and "ought" collapses, and with it the Kantian formulation of Durkheim's dilemma.

15 It is worth noting that the solution I have offered to the concept horse problem succeeds only because it diminishes the role of the word "concept." T h e roles of "concept" and italics in suggesting quotation-marks around "horse" have been replaced in my formulations by actual quotation-marks. Indeed, we might simply replace "The concept horse is not a concept" with "'Horse' is not a horse." This expression is not only meaningful and true but does not lend itself to any paradoxical interpretation.

This argument is powerful because it exploits the attractive idea that because normativity is involved in all our concepts, it must be involved in the "is" judgments that use those concepts. The argument has a crucial flaw, however: it is false that a presupposition of the meaning of a proposition is part of the meaning o f t h a t proposition. If it were true that the presupposition "All bachelors are unmarried" is part of the meaning of the proposition "A bachelor lives at 222 Jackson Street," then "All bachelors are unmarried" would follow from "A bachelor lives at 222 Jackson Street." But it doesn't. The argument therefore fails. Objection 5: Logical necessity is a "must, " not an "ought. " Moreover, it is not reducible to an "ought. " (There is no contradiction in saying that I must make an inference that I ought not to make.) Accordingly, Durkheim's reduction of necessity to contingency is not a reduction of "ought" to "is." This is an important issue, but it doesn't alfect the chief point of sections II and III. The chief point there is that both is/must inferences and is/ought inferences are non sequiturs. Perhaps they share this feature because the "musts" of logic and the "oughts" of morality both derive from some more basic sort of "ought"; perhaps they don't. It makes no difference to the argument in sections II and III. As long as the is/must inference is a non sequitur, it remains true that Dürkheim must either give up trying to explain necessity or else build a fallacious inference into his attempt. 16 Similarly, as long as is/must inferences and is/ought inferences are both non sequiturs, then, whether we assimilate universality to "must" or to "ought," it remains true that Dürkheim must either give up trying to explain universality or else build a fallacious inference into his attempt. Objection 6: Since the account in sections II and III is "Kantian" only in denying that the universality and necessity of the categories can be inferredfrom an "is," that account doesn't deny that the entire content of the categories might be explained by an "is, " nor does it deny that such an explanation might be sociological. In short, sections II and III imply only that theform of the categories can't be explained sociologically, not that the content can't. But the content is what counts. If the Cheshire Cat has been explained, it doesn't matter that his smile remains. This objection is right in its interpretation of sections II and III, but wrong in saying that it doesn't matter that Dürkheim can't explain universality and necessity. Imagine a people that has the understanding of the categories that they ought to have. Dürkheim might be able to explain why they have the understanding that they do, but qua sociolo-

16

The objections about "is" and "ought" in the present section can be raised mutatis mutandis for "is" and "must." The replies hold likewise.

gist he can't explain why that understanding is right. His inability to do this is not blameworthy, of course, but it's not trivial either. V In its bolder moments, then, Durkheim's sociology of the categories is involved in a single, two-part error: construing the universality and necessity of the categories as facts, then concluding that those "facts" can be given a sociological explanation. This doesn't mean that a sociology of the categories is a bad idea, only that Durkheim's followers should take his more cautious moments as their model. T h a t is, sociologists of the categories should try to explain the "is's" of human reason, not its "oughts" or "musts." 17 It is worth noting in passing that the error of the bolder moments is by no means peculiar to Dürkheim: attempts to reduce normativity to facticity are common in contemporary social constructionism. T h e account given above suggests that such attempts are bound to fail: in the explanations they propose, the "oughts" and "musts" of the norms cannot be validly derived from the "is's" of the facts. 18 Yet we can expect to see such efforts again and again, not only because it is easy to slide from the "is" of a practice to its "ought" or "must," but also because the explanation of normativity is the grail that many constructionists seek. 19

17

See the latter part of footnote 18. In an earlier paper, I argued that as far as our interest in the truth is concerned, there is nothing to be feared from reductionist attempts to explain religion: if a reductionist explanation is unsound, then this can be argued from counterevidence; if it is true, then fine—truth is good. ("Religion, Explanation, and the Askesis of Inquiry," in Religion and Reductionistn, edited by Thomas A. Idinopulos and Edward A. Yonan (Leiden: E . J . Brill), pp. 162-182). I thought I didn't need to mention that a reductionist argument might also be unsound because it involves a non sequitur; this is true of all arguments, and therefore goes without saying. But in fact I did need to mention it, for reductions of normativity are an important class of non sequiturs, and they are not revealed by the evidence. Nevertheless, my basic point still holds: reductionist projects aren't cause for alarm; they merely call for careful consideration. Nor should we assume that every inquiry into the causes of norms involves an is/ought or an is/must non sequitur. Some do; some don't. "Causes of norms" can be a researcher's shorthand for "causes of the fact that [a particular people] takes as 'oughts' and 'musts' what they do take as 'oughts' and 'musts'." T o inquire into such causes is to attempt the whole or partial explanation of a complex fact. As such, it does not involve an is/ought or an is/must inference, but only an is/is inference. See Objection 6 and the reply. For a judicious discussion of social constructionism, see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 19 I am grateful to my wife, Lisa Kerestesi Edwards, for comments on two earlier drafts of this paper. 1,1

CHAPTER SEVEN

T H E D U R K H E I M I A N S AND T H E F I F T H S E C T I O N O F T H E ECOLE PRATIQUE DES HAUTES ETUDES: AN O V E R V I E W J o h n I. Brooks III

A comprehensive assessment of Emile Durkheim's influence on the study of religion would require a history of religious studies—indeed of the h u m a n sciences—in the twentieth century. T h e closest attempt to do this probably remains a brief article by the Frankfurt school sociologist Paul Honigsheim, who tallied up a number of works on religion by Dürkheim and his successors. 1 Another approach can be found in studies of Durkheim's sociology of religion, which inevitably call for an assessment of his legacy. Of these, the most magisterial remains W. S. F. Pickering's Durkheim's Sociology of Religion, but the volume of essays On Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life also assesses aspects of Durkheim's work on religion. 2 Most of these works focus on Durkheim's intellectual contribution to the study of religion. However, in assessing and accounting for influence, one should not neglect the processes of recruitment and institutionalization that ensure the continuation of intellectual insights. This is especially true for Dürkheim, who was extraordinarily sensitive to such issues. A great deal of work has been done on the origins, development, and fate of the Durkheimian équipe, usually defined as those who contributed to the Année sociologique, which was itself perhaps the most important and distinctive way in which Dürkheim sought to build a concrete foundation for his vision of sociology. 3 It is not surprising that some of that work has touched upon the sociology of religion, since this was a topic of central concern to Dürkheim and to two of his closest collaborators—Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert. For this rea1 Paul Honigsheim, "The Influence of Dürkheim and His School on the Study of Religion," in Emile Dürkheim: Critical Assessments, Second Series, Vol. 6 (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 82-92. 2 W. F. S. Pickering, Durkheim's Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); N.J. Allen, W. F. S. Pickering, and W. Watts Miller, eds., On Dürkheim 's Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: Routledge, 1998). 3 Philippe Besnard, ed., The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

son, Marcel Fournier's comprehensive biography on Mauss is also one of the best sources of information about the influence of Durkheimian sociology of religion. 4 Mauss and Hubert both taught in the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, the French institution most directly involved in the study of religion. Indeed, because the Fifth Section was (and is) so central to religious studies in France, and because the most prominent Durkheimian sociologists of religion taught there, assessing the impact of Durkheimian sociology of religion on this institution is one of the most fruitful ways of gauging Durkheimian influence on religious studies in France. The resources for such an assessment come primarily from two directions. One is historical reflection upon the institution itself. The centenaries of the Ecole in 1968 and of the Fifth Section in 1986 were occasions for historical reflection on the institution. 5 The other direction is a growing body of work on the historical context of Durkheim's sociology of religion by specialists in religious studies. Donald Nielsen explored the relationship between the Durkheimians and Auguste Sabatier, one of the most prominent scholars of the Fifth Section. 6 Ivan Strenski has expanded this direction by examining the relationship of Durkheimian sociology of religion with French Protestant historians of religion, of whom Sabatier was one, and with the community of Jewish religious scholars, some of whom were connected with the Fifth Section. 7 In the process, he has done more than anyone to reconstruct the scholarly world of religious studies in France during the Third Republic. The goal of this essay is to place the research of Strenski and others in the service of a systematic assessment of the influence of 4

Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994). Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes—Ve Section, Problèmes et méthodes d'histoire des religions (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968; hereafter referred to as EPH Ε 1968); Jean Baubérot, Cent ans de sciences religieuses en France (Paris: Cerf, 1987). 6 Donald A. Nielsen, "Auguste Sabatier and the Durkheimians on the ScientificStudy of Religion," Sociological Analysis AI (1987): 283-301. 7 Ivan Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Ivan Strenski, "Henri Hubert, Racial Science, and Political Myth," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23 (1987): 353-67; Ivan Strenski, "L'apport des élèves de Dürkheim," in La traditionfrançaiseen sciences religieuses, edited by Michel Despland (Quebec: Groupe de recherche en sciences de la religion, 1991), pp. 109-28; Ivan Strenski, "The Social and Intellectual Origins of Hubert and Mauss's Theory of Ritual Sacrifice," in India and Beyond: Aspects of literature, Meaning, Ritual, and Thought. Essays in Honour of Fritz Staat, edited by Dick van der Meij (New York: Kegan Paul, 1997), pp. 511-37; Ivan Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (forthcoming). I would like to thank Ivan Strenski for sharing with me the manuscript of his forthcoming book and for advice on the direction of this essay. What I have done with his kind help is of course solely my responsibility. 5

Durkheimian sociology on the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. These scholars have looked at a number of the specific debates and intellectual borrowings between the Durkheimians and their contemporaries. I would like to place those studies within the perspective of an overview of the evolution of the Fifth Section during the period when the Durkheimians were most active. Hubert and Mauss were both appointed to the Fifth Section in 1901. By 1940, with one exception, all the original Durkheimians who would gain positions in the Section had done so, and the ranks had begun to thin through death or retirement. Looking at appointments to academic positions is an admittedly crude measure of influence. However, it seems to suggest some patterns that bear further investigation with more refined measures. Durkheimian sociology scored an early and dramatic success with the appointment of Hubert and Mauss. Rather than signaling a general revolution in religious studies, however, this early success proved to be the exception rather than the rule. For every Durkheimian appointed to a position at the Fifth Section, at least one scholar was appointed who was indifferent or even hostile to the Durkheimian program. Moreover, Durkheimians gravitated toward the "exotic" religions—"uncivilized" peoples, Egypt, Assyria—but they made few inroads into the study of Christianity, Judaism, or the religions of Greece and Rome, the religions most closely identified with French cultural heritage. Many of the same factors that contributed to the early success of the Durkheimians in religious sociology also led to their eventual stagnation. T h e theoretical brilliance that impressed the contemporaries of the Durkheimians alienated not only those with other theoretical orientations but also those who were suspicious of theory altogether. T h e Durkheimian focus on the "elementary forms" of religion, which made their contribution to ethnology so profound, limited their impact on the study of the religions of literate peoples. And the ability of Durkheimians to use the network of personal relationships and mentorship to their advantage depended on an educational system so small at the top that it presented limited opportunities for their successors. After a discussion of how the scope of this study was delimited, I will paint a picture of the Fifth Section in 1900.1 will then sketch early Durkheimian sociology of religion as it was emerging at that time. Lasdy, I will look at the appointments of Durkheimians and selected non-Durkheimians to the Fifth Section.

A Note on Method To reconstruct the evolution of the Fifth Section, I constructed a biographical database with information on everyone who held a permanent position there between 1900 and 1940. Since the number of positions was small (between fifteen and twenty) and the tenure of incumbents long (over twenty-five years on average), the total number of individuals was relatively limited—around fifty. I excluded individuals who served only as substitutes—suppléants—and those who gave cours libres—special courses authorized on a year-to-year basis. These exclusions eliminated at least one bona fide Durkheimian, Robert Hertz, but they excluded non-Durkheimians as well. Information on these individuals came from a variety of sources—obituary notices in the Annuaire of the Fifth Section or the Revue de l'histoire des religions, the biographical dictionaries of French academics compiled by Christophe Charle, and Fournier's biography of Mauss were among the main sources. The composition of the Fifth Section in 1900 is given in Table 1, and the list of individuals appointed between 1900 and 1940 is given in Table 2. I defined a Durkheimian as someone who contributed to the original series of the Année sociologique, which appeared between 1898 and 1913.8 I did not include all those who contributed to the subsequent incarnations of the Année, because the degree of substantive and methodological agreement implied by such contributions decreased after World War I. Within the first series, I included only individuals who contributed to the section on sociologie religieuse. I included all such individuals, regardless of the number of contributions. This meant including some marginal contributors, such as Charles Fossey and Alexandre Moret, who contributed only one review apiece. It also meant excluding some individuals clearly more committed to the Durkheimian program, such as Marcel Granet, a student of Dürkheim who taught the history of Chinese religion in the Fifth Section for a number of years but who did not contribute to the first series of the Année. Nevertheless, it is a principle of Durkheimian method to define the object of study with clearly identifiable external characteristics and then to study systematically the phenomena so defined. That is what I have tried to do. The list of Durkheimian sociologists of reli-

8 Yash Nandan, The Durkheimian School: A Systematic and Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1977); Philippe Besnard, "The 1Année sociologique' Team," in The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology, edited by Philippe Besnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1139.

Table 1. T h e Composition of the Fifth Section, 1900-1940' Position"

1900

1910

1920

1930

1940

History of the Christian Church History of Dogma History of Canon Law Christian Literature

Réville,J Réville, A Esmein de Faye Sabatier Picavet

Lacroix Alphandéry Esmein de Faye Monceaux Picavet

Lacroix Alphandéry Généstal de Faye Monceaux Picavet

Goguel Alphandéry Généstal Puech Monceaux Gilson

Goguel Vignaux Le Bras Puech

iii —.vi

—

Koyré Grabar

Relations of Philosophy and Theology History of Religious Ideas in Modern Europe*' Byzantine Christianity Millet Religions of Greece and Rome Berthelot Primitive Religions of Europe"' — Religions of Israel and of Vernes Occidental Semites Talmudic and Rabbinic Judaism Levi I Islam and Religions of Arabia Derenbourg Religions of Egypt Assyro-Babylonian Religion'" Religions of India

Religions of the Far East Religions of Indochina" Religions of Pre-Columbian America"" Religions of Uncivilized Peoples History of Moral Ideas""1 Comparative Mythology"'1'

Millet Toutain Hubert* Vernes

Millet Toutain Hubert* Vernes

Millet Toutain Marx*

Lévi I Huart

Lévi I Huart

Amélineau

Amélineau

Moret*

Lévi S Foucher

Fossey* Lévi S Foucher

de Rosny

Chavannes

Fossey* Lévi S Foucher MassonOursel Granet

Raynaud

Raynaud

Raynaud

Liber Liber Gaudefroy- Massignon Demombynes Moret* Sainte Fare Garnot Fossey* Nougayrol Lévi S Mus, Paul Foucher MassonOursel Granet Haguenauer Mestre —xi Raynaud

Marillier

Mauss*

Mauss*

—

—

—

viii

Mauss* Bayet

VÎ

Marx* Virolleaud

Mauss* Bayet Dumézil

i Source: EPHE 1968. " Name of position at time of creation, unless otherwise noted. Positions often changed names over time. Minor changes are ignored. If the position did not exist in 1900, the year of creation is indicated in parentheses, i" Vacant 1934-1943. iv Consolidated into History of Dogma in 1932, when Gilson left for the Collège de France. * Created in 1931. " Vacant 1934-1943. ™ Created in 1901. ' Durkheimian. ™ Vacant 1926-1936. » Created in 1906. » Created in 1931. " Originally part of Religions of the Far East. Raynaud was appointed as an adjunct of de Rosny in 1894, and the position became autonomous in 1908. "i Vacant 1934-1954. Created in 1923. Created in 1935.

Table 2. New appointments to the Fifth Section, 1900-1940' Date

Individual

Position" Religions of Pre-Columbian America'" Primitive Religions of Europe Religions of Uncivilized Peoples Religions of Greece and Rome Assyro-Babylonian Religion History of Doctrines and Dogma Religions of the Far East History and Organization of the Catholic Church Since the Council of Trent Christian Literature and History of the Church Islam and Religions of Arabia History of Canon Law Religions of the Far East Religions of Egypt Relations of Philosophy and Theology History of Moral Ideas Religions of Israel and of Occidental Semites Islam and Religions of Arabia

1900 1901 1901 1903 1906 1907 1908 1908

Feb Jul Dec Jun Dec Jan Apr May

13 15 5 29 8 4 3 15

Raynaud, Georges Hubert, Henri* Mauss, Marcel* Toutain, Jules Fossey, Charles* A1phandéry, Paul Chavannes, Edouard Lacroix, Léon

1908 1909 1913 1913 1918 1921 1923 1924 1927

Dec Mar DecDec Dec Dec Sep May Jun

24 22 3 6 2 16 11 8 1

1927 1927 1927 1927 1929 1931 1931 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1937 1938 1938 1940

Jun Aug Aug Oct Dec Aug Dec Dec Aug Nov Mar Nov Sep Feb Sep Nov Nov Dec

1 23 23 1 30 20 7 7 18 13 30 6 10 27 10 21 21 25

Monceaux, Paul Huart, Clément Généstal, Robert Granet, Marcel Moret, Alexandre* Gilson, Etienne Bayet, Albert Loisy, Alfred Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Maurice Masson-Oursel, Paul Goguel, Maurice Marx, Jean* Liber, Maurice Puech, Henri-Charles Le Bras, Gabriel Mestre, Edouard Koyré, Alexandre Elisséev, Serge Massignon, Louis Vignaux, Paul Dumézil, Georges Virolleaud, Charles Mus, Paul Grabar, André Sainte Fare Garnot, Jean Nougayrol, Jean Haguenauer, Charles

Religions of India Early Christianity and New Testament Primitive Religions of Europe Talmudic and Rabbinic Judaism Christian Literature and History of the Church History of Canon Law Religions of Indochina History of Religious Ideas in Modern Europe History of the Religions of Japan Islam and Religions of Arabia History of Doctrines and Dogma Comparative Mythology Religions of Occidental Semites Religions of India Byzantine Christianity and Christian Archaeology Religions of Egypt Assyro-Babylonian Religion Religions of the Far East

' Source: EPHE 1968. " Name at time of creation, unless otherwise noted. Names may vary somewhat from positions in Table 1 because of name changes over time. "' See Table 1, note 9. * Durkheimian.

gion thus constructed is given in Table 3, along with the number of reviews they wrote for the section on sociologie religieuse. From this information one can construct snapshots of the Fifth Section at different points in time (Table 1). Positions are arranged by religion, roughly from West (Christianity) to East (Religions of the Far East), with some miscellaneous and comparative positions placed at the end. T h e incumbents of the positions at ten-year intervals are listed below the appropriate year. Durkheimians are indicated with an asterisk. A comparison of these tables reveals that Durkheimian sociologists of religion occupied a substantial place in the Fifth Section by 1910 (three of nineteen positions, or 15.8%) and held on to that place at least through 1930 (four of twenty positions, or 20%). T h e number falls by 1940, but that is to be expected, since individuals entering their careers before World W a r I could be expected to be retiring twenty-five to forty years later. Nor do the data account for secondgeneration Durkheimians—the students of Hubert, Mauss, and others who would carry on at least some aspects of the Durkheimian tradition (for example, Henri Jeanmaire was a student of Mauss who would eventually gain a position in the Fifth Section in the Religions of Ancient Greece—but not until 1943). T h e exception is J e a n Marx, a student of Hubert who succeeded his teacher upon the latter's untimely death in 1927. But while the place of Durkheimians is substantial, it is never overwhelming—indeed, it never rises above twenty percent. While five Durkheimians are appointed to the Fifth Section during the period in question, twenty-five non-Durkheimians gain access. T h e clustering of Durkheimians in certain areas, and their virtual exclusion from others, is also clear. Durkheimians are appointed to chairs in "primitive" (Hubert, Mauss, Marx) or ancient Middle Eastern (Fossey, Moret) religions. Christianity, by contrast, remains a Durkheimian-free zone, as do the other religions of theJudaeo-Christian tradition Judaism and Islam). T h e tables suggest the extent and pattern of Durkheimian penetration into the Fifth Section, but to understand the reasons it is necessary to go behind the tables to examine the membership and intellectual commitments of the Fifth Section in greater detail.

The Fifth Section in 1900 T h e Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes was a relatively recent institution for a relatively recent field of study. T h e Ecole itself dated only from 1868. It was founded toward the end of the Sec-

Table 3. Durkheimians who wrote reviews in the Religious Sociology section of the Année sociologique' Individual

No. Reviews

Individual

No. Reviews

Mauss, Marcel* Hubert, Henri* De Félice, Philippe Dürkheim, Emile Hertz, Robert Lévy, Isidore Marx,Jean* Bianconi, Antoine Reynier,Jean David, Maxime Chaillié, René

357 280 16 15 12 9 7 6 5 4 3

Fauconnet, Paul Beuchat, Henri Doutté, Edmond Gelly, Georges Jeanmaire, Henri* Stickney, Joseph Davy, Georges Fossey, Charles* Laskine, Edmond Moret, Alexandre* Poirot,Jean

3 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1

1

Source: Nadan, The Durkheimian School. ' Held a permanent position at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.

ond Empire as part of an effort to reform higher education by adding to the existing faculties, which functioned largely as arenas for public lectures, sources for professional degrees, and pools of baccalaureate examiners, an institution dedicated to the advanced training of scientists and scholars. 9 The school was called "practical" not because its graduates would pursue applied research but because it would provide "along with theoretical teaching, exercises that can fortify and extend it." 10 At its inception the Ecole contained Sections in mathematics, physics and chemistry, natural history and physiology, and "philological and historical sciences." Unlike the faculties, the Ecole Pratique had no set admission requirements, such as age, previous degrees, or even French nationality. Admission was at the discretion of the Director of each section. The duration of studies was normally three years, although in practice students remained as long as they needed to acquire proficiency in the studies they pursued. The Ecole Pratique granted a certificate of studies, which carried prestige but no official status, unlike the state examinations that led to the agrégation and doctorate. The Ecole filled a niche between the faculties and the Collège de France, which was also dedicated to research but which

9 "Décret relatif à la création d'une Ecole pratique des hautes études," in EPHE 1968, p. 283. 10 "Décret relatif à la création d'une Ecole pratique des hautes études," in EPHE 1968, p. 283.

offered only public lectures, not closed seminars or laboratories. Even as the faculties developed into universities during the Third Republic (1870-1940), the Ecole Pratique flourished as a center of research and specialized training. T h e Fifth Section, devoted to the sciences religieuses, was created in 1886. In some ways, it was merely a logical extension of the concept of the Ecole Pratique to the growing field of religious studies. With the introduction of Higher Criticism into France by Ernest Renan and others in the mid-nineteenth century, an increasing number of French scholars became interested in the historical and philological study of the Bible and of religion in general." Scholars and positions were scattered among different disciplines and institutions, including the Fourth Section of the Ecole Pratique. Official recognition for religious studies as a distinct discipline came with the establishment of a chair in the history of religions at the Collège de France in 1880. T h e creation of the Fifth Section was in part the consolidation and consecration of these trends. However, the Fifth Section was also caught up in the religious politics of the Third Republic, during which separation of church and state was gradually and painfully established. In the context of a government that was attempting to establish the principle that public education should be secular, the continued existence of publicly supported Catholic faculties of theology came to be seen as anomalous, and they were abolished in 1885. T h e new Section of the Ecole Pratique was explicitly proposed as a replacement for the defunct schools of theology. It was both an acknowledgment of the importance of religion as a cultural phenomenon and an assertion that public education in religion should be conducted from a secular perspective. 12 This made it a model for anticlerical republicans but suspect to the Catholic Church. Not all religious groups found the new Section distasteful, however. M a n y of the scholars appointed to the new Section were liberal Protestants, whose disproportionate impact on the intellectual and political life of the Third Republic has often been noted. 1 3 O f the seventeen professors of the Section in 1900, at least five were

11 François Laplanche, "La méthode historique et l'histoire des religions: Les orientations de la Revue de l'histoire des religions," in La traditionfrançaise,pp. 85-105; Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France. 1L ' EPHE 1968, pp. vii-viii; Jacques Béguin, "Religion et laïcité à l'E.P.H.E.," in Cent ans de sciences religieuses, pp. 15-19. ,;i Robert Mandrou, et al., Histoire des protestants en France (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1977); Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice.

Protestant—Albert Réville (1826-1906); his son J e a n (1854-1908); Auguste Sabatier (1839-1901); Maurice Vernes (1845-1923) and Emile Amélineau (1850-1915). They tended to dominate the positions in the study of Christianity and even Judaism, although Amélineau, in Egyptian religion, was an exception. Despite some significant differences that occasionally led to conflict, these Protestant scholars shared some core orientations that characterized their scholarship. They were liberals in that they wanted to reconcile religion with the findings of modern science. This meant that they rejected most doctrine, such as a belief in miracles, that contradicted the ideas of laws of nature. They did hold on to the idea of free will, however. The Révilles in particular were associated with a brand of Dutch Calvinism known as Arminianism, which stressed free will over predestination. They admired the work of Dutch Protestant historians of religion such as C. P. Tiele and Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, who were prominent in the field of the history of religions. 14 They also downplayed the liturgical and clerical manifestations of religion in favor of the believer's inner experience. In the definition of Albert Réville, "Religion is the determination of human life by the sentiment of a link uniting the human spirit to the mysterious spirit of which he recognizes the domination over the world and over himself and to which he loves to feel himself united." 13 This fundamental religious sentiment was the same in all religions, but it expressed itself in many ways throughout history, accounting for the great diversity of religions in the world. As civilization developed, the religious sentiment refined itself and discarded the external trappings with which it was initially encumbered. Since these scholars shared the nearly universal assumption that Christian Europe represented the pinnacle of civilization, they tacitly assumed that religion expressed itself most purely in Europe. As Protestants, they held that the primary accomplishment of the Reformation had been to divest religion of the ceremonial and hierarchical baggage of the Catholic Church. In general, the history of religions was the story of this progressive refinement. This orientation was less the result of empirical investigation than an a priori assumption that was neither hidden nor examined because it fit so well with the tenor of the times. Strenski has analyzed the cryptotheological character of liberal Protestant assumptions as well as the congruence of Protestant assumptions with French republican val-

14

Strenski, Theology and the First Theory ofSacrifice, ch. 3. Albert Réville, Histoire des religions, vol. 1: Les religions des peuples non-civilisés (Paris: G. Fischbacher, 1883), p. 34. 15

ues, which also stressed individualism and independence from binding religious hierarchies. 1 6 T h e tendency to explain religion in psychological terms was not limited to Protestants. Léon Marillier (1863-1901), who held the chair of the Religions of Uncivilized Peoples, was not a Protestant, but he was convinced that the royal road to religion lay in a convergence of Protestant scholarship, scientific psychology, and anthropology. 17 He had been a student of Sabatier, and when the chair in the Religions of Uncivilized Peoples was created in 1888, Marillier was appointed to fill it. Not everyone at the Fifth Section was happy with Protestant crypto-theology or psychological theory. Even within the Protestant camp, Maurice Vernes objected to the rampant generalizing characteristic of this approach. 1 8 Vernes advocated a much more modest approach to religious studies that confined itself to careful text criticism and archaeological research—to borrow Laplanche's expression, a "prudent empiricism." 19 Jules Toutain (1865-1961) was another scholar who remained suspicious of theorizing. An eminent classicist and archaeologist of Roman antiquities, Toutain was appointed to the Fifth Section in 1898 as a substitute for André Berthelot in the Chair of the Religions of Greece and Rome. 2 0 He was made maître de conferences in 1903 and continued in this position until 1934. His work in the Fifth Section was supplemented by a variety of appointments to governmental bodies involved in the supervision of archaeological sites in France and French North Africa. Toutain advocated the slow, careful description and classification of evidence. He distinguished between the history and the science of religions, placing himself in the former camp and declaring the latter premature. 2 1 He was critical of most of the new anthropological and sociological approaches to religion, whether British, German, or French. He was especially opposed to the comparison of ancient Greek and R o m a n cultures with latterday "primitive" cultures, which he considered too disparate in both

16

Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, ch. 3. Léon Marillier, "Du rôle de la psychologie dans les études de mythologie comparée," Revue de l'histoire des religions 32 (1895): 116-41. O n Marillier, see Jean Réville, "Léon Marillier," Revue de l'histoire des religions 44 (1901): 167-73. 18 Laplanche, "La méthode historique"; Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, ch. 4. 19 Laplanche, "La méthode historique," p. 96. 20 EPHE 1968, p. 147. "Jules Toutain," Dictionnaire biographiquefrançais contemporain, 2nd edition (Paris: Pharos, 1954). 21 Jules Toutain, Les cultes païens dans l'Empire romain, 3 vols. (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1920), vol. 1, pp. ii-iii. 17

time and space to be valid objects of comparison. 22 This orientation towards erudition rather than speculation was an important value in the Fifth Section that served to mute the expression of explictly religious biases. It was part of the ethos of the institution that personal religious beliefs should not intrude on scholarly research. While the Sabatiers and the Révilles insisted that theirs did not, not everyone agreed. Most uncomfortable perhaps with thinly disguised Protestant theology were the Jewish members of the Fifth Section—Israel Lévi (18561939), professor of Talmudic and Rabbinic Judaism, Hartwig Derenbourg (1844-1927), who taught Islam and the Religions of Arabia, and Sylvain Lévi (1863-1935), who was Director of Studies of the Religions of India in the Fifth Section. Strenski has shown how Sylvain Lévi embraced the ritualistic, community-based character of Judaic and Vedic religions as essential, in contradistinction to the Protestant tendency to reject it as superficial. All of these scholars fell between traditional orthodoxy and radical liberalism. 23 They wanted to apply critical and historical methods to the study of Jewish texts, but they felt no desire to belittle traditional practice in favor of a modernized, assimilated Judaism. This was especially evident in their defense of Talmudic Judaism against its denigration not only by overtly anti-Semitic writers but by supposedly neutral scholars. 24 This interpretation of Judaism and of religion in general as a "concrete, socially embodied reality" would be an important influence on the Durkheimians. 25 In sum, the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes was the center of secular religious studies in France at the turn of the century. Its ethos of non-partisan, "scientific" erudition privileged the methods of text criticism, philology, and archaeology, although ethnography and psychology were gaining ground. Underneath the surface of objective research, a variety of philosophical and theological orientations motivated the scholars who made up the Fifth Section. Although one can speak of a prominent Protestant faction, there was enough variety within the Section, and enough overlapping a n d / o r conflicting interests, to make new appointments a matter of some uncertainty and much behind-the-scenes politicking. This

22 Jules Toutain, "L'histoire des religions et le totémisme à propos d'un livre récent," in Etudes de mythologie et d'histoire des religions antiques, edited by Jules Toutain (Paris: Hachette, 1908), pp. 56-80. 23 Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France, pp. 94-95, 129-30. 24 Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France, pp. 104-13. 25 Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France, p. 131.

meant that there was at least some hope that scholars committed to a Durkheimian approach could gain entrance. Durkheimian Sociology of Religion Durkheimian sociology of religion had begun to take form by 1900. Although the methodological and conceptual assumptions of that approach were basically Durkheim's, Strenski makes a convincing case that Durkheimian sociology of religion was a collective creation involving Mauss and Hubert as original contributors rather than passive disciples.26 Their approach was elaborated in the articles and reviews of the Année sociologique, a truly collaborative effort. T h e first volumes included Durkheim's article " O n the Definition of Religious Phenomena," as well as Hubert and Mauss's piece " O n the Nature and Function of Sacrifice." In addition, by 1900 Mauss and Hubert had between them contributed over a hundred reviews to the section on religion. T h e sociology of religion that was beginning to emerge from this collective effort was very different from and even incompatible with the science religieuse practiced by the Protestant members of the Fifth Section. For example, with the The Rules of Sociological Method (1894-95) clearly in mind, Dürkheim declared that to make the study of religion scientific, one had first of all to define it objectively, using external characteristics that distinguish all and only religious phenomena. 2 7 In an implicit criticism of the Protestant school as well as of many evolutionary theories of religion, Dürkheim insisted that the religious phenomena thus defined were all equally religious and equally deserving of systematic study. 28 For the Durkheimians, it is not the case that some phenomena are more religious or more essential to religion than others. T o assert this would be to presume to know the essence of religion from the outset, and this is the negation of science, which starts with facts and gradually elucidates laws. Dürkheim rejects several definitions of religion dear to the Fifth Section Protestants, including the one by Albert Réville discussed above. Dürkheim contests both the idea of mystery, which he maintains is absent from many religions, and the idea of God, which is also absent most notably from Buddhism. 29 He is not above citing Fifth

26

Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France, ch. 5. Emile Dürkheim, "De la définition des phénomènes religieux," in Journal sociologique, edited by Jean Duvignaud (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969), pp. 140-41. Originally published in the Année sociologique 2 ( 1899): 1-28. 2li Dürkheim, "De la définition des phénomènes religieux." 2!l Dürkheim, "De la définition des phénomènes religieux," pp. 145-48. 27

Section scholars and their mentors for his own purposes. Thus, he cites Tiele for evidence that Hindu holy men considered themselves superior to gods and Abel Bergaigne on the direct effectiveness of Brahmanic sacrifice without divine intervention. 30 However, he opposes defining religion in terms of a religious sentiment or even by individual beliefs alone. Dürkheim insists that religious practice is as universal as religious belief and hence must be included in the definition. He setdes on the well-known definition of religious phenomena: "The phenomena called religious consist of obligatory beliefs connected with definite practices related to the objects given in these beliefs."31 The obligatory character of religious beliefs means that they are necessarily social in origin. Suicide rates are explained by how well given types of societies integrate individuals, not by the circumstances surrounding specific cases. Hubert and Mauss adopt the same style of definition in their essay on sacrifice, their first major contribution to the sociology of religion. They too begin by seeking a definition that would distinguish all and only acts of sacrifice. However, they do not do so by attempting to survey all known sacrifices; instead, they analyze in depth two cases— Hebrew and Vedic religions. They justify this by arguing that broad comparisons are necessarily superficial, usually arbitrary, and often misleading. They criticize Robertson Smith, whose theory of totemic communal sacrifice had raised an acute controversy within religious studies, for making just this mistake: The error of R. Smith was above all an error of method. Instead of analyzing in its original complexity the Semitic system of ritual, he fixed on grouping the facts genealogically according to the analogical relations he believed he perceived among them. This is incidentally a common trait among English anthropologists, who are above all preoccupied with accumulating and classifying documents.32 Hubert and Mauss prefer to analyze two well-known cases in detail and generalize from them. In this they were following another of Durkheim's rules, which privileged the crucial experiment over the exhaustive inventory: It is not true that science can institute laws only after having reviewed all the facts they express, and can establish classes only after having described, in their entirety, the individuals they comprise. The true experimental method tends rather to substitute for common sense 30

Dürkheim, "De la définition des phénomènes religieux," pp. 150, 152. Dürkheim, "De la définition des phénomènes religieux," pp. 159-60. 32 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, "Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice," in Mélanges d'histoire des religions, 2nd edition (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1929), p. 7. 31

facts...decisive o r crucial facts, w h i c h , by themselves a n d i n d e p e n dently of their n u m b e r , h a v e scientific value a n d interest, as Bacon h a s p o i n t e d out. 3 3

This emphasis on generalizing from a few good facts would characterize the Durkheimian approach to sociological analysis, and it set them apart from the Fifth Section Protestants in two ways. Albert Réville's Religions des peuples non-civilisés, for example, is just such a superficial survey of all the world's societies. At the other extreme, the painstaking epigraphic work of the classicists and archaeologists in the Fifth Section rarely led to any generalizations at all. Like Dürkheim, Hubert and Mauss conclude that sacrifice is a social phenomenon. This is the only explanation that can account for the universality and power of sacrifice in human culture. Indeed, the primary function of sacrifice is to reinforce the social bonds that link members of a society. Thus, they too reject explanations of sacrifice that derive it from psychological impulses or primitive world views. French scholars of the Fifth Section play ambivalent roles in these earliest products of Durkheimian religious sociology. They are occasionally cited as sources and sometimes pilloried for their methodological or conceptual shortcomings. For example, Mauss wrote a review for the Année sociologique of a long critical essay by Marillier on totemism in the evolution of religion. Marillier was highly critical of the abuse of the concept of totemism, and Mauss thanked him for bringing a dose of criticism to the topic. "This critique of current theories of totemism is very useful; it was urgent and the great erudition of the author gives it a high authority." 34 However, Mauss added that he thought Marillier went too far in denying any validity to the concept of totemism. Mauss maintained in typical Durkheimian fashion that a more careful definition of the concept might bring some unity to the field of primitive religion. By implication, Marillier had not done so. Mauss also reviewed Sylvain Lévi's La doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas. This review was in general highly favorable, which is not surprising, given that Mauss admitted that he had "drawn gready upon it" in his own work on sacrifice. 35 Mauss found that Lévi had focused on a single well-documented case that he was able to analyze in depth. As with Marillier, Mauss praises the great eruditon of the

33 Emile Dürkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique, 21st edition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983), p. 79. 34 Marcel Mauss, "Review of La place du totémisme dans l'évolution religieuse, by L. Marillier," Année sociologique 2 ( 1899): 203-04. 35 Marcel Mauss, "Review of La doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas, by Sylvain Lévi," Année sociologique 3 (1900): 293-95.

author. However, he is not without criticism. He thinks that the author's "method, too narrowly historical, has done him a disservice." 36 He also criticized the method of presentation. By remaining essentially a work of philology that concerned itself mostly with the presentation and interpretation of texts, he could offer no sustained explanation of the phenomena beneath the text. More seriously, by focusing on the texts, the author separated theology from ritual, which are in reality indissoluble. Finally, Mauss wrote a curious review of Sabatier's Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion d'après la psychologie et l'histoire. Mauss acknowledged that, as a self-declared work of philosophy, Sabatier's book could not be faulted for straying from science. Nevertheless, Mauss summarized it at length, recapitulating liberal Protestant ideas about the primacy of inner experience in religion and the gradual purification of religion through history. Mauss criticized Sabatier for holding that prayer was the whole of religion and that it was always an expression of the individual soul. But Mauss held that the book was of interest to sociologists for two reasons. One was that it constituted a primary source on the state of liberal Protestantism. The other was that, despite himself, Sabatier had stumbled upon an important sociological generalization: namely, that "the constitution of a Church was made necessary by the propagation of an international and individual set of beliefs."37 In the context of the Année sociologique, this review can only be interpreted as subtly ironic. Mauss is in effect highlighting the features of liberal Protestant scholarship and suggesting that their proper sphere is philosophy or theology rather than science. Any substantive contributions they might make would be more-or-less accidental. These three reviews constitute the sum total of reviews of Fifth Section scholarship in the religion section of the first three issues of the Année sociologique, out of a total of 127. The paucity of references to Fifth Section scholars is striking compared to the wealth of citations of English and German writers. Several explanations have been offered for this lack of attention. Nielsen points to the opposition between the Durkheimians and the whole approach for which Sabatier stood. 38 This, however, does not explain why, given the prodigious output of the Fifth Section, the Durkheimians missed so many opportunities to lambaste their enemies. Strenski suggests that the relative kid-glove 36

Mauss, "Review of La doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brāhmanas," p. 295. Marcel Mauss, "Review of Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion d'après la psychologie de l'histoire, by A. Sabatier," Année sociologique 1 (1898): 171-76. 38 Nielsen, "Auguste Sabatier." 37

approach was part of a strategy to muffle criticism until after Mauss and Hubert gained positions in the Fifth Section, for which they would obviously depend upon the membership. 3 9 Strenski makes a convincing argument, but it does not explain why the neglect of Fifth Section scholarship continued after Mauss and Hubert were safely ensconced. T h e Fifth Section continued to be almost completely absent from the Année sociologique through the end of its pre-World War I run in 1913. T h e notable exceptions were the reviews Hubert and Mauss wrote of their own works, which is hardly to the point. T w o other considerations may also have played a role in this neglect. O n e was simply that the members of the Fifth Section were not studying the kinds of religious phenomena in which the Durkheimians were interested. At the same time that Dürkheim became interested in religion, he also developed the conviction that the fundamental aspects of religion could best be clarified by studying the so-called "elementary forms" of religion in simple societies. Hubert and Mauss followed him in this conviction, which led all of them to concentrate on ancient religion and contemporary non-literate societies. Hence their voracious appetite for the ethnographic studies of British and German anthropologists. In the Fifth Section, Marillier was the only specialist in "uncivilized" peoples, and he did no fieldwork. T h e other consideration had to do with the definition of what was to be included in the Année sociologique. In the preface to the first volume, Dürkheim made it clear that he would exclude two kinds of work—those that were too philosophical and those that were too historical in certain ways. O n the philosophical end of the spectrum, Dürkheim stated that to be included in the Année, a work would have to acknowledge the basic principle that there exist "laws that reflection, methodically employed, can discover." 40 Without excluding all contingency, works would have to assume that "social phenomena are linked according to relations that are intelligible and accessible to scientific investigation." 41 This might exclude the kind of crypto-theological works favored by the Fifth Section Protestants. A more likely filter was the historical end of the spectrum. Dürkheim excluded the individual as such from the pages of the Année sociologique. By this he meant particularistic history such as the lives of individuals or even groups, "in a word, all that is biography either of 39 Ivan Strenski, "Durkheimians and Protestants"; Ivan Strenski, Theologt and the First Theory of Sacrifice, ch. 5. 40 Emile Dürkheim, "Preface," in Journal sociologique, p. 34. 41 Dürkheim, "Preface," m Journal sociologique, p. 35.

individuals, or of collectivities."42 This could and did exclude much of the historical spadework of the Fifth Section. Although the scholars of the Fifth Section did not figure prominently in the work of the Durkheimians, they were nevertheless important in several ways. As Nielsen and Strenski have pointed out, Sabatier and the other Fifth Section Protestants were strong negative examples for the Durkheimians. 43 They defined themselves in opposition to this school. More positively, Hubert and Mauss both studied at the Fifth Section, and Strenski has shown how the non-Protestant faculty—Sylvain Lévi in particular—left their mark on the young scholars. Mauss himself declared that Lévi gave a "new direction" to his studies.44 Although he did not say exacdy what that new direction was, we can make some inferences from the writings that came out of this. For one thing, Lévi seems to have broken Mauss of any lingering fondness for superficial generalization and forced him into the careful, focused analysis of specific texts characteristic of historical and philological work in nineteenth-century France. Strenski follows Mauss in claiming that this penchant was a residue of Mauss's early training in philosophy, and there is truth to this assertion. 45 However, the tendency to generalization was also characteristic of the anthropological study of religion, and Mauss's historicist training seems to have reinforced his distrust of broad statements about laws of human development based on a superficial comparison of widely divergent phenomena. Hubert and Mauss's emphasis on ritual over myth in the definition of religion stems in part from Lévi, who upheld the primacy of ritual over myth in an ongoing controversy within the community of Sanskrit scholars. 46 Lévi believed that religion should be studied as a socially embodied set of practices rather than as an abstract set of beliefs.47 This almost certainly reinforced the Durkheimians' own belief in the need to study religion as a social phenomemon. And Strenski argues that Lévi was also the source for the Durkheimian position that the sacred functioned to create and transmit a kind of energy to believers. This energy was the force of society.48 In his inaugural lecture in the chair of the Religions of Uncivilized Peoples, Mauss would praise Marillier's careful critique of ethno42

Dürkheim, "Preface," in Journal sociologique, p. 35. Nielsen, "Auguste Sabatier"; Strenski, "Durkheimians and Protestants"; Strenski, Theology and the First Theory ofSacrifice. 44 Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France, p. 139. 45 Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews ofFrance, pp. 139-41. 46 Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France, pp. 141-44. 47 Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews ofFrance, pp. 132. 48 Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews ofFrance, p. 132. 43

graphie reports and claimed that the example of his teaching was a true inspiration to him.4·' Moreover, unlike many philologists, Marillier, according to Mauss, went beyond the critique of texts to the critique of facts. While this may be in part an effort to find something nice to say about one's deceased predecessor in a context in which eulogy was expected, it is also a genuine tribute from one armchair ethnographer to another. T h e ability to assess data about distant peoples recorded by a wide variety of observers was absolutely essential to the kind of ethnography Mauss would practice in his early career, and he learned it from Marillier. This was a kind of validation that Mauss could not get from the study of Sanskrit with Lévi. At least one other substantive element of Marillier's teaching also seems to have affected Mauss—namely, Marillier's vigorous critique of totemism. It is the one positive contribution Mauss cites in his inaugural lecture, and Mauss also mentioned it in his review of Marillier for the Année sociologique.50 A reference to the same article appears in Hubert and Mauss's "Nature and Function of Sacrifice," where they criticize Robertson Smith's theory of sacrifice in part because of its assumption of a close relationship between sacrifice and totemism. According to Robert Alun Jones, Hubert and Mauss were much more skeptical of totemism than was Dürkheim, who made totemism the center of his analysis of early religion in The Elementary Forms.51 It is likely that their reticence stemmed in part from the arguments they learned from Marillier.

Durkheimian Appointments to the Fifth Section Studying at the Fifth Section was important for Hubert and Mauss in another way as well. It made them familiar to the faculty, so that when positions unexpectedly became available in 1901, they could present themselves as candidates who had at least one foot in the door. O n the recommendation of Sylvain Lévi, Mauss taught a course on the religions of India during the 1900-1901 academic year when one of the regular substitutes became unavailable. 52 In 1901, two positions opened up with the deaths of Sabatier in April and Marillier in October. Fournier's account of the process by which Hubert and Mauss gained those positions makes it clear that despite their affifiation with Dürkheim, they

49 Marcel Mauss, "L'enseignement de l'histoire des religions des peuples non-civilisés à l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes," Revue de l'histoire des religions 45 ( 1902): 40-41. 50 Mauss, "Review of La place du totémisme." 51 Jones, "Robertson Smith, Dürkheim, and Sacrifice," p. 196. 52 Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 180.

enjoyed considerable support within the Fifth Section.53 Filling a position at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes was a two-step process, although in practice the two steps were often linked. The first decision was whether to keep the same designation or redescribe the position. Sabatier had held the chair of Christian Literature, and neither Hubert nor Mauss would have a chance if the position were not changed. Mauss felt that this was a distinct possibility. He wrote to Hubert, "It is evident that the Protestants are going to present a successor to Sabatier. It appears that the thing has long been prepared and that the inheritance was distributed before the death...." 54 And indeed, at the faculty meeting held to discuss the succession, Vernes and Jean Réville advocated retaining the name of the position. 55 The two names mentioned for the position should it remain Christian Literature were Alfred Loisy and Paul Monceaux. Interestingly enough, both were Catholic, although Loisy was already having enough trouble with the Catholic Church for his modernist views that he would be acceptable to the Protestants. 56 However, a majority of the faculty, including the elder Réville, voted to change the position. The specific reasons for this varied. Sylvain Lévi hoped to appoint Hubert. Marillier wanted a position in AssyroBabylonian religions. Albert Réville expressed the common denominator that united this faction when he stated that he wanted to see the addition of disciplines that were lacking from the Section. 57 The split between père and fils on this issue is evidence that the Protestant bloc was by no means monolithic. Of course, it probably helped that Sabatier's death did not leave the field of Christian Literature vacant. Since its creation in 1886, the chair had been shared by two people, and in 1901 Eugène de Faye still served as maître de conferences,58 Marillier and Albert Réville then proposed the transformation of the chair into Assyro-Babylonian Religions. They had in mind for the position Charles Fossey, a prominent archaeologist who taught a cours libre in the Fifth Section and would eventually gain full positions both there and in the Collège de France. However, Hubert eventually won the day with the support of Sylvain Lévi and others. 59 They successfully

53

Foumier, Marcel Mauss, pp. 179-86. See also Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, ch. 5. 54 Foumier, Marcel Mams, p. 182. 55 Foumier, Marcel Mauss, pp. 183-84. 56 Alfred Loisy, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire religieuse de notre temps, 2 vols. (Paris: Emile Noury, 1932). 57 Ix)isy, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire religieuse de notre temps, p. 184. 58 EPHE 1968, p. 193. 59 Foumier, Marcel Mauss, p. 185.

lobbied to change the position to the Primitive Religions of Europe, Hubert's specialization. Dürkheim celebrated Hubert's appointment as a victory for sociology. 60 Mauss's opportunity came later that same year when Marillier was tragically killed in a marine accident. 61 As a former student of Marillier and an emerging specialist in the religions of "uncivilized" peoples, his appointment was in some ways more straightforwardly obvious than Hubert's. O n the other hand, Hubert's appointment meant that there was already one specialist in "primitive" religions in the Fifth Section. After some debate, the faculty decided to retain the same designation and nominate Mauss for the position. Once again, a Durkheimian candidate received the support of Albert Réville and Tiele. Personal contact probably played a role; Mauss had met Tiele on a study trip in 1896. 62 The most vocal expression of concern came from Toutain, who worried about Mauss's pursuit of "methodology," clearly intended in a derogatory sense. 63 T h e next appointment to the Fifth Section of someone who could be considered a Durkheimian was Charles Fossey in 1906. Fossey ( 1869-1946) has been mentioned above as one of the competitors for the positions of Hubert and Mauss. By 1906 Fossey could be counted as a Durkheimian, because he had contributed a review to the Année sociologique.64 He would be a colleague, friend, and sympathizer of Mauss for the rest of his life.65 However, he only wrote one review for the journal, and his own work was more connected with philology and archaeology than with sociology. Fossey was trained as an Assyriologist in the Fourth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. However, his work focused more on the technical problems of linguistic and archaeological evidence than on interpretation, sociological or otherwise. He participated in several expeditions to sites in the Middle East, and he published a number of manuals, dictionaries, and grammars of Assyrian languages. 66 He did publish several works on Assyri-

60

Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 185-86. J e a n Réville, "Léon Marillier," pp. 167-68. Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 126. 63 Fournier, Marcel Mauss, pp. 188-89. 54 Charles Fossey, "Review of The Babylonian and the Hebrew Genesis, by H. Zimmern," Année sociologique 6 ( 1903): 264-66. 65 See for example the letter from Fossey to Mauss dated 6 November 1944, in Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 752, n. 7. 66 Charles Fossey, La magie assyrienne: étude suivie de textes magiques (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1902); Charles Fossey, L'assyriologie de 1903 à 1907 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1909); Charles Fossey, Manuel d'assyriologie: fouilles, écriture, langues, littérature, géographie, histoire, religion, institutions, art (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1904); Charles Fossey, Textes assyriens et babyloniens relatifs à la divination (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1905). 61

62

an magic and divination, and these works brought him to the attention of both the Durkheimians and the other members of the Fifth Section. He had been mentioned as a candidate as early as 1901, when Marillier and Albert Réville proposed the position in AssyroBabylonian Religions. The next opportunity to create such a position arose in 1906, and because it was a new position that did not threaten anyone else's territory, Fossey was easily appointed. His victory, however, was less a triumph for Durkheimian sociology of religion than for unobjectionable erudition in a hitherto unrepresented field. Alexandre Moret (1868-1938) is another example of someone attracted to the Durkheimian team from other disciplines. Though trained as an Egyptologist, he was attracted to Durkheimian sociology. More of a synthesizer than an archaeologist, from his early career he showed a historical and sociological interest in Egyptian civilization. 67 He became intrigued with the possibility of a totemic phase of Egyptian society as an explanation for some of the features of Pharaonic monarchy. He contributed a small number of reviews to the first and second incarnations of the Année sociologique, but more significant was his collaboration with another Durkheimian—Georges Davy—on an ambitious book entitled From Tribe to Empire: Social Organization among Primitives and in the Ancient East.68 Moret had taught in the Fourth Section since 1899, and in 1918 he succeeded the Protestant Amélineau in the chair of the Religions of Egypt. Thus by 1925 Durkheimians occupied four of eighteen positions in the Fifth Section. In the meantime, a number of other positions were filled that did not go to Durkheimians. Some went to scholars who clearly practiced or sympathized with the Protestant approach. For example, upon the death of Albert Réville, the chair of the History of Dogmas went to his former student Paul Alphandéry (1875-1932), a medievalist who continued the psychological approach favored by his mentor. 69 Alphandéry also worked closely as co-editor of the Revue de l'histoire des religions with Jean Réville until the latter's death in 1908, upon which Alphandéry became principal editor. Jean Réville's replacement in the chair of Christian Literature was Paul Monceaux (1859-1941),

67

Alexandre Moret, Au temps des Pharaons (Paris: A. Colin, 1908); Alexandre Moret, Du caractère religieux de la royauté pharaonique (Paris: Leroux, 1902); Alexandre Moret, Le Ml et la civilisation égyptienne (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1926); Alexandre Moret, Mystères égyptiens (Paris: A. Colin, 1913); Alexandre Moret, Rois et dieux d'Égypte (Paris: A. Colin, 1911). 68 Alexandre Moret and Georges Davy, Des clans aux empires: l'organisation sociale chez les primitifs et dans l'Orient ancien (Paris: la Renaissance du Livre, 1923). 69 On Alphandéry, see the obituary notices in the Revue de l'histoire des religions 105 (1932): 139-57.

who, though a Catholic, was also sympathetic to the Protestant approach to religious studies. 70 Other positions went to scholars whose education and experience were primarily in other fields. Fossey's appointment could easily fit into this category. Edouard Chavannes (1865-1918) is another example. Chavannes was trained as a Sinologist and, while not a Durkheimian, was interested in the social role of literature in traditional Chinese civilization. 71 When the existing chair of Religions of the Far East and of Indian America was split in 1908, the renamed Chair of Precolumbian Religions remained in the hands of Georges Raynaud, and the Far East went to Chavannes. He collaborated with Sylvain Lévi, another Durkheimian sympathizer, on studies of Buddhism in India. His approach was closer to Durkheim's than it was to that of the Protestants, but he was appointed primarily because of his credentials in Sinology, not because of any particular methodological approach. After the early retirement of Chavannes in 1913, his successor was Marcel Granet (1884-1940). Although he did not contribute to the first series of the Année sociologique, by many criteria Granet could easily be considered a Durkheimian. He was like Mauss a student of Dürkheim, though not nearly as close. Granet attended some of Durkheim's lectures at the Ecole Normale Supérieure between 1904 and 1907. He went on to study with Chavannes in the Fifth Section and became a specialist in Chinese civilization. He brought to the study of China a broad sociological perspective that was already evident in the theses he would publish after World W a r I and would reach a broad audience with his popular books on Chinese Civilization and Chinese Thought.1'2 T h e succession of Chavannes by Granet raises the question of how the Durkheimians fared in replacing themselves. Upon the death of Henri Hubert in 1927, Mauss succeeded in h a v i n g j e a n Marx (18841974) appointed to Hubert's position. 73 Marx was a former student of both Hubert and Mauss, and he also contributed to the Année soci-

70 Charle, Les professeurs du College de France: Dictionnaire biographique, 1901-1939 (Paris: Institut National de Recherche Pédagogique, CNRS, 1988), pp. 182-83. Fournier, Marcel Mauss, pp. 183-85. 71 Paul Alphandery, "In Memoriam—Edouard Chavannes," Revue de l'histoire des religions 79(1919): 368-71. 72 "In Memoriam," Année sociologique, 3d series, 1 (1940-1948): xiii-xiv. Marcel Granet, Coutumes matrimoniales de la Chine antique (Paris: Leroux, 1912); Marcel Granet, Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine (Paris: Leroux, 1919); Marcel Granet, La civilisation chinoise: la vie publique et la vie privée (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1929); Marcel Granet, La pensée chinoise (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1934). 73 Fournier, Marcel Mauss, p. 544, n. 4.

ologique. He would continue Hubert's work on early European civilization and literature, both by helping with the posthumous edition of Hubert's book on Celtic civilization and through his own work on the Arthurian legends. 74 His appointment seems to have raised no objections from other members of the Fifth Section. However, none of the other Durkheimians—Fossey, Mauss, or Moret—were replaced by Durkheimians. In part, this simply reflects the limitations of the criteria used for defining Durkheimians. By the time these individuals relinquished their positions, few contributors to the original series of the Année sociologique were around to be candidates. Subtler criteria might reveal significant influences across generations. However, the case of Mauss's own succession, though it falls just outside the temporal scope of this overview, indicates that such refinement may yield only ambiguous results. In 1941 Maurice Leenhardt (1878-1954) was appointed to the chair of the Religions of Uncivilized Peoples, from which Mauss had retired under the twin pressures of age and Nazi occupation. 75 Leenhardt was a student of Mauss who incorporated sociology into his ethnographic study of the indigenous peoples of Melanesia. He was thoroughly familiar with the work of Durkheimians on religious sociology. He never contributed to the Année sociologique, so he does not count as a Durkheimian for the purposes of this study. However, even with a more generous definition of Durkheimian, it would be difficult to bring Leenhardt into the fold. Leenhardt was a Protestant missionary with a quarter-century of field experience before he came to the Fifth Section in the early 1930s. He was also as much a colleague as a student of Mauss, bringing a wealth of firsthand experience that Mauss lacked. He almost immediately began teaching part of Mauss's classes at the Fifth Section, so that by the time he replaced Mauss he was already practically the incumbent of the chair he assumed. Most important, Leenhardt was a deeply religious individual and an independent thinker who, though indebted to Dürkheim and Mauss, was also critical of many aspects of Durkheimian sociology. His own approach was more psychological and phenomenological than that of either Dürkheim or Mauss.

74 Henri Hubert, Les Celtes et l'expansion celtique jusqu'à l'époque de la Tène (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1932); Henri Hubert, Les Celtes depuis l'époque de la Tène et la civilisation celtique (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre, 1932); Jean Marx, IM légende arthurienne et le Graal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952); Jean Marx, Les littératures celtiques (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949); Jean Marx, Nouvelles recherches sur la littérature arthurienne (Paris: C. Klincksieck, 1965). 75 Foumier, Marcel Mauss, pp. 728-29. On Leenhardt, see James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Ixenhardt in the Melanesian World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).

Conclusion T h e Durkheimians created a distinctive and powerful paradigm for the sociology of religion. They succeeded in creating an institutional niche in the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes from which they could further develop and propagate that paradigm. More refined criteria than those used in this study would almost certainly show that the influence of Durkheimian sociology of religion was greater than mere numbers would indicate. However, more refined criteria would also likely show that Durkheimian principles were often interpreted in ways that Dürkheim himself would not approve and combined with other approaches that might strictly speaking be considered incompatible. This was because Durkheimian sociology had to compete with other approaches to the study of religion that continued to attract support within the Fifth Section. T h e Durkheimians also encountered the resistance of cautious historicists who resisted the theoretical boldness inherent in the sociological enterprise. As a result, the Durkheimian approach, rather than taking over the field of religious studies in France, became one voice in an evolving dialogue about the role of the social and the psychological in the study of religion, a dialogue that continues to this day.

C H A P r E R EIGHT

D Ü R K H E I M , J U D A I S M AND T H E A F T E R L I F E Ivan Strenski

Toforget a period of one's life is to lose contact with those who then sunounded us Maurice Halbwachs

The past is not dead. It's not even past? William Faulkner

In considering future forms of community, we will not get very far unless we can conceive how individuals and members of communities living in the present have to do with both those in the past and the future. Put otherwise, we will not be able to make satisfactory sense of the form of community we have with the past and future—short of recourse to beliefs in bodily resurrection or personal immortality— until we can conceive how the persons and events of our own day are related to the persons and events in the past. T h e Durkheimians thought about such matters and did so, in some measure, but not exclusively, like some of their Jewish compatriots and fellow-travelers. They also thought about such things like their positivist colleagues. I would like to lay out what the Durkheimian view was and how it echoed Jewish and other nodons of those days. Then, I would like to ask what this may say about both the nature of the Judaism of Durkheim's day as well as about the possible Jewish character of Durkheimian thought. T h e problem of conceiving how the living are related to the dead and to the yet unborn remains one of the primary puzzles of being human. For present purposes, I want to put to one side our relation to the yet unborn and limit myself to questions about relations with the dead and the past, and in particular Durkheim's conception of these, and how they may be related to his supposed Jewishness. Having said 1 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, translated by Francis J . Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper, [1950] 1980), p. 30. 2 Attributed to William Faulkner by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip, "Living in Black History Today (Sigh)," Los Angeles Times, 21 February 1999: M8.

this, we need to recognize that this question is really two questions. First, are questions about the relation of historical periods and events to each other—questions about the nature of the "past." Second, are questions bearing on the relation of individual persons across the life/death boundary, questions about the afterlife, personal immortality, the relation of matter and mind, body and soul, and so on. Let me deal first with how the Durkheimians treated the question of the relation of the present to the past, and then to immortality and the afterlife. But by way of doing so, let me begin with some remarks on the Jewishness of Dürkheim. Was Dürkheim a Jewish Thinker? The main problem in seeing Dürkheim as a "Jewish" thinker has always been that he deliberately fashioned his identity around the universalist ideals of the French Revolution and its secular humanism, rather than in terms of the particularist features ofJewish self-understanding. In this, Dürkheim was like many of his 'Jewish" contemporaries in the academic world of the Third Republic for whom French nationalism crowded out traditional religious or other identities. But having said this, it is also true that Dürkheim himself believed that in principle, "Jewish" traits existed and could form character even in unconscious ways, thus passing on from generation to generation—at least relative to certain environments. Dürkheim notes that Montaigne, for example, "stands out oddly amongst his contemporaries because of a practical cast of his mind (which derives perhaps from his Jewish origins)." Dürkheim is quick to add, however, that Montaigne's Jewish nurture does not insure his inheritance of a collective or social sense—a trait often associated with Jewishness by those who would make such claims. 3 In a glowing tribute to the liberal spirit of European Jewry, exemplified by the early twentieth-century philosopher, Léon Brunschwicg, Emmanuel Lévinas raises this question of the Jewishness of the thought of those of Jewish birth, like Dürkheim, who have transferred their loyalties outside the Jewish circle. Lévinas begins by calling attention to the ironies of the assimilated Franco-Jewish consciousness. As a typical rationalist atheist of the French variety, Brunschwicg dismissed Jewish or any other belief in an afterlife. Indeed, Lévinas reports that Brunschwicg was always tranquil and a bit amused in 3 Emile Dürkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondaiy Education in France, 2nd Fr. edition, translated by Peter Collins (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 289.

contemplating the subject of death, even his own. In a retort to Gabriel Marcel's existential agitation over the afterlife, Brunschwicg observed coyly: " Ί think that the death of Léon Brunschwicg preoccupies Léon Brunschwicg less than the death of Gabriel Marcel preoccupies Gabriel Marcel.'" 4 Put positively, however, Brunschwicg's Franco-Jewish consciousness stood for humanity. Even in his domestic confinement during the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1942, Lévinas notes that Brunschwicg continued to "identify with human conscience," noting remarkably that "we do not find, in his Diary's entries for the whole of 1942, the slightest trace of a specifically Jewish reaction. Brunschwicg is wounded only in his human-conscience." At the same time, Lévinas aífirms that Brunschwicg's universalism was and is something to celebrate, partly because it did not necessarily require him to disown or hate beingjewish. Lévinas tells us that Brunschwicg was a member of the Central Committee of the Alliance Universelle Israelite from well before the war and never tried to forget his origins. But it is perhaps through this that, he represents, even for those who feel they are men only through their Judaism, a profoundly respectable form of successful assimilation (which is so decried, and justly). Assimilation for Brunschwicg proceeded not from betrayal, but from adherence to a universal ideal to which he could lay claim outside of any particularism. 5 This, I have argued in Dürkheim and the Jews of France, was the way it was with Emile Dürkheim as well. More than anything else, Dürkheim loved the "republic," and identified himself totally with her. In dedicating himself to French secular republican values and identity, Dürkheim might be said to have "forgotten" (or attempted to forget) his Jewishness. He lost contact with the self-identified Jews of his youth and did not seek or really reassemble another such self-identified community in their place. He surrounded himself instead with a community devoted to science, known as the Durkheimian équipe or "team," a group of young men equally well identified with the republic. "Only a few" of them, like Dürkheim, were also Jewish by birth, and most of those no longer identified significantly with Judaism or Jewishness. 6 In terms of Judaism, the Durkheimians constituted a community of forgetfulness.

4 Emmanuel Lévinas, "The Diary of Léon Brunschwicg," in his Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hand (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 44. 5 Lévinas, "The Diary of Léon Brunschwicg," p. 43. 6 W. S. F. Pickering, review of Strenski, Dürkheim and the Jews of France, Religion 30/1 (2000): 80. T h e main exceptions to this mle of forgetting their own Jewishness were Durkheimians Emmanuel Lévi, Isidore Lévy and, later, Robert Hertz.

In this creation of a group of scientific collaborators with whom he had the most intense contact throughout his mature life, Dürkheim lives up to the promise of my opening epigram from Maurice Halbwachs' Collective Memory, namely that "To forget a period of one's life is to lose contact with those who then surrounded us." 7 Dürkheim did not hate Judaism or his Jewishness; he simply wished in a way to forget the Jewish circumstances of his own Jewish birth. He "forgot" his Jewishness then by neither observing nor celebrating its essential rites of memory. He, like Brunschwicg, neither denied nor publically criticized Jews and Judaism—and certainly not viciously, as several notable self-identified quintessentially Jewish thinkers of the time—Bernard Lazare and Salomon Reinach, for example—often did. He simply wanted other memories and loyalties to fill his mind and heart and in that way he simply did not want to remember that he was born Jewish. Lévinas however has more to say. He puts the question to us whether this is then the end of the "Jewish" story of so-called assimilated French thinkers like Brunschwicg or Dürkheim? His answer is a resounding "no!" Having duly registered the truth about Brunschwicg's distance from Judaism, Lévinas goes on to claim that the thought of his old friend was profoundly Jewish, in spite of itself. For example, Brunschwicg's independence of thought showed how truly Jewish he was, malgré lui. Adds Lévinas, does he not discover [Judaism's]... essential strains by affirming that at the heart of the Infinite, where the intellect dwells, there is an independent man, master of his fate, who communicates with the Eternal, in the clear light of intellectual and moral action?8 Further, says Lévinas, other elements of Brunschwicg's thoughts strongly echo those of great Jewish thinkers, and therefore make mere coincidence seem unlikely. Lévinas notes that in Brunschwicg's Diary entry of 7 October 1892, he claims that "'one can only work effectively for the future if one wishes to realize it immediately.'" Here surely, says Lévinas, is "the thought of a Jew, a thought echoed in the famous verse by [the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century (1873-1934) Hebrew revival poet, [Hayam Nahman] Bialik: 'And ifjustice exists, it must appear immediately.'" Thus, paradoxically, Lévinas claims that even in Brunschwicg's ignorance ofJudaism ("...Brunschwicg ignores Judaism, since he does not know it...," says Lévinas 9 ) and in his "atheism," developed elsewhere in his thinking, he "is much closer to the 7 8 9

Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, p. 30. Lévinas, "The Diary of Léon Brunschwicg," p. 44. Lévinas, "The Diary of Léon Brunschwicg," p. 44.

O n e God than the mystical experiences and horrors of the Sacred to be found in the supposed religious revival of our contemporaries." 1 0 So, if Léon Brunschwicg and Bialik express the same ideas in practically the same idiom, do we not have the right to conclude that Brunschwicg is actually echoing his classic Jewish predecessor—whether consciously or not? 11 A fortiori, if Lévinas is right about the Jewishness of Brunschwicg's thought, might not something of the same be true about Dürkheim and the Jewishness of his thought—especially since, unlike Brunschwicg, Dürkheim did know a very great deal about Judaism? We will then be on the lookout for parallel passages between Dürkheim and self-identified Jewish authors. O n e is even more tempted to pursue this line of questioning when certain subjects are at issue. O n e such area of life (sic) is that of death, the question of human mortality or immortality, the nature of the afterlife, and the general relation of the present to the past. If some area of life should be susceptible to religious promptings and borrowings from classic traditional sources, it would surely be this area. It is in discussions of the afterlife and the nature of the past that I believe we find discussions by Dürkheim which seem to replicate the kinds of things his observant Jewish contemporaries were saying about the same issues in dedicated Jewish contexts—much as Lévinas hears unwitting Jewish echoes in the otherwise intentionally or consciously non-Jewish thought of Léon Brunschwicg. Let me then turn direcdy to these parallels, and in doing so make bold to test Lévinas' estimate of the unwittingly Jewish nature of the thought of so-called "assimilated" French Jews like Brunschwicg and Dürkheim.

Jewish Parallels? Sylvain Lévi and Jewish Historiography In his presidential "allocution" before the general assembly of the Société des Etudes Juives in 1904, the great Jewish Indologist, Sylvain

10

Lévinas, "The Diary of Léon Brunschwicg," pp. 44-5. I view Lévinas here as articulating a theological position, instead of making a claim about a matter of fact. Namely, he believes that Judaism persists even in those who deny it. As interesting as this position may be, it may in the long run be costly to assert it. If the truth about us is to be found at the level of the unconscious, can we trust our conscious claims about our own nature and identity? What value can we assign them over against those supposedly unconscious aspects of ourselves? What value in particular could we then assign to those who claim openly to be Jews or Jewish thinkers? If the truth of things lies in the unconscious, they might conceivably be mistaken about their own identities! Placing such store in the unconscious or unwitting Jewishness cheapens open and explicit affirmations ofJewishness by Jews themselves. 11

Lévi made what seems a remarkable claim about the nature of the past—it does not die, but rather is the reality of the present: The present is no longer a spontaneous creation—autonomous and independent of the past. It prolongs the past; it continues it and condenses it. It is only the past itself on the way to being transformed.12 For Lévi, this belief gave rise to perhaps simply poetic, possibly mystical, but arguably also earnest and literal, views about the persistence of the generations in Jewish life. Nowhere is Sylvain Lévi's idea of the dead living on in our hearts and minds more beautifully put than in this same allocution to a general assembly of the Société des Etudes Juives. What is more, Sylvain Lévi says there that this life in our hearts and minds is an objective fact, and not just a thing of our subjective memory. Thus, Lévi tells his audience of Jewish scholars that in less enlightened times, Jews would escape the spiritual turmoil and mental stress of persecution by retreating into their libraries and scholarly work. There, they discovered a "dream" world of "eternal calm." These scholars of former ages are "the men who made us," Lévi reminds his fellows. But those self-same dead do not leave us alone, cut off in time and space with little but reverent thoughts to connect us to them. Lévi claims that the old scholars go on actually—and apparently objectively—living within us, indeed initiate intrusions into our lives and, as it were, invade the minds of the living without waiting to be recalled into memory by us: If we lend an ear to those secret voices in our minds [consciences], if we pay heed to those things we do without explicitly wanting to, if we get to the bottom of some of the subtle sources of the inchoate thoughts which play in our brains—we would hear them. We would take them by surprise. While we may believe that by means of history, we live in them, it is actually they who live in us. They continue their history through ours.13 While such things may not be remarkable to hear from the mouth of an observant and at times conservative Jew like Sylvain Lévi, we hardly expect the same from Dürkheim, as indeed we would not from the aforementioned Brunschwicg. Yet in Dürkheim, we do read much the same. In his study of the history of education in France—doubdess Durkheim's best historical work he asks why the study of history is so important. Durkheim's answer, hardly different from that of his respected colleague and associate, Sylvain Lévi, is that the past is 12 Sylvain Lévi, "Allocution to the General Assembly of the Société des Etudes Juives, séance of 24 January 1904," Revue des Etudesjuives 66 ( 1913): ii. 13 Lévi, "Allocution," p. ii.

more real than the present, thus more important to study for understanding society. Says Dürkheim, ...the truth is that the present...is by itself nothing; it is no more than an extrapolation of the past, from which it cannot be severed without losing the greater part of its significance.14 Dürkheim thus felt that past events "continued" into the present in such a way that there was something of a "chain of being" between all events in history stretching back to the distant past. He and Sylvain Lévi, in effect, anticipated the words of William Faulkner that "the past is not dead. It's not even past." 15 Further, speaking in the same idiom as Sylvain Lévi, Dürkheim says that the people of the past in fact "live" in us. Although lacking the poetry of Sylvain Lévi's mention of the old Jewish scholars haunting the mind of their successors, Dürkheim nonetheless also sees the people of the past objectively alive in us. Early in the same work, Dürkheim asks rhetorically: Indeed what do we even mean when we talk of contemporary man, the man of our times? It is simply the agglomeration of those characteristic traits whereby today's Frenchman can be identified and distinguished from the Frenchman of former times. But this cannot really give us a picture of the whole of modern man; for in each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and indeed in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate, since the present is necessarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in the form we have today. It is just that we don't directly feel the influence of these past selves precisely because they are so deeply rooted within us.16 As if to emphasize the importance of this perspective, Dürkheim concludes his history of educational thought in France by repeating and in some ways amplifying his view with talk about the unconscious nature of this indwelling of others in us. How can we fail to realise that we contain within us hidden depths where unknown powers slumber but which from time to time may be aroused according to the demands of circumstances? This extended and expanded view of humanity makes us realise more clearly how impoverished, flimsy and deceptive is the one yielded by direct observation of ourselves; for we must candidly admit that there exists in us something of all these styles of humanity which have historically suc14

Dürkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, p. 15. Attributed to William Faulkner by Haizlip, "Living in Black History Today (Sigh). 1(> Dürkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, p. 11. 15

ceeded one another, even if we are not currendy sensible of the fact. These men of former ages were men like ourselves and it is consequently impossible that their nature should be foreign to us. Similarly, there live in us, as it were, other men than those with whom we are familiar. This proposition is confirmed by the findings of modern psychology, which reveal the existence of an unconscious psychic life beyond that of consciousness: a life which science alone is gradually managing to uncover, thanks to its special methods of investigation. 17 Now, given these remarkable parallel statements about objective immortality, what are we to say about their possible Jewishness? To return to Lévinas' view of Brunschwicg echoing of Bialik, is it not possible that Dürkheim likewise reflects Sylvain Lévi, or at least a Jewish, possibly French Jewish, sensibility which both men shared? Is not Dürkheim himself in fact admitting the very possibility of his own Jewish nurture and past acting upon him, given his talk of unconscious parts of ourselves, of "unknown powers" which "slumber but which from time to time may be aroused according to the demands of circumstances?" Does Dürkheim subscribe to a Jewish agenda articulated by Sylvain Lévi? Can we perhaps speak of a common Jewish "influence" upon either or both men? If there is, I have not found one.

On Jewish Influences in Durkheim's Thought Let us consider "influence" first. When we speak of "influence," several considerations need to be borne in mind. 18 First, to credit someone as an "influence," real similarities need to exist between what the partners in such a relation say. This seems confirmed for the most part in the citations from Dürkheim and Sylvain Lévi. But, however, a second requirement for justifying a claim to "influence" fails. T o wit: there must be awareness of this supposed "influence," and real dependence on the thought of the "influence." Do either Dürkheim or Sylvain Lévi need the precedent ofJewish thought to justify their saying what they did? In Sylvain Lévi's case, given his Jewish audience, he would probably need to assume that his hearers could recognize his claims about the continuous life of the old teachers as acceptable Jewish ideas—or at least acceptable French ideas. In the case of Dürkheim, we would be left with the question of explaining why Jewish claims would have struck a sympathetic chord with him and his

17

Dürkheim, The Evolution ofEducational Thought, p. 330. For a critical discussion of the utility of the concept of'influence' in intellectual history, see Robert Alun Jones, "On Understanding a Sociological Classic," American Journal ofSociology 83 (1977): 279-319; p. 293. 18

reading audience. How did Jewish claims get to be influential when there is so little evidence for this in Durkheim's writings generally? How did they graduate to the level of being so-called "influences"? "Influences" are not then just brute transmissions of information. They contain information which has attained a certain status, a status sufficient to be accepted as something which will guide or thus "influence" thought. Acceptance demands its reason for acceptance. And, these go beyond the mere fact of transmission to the world of meaning in which these authors were situated. T o understand how and why certain claims about the eternity of the past, made by Jews like Sylvain Lévi, would have attained the status of the "influential," we need then to understand the motives, intentions and projects of Dürkheim which made it desirable for them to appropriate Jewish, or even specifically Sylvain Lévi's, notions about the nature of the past. In Durkheim's case, however, although Jews reading him might well be drawn to Durkheim's claims about the eternity of the past by their own Jewish values, it is unlikely that Dürkheim was speaking in particular to French Jews. I say this because, as we will see, the Gentile intellectual and ideological circles in which Dürkheim moved, even though many of their members were positivists a n d / o r atheists, believed as well in the eternity of the past. O n e such Gentile scholar well placed to move Dürkheim toward a vew of the reality and eternity of the past was none other than Fustel de Coulanges. While the coincidences of the statements of Dürkheim and Sylvain Lévi are indeed striking, they do not stand alone. We in fact find the same attitudes expressed in the work of one of Durkheim's most influential teachers at the École Normale Supérieure, the historian, Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges (183089).19 In the concluding paragraphs of the introduction to his classic, La Cité antique, Fustel de Coulanges sounds very much like the Dürkheim of The Evolution of Educational Thought paying his debts to the living past. Fortunately, the past never completely dies for man. Man may forget it, but he always preserves it within him. For, take him at any epoch, and he is the product, the epitome, of all the earlier epochs. Let him look into his own soul and distinguish these different epochs by what each of them has left within him.20

19 Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 160-7. 20 Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome, translated by Arnaldo Momigliano and S. C. Humphreys (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, [1864] 1980), p. 6.

Although Fustel de Coulanges is often regarded as someone who stressed discontinuity between past and present, this applies to what one can call imagined, mythological or ideological continuity. 21 The polemic burden of his classic treatment of ancient Roman and Greek religion and society, La Cité antique, is precisely to oppose such ideologically based claims of real historical continuity to factually historical ones. But, when it came of real religious traditions, as opposed to ideological ones, Fustel de Coulanges could affirm continuity. For example, in the religious practice of ancient Romans, "they carry within them the authentic marks and the unmistakable vestiges of the most remote ages." 22 In 1864, Fustel de Coulanges thus challenged the received opinion of the followers of the revolutionary tradition that one could establish real continuity between the classic past of Rome and Greece and the (present) realities of French republican politics. This is largely a myth. In our system of education, we live from infancy in the midst of the Greeks and Romans, and become accustomed continually to compare them with ourselves, to judge of their history by our own, and to explain our revolutions by theirs. What we have received from them leads us to believe that we resemble them.23 But, this is to believe the mythological rhetoric of a revolution seeking to sever its ties with its Roman Catholic past as if it were fact. In truth, the past of ancient Rome and Greece is "another country," despite what the generation of 1789 and its offspring would like to believe. The Catholic (albeit non-believing) Fustel de Coulanges is in effect exposing the French Revolution's pretensions to real continuity with the ancient pre-Christian world as fraudulent. Thus, adds Fustel de Coulanges, we have "some difficulty in considering" ancient Rome and Greece as foreign nations; it is almost always ourselves that we see in them. Hence spring many errors. We rarely fail to deceive ourselves regarding these ancient nations when we see them through the opinions and facts of our own time.24 21

Jones, The Development ofDurkheim's Social Realism, ψ. 162. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, p. 6. 23 Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, p. 3. 24 Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, p. 3. In particular, Fustel de Coulanges denied that the French Revolution's notion of personal liberty had any sort of ancient classic precedent: "They have deceived themselves about the liberty of the ancients, and on this very account liberty among the moderns has been put in peril. The last eighty years have clearly shown that one of the great difficulties which impede the march of modern society is the habit which it has of always keeping Greek and Roman antiquity before its eyes" (p. 3). 22

Adding a sense of urgency to his reproach are the contemporary political consequences of believing the revolutionary myth: Now, errors of this kind are not without danger. The ideas which the moderns have had of Greece and Rome have often been in their way. Having imperfectly observed the institutions of the ancient city, men have dreamed of reviving them among us.25 Now none of this should blind us to the overarching claim behind Fustel de Coulanges' demythologizing effort that, like Dürkheim, too believed, "the past never completely dies for man." Of course, it might well be that Durkheim's thought about the reality of the past stems from Jewish influences all the same. And, as he said of Montaigne, Dürkheim might think about things because he was raised in a Jewish home and community. It is just that in the present state of knowledge, we cannot determine whether this is true or not. Yet, a case might be made on circumstantial grounds if we take into account the possible opposition—political or otherwise—of the Durkheimians and French Jews to those who held an opposing view about the status of the past. T h e first sector of French society to which Durkheim's affirmation of historical continuity might plausibly have been addressed was the Jacobin or revolutionary tradition as it existed in the politics of his day. Here we can return to the link between Fustel de Coulanges' skepticism of the revolutionary tradition's denial of its own debt to the long history of French Catholicism in favor of a mythical R o m a n past and his belief in the real continuity of real religious traditions. In a spirit congenial to Fustel de Coulanges' claims, Durkheim's The Evolution of Educational Thought shows the same spirit of affirmation toward real historical traditions. Surprisingly, Dürkheim has many good things to say there about the ongoing contribution of the French Catholic past to the formation of modern-day France. 26 Dürkheim approved of the unities of faith and reason, sacred and profane, religion and philosophy achieved by the Catholic middle ages, and indeed sought to "reproduce" them for his own time. 27 Real history cannot be denied—indeed it is unscientific so to do. While a liberal and republican, it is not generally appreciated that Dürkheim general-

25

Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, p. 3 Jones' extensive discussion of Durkheim's appreciation for France's Christian, especially Catholic, past in his The Evolution of Educational Thought is well worth close attention. (Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], ch 2). 27 Jones, The Development of Durkheim's Social Realism, p. 52. 26

ly disapproved of revolutionary social change. 28 Insofar as revolutionary change spells radical breaks with the past, Durkheim's political attitudes here conform to his attitudes to historical continuity. Completing the parallel with Fustel de Coulanges, while in truth a liberal much like Dürkheim, Fustel de Coulanges could sometimes look to be as conservative as scholars such as Robert Nisbet have tried to make Dürkheim out to be. 29 Fustel de Coulanges' dissent from much of the Jacobin party-line of the revolutionary tradition made him easily exploitable by right-wingers in France like Charles Maurras. 30 A second segment of French political and religious society likewise to which Durkheim's views about historical continuity might have been addressed were the French liberal Protestants. While for the most part allied politically with French Jews and the Durkheimians, on certain matters of social policy and public morals, the French liberal Protestants, Jews and the Durkheimians were far apart. I note both the liberal Protestant tendency to theologize public policy about morals and moral education in a Christian direction and, as fierce political, religious, economic and methodological individualists, to resist the societist or collectivist methodological and public policy perspectives pioneered by the Durkheimians. Thus, there existed within the leadership of the Third Republic a liberal Protestant elite who held views of the past greatly at odds with those expressed by Sylvain Lévi and Dürkheim. A prime example of such a figure was a Liberal Protestant intellectual, close to the Third Republic's leading politicians and public intellectuals, Albert Réville. He typified a certain mentality which sought to free France of her past—particularly of course, her Catholic collectivist past and anticipated future. This led Albert Réville to hold what might be called a non-transitive or discontinuous view of historical change. As one stage of historical evolution

28

Steven Lukes, Emile Dürkheim: His Life and Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 322f. 29 Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966). As if Lukes and Pickering had never written a word over the past quarter century, debunking the claim that Dürkheim had any serious debts to the intransigent Catholic theocrats, John Milbank cites Nisbet with approval in his Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 54f. See Lukes, Emile Dürkheim, pp. 196, 474, and especially ch. 1 7 for a summary of Durkheim's ideological orientation. See also W. S. F. Pickering, "Human Rights and the Cult of the Individual: An Unholy Alliance Created by Dürkheim?" in Individualism and Human Rights in the Durkheimian Tradition, edited by W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller, Occasional Papers, No. 1 (Oxford: British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, 1993), ch. 3. 30 Pirn Den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818-1914, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 246.

succeeds another, such as the republic, it leaves the previous, Catholic France, the Empire and such, behind. "What has been, is not; what is, will not be," begins Albert Réville; "this is all that we can affirm," he concludes. 31 T h e present does not "participate" in the past for the likes of republicans like Albert Réville, because he seeks to liberate the present and future from the past. In the context of religious change, J e a n Réville, the son of Albert, affirms his father's belief in historical discontinuity: Doubtless each new degree of spiritual development negates that preceding it.... Monotheism only acquires its value and consciousness of itself in disengaging from its polytheistic context.... In this sense, to abolish is to fulfill.32 In terms of promoting a French Jewish agenda, Sylvain Lévi might have had several reasons for affirming the reality of the past. For one, it supports belief in the reality and continuity of the Jewish community itself-of course a prime value in itself for observant Jews. And, in political and cultural terms, this view of history as gathering the past into the present also functioned to guarantee the contribution of French Jews to French history. It legitimized their place in a time when attempts had been made to separate off the Jews of France from the history of the "real" (sic) French nation. At a certain point, the Durkheimians reacted to anti-Semitic attempts to alienate French Jews from the course of French life and history. T h e main problem with this scenario for linking Sylvain Lévi with Dürkheim lies in Durkheim's apparent disinterest in the integrity and continuity of the Jewish community in France, cherished by an observant J e w like Sylvain Lévi. O n the contrary, part of Durkheim's reaction to the antiSemitism of the end of the nineteenth century was to predict that French Jews were on the way to disappearing as a distinct social entity in France. So, Dürkheim seems to have had other than Jewish reasons for affirming the survival of the past which made him sound, deceptively, like a really Jewish intellectual such as Sylvain Lévi. These reasons seem tied to Durkheim's so-called "sociological realism" and not, of course, to any affinities he might have had with Christianity or some other traditional religion. O n this view, "society" was seen by Dürkheim to be real. But, when Durkheim's thought about the reality of society is characterized as "real," we typically only imagine the society in question as real in the present. I am stressing however that

31

Albert Réville, "Evolution in Religion, and Its Results," Theological Review 12 (1875): 235. 32 Albert Réville, "De la renaissance des études religieuses en France," Essais de critique religieuse (Paris: Cherbuliez, [1859] 1860), p. 388.

Dürkheim also wished to speak of society as existing over time and thus continuously through history. For him, speaking of the reality of the past was also a way to speak of the reality of society on a diachronic axis. What Have "We" to Do With "Them"? While Durkheim's general view of historical continuity and the reality of the past may thus remind us ofJewish thinking, they do not, at least on the historicist grounds from which I operate {pace Lévinas) necessarily confirm him as a Jewish thinker. So, let us try another tack. Perhaps his view of personal immortality—a much more sensitive issue and one at least open to considerations about supernatural being— can provide this link to Judaism? People have disagreed quite sharply about how to conceptualize the fate of the dead. Some have imagined that the dead or their "souls" are not really dead in every sense of the word, but continue to exist at another level of existence. Whether this place beyond death is one of a series, as in the Indian and Pythagorean beliefs about rebirth and reincarnation, or whether it is terminal, as in the Jewish, Christian or Muslim idea of heaven, the status of the dead is assured. While they may be dead in body, they live "in spirit." In effect, they are not really dead. I call this the "spiritualist" position of "objective immortality." 33 At the other extreme, in much of recorded and unrecorded history, others have imagined that the dead are utterly effaced. They are dead and gone, so to speak, vanished without a trace. They are "history," as we tellingly say in these days of casual killing and disdain for the past, conveying thereby our belief in the obliteration and irrelevance of the dead. This, I call the "annihilationist" position. Between these extremes, still others have imagined that while the dead are not literally alive in some other space—the "spiritualist" position of "objective immortality"—they are nonetheless not utterly annihilated either but continue their existence in some form. I distinguish two forms of such immortality—a "subjective" and non-subjective sense. I hesitate to call the non-subjective case "objective" just yet, since I have just used that term for the spiritualist position. In the case of "subjective immortality," individuals are said to be immortal in a figurative or metaphorical way—only in the subjective, individual minds of people. In the non-subjective sense, the dead are claimed

33

Thomas A. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 142.

really to exist in some, not just metaphorical or figurative, way in their offspring, in personal dream and memory, in legend and literature, indeed in all representations of them, or further in the consequences of their actions, such as in shaping social institutions, in affecting the lives and personalities of those with whom they had significant contact, and even in the way the physical and material spaces of their environment were shaped distinctively by them, and so on. Let me call this alternative, "social realism" or "realism" for short. I identify this position with Dürkheim and his school against the more typical characterizations of their view as "positivist." 34 We will see that while Durkheim's position owes much to positivism, as in other aspects of Durkheim's thinking, he represents so radical a revision of positivism that the term no longer arguably applies. In laying out the realist alternative, I would emphasize that I am not speaking of a so-called "figurative" life after death, or a so-called "metaphorical" immortality. Using terms like "figurative" or "metaphorical" to speak of these matters is really just another way of dismissing the reality of individuals surviving annihilation upon death. It is to say at best that it is "as if ' annihilation were not true. But in social realism, it is not "as if' an institution or practice, environment and such had been shaped by the deceased, nor that the legends, stories and memories of the deceased were of someone else, nor that one only pretends that the individuals had been socialized by the deceased. In every case, the deceased had in their ordinary lifetimes really caused certain states of affairs to be, even by the standards of the annihilationist. This claim falls far short as well of the claim spiritualists would have us make, since social realism asserts only that the dead live on in the real effects they have wrought in the real world of social relations and human affairs. Thus, the reality of the dead on the social realist view is not just subjective. What the deceased made during their lives remains what they really and objectively made. Of course, the living center from which these effects emanated—the human person—is empty, and no longer generates effects. But the effects generated remain as long as they continue to exist. In that sense, the person in question lives on. Now, while these achievements may not in all cases be recognized for what they are, and thus not recognized as alive by the living, they have the objective ability so to be recognized. In this way, the continued existence of the dead is "recognized" in the way, say, Ruthenian nationality could be said to be recognized. 35 A real

34 35

Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, pp. 139-40. Timothy Garton Ash, "Hail Ruthenia!"JVézt> York Review of Books 46: 7 (1999): 54.

social substratum beneath the name exists in the way the real social effects of the dead exist. Contrast, for example, the act of "recognizing" or trying to recognize an imaginary nation—a Ruritania—a nation in name only. "Recognition" here means nothing, since no one exists, nothing exists which could be the basis for the consequences of such recognition. In failing to recognize what the dead have done, we can therefore make them just "history"—in effect annihilate their memory. But on realist grounds, lack of recognition is our failure, not theirs. This is just another reason why rituals were so important for the Durkheimians: they maintained the collective memory of the acts of real people. Now, we must inquire whether Durkheim's social realism is Jewish. Jewish Ideas of Immortality Jewish conceptions of the afterlife at once showcase the glorious diversity of Jewish theology as well as serve as a source of bafflement to Christians. This diversity applies of course to matters outside the halakhah or to those matters not governed by the direct teaching of the rabbi of a particular Jewish community, such as for the contemporary Chabad under Rabbi Menachim Mendel Schneersohn. But outside such limits, however valued the opinions of the rabbis may be, they are not binding and a general lack of doctrinal or theological consensus typifies the tradition of the rabbis. Even the towering figure of Maimonides could not succeed against this Jewish essence of refusing to have a theological essence. He tried heroically to lay down what he took to be the fundamentals of Jewish orthodox belief in his famous thirteen principles, for example, the existence, incorporeality, omniscience, eternity, unity and sole worshipfulness of God, reward and punishment after death, the role of the prophets, with Moses as the greatest, the divinity and unalterability of the Torah, the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead. But, even Maimonides could not command consensus on these arguably fundamental articles of Jewish faith. In Jewish theology, contest, conflict and pluralism reign. 36 As to beliefs proper about the afterlife, relatively little importance attaches to them and they vary a great deal. Before the period of the Second Temple, some belief in the spirits of the dead is found. But, Jews generally resisted cults of the dead. Jews further resisted elaborating or even developing ideas of the survival of the dead primarily because of the fear that the dead, as in many other cultures, would 36

Daniel Cohen-Sherbok, "Death and Immortality in the Jewish Tradition," Death and Immortality in the Religions of the World, edited by Paul and Linda Badham (New York: Paragon, 1987), p. 31.

become deified and thus potential rivals to the one God. From the period of the Second Temple, belief in the resurrection of the body appeared among some segments of the Jewish theological population, but this is not accompanied by the belief in the existence of a soul or spiritual essence surviving death. Later, the Pharisees would champion both the belief in a human soul surviving death and in bodily resurrection of the dead—but only for the blessed and not for the damned. However, in keeping with Jewish traditions of dissent and disagreement, even though the pharisaic tradition would become relatively normative well into the middle ages, their opposite party, the Sadducees, would reject survival of death, resurrection and final judgment. However, if we make Jewish ritual practice and the witness of Jewish material culture our main criteria for measuring beliefs about the afterlife then we arrive at a somewhat different conclusion. 37 T h e evidence from archeology points clearly to the fact that Jewish funerary practice conformed closely to those of the host cultures in which Jews found themselves, even if such practices may have been in some tension at times with rabbinic thought. Thus, where beliefs in particular forms of afterlife prevailed in the host culture, Jewish belief and practice often followed. Erwin Goodenough tells us how Jews borrowed from the symbolic imagery of pagan sources about the nature of the afterlife. Or, in the Jewish catacomb in Rome, for example, the peacock had been adopted from Indian sources by the pagans and then by the Jews. There, "it is painted upon an altar with wreaths of Victory upon it...." 38 In the time of Philo, the pagan cupid is found depicted in Jewish burial sites to represent God's love for humanity in promising of immortality. 39 Peter Brown too notes the existence of cults of the dead among Jewish communities of late antiquity, and of the importance of the tombs to the Jewish community. 40 Yet, Brown also emphasizes Christian departures from Jewish practice. Christians "leaned on" the graves of their saints. In Christianity "tomb and altar" were joined as holy graves became sites of public worship; in Judaism "holy graves and the rabbinate drifted apart." 41 In the modern period, two opposed trends have emerged. First, belief in an immortal soul has tended to replace belief in bodily resur37 I particularly thank Professor Richard Hecht, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, for this. 3,1 Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: Summary and Conclusions, vol 12 (New York City: Pantheon Books, 1965), p. 146. 39 Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, p. 145. 40 Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 10. 41 Brown, The Cult of the Saints, p. 10.

rection for both Orthodox and non-orthodox. Belief in resurrection faded as belief in the Messianic restoration waned. Indeed, in the Reform, belief in the immortal soul was seen as a refutation of belief in resurrection. Typical of the Reform's universalist humanist basis for this belief in individual human immortality was their view that humanity shared the divine nature— '"in the Divine nature of the human spirit, which forever finds bliss in righteousness and misery in wickedness.'" 42 Second, and opposed to what we might call a spiritualist view of'human nature, a gradual increase in this-worldliness among certain segments of Jewish theological opinion has come to prevail. In the Reform, this takes the form of the ideal of the dead surviving, as it were perhaps only subjectively, in the living. Souls exist neither in isolation as individuals, nor even as resurrected re-embodied souls. Rather, it is in one's progeny and legacy to the world that one is said to survive death. Likewise, the foundation of the state of Israel has itself become the object of the future hopes of many contemporary devoted Jews. Thus, while there are affinities between the Reform's subjectively realistic conception of immortality being thoroughly human or even materialist or nationalist , we seem a reasonable distance from Durkheim's social realism, because for the Reform, it is chiefly only as if the dead survive in their offspring. Survival is a metaphor, not a statement about social ontology. Dürkheim, however, argued for the reality of society. As such Durkheimian social realism might provide a theoretical basis for a Reformed Jewish view of objective survival had the Reform wanted to avail themselves of it. In this light it is instructive to compare how the later Jewish Reconstructionist American Jewish thinker, Mordecai Kaplan, seems to exploit Durkheimian social realism to make sense of the afterlife in realistic ways. Kaplan thus affirms something rather closer to the Durkheimian social realist position on the afterlife: To limit our perspective on human life to the span of our earthly existence would destroy all values. Insofar as the good we do while we live bears fruit after we are gone, we have a share in the world to come. To be sure, we will not be there to enjoy the good achieved, but to ask that we be, is to refuse to accept the limitations which God places on individual life.43 42

W. G. Plantt, The Growth ofReform Judaism (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1965), p. 34, cited in Cohen-Sherbok, "Death and Immortality in the Jewish Tradition," p. 33. 43 Mordecai M. Kaplan, Questions Jews Ask (New York City: Reconstructionist Press, 1956), p. 181. For Durkheim's influence on Kaplan, see Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, [1934] 1981), p. 333.

Further, in terms of connections with Jewish positions on the afterlife of his own time, it is striking that the two divergent trends in Judaism which characterize the Jewish problematic over the afterlife —one spiritualist, the other materialist—replicate the same opposition in Dürkheim. As we will see, Durkheim's discussions of persons typically concerns itself with the soul or the spiritual essence of persons, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the belief in the real continuity of the past in the present. How "Jewish" then is Dürkheim being in thinking across the entire spectrum represented by modern Jewish thought about the afterlife?

The Durkheimians, Spiritualism and the Supernatural Just what were the dead for the Durkheimians? For at least some of the most prominent Durkheimians, I shall argue that they were more than metaphorically, figuratively, symbolically or even just subjectively immortal, as the positivists proposed. T h e dead lived on in a more robust way as extra-subjective persistent features of their lives, thus making it difficult for us to subsume the Durkheimians as easily to the positivist model as scholars such as Kselman, for example, have asserted. 44 There are several indications that Durkheimian thought is to be read this way. Staying with the matter of personal immortality for the moment, in contrast to the positivists, Marcel Mauss for one, seems to have trod dangerously close to the belief in the kind of objective immortality which was embraced in their later years by the positivists, Renan and Comte, contrary to all the explicit claims of the main lines of their thought up to that time. Marcel Mauss seems to have trod close to Spiritualism, or even to the more extreme Spiritism of an Arthur Conan Doyle, and thus to supernaturalist conceptions of the reality of souls and spirits. In a recently discovered memoir composed in 1930, Mauss reviews his life and career up to that point. After paying tribute to the many losses of members of the équipe fallen in the First World War, Mauss says despite the enormous losses of colleagues

44 Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, pp. 140-3. Whether this is to be interpreted as the Durkheimians supplying a (scientific) theory designed to provide objective grounding for what was for the positivists at best a psychological doctrine is one of the questions driving the argument of this paper. In this light, Durkheimian social realism can be seen as an attempt to provide an objective basis for intergenerational moral responsibility. Quite simply, we only owe debts to the past, if the past is causally agent in the present; we only have obligations to the future if our actions outlive the present moment—and objectively, not merely because we may feel such debts and obligations at one time or another.

sustained in the war that "This team lives and has ever been reborn." What gave Mauss, a severe rationalist and longtime atheist, the confidence to make such claims-even if only meant figuratively? Mauss was after all part of the generation surviving the First World War. Many of their number filled the halls of popular lectures by members of the Spiritist movement. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was, for instance, a leading speaker for Spiritism. One wonders then whether Mauss, and this is the point, even ventured beyond Spiritualism and into the musty realm of Spiritism along with others who grieved so deeply for those lost in the war? One would be tempted to dismiss the literal sense of Mauss' apparent assertion of a belief in immortality and resurrection, or even rebirth as elegiac poetic license were it not for similar claims made elsewhere in his oeuvre. In Mauss' classic The Gift, Lévi-Strauss, for example, complains that Mauss seemed to imbue the phenomenon of gift with (what Mauss at least took to be) Maori supernatural beliefs in a spirit called the "hau."45 Mauss claims that the Maori believe that the inherence of the "hau" in the gift given is the reason the gift is repaid. 46 But at the same time Mauss, in effect, affirms (what at least he represents as) Maori Spiritism by himself asserting that essential to the gift relation is the sense that in giving we give something of our own selves, a portion of our "spiritual essence." The "thing given," says Mauss, "is not inactive. Invested with life, often possessing individuality, it seeks to return to ... its "place of origin"...." 47 Twitting Mauss for his credulity in the face of native beliefs, Lévi-Strauss reproaches his would-be master: "Are we not faced here with one of those instances ... in which the ethnologist allows himself to be mystified by the native?" 48 But having dangled this tempting morsel before you, I must confess not being able to progress much further in establishing that Marcel Mauss on occasion seemed to give evidence of a belief in the immortality of the soul and the existence of spirits independent from the body. Had he believed in spirits, however, he would not have been the first critical intellectual so to do, and especially in the wake of the massive deaths of close friends and colleagues in the First World War. 45 This discussion is summarized in Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), pp. 153-7. 46 Whether or not the Maori in fact think about the "hau" as Mauss thinks they do is also contested by other critics, such as Raymond Firth (see Sahlins, Stone Age Economic.r, pp. 154-7). 47 Marcel Mauss, The Gift, translated by W. D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago, [1925] 1990), pp. 12f. 48 This discussion is summarized in Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, pp. 153f.

After the war, the belief in the reality of spirits and souls became something of a cultural vogue in Europe. 49 Whatever may be true about Mauss' supernaturalism, Mauss clearly felt that the dead lived in a way more real than talk of metaphors would permit. It is here in Mauss' perhaps budding supernaturalism, I believe, that we can triangulate on Durkheimian belief about the nature of the dead. For, one can make a case that Mauss was actually closer to what I have called a "realist" about the life of the dead than to his more spectacular spiritist-sounding published statements. But to get at this view, we need to look to the source of many of Mauss's ideas—his uncle, Emile Dürkheim.

Durkhám Between Spiritualism and Positivism Dürkheim did not believe in the separate and autonomous existence of spirits or souls—Spiritism—although he enthusiastically identified himself with a revised form of Spiritualism, and was widely recognized by the commentators of his day for doing so. 50 In perhaps his deepest moment of personal grief after receiving definite news of the death of his son, André, in the First World War, Dürkheim declared his disaffiliations from religion as unambiguously as perhaps could be. It is truly incredible that the therapeutic of moral grief should still be as Epicurus described it. I am not aware that anything new has since been said on this subject. It is inconceivable that this should be the great human malady and that almost nothing should have been done to treat it. Of course I know that the religions are there, and that their practices are rich in experience that is unconscious and full of accumulated wisdom. But their wisdom is crude and empirical; nothing resembling ritual practices has been of use to me or seems effective to me....51

49 J a y Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch 3; Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), ch 4. 50 Abstract of Emile Dürkheim, Cours de philosophie fait au Lycée de Sens (Paris: Written manuscript. Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Manuscript 2351, 1884). Student lecture notes taken from Durkheim's course on philosophy in 1883-84. Notes taken by the French philosopher, Andre Lalande, "De l'âme et de son existence," edited and translated by Robert Alun Jones. For contemporary commentary on Durkheim's Spiritualism, see Céléstin Bouglé, "Le Spiritualisme d'Emile Dürkheim," Revue Bleue (1924): 550-3 and Félix Pécaut, "Le Spiritualisme scientifique: la philosophie d'Emile Dürkheim," Revue de l'enseignementfrançois hors de France 2 (1920). 51 Letter to Xavier Léon dated 20 April 1916, cited in Lukes, Emile Dürkheim: His Life and Work, p. 556.

Despite the implications of such a stark acceptance of the annihilating death of his son, Dürkheim was, however, no classic annihilationist or materialist about these matters. In another place, Dürkheim defends himself vigorously against charges of materialism: Nothing is wider of the mark than the mistaken accusation of materialism which has been leveled against us. Quite the contrary: from the point of view of our position, if one is to call the distinctive property of the individual representational life spirituality, then one should say that social life is defined by its hyperspirituality. By this we mean that all the constituent attributes of mental life are found in it, but elevated to a very much higher power and in such a manner as to constitute something entirely new.52 For him, then, the soul cannot be reduced to matter; it is especially not an epiphenomenon of the "extended matter" of Cartesian philosophy. 53 The reason for this is that Dürkheim felt that the so-called "soul" was simply the presence of society in us. That is to say that it was a way of speaking of the presence of our values, our socially formed consciences, our basic concepts and assumptions about what is to be done and what we should do. And, given his belief in the autonomy of society and social forces, this social soul was equally well autonomous of matter. In addition, Dürkheim felt on philosophical grounds that matter itself was equally as problematic a notion as spirit. This led Dürkheim to reconceive both "soul" and "body," such that the one involved the other in paradoxical ways. In a typically ambiguous and tantalizing statement of this view, Dürkheim said that "our spiritualism admits," unlike most spiritualists of the time going by that name, "that the soul is not a reality of a separate nature, arising suddenly in the scale of beings." Rather, "the mind finds itself in all degrees, only more or less rudimentary: everything lives, everything is animated, everything thinks." 5 4 What could such a claim mean? We know that the soul is for Dürkheim not ontologically different from the stuff of material things. In this sense, the soul is still material. Yet, the "soul" is "spiritual" in the sense that it is an autonomous perspective on the human person. It is an internal or social perspective on the human person. Spirit and matter are then two alternative ways of seeing the same entity. Thus,

52

Emile Dürkheim, "Individual and Collective Representations"; Emile Dürkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, translated by I). F. Pocock (New York: The Free Press, 1974), p. 34.' 53 Dürkheim, Cours de philosophiefait au Lycée de Sens. 54 Dürkheim, Cours de philosophiefait au Lycée de Sens, p. 498.

"the principle that we call matter, when it is perceived by the senses, is identical to the principle we call the mind, when perceived by the consciousness."5"' Referring to the soul, Dürkheim says that "there really is part of us that is not direcdy subordinate to the organic factor...." 56 How is such a claim to be defended without recourse to the Spiritism of an Arthur Conan Doyle? Durkheim's answer is to see society as a mediating entity between brute matter and ethereal spirits. Immortality is Ndther Subjective nor Metaphom Answering our question of what it means to say that the soul is not "directly subordinate to the organic factor"—the body—Dürkheim adds that there exists an intermediate realm between spirit and matter made up of "everything that represents society in us...." This is also to speak of the entire domain of human culture and communication as an autonomous realm located between brute matter and ethereal spirit—in effect, what the phenomenologists have called the h u m a n realm. Says, Dürkheim, "all higher forms of psychic activity that society stimulates and develops in us—are not, like our sensations and bodily states, towed along with the body." 57 H u m a n culture, although materially rooted in our organism is not a simple evolute of the organism. H u m a n cultures take form in ways which, at least until now, seem to operate by rules of formation and regulation unrelated to the rhythms and rules governing the body or matter in general. Sociobiology is still very much an unrealized and unfinished project, while patterns of political, economic, religious, artistic and other behavior are quite well, if not precisely, understood. While one may admit, for example, that the behavior of the congress in the impeachment of President Clinton can be understood in terms of their organic desire to survive, this tells us nothing about the intricate culturally-constituted tactics and strategies of political maneuvering that characterized this episode of the nation's history. As a literally "eclectic" thinker, Dürkheim thus seeks to balance extremes of his own diverse position. 58 His non-dualist perspective militates against conceiving immortality as involving belief in an eternal spirit, since the soul cannot exist independently of the body. But,

53

Dürkheim, Cours de philosophiefait au Lycée de Sens, p. 498. Emile Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Karen E. Fields (New York: T h e Free Press, 1995), p. 274. 57 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 274. 58 J o h n I. Brooks, III, The Eclectic Legacy: Academic Philosophy and the Human Sciences in Nineteenth-Century France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998). 56

in denying rank materialism, he concedes some part of the views proposed by spiritualists. As far as Dürkheim was willing to go in speaking of immortality was then to say that after death, something of us survives. Dürkheim, for example, mentions that what survives of us may be described as something transformed or something of a non-personal nature. 59 Given the organic connection of individual personhood with particular body and mind, upon dissolution of the body, that something (not to mention the "somehow") seems best expressed in terms of what I have described as the real effects of our deeds in the world. We get closer to Durkheim's vision of the afterlife, I would suggest, by appealing to the idea that what survives of us are the effects our life has made in the world, the ways we have organized the space and time of our own use and that of others, the ways we have altered the nature of human institutions, human knowledge and understanding, and so on. One of Durkheim's most original followers, Maurice Halbwachs, articulated such view in his study of collective memory: In addition to engravings and books, the past has left many other traces, occasionally visible, in present-day society. We see it in people's appearance, the look of a place, and even in the unconscious ways of thinking and feeling preserved by certain persons and milieus. Ordinarily we don't notice such things. But we need to alter our attention only slighdy to see the outcroppings of the older strata underlying modern customs.60 Like Halbwachs, I am saying that Dürkheim was what I have called a social realist about human survival of death. Translating Durkheimian social realist metaphysics into religious belief and practice, Dürkheim would seem committed to a more robust view of the afterlife than that the dead live merely "metaphorically," as we say, in memory, in the minds, habits and actions of living human beings. For him, that kind of living in memory was itself real, to the extent it entailed informing the lives and actions of individuals and institutions. In this way, Durkheim's talk of the soul or spirits conforms to the pattern established in his talk of the reality of society— something whose reality is also often considered merely metaphorical, but which it is well known the Durkheimians considered robust, if not identical to the way individual human persons were real. How Jewish then are Durkheim's beliefs about the dead?

59 60

Dürkheim, Cours de philosophiefait au Lycée de Sens. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, p. 66.

Spiritualism in the Third Republic When we turn to other than Jewish contexts proximate to Dürkheim and his world, we find a remarkable flourishing of beliefs about the afterlife in France. At least since the eighteenth century, in France, the religious traditions were hardly alone in offering solutions to life's perennial problem, and indeed as we will see, were often deeply implicated in political agendas in which the Durkheimians were eager participants. Regarding influences upon Dürkheim then, we will, first, find affinities between his beliefs about the afterlife and those of the non-Jewish alternatives I shall now discuss. We will also, second, find that he was aware of such non-Jewish ideas, and third, that he had good reasons for depending upon these non-Jewish sources and thus strong reasons for adopting them. Thomas A. Kselman, author of a recent fascinating study of these "alternative afterlives," notes that they flourished in opposition to the official Roman Catholic doctrines of objective immortality and their political concomitants, reaching a kind of peak during the Third Republic, even if they mark their beginnings much earlier. T h e fathers of the French Revolution went to considerable lengths, for example, to affirm the immorality of the great men of the revolution and the h u m a n ideal. Falconet's article on immortality in the Encyclopédie celebrates the memorial use of sculpture for the way its solidity symbolized the '"promise of immortality.'" 61 Similarly, in 1791 Quatremère's intentions for converting the church of Sainte Geneviève into the Pantheon were informed by the notion that for the great men interred there "death was only a prelude to continued life...." 62 With an eye for where Dürkheim might fit among such options, let me explore them at this point. These ranged all the way from the idea of subjective immortality celebrated by the positivists to the occultist spiritism of the fin-de-siecle. Within the intellectual circles in which Dürkheim moved, the most salient of these doctrines were those one might call positivism and a cluster of beliefs not to be confused with the "spiritism" of Ouija boards, known as "spiritualism." Intricately connected with these alternative doctrines of the afterlife were political concerns about the bases of public morality, stimulated by the dechristianizing policies of the French Revolution. How, the revolutionaries asked, could the state maintain moral order and a 61 Mona Ozouf, "The Pantheon: The Ecole Normale of the Dead," Realms of Memory, Volume III: Symbols, edited by Pierre Nora, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 333. 62 Ozouf, "The Pantheon," p. 335.

sense of ultimate accountability for our actions in the face of the rejection of the then Roman Catholic notions of the afterlife? Kselman cites none other than Robespierre's remarkable plea for a doctrine of an immortal soul, made during the Terror ofJuly 1 794. In a raucous political debate against two of its antagonists, the atheists, Anaxagoras Chaumette and Joseph Fouché, Robespierre shouted out: The good and the bad, tyrants and the friends of liberty, all disappear from the earth, but they do not suffer the same fate. Frenchmen, do not allow your enemies to debase your souls and to weaken your virtue by this deadly doctrine! No, Chaumette, no Fouché, death is not an eternal sleep! Citizens, erase from your tombs this impious saying, which throws a funeral pall over nature and is an insult to death; carve there instead this saying: Death is the beginning of immortality.63 Kselman also reminds us that Robespierre's sentiments were by no means eccentric among the leadership of the revolution, nor were they offered as purely religious and apolitical doctrines. 64 As theists, the French Deists remained faithful to beliefs in the existence of God and the immortality of the soul; more surprisingly, the Directory supported the tenets of the neo-religion, Theophilanthropy, which affirmed beliefs in God and immortality as well.65 Both Deists and members of the Directory saw in such beliefs necessary bases for a well-ordered citizenry. In the period between 1800 and 1850, the issue of the nature of the afterlife continued to remain politicized. Victor Cousin (1792-1867), an eclectic philosophical system-builder and political liberal, held a professorship at the Sorbonne during the Bourbon Restoration. Identified as the principal source of the very influential philosophy of Spiritualism, Cousin taught the same core lesson of the necessary link between theism and personal immortality, on the one side, and the stability of the social order, on the other. In the beginning, Cousin's motive was to provide a metaphysical grounding for morality to replace that supplied by the Catholic church, then enjoying renewed patronage under the restored Bourbons. Later, after 1848, Cousin redirected his rhetorical fire against the socialists, whose atheism made him anxious about the fate of public morals in the event of a socialist succession to power. So great was Cousin's influence that even Durkheim's great philosophical master

63

F. A. Aulard, ed., IM Société des Jacobins-Recueil des documents (Paris: Cerf, 1897), 6:280. Cited in Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, p. 125. 64 Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, pp. 126-43. 65 Albert Mathiez, La Théophilanthropie et le culte décadaire (Geneva: Slatkine-Margolis Reprints, [ 1903] 1973), cited in Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, p. 127.

and the unofficial philosopher of the Third Republic, the neo-Kantian, Charles Renouvier (1815-1903) formed a position on the afterlife similar to Cousin's. Justice required a God who would administer appropriate sanctions for human behavior and an immortal human soul which would survive death to reap the rewards or punishments for human deeds. Indeed, Kselman calls Renouvier one of the two most important representatives of the spiritualist movement in the last half of the nineteenth century—not an inconsiderable factor therefore in Durkheim's formulation of his own position on the afterlife. 66 Unlike Cousin, who taught and wrote under the threat of royalist oppression, Renouvier was free to reconcile spiritualism with republicanism. Given the affiliation of the Church with monarchist regimes Renouvier concluded that the church must be dethroned from its dominance over the formation of the moral conscience of France. Renouvier attempted to articulate what he hoped would be a durable "laïc" civic morality. He argued for a "philosophical justification for a moral code that no longer relied on revealed religion and the authority of the Catholic clergy." 67 Significantly, Renouvier was in great favor among liberal Jews and Protestants, who in the late nineteenth century shared beliefs close to the abstract religion of the Deism of the eighteenth century. 68 T h e liberal Protestants were disproportionately represented in certain key ministries, such as education, and in being so placed were able to introduce Renouvier's spiritualist theories of morality into the schools. Under the leadership of liberal Protestants like Félix Pécaut 69 and Ferdinand Buisson, the Third Republic gained the reputation as "the revenge of the Reformation." 70 Returning for a moment to the issue then of Jewish contributions to Durkheim's thought about immortality, their weight would seem small compared to the many references to Spiritualism and Spiritualists found in the Durkheimian corpus. By contrast, references to modern or classic Jewish authors or texts in Durkheim's oeuvre are relatively slight. This would seem to indicate that while Dürkheim believed

66

Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, p. 131. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, p. 132. 68 Durkheim's close friend and intellectual partner, the Protestant idealist, Octave Hamelin, shared this view, as did Durkheim's intellectual opponent, the Jewish philosophical rationalist, Léon Brunschwicg. Lukes tells us that Hamelin "held that, in a rational morality God could not intervene as the source of obligation" (Lukes, Émile Dürkheim, p. 358). 69 Pécaut was no rank and file Liberal Protestant, but one of the founders of the liberal Protestant movement itself. Along with Pécaut, we can also list other founders of the liberal movement, Edouard Schérer and Albert Réville—both of whom will figure in the discussion to follow. 70 Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Politics and Anger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 263. 67

that the past lived on in the present, and thus in him, the past of which he saw himself part was the past of these great French scientists and philosophers. For Dürkheim, his Jewish past was in this sense crowded out by the French public heroes of letters and science. It may have lived on in him, as he himself in effect admitted in his remarks cited earlier about the "men of former ages" who "live in us." But, to Dürkheim their voices would seem faint compared to the great heroes of the Third French Republic and its letters and science. Immortality for Positivists, Too7/ In the politicized religious context of the Third Republic, it was not only the Catholics and Spiritualists who found that conceptualizations of the afterlife were consequential items of public discourse. So, also did the so-called positivist or "laïc" thinkers of the early to middle nineteenth century. Major figures here are Claude Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Over against both the Catholics and the Spiritualists, they—at least the early Comte before the foundation of his "Religion of Humanity" 7 2 -rejected beliefs in a God who shall judge the living and the dead as well as a belief in objective immortality. Neither was necessary to maintain civic morality. Instead the positivists reoriented "salvation from a vertical to a horizontal plane." They planned to create "social rather than individual happiness ... [and] felicity would be achieved in historical time as a result of human effort ,..." 73 In this vein, prominent figures of the Third Republic, such as Jules Ferry, the great reformer of the national French educational system, explicitly embraced Comte's positivism and argued that the values of human solidarity, progress, science and family should be sufficient to fill the human heart and justify morality in a modern nation-state. 74 Neither Catholic nor Spiritualist metaphysical beliefs were required for the sound socialization of the youth of France into the duties of citizenship. Indeed, rightly or wrongly, Ferry felt that Catholicism's teaching of gloomy resignation and selfish otherworldliness stood in the way of the altruistic generosity of spirit and fellowship required of a motivated citizenry in a republic. 75 Ferry's policies finally succeeded with the hotly contested adoption of

71

Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, pp. 132-43. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, p. 134. 73 Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, p. 133. 74 Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, p. 136. 75 Here Kselman seems to pass over the Catholic spirit of sacrifice, which had been resuscitated and put to work for nationalist ends during the Third Republic 72

the education law of 1882. In it, Ferry established a plan for '"moral and civic instruction'" in the schools which officially severed the link between morality and religion. 76 By 1910 after the official Separation of Church and State, Ferry's work was completed under the direction of Ferdinand Buisson, who installed a scheme of moral education in the French schools which in his words established '"morality apart from religion and metaphysics.'" 77 But it would be a mistake, however, to see the positivists as being merely interested in eliminating references to God and the immortal soul from public discourse. T h e y were profoundly, indeed perhaps religiously, devoted to the nation and were thus vigorous advocates of the belief in the subjective immortality of, at least, assemblies of "great men," contributing to the French state. 78 Because the positivists considered immortality as subjective, it required frequent and well constructed occasions to stimulate memory. In this, Comte and his Religion of Humanity provided some of the impetus for the intense cultic memorializing of the dead encouraged by the Third Republic from the middle of the nineteenth century. In truth, this intensification of public memorializing of national notables by the very individuals who were most contemptuous of religious cults of the dead had deep cultural causes. Comte's thought doubtless tapped into this sentiment in its own right. 79 T h e Third Republic's elaborate attention to secular cults of the dead expressed the need for a certain grounding of the present in the past, a certain solidarity between generations which the positivists had eliminated by severing links with religion and its theological notions of divine chosenness and French Catholic exceptionalism. T h a t such attempts to legislate memory and immortality often failed—the Pantheon, that dour "Ecole Normale des Morts," being the prime example here— does not minimize the seriousness of the intentions of the hierarchy of France's secular religions, it only questions their wisdom and talents in affairs of the spirit. 80 Kselman ends his discussion of the positivists by noting the irony of

(Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, p. 136). For discussion of Catholicism and civic sacrifice in France, see my book Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought in France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 76 Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, pp. 137-8. As Kselman points out, although Ferry's scientism won the day, he had in fact to compromise with the corps of teachers, who were by and large Spiritualists. 77 Buisson, cited in Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, p. 139. 78 Ozouf, "The Pantheon," p. 327. 79 Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modern France, pp. 134-35. 80 Ozouf, "The Pantheon," pp. 325-48.

the fact that some of those prominent in positivist circles, such as Comte and Ernest Renan, actually grasped at beliefs in objective immortality. In the cases of Comte and Renan, despite their rejection of traditional Catholic or Spiritualist beliefs, late in life both men, for example, took up praying to their respective beloved dead. 81 Whatever else these positivist lapses into supernaturalism may indicate, they underline Kselman's contention that while positivists delighted in the decline of Catholic belief, they also concurred with Catholics and Spiritualists that "death should be surrounded by a sacred atmosphere and an anxiety that was threatened by the profanity of the modern world." 82 Dürkheim and the Secular Religions of France Thus when we think of non-observant Durkheimians and their ideas of the afterlife, I would suggest that we need more to think of them as equally well participating in the thought-world of these alternative afterlives than in that of traditional or even modernist Judaism. In many ways, the Durkheimians remind us most of the positivists in their attitude to the dead. They were clearly neither traditional theists nor Spiritualists in the full and unqualified sense of the word. Nor is there evidence that the Durkheimians in general believed in the immortality of the soul, understood in the traditional sense. Yet, like the positivists, the Durkheimians were committed to the ideal of real solidarity across the generations. With the positivists, they felt that this shared sense of community reinforced claims for responsibility needed to sustain civic morality across time. With the positivists as well, they saw rituals as essential to stirring up the memory of the dead among citizens. With the Durkheimians, too, we see how personally they took such sentiments. Marcel Mauss, for example, was conspicuous for the degree to which he honored the dead among the Durkheimian group—and at great cost to his own career. Durkheim's famous nephew and perhaps the most significant member of Durkheim's équipe, carried out the great work of memorializing the Durkheimians who had died in the First World War. For many years after the First World War, he dedicated himself almost exclusively to publishing the works of members of the équipe who died during the war, Dürkheim among them. For the Durkheimians, as for many of the positivists, the équipe's dead were neither "history," on the one (materialist) hand, nor potential ghosts, on the other (spiritist) side.

81 82

Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, pp. 140-43. Kselman, Death and the Afterlife in Modem France, p. 302.

Conclusion What is the moral of our story? For historians and students of identity, part of the message must surely be how tricky it is, in the absence of direct evidence, to establish, with high degrees of certainty and on historicist grounds, the identities of persons in a world where multiple and plural loyalties are available. T h e main reasons the question of Durkheim's Jewishness presents such difficulties are thus two. First, in the cosmopolitan world of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France, he enjoyed freedom from the social control set by traditional loyalties presumed or enforced in more homogeneous social settings. He owed nothing professionally to his Jewish brethren, since he had made his career within the "laïc" circles of the Third Republic. If Durkheim's career was dependent upon any religious community, it would have been upon the favor of liberal Protestants, who filled many of the important posts in the Third Republic. In this sense, it is perhaps truer to say that instead of our having identities, they, in a way, have us. We have identities to the extent those bases of identity Judaism, positivism and such—encompass our thinking, channel our action, mold us in their image. Second, in a time of especially heightened nationalism and in a time of rallying to the Third Republic by persons of Durkheim's political persuasion, he was presented with compelling alternative identities to those provided by his own particularist Jewish nurture in provincial Lorraine. Granted, as a Jew, Dürkheim had additional interests in preserving the republic and resisting the rise of clerical political forces. But, the same was also true of every French religious minority, in particular the Protestants, and thus no particular Jewish interests were here at stake. For Judaism, the moral of our story seems to be to support the wisdom of reaction to the extremes of Franco-Jewish assimilation. O n e way of putting this is to say that if Judaism (or Jewishness) is everything, then it is nothing. It is likewise to say, pace Lévinas, if self-consciously disaffiliated Jewish thinkers can be judged unconsciously Jewish, then so too could self-consciously, self-identified Jewish thinkers be judged in various cases unconsciously not Jewish! If, as prominent Franco-Jewish apologists claimed, the essence ofjewish tradition is fulfilled in republican France, then what is left of Judaism? In terms of the themes of this paper, if Judaism just teaches the same solidarity with the past as any number of secular religions, then what is there Jewish about it? This, of course, does not mean that the values of historically different social and religious systems are never commensurable, only that they are unlikely to be identical. How, despite similarities, for example, can one identify the flavor and nature of the Jewish hunger

for justice which emerges from adherence to the will of an essentially transcendent—and therefore capricious—deity with one emanating from the revolution's certainty of an unalterable moral law inscribed in nature herself? It was in part the dissatisfactions some Jewish thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found with the colorlessness of Franco-Jewish theology which marked the beginnings of Jewish revival from their own ranks. Further work on such organizations as "Les Amis du Judaïsme" of the early twentieth century, and cultural conceptions of Jewish identity explored by Sylvain Lévi and his coreligionists might be especially pertinent for the study of the emergence of particularism in the midst of the purported universalism of metropolitan cultures such as France. The example set by Dürkheim then should not encourage further quests for the hidden Judaism or Jewishness of disaffiliated Jews. It should rather stimulate Jewish theology to create compelling and durable conceptions of Jewish identity for the centuries to come.

C H A P T E R NINE

D Ü R K H E I M AND EARLY C H R I S T I A N I T Y James Constantine Hanges

Since the publication of Burton Mack's A Myth of Innocence1 the longstanding debate over the origin of Christianity has intensified to unprecedented levels. Perhaps most unprecedented has been the degree to which this debate has moved beyond the boundaries of the academy. Given the recent attention paid by the news media to the battie over the figure ofJesus, it is not surprising that more and more undergraduate students enter college classes covering the history of early Christianity already familiar with terms such as "the historical Jesus" or groups such as the Jesus Seminar. Despite the diversity of Christian views on the subject, Christians almost universally assume that something extraordinary stands at the very beginning of Christianity. Whether this extraordinary moment is understood in terms of the singular intrusion of the divine into history, or in terms of the revolutionary way in which the historical Jesus awakens the numinous in others, the origin of Christianity for Christians remains unique. 2 Apparendy, as Rodney Stark's recent account demonstrates, the power of this presumption of uniqueness is great enough to immunize the extraordinary nature of Christian origins against even the explanatory efforts of sociologists.3

1 Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). See the comments o f j o n a t h a n Z. Smith regarding Mack's work in Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 2 See for example, J o h n Dominic Crossan, "Why is Historical Jesus Research Necessary?," in James H. Charlesworth and Walter P. Weaver, eds., Jesus Two Thousand Tears Later, Faith and Scholarship Colloquies Series (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000); Marcus J . Borg, Meetingjesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); Leander Ε. Keck, Who is Jesus?: History in the Perfect Tense (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000). 3 While explaining on the basis of analogy a wide range of phenomena associated with the rise of Christianity through the application of critical social science theory, when Stark comes to the question of the actual origin of Christianity he simply defers to the mystery of the resurrection and the fact that Jesus' followers believed in it as sufficient explanation (Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries [San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc, 1997], p. 44).

Even so, for historians of religion the origin of Christianity must be explicable in terms of empirical processes, especially in terms of the processes of social formation. 4 In the present essay we will take the recent and intensifying focus on the social formation of early Christianity as an opportunity to return to Durkheim's understanding of the nature of religion. Specifically, this essay is an attempt to apply certain principles derived from Durkheim's theory of religion to the evidence for earliest Christianity in order to explore the possibility that these might lead to a better understanding of Christian origins. Remembering those popularly informed undergraduate students of religion, the application of Durkheim's theory to Christianity offers teachers of Christian origins a means by which to disrupt their students' accepted religious categories and to make something familiar seem suddenly very strange. Obviously, it means presenting a tradition that in the history of American Christianity has become increasingly focused on the individual as something "eminently social," the origin of which is rooted in the How of social forces and the redefinition of group identity.

The Applicable Durkheimian Principles Of first importance is Durkheim's principle that the bi-partite nature of the individual and the nature of society are the fundamental, and perhaps only, truths expressed in any enduring religion. That is, religion expresses our consciousness that society is something unique and that somehow each human exists as both a separate individual and as a member of society.5 Dürkheim describes religion as "first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagine the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it." Moreover, Dürkheim continues, religion "fully translates the essence of the relations to be accounted for. It is true with a truth that is eternal that there exists outside us something greater than we and with which we commune." 6

4

See the Festschrift for Burton Mack, Reimagining Christian Origins: A Colloquium Honoring Burton L. Mack, edited by Elizabeth A. Castelli and Hal Taussig (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1996). 5 According to Dürkheim, humans are conscious that "(s]ociety is a reality sui generis ... [that] man is double. In him are two beings: an individual being that has its basis in the body and whose sphere of action is strictly limited by this fact, and a social being that represents within us the highest reality in the intellectual and moral realm that is knowable through observation: I mean society" (The Elementary Forms ofReligious Life, translated by Karen E. Fields [New York: The Free Press, 1995], p. 15). 6 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 227; cf. p. 141.

Secondly, Durkheim's discussion of the fact that society tends to fragment, or segment itself, is especially relevant here since it is axiomatic in the study of Christian origins that Christianity began as a sect o f j u d a i s m . Dürkheim illustrated this tendency by referring to the structured relations between clans in a phratry. 7 He believed that a single clan naturally breaks into multiple clans over time. It follows from this and Durkheim's understanding of the truth expressed by religion that we should expect social fragmentation to find religious expression within the newly-formed community. T h e fact that social segmentation does not necessarily produce completely independent communities is due, according to Dürkheim, to the fact that the specific cults of the individual clans within a larger phratry and then tribal hierarchy are not isolated, but are parts of a system shared by all affiliated clans. In other words, to extract the sociological principle Dürkheim assumes here, new cults develop within and belong to the history of religion extending beyond their apparent and peculiar boundaries; new religions are not created ex nihiloß In this sense, Christianity could be seen as a manifestation of the segmentation of the religious community; the cause of which together with its emblematization are inseparable. Thirdly, Dürkheim believed that all fundamental categories of thought are religious. Picking up what was mentioned earlier, religion is at root the expression of our capacity for categorizing all phenomena and experience by reference to our social experience. What we know is the fundamental truth of religion that I am two persons, an individual limited by my physical body and yet always a member of a transcending social group. T h e fundamental categorization of human

7 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 105-11. Dürkheim focuses on cultural examples he calls the "simplest," by which he means those where religion co-occurs with the simplest form of social organization. He recognizes that in following this course he is subject to the criticism that he reduces even Christianity to the level of the crudest cull. Nevertheless, Dürkheim is convinced that every enduring religion is true, or expresses reality, in the same way (The Elementary Forms, pp. 1-2). It follows still further that all religions belong to the same genus, and, to be accurate to Dürkheim, even those which appear to be the most crude are already very complex. The socalled complex religions are then made up of a body of diverse elements (originally independent cults); in advanced religions the true causes are still at work, but difficult to isolate. Therefore, Dürkheim assumes that the "simplest" religion can help us understand complex, modern religions such as Christianity, which can absorb other religious forms, or "imprint" itself on them. Nevertheless, all these accumulated beliefs and rites, even in Christianity, are not the peculiar property of any single religion, rather they are survivals from extinct religions (see pp. 4-7, 34, 38-39, 45). 8 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 141-57, esp. 152-57. O n the process of segmentation see below.

cognition is modeled on this truth. We categorize all things in the universe according to their relations to the realm of our individual or group experience; in religious terms this means consigning all things to one of two classes, either to the sacred or to the profane. 9 Moreover, the experience of the sacred, that which correlates with our collective experience, is the foundation of our sense of identity. Dürkheim believed that because the feeling of being a part of something that transcends our individual limitations that we experience in the group is both overwhelmingly profound and limited in time and space we necessarily preserve access to this "effervescence" through periodic repetition and symbolic representation. What we experience is the power of society and the primary symbol of this power is the totem. 10 The totem is both the name and the emblem of the social group. It is the identifier of a specific species, or class, of human society, and all members of the society identify themselves by reference to this representation and participate in its power." The totem then is the archetype of the sacred, and it is in reference to the totem that all things in the universe are categorized as either sacred or profane. That which is not subsumed under the totem is profane. 12 For our purposes, it is important to keep in mind that Dürkheim believed that the collective feeling of power associated with and preserved in the totemic emblem can just as easily be "incarnated" in "persons and formulae." 13 Implicit in our survey to this point is the notion that individuals who identify themselves by the same totem constitute what for Dürkheim is the most elemental social group, the clan. Although we easily think of this social unit as kin-based, Dürkheim points out that

9 "It is because men formed groups that they were able to group things: All they did was make room for things in the groups they themselves already formed" (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 145, cf. 148-49). All thought categories (genus, force, personality, efficacy, cause, time, space, contradiction) are modeled on society (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 8-12). All religions, both simple and complex, classify things as either sacred or profane (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 34-36). 10 "Emblematizing" is necessary, according to Dürkheim, for group self-consciousness, see pp. 190-206, 207-23, 230, 238; on collective representations, pp. 23138. 11 The Elementary Forms, pp. 16, 100, 1 1 1-17. Of course, Dürkheim lifts from his data the term Mana to refer to the invisible power of society that he identifies behind the "totemic principle." 12 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 118, 133-34. 13 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 233. Dürkheim mentions Christ in the context of his broader discussion of the totemic ancestor, the human founder who becomes a totem, and the process of human deification (Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 103-104, 175-76,215).

the bond uniting individual members within the clan is socially constructed and often ignores consanguinity. 14 In simple terms, clan membership is a factor of name. All members of a social group are united because they are, at some level, identified by the same name. Members of the group use familial language where no blood relationship exists. Those sharing the same name also share a recognized set of reciprocal obligations. T h e totem then is a name or identifier, a collective symbol, in which all clan members participate, sharing special relations with it and with all others who share that inclusion. T o share in the sacred then encapsulates the idea of finding one's specific location in the cosmology. 15 It is an important aspect of this principle that the clan can thus transcend even geographical boundaries and yet remain a unity. 16 T o pursue the idea of cosmology we must return to Durkheim's view that clan segmentation produces a set of related clans within which a similarly related set of cults is shared as a system. 17 From this observation, Dürkheim proceeded to argue that just as the totem is the visible manifestation of the clan, so the system of related totems in a tribe is the visible image of the cosmos. Simply put, a society's cosmology is a factor of group formation. When the clan divides, the universe divides also. All of nature is now divided according to the new boundary lines. Even the divine beings must be re-classified. 18 How then does segmentation occur? Although he did not go into depth, Dürkheim attributed the segmentation of the clan to a "natural wear and tear of time" that could include such causal elements as the dispersal of population, the encounter with other cultures, and the formation of smaller groups within the clan due to individual affinities. Suffice it to say that he saw this process as natural and continuous. As sub-groups within the clan begin to form, they appropriate representations (totems) for the newly-formed affiliation. T h e appropriated "sub-totem," or group identifier, is always chosen from within the existing hierarchically classified totemic system. However, sub-totems can become principal totems in their own right, once emancipated by changing circumstances or social developments from the universe of

14

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 100, 169. All religions are for Dürkheim cosmologies (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 141-57). 16 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 100-101. 17 Again, this is an important principle for our purposes because of the fact that Christianity originates as a sect ofjudaism; more on this in due course. 18 The resulting categorization is rightly called cosmology because taken together, with all levels in the totemic hierarchy, it is a system (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 141-42, 145-49, 150-57). 15

things classified under the principal totem. 19 The point where this emancipation occurs is a reflection of the segmentation of the distinct clan it now represents. Even so, as mentioned earlier, the newlyformed social group continues to recognize certain connections with the original group, as the reciprocal relations maintained by multiple clans in a phratry or tribe illustrate. 20 These reciprocal relations often include ritual obligations and usually involve certain shared traditions. In any case, the resulting segmentation of the original clan must find expression in the cosmology, and it is myth that serves, according to Durkheim, as the appropriate means by which to explain how two presently separate clans once constituted a single social group. Myth answers the question, "how are we not them?" 21 Finally, it is crucial to note that the collectively shared system of relations between all things in the universe includes, for Durkheim, both positive and negative elements. These two sub-systems, or complexes, are interconnected and serve to unite all members of the group by virtue of their submission to and practice of the included rites. In other words, the religious community is defined and identified not only by what its members do but also by what they do not do. Systems of prohibitions, or taboos (to use Durkheim's preferred term), are fundamental elements of the symbolic unity upon which group unity is based. 22 Consequently, Durkheim argues that the clan's stability depends on the maintenance of the unity of this symbolic system because the clan, by its very nature, lacks other, more elaborate means for maintaining its own stability. In fact, the unity of the social group is fully dependent, for Durkheim, on the shared name, the totemic identifier, alone. This implies that to destroy the 19

Dürkheim, Elementary Forms, pp. 152-53. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 130. Note that the apostle Paul teaches his nonJewish converts that they are indebted to both the Jews as an ethnic group and to the Jewish Jesus group in Jerusalem for their own access to salvation, 1 Cor 10:1-10 (cf. Rom 3:1-2; 9:4-5; 11:11-32); Gal 3:6-29; 4:22; Rom 4:1-16, cf. Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 84-85, 91; note as well the implication of Paul's financial collection for the Jerusalem church, Rom 15:25-31; 1 Cor 16:1-4; 2 Cor 8-9; Gal 2:10 (see Dieter Georgi, Remembering the Poor: The History of Paul's Collection for Jerusalem [Nashville: Abingdon, 1992]). 21 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 105-11, 152-54; 129. 22 Positive cult, exemplified by sacrifice, functions not only to rejuvenate the participant through communion with the sacred power of the totem, but actually enlivens the sacred power through the calling together of the group. The positive cult reaffirms the sacred world by reconstituting the collective context which first created it (Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 330-54). The negative cult is essentially the system of prohibitions and rites that maintain the separateness of the sacred (pp. 303304). 20

symbolic unity of the clan's totemic system is to destroy the unity of the clan. 23 With these selected elements of Durkheim's theory of religion in hand, we now turn to the evidence for early Christianity. We should, however, issue a qualification. Returning to Dürkheim cannot be done presently without recognizing the serious criticisms to which his theory of religion has been subjected. While we have started with Durkheim's analysis of the totemic religion of clans, in light of Durkheim's almost total dependence on what subsequent fieldwork has show to be fundamental misapprehensions of the ethnographic facts, we can continue only by extracting from Durkheim's work the sociological principles that guided it. We must then speak of social groups and the unifying role of symbols, instead of clans and totems. 24 If Durkheim's system is to prove useful, we should find these fundamental principles and observations helpful in understanding the truth of the social formation of early Christianity, as it is expressed in the cult itself. It is the goal of this chapter to demonstrate this possibility.

Dürkheim and the Religions Expression of the Social Truth of Early Christianity Despite the variety of modern pictures of the historical Jesus, it is hardly debated that Jesus was a Galilean J e w whose teaching and pronouncements attracted a small body of Jewish followers. T h e gospels together with non-Christian sources are clear that Jesus was sufficiently controversial to provoke the hostility of certain Jewish authorities in Jerusalem, and believed to be politically subversive enough by the R o m a n authorities, particularly Pontius Pilate, to deserve execution. While most critics believe that Jesus taught about the kingdom of God, consensus as to the nature of the kingdom Jesus presented is hot23 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 169, 234-35, 238. For the importance of this Durkheimian notion of the systemic character of the symbolic world and the society's dependence on it, see, despite certain differences, Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1985), pp. 62-64. Without mention of Dürkheim, notice the similar description of the role of very specific symbolic identifiers in religious communities by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of .Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 12-19. This idea too will play a crucial role in a Durkheimian analysis of the derivation of Christianity from Judaism. 24 See the survey of Durkheim's sociology of religion, and the review of the serious critical responses it engendered in Steven Lukes, Emile Dürkheim: His life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 435-84; Warren Schmaus, Dürkheim 's Philosophy of Science and the Sociology ofKnowledge: Creating an Intellectual Niche (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 185-243.

ly debated. Two principle interpretations of Jesus and his mission have dominated the modern scholarly debate: the first, classically formulated by Albert Schweitzer, sees Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher of an impending physical kingdom on a mission solely to Jews, the second, its modern versions going back to Julius Wellhausen, understands Jesus as a man who taught a radical, non-traditional and universal understanding of the Kingdom as a present spiritual reality?25 Despite years of debate, the basic question each man answered remains current. Is Jesus to be understood in Jewish terms, within Judaism, or does he stand fundamentally outside the Judaism of his own day? Despite the focus of New Testament scholars on the historical person of Jesus as the key to understanding Christian origins, I believe that from a Durkheimian perspective the focus must be on the evidence for the social nature of the earliest Jesus groups. With this in mind, it is interesting to note that there is ample evidence to show that from its beginning in Jerusalem the question of group identity was for the community of Jesus the critical issue. Applying Durkheim's discussion of group segmentation, I suggest that this evidence supports the widely-held view among New Testament scholars that the gospels preserve for us less the historical Jesus than the "imagined" Jesus of developing Christian theology. Similarly, a Durkheimian perspective would, in my view, see the determining symbolic factor in the eventual development of Christianity, a new religion, independent from Judaism, as a matter of collective representation. In other words, It would not be the Jesus of history, but the Jesus of the collective imagination that determines group formation. Jesus, the faithful servant of God and the law given by God through Moses, having been appropriated by a growing affiliation of individuals among his followers for whom Moses is not determinative, and having been emancipated from the symbolic universe of his own Judaism, becomes the Christ, the symbolic Jesus who stands independent from Moses and the Mosaic law and in whom the new community images itself. We can explore this possibility first, for example, in the canonical Acts of the Apostles. Acts sets at center stage the crisis over the mode of inclusion of non-Jews (i.e., Gentiles). It is clear from the author's explicit program that the Church is by this time substantially composed of non-Jews, a situation for which the author makes Peter and then Paul largely responsible. The author makes clear two important aspects in 25

Albert Schweitzer, Das Abendmahl im Zusammenhang mit dem Leben Jesu und der Geschichte des Urchristentums (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1901); Julius Wellhausen, "Das Evangelium," in Israelitische undjüdische Geschichte (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1894).

the narrative development of the book: first, the earliest community of Jesus'Jewish followers in Jerusalem never abandoned its loyalty to the Mosaic law, and second, the inclusion of non-Jews without demanding their adherence to this law caused fundamental and lasting problems within the Jesus community as a whole.21' Despite the well known literary-critical and historical problems with the book of Acts, there is little to compel us to reject the historical reality reflected in these two elements of its narrative. As we shall see, the letters of the aposde Paul, the earliest identifiable Christian writings, presuppose this conflict in similar terms. Here it is a social conflict that turns on issues of language and culture, and of the continuing importance of the Mosaic law, especially evident in the demand by Jews that Gentiles accept circumcision, the quintessential ethnic identifier for Jews. 27 It appears here that Jewish Jesus people could not imagine membership in the community apart from observance of Jewish law, without accepting the fundamental symbol, or shorthand, for the whole symbolic ritual system which constituted their identity. 28 At no time is this conflict, at least in Acts, a question of the character of Jesus' relationship to Judaism. He is throughout the Jewish Messiah. In fact, according to Acts and, as we shall see, the Pauline material, acceptance of Jesus' Messiahship and his resurrection was never interpreted by the Jewish Jesus community in Jerusalem to entail separation from Judaism. In other words, the idea of and belief in the resurrection of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah cannot in itself explain the eventual separation of a distinct and largely non-Jewish Christianity from Judaism. 2 9

26 Acts 1:8 lays out the structure of the work, and reveals the author's plan to explain how Christianity moved from Jerusalem to Rome. O n the program of Acts as the expression of its author's intentions rather than as a reflection of an intention to simply record historical events, see Christopher Mount, Christianity as Paulinism: The Legacy of Paul According to Luke-Acts (Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1997). Acts 10:1-11:26; 13:1-14:7; 14:19-15:31; 21:17-26 form a chain of key passages acknowledging the intense internal Christian debate over group identity, and explaining how it came about that non-Jews were admitted to the community of salvation without adopting the Mosaic law. 27 For the continuing importance in the Durkheimian tradition of the view that the system of ritual is a complex of condensed symbols, each one of which implies the whole, see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2nd edition (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), pp. 29, 54-60. 28 This reminds us of Durkheim's discussion of tattooing and the importance of inscribing the body with the totemic image (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 11617). 29 Note that Mack's thesis argued that an appeal to an extraordinary or unique event or character was unnecessary to an historical explanation of the origins of Christianity. We owe this idea, according to Mack, to the author of the gospel of Mark.

Outside Acts, the letters of Paul, while being framed by the same raging argument about group identity, reveal that the key element in the debate is the perceived relation of Jesus to Moses. The career of Paul is incomprehensible apart from this controversy. First of all, Paul's letter to his Gentile converts in Galatia reveals that, despite his assumption that common ground had been reached, he and the Jewish believers in the Jerusalem church do not understand Jesus and his relation to Jewish law in the same way. For most commentators, especially post-Reformation commentators, this difference is to be understood in soteriological terms, grace versus works. However, from a Durkheimian perspective the controversy should best be described as a feature of the process of group segmentation. The Antiochene controversy described in Galatians 2:11-21 arises because visiting ethnic Jews expect the apostle Peter, himself an ethnic Jew from Jerusalem, to observe dietary laws that restrict contact with non-Jews even within a church where unrestricted contact between Jews and Gentiles, especially in the sharing of common meals, appears to have been the accepted practice. Paul interprets Peter's accession to these demands as hypocritical, and frames his objection in terms of the complete efficacy of Christ. In Paul's mind, the visiting Jews' insistence that Peter and the other Jews in Antioch adhere to the practices that define their ethnic distinctiveness implies that with respect to one's inclusion in the community of salvation, Jesus without the law is deficient. Whether by ethnic Jewish believers, or by Gentile believers who had already accepted circumcision, the Galatians, to whom Paul relates this episode, were being told that they needed to be circumcised in addition to claimingjesus and being baptized. 30 For Paul, the Jewish law is a wholly integrated system from which the Galatians cannot simply pick and choose (5:3). If the Galatian converts were to accept the demand of these competing preachers that they accept circumcision, Paul said they must necessarily embrace the whole law given by Moses. In that case, he went on, Christ ceases to be efficacious for their salvation (5:2-4). Here, circumcision becomes the cipher for the Mosaic law, it is a condensed symbol encapsulating the whole of Jewish identity. With respect to Jesus, it meant in Paul's mind that Christ would remain a servant of Moses, or in Durkheimian terms, that Jesus would remain subordinated within the symbolic hierarchy, or totemic system, of Judaism to the law of

30 That Paul connects these two situations in principle implies that from his perspective, where the issue is justification, Christ's role is independent of Moses. The mode of salvation cannot be subsumed under Mosaic traditions.

Moses. 31 We need not here delve into the question of whether or not Paul's logic demands that Jews, even when not in fellowship with Gentiles, should give up their observance of the law. Here it is important only to point out that Paul prohibits his non-Jewish converts from adopting any element of the Mosaic regulations, and demands that Jewish believers in community with non-Jewish believers forgo fulfillment of the law. 32 T h a t Paul in the Galatian letter is concerned with the existence of a new kind of religious community is clear from his final comments. In summing up his argument Paul calls his reader to what appears to be his own operating principle (his κανών, 6:16) that "neither circumcision nor uncircumcision [counts for] anything, but [only] the new foundation (καινή κτίσις, 6:15)." 33 It is crucial here that we understand Paul's language. T h e word κτίσις is the usual word for the newlyfounded city, a new community. 3 4 In a context where the terms circumcision and uncircumcision clearly represent Jews and non-Jews as particular kinds of human social groups, Paul's use of this term leaves little doubt that the purpose of his argument has been to demonstrate that "in Christ" (Gal 3:26-28) a new kind of social category has come into existence the boundaries of which cannot be conformed to those of any previously known society. T h e letters found in 2 Corinthians 10-13, Philippians 3:2-4:1, and finally his letter to the Romans demonstrate the extent to which Paul continues to be concerned with the question of group identity, or of being in Christ (έν Χριστώ).35 It is "in Christ" that neither circumcision

31 Cf. Douglas, who also points to what she calls a "shorthand" for Jewish cosmology, the Levitical dietary rules, essentially the shorthand that provoked Paul's response in Antioch in Gal 2:11-21 (Purity and Danger, pp. 41-57). 32 Here we refer specifically to those elements of the law which were ethnically distinctive (circumcision, dietary rules, and the sabbath). It is another issue to what degree Paul established rules of participation for his congregations that are rooted in Jewish ethical teaching. In many cases, Jewish authors, especially from the Diaspora, argued that Jewish ethics are compatible with the highest Greek philosophical traditions (see John J. Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, Biblical Resource Series [Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999]). 33 Cf. 5:6. 34 The importance of the Greek colonial period and the legacy it left in the minds of Greeks can hardly be overestimated. The point here is that this legacy would inform any Greek-speaking reader before any other connotation, see T . J . Cornell, "Gründer," Reallexikon fir Antike und Christentum 12 (1982), cols. 1107-1145; W. Leschhorn, "Gründer der Stadt": Studien zu einem politischreligiösen Phänomen der griechischen Geschichte, Palingensia: Monographien und Texte zur klassischen Altertumswissenschaft 20 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1984). 35 T h e phrases έν Χριστώ and έν κυρίφ are not found earlier than Paul, are rare outside of Paul, and peculiar to Paul. They denote membership in Christ's body and

nor uncircumcision, being Jewish or non-Jewish, counts for anything. Christ is the condition of the believer's existence, the believer's identity, and, in fact, the believers "put on" Christ as their identity (Rom 13:14; Gal 3:27).36 In Christ one has one's true being, one's freedom (1 Cor 1:30; Gal 2:4).37 In Christ the many are brought together in one body (εν σώμά έσμεν, Rom 12:5; cf. Gal 3:28; 5:6).38 While the body of Christ into which every believer is baptized (Rom 6:3; Gal 3:27) is certainly a mystical concept, and being "in Christ" means living in the world through the present reality of the Spirit, the social ramifications of this concept are clearly evident in Paul's response to Peter's withdrawal from the ethnically mixed table in Antioch (Gal 2:11-21). For Paul, the practical barrier erected by the Mosaic law between Jews and non-Jews has been taken down "in Christ." However, this does not mean that Paul has abandoned in principle all group-defining regulations. The members of this new community, the members of the body of Christ, must avoid physical contact with idolatry. 39 The members of this new society are not to behave as out-

the Church, with referents including the saints (1 Cor 1:2, 30; Phil 1:1; 4:21), the churches(1 Thess 1:1; 2:14-; Gal 1:22), the dead believers ( 1 Thess 4:16), Paul's believing co-workers and associates (Rom 16:3, 7-13; 1 Cor 16:24; Phlm 23), and even immature believers (1 Cor 3:1). In identifying an individual as both a kinsperson in the flesh (biologically) and also "in the Lord" Paul assumes the converse that one can be a biological kinsperson and not be "in the Lord," implying that those under the latter description comprise a distinct and separate social category (Phlm 16). It is important to note here that this formula, so crucial to Paul's argument about the identity of the believer, does not come from the Jewish context; it is not a Hebraism derived from the Septuagint. In other words, this formulation cannot be traced to the Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem. See Albrecht Oepke, "έν," Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by G. Kittel and G. Friedrich, translated by G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964-) 2, pp. 541-43. 36 We cannot here deal with the various interpretations and theories of the origin of Paul's image; see Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul's Letter to the Churches in Galatia, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), pp. 186-89. 37 Paul finds his true place in the cosmos "in Christ" (1 Cor 1:4). According to Paul, believers are justified before God by the redemption made available in Christ's blood (Rom 3:24); those who are "in Christ" no longer face condemnation for their sins (Rom 8:1). They have been made alive to God "in Christ" (Rom 6:11), and now have the hope of eternal life "in Christ" (Rom 6:23, cf. 8:2; 1 Cor 15:22). 38 We especially note Paul's language in discussing the communal sacred meal, the Lord's Supper. Here all participate through the single cup, the single loaf of bread in the one body of Christ of which all constitute the various members, "body parts" (1 Cor 10:16-17). 39 Here we need only recall Paul's discussions of prostitution as idolatry and participation in cultic meals as participation in demon worship (1 Cor 16:12-20; 10:14-22). The prohibition of prostitution probably rests on Jewish concepts of idolatry, and, as 1 Cor indicates, this idea was not readily understood by Paul's Greek converts (1 Cor 5:1-2, 6:12-20, cf. Phil 1:20); see Roy Bowen Ward, "PORNEIA and Paul," Proceedings: Eastern Great Ijakes Biblical Society and Midwestern Society ofBiblical Literature ( 1986), pp. 219-28.

siders behave, especially with regard to sexual matters (1 Thess 4:3-5). Now, with regard to the conditions of membership in the new community, Paul can speak in terms of three distinct types of humans: Jews, non-Jews, and the " C h u r c h " (the έκκλησία, or assembly of God), and distinguish the behavior appropriate to the insider from that of the outsider. Whether therefore you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all things to the glory of God. Be unoffensive persons to Jews, to Greeks, and to the assembly of God (1 Cor 10:32). For this is the will of God, your sanctification, to hold yourselves back from prostítutíon, [that] each of you know how to possess your vessel in a state of sanctity and honor, not in the struggle of desire in the same way as the nations who do not know God... (i. e., Gentiles, 1 Thess 4 3-5a).40 T o repeat, with Paul we find clear evidence of a controversy among followers of Jesus similar to that portrayed in Acts, a conflict where not only the conditions under which one is to be included in the group are in dispute, but where, in Paul's case, the nature of those conditions depends on the perception o f j e s u s ' s relation to the law of Moses. Whatever else Paul may mean when he describes Christ as the end, goal, or completion (τέλος, Rom 10:4) of the law, it is clear that "in Christ," or since Christ, the law has ceased to have any group-defining value. 41 While clearly associated with the prophetic scriptures, and especially with God's promise to Abraham, Christ is in Paul separated from Moses. 42 T h e law of Moses scarcely plays a role in Paul except when the issue is the particularity ofJews and the need to show all humans as sinners (e. g., R o m 2-3). Herein lies the important clue for a Durkheimian examination of the rise of Christianity; for Paul, Christ cannot be subsumed under Moses. This is not the case for his opponents, who, although at times difficult to identify,

4 " All biblical translations are the present author's. Cf. Ο. L. Yarbrough, "Not Like the Gentiles": Marriage Rules in the Letters of Paul, SBIDS (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985). 41 Rom 3:21-25; so also James D. G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, Word Biblical Commentary 38B (Dallas: Word Books, 1988), pp. 589-90. 42 See Gal 3:15-5:1; Rom 3:21-4:25, Paul's discussion of the law ofMoses and the earlier covenant of faith given to Abraham. While Moses is not even mentioned in Galatians, shorthand codes for the Mosaic law are found, e.g., Sinai symbolized by Hagar the slave (Gal 4:21-31); cf. 2 Cor 3:7-18 where Moses is explicidy mentioned. Here Paul contrasts unfavorably Moses' "dispensation of death carved in letters of stone" with Christ's work. Moses can foreshadow Christ, his mission, and the church, but this does not detract from Christ's independence from Moses (Rom 9:15; 10:5,19; 1 Cor 10:1-11).

certainly included persons associated with the Jerusalem Jesus community. 4 3 T h e counterpart to Paul's understanding that Jesus is alone God's mediator, apart from any qualification by or role for the Jewish law, may also be found in early Christian literature. In terms of the Durkheimian approach we are testing, traditions of this sort would necessarily be of crucial importance. Here we turn to the traditions that constitute what New Testament scholars have described as "antipaulinism." 44 T h e fundamental assumption in these traditions, one that certainly lies behind material found within the New Testament itself, is that Jesus the Messiah always remains within the Mosaic tradition, even if his own understanding of this tradition, or that of his followers, challenges temple authorities or other interpreters of Moses such as the Pharisees. Recently, Hans Dieter Betz has argued persuasively that Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7) belongs to this kind of tradition. Betz sees this sermon as an independent element among the existing Jesus traditions used by the final redactor of the gospel of Matthew. 4 5 It is generally believed that this gospel represents a church that owes its origin to ethnically Jewish Jesus people. By the time of the gospel's composition, this community was clearly ethnically mixed; the author obviously presupposes the success of the mission to the Gentiles. 46 Nevertheless, the gospel presents Jesus as the Jewish Messiah whose personal mission was directed to Jews (Matt 10:5-6; 15:24), and only after his resurrection to non-Jews; note Matthew 28:18-20: And going forth, Jesus spoke to them [the disciples], "All authority in heaven and on the earth is given to me. As you go, therefore, make all the nations (non-Jews) disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, instructing them to keep all things whatever I commanded you; and take note, I myself am with you all the days until the completion of the age."

43

Essentially, in Durkheimian terms, the Jewish believers in Jerusalem would not understand themselves as being "in Christ," but rather, given the symbolic hierarchy of their universe of things, they and Jesus are together "in Moses." 44 See Gerd Lüdemann, Opposition to Paul in Jewish Christianity, translated by M. Eugene Boring (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989). 45 Hans Dieter Betz, "The Hermeneutical Principles of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:17-20)," in Essays on the Sermon on the Mount, translated by L. L. Welborn (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), pp. 37-53; see most recendy, The Sermon on the Mount: A Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Including the Sermon on the Plain (Matthew 5:3-7:27 and Luke 6:20-49), Hermeneia, edited by Adela Yarbro Collins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). 46 Cf. the Matthean version of the parable of the Vineyard owner, 21:33-46, cf. Mark 12:1-12, noting especially what Matthew includes over against Mark.

For the author, it is the actual state of affairs that belief in Jesus has been spread beyond Judaism. However, that Jesus should have been proclaimed apart from the law of Moses is not so clear in Matthew. In fact, the reader has already been informed as to Jesus' relation to the law in the Sermon on the Mount, and already knows precisely what those things are that Jesus has commanded. 4 7 Here, Betz's reading of the text proves crucial to a Durkheimian analysis of the origin of Christianity. Matt 5:17-20 reveals that the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is to be understood in terms of the Mosaic law. Do not think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. Truly I say to you all, until heaven and earth pass away, an iota or a mark will not pass away from the law until all be realized.48 Whoever, then, relaxes one of these commandments, one of the least of them, and teaches people in this way, will be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. But, whoever, does [them] and teaches [them], this one will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you all that unless your righteousness abound to exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.49 It is not important for our purposes whether or not one accepts the whole of Betz's hypothesis. T h e crucial point for us is his observation that this tradition portrays Jesus as the final and authoritative interpreter of the law of Moses. Jesus' distinctive and perhaps more demanding interpretation, while certainly critical of rival interpretations, does not place him outside the Mosaic system or contemporary Judaism. T h e teaching of the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount about the law, in Betz's words, was "orthodox" in terms of contemporary Jewish theology. 50 Neither this Jesus nor the community of Jews this particular tradition originally served stood alone in its critical stance toward various aspects of the Jewish cult and tradition.

47 There is a subtle linguistic link between Jesus' final instructions to the disciples to teach the Gentiles whatever Jesus had "commanded" (ένετειλάμην) them and the "commandments" to be rigorously observed in Matt 5:19, αίέντολαί. 48 Cf. Luke 16:17, "It is easier for heaven and the earth to pass away than for a single stroke of the law to drop [from it]." 49 T h e reference to the iota and the mark cannot refer to the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures which the author's community appears to have used as its scripture, but must instead refer to the smallest marks in the Hebrew Torah, probably reflecting a very early Palestinian tradition and therefore a very specific reference to the Hebrew form of the Mosaic law (see Betz, Essays, p. 44; Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993], pp. 18-21). 50 Betz, Essays, p. 38. Especially see Vermes, Religion of Jesus, pp. 11-45.

In sum, the earliest Christian evidence reveals a fundamental ambiguity about Jesus and his mission as it relates to the Mosaic law. This ambiguity is clearly connected, at least in the Pauline letters, to the question of the criterion of membership in the Jesus community. At this point we return to the Durkheimian principles laid out earlier to ask how, applying them, we might read the early Christian evidence and understand the origin of Christianity. Dürkheim and the Fundamental Social Truth of Early Christianity Although Dürkheim has relatively little to say about Christianity, it is obvious that for him Christianity is anything but a simple religion.51 Nevertheless, Dürkheim is clear that Christianity can be understood on the same basis as the most simple religion; "Christianity proceeds from the same mentality [as the crude cults of Australia], in other words,... it is made up of the same superstitions and rests on the same errors." 52 That being so, it also rests on, or better endures because of, the same reality or truth. 53 By this he means that Christianity, like all other religions, maintains a distinction between the sacred and the profane, a categorization that images the true nature of our social reality. And, like all other religions, Dürkheim would expect Christianity to emblematize this distinction according to the totemic principle. Recendy, Graydon F. Snyder has completed a project the roots of which go back to his well-known book, Ante Pacem. Its final chapter appears in Snyder's latest work, The Inculturation of the Jesus Tradition,54 Snyder argues that Early Christianity "deculturizes" Jesus and universalizes Judaism. From our Durkheimian perspective we should nuance this proposal somewhat. Accordingly, we would agree that the

51

Using his criteria, Christianity cannot be understood in the terms most often assumed since its supposedly definitive characteristics are non-essential developments, e.g., the doctrine of souls (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 1-2, 59); the notions of divine providence or universal determinism, and the distinction between the natural and the supernatural (Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 24); its anthropomorphic understanding of its deity (in fact, its god becomes human [Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 57-61, 64]). 52 Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 2. 53 "Religions are founded upon and express 'the real,'" in "Contributions to Discussion of Religious Sentiment at the Present Time," in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Dürkheim on Religion: A Selection ofReadings with Bibliographies (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 184. 54 Graydon F. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1985), and Inculturation of the Jesus Tradition: The Impact of Jesus on Jewish and Roman Cultures (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999).

crucial step in Christianity's development into an independent and enduring religious community, was the imaging of the figure of Jesus apart from Judaism (deculturation). However, in this very process the figure o f j e s u s sine Moses became the sole identifying symbol for a new society, becoming the catalyst for the formation of a unique universe of collective representations ("re-culturation"), which, despite being distinct from all others, nevertheless, includes within it a collective self-consciousness of the group's continuing connection to the Judaism from which it arose. In large measure this has been realized by most scholars with the recognition that Christianity very soon developed its own distinctive rites of passage and commemoration. 5 5 As we have already pointed out, Paul's converts, as those who belong to Christ, were not to mix with what belonged to neighboring deities. T h e priorities of society's mainstream (marriage and the production of legitimate children) were superseded in the new community. Nevertheless, for Durkheim all these distinctions would point to something far more fundamental. Ethnically Jewish Jesus people apparently baptized and celebrated such distinctive rituals as the common meal of the Lord's supper just as Gentile believers did. At least this appears to be implied in Paul's description of the Antiochene community in Galatians 2. Moreover, our evidence offers no hint that for Paul's critics, especially including those associated with the Jerusalem congregation of James, Jesus' brother, participation in peculiarly "Christian" ritual, in itself, negated their Jewish identity as law-abiding Jews or excluded them from Jewish society. From a Durkheimian perspective, the source of a distinctively "Christian" identity must be sought where social identity is formed, in the group's symbolic imaging of itself. Even though Durkheim describes Christianity as inconceivable without Christ, it cannot be his divinity or his uniqueness, however this may eventually be understood, that serves as the fundamental definition in the analysis of this religion. 56 In a Durkheimian context, Christology becomes semiotics. T h e crucial question becomes not who Jesus was, or is, but what he symbolizes for the community. In a day and age when the "real" truth of Christianity is constantly being rescued from traditional apocalyptic supernaturalism, 57 we find a variety of modernizations, existential or psychological reinterpreta-

55

E.g., see Meeks, The First Urban Christians, pp. 140-63. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 23, 27-33. See, e. g., the recently published results of the Jesus Seminar, Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, 77ÌC Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words ofjesus (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 56 57

tions, of Christianity desperately attempting to save the historical Jesus from impending irrelevance. 58 Jesus or Paul are constantly being rehabilitated as champions for every kind of "liberation" theology. In turn, these revisions invariably provoke recapitulations of, and apologies for, the traditional Christologies of the Churches. The fact that we find so much variety in modern interpretations ofJesus would be no surprise to Dürkheim. He would see the present cults ofJesus has surviving elaborations of a cult long since cut off from its original context. Of course, the history of the Church shows that such variety has always characterized Christianity. As I read Dürkheim, this persistent inability of Christians to agree on a single understanding of Christ should be taken to suggest that a proper Christology is not the central truth of Christianity usually assumed. To return to the evidence, on the one hand, for the final redactor of Matthew, Jesus teaches that Gentiles must obey all that he has commanded, but this writer has preserved, as we have seen, an earlier picture of Jesus that explicates this obedience in terms of the continuing importance of the law of Moses. 59 As suggested earlier, the writer of the Sermon on the Mount appears to preserve for us a Jesus who is not one "jot or tittle" outside the multiple currents in the stream of then contemporary Judaism. On the other hand, for the Greek author of Luke, the mission to the Gentiles apart from the Mosaic law reaches back to Jesus himself, and in Acts, his sequel, is spearheaded from Jerusalem by Peter, one of Jesus' Twelve, by whom, along with the Elders, the mission is later endorsed. The whole story of Christianity for this writer is the story of the gospel, driven outward by the risen Christ himself, breaking the bonds of Judaism. These two narratives are then the Durkheimian myths that explain to their respective communities why the present conditions exist between two related but by this time distinct peoples. For Dürkheim, the key to these myths is their different symbolic hierarchies, their totemic systems. This history of multivalence regarding the understanding of Jesus is therefore consistent with our proposed Durkheimian prediction that Jesus' enduring and crucial importance to Christianity should reflect a social truth. In other words, it is not what early Christians knew about the historical Jesus, or, for that matter, what they have come to "con-

58

See n. 2 above. To be sure, by the time of this final redaction, the redactor's community apparently sees itself outside Jewish society and its Jesus as superior to Moses. But this gospel has preserved traditions from a time when the social situation must have been fundamentally different. 59

fess" about him that segmented them from Judaism. Rather his definitive significance for Christianity is found in his function as the primary identifier for the developing social group. In this sense, Jesus' importance to Christians, the importance that overrides all others from Paul to the present, has been social, "being i n / o f Christ." In my view, Durkheim leads us to the conclusion that the origin of Christianity as a distinct religious community is to be found in that moment when Jesus can no longer be subsumed under Moses, when he ceases to be God's chosen interpreter of Moses, the identifying symbol or name for a faithful and obedient Jewish community. At some point in the history of his earliest followers the figure o f j e s u s was isolated from the existing symbolic hierarchy of his Jewish devotees to become an independent emblem, the identifier of a developing social group for which the symbolic system of the Jewish law no longer functioned. T o conclude our test case with an illustration of the interpretive possibilities of approaching the social formation of early Christianity by focusing on the symbolic role of the image o f j e s u s , we need look no further than two provocative features of the New Testament itself. T h e first is found in the comparison of the hopelessly irreconcilable genealogies o f j e s u s in the gospels of Matthew and Luke (Matt 1:1-17 and Luke 3:23-38). T h e history of interpretation shows that, apart from transparendy apologetic schemes, these two genealogies cannot be harmonized and bear little connection to history. They are each constructs designed to place Jesus correctly within the author's symbolic universe. They are fundamentally different because they reflect the different symbolic understandings o f j e s u s held by their respective authors, and by extension, the communities their authors address. For Matthew Jesus is a son of David and son of Abraham; for Luke he is a son of David but not through the dynastic successors, and, more importandy, this genealogy traces him beyond Israel to Adam, the father of all people. Every aspect of the construction of each of these texts shows that they were not written to preserve history but rather to construct the appropriate image ofjesus. 6 0 O u r second example compliments the first, and clearly resonates with the notion that it is the symbolic significance o f j e s u s that is crucial. Here we refer to the apostle Paul's nearly complete silence about the historical Jesus. Only a few of Paul's comments refer to Jesus prior to his crucifixion; he mentions certain sayings o f j e s u s (some of which are extant only in

60 The problems involved in attempting to reconcile these two texts, i.e., to make them historical, are notorious; see on this issue Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Ijuke, 2nd edition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1993), pp. 57-94.

Paul, 1 Cor 9:14), he repeats the tradition of the institution of the Lord's Supper (1 Cor 11:23-25), and he describes Jesus as the son of David according to the flesh (Rom 1:3). What then is Paul's image of Jesus? From what we have seen, it does not include Jewish law. In this light, and using our Durkheimian perspective, Paul's comment in 2 Cor 5:16-17 takes on critical importance: So then, from this point on, we know no one according to flesh; and if we knew Christ according to flesh, no longer do we know him [in this way]. So that if anyone is in Christ [this person is] a new foundation. The old things passed away; look, new things are here. Is this the language of symbolic change, of the formation of a new identifier for a new community? Despite the fact that Paul can make use of Jesus' connections with historical Israel (e.g., Rom 9:4-5), as a matter of emphasis, it is precisely the historical, Jewish Jesus, the Jesus according to the flesh, that is essentially irrelevant to Paul. Paul writes almost exclusively of the risen Christ, and always as separate from Moses. For Dürkheim, the processes of emblematization and social formation are intertwined and essentially simultaneous. It is, therefore, irrelevant to ask which came first. In Durkheimian categories, these processes result in the creation of a new totem, the divinely exalted and universal Christ, a Jesus freed from the former totemic symbols of Moses, Torah, and circumcision. Only over time, and once firmly established, was this new community able to reach back into the storehouse of traditional images and claim some of them as their own. But this reclamation process itself, occurring within a community now loosened from any connection to the system of symbolic identifiers that distinguished Jews from all others, only solidified the break between the old and the new social realities, as clearly illustrated in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho the Jew. In the end, Dürkheim would leave us with Jewish followers ofjesus and Christians. The usual category of "Jewish-Christians" would in this scenario become meaningless. As mentioned earlier, we are also left then with what is perhaps the most provocative implication of our Durkheimian experiment, namely that the elevation of the figure of Jesus from a "subtotem" within the hierarchical symbolic system of Judaism to a full totem in its own right, rooted in but superior to the original system, the emblem of an equally new community, reflects a fundamental ambiguity in the way Jesus' earliest followers understood him. How, precisely, did an affiliation arise among the earliest Jesus people for whom traditional loyalty to Moses diminished, and who could see in Jesus the potential to serve as the supreme image of that affiliation? This is the question that will demand further exploration.

C H A F I ER T E N

ALTARS AND CHALKSTONES: T H E A N O M A L O U S CASE O F P U R I T A N S A C R E D SPACE IN L I G H T O F D U R K H E I M ' S T H E O R Y O F R I T U A L Brian C. Wilson

When it comes to the study of sacred space, the New England Puritans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries present several anomalies. Alone among the first Europeans who colonized the Americas, the Puritans resolutely rejected the reality of sacred space. Early Puritans were fiercely anti-sacramental in the tradition of J o h n Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, and, for this reason, they refused to practice rituals of spatial consecration in any form, whether church buildings or cemeteries, nor did they recognize the spontaneous appearance of sacred space which, in the Catholic world, often developed into pilgrimage shrines. Thus, upon immigrating to New England in the first part of the seventeenth century, the Puritans sought to establish a totally desacralized environment—an environment in which sacred church buildings, cemeteries, shrines, or any other sacred place would not exist.1 And yet, despite their utmost efforts to prevent it, despite their violent rhetoric against it, Puritan sacred space nevertheless eventually appeared in New England. How can we account for this? In this chapter, I will use Durkheim's theory of ritual as articulated in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life to analyze and explain this seeming anomaly. 2 Durkheim's theory, I believe, cogendy and persuasively allows us to understand the socio-psychological mechanisms at work in the creation and maintenance of sacred space. Moreover, it allows us to understand the almost historical inevitability of the Puritans' return to sacred space in the New World. Beyond the issue of sacred space, however, my goals in this chapter are a bit more ambitious. I wish not only to use Durkheim's theory of ritual to analyze Puritan sacred space, but I also wish to use Puritan 1 This chapter draws from sections of my forthcoming book, The New World's Jerusalems: The Role of Sacred Space in the Conquest and Colonization of the Americas. 2 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, translated by Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

sacred space as an opportunity to rethink Durkheim's theory of ritual itself. Better than the aboriginal material he used, Puritan sacred space highlights several important, yet neglected, elements in Durkheim's theory. The most important of these—and the most poorly presented in The Elementary Forms—is Durkheim's concept of the sacred. One of the most confusing aspects of Durkheim's The Elementary Forms is that he uses the term "sacred" ambiguously throughout the text. When the term is first introduced, Dürkheim uses a functional definition in which the sacred is a purely relational category with the profane: W h e t h e r simple or complex, all known religious beliefs display a c o m m o n feature: T h e y presuppose a classification of the real or ideal things that m e n conceive of into two classes—two opposite g e n e r a — that are widely designated by two distinct terms, which the words p r o f a n e a n d sacred translate fairly well. T h e division of the world into two d o m a i n s , one containing all that is sacred a n d the other all that is p r o f a n e — s u c h is a distinctive trait of religious thought. 3

Religion itself, therefore, is, in Durkheim's famous formulation, "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them." 4 According to this definition, the sacred is contentless, and sacred things are known simply because (1) they are taboo, and (2) they promote social solidarity. Ultimately, the sacred is primarily an abstract category of thought, one which "nothing in sense experience seems likely to have suggested." 5 And yet, later inThe Elementary Forms, Dürkheim proceeds to argue that the sacred did indeed arise in sense experience, thus leading to Durkheim's second, substantive, definition of the sacred. According to Dürkheim, in the experience of collective effervescence, the sacred emerges as "a sort of electricity" which then gets collectively interpreted as the action of some "external power," usually attributed to supernatural beings. 6 This second definition, of course, corresponds to traditional western notions of the sacred as a presence of the supernatural or supernatural power. Unfortunately, however, Dürkheim uses the two senses of the sacred interchangeably and never explicitiy spells out the relationship between the two concepts. This I have always found 3 4 5 6

Dürkheim, Dürkheim, Dürkheim, Dürkheim,

The Elementary Forms, p. 34. The Elementary Forms, p. 44. The Elementary Forms, p. 39. The Elementary Forms, pp. 217, 220.

surprising, since as I read The Elementaiy Forms, the relationship between the traditional sacred and the "Durkheimian" sacred is precisely one of the main theses of the book. T h a t a relationship between the two senses of the word sacred exists I do not doubt, and this relationship can best be illustrated through a Durkheimian ritual analysis of Puritan sacred space. Puritan "Sacred" Space in New England Christians have for centuries recognized a variety of spaces as sacred, that is, spaces which are invested with a supernatural presence or power. As in other religious traditions, sacred spaces are thought to arise spontaneously or they are evoked by ritual.7 T h e most common form of the latter in the Christian tradition was employed in the creation of sacred church buildings. T h e early history of the sacralization of Christian churches is complex, but by the 4 lh century, the Catholic Church instituted special rituals of consecration which have remained largely unchanged to this day. 8 And even among Christian groups which do not formally consecrate their buildings, the church remains a sacred space par excellence. Not all Christians, however, have accepted the reality of sacred space. During the Protestant Reformation, sacramentalism, that is, the attribution of sacrality to material objects, came under attack from several sides, especially within the Reformed tradition of Calvin and Zwingli. For one Reformed group, the seventeenth-century English Puritans, the ritual consecration of space became a particular object of scorn." T h e Puritans argued that only God would sacralize space, and in those rare instances when he did (e.g. the Jerusalem temple), he had allowed these spaces to be destroyed long ago. Specifically, the Puritans pointed to J o h n 4:21-23, in which Jesus tells the Samaritan

7 For a cross-cultural overview of sacred space, see Joel P. Brereton, "Sacred Space," in The Encyclopedia of Religions, edited by Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillian and Co., 1984), 526-35. For a more sociological approach, see the introduction to David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (eds.), American Sacred Space (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 8 J. D. Davies, The Secular Use of Church Buildings (New York: T h e Seabury Press, 1968), pp. 250-51. 9 Harold W. Turner, From Temple to Meeting House: The Phenomenology and Theology of Places of Worship (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1979), pp. 206-7. According to William Ames (1576-1653), "The adjurings or exorcisms of inanimate things and consecration of them to supernatural use, as the papists do with their holy water, temples, bells, and the like, are superstitious incantations" (William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, edited and translated by J o h n D. Eusden (Boston: Pilgrim Press, [1629] 1968), p. 270).

woman that temple worship had been superceded, as an explicit prohibition against further creation of sacred spaces. Thus, according to one Puritan divine, Samuel Mather, the belief in "the Holiness of Places and consecrating Churches" was nothing more than a gross misinterpretation of "Pieces and Reliques of the Law of Ceremonies" of the ancient Jews. In the face of this, continued reverence for places as sacred was the rankest kind of idolatry, since the "sacrality" of such places could be nothing more than manmade or worse, the work of the Devil. 10 As early as 1603, a group of Puritans petitioned James I for the destruction of all "temples, altars, and chapels" then existing in England because they had become irreparably profaned through ritual consecration when England was Catholic." Of course, the King was loathe to do this for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that belief in the sacrality of church buildings continued strong among most Anglicans. 12 This led some Puritans to fear for the future of the British Isles. Samuel Mather, for example, lamented, God will never purge away the Iniquity of Ireland, nor take away the sins of England, till the Stones of the Altar be as Chalk-stones, till People be Convinced that there is no more Holiness in a Church, I mean a Meeting-place of Wood or Stones, than in a Dwelling-house, nor an Altar more than in Chalk-stones.13 Puritans, therefore, would have to look elsewhere if they wanted to find a country undefiled by superstitious spatial sacramentalism. New England was seen as one such neutral landscape, and the Puritans who migrated there before the 1640s worked hard to keep it that way. Upon landing, the Puritans practiced no sacramental ceremonies of possession as most colonizing European groups did, nor did they consecrate towns or town boundaries. 14 Moreover, as historian

10

For a discussion of all these points, see Samuel Mather, The Figures or Types of the Old Testament, edited by Mason 1. Lowance,Jr. (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, [1672] 1969), pp. 324-37. This sermon was derived largely from an earlier sermon, originally delivered in 1660: Samuel Mather, A Testimony From the Scripture against Idolatry and Superstition (Boston, 1725; Evans Index 2676). 11 James P. Walsh, "Holy Time and Sacred Space in Puritan New England," American Quarterly 32 (1980): 79-95, p. 80. 12 The Anglican defense of both converted church space and consecration was best articulated in Book Five of Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., [1600] 1922) in a section entitled "Of Place for Public Worship." 13 Mather, A Testimony From the Scripture, 74. 14 For a discussion of typical ceremonies of possession, see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

J a m e s P. Walsh tells us, Puritan leaders attempted to impose a strict prohibition against any place names that even implied sacrality. As J o h n Winthrop and his party explored the countryside surrounding Boston during the 1630s, they carefully avoided assigning names that might imply consecration to any topographic features. Beaver Brooke, for example, was named after the animals that inhabited it; Spot Pond was so named because of the spotted nature of its surface; and many other landscape features were named after members of the exploring party, such as Master's Brook or Mount Feake. At some point in his journeys, Winthrop came across a river ford that one of the Separatists from New Plymouth previously named Hewes' Cross. Winthrop "was aghast that so 'Papish' a name had been given it" and promptly renamed it Hewes' Folly. 15 Perhaps the most striking instance of New England Puritan spatial anti-sacramentalism was the absolutely mundane nature of their meetinghouses, so named to differentiate them from consecrated church buildings. Puritan meetinghouses were typically the last buildings constructed in a new town, nor were they necessarily built at the center of town. 16 Puritan meetinghouses were usually constructed in the now celebrated architectural idiom known as "Protestant Plain Style," the origins of which, while still debated, certainly were not found in the existing ecclesiastical architecture of Europe. 17 Such "Plain Style" buildings were square or rectangular, but never cruciform, and they maintained no specific east-west orientation as most Catholic churches do. Moreover, as historian Kevin M. Sweeney has observed, "to remove any suggestion that the meetinghouse was a church standing on consecrated ground, the setders in certain parts of New England avoided locating their burying grounds next to the meetinghouses." 18 In terms of their internal arrangements, meetinghouses were conspicuous for their lack of an altar or any fixed, central space for the celebration of the Eucharist for, according again to Samuel Mather, "to have a Chancel, or one part of the Meeting-place, as more Holy than the rest, in imitation of the Jewish Oracle, this is evil and super-

15

Walsh, "Holy Time and Sacred Space," pp. 79-95. Walsh, "Holy Time and Sacred Space," pp. 90-91. 17 Walsh, "Holy Time and Sacred Space," p. 86. For one theory of the origins of the Protestant Plain Style, see Marian Card Donnelly, The New England Meeting Houses of the Seventeenth Century (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1968). 18 Kevin M. Sweeney, "Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches: Changing Perceptions of Sacred and Secular Space in Southern New England, 1720-1850," Winterthur Portfolio 28:1 (Spring 1993): 59-93, p. 66. See also David E. Stannard, The Puútan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 104-05, 108-10. 16

stitious." 19 What's more, these buildings had very few images and were completely devoid of statues, stained glass, or "virtually every other form of adornment unless one counts the wolves' heads nailed to the exterior walls as the bounty laws required." 20 Indeed, as the social centers for their towns, Puritan meetinghouses were routinely used for such secular purposes. In addition to church services, town meetings were held there, and meetinghouses were frequently used as warehouses and armories. 21 All of this is not to say that the meetinghouse was not an important and, in some respects, a special building for the Puritans. Collective worship did occur there and Puritans continued to believe that the spirit of God was present during worship, even if this holiness lasted only for the duration of the service and was in no sense contagious to material things. 22 Moreover, in time, the meetinghouse came to function as a powerful social mirror. As historian Robert J . Dinkin explains, "It is clear that in colonial and provincial Massachusetts when people attended the meetinghouse they were assigned specific places according to their standing in the community." 23 The practice of "seating the meetinghouse" does not seem to have been imported from England but developed rapidly from the first days of the New England colony, such that by the 1660s, it was a colony-wide practice. Each congregation developed committees to deal with the important problem of "seating the meetinghouse." In most cases, the greater one's age and wealth, the closer one sat towards the pulpit, with those of descending social rank seated correspondingly farther away. Children, Blacks, and Indians formed the outer perimeter of the congregation and of the meetinghouse. Seating the meetinghouse was serious business and relatively large fines could be assessed against people found willfully sitting in seats of "too great honor." In one case, a member of a congregation not only sat out of place, but had the temerity to place an easy chair next to the pulpit for his exclusive use. The congregants were so outraged by this affront to the social order that they not only fined the offending member, but they carted the chair outside and hung it from a hemlock tree. So ingrained did the practice of "seating the meetinghouse" become,

19 Mather, The Figures or Types of the Old Testament, p. 350. 20 Walsh, "Holy Time and Sacred Space," p. 86. 21 Darret Β. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1972), pp. 161-69, 216, 226. 22 Mather, A Testimony From the Scripture, p. 74. 23 Robert J. Dinkin, "Seating the Meeting House in Early Massachusetts," The New England Quarterly 43:3 (September, 1970), pp. 450-64.

that it only began to disappear after the Revolutionary War, and in some communities, it lingered on as late as 1830. 24 Thus, while the meetinghouse was not considered sacred space, it nevertheless became a highly charged symbolic space within the first generation of Puritan settlement of New England. By the second and third generations, the meetinghouse became even more symbolically charged as a place to be protected against profanation. Throughout the seventeenth century, excommunications increased in Puritan communities. Along with other religious and civil disabilities, the excommunicate could not attend worship services (although in typical Puritan fashion, they were fined for non-attendance). 25 In some communities, such as New Haven, the excommunicate could stand outside the meetinghouse door during services and catch as much of the service as he or she could. However, until the excommunicate was reconciled with the church, the meetinghouse remained a forbidden place. 26 Over time, other threats to the meetinghouse emerged. As New England became more religiously diverse during the seventeenth century, it became increasingly necessary to keep such radicals as Baptists, Quakers, and other sectaries out of the building. Perhaps the most important example of this came in 1686, when Governor Andros, sent by the English Crown to assert royal control over new England, sought to hold Anglican services in Boston. 27 Andros asked the Puritan ministers of the city to decide which of Boston's meetinghouses should be made available for his use. T h e ministers were frankly appalled at such a suggestion and reported to the Governor that "twas agreed that [they] could not with good conscience consent that our Meeting-Houses should be made use of for Common-Prayer worship." 28 Andros asked them to reconsider, meeting with no less than Cotton Mather and Samuel Willard, who "thoroughly discoursed his Excellency about the Meeting-Houses in great plainness, shewing they could not consent." 29 Eventually Andros simply forced his way into the Third Church of Boston, provoking a very loud

24

Dinkin, "Seating the Meeting House," pp. 461-62, 463-64. Edmund S. Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1967), p. 67. 26 Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England (Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, [1891] 1974), p. 264. 27 Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study ofBritish Colonial Policy (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1960), pp. 122-34. 28 Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Servait, 1647-1729 (New York: Farrar, Straus andGiroux, 1973), p. 128. 29 Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, p. 128. 25

demonstration by the congregation. The royal governor ignored these outbursts and held service in the Third Church for several months. In response, Boston's Puritan ministers called upon supernatural assistance in the crisis, appointing a private fast in order that the profaning shadow of Anglican services in a Puritan meetinghouse would speedily pass away. 30 As late as 1699, Puritan divines reminded their audiences that "there is now no place which renders the worship of God more acceptable for its being performed there," and generally Puritans still resisted attributing sacrality to their meetinghouses. 31 And yet, despite all their explicit prohibitions, their behavior suggests that they considered their meetinghouses very sacred indeed, at least in a Durkheimian sense, that is, as places to be rigorously guarded against profanation and as powerful symbols of social cohesion. Considering the Puritans guarded so carefully against sacralizing their meetinghouses in the traditional supernatural sense, how is it that meetinghouses became so profoundly "Durkheimianly" sacred? Durkheimian Ritual Theory and the Puritan Meetinghouse Before beginning the analysis of the Puritan meetinghouse, I wish to first review Durkheim's theory of ritual and its role in the genesis of the traditional and the Durkheimian sacred. I will do so by drawing not only on Durkheim's The Elementary Forms, but also on the work of Randall Collins which has clarified some key points of Durkheim's thought. 32 According to Collins, Durkheim's theory of ritual can be broken down into five elements: 1. A group of minimum size two assembled face-to-face. The sheer physical presence of human animals in the same place is a precondition for the emotional and cognitive processes that follow. 2. Focus of attention upon the same object or activity, and mutual awareness of each other's attention. Collective formalities, such as church service or political protocol, are important because they are one easy way to focus common attention .... The crucial feature is that individuals become caught up in group activity, in which they are mutually aware of what each other is doing. This makes the group itself the focus of attention, as a transindividual reality, influencing

30

Barnes, The Dominion of New England, 130. See also Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, pp. 136-39. 31 Walsh, "Holy Time and Holy Space," p. 86. 32 Randall Collins, "Stratification, Emotional Energy, and Transient Emotions," in Theodore D. Kemper, ed., Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 27-57.

members from outside while permeating their consciousness from within. 3. Members share a common mood. It is inessential what emotion is present at the outset. The feelings may be anger, friendliness, enthusiasm, fear, sorrow, or many others. The model posits an emotional contagion among the persons present, for they are focussing attention on the same thing and are aware of each other's focus; they become caught up in each others' emotions. As a result the emotional mood becomes stronger and more dominant; competing feelings are driven out by the main group feeling .... 4. The outcome of a successful buildup of emotional coordination within a ... ritual is to produce feelings of solidarity. The emotions that are ingredients of the ritual (in No. 3 above) are transient; the outcome however is a long-term emotion, the feelings of attachment to the group that was assembled at the time .... 5. Rituals shape cognitions. The main objects or ideas that were the focus of attention during a successful ritual become loaded with emotional overtones. Those ideas or things become symbols; whatever else the ideas may refer to on the mundane level, there is also a deeper, Durkheimian level on which symbols invoke membership in the group that charged them up with ritual significance ,...33 As Collins suggests, for a clear understanding of the flexibility of Durkheim's theory of ritual, it is imperative to differentiate between the two emotional states generated by a Durkheimian ritual, the intense, yet transient emotions and the long-lasting, yet less intense emotions of social solidarity. Durkheim pointed out that the intense, yet transient, emotions generated by ritual ("collective effervescence") have often been attributed to supernatural agency (the traditional sacred). 34 T h e long-lasting emotions of social solidarity, however, are largely unconscious and therefore do not demand attribution. As Collins puts it, they comprise more a "feeling than an explicit cognition," and yet they are subdy powerful nevertheless. Such are the bases of what I have been calling the "Durkheimian" sacred. Why, in the context of this chapter, is this distinction important? Both the short-lived intense emotions and the long-lasting emotions can become associated with symbols through ritual. However, for those groups that do not attribute the traditional sacred (i.e. supernatural agency) to the intense emotions, or who limit the contagiousness of that sacrality, the rituals can be successful nevertheless, since they

33 Collins, "Stratification, Emotional Energy, and Transient Emotions," pp. 3134. For a review of recent experimental work confirming the reality of emodonal contagion, see Elaine Hatfield, J o h n T . Cacioppo, Richard L. Rapson, Emotional Contagion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 34 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 220.

also create long-lasting feelings of social solidarity, and these feelings can become associated with symbols. In other words, the sacralization of symbols in a Durkheimian sense is independent of the sacralization of symbols in a traditional sense: if collective effervescence is achieved, "Durkheimian" sacralization can occur even if traditional sacralization does not. It might be argued that the above construction of Durkheim's theory of ritual relies too heavily on the unconscious, far more, at least, than traditional Durkheimian sociologists are wont to do. However, sociologist Stjepan G. Mestrovic recently argued that the unconscious is central to Durkheimian sociology.35 Mestrovic reminds us that the French conscience is not necessarily synonymous with consciousness, nor is consciousness inherent in Durkheim's concept of collective representation. 36 In Professional Ethics, for example, Dürkheim wrote, Within every one of us ..., there is at all times a host of ideas, tendencies and habits that act upon us without our knowing exacdy why or wherefore. To us they are hardly perceptible and we are unable to make out their differences properly. They lie in the subconscious.37 Collective representations may be conscious, but it is doubtful to Dürkheim that these are the most important examples of collective representations. Indeed, according to Mestrovic, Dürkheim expressed this priority of unconscious over conscious collective representations through the concept of "social fact": "Dürkheim regarded social facts as a type of collective representation whose reality eludes the consciousness of agents, witnesses, and society itself."38 In this regard, then, traditional sacrality and "Durkheimian" sacrality are both collective representations, although the "Durkheimian" sacred is truly a social fact. If we accept the foregoing construction of Durkheim's theory of ritual, then returning to our New England example, Puritan attitudes towards their meetinghouses become intelligible despite their explicit prohibitions against the contagiousness of the traditional sacred. Puritan services involved a series of complex rituals: a highly stylized introit, public confession, the sermon (or more usually, series of sermons), communal prayer and psalm singing, and lay preaching or

35 Stjepan G. Mestrovic, "Durkheim's Concept of the Unconscious," Current Perspectives in Social Theory 5 (1984), pp. 267-88. 36 Mestrovic, "Durkheim's Concept of the Unconscious," p. 278. 37 Emile Dürkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, translated by Cornelia Brookfield (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958), p. 271. 38 Mestrovic, "Durkheim's Concept of the Unconscious," p. 268.

"prophesying." Despite the popular twentieth-century stereotype of "bored and sleepy congregations," historian David Hackett Fisher tells us that "nothing could be further from the truth." 3 9 Puritan worship elicited strong emotions from its participants, often provoking spontaneous outbursts from the congregation. Exceptional Puritan preachers could easily keep the emotional pitch high for hours on end, and few in a community would voluntarily miss worship services. Even with the decline of conversion experiences in the second and third generations, attendance at weekly worship remained high. Puritan worship services, therefore, could truly be regarded as examples of collective effervescence on a regular basis. Thus, even if the traditional sacred did not become permanently attached to ritual objects, it was inevitable that long-lasting emotions of social solidarity (the "Durkheimian" sacred) would. The Puritan meetinghouse, a large and often overlooked ritual object, was no exception. As soon as it became the center for worship in New England, the process whereby the building became an effective symbol, that is, invested with "Durkheimian" sacrality, began. It is no wonder that by the second and third generations, the Puritan meetinghouse ceased to be simply a utilitarian structure and became an object of intense respect bordering on awe. T h e example of Puritan sacred space illustrates well the causal relationship between collective effervescence interpreted as the traditional sacred and the "Durkheimian" sacred. It illustrates also that this is not a conscious process, that the contagiousness of the traditional sacred can be actively denied, and yet the "Durkheimian" sacred can accrue to objects anyway. Of course, recognizing the autonomy of the "Durkheimian" sacred from the traditional sacred leads one necessarily to deduce that the strong emotions generated by ritual might not have to be attributed to anything for ritual to be effective. In other words, the socio-psychological mechanisms at work in Durkheimian ritual work even in the most secular rituals. This, I believe, was the ultimate implication of Durkheim's The Elementaiy Forms, although Durkheim himself gave few concrete examples of purely secular rituals. Durkheim did suggest obliquely that patriotic rituals might be a good example of such, but after a century of research, it is not clear that nationalism is ever devoid of the transcendent. Today, in the United States at least, better examples can be found not in politics, but in sports.

39 David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 127.

It might be argued that while sports can generate collective effervescence in participants and spectators, these practices are, nevertheless, not generally socially effective as ritual. Dürkheim himself argued that purely secular games and festivals lacked the "high seriousness" of the traditional sacred to be successful rituals.40 And yet, college administrators and city councils seem to know better: sports continue to be one of the most potent ways of creating a community of highly committed people out of usually indifferent students and alumni or atomized urban citizens. Indeed, even in terms of symbol formation, sports seem to be highly effective. If one were to look for the most elaborate and expensive ritual spaces on college campuses or large cities today, one wouldn't look for the college chapel or the church on the square; rather one would look for the football stadium or basketball arena. Few, of course, would attribute traditional sacrality to these spaces, and yet these are the places most likely to evoke longlasting feelings of social solidarity on a college campus or a big city. In other words, sports complexes are the most powerful symbols of "Durkheimian" sacrality in America today and this is a result of a purely secular ritual. At this point, an obvious question arises: what is the functional value of the traditional sacred? In other words, does the attribution by a group of the traditionally sacred to collective effervescence (1) heighten these strong emotions such that the long-lasting emotions of social solidarity are even stronger and longer lasting; and (2), does this make for the creation of more effective symbols? These are large questions, and it will take a great deal more historical and sociological work than I can offer here to answer these questions definitively. In the rest of this chapter, however, I would like to return to my research on sacred space in Puritan New England and explore a more modest aspect of these questions: what is the functional value of the contagiousness of the traditionally sacred within the context of Durkheimian ritual? From Puritan to Yankee, from "Durkheimian " to Traditional Sacrality At the beginning of the seventeenth century, New England's Puritans strove mightily to avoid attributing traditional sacrality to space. By the end of that century, however, such attributions had become commonplace. Beginning in the first decades of the eighteenth century, we find an intensification of the "Durkheimian" sacrality of the meetinghouse, and occasionally Puritan expression of this sacrality slipped

40

Dürkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 385-87

into the language of traditional sacrality. For example, we find that the construction of new meetinghouses now took several years from the planning stages to completion, as there was often intense haggling over its location, "each section of the town wanting the site in its own domain." 4 1 T h e social prestige and economic advantages of the meetinghouse were, of course, obviously still factors. However, when relocations were contemplated, concern was now expressed not only in economic terms, but also in terms of the traditional sacrality of the place. 42 Perhaps most telling is the fact that even when a meetinghouse burned or fell into such disrepair that it had to be condemned and a new building built elsewhere, the initial lot "retained sufficient sanctity into modern times to be set apart from mundane residential or commercial uses. Most of the town greens in New England today are what remains of the original church lot, not, as one might have thought, a survival of the old town commons." 4 3 Another indication ofjust how far the sacralization of the meetinghouse had gone by the first decades of the eighteenth century was the fact that many Puritans now no longer considered secular uses appropriate for their meetinghouses, although this was one of the key points Samuel Mather emphasized in his sermon of 1660. Mather had argued that meetinghouses were only contingently sacred, that is, sacred when the church members were at communion, but not at other times, and therefore, like the synagogues of the ancient Jews, they were available for secular uses. By the 1710s and 1720s, however, New England congregations were having difficulty seeing their meetinghouses in this light. In 1723, for example, the town of Norwalk, Connecticut, voted overwhelmingly "that no town meetings shall be warned to convene at the new meeting house, nor attended and held within sd. house." Indeed, from then on, nothing was to be done in the meetinghouse "but what is consistent with, and agreeable to the most pure and special service of God, for which end it was built and now devoted." 44 As the century progressed, more and more New England towns followed suit. 45 Changing attitudes towards meetinghouses are also reflected in an architectural shift during the eighteenth century. T h e origins of this

41

Dinkin, "Seating the Meeting House in Early Massachusetts," p. 452. Walsh, "Holy Time and Sacred Space," p. 91. Walsh, "Holy Time and Sacred Space," p. 91. See David D. Brodeur, "Evolution of the New England Town Common: 1630-1966," The Professional Geographer 19:6 (November, 1967): 313-18. 44 Quoted in Sweeney, "Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches," p. 59. 45 Sweeney, "Meednghouses, Town Houses, and Churches," p. 93. 42

43

shift are to be found in Boston in 1723, when the Anglican communion there built Christ Church, later known as the Old North Church. According to religious historian Peter W. Williams, its erection set off "a kind of architectural dance ... between New England's Puritan Congregationalists and the Anglican church they reviled." 46 Christ Church was built in a style derived from the neoclassicism of Sir Christopher Wren. In response, the Puritan Old South Meetinghouse was built in Boston six years later, and although the Old South Meetinghouse retained many of the elements of the layout of the Protestant Plain Style, it was nevertheless essentially a copy of the Wren-style Old North Church. In time, Wren's style of ecclesiastical architecture spread from Boston, eventually becoming the preferred style for meetinghouses throughout New England. As Kevin M. Sweeney observed, this transformation was not "merely a case of steeple envy inspired by urban Anglican churches," but was "in part a conscious process expressing a growing sacramentalism" on the part of the Puritans. 47 In other words, Puritans adopted the Wren-style of architecture to make sure that their Anglican, Baptist, and Quaker neighbors would not miss the sanctity of the Puritan meetinghouse. One last indication of the growing sacralization of the Puritan meetinghouse during the first half of the eighteenth century can be seen in the changes in Puritan attitudes towards cemeteries. As discussed previously, the earliest New England Puritans were loathe to place burying grounds next to meetinghouses for fear that this would lead to a mistaken belief in the sacrality of the grounds. However, by the early 1700s, cemeteries were routinely placed next to the meetinghouse walls, and while the earliest Puritans unceremoniously disposed of their dead in unmarked graves, later Puritans began to practice elaborate funerals and to mark the graves of their dead with expensively-carved headstones. 48 The shift in iconography of these headstones is in itself fascinating. Along with scythes and hourglasses, the most popular figure on a Puritan headstone was the winged, grimacing death's-head, an image much like the fearful figures found on Puritan spirit stones and perhaps employed with the same intent—to ward off supernatural evil. However, according to historian David E. Stannard, between 1740 and 1760, the death's-head gradually "metamorphosed into a pleasant cherubic image." 49 While this iconograph-

46

Peter W. Williams, Houses of God: Region, Religion, and Architecture in the United States (Urbana, IL: University oflllinois Press, 1997), p. 8. 47 Sweeney, "Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches," p. 60. 48 Sweeney, "Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches," pp. 65-66. 49 Stannard, The Puritan Way ofDeath, pp. 156-57.

ic change has been explained by theological shifts, it may also have been driven by the increased sense of sacralization of the meetinghouse-cemetery complex. T h e death's-head would have been wholly appropriate in the neglected burying grounds of the early Puritans, but more heavenly figures were perhaps called for when cemeteries began to share the sacred space of meetinghouses. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century, the practice of formally and publicly acknowledging the traditional sacrality of the meetinghouse through ritual consecration—anathema to the Puritans of Winthrop's generation—was revived and again became the norm. 5 0 Throughout the eighteenth century, Congregationalists routinely "dedicated" their meetinghouses with a special sermon. By the end of that century, however, the dedication sermon had metamorphosed into a sermon of consecration. 51 Elijah Wheeler's 1814 dedication sermon of the Barrington, Massachusetts, meetinghouse was the epitome of this metamorphosis. T h e entire sermon was devoted to proving the proposition that "God does dwell in houses and places consecrated to him." Wheeler did this, apparently to his congregation's satisfaction, by citing all the places in the Bible—the temple, Jerusalem, the Land of C a n a a n — where this was true and would always be true: "For He has promised, and I repeat again, 'in all places where I record my name, I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee'." 52 T h e sermon ends with a rousing comparison of the sacrality of the Barrington meetinghouse with that of the ancient temple ofJerusalem. 5 3 With the erection and consecration of this New World Jerusalem temple, the metamorphosis of the Puritan meetinghouse from a purely "Durkheimian" sacred space to traditional sacred space was now complete. Ultimately, perhaps the best indicator of how general the accep-

50

Sweeney, "Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches," p. 80. During the period from 1780 to 1819 alone, Sweeney noted over fifty published dedication cum consecration sermons (Sweeney, "Meetinghouses, Town Houses, and Churches," p. 81, n. 39). 52 Elijah Wheeler, The Divine Presence Implored: A Sermon Delivered at the Dedication of the New Meeting-House in Great-Banington, December 30, 1813 (Stockbridge: Willard for Kingsley, 1814; Evans Index S33661), pp. 5, 9. 53 Wheeler, The Divine Presence Implored, pp. 11-12. For some, however, simply using the imagery of Jerusalem was not enough. Later in the nineteenth century, we even find a few Congregationalists going so far as to erect church buildings in conscious imitation of the Jerusalem temple. The Whalers' Church in Sag Harbor, New York, for example, was built in 1843 according to the best archaeological evidence for the true form of Solomon's temple (see Richard G. Carrott, The Egyptian Revival: Its Sources, Monuments, and Meaning 1808-1858 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], p. 126 (note 32 and figure 95). 51

tance of traditional sacred space had become by the descendents of the Puritans was not simply the appearance of sacred church buildings and cemeteries in New England, but by the emergence of the most unlikely form of sacred space: a pilgrimage shrine. The shrine I'm referring to, of course, is Plymouth Rock. Local historians from Plymouth dated the first celebration of Plymouth Rock—albeit a rather ad hoc one—to the year 1741.54 Two decades later, in 1769, the town of Plymouth officially organized an anniversary sermon to be read over the rock each year, and in 1772, the town fathers set up a corresponding committee to invite noted speakers of the day to come yearly to the rock and explain to the country and the world the importance of the landing of the first settiers at Plymouth. The sermons and discourses that resulted from these invitations were a varied lot. Many took the occasion to rehearse at length the Separatist history of the Pilgrims, while others in a more revolutionary mood made the Pilgrims the initial bearers of democracy and religious freedom to the New World. Many of the orators reminded their listeners of the important comparison between the Pilgrim migration and the exodus of the Israelites. On at least two occasions, however the speakers felt the need to address the meaning of the rock itself. Significantly, they did so in essence by retroactively consecrating America, claiming that the Pilgrims themselves had taken possession of the land by consecrating Plymouth Rock. Daniel Webster, for example, in his discourse of 1820, told of how the "Rock became hallowed in the esteem of the Pilgrims," just as the soil of New England was to become "sacred ground" for them. 55 Thus, one still feels at the rock, Webster wrote, "a sort of genius of the place, which inspires and awes us," a genius that the Pilgrims themselves had planted there many years before. 56 Even more explicit was the Congregational minister James Flint's A Discourse Delivered at Plymouth, December 22, 1815, at the Anniversary Commemoration of the First Landing of Our Ancestors at that Place. Flint, too, felt that a kind of genius pervaded the place: "The rock, on which they first stepped, when they took possession of this land, is, with reason, piously preserved and visited by their posterity, an appropriate monument o f t h a t event. It is to their posterity, what that heap of stones upon the margin of the Jordan was to the children of the Israelites, a monument

54 Wesley Frank Craven, The legend of the Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 31-32. 55 Daniel Webster, A Discourse Delivered at Plymouth, December 22, 1820. In Commemoration of the First Settlement of New-England (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1821), pp. 44, 43. 56 Webster, A Discourse, p. 11.

to remind them of the wonders, which God wrought for their fathers." 57 In the mind of Flint, therefore, Plymouth Rock had indeed become the gateway to the "Zion of America." 5 8 Appropriately enough, Flint took his model of ritual consecration from the example of the Israelites at the moment they entered into the Promised Land: "These and a crowd of kindred ideas throng into the mind when we contemplate the rock of the pilgrims, and while, as at this time, we are assembled upon the spot, which first afforded a resting place to the weary voyagers, on which they first erected their domestic altars, on which the first Bethel, in this land of idolaters, was consecrated with christian rites, by a rational and spiritual worship of the true God." 5 9 Needless to say, the first generations of Puritans never did attribute sacrality to the rock and would have been aghast at the suggestion. T h e fact that the rock would develop into a pilgrimage shrine would have been equally appalling. And yet, that is exactiy what happened. As the early nineteenth century wore on, visitors came to the rock throughout the year—not just on July 4th—in ever-increasing numbers. In time, the mythology of the Pilgrims would spread far beyond New England, and Americans would be drawn far and wide to experience the "genius" of this holy place. And, as if to make the sacred nature of the rock explicit, it was eventually covered by a stone cupola—a cupola surmounted by nothing less than the iconic scallop shell so evocative of the medieval Catholic pilgrim. 00

Conclusions Why, despite the strong theological prohibitions against the contagiousness of the traditional sacred by their ancestors, did the descendents of the Puritans so fulsomely embrace traditional sacred space? Although far from definitive, I would like to propose two possible answers. T h e first answer has to do with the fact that the rise of the traditional sacred inversely mirrored the fracturing and gradual loss of Puritan political power and cultural hegemony over New England. From the late seventeenth century on, Puritan control was successively undermined by the waves of immigration by non-Puritan groups—

57 James Flint, A Discourse Delivered at Plymouth, December 22, 1815, at the Anniversary Commemoration of the First Landing of Our Ancestors at that Place (Boston: Lincoln and Edmunds, 1816; Evans Index S37619), pp. 3-4. 58 Flint, A Discourse Delivered at Plymouth, p. 20. 59 Flint, A Discourse Delivered at Plymouth, p. 5. 60 J o h n Seelye, Memory's Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Ì998), p. 539.

groups which the English Crown forced the Puritan elite to tolerate. The resulting religious diversity led to a breakdown of the quasi-theocratic linkage between church and government in New England. This in turn led to a precipitous decline in the status of Puritan clergy.61 The response to this situation, I would argue, was a gradual return to sacramentalism. As power and influence slipped away, the urge for traditional sacralization intensified, and this was expressed most clearly by the appearance of Puritan sacred space. Despite twentieth-century historians' attempts to make Puritans into the harbingers of modernity, they themselves were firmly rooted in the worldview of premodern Europe, a worldview in which the equation of political power with control of the traditional sacred was still an unquestioned fact. Throughout Western history, political power was often partially derived from, and legitimated by, the control of the traditional sacred. And indeed, one of the most powerful because tangible—ways of demonstrating control over the traditional sacred had always been to control the place where the traditional sacred manifested itself, i.e., sacred spaces. While New England remained more or less religiously homogeneous and politically secure, demonstrating control over the traditional sacred by confining it to worship services was powerful enough. However, once the Puritans began to lose political ground to other religious groups that could demonstrate a much more pervasive and tangible control over the traditional sacred (especially, but not exclusively, Anglicans), it must have been increasingly difficult to resist the temptation to return to an age-old sacramentalism. The fact that this process of sacralization eventuated not only in traditionally sacred churches and cemeteries, but in a pilgrimage shrine—a form of sacred space that even Anglicans didn't possess—indicates just how great the Puritans' descendents perceived their loss of control over New England to have been. Did the return to sacramentalism and to traditional sacred space actually serve a positive social function for the Puritans and their descendents? In other words, did it increase their social cohesion and bolster their power and influence in New England? T o a degree, I suspect it did, although not for the mystical reasons above. At the most basic level, the overt recognition of the traditional sacrality of these spaces focussed conscious attention on them, thus making them even more potent symbols of Puritan, later Congregational, solidarity. For

61 See for example, "The Elect Lose the Fasces," chapter ten in Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker, 7he Puritan Oligarchy: The Founding of American Civilization (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1947), pp. 292-338.

those groups that believe in the reality and contagiousness of the traditional sacred, this, of course, is probably always true. Just as importantly, however, while controlling the traditional sacred in the form of sacred space did not magically lead to an increase in power or control, the perception that it did probably contributed to a renewed sense of confidence and a willingness to fight to maintain political power and cultural hegemony in New England. In the face of mounting nonPuritan immigration during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Congregationalists in Massachusetts managed to hold on to their established status longer than any other religious group in the United States—until 1833. 62 Out of this struggle came the incredibly durable myth of the preeminent place of Puritan New England in U.S. history, a myth that still resonates in the American imagination to this day. It is perhaps not incidental that images of the steepled church on the green and of Plymouth Rock figured prominently in the protracted resistance to disestablishment. Moreover, the fact that these sacrcd spaces still figure prominently in the myth of the Puritans today is an indication of just how successful these traditional sacred spaces were as social symbols in the rapidly diversifying New England of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the context of the times, therefore, the contagiousness of the traditionally sacrcd did indeed have functional value. At the beginning of this section, I promised two answers to the question of why the Puritans' descendents reverted to traditional sacred space. This second answer is perhaps far more obvious than the first, but it brings us back to Durkheimian ritual theory and the point of this chapter. Why did the descendents of the Puritans revert to traditional sacred space? Because, by the eighteenth century, New England was already filled with generations-old "sacred" spaces— "Durkheimian" sacred spaces. T h e fact that New England meetinghouses, cemeteries, and, later, Plymouth Rock, were all ritual sites and places of collective effervescence meant that these were symbolic spaces already heavily invested with emotion. Durkheimian ritual is, after all, effective whether or not collective efferescence is attributed to the traditional sacred or whether that sacred is considered contagious. For all the seventeenth century, the Puritan meetinghouse functioned as a perfectly effective social symbol despite its lack of traditional sacrality. However, in those contexts in which the traditional sacred is

62 See Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Authority and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780-1833 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,

1998)."

of functional value, the presence of the "Durkheimian" sacred facilitates its appearance. Thus, we find in eighteenth-century New England, an easy and unremarked drift back into traditional sacralization. In light of Durkheimian ritual theory as I have presented it, the anomalous case of Puritan sacred space is far less anomalous. Furthermore, as I hope the case of Puritan sacred space has demonstrated, the recognition of the "Durkheimian" sacred alongside the traditional sacred makes Durkheim's ritual theory more flexible—flexible enough, I believe, to be used across the full range of historical and cultural contexts that Durkheim hoped it would.

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Nandan, Yash. The Durkheimian School: A Systematic and Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1977. Nielsen, Donald A. "Auguste Sabatier and the Durkheimians on the Scientific Study of Religion." Sociological Analysis 47 (1987): 283-301. . Three Faces of God: Society, Religion and the Categories of Totality in the Philo ophy of Emile Durkheim. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.

Paden, William E. "Durkheim's Revenge: Transformations and Ironies in the American History of Religions Tradition During the Cold War," in The Academic Study of Religion During the Cold War, East and West, edited by Iva Dolezalova, Luther H. Martin, and Dalibor Papousek. New York: Peter Lang Press, 2001, pp. 253-65. Pécaut, Félix. "Le Spiritualisme scientifique: la philosophie d'Emile Dürkheim." Revue de l'enseignementfrançais hors de France 2 (1920). Pickering, W. S. F. Durkheim's Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. . "Human Rights and the Cult of the Individual: An Unholy Alliance Created by Dürkheim?" in Individualism and Human Rights in the Durkheimian Tradition, edited by W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller, Occasional Papers, No. 1. Oxford: British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, 1993, chapter 3. Schmaus, Warren. Dürkheim 's Philosophy ofScience and the Sociology ofKnowledge: Creating an Intellectual Niche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Strenski, Ivan. "L'apport des élèves de Dürkheim," in La traditionfrançaise en sciences religieuses, edited by Michel Despland. Quebec: Groupe de recherche en sciences de la religion, 1991, pp. 109-28. —. Dürkheim and the Jews of France . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. - . "The Social and Intellectual Origins of Hubert and Mauss's Theory of Ritual Sacrifice," in India and Beyond: Aspects of Literature, Meaning, Ritual, and Thought. Essays in Honour of Fritz Staat, edited by Dick van der Meij. New York: Kegan Paul, 1997, pp. 511-37. Watts Miller, W. Dürkheim, Morals and Modernity . Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996, pp. 95-110. . "Durkheimian Time." Time and Society, 9:1 (2000): 5-20.

INDEX O F NAMES

Abraham 155, 161 Adam 161 Alexander, Jeffrey 65 Alphandéry, Paul 106 Amélineau, Emile 94, 106 Andros, Sir Edmund 169-70 Aubéry, Pierre xvi Augustine, St. 55 Bacon, Francis 99 Beidelman, T . O. 64-65 Bellah, Robert 16, 37, 42 Bergaigne, Abel 98 Berger, Peter 16, 19 Berthelot, André 95 Betz, Hans Dieter 156-57 Bialik, Hayam Nahman 114-15, 118 Black, J . S. 49 Blake, William 38 Bourdel, Philippe xvi Brown, Peter 127 Brunschwicg, Léon 112-18 Buisson, Ferdinand 137, 139 Calvin, J o h n xviii, 163, 165 Chantepie de la Saussaye, Pierre Daniel 94 Charcot, J e a n Marie 54 Charle, Christophe 88 Chaumette, Anaxagoras 136 Chavannes, Edouard 107 Clinton, President William J. 133 Collins, Randall 170-71 Comte, Auguste 129, 138-40 Cousin, Victor 136-37 David 161, 162 Davy, Georges 106 Deploige, Simon 63 Derenbourg, Hartwig 96 Dewey, J o h n 58 Dinkin, Robert J . 168 Douglas, Mary 16, 20 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 129, 130, 133 Durkheim, André xvii, 131 Eliade, Mircea xii, xiii, 1,12, 16-25 Elzey, Wayne 1 Epicurus 131 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. xiv, 49, 64

Faulkner, William 111, 117 Faye, Eugène de 104 Féré, Charles 54 Ferry, Jules 138-39 Feurbach, Ludwig xi Fisher, David Hackett 173 Flint, James 178 Fossey, Charles 88, 91, 104-108 Foucault, Michel 16, 41-42 Fouché, Joseph 136 Foumier, Marcel 86, 88, 103 Frazer, Sir James 25, 45, 48-58, 65-66, 70-71 Frege, Gottlob 80-81 Freud, Sigmund 1,3, 13 Friess, Horace 11 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa-Denis 48, 119-121 Gillen, Francis 54, 56 Goodenough, Erwin 127 Goodman, Nelson 23 Granet, Marcel 88, 107 Halbwachs, Maurice 111, 114, 134 Hertz, Robert 37, 39, 88 Honigsheim, Paul 85 Hubert, Henri xvi, 39, 40, 42, 85-87, 91, 97-108 Hume, David 78 Huntington, Richard 36, 37 Israel,Jacob 161, 162 James 1 (English king) 166 James, William xiv, 54-58, 91, 159 Jeanmarie, Henri 91 Jesus xviii, 30, 57, 143, 149-165 Jones, Robert Alun 63, 65-66, 103 Justin Martyr 162 Kant, Immanuel xi, 77-79 Kaplan, Mordecai 127 Kerry, Beno 80 Kierkegaard, Soren 7 Ksleman, Thomas A. 129, 135-36, 139-40 Lalande, André 53 Lazare, Bernard 114

Leenhardt, Maurice 108 Levi Israel 96 Lévi' Sylvain 96, 99, 102-104, 107, 115-19, 122-23, 142 Lévinas, Emmanuel 112-15, 118, 124, 141 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 16, 46, 130 Loisy, Alfred 104 Luckmann, Thomas 19 Lukes, Steven 47, 63 Luther, Martin 7 Mack, Burton 143 Maffesoli, Michel 35-36, 41-43 Maimonides 126 Marcel, Gabriel 113 Marillier, Léon 95, 99, 101-103, 105-106 Marx, Jean 91, 107 Marx, Karl 3 Mather, Cotton 169 Mather, Samuel 166-67, 175 Maurras, Charles 122 Mauss, Marcel xvi-vii, 39-41, 47, 8588, 91, 97- 103, 104-105, 107-108, 129-31, 140 Mestrovic, Stjepan J. 172 Metcalf, Peter 36-37 Monceaux, Paul 104, 106 Montaigne, Michel de 112, 121 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondât, Baron de 53 Moret, Alexandre 88, 91, 106, 108 Moses xviii, 126, 150, 152-162 Mueller, Max 3-5 Nielsen, Donald 86, 100, 102 Nisbet, Robert 122 Nora, Pierre 35-38, 42 Otto, Rudolph 1, 11, 18 Pascal, Blaise 46 Paul (apostle) xviii, 150-156, 159-162 Pécaut, Félix 137 Peter (apostle) 150, 152, 154, 160 Philo 127 Pickering, W. S. F. xvii, 64-65, 85 Pilate, Pontius 149 Plato 53 Pocock, John 63

Raynaud, Georges 107 Reinach, Salomon 114 Renan, Ernest xvi, 93, 129, 140 Renouvier, Charles 137 Réville, Albert xvi, 94, 96-97, 99, 104106, 122-23 Réville, Jean 94, 96, 104, 106, 123 Ritschl, Albrecht xiv, 56-58 Robertson Smith, William xiii, xiv, xv, 19, 25, 45, 47-51, 53, 57-58, 59-72, 98, 103 Robespierre, Maximilien 136 Rorty, Richard 39, 41, 52 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 53 Sabatier, Auguste xvi, 86, 94-96, 100, 102, 103-104 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri 138 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 56-57 Schneersohn, Rabbi Menachim Mendel 126 Schneider, Herbert 11 Schweitzer, Albert 150 Skinner, Quentin 63 Snyder, Graydon F. 158 Spencer, Baldwin 50, 54, 56 Stannard, David E. 176 Stark, Rodney 143 Stocking, George 63 Strenski, Ivan xvi, 86, 94, 96-97, 100, 102 Sweeney, Kevin M. 167, 176 Tiele, C. P. 94, 98, 105 Toutain, Jules 95, 105 Turner, Victor 16, 20 Tylor, E. B. 3-5, 48-49 Vernes, Maurice 94, 95, 104 Wach, Joachim 12, 15 Walsh, James P. 167 Warner, Lloyd 37 Weber, Max 1, 58 Webster, Daniel 178 Wellhausen, Julius 150 Wheeler, Elijah 177 Willard, Samuel 169 Williams, Peter W. 176 Winthrop, John 167, 177 Wren, Sir Christopher 176 Wundt, Wilhelm 53, 63 Zwingli, Ulrich xviii, 163, 165

I N D E X O F SUBJECTS Afterlife xvii, 27, 111-42 Annihilationist position 124-26, 132 Objective immortality 124, 129, 138, 140 Subjective immortality 124, 135, 139 Alliance Universelle Israelite 113 "Les Amis du Judaisme" 142 Anglicanism 169-70, 176, 180 Animism 4, 5 L'Anne Sociologique xv, 47, 66, 85-108 Anomie 53 Ante Pacem (Snyder) 158 Antiochene controversy 152 Anti-sacramentalism xvii-xviii, xix, 163, 167 Anti-Semitism 96, 123 Australian aboriginal religion xi-xiii, 111, 22, 37, 41-43, 50-51, 55, 158, 164 Buddhism 11, 44, 97, 107 Cartesian philosophy 46, 52-53, 132 Categories of human thought xv, 7384, 145-46, 164 Categories of social classification 8-10 Ceremonies of possession 166 Chinese Civilization (Granet) 107 Chinese Thought (Granet) 107 Christianity xi, xvi, xvii, xviii, 11, 33, 34, 44, 59, 60, 87, 91, 93, 123, 124, 127, 143-62 Christology 159-60 Circumcision 151-53, 162 La Cité antique (Fustel de Coulanges) 48, 119-20 Collective effervescence xi, xii, xix, 3, 12-13, 15, 41-43, 146, 164, 171-74, 181 Collective memory 126, 134 Collective Memory (Halbwachs) 114 Collective representations xi, xviii, 3, 89, 45, 67, 75, 146-47, 150, 159, 172 Collège de France 92, 93, 104 Comparative religion 9, 15 Concepts 73-75, 80-82 Confessions (St. Augustine) 55 Congregationalism 176-77, 180-181 Consecration, spatial 163, 165-67, 17779 Le Contrat social (Rousseau) 53

Conversion experience 55, 173 Cosmology xiv, 8, 18, 21, 56, 147, 148 "De la Définition des phénomènes religieux" (Durkheim) 48, 66, 97 De la division du travail social (Durkheim) 46, 53 Definition of religion 10 Definition of religion, Durkheim's χ, xvi, xviii, 27, 66-70, 97-98, 164 Definition of religion, Hubert's and Mauss' 98, 102 Definition of religion, Réville's 94, 97 Deism 136-37 Dialogue with Trypho the Jew (Justin Martyr) 162 Diary (Brunschwicg) 114 Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (Ritschl) 56-57 Discourse Delivered at Plymouth (Flint) 178 "Discourse of 1820" (Webster) 178 LA Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas (Lévi) 99 Duality of human nature, Durkheim's concept of 46, 144 Dreyfus AfTair 53 Duhem-Quine thesis 51 Durkheim and the Jews of France (Strenski) xvi, 113 "Durkheimian" sacred xix, 170-74, 177, 182 Durkheim's Sociology of Religion (Pickering) xvii, 85 "Dynamogenic" quality of religion xiv, 45-47, 52, 54-55, 58 Ecole Normale Supérieure 107, 119 Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes xv, 86-109 Annuaire of the Fifth Section 88 Fifth Section xv, 86-109 Fourth Section 93, 105, 106 L'Education morale (Durkheim) 53 Empiricism 74, 78 Encyclopédie 135 Équipe, Durkheimian 85, 113, 129-30, 140

Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion d'après la psychologie et l'histoire (Sabatier) 100 Essay on Time (Hubert) 40 Ethik (Wundt) 63 Ethnography 25, 46, 48, 54, 67, 87, 96, 101-103, 108, 130, 149 Euhemerism 48, 71 Evolutionary theories of religion xi, xvi, 51, 97, 99 L'Evolution pédagogique en France (Dürkheim) 53, 116-17, 119, 121 Exogamy 8, 50

Kantian philosophy 46, 73, 77-79, 82, 137 Khunian philosophy of science 51-52 Last Supper of Christ (Eucharist) 13, 71, 159, 162, 167 lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Smith) 48, 58-59, 62 Libertarianism 31-32 Lieux de mémoire vs. milieux de mémoire 37-38 Logic (Kant) 77 Lyçée de Sens 53

Fetishism 33 Magic 48, 50-51, 64, 66-68, 70, 106 Frankfurt School 85 Mana 6-8, 13, 20 Free Church of Scotland 56, 58 Materialism 17, 128-29, 132, 134, French Revolution xiii, 27, 42, 43, 112, 140 135, 142 Meetinghouse, Puritan 167-70, 172-77, 181 From Tribe to Empire: Social Organization among Primitives and in the Ancient East Messiah 126, 128, 151, 156 (Davy) 106 Methodological atheism x, 3 Functionalism x-xii, xviii, 12-13, 69, Monotheism ix, xi, 123 99, 174, 180-82 Mosaic law xviii, 150-60 The Myth of Innocence, A (Mack) 143 Myth, Durkheim's theory of xi-xii, xv, The Gift (Mauss) 130 ' 2, 9, 18, 20-22, 29, 37, 51, 66-72, Gift, Maussian concept of 40-41, 130 148, 160, 181 The Golden Bough (Frazer) 49-50 Myth-ritualist theory xiv, 48-49, 51, 59Greek Orthodox Church 3 72, 102 Halakhah 126 Higher Criticism of the Bible xvi, 93 Nationalism 112, 128, 141, 173 Hinduism 44, 98 Naturistic theory of religion 4, 5 History of religions 17, 93, 94 New Testament 150, 156, 161 Homo religiosus xiii, 11,21 Acts of the Aposdes 150-52, 155, Humanism xiii, 23, 28, 112, 128 160 Corinthians, first 154-55, 162 Icons 3, 32, 36 Corinthians, second 153, 162 Iconography, Puritan headstone 176-77 Galatians 152-54 Inculturation of the Jesus Tradition (Snyder) Galatians, second 159 158 Gospels, the 149-50 Islam xi, xvi, 44, 91, 96, 124 John, gospel of 165 Israel, state of 128 Luke, gospel of 160-61 Israelites 178-79 Matthew, gospel of 156-57, 160, 161

Jacobin revolutionary tradition 121-22 Jerusalem 149-52, 159-60, 177 Jerusalem Church 152, 156 Jerusalem Temple 165, 177 Second Temple period 126-27 Jesus Seminar 143 Judaism xi, xvi, xvii, xviii, 11, 33, 34, 87, 91, 93, 96, 98, 111-42, 145, 150-52, 157-60, 162 Reconstructionist Judaism 128 Reform Judaism 128 Orthodox Judaism 128

Pauline Letters 151, 158 Philippians 153 Romans 153-55, 162 Sermon on the Mount 156-57, 160 Thessalonians, first 155 On Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Pickering) 85 "On the Nature and Function of Sacrifice" (Hubert and Mauss) 97, 103

Pharisees 127, 156-57 Phenomenology 16, 22, 25, 108, 133 Pilgrims, Separatist Puritans 178-79 Plymouth Rock 178-79, 181 "The Politics of the Future" (Dürkheim) 41 Polytheism xi, 9, 123 Positivism 3, 15, 23, 111, 119, 125, 129, 131, 135, 138-41 Pragmatism 52, 55-58 Prayer 40, 100 Primitive Culture (Tylor) 49 Principle of sufficient reason (Kant) 76, 79-80 Principles of Psychology (James) 54, 56 Protestant scholarship on religion xiv, xvi, 19, 22, 56, 58, 86-108, 122, 137, 141 Protestant Plain Style architecture 167, 176 Psychology of religion xvi, 4, 13, 55, 64, 66, 95, 96, 99, 106, 108, 109, 163, 173, Puissance vs. pouvoir 41-43 Puritanism xvii, xviii, xix, 163-82 Rationalism xvii, 3, 17, 32-33, 43, 48, 50, 56, 112, 130 Realms of Memory (Nora) 37 Rcductionism xii-xiii, 2-3, 15-17, 20, 23-25 Reformation 94, 137, 152, 165 Les Réçles de la méthode sociologique (Dürkheim) 46, 53 Relies xiii, 32 Religion of Humanity, Comtean 13839 The Religion of the Semites (Robertson Smith) 19 Religions des peuples non-civilisés (Réville) 99 Religious Studies 20, 22, 85-87, 95, 98, 109 Revelation ix, 57 Revolutionary War, American 169 Revue de l'histoire des religions 88, 106 La Revue néo-scholastique 63, 66 Rites of passage 36-37, 39 Ritual, Durkheim's theory of 2, 63-72, 163-65, 170-72, 181-82 Ritual, Robertson Smith's theory of xiv-XV, 48-51, 59-72 Roman Catholicism 38, 63, 93, 94, 104, 107, 120-22, 135-38, 140, 163, 166, 167, 179 French Catholicism 121, 123, 139 Romanticism 56

The Rules of Sociological Method (Dürkheim) 97 Ruritania 125-26 Sacramentalism xix, 165, 176, 180 Sacred space 163-82 Sacred/profane dichotomy x-xii, xviii, 3, 5-6, 8-12, 15, 18, 26, 46, 67, 146, 158 Sacrifice xiii, xvi, 40, 49, 51, 64, 69, 98-99, 103 Saducees 127 Secular religion xiii, 27, 31, 33-36, 40, 43-44, 140 Secularism 10, 27, 33-34, 173 Segementation, social xviii-xvii, 145, 147-48, 152, 161 Semi-sacred xiii, 28, 34, 36, 39, 44 Sensation et mouvement (Féré) 54 Social constructionism 83-84 Social facts 172 Social formation 16, 144, 149, 161 Social realism 52-54, 123, 125-26, 128, 131, 134 Société des Etudes Juives 115-16 Société française de philosophie 45, 55 Sociobiology 133 Sociology of knowledge xi, xv, 16, 75 Sociology of Religion (Wach) 15 Sociology of the categories, Durkheim's 79, 83 Spiritism xvii, 129-31, 133, 135, 140 Spiritualism xvii, 124-25, 128-140 Sports 173-74 Structuralism 21 Sub-totem xviii, 147, 162 Le Suicide (Dürkheim) 47, 53 Sut generis, religion as x-xii, 18-19 Taboo 25, 31-32, 48, 50-51, 53, 55, 148, 164 The Time of the Tribes (Maffesoli) 41-43 Thcophilantropy 136 Third French Republic xvii, 53, 86, 93, 112, 122, 135, 137-39, 141 Thirteen principles, Maimonides' 126 Torah 126, 162 Totemism xi-xviii, 1-12, 19, 32, 46, 4955, 64-69, 98-99, 103, 106, 146-47, 149, 152, 160, 162 Totemic emblem xi, 3, 7-8, 11, 13, 146, 161-62 Totemic principle xi, 6, 8, 9, 13, 20, 158 Unconscious, Dürkheim and the 172 Utilitarianism 30-32, 48, 50, 55

The Varieties of Religious Experience (James) Wakan 7 55-56 World and Worldmaking 22-25 Vertical approach to the study of World War I xvii, 88, 91, 101, 107, religion ix-x 129,130,131,140