Lived Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Approaching Religious Transformations from Archaeology, History and Classics

Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, Emiliano Urciuoli, Valentino Gasparini, Maik Patzelt, Rubina Raja, Anna-Katharina Rieger, Jörg Rüpke, Emiliano Urciuoli

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110557947
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

The Lived Ancient Religion project has radically changed perspectives on ancient religions and their supposedly personal or public character. This volume applies and further develops these methodological tools, new perspectives and new questions. The religious transformations of the Roman Imperial period appear in new light and more nuances by comparative confrontation and the integration of many disciplines. The contributions are written by specialists from a variety of disciplinary contexts (Jewish Studies, Theology, Classics, Early Christian Studies) dealing with the history of religion of the Mediterranean, West-Asian, and European area from the (late) Hellenistic period to the (early) Middle Ages and shaped by their intensive exchange. From the point of view of their respective fields of research, the contributors engage with discourses on agency, embodiment, appropriation and experience. They present innovative research in four fields also of theoretical debate, which are "Experiencing the Religious", "Switching the Code", "A Thing Called Body" and "Commemorating the Moment".

Section 1: Experiencing the religious

Introduction to Section 1

Maik Patzelt

1 Religious experience: a difficult thing to engage with

In approaching the topic of religious experiences, a writer always runs the risk of making arbitrary assumptions, as a brief survey of the academic debate on the topic reveals. For more than a century, scholars working in philosophy, psychology of religion, anthropology of religion, religious studies, and many other disciplines besides, have been engaged in a debate about the correct way to approach experiences in general and religious experiences in particular. Support has oscillated between subjectivist and constructivist poles, which is to say the ideas that religious experience is either something highly individual, something intrinsic and authentic, or something that is the result of culture and society.¹ In recent years, a broader critique of the notion of religious experience itself has also developed. R. Sharf (2000), for instance, has argued that the idea of an experience deemed religious or divine is itself intrinsically tied to Western conceptions of religion and religiosity, which prioritize, or even overvalue, experiences as pivotal points of human practice.

Sharf’s criticism is primarily directed towards philosophical approaches to religious experience. Scholars contributing to this debate have tended to maintain a normative, indeed essentializing, approach that focuses on religious experience, rather than religious experiences. With the exception of F. Schleiermacher, one of the first and most influential thinkers to work on this topic (Martin 2016, 526–527), the most prominent protagonists in this respect tended to be early pragmatists and phenomenologists. Just as pragmatism, represented by W. James’ highly influential The Varieties of Religious Experience, the phenomenology of religion (W. Dilthey. J. Wach and M. Eliade)² “enjoins the ‘imaginative participation in the world of the actor’ in order to arrive at ‘value free’ and ‘evocative’ descriptions” (Sharf 2000, 268 quoting Smart 1973, 20–21). Due to the new technological devices that neuroscience appears to offer for the study of religions, these essentialist approaches have undergone a renaissance in recent decades. Despite the questionable scientific bases of their 19th century’s predecessors experiments in magnetism and other fields of popular psychology (cf. Taves 1999),³ cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and, particularly, neuro-psychologists of religion (who tend to term themselves neuro-theologists),⁴ have not been deterred from seeking to identify religious experiences as anthropological constants, universal truths that are encoded as inherent elements in the human brain.

These essentializing approaches – as varied as they are – mainly build on a notion of religious practice that ignores its embodied dimensions. However, recent discussions in the cognitive science of religion,⁵ as well as research on the senses in religion, focusing particularly on aesthetics and mediality,⁶ have foregrounded an embodied approach to religious practice and experience. The emphasis here is on a non-Cartesian dialectical interaction between the body, the mind (or rather the brain), and the cultural and social environments in which body and brain are embedded (Kundtová Klocová and Geertz 2019, 76–80; Geertz 2010, 306–308). These studies do not consider religious experience as essentialized or as an anthropological constant or as something solely derived from a neurological core. Rather, they ask “How are the senses stimulated, governed and disciplined in the context of religious practice?” and “How are religious experiences, emotions and attitudes created, memorized and normalized?” (Grieser and Johnston 2017, 2).

From this perspective, religious experiences are not to be reduced to various aesthetic qualities – such as (flashing) lights, fragrances, or rhythmic sounds and performances (Geertz 2010, 306–308).⁷ An embodiment approach focuses instead on the “interplay between sensory, cognitive and socio-cultural aspects of world-construction” (Grieser and Johnston 2017, 2). Religious experiences are, thus, above all culturally learned and socially evoked. These experiences only have significance within a particular culture, within a particular social environment (status, milieu, etc.), and within the specific moment and social gathering in which they are evoked, negotiated, and communicated.⁸ In the words of Tanya Luhrmann, every culture and every individual within “cultivates” its own ways of “sensing” the religious.⁹ More precisely, it is the cultural- and milieu-specific recollection of these experiences, such as symbolic constructions (e.g. narratives) and representations (e.g. statues), that determines our ways of detecting a religious experience, most of all conceptualized as an experience of superhuman agency.¹⁰ These forms of knowledge and commemoration are (re)produced, nuanced, and actualized through communication.

An embodied approach of this sort leaves scholars of religion – and particularly historians of religion – with the problem of the communicability of experiences (see Jung 2006, 1999; Knoblauch 1998) and the interpretive dominance of religious specialists (Bendlin 2015, 538). There are many factors that complicate a coherent analysis of communicability. These range from the almost endless variety of individual (religious) knowledge, which may or may not be ascribed to an equally endless variety of neuro-physical ‘manipulations’ and arousals, or to the complexity of intersubjective negotiation processes in social gatherings (cf. Csordas 2008). However, the factor with which historians of religions are primarily concerned is the limited and fragmented historical evidence that complicates these efforts. This problem touches the very heart of the study of past cultures, that is, the expressive limits of language (cf. N. Belayche in this volume), the semiotics of architectural and poetic language, and the ‘meaning’ of ritual practice. The study of the experiences of the past thus requires a great deal of effort to, first and foremost, disclose and reconstruct the cultural, social, situational, and particularly the ritual context and the related discourses. As R. Gordon points out in this volume, religious experience “is at any rate communicable only via the relevant constructs available in a given culture or sub-culture”. The historian of religion, and particularly the historian of ancient religions, faces a difficult challenge in not reducing experiences to purely subjectivist frameworks while, at the same time, avoiding the development of normative generalizations about coherent group experiences. This latter case would amount to little more than the transfer of a civic religion model to a smaller scale of analysis.

The present volume seeks to take up this challenge. The embodiment approach to experience avoids reducing experiences to a culturally normative set of meanings, as is pointed out by Sharf, and it is precisely for this reason that the “lived ancient religion”-approach pursues an embodiment approach to religious practice and experience. The “lived ancient religion”-approach furthermore seeks t...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Pursuing lived ancient religion
• Section 1: Experiencing the religious
• Section 2: A “thing” called body: expressing religion bodily
• Section 3: Lived places: from individual appropriation of space to locational group-styles
• Section 4: Switching the code: meaning-making beyond established religious frameworks
• Index