THEOLOGY AND THE FIRST THEORY OF SACRIFICE
NUMEN BOOK SERIES STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS edited by W.J. HANEG...
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THEOLOGY AND THE FIRST THEORY OF SACRIFICE
NUMEN BOOK SERIES STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS edited by W.J. HANEGRAAFF
advisory board P. Antes, M. Despland, RI.J. Hackett, M. Abumalham Mas, A.W. Geertz, G. ter Haar, G.L. Lease, M.N. Getui, I.S. Gilhus, P. Morris, J.K. Olupona, E. Thomassen, A. Tsukimoto, A.T. Wasim
VOLUME XCVIII
THEOLOGY AND THE FIRST THEORY OF SACRIFICE BY
IVAN STRENSKI
BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2003
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strenski, Ivan. Theology and the first theory of sacriface / by Ivan Strenski. p. cm. — (Numen book series. Studies in the history of religions, ISSN 0169-8834 ; v. 98) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-13559-6 (alk. paper) 1. Sacrifce—Christianity—History of doctrines. I. Title. II. Studies in the history of religions ; 98. BT263.S77 2003 291.3’4—dc21
2003052252
ISSN 0169-8834 ISBN 90 04 13559 6 © Copyright 2003 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 permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands
For Joe “A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.” (Emerson)
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CONTENTS Acknowledgments ......................................................................
xi
C O Public Discourse and Theory of Sacrifice .............. 1. Sacrifice and Moral Discourse ...................................... 2. When Sacrifice Was Religious ...................................... 3. Theorizing and Historicizing Theories .......................... 4. The “First Theory” of Sacrifice .................................... 5. The Religious Factor and the Plan of this Book ........
1 1 7 12 17 27
C T French Sacrifice, Catholic Eucharist .................... 1. Uninvited Guests ............................................................ 2. Catholic Sacrificial Discourse and the Theology of the Eucharist .............................................................. 3. Sacrifice Nationalized: Revolution and Counter-Revolution ........................................................ 4. “La Mystique” ................................................................ 5. Durkheimians and Catholics .......................................... 6. Transgression and the ‘Catholic’ Bataille .................... 7. Peace at Any Price? Or the Resentments of René Girard .................................................................... 8. René Girard and Social Justice ....................................
32 32
C T World without Theory, Amen .......................... 1. Theory “Malgré tout” .................................................... 2. The “Revenge of the Reformation” in the Fifth Section .................................................................... 3. Who Were the Liberal Protestant “Extremists”? ........ 4. Meaningless Rituals, Impious Bribes, Dead Pasts and Bad Religions .......................................................... 5. The Bible, Tylor and Robertson Smith ...................... 6. The Theological Dialectics of Sacrifice: Tylor and Smith ............................................................ 7. For Reasons of Method ................................................ 8. Robertson Smith among the Theory-leery .................. 9. ‘Scientific’ History, Positivist History, Protestant History ..........................................................
34 42 45 49 53 60 64 69 69 79 80 85 93 96 102 105 109
viii
10. Vernes and the Politics of Methodology ...................... 11. Appreciating Ernest Renan ............................................ 12. Renan and the Civic Uses of Positivism ......................
114 116 120
C F Bringing Theory (and Theology) Back In ............ 1. Vernes and the Historicism Too Historicist ................ 2. Evolution as Cryptic Theology ...................................... 3. Albert Réville, Tiele and Comparative Study of Religions .......................................................................... 4. “Modern Theology”: Why Albert Réville Thought He Was Right ................................................................ 5. Tiele and Theory: Morphology Becomes Theology .......................................................................... 6. Tiele’s Theory of Sacrifice as a Theology of Sacrifice ............................................................................ 7. On Still Not Theorizing Sacrifice ................................ 8. World War and the New Politics of Sacrifice ............
122 122 126
C F Conspiracy/Theory and the Goodness of Society .... 1. Plots and Skirmishes ...................................................... 2. Hubert and Mauss against the “Science of Religion” .......................................................................... 3. Durkheimian “Foxes” and Protestant “Lions” in the Fifth Section ........................................................ 4. Ritual Is Religion Made Flesh ...................................... 5. Theorizing Sacrificial Gift .............................................. 6. Theorizing the Sacrificial Past ...................................... 7. Religion Is Relatively Good, So Sacrifice Is Too ..............................................................................
152 152
C S Imagining Sacrifice ................................................ 1. Familiarity and Contempt: Loisy and the Durkheimians .................................................................. 2. Loisy’s Historicism .......................................................... 3. Loisy’s Theology and Public Discourse ........................ 4. Inventing Sacrifice or Finding It? .................................. 5. Both Finding and Inventing Sacrifice? .......................... 6. Wobbly Theory Meets Wavering Positivism ................ 7. Comparison and the Key to Theory ............................ 8. Duchesne, the ‘Primitives’ and Sacrifice ......................
192
128 131 134 138 140 144
157 165 171 173 176 181
192 196 198 202 207 210 216 219
ix
C S Epistemology and the Study of Religion .............. 1. Power and Principle .......................................................... 2. Theology, Theory and Post-Modernity .......................... 3. Theology and Epistemology in Their Places ..................
229 229 236 237
Index ..........................................................................................
245
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the many colleagues and friends who read, commented upon and in other ways aided this project: Greg Alles, Juana Alvarado, Scott Bartchy, Philippe Besnard, Ron Burke, Donald Charlton, Jim Clifford, Robin Craver, Grace Davie, Winston Davis, Michel Despland, Roger Dilts, Louis Dumont, Antoine Faivre, Clare and Joe Fischer, Myra Fisher, Marcel Fournier, Peter Frank, Tamar Frankiel, Ernest Frerichs, Janice and Steve Glass, Richard J. Golsan, William Scott Green, Etienne Halphen, Alf Hiltebeitel, Gérard Hubert, Brad Hurley, François-A. Isambert, Robert Alun Jones, Victor Karady, Henrika Kuklick, Bruce Lincoln, William Logue, Akiko Masuda, Jennifer Mergy, Arie Molendijk, Bobi Moreno, Don Neilson, Jacob Neusner, Bill Pickering, Sam Preus, Douglas Parrott, Laurie Patton, Sam Preus, Norman Ravitch, Michèle Richman, Robert Segal, Ninian Smart, George W. Stocking, Jr., Ellen Marie Strenski, Jennie Strenski, Edward Tiryakian, and Irwin Wall. For generous use of library facilities, in Paris, I should also like to thank the Bibliothèque de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, the Bibliotheque Nationale and Archives Nationales. In California, I salute the Graduate Theological Union Library, the Hoose Library of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Young Reference Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Southern Regional Library Facility. In New York City, I thank the New York City Public Library. On my home campus at the University of California, Riverside, I am grateful to the tireless, cheerful and efficient staff of the Rivera Library, especially its Interlibrary Loan Services. Thanks finally are due also to the Holstein Family Community Endowment in Religious Studies for much appreciated financial support.
CHAPTER ONE
PUBLIC DISCOURSE AND THEORY OF SACRIFICE 1. Sacrifice and Moral Discourse The idea of sacrifice sometimes seems so repellant that the word might just as well be banned from public discourse. In ritual sacrifice, what can excuse the often unmitigated cruelty of the act? Some ritualists may argue that sacrifice injects meaning into human affairs. But, what meaning gained from the death of a victim—even a simple animal—could ever justify the suffering wrought upon the unfortunate creature?1 Talk of ‘sacrifice’ seems then only to mask brutality. In the realm of civic or social sacrifice, things are not very different. ‘Sacrifice’ used here is but a cruel euphemism covering up victimization or just a device to conceal injustice. The proponents of socalled ‘trickle down’ economics never cease calling the poor to ‘sacrifice’ immediate benefits for the sake of future rewards, but the rich seem excused from deferring their own gratifications. Similarly, who today entertains appeals to sacrifice in wartime without a measure of cynicism? As the recent military actions in Kosovo and Afghanistan showed, it is virtually (and in a way ‘literally’) unthinkable that soldiers today might be expected to ‘sacrifice’ their lives in battle, however popular the conflict. Even in the intimate domain of interpersonal relations, it is a commonplace that partners are not expected to ‘sacrifice’ their individual career aspirations, for example, for the sake of the family at large. ‘Sacrifice’ and its attendant rhetoric have fallen on hard times. But, talk of “sacrifice” cannot comfortably or indeed totally be avoided. It keeps nagging at us. Can we go on having our egoist, or even individualist, ‘cake’ and eating it too? Does not there come a time when the self must be denied—and denied even unto death? ‘Sacrifice’ still has a hold on us at least because sacrifice is so thoroughly embedded in our cultural traditions and moral history. ‘Sacrifice’
1 Richard Wollheim, The Sheep and the Ceremony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 27.
2
is too much part of the rhetoric of our public language. Both Jewish and Christian bibles are unthinkable without reference to ritual sacrifice, even in extreme forms such as human sacrifice. From the story of Abraham leading Isaac up Mount Moria to the doctrine of Jesus’s paradigmatic death as atoning sacrifice for human sinfulness, sacrifice sits squarely in the midst of our traditions. Thus, when we need, as we inevitably do, to consider curtailing individual interests for the sake of others, we find it hard indeed to resist falling into talk about “sacrifice.” Thus, despite reservations and resentments, when we seek appropriate language to address extreme occasions like patriotic devotion in wartime, we still appeal to ‘sacrifice,’ and to these solemn religious precedents—if only to justify loss after the fact. Thus, while it seems either bad taste or vulgar to trumpet the virtues of civic sacrifice as motives to serve, the fallen are typically celebrated as having died sacrificially so that we might live. Thus, when memorialists search for words to carve into monuments dedicated to those victimized by war, they typically take hold again of the solemn language of ritual sacrifice. However troubled we may be, then, by the morbidity and severity of sacrifice, we continue to trade on its imagery when the times demand it. As we talk “about” sacrifice—however charily—we also talk “with” it, invoking images rooted in deeper levels of our cultural consciousness. But, just what is sacrifice, and how should we talk about it in the civic arena, in public life? Such fundamental conceptual questions matter at the very least because they will color the moral language of everything that goes by the name, ‘sacrifice.’ Thus, those often disturbing ‘primitive’ rites of sacrificial violence, as well as the hard choices of public life will all come under the sway of our conceptions of sacrifice. What attitude should we take toward the sacrificial system of human immolations characteristic, say, of the Aztecs— especially when treated to radical post-modern reconsiderations of them by the likes of David Carrasco and Tzvetan Todorov?2 How much of our talk “about” ritual sacrifice, such as that of the Aztecs, is determined by our talking “with” the moral judgments we assume 2 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (1982), Richard Howard, trans., (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1999), David Carrasco and Micah Kleit, eds., City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization (Boston: Beacon, 1999).
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for or against it? In the civic realm, exactly what does asking an electorate for ‘sacrifice’ really entail? Is it more akin to asking for total denial of self-interest, or only for modest amounts of the same? Depending upon how we conceived the nature of ‘sacrifice,’ surrender for the sake of saving the lives of troops might be seen either as a ‘realistic’ or cowardly policy, while fighting to the ‘last man’ might be seen as either honorable or ‘suicidal.’ Similarly, while a few deaths in battle for a just cause might be acceptable, many more would not. If we are being asked to ‘sacrifice,’ we will want to know what such a call would demand. Even in wartime, does a call to ‘sacrifice’ imply a policy of the army’s fighting, Masada-like—“to the last man”? Or, is it well understood that even in the extremity of warfare, soldiers will not be expected to give up themselves, even as they are asked to give of ourselves? How we think about sacrifice in general, therefore, inevitably invades how we think about the sacrifices demanded in the course of civic life. Now, although these gut-wrenching moral choices of civic life are not the principal foci of this book, they set something of a backdrop for it. The main axis around which this book’s discussion turns is how—if at all—sacrifice should be studied in a principal arena of public discourse—the university. In this book, I want to move from what might seem the sublimity of moral discourse about sacrifice in the ritual and civic domains to what might appear at first the relative insignificance of the study of sacrifice in the academic world. Ironically enough, these academic discussions in the end will prove to be anything but ‘academic.’ In the overheated hothouse ideological atmosphere of the France of Durkheim’s day, academic discussions often boiled over into the larger public discourse of the day. We can understand something of this phenomenon since today we find the same thing. Many putatively ‘scientific’ discussions of ‘sacrifice’ in ethnographic or historical settings, for example, seem to be more like meditations on the moral nature of violence in the modern world, rendered in a kind of coded discourse about ritual sacrifice. These scholars in general simply equate sacrifice with a rite, immoral because of its violence or injustice, and then proceed essentially to deplore it and its analogues in the modern world.3 ‘Victimization’ is an all
3 Ivan Strenski, “Between Theory and Speciality: Sacrifice in the 90’s,” Religious Studies Review 22/1 (1996), 10–20.
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too familiar trope of these discussions common in our recent moral discourse. A prime example of this style of discourse comes from contemporary thinker, René Girard. He finds that sacrifice is burdened with moral faults. For him, sacrifice “serves to protect the entire community from its own violence” by shifting it onto a victim in a ritual.4 “The function of sacrifice,” says Girard thus, “is to quell violence within the community and to prevent conflicts from erupting.”5 In this way, it establishes an ‘order.’ Sacrifice somehow attacks the “elements of dissension scattered throughout the community,” and then finding a substitute for the community itself, refocuses them so that they “are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.”6 “Substitution” therefore becomes “the basis for the practice of sacrifice” of whatever kind.7 Sacrificial violence is thus shifted safely away from the sacrifier or the good citizens of the sacrificing community. Their ‘peace’ remains blissfully undisturbed. But, what drives Girard, I would submit, is his deeply felt moral conviction roundly and loudly to denounce sacrificial victimization, whether it be functional or not. Christian theologian Tom Driver is another prominent scholar who engages sacrifice from an even more extreme moral point of view. Driver refuses even to grant Girard’s argument that sacrifice might have mitigating functions for deflecting violence. For Driver, ritual sacrifice is morally unsettling because it lends excuses to those who would do other sorts of violence outside the ritual context in ‘real’ life. Fresh from his experiences of both ritual (sacrifice) and political violence in Haiti, Driver concludes that the “presence of killings in ritual, . . . actually contributes . . . to the spread of senseless killing in society.”8 Those societies that place ritual sacrifice at the center of their social life will tend to breed a corresponding culture of civic violence by the sheer force of imitation. “This is not to say,” Driver notes,
4 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Patrick Gregory, trans., (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977), 8. 5 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 14. 6 Ibidem, 8. 7 Ibidem, 3. 8 Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual (San Francisco: Harper/Collins, 1991), 105.
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that without ritual we would not kill. It is rather to say that the sources of killing by humans are multiple, and that one of them is ritual itself. For ritual is not only reactive, not only imitative or compensatory in its functioning, but also generative. Not everything it generates is good.9
Thus, for the likes of Girard and Driver ‘sacrifice’ denotes something morally repugnant in itself, like murder or rape. Writing as moralists, they are impelled to denounce sacrifice across its entire range of senses from social victimization to ritual act.10 For them, it would be monstrous even to treat sacrifice in some disinterested or morally neutral way as it would be to bring out the ‘other side’ of the story of victimization or violent death. Would it not be just as monstrous of scholars to tolerate so-called accounts of the Holocaust, purporting to tell ‘the other side’ of that story as well?11 Girard and Driver seem then to be saying that some ‘stories’ just do not have ‘other sides,’ and sacrifice is one of those ‘stories.’ While noting these familiar sentiments of our own time, we would do well to recall that the story of sacrifice has indeed had an ‘other side’ in the not too distant past. There, ‘sacrifice’ carried a moral charge as positive then as it is negative now. ‘Sacrifice’ exuded a sense of moral gravity and lofty high-mindedness that the words ‘hero’ and ‘rescue’ do for us. ‘Modernist’ French Catholic theologian, Alfred Loisy, one of the leading religious intellectuals of the period, saw sacrifice as a leading metaphor and practice that ought to govern thinking about even the most mundane aspects of daily life: Ordinary sacrifice—indispensable to common life and running of society—consists in renunciations which day after day, human discipline imposes on whomever wants fully to play his human role in the family and city . . . . daily sacrifices will always be the daily bread of social life. . . .12
9
Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual, 105. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 134–43. William Beers, Women and Sacrifice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), Robert G. Hammerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 11 See the recent debate about Holocaust denial spurred in part by writers like David Irving as well as Deborah E. Lipstadt’s stunning rebuttal, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault of Truth and Memory (New York City: Plume, 1993). 12 Alfred Loisy, La Morale humaine (Paris: Nourry, 1923), 292. 10
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In Loisy, we find nary a trace of the views of our contemporaries, Girard and Driver, that sacrifice might conceivably perpetuate domination, injustice and pain. Nothing could be further from Loisy’s early 20th century mind. In a similar vein, although no cheerleader for sacrificial violence, Tzvetan Todorov has argued for the moral value of Aztec ‘sacrifice’—certainly in contrast to practice of ‘massacre,’ typical of the Spanish Conquistadors. The ritualized killing in the ‘sacrifices’ of the Aztecs or Mexicas was limited and done for lofty common purposes while, in comparison, the brutal mass slaughters of the ‘massacres’ wrought by the Conquistadors spilled endless streams of blood in the base pursuit of personal economic gain.13 Outside the realm of moral discourse, sacrifice also has wide use in such social sciences as anthropology, Indology and their cognate disciplines. Here, moral principles are set aside in the spirit of working cultural relativism, and sacrifice is employed as a value-neutral scientific notion.14 Even when it may be violent, ‘sacrifice’ here carries no more a moral burden than notions like war, power, struggle, cannibalism or incest. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, for example, see sacrifice in ancient Greek society as a kind of “cuisine,” a kind of cooking.15 Frits Staal, as well, sees sacrifice formally, as a syntactically devised formal practice, devoid of meaning, done for its own sake.16 Claude Lévi-Strauss strays even further from the religious and moral discourses of sacrifice typical of the Durkheimians and initiates a radical line of inquiry. Like ‘totemism’, ‘phlogiston’, ‘hysteria’ and such, ‘sacrifice’ is an ‘illusion’ of scholarship, rather that a ‘natural kind.’ ‘Sacrifice’ is a ‘construct,’ and what should interest us is less what it ‘is,’ and more what we have made of it in
13 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (1982), Richard Howard, trans., (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1999), 143–5, 228–32, 252–3. 14 Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, Linda O’Brien and Alice Morton, trans., (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), John M. Beattie, “On Understanding Sacrifice,” in Sacrifice, M. F. C. Bourdillon and Meyer Fortes, eds. (London: Academic Press, 1980), 34. Jean Paul Colleyn, “Le Sacrifice selon Hubert et Mauss,” Systèmes de pensée en Afrique noire. Cahier 2, “Le Sacrifice,” Luc de Heusch, ed., (Paris: Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 1976). Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), Victor Turner, “Sacrifice as Quintessential Process, Prophylaxsis or Abandonment?,” History of Religions 16 (1977), 189–215. 15 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, eds., The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, (1979) Paul Wissing, trans., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 3f. 16 Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences.
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the course of theoretical thinking and fundamental conceptualization.17 Following Lévi-Strauss’ lead, anthropologist Luc de Heusch departs as well from Hubert and Mauss’ conception of sacrifice as a religious act, and instead treats it solely in terms of its semiotic functions, as a set of symbolic structures.18 2. When Sacrifice Was Religious By contrast with the structuralist rejection of a moral and religious conception of sacrifice, I want to tell a story of sacrifice that takes us back to a time when sacrifice was seen as just such a notion, and moreover one that engaged public intellectuals and academics in lively moral and religious debates. My desire to historicize inquiry into theory of sacrifice does not mean, however, that structuralist insights need to be discarded entirely. These insights need instead to be refocused in the disciplinary interests of the study of religion. It is no secret that a Lévi-Strauss or a de Heusch prefer to inquire into culture in terms of problems particular to general semiotics or neural structuring. Fine. We all have the right to promote our own disciplinary objectives in the research programs we follow. LéviStrauss and de Heusch, therefore, reject the religious readings of sacrifice of the late 19th and early 20th century, in effect, because to them these reflect other disciplinary priorities—namely those of study of religion. Fine, again. But rather than dismiss from consideration religious constructions of sacrifice because these may reflect the historically-conditioned religious constructions of sacrifice prevailing in the late 19th and early 20th century, it is precisely those religious constructions of sacrifice that I seek to understand—as objective historical facts of the religious imagination. As an historian of religion, I believe we not only ought therefore to be studying religion ‘out there.’ We should also be studying religion ‘in there’—as it
17
I am aware that Claude Lévi-Strauss and his structuralist kin exemplify a radical turn in the putatively scientific studies of sacrifice. Marcel Detienne and JeanPierre Vernant, for example, see ‘sacrifice,’ like Lévi-Strauss did ‘totemism,’ as a symptom of how previous generations of thinkers thought about the Other. ‘Sacrifice’ does not name a ‘thing’ or institution in itself, but is rather an ‘illusion’ created to collect a mass of assorted data dreamed up by past scholarship. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, eds., The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, 20. 18 Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, 11, 14, 22.
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is conceived or constructed by those who think about religion. We ought, therefore, to be studying the way people make religious constructions of all sorts of things, like sacrifice, in the present case. To my mind, the point of doing this is to understand various religious structurings in their historical contexts. If, however, we took the main contestants vying for priority over the religious notions of sacrifice at their words, they might well deny any constructive effort at all. To them, attitudes and approaches to sacrifice could be settled by simple observation. In their minds, discussions about the meaning and nature of were waged on morally neutral and scientific ground. But, the more we study their rivalry, the more a Lévi-Straussian skepticism about the category of ‘sacrifice’ as a ‘natural kind’ is borne out. Instead of an objective thing ‘out there,’ that could study ‘scientifically’ or objectively, the category of ‘sacrifice’ is exposed as a product of the contending parties who purport merely to observe the thing objectively. Like totemism in the view of Lévi-Strauss, sacrifice too is a kind of ‘illusion.’ Far from being an object of dispassionate observation, the category ‘sacrifice’ reflects a series of conceptual decisions about the moral, ideological and even religious presuppositions of those purporting to ‘observe’ the thing itself. Here, I revert to comments made at the beginning of this chapter about the lack of conceptual consensus about sacrifice. Is sacrifice a total ‘giving up’ or only a ‘giving of ’? Is it gift, consecration, scapegoating, source of transcendent power, or abomination? Studying sacrifice for the way that religious positions shaped what was ‘seen,’ in the present case, will entail studying the relationship between these competing religious and anti-religious notions of the thing itself. My approach then amounts to a thoroughgoing rejection of the claims of recent students of sacrifice, such as Susan Mizruchi, who claims that “sacrificial thinking in the late nineteenth century is social scientific thinking.”19 It was at the very least a sophisticated species of different sorts of religious and anti-religious thinking well before it became what Mizruchi thinks it is. To call it “social scientific thinking” in any contemporary sense is at best a misleading halftruth.20 Modes of theological, ideological, religious and anti-religious 19 Susan L. Mizruchi, The Science of Sacrifice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 6. 20 This has been made abundantly clear at least for the case of the Durkheimians
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thinking were the real stuff of conceptual arguments about sacrifice in the late 19th and early 20th century. Protestant and Roman Catholic theologies thus need to be brought back into the study of sacrificial thinking of the late 19th and early 20th century, where they belong. First then, to ‘theology’—actually of course, some version of Christian theology. Prominent in these discussions about sacrifice in the religious vein were the French liberal Protestants. They had achieved an enormous degree of prestige for themselves in higher education with their establishment of the national center of the study of religion in the university of Paris, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth Section. Its founding members, Albert Réville, Jean Réville, Auguste Sabatier and Maurice Vernes, were all Protestants of the liberal wing of that movement. They also moved in the international world of liberal Protestant scholarship in Europe and America, and were intellectually sustained and connected with their allies in neighboring Protestant countries like the Netherlands, where Cornelis P. Tiele held forth and England, where Friedrich Max Müller was in place. From its center in the Fifth Section, the French liberal Protestants dominated the study of religion in French higher education.21 Now while the French liberal Protestants identified with what could be called with justification scientific studies of religion, they did not distinguish this work with their own theological ambitions. They, in fact, felt that no conflict existed between theology and science, because both led eventually to union with God. They even felt that their more overtly ‘theological’ interpretations or explanations of religion and sacrifice had as legitimate a claim to membership within the
in W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984) and more recently in Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The title of chapter 1 of Jones’ book speaks directly to the point in referring to religious reform as the “reform that contained all other reforms.” 21 In respect to this debate between theologians and Durkheimians, the pose we need to take is straightforwardly earnest. Because the issues over which the theologians and Durkheimians fought are still very much alive and even identical to those we face today, we do not require the Rorty-like ‘irony’ that recently, and correctly, adopted by Robert Alun Jones’, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism, 1–3. There, Jones finds Rorty useful because the Durkheim of the discourse on ‘things’ is not at all our contemporary. It is quite otherwise, I am arguing in this book, with the Durkheimian attitude toward theological discourse in the public domain.
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world of the secular university as did the offerings of so-called “rationalist”, “naturalist” or ‘scientific’ theories of religion.22 What should be appreciated was that these liberal theologians were sincerely committed to reconciliation between science and religion, and did not think themselves to be making narrow confessional positions the standard for public discourse about religion. Rather, they felt that a universalist reference to religious values and beliefs might conform to the conditions of a secular society. The theologians of late 19th and early 20th century France under discussion had no wish, therefore, to establish traditional forms of their Calvinism or Lutheranism within public discourse and public life. Much like the religious liberals of our own day, they appealed to a capacious, but still theistic, Enlightenment humanistic religious faith (virtually unitarian in several prominent cases) as a suitable basis for public discourse about religion in a secular state. On the side of the forces arrayed against ‘theology,’ were a motley group of agnostics, atheists and rationalists, who might loosely be called social scientists. At the head, here, was Émile Durkheim and his ‘team,’ especially the its nucleus, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss. Durkheim and his ‘team’ were organized around Durkheim’s great periodical at the turn of the century, the L’Année sociologique, and shared most of Durkheim’s basic ideas.23 The Durkheimians formed the sharp and durable cutting edge of opposition to the theologized study of religion promoted by the French liberal Protestants. The Durkheimian attempt to unseat the French liberal Protestants from their dominance over the study of religion and sacrifice plays a large role in the story I shall tell in this book.24 In the eyes of 22 J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion (New Haven: Yale University, 1987), ix. In this book, I adopt Preus’ use of “naturalistic” to mean, first of all, an attempt to “explain” religion (xv), and to do so without reference to some transcendent or supernatural source of religion (xvi). 23 Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), 14–5. 24 To focus on the French liberal Protestants is not to say that others, such as France’s Jewish or Roman Catholic scholars of religion, were without interests in matters pertaining to the study of religion in public institutions in France. It is only to say that they did not or could not pursue those interests by joining the battle in the radically engaged way in which both liberal Protestants and Durkheimians did. As a community, Jews, as we will see, kept a low profile of discrete neutrality in matters involving public policy and religion. There was no collective published ‘Jewish’ position articulated about the conduct of the study of religion in the Ecole Pratique, Fifth Section, although many individual Jewish scholars voiced views
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these rationalist and naturalist critics, liberal Protestant theological approaches to religion, with their inevitable appeals to the supernatural, had no right to represent their work as ‘scientific’ in any conventional sense of the term. On what grounds—other than theological ones—could one regard a flourishing ritual life in a society as a mark of intellectual, and in the case of sacrifice, moral, inferiority? How persuasive, for example, could talk about the supernatural efficacy of sacrifice be in the absence of an epistemological consensus supporting such talk? As the naturalists saw it, while the liberal theologians in question drew shy of making any particular confessional theology the measure of religious discourse in the land, they fell into one anyway. Despite all their sincere intentions, their humanism turned out to be more confessional and theological than universally human. For, while their humanism was supposed to be free of confessional taint, and thus about as ‘scientific’ and inoffensive to religious scruples as possible, it was not altogether free of Christian, and specifically Protestant, biases. How could one speak publically about the death of Jesus as a ‘sacrifice’—even interpreted in their humanistic sense as an heroic death of a Divine Man for Humanity—if all members in the conversation did not share the basic well understood, but Christian, religious logic of the supernatural efficacy of sacrificial death for any purpose whatsoever? The anti-sacrificial sensibilities essential to Buddhism, for example, would lead to a sharp rejection of this logic. The naturalists felt, on the contrary, that while the liberal Protestant attempt at a public discourse about religion may have been well and sincerely intended, it was still far too Christian for service within a nation pledged to religious impartiality. If modern society needed
about the character which the study of religion should have. In a summary statement which embodies the view of Jewish academics about the scientific, rather than theological or speculative character of the study of religion as they desired to see it, the Jewish Islamicist, Hartwig Derenbourg, said: the science of religion “as we conceive it is not a branch of philosophical studies.” (Hartwig Derenbourg, “La Science des religions et l’Islamisme,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 13 (1886), 302.) As for the Roman Catholics, their place in the university suffered disestablishment when the Catholic faculty of divinity was replaced by the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Fifth Section. Moreover, anti-clericalism often guaranteed exclusion of qualified individual Roman Catholics from positions there, as we will see in the case of Loisy. The combination of these two conditions put the Roman Catholics outside the domain of public debate about the shape of the universities, and the study of religion in the public institutions from which they were, in effect, absent.
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this sort of moral or spiritual center—the ‘civil religion’ articulated by Rousseau—then such a civil religion needed to be informed by the religious history of the entire globe, and also without prejudice to those dissenting from ‘religion’ as well. Christians had to make room for Buddhists, Jews, Hindus and Muslims, as well as secular humanists and atheists as well. Christianity had to be ‘decentered’ from its historic place within the nation, lest the principle of public— rather than confessional or sectarian—discourse be violated, even if inadvertently Second, alongside these quarrels about the relative statuses of religions and science, a politics was also in play. For various historic reasons that we will uncover later, the Protestant theologians were well-ensconced in the university. So well entrenched were they that they and along with them their subtle theological agendas virtually ruled the leading secular institutions of the study of religion in France. They were the ‘lions’ of their domain, to use Vilfredo Pareto’s classic description. Like the king of the beasts, they reigned over their field, and determined how a subject like sacrifice or religion would be treated. Their view of the meaning and nature of both sacrifice and religion became ‘conventional wisdom’ in the academic world of their time and place. The naturalistic party, by contrast, play the part of insurgent upstarts, making up with deviousness and craft what they lacked in institutional power. They played the corresponding role cast for them by Pareto as sociological ‘foxes.’ Their advantage lay in their fluidity and guile, in their ability to surprise the slumbering ‘lions’ unawares. At a certain crucial point, these anti-theological ‘foxes’ challenged the right of the liberal Protestants to maintain their institutional hegemony over the study of religion and sacrifice. Here, I shall argue is where the Durkheimians, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss and their work on sacrifice, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function played such an important role in changing the way religion and sacrifice were studied from then on. Telling the story of how this change came about will occupy a major part of the narrative of the present book. 3. Theorizing and Historicizing Theories Although the rivalry between the theologians and the naturalists was a political one for influence over the study of religion in the major educational institutions in France, it was also a ‘theoretical’ one in
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the broad sense. Both theologians and the naturalists were faced with the theoretical problem of how to give an account of sacrifice. Not surprisingly, their answers to this problem were in conflict. In this book, I want to look at these broadly theoretical conflicts, and I want to look at them in ways which better grasp the import of what one might call ‘the theoretical moment’ in intellectual discourse. These are those special moments in the intellectual life when theorizing flourishes, when thinkers create new general accounts of the way the world is, when they redraw the intellectual boundaries of discourse, rather than concentrating intellectual energies on description, data collection, cataloging and such. What is the significance of such ‘theoretical moments’? If we believe the likes of British literary critic, Terry Eagleton, we have much to learn from dwelling on ‘theoretical moments’ such as I propose we consider in the conflict between the Durkheimians and French liberal Protestants over the theory of sacrifice.25 For Eagleton, a surfeit of theorizing talk, such as that we can detect about sacrifice in turn-of-the-century France, means that “something is amiss” of a much broader sort. “Like small bumps on the neck,” theorizing is a “symptom that all is not well.”26 And, if Eagleton is correct in being concerned about “a really virulent outbreak of theory, on an epidemic scale”27 in our own time, then we should also be concerned about the nature and causes of such an outbreak of theorizing about sacrifice in fin-de-siècle France.28 How should we go about doing so? Taking my lead from Eagleton, I want to make the main purpose of the present book to lance a few of those swelling “bumps on the neck,” to probe those curious outgrowths of theorizing in the modern humanities where, indeed, “all is not well.” I want to do
25 Terry Eagleton, “The Significance of Theory,” in The Significance of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 26. See, for example, the many writings of Frederic Jameson, especially his two volume collection of essays from 1971–1986, The Ideologies of Theory. Vol. 1: Situations of Theory and The Ideologies of Theory. Vol. 2: Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 26 Terry Eagleton, “The Significance of Theory”, 26. 27 Ibidem, 25. 28 For postmodernists among my readers, there is moreover a certain timeliness in looking carefully at what transpires in the ‘theoretical moment.’ Frederic Jameson even claims that ‘theory’ itself “‘can be numbered among the manifestations postmodernism.’” Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster, ed., (Port Townsend, Wash: Bay Press, 1983), 112 cited in Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (London: Routledge, 1995), 161.
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this poking about in a rather palpable way—one not often practiced in theoretical circles. I therefore intend to submit theories to a headto-toe examination under the microscope of history—as they live and breathe and have their being. And, why not? As Eagleton himself notes, “theorizing is itself of course an historical event.”29 With theory and talk about theory so abundant these days, a pause to take stock of them as historical realities might help us understand better what we do and what needs to be done in future theorizing. How, in fact, are theories formed in particular cases and how do they come to dominate fields of discourse, while others are thwarted, stillborn or never even conceived at all? How conscious have great theorists of the past been of their theorizing? And, does it matter, or not, if they were? Or, if we shift to the study of religion and consider theories of religion, the same sorts of questions can and ought to be asked. In general, can theories of religion themselves avoid being ‘religious’—either intentionally or not? Have actual theoretical approaches to the study of religion in fact implicated us in religious or theological commitments, thus invalidating attempts to
29 Terry Eagleton, “The Significance of Theory”, 27. Yet, no sooner does Eagleton treat us to a show of marxist theory of theories than he snatches away the hope that others might do something similar. This is somewhat odd, given Eagleton’s equally well taken view that “theorizing is itself of course an historical event,” and thus ought therefore to be perfectly fitted out for thorough historicizing. Problem is that Eagleton finds things also a little more complex than he lets on. Theory “finds itself joining the very history it ponders, altering it in the process” (27). But for Eagleton this spells doom. To understand theorizing would require a “meta-theory” which, as an “historical event will be absorbed into the history upon which it reflects, and will thus require yet another act of theory to show how all this comes about” (28). The only way out of this infinite regress would be to concoct a great mythical “Theory of Theories, the Grand Global Theory which would not itself constitute an historical event”—an impossibility, as it happens (28). Should we then be dissuaded from the task of historicizing the theorizing of sacrifice even before we begin? If Eagleton is not dissuaded from bringing marxist perspectives to bear on the significance of theory, I frankly do not see why anyone else should? The key, as ever, is the reach of our ambitions. Everything pales by comparison with the absolute. Of course, there is no God’s Eye View of theory or anything for that matter—leaving aside the idea that denying such is about as much a God’s Eye View as anything else. So, why wait for a perfection that we never expect to be realized? Perhaps modesty’s day has finally come to the theory-trade? Thus, as long as we are willing to engage challenges and contestings of our ‘history,’ why should we be put off by a little infinite regress? Let a hundred historical flowers bloom—marxist or any other! Moreover, there is a world of difference between infinite regress in principle and such a regress in practice. An infinite regress can take a long time coming home to roost.
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separate off religious studies from theology? I believe that we can get some closure on such large theoretical questions by considering particular theories, and inquiring whether their general claims ring true. This book seeks then to entertain such questions by historicizing the act of theorizing in its various moments of existence. As a bonus, the historicizing of theories can be especially valuable in helping us avoid misdirected criticism. Recently, for example, charges have been made about the supposed intrusion of theological biases into theories in the study of religion like Hubert and Mauss’ classic theory of sacrifice. Luc de Heusch and Marcel Detienne have chastised Hubert and Mauss’ classic theory of sacrifice for its supposed Christian and Western ethnocentrism. But is it, or was it? They charge that Hubert and Mauss built their theory of sacrifice on Christian models, and thus smuggled in a theology at once ethnocentric and confessional into data which should be seen in its own indigenous light.30 De Heusch’s attention was drawn by a passage from Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice which looks indeed like incriminating evidence. There, Hubert and Mauss say that “Christian sacrifice is one of the most instructive to be met with in history.” Deepening the sense of their ethnocentric bias, Hubert and Mauss seem to go on to generalize from a local occidental example of sacrifice to the rest of the world. “The mechanism of consecration in the Catholic Mass is . . . the same as that of the Hindu sacrifices. It shows us, with a clarity leaving nothing to be desired, the alternating rhythm of expiation and communion. The Christian imagination has built upon ancient models.”31 Confident that he has caught the Durkheimians holding the ‘smoking gun’ of ethnocentric imposition at the scene of their ‘crime,’ De Heusch concludes: “Whatever scandal such a proposition might have caused in the bourgeois mentality of the early twentieth century, it nonetheless shares in the spirit of the times.”32 A good part of the chapters which follow will attempt to answer the question of whether de Heusch and others are right. Does Hubert and Mauss’ theory of sacrifice just recite the occidental and Christian prejudices of their time? Moreover, just what is ‘the’ spirit of the
30 Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, La Cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 28. 31 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, (1899), W. D. Halls, trans., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 93–4. 32 Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, 20.
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times—if indeed there is one, or only one? Is it possible that such a will-o’-the-wisp ‘spirit of the times’ exists, and if something like it does exist that it is as uncomplicated and ready-made for de Heusch’ purposes as he imagines? And if there is such a ‘spirit,’ does Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice ‘share’ in it? While De Heusch seems exercised by the intrusions of religion, he seems a little too careless in overlooking other sorts of common intruders into theory-making in the human sciences. Cannot ideology or politics, for instance, be as insidious in invading their subjects like religion does sacrifice? I shall argue indeed that politics and ideology are particularly aggressive intruders into theorizing sacrifice in turn-of-the-century France.33 As Eagleton notes: “‘theory’” (here, meaning contemporary literary theory) “was born as a political intervention, whatever academic respectability it may since have achieved.”34 What is true of literary theory seems also true of religious theory, and theory of sacrifice above all. In historicizing the theory of sacrifice, I seek indeed to discover the various ‘politics’ of theorizing sacrifice— understood broadly as the enabling conditions either facilitating the theorizing of sacrifice or disabling a potential theory of sacrifice. Specifically, as Eagleton argues, if modern literary theory arose out of a massive intellectual revolt against the co-optation of the modern university along all fronts by the “structures of technological dominance,”35 perhaps sacrificial theories too took their rise (or demise) from analogous conditions? Perhaps the convergence between theory of religion (notably sacrifice) and literary theory in the persons of literary theorists like Georges Bataille or René Girard holds lessons as well? While Durkheimian turn-of-the-century theories of sacrifice do not really thrill with quite the same frisson of rebellion against the powers of instrumental rationality as thinkers of the 1930’s like Georges Bataille or René Girard in the 1970’s, they do play in a vast arena of civic and political life which prepared the way for Bataille and Girard and their kind of theorizing about sacrifice. As forces shaping French national culture, theories of sacrifice at the very least attained a certain urgency during the late 19th and
33 By this I do not mean to limit myself to the Foucaultian analysis of power, where power is always power over another. But, that kind of power is surely at play. 34 Terry Eagleton, “The Significance of Theory,” 30. 35 Ibidem, 30.
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early 20th century, as I have shown in my recent book, Contesting Sacrifice.36 There, for example, I mapped the ways in which theoretical and theological thinking about sacrifice interacted with French politics and political culture over several centuries, ranging from attitudes toward death in warfare to the construction of Dreyfus as sacrificial victim. Here, in the present study of theorizing sacrifice, I seek to understand the way an excellent candidate for being recognized as the “first” theory of sacrifice—that devised in Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function—took form in the world of academic and civic politics of its day. 4. The “First Theory” of Sacrifice A few words are then in order to orient readers to this ‘first’ theory of sacrifice, as I call it. Why, in particular, should sacrifice have attracted such attention at all, making it one of the primary foci for theoretical work in the study of religion and beyond—at least in a certain period like the one in question? The beginning of an answer is that few religious concepts can really compete with sacrifice for the number of years that students of religion have puzzled over it and for the amount of effort applied to theoretical debates about its nature. Only myth, magic and the related notion of ritual come close. Almost from the beginning of the formal study of religion in the nineteenth century, sacrifice has drawn the leading minds in the study of religion. Classic thinkers like William Robertson Smith, Julius Wellhausen, Sir James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Sylvain Lévi, Salomon Reinach, Alfred Loisy, Henri Hubert, Marcel Mauss, or Georges Bataille share this interest with a host of our contemporaries, Jonathan Z. Smith, René Girard, Mircea Eliade, David Carrasco, Walter Burkert, Luc de Heusch, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Frits Staal, Marcel Detienne and Pierre Jean-Pierre Vernant, Maurice Bloch, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner, Cristiano Grottanelli, Bruce Lincoln, Jacques Derrida, and Marvin Harris among others. For these reasons alone, sacrifice seems to offer the perfect case study for the application of historical methods to theorizing in the study of religion. 36 Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
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But attention to sacrifice is not the same thing as producing a theory of sacrifice—in Eagleton’s sense or in anyone else’s. Now, while all the thinkers recognized in the list above have attended to sacrifice and, in some case, written volumes about it, not all can be said to have produced a theory of sacrifice in the sense I want to feature. That is, relatively few of those who have paid scholarly attention to sacrifice have produced extensive, detailed and ramified accounts of what sacrifice is, or if one prefers, what should be seen as ‘sacrifice.’ For the purpose of the present study, I want to focus on what I might call ‘full-blown’ attempts to make sense of sacrifice—‘theories’ of sacrifice in a plenary sense. In this sense, thinkers I have discussed earlier in this chapter, such as René Girard, Georges Bataille and perhaps Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, can be said to have produced accounts of sacrifice dedicated and ramified enough to qualify as theories of sacrifice. Their accounts are more or less focused on sacrifice itself; they are well worked out, extensive and relatively complete. By contrast, as I have noted earlier in this chapter, someone like Frits Staal is a great master of theory of ritual, and secondarily a great student of the fire sacrifice in India. Much the same might be said of the work on sacrifice by William Robertson Smith. While his contribution to a full-blown theory of sacrifice is considerable, his master piece, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, as well could be said to really focus on the very subject embodied in the title, or at the very least, ritual action itself. Even more radical is Lévi-Strauss, who while having important things to say about sacrifice, as I have already noted, treats it more in the matter of a scientific ‘illusion’ like totemism. Lévi-Strauss’ interest in sacrifice is subordinated to his interest in classification, as Staal’s is to ritual behavior. In this book, I want to focus instead on some piece of intellectual work which attends exclusively and in a detailed way to sacrifice alone, and in doing so seeks to give an account of its Nature and Function—that is to say, a full-blown theory of sacrifice. Having said this, I want also to add that a theory of sacrifice, in the sense I shall try to defend in this book, is not the same thing as any account of sacrifice whatsoever. As we will see, there are ‘accounts’ and there are ‘accounts.’ Although, for example, Alfred Loisy has written an entire volume (and more) on sacrifice, that volume is almost purely descriptive. For the most part, it explains nothing. It simply describes and classifies what the great Roman Catholic modernist and historian of religions assumes sacrifice to be. Thus, a
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merely descriptive account of sacrifice would not qualify as a theory of sacrifice, since it does not seek to explain sacrifice. Furthermore, in the case of Loisy and some of his French liberal Protestant contemporaries, when they step beyond description and attempt to account for sacrifice, they do so in a way which radically sets their kinds of accounts off against others. Their accounts of sacrifice are what I shall call ‘theological,’ rather than anything we could call social scientific.37 Although theological accounts of sacrifice need to be compared with and posed over against what I call theories of sacrifice, I do not believe we should call them ‘theories’ in the same sense as those which generally circulate in the human sciences. The main reason for this— and this was, in effect, the argument of the Durkheimians—is that theologies of sacrifice operate under radically different rules of evidence than theories of sacrifice. Given these focusing criteria and given the possible candidate fullblown theories of sacrifice (about which we have sufficient historical evidence to support an historical treatment), I believe no better choice could be made than to explore the conditions for the coming to be of what is plausibly the first theory of sacrifice. This, I believe, is none other than Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss’ little classic of less than a hundred pages, “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice” (1898), which we have already had some reason to discuss.38 Moreover, besides being the first full-length monographic treatment of the subject, Sacrifice is arguably the single-most influential book ever written on the subject, if not the required point of departure for almost every subsequent theoretical effort in the field.39 Furthermore, Hubert
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Susan L. Mizruchi, The Science of Sacrifice, 6. Published at the head of the second volume of L’Année sociologique as the second of the two “Mémoires originaux”, Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice appeared in the distinguished company of Durkheim’s own classic “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena.” Durkheim revealed that while he felt that religion is the “germ” from which all of social life grows, sacrifice mysteriously sustains society and makes it possible. (Émile Durkheim, “Préface” to L’Année sociologique, volume 2 (1899) trans., J. French, in Yash Nandan, ed., Émile Durkheim: Contributions to “L’Année Sociologique” (New York: Free Press, 1980), 54. 39 See for instance, John M. Beattie, “On Understanding Sacrifice,” 34. Jean Paul Colleyn, “Le Sacrifice selon Hubert et Mauss.” Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, 16f. Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever, 134–43. William Beers, Women and Sacrifice, ch. 1., Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, passim. Victor Turner, “Sacrifice as Quintessential Process, Prophylaxsis or Abandonment?,” 189–215. 38
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and Mauss’ Sacrifice continues to inspire commentary and controversy, as witness by de Heusch’s critique. In the estimation of leading thinkers in the study of religion such as Louis Dumont, Hubert and Mauss’s effort is no museum piece. It still remains “fresh” while, by contrast, the ideas about sacrifice from Sir James George Frazer’s masterpiece, The Golden Bough, which appeared a scant two years before Sacrifice, are today thoroughly “antiquated.”40 Notably, even its critics concede that Sacrifice was a “major contribution and without doubt decisive on most points.”41 It thus makes an especially attractive focus for understanding consequential theorizing in the study of religion. There are also other reasons to focus on Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice—such as its dramatic and revolutionary pedigree. More than one of those “small bumps on the neck,” which Terry Eagleton claims inspires theorizing, Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice seems to have raised irritating ‘boils’ aching to be lanced. As such, their theory was a source of great intellectual discomfort and consequently subject to intense and well-documented public theoretical debate by interested parties over the years. Some of the controversy surrounding Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice was indeed incited by Hubert and Mauss themselves. In 1898, Hubert wrote Mauss that he relished the mischief their “polemics” on sacrifice would provoke among the religious powers of the day—doubtless, as we will see confirmed during the course of this book, the French liberal Protestants in the Fifth Section: We shouldn’t miss a chance to make trouble for these good, but badly informed, souls. Let’s stress the direction of our work, let’s be clear about our aims so that they are pointed, sharp like razors, and so that they are treacherous. Let’s go! I love a fight! That’s what excites us!42
Here Hubert spoke not only for himself but also for Marcel Mauss, his lifelong companion in collaboration. He thus gave voice to the vigor and flair of two twenty-six year old, intensely patriotic, drey-
40 Louis Dumont, “Marcel Mauss: A Science in Becoming,” Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 192. 41 Jean Paul Colleyn, “Le Sacrifice selon Hubert et Mauss,” 23. 42 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” Études durkheimiennes/Durkheim Studies 3 (1991), 2–9.
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fusard, humanist, philosemitic, socialist, rationalist, somewhat anticlerical, iconoclast, historicist, scientific, upstart intellectuals. What is more, Hubert and Mauss were both fully conscious of the intended effect they wished to achieve with their little book, embroiled as they were in the intellectual, civic and religious turmoil of turn-of-thecentury France. Such zeal did not pass unnoticed among Hubert and Mauss’s contemporaries or ours. In its day, Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice was recognized for its radical departures from the conventions of scholarship. The otherwise friendly liberals in the Catholic scholarly community chided Hubert and Mauss for their brash dogmatism, for imagining that they could gather the entire phenomenon of sacrifice under their theoretical cloaks. These “good, but badly informed, souls,” in Hubert’s memorable words, saw Sacrifice as little more than a Durkheimian theology of sacrifice itself. The list of critics of Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice in our own time includes some formidable figures as well. In words that would doubtless thrill Hubert and Mauss’s fin-de-siècle positivist critics, Luc de Heusch chastises the youthful Durkheimians for arrogant theoretical overreaching. De Heusch instead “renounces defining a formal universal sacrificial schema.”43 Further, because Hubert and Mauss are supposed to have built their theory of sacrifice on Christian models (a ludicrous charge, as it happens), de Heusch and Marcel Detienne have accused Hubert and Mauss’s theory of Western ethnocentrism.44 The intensity of theoretical debate about Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice then guarantees that we will have at our disposal an ample literature for exploring theory-making about sacrifice. A final reason to start with Hubert and Mauss’ theory of sacrifice is for its rich civic and political implications for matters of state— the transcendence of ‘pure’ academic discourse of which I spoke earlier. Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice became for the Durkheimians part of an attempt to justify a social policy with global implications. Recently Robert Alun Jones has shown how Durkheim’s strategy of “replacing” traditional religion with his new civil religion called for a systematic reinterpretation of traditional religious symbols into beliefs and practices consonant with rational social reconstruction. While not mentioning sacrifice explicitly, Durkheim made clear the
43 44
Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, 213. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, La Cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec, 28.
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outlines of a strategy of “replacing” traditional religion with something more palatable to rationalist standards of cognition. In terms which would fit the pre-eminently religious practice of ritual sacrifice well enough, Durkheim says: We must seek, in the very heart of religious conceptions, those moral realities that are, as it were, lost and dissimulated in it. We must disengage them, and find out what they consist, determine their proper nature, and express them in rational language. In a word, we must discover the rational substitutes for those religious notions that for a long time have served as the vehicle for the most essential ideas.45
What makes the replacement of traditional ritual sacrifice so important for Durkheimian thought is its intrinsic relation to morality. For Durkheim and his group, while the origins of literature, the arts and morality were to be found in religion, the origins of morality itself were to be found in sacrifice.46 So too “family relations,” said Durkheim in 1898, “started by being an essentially religious bond; punishment, contract, gift, homage are derived from the expiatory, contractual, communal, noble sacrifice.”47 Charity as well “‘has moral value . . . because it points to a moral propensity to sacrifice, to go beyond one’s self. . . .’” Because charity as sacrifice puts one “‘beyond the circle of self-interest, it clears the way for a true morality.’”48 Testimony to the significance of this formula, Durkheim maintained this view of the relation of morality to sacrifice right to the end of his life. In 1914, he noted that there “is no moral act that does not imply a sacrifice, for, as Kant has shown, the law of duty cannot be obeyed
45 Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism, 84, citing Émile Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), 9. 46 In a letter to Hubert, Durkheim himself declared that he was “ever more convinced that [sacrifice] is a fundamental notion playing a capital role in the evolution of morals and ideals”. See a private letter to Hubert shortly after the publication of Sacrifice. (Émile Durkheim, Letter to Henri Hubert, 5 June 1898, “Lettres de Émile Durkheim à Henri Hubert,” Philippe Besnard, ed., Revue française de sociologie 28 (1987), 497. 47 Émile Durkheim, “Préface” to L’Année sociologique, volume 2, 54 (my emphasis). In the “Préface” to the inaugural volume of L’Année sociologique, Durkheim says that these “Mémoires” attempted “to show by means of a few examples how . . . materials (“essential for science”) may be put to work”. Émile Durkheim, “Préface” to L’Année sociologique, volume 1, 49. 48 Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism, 92, citing Émile Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology of Education, 83.
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without humiliating our individual, or, as he calls it, our “empirical” sensitivity.”49 Few notions could therefore claim more theoretical and indeed practical importance in the Durkheimian scheme of priorities than that assigned to sacrifice. Without rehearsing an argument I have made elsewhere about the importance of the theory of sacrifice of Hubert and Mauss for Durkheimian thought as a whole, it can now be confidently said that within the Durkheimian movement, Hubert and Mauss’s theory of sacrifice succeeded in displacing their master’s—indeed, driving Durkheim’s into obsolescence. Theirs is what we should therefore call the Durkheimian theory of sacrifice. The Elementary Forms at best presented a confused and derivative concept of sacrifice. Robert Alun Jones has shown that Durkheim changed his mind about the relative importance of sacrifice as totemic communion, turning finally to sacrifice as a species of exchange and gift.50 Oblation, says Durkheim, is “even more permanent than communion.”51 And so, Durkheim here just echoes the view of Hubert and Mauss.52 Their theory of sacrifice has in effect become his. It moreover is the only Durkheimian theory of sacrifice which survived in order to generate intellectual
49 Émile Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions,” [1914] Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, Kurt Wolff, ed., (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 328. 50 Émile Durkheim, “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena,” in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Durkheim on Religion (London: Routledge, 1975), 80, 86. See as well my full treatment of the triumph of Hubert and Mauss’ theory within Durkheimian circles in Ivan Strenski, “Durkheim’s Bourgeois Theory of Sacrifice,” Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering, W. Watts Miller, eds. (London: Routledge, 1998), 116–26. 51 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans., Joseph W. Swain (New York: Free Press, 1915), 385. 52 Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for the The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,” Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981), 194–5. Durkheim’s deference to Hubert and Mauss on sacrifice is just another example of their stature within the Durkheimian équipe when it came to the study of religion. At one point Pickering says that it was “Durkheim rather than his disciples who gave prominent place to religion and who was willing to write about it in such positive terms . . . who was unique in his enthusiasm for things religious.” This seems to me most certainly mistaken—at the same time Pickering is correct to indicate Durkheim’s unique concern with religion in contemporary society and its future, or with his imaginative explorations of the religious dimensions of humanism and individualism, as well as his passion for what sociologists since Bellah might today call ‘civil religion’. (W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, (1983), 508.)
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offspring such as Georges Bataille and René Girard. Durkheim’s view does not. Thus, not only can Hubert and Mauss’ theory of sacrifice be said the be the ‘first,’ it can also fairly be said to be the Durkheimian theory of sacrifice. It represents a fully worked out consensus statement of Durkheimian thinking on sacrifice.53 Part of the reason we have not seen how central the work of Hubert and Mauss was to Durkheim’s own thinking about religion is that, until recently, the history of Durkheimian thought has been written primarily by persons professionally committed to philosophy (Lukes, Brooks), history ( Jones), or sociology itself (Besnard, Fournier).54 Here, when not viewing Durkheim as fathering a new science of sociology, he is rightly cast as something the French call a “moraliste.” In the process, and without, perhaps, intending it, their description of Durkheim as “moraliste” has tended to minimize the “religious” dimension of his thought and its context. The chief exceptions to this rule are W. S. F. Pickering’s Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion, a number of trenchant seminal articles and a recent book by Robert Alun Jones, as well as the discussions of Durkheim and French Protestantism
53
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 382–8. See especially Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), John I. Brooks, III, The Eclectic Legacy: Academic Philosophy and the Human Sciences in Nineteenth Century France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism, Philippe Besnard, ed. The Sociological Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994), W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories. Historians of the different disciplines often tailor their reading of the past to conform it to the world-view and intellectual agendas of their own discipline. Now although I am on Jones’ side in these debates, I have some sympathy with the approach he criticizes. I agree in spirit with those who say that “some concerns must dictate the questions we ask and the criteria of relevance we use, and contemporary concerns at least make for interesting history.” (Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 11). This is why Robert Alun Jones has justifiably complained against historians of sociology for looking at the ‘sociological classics’ as series of ‘anticipations’ legitimizing current practice in their field. (Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for the The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,” Journal for the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981), 184–205.) In principle, I agree with Jones even as I may be more understanding about the “presentist” urge behind such attempts to see ourselves in the classics. Every academic discipline needs its own origin myth, ancestors and salvation history. In order to do this, a little “invention of tradition” may well be required, provided we do not delude ourselves in the process. (Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 54
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by Donald Nielsen.55 The time has come, I believe, to figure in even more thoroughly the religious factors at work in the formation of Durkheimian ideas. As soon as we see religion as a focal interest of Durkheim and his ‘group’ (the “équipe”), we begin to see how central was the role played by Hubert and Mauss in the Durkheimian study of religion. In light of what was actually done by the Durkheimian équipe, Durkheim might be said to come off as something of a secondary figure in the study of religion among the Durkheimians! In particular, he took second place behind junior members of the équipe, the authors of Sacrifice, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss. Well before the work of L’Année sociologique had begun, Hubert and Mauss had trained extensively in history of religions, and identified themselves professionally
55 In general both Jones and Pickering have sought to begin understanding the work of Durkheim in terms of his engagement in the larger questions of the nature of religion and the study of religion in fin-de-siècle. Thus in Pickering’s careful tour through the thickets of Durkheim’s thinking about religion, he takes on all the thorny issues, including such matters as Durkheim’s supposed Jewishness, the sacred-profane relation, his relation to religious humanism, the sanctity of the individual, as well as the relation of Durkheim’s work to the one time member of the équipe, the Protestant, Gaston Richard. Jones as well has shed light on intriguing places in Durkheim’s work on religion, especially on Durkheim’s debt to William Robertson Smith and even as far afield as the German neokantian liberal theologian, Albrecht Ritchl. Following Jones and Pickering, I have located Durkheimian theory of sacrifice within the context of a polemic among France’s three great religious traditions, and within a polemic about the academic discipline of the study of religion in France. See Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for the The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,” 184–205. Robert Alun Jones and Paul W. Vogt, “Durkheim’s Defense of Les formes Élémentaires de la vie religieuse,” in Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long, eds., Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present. vol. 5 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984), 45–62. Robert Alun Jones, “Demythologizing Durkheim,” in Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long, eds., Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present. vol. 5 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984), 63–83. Emile Durkheim, “The Problem of Religion and the Duality of Human Nature,” (1913) Robert Alun Jones and W. Paul Voyt, trans., Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present. vol. 5 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984), 1–44. Finally, readers should consult Jones’ fine new book, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism, especially chapter 1. W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion. Recently W. S. F. Pickering has argued that a “deep concern for matters religious is . . . at the heart of Durkheim’s Theory”. (W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983: 23.) Donald A. Nielsen, “Robert Hertz and the Sociological Study of Sin, Expiation and Religion: A Neglected Chapter in the Durkheim School,” in Structures of Knowing, ed. Richard C. Monk (New York City: University Press of America, 1986), 7–50.
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in terms of the “science religieuse”; Durkheim did not. Hubert and Mauss studied with the leading students of religion of their day as we will see. Hubert and Mauss directed the Année sections on “sociologie religieuse”; Durkheim never did. Mauss alone wrote 206 reviews on religious topics in the Année’s first series; Durkheim managed 50. While Durkheim published virtually nothing substantial on religion between his 1899 “De la definition phenomènes religieux” and the 1912 Elementary Forms, Hubert and Mauss, singly or in collaboration, produced studies on magic, myth, the papal states, prayer, sacrifice, and sacred time. Both Hubert and Mauss likewise won chairs in the prestigious Fifth Section (religious sciences) of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and taught history of religions throughout their careers. Mauss was Buddhism, Hinduism and the ‘primitive’ religions; Hubert was Druidism, Gnosticism, Judaism, Christianity and the ‘mystery’ religions. In 1904 Hubert wrote his “Introduction à la traduction française” to P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye’s Manuel d’histoire des religions, which, in its time, was recognized as a “manifesto” for the Durkheimian program of religious studies. While Hubert taught 12 of his 17 courses between 1901 and 1912 on religion and Mauss 20 of 23 in roughly the same period, Durkheim taught only 1! Durkheim was thus far from being “unique” in the équipe in his devotion to religious studies, nor is it clear that he was in many areas its prime mover.56 With Hubert and Mauss in focus, other revelations follow. Neither Hubert nor Mauss were “sociologists”—at least not in the beginning and not in the sense Durkheim already was. Hubert trained as an historian of the ‘old (historicist) school’, Mauss matured intellectually as a rationalist philosopher. Both moreover, and independently of each other and Durkheim, had already committed to what the French of those days called “la science religieuse,” what we might call today’s “religious studies.” This led me naturally to seek what such a field was, why Hubert and Mauss were drawn to it, and why they battled fiercely for posts in “science religieuse” at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth Section, rather than in some institute of sociology or history? Thus, because Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice has almost singlehandedly shaped an entire field of discourse concerning one of the
56 Georges Condominas, “Marcel Mauss, pere d’ethnographie française,” Critique 297 (1970), 130f.
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perennial subjects in the study of religion, because it was written by key influential representatives of one of the most consequential schools of the study of religion ever assembled, because it opens up key methodological and ideological issues dogging the study of religion since its inception, because it lays bear the continued struggle between theological and scientific approaches to the study of religion as well as the import of academic work to civic life, I believe ‘understanding’ Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice offers us a remarkable opportunity to look inside the conception and genesis of our own thought about sacrifice. Here, I stand with Michel Foucault, who said about his own historical investigations into the genesis of conceptions of sexuality: “The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks and so enable it to think differently.”57 As with notions of sexuality, so too with Hubert and Mauss’s concept of sacrifice. I want to free our present-day ‘silent’, and not so silent, theoretical thought about sacrifice from the historical constructions imposed on us by the way we have been given to think sacrifice by Hubert and Mauss and their contemporaries. ‘Thinking one’s own history’ in this regard, having seen how Hubert and Mauss constructed ‘sacrifice’ in the midst of the alternatives current in their world, we may, with Foucault, want to “think differently”. Then again we may not. But until one can ‘think one’s own history’, until we know how and why Hubert and Mauss thought sacrifice as they did, we will be distinctly disadvantaged in our attempts either to think differently about sacrifice or think the same. Studying its strategies for acceptance may show us what theoretical innovators need to do in order to break through to new levels of conceptualization. One can then conclude that the Durkheimian theory of sacrifice was really Hubert and Mauss’ and not Durkheim’s. On sacrifice, the master seemed to have deferred to his pupils. 5. The Religious Factor and the Plan of this Book In shifting focus to the religious or ideological location of theoretical discussions of sacrifice, we actually recapture the priorities for 57 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, Robert Hurley, trans., (New York: Vintage, 1990), 9.
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conceiving sacrifice in late 19th and early 20th century France. In our day, we tend to group sacrifice under the rubric of ritual, but Durkheim and his peers classified sacrifice primarily as part of religion.58 This rupture in the history of conceptualizing sacrifice has had tremendous consequences for understanding. The nineteenth-century founders of the study of religion assumed that the study of sacrifice was important because it was a privileged way to understand the ‘real’ nature of religion, not because it showed how violent human beings could be to one another, as our contemporaries René Girard or Walter Burkert would have us believe,59 or that it demonstrated human ritual behavior in an exemplary way.60 The Catholic ‘modernist,’ Alfred Loisy, could therefore say with total assurance that “a complete history of sacrifice would almost be a history of the religious cults of humanity.”61 The founders likewise assumed religion itself was important, because of the part religion had played in France’s peculiar history, and doubtless because very few of them were indifferent to religion itself. They may have blown ‘hot’, or just as often ‘cold,’ but few of the founders of the study of society in France were ‘lukewarm’ about religion. Hubert and Mauss thus take their places in the company of the great theorists and founders of the study of religion, such as Robertson Smith, Frazer, Tylor, and Durkheim. The absorption in our time over ritual or our exasperation with violence in our world stand out as later turns of the dialectic of social thought in the West, and thus ones deserving to have their own stories told at a later date. But it is only in grasping this dominance of the religious factor in the turn-of-the-century discussions of sacrifice that we can then get our bearings about how to locate the Durkheimian theory. On this score, Hubert and Mauss’s interest in sacrifice, although arguably the first attempt to launch a theory of the subject, was not 58 Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, 5. Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences, Part IV. 59 Robert G. Hammerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). René Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth. 60 Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences. Victor Turner, “Sacrifice as Quintessential Process, Prophylaxsis or Abandonment?,” 189–215. Note especially Turner’s view of “sacrifice as a process within a process within a process” (201). 61 Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice (Paris: Nourry, 1920), 16.
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at all unique in our period of investigation. Several major books on sacrifice appeared in the period when Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice was written, issuing from three different members of the major religious traditions of France, each in their own way related to the Fifth Section. First among books by Catholics was Alfred Loisy’s, Essai historique sur le sacrifice,62 which although published in 1920 represents the culmination of work he had undertaken since the 1890’s. Among French Protestants, there was no theoretical work (a significant fact itself ), not even something like William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. We do however have Albert Réville’s Collège de France Lectures of 1880, later incorporated into Prolégomènes de l’Histoire des Religions [1880], which, as subsequently happened, would give one all the reason one would want for avoiding the subject of sacrifice completely.63 As for Jewish scholarship, standing out above all is Sylvain Lévi’s La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brahmanas, published in the same year as Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice, 1898.64 In order to understand the academic polemic of religious scholarship of Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice we will attend to these key works in the theory of sacrifice, produced after all by scholars, who for the most part, commanded the production of knowledge about religion (and thus sacrifice) in the premier venue of the study of religion in France (and perhaps the world), the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth Section. This I will do in chapters 3, 4 and 5 and chapter 6 for Roman Catholic ‘modernist’, Alfred Loisy. As critics and scholars of traditional religions, the Durkheimians well understood the theological history and polemics of sacrifice in France. What Hubert and Mauss wrote about sacrifice challenged these three religious histories with all their wider political and cultural associations. As Hubert said in that fiery 1898 letter to Mauss about Sacrifice, “we are condemned, my dear fellow, to make religious polemics. We shouldn’t miss a chance to make trouble for these good, but badly informed, souls.”65
62
(Paris: Nourry, 1920). Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions [1880], A. S. Squire, trans. (London: William and Norgate, 1884). 64 Sylvian Lévi, La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas [1898] (Paris: Leroux, 1898). 65 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” 2–9. 63
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In the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, we thus cannot understand theories of sacrifice apart from the study of religion, namely what was called then the “science religieuse,” of that time. Accordingly, this book will occupy itself with theories of sacrifice in relation to the way the study of religion was conceived in the France of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the next chapter, we will see how the Roman Catholic religious and theological heritage of France set a certain standard for conceiving sacrifice, and thus for what the object of theorizing about sacrifice would be. In chapters 3 and 4, I will show how Protestant dominance over theory of sacrifice was established by their position of prominence in the main institution for the study of religion in France, the École Pratique, Fifth Section.66 From their position atop the academic heap, the liberal Protestants shaped not only to what was studied but to how studies of religion would be undertaken. In chapter 5, we will see Protestant theological and ideological commitments eventuated in sharp struggles between them and the Durkheimians, who sought nothing less than to overturn the entire Protestant hegemony in the study of religion. Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice was one of the first shots fired across the bow of the Protestant dominance of the “science religieuse.” In chapter 6, we will see how the leading Roman Catholic student of sacrifice, Alfred Loisy, collided even with the half-hearted anti-positivist program advanced by Hubert and Mauss.67 As the leading critic of their departure from the prevailing positivist mode of inquiry in the study of religion, Loisy brings us fully up to date with our generation’s concerns to accentuate the constructed nature of categories of inquiry. Loisy attacks Hubert and Mauss for nothing short of their own early version of a ‘constructed’ sense of ‘sacrifice.’ In our concluding chapter, we will take the measure of the lessons learnt along the way about the historical process of theorizing. With these considerations in mind, I should like to begin by considering what notion of sacrifice was taken for granted or lurked in the background for anyone—whether ‘theorist’ or ‘theologian’—contemplating the subject of the meaning of sacrifice. In France, despite strong traditions of anti-clericalism, despite being the home of many
66
Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Apologies are of course in order to Ralph Gibson and his A Social History of French Catholicism: 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989). 67
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of the early reformation thinkers, that story must begin with Roman Catholicism. In 1922, the American philosopher, J. A. Gunn, even felt that nothing but Catholicism mattered in the religious affairs of the French: “. . . in France the only form of Christianity which holds any sway is the Roman Catholic faith. Outside the Roman Church there is no religious organization which is of much account.”68 If Gunn be substantially right in his assessment of religion ‘on the ground,’ as it were, it makes the story I want to tell about struggle between Protestant dominance and Durkheimian insurgence over the study of religion and sacrifice all the more curious. So, first to the Catholics.
68
J. A. Gunn, Modern French Philosophy (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), 270.
CHAPTER TWO
FRENCH SACRIFICE, CATHOLIC EUCHARIST Sacrifice is a religious act.1 (Hubert and Mauss)
1. Uninvited Guests Were this a book written in modern India about the subject of ‘dharma,’ we would immediately feel that we needed to have recourse to everyday Buddhist and Hindu religious discourse. Whatever we said about ‘dharma’ would be in part informed by the taken-forgranted understandings of that term, the religious commonsense of that time and place. To deepen our treatment of ‘dharma,’ we would furthermore want to become aware of how that notion reverberated down the long corridors of the history of religion in the subcontinent. What has been the cultural history of this idea? In France, attempts to make sense of almost any religious subject draws one similarly into the orbit of Roman Catholic religious discourse. Nowhere is this more true than for the idea of sacrifice. There, although the elements of Roman Catholic discourse on sacrifice may be absent from the secular university world and academic theorizing interests which concern the present work, they are too important a cultural background to ignore. In an earlier book, Contesting Sacrifice,2 I argued not only that sacrifice has a special salience for France, but that a dominant discourse about sacrifice can be identified in the history of French Catholic theology and that it pervades religious, academic and political life— in several respects up to the present time. In Contesting Sacrifice, I argued that a large portion of the Catholic assumptions about the nature of sacrifice were in their turn equally well assumed by a host
1 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, (1899) W. D. Halls, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 13. 2 Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
,
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of French thinkers, ranging all the way from Durkheim, Hubert and Mauss to Alfred Loisy, or later to the likes of Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, as well as René Girard, Paul Claudel, Marguerite Yourcenar and others.3 Even in de-Christianizing, the French Revolution and its epigones traded on the Catholic discourse of sacrifice. Indeed, this discourse seemed durable enough to make it possible to speak of ‘sacrifice’ as having its own history, whether or not a firm lineage of transmission could be traced across the years. I have claimed that a history of ‘sacrifice’ in France would plausibly count at least four historical periods in the renewed and contested interpretation of the sacrificial ideal, beginning in the seventeenth and extending at least to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—all in either a certain dialogue or tension with Catholic theological thought about sacrifice. Anyone then taking on the subject of theorizing sacrifice in the academic context of the France of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have then to take into account this universe of Catholic commonplaces simply because they were often taken for granted in public discourse about sacrifice.
3 Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought, chs. 1–3. See also Joan E. Howard, From Violence to Vision: Sacrifice in the Works of Marguerite Yourcenar (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 1992), shows how deeply the intransigent Catholic views of sacrifice persist even in the assumptions made by modern novelists like Marguerite Yourcenar (1903–87). Howard shows how “sacrifice” pops up all over Yourcenar’s writing —simple violence (Howard, 6), “ritual violence” (7), self-immolating victimization (272), exploitation of the individual by the state (16), “mass exterminations in World War II”, “calculated” Nazi brutality (22), or even the Nazi victimizations which Yourcenar feels we must admit to be present in our own worst tendencies to cast others as victims (36). With feminist culture critique not very far below the surface, Howard shows how Yourcenar recasts standard sacrificial themes pitting women in the role of self-effacing ‘sacrificial’ victims in the old Greek myth of Alceste, into a passionate contrarian argument against womanly self-sacrifice. Yourcenar’s attractiveness lies in part in her ability passionately to embrace the past in a series of mythico-historical creations such as her Memoirs of Hadrian, The Mystery Play of Alcestis or To Each His Minotaur, yet without casting her heroines in the roles which tradition would assign them as self-effacing social victims. High on Yourcenar’s list of evils of the past is the hierarchy of victimization, which she associates with the Nazi totalitarianism that drove her into exile in the United States (266). Accordingly, Alceste’s ‘unwomanly’ rejection of her culturally designated self-immolating role, compels one to rethink the role of women, in particular how casting them as convenient self-effacing victims only replays the roots themes coursing through the horrors of our century which Yourcenar bears in mind. Subversiveness is then the key to Yourcenar’s female characters (268f ). She upsets cultural stereotypes about women’s ‘natural’ fitness for moral sacrifice by trading on metaphors derived from ritual sacrifice.
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In such a spirit, this book deals with the attempts of both liberal Protestants and Durkheimians, in effect, to speak to the issue of sacrifice against what in many cases turn out to be its prevailing Catholic background discourse. Indeed, even though I will concentrate on the world of ‘theory,’ and thus on the academic rivalry between the Durkheimians and the French liberal Protestants, I believe that the Catholics might be said to be the ‘uninvited guests’ at the table where sacrifice was being hotly contested by the Protestants and Durkheimians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 2. Catholic Sacrificial Discourse and the Theology of the Eucharist What strikes one as remarkable about this French Catholic discourse about sacrifice is its vivid and adaptive reinterpretation of the sacrificial ideal at various points in history of the nation. French Catholicism has been unusually creative in adapting sacrifice to changing times. I have argued in Contesting Sacrifice that one can at least distinguish five moments in this history of cultural creation and interpretation of the sacrificial ideal.4 These are the baroque, rococo, restoration, and intransigent/integrist conceptions of sacrifice, each of which carry with them their own characteristic styles of sacrificial spirituality. The “baroque” refers to the period of first reactions to the Reformation in the very early seventeenth century, following on the Council of Trent. There, we can begin speaking of the high water mark of “royal religion” and of organizations of the “réaction,” devoted to Trent’s sacrificial understanding of the Eucharist, such as the Oratory, the “Ecole Française de Spiritualité,” and the “Compagnie du Saint Sacrement.” The second period, encompasses both the Catholic “rococo,” exemplified by a sacrificial spirituality of devotion to the Sacred Heart as well as its nemesis, the iconoclastic destructions of the French Revolution as well as its own attempts at neo-religious cults of sacrifice for the nation. On the Catholic side, this form of spirituality, long championed by the Jesuits from the later seventeenth century, has been central to international Catholic piety at least up to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The French Revolution’s sacrificial devotion to the nation has, of course,
4
Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought, 19–47.
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continued to have a lively (deathly) history up to the present day. Third, we can distinguish the post-revolutionary period of “restoration” spirituality. Here, sacrificial piety receives fresh impetus imparted by radical thinker, Joseph de Maistre, and takes on an explicitly politicized nature in his meditations on political sacrifice and the national ideal. Fourth, and finally, from the first third of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth centuries, we can identify a period of religious and political intransigence and integrism, reinforced by the Syllabus of Errors and the assertion of papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council. As powerful voices of dissent from the Third Republic, representing a large proportion of the Catholic majority of the nation, the Catholic intransigents dictated many of the taken-for-granted assumptions surrounding everyday thinking about such a religious notion as sacrifice, and in time also higher order thinking about sacrifice in the academy and in political life of the nation. Let me sketch their vision and explain something of its origin and rationale. Provoked by reactions to Protestant denial of the Eucharist as sacrifice, a Roman Catholic theological literature on the nature of sacrifice appeared under the form of a new theology of the Eucharist in the early modern France. Developing fully in the seventeenth century, this sacrificial theology of the Eucharist became the basis for an entire discourse on sacrifice which would be worked out in political, religious, literary and other contexts in France up to the present day. Sacrifice, in the Catholic Eucharistic sense, consists in at least two core notions. First, is a total annihilation of a victim, as in the case of Jesus, but extended by imitation to the laity. Second, is the expiation for sin effected by this immolation of the victim. Although the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council considerably lessened the influence of this conception of sacrifice among Catholics, it held sway from the time of the Council of Trent into the present day. In recent times, for example, opponents of the reforms of Vatican II, such as the renegade French bishop, Marcel Lefebvre, have reasserted the centrality of the sacrificial Eucharist with a sort of vengeance.5
5 Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), 119–21.
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Conceived as annihilation, Catholic conceptions of sacrifice called for a total “giving up” of the individual self, rather than a prudent “giving of ” (some portion of the) individual or their property. This is sacrifice in what may be recognized as the idealistic or altruistic mode of total giving of self for others, or in the romantic mode of gallant offering of the self for the beloved. As such, sacrifice here carries a note of extremity with it, rather than the more modest notion of generous giving. It admits no room for a prudent “giving of ” as sufficient to the notion. The normal sense of sacrifice is here total and uncompromising. As expiation, sacrificial death is thought to settle some cosmic score, to weigh in the balance of debts owed and thereby to effect sure repayment, to appease the righteous wrath of the deity.6 On this logic, transgressions can never merely be thought away, excused or eliminated in some ‘spiritual’ way. Even Christ’s good intentions could alone never suffice in place of a real sacrificing death and resurrection. Because Adam’s sin materially disturbed the relation between humanity and divinity, it must be removed by some sort of thoroughly incarnated process—‘paid in blood,’ so to speak—such as by a ritual, like sacrifice. In France, this widely assumed notion of sacrifice was worked out intellectually first and primarily by pious, some would even say, “mystical,” theologians, the foremost of whom was Pierre de Bérulle and other members of the Oratorian order. Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629)7
6 In material terms, the existence of minor monuments to this sensibility witness to the durability of this sacrificial spirituality across the centuries. In Paris off the great nineteenth century Boulevard Haussmann, in the Square Louis XVI, the Chapelle Expiatoire was erected in 1815–26 by order of Louis XVIII in memory of his eighteenth century forebears, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. There, in the style of classical “funeral temenos,” Louis XVI stands, accompanied by his confessor, while Marie Antoinette is supported (significantly enough) by Corot’s image of “Religion.” (Stuart Rossiter, ed., The Blue Guides: Paris (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), 103. 7 Henri Bremond, A Literary History of Religious Thought in France. Volume III: The Triumph of Mysticism [1921], K. L. Montgomery, trans., (London: SPCK, 1936). The better known successors of Bérullean spirituality during the time of “royal religion” were the Jansenists. Especially as Jansenist spirituality called for rigorous cultivation of the interior life and Augustinian awareness of human sinfulness, the Jansenists followed closely the lead of Bérulle. Yet, the Jansenists were not wholly faithful followers of Bérulle. To be sure, they, like Bérulle, were constantly conscious of human sinfulness. Yet, in place of Bérulle’s passionate mysticism of self-annihilation, the Jansenists spoke of God meeting the human soul in a recognition of the divine pres-
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was both a theologian of mystical devotion and spiritual severity, as well as consummate politician and builder of institutions. Bérulle founded the French version of one of the most influential institutions of the French “réaction” to the Reformation, the Oratorian congregation (1611) originally founded in the wake of the Council of Trent by the Italian, Philip Neri. Through the Oratory, Bérulle sought to renew Catholic education by revamping the ideology and training of priests and laity alike. He is rightly recognized as well as the founder of what came to be known as the “Ecole Française de Spiritualité,” or simply the “French School”8 For the “French School,” sacrifice consisted in an offering, its immolation and final “consummation” or acceptance by God.9 In the process, it was the human individual who was annihilated. Condren’s theory of sacrifice “requires destruction . . . [a] total destruction . . . as much as is completely possible.”10 With the image in mind of Christ the heavenly priest continually offering sacrifice to the Father throughout eternity, another prominent Oratorian, Jean Jacques Olier, saw Christ’s sacrifice as eternal. It cannot be doubted that there is sacrifice in heaven, because heaven is most of all the place of perfect religion. . . . By right, sacrifice should be offered there, and offered there unceasingly, because it is there that religion suffers no interruption. . . .11
The idea of Christ’s eternal sacrifice informed Olier’s view of a reformed clergy: Christ’s sacrifice was not only eternal itself, but eternally exemplary for the secular Roman priesthood, and by extension to the faithful themselves. Thus, the core of this new spirituality consisted of seeing the whole of life as a living sacrifice. For these
ence. But, as we will see, not only did the theological features of Bérulle’s spirituality put him into a tense relationship with the Jansenists, but so did his politics as well. Unlike the Jansenists, Bérulle championed the crown and its “royal religion” of absolutism under which the Jansenists were to suffer such deadly blows. (Louis Dupré, “Jansenism and Quietism”, in Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern, Louis Dupré and Don E. Saliers, eds. (New York: Crossroads, 1991), 129. 8 Eugene A. Walsh, The Priesthood in the Writings of the French School: Bérulle, De Condren, Olier (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1949). 9 Eugene A. Walsh, The Priesthood in the Writings of the French School: Bérulle, De Condren, Olier, 56. 10 Jean Galy, Le Sacrifice dans l’école française (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1951), 145. 11 Eugene A. Walsh, The Priesthood in the Writings of the French School: Bérulle, De Condren, Olier, 21 citing Olier, “Preface,” Grand’ Messe, cols. 287–8.
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Catholics of the seventeenth century, the sacrificial dimension of the Eucharist, understood as the real physical passion, suffering and death of Jesus, received an emphasis “it had not previously had.”12 What we may call Catholic baroque spirituality’s conception of sacrifice broke with Aquinas’ emphasis on sacrifice as the interior psychological act of the recognition of divine sovereignty.13 When married to the practical spirituality of the “imitation” of Christ, this theology urged self-effacing self-sacrifice of the human individual. Such self-immolation in some way expiates for human sin by participating in what Roman Catholics thought Jesus accomplished by his death on Calvary. This eucharistic theology, in turn, regulated and informed Roman Catholic piety as early as the middle sixteenth century.14 As late as 1922, celebrated Catholic theologian, Henri Bremond, wrote that the “center of the entire Catholic religion [culte] . . . is not the Eucharist distributed at the holy table.” Instead, something far more severe, and challenging to normal humanity makes for a Catholic center. Bremond continues: “Our religion has the holy sacrifice of the mass as its center and chief source of vitality, renewing the immolation of Jesus Christ on the cross, along with the participation of the faithful in this very same sacrifice by means of holy communion.”15 For our purposes, five aspects of the sacrificial conception of the mass, developed by Bérulle and his school, need to be stressed: Jesus’s death on Calvary is Jesus an expiatory sacrifice; furthermore it is a total self-immolation with nothing held back; this sacrifice is the origin of the Catholic mass; the mass is believed to be a complex symbol and sacrament referring to Calvary; humanity can communicate with God’s holiness through participation in this sacramental sacrifice; Calvary becomes the unique point of reference for all masses to follow, and not just for the sacrificial death of Jesus, but for all sacrifices, whether past or to come.
12 “Sacrifice in Christian Theology,” The New Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 12, (New York City: McGraw Hill, 1967), 839. 13 “Sacrifice in Christian Theology”, The New Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 12, 837–40. 14 John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution,” Past and Present 100 (1983): 29–61. But readers should beware of Bossy’s glib and uninformed reading of both Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice and the Durkheimian tradition (49–50). 15 Henri Bremond, Histoire litteraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 9, La vie chrétienne sous l’ancien régime, (Paris: Librairie Bloud et Gay, 1932), 132. Attributed to a Dom G. Godu .
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First, Catholics felt that the death of Jesus on Calvary was a sacrifice with cosmic implications: it expiated for the sins—past, present and to come—of humanity. Despite appearances, it was not then in reality a judicial execution. Rather, Jesus as the Son of God sacrificed himself to the Father for the sake of making up the debt humanity had, and would incur, by its sinfulness. Jesus is thus seen as both priest offering the sacrifice of himself and its victim at the same time, because only a divine priest offering a perfectly holy victim could ever compensate the Father for the offenses of humanity. Second, in his total immolation of self, Jesus holds nothing back in reserve. In his sacrificial death, he pours out his being in death for the sake of all humanity in an act of sacred annihilation. Ironically and mystically, in accepting annihilation, he is raised from the dead and wins life everlasting for humanity. Third, for Catholic theology, the mass both symbolically represents and mystically re-presents this sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus. The sacrifice of Jesus is thus eternally present; every mass thereafter, as it were, perpetuates the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus. Thus, the mass is believed to be more than a symbolic commemoration of those past salvific historical events; it is fundamentally a mysterious ‘participation’ in the reality of the historical moment of Jesus’s sacrificial death and resurrection. Every mass, Catholics believe, makes otherwise past historical events present again for the faithful. As the pious Abbé Kerné put it in 1902, the mass is “continuation of Calvary.”16 It is “not only the representation and memorial of the unique true sacrifice . . . it is identically the same.”17 Fourth, at the center of the mass is the Eucharist, the sacrificial communion meal. In participating in this meal, the faithful believe themselves to be sitting alongside Jesus at his last supper sharing sacramental communion with him and of his divine substance. Through this participation in the sacrifice and substance of Jesus, the faithful are ‘made holy’—the literally what ‘sacrifice’ means.18 Believers hold that in this way God imparts some of his holiness to humanity. Without this, adds Abbé Kerné, humanity should “recognize [its]
16 Abbé Kerné, Le Sacrifice en général et le sacrifice de la Messe en particulier (Landerneau: J. Desmoulins, 1902), 51. 17 Abbé Kerné, Le Sacrifice en général et le sacrifice de la messe en particulier, 20. 18 Ibidem, 13–6.
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nothingness and miserable [nature].”19 Human holiness is thus “borrowed.” It is neither produced by us nor derived from some, supposed but really nonexistent, innate goodness in human nature.20 Even our human orientation to God—human religiousness—is also a product of gracious divine initiatives, and not, as we will see later in our discussion, a trace of some innate human proclivity for religion such as in a primordial “natural religion.” Fifth and finally, the sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary, with the mass taken as identical, is the only true sacrifice. Whether consciously or not, all other sacrifices, past, present and to come, whether offered by druids or Brahmins with whatever intentions, are only, as Abbé Kerné informs us again, “imitations of true sacrifice. They are “an image, more or less exact, a memory, a recollection . . . a derivation of true sacrifice.”21 In this respect, Kerné does not damn the religious sacrifices of other cultures; he patronizes them. The sacrifices of the other religions are not “true,” but they have something of the truth in them.22 In this way, believing Catholics inhabited a world of mystic correspondences, where ordinary time and space collapsed into the sacred time of the sacred events of Christian salvation history. The focus of their history became the focus for the histories of all others. At the center of that history was a sacrifice. Even while the Oratorians spread the influence of their sacrificial theology far and wide in France, their lead was taken up by the Jesuits. Propagating a spirituality in many ways analogous to that encouraged by the French School, the Jesuits organized lay organizations or sodalities devoted to the Eucharist all across Western Europe. The membership of these Jesuit-informed pious lay groups became known as “dévots,” some of whom became the model for Molière’s Tartuffe.23 As such, the Jesuits tended frequently to emotional and public displays of piety centered round the Eucharist. The practice of frequent communion and confession, which so irritated the Jansenists, was theirs.24 Among the first such bodies organized 19
Ibidem, 15. Ibidem, 11116. 21 Ibidem, 18 22 Ibidem, 17. 23 Louis Chatellier, The Europe of the Devout [1987], Jean Birrell, trans., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 24 Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 58. 20
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by the Jesuits in 1554, was a Eucharistic sodality, the Society for the Veneration of the Holy Sacrament. Another with Jesuit connections, prominent in this period was Compagnie du Saint Sacrement. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Jesuits injected new life into the sacrificial spiritualities of the “Ecole Française de Spiritualité” by promoting the cult of the Sacred Heart. In promoting devotion to the Sacred Heart, the Jesuits exploited and popularized the powerful mystical spirituality of the Visitandinian nun, Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. In 1673, she reported violent and passionate visions of Jesus’ wounded heart all aflame with love for humanity, all intent on total human devotion.25 Graphically depicted in terms of the tormented images of self-sacrificing suffering, this sacrificial spirituality, backed up with Oratorian Eucharistic theology, provided the stuff of a passionate Catholic reassertion of sacrificial values. The Jesuits encouraged devotion to (the heart of ) Jesus under the species of his sacrificial suffering for the sins for humanity.26 As with Olier and the Oratorians, one finds a spiritual movement recapitulating the essentials of a now familiar Catholic theology of sacrifice. To wit, Jesus is the perfect and total sacrificial offering for the expiation of the sins of humanity.27 Devotion to the Sacred Heart persisted as the leading emblem around which especially right-wing Catholic spirituality and politics rallied up into our own time. Paris’ Basilique du Sacré Coeur, for instance, links the monarchist spirituality of the dévots of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the intransigent Catholic right-wing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in a powerful and literally concrete way. In 1915, the French bishops dedicated France to the Eucharist symbol of the Sacred Heart. Devotion to the “suffering Christ” of the Sacred Heart cult actually increased during the First World War, and was doubtless
25 Keith P. Luria, “The Counter-Reformation and Popular Spirituality,” Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern, Louis Dupré and Don E. Saliers, eds. (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 117. 26 At first, the rise of the cult split the world of French Catholic spirituality between the Jesuits and the “parti dévot.” Jean-Jacques Olier as well as the members of the “parti dévot” in the French School and their Jansenist successors objected fiercely to the emotionalism of the Jesuit devotion to the Sacred Heart. (Keith P. Luria, “The Counter-Reformation and Popular Spirituality,” 118 and Louis Dupré, “Jansenism and Quietism”, in Christian Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern, Louis Dupré and Don E. Saliers, eds. (New York: Crossroads, 1991), 125. 27 Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 116.
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linked to the national travail induced by the great combat.28 In the last years of the War, the most militant and intransigent Catholics campaigned to include the emblem of the Sacred Heart among the banners making up the “couleurs nationals”—an effort so bold that it energized the laïc forces in 1917 to a counter-offensive against the intransigent Catholics.29 3. Sacrifice Nationalized: Revolution and Counter-Revolution No sooner had the Jesuits converted the politico-religious cult of the Sacred Heart into a powerful weapon of monarchy, than the French Revolution started on its path of renovating all of French life around an ideal of national sacrifice. Yet, despite their best efforts to cut the nation free of its Catholic past, the fathers of the French Revolution seem to have built their ideology of sacrifice for the nation on the deeply entrenched structures of Catholic discourse about sacrifice. While it must be acknowledged that classic Roman models played their parts in guiding revolutionary attitudes toward sacrifice for the nation, the “cultural references” of Catholic France were in large part reinterpreted and thus continued by the fathers of the French Revolution.30 François Furet even writes of the Terror as having “refashioned, in a revolutionary mode, the divine right of public authority.”31 Catholic models continued to resurface with even greater force later among some of the Revolution’s staunchest supporters, such as Michelet. In his attempt to create “a viable national mythology” of sacrifice to replace the old Catholic model he failed and instead simply resorted to the Catholic idea. The Passion story of Jesus, the saintly myth of Jeanne d’Arc, the transcendent reality of the martyred France and of the holy “People,” became for him the materials of a national mythology of sacrifice and had irresistible and “profound attraction” him. And, so he declared in behalf of “sacrifice
28
Jean-Marie Mayeur, “Le Catholicisme français et le première guerre mondiale” Francia 2 (1974): 388. 29 Jean-Marie Mayeur, “Le Catholicisme français et le première guerre mondiale,” 389. 30 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Knopf: New York, 1989), 350. 31 François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution [1978], Elborg Foster, trans., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 77.
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for the nation.”32 In his own inimitably romantic manner, he viewed French nationhood as a whole, through the lens of sacrifice and martyrdom, revealing that France was at once “an innocent and divine victim and savior.”33 As Michelet supplied evidence of the entrenchment of Catholic ideas of sacrifice in revolutionary tradition, Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821)34 gave enthusiastic testimony to its vitality for the counterrevolution. A vigorous monarchist and slashing critic of the Enlightenment and French Revolution, Maistre championed the cause of Catholic ultramontanism and a restored monarchy.35 Prominent among the political and religious works which he wrote one of France’s greatest works on sacrifice, “Eclaircissement sur les sacrifices.”36 Maistre’s conception of political sacrifice recalled much of the eucharistic theology of the Ecole Française de Spiritualité, but added an explicit political view of it. For de Maistre, sacrifice plays a central role in an overall theory of history and society.37 Recalling the
32 Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 46. 33 Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination, 66. 34 Susan Dunn argues persuasively that the rhetoric of Jacobin regicide and Michelet’s celebration of Jeanne d’Arc’s death should be seen as sacrificial. (The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination, ch. 1, 2.) 35 Born of a noble family in Chambéry, Savoy, Maistre began his intellectual life as a student of law in Turin. After a period as chief judicial officer of Sardinia, he served for fourteen years as Sardinian ambassador to the court of Czar Alexander II in St. Petersburg. 36 Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, ou entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la providence suivis d’un traite sur les sacrifices, Volume 2 (Paris: La Librairie Ecclesiastique de Rusand, 1822). 37 While I have been unable to trace a direct lineage between them and Maistre nor find explicit reference to them in Maistre’s major writings on sacrifice this may not be of much consequence. The sacrificial Eucharistc theology of the French School and the devotion to the Sacred Heart were then so widespread and popular in the France of the eighteenth century, we must presume that a pious Catholic like Maistre was informed by them. We can say this with certainty of the theology of the French School because it had attained a classic status in the seventeenth century, and was besides fundamental in the formation of the clergy. Likewise, devotion to the Sacred Heart was a spiritual commonplace in the eighteenth century, indeed in some ways defining the essence of rococo spirituality. As a sophisticated, pious and educated lay theologian, Joseph de Maistre could not have avoided their influence and knowledge of them. They formed part of the spiritual taken-forgranted core of the Catholicism which would have shaped Maistre. ( Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg, ou entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la providence suivis d’un traite sur les sacrifices, Volume 2, “Dixième Entretien” and “Eclaircissement sur les sacrifices.” See also the discussion of expiation in Maistre’s work in Joyce
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Oratorians, de Maistre too holds that sacrifice requires bloody annihilation in the quest for expiation of sins.38 The political realm since the French Revolution was putrid and needed to be purged of its sins. Expiation for the sins of the French Revolution required, in turn, a pure and innocent victim to be sacrificed to redeem the guilty.39 Indeed, the guilty can only be redeemed by the sacrificial death of the innocent. In this light, Maistre considered the execution of Louis XVI, for instance, a literal ritual ‘sacrifice’ of such an innocent victim, whose death in turn expiated the evils of the guilty Revolution fathers. Maistre’s embrace of political sacrifice was not without its worries for one opposing its sanctification of the nation. De Maistre, in effect, wound up sanctioning the religio-political principle of “raison d’état.”40 Post-revolutionary in his own way, Maistre thus posited a “‘religion of state.’” “Government” (of the right sort, to be sure), says Maistre a “is veritable religion: it has its dogmas, its mysteries, its ministers.” And because of this, sacrifice is required: “To submit it (government) to the discussion of each individual is to annihilate it. It only lives by the national reason, that is to say, by political faith . . .”41 and “‘individual abnegation,’”42 which is to say, sacrifice. Testimony to the durability of the classic intransigent Catholic theology of (eucharistic) sacrifice, Maistre’s theory of sacrifice, however severe, spurred an endless string of discourse, typically among the apologists of the right in France.43
O. Lowrie, The Violent Mystique: Thematics of Retribution and Expiation in Balzac, Barbery d’Aurevilly, Bloy and Huysmans (Geneva: Droz, 1974), 17–24. 38 Joseph de Maistre St. Petersbourg Dialogues, translated and edited by Richard A. Lebrun, (Montréal/Kingston: McGill/Queen’s University Presses, 1993), 384, 385. 39 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred. 40 Richard A. Lebrun, Throne and Altar: The Political and Religious Thought of Joseph de Maistre (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 1965), 76. 41 Quoting Maistre’s Etude sur la souveraineté, Oeuvres complètes, 1, 377 (Richard A. Lebrun, Throne and Altar: The Political and Religious Thought of Joseph de Maistre, 76. 42 Quoting Maistre’s Etude sur la souveraineté, Oeuvres complètes, 1, 377 (Richard A. Lebrun, Throne and Altar: The Political and Religious Thought of Joseph de Maistre, 76. 43 Maistre thus fed the ideological needs of a generation of intransigent and integrist thinkers, whether Catholic or not, such as Charles Maurras, Louis Veuillot and others. (Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, L. Vennewitz, trans., (New York: New American Library, 1965), 57–61. On Veuillot, see Richard A. Lebrun, Throne and Altar: The Political and Religious Thought of Joseph de Maistre, 143.
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4. “La Mystique” The theme of sacrifice figuring so prominently in France was thus played and replayed in many different keys. While Roman Catholic theological strategies of the “réaction” to the Reformation set things going, generations later Jacobin conceptions of patriotism gave sacrifice, apparently secular, political bearing.44 Resuming the dialectic, counterrevolutionary thinkers like Joseph de Maistre found in the humiliating execution of Louis XVI the saving grace of royal sacrifice for the ungrateful nation. Returning unwittingly to the fold, even a republican apologist like Michelet reprised Catholic themes by rehabilitating Jeanne d’Arc for the republic, and as sacrificing herself in classic Catholic manner for the nation.45 We ought not then be surprised that sacrifice should figure in the religio-political rhetoric of the turbulent late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well. There, this discourse was deployed especially in the extravagant growth of sacrificial rhetoric in intransigent and integrist Catholic circles, in its politics and literary production, and finally in radical reactions to both, but also in the growing ideal of altruistic service to the nation in the face of the coming of First World War. First, to the radical intransigent politics of the day. A dream of rightist Catholics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the establishing of what is known as an “integral” social order. Here, the nation, now no longer liberal and secular, embraced the spiritual guidance of Catholicism, so much so that modern institutions and values would be brought directly under the control of Catholic teachings. The chief ecclesiastical power promoting integrism was the Assumptionist order. They led the effort, despite the republic, to reunite “throne and altar,” by appealing—significantly—to the language of sacrifice developed in Catholic theology since the seventeenth century.46 “Assumptionist” Catholicism saw the world as arena in which sacrificial death expiated or compensated for human misdeeds47—
44 Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination, ch. 1. 45 Ibidem, ch. 2. 46 René Rémond, The Right Wing in France: from 1815 to De Gaulle, James M. Laux, trans., (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1966), 184, 187. 47 Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature, 1870 –1914 (London: Constable, 1966), 157, 217.
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typically of French secularism and revolutionary politics.48 In this great cosmic drama, even the ordinary Catholic laity could play a part by adding their penitential sufferings to the scales of cosmic justice, according to the mystic logic of “vicarious suffering or mystical substitution,” which “assumed an importance out of all proportion to the other doctrines of the Church. . . . God so arranges the world that the sins may be balanced by expiatory sacrifices.”49 By encouraging such an anti-liberal ethic, the Assumptionists hoped to overturn the Revolution and revert to an imagined time of harmony between church and state—one in which human rebelliousness was kept in check by a sacrificial ethic of submission to authority. Here, the Assumptionists argued like de Maistre50 and his intellectual heirs, such as Louis Veuillot, for a sacrificial conception of political culture in modern France as the surest way to put the twin genies of bourgeois liberal individualism and godless secularism back into the bottle. This Catholic idea of expiatory sacrifice also filled the pages of French literature as the most popular theme of writers such as Bernanos, Léon Bloy and many others.51 Novelist Barbery d’Aurevilly’s Un Pretre marié (1865), seems to have introduced the term, “expiatory suffering” into common literary parlance.52 Historian Richard Griffiths claims that this novel created the popular notion of sacrificing oneself for one’s fellows.53 Similarly, Catholic author, Paul Claudel, in his play of 1896, “Le Repos du Septième Jour” posed his lead character as a “symbolic portrayal of Christ’s original sacrifice for man.”54 Emile Baumann’s L’Immolé has been said to well reflect the “interests of the Catholics of his day”in sacrifice55 in recounting the tale of a man “who offers up his whole life as a sacrifice” based on the model of Jesus.56
48 Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution, 157. See also René Rémond, The Right Wing in France: from 1815 to De Gaulle, 184–9. 49 Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution Revolution, 156, and see also 190–3. 50 Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution, passim. 51 Joyce O. Lowrie, The Violent Mystique: Thematics of Retribution and Expiation in Balzac, Barbery d’Aurevilly, Bloy and Huysmans. Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution, 156. 52 Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution, 167f. 53 Ibidem, 171. 54 Ibidem, 200. 55 Ibidem, 198. 56 Ibidem, 193.
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Not even Catholic writers and political figures far removed from the integrist right-wing politics of the intransigents escaped the influence of the themes of intransigent sacrificial rhetoric. While Charles Péguy deplored the harshness of the rightist Catholic writers of his time, he readily cast his Jeanne d’Arc as classic Catholic sacrificial victim, expiating the punishment of the souls of the damned by her own death.57 Paying bizarre tribute to the power of integral Catholicism’s ideal of expiatory sacrifice, even the turn-of-the-century’s anarchists saw, what might have seemed like the meaningless deaths of their fellows, as having cosmic significance. They drew directly from a mythology of the “expiatory” sacrificial death of the activist based on Catholic precedents.58 In 1882, anarchist writers, Eliseé Reclus and Carlo Cafiero proclaimed, along with Maistre and the long tradition of French Catholic eucharistic theology, that religion is founded on sacrifice, on the eternal immolation of humans to an angry God.59 Attesting further to the depth of these classic expressions of sacrificial piety into the twentieth century was their persistence even among Catholics opposed to the intransigents and integrists. Certainly one of the leading liberal Protestant intellectuals of the day, Albert Réville, was right in suspecting that even those religious affiliations long ago surrendered may continue to shape tendencies of thought. “Unknown to themselves,” says Réville, “the bent of mind formed by the religion of their infancy persisted into mature age.”60 Alfred Loisy, for example, France’s chief Catholic “Modernist” and the bane of the intransigent party among French Catholics, knowingly or not, echoed the views of his religious opposites. As firmly as any intransigent Catholic, Loisy frankly declared that “sacrifice remains the religious act par excellence—all the more religious to the extent it is more consciously and voluntarily consented to.”61 Despite his intellectual liberalism, Loisy’s religion was just as irrational as that of the intransigents. And, we will see how Loisy’s views play themselves out accordingly in the coming pages. For the moment, suffice it to say that religion was for Loisy, “la mystique”62—an 57
Ibidem, 217. Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989), 287–8. 59 Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siècle France, 264f. 60 Albert Réville, “The Dreyfus Affair,” The New World 8 (1899), 621. 61 Alfred Loisy, La Religion (Paris: Nourry, 1917), 64. 62 Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1960), 235. 58
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“expression of this unseen, indefinable mystery.”63 With this irrational or, for Loisy, a super-rational mystique so much part of his view of religion, the great Catholic modernist naturally preferred an equally extreme view of sacrifice as the total surrender of the individual. Seen as the total “giving up” of the self, such as in wartime for the nation, Loisy, like those before him, recapitulated the classic Eucharistic theology of the Oratorians. So strong indeed was Loisy’s commitment to what seems like a renewed version of the classic theology of sacrifice, that he reasserted it unaltered in the wake of disillusionment with the high-flown rhetoric of noble sacrifice after the war.64 Here, in 1923, “after the massacre,”65 as he put it, Loisy reaffirmed absolute commitment to the equally absolute norm of “giving up” oneself to the nation. In the same work of 1923, La Morale humaine, Loisy reaffirmed sacrifice in a virtual elegy to total self-immolation. Speaking first of the war dead, Loisy referred to them as “the happiest” (sic). Full of the high-flown rhetoric dead or missing in action in the trenches of First World War, Loisy tells us without a note of irony that the deceased soldiers “perished in the tempest with the conviction of serving a great cause and having won it. They have at least gained something for themselves.”66 Far from what we know of the epidemic fear and depression of the common soldier, ‘happiness’ was the last thing filling their pathetic hearts. But Loisy knows none of this and takes his religious idealism straight to the survivors. In a time of growing cynicism, Loisy tells them that their duty is to consecrate themselves to the service of the society to which they belong, in order to assure the future of humanity. . . . And after all is said and done, this service amounts to giving things up.67
Incredibly, he calls for further sacrifice on top of all that has been surrendered: It is in sacrifice that the secret of happiness lies. Sacrifice, which seems to be the negation of happiness, is on the contrary, its condition and 63 Maude D. Petre, Alfred Loisy: His Religious Significance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 94. 64 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 221. 65 Alfred Loisy, La Morale humaine (Paris: Nourry, 1923), 290. 66 Alfred Loisy, La Morale humaine, 290. 67 Ibidem, 291.
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reality. (Sacrifice) . . . is above all and essentially an act of love in an act of faith: being love it is the transcendent and moral truth of life—supreme contentment. This is indeed true of all sacrifices, large and small; they never count for nought.68
While Loisy may be the last man in France to feel this way, that a major thinker at the time, long disaffiliated from official church teachings and institutions, should publish such claims, witnesses to the deployment and strength of the assumptions about the concept of sacrifice assumed by intransigent and integrist Roman Catholics. What later became a ‘secular’ call to patriotism was derived originally from and maintained by a peculiar kind of Catholic theology, especially as articulated in theology of the Eucharist as sacrifice. I contend that this Catholic theology was so deeply ingrained in France that it became the point of reference for all thinking about sacrifice ever since. It even served as the point of departure for all attempts to revise or eliminate it. 5. Durkheimians and Catholics Although I am concentrating on the Durkheimian arguments with the French liberal Protestants because of their location in the university, it would be well to remember that the Durkheimians were as well attempting to replace the accumulated influence of the Catholic tradition, primarily, however, in the civic realm. The Durkheimians in effect fell in between the positions of the French liberal Protestants on the liberal side, and of the Catholics on the anti-liberal side. As far as their distancing themselves from the Catholics, in Contesting Sacrifice, I dwelt at length with the way the Durkheimian approach to sacrifice could be seen as in part a natural reaction to aspects of the wide-spread conceptions of sacrifice traceable to the Catholic formation of the nation and its civic ethic.69 At that time, I argued that ‘the’ Catholic position, especially as crystalized in intransigent Catholic theological and political thought, could be usefully seen to rest on several major assertions. First, the Roman Catholics assumed that sacrifice was ‘extreme,’ that it was a total and often self-sacrificial annihilation of human individuality. Second, this annihilation of self 68 69
Ibidem, 289–91. Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought, ch. 6.
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effected positive redemptive changes in the cosmic order much as did sin, its opposite, worsen the human condition. Sacrifice was indeed expiation for human sin. Third, Jesus had an central historical role in the sacrificial rites of the entire world—whether Christian or not. While the Durkheimians challenged the French liberal Protestants in the university, they also took aim at each of these key Catholic positions in the wider realm of the national political ethos. First, while approving a civic ethic of sacrifice along side the Catholics, Hubert and Mauss, resisted Catholic extremism. Not for the Durkheimians the annihilationism of the Catholic position so deaf to the moral value of the individual. For the Durkheimians, sacrifice had to be conceived within the bounds defined by the sacredness of the individual as a limiting condition. As new kinds of liberals, Hubert and Mauss opposed the legacy of the Oratory and De Maistre, and the rightwing politics internally related to them. They proposed instead a theory of sacrifice, which might be seen as tailor-made for members of the liberal individualist bourgeoisie, which they were. Thus, Hubert and Mauss argue for prudence in sacrifice as its norm. Beginning with approval of a “giving of ” the self, they say that in “any sacrifice there is an act of abnegation since the sacrifier deprives himself and gives. . . .” But, unlike the Oratorians or de Maistre, they quickly add that “this abnegation and submission are not without their selfish aspect. The sacrifier gives up something of himself but does not give up himself. Prudently, he sets himself aside. . . . Disinterestedness is mingled with self-interest.”70 For the Durkheimians, such ‘selfishness’ is a normal and valid moral stance of citizens in a liberal republic. Thus, unlike Roman Catholic theorists, Hubert and Mauss excuse human beings from the duty of self-immolation, and in political terms, to a social body such as the state, especially in wartime.71 Durkheim wrote, for example, at length against the statism of the Prussian philosopher, Heinrich von Treitschke, who argued that war was “moral and healthy.”72 Durkheim reports that at the 70 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, (1899) W. D. Halls, trans., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 100. 71 This amelioration of the demands of sacrifice as articulated by the intransigent Catholics shows how well, for example, the Durkheimians continue the line of thought developed by the Protestants, Renouvier and Hamelin. (Ivan Strenski, “Durkheim, Hamelin and the ‘French Hegel’,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 16 (1989): 153. 72 Emile Durkheim, L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout: la mentalité allemande et la guerre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1915), 12.
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root of Treitschke’s love of war was the sense that it disciplines egoism. And, for Treitschke, egoism spelled unmitigated danger to the state. War forces egoism to submit to the discipline of sacrifice, and thus of the state. For Treitschke, war constitutes the “supreme sacrifice”, the “sacrifice of the self,” and a blessed state in which we “surpass ourselves.”73 By contrast, ever guarding the sacrality of the individual, Durkheim said that even in wartime, persons are not required to “sacrifice” their “individuality.”74 In this same vein, and closer to the perhaps hyper-individualist French liberal Protestants, Hubert and Mauss only requested ordinary citizens to “give of ” themselves, not a total “giving up” of themselves implied in Roman Catholic theology and political thought. Second, Hubert and Mauss also challenged the would-be prestige of expiatory sacrifice generally, so central to the Catholic conception of the cosmic role of Jesus, and as we will see, rejected by the French liberal Protestants. Taking on the Catholics and De Maistre with a single stroke, Hubert and Mauss note that on empirical grounds alone “expiation” does not mark a “real type of sacrifice.”75 It is not a clearly separable form of sacrifice, and as such “cannot thus form the basis for a general and rigorous classification of sacrifices.”76 While, expiation may be a factor in sacrifice, the Durkheimians are claiming that it is not its center, as the Roman Catholics would have it. The classic Catholic view of sacrifice as total self-sacrificing annihilation and expiation therefore needs to be decentered and placed into the wider context of sacrifice the world over, where it can be seen, at best, as exceptional, rather than normative. Third, in taking this modified view of sacrifice, the Durkheimians, in effect, pushed Jesus, the Catholic paradigm of total giving up of the self, from the center of public discourse about sacrifice. Hubert and Mauss simply challenged Jesus’s self-annihilating sacrifice as any kind of model for the sacrifice expected of citizens in a republic based on the individualist “droits de l’homme.” It is furthermore contrary to the rules of public discourse, that those who are not
73 Emile Durkheim, L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout: la mentalité allemande et la guerre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1915), 12. 74 Émile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals [1904], Cornelia Brookfield, trans., (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983) 72. 75 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice Its Nature and Function, 14. 76 Ibidem, 17.
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Christians need to accept anymore than the historical fact that Jesus was the subject of judicial execution. The status of Jesus’ death on Calvary as ritual sacrifice is at the very least a piece of Christian theological interpretation—a vision of religious faith itself. Valid in its own way in its religious context, the sacrificial death of Jesus is, in Durkheimian terms, a “représentation” of an ideal, and a mythological projection of what perfect sacrifice might be—sacrifice completely free of self-interest or calculation typical of human efforts.77 It is not however a ‘fact. This, in turn, excludes appeals to Jesus’ ‘sacrifice’ from public discourse. Hubert and Mauss also tried to decenter Jesus from public discourse about sacrifice in yet another way. Catholic orthodoxy held that Jesus was an embodiment of a pre-existent divine logos, and thus that Jesus was a priori and absolutely holy. Hubert and Mauss, on the contrary, relativized Jesus’ holiness to his participation in a sacrifice. It was the ritual of sacrifice itself which made a victim like Jesus holy. ‘Victims’—indeed any victim—was not ‘holy’ a priori. This attack on the central Christian christological contention that Jesus was sacred before the fact of his immolation, undercut the very idea of a transhuman sacred acting in the world. Bringing historical and linguistic evidence to bear in their behalf, the Durkheimians claimed that the rite of sacrifice—itself a social act—is a process of consecration—as the name, ‘sacri-ficium’ itself implies. In a piece of classic Durkheimian sociological reduction, society, as embodied here in a ritual, literally manufactures the holiness of beings as a matter of social technique. The social act of ritual makes ‘gods’ of them, and/or sustains the gods in their divinity. Jesus becomes holy as a result of being assimilated to the social act of ritual in which the holiness of a victim is achieved through the power of the group gathered in ritual action.78 So potent and pervasive, then, was the Catholic view of sacrifice that the Durkheimians seemed compelled to produce their own version of as part of their plan to replace Catholicism at the center of French moral life. The residual impact of the Catholic discourse, however, carried beyond the Durkheimians and the historical reach of this book and into our own time. In particular, two thinkers, widely read
77 78
Ibidem, 101. Ibidem, 69, 81.
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today, give surprising evidence of the ability of French Roman Catholic thought about sacrifice to generate both inheritors and renegades. They are Georges Bataille and René Girard, respectively. 6. Transgression and the ‘Catholic’ Bataille Contrary to what one might conclude from his well-deserved reputation as a pornographer, Georges Bataille really fits nicely into a tradition of French Catholic religious thought about sacrifice. It is in his Theory of Religion (1973), for example, that Bataille lays out many of the details of a dedicated theory of sacrifice and the sacred.79 Even if only unwittingly, Bataille’s work can be seen as renewing and reinterpreting the classic Catholic notions. As part of a French tradition of discourse on sacrifice, in Bataille’s work we can also see how the thinking initiated by Hubert and Mauss at the turn-of-thecentury kept generating new theorizing. Making these links all the tighter, Bataille in fact studied formally under Mauss in Paris, and has written a series of original explorations of Mauss’ key ideas. Although constraints of space prevent me here from going on at length, Georges Bataille is then a fitting person exemplifying how Catholic theologies of sacrifice merged into an original hybrid with the theory of Hubert and Mauss. Known mostly as a philosopher, literary critic and author of erotic fiction, the career of Georges Bataille (1897–1962)80 pays tribute to the ability of eccentric French intellectuals to make careers for themselves (‘prosper’ would be too strong a word) in France outside the 79
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (1973), Robert Hurley, trans., (New York City: Zone Books, 1989). 80 Amid all these streams of influence, perhaps the greatest was his part in the first revival of hegelian thought in twentieth century France. Bataille came under the direct influence of the Russian émigré, Alexandre Kojève in the 1920’s and 30’s. His hegelianism also informed the marxist activism and thinking that featured throughout the balance of his life as well. In 1936, Bataille founded a short-lived (1937–9), but highly influential intellectual group, “the Collège de Sociologie.” Its membership counted a motley group of Surrealists, Marxists, Hegelians, Freudians— in all, a rambunctious and fascinating assemblage of avant-garde French intellectuals of the 1930’s. Meeting in local cafes, such figures as Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Michel Leiris, Alexandre Kojève, Denis de Rougemont, and of course Bataille himself, gave papers on subjects as various as political rituals in Germany, shamanism, the idea of the festival, Marquis de Sade, or the various modes of the sacred in everyday life. (For details of Bataille’s life an works, consult Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994).
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sponsoring confines of major institutions of learning and education. A true homme des lettres, Bataille spent most of his life working as an author of serious books on literary criticism and philosophy. But, in the spirit of this independence, he also wrote numerous commercial articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as many short stories and novels of raw erotic fiction. Only later in life, just a few years short of his death was he assumed into the bosom of French intellectual respectability by being appointed to a post at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He reveled in everything from surrealism to Freudianism, to the rediscovery of Nietzsche, and to cultural experiments in automatic writing, avant-garde music and graphic arts. In the early 1930’s, Bataille attended Marcel Mauss’ lectures and, as a result, made the data of religious ethnography an integral part of the remarkable mix of intellectual streams already coursing through his mind. It was from Marcel Mauss, for example, that the writings of Bataille which concern us most—those on sacrifice, potlatch and gift—would take their lead. How then, with this kind of intellectual background, does Bataille see sacrifice, and especially how does he fit within French traditions of the discourse on sacrifice which we have been considering? In general, the logic of Bataille’s view of sacrifice can be summed up in the following way. Sacrifice is above all a violent, and thus destabilizing transgressive force directed in general at basic secular, bourgeois life and values. As such, it disrupts that everyday world in part because it rejects the values of economic rationality by asserting in their place the value of unlimited giving or expenditure. In actualizing this negation the calculating spirit and institutions of economic ideology, sacrifice effects the removal of objects and persons from the profane world into the sacred world of excess and limitlessness. Let us consider first Bataille’s grasp of the differences between economic ideology and the ideology of sacrifice. Bataille is impressed by the stark ontological opposition of economic exchange, on the one side, and gift exchange—especially in its extreme form of sacrifice— on the other. What seizes Bataille’s imagination is the way sacrifice negates utilitarian calculation. Thus, Bataille speaks of sacrifice as an “unconditional consumption,” or of how an “offering is rescued from all utility.”81 Indeed, reminiscent of Catholic annihilationism, Bataille’s
81
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (1973), 49.
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view of sacrifice runs to the extreme. Despite Hubert and Mauss’ rehabilitation of sacrifice, their desire to protect the sacrifier by substituting a victim is simply “a cowardly gesture.”82 Bataille pours out contempt on any holding back in sacrifice, on any note of self-interest, so essential, as we will see, to the view of Hubert and Mauss. Thus, Bataille waxes eloquent again about the vision of extremity he nurtures in his theory of sacrifice: the movement that pushes a man in certain cases to give himself (in other words, to destroy himself ) not only partially but completely, so that a bloody death ensues, can only be compared, in its irresistible and hideous nature, to the blinding flashes of lightning that transform the most withering storm into transports of joy.83
By contrast, Mauss sees excessive giving, such as potlatch, as a virtual sacrifice and as the “monster child of the gift system.”84 For Bataille, the excess and ‘monstrosity’ of potlatch are norms for giving. Indeed gift for Bataille is a “form of potlatch” rather than the other way round.85 In terms of the violence of sacrifice, Bataille seems as indifferent to it as was the Roman Catholic annihilationist theology of the Eucharist dating from the “réaction” or the counter-revolutionary Catholic restoration thinking of Joseph de Maistre. Like Oratorian Charles de Condren, who could speak with mystical joy of sacrifice that “requires destruction . . . [a] total destruction . . . as much as is completely possible,”86 Bataille delights in violence—sacrificial violence above all. Far from showing compassion for the suffering of sacrificial victims or moral outrage at the injustice of victimization, Bataille projects what may seem a theatrical perversity in meditating (without any traces of conscience) on sacrificial (and other) violence and then even celebrating it. Tapping, as well, the tradition of
82 Georges Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh” (1924) in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939: Georges Bataille Allan Stoekl, ed. and trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 69. 83 Georges Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” 69. 84 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, (1925) Ian Cunnison, trans., (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 41. 85 Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933) in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939: Georges Bataille, Allan Stoekl, ed. and trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 121. 86 Jean Galy, Le Sacrifice dans l’école française, 145.
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revolutionary violence of which the Catholic De Maistre, for example, is a sharer, Bataille takes cues from Sade. For both Bataille and Sade, “cruelty” was a virtue.87 In Bataille’s eyes sacrificial violence was valuable and not to be scorned, because it served a great and definite purpose. Like his surrealist fellow-travelers, Bataille’s trafficking in violent perversity served the distinctly religious end of transcending our bourgeois humanist natures and ascending beyond to what Bataille called “the sacred.” A recent critic of Bataille’s, Alice O. Letvin, sums up this surrealist connection between transgression and the sacred: “The surrealists’ fascination with violence is to be understood . . . in part in the context of their desire to make contact with the sacred,” to reactivate the sacred in everyday life by overcoming the imperatives of everydayness.88 “Sacrifice,” adds Bataille “essentially turns its back on real relations.”89 The surrealist part of Bataille wanted to do just that. In pursuit of the sacred, in pursuit of a transcendence of the everyday, Bataille, for example, actually wanted to institute human sacrifice in the midst of one of central Paris’s busiest intersections, the Place de la Concorde (sic). For Bataille, such sacrificial violence was a kind of ‘good’ evil, because it would shake ordinary folk out of their practical utilitarian everydayness. Like real religion, such violent transgression as human sacrifice would break the plane of the profane, and thus open the doors to the something beyond its limits—the sacred. This going beyond the everyday is what the bourgeoisie really fear. The champions of the “real order” may talk of repugnance with violence, but they are hypocrites for saying so. The “real order,” says Bataille “does not so much reject the negation of life that is death,” as Bataille seems to do (and probably does), “as it rejects the affirmation of the intimate life,” for which Bataille himself stands, and “whose measureless violence is a danger to the stability of things,” that very stability being the very soul of bourgeois existence which Bataille so despises.90 Sounding ever more like the mystical Catholics
87
Alice Owen Letvin, Sacrifice in the Surrealist Novel: The Impact of Early Theories of Primitive Religion on the Description of Violence in Modern Fiction (New York: Garland, 1990), 112. 88 Alice Owen Letvin, Sacrifice in the Surrealist Novel: The Impact of Early Theories of Primitive Religion on the Description of Violence in Modern Fiction, 56. 89 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (1973), Robert Hurley, trans., (New York City: Zone Books, 1989), 44. 90 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (1973), 46.
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of the seventeenth century in their pursuit of annihilating abandon, Bataille accuses today’s secular bourgeoisie of being afraid of letting go and passing beyond what they cannot manipulate, calculate and control. In respect to the transgressive violence of sacrifice, Bataille seeks as well to bring out the cognitive value of the act for those performing or observing it. Unlike today’s critics of sacrifice, such as René Girard,91 this lets us see how Bataille directs attention away from the potentially anguished self-consciousness of the victim, and onto the effect of sacrifice on the spectators. This is partly because, as we have just seen, sacrifice is for Bataille primarily a way of transcending secular individualist consciousness.92 It is a kind of performance meant to have socially revolutionary effects. Thus, the witnesses of sacrifice matter most, not the hapless victims. In witnessing bloody sacrifice, we are meant to expose ourselves to the revolutionizing and transgressive power of its violence. We should feel anguish thereby, so that we can really know death, and in this contemplation of death, experience our limits.93 Sacrifice in this sense is for the spectator a vicarious experience, a “limited experience of death”, and one which is pleasurable at the same time because it allows us to escape the human order of mundane experience.94 Sacrifice, as an act of excessive violence becomes above all a “path to awareness,”95 and thus something to celebrate in the extreme. Bataille is then in open and total revolt against the mores of everyday practicality which go along with the secular, utilitarian economic values of modern, godless, liberal bourgeois life. He hates the reifying interpersonal relations engineered by this drive to maximize ‘utilities’ such as pleasure or status.96 Instead, Bataille celebrates a freedom from such calculation in the form of his ideas of the anti-utilitarian essence of the transcendent sacred. Reminiscent of Mauss’ The Gift, Bataille revels in “expenditure,” in the useless, wasteful and gratuitous—in everything which smacks of the inversion of utilitarian rationality of
91
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Alice Owen Letvin, Sacrifice in the Surrealist Novel: The Impact of Early Theories of Primitive Religion on the Description of Violence in Modern Fiction, 74. 93 Ibidem, 75. 94 Ibidem, 111. 95 Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994), 23. 96 Alice Owen Letvin, Sacrifice in the Surrealist Novel: The Impact of Early Theories of Primitive Religion on the Description of Violence in Modern Fiction, 56, 115. 92
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capitalism and its economic ideology.97 He thus champions the animalistic98 and instinctual99 over the rational and planned. He cherishes the impulse to ecstatic annihilation, where the bourgeoisie think only of preserving themselves.100 All these anti-utilitarian virtues are on display for Bataille, in sacrifice. In a burst of transgressive extremity, in the ‘useless’ violence it unleashes, sacrifice shatters the certainties of the mundane by transgressing the ‘rules’ of bourgeois good sense. And, although one might simply concur with critic Alice Letvin in her apt description of Bataille as the “last of the romantics,”101 Bataille’s obsession with the religious themes of classic Catholic theology, such as sacrifice itself, understood as self-effacing annihilation so reminiscent of the Oratorians and the Jesuits and other Catholic mystics of the Golden Age, compels one to probe further into the man’s connections with the Catholicism of France.102 What might these Catholic connections reveal about Bataille and his ideas about sacrifice? As a teenage convert to Roman Catholicism in full rebellion against his good bourgeois anti-clerical parents, Bataille entered the seminary of Saint-Fleur in 1917 fully intending to advance to the priesthood.103 Michael Richardson, in a recent book on Bataille, even has advanced 97
Ibidem, 114. Ibidem, 105. 99 Ibidem, 56. 100 Ibidem, 106. 101 Ibidem, 42. Mircea Eliade, an admirer of Bataille’s, also celebrated the sacred conceived along lines sympathetic to the approach of Bataille. For Eliade, it was Hindu and Buddhist tantrism, the coincidenta oppositorum of the renaissance mystics, who moved him. Nonetheless, both Eliade and Bataille assume very similar rationales for conceiving the sacred or the nature of religion, even if derived in some part from their own different historical intellectual traditions. Both felt that transcendence and thus sacredness are absolute; they stand over against the profane world as its total negation. Part of this in Eliade comes from the via negativa and mystical traditions of Romanian Orthodoxy, reinterpreted in his own youth in terms of Yogic negation, neo-romantic primitivism or irrationalist existentialism. Bataille, not accidentally I would argue, at first welcomed Hitlerian extremism, much as Eliade raged in radical Romanian rightwing circles. (See my Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History (London/Iowa City: Macmillan/University of Iowa , 1987), chapter 5). 102 This quest takes one beyond other, more immediate, influences of the intellectual world of the 1930’s which we have already mentioned. These include Alexandre Kojève, interpreter of a newly discovered radical Hegel, who encouraged the dialectical language Bataille uses so freely. It likewise takes note of Nietzsche and his French avatars, who were likewise highly influential in the same milieu. 103 Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille, 19. Alice Owen Letvin, Sacrifice in the Surrealist Novel: The Impact of Early Theories of Primitive Religion on the Description of Violence in Modern Fiction, 117 note 170. 98
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the view that “in many ways, Bataille was never anything other than the serious young man who would have devoted himself to God.” Indeed, even in the notorious experiments in transgressive debauchery which Bataille engaged throughout his whole life, Richardson also believes that Bataille did so “with all the seriousness and diligence of a novice priest taking a vow of chastity.”104 Bataille’s Catholicism might well have conformed to the spirit of a kind of extremity we met at the outset in the Catholic piety dating from the French Golden Age and renewed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Like the intransigent Catholics, Bataille seems to have been the picture of the intense Catholic nationalist, linking the patrie and the Church in a solemn bond—just the kind of person who did draw close to the “neo-fascism of the ‘Action Française.’”105 But this picture is not so simply drawn, even if it may on balance be correct. Given the themes of maternal love dominating his first publication lamenting the bombing by the Germans of the cathedral at Rheims, Bataille is perhaps more under the influence of the sweeter gospel of Marian love.106 Yet, even here where Bataille exults in “Mary herself, whose charity lived among us”107 and in the cathedral, her symbol, “as the highest most marvelous consolation left among us by God,”108 he recalls familiar classic seventeenth century Roman Catholic themes of bloody, expiatory sacrifice. You are the ones from whom she awaits renewal, for she is none other than a direct manifestation of Our Lady; and she shows you the light along way leading to Christ. Others work for liberation in tortures such that they cannot be written except with bleeding hands, and truly Christ alone was able to write them with his blood. You must be worthy of those who suffer thus for you. You have to devote yourself to praying Jesus on the cross for them so that he will teach them what blood is worth. Above all, it is for you to take, in happy peacetime, the way they have opened for you.109 104
Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille, 24. Ibidem, 19. 106 Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism: 1789 –1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), 251ff. 107 Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille, 19. But see Georges Bataille, “NotreDame de Rheims,” (1919) in Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, Denis Hollier, ed., Betsy Wing, trans., (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1989), 18. 108 Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille, 19. But see Georges Bataille, “NotreDame de Rheims,” 16. 109 Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille, 19. But see Georges Bataille, “NotreDame de Rheims,” 18. 105
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So, even given Bataille’s sweeter religious orientation, the power and influence of intransigent French Catholic understandings of sacrifice seems to have made its presence felt. Bataille’s intense engagement with Catholicism needs then to be taken in to account in part for some of the very extremity of his views of sacrifice. 7. Peace at Any Price? Or the Resentments of René Girard At the opposite pole from Bataille’s extremist celebration of sacrifice, but ever dependent on the same Roman Catholic reference points we have surveyed, is René Girard. As we will see in the next chapter, Girard should be looked on as updating the liberal Protestant critique of sacrifice of the turn-of-the-century against which the Durkheimians fought. In this way, Girard provides a good example of how the theology of sacrifice stemming from the Roman Catholics was contested in our own day, much as Bataille represents a perverse renewal Catholic notions. Girard makes no secret of his contempt for the very sacrificial violence. This applies with full force to the sacrificial rite so sacred to Bataille. Indeed, Girard’s words drip with sarcasm as he accuses Bataille of seeing “violence in terms of some rare and precious condiment, the only spice still capable of stimulating the jaded appetite of modern man.”110 But, witness to Girard’s general distaste for the entire rite is his equally sharp condemnation of the kind of compromised sacrificial values represented in Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice. As we will see in the course of this book, Hubert and Mauss accepted sacrificial violence and the unequal distributions of burdens parceled out to the victims of sacrifice. The Durkheimians approved a prudent ‘giving of ’ in sacrifice even if this was made at the expense of a hapless victim. What Hubert and Mauss cared about in sacrifice was the safety of the person offering sacrifice—not the mediating victim who stood in the place of the sacrifier. Mitigated or not, Hubert and Mauss’ acceptance of sacrificial violence will not pass below Girard’s moral radar. In response to the compromised or mitigated view of the Durkheimians, marxist and other critics of the period, and so as well Girard in our own time,
110
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 222.
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have rebelled at the easy substitution of the mute victim for the sacrifier, essential to the Durkheimian scheme. If victimization could not be ended, the critics, at least, insisted that such inequalities be demystified and bared in public, all the better to expose their injustice. Higher values exist than Durkheimian social peace. Justice for one stirred the consciences of these critics and Girard as well. Accordingly, the French philosophical establishment of which Durkheim was seen as a prominent member, was treated to a withering critique by marxist Paul Nizan. He explicitly railed against the false ‘peace’ which Durkheimianism sought in the society of the early twentieth century: Emile Durkheim manifests [an] . . . obsession with peace and concord. The chief purpose of a book like The Division of Labor in Society is to preserve the peace. Durkheim deplores a social order which “is still in a state of total war”; he deplores “the multifarious disorders of which the economic world exhibits so sad a spectacle.” The aim of society, in his view, “is to suppress, or at least to moderate, war among men . . .” (pp. 2, 3). Durkheimian sociology defines society—any society, regardless of its specific characteristics—as a means of communion, which can pacify men, which can make them forget the realities of their struggles. . . . Whether it be mathematics or collective representations, everything in Durkheimianism leads to social harmony. Bourgeois philosophy tries very hard to conceal the war raging throughout society, a war it does not dare declare—beneath the celestial veil of an imaginary peace, a peace it is incapable of establishing on earth.111
In our time, the same moral indignation against (Durkheimian or other) values of social peace at the expense of justice stemming sacrificial victimization, constitutes the moral core of the equally radical spirit of Christian social justice animating René Girard. Ironically, although René Girard often associates his theories with those of Hubert, Mauss and Durkheim, he approaches sacrifice in a way which represents a major departure from the path which the Durkheimians took. For Girard, the principal fact to be observed in sacrifice is the fate of the victim, and the logic of sacrifice embedded therein. This is not the Durkheimian way, however. Hubert and Mauss argue that the model of sacrifice places a victim between the sacrifier or sacrificer and the deity. A victim mediates between the
111 Paul Nizan, The Watchdogs, (1960) Paul Fittingoff, trans., (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 156.
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sacred and the profane, because it is too dangerous for mere mortals to approach: If the religious forces are the very principle of the forces of life, they are themselves of such a nature that contact with them is a fearful thing for the ordinary man. Above all, when they reach a certain level of intensity, they cannot be concentrated in a profane object without destroying it. . . . If he [the sacrifier] involved himself in the rite to the very end, he would find death, not life. The victim takes his place. . . . The sacrifier remains protected: the gods take the victim instead of him.112
Thus, the sacrifiers place a victim on the altar of sacrifice in part out of self-interest in the value of their own lives—not with the intention of victimizing another. In this way, observe Hubert and Mauss in referring to the sacrifiers, “the social norm is thus maintained without danger to themselves, without diminution for the group.”113 And, in this way, the ease of the bourgeoisie never gets disturbed at all. Someone else ‘takes it in the neck,’ as we so aptly say. On the contrary, this Durkheimian substitution is precisely what upsets Girard. What strikes René Girard about sacrifice is the quintessential, but deceptive, violence meted out to the victim. In sacrificing someone, Girard would have us recall that society eliminates the victim—a none too important fact that seems hardly to raise a murmur of regret from Hubert and Mauss. There, attention is fixed on the fortunate way in which the sacrifier escapes destruction by substituting a victim in their stead. Too bad for the victim. The dire fate meted out to the victim by the community is what Girard calls “scapegoating.” Society deflects “upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect.”114 In this way, sacrifice insures social order, and Paul Nizan’s hated Durkheimian social “peace.” Indeed sacrifice provides the utmost of social protection, in that it is even by means of sacrifice that Girard says that societies actually found themselves: “the origin of any cultural order involves a human death and that the decisive death is that of a member of the community.”115
112 113 114 115
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 98. Ibidem, 103. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 2. Ibidem, 256.
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Sacrifice is therefore not irrational violence at all. For one, it “serves to protect the entire community from its own violence.”116 It serves critical social functions. “The function of sacrifice,” says Girard, “is to quell violence within the community and to prevent conflicts from erupting.”117 In this way, it establishes an ‘order.’ Sacrifice somehow attacks the “elements of dissension scattered throughout the community,” and then finding a substitute for the community itself, refocuses them so that they “are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.”118 So powerful is this drive to substitute a victim for the community that even when a community is sacrificing in order to appease an enemy, and not just tending to their own inner demons, substitution is the rule. In these sacrifices, we find as well “the strange propensity to seize upon surrogate victims, to actually conspire with the enemy and at the right moment toss him a morsel that will serve to satisfy his raging hunger.”119 “Substitution” therefore becomes “the basis for the practice of sacrifice” of whatever kind.120 Sacrificial violence is thus shifted safely away from the sacrifier or the good citizens of the sacrificing community. Their ‘peace’ remains blissfully undisturbed. Furthermore, for Girard, sacrifice is not meaningless violence in a second way. Sacrifice is anything but a blind lashing out against a transgressor; it is not party to a mad spiral of never-ending revenge. In fact, Girard feels that sacrifice ends vengeance. For Girard, the ending of vengeance is itself critical in protecting society and quelling the violence which it initially sought to contain. The logic of vengeance is an endless cycle of violence, the persistence of which spells the end of any sort of social being. Thus, a key for maintaining social life is finding a formula for short circuiting vengeance. Sacrifice serves this social function perfectly. Thus, says Girard, In a universe where the slightest dispute can lead to disaster a slight cut can prove fatal to a hemophiliac—the rites of sacrifice serve to polarize the community’s aggressive impulses and redirect them toward victims that may be actual or figurative, animate or inanimate, but
116 117 118 119 120
Ibidem, Ibidem, Ibidem, Ibidem, Ibidem,
8. 14. 8. 4. 3.
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that are always incapable of propagating further vengeance. The sacrificial process furnishes an outlet for those violent impulses that cannot be mastered by self-restraint.121
Of course, we must not forget the ‘catch’ here, the mortifying price to pay for the end of endless violence. Sacrifice still requires someone to die, someone who typically is innocent of all wrong-doing, and thus does not ‘deserve’ to die—even for the sake of their fellows. It should come as no surprise that Girard views Jesus in this light, with the added twist that in suffering victimization for humanity in sacrifice, he actually puts an ‘end’ both to violence (certainly as a legitimate means of resolving human problems) and to sacrifice itself. This is a hotly debated matter into which we need not venture at this point.122 In thus another way, Girard senses the condition of the victim in a way in which Hubert and Mauss never seem to do. 8. René Girard and Social Justice What is interesting about Girard from the viewpoint of the creation of theories of sacrifice reviewed in this book is that he, like the rest, does theory of sacrifice in conjunction with certain social concerns. It is these social and moral concerns that raise those annoying “bumps on the neck,” telling us that something has “gone amiss” in Girard’s world. Theory gets formed here not just by something in an academic world of ‘pure’ theory, but something that involves deep social and moral anguish—the threat of violence in a world armed, in the extreme, with weapons of mass destruction: The specters of nuclear, warfare and industrial pollution that menace our own society constitute only one illustration—admittedly a dramatic one—of a law that primitive people regard as real even if they do not entirely understand it, but that we dismiss as fictitious: whoever uses violence will in turn be used by it.123
121
Ibidem, 18. See the special issue of Religion 27/3 ( July 1997), with essays devoted to the issue of developing the Girardian discourse of whether Christianity is a sacrificial religion. 123 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 261. 122
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Girard’s concern with the violence of sacrifice seems driven then by heated contemporary public concern having to do as well with the everyday, systematic exploitation—read, ‘victimization’—of people as a result of their disadvantaged class, gender, economic status, or location in the third world. And, thus we meet the moral problems thrown up by Liberationist critiques of the dominance of bourgeois liberal economics and politics. Witness to the moral salience of Girard’s theory of sacrifice, one should note how his work has entered into the discourse of Latin American Liberation theologians and social justice activists.124 Much of what a theorist like Girard says about ritual sacrifice seems then rhetorically directed by a sub-text of personal, moral and political commitments. Much, therefore, of what he says about ritual sacrifice is really being said with his revulsion to injustice arising in sacrifice. Concerns about public policy are thus mirrored in subtle ways against what is argued about the nature of ritual sacrifice here as they were with the Durkheimians. Some recent trends in liberation theology offer fine examples of how Girardian theoretical ideas about sacrifice have been picked up and employed to launch radical critiques of bourgeois economics and capitalist social conditions—the very kinds of radical critiques which the Durkheimians rejected in their own time. An official study pamphlet from The World Council of Churches, Sacrifice and Humane Economic Life, is such a document. Made up of four essays by authors dealing with such various topics as privatization of state functions, general capitalist economic notions or rationales of western domination, each essay turns on the relation of these themes to sacrifice. In particular, the authors devote themselves to exploring and exposing the links between economic and social conditions, on the one side, and theological and theoretical thought, on the other—with René Girard’s theory of sacrifice particularly prominent on the theoretical side.125 Julio de Santa Ana’s, “Sacralization and Sacrifice in
124 See, for example, Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Violence And the Sacred in the Modern World (London/Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1992), Sacrifice and Humane Economic Life, Occasional Study Pamphlet No. 7., (Geneva: World Council of Churches, nd), as well as the activities of a professional society devoted to discussion of Girard’s work within the larger context of religion and violence—COVR—the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. An academic journal devoted to devoted to discussion of Girard’s hypotheses has also appeared in Spring 1994—Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. 125 Sacrifice and Humane Economic Life, Occasional Study Pamphlet No. 7. Note, in
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Human Practice,” for example, argues that the rise of a “bourgeois” economic ideology is linked historically with an “orthodox Christian theology” in that both hold “sacrifice” to be “a central issue.”126 In sacrificial terms of the orthodox scheme, de Santa Ana deplores the fact that the “poor . . . have to bear the brunt of the crisis”—that they are ‘sacrificial’ victims in the ritual of so-called ‘“free market”’ development.127 “Especially in modern times,” adds de Santa Ana, “this has allowed a definite logic of violence to develop. Those with power to wield violence and exercise it most strongly and calculatingly sacrifice the others in the material field.”128 And, at the present time, in de Santa Ana’s eyes, this violent scheme of indebtedness is administered by the IMF and the World Bank. Even though this logic of victimization sometimes hides under a rhetorical smokescreen, the under-classes nonetheless become victims in this bourgeois economic scheme. After all, sacrifice entails loss and pain. And, no one wishes to make this fact too well known. However, at crucial moments, de Santa Ana believes that the theological ethic underpinning economic sacrifice erupts in the very words of the bourgeoisie demanding sacrifice of the poor. Thus, de Santa Ana observes how “John D. Rockefeller, a devout Baptist, who for many years taught adults’ class at the church where he was a regular attender” would raise the image of sacrifice in the economic realm. In Rockefeller’s own words: “‘The rose “American Beauty” can only achieve its full fragrance, which so delight connoisseurs, if the first buds that around it are sacrificed.’ ”129 About this maxim, economist, J. K. Galbraith observed that ‘“the same sacrifices occurred in the world of business, hence justifying the splendour of a Rockefeller. This is not an evil tendency of business. It is merely the fulfilment of a law of nature and a law of God.’”130 For
particular, citations to René Girard’s work on pages 78 note 5, and 79 notes 14 and 15. 126 Julio de Santa Ana, “Sacralization and Sacrifice in Human Practice,” Sacrifice and Humane Economic Life, Occasional Study Pamphlet No. 7, (Geneva: World Council of Churches, nd), 26. 127 Julio de Santa Ana, “Sacralization and Sacrifice in Human Practice,” 18. 128 Ibidem, 28f. 129 John D. Rockefeller, cited in Richard Hofstadter: Social Darwinism in American Thought 1860 –1915, pp. 45 and 31. Cited by Julio de Santa Ana, “Sacralization and Sacrifice in Human Practice,” 26. 130 John K. Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, np. Cited in Julio de Santa Ana, “Sacralization and Sacrifice in Human Practice,” 26.
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de Santa Ana this and the historical analysis he also supplies is evidence enough that an ethic of sacrifice lodges happily and explicitly in bourgeois economics and in certain strands of Christian theology.131 Indeed, sacrificial religious traditions as “symbolic systems” reinforce the legitimacy of the idea of sacrifice, such as the need to repay debts to the IMF or World Bank. “The moneylenders have to be reimbursed and this is where the need for material sacrifices comes in.”132 In this way, religion creates a “generally accepted sense that debts must always be paid.”133 Finally, if we were to ask de Santa Ana why the logic of sacrifice must be this way—what theory underlies this necessity to pay back what one has borrowed—he resorts explicitly to René Girard and rehearses key themes we have met there. Sacrifice involves an act of violence against life in order to save the established order (controlled or at least legitimated by the priesthood). The sacrifices are imposed to preserve the purity of that order, or rather, to re-establish “good order”—sacrificial violence imposed not only on the victims but also on those offering such sacrifices. The celebrants (priests who can confirm or refuse to confirm the legitimacy of the ritual ceremony) are the guardians of the social order.134
Thus, in the theoretical discourse on sacrifice articulated by René Girard, we find both a sharp departure from the cozy world of Hubert and Mauss as well as an inversion of the world of extremity fashioned by Georges Bataille. For Girard and his liberationist colleagues, the very existence of the (bourgeois) social order is put into question in a way it never was by Hubert and Mauss. It is hard to tell then who, however, is worse in Girard’s view. Is the clear-eyed but “decadent estheticism” of Bataille worthier of damnation than Durkheimian ‘prudence’? We need only recall Girard’s damning of Bataille’s decadent infatuation with that “rare and precious condiment” of violence employed to sauce up “the jaded appetite of modern man.”135 But does that make Hubert and Mauss any less worthy of sanction by reason of their cool calculating scheme of ‘peaceful’
131
Julio de Santa Ana, “Sacralization and Sacrifice in Human Practice,” 26. Ibidem, 35. Emphasis original. 133 Ibidem, 35. 134 Citing René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, chapters 10 and 11, Julio de Santa Ana, “Sacralization and Sacrifice in Human Practice,” 32. 135 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 222. 132
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victimization in which there is always a surrogate at hand to suffer the consequences which would have befallen us? With Girard, we are actually invited to entertain the idea of elimination of sacrifice altogether. Interestingly enough, in the work of Girard, we find then a rejection of the kind of theory of sacrificial extremism expressed by the pseudo-Catholic Bataille no less than the bourgeois theory of Hubert and Mauss. In our own time, with the likes of Bataille and Girard, but also building to a patriotic pre-war climax in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one must imagine an accumulated history of discourse about sacrifice amassed for the most part by the labors of dominant segments of French Roman Catholicism, identified as “intransigents.”136 In the period from 1870 to 1900, sacrificial discourse indeed became the mark of this intransigent Catholicism, and because of its dominance in the nation, the source of what was taken for granted about the meaning of sacrifice itself. Commenting in 1912 on the current scene of socialist agitation, Georges Sorel claimed that both extremes of French political and religious life—radical socialism and intransigent Roman Catholicism—really affirmed the same moralities: both required “certain immolations, efforts, sacrifices on the part of society’s members. . . . [certain loyalties to the] transcendent, immutable, absolute. . . .”137 An intransigent, “subconscious” Catholicism, as Georges Goyau noted in 1918, is the very thing which “incites” the French “to sacrifice.”138 It is from this intransigent Catholicism, historical baggage in hand, that the discourse of sacrifice in France of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came—either directly as ‘gospel,’ or as the something to contest. The next chapter of our story concerns the ways this intransigent Roman Catholic hegemony over the meaning of sacrifice was contested by the Liberal Protestant minority at the level of ‘scientific’ discourse from their position of control over the study of religion in the France.
136
Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism: 1789–1914. Georges Goyau, “Disciplines catholiques et disciplines socialistes,” (1912) Catholicisme et politique (Paris: Editions de la Revue des Jeunes, 1923), 65–6. 138 Georges Goyau, The Church of France during the War (Paris: Blond and Gay, 1918), 10. 137
CHAPTER THREE
WORLD WITHOUT THEORY, AMEN 1. Theory “Malgré tout” Along with the Catholics, the ‘orthodox’ Protestants of France never ceased believing in Jesus’s death as a kind of penal atonement, that he died as a sacrificial victim to satisfy divine anger, and in expiation for human sin.1 But, in 1912, a Catholic commentator on a recent international Liberal Protestant colloquium on atonement, reported virtual unanimity against the “classical orthodoxy” of the Reformers2 (and thus the Catholics) in rejecting a “theory of juridical expiation applied to the passion of Christ”3 and “brutal theories of expiation,” linked to the intransigent Catholic thought of de Maistre.4 For the Liberal theologians, on the other hand, sacrifice was a psychological, experiential matter, or a strictly moral one. The leading French Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion of his day in the Fifth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Auguste Sabatier, for example, explicitly denounced interpreting sacrifice as a cosmic drama of expiation in the way we have seen in the classic Catholic sacrificial theologies from “Ecole Française de Spiritualité” to Maistre. In doing so, he also abandoned the domain of public
1 Jean Rivière, “La rédemption devant la pensée moderne,” Revue du clergé français 70 (1912): 161–80 and 278–305. Note especially pp. 283–5, 298f. The orthodox position is even reflected in the thought of Frédéric Lichtenberger’s article, “sacrifice” in the Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses, vol. 8, Frédéric Lichtenberger, ed. (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1889), 383. Although he promoted a liberal enterprise such as the scientific study of religion, Lichtenberger, as we will see in Chapter 3, p. 124, dismissed Maurice Vernes from his post in the Protestant Faculty of Theology over matters of dogma. 2 The ‘orthodox’ never ceased believing in Jesus’s death as a kind of penal atonement, that he died as a sacrificial victim to satisfy divine anger, and in expiation for human sin. See Jean Rivière, “La rédemption devant la pensée moderne,” 161–80 and 278–305. Note especially pp. 283–5, 298f. The orthodox position is even reflected in the thought of Frédéric Lichtenberger’s article, “sacrifice” in the Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses, vol. 8, 383. 3 Jean Rivière, “La rédemption devant la pensée moderne,” 171f. 4 Ibidem, 284, 285.
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discourse about sacrifice and religion in favor of theological assertion. Speaking from within an explicitly confessional liberal Protestant theological context, in his The Doctrine of the Atonement and Its Historical Evolution (1901), Sabatier seemed to make no effort at all to forge a public discourse about sacrifice. Instead, he was content to declare the uniqueness and moral superiority of Christ’s death on Calvary in this well-known theological text. The notions of sacrifice, oblation, propitiation, and expiation come from creeds anterior to Christianity; . . . we cannot possibly compare, otherwise than metaphorically, the death of Christ on the cross with the rite of the victim sacrificed and burnt on the altar. In order to realize on Calvary the idea of primitive sacrifice, we must turn the cross into an altar, Christ’s murderers into sacrificing priests, or else we must say that Jesus was both the priest and the victim; even then the harmony and similarity remain imperfect, for Jesus does not nail Himself to the cross.5
For Sabatier, “sin and expiation [are] facts primarily of the human heart,”6 and this entailed Sabatier’s claim of Christian exceptionalism. Thus, Jesus’ death does not belong to the order of ritual sacrifices, but to an infinitely higher order, namely, the moral order. . . . (B)ut who fails to see that the word has taken on a moral sense, and that it has become a metaphor which all employ, but which misleads none. Nor must we be misled by the word when we speak of Christ’s sacrifice. We deceive ourselves in the most naive manner if we reduce the word to its primitive sense of a religious rite, and if, from this old notion, we draw, by purely formal logical deduction, a metaphysical doctrine of the Saviour’s death. . . . We are no longer in the lower order of sacerdotal ritual; we are in the holiest realities of the moral life.7
5 Auguste Sabatier, The Doctrine of the Atonement and Its Historical Evolution, (1901) Victor Leuliette, trans., (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904), 113. 6 Donald A. Nielsen, “Robert Hertz and the Sociological Study of Sin, Expiation and Religion: A Neglected Chapter in the Durkheimian School,” in Structures of Knowing, ed. Richard C. Monk (New York City: University Press of America, 1986), 19. For Sabatier “self-sacrifice is the unique but all-powerful lever which, renewing the human soul, draws it out of its selfishness and makes it know and taste a higher life.” It is another away of speaking about the moral absolute of altruism so beloved of the moral and philosophical idealists of the fin-de-siècle. (Auguste Sabatier, The Doctrine of the Atonement and Its Historical Evolution, 134. 7 Auguste Sabatier, The Doctrine of the Atonement and Its Historical Evolution, 115–6.
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Co-religionist and fellow-traveler of the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section , the Dutch historian of religion, Cornelis P. Tiele, likewise affirmed that the only value in sacrificial ritual was the inner attitude of heart, the “yearning of the believer for abiding communion with” God.8 The only kind of sacrifice which attained the level of being “the culmination of all sacrifices” is sacrifice in the “civic” or moral sense. Sacrifice is nothing else than “self-denial . . . which proceeds from religious motives (devotio).” Indeed, for Tiele, “moral or inner sacrifice is the offering par excellence, of which all others are but lower forms, and, as it were, masks and foreshadowings; it is the only offering which is actually associated with worship, not as a mere symbol, but in spirit and in truth.”9 Unlike the Catholics and their conservative brethren, the Liberal Protestants then uniformly interpreted sacrifice in what they called ‘spiritual’ terms.10 From a present-day perspective, such Liberal Protestant views of sacrifice might be said to amount to a theory, even if a ‘theological’ one. What, however, would be particularly irritating for readers in our own day is that the Liberal Protestants would not recognize their view of sacrifice as being in any way constructed or theoretical. They would not ‘get’ our point, and very little we could say or do would bring them round. Their psychological and ethical reading of sacrifice was so much taken for granted by the liberal Protestants that it had attained for them the status of a virtual ‘fact.’ It was just ‘true,’ even though they knew of alternatives to it. In this, the Liberal Protestant ‘theory’ of sacrifice was like their ‘theory’ of radical and progressive religious and social evolution—a “quasi-certitude,” and, thus, in their minds nothing to be contested at all—and thus no ‘theory’ whatsoever.11 In this respect the French liberal Protestants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century present an interesting contrast with today’s critics of sacrifice, such as René Girard. For while
8 Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1898), 149. 9 Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological, 147. 10 This view seemed to prevail throughout Europe and America as well. For an instructive survey of these discussions, see Jean Rivière, “La rédemption devant la pensée moderne,” 161–80, 278–305. Of the conservative Protestant position, Rivière noted its acceptance of “brutal theories of expiation,” which call to mind the intransigent thought of de Maistre. (284, 285). 11 Comte Eugène Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 12 (1885): 173.
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Girard, hates sacrifice and sacrificial ritual as much as any liberal Protestant of the turn-of-the-century, he is one of the greatest theorizers of sacrifice on the contemporary intellectual scene. He proposes an account of sacrifice, and argues for it over the course of many publications.12 The French liberal Protestants seldom if ever mention the Roman Catholics, for example, or any particular target of their remarks. They are far from the context of theoretical debate and contestation. Girard, for one, shows then that much has changed in French religious and theological thought since the fin-desiècle. One of the biggest changes, and one we will explore in this chapter, are the grounds for the unwillingness of the French liberal Protestants of the fin-de-siècle to theorize their discontents about sacrifice in terms of a public discourse. I am arguing in this chapter that French liberal Protestant confidence about the objective nature of certain ideas critical in their religious world arose in part from two main related sources. The first is the religious conviction of the superiority of their own tradition. This was in part supported by a second belief, namely their confidence in a ‘scientific’ history of religions bolstering their theological positions. Typical here was Jean Réville, himself both a member of the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and a leading Liberal Protestant theologian in his own right. He delighted in showing how historical evidence supported his own theological views. For instance, he argued that the Protestant rejection of the sacrificial Eucharist was, in effect, objectively given in the historical evidence pertaining to Christianity. By contrast, Réville felt that the Catholic views which we surveyed in the previous chapter, had no historical precedent in ancient Christianity.13 In concluding a discussion of the 12 See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, (1972) Patrick Gregory, trans., (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), The Scapegoat, (1982) Yvonne Freccero, trans., (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, (1978) Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer, trans., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). See as well Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Violence And the Sacred in the Modern World (London/Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1992), Sacrifice and Humane Economic Life, Occasional Study Pamphlet No. 7, (Geneva: World Council of Churches, nd), as well as the activities of a professional society devoted to discussion of Girard’s work within the larger context of religion and violence—COVR—the Colloquium on Violence and Religion. An academic journal devoted to devoted to discussion of Girard’s hypotheses has also appeared in Spring 1994—Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. 13 Jean Galy, Le Sacrifice dans l’école française (Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1951), 131.
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Last Supper, Réville declared that the “Eucharist is not presented in any document as a redemptive sacrifice—or indeed of any other kind of sacrifice—in which Christ would be the sacrificer or victim.”14 Hammering home the point, Jean Réville pointed out that only pagans and Jews might offer “sacrifices;” Christians never did.15 Cited in behalf of this ‘spiritual’ reading of sacrifice, Réville claimed that the early Christian theologian, Justin Martyr taught that “the only sacrifices that Christians might offer to God are of the spiritual order.”16 Joining Réville in this partisan effort, Auguste Sabatier noted too that his biblical research, in effect, undercut what we know as the Catholic claims for the antiquity of key aspects of the sacrificial notions in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Indeed, a closer look at the biblical tradition revealed that the ideas of substitution and of penal satisfaction are entirely absent from the Biblical sacrifices. To make propitiation for sin, is to cause God to become propitious; that is to say, to obtain His favour, and this one obtains by offering Him savoury food or other things of value. The prophets rose up against this puerile and barbarous conception of worship, this superstitious belief in the value of sacrifice, and proclaimed the voice of conscience.17
And, like Réville, Sabatier celebrated the ‘spiritual’ understanding of sacrifice. “This doctrine,” said Sabatier, constitutes an enormous progress over the old sacerdotal theories. Two elements compose and characterize it: a moral element, justice founded on individual responsibility and reduced to purity of heart and uprightness of will; and a religions element, divine mercy requiring, in order to be exercised, nothing but the repentance and conversion of the sinner.18
For the Liberal Protestants, then, ritual sacrifice had little or no positive religious value for Christianity, and by extension, as we will see, for religion as such. What need then self-consciously or deliberately to theorize sacrifice? The case for a theory of sacrifice, an account
14 Jean Réville, Les origines de l’eucharistie (Messe—Sainte Cène) (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1908), 116. 15 Jean Réville, Les origines de l’eucharistie (Messe—Sainte Cène), 19. 16 Ibidem, 117. 17 Auguste Sabatier, The Doctrine of the Atonement and Its Historical Evolution, (1901) Victor Leuliette, trans., (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904), 29. 18 Auguste Sabatier, The Doctrine of the Atonement and Its Historical Evolution, 29.
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of the nature and function of sacrifice, had thus been closed from the start for the Liberal Protestants by prior theological commitments grounded in historical research. Testimony to the strength of this fundamentally religious commitment was the fact that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no French Liberal Protestant even wrote a deliberately theoretical—non-theological—work on sacrifice. They made no effort to deal with sacrifice in a way which did not depart from the confessional theological stance of the extreme liberal wing of the reformation.19 A telling observation about Liberal Protestant disinterest in theorizing sacrifice during in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was that no French Protestant scholar even produced a major descriptive work on sacrifice!20 This avoidance holds a special significance, I would suggest, since from at least the 1830’s, in France scholars of religion of all confessions felt compelled to address religious topics to the general reading public across denominational lines, therein incidentally constituting the actual practice of a ‘public discourse about religion’ so important in the main arguments of this book. This so-called literature of “vulgarisation” was distinctive for seeking a language for speaking about religion which presupposed no par-
19 Consider the tone and language of Sabatier’s arguments in his classic on atonement, The Doctrine of the Atonement and Its Historical Evolution: Sabatier’s intentions are clearly confessional and apologetic in his attack on what seem like Catholic theologies of Eucharist and sacrifice: Are we not at once guilty of the grossest error when we speak of the merits which Christ obtained before God, and which can be transferred to us from without? Is not this very idea of merit in reality contrary to the Gospel? Would it not have wounded the filial consciousness of Jesus? If we attempt to construct a Christian doctrine out of it, does it not fatally bring us back to the religion of the law? (111) Or further, does he not speak for m the same ‘pulpit’ when he openly offers guidance for this fellow religionists? In order to accomplish the task which devolves to-day upon Christian thinkers, it is necessary once and for an to free the old dogma from the absolute notions which constituted its first environment, and in which it has ever since remained enveloped. (110) 20 My colleague, Professor Douglas Parrott, informs me that as a student in one of American Liberal Protestantism’s leading institutions, Union Theological Seminary (New York City), no course on the ancient Hebrew sacrificial system was offered— and this in the education of students specializing in the religion of ancient Israel! This spirit of antipathy to sacrifice continues today in the work of a good-hearted nemesis, Professor Tom F. Driver of Union Theological Seminary. See his Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual (San Francisco: Harper, 1991).
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ticular theological assumptions. In light of this intellectual tradition, that the French liberal Protestants should have vacated the subject of sacrifice is then particularly noteworthy.21 How can we explain how and why the French liberal Protestants may have thought they were right in doing so, when national traditions of public discourse about religion would certainly have found them doing at least descriptive work? Some of this refusal to engage public discourse about sacrifice on the part of the liberal Protestants may be attributable to the innocent, sincere, and therefore, not unreasonable, belief among French liberal Protestants that their tepid, Enlightenment theological beliefs were not really confessional at all, but public discourse itself. It was as matter of fact true that, as we will see, in liberal Protestant religious positions, “one finds Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, more easily than Calvin.”22 The French liberal Protestants took great pride in the fact that their beliefs rested on rationalist historical research and grew out of the traditions of Enlightenment French liberalism—indeed even to the point where a recent commentator could characterize French liberal Protestantism as “a form of free thought touched with Christianity.”23 As such, what sense did it make to separate them out as confessional in their beliefs? Were not French liberal Protestant beliefs the bedrock of the liberal creed upon which the republican consensus rested? Indeed, the comparison that one might invoke between theologians and naturalists in contemporary North America lends credence to the innocence of the intentions of the French liberal Protestants.
21
Michel Despland, L’émergence des sciences de la religion: La Monarchie de Juillet: un moment fondateur (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), ch. 23. 22 Daniel Ligou and Philippe Joutard, “Les Déserts (1685–1800)” in Histoire de Protestants en France, Robert Mandrou, Janine Estebe et al. (Toulouse: Edouard Privat, 1977), 235. Protestants of the period drew especially upon Rousseau, who was born and died a Protestant, even though he dallied with Catholicism in between. (Daniel Ligou and Philippe Joutard, “Les Déserts (1685–1800)”, 234.) The authors single out Protestant ministers, David Lévade and François Jacob Durand, for special mention as disciples of Rousseau in the years 1750–90. On Rousseau’s Protestantism, see Ronald Grimsley, The Philosophy of Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 71–3, 80–3. 23 Daniel Robert, “Les intellectuels non-protestants dans le protestantisme des debuts de la Troisième République,” in Actes du colloque: Les protestants dans les débuts de la Troisième République (1871–1885) (Paris, 3–6 Octobre 1978), André Encrevé et Michel Richard, eds. (Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1979), 93.
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I believe a parallel logic informs the thinking of many of those seeking to qualify ‘theology’ for public discourse in North America, such as those I would call modern-day theologizers of religious studies. A prominent advocate of theology’s public role, Delwin Brown, even finds historical precedent for his own ambitions. Citing a class thinkers flourishing between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Brown believes they can be said to have articulated a non-confessional “personal theology” aimed eventually at the realm of public discourse in the nation. Such “unattached” theologians24 rejected “theology’s purpose to serve a particular religious community,” says Brown, and instead operated from the assumption that their “personal theology” had universal implications and application.25 Good intentions aside, whether in fact these extra-ecclesial theologies, anymore than those produced by the French liberal Protestants of the turn-of-the-century, actually did attain universality is precisely the question. In vacating the study of sacrifice on almost all but confessional theological fronts, the universalist intentions French liberal Protestants seem from the start thwarted by their own confessional commitments. Further comparison with the work on sacrifice by the Durkheimians, as ideological as their work may have been, likewise exposes the depth of the confessional character of even putatively universalist writing on religion by the French liberal Protestants. In France, even descriptive works on sacrifice cluster conspicuously around representatives of religious traditions where ritual sacrifice still carried a certain prestige, however qualified. These belong to the then no longer Roman Catholic Alfred Loisy with his Essai historique sur le sacrifice, and to the liberal Jewish Indologist, Sylvain Lévi, who wrote on the notion of sacrifice in ancient India.26 As a deliberately and distinctly theoretical work, Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function seems quite unique. In my view, it is the major and perhaps only theoretical work of its kind on sacrifice
24 Delwin Brown cites Sheila Davaney’s term “‘unattached theologian’” (however without reference to specific publication) in this connection in his “Believing Traditions and the Task of the Academic Theologian,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 62/4 (1994): 1169. 25 Delwin Brown, “Believing Traditions and the Task of the Academic Theologian,” 1168–9. 26 Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice (Paris: Nourry, 1920). Sylvian Lévi, La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas [1898] (Paris: Leroux, 1898).
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(Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites, for the moment excluded) up until that time. After the turn of the century, it was still perhaps the only work in its field until the 1930’s when dissident Durkheimians (again), such as members of the Collège de Sociologie like Georges Bataille, took up the question of theorizing sacrifice.27 Thus, in whatever direction we turn, we find that the French Liberals had abandoned the field of theory (and extensive description) of sacrifice to others passionate to show how critical sacrifice was to the things that mattered. At best, we are left to impute a theory of sacrifice to them instead.28 Given the fact of these differences over whether to theorize—or even extensively describe—sacrifice, I want to explore more deeply in this chapter why the Liberal Protestants thought they were right in feeling that there was no need to theorize sacrifice, or if we impute theorizing to them, why they thought they were right not to make their own theorizing open and explicit? Such questions naturally raise a corresponding set of questions of those who did theorize sacrifice and who did so explicitly, indeed with a certain fanfare. Why, therefore, did the Durkheimians think they were right to theorize sacrifice in their own right, and indeed why, in doing so, did they seek to overturn the thinking which the Liberal Protestants did on the subject? I shall argue that there are three closely interrelated reasons why the Liberal Protestants never really bothered to theorize sacrifice. One reason is a kind of theoretical complacence and self-satisfaction, which I have already touched on to some extent. Liberal Protestant reluctance to theorize sacrifice rests on the uniquely antisacrificial theology of Liberal Protestantism, of which we have just seen a sample. Sacrifice itself was just not a particularly attractive focus for thinking about religion. It was generally regarded by the Liberal Protestants as a most unpleasant, and even embarrassing,
27 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion [1973], Thomas Hurley, trans., (New York: Zone Books, 1989). 28 See Delwin Brown on the idea that theorizing is inescapable: “Believing Traditions and the Task of the Academic Theologian,” 1174f. In imputing a theory to the Liberal Protestants, I also join Caroline Walker Bynum in departing from standard history of ideas in claiming that “linguistic trappings of texts are often more telling than the explicit arguments.” (Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body (New York City: Columbia University Press, 1995), xvi.
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feature of religion, which at best had to be ‘explained away,’ and indeed, explained ‘out’ of religion. They thus prevented themselves from theorizing sacrifice because of the bad religious nature of what sacrifice itself was taken by them to be. Second, in the nineteenth century, other thinkers of considerable note—British anthropologists in particular—had theorized sacrifice. Yet, they had done so in ways which seem to have made any new theorizing by the Liberal Protestants, doubly superfluous. As it turns out, the work of Tylor, Frazer and others, actually reinforced Liberal Protestant prejudices against theorizing sacrifice. There was in effect nothing new to be learnt by theorizing sacrifice anew—or at least nothing new which the Liberal Protestants wished to learn (or teach) about sacrifice. Sacrifice was a non-starter. The third, and I think perhaps most potent reason, is methodological. For even if the Liberal Protestants both felt that sacrifice was an unsavory subject for theoretical thinking, and even if they felt that others had not theorized it amply, they still would have resisted theorizing sacrifice because they generally resisted any theorizing in the study of religion at all. It did not matter whether theorizing should happen to fall on theologically sensitive or over-theorized topics like sacrifice or not. Theorizing itself was suspect. I shall also argue that the source of this the anti-theorizing methodology is what has been variously called the ethos of the ‘scientific’, ‘positivist’ or ‘historicist’ history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As practitioners of this kind of scholarship, the Liberal Protestants resisted theorizing most things in religion, with sacrifice only being one feature of religion conspicuously over-determined for such resistance in the world of the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section. Let me begin considering the theological beliefs and their rationales which stood in the way of Liberal Protestant theorizing about sacrifice. After that, we will tour the theoretical lay of the land of the theory of sacrifice during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known and available to the Liberal Protestants. In looking there, I think we can see how and why the Liberal Protestants felt there was nothing much to add to what other theorists had said about sacrifice. But, first, who precisely were the Liberal Protestants of France, and what did they represent in terms of a religious culture fit and able to contend over issues like sacrifice?
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2. The “Revenge of the Reformation” in the Fifth Section While Catholic theological teachings about sacrifice and Eucharist shaped the popular cultural understandings of sacrifice in France, a tiny minority of France’s already tiny population of Protestants—in all a mere 600,000 inhabitants, or 1.5% of the population—controlled academic discourse about the nature of religion and sacrifice.29 Called “Liberal Protestants” or “Liberals,” although sometimes tagged as “Extremists,” the academics among them represented a rationalist, dissident, but highly influential, branch of France’s small Protestant population. These scholars had been deprived of their ecclesiastical careers by the ascendance of the ‘orthodox’ Protestants, and thus abandoned the seminaries for careers in the principal venue for the academic study of religion in the nation—the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.30 In many ways, the migration of the French liberal Protestants from the theological schools to the university has been repeated in North America several generations later roughly for the same reasons, and much to the same effect. In the North American case of religious liberals migrated from their churches and schools of divinity, in part because of hostility to them there, into the newly expanding university departments of religious studies, dating from the expansion of secular higher learning in the 1960’s. In his own colorful style, Bill May referred to this emigration of Protestant liberal theologians from their church-related institutions as a flight from the intellectual dreariness of the appropriately named “‘hippopotamus church.’”31 I have argued elsewhere that, like their French liberal Protestant precursors, the American Protestant liberals persisted in their old liberal theological agenda despite their new location in religious studies. From there, they framed the academic agendas in the studies of religion which have raised the ire of writers mentioned in the first chapter of this book. In the same way, the French liberal Protestants of the turn-of-the-century also used their presence in the École Pratique, Fifth Section to shape the study 29 On the current state of French Protestantism see Grace Davie, “The Changing Face of Protestantism in 20th Century France,” Proceedings of the Huguenot Society 24 (1987): 378–89. 30 See references to religious liberals and their problems with the what Bill May termed the “‘hippopotamos church’” in my “Our Very Own ‘Contras’,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44/2 (1986): 327. 31 Ivan Strenski, “Our Very Own ‘Contras’,” 327.
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of religion along lines consistent with liberal Protestantism, and in particular, the subject of sacrifice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France. The result of this dominance of the Liberals was to give the study of sacrifice—indeed the entire academic study of religion—a distinctly anti-theoretical look, but ironically, at the same time, a wellconcealed theological character. As we will see, either by virtue of the methods for studying religion which they pursued or because of their theological viewpoints, the Liberals relegated sacrifice to the outer limits of intellectual and theoretical concern in the Fifth Section.32 Liberal withdrawal from theorizing sacrifice thus left a vacuum, since some of those who might have theorized sacrifice—Catholics and conservative Protestants—were in effect excluded from or marginalized within the Fifth Section from the start. On the other hand, liberal Jews, such as Sylvain Lévi, stand out as exceptions to the general Protestant resistance to the subject of sacrifice, and consequently did play a minor role in theorizing sacrifice within the Fifth Section, and in later attempts to further such efforts by the Durkheimians. Thus, to understand this atmosphere of resistance to theoretical thinking about sacrifice in the study of religion at the turn of the century in France, we will need to understand both the methodological and theological impediments which stood in the way of theoretical work on sacrifice among the Liberal Protestants in the Fifth Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. And, to begin understanding the nature of the source and nature of these impediments, we will need to understand the thought-world of the Liberal Protestant establishment of the Fifth Section. 3. Who Were the Liberal Protestant “Extremists”? The French liberal Protestants are really that portion of the reformed tradition most influenced by a combination of Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism. This merging of modern religious sensibilities led to the liberals holding to a vaguely pantheistic uni32 Note that almost all the extensive references to work on sacrifice in Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss’ Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, (1899) are to British and German authors. The French exceptions to this rule are Abel Bergaigne, Salomon Reinach, Sylvain Lévi, Franz Cumont, the biblical historian, Louis Duchesne, and Léon Marillier. Of this list, only Cumont and Marillier were French Protestants.
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tarianism or Deism. The liberals united behind a fairly pale consensus of rationalist beliefs inherited from the days of the Revolution: resistance to supernaturalism, such as the belief in miracles, and thus an openness to science. So weak, in fact, was the doctrinal core of French Liberal Protestantism, and so great was its affinity for the liberal individualism and tolerance of Enlightenment that it became difficult after a while to distinguish their beliefs from so-called “natural religion,”33 or even from a more generalized religion of humanity of the revolutionary epoch.34 In Liberal Protestantism, it was said, “one finds Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, more easily than Calvin.”35 The claim to such a lineage turns out to be literally true, since the religious rationalism of the Liberal Protestants derived largely from Rousseau.36 It consisted in a belief in a supreme, but nonintrusive, god, creator of the world according to the natural laws we discover in the sciences, and whom we could know by reason alone. Accordingly, people, therefore, needed no special divine revelation or institutional structures because we were innately and in essence “naturally” religious by virtue of our common humanity. Every human being shared in the common primordial religion, even if hidden beneath the distortions of history. One of the leading Liberal Protestants of his day, Albert Réville, assures us that “the principle of humanity guides religion along higher paths . . . [and that the] truer a religion is, the more absolute the homage it will render to the principle of humanity.”37 Commentators of the day in fact characterized extreme 33 Stuart R. Schram, Protestantism and Politics in France (Alençon: Corbière et Jugan, 1954), 50. 34 Daniel Ligou and Philippe Joutard, “Les Déserts (1685–1800)”, 235. 35 Daniel Ligou and Philippe Joutard, “Les Déserts (1685–1800)”, 235. Protestants of the period drew especially upon Rousseau, who was born and died a Protestant, even though he dallied with Catholicism in between. (Daniel Ligou and Philippe Joutard, “Les Déserts (1685–1800)”, 234.) The authors single out Protestant ministers, David Lévade and François Jacob Durand, for special mention as disciples of Rousseau in the years 1750–90. On Rousseau’s Protestantism, see Ronald Grimsley, The Philosophy of Rousseau, 71–3, 80–3. 36 Ronald Grimsley, The Philosophy of Rousseau, 71–85. But note that Albert Réville rejects the epithet, “deist,” to apply to the French Liberal Protestants. Réville’s warm conception of God clashed with the “dreary God of Deism . . . withdrawn into the cold depths of His own eternity.” (Albert Réville, History of the Doctrine of the Deity of Jesus Christ, Anne Swain, trans. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1870), 98. 37 Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, [1884], P. H. Wicksteed, trans. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1905), 254. This humanism passed to the
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liberal Protestantism sarcastically as “a form of free thought touched with Christianity.”38 While all Liberals did not necessarily agree to this description, perhaps for historical reasons having to do with being survivors of suppression, they clung to Protestant identity. To them, (at least, liberal) Protestantism was simply a form of “Christianity less constraining [than Roman Catholicism], in which one might believe whatever was convenient, and not a Christianity founded upon the Bible . . .,” as Protestant sympathizer, Charles Renouvier put it. The great neo-kantian public philosopher of the Third Republic, even urged Free Thinkers to “declare themselves Protestants” so as to make common cause against the revanchist Catholic forces threatening the republic.39 Alternately, Protestant free believers such as Ferdinand Buisson, Schérer and Pécaut never even felt they needed to repudiate their Protestant faith in becoming free thinkers!40 In opposition, the orthodox Protestants took the evangelical root and sought a deeper sense of the personal activity and supernatural mystery of Christian revelation’s traditional notion of God.41 The conservatives celebrated religious experience in all it expressive glory. Such a celebration of the ‘irrational’ and emotional led naturally enough, as it did in the “Great Awakenings” of American religious history, periodic evangelical awakenings or “réveils.” But, the revivals did not only seek to reignite practical religious experiential life, they also encouraged a degree of doctrinal conformity.42 In these attempts to reassert doctrinal conformity, the “réveils” sought to encourage a ‘return’ to what was thought to be the original spirit and content of
Protestant community of 1789 in several ways. One was through the ideal of tolerance deriving primarily from Voltaire. (Stuart R. Schram, Protestantism and Politics in France, 50. Daniel Ligou and Philippe Joutard, “Les Déserts (1685–1800)”.) Ligou and Joutard identify Antoine Noël Polier de Bottens, Paul Rabaut-Saint-Etienne as mid- to late-eighteenth century theologians especially influenced by Voltaire (234–7). See also André Encrevé, Jean Baubérot, Pierre Bolle, “Les réveils et la vie interne du monde protestant,” in Robert Mandrou, Janine Estebe et al., Histoire des Protestants en France (Toulouse: Eduoard Privat, 1977), 293. 38 Daniel Robert, “Les intellectuels non-protestants dans le protestantisme des debuts de la Troisième République,” 93. 39 Ibidem, 95. 40 Ibidem, 93. 41 André Encrevé, Jean Baubérot, Pierre Bolle, “Les réveils et la vie interne du monde protestant,” 272–3. 42 André Encrevé, “La première crise de la Faculté de theologie de Paris: la démission de Maurice Vernes,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 136 (1990): 83.
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the theology of the Reformation. Against liberal Deistic unitarianism, the conservatives or ‘orthodox,’ for example, reaffirmed the christology of the Athanasian creed ( Jesus is “‘true God from true God, begotten not made, of the same substance as the Father’”),43 the sinfulness of humankind, the “‘vicarious atonement and salvation by faith in the sacrifice of Christ’”, the divine inspiration of the Bible, and eternal damnation in hell.44 The Liberals rejected all these doctrines, concluding that “the Protestant orthodoxy of today has nothing very attractive about it,” given the unpalatable harshness of its Calvinist theology.45 On balance, however, the lasting effect of the réveils seems only to have been to foster a religious individualism of emotional piety and practice.46 The sweeping revival of Reformation theology, so eagerly sought by the evangelicals, never came to pass.47 Indeed,
43
Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind, 3rd ed. (New York City: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1984), 364. 44 André Encrevé, Jean Baubérot, Pierre Bolle, “Les réveils et la vie interne du monde protestant,” 272. On ‘orthodox’ views favoring the atonement theory of Jesus’ death, see Jean Rivière, “La rédemption devant la pensée moderne,” 161–80 and 278–305. 45 Albert Réville, “The Religious Situation in France subsequent to the War of 1870–71,” Theological Review 40 ( January 1873): 124. Albert Réville, “Dutch Theology: Its Past and Present State,” Theological Review 3 (1864): 262. 46 This is not to say however that the réveils left the rationalists untouched. The origin of the Liberal movement, for example, in Jean-Jules Clamageran’s Union protestante libérale (1861) found inspiration in Samuel Vincent’s (1787–1837) attempts to reconcile rationalism with the theology and spirituality of the Réveil. Vincent’s position is often described as that of a ‘“Réveil pré-libéral.”’ Thus, while this influential pastor from Nîmes broke decisively with the Réveil on a range of theological issues, such as claims that Christ was a divine saviour, he nevertheless mixed rationalist theology and deeply personal religious spirituality. Vincent held fast to the Réveil’s mystical sense of personal union between believer and Christ; but Christ was for him merely an excellent guide of human conduct, not a transcendental spiritual being. ( Jean Baubérot, “Le protestantisme français et ‘la question sociale’ au debut de la Troisième République,” in Actes du colloque: Les protestants dans les débuts de la Troisième République (1871–1885) (Paris, 3–6 Octobre 1978), André Encrevé et Michel Richard, eds. (Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1979), 460. 47 André Encrevé, Jean Baubérot, Pierre Bolle, “Les réveils et la vie interne du monde protestant,” 271. Some efforts were however made in this direction at the Synod of 1872 (André Encrevé, “La première crise de la Faculté de theologie de Paris: la démission de Maurice Vernes,” 83.) The best attempt of the evangelicals to defeat deistic rationalism in favor of a more ‘orthodox’ position was their gradually successful effort to enforce doctrinal discipline beginning after the first réveil in 1818. This committed the orthodox faithful to a series of doctrinal positions soundly rooted in scripture and the tradition of Church councils: the christology of
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evangelical moves to enforce discipline at the 1872 Synod eventually produced a formal split between “liberal extremists” and conservatives.48 This institutional break spawned a series of spectacular defections, which forced several leading clergy out of their posts in seminaries and into institutional refuge in the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth (religious sciences) Section. Prominent among the rebels was a group of personal comrades, Timothée Colani,49 Edmond Schérer,50 Félix Pécaut51 and Albert Réville. As dissenters, they cherished the freedom of individual conscience, religious tolerance and freedom of thought.
the Athanasian creed ( Jesus is “‘true God from true God, begotten not made, of the same substance as the Father’”), the sinfulness of humankind, the “‘vicarious atonement and salvation by faith in the sacrifice of Christ’”, the divine inspiration of the Bible, and eternal damnation in hell. (André Encrevé, Jean Baubérot, Pierre Bolle, “Les réveils et la vie interne du monde protestant,” 272. On ‘orthodox’ views favoring the atonement theology of Jesus’ death, see Jean Rivière, “La rédemption devant la pensée moderne,” 161–80 and 278–305. 48 Stuart R. Schram, Protestantism and Politics in France, 54. 49 A disciple of Vinet’s, Colani studied theology at Tübingen, like the elder Réville, Schérer and Pécaut. Tübingen was then the center from which the theory and practice of historical and critical study of the bible emanated. Colani adhered to this standard of scientific study of the biblical documents, and, like Vinet, was led to deny standard orthodox doctrines, such as Christ’s miraculous virgin birth, divinity, and resurrection, as well as original sin. (André Encrevé, “Les deux aspects de l’année 1876 pour L’Eglise réformée de France,” in Actes du colloque: Les protestants dans les débuts de la Troisième République (1871–1885) (Paris, 3–6 Octobre 1978), André Encrevé et Michel Richard, eds. (Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1979), 372.) Although Colani had founded the leading periodical of the liberal movement, the Revue de théologie et philosophie chrétienne (later to become the Revue de Strasbourg), he quit publishing it (1869) before his open rejection of the 1872 orthodox Declaration of Faith. Shortly thereafter, he abandoned theology entirely and even ceased church attendance. (290, 293). 50 Schérer began his professional life as a professor of biblical exegesis in Geneva. After exposure to German biblical criticism, he broke with orthodoxy over questions of the inerrancy of scriptures, the incarnation and divinity of Jesus, original sin and Jesus’s resurrection. Later he would become a leading light at the Paris newspaper, Les Temps and in the politics of the foundation of the Third Republic. (Philippe Vigier, “Edmond Schérer, père fondateur de la Troisième République,” in Actes du colloque: Les protestants dans les débuts de la Troisième République (1871–1885) (Paris, 3–6 Octobre 1978), André Encrevé et Michel Richard, eds. (Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1979), 183–97. 51 Pécaut resigned his pastorate only months after his assignment. While in the service of the church, he had gained fame as an author of a book declaring Jesus an ordinary mortal, Le Christ et la conscience (1859) and approaching the time of his resignation took to writing on the “religion of the future” in his De l’avenir du théisme chrétien considéré comme religion (1864). Later he was appointed by the Protestant minister of public instruction, Jules Ferry, to be director of the Ecole Normale Supérieure at Fontenay-aux-Roses. There he sought to define the bases of a “secular faith.”
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With such a rationalist theological basis, the Liberals put the status of revelation into question both as to its necessity and indeed its very possibility. For the Liberals ‘natural religion,’ so called, sufficed for humankind. What need of revelation if humanity had been given in equal proportions a pure and unsullied primordial monotheistic revelation? But, as a result of the Fall and priestly conspiracies, humanity’s grip on this religion weakened and it fell into a babel of ‘the religions.’ The history of ‘the religions’ was thus in great part a parade of error—magic, political injustice or sheer ignorance, polygamy, bloody (sometime human) sacrifice, ‘superstition,’ ritualism, fetishism, animism and so on. The mission of Christ was to destroy these degenerate forms of the historical ‘religions’ which had arisen since the Fall, then to restore the primordial natural religion. In its turn, the Reformation saw itself returning to the essence of Christ’s mission, by destroying those “pagan” elements which it felt had re-entered Christianity through Catholicism and restoring natural religion once more as Christ himself was believed to have done.52 4. Meaningless Rituals, Impious Bribes, Dead Pasts and Bad Religions Such fundamental doctrinal attitudes and beliefs bore directly on the theorizing of religion, especially sacrifice. It was first largely out of their own religious reasons that Liberal Protestants thought that sacrifice was not worth thinking about theoretically, nor even that conceptualizing sacrifice was a matter of their scholarly business. To the French liberal Protestants of the turn-of-the-century, sacrifice inspired roughly the same reactions then as today such practices as the “honor killing” of women felt to have disgraced their families or gross forms of genital mutilation, such as clitoridectomy invoke in us. Our initial reaction to these practices is to denounce them; the second is to put them outside the bounds of polite conversation— of which academic discourse is a subclass. Accordingly, the French liberal Protestants such as Albert Réville directed his energies at denouncing sacrifice. In his predictably liberal Protestant aversion to sacrifice, Albert Réville lived up to his biographer’s view that, despite all Réville’s so-called ‘scientific’ work, he remained “the type of a 52 “Natural Religion,” Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropedia, vol. 26, 15th ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica Company, 1985): 607.
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true Protestant theologian.”53 In Albert Réville, we can thus divine the Liberal Protestant theological reasons why they thought they were right to eschew the task of theorizing sacrifice. Réville’s attack on sacrifice fell into three parts. First, ritual sacrifice was only proper to a very low estate of religious evolution, and therefore not of perennial religious value. Second, ritual sacrifice deserved its low status on a scale of religious evolution because it assumed by virtue of its performance that mere mortals could compel the favor of God. Third, ‘real’ religion was in any event a matter of “spirit and truth.” Crude sacrifice was, however, something external and even material. Réville believed that this ‘real’ religion of the “spirit and truth” was essentially good. But, given the brutality and violence of sacrifice—“hideous”, “terrible” or “horrible,” in Réville’s words54—sacrifice could not essentially belong to good ‘real’ religion. Taking these points in reverse order, unlike some of his contemporaries, Réville was theologically incapable of accepting ritual sacrifice as an essential part of religion, and as such it could not be the subject of serious theorizing in the study of religion. In this respect, it is instructive to read that one of Réville’s Jewish contemporaries, the American historian of religion, Morris Jastrow, Jr., saw sacrifice as symbolic of “the instinct of reverence for something regarded as superior.”55 By contrast, for Réville, sacrifice was only a ‘corruption’ of ‘real’ religion, in the same way that Protestant apologists said ‘idolatry’ or ‘magic’ were. All such cultural or embodied forms of religion were examples of what Albert Réville (and other Protestants as we have seen) called “religious materialism.”56 In 1874, Réville voiced his condemnation of what in his day was called the “religious materialism” of ritual—an opinion shared by Robertson Smith, as we will see. Sacrifice thus implies that “religious forms” were “indispensable receptacles of the divine reality.”57 As such, any expression of reli-
53 Jacques Marty, Albert Réville: sa vie, son oeuvre (Cahors/Alençon: A. Coneslant, 1912), 144. 54 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions [1881], A. S. Squire, trans. (London: William and Norgate, 1884), 72, 79, 86. 55 Morris Jastrow, Jr., The Study of Religion (1902), (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 291. 56 Notes 57, 58. 57 Albert Réville, “Contemporaneous Materialism in Religion: the Sacred Heart,” Theological Review 44 ( January 1874): 152. Interestingly enough, Réville is equally hard on the Anglican liturgical reformers of the mid-nineteenth century, saying that
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gious materialism, such as ritual, “always more or less superstitious.”58 In the spirit of Victorian moralistic religiosity of the age, Réville argues that a really religious person would inform their sensibility with a religious “spiritualism,” which results from a “more elevated moral and religious sense.”59 Thus, for liberal Protestant thinkers, if there was any real religious worth in ritual sacrifice it basically lay on the periphery of the institution. Sacrifice it so problematic that it cannot even redeem itself by serving as a symbol for internal religious states of devotion: sacrifice itself was not “at all symbolical,” said Réville. Only “the externals with which it was surrounded were . . . symbols.”60 The second reason Albert Réville rejected the value of sacrificial ritual was because it presumed that people could control deity by giving gifts. Again, the contrast with the equally liberal, though firmly Jewish scholar, Morris Jastrow is telling. The giving of gifts to the gods in sacrifice, says Jastrow, has “its source in the natural disposition of man to pay homage. . . .” And, “it matters little that this homage is, originally, at least, suggested by selfish motives for the purpose securing the protection and aid of God. . . .” Why? Because behind this selfish motive, is “the instinct of gratitude.”61 Not sharing Judaism’s, at least, residual reverence for sacrificial religiosity, Réville instead is informed in his theoretical convictions from the Reformation’s criticism of Catholic sacramentalism. Sacrifice was, thus, unredeemed humanity’s way of trying to bend divine favor toward the gift giver, or worse yet, of thinking that such favor needed to be or could be won from the divine. Says Réville, “in primitive times especially, man, judging his divinities by himself, considered that words alone did not merit a good gift from them. Thence, and very naturally, he determined to make them presents.”62 While it
“it enjoins participation in its mysterious ceremonies as necessary for the salvation of souls. . . .” (Albert Réville, “Evolution in Religion, and Its Results,” Theological Review 12 (1875): 243. 58 Albert Réville, “Contemporaneous Materialism in Religion: the Sacred Heart,” Theological Review 44 ( January 1874): 151. 59 Albert Réville, “Contemporaneous Materialism in Religion: the Sacred Heart,” Theological Review 44 ( January 1874): 154. 60 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, 126. 61 Morris Jastrow, Jr., The Study of Religion (1902), (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 291. 62 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, 129.
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may have been true, says Réville, that “all religions” considered sacrifice “as pre-eminently the means of realizing the union of man with the divinity,”63 the union thus created seemed fundamentally corrupted by the failure of human confidence in divine salvation. Reciting a standard reformation polemic against the supposedly Roman Catholic position on sacraments and indulgences, Réville says of ritual in religion generally that, “the human mind is religious through the feeling of a bond which unites it to the divine spirit. . . . But man is not always sensible nor certain of this union, and he likes to think that he may draw it closer.”64 Strictly speaking, there was no need for establishing such a bond: it already existed according to Réville’s reformed theology. Moreover in trying to bridge the gap on their own terms humans showed that their presentation of gifts in sacrifice reflected not disinterested love or generosity, but “the perfect egotism of calculation. Man gives to his god only in order that he may receive, and reckons upon receiving much more than he has given.”65 With what must have been delicious irony for a descendant of victims of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Réville summarizes this point of his critical discussion of sacrifice in the Prolegomena of the History of Religions by recalling how, after a series of political setbacks, Louis XIV looked heavenward in exasperation and complained ‘“After all that I have done for God!”’66 But Réville was not satisfied to damn sacrifice by reducing it to “a revolting egotism.”67 Supremely confident of the religious monstrosity of sacrifice, he argued that it culminated inevitably in the evils of human sacrifice and cannibalism.68 To Réville, the pseudoreligious calculus of sacrificial gift giving, necessarily pushed the rite toward an unhealthy degree of adherence to values of self-hatred and ascetic renunciation. For human beings, what greater act of renunciation could be imagined than the annihilating sacrifice of ourselves or of one of our own kind? Yet, human beings in their sinfulness found it hard to resist this unsavory trend. Réville knew that in early in the religious history of Israel, “notably among the Semites,”
63 64 65 66 67 68
Ibidem, Ibidem, Ibidem, Ibidem, Ibidem, Ibidem,
128. 129. 130. 133. 133. 132.
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human sacrifices were commonplace. Especially troubling for Réville was the fact of the persistence of human sacrifice. Even “Mosaism,” he muses, “had great difficulty in extirpating this horrible custom among the Israelites.”69 Worse yet, despite the proscription against sacrifice in modern Judaism, the spirit of human sacrifice survived to this day in its sacrifice-like ritual of circumcision.70 Extending his repugnance for sacrifice into the then contemporary arena of politics, Réville protested the condemnation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus as an example of such sacrificial barbarism. To Réville, the innocent Dreyfus stood as a degraded Jesus before Pilate’s “Ecce Homo,”71 a “man victimized by a dreadful injustice, suffering . . . the loss of his honor.”72 To Réville, tolerance of such maltreatment and injustice in France could only be explained in terms of the long historical formation of human minds effected by the Catholic theology of the sacrificial Eucharist.73 The third reason Protestant scholars like Albert Réville felt confident in refraining from theorizing sacrifice was belief in a radically discontinuous view of religious evolution.74 As one stage of evolution succeeded another, it left the other behind without remainder. Nothing passed over from one stage to the other. “What has been, is not; what is, will not be,” said Albert Réville. “This is all that we can affirm,” he concluded.75 More even than failing to carry the past of religion forward into our own time, “each new degree of spiritual
69
Ibidem, 133. Ibidem, 133. 71 Albert Réville, Les étapes d’un intellectuel (Paris: Stock, 1898), 57. 72 Albert Réville, Les étapes d’un intellectuel, 79. 73 Albert Réville, “The Dreyfus Affair,” The New World 8 (1899): 621. 74 Jean Réville, then doyen of the Protestant faculty of divinity at Paris and president of the Fifth Section, notes that It is perfectly right to appeal to solidarity. . . . But those who wish to found our entire moral life upon the feeling of our duty to humanity forget that this duty in nowise constitutes a moral obligation. We owe everything to the labours of previous generations, and we are fixed into our present social solidarity in its ever increasing complexity. Doubtless; yet the previous generations did not labour on our behalf; and in our day every individual who performs his social duties is not labouring to do me a service, but to satisfy his own wants. With regard to our contemporaries, solidarity simply amounts to division of labour. With regard to the past we need feel no gratitude. Jean Réville, Liberal Christianity, V. Leuliette, trans. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 198f. 75 Albert Réville, “Evolution in Religion, and Its Results,” 235. 70
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development negates that preceding it,” says Jean Réville. Monotheism, for example “only acquires its value and consciousness of itself in disengaging from its polytheistic context,” says Jean Réville. In this sense, to abolish is to fulfill.76 This radically discontinuous conception of the nature of religious change even entailed a belief in the non-existence of the past. That was then, this is now. Accordingly, the value of sacrificial religion, was limited to its proper time, and has no further claims on us, as Albert Réville affirms in general. Everything has its time and place; and the only blame one has a right to assign in the history of religions is to the obstinate friends of the past, who have wanted to halt the ships, even after the breath from on high has filled their sails, and the order has been given for the great departure.77
Of course, such opinions were easy enough to understand coming from radical sons of the Reformation such as the Révilles. Playing the theologians again, they assumed that as the Reformation represented ‘progress’ beyond the Roman Church, so also did the religion of ‘spirit and truth’ represent the same radical ‘progress’ over the religions of the ‘non-civilized’ or, to a somewhat lesser extent, the religions of the ‘letter and the law’—Judaism. If their opinions seem a trifle harsh, we might pause to realize that the highly political Révilles felt that as part of a distinct minority in France, such points needed to be reaffirmed in their day in the face of constant attempts by their Catholic enemies to reassert their power over them.
76 Albert Réville, “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” (1859) Essais de critique religieuse (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1860: 388). Typically, such positions contain more than meets the eye. Beyond denying Catholic beliefs about the sacramental re-presentation of Jesus’s death, Protestants made a more general ideological statement about the legitimacy of the present over against the past, and thus of course of the legitimacy of the Reformation over against the long past of Catholic Christianity. Moreover, in France, Protestants who approved of the revolutionary tradition could also feel it too confirmed the wisdom of their view of a radically discontinous history. After all, had not all things been made new by the sweeping changes achieved by the revolution? (Marcel Royannez, “L’eucharistie chez les évangéliques et les premiers réformés français (1522–1546),” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 125 (1979): 548–576). Correspondingly, in their Eucharistic theology, even when the early French Protestants admitted a real “corporal presence of Christ” in the Eucharist, they insisted that the mass and Eucharist only commemorated “the sacrifice accomplished once and for all” by Jesus (554), they insisted that the mass and Eucharist only commemorated “the sacrifice accomplished once and for all” by Jesus (551). 77 Albert Réville, “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” 388f.
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Thus, as he did with his pamphlet condemning the conviction of Dreyfus as a modern-day human sacrifice, Réville applied his religious progressivism to a critique of the religion of his own time.78 A salient case in point was the newly popular pilgrimage to the spring at La Salette, so important to the renewed intransigent Roman Catholic spirituality of sacrifice of Réville’s time. Réville saw the popularity of La Salette and its Little Calvary, recalling the ancient pagan Celtic religious devotions, and thus only demonstrating how far the renascent, sacrificial Catholicism of his own time was from true religion.79 Between the pagan, sacrificial ‘them’ and the enlightened, non-sacrificial ‘us’ there was no real relationship. Since the Liberals believed that religious evolution occurred in discrete discontinuous stages, the contribution of the past to the present is minimized. The ritual sacrificial heritage of humanity at best therefore counted for relatively little to the great Protestant figures of the study of religion in France. For this reason, they seem to have been required to conclude that sacrifice was better denounced than making claims upon their theorizing energies. Sacrifice simply laid the ‘dead hand’ of the past on the already burdened shoulders of living faith and scholarship. What need to ‘scratch out’ a ‘theory,’ if no “bumps on the neck” even raised themselves up for the purpose? Indeed, what need of a theory of sacrifice in light of the “quasicertitude” of a religious evolution which lodged it in the most benighted period of the human growth story.80 The Liberals had better things to do than theorize the sacrificial rituals of defunct and dysfunctional religions. And, that seemed pretty much the most mundane reason of all why the French liberal Protestants had so little to say about the meaning of sacrifice. They were pretty content with their lot at the top of the academic heap. Doubtless, ultimately behind all these reasons for Albert Réville’s condemnation of ritual sacrifice, and subsequent disinterest in theorizing it, lay the deepest assumptions of his own personal liberal Protestant religious faith. The final point of anchorage of this faith was in the idea of religion as humane and good in itself. Stemming
78
Albert Réville, Les étapes d’un intellectuel. Albert Réville, “The Religious Situation in France subsequent to the War of 1870–71,” 128. 80 Comte Eugène Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” 173. 79
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from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideal of the religion of humanity or “natural religion,”81 Réville declares that “the principle of humanity guides religion along higher paths . . . [and that the] truer a religion is, the more absolute the homage it will render to the principle of humanity.”82 Despite his formal identification with Protestant Christianity, as a Liberal Protestant, Réville was far more deeply committed to this rationalistic, reified and ideal standard of religion-as-such. That even Réville’s idea of Protestantism should be governed by an ideal of ‘natural religion’ should come as no surprise given what we already know of Réville’s break with the leadership of mainline French Protestantism, his resignation from the ministry, and his adherence to a number of traditionally heterodox creedal positions. It was his commitment to natural religion, together with what was compatible with it in the Reformation tradition, which ‘over-determined’ Réville’s rejection of sacrificial ritual. On Réville’s view, all historical examples of religion, represent approximations of an ideal from which they have departed: “Religions constitute an evolution—the evolution of religion; but religion, under the most various forms, abides and will abide.”83 Embodied in this notion of a persistent religion-as-such is the idea of its essential goodness. Religion is “the bridge uniting the world of the finite with the world of the eternal.”84 Religion is, moreover, a bond which a human being “delights in feeling,”85 as well as a “natural property and tendency, and consequently an innate need of the human spirit.”86 By this logic, sacrifice cannot be an essential part of real religion—religion-as-such, because it is in Réville’s eyes, ‘bad.’ Sacrificial religions are at best only ‘fallen’ or greatly diminished approximations of what religion-as-such really is. For this reason, Réville finds sacrifice most just where his discontinuous evolutionism would lead him to expect it to be—among the benighted inferior religions, “in the darkness of polytheism and idolatry.”87 Religion-as-such is, in the view of Réville and those like him, something essentially ‘good.’
81 82 83 84 85 86 87
Albert Réville, Albert Réville, Albert Réville, Albert Réville, Albert Réville, Albert Réville, Ibidem, 86.
History of the Doctrine of the Deity of Jesus Christ, viii. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 254. “Evolution in Religion, and Its Results,” 246. “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” 368. Prolegomena of the History of Religions, 25. Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 6.
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Now this essentialist notion of religion-as-good makes all the difference to how religion is studied, and thus how or even whether sacrifice will be theorized. Does religion-as-such, natural religion, exist in an historical sense? Réville is vague on the point, even though he says in Buisson’s Dictionnaire de pédagogie that “religion-as-such has a history—in effect that of the religions.”88 Despite his vagueness about the historical construal of natural religion, Réville affirms a psychological variant of the historical natural religion thesis in terms of a religious a priori. On this view, all human beings are endowed with a natural religious faculty, “a natural property and tendency, and consequently an innate need of the human spirit.”89 This natural religious faculty embodying “la religion” confirmed for Réville the truth of his personal unitarian theology: . . . the recognition of religion itself (in distinction from the varied forms it may assume), as a natural tendency and essential need of the human mind, implies the reality of its object, even if that sacred object should withdraw itself from our understanding behind an impenetrable veil. . . . Religious history, by bringing clearly into light the universality, the persistency and prodigious intensity of religion in human life, is therefore, to my mind, one unbroken attestation to God.90
Given all this, we can see how deeply rooted Réville’s religious resistance to theorizing sacrifice was, and how therefore it could not have helped but to cast such a pall over the study of sacrifice in the Liberal Protestant dominated Fifth Section of the École Pratique that no Liberal Protestant wrote either a major descriptive or theoretical work on sacrifice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 5. The Bible, Tylor and Robertson Smith As standard-bearers for the study of religion in France, the Liberal Protestants like Albert Réville dealt nonetheless with those who had made sacrifice a major area of their research and writing—Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazer and William Robertson Smith. These representative of the so-called “école anglaise” theorized sacrifice
88 Albert Réville, “Religions,” Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire, vol. II, part 2, Ferdinand Buisson, ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1882), 1831. 89 Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 6. 90 Ibidem, 6–7.
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in order to highlight the sacrificial origins of Christianity in so-called ‘primitive’ religion, ancient Judaism and in light of the sacrificial conception of Jesus’ death. In doing so, they sought to associate Christianity with what they saw as the barbarism of the ‘primitives.’ The Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section were only slightly less hostile to the “école anglaise” than the British ‘anthropologists’ were to Christian theology itself—whether in the society at large or in the academic domain. Tylor tells us he opposed the “mysticism” of Christian theologians with his own “simple rational interpretation.”91 The project of delegitimizing Christianity—“‘theologians all to expose’”— motivated much of Tylor and Frazer’s respective work on religion. This lesson was not lost on the French liberal Protestants. As observers of the attacks of the “école anglaise” on their coreligionists, such as Max Müller, indicated to them, the “école anglaise” was deeply hostile to anything reeking of theology.92 Nevertheless, as unpalatable as the “école anglaise” was to the Liberal Protestants, its studies of sacrifice could not be ignored. The French liberal Protestants therefore engaged the theorizings of the “école anglaise” in two ways. First, insofar as the theories of the “école anglaise” simply confirmed Liberal Protestant theological judgments against sacrifice, the Liberal Protestants merely accepted them. Second, insofar as the Liberal Protestants accepted the general theories of sacrifice of the “école anglaise” (although not necessarily as it extended to all forms of Christianity), they then did not themselves need to undertake new theorizing of the unsavory subject. Thus, rather than responding to the anti-Christian polemics of the “école anglaise” with novel theorizings of sacrifice in the face of “école anglaise,” the Liberal Protestants simply either redeployed the theological positions we have just explored against them, or turned the theories of the “école anglaise” to their own theological purposes. It is true however that the Liberal Protestants had also absorbed theories of sacrifice implicit or explicit in the work of the German Protestant biblical critics of the day. Sacrifice was, of course, a particular concern of these Protestant ‘higher critics’ writing on the
91 Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion in Primitive Culture, vol. 2 [1873] (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 461. 92 Tylor and Andrew Lang cited in Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79.
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Hebrew bible. And, we would do well to recall the evolutionist perspective of superiority over Judaism cherished by most Christian scholars of the day. Such prejudices were accordingly embedded firmly in such terminology as the ‘Old’ Testament. That sacrifice belonged principally there in the long gone past of Christianity, only flattered the prior theological biases of Christians, not to mention the Liberal Protestants, as well. After all, did not Jean Réville remind us that the venerable Justin Martyr held that “only pagans and Jews” might offer “sacrifices” and that early, and thus ‘true,’ Christians never did?93 In this regard, Julius Wellhausen, the founder of the so-called ‘higher criticism’ of the bible, and his ideas about sacrifice in the Hebrew bible, serve to demonstrate what the ‘higher’ biblical criticism of the nineteenth century had to offer its Liberal Protestant readers.94 Wellhausen saw Jewish history as divided into periods of varying ethical refinement. For him, the ethical religion of reform of the prophetic age epitomized the loftiest levels of the religion of the ‘Old Testament.’95 Opposed to the prophetic strand of the religion of Israel was the corrupting priestly strand, with its lavish rituals, sacrifice chief among them. For Wellhausen ritualism spelt trouble for real religion, because it exposed a tendency for Israel to lapse back into the idolatrous “crude nature religion” so hated by the prophets.96 In earlier periods of the religious life of Israel, while it was true that Wellhausen romanticized the ancient Hebrews for their primitive religious vitality, especially revealed in their sacrificial rites, he was not unqualified in his admiration of them. As with the later ritualistic priestly religion, he was uneasy about sacrifice. The only way Wellhausen felt that this sacrificial ritualist religion of ancient Israel could be said to have value was essentially to impute to it a hidden spiritual essence. For Wellhausen then, the very earliest level
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Jean Réville, Les origines de l’eucharistie (Messe—Sainte Cène), 19. We should not, of course, forget the abundant work of the Protestant biblical scholars on sacrifice in the Hebrew bible. As we will see, much of what they wrote figured in the thinking of certain members of the “école anglaise,” such as William Robertson Smith. Robertson Smith had, for example, studied the new biblical scholarship with the great German scholar, Julius Wellhausen. 95 Wellhausen, Julius, The Jewish Encyclopedia, volume 12 (New York City: KTAV, 1960), 501. 96 Henri Hubert, review of Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1899), L’Année sociologique 4 (1901), 218. 94
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of ancient Hebrew sacrifice was really highly spiritual. It was a pure act of communion between humanity and deity—not the external ritual thing it may have seemed to be. As Wellhausen felt the prophets showed, the ritual part proved, in effect, to be dispensable. For the ancient Hebrews, it only expressed a noble, but groping, attempt to approximate a spiritual and ethical ideal, later to be realized in full as humanity matured in its evolutionary growth to the higher forms of ethical religion like those championed by his beloved prophets. For the Liberals, Wellhausen’s ideas about sacrifice played nicely into the hands of their own theology of sacrifice. They had no need to change conceptions of the rite—to theorize sacrifice anew—given the opinions of the leading biblical scholar of the day. In many cases, as well, the Liberal Protestants discovered that the grand theorists of the “école anglaise” and the chief representatives of the “higher criticism” joined the consensus anti-ritualism of Liberals. Indeed, some of the German ‘higher critics’ directly influenced the work of the British. For example Wellhausen mentored Robertson Smith in the ‘higher criticism’ in the 1860’s. Thus, in turning attention to the “école anglaise.” Thus, the Liberals entered into what we might call ‘conversations’ with the “école anglaise.” They used their theories of sacrifice dialectically to provide points of departure for their own views when they coincided, and when they did not find the theories of the “école anglaise” congenial, they simply pushed them aside. What I am arguing is that in the face of such a superficially unlikely, but actually agreeable, consensus about sacrifice why would the Liberals feel that they needed to theorize sacrifice at all? Did not the French Liberal Protestant theologians, the leading Christian biblical critics and the “école anglaise” form a common consensus about the nature of sacrifice? Let us then look in some detail at the dialectical way in which the Liberals played their double game with the theories of sacrifice of the “école anglaise,” so skillfully in fact that they never seem to have felt that they needed to theorize sacrifice anew on their own. 6. The Theological Dialectics of Sacrifice: Tylor and Smith For the most part, the Liberals held many positions identical, or at least consistent, with their British ‘anthropologist’ contemporaries. Both believed in progressive evolution, the superiority of the ‘civi-
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lized races’ over the ‘savage,’ and a general bias for the moral and spiritual features of culture over the material and somatic. Yet, the Protestant Liberals kept the “école anglaise” at arm’s length.97 Typical here was Albert Réville. He well knew his way around the ethnographic literature of his day, but engaged it as a “science of religion” loyalist, affirming with Friedrich Max Müller the romantic the ideal of a religion of nature, which turns out to be virtually indistinguishable from the ‘natural religion’ of Rousseau. Réville thus opposed Tylor’s animism, and took Max Müller’s naturism side of the debate about the origins of religion.98 For Réville, as for Max Müller, the study of religion was ultimately about seeking the traces of a primal natural religion, hidden behind the shifting historical forms of the “positive religions.”99 In Réville’s view, Tylor’s animism amounted to an attempt to reduce religion to a ‘childish’ belief in spirits, or to dwell on its “puerilities (and) . . . terrible cruelties . . . . of the coarse rudiments of religion.” In place of Tylor’s reductionism, Albert Réville declared himself in favor of studying the “non-civilized . . . separately—from the religious point of view.”100 The younger Réville, Jean, also maintained a frigid remove from Tylor, Robertson Smith and James George Frazer, no doubt aware of the anti-religious, in particular anti-Christian, implications of their program. He felt that the entire program of theorizing religion on the basis of comparison with the “non-civilized” was wrongheaded.
97 For the relations between theologians and ‘anthropologists,’ see Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within, 78–80 and John Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), ch. 1. 98 Max Müller had originated the term, “science of religion” and together with Cornelis P. Tiele, laid out the main lines of the study of religion championed by the Révilles and their allies in the Fifth Section. For Albert Réville’s arguments against animism and for naturism, see Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, 92f. 99 There Jean Réville acknowledges Herbert of Cherbury’s contributions to the idea of Natural Religion as opposed to the historical or ‘positive religions’ (82f ). For Réville, however, the notion of Natural Religion is to be understood as an analytic construct, a theological idea, rather than an historical period in the evolution of religion. (114f ) By the time this quest was taken up by the Révilles, any historical construal of this quest had been abandoned in favor of a psychological quest for an essential interior human religiousness—a “normal function of human nature.” ( Jean Réville, Les Phases successives de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1909), 116). 100 Albert Réville, Les religions des peuples non-civilisés (2 vols) (Paris: Fischbacher, 1883), vol. 1, 25.
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Years before Durkheim and Salomon Reinach would feature totemism at the center of their theories of religion,101 but in the midst of the flurry of controversy caused by William Robertson Smith ten years earlier, in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1894), Réville argued that “one ought not exaggerate” the religious character of the “noncivilized.” In particular, we should not try to “base a theory” on something “as poorly understood and of such dubious religious value as totemism.” To do so, would be like “erecting a cathedral on shifting sands,” says the younger Réville.102 Thus, although their theological commitments may have been thin and pale, when the Liberals were challenged by the radical antiChristian theories of the “école anglaise,” even they stiffened their theological backs and resisted these new theories. As a result, the Liberals had recourse to the “école anglaise” only when it served their liberal theological agendas, whether this be delegitimizing Catholic ritualism or protecting their own conception of religion. By contrast, the Durkheimians and liberal Jewish iconoclasts, like Salomon Reinach,103 were the chief French patrons of the “école anglaise,” in part, I believe, for the assistance which the British gave them in budging Liberal Christianity from its privileged place in the study of religion in France.104 Thus, despite the inhospitality of the Révilles to the theories of Tylor, much of what Tylor said about sacrifice could be and was assimilated by the Liberal Protestants. In fact, Tylor’s theory occupies an odd place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Protestant theoretical discourse on sacrifice because it was singularly
101
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, (1912) Karen E. Fields, ed. and trans., (New York: Free Press, 1995) and Salomon Reinach, Orpheus, (1909) Florence Simmonds, trans., (New York: Liveright, 1930). 102 Jean Réville, review of Henri Hubert and Isidore Lévy, translation of Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, Revue d’histoire des religions 51 (1905): 82. 103 See my account of Salomon Reinach ‘s relation to the work of William Robertson Smith in Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), chapter 3. 104 For further information, see the work of Robert Alun Jones on Robertson Smith, such as “Robertson Smith, Durkheim and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for The Elementary Forms, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981): 184–205. Robert Alun Jones, and W. Paul Vogt, “The Problem of Religion and the Duality of Human Nature,” in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, vol. 5, Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long, eds., (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984): 45–62.
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over-determined. His gift theory of sacrifice, for example, is so easily assimilable to Protestant theological polemics against the Catholic sacramentalism, that it is virtually impossible to distinguish its theoretical influence on subsequent thought about sacrifice as an independent variable from other available options, such as main line of Reformation theological polemics. Thus, as Albert Réville showed, the Liberals sometimes trade on Tylor’s view that sacrifice was either a kind of gift, tribute or bribe to appease the anger of a deity, because it already existed in Protestant polemics against the Catholics. Ever since the Reformation, Protestants routinely held that Catholic ritual often enough gave the impression of mere humans trying to buy off the favor or just wrath of the creator. In this, the Catholic interpretation of the Eucharist as sacrifice, was a prime offender. On this scenario, Tylor’s theory of sacrifice first ‘came from’—or at least ‘corresponds to’ that of—his own Non-conformist reformation antiritualist background and seems to have been recycled back into it in the work of those Protestant scholars who found in it all the same anti-ritualist and anti-sacrificial prejudices which they themselves had absorbed independently in their own theological nurture. Even as a simple gift, Tylor called sacrifice “that most childlike kind of offering.”105 While it is strictly speaking true that Tylor’s theory of sacrifice encompasses more than simple gift, and includes “homage” and “expiation,” he remained cool to the entire sacrificial economy. Referring to the contest between the supposed ethical reformism of the prophets of ancient Israel and the ritualism of the priestly classes, Tylor makes clear his sympathies for an ethical agenda indistinguishable from those who would be among his greatest enemies in France—the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section. Says, Tylor, “To this historian, in sympathy rather with the spirit of the prophet than the ceremony of the priest, it is a congenial task to dwell upon the great movement in later Judaism to maintain the place of ethical above ceremonial religion.”106 With Smith, the relations to Protestant theological polemic were more complex, and sometimes even contrary. After all, Liberal Protestant Robertson Smith was himself a churchman and biblical scholar, indeed he was regarded by the French as an exemplar of
105 106
Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion in Primitive Culture, vol. 2, 462. Ibidem, 473.
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the “école anglaise” itself. His connections with biblical studies meant that Robertson Smith’s theory of sacrifice had to be taken seriously by the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section in a way in which the hostile Tylor’s did not. His Lectures on the Religion of the Semites had to be treated to a full review in Revue d’histoire des religions, as we will see, while Tylor’s works were not given the same pride of place. As a bonus, and like Tylor’s, Smith’s view of sacrifice rehearsed the same Protestant theological complaints against the Catholics as we saw in Tylor. But, in the very different, but nonetheless acute, way Smith’s ideas provoked his own conservative religious community to bring him to trial for heresy. In the end, then despite being coreligionists, the liberal Protestants scholars of the science of religion found in Smith’s theory of sacrifice seemingly as many unassimilable theological and theoretical notions as agreeable ones. Thus, whether in accepting his theory of sacrifice and primitive religion, or in defining one’s own position over against it, the French liberal Protestant practitioners of the scientific study of religion, who wrote about sacrifice in the late nineteenth century, increasingly needed to address the theories of Robertson Smith. In the end, the major Liberal Protestant thinkers, such as Albert and Jean Réville, took pretty much what they wanted from Tylor and Robertson Smith. In part on Smith’s side was Jean Réville. He saw in Smith a reflection of his own Liberal Protestant critique of sacrificial religion as ‘materialistic.’ This notion of religion, says Jean Réville, “corresponds to a conception of the gods as beings who eat and drink, and are not survivals of the cult of spiritual gods.”107 Similarly, in his account of the indigenous religions of Mexico, Albert Réville seems to parrot Tylor’s tribute or gift theory, on the one hand, saying that sacrifice shows itself as a “good gift”108—something “appeasing the wrath or conciliating the favor of the deities.” Or, Albert Réville takes Tylor’s line in saying that “under all its forms, sacrifice is the offering to the divinity of that which is likely to dispose him favorably towards the offerer.”109 Along with the gift theory, which Robertson Smith felt was not primitive, Réville exploits
107 Jean Réville, Les Phases successives de l’histoire des religions, Revue d’histoire des religions 61 (1910): 113. 108 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, 129. 109 Ibidem, 128f.
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Robertson Smith’s novel view that sacrificial “communion” expresses our desire for kinship with god—the desire to be one with the divine.110 Like Smith and Tylor, Réville holds that sacrifice is devoid of the ethical or ‘spiritual’ elements making for real religion—those “metaphysical and moral ideas which did not appear until much later.”111 For the Révilles, then, it was ‘pick and choose’ as far as the work of Tylor and Robertson Smith was concerned. What, however, marks off Albert Réville from both Tylor and Smith, despite their common spiritualist anti-ritualism, is his passionate hatred of sacrifice. For Albert Réville, at least part of the real explanation of the prevalence of sacrificial religion, among the Aztecs at least, was their incorrigible barbarism, their hopeless residence at the lower levels of evolutionary development.112 But even here, the theories from the “école anglaise” do not really add something new to the thought of Albert Réville. They only fuel the already hot flames of his theological contempt for the rite. Beyond all the features shared in common with “école anglaise” which mark sacrifice as ‘low’ on the evolutionary scale, for Réville, sacrifice deserves special theological condemnation as a paradigm of humanity’s “perfect egotism of calculation.”113 When Réville explores the extravagant sacrificial rites of Aztec Mexico, he abandons all inhibitions and damns sacrifices there as “so numerous and so horrible.” Sacrifice is just a symptom of spiritual error, a mark of practice “still enveloped in the darkness of polytheism and idolatry.”114 Sacrifice was for Albert Réville not even redeemable as a kind of metaphor, since for him it is “not at all symbolical.”115
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Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 90–1. Ibidem, 87. 112 Albert Réville, Fernand Cortez et les causes réeles de la conquête du Mexique (Paris: Ve Ethiou-Perou, 1882), 30. 113 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, 130. 114 Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 86. 115 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, 126. In addition to the main thinkers of the Fifth Section, the only other liberal Protestant attempt to theorize sacrifice around the time of Hubert and Mauss’ theoretical work was the Protestant Comtean linguist and polymath, Raoul de la Grasserie. His theoretical statement came in the form of an address to the first International Congress of the History of Religions in Paris (1900), organized by Albert Réville and the (chiefly) Liberal Protestant leadership of the Fifth Section. We must therefore imagine that Grasserie had been deliberately selected to articulate views consonant with those of the leadership. His address, “Du rôle social du sacrifice religieux,” was later published in the Liberal Protestant approved Revue 111
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7. For Reasons of Method
The testimony of the Révilles gives us a good start, then, on understanding the theological reasons why the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section thought they were right in feeling that there was no need to theorize sacrifice, or if we impute theorizing to them, why they thought they were right not to make their own theorizing open and explicit. Theologically, they felt secure in their condemnation of sacrifice, and found that the latest researches and theories of the “école anglaise,” for example, added virtually nothing to their theological judgments against the rite. There remains, however, one further mystery, only partly solved by considering the theoretical and theological impediments to a new round of reflection about the nature of sacrifice which theorizing sacrifice would entail. Although the availability of other theories and
d’histoire des religions. It seems, in a way, a marvel of the eclectic and synthetic spirit of French philosophy of the period, here seeming to include notions taken from Tylor, Robertson Smith and the Durkheimians—although never citing a single source throughout. (Raoul de la Grasserie, “Du Rôle social du sacrifice religieux,” Revue d’histoire des religions 44 (1901), 16–35. Grasserie organized his discussion around several questions: why do people sacrifice? are there kinds of sacrifice, coordinated, say, with different stages of human evolution? and, if so, what do we make of this troublesome phenomenon? Grasserie answered these lead questions in the way we may now expect from the eclectic thought about sacrifice of Protestant scholars in this milieu. To wit, peoples in the past have done sacrifice for three main reasons, corresponding to three increasingly noble degrees of human religious consciousness. First, along with Tylor’s theory, primitive people think naively that the gods need to be given gifts, typically to be fed. But, then as if shifting to Robertson Smith, Grasserie says that by sharing a meal with their god, humans can gain union with their god, assuage divine anger. Along with Robertson Smith, Grasserie, then argues, second, that people also sacrifice for the sake of their own social cohesion or to restore the cosmos to proper running order. Third, and finally, echoing what Robertson Smith argues about the evolution of sacrifice after its primitive phase as a communal meal, Grasserie declares that people sacrifice to expiate sin. At best, sacrifice becomes a moral expression, a precursor of our modern altruistic sentiments. Even though the sacrifice remains “sacred butchery,” it promotes a selfless attitude altogether noble. Thus by tracking the development of sacrifice through several comtean evolutionary stages, Grasserie believed sacrifice culminated in an expression of human altruistic sentiments. (35) Critical, however, in this last evolutionary phase of sacrifice is its own transcendence of its early nature. The altruism of the final stage of the evolution of sacrificial religion propels it beyond itself; it negates features of the earlier stage. Grasserie believed that at bottom, sacrifice remained only, and at best, “the kernel of social religion”. By and by, the social, and thus essentially sacrificial, nature of this religion develops into the “religion of the individual.” (39) There, the proper forms of the religious life are prayer, asceticism, and ecstasy.
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their theological aversion for sacrifice may in part explain why the Liberal Protestants resisted theorizing sacrifice, how do we explain why French Catholic and Jewish scholars likewise resisted theorizing sacrifice along with them? After all, unlike the Liberal Protestants, Catholic Modernists, like Alfred Loisy or liberal Jewish Indologist, Sylvain Lévi, carried much less anti-sacrificial baggage than the rationalist anti-ritualist theologians and ‘scientists of religion’ of the Fifth Section. In the cases of Sylvain Lévi, Loisy and even Ernest Renan, sacrifice finds an important and indeed positive place in their intellectual agendas. They at least spend some time and energy describing sacrificial rites, even though they do not think to theorize sacrifice. Why then do they too resist theorizing sacrifice? The answer lies in the methodology of writing history. Both Roman Catholic and Jewish modernists shared with the liberal Protestants the same principles of historical scholarship—and these were decidedly anti-theoretical. Little different from the Liberal Protestants in his anti-theoretical attitudes toward sacrifice then was Jewish Indologist, Sylvian Lévi, rightly famous for his influential La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas of 1898.116 Mauss tells us that he expressly moved to Paris to do his doctorate with Sylvain Lévi. From Mauss, we also learn that Lévi actively discouraged his own students from theorizing. After having worked with high-flying rationalist philosophers, like Durkheim and Octave Hamelin, in Bordeaux, Mauss tells us that it was specifically Sylvain Lévi who set him on a “new direction to my career.” When Mauss first met Lévi, he was puffed up with the theorizing ambitions and pretensions of the cosmopolitan idealist philosophy, he had imbibed from his maitre at Bordeaux. Mauss therefore thought his time plugging away at Indian data with Lévi would be short and uncomplicated. In a year or so, he would move on to the real business of producing a grand theoretical synthesis for which his philosophical education had prepared him. But instead Mauss tells the story of his unexpected conversion from philosophy to “histoire historisante.” Lévi “made me plunge into a sea of facts . . .,” says Mauss. And, even after two years of immersion in the documentary historical method of the ‘scientific’ historians, Mauss confessed in exasperation, “I kept on collecting and sifting facts. . . .”117
116 117
Sylvian Lévi, La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas. Marcel Mauss, “Sylvain Lévi” (1935) in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 3. Cohesion
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The first full-scale theory of sacrifice would have to wait until Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert were tasked by Durkheim with producing Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Mauss’ experience with Sylvain Lévi thus tells us that while the appeal to religious affiliation might explain why Catholics and Jews looked favorably enough on ritual sacrifice to write about it descriptively, one must not forget that no French Jew (save perhaps Salomon Reinach who imported Robertson Smith) or Catholic saw fit to theorize sacrifice in France as Robertson Smith and Tylor had done earlier, and the Durkheimians would do for the first time in a full-scale dedicated way later. I shall argue that the main factor accounting for the absence of French Catholics, Jews and Protestants from theorizing sacrifice was also the main factor linking these scholars of different religious affiliation together in the common scientific endeavor to which they were all loyal. No matter what religious affiliation, among the religious liberals, they all saw themselves as ‘scientific’ historians of religion. They all studied religion and sacrifice by the rules of the same methodology—a ‘scientific’ or historicist approach to the study of religion which was by nature averse to theorizing anything. Among liberal Protestants, only perhaps Auguste Sabatier could be said to have written about sacrifice from a theoretical (also theological) point of view. But significantly, Auguste Sabatier was not an historian in the strict sense of the term, but was instead a philosopher of religion or systematic theologian. In this, as we will see, the Liberal Protestants were no different, for example, from Catholic scholars like Alfred Loisy, who although he wrote extensively in a descriptive mode about sacrifice, never wrote theoretically about it and was not shy in saying why. Says Loisy, My originality, if I may venture to say so, was in thinking that the true method in history is one of seeing aright, of penetrating as completely and as intimately as possible into the meaning of testimony and of data; and also there was an element of novelty in not propounding any theory which was considered exhaustive of the meaning of the history that it was my business to explore.118
sociale et divisions de la sociologie. Victor Karady, ed., (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 537. 118 Alfred Loisy, My Duel with the Vatican [1924] (New York City: Greenwood, 1968), 330.
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With, firm faith in ‘common sense,’ Loisy elsewhere described his approach to the history of religions as “direct observation of facts, without preconceived theory. . . .”119 At most, then when liberal Protestants or their methodological kin wrote about sacrifice, they did so, as we will see, so as to undercut its theoretical ‘legs.’ They spoke either only of particular ‘sacrifices’ in the plural, like arch-positivist historian Maurice Vernes, and not of a full-blown category or theoretical notion, ‘sacrifice.’120 Or, they spoke of sacrifice as a subject either only worthy of theological censure—hideous . . . terrible . . . horrible,121 in Albert Réville’s calm view—or as the spiritualized soul of the human heart of Sabatier’s theology. In order to tell the story of the unifying method which precluded theorizing sacrifice, we need to grasp what it was to do ‘scientific’ history of religions in the France of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 8. Robertson Smith among the Theory-leery I have argued that while theological considerations about sacrifice rendered the Liberal Protestants unlikely to theorize sacrifice, their methodological commitments to ‘scientific’ history may have made it impossible. For even if the Liberal Protestants both felt that sacrifice was an unsavory subject for theoretical thinking, and even if they felt that others had not theorized it amply, they still would have resisted theorizing sacrifice because they generally resisted any theorizing in the study of religion at all! It did not matter whether theorizing should happen to fall on theologically sensitive or over-theorized topics like sacrifice or not. Theorizing itself was suspect. I shall also
119 Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1960), 195. 120 In the historical context of the religion of Israel, for example, Vernes summarizes the contents of various classes of biblical books, e.g., legal, prophetic and so on, reporting the then standard line on what each has to say about ritual sacrifice. Thus, in the Pentateuch and “historical” books (following Wellhausen), sacrifice is primarily a festive meal. The prophets, on the other hand, Vernes portrays as innovators in opposition to the sacerdotal mentality of the ritual specialists of the Israel of the second temple. Significantly, in these studies Vernes always uses “sacrifice” in the plural, choosing to speak of “sacrifices.” (Maurice Vernes, Du prétendu polythéisme des Hébreux, 2 vols (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1891), vol. 2, 180–246. Maurice Vernes, Histoire Sainte. Première partie: Éléments d’histoire juive (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1891), 112f. 121 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, 72, 79, 86.
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argue that the source of this the anti-theorizing methodology is what has been variously called the ethos of the ‘scientific’, ‘positivist’ or ‘historicist’ history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As practitioners of this kind of scholarship, the Liberal Protestants resisted theorizing most things in religion, with sacrifice only being one feature of religion conspicuously over-determined for such resistance in the world of the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section. One way to bring home the particularly French Liberal Protestant nature of this reluctance to theorize sacrifice is the varied reception by Liberal Protestants of different nationalities of the theories of sacrifice of Robertson Smith. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Smith’s work provoked great interest as a theory of sacrifice in many of the leading nations of the academic world. Outside hyper-historicist France, for example, major figures in the scientific study of religion were particularly enthusiastic about importance of Smith’s theory for the study of sacrifice. In particular, they applauded its originality and daring as a theory. While J. G. Frazer, a close friend of Smith’s at Cambridge was naturally delighted to see in Smith’s work exactly the main thrust of his own, his words of praise are nonetheless worth recording.122 In his obituary of Smith, Frazer wrote of Smith’s theoretical achievements. Smith was the first to show . . . (that mystical or sacramental sacrifices) are not confined to Christianity, but are common to the heathen and even savage religions. . . . The discovery was Robertson Smith’s, and it is of capital importance for the history of religion.123
The liberal Protestant pioneers of the scientific study of religion at Harvard, seemed equally taken by Smith’s theory.124 In 1895, within a year after its first publication, Semiticist and general student of 122 J. G. Frazer, “William Robertson Smith,” Gorgon’s Head (London: Macmillan, 1927), 278–90, see especially pp. 288–9 where Frazer notes how Smith finds primitive forms of Christianity in a “low stage of society and in a very crude phase of thought.” (288). 123 J. G. Frazer, “William Robertson Smith,” Gorgon’s Head, 288. Yet, seeming to take back his own words, Frazer confessed to Mauss that he had “never accepted his ( Robertson Smith’s) derivation of sacrifice in general from totemism. The theory has always seemed to me artificial and destitute of adequate evidence.” (Quoted in Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 154, from a letter of Frazer to Mauss, 14 July 1899.) 124 See especially the journal, The New World, published from 1892 to 1900. Prof. C. H. Toy reviewed William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series. London: A & C Black, 1894), 389.
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religion, Crawford Howard Toy (1836–1919), reviewed Smith’s Lectures for Harvard’s journal The New World.125 There, Toy reported that Smith’s lectures “were received with marked consideration by all persons interested in Semitic and general religious study.” Indeed, Toy was, as Frazer in the first instance, especially excited by Smith’s theoretical innovations. The Lectures on the Religion of the Semites was, in fact “revolutionary in its teaching. It not only attacked the subject from a new point, but also presented a novel, and to many persons a startling, theory of the primitive idea of sacrifice. . . .” In conclusion, Toy was in no doubt as to the consequential nature of what Robertson Smith had written about sacrifice: “The bearing of this theory on the New Testament idea of sacrifice, and on the conception of piacular offering everywhere is obvious.”126 In France, Freethinker and Jewish scholars, such as Salomon Reinach and the Durkheimians enthused over Smith’s theoretical conceptions. Accordingly, they either followed Robertson Smith’s lead, or at least made it the basis for ‘conversation’ about the theory of sacrifice set out in his The Religion of the Semites. Reinach proudly wrote: “When I began, in 1900, under Smith’s and Frazer’s influence, to lecture in France on taboos and totemism, I had to explain these terms, which nobody understood at that time.”127 In hyperbolic terms, Smith’s self-anointed representative in France, referred to Smith as “the author of a veritable revolution in the study of religion.”128 The Durkheimians, despite their reservations about Robertson Smith’s inductivism, made him into a virtual heroic precursor of their own theory of sacrifice.129 Many general features of Durkheim’s approach to religion may be linked to Smith: “magic is opposed to religion as the individual is opposed to the social”; the sacred is marked by ambiguity130 and “‘contagiousness’”;131 totemism is connected
125 Robert S. Shepard, God’s People in the Ivory Tower (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1991), Chapter IV. 126 C. H. Toy, review of William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series. London: A & C Black, 1894), The New World 4 (1895): 389. 127 Salomon Reinach, “The Growth of Mythological Study,” The Quarterly Review 215 (1911), 438. 128 Salomon Reinach, “La théorie du sacrifice” (1902) in Salomon Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, vol. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1922), 104. 129 Text. 130 Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith, Durkheim and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for The Elementary Forms,” 192. 131 Ibidem, 185.
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to the celebration of a communion feast;132 religion is conceived dynamogenically—as a locus of forces;133 religion is really a practice, and therefore we should attend to its practices like ritual and morality, and to its pragmatic functions.134 The spiritual life is at bottom simply the moral life; only within a social environment can our moral natures be realized.135 By contrast, the diffidence and reserve of the French Liberal Protestant historians of religions toward Smith and those following him as a theorist is striking. Although the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section took some note of the virtues of Smith’s theory, they generally seemed cool to him. Taking especially sharp aim at Smith’s theorizing tendencies was the 1890 feature review article of the first series of Lectures on the Religion of the Semites for the Revue de l’histoire des religions. To wit: “we are far from believing that the same evidence could not just as easily support a different set of conclusions,” the reviewer concludes.136 This distaste for Smith’s new approaches to sacrifice was extended in turn to Liberal Protestant revulsion, if that is not too strong a word, for those aligned with Smith, like the Durkheimians. Specifically citing Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice as a case in point, Jean Réville wrote that Durkheimian sociology “had
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Ibidem, 185. Robert Alun Jones, and W. Paul Vogt, “The Problem of Religion and the Duality of Human Nature,” 47f, 55. 134 Ibidem, 55. 135 W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 55. As for sacrifice, Smith and, at first Durkheim, saw original sacrifice as a joyous alimentary communion sacrament linked with totemism. In The Elementary Forms, Durkheim, of course, demonstrated this pattern from the Australian ethnographic materials, but tellingly in Smith’s methodological style of “The ‘one well-conducted experiment.’” (W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories, 1984), 68.) As for the totemic aspect of sacrifice, numerous critics—among them Hubert and Mauss—variously sought to sever the links among alimentary communion, sacrifice and totemism. Or they denied that such sacrifices, if they did occur, were either not accompanied by a communion meal, or were early in an evolutionary scheme. (Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith, Durkheim and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for ‘The Elementary Forms,’” 191–6.) Despite such objections from his closest confederates, Durkheim persisted in asserting that the Intichiuma was a “totemic sacrament and the evolutionary origin of sacrifice” Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith, Durkheim and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for ‘The Elementary Forms,’” 196. long after it had been shown that no necessary connection prevailed between totemic belief and alimentary sacramental communion in Australia or elsewhere. 136 S. Arthur Strong, review of William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, First Series, Revue de l’histoire des religions. 21 (1890), 326. 133
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seduced many of those who study the history of religions.” To Réville, ‘sociology’ was little better than a mindless fad like the rage for socialism in his day.137 Having seen how the French Liberal Protestants stood out in their resistance to theorizing sacrifice, even among their liberal Protestant peers in the study of religion in other parts of the world, the question then is why? Why did the French Liberal Protestants think they were right in this resistance to theorizing sacrifice—especially when other Liberal Protestants in other parts of the world apparently did not share their view? I shall argue that this resistance to theorizing sacrifice is peculiar to the liberal French Protestant scene, in particular to the ‘scientific’ style of doing history of religions in which they had been reared, reinforced as this method was by various related political reasons as well. This method of ‘scientific’ history and its rootedness in the political situation of the French Liberal Protestants finally deterred them from theorizing sacrifice. Let me then conclude this chapter by showing what this method of ‘scientific’ history was and how it conformed to political agendas favored by the Liberal Protestants. 9. ‘Scientific’ History, Positivist History, Protestant History In the France of our period, history was commonly called the “Protestant science.”138 This was so primarily because of the revolutionary impact of the work done by a generation of French Protestant historians from the middle of the nineteenth century across a whole field of subjects, religion being one of them.139 The most prestigious institutions of academic history in France—the Revue historique, the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fourth Section (history and philology) in 1868, the Fifth Section (the “sciences religieuses”) of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1886, and the learned journal associated with it, the Revue de l’histoire des religions—all boasted Protestant
137 Jean Réville, “Les Phases successives de l’histoire des religions,” 221 and 221 note 2. 138 Quoted without attribution in François La Planche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions; les orientations de la Revue de l’histoire de religions,” La Tradition française en sciences religieuses, Michel Despland, ed. (Québec: Université Laval, 1991), 97. 139 See, for example, Jean Réville, Liberal Christianity, 17.
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leadership. First among this number and founder of the Revue historique was Gabriel Monod. For Monod, history was an objective, scientific enterprise, called somewhat imperialistically, “la méthode historique.”140 The belief in such a ‘scientific’ history was imagined to provide a moral fulcrum, an absolute foundation, upon which various claims made in the public sphere could be adjudicated. Protestant devotees to Monod’s ideal of objective history could thus represent themselves as standing in a neutral place free of even their own special interests. And, in light of the national prestige of the Revue historique and their location at the ‘center of the world’ in Paris, capital of universal humanity university, they could speak with the authority of ‘science.’ A key figure, exemplifying all the qualities of the Liberal Protestant ‘scientific’ history was a former member of the Protestant Faculty of theology in Paris, Maurice Vernes (1845–1923).141 Issuing from a moderate evangelical background, he took his first degree in theology from the Protestant seminary at Montauban (1866), writing a thesis on the notion of redemption as it might have been understood in Jesus’ time, and then took his doctorate at Montaubon after further studies in Strasbourg. His chief legacy to the study of religion was his founding in 1880 of the most eminent periodical in the study of religion, the Revue d’histoire des religions. François La Planche tells us that Vernes conceived the Revue d’histoire des religions along the lines of Monod’s Revue historique’s “prudent empiricism”—a cautious approach “which only intends to advance on sure ground.”142 Like Gabriel Monod for the field of general historical scholarship, Vernes exemplified the tradition of ‘scientific’ history, even to the extent of writing a history of religions, which may fairly be called ‘positivist.’
140 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Les historiens protestants dans le renouveau de l’historiographie française,” in Actes du colloque: Les protestants dans les débuts de la Troisième République (1871–1885) (Paris, 3–6 Octobre 1978), André Encrevé et Michel Richard, eds. (Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1979), 65. 141 Vernes was the son of the illustrious Louis Vernes (1815–1906), the president of the Paris Protestant consistory and president as well of the Protestant Supreme Commission. (Philippe Alphandéry, “Nécrologie, Revue d’histoire des religions 88 (1923): 141–2; André Encrevé, “La première crise de la Faculté de theologie de Paris: la démission de Maurice Vernes,” 86–92.). Nurtured by his experiences of religious liberalism in the Netherlands and by his study of the higher criticism of the bible in Strasbourg, Vernes had been a theological liberal from an early age. 142 François La Planche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions; les orientations de la Revue de l’histoire de religions,” 96.
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In his introductory remarks to the first number, Vernes declared allegiance to the ‘scientific’ history of the Revue historique: the “Revue (d’histoire des religions) is purely historical; it excludes all work presenting a polemical or dogmatic character.”143 Other commentators would describe such sentiments differently, saying that Vernes was just an “historical positivist and rationalist”144—a fact doubtless reflected in the initial support Ernest Renan’s patron, Émile Guimet, lavished on Vernes’s journal. In a short treatment of the history of Israel, Vernes described his method of doing history of religions accordingly: This little volume, written by a Protestant who remains attached to the tradition of his church and to Christianity, embodies an ambition: that by means of the respectful and truly objective way in which the facts have been presented, it will be just as useful to Catholics, Protestants and Jews as to the unchurched. This is a book of history, and as such excludes theological doctrine.145
Following the lead of the Protestants connected with the Revue historique, Vernes illustrates how profoundly anti-theoretical these scholars were in their dedication to so-called ‘scientific history.’ So determined were they to blunt the power of the Catholics aligned with the periodical, Revue des questions historiques, and so convinced were they that this meant rigid adherence to a strict historicism, that they totally ruled out theoretical intrusions into their work.146 For them, the best way to defeat the self-serving Catholic reading of the history of France—a kind of ‘mythologized’ history—was to ‘demythologize’ by launching assaults upon their factuality with a host of well-documented facts. A good example of this debunking strategy close to home comes from the Durkheimian Henri Hubert’s first major publication in the history of religion, his 1899 “Étude sur la formation des états de Église.” Naturally enough, it appeared in the prestigious Revue historique, then 143
Maurice Vernes, “Introduction,” Revue d’histoire des religions 1 (1880), 17. André Encrevé, “La première crise de la Faculté de theologie de Paris: la démission de Maurice Vernes,” 92. 145 Maurice Vernes, Histoire Sainte. Première partie: Éléments d’histoire juive, vii. This did not prevent Vernes from arguing for the possibility of a theology devised as a “positive science”. By this, Vernes seemed to have meant something akin to a purely critical treatment of religion. Maurice Vernes, Mélanges de critique religieuse (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1880), 301–10. 146 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Les historiens protestants dans le renouveau de l’historiographie française,” 65. The Revue des Questions historiques began publication in 1866. 144
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edited by its founder, the Protestant, Gabriel Monod.147 Hubert’s two part article totaled over seventy pages of densely fact-ridden documentation. In it, Hubert sought, among other things, to demythologize the Catholic tradition of the “Donation of Constantine.”148 By appeal to this (fictitious) grant, the papacy had justified its autonomous rights to political supremacy in the Western Empire, and thus in the future papal states. Rather than such a pact with Constantine, Hubert argued that theological controversies and political machinations lay behind the myth. Subsequent to Emperor Leo III’s declaration of the prohibition of image worship, “the popes profited” from the ensuing “profound breakdown” between the Church and empire to carve out an independent domain of authority for the papacy.149 The historical basis of absolute Petrine authority was also dealt a blow by Hubert’s analysis of the Pact of Quierzy. Any claim to papal absolutism, still a sore issue at the turn of the century, was apparently compromised by arrangements the papacy had made with the Franks. Concluding his articles on an ominous rhetorical note, Hubert said: In 750 . . . . Rome entered into a client relation with the Franks, and did not seek to get out of it. Will Rome be autonomous? Did the . . . Franks share in the power of the pope? Such is the suit which remained to be argued between the successors of [Pope] Stephen and the heirs of Pepin.150
As history then, this work of Hubert’s reflected a critical demythologizing treatment of a sacred legend, with present-day political relevance as well, done up in massively documented, factual style. The bearing of such scholarship upon the status of the Gallican church, the Church-State struggles during the Separation Crisis and upon the efforts of Catholic liberals to soften the hard authoritarianism of Popes Pius IX and Pius X, as well as the edicts of the First Vatican Council seem obvious. Then, one ought not forget the ambiguous role Napoleon III played at once assisting the Italians of the Piedmont against the Austrians, but at same time protecting the
147 Henri Hubert, “Étude sur la formation des états de église,” Revue historique 69 (1899): 1–40, 241–72. Regarding Monod’s “scientific history,” see William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 52. 148 Henri Hubert, “Étude sur la formation des états de église,” 267. 149 Ibidem, 2. 150 Ibidem, 272.
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Papal States against the new republic. This was exactly the kind of engaged and critical, ‘scientific’ history of religions which Renan and the Liberal Protestants encouraged in aid of their “brand new episode of the Wars of Religion”151 against perceived Catholic hegemony. This is history Maurice Vernes would celebrate in particular. Of a piece with his vigilance against theological intrusions into history, Vernes had a distinct and strong “aversion” to the introduction of what he called “philosophy” into historical narrative.152 By ‘philosophy,’ Vernes meant the theoretical work of the great system-builders of the nineteenth century, such as Hegel, Vico or Comte. Given his resistance to theory in the academic study of religion, to the so-called ‘philosophical constructs’ in history, Vernes wrote nothing remotely theoretical on ritual sacrifice. His discussions typically, even dutifully, describe situations, but without theoretical comment; they are further always fixed tightly within historically restricted domains. In the historical context of the religion of Israel,153 for example, Vernes summarizes the contents of various classes of biblical books, e.g., legal, prophetic and so on, reporting the then standard line on what each has to say about ritual sacrifice. Thus, in the Pentateuch and “historical” books (following Wellhausen), sacrifice is primarily a festive meal. The prophets, on the other hand, Vernes portrays as innovators in opposition to the sacerdotal mentality of the ritual specialists of the Israel of the second temple. Significantly, in these studies Vernes always uses ‘sacrifice’ in the plural, choosing to speak of “sacrifices.” Vernes thus records his reservations about making general theoretical claims—even that “sacrifice” names a single notion or institution, which one might compare outside narrow historical contexts—across cultural and historical boundaries. Further, Vernes adds no evaluative comment to these descriptions of ritual sacrifices. He does not, as do William Robertson Smith or Albert Réville, either denounce or celebrate these practices—even to the point of letting human sacrifice in ancient Israel pass without comment. Thus, in his attempts to keep history 151 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Les historiens protestants dans le renouveau de l’historiographie française,” 65. 152 Jean Réville, “L’histoire des religions. Sa méthode et son rôle, d’après les travaux récents de MM. Maurice Vernes, Goblet d’Alviella, et du P. van den Gheyn,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 14 (1886), 357. 153 Maurice Vernes, Du prétendu polythéisme des Hébreux, vol. 2, 180–246. Maurice Vernes, Histoire Sainte. Première partie: Éléments d’histoire juive, 112f.
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solidly based on ‘facts,’ by keeping it clear of the historical constructions typical of the great system-builders, Vernes also put up barriers to the proposal of theoretical models to gather and interpret the ‘facts.’ 10. Vernes and the Politics of Methodology Before leaving Vernes, it would be well to notice that even though we may remain skeptical about attaining his ideals of objectivity, Vernes and others of his political persuasion thought they had more than ample warrant to attain such ideals. The case of Vernes shows in particular how tightly his scientific style of history of religions was bound to his republican political agendas. As historian François La Planche puts it: “Vernes’s project with the Revue d’histoire des religions was perfectly situated within the context of the vast republican cultural enterprise—which naturally enough was not distinct from a desire for political transformation.”154 Of Vernes’ patriotic and humanistic devotion to the subject, François La Planche adds: If the love of the French fatherland, if the attachment to the unity of its heritage could only be promoted by a new approach to the history of the nation, less polemical, more comprehensive, could not one think that the love of humanity and republican virtue, would be favored by a new approach to universal religious history?155
As if confirming these words, Albert Réville observed that commitment to scientific history had a political and religious flavor all its own in the late nineteenth century. It functioned as “the great school of the respect for consciences,” said Réville.156 History should be a strict science, because science favored republicanism. Science alone could withstand the ever dangerous political and religious dogmatism emanating from the legitimist, monarchist Catholic “intransigents.” Thus, as we saw with Protestant Gabriel Monod’s conception of a scientific (read, positivist) history profession in general, republican politics were right at the heart of liberal Protestant Maurice Vernes’ commitment to the scientific (read, positivist) study of religion.
154 François La Planche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions: les orientations de la Revue d’histoire des religions.” 155 Ibidem, 96. 156 Jacques Marty, Albert Réville: sa vie, son oeuvre, 139.
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This sentiment recalls how scholars like Vernes, and others concerned with the moral stability of the Third Republic, believed that a scientifically conceived study of religion might likewise play a role in maintaining the republican consensus.157 Vernes’ positivism—his “prudent empiricism”—in the historical study of the scriptures afforded Protestant religious liberals leverage against Catholic theological historians typified by the tradition of Bossuet, or the authority exercised by the Catholic hierarchy, recently reinvigorated by the First Vatican Council’s proclamation of papal infallibility.158 From the Protestant side, paralleling the Catholic church historian Louis Duchesne, he showed the way a secular republic would deal with the study of religion by urging a “purely scientific” approach to the subject.159 Keeping in mind the tolerant rationalism of Renan, Vernes sought a secular study of religion which could be used as a resource by any religion or even by atheists.160 As one might expect from what we know of political alignments among historians, the political liberalism of Vernes corresponded to his assumption of a variety of positivism as the appropriate historiography for religious studies. In the France of our time, academic studies can be seen to have carried a burden of civic and moral concerns. An academic subject like history took on political significance, because it bore upon how the story of Protestants in France was to be told or how various issues of particular concern to the minority Protestants community, such as the matter of individual human rights, would be cast.161 The study of history in France of the early decades of the Third Republic exemplifies this as well as any other example, as we have seen in reviewing the career of Gabriel Monod’s republican Revue historique. From what we have seen as well of Renan and the politicized historical profession in an earlier discussion, we already know that the history of religions was deeply implicated in the political strategies
157 William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession, 11. 158 François La Planche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions; les orientations de la Revue de l’histoire de religions,” 90. 159 Ibidem, 96. 160 Ibidem, 102. 161 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “La Naissance de la Revue historique (1876–1885),” Revue historique 255 (1976): 333. Carbonell goes so far as to call the Revue historique the “organ of a school, just like its rival” [the royalist Catholic Revue des questions historiques] (351).
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of both university and nation. Albert Réville too joined this chorus in 1884 noting that historical studies should “guide” our society in “resolving the grave difficulties presented by the problems of the hour.”162 This struggle continued right up and beyond the period when Hubert and Mauss wrote Sacrifice, and thus becomes a necessary background for understanding the issues at stake. Mauss at least felt that the key to social reconstruction was a profound knowledge of the past. In 1904, he said we “ought not be come absorbed in the past; but that history and ethnography ought better to serve to understand the present in order to aid humanity to take stock of its future.”163 It is then only by understanding the relation of the academic discipline of history of religions in relation to these political and social agendas that we can see how theorizing about sacrifice was discouraged among the scholars of the French Liberal Protestant community. 11. Appreciating Ernest Renan We have already met most of the figures of the Fifth Section who will figure in this story of the ‘scientific’ history of religion, Liberal Protestants, Albert and Jean Réville, and their colleague, Maurice Vernes. But, the initial responsibility for the introduction of these new critical historical methods in the area of the study of religion rests with dissident Catholic, Ernest Renan (1823–92).164 Born in the traditionally conservative Catholic milieu of Brittany, Renan trained for the academic clergy, specializing in philology and history with a special attention to Jewish studies. He studied Hebrew at the seminary of Saint Sulpice, and maintained his love of the language throughout his life.165 Renan along with certain other Gentile savants, such as Maurice Vernes, was even recognized for his work in Jewish studies with election into the Société des Études Juives. He published major works on the history of Semitic languages (1855), a seven
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Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 4. Marcel Mauss, “Philosophie religieuse,” L’Année sociologique 7 (1904): 201. 164 Having said this, In a way, it should be added that like Renan himself, critical history of religions, whether Protestant, Catholic or Jewish, ultimately owe their critical historical methods of studying religion to the German Protestant biblical critics. 165 R. M. Chadbourne, Ernest Renan (New York: Twayne, 1968), 27. 163
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volume study of the origins of Christianity (1863–81), a five volume history of the Jews (1887–93).166 Renan was named professor at the Collège de France in 1862, only to be suspended for having referred to Jesus as an “incomparable man” in his inaugural lecture!167 One year later, with the publication of his rationalist Vie de Jésus, Renan was dismissed entirely. He did not regain his chair until the advent of the Third Republic. Like many others of his generation, Renan’s scholarly and personal religious life turned around with his encounter with the scientific history of nineteenth century German Protestant biblical scholarship such as Baur, Lücke, Weise, Zeller and Strauss.168 This encounter doomed Renan to insuperable conflict with the church’s teaching on the inerrancy and immutability of the Christian scriptures. In 1845, he finally and reluctantly left the church169 over the very ‘Protestant’ issues of the freedom of intellectual inquiry and the liberty of the individual conscience.170 While never being capable of converting to Protestantism, Ernest Renan was so taken with the liberating ideals of German scientific study of sacred texts, that he is reputed to have expressed the wish to have “been born a German Protestant!”—a notable remark for an enthusiastic French patriot after 1870.171 About as far as Renan could go toward conversion was to give over the education of his daughter to liberal Protestants.172 The loyalty Renan once displayed for Catholicism was now however transferred to “la religion”—what in reality was the religious humanism we have already identified as characteristic of the Liberal Protestants. Professionally, however, Renan’s religious energies were transferred to the academic study of religion. As a dissident Catholic and humanist free thinker from his early twenties, Renan was an
166 Histoire générale des langues sémitiques (1855) Les Origines du Christianisme 7 vols (1863–81) L’Histoire du peuple d’Israël 5 vols, (1887–93). 167 Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son oeuvre, 396. 168 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Les historiens protestants dans le renouveau de l’historiographie française,” 61. 169 In the judgment of Sir James Frazer, Renan retained a profound sympathy for Roman Catholicism and remained emotionally attached to the church all of his life. ( James G. Frazer, “Ernest Renan et la méthode de l’histoire des religions” (1920) Sur Ernest Renan (Paris: Claude Aveline, 1923), 38. 170 R. M. Chadbourne, Ernest Renan, 18, 25. 171 Ibidem, 94. This is drawn from one of his letters to his beloved sister, Harriet. 172 Daniel Robert, “Les intellectuels d’origine non-protestants dans le protestantisme des debuts de la Troisième République,” 91–8.
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avowed devotee of the ideals of criticism as a “positive, creative faculty.”173 His positivism led him both to appreciate religion as an object of scientific study and to make science itself a kind of religion in his life.174 Albert Réville felt that Renan’s commission was to assert the autonomy of scientific endeavor, while at the same time not provoking or scandalizing the Catholic faithful.175 Renan thereby set the tempo for the relatively tolerant, undogmatic, though critical and skeptical style of modern religious studies in France of which the Révilles, Léon Marillier, Salomon Reinach, the “Lévis” (Israel, Isidore, Sylvain, Louis-Germain), James Darmesteter, Alfred Loisy, and Durkheimians like Hubert and Mauss were all beneficiaries. His influence with education minister Jules Ferry led to the creation of the history of religions chair at the Collège de France, which Albert Réville occupied from 1880. Renan was thus nothing less than the “valiant precursor” of the renaissance of religious studies of the last third of the nineteenth century, and the natural point of departure for this chapter.176 As far as understanding the kind of historical study of religion prevailing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and thus understanding that generation’s attitude to theorizing in the study of religion, Renan is essential. Virtually singlehandedly, he was responsible for motivating and directly influencing the generation of France’s religious historians who created the study of religion in the France of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A list of these includes the chief scholars of religion of the day—the Liberal Protestant (Albert Réville), modernist Catholics (Abbé Louis Duchesne, Alfred Loisy), and modernist Jewish ( James Darmesteter, Sylvain Lévi).177 Albert Réville, for example, credits Renan for having revived
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R. M. Chadbourne, Ernest Renan, 39. Ibidem, 46. 175 Albert Réville, “Introduction: L’enseignement des sciences religieuses a l’école des hautes études,” Bibliothèque de l’école des hautes études: Sciences religieuses, vol. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1889): x. 176 Albert Réville, “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” 393. 177 After a youthful education in traditional Jewish learning, Lévi was poised to continue in Jewish studies. But as a student in Paris, Lévi gradually resolved to do oriental studies, even though he could not decide about a speciality. So Sylvain Lévi sought the advice of Ernest Renan, himself a former élève of the Indologist, Eugene Burnouf. Renan had always felt a special affinity for Indian studies, in no small part because it was one of the world’s great civilizations. Moreover, Renan confided in Lévi that Abel Bergaigne, the incumbent in the chair of Indian religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth Section, had no élèves under 174
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“critical erudition” in France—something which in Réville’s eyes had ceased with the suppression of his own intellectual and religious ancestors, the Huguenots.178 The great student of Zoroastrianism, James Darmesteter, was known tellingly as the “Jewish Renan.”179 Thus, much of what developed in the study of religion in France, during the time when Hubert and Mauss wrote Sacrifice, can be linked with Renan—either as model of what good work should be, or as an example of what was wrong with the history of religions.180 Good, then, as the Ernest Renan was for the ability of the study of religion to meet the canons ‘scientific’ history of the nineteenth century, he was not good at all for promoting a history of religions more informed by the interpretive nature of human affairs or for a history written with a certain theoretical flair and originality. Renan remained a positivist in intellectual style throughout his life. Therefore, despite his interest and approval of sacrifice, Ernest Renan was not about to encourage the creation of a theory of sacrifice any more than were the positivist liberal Protestant historians of religion whom he had inspired and promoted.181 He simply assumed one ready-to-hand from the Roman Catholics.
his direction. Sylvain Lévi took up his studies with Bergaigne, and thus began his scholarly life. ( Jean Filliozat, “Diversité d’oeuvre de Sylvain Lévi,” in Hommage à Sylvain Lévi: pour le centenaire de sa naissance (1963), Luciano Petech, ed. (Paris: Bocard, 1964), 53. 178 Albert Réville, nécrologie for Ernest Renan, Revue de l’histoire des religions 26 (1892): 222. Albert Réville, “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” 393–5. On Renan, see André Couture, “Le Recours à la notion de syncrétisme chez Renan,” La tradition française en sciences religieuses: pages d’histoire, Les cahiers de recherche en sciences de la religion, volume 10, Michel Despland, ed. (Québec: Université Laval, 1991), 109–28. An institutional confirmation of this line of influence can be made by noting the succession in the chair of the study of religion at the Collège de France. Renan was first, followed by Albert Réville, Jean Réville and then Alfred Loisy. French academic authorities knew what they were doing in making such appointments in the heart of Catholic France even at the height of a Catholic revival. 179 Muzlak May, Jean, “Un Renan Juif: James Darmesteter (1849–1894)”, L’Univers Israelite 90/10 (29 Nov 1935): 151–2. This is the first of a six part series on Darmesteter published in volume 91, numbers 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, and 19 (1936). 180 Comte Eugène Goblet d’Alviella, review of Jean Réville, Les Phases successives de l’histoire des religions. Here Goblet lumps Renan, the Révilles and Loisy as doing history of religions in approximately the same way. 181 Renan argued that the only way France could recover from its defeat to the Prussians was to adopt the spirit of sacrifice for the nation, even if this meant submitting to the discipline of a monarchic regime. (Ernest Renan, “La Réforme intellectuelle et moral de la France,” in La Réforme intellectuelle et moral de la France, P. E. Charvet, ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 45.
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12. Renan and the Civic Uses of Positivism
What becomes immediately clear as one attends to the study of religion in France in the nineteenth century is its political location amidst the struggles between republican and reactionary Catholic forces. In the France of 1870 and beyond into the fin-de-siècle, the study of religions was political because political life was riven with religious issues. It was thus perfectly natural that religious studies in France can point to Renan as a man equally active in both letters and politics.182 He was among the first to appreciate and exploit the influence of the study of religion upon politics, and the political nature of some of the things done under the cover of the academic study of religion. Culminating in debates over the Church’s role in primary and secondary education, this struggle was finally resolved in the Separation crisis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In our context, the critical event was the Third Republic’s dissolution of the Catholic Faculty of theology in the Sorbonne, and its replacement in 1886 by the Fifth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études under the leadership of Albert Réville. Thus as with many things religious in the France of the nineteenth century, politics was deeply involved. Renan shows us once more how politics and the study of religion trafficked in each other’s domains. How religion was studied had political implications for the French of the fin-de-siècle; political exigencies likewise shaped what would be permitted by the way of state sponsorship of the study of religion. Accordingly that journal of the new scientific (Protestant) critical history, the Revue historique, was created in 1876 deliberately to oppose the kind of history then being done by reactionary Catholic historians of the legitimist, ultramontane and clerical Revue des questions historiques.183 The Catholic journal was “conceived by its founders as an instrument of a crusade, animated by the spirit of the Counterreformation.”184 On the other side of this classic French divide, the Revue historique was lined up with the republican liberals, Free Thinkers and secularizing Protestant Liberals. The subsequent struggle between
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Albert Réville, “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” 393. Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Les historiens protestants dans le renouveau de l’historiographie française,” 65. The Revue des Questions historiques began publication in 1866. 184 Ibidem, 65. 183
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partisans of each side was in the eyes of a recent historian: “a brand new episode of the Wars of Religion.”185 In this context of politicized scholarship, writing history was itself, of course, political. In particular, critical history enabled aggrieved groups, such as the French Protestants, to demythologize—and thus delegitimize Catholic history, always a hegemonic threat given the power of Catholic forces in the nation. Therefore, from an epistemological point of view, this critical or scientific history writing worked to discouraged attempts to theorize or interpret historical materials. Keeping close to the ‘facts’ in the name of ‘scientific’ history was enough to achieve the goals of demythologizing the Catholic history of France. Why, with the facts securely in hand, and science on one’s side, had one need of theories?
185
Ibidem, 65.
CHAPTER FOUR
BRINGING THEORY (AND THEOLOGY) BACK IN 1. Vernes and the Historicism Too Historicist In the previous chapter, I have shown how a combination of Liberal Protestant theological biases against sacrifice, historicist methodological proscriptions against theorizing it, all the while bolstered by the political situation of the French Protestants, seem to have squelched the formation of a Liberal Protestant theory of sacrifice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this chapter, I want to show how, as the political situation radically changed during the First World War, that a new Liberal Protestant theory (here a theology) of sacrifice began ever so slightly to form, even against the grain of native French Protestant objections to it. As far as the activity of theorizing (and theorizing sacrifice in particular) goes, then, I shall be arguing that theorizing sacrifice is somewhat ‘opportunistic.’ In this sense, theorizing sacrifice not only evidences a response to the conditions of life, to cultural, political and social situations and strategies, but in some sense seems caused by them. Without getting unduly pragmatic about theorizing, here, I believe, we find theorizing which occurs far from the proverbial ‘ivory tower’ of abstract thinking, but instead is dramatically shaped by the real lives of theorists. Let me begin this chapter with the emergence of theorizing, granted still of a highly theological sort, within the very heartland of anti-theoretical ‘scientific’ history in the Fifth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The reign of an anti-theorizing historicism in the study of religion, so strong, despite its Liberal Protestant theological underpinnings, and so well fortified by its social and political location within the Third Republic was, however, perhaps never quite as secure as it made itself out to be. A series of telling incidents, however, exposed those very theological underpinnings and perhaps covert theorizing among those self-proclaimed paragons of ‘scientific’ history and secularism. At the center of these disruptions over theory was Maurice Vernes, showing once more the wisdom of Terry Eagleton’s claim that theorizing is a sure sign of things gone “amiss.”
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Like many of his liberal co-religionists, Vernes’s scholarly and personal religious life turned around with his encounter with the scientific history of nineteenth century German Protestant biblical scholarship of the likes of Baur, Lücke, Weise, Zeller and Strauss.1 Vernes held posts both in the Paris Protestant theological seminary (from 1877) and in the Fifth Section. He had trained as a Semiticist, and became a charter member of the Fifth Section in the chair of biblical exegesis and the religions and history of the people of Israel. He went on to a higher degree at Strasbourg (1871), and a doctorate at Montauban (1874), where his dissertation dealt with the gaining first hand experience of the methods of biblical criticism from its masters. But, the orthodox Protestants were ever watchful of the liberal Vernes, and finally succeeded in driving him from his seminary post.2 Early in his tenure at the Protestant seminary, the biblical literalists who dominated the academic agenda, attacked Vernes’ critical or ‘scientific’ historical studies of the Christian scriptures. But, they were even more enraged when Vernes put theologizing to one side and urged that history of religions should be taught as an “independent science” required of all students in the schools of France. After being censured for denying the validity of the belief in divine Providence in a public lecture, Vernes resigned his post. In 1880, he failed to win the chair of history of religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, which subsequently went to Albert Réville. In the end, however, Vernes, like other disaffected Liberals, eventually moved over completely into the Fifth Section, and into the history of religions where at first he found the security of an intellectual home which the inhospitable Protestant Faculty of Theology refused to provide. Vernes remained in the Fifth Section until his death in 1923. Despite having apparently found refuge from conservative theological censure in the Fifth Section, Vernes’ woes had only begun. Hard upon his stormy departure from the Protestant Faculty of
1 Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Les historiens protestants dans le renouveau de l’historiographie française,” in Actes du colloque: Les protestants dans les débuts de la Troisième République (1871–1885) (Paris, 3–6 Octobre 1978), André Encrevé et Michel Richard, eds. (Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1979), 61. 2 André Encrevé, “La première crise de la Faculté de theologie de Paris: la démission de Maurice Vernes,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 136 (1990), 91. Van Hamel also mentions that in the Dutch secondary schools, history of religions occupies “first place” of honor in the curriculum. (“L’enseignement de l’histoire des religions en Hollande” in the Revue d’histoire des religions 2 (1880), 379–85.
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Theology, his work was attacked by his fellow Protestant Liberals in the Fifth Section! Worse yet, chief among Vernes’ attackers were the leaders of the Fifth Section—both Albert and Jean Réville—joined as well as by the then liberal doyen of the Protestant Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne, Frédéric Lichtenberger.3 In the mid to late 1880’s, these erstwhile champions of the so-called ‘historical method’ or ‘scientific history’ laid an odd charge at the feet of their long-time colleague. In effect, their view of Vernes’ ‘scientific history’ was that it was just too scientific, too historicist! In the eyes of the Révilles and others, Vernes’ histories ended up being just catalogues of facts, exercises in “rigorous sifting” and “scrupulous” verification of data, and nothing more.4 According to the canons of the scientific historical craft of his day, Vernes refused to commit himself to discoursing on the meaning of the materials he studied. Ironically, then, even though Liberal Protestants like the Révilles were dedicated to an ideal of ‘scientific’ history, Vernes’ practice of that very scientific style of doing history put him into conflict with them. The Liberals wanted more. This ‘more’ which the French liberal Protestants wanted was, I am arguing in this book, theology. Put otherwise, in the course of their critique of Vernes historicism in the mid to late 1880’s, the French liberal Protestants exposed their allegedly theory-free ‘scientific’ history of religions as being deeply implicated in a confessional theological effort. Vernes may not have been totally surprised by such attacks from colleagues otherwise so close in fundamental beliefs about the “science religieuse.” As early as 1880, shortly after his arrival in the Fifth Section and a good half decade or so before the liberal Protestants
3 We will soon see how the Révilles and Vernes parted ways. Quite unexpected from theological liberals, however, was the opposition of the otherwise undogmatic editor of the Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses and Vernes’ superior in the Protestant Faculty of Theology, Frédéric Lichtenberger. (Frédéric Lichtenberger, ed., Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1889). Reminiscent of the recent conflict over academic freedom for Catholic theologians between the American, Father Joseph Curran, and the Vatican, Lichtenberger denied Vernes’ demands for unlimited Lehrfreiheit, and thus forced Vernes to resign his post. (André Encrevé, “La première crise de la Faculté de theologie de Paris: la démission de Maurice Vernes,” 97–100. 4 Jean Réville, “L’histoire des religions. Sa méthode et son rôle, d’après les travaux récents de M. Maurice Vernes, Goblet d’Alviella, et du P. van den Gheyn,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 14 (1886), 349, 357. Comte Eugène Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 12 (1885), 170–8.
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had attacked Vernes’ ‘scientific history,’ Vernes already warned of what he felt was an incipient theologizing tendency within the Fifth Section. The Liberals, said Vernes, wished to insert what turned out to be theological “mental constructs” or models into the data, but which had not themselves ‘emerged’ from the “facts.”5 On the face of it, although such interpretation of the data might only seem like a salutary way of breaking from the narrow strictures of a ‘scientific’— even positivist—history, Vernes saw in the interpretations of the French liberal Protestants the imposition of their own liberal theological vision. A case in point was the French liberal Protestants reading of Jesus. In place of a factual data about the Jewish historical context of Jesus’s thought, the Liberals projected a model of the moral man of the late nineteenth-century onto the hapless Nazarene. As a result, in place of the at first strange, yet nonetheless rich historical textures of Jesus’ Jewish life, the well-meaning Liberals had substituted an image of their own confessional ideal of religious perfection. They had just ‘read’ Jesus along lines which were defined by a theological “psychologism and subjectivism” reminiscent of the great nineteenth century German Protestant theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher6—and Vernes called them on it. In disgust at these theological maneuvers, Vernes complained that the typical Protestant ‘scientific’ historian of religion therefore “rarely studies the past without some concern to discover its pet ideas in it.” Not for him such sectarian gambits: “. . . we are definitely not going to model [our approach] on them. The historian who doubles as a dogmatist only produces a history which is suspect.”7
5
Comte Eugène Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” 174. 6 André Encrevé, “La première crise de la Faculté de theologie de Paris: la démission de Maurice Vernes,” 87. This resistance to psychological theology also put Vernes into conflict with the Révilles, as we will see. Indeed, Albert Réville cites the great German theologian of the religious experience of absolute dependence favorably on at least one occasion in his Prolegomena of the History of Religions [1881], A. S. Squire, trans. (London: William and Norgate, 1884), 72. Somewhat later toward the end of the century, we will see how what thinkers like Vernes and his contemporaries called “philosophy” would for a while again play a part in the development of a new style of history and history of religions, under the inspiration of Henri Berr and the Durkheimians, and to some extent by Jean Réville. Here to speak of “philosophy’s” role is simply to speak of a departure from the canons of positivist history writing, and the acceptance of the privileged place of prior presuppositions or models in writing historical narrative. 7 Maurice Vernes, “Introduction,” Revue d’histoire des religions 1 (1880/1): 10, quoted
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Despite what might seem meritorious arguments, Vernes’ criticism of cryptic theologizing in the study of religion, as evidenced in the ideology of religious evolutionism, seems to have made no impact on the study of religion in the Fifth Section in his lifetime. And, his feuds with the Liberal Protestant leadership of the Fifth Section left him relatively isolated thereafter. The role of intellectual leadership belonged, as it had done from the creation of the Section, to the Révilles. Father and son continued to represent the Fifth Section in national and the international professional worlds. Albert Réville conceived the International Association for the History of Religions and convened its first global meeting in Paris, 1900. Albert Réville was also France’s representative several years before at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Thus, at least, the most prominent members of the Fifth Section basically ignored Vernes’ critiques of their thinking, and went on writing about religion (and sacrifice) as if religious evolution was the “quasi-certitude,” which Liberal Protestant, Goblet d’Alviella had said it was. Liberal evolutionism eventually faded as evolutionism did everywhere, and not apparently as a result of Vernes’ polemics. Thus, the ideology of the Fifth Section today is not at all noticeably evolutionist, but ironically as historicist as Vernes would have liked it to be. 2. Evolution as Cryptic Theology Perhaps the chief liberal theological projection of all, and the one against which Vernes leveled his mightiest criticism, was the French liberal Protestant commitment to religious ‘evolution.’ Vernes’ assault on liberal evolutionism provoked an angry exchange which in effect broke relations between Vernes and the Liberal establishment.8 Albert Réville, for instance, believed in all honesty that the idea of the evolution “of humanity is not arbitrary.” It reflected a “law of continuity” which applies to “successive evolutions of the human mind
in François La Planche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions: les orientations de la Revue d’histoire des religions” La tradition française en sciences religieuses: pages d’histoire, Les cahiers de recherche en sciences de la religion, volume 10, Michel Despland, ed. (Québec: Université Laval, 1991), 94 n. 10. 8 François La Planche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions; les orientations de la Revue de l’histoire de religions,” 93. This remark was aimed specifically at the evolutionary ideas of Albert Réville.
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as to the animal and vegetable worlds.”9 In the minds of the Liberals, religious evolution was not then some ‘construct’, ‘model’ or ‘hypothesis’ projected onto the data of religion. It was objectively ‘there.’ For them, evolution was the “quasi-certitude” which Belgian historian of religion, Goblet d’Alviella, had announced it to be in attacking Vernes on this very issue.10 Even though Vernes no doubt was aware that the Liberals may not have thought they were imposing their confessional theological vision onto religious data in being committed to religious evolution, and thus in the process violating the standards of ‘scientific’ history, he was sure that they nevertheless were guilty of doing so.11 For Vernes, the liberal view of evolution was “not at all historical,” but only “reflects the ideological preferences of the historian”12 for a number of reasons which will no doubt strike readers today as remarkably compatible with our own principles. Vernes argued that in any religion in a given time, one could find simultaneously the representatives of the various stages of religious evolution which supposedly were lodged in discrete stages of historical evolution. Do we not, for example, find a kind of polytheism in the cult of the saints and blessed virgin in undeniably monotheistic Roman Catholicism? Does not any polytheist, when focused on a particular deity, at that moment not enter the spiritual frame of mind of the monotheist?13 Vernes thus rejected Réville’s entire vision of a grand evolutionary march to monotheism up from animism, naturism etc., which was, as well, characteristic of so much work by the French Liberal Protestant savants of the Fifth Section in the last years of the nineteenth
9
Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, [1884] 2nd ed., P. H. Wicksteed, trans. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1905), 4. 10 Comte Eugène Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” 173. 11 This common recognition of the theological purposes driving the study of religion among the leadership of the Fifth Section and their Dutch colleagues was thus widespread at the time. Recent critics of my assertion of this claim, such as Donald Wiebe, might take note. It is one thing to hope that the likes of Albert Réville and Cornelis P. Tiele were as ‘scientific’ as Wiebe wants them to be, but quite another thing that they actually be so. (Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), Ch. 3 passim.) 12 François La Planche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions; les orientations de la Revue de l’histoire de religions,” 93. This remark was aimed specifically at the evolutionary ideas of Albert Réville. 13 Comte Eugène Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” 173.
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century.14 Betraying the theological basis of the liberal Protestant ideal of religious evolution, Jean Réville argued against Vernes that if the objectivity of religious “progress” were shaken, that this would have the intolerable result (heaven forbid!) of placing all religions into the same developmental class. It is hard indeed to imagine a more damning admission of Vernes’ case against the theological ambitions of the liberal Protestant leadership.15 What this dispute between the Révilles and Maurice Vernes reveals is that the Liberals had gone far down the theological road, all the while promising loyalty to ‘scientific history.’ Here, the Révilles anticipated today’s post-modern critics of religious studies by seeking to justify a place for (even an avowedly) Christian theologizing within the academic study of religion. If then we want to understand how sacrifice and religion were actually theorized, it is thus imperative again that we consult the life and letters of Albert and Jean Réville and their theologizing intellectual kin in the Fifth Section. The main question I wish to ask at this point is how this could be? Imagining for a while that the liberal Protestants might be aware of this confusing mixture of orientations, how did they manage to justify such cohabitation of ‘scientific history’ and theology to themselves? To answer this question, we might instructively to look into the life and works of one of the chief liberal Protestant thinkers of the Fifth Section who did—Albert Réville. 3. Albert Réville, Tiele and Comparative Study of Religions The humanism and deistic rationalism of Réville’s extreme liberal Protestantism led him, like Vernes, to surrender his ministry after a long career of ecclesiastical service. But Réville’s professional life did not end there. The seeds of his often heterodox and dissident thoughts flowered into a new career in the study of religion. Much like Vernes, Réville too put to one side (although never fully abandoning) his original career as a biblical and ecclesiastical historian, and became his generation’s leading exponent of the comparative study of religions, or “science religieuse,” as this academic pursuit was known
14
Ibidem, 173. Jean Réville, “Leçon d’ouverture de M. Maurice Vernes,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 47 (1903), 432. 15
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in its day. Along with this intellectual reorientation, Réville shifted institutional allegiance from church to university.16 In the course of his long career as historian of religions Albert Réville wrote many articles as well as several general surveys of so-called primitive religion,17 and some specialized books on the religions of the world, such as Mexico18 and “the religion” of China.19 His path along the route from biblical criticism to the “science religieuse” was both an indirect and interesting one. In one of the only studies of significant length devoted to the thought of the Albert Réville, Franck Storne argued that by 1850 or so, Albert Réville had deepened his unitarian and rationalist commitments so much so that he found it necessary to surrender his ministry at the Temple Neuf in Luneray (west of Dieppe).20 Storne however persuasively argues that we lack evidence to determine why Réville then left France for Rotterdam. Doubtless some mixture of political and religious causes might be cited, among which were probably Réville’s desire to affirm his religious and political liberalism by association with the historically liberal Rotterdam church and those within its ambit, such as J. H. Scholten and Cornelis P. Tiele.21 Réville worked abroad for twenty-two years in Holland, ministering to the needs of the expatriot French Protestant community in Rotterdam. There in 1858, Réville first met Renan, and immediately invited Réville to use the pages of his Revue des deux mondes to sound out his liberal views to the French reading public.22 At the same time, perhaps also upon Renan’s urging, Réville expanded his
16 Albert Réville, “Introduction: L’enseignement des sciences religieuses a l’école des hautes études,” Bibliothèque de l’école des hautes études: Sciences religieuses, vol. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1889), i–xxx. 17 Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions. Les religions des peuples noncivilisés (2 vols) (Paris: Fischbacher, 1883). 18 Albert Réville, Les religions du Mexique, de l’Amérique centrale et du Pérou (Paris: Fischbacher, 1885). 19 Albert Réville, Religion chinoise (Paris: Fischbacher, 1886). See Philippe Alphandéry, “Albert Réville,” 54 (1906): 415 on Réville’s use of the singular, “the religion,” instead of the more common plural form. 20 Storne, Franck, “Les Protestantisme liberale français au XIXème siècle à travers l’engagement des Révilles, pasteurs réformes,” (Diplome d’études approfondies. Université de Reims, 1985), 43–52. For biographical details of Albert Réville, see Jacques Marty, Albert Réville: sa vie, son oeuvre (Cahors/Alençon: A. Coneslant, 1912). 21 Storne, Franck, “Les Protestantisme liberale français au XIXème siècle à travers l’engagement des Révilles, pasteurs réformes,” 52. 22 Ibidem, 56.
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studies beyond the ancient Near Eastern and Christian worlds of his seminary training and ministry into the new field of the scientific study of religion then established in Holland.23 Réville and Renan enjoyed a veritable “parenté d’esprit” in matters concerning religion and politics.24 Renan set an example moreover of how Réville might coexist with the Catholic majority of France, even though Réville was later to regard the Fifth Section as an “excellent engine of war for combating clericalism”—viz. Roman Catholicism.25 Renan’s achievement was to persuade Réville that he could be both scientific and interested in religion, but that he need not provoke the suspicions of the Roman Catholic faithful in doing his scientific work.26 Réville began publishing in the comparative study of religion in the late 1850’s or early 1860’s, focusing on the so-called primitive religions.27 Although Renan set Réville on his way into the history of religions, it seems to have been Cornelis P. Tiele who most informed Réville’s professional thinking about the comparative study of religion in those years in Holland.28 He and Réville met in Rotterdam, where Tiele was pastor of the Arminian or Remonstrant church. In 1873, Tiele went on to become professor at the Remonstrant seminary in Leiden, and in 1877, professor of the history of religions at Leiden. Until his death in 1902, he maintained formal academic relations with the Fifth Section and the Revue d’histoire des religions. Tiele’s books were cited routinely in the Revue, with Albert Réville even publishing a French résumé of Tiele’s Inleiding tot Godsdienstwetenschap in installments over a period of four years—apparently in lieu of a critical review which never appeared in the pages of the Revue de l’histoire des religions.29
23
For Albert Réville’s view of Renan see his “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” (1859) Essais de critique religieuse (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1860), 361–415 and “Introduction: L’enseignement des sciences religieuses a l’école des hautes études,” i–xxx. 24 Storne, Franck, “Les Protestantisme liberale français au XIXème siècle à travers l’engagement des Révilles, pasteurs réformes,” 63. 25 Ibidem, 68. 26 Albert Réville, “Introduction: L’enseignement des sciences religieuses a l’école des hautes études,” x. 27 Albert Réville, review of De Rougemont, Le Peuple primitif. SA religion, son histoire et sa civilisation, Le Lien 9 October 1858. Albert Réville, review of Pleyte, De la religion primitif des Hébreaux, Le Lien 12 July 1862. 28 Albert Réville, nécrologie of C. P. Tiele, Revue d’histoire des religions 45 (1902), 70–5. 29 Albert Réville, “Un essai de philosophie de l’histoire religieuse,” Revue d’histoire des religions 36 (1897): 370–98, 40 (1899): 374–413, 41 (1900), 201–19, 359–89.
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But, Albert Réville did not seem to take his direction solely from the desire for pure scholarship. He had theological motives in mind for pursuing his studies into the ‘religions.’ Réville’s theological interpretations of ‘the primitives,’ for example, emerged conspicuously in a notable public debate with William Gladstone over the nature of ‘primitive religion.’ There Réville argued that the primal religious sensibilities of the ‘primitives’ were ‘natural’ and not the result of any extraordinary divine intervention or revelation. And as such, they were open to scientific study. Along with Charles Renouvier and other partisans of what we might call “natural religion” or a kind of deistic rationalism, Réville believed that the ‘primitives’ were inherently endowed with a “moral sense” of God’s existence. The problem was, however, that the ‘primitives’ often seemed grossly deficient in adhering to this natural morality, as evidenced by their gruesome sacrificial rites.30 The character of Albert Réville’s theological orientation and its hospitality to the scientific study of religion seems, in turn, attributable in part to Cornelis P. Tiele. Albert Réville tells us that Tiele had been trained for the ministry by J. H. Scholten, a Leiden professor of theology who led the so-called liberal “modern theology” movement in Holland.31 It was through these “modern theologians” that the new German methods of the critical study of the bible arrived in Holland—and thus in a way—a ‘scientific history’ of the biblical texts. 4. “Modern Theology”: Why Albert Réville Thought He Was Right This link with the “modern theology” movement helps us understand how and why Réville thought he was right in linking the ‘scientific history’ of the German biblical critics with his humanistic Christian theological ambitions. Scholten taught that religion was a “natural fact and spontaneous tendency of human nature.” It was thus not something “superadded,” in Scholten’s words, as he believed the Catholics held, nor still less a theoretical ‘construct’ as we might say in our own time.32 Scholten’s theology neatly recapitulated 30
Marcel Méry, La critique du christianisme chez Renouvier (Paris: Ophrys-Gap, 1963),
494. 31 Albert Réville was later to translate a major work of Scholten’s into French. This was J. H. Scholten, Manuel d’histoire comparée de la philosophie et de la religion, Albert Réville, trans., (Paris et Genève: Cherbuliez, 1861). 32 Albert Réville, “Dutch Theology: Its Past and Present State,” Theological Review 3 (1864), 281–2.
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Rousseau’s influence on the French Liberal Protestant movement, which Albert Réville affirmed in his debate with William Gladstone. Both Scholten and Rousseau taught that human beings contained within themselves “the germ of a spiritual development, the objective ideal of which is God Himself ” independent of any supernaturally originated special revelation.33 What is more, no conflict with ‘science’ or ‘scientific history’ interfered with such lofty theological tenets because Scholten considered the existence of God a ‘fact.’ Thus, however exalted this ‘fact’ might be, people could come to see and know God as He expressed Himself in and through His creation merely by contemplating the natural world with a pure and open heart. Far then from being an impediment to religious life, ‘science,’ in the view of both Scholten and Réville, led to the sacred. For Albert Réville, Scholten’s words reflected beliefs about the religious value of science long held by him.34 Indebted as he was to Ernest Renan and the growth of the ‘scientific’ historical disciplines in France, Albert Réville believed as well that ‘scientific’ history of religions led its practitioners unerringly to the divine throne. What began in ‘scientific’ history, then, ended in theology, indeed, in contemplation of the divine. Albert Réville held that historical research into the religions “purges” Christianity of the inessentials and moves its adherents closer to “the Eternal.” It does so by revealing how humanity strives “towards the Supreme reality, mysterious, nay incomprehensible, and yet in essential affinity with itself, with its ideal, with all that is purest and sublimest.” Thus for Albert Réville, the historical study of religion was, in a way, religion itself; the “science religieuse” was not only “one of the branches of human knowledge,” but religious itself as well. Indeed, the very practice of the history of religions itself promotes a religious affiliation with Réville’s “la religion,” as he tells us: . . . in the domain of Religion . . . we can never lose our confidence that, if historical research may sometimes compel us to sacrifice illusions, or even beliefs that have been dear to us, it gives us in return
33
Albert Réville, “Dutch Theology: Its Past and Present State,” 283. See along these lines, Don Wiebe’s discussion of Tiele, “Toward the Founding of a Science of Religion: The Contribution of C. P. Tiele,” The Politics of Religious Studies, Ch. 3. 34
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the right to walk in the paths of the Eternal with firmer step, and reveals with growing clearness the marvelous aspiration of humanity towards a supreme reality, mysterious, nay incomprehensible, and yet in essential affinity with itself, with all that is purest and sublimest. The history of religion is not only one of the branches of human knowledge, but a prophecy as well. After having shown us whence we come and the path we have trodden, it shadows forth the way we have yet to go, or at the very least it effects the orientation by which we may know in which direction it lies.35
This belief that the scientific study of nature and history would lead ultimately to direct experience of the transcendent had great, if finally destructive, repercussions for the study of religion. For Tiele and those like Albert Réville, since scientific activity led to spiritual vision, science and religion were complementary, and not opposed. Thus while this meant that religious folk need not fear science, it also meant that theological claims could fairly intrude into the domain of science. Albert Réville sums up these sentiments eloquently, even though he seems totally oblivious to the barriers such a position would throw up to those not sharing his theism. In virtue of his religious consciousness, man directly feels God, and even if he were to be the subject of a perpetual evolution, would never be able to avoid feeling Him. If we are able to admit the validity of this double method of finding God in nature and in the soul, I think that we may watch with perfect serenity all the progress, all the discoveries, all the transformations of science. If we open our eyes to the universe, God is there; and if we close them to look into our own nature, God is with us still.36
Given Vernes severe scientific ethic, then, we can well appreciate his alarm as more and more of Albert Réville’s theological orientation became apparent to him. Given Albert Réville’s tender piety in these matters, we can likewise appreciate why his disputes with Vernes over the theologizing of the study of religion provoked such sharp clashes. We should then feel confident in finding the origins of Albert Réville’s so-called ‘scientific’ theology at home with the general religious position of key figures in the study of religion of the time in
35
Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 4–5. Albert Réville, “Evolution in Religion, and Its Results,” Theological Review 12 (1875), 242. 36
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close relation with Albert Réville—leaders of the so-called ‘science of religion,’ Friedrich Max Müller and Cornelis P. Tiele.37 In the context of Réville’s own actual intellectual nurture, his mentor Tiele calls for special attention. At the very least, Tiele reinforced Réville’s view that scientific—here meaning ‘historical’—research can have positive religious value, and not merely the negative demythologizing value typical of the French critics. Thus, says Albert Réville, historical criticism “should guide [our societies] in resolving the grave difficulties presented by the problems of the hour”38 and gets Aus closer to ‘the Eternal.’”39 Given this conviction of the factual nature of the real presence of God immanent in nature, Tiele (and Réville) felt justified in referring to the study of religion as a “science of religion”—understood along the anti-theoretical lines of nineteenth century positivism. Needless to say, others would find this odd blend of ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ a good reason to reject the assumption of scientific status by the so-called “science religieuse.” Yet, it seems clear form this inquiry into the genesis of Albert Réville thought about the nature of religion that for him science and theology belonged together. A further look at Tiele’s methods show how Réville’s anti-positivist and anti-historicist orientations would gain strength under the tutelage of the great Dutch pioneer of the ‘science of religion.’ Indeed, the very practice of the history of religions itself promotes a religious affiliation with Réville’s “la religion”. 5. Tiele and Theory: Morphology Becomes Theology Now unlike the French pioneers of the study of religion, Renan and Vernes, the ‘philosophical’ Tiele was neither committed, institutionally or otherwise, to historicism, nor even to the writing of historical narrative. Because of Tiele’s strong influence on Albert Réville, he no doubt was responsible for steering Albert and Jean Réville away from the positivist path upon which their mentor, Ernest Renan, had set them, and instead moved them in a conceptually more con-
37 On Max Müller see, Ivan Strenski, “The Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony of Myth: Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians and Max-Müller, Myth and Method, W. Doniger and L. Patton, eds., (Charlottesville: U Virginia, 1996), 52–81 and “Misreading Max-Müller”, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996), 291–6. 38 Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 4. 39 Ibidem, 5.
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structive direction.40 In 1881, in the same address in which he spoke in favor of ‘scientific’ history, Albert Réville in effect distinguished his approach from Vernes’ positivism in asserting the creative role of the historian in theorizing and concept formation. The historian’s task, is “to choose in this mass of [data] the typical facts, the ‘standard facts’ which reveal [their] spirit—the true originality of a definite religious state.”41 Sounding even more like the anti-positivist, and to some degree proto-phenomenologist, Tiele who sought the underlying forms of historically variant religions, Albert Réville argued in the same address for an investigation into the hidden laws governing religious phenomena. Specifically aiming his remarks against Tylor’s view of traditional folk as ‘primitive philosophers,’ Réville urged those studying the religions of the so-called “non-civilized,” to study and admire in them, their involuntary and unconscious brainwork—the internal logic of the human spirit, though yet uncultivated, no doubt following its own guiding principles and workings, and revealing that unthinking logic in their religions and religious practices.42
Tiele thus was a generation in advance of the anti-positivist revolution in French historiography of the end of the century, about which we will see much more in due course.43 It may very well have been he who drew the Révilles into it. Confirmation for this link comes from an unlikely source when speaking of theologians and such—the Durkheimians. Although much separated Tiele from the theoreticallyminded the Durkheimians, like Hubert and Mauss in their book on sacrifice, some things bound them to each other. We know, for example, that Durkheim respected Tiele’s work enough to send Mauss to study with Tiele in Leiden as part of a tour of leading foreign university efforts in studying religion. On this tour, Mauss also worked with Tylor at Oxford and Frazer at Cambridge. What seemed to
40 Goblet d’Alviella noted that the operation of “grouping things into a more general synthesis” as Albert Réville did in his Prolegomena of the History of Religions [1881] marked a decisive step beyond “analytic history.” Goblet d’Alviella, review of Jean Réville, Les Phases successives de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1909), Revue d’histoire des religions 61 (1910), 351. For general and detailed information about Albert Réville’s life and intellectual orientation see Jacques Marty, Albert Réville: sa vie, son oeuvre. 41 Albert Réville, Les religions des peuples non-civilisés, vol. 2, iv. 42 Albert Réville, Les religions des peuples non-civilisés, vol. 1, 24. 43 William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), chapters 8–10.
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recommend Tiele to the Durkheimians (especially Mauss)—besides their mutual interest in the history of religions—was their desire to study religion in a way which was “philosophical.” With just enough of a soupçon of the hegelianized historical theorizing and speculation which the term ‘philosophical’ had at the time, Tiele associated of his studies of religion with a “philosophical” approach meant no less than to advocate the study of religious phenomena in what I have called a ‘theoretical’ way. As Tiele put it, the study of religion should be truly “scientia” and not merely “eruditio.” To him, this meant a departure from the historical positivism of a Renan or Vernes. Such a study sought to take hold of religious phenomena and “penetrate to their foundations.”44 Tiele then moved well beyond the realm of brute data, by actively encouraging the efforts which theory always makes to explain phenomena in terms of causes at another strategic level than what is given. Calling this approach also “literally the philosophy of religion,”45 Tiele quite explicitly rejects the “onesided empirical method which culminates in positivism and only ascertains and classifies facts, but is powerless to explain them.”46 Tiele even called for a “deductive method” of the study of religion, one which while not “speculative . . . starts with the results yielded by induction, by empirical, historical and comparative methods.”47 Thus together both Tiele and the Durkheimians sought to explain and interpret religious facts, and not simply to chronicle them in good historicist style.48 Tiele thus began from a perspective at odds with the critical or positivist history practiced by Renan, Maurice Vernes, or for that matter, probably even Albert Réville at the time they met in the 1860’s. One further aspect of Tiele’s new anti-positivist approach to religion attracted the theory-minded Durkheimians in particular. Oddly, enough it also seems to have drawn the theologizing Albert Réville, although precisely for what reasons we do not know. I refer here to
44 Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part I: Morphological. (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1898), 15. 45 Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part I: Morphological, 15. 46 Ibidem, 18. 47 Ibidem, 18. 48 Ibidem, 17–8. Compare Émile Durkheim, “Debate regarding Explanation in History and Sociology,” [1908] The Rules of Sociological Method [1894] Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, Steven Lukes, ed., W. D. Halls, trans., (London: Macmillan, 1982), 212.
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Tiele’s work on religious “morphology.”49 In Mauss’s estimation, Tiele’s classification and grouping of religion into different forms was the one part of his book closest to the work of the Année sociologique. It was, Mauss tells us, essentially rudimentary—and most important for our inquiry into theorizing—an example of scientific work in the study of religion which departed from the positivist character of the French historicism typical of the Fifth Section. Tiele may thus be cited as a precursor of the newer approaches to religion with which we can associate Albert Réville and Mauss, and in that way with the breaks with the anti-theorizing historicism with which both Marcel Mauss and Albert Réville identified.50 Perhaps it was only Tiele’s theological agendas which prevented his work from being for Mauss the model for the kind of science of religion he and the Durkheimians sought to create.51 But just how could Tiele’s conception of the study of religion even qualify for such a role in Durkheimian thought? In sum, Tiele’s “morphology” flew in the face of positivist canons of historiography which dominated the study of religion in France in at least three ways. First, Tiele presumed an evolutionist model of religious development behind the data, in effect, at a theoretical level. His “morphology” of religions sought the “constant changes of form resulting from an ever-progressing evolution.”52 Second, in doing his morphological classification and ranking of the religions, Tiele offended positivism by claiming access to the general species of religion which lay below the chronological surface flow of the data and facts of the many ‘religions.’ In this way, the “morphology” of the first volume of his great work, The Elements of the Science of Religion
49 Mauss makes a point of crediting Tiele lavishly for his work on morphology. (Marcel Mauss, (1899) review of Cornelis P. Tiele, Inleiding: Part I in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré. Victor Karady, ed. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 540, 544. 50 Tiele’s religious morphology is also close to that of Mauss’s successor in the chair the comparative study of non-literate peoples at the Fifth Section, the liberal Protestant, Maurice Leenhardt. ( James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 152–3. See also Albert Réville’s works of classification of religious categories, Albert Réville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions and Albert Réville, Les religions des peuples non-civilisés. 51 For Mauss, Tiele’s work remained in the realm of philosophy because it lacked application to facts. Marcel Mauss, (1899) review of Cornelis P. Tiele, Inleiding: Part I in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, 544. 52 Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part I: Morphological, 27.
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(evolution and morphology) prepared the way for the second volume and its “ontology” (in truth, just a ‘theology’) of religion-as-such. There, Tiele enjoyed access to the “permanent elements within what is changing, the unalterable element in the transient and ever-altering forms.”53 Third, having completed the evolutionary ranking of ‘religions’ over against the transcendent standard of “la religion,” Tiele emerged to advocate a sophisticated, if nonetheless transparent, theological program. The putative ‘scientist’ of religion, Tiele, and with him in varying degrees, the Révilles, was more than just a naturalist critic of positivism, but in fact a man of faith seeking to found a new theology. This left a Durkheimian, like Mauss, who went at first to learn from Tiele, put off by with a program of study which ended up being a means of promoting a novel form of Christian piety, and not the public discourse about religion which the so-called ‘science of religion’ had promised to be. The Durkheimians reached the same conclusions about the work of Tiele’s close disciple and virtual co-religionist, Albert Réville and indeed about the entire liberal Protestant effort in the “science religieuse” at the Fifth Section. Well hidden though it might be, the confessional Christian theological agenda of the “science religieuse” made it unfit for being the source of public discourse about religion in the Third Republic. 6. Tiele’s Theory of Sacrifice as a Theology of Sacrifice From a review of Tiele’s theological and methodological positions, one might well predict his theory of sacrifice. For one, Tiele was not adverse to a constructivist or theoretical approach to the data of sacrificial religion and rite. Therefore, we might well expect him to ‘bifurcate nature’ and depart from standard descriptions of sacrifice. As a constructivist theorist, Tiele would aim at showing what lay beneath the data, what was, in his mind, concealed in the data. We should not be surprised by surprises, so to speak. Second, as a deeply committed Remonstrant Protestant, who also felt that the things of faith were just as factual as the things of science, we should also not be surprised if what Tiele finds beneath the data of sacrifice, especially sacrificial ritual, are things otherwise considered matters of a
53
Ibidem, 27.
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particular faith tradition. In this respect, we would expect Tiele to relegate so-called ‘externals’ such as ritual to levels inferior to human interiority, to matters of the heart. Tiele does not disappoint. His theory of sacrifice faithfully represents the theological faith positions of his own reformed Calvinism. His ‘theory’ of sacrifice is constructed by simply importing the main tenets of his ‘theological’ position on the left wing of the reformation. Thus, in his Gifford Lectures of 1898, Tiele articulated a conception of sacrifice which fundamentally rehearsed the anti-ritualist theological scheme which we saw developed earlier by the Liberals. For Tiele, the only value in sacrificial ritual was what lay beneath the surface of the external ritual ‘facts.’ For Tiele, this was nothing less than the pious inner attitude of heart, the “yearning of the believer for abiding communion with” God.54 All observable features of sacrificial ritual, such as gift giving, the communal meal, feeding the gods, immolations were ‘external’ and ‘material,’ and thus ultimately dispensable. They are merely “means” employed corresponding “with the more or less advanced development” of the particular believer’s “conceptions” of things. For instance, if the believer regards the superhuman powers as being subject to material needs like himself, or at least being analogous to earthly powers, to the princes and chiefs to whom he is subordinate, he will take care not to approach them with empty hands, but will offer them the best gifts at his disposal. . . .55
But corresponding to what Tiele took to be his own religion’s higher state of development, only one kind of sacrifice attained the level of being “the culmination of all sacrifices.” This is sacrifice in the “civic” or moral sense; sacrifice is nothing else than “self-denial . . . which proceeds from religious motives (devotio).” From Tiele’s dogmatically anti-ritual viewpoint, rather than being sacrifice in “a figurative sense,” moral or inner sacrifice is the offering par excellence, of which all others are but lower forms, and, as it were, masks and foreshadowings; it is the only offering which is actually associated with worship, not as a mere symbol, but in spirit and in truth.56
54 55 56
Ibidem, 149. Ibidem, 149. Ibidem, 147.
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Thus, doing theory for Tiele was essentially what it had been for Albert Réville, namely, doing theology. Tiele’s reformed theological way of theorizing sacrifice coincided then with what Albert Réville taught and by virtue of its prestigious placement there, dominated discussion about sacrifice in fin-de-siècle France. 7. On Still Not Theorizing Sacrifice While it should now be no mystery why Albert Réville took a theological approach to sacrifice, however, veiled in Tiele’s rhetoric of a science of religion, he still did not theorize sacrifice. Instead, he and his religious fellow travelers rendered theological judgments upon sacrifice. The same goes for Albert’s son and appointed successor as head of the Fifth Section, Jean Réville. In something of the spirit of the younger generation, he ventured beyond the ‘scientific’ history of the Fifth Section to the brink of the avant-garde of historians in his time. Yet, he could not or would not theorize sacrifice, as others in revolt against French ‘scientific history’ would. I am here referring to the avant garde historians who took their rise in the Dreyfus generation’s reaction against the “histoire historisante.” In particular, I have in mind that singular and widely influential intellectual, Henri Berr. Holding forth from the pages of his own journal, the influential Revue de synthèse historique, Berr sparked a veritable revolution in historical studies in France. Notable among those directly influenced by Berr were the founders of the “Annales” school Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, and as well that one-time devoted ‘scientific historian,’ the Durkheimian, Henri Hubert.57 Like the Annalistes and Durkheimians, Berr emphasized comparative studies over the specialized work of his ‘scientific historian’ peers. He also took much form the Durkheimians. Berr sought to incorporate the “concepts and methods of the theoretical social sciences” in order to identify the “laws, trends and general tendencies in the past. . . .”58 This was, in effect, to follow Durkheim’s criticism of the French his-
57 Bloch published some of his seminal early articles in the Revue de synthèse historique, such as Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européenes,” Revue de synthèse historique 46 (1925), 15–50. 58 William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession, 11.
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torical profession in favor of sociology’s interests in doing more than merely describing data. Both Berr and Durkheim sought to explain the data—and that required theorizing. In Durkheim’s words, in sociology’s role as a theorizing discipline, it sought the objective laws in history, the “profound causes” of historical events.59 Like all good theories, Durkheim’s sociology and Berr’s new history sought to go beyond the data. But after all I have done to argue the differences between theorizing and theologizing, I seem to have run into an immovable obstacle. The scholar of religion most conspicuously vocal in support of Berr’s history of “synthesis”—and thus one who according to my arguments, should be foremost among theorizers—was none other than Jean Réville.60 If I have been correct in my interpretations of Tiele and Albert Réville, why do we now seem to find Jean Réville theorizing, when he should be continuing to press the theological agendas I isolated in Tiele and Albert Réville? Even Jean Réville’s contemporary theorizers seem to line up against me. Vocal in Jean Réville’s behalf, for example, was Henri Berr himself! Berr even commissioned an article from Jean Réville for the inaugural number of Revue de synthèse historique on the work of the first international congress of the history of religions (1900).61 There, Réville laid out plans for a psychologized history reminiscent of the father of modern hermeneutic history, Wilhelm Dilthey—surely an anti-positivist without being at the same time a theologian in this respect. With the target of the histoire historisante squarely within his cross-hairs, the younger Réville took aim and shot. The “historian has not finished his task until,
59
Émile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, 8, 10. 60 Jean Réville, “Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire des religions au Collège de France,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 55 (1907), 200. A Catholic commentator alos called attention to what apparently had become evident as Jean Réville’s methodological “eclecticism.” Without rejecting the ideals of erudition of the “école historique,” Réville sought to do an “histoire synthètique.” (P. Collomp, review of J. Réville, Les Phases successives de l’Histoire des Religions, Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne 165 (1912–13), 523. The younger Réville’s commitment to the ideal of ‘synthesis’ is confirmed as well in Goblet d’Alviella’s review of Jean Réville’s Les phases successives de l’histoire des religions, 351 and Jean Réville’s contribution to the inaugural number of Berr’s Revue de synthèse historique—1 (1900), 211. On Berr and synthesis, see William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession, 127–39. 61 Jean Réville, “Congrès d’histoire des religions,” Revue de synthèse historique 1 (1900), 211–3.
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with the aid of the testimonies which he has preserved, he reconstitutes their exact tenor.”62 The old “histoire historisante” is dead for Jean Réville. Is this not evidence that he is, at least, on his way to theorizing, instead of theologizing the data of religious history? Indeed, is this not evidence that theology can be the basis of a public theoretical discourse about religion? At first, it seems so. To Jean Réville, for example, the task of reconstructing the frame of mind of religious folk lays a special burden upon the historian to develop certain kinds of psychological expertise such as empathy. Here, perhaps we find a genuinely public way to enter into religious data, and in doing so transcend the limits of a particular confessional background. Thus, Jean Réville tells us that while he does not denigrate the many studies of religion done “from outside,” more is possible. One must, says Jean Réville, now seek “the human soul” so that one can “find the underlying and true explanation of religious phenomena in the imagination, heart, reason, conscience, instincts and passions” (my emphasis).63 Empathy becomes for Jean Réville therefore a public practice enabling the new historian to plunge beneath the surface of data, and to generate theories of religion. Jean Réville seems to have taken the step beyond theologizing data to theorizing or explaining it.64 That he should do so by the psychological route, rather than along Durkheim’s collectivist, sociological path, may mark a difference in religious nurture—but one which, interestingly enough does not for all that invalidate Jean Réville’s approach as public discourse. What Jean Réville has to say is secularized—perhaps ‘sanitized—quite enough to remove any confessional taint. Indeed, I would submit that Jean Réville’s preference for such a psychological method of grounding theorizing about religion calls quite legitimately upon the historical experience of French Protestants and constitutes a ‘method-
62 Jean Réville, “Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire des religions au Collège de France,” 202. 63 Ibidem, 203. Why this ‘methological Methodism’ is virtually absent from Albert Réville’s writings is a question for further research. 64 Not far from the mark, a Catholic contemporary commenting on this new Jean Réville, accused him of methodological “eclecticism.” To this critic, while Jean Réville was wary of abandoning the erudition of the “école historique” enshrined in the Fifth Section, he was also simultaneously heading off into the unknown territory of Berr’s “histoire synthètique.” (P. Collomp, review of J. Réville, Les Phases successives de l’Histoire des Religions, 523.
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ological Methodism.’ By this, I mean that we might see in Jean Réville’s aptitude for internal matters the residue of his own French liberal Protestant cultivation. Without committing anyone to his confessional theology, he could therefore be seen as reclaiming part of the vital Methodist heritage of French Protestantism in resorting to internal psychological or experiential methods. This move away from an objectivist historicism deepened the anti-positivist aspects of his father’s thought gained perhaps from Tiele, and drew upon the psychological acuity cultivated by the French Protestant heritage of inwardness and retreat from the social world.65 The only problem for theory of sacrifice however was that it did not eventuate in any new theorizing about sacrifice. Instead, it led to intensified Liberal Protestant theologizing in a new key. Thus, at the same time Jean Réville was developing the tools of modern history writing which we widely take for granted, he was also calling for a “scientific theology” on the pages of Maurice Vernes’ showpiece of ‘scientific history’ of religions, Revue d’histoire des religions.66 These plans for a new effort to theologize the study of religion were cut short by Réville’s premature death. Yet, it is worth recording that Jean Réville promised to go even further out on the antipositivist theological limb of history writing in a series of pronouncements he made about the future of the history of religions.67 This leads one to think that in adopting something like the method of empathy and Verstehen, Jean Réville was actually arming himself for a new bout of theologizing rather than preparing to abandon theology for religious studies. Evidence for my suspicions of Jean Réville’s sincerity about theorizing come from noting that while both father and son remained public adherents to the spirit of critique typical of the “méthode 65 For an excellent recent study of the theological origins of German historicism see, Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. De Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 66 Jean Réville, “La Théologie partie integrante du cycle de l’enseignement universitaire et fondement indispensable de la Réformation,” reported in “Chronique,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 39 (1899), 412. 67 Jean Réville, “Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire des religions au Collège de France,” 189–207. “The Role of the History of Religions in Modern Religious Education,” The New World 1 (1892), 503–19. “La Theologie partie integrante du cycle de l’enseignement universitaire et fondement indispensable de la Reformation,” reported in “Chronique,” 412. Jean Réville, Les Phases successives de l’histoire des religions. “L’Histoire des religions et les facultes de theologie,” Revue d’histoire des religions 44 (1901), 428.
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historique” of Gabriel Monod, they began to shift their grounds. In his day, for example, Albert was lauded for his “documentary interests.”68 Jean likewise reaffirmed “the greatest fidelity to the rigorous method of scientific history.”69 Yet, paradoxically, and at the same time, the Révilles boldly asserted their theological orientations. In Jean’s words, “religious universalism, and I should add . . . Christian universalism—this is what the science of religion teaches modern society.”70 Jean Réville became thus even less open to general theorizing about matters religious and even more confirmed in his own confessionally conceived Christianity. The pale, old rationalist Deism seems no longer enough to fill Jean Réville’s heart. So, despite all this epistemological turmoil among the leaders of the Fifth Section, like Jean Réville, the theological agenda remained in place, and reinvigorated. There was still no theorizing of sacrifice to be seen among the Révilles and their ilk. Among Liberal Protestants, theorizing about sacrifice would have to wait, as we will now see, for the onset of the First World War. 8. World War and the New Politics of Sacrifice I wish to conclude this discussion of Liberal Protestant failure to theorize sacrifice by returning to Terry Eagleton’s suggestions that theorizing occurs when “something is amiss.” “Like small bumps on the neck,” said Eagleton, theorizing, “is a symptom that all is not well.”71 The period around the First World War was certainly a time when “something was amiss” for the French Protestants, liberal and otherwise. Age-old ‘Catholic’ prejudices persisted against the Protestants, since in the mythology of nationalist “Catholic” France (sic) was at war against “Lutheran” Germany (sic). Protestants were thus suspect as “foreigners” or “virtual foreigners.”72 Further fueling nationalist suspicions against the Protestants before 1914 was official Protestant 68
Philippe Alphandéry, “Albert Réville,” 419. Jean Réville, “L’histoire des religions. Sa méthode et son rôle, d’après les travaux récents de MM. Maurice Vernes, Goblet d’Alviella, et du P. van den Gheyn,” 352. 70 Jean Réville, “The Role of the History of Religions in Modern Religious Education,” 518. 71 Terry Eagleton, “The Significance of Theory,” in The Significance of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 26. 72 Daniel Robert, “Les Protestants français et la guerre de 1914–1918” Francia 2 (1974), 415–30. 69
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diffidence toward the fight. A “small but active . . . leftish and relatively pacifist” minority in the Protestant camp thwarted full scale support for the coming war.73 They felt that any war—an offensive and aggressive one to be sure—was to be avoided at all costs. Thus when the war came, French Protestants had to catch up with the nationalist surge which swept the nation, and do so in a convincing manner. Inevitably, this meant justifying for their congregations what death in war meant. With the rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’ everywhere deployed in times such as these, the Protestants too had to reconcile themselves to this language of national death and suffering in wartime. Given the ‘external’ nature of death in warfare, they had, in effect, to theorize sacrifice beyond their privatized theology of Sabatier’s “facts . . . of the human heart.”74 They had to develop trends visible already in a Liberal Protestant theologian like, Dutch historian of religion, Cornelis P. Tiele. We will recall that Tiele at least opened the door to a conception of sacrifice as something more than a matter of human interiority, even as he strove valiantly to save the internalized sacrifice of the Liberals at the same time. For him, sacrifice is essentially “moral or inner sacrifice . . . (and therefore) is the offering par excellence of which all others are but lower forms, and, as it were, masks and foreshadowings.”75 A Liberal Protestant ‘scientific’ historian, close colleague to the Révilles, who took a conspicuous role in just the sort of new theorizing which Eagleton says we should expect in times when thinkers feel those “small bumps on the neck” was Raoul Allier. Raoul Allier was a preacher, philosopher, liberal theologian, historian of religion, and later in life, the doyen of the Paris Protestant Faculty of Theology.76 As an active and highly political ‘scientific’ historian, Allier authored numerous ‘demythologizing’ studies of the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement—that key Catholic Eucharistic organization, so active in the counter-reformation suppression of the
73
Daniel Robert, “Les Protestants français et la guerre de 1914–1918,” 416. Donald A. Nielsen, “Robert Hertz and the Sociological Study of Sin, Expiation and Religion: A Neglected Chapter in the Durkheimian School,” in Structures of Knowing, ed. Richard C. Monk (New York City: University Press of America, 1986), 19. 75 Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological, 147. 76 Raoul Allier, La Compagnie du trés Saint-Sacrement de l’autel: la cabale des dévots (Paris: Colin, 1902), La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. Marseille (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909), La Compagnie du trés Saint-Sacrement de l’autel à Toulouse: une esquisse de son histoire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1914). 74
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Protestants in France.77 Replete with notorious biases revealed by present-day scholarship, Allier’s reading of the counter-reformation shows how politically and religiously informed by republican and liberal Protestant values the so-called ‘scientific’ history actually was.78 Not surprising for that ideological age, Jean Réville could testify in apparent good faith that Allier had adhered to the rigorous standards of ‘scientific’ history of religions, and had been “rigorous and impartial” (sic).79 During World War One, Allier would become one of Paris’ most sought after preachers, perhaps because of the novel and hear-felt interpretations of the tragedies of the conflict which he offered from the pulpit. In 1915 alone, Allier delivered a series of eighty-one midweek sermons at various Protestant “temples” in the city.80 Apparently in reaction to the devastating loss of his son, Roger, in the very first weeks of the war, followed by what Allier tells us was a mysterious experience of “communion” with him, Allier devoted a series of sermons expressly to sacrifice.81 This turn in Allier’s attention to the theme of sacrifice, and in particular to the views he voices there, marks what might have been a pivotal moment in Liberal French Protestant thinking about the subject. Its precise causes, as in many things of this kind, are unclear. In the end, however, the pivot does not ‘tilt’ toward a new theoretical thinking about sacrifice among the Protestant intellectual establishment. Nothing substantial in terms of theoretical thinking about sacrifice issues from Allier’s new views. They might have become the source for new thinking about sacrifice, but they simply did not. In the course of these conférences, Allier reflects the classic mood of theoretical—here, theological—crisis. He, in effect, seems to have been forced to rethink those once certain theological verities in the face of things having gone “amiss.” Against his French Protestant
77 Raoul Allier, La Compagnie du trés Saint-Sacrement de l’autel: la cabale des dévots, La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. Marseille, La Compagnie du trés Saint-Sacrement de l’autel à Toulouse: une esquisse de son histoire. 78 Alain Tallon, La Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement (Paris: Cerf, 1990). 79 Jean Réville, review of Allier, La Cabale des dévots (1902), Revue de l’histoire des religions 48 (1903), 256. 80 Raoul Allier, Le Sacrifice vivant (Paris: Librarie de Foi et Vie, 1915). See also Raoul Allier, Sacrifice et récompense (Paris: Librairie de Foi et Vie, 1915). 81 See also the remarkable memorial volume of Roger Allier’s letters edited and with commentary by Raoul Allier, entitled Roger Allier, Henry H. King, trans., (New York City: Association Press, 1919). The English translation bore an introduction written in 1919 by former president Theodore Roosevelt.
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pacifism, he doubted openly whether one could really pray for the German enemy under the present circumstances. Against the Calvinist proscription of prayers for the dead, Allier mused that if we pray for the safety of someone setting out on a dangerous voyage, why should we not pray for those leaving this life for the next?82 To his regular mid-week audiences in the great ‘temples’ of the capital, Allier even pondered aloud how long a soul remains in a body after death.83 But most instructive for us, was the way Allier began to think about sacrifice afresh against the now obsolete-seeming certainties of his Liberal Protestant faith. What amounted to potential beginnings of new Liberal Protestant theorizing about sacrifice emerged especially in two sermons, Le Sacrifice vivant (1914) and Sacrifice et récompense (1915). In these addresses, Allier straightaway broke with the interiorist conception of sacrifice typical of Liberal Protestants, Auguste Sabatier or Cornelis P. Tiele. Allier even pressed beyond acceptance of the rather tame sorts of civic sacrifice, which the Révilles felt a good citizen ought to make for the nation. Allier felt that the war demanded more extreme sorts of sacrifice than the commonplaces of good citizenship. Heroism was the new order of the day. Christian duty to the nation required citizens to give of themselves for the fatherland.84 “‘There is no surer foundation for civic heroism than Christian courage,’” Allier says.85 But, asks Allier, how far should such shows of courage go? And, how shall we evaluate the losses of life suffered in this pursuit of the national ideal of courageous giving of the self ? Certainly, good Protestants, steeped in a certain humanism, should not join the extreme Catholic nationalists and their heedless cult of self-annihilation! It may, for example, be significant that even as late as the day before the outbreak of hostilities on the 4th of August 1914 that young Roger Allier had written to his parents from the army camp, where French forces were mobilizing, voicing concern about a certain “shadow in the picture.”
82
Gaston Richard, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Raoul Allier, 205. Gaston Richard, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Raoul Allier, 205. 84 This is a view Allier shared with his philosophical mentor, Charles Renouvier. (Gaston Richard, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Raoul Allier, 224. 85 Ibidem, 197. 83
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We are disconcerted by the rapidity with which all the men have responded to the call. Fathers of families who were not expected until the third or fourth day presented themselves in the first hours, begging us equip them at once. Men fifty and sixty years old come pouring in, and some old men of sixty-five ask for guns. Young boys are joining us. Our ranks have just been increased by an old chamois hunter come down from Tarentaise with his sons. . . . It gives an impression of great and irresistible force.86
Nevertheless, war was not “a divine institution, such as Maistre and Moltke have said,” and therefore the nation ought not be absolutized into a perfect object of total sacrificial giving. Nor were the sufferings of, otherwise innocent, soldiers in war some sort a mystical Maistrean sacramental expiation for collective national sin, as intransigent Catholics believed. War is neither “divine law nor a providential expedient.”87 In a classic French Protestant way, Allier believed that positive guidance for his theory of sacrifice in wartime could be found by resorting to his own internal religious experience and to the scriptures—in particular in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Speaking before what we must assume is a rapt audience, Allier relates a blessed hour’s mystical “luminous experience” in which the meaning of the classic text of Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son, Isaac, is revealed. There, “I saw . . . what sacrifice ought and ought not to be,” says our new mystic. Allier’s vision spirits him out of this everyday world and onto a mystical flight. First, he finds himself among the ruins of ancient Carthage, witnessing the pitiless sacrifices of infants to Baal-Moloch. Here is just “what humanity too often sees in sacrifice and why it revolts us. . . . Sacrifice is to surround oneself with death, to traffic in death itself.” It means death in the service of God—a giving up of what we love to “le néant,” Allier declares. To all this, Allier thus reacts with the Liberal Protestant attitudes to sacrifice we have seen thus far: “Our conscience protests!” he says.88 But, Allier’s gruesome “nightmare” flight holds more in store for him. Transported magically again farther afield to another sacred site, Allier arrives on Mount Morija, where he sees the patriarch Abraham trudging off dutifully to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. Watching
86 87 88
Raoul Allier, Roger Allier, 198. Gaston Richard, La Vie et l’oeuvre de Raoul Allier, 216. Raoul Allier, Le Sacrifice vivant, 3f.
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in horror, Allier sees Abraham bent on repeating all the barbarisms of the sacrificial killings at the altar of Baal-Moloch. But, no. Just as Abraham raises the knife, the patriarch inexplicably (and uncanonically)89 “hesitates,” an astonished Allier reports.90 And, in that slight moment of hesitation, Allier believes he divines a paradigm for the proper Christian attitude to sacrifice. Abraham’s ‘résistance’ to the act must have been deep, betrayed as it was by a moment’s hesitation in dealing the deadly blow. The patriarch’s unconscious reluctance reveals a profound truth. To wit, that Abraham did not relish consummating the sacrifice of Isaac; he paused, as it were, to give God the chance to break the blow. Moreover, Abraham’s willingness to carry out the act, linked with his hesitation, proved to God the depth of Abraham’s inner spiritual submission, not his ability to carry out the exterior act of the sacrificial immolation of Isaac. God only sought to make Abraham “dead to sin,” dead in spirit to iniquity, not literally a dealer of death.91 Allier’s hermeneutic ‘trick’ then was to articulate, against considerable odds, a new theological vision of sacrifice as something acceptable to Liberal Protestants. The crisis of spirit created by the War, thus seems to have compelled Allier to theorize sacrifice anew as the generation of the Révilles preceding him did not really have to do. Bringing this lesson to the polemics against the Roman Catholic nationalist propaganda we met earlier on, Allier explicitly links his telling of the story of Abraham and Isaac to the attempt to understand the great losses of life during the War. Recalling the loss of his own son, Allier, in effect, rejects the intransigent Roman Catholic fixation upon bloody expiatory sacrifice for the nation. Like the Abraham of Allier’s telling, we “are not [in reality] asked to sacrifice our sons and husbands.” Their fate is a matter of God’s will and their own free consciences. “The truth is that our loved ones sacrifice themselves,” says Allier. Thus, pious Protestants should focus attention on the public sacrifices which all civilians need to make to the war effort. They need to bolster the steadfastness and courage of the troops by subsuming their needs to those who have chosen freely to sacrifice themselves for the nation. Citizens need actively and externally 89 Genesis 22 nowhere speaks of Abraham’s hesitation. On the contrary, the patriarch is dutiful to the letter. 90 Raoul Allier, Le Sacrifice vivant, 5. 91 Ibidem, 6.
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to sacrifice their own comfort and concerns for those who have made higher sacrifices yet. We can only speculate how the communications from the front by Allier’s son, Roger, may have turned his father’s head. We do know that on the 10th of August 1914, seeing his troops depart, Roger had celebrated the fact that those under his command would fight to the death. Joining their spirit of sacrifice, to his own, he says: Will they return? Always this question! All are happy to go and are quite simply and unostentatiously resolved to do their duty. When the train left, 1,500 voices sang the “Sidi-Brahim.” “They fell in silence”— those are the last words which reach our ears. Yes, many will fall, but not one will retreat. Such troops can be cut to pieces; they cannot be beaten. “Sidi-Brahim” is the name of a massacre—a massacre and a victory.92
And, we also know in addition that the father confirmed his son’s spirit of sacrifice. Roger “defended his position to the end,” writes Raoul Allier: “the idea of retreating did not occur to him.”93 Closing his memoir for his son, Raoul Allier repeats those words all too familiar in urging sacrifice for the national ideal: “‘Greater love hath no man that he lay down his life for his friends.’”94 Thus, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that Allier begins to make stabs at theorizing sacrifice anew outside the safety of the pious French Protestant human heart and into the world of life and death extremity by theorizing the sacrificial death of soldiers in a still discernibly liberal Protestant way. At least, this is what Allier did for the moment in grasping the opportunity provided by the highly charged issue of wartime sacrifice of the innocent to pose some questions regarding sacrifice. In doing so, he might have begun to produce a full blown new theory—one which would try to stand up against both intransigent Catholic theologies of sacrifice as well as against the pale interiorization or avoidance of sacrifice typical of the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section. But, he did not. Instead, he went on to a busy life of practical administrative duties as the doyen if the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris. His writings never touched the issue of sacrifice again, but instead concentrated on guiding
92 93 94
Raoul Allier, Roger Allier, 204. Ibidem, 236. Ibidem, 247.
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prospective missionaries in the tasks which lay ahead of them. His two volume study of conversion (1925) dwelt on how Protestant missionaries in the field ought to approach their essential tasks.95 His treatment, reminiscent of Lévy-Bruhl, of ‘how natives think,’ Le Noncivilisé et nous: différence irréducible ou indentité foncière? (sic) tried to find a middle path between enlightenment and Protestant beliefs in the unity of the human species with the facts of cultural and mental differences reported by the missionaries.96 There, Allier concluded that the reliance on magic, not resort to sacrifice or beliefs in the efficacy of prayers to the dead, kept ‘the primitives’ in their lowly state. ‘They’ had the chance to rise above their ‘fallen’ condition, if and only if they turned around their lives to Christ and abandoned the system of ‘superstitions’ assumed in the practice of the hated ‘magic.’97 Neither as well did the two most substantial French Protestant sociological thinkers following Allier, Maurice Leenhardt and Gaston Richard, develop theories of sacrifice. Indeed, they ignored the subject as much as had the earlier generation of Liberal Protestant scholars, typified by the Révilles. The agendas governing Leenhardt’s thought, for example, remained constrained by the theological tenets of reformation faith. To wit, his interest in the person and myth.98 Likewise, the issues exercising Gaston Richard recalled again the syllabus of French Protestant theological concerns—the autonomy of the individual, the locus of religion in individual faith, the autonomy of psychology, and such.99 And, so after Allier’s brush with the idea of sacrifice in the context of a pastoral address, French Protestant students of religion fell back into their habit of ignoring it altogether.
95 Raoul Allier, La Psychologie de la conversion chez les peuples non-civilisés, 2 vols., (Paris: Payot, 1925). 96 Raoul Allier, Le Non-civilisé et nous: Différende irréducible ou indentité foncière? (Paris: Payot,1927) 97 Raoul Allier, The Mind of the Savage, (1927) Fred Rothwell, trans., (New York City: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), chapters 2 and 6 especially. 98 James Clifford, Person and Myth: Maurice Leenhardt in the Melanesian World. 99 Gaston Richard’s review of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, “Dogmatic Atheism in the Sociology of Religion,” [1923], in Durkheim on Religion, W. S. F. Pickering, ed., (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 228–76.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONSPIRACY/THEORY AND THE GOODNESS OF SOCIETY 1. Plots and Skirmishes I have argued that the French Liberal Protestant scholars of the Fifth Section never bothered to theorize sacrifice. They were discouraged from doing so both by the unlikely combination of their liberal reformed theological commitments and their insistence upon positivist methods of scholarship. Theology militated against the theorizing the subject itself, the historicist history against the cross-cultural comparison and generalizing implicit in theorizing. When indeed some of these Liberal Protestants did transgress their positivist scruples, their attempts to go beyond the ‘facts’ took the self-defeating form of confessional theological condemnations of sacrifice. Thus, given the pride of place of the Liberal Protestants within the Fifth Section and its leadership, a certain tone was set against theoretical discourse about sacrifice with which any prospective theorist of sacrifice in the French academic world would have had to contend. Durkheimian theory of sacrifice, chiefly Hubert and Mauss’ Sacrifice, was just the sort of theory of sacrifice which took on this strange hybrid of positivist and theological discourses about sacrifice established by Liberal Protestant dominance in the Fifth Section. In this chapter, I shall try to show how and why this ‘first’ theory of sacrifice, in part, was formed within the context of a rivalry with specific points of the theological approach to sacrifice of the Liberal Protestants. Claiming that the Durkheimians theorized instead of theologizing is not to attribute some sort of purity of purpose to them. Nor is it to judge the sincerity of the scientific intentions of the French liberal Protestants in the Fifth Section. Far from it. As we will see in this chapter, the liberal Protestants sincerely believed, in some real sense, that even if they could be said to be doing ‘theology,’ that it was ‘scientific’ nonetheless.1 Likewise Durkheimian theory of sacrifice
1 Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies (New York City: St. Martin’s, 1999), chapter 2, 3.
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was not some purely academic enterprise either; it was part of a concerted political and institutional strategy. Unlike the liberal Protestant theological projects, however, Durkheimian theorizing of sacrifice was better adapted to public discourse about religion in a society itself religiously plural. Although their social strategy may be judged as one likes, their theory of religion and sacrifice required no religious test or act of faith in transcendental claims in order to engage it— despite the fact that the Durkheimians were themselves fervent atheists. This chapter will then continue to make good on the promise with which this book began—namely, to look at theories as historical realities, to see how theories were formed in particular cases. I shall therefore approach this issue in two ways. On the one hand, I want to see how the Durkheimians pressed the intellectual case of their theory of sacrifice as a piece of public discourse; on the other hand, I want to show how they created the institutional conditions favoring their intellectual positions embodied in their theorizing about sacrifice. This is then a story of both intellectual argument and concerted political plotting, but entwined together in intricate ways. In order to achieve their political goals of displacing the Liberal Protestants from the center of the Fifth Section, the Durkheimians had to show that the so-called “science religieuse” no longer qualified for the title of “science” with good, solid intellectual arguments. In order to promote their own cause within the institutional context of the Fifth Section, the Durkheimians then had to demonstrate a more defensible public discourse about religion than that achieved in the liberal Protestant theologized “science religieuse.” ‘Theory,’ whether Durkheimian or not, was a ‘public’ discourse—at least in the eyes of their contemporaries; ‘theology’ was necessarily confessional, partial, and thus not public in the sense required by the norms of such discourse in turn-of-the-century France. With ‘theory’ as one of the weapons in the Durkheimian arsenal for achieving their institutional aims, Durkheim sought to place his allies inside the center of religious studies in France where the liberal Protestants held sway. Such changes called for nothing short of a kind of concerted plot. In spite of the appearance of cordiality among the main parties in the academic study of religion in the Fifth Section, underlying tensions disturbed the otherwise placid civility of the Section in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These tensions, chiefly between the Section’s Christians and Jews, or between its more or less pious members, rarely, if ever, emerged into public view. They were characteristically reserved for confidential communications, some
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of which are now coming to light.2 Prime examples of these hidden resentments and antagonisms come to us from recently discovered letters between key members of the Durkheimian group about their liberal Protestant opposites in the Fifth Section. In 1898, while still students in the Fifth Section and thus several years before they won their posts there, Henri Hubert wrote a remarkable note to Marcel Mauss revealing the hidden antagonisms of the Durkheimians toward the liberal Protestants. Interestingly enough for us, Hubert writes about the theory of sacrifice he and Mauss were at the very moment conceiving. In this letter, Hubert tells Mauss how thoroughly he relishes the mischief their “polemics” on sacrifice would spread among the religious powers of the day—meaning perhaps both the Liberal Protestants holding sway in the Fifth Section as well perhaps as the Roman Catholics so vocal in public affairs bearing on religion. Hubert tells Mauss how we “shouldn’t miss a chance to make trouble for these good, but badly informed, souls,” and concludes with a conspiratorial call to arms: “Let’s go! I love a fight!”3 In other places, we find Marcel Mauss referring to “the Protestants” as a political bloc against whom it would be wise to guard, since they acted in concert for their own sectarian interests.4 Far from being isolated instances, we also now know how Durkheim had long plotted to maneuver his ‘men’ into positions of power in the Fifth Section. We also learn from another recently available letter that Durkheim had directed Marcel Mauss, then interviewing with Albert Réville, the Section’s President, for a chair in the Fifth Section, to conceal his sociological agenda in order to smooth his entry into the Section. Dated November 1901, Durkheim wrote Mauss:
2
Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994). Émile Durkheim, Lettres à Marcel Mauss, Philippe Besnard and Marcel Fournier, eds., (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1998). 3 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” Études durkheimiennes/Durkheim Studies 3 (1991), 2–9. 4 Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss, 182f.
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My dear Marcel, A few words in haste, since I am very busy today. I’m so happy with the news you passed on. Regarding your visit tomorrow with (Albert) Réville: just watch out for yourself ! Don’t do anything which might surprise or upset the old man. And, forget about trying to win him over. The important thing is that you don’t give him any reason to think ill of you. Let him run the conversation, and don’t pressure him. You’re there so he can get to know you, not so that you can preach to him. It will get you nowhere if he knows exactly what you do, and what methods you employ. In fact, if he asks you about these, just answer as simply and cleverly as you can. . . . E.D.5
Thus, in and around the Fifth Section, relationships could be calculated and political to a high degree.6 Indeed, one could well conclude that the Durkheimians were routinely and systematically devious in their relations with the Liberal Protestants. For instance, although we know how deeply divided they were on key issues, the upstart Durkheimians never publically attacked the positions of the major liberal Protestant members of the Fifth Section until they had attained a degree of security against counterattack. Instead, until Hubert and Mauss gained their footholds in the Fifth Section, the Durkheimians diverted their critical fire onto the Dutch Protestant co-religionists associated with the Révilles, Cornelis P. Tiele and Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye. The Révilles and Tiele shared common religious affiliations on the Remonstrant wing of Calvinism.7 We have just treated Tiele’s tutelage of Albert Réville in the Netherlands. But for many years thereafter, Tiele and the Révilles continued to collaborate on the Revue d’histoire des religions. Thus, an attack on Tiele 5
Émile Durkheim, Lettres à Marcel Mauss, 292–3. In fairness, it is important to note that Albert Réville was enthusiastic about the candidacy of Mauss in the Fifth Section in a letter to him of 4 November 1901, possibly just after their interview. But, some reserve seems as well to mark Réville’s attitude as Marcel Fournier points out in his comments on this letter of Albert Réville to Mauss. There, while heaping praise of Mauss’ talents and accomplishments, Réville “maintains his prudence,” says Fournier, regarding Mauss’ candidacy and promises him nothing. Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss, 187 n. 2. 7 Although close as well to de la Saussaye in many of these same respects, the Révilles did not share his rather eclectic and somewhat more conservative Calvinism. Albert Réville, “Dutch Theology: Its Past and Present State,” Theological Review 3 (1864): 275–7. 6
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or Chantepie de la Saussaye, for example, would serve the same polemical strategy as an attack on the Révilles—to expose the unfitness of theological discourse for the public realm in a secular state. It would do so, however, without risking the potential acrimony an attack on another French scholar would. Focusing attacks on the Dutch instead of the French seems to have kept matters civil, thanks to a certain level of Durkheimian prudence. As Durkheim’s letter to Mauss shows, the Durkheimians were keen to avoid being targeted as enemies by the very men who controlled their academic careers in the Fifth Section. Such direct attacks would surely have sunk the candidacies of Hubert and Mauss for the chairs which they avidly sought in the Fifth Section. Indeed, the radical reputations of Hubert and Mauss had already begun to circulate when Hubert and Mauss were pursuing their candidacies, and appointment there would be anything but sure. We will shortly examine Jean Réville’s testy review of an early work of Hubert’s, showing how hostile the Liberal Protestants could be to the anti-theological intentions of the Durkheimians.8 But, as we will also see later in this chapter, the Durkheimians succeeded in passing the tests for their admission into the Section. But once the Durkheimians were safely ensconced in the Section, they put political prudence aside and attacked the subtle theologizing carried on under the name of “science religieuse” by the Liberal Protestants.9
8 They Durkheimians did attack the liberal Protestant philosopher of religion, Auguste Sabatier, as Donald Nielsen has discussed at length. But it is also well to point out that their first review was not critical. 9 This is clear when we note the disparity between Mauss’s rather soft criticism of the great Liberal Protestant scholar, Auguste Sabatier’s, work before he had won appointment to the Fifth Section with a sharply critical attack on Sabatier which followed shortly thereafter. In 1898, before election to the Fifth Section, Mauss complimented Sabatier’s Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion for having put the “social and external character of dogma into bold relief ” (Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré. Victor Karady, ed. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 535). He likewise passes over the theologian’s treatment of primitive religion. But in his never completed PhD thesis, La Prière (1909) he calls Sabatier’s treatment of primitive religions “cavalier” (535). Similarly in 1898, Mauss politely notes about Sabatier that the “preoccupations of the soul sincerely burning with his religious faith compromises the uses of method here” (531). Yet, from the security of his post in 1909, Mauss damns Sabatier’s entire discussion of prayer as “predetermined by the faith of the author” (375). In 1909 Mauss also notes that Sabatier’s progressivist story of religious evolution is “broad and facile. . . . (536) It is a matter less of analyzing facts than of demonstrating the superiority of the Christian religion” (375).
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The notion of sacrifice presented the Durkheimians with a perfect opportunity for pursuing their strategy of discrediting the French liberal Protestant theologized “science religieuse.” Since sacrifice was held in such theological contempt by French liberal Protestants, it served as the perfect ‘wedge issue’ for demonstrating how different Durkheimian approaches to religion could be. Where the Durkheimians went in exploring and theorizing sacrifice, the French liberal Protestants could not and would not follow. I am arguing then that it was within the context of this political struggle against a theologized “science religieuse” that the Durkheimian theory of sacrifice was in part formed. What then were these real conflicts conditioning Durkheimian theoretical thinking about sacrifice as it emerged in the somewhat hothouse atmosphere of the École Pratique, Fifth Section? How and why did Hubert and Mauss in particular justify overturning the ‘theological’ approach to the study of religion in general as practiced by the Liberal Protestants who dominated the academic study of religion in France? 2. Hubert and Mauss against the “Science of Religion” As we already know, the French liberal Protestants had certain clear ideas about what religion was. It was for them, spiritual and internal, largely a matter of personal experience and individual moral conscience. All these features of religion militated against the liberal Protestants considering sacrifice worthy of their respect as an object of study. As budding ‘sociologists, the Durkheimians, on the other hand, could hardly have thought differently about religion, and thus about sacrifice. Most of these points of difference emerged in the Durkheimian critical writing about the Dutch scholars of religion, Cornelis P. Tiele and Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye.10 We have already seen how Tiele made the study of religion into an anti-positivist morphology. What attracted Durkheimian criticism was that he also made it a kind of psychology.11 To the Durkheimians,
10 In intellectual terms there was, however, little to choose from between their views, especially Tiele’s, and that of the Révilles. For a review of the history of religions in Holland near century’s end, see Van Hamel, “L’enseignement de l’histoire des religions en Hollande,” Revue d’histoire des religions 2 (1880), 379–85. 11 Marcel Mauss, review of Tiele’s Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological (1900), Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, 547f.
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this made light of the manifestly ‘external’, visible and thus social character of so much religious practice. Tiele in fact was a radical on this point. He held that the “social side” of religion emerged secondarily from “religious emotion.”12 Rejecting this psychologizing of religion, Mauss felt that since religion was at the very least a human thing, and since humans were social, the social dimension of religion was just as likely (if not more so in his case) to be “essential” to the nature of religion as any sort of mental state.13 This is not to say that Mauss was without psychological sensibilities about religion. Even as he advocated taking the social side of religion seriously, Mauss tried to accommodate the interior side of religion as a symmetrical ‘partner,’ so to speak. True, the Durkheimian preferences for the ‘social,’ directed them first to facts which are “more external, more distant.” But, Mauss promised that a social approach would “at the same time” direct us to religious facts which were for all that even “more intimate to religious life.” By contrast, Mauss felt that Tiele’s approach was asymmetrical. It could not accommodate the social as well as he was able to take account of the internal. Referring explicitly to Tiele, Mauss argued that when “one tries to reach . . . (key religious facts) at one go, by simple introspection, one just substitutes one’s own prejudices, personal impressions and subjectivity for the things one wants to understand.”14 Assuming the classic “social realist” position of Durkheim, Mauss seemed to be saying that in being so subjective in its approach to religion, the Protestant “science religieuse” did not let objects ‘speak at all.15 This turning from realism to subjectivism by Tiele and the Révilles in Durkheim’s time was in a way extreme, even by Protestant standards. Durkheim had been full of praise for what he took to be the original Protestant contribution to the formation of just the sort of realism he had admired among German scholars—the practice of studying “things.”16 Mirroring Max Weber, Robert Alun Jones has argued that Calvin’s theology induced a sense of the sanctification
12
Ibidem, 546. Ibidem, 547f. 14 Ibidem, 548. 15 For a full treatment of this entire subject, see Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 16 Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism, 66–8. 13
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of the world, and thus of the positive value of studying it. Durkheim’s French liberal Protestant contemporaries had apparently lost their way from what could have been the salutary beginnings of a real “science religieuse.” Instead, it turns out to be the Durkheimian role to reassert early Protestant ‘realism’ by way of their study of society and their sense of that study as a study of “things.” Only in this way could one provide our introspections and subjective feelings with some sort of external check, and thus achieve something worth of the name “science religieuse.” On top of its subjectivism, Tiele’s psychological approach to religion was also bedeviled by its apologetic purpose and structure. In this way, Tiele placed obstacles in the way of a public discourse about religion, and thus really prevented a “science” of religion from emerging. In effect, Tiele held that religion was not at all a public matter. Evidence again of its subjectivism, it was immune from rational criticism and beyond the reach of public scrutiny. Tiele made no secret of this, even as he claimed scientific status for such a study of religion. From “the inmost depths of our souls,” he said, religion radiates a “power . . . which the assaults of the keenest of the adversaries of religion with the keenest shafts of their wit, with all their learning and eloquence . . . are in the long-run unavailing and impotent.”17 Religion therefore dwelt in the secret recesses of “the heart”— an impregnable and autonomous fortress fashioned by the liberal Protestant piety of the day, thus rendering it ultimately resistant to inquiry.18 Quite naturally, the Durkheimians concluded that Tiele’s assertion of the privileged autonomy of religion simply exposed the confessional theological nature of his entire discourse of religion. Science had no way inside this kind of religion. When Tiele spoke of this “interior God,” concluded Mauss, “he truly seems to be teaching a theology.”19 To Mauss, this was lamentable, since it was simply unnecessary for Tiele to withdraw religion from the public realm, and thus from any criticism or ‘objective’ study. Religion was one of the many things open for curious human beings to try to understand. Tiele’s
17 Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1898), 24. 18 Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological, 14. 19 Marcel Mauss, (1900) review of Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, 547.
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claims for the a priori autonomy of religion were thus simply fideism dressed up in the language of the academy. Such a conception of religion, said Mauss, “retiring more and more from social and material life in order to take refuge in the individual conscience” simply made the study of religion impossible.20 In this way, by removing religion from the public sphere, by grounding religion in an essentially private psychological realm, the liberal Protestants made it impossible for the science of religion to be “properly scientific.”21 By contrast, Mauss felt that the Durkheimian social approach at least permitted a putative science of religion really to achieve something of this goal: Thanks to [the sociological method] the facts of the religious order appear as objective and natural things; they have an existence outside the fleeting instances where the individual acts and thinks. . . . Thanks to sociology, we can study [religious facts] comparatively, while at the same time pushing as far as possible the detailed analyses which preserve the value of [religious facts]. Everything thus stays in its place, and yet is part of an infinitely perfectible system—the mark of every true science.22
In his critical reading of Tiele’s work on religion, Mauss then tried to show that the Durkheimian study of religion stood for a study of religion fully public in both collective and historical dimensions. Oddly enough this was to claim in effect that Durkheimian sociology worthier of being a “science religieuse” than what the Liberal Protestants passed off under the same rubric. Having done with C. P. Tiele, the Durkheimians took on Tiele’s countryman, Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye. They did so, however, in a way which was deliciously devious. In 1897, de la Saussaye published the second edition of his lengthy 1887–9 “phenomenological” handbook of the world’s religions under the title, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte.23 In this, one the first great manuals of
20
Marcel Mauss, (1899) review of Cornelis P. Tiele, Enleidung . . . Part I: in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré. Victor Karady, ed. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 544. 21 Marcel Mauss, review of Tiele’s Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological (1900), Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, 547. 22 Ibidem, 544f. 23 Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols [1887–92] 2nd ed (Freiburg: n.p., 1897).
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the world’s religions, Saussaye organized the new data about the religions of the world into categories useful for facilitating the future of the study of religion. Interested as they were not only in new data about religion, but also about new ways of studying it, in 1904, Henri Hubert and Isidore Lévy gathered a team of translators to produce a French edition of this massive work, under the title, Manuel d’histoire des religions.24 Durkheimian sponsorship of de la Saussaye was not, however, as innocent as it seemed to be at first glance. The Durkheimian project was shot through with disingenuous political purpose. While nothing at all was controversial about the avowed public purpose and content of the translation of the text itself, the Durkheimian use of it was. Hubert wrote a most peculiar introduction to the volume, taking much of its forty-three pages severely to attack many of Chantepie de la Saussaye’s main theses! Beginning innocently enough, Hubert saluted Saussaye for initiating the perhaps thankless task of sorting through the masses of data about religion, which had accumulated in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Further in this friendly vein, he warmly praised Saussaye for having provided an adequate and careful statement of the present state of play in the “science of religion.”25 But then Hubert’s commentary took a critical turn by identifying what he took to be the many difficulties in Saussaye’s work.26 In fact, the book was so problematic, said Hubert, that it would be “useless to remake it.”27 Adding insult to injury, Hubert then turned de la Saussaye’s Manuel into a vehicle for laying out the main lines of a Durkheimian “manifesto” for religious studies.28 In
24
Henri Hubert, “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions [1897] 2nd ed., Henri Hubert and Isidore Lévy, trans. (Paris: Colin, 1904). 25 Henri Hubert, “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, vi. 26 Indeed, contemporaries of the Durkheimians claim that until the publication of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, seven years later, Hubert’s “Introduction” ranked as the most complete and trenchant statement of Durkheimian theoretical intentions. To their Protestant opponents, Hubert’s work exemplified the much feared “imperialism” of the Durkheimians. ( John E. Craig, “Sociology and Related Disciplines between the Wars: Maurice Halbwachs and the Imperialism of the Durkheimians,” The Sociological Domain, Philippe Besnard, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 263–89.) 27 Henri Hubert, “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, v. 28 Henri Berr, “Les progrés de la sociologie religieuse,” Revue de synthèse historique
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Hubert’s eyes, the only way to overcome the difficulties of Saussaye’s effort was to propel the study of religion toward a more public and encompassing future. Hubert naturally identified this with Durkheim’s plans for the study of religion. Noting, for example, that Saussaye, like Tiele, had wedded the study of religion to a theologized introspective psychology, Hubert reasoned that by virtue of this, it could not possibly pass muster as public discourse in a pluralist secular society. To wit, Saussaye’s work rested squarely on things which could not be ‘known,’ but relied on acts of faith. Saussaye’s belief in the truth of the existence of God and the private inner workings of the human heart, for example, were not the stuff of public knowledge.29 The only path to redemption for this putative ‘science of religion,’ said Hubert, was “to extirpate the unknowable from its domain and to ban theology from it as well.”30 A final, particularly damning, consequence of Saussaye’s theological prejudice was to exclude both Judaism and Christianity from the Manuel. For Chantepie de la Saussaye, they were not mere ‘religions,’ like the rest, but ‘true’ revelations of divine will.31 As such, they could never be the object
12 (1906), 18. Comte Eugéne Goblet d’Alviella, “La sociologie de M. Durkheim,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 67 (1913), 195. 29 Henri Hubert, “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, xix. 30 Henri Hubert, “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, xix. 31 Saussaye responded to such criticism by promising to deal with Christianity separately and then later integrate into a general phenomenology. This was reported in Henri Hubert’s “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, vi. This excuse did not please Saussaye’s arguably sharpest critic, the Catholic modernist, Alfred Loisy, either. In reviewing both the French translation of the second edition and the subsequent third German language edition, Loisy says, Christianity has the completely negative privilege of not being represented. This form of respect may have its inconveniences. Without doubt, a time will come when the history of religions—in its own interests—will see that it cannot do without Christianity; and a time will come when Christian theology will recognize that it ought—for the same reason as well—make a place for the history of religions. (Albert Loisy, review of Henri Hubert, “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 9 (1904): 479. See also Albert Loisy, review of Chantepie de la Saussaye’s Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 3rd ed, Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 10 (1905): 505–6. In his review of the third edition of Saussaye’s Manuel, Loisy observed that Christianity is still left out. But this time, Loisy spares the charm: “Christianity might figure there [in comparison with other religions] with
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of scientific study in the way the other ‘religions’ were. Thus, deep in the heart of a putatively ‘scientific’ project was a clear confessional agenda—and one which Hubert made it his business to expose and exploit for Durkheimian purposes. In so using Saussaye’s book to bolster Durkheimian ideas, Hubert had then simply ‘hijacked’ the Manuel and ‘drove’ it off to do Durkheimian work. Within the otherwise clubby confines of the Fifth Section, Hubert’s translation and introduction in particular created a major flap, showing how serious were the conflicts between the Durkheimians and the Protestants. That Hubert should undertake this project was no surprise, since we already know how concerned the Durkheimians were about breaking with historicism by promoting a comparative study of religions informed by the critical study of categories and religious morphology.32 Yet, as Hubert had promised in his letter to Mauss of 1898, he had something much more ‘mischievous’ in mind in commissioning the French translation of Chantepie de la Saussaye’s book.”33 Not surprisingly, liberal Protestant reactions to Hubert’s treatment of Saussaye were unfriendly indeed for what was an age of rather gentlemanly academic discourse. The ‘bite’ of the Durkheimians upon the “science religieuse” was apparently beginning to be felt. There was doubtless as well a sense of personal betrayal. Despite his Catholic family background, Hubert showed much the same profile of intellectual orientations as many of the French liberal Protestants.
damage to the faith of its adherents; [but] for the good of science, it should already have been introduced”. Albert Loisy, review of Chantepie de la Saussaye’s Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 505–6. Jean Réville also found Saussaye’s omission of Christianity “inexcusable”—but only because in excluding Christianity from comparison with other religions Saussaye had missed a great chance to demonstrate its superiority! All histories of religion which systematically leave aside Christianity—insofar as the focus of such history is religious—are deprived of the crown of the religious evolution of humanity; in its different forms and in its progressive evolution, Christianity has been for the last five hundred years the religion of those peoples who have marched at the head of civilisation ( Jean Réville, review of Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, Second Edition, 1897. Revue de l’histoire des religions 38 (1898): 69). 32 Henri Hubert laments that Chantepie de la Saussaye had however excluded the taxonomic sections in the second edition. See his Henri Hubert, “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, vi. 33 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” 2–9.
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Hubert had been, agrègée in the “Protestant science” of history, a past contributor to Protestant Gabriel Monod’s La revue historique and a model of historicist erudition. The French liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section may well then have felt betrayed by one they counted as their own. Hubert’s attacks on the public and scientific pretensions of the liberal Protestant “science religieuse” could not be avoided or totally ignored. In 1905, a leading figure in Liberal Protestant circles, Jean Réville, took direct aim at Hubert’s critique of Saussaye’s theological approach to the study of religion in a featured review in the Revue de l’histoire des religions, the official organ of the Fifth Section.34 There, Jean Réville barely seems to be able to control his rage, as Réville’s biographer noticed. The reviewer singled out Jean Réville review of Hubert’s “Introduction” as “one of the rare doctrinal statements” which Réville made during his career.35 An intimate of the faculty of the Fifth Section, the Belgian historian of religion, Goblet d’Alviella confirmed these bad feelings among the Protestant faculty created by Hubert’s “Introduction.” Reporting this without ascription, Goblet noted that certain unnamed “esprits chagrins” (apparently, Jean Réville) had “reproached”36 Hubert for having misrepresented Saussaye’s historical work, making of it in the process a “veritable manifesto . . . of neo-sociology.”37 Goblet d’Alviella’s aggrieved mood fit well the tenor of Réville’s angry review. In a word, “doctrinaire,” was how Jean Réville described Hubert’s imposition of a sociological notion of religion onto Saussaye’s book—the furthest thing of course from the Dutch theologian’s mind.38 Without arguing the particular merits of the Durkheimian claim, Jean Réville simply vented his fury against the Durkheimians for making society central and essential to religion, over against his own Protestant belief that religious experience and “religious individuality” constituted the essence of religion.39 Thus, Hubert’s assertion of the 34 Jean Réville, review of Henri Hubert and Isidore Lévy, translation of Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, Revue d’histoire des religions 51 (1905): 75–82. 35 These three are Hubert, Adolf von Harnack, and Salomon Reinach. Philippe Alphandéry, “Jean Réville,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 57 (1908): 278n1. 36 Eugéne Goblet d’Alviella, “La sociologie de M. Durkheim,” 197. 37 Ibidem, 195. 38 Jean Réville, review of Henri Hubert and Isidore Lévy, translation of Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, 78. 39 Ibidem, 81.
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social nature of religion as well as his attack on the Protestant doctrine of the privileged interiority of religious life brought out into the open how Protestant ‘theorizing’ about religion was really theology, how it remained a private discourse of an admittedly liberal religious confession rather than the makings of a language for speaking in the public arena about religion. And, so the lines of battle were sharply drawn between Liberal Protestant theology and Durkheimian theory. Perhaps this was where Hubert was fulfilling his promise to Mauss that we “shouldn’t miss a chance to make trouble for these good, but badly informed, souls. . . .”?40 Whatever else he had done, by making a public issue of Protestant theologizing of the “science religieuse,” Hubert had certainly made his share of “trouble” for the universalist pretensions of these “good, but badly informed (Liberal Protestant) souls” of the Fifth Section. 3. Durkheimian “Foxes” and Protestant “Lions” in the Fifth Section It was no doubt part of Hubert and Mauss’ calculating strategies that the row over Hubert’s edition of Chantepie de la Saussaye’s Manual would not erupt until well after they had both achieved their respective elections to the Fifth Section. By the time Jean Réville had seen through Henri Hubert’s intentions in launching his translation (1904 or 1905),41 it was too late. Both Hubert and Mauss were safely installed in their lifetime chairs in the Fifth Section. In 1900, Henri Hubert had narrowly won appointment to succeed recently deceased Protestant theologian, Auguste Sabatier. A year later, Marcel Mauss followed Hubert and succeeded Léon Marillier, and thus Durkheim’s plans to infiltrate members of his ‘team’ into the Fifth Section were beginning to see fruit. As it was, Henri Hubert, the first of the Durkheimian group to win a chair in the Fifth Section, came close to being rejected for election to the Section, primarily by the votes cast by the Liberal Protestants. A look now into the process of Hubert’s election also gives us a privileged access into the inner workings of the institutional side of the division between 40 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” 2–9. 41 Jean Réville, review of Henri Hubert and Isidore Lévy, translation of Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, 78.
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the Durkheimians and the Liberal Protestants in the Fifth Section, which we have so far only considered in terms of their theoretical differences. Hubert’s victory was won against the opposition of some of the leading members of the Liberal Protestant leadership, and only because the Durkheimians were able to rally support for Hubert from their great friend and patron in the Fifth Section, Sylvain Lévi. Elections to the Fifth Section were held in camera, but the paper ballots identified each voter. In order to be declared the winner, an “absolute majority” of eight of the fourteen members of the faculty was required. The first round of voting found the Section split into camps almost equally divided among various candidates. Significantly these camps corresponded closely to the religious and ideological divisions of the Section. Jews and liberal Catholics lined up for Hubert and his proposed offering of a specialty in the “Primitive Religions of Europe.” The liberal Protestants opposed Hubert and opted either for Charles Fossey’s subject of Babylonian religions or Paul Monceaux’s history of Christianity in Africa. A notable exception to this solid front of Liberal Protestants against Henri Hubert was Maurice Vernes who, as we have seen, had his own reasons to object to the theologizing of the prominent Liberal Protestants. He alone among the Liberal Protestants voted for Henri Hubert. Finally, after several rounds of voting, Hubert got the minimal “relative majority” (seven of thirteen voting) rather than the “absolute majority” of the total membership (eight of the fourteen member Fifth Section) necessary for clear election.42 Aside from Vernes, vocal in support of Hubert were the Jewish faculty—Israel Lévi, Hartwig Derenbourg and Sylvain Lévi. In fact, Sylvain Lévi led the campaign for Hubert’s nomination, making the key arguments during the Section’s lengthy deliberations. Also declaring for Hubert were three other lesser known figures.43 Arrayed conspicuously against Hubert were Albert Réville, Jean Réville, Léon Marillier, Eugène De Faye and Georges Raynaud. The two remaining members of the Section, François Joseph Picavet and Jules Toutain, held out to the
42 Proces Verbaux. École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth Section, 10 November 1901, 274, reporting the vote taken on 18 June 1901. 43 These were Adhemar Esmein, the Catholic canon lawyer, André Bertolet, the Greco-Roman specialist and Georges Millet, the Byzantine Christianity incumbent.
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bitter end for the historian of African Christianity, Paul Monceaux.44 Henri Hubert, thus, won election in the Fifth Section by the narrowest and most improbable of margins, holding onto all seven of his first round votes until either Picavet or Toutain abstained on the third ballot, leaving Hubert the winner by a kind of default. Elated by Hubert’s election against such odds and through such trials, Durkheim shared his delight with his young collaborator for what he saw as a political and institutional victory for ‘sociology.’ In general, it is not without interest that sociology has now penetrated the École Pratique des Hautes Études. For, even if this time, (the term, “sociology”) . . . does not appear on the (official) posters (announcing courses and faculty), it is really there in this choice of (you) and in your personal presence there. Now, those are reasons to celebrate!45
What Durkheim also knew was that these political alignments carried favorable intellectual implications as well for at least neutralizing Protestant theological dominance over the Fifth Section. Judging by patterns of voting, two members of the Fifth Section seemed pivotal—Sylvain Lévi, who was always closely linked to the Durkheimian, especially to Hubert and Mauss, and Maurice Vernes, a Liberal Protestant prominently out-of-step, as we know, with the theologizing ambitions of Albert and Jean Réville. That Vernes should have lined up with the Durkheimians against his co-religionists was in itself encouraging. Vernes’ support of Hubert’s appointment in effect meant the real possibility of a general re-evaluation of the meaning of religion of Europe’s pre-Christian past, and therefore of the liberal Protestant line taken on religious change and evolution. While it is true that Albert Réville was an early enthusiast of the study of ‘primitive religions,’ and supported their further study by hand-picking Léon Marillier to the first chair in this area of study in all of Europe (1888), Albert Réville leveled theological judgment against them. As an intellectual ally of the Révilles, Marillier shared the evolutionist views of the Révilles toward ‘primitive’ religions as inferior. Moreover, the study of the ‘primitives’ should serve the interests of Christian apologetics. The chair was tellingly entitled
44 François Joseph Picavet was an historian of scholasticism, and Jules Toutain, the archeologist, was best known perhaps for his translation of the Golden Bough into French. 45 Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss, 185.
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“L’histoire des religions des peuples non-civilisés.” Its title reveals how the liberal Protestant conception of the ‘primitives’ was conditioned by their belief in Christian superiority. To wit, “we” study “them” in order to see how far “we” have progressed from the conditions prevalent among “them” and how far “they” have strayed from the primal revelation of religion-as-such. Leaving little doubt about his views of the ‘primitives,’ Albert Réville tells us that “religions constitute an evolution—the evolution of religion.” Thus, in the eyes of the French liberal Protestants, one studies the mechanisms of growth and decline among the ‘religions.’ It is otherwise, however, with “la religion,” which “under the most various forms, abides and will abide.”46 By this logic, then, sacrifice cannot be an essential part of the real religion, because sacrifice prevails among the inferior religions, “in the darkness of polytheism and idolatry.”47 In contrast to this, the Durkheimians, and Vernes with them, broke first of all with the (“discontinuous”) radical step-wise evolutionist model of historical change implicit in the Liberal Protestant position. Virtually the first official act undertaken by Mauss in succeeding Marillier was to scold the Section heads for the derogatory title of the chair: “there are no non-civilized peoples”, Mauss thundered, “only people of different civilizations. . . .”48 Hubert’s view was identical to Mauss’s. He wished to study the primitive past of European civilization, but as having made invaluable contributions to modern European identity.49 But, the liberal Protestants, believing that religious evolution was discontinuous, resisted such substantial links to the past. Thus, Jean Réville, then occupying a public post as president of the Fifth Section, virtually delivered a writ of divorce from the past—whether Catholic or ‘primitive.’ “With regard to our contemporaries, solidarity simply amounts to division of labour. With regard to the past we need feel no gratitude.”50 The ‘religions’ evolve and change; ‘real’ religion does not. Given that the value of the primitive European past was a bone of contention in this way, it
46
Albert Réville, “Evolution in Religion, and Its Results,” Theological Review 12 (1875), 246. 47 Albert Réville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, [1884] 2nd ed., P. H. Wicksteed, trans. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1905), 86. 48 Marcel Mauss, “Leçon d’ouverture”, Revue d’histoire des religions 45 (1902), 43. 49 Ivan Strenski, “Henri Hubert, Racial Science and Political Myth,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23 (1987), 353–67. 50 Jean Réville, Liberal Christianity (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 198f.
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was not surprising then that the leading Protestant members of the Fifth Section were to a man lined up against Hubert and his research project on the primitive religions of Europe. Another part of the significance of the support of Maurice Vernes was that he had struggled against the theologizing evolutionism of his co-religionists which, in turn, had functioned for them to denigrate the ‘religions’ of the past in favor of religion-as-such or Christianity. In voting for Hubert, Vernes was apparently casting his vote for a more honorable study of the religious past, and thus for Hubert’s Durkheimian commitment to show how the archaic religions of Europe laid the bases for the religious developments of the present day. Comparing the Catholic mass to the ritual sacrifices of the socalled ‘primitives,’ Hubert and Mauss declared that by “the same ritual processes our priests seek almost the same effects as our primitive ancestors.”51 Vernes seems to have known that Hubert would resist seeing the past of Europe apologetically—as something which was seen to culminate in liberal Protestant Christianity as the leadership of the Fifth Section believed. So, by contrast with his theologically tending co-religionists in the Fifth Section, Vernes would have found someone in league with Durkheim like Hubert, a desirable candidate for a chair at a public university. As for Sylvain Lévi, Mauss claims him as nothing less than his “second uncle.” Knowing full well how such an epithet would resonate to anyone knowing how identified Mauss was with his ‘first’ uncle, we must consider Sylvain Lévi of utmost importance to Mauss.52 As we know from Sylvain Lévi’s leadership role in electing Mauss’ comrade-in-arms, Hubert, the intimacy of this relationship translated immediately into patronage for the Durkheimian ‘team’ in the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth Section.53 Added to these personal
51 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice Its Nature and Function [1899], trans. W. D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 93. 52 Marcel Mauss, “Sylvain Lévi” (1935) in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 3. Cohesion sociale et divisions de la sociologie. Victor Karady, ed., (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 537. 53 In Mauss’ estimation, Sylvain Lévi did more for us and all of you who have followed us [than one might imagine]. He never separated the advancement of a concern for science and for our careers from the advancement of our progress and work. One of his great ‘merits’ was that he thought about each one of us in material, fatherly, and fraternal ways. . . . He evaluated us and placed us all exactly as we ought to
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relationships, in 1898 Sylvain Lévi produced an important study of sacrifice in ancient India, laden with all sorts of parallels to Durkheimian ideas of sacrifice. Here, we can begin to see the makings of real intellectual dependencies. In the context of our concern with public discourse about religion, sacrifice and such, we also need to register Sylvain Lévi’s support of the public, as opposed to the theological, nature of scholarship on sacrifice. Although we do not have recorded comments on the matter, as a pious Jew, one must assume that Sylvain Lévi found himself increasingly uneasy as the confessional theological ambitions of his Liberal Protestant colleagues came more and more out into the open. As early as 1892, Jean Réville brazenly asserted his confessional theological ambitions in the public space of the Fifth Section: “Religious universalism, and I should add . . . Christian universalism—this is what the science of religion teaches modern society.”54 How could a pious Jew and devotee of the secular republic like Sylvain Lévi, have welcomed such ambitions among his liberal Protestant colleagues? Mauss’ opposition to a theologized study of religion in the École Pratique, Fifth Section, published in his 1899 and 1900 reviews of Tiele,55 would have been well known to an intimate like Sylvain Lévi, who was already a natural ally for the naturalistic public discourse about religion for which the Durkheimians stood. The main point to underline in reviewing how the Protestants and Durkheimians differed on the study of religion is how this academic debate spoke to the question of the nature of public discourse about religion in a religiously diverse society. Not only did the struggles between the Durkheimians and the Protestants involve careers, national and global prestige but also their outcome would influence the shaping of national policies of moral and civic education, and the way religion would be conceived in the public domain. I conclude this chapter, then, by showing how key aspects of the Durkheimian theory
have so been—for another task even greater, in relation to our studies, teaching, and science—but also for ourselves and for him. . . . Marcel Mauss, “Sylvain Lévi”, 539. 54 Jean Réville, “The Role of the History of Religions in Modern Religious Education,” The New World 1 (1892): 518. 55 Marcel Mauss, (1899) review of Cornelis P. Tiele, Enleidung . . . Part I: in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, 544, and Marcel Mauss, (1900) review of Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, 547.
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of sacrifice, opposed to French liberal Protestant ideas, demonstrate a Durkheimian attempt to articulate a public discourse about religion and sacrifice. 4. Ritual Is Religion Made Flesh Set off conspicuously from their French Liberal Protestant colleagues in the Fifth Section, the Durkheimians held, first, that sacrifice was a kind of ritual gift, neither necessarily good nor bad. Second, it was an historically continuous part of human social life, and third, if conceived properly, could serve in a potentially valuable and necessary role in our modern societies. Recalling what we know of Protestant theological abhorrence of ritual and gift, how did the Durkheimians propose shifting our understanding of sacrifice as ritual and gift so that sacrifice could assume its place within public discourse about religion? The Durkheimians provided us with a language for talking about sacrifice as gift and ritual without having to presume that they were necessarily bad things in religion. It can be looked on from an ideologically and religiously neutral standpoint as a social mechanism. We have seen earlier that Albert Réville’s criticism of sacrificial ritual was conditioned by his belief that real religion—the natural religion or religion-as-such—was a personal internal affair where ‘externals’ like rituals were absent. The Durkheimians, on the other hand, in effect steered clear of value judgements about the religious status of ritual, and instead took a ‘look and see’ attitude to ritual and gift. They, in effect, urged that we first ‘look and see’ what ritual and gift are and do—their ‘Nature and Function’ as Hubert and Mauss’ book is entitled—before damning them in advance. Indeed, as committed to the public criteria of knowledge characteristic of their notion of science, they actually made a ‘look and see’ empirical approach to data part of their way of building a theory of religion and sacrifice. In the interests of public knowledge and public discourse about religion, ritual offered them privileged access to religion, since it was pre-eminently a public and observable thing. As Durkheim himself put it, ritual was “religion made visible and tangible.”56 So, why not start from the common ground of our experience 56 Émile Durkheim, review of Guyau, L’Irreligion de l’avenir [1887] in Durkheim on Religion, W. S. F. Pickering, ed., (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 26.
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of ritual for theorizing about religion, indeed for any study of religion at all? By contrast, to exclude ritual (worse yet for sacrifice) in advance from having anything important to tell us about religion was to rule out what might be a basis for a public discourse about religion. What public or non-confessional reasons could there be for ruling ritual or ritual sacrifice ‘out of court’ for understanding religion? Now, the Durkheimians seem to argue that although one might have other than theological reasons for passing over ritual or ritual sacrifice in understanding religion, these reasons were few. They contended, in effect, that ritual (sacrifice included) was so widely deployed in systems generally accepted as ‘religious’ that, at the very least, it provided a fair enough public point of departure from whence a scientific study of religion could depart. We, therefore, do not need to like sacrifice, for example, in order to bring it into the study of religion, but we at least have to describe it carefully—empirically— and study it deeply—theoretically—in order to justify our constituting a public discourse about religion. As we have seen, the French liberal Protestants did not even bother producing serious descriptive work on sacrifice. Particularly troublesome about excluding sacrifice from any part in defining religion was its ubiquity. Since ritual sacrifice was especially prominent in religion, it might potentially hold a key to a full grasp of religion itself. Perhaps we are missing something really important about religion in refusing engage sacrifice theoretically? The recent work of René Girard on sacrifice testifies to the possible fruitfulness of such view of the relation of sacrifice to religion. In a sense, Girard provides an intellectually sounder approach to the brute fact of the ubiquity of sacrifice than that taken by the French liberal Protestants. Even though Girard hates sacrifice as much as does Albert Réville or any of his cohort in the Fifth Section, he does not for that reason just turn his back on the rite. Like the Durkheimians, Girard theorizes religion and sacrifice in light of the ineluctable facts of its widespread occurrence.57 Whether or not one likes Girard’s theory that sacrifice shows how religion arises in violence does not really matter on this point. Girard at least ‘faces the
Also cited in W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 326. 57 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
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facts’ of religion. The French liberal Protestants, however, cast sacrifice for the most part outside the realm of the ‘facts’ of religion, and thus never engage what seems undeniably important if only in a quantitative sense. For the Durkheimians, as for Girard, sacrificial ritual was more than an just another appropriate object of their theorizing minds; it was essential to their efforts in theorizing religion. Thus, how and why do the Durkheimians in effect take up positions about theorizing sacrifice diametrically opposed to Albert Réville’s theological denunciation of it? Consider Albert Réville’s critique of sacrifice as gift and the Durkheimian position contrary to it. 5. Theorizing Sacrificial Gift Now, what were the reasons Durkheim and the Durkheimians thought they were right about how to theorize sacrifice as gift in public discourse about sacrifice? To the Durkheimians, any rejection of the place of sacrificial gift in religion was implausible on its face, because it was central to so many religions. Quantity, in a way, matters. While one must always bear in mind that truth is not a function of quantity, the abundant data from the religions ought to make anyone dismissing gift from the idea of religion have second thoughts. The Durkheimians had ‘second thoughts’ and more. Like Réville, one might not approve or like such a religion because it embraced sacrificial gift. But, would this be enough reason to cast out such a ‘religion’ from the circle of ‘real’ religions? We would at least have to have considered the dynamic of gift at considerable depth before doing so—especially so as in the case of the French liberal Protestants where strong theological opposition to the religious status of gift existed. Unless we accepted Réville’s reformation abhorrence of ‘works,’ for human agency, for example, why should we assume with him, that a religion in which gift featured centrally was any less (even less ‘evolved’) a religion than one which did not?58 The burden of proof seems to be upon Réville. Why, furthermore, should we accept Albert Réville’s view that a religion in which gift mediated the relation of humanity to divinity fell short of some standard of excellence in matters religious? Doing so required Réville and 58 John Bossy, Christianity in the West: 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Part One, on pre-Reformation Christianity’s social conception of itself.
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Tiele, as we noted earlier, to define religion in so spiritual a way— a matter of “spirit and truth”59—as to make any role for the body in religion reason for its disqualification. Because the liberal Protestant theological discourse on sacrifice drew so narrow a circle round ‘religion,’ it excluded too many things which at least at first glance deserved to be called ‘religion. It thus failed as a public discourse from the outset. By contrast, when looked on as gift, Hubert and Mauss tried to avoid the sectarian theological splits between the Catholics and Protestant debates about ‘works’ versus ‘grace.’ Instead, seeing sacrifice as gift opened up possibilities where both Catholic and Protestant could join a public discussion. Without assuming that sacrifice as gift compelled the deity, the Durkheimian sense of sacrifice as gift exploited the idea that religion was a matter of kinship, as William Robertson Smith had argued.60 For the Durkheimians, this sense of kinship was expressed in terms of sacrifice being a special mode of exchange.61 Neither Catholic nor Protestant could or would gainsay this, and thus both could engage the issue on the basis of a common conception of sacrifice. Was there not public consensus that religion was at the very least about exchanges or relationships between divinity and humanity? To be sure, there is more to the Durkheimian theory of sacrifice than simply an emphasis upon exchange. The notorious Durkheimian social reduction of religion, surely qualified as a point of ideology that would eliminate Durkheimian theory from being the basis for a public discourse about sacrifice. As Mauss’s little monograph, The Gift, argued, gift was essential to society: “no sacrifice without society” and no society without sacrifice.62 As for sacrifice, Hubert and Mauss concur with the hated Durkheimian social reduction of religion. Speaking of sacrifice, Hubert and Mauss conclude: “The unbeliever sees in these rites only vain and costly illusions, and is astounded
59
Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological, 147. Émile Durkheim, review of Guyau, L’Irreligion de l’avenir [1887] in Durkheim on Religion, 26f. 61 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 11. 62 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, “Introduction à l’analyse de quelques phénomènes religieux,” (1906) Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, 16. 60
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that all mankind has so eagerly dissipated its strength for phantom gods.” But, rushing to the rescue of the validity of traditional religion, Hubert and Mauss put in their attempt at laying the basis for a public discourse about sacrifice. They continue But there are perhaps true realities to which it is possible to attach the institution in its entirety. Religious ideas, because they are believed, exist; they exist objectively, as social facts. The sacred things in relation to which sacrifice functions, are social things. And this is enough to explain sacrifice.63
Yet, try as they might, here is at least one place where the theological critics of the Durkheimians might be justified in pointing to a Durkheimian ‘theology’ rearing its head from beneath the sweet reasonableness of an attempt at achieving public discourse about sacrifice. While the Durkheimian project began with a quest for a public discourse, perhaps they too, like the French liberal Protestants in their own way, detoured into what their critics like Catholic Charles Péguy complained was metaphysics, or really a kind of secular theology (sic): “We have witnessed the disestablishment of the churches. When shall we see the disestablishment of metaphysics?”64 For the Durkheimians to say that religion was ‘really’ about society, seems as metaphysical a claim as the assertion that religion resided in those unassailable recesses of the human heart where the infinite divinity touched the finite inner self. One might, of course, defend the Durkheimians on the grounds that if they aspired to being ‘scientists,’ they would need to be committed to the view that religion in its social aspect should be open to public access in a way that Tiele or Réville’s ‘inner recesses of the human heart,’ could not. Thus, the Durkheimian sociological view of religion might qualify as public discourse, while it is hard to see how theological talk about ‘inner recesses,’ in principle, ever could. Even granting this, the Durkheimians are not wholly excused from launching a kind of ‘secular theology,’ and in the process threatening the very public nature of the discourse on religion which they had sought to articulate.
63
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 101. Charles Péguy, “De la situation faite au parti intellectuel” in Oeuvres en prose complètes Vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 166. 64
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6. Theorizing the Sacrificial Past
In the interests of clearing a safe place for public discourse about sacrifice, the Durkheimians naturally often tried to situate themselves strategically between the Catholics and the Protestants. But sometimes they seemed to opt for one over the other. Among other things dividing these two wings of Christianity, one was their different valuations of history or the past. Here, the Durkheimians seemed to take the Catholic side. They argued, for example, that the lessons of the sacrificial practices of the entire human past were somehow retained in the present. In particular, the Durkheimians believed that the religious past of the human race informed our lives in yet to be discovered ways. As such, we might better understand what the function and nature of sacrifice in our modern complex societies, and provide a language in which to talk about it, if we paid attention, as Hubert and Mauss did, to sacrifice among the societies of the past—all societies of the human past.65 Regarding sacrifice, when Hubert and Mauss say that the “Christian imagination has built on ancient models,”66 they in effect argue that the sacrificial structures established in the past inform (and perhaps even determine) something about the present forms of sacrifice in our own experience. Therefore, whether or not we approve of sacrifice, for the sake of understanding present-day cases of sacrifice—even public policy about civic sacrifice—we need to comprehend how past forms of sacrifice, in effect, inform and cause our own.67 Even though one gathers that the Durkheimians were not at all repelled by the idea of the persistence of past, the Durkheimians might well have joined fellow idealist, George Santayana in saying that “Those who cannot remember the past (or at least ‘know’ the past) are condemned to repeat it.”68
65 We also know that the Durkheimians thought they could better understand the past by studying today’s so-called ‘primitive’ folk, such as the Australian aborigines who featured in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. 66 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice Its Nature and Function, 94. 67 There is however a polemic which should not go unnoticed in Hubert and Mauss saying that the Eucharist ‘participates’ in the same sacrificial “models” as distributed across history and around the world in the non-Christian world. In claiming this, Hubert and Mauss are at once affirming Catholic views on the Eucharist as the culmination of sacrifice while also denying Catholics claims to Christian uniqueness. 68 Ivan Strenski, “Durkheim and the Reality of Historical Community,” paper read at conference “Operative Communities? The Jewish Question in France from
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Clearly, Durkheimian strategy dictated doing more than just improving understanding of sacrifice in some ideologically neutral way. They were committed to definite social goals as well. They sought to chase sacrifice from the realm of theological dispute and install it into public discourse. This is so for the following reasons. Thus, on the Catholic side, we will recall that the theologians of the Eucharistic sacrifice believed that all the sacrifices of humankind and its entire history culminated in Jesus, only had meaning in terms of the sacrificial death of Jesus. The crucifixion of Jesus on Calvary, and the mass taken as its sacramental equivalent, was in fact the only true sacrifice. All other sacrifices—past, present and to come— were only “imitations of true sacrifice. . . . an image, more or less exact, a memory, a recollection . . . a derivation of true sacrifice.”69 A more confessional, theological view of sacrifice can hardly be imagined. The focus of history, as seen with the eyes of Catholic faith, became for the Catholic theologians, the focus for the histories of everyone else on the globe—past, present and to come. While Jesus might be the center of history for Christians, he simply was not its center for any other group of religious folk—and, of course, even less so for those antagonistic to religion. Thus, if any form of sacrifice, then, could merit the sort of priority claimed for Jesus’ death made by the Catholic theologians, what, could this be other than what the Durkheimians made it—namely, that form of sacrifice which could be distilled from the cumulative history of humanity? In denying the Catholics ownership of the sacrificial legacy of the entire human past, the Durkheimians in effect decentered talk of sacrifice from any Christian, and in particular, Roman Catholic focus, and threw it into the public realm. Decentering Christianity was, on its other side, simply opening up of a public discourse about sacrifice. When it came to the liberal Protestants, just the opposite kind of position was assumed regarding the sacrificial past of humanity. Rather than trying to assume the human past into Protestant theological history, the French liberal Protestants, as one might expect, wished to sever the sacrificial past of humanity from themselves. They did so by denying general historical continuity between the
Durkheim to Levinas,” held at the University of Pennsylvania on May 5, 6 and 7, 1999. 69 Abbé Kerné, Le Sacrifice en général et le sacrifice de la messe en particulier (Landerneau: J. Desmoulins, 1902), 18.
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religious past and present tout court. In doing so, they in effect rejected the kind of theory or theology of historical ‘culmination’ or ‘fulfillment’ proposed by Catholic theology. One of the leading representatives of French liberal Protestant scholarship in religion, Albert Réville, was, like the Durkheimians, a social evolutionist—a position one might expect to favor the idea of historical continuity. But, Réville believed instead in a theory of evolutionary novelty, rupture and discontinuity between successive stages of social development. Thus, in matters of religious evolution, Albert Réville declared that “each new degree of spiritual development negates that preceding it.” As if reflecting on Protestant views of the Catholic past, Albert Réville went on to observe that when it came to the institutions and practices of the past, “to abolish is to fulfill.”70 The elder Réville’s son, Jean, essentially reaffirmed his father’s view, saying that we in the present need to feel “no gratitude” to the past.71 It should be no surprise that history looked quite different through French Protestant eyes, given their grievances about their suppression by the Catholics. As for the Durkheimians, they felt that the historical religious forms of the past were not things which we should disown, but they rather constituted an historical legacy that we should recognize as causally continuous with our own times—even if we did not altogether approve of it.72 Based largely on organic models of evolutionary change,73 the Durkheimians saw human cultural evolution as
70 Albert Réville, “De la renaissance des etudes religieuses en France,” (1859) Essais de critique religieuse (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1860: 388). 71 Jean Réville, Liberal Christianity, 198f. 72 Durkheim’s opposition to the attempts of segments of the revolutionary as well as Protestant traditions to sever themselves from the past of France—Catholic or otherwise—were not unique to him and his ‘team.’ They were part of a tradition of philosophical thinking in the Third Republic affirming ideas of historical continuity. These thinkers were quite often avowedly secular thinkers, including both Spiritualist philosophers and the positivists. I have dealt extensively with this issue in an unpublished manuscript first given as part of the “Operative Communities” conference on 6 May 1999 at the University of Pennsylvania, under the title, “Durkheim and the Reality of Historical Community.” 73 As far as Durkheim was willing to go in speaking of immortality was the to say that after death, something of us survives. Durkheim, for example, mentions that what survives of us may be described as something transformed or something of a non-personal nature. (Abstract of Durkheim, Émile. 1884. Cours de philosophie fait au Lycée de Sens. (Paris. Written manuscript. Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Manuscript 2351). Student lecture notes taken from Durkheim’s course on philosophy in 1883–84. Notes taken by the French philosopher, Andre Lalande, translated and edited by Robert Alun Jones.)
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continuous and cumulative, rather than marked by the clean, sharp and radical breaks between stages of past and present. In The Evolution of Educational Thought, for example, Durkheim expounded a theory of the relation of the past to the present sharply at odds with the attitude of these heirs of the Protestant Reformation. Compare, for example, how Durkheim approaches the problem of understanding such a highly evolved creature as “modern man.” “Indeed what do we even mean when we talk of contemporary man, the man of our times,” Durkheim asks? 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.74
Indeed, if it is not going far enough to come down hard in favor of the undying reality of the past, Durkheim dissolves the present: “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.”75 So, in terms of conditions affecting whether to theorize sacrifice against the background of the history of humanity, the Durkheimians had ample incentive so to do, while the French Liberal Protestants had an equal and opposite disincentive, and the Catholics only an apologetic, and therefore theological, one. To the Durkheimians, sacrifice was indeed old, and furthermore a notion whose meaning was in France, in effect, controlled in general parlance, as we have seen in chapter two, by the Catholic enemies of the Durkheimians, and in the university by the liberal Protestants. Yet, that was all the more reason for the Durkheimians to theorize it and to see it embedded and alive in the history of the French nation as Hubert and 74 Emile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Secondary Education in France. 2nd ed., [1938] Peter Collins, trans. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 11. 75 Emile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Secondary Education in France, 15.
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Mauss did in Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. And, in order that such a co-opting could succeed, the past—even the Catholic past—it and the secular present must be in some sort of organic continuity. The new Durkheimian secular civic ethic of sacrifice must not only be seen to ‘fulfill’ Catholic ideas of the Eucharistic sacrifice, it actually must be an ontological fulfillment in a real historical continuum.76 Since the French Liberal Protestants rejected continuity between past and present, they could not even connect with the Catholic past in order to usurp it! Might we not ask, however, whether in asserting what this seemingly mystical view of the survival of the past, were the Durkheimians again being ‘metaphysical,’ and thus really ‘theologizing’ instead of ‘theorizing’? After all, are not the Protestants closer to commonsense empirical evidence of the non-existence of the past, and thus further from ‘theologizing’ than the Durkheimians in refusing to countenance what could be seen as a sentimental or mystical clinging to what was no more? One is tempted to argue that the liberal Protestants were here being more than anything just positivists or phenomenalists in restricting the reach of their knowledge and investigation of human reality to what was directly and immediately perceivable. To deny the link between past and present is to deny to causal dependence of the present upon the past. While it also may be ‘metaphysical’ in itself to speak of ‘causes,’ it is at least standard scientific practice. Science, in at least one of its moments, involves making “conjectures” or positing models. While these models are not themselves empirical, at least in the first instance, they are the bases of theories which are themselves open to “refutation,” as Popper has 76 These differences over the nature of social evolution had in France political and institutional implications. Here, the Durkheimians showed themselves in religion what they were in politics—gradualists as far as change was concerned. They felt that the most realistic attitude toward achieving their social aims was not revolution, but a progressive adjustment of social institutions—sacrifice included. Typical here was Durkheim’s view of the all-important policy of the reform of primary and secondary education in his The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Secondary Education in France. There, Durkheim saw the reforms he sought as part of a long and gradual evolution, not a major upheaval. He accordingly is generous in his praise, qualified though may be by his support of a state monopoly in education, for the historic role in performed in the past by Catholic educators, even the hated Jesuits! By contrast, although the Durkheimians joined forces with the secularizing policies of the French Liberal Protestants active in the Third Republic’s ministry of education, it was the French Liberal Protestants who had taken the lead and forced a rupture between church and state in education.
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argued.77 Durkheim’s argument for causal connections between past and present can then be seen as an example of theoretical thinking with models. If this is a form of ‘metaphysics,’ it is one common to theorizing rather than to theologizing, since it is problematic at best how the absolute claims of theology (e.g. in Christianity affirming that Christ is Lord) could in principle be falsified or refuted while retaining Christianity. On the other hand, Durkheim’s model of continuous and transitive human evolution might well be refuted without either putting an end to sociology or even Durkheimian sociology. Indeed, so confident was Durkheim of the public status of the causal continuity between past and present, that he took for granted that they were biologically linked.78 7. Religion Is Relatively Good, So Sacrifice Is Too The third and final way in which the Durkheimians felt they were right about their theory of sacrifice as public discourse was its articulation of a remarkably evenhanded and ecumenical approach to religion. I say ‘remarkable,’ because we know that when it came to individual “religions,” the Durkheimians could be harshly critical of them. In Durkheim’s eyes, the Catholic church of the France of late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a “‘monstrosity.’”79 His own Judaism was to Durkheim not only “false,” but based on “a confused and distorted form of morality . . . expressed in theological and mythological, rather than positive or scientific idiom.”80 Yet, on 77 Karl Popper, “Science: Conjectures & Refutations,” Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1963), 33–9. 78 As far as Durkheim was willing to go in speaking of immortality was the to say that after death, something of us survives. Durkheim, for example, mentions that what survives of us may be described as something transformed or something of a non-personal nature. (Abstract of Durkheim, Émile. 1884. Cours de philosophie fait au Lycée de Sens. (Paris. Written manuscript. Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Manuscript 2351). Student lecture notes taken from Durkheim’s course on philosophy in 1883–84. Notes taken by the French philosopher, Andre Lalande, translated and edited by Robert Alun Jones.) 79 Émile Durkheim, remarks made at the March 12, 1905 meeting of the Union pour la Verité, Libres Entretiens, série 1 (1904/5), 369. 80 Robert Alun Jones and Paul W. Vogt, “Durkheim’s Defense of Les formes Élémentaires de la vie religieuse,” in Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long, eds., Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present. vol. 5 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984), 48, quoting Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 44.
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the other hand, there is much in the Durkheimian opus testifying to the historical and intellectual importance of the individual religions. For all his desire to reform French education along secular lines, for example, Durkheim gave due credit to the contributions made by Catholicism to the formation of French traditions of education.81 For the Durkheimians, therefore, the religions could be either good or bad as the case dictated. But, while Durkheim treated traditional religions with respect, his empirical and sociological conception of the reality of religion was far from the Liberal Protestant ideal of the rationally unassailable, divinely implanted spark of transcendence, the religious a priori, such as Tiele’s or Albert Réville’s religion-as-such. In this way alone, Durkheimian thinking about religion departs from the theological norm, however highly constructed or ‘theoretical’ Durkheimian theory may be. On the other hand, like the French liberal Protestants, the Durkheimians too accepted that religion, in the generic sense, was good. Differences are to be found with the liberal Protestant position on the absolute goodness of religion, since Durkheim only believed religion was good with qualification. Religion was good only because it served certain social functions. It was society, human fellowship and cooperation which were presumptive goods for Durkheim. To the degree that religion nurtured these, or indeed was identical in essence with these, it was correspondingly good. Thus, regarding ‘religion’ in general, the Durkheimians followed the conventions of a prudent, if often patronizing, tolerance, typical of French churchstate relations in the modern era. The French state tolerated, and ultimately sought to control, religion because the state felt that religion functioned to maintain the state’s grip on the social order. As early as the seventeenth century, Louis XIV’s fear of national disorder, for example, caused him to seek control over the church.82 A century or so later, Voltaire argued that state interests required it, in fact, to maintain religion. But, again religion was good only insofar as it served the interests of maintaining good order in the realm.83 Napoléon too assumed the same view of religion’s political utility—
81 Émile Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and Development of Secondary Education in France, 1977. 82 Norman Ravitch, The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589–1989 (London: Routledge, 1990), 21. 83 Norman Ravitch, The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589–1989, 52f.
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even if that national religion was to be a traditional religion like Catholicism.84 This conviction repeated in so many different ideological contexts may help us understand why religion’s function in society was defended so readily by later, even anti-clerical tending, figures from Voltaire through Renan all the way to Durkheim. To the extent that the Durkheimians thought that religion was good, they simply generalized from French political experience. Now, despite Durkheim’s view that religion was only good in a qualified sense, he held that society was in general unqualifiedly good, meaning in this sense that human solidarity, fellowship and cooperation were good. This value might be called his ‘soft’ societism. Sometimes, however, Durkheim’s valuation of societism took the form of a Durkheimian statism or nationalism—what I would call Durkheim’s ‘hard’ societism. Clearly, Durkheim had his values: he did believe in the value of the state apparatus and of nationalism as a realistic position to hold in the world as he knew it. Now, when Durkheim’s societism is viewed as statism or nationalism, it has been the target of critics who go as far as accusing Durkheim of protofascism.85 In the minds of Durkheim’s critics, this belief in the goodness of society then ranks Durkheimian sociology alongside the theology of the Liberal Protestants as its epistemological equal as Roman Catholic theologian, John Milbank, for instance, argues. Are not both then transcendental systems of thought, grounded in fundamentally unfalsifiable, trans-empirical commitments? In one sense of Durkheim’s use of the term “society,” that is, in the plural sense of “societies,” Milbank seems flatly mistaken. Durkheim did not think all concrete societies were good, any more than he believed all concrete religions were good. Some societies—nations,
84 Napoleon’s reasoning was somewhat complex. First, he, like the fathers of the French Revolution, felt that religion functioned better than any conceivable substitute, for maintaining social order, thus for smoothing the way for trouble-free implementation of his own political goals. Furthermore, given the Catholic nature of France, it was simply more politic to sponsor it as the de facto religion of the realm than to seek to found a new religion. At any rate, obedience to the Emperor was the real “essence of religious obligation of the French subject and citizen.” (Norman Ravitch, The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589–1989, 58. 85 S. Ranulf, “Scholarly Forerunners of Fascism,” Ethics 50 (1939): 16–34, cited in Steven Lukes, Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 338f. To his discredit, John Milbank has revived this canard by associating Durkheim with Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. ( John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 54–8.
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syndicates, clubs and such—might warrant rather severe sanction. During the First World War, Durkheim dealt severely with Imperial Germany insofar as it was guided by the warrior nation principles articulated by Heinrich von Treitschke.86 Similarly, Durkheim’s preference for democratic and republican forms of government over the competing claims of authoritarianism and anarchism circulating in his own day, are all well known. Durkheim’s belief in the goodness of “society” did not entail, therefore, believing that all concrete societies were then a priori good. What then does the Durkheimian belief in the goodness of “society,” in a more generic sense, really assert—in the sense of a ‘soft’ societism? At a minimum, when the Durkheimians express their fondness for ‘society,’ they seem at least to be expressing a belief in the general desirability and goodness of human solidarity, cooperation and association. People are not meant to live alone, but in some relation to each other. But, this can hardly be, one would have thought, the kind of proposition likely to incite the kinds of criticism launched recently by John Milbank. Indeed, Milbank and others critical of Durkheimian societism aim their attacks on what they take to be at least two features of the way the Durkheimians fleshed out their belief in the goodness of society. First, at the very least, they reduce Durkheimian societism to statism, and second, as a denial of the natural rights of the individual. John Milbank spells out his distaste for Durkheim’s approval of nationalism in rather sharp, if not hysterical, terms: The ‘truth’ of Durkheimian sociology is spelled out in his political programme; because only the nation state embodies and guarantees the 86 By contrast, for Durkheim and Jean Jaurès, war was a sometimes necessary, but always regrettable, act of the state. To Treitschke, says Durkheim, war was “moral and healthy.” Émile Durkheim, L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout: la mentalité allemande et la guerre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1915), 12. Durkheim, for instance, cites with disapproval Treitschke’s glorification of war. Treitschke believed this for many reasons, Durkheim tells us. First, because Treitschke felt that war disciplines egoism. For him, egoism held the greatest danger to the state. In war, said Treitschke, egoism is submitted to the unqualified discipline of sacrifice. Unlike Durkheim, Treitscheke did not distinguish egoism from “individualism.” Émile Durkheim, “Individuals and the Intellectuals” [1898] W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim on Religion (London: Routledge, 1975), 59–74. War is the Asupreme sacrifice, the “sacrifice of the self,” in which we “surpass ourselves,” Durkheim reports of Treitschke. “Peace, on the other hand, is the triumph of personal interest over the spirit of devotion and sacrifice, of the mediocre and vulgar over the noble . . . the reign of materialism.’” Émile Durkheim, L’Allemagne au-dessus de tout: la mentalité allemande et la guerre, 12.
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new totemism, which is the cult of the sacrality of individual freedom and choice, there can be no opting out of state institutions, including its secular education, where ‘sociology’ will be found on the curriculum. As Charles Péguy well understood, this was still the voice of the positivist new papacy, the secular transformation-through-disguise of a new and perverse theology.87
Conveniently, however, Milbank will not reproach Durkheim for his ‘soft’ societism—an absurd venture to be sure, but chooses instead to claim—without proof—that the “‘truth’ Durkheim’s sociology” is its most vulnerable part—the ‘hard’ societism of statism and nationalism. How, indeed, could Milbank deplore the values of human solidarity, fellowship and cooperation, and thus equate Durkheimian ‘soft’ societist values to theology’s claims in behalf of the transcendent? Even in connection with ‘hard’ societism, while we might not all take a fancy to nationalism, it is hard to know how the modern world could function in its absence. True, there is not much to be said for some of the forms nationalism has taken, such as in Nazi Germany and in recent years in the former Yugoslavia. But for all practical purposes, in Durkheim’s day, and to a great extent ours, the primary overarching vehicle of human collectivity remains nationalism. The nation state therefore remains—for the while at least— the most important mode of higher order social life. As Conor Cruise O’Brien has argued. It seems impossible to conceive of organized society without nationalism, and even without holy nationalism, since any nationalism that failed to inspire reverence could not be an effective bonding force . . . (And) despite a fair amount of “one world” and “global village” rhetoric, there are no signs, at the United Nations or anywhere else, of any real movement in the direction of superseding nationalism.88
If then the only realistic option at the turn-of-the-century, (and arguably beyond) for real, large-scale human community is the nation, it would be anachronistic, at best, to judge Durkheim on the basis of our profound doubts about national modes of social organization in the wake of the First World War, the Holocaust, and such. At
87 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 65–6. Milbank’s citation to Charles Péguy is from Romain Rolland, Péguy (Paris: Albin Michel, 1944) tome I, 137–9, 309. 88 Conor Cruise O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 40–1.
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worst, to damn nationalism, and all that this entails for demonizing Durkheimian societism, in favor of what-one-does-not-know, seems improvident. Does Milbank prefer some sort of theologically based alternative mode of social organization, such as played such key roles in the tribulations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and in today’s BJP-run India? A “Hobson’s choice.” Perhaps so. But, this is one about which Durkheim made an honorable and defensible choice in behalf of the nationstate.89 Given Durkheim’s historical location, we may better understand therefore why he did not see things as we do. Furthermore, the Durkheimian belief that such large scale social organizations as the nation were good (at least until proven otherwise) does not make Durkheimian thought fascist-tending in the way Milbank would have us believe.90 Unless Milbank wishes to propose we do without nationalism or allegiances to high-order modes of social organization, then we need to face up to the problem of how individual autonomy, liberty and the rest of the ‘Protestant’ virtues, beloved of Milbank, can be reconciled with membership in largescale human groupings. This is, as I have been trying top show in this book, precisely the exercise with which Hubert and Mauss were preoccupied in their theory of sacrifice. It is particularly noteworthy in connection with Milbank’s alarm about Durkheimian societism that in Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, the Durkheimians more than anything could be, as we will see in the next chapter, regarded as shoring up the case for the protection of inalienable individual human rights over against the demands of the collectivity. Although Milbank reads the Durkheimians as statists, they are really liberals trying to refurbish the rather tame bourgeois values to which one would expect Milbank too is committed.91 The Durkheimians are well ensconced in a political center of a spectrum defined on the left by radical syn-
89 My own view is closer to Ernest Gellner’s. He criticizes Cruise O’Brien’s for absolutizing nationalism as “‘the natural political unit,’” taking exception with Cruise O’Brien’s view that “‘nationality is in the very nature of things the basis of political order.’” (Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1994), 60. For Gellner, this represents Cruise O’Brien’s failure to imagine other more fundamental sorts of overarching mass modes of social organization, such as “culture.” In fact, “culture,” not social structure holds the “nation” itself together. (Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism, 61. 90 Milbank’s view that Durkheimian thought is fascist-tending is at least implied by his attempt to link Durkheim with proto-fascist French thinkers as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 54–61. 91 Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 41–2.
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dicalists and other Marxist parties and on the right by the antirepublican intransigent Catholic and monarchist parties—both of whom the Durkheimians fought without ceasing. If the Durkheimians look like statists to Milbank, it is perhaps because he looks at them through the narrow slits of the eyes of ‘new right’ politics? In connection then with nationalism, sacrifice, a paradigm for service to society, is just this giving of the self for the nation, state, or other collectivity troubling Milbank and others. To the extent, that the Durkheimians felt sacrifice was due the nation, they show themselves among the Third Republic’s numerous ideological heirs to the French Revolution’s traditions of civic and national sacrifice.92 High on the list of civic values raised up by the Revolution was the readiness of citizens to “sacrifice” for the nation. Standard appeals to the duties of citizenship, for example, were made in terms of the lofty examples of “neo-Roman ideal of patriotic sacrifice.”93 Thus, Charlotte Corday speaks in rich sacrificial language justifying her murder of Marat to her judges. She determined to be counted as one of those “‘who put their own interests to one side and know how to sacrifice themselves for the nation.’”94 Similarly in a patriotic vein, the Revolution shows us how it sanctified loyalty to the nation by celebrating Brutus’ blow against Caesar. This was not seen as Brutus having sacrificed Caesar, but a model of Brutus’ willingness to accept his own sacrifice by putting himself at the service of the nation.95 Continuing the revolutionary tradition to which the Durkheimians adhered, it is said of Jules Michelet that for him “sacrifice reigned supreme: indeed sacrifice was his political ideal,” especially if it was “sacrifice for the nation.”96 Carrying this logic further, we are not surprised to find Michelet celebrating the French Revolution as the school in which the People learned sacrifice.97 French nationhood as a whole, viewed through the lens of sacrifice and martyrdom revealed that
92 On the ideal of civic sacrifice in the Third Republic see chapters 3, 5 in my Contesting Sacrifice. 93 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Knopf: New York, 1989), 259. 94 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, 738. 95 Ibidem, 564. 96 Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 46. 97 Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination, 47.
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France was at once “an innocent and divine victim and savior.”98 So, the ideological situation of the Durkheimians on the republican left predisposed them, like the Roman Catholics for different reasons, to be open to the necessity of sacrifice in society, and thus to the need to theorize it aright. But are the Durkheimians thereby heirs to the intransigent Catholic traditions of Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald that Robert Nisbet and Milbank take them to be?99 It is true that classic Roman models of citizenship shaped ideals of civic sacrifice for the French Revolution assumed by republicans like the Durkheimians. Further, the French Revolution’s ideals were quite possibly shaped by the classic Roman Catholic theology of Eucharistic sacrifice discussed in chapter two.100 It is another thing, however, to read Durkheimian concepts of sacrifice into the tradition of the intransigent Catholics, as Milbank wishes to do. For one thing, and as we will see further in the next chapter, we must not forget that their theory of sacrifice seeks from the beginning to protect the individual. Hubert and Mauss stress how in “any sacrifice . . . the sacrifier gives up something of himself but does not give up himself.” Short of the kind of collectivist surrender of individuality intransigent Catholic thinkers like Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald demanded as a norm, the Durkheimian ideal looks positively selfish, if not just cautious and bourgeois. Hubert and Mauss note that in sacrifices, the person making the offering, saves themselves and “prudently . . . sets himself aside.” There is no ideal of mystical Catholic (or radical anarchist)101 98
Ibidem, 66. As if Lukes and Pickering had never written a word over the past quarter century, debunking the claim that Durkheim had any serious debts to the intransigent Catholic theocrats, Milbank cites Nisbet with approval in his Theology and Social Theory, 54f. Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, 196, 474, and especially ch.17 for a summary of Durkheim’s ideological orientation. See also W. S. F. Pickering, “Human Rights and the Cult of Individual: an Unholy Alliance Created by Durkheim?” in Individualism and Human Rights in the Durkheimian Tradition (W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts-Miller, eds. Occasional Papers, No. 1, (Oxford: British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, 1993), ch. 3. 100 See chapter two, “Catholic Politics and French Sacrifice” in my book, Contesting Sacrifice. 101 Anarchists of the fin-de-siècle paid bizarre tribute to the power of the integral Catholic symbolism of expiatory sacrifice. In order to give what might be seen as meaningless deaths a cosmic significance, the anarchist movement put together a mythology of the “expiatory” sacrificial death of the activist drawn from Catholic precedents. Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin de Siécle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989), 287–8. 99
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annihilation of self for the Durkheimians, but rather calculated generosity or enlightened self-interest, whatever one prefers. The picture Hubert and Mauss give us of the ideal of the citizen offering sacrifice for their society is a modest one indeed. This good bourgeois only “gives” in order to “receive. . . . Disinterestedness is mingled with self-interest.”102 But even given this “prudence,” did not Durkheimian ideas of sacrifice ultimately minimize the sanctity of the individual—say in comparison to the individual’s being a ‘child of God’ or endowed with certain pre-social ‘inalienable’ natural rights? Might one then press the argument further and contend that nonetheless, because the Durkheimians felt that society was good, that this necessarily put the individual in a disadvantageous position? Was Durkheimian thought then just a piece of ‘ideological’ collectivism, or if one preferred, a piece of “perverse theology,” as Milbank claims?103 Where is the openness to the possibility that, say, the individual had ‘natural’ rights—rights which no society either gave or could take away? Where is the Durkheimian willingness to entertain the possibility that the individual’s dignity was independent of whatever social consensus or norms there might be, as Durkheim argued in “Individualism and the Intellectuals”?104 Is not the sacred nature of human social life precisely one reason the Durkheimians promoted ‘sacrifice,’ however modified in favor of saving the individual, in service and devotion to the collectivity? But, while it is true that Durkheim felt that the rights of the individual had been firmly established from at least the French Revolution’s promulgation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (even though there they are paradoxically recognized there as ‘natural rights’), these rights seem contingent upon certain practices and historical arrangements.105 In the Durkheimian scheme, individuals indeed have rights, and very substantial ones at that. But these are rights accruing to individuals from the actions of collectivities, not
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Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 100. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 65–6. Milbank’s citation to Charles Péguy is from Romain Rolland, Péguy, tome I, 137–9, 309. 104 Émile Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” (1898) in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Durkheim on Religion, ch. 4. 105 W. S. F. Pickering, “Human Rights and the Cult of Individual: an Unholy Alliance Created by Durkheim?” ch. 3, especially pp. 56, 67 where Pickering notes that individualism for Durkheim is not a “theory,” but a state of affairs. 103
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innate and natural properties of individual existence.106 There is much merit in this approach, given the concern for approaching such matters scientifically. How could we tell, the Durkheimians in effect argue, that rights are natural, since we only know of rights existing within concrete social contexts and rights coming into being in the course of the historical development of societies?! Things might have been otherwise than they were in late nineteenth and early twentieth century France. For example, the history of France might have turned out differently. Thus, when Durkheim tried to defend Dreyfus in the face of right-wing Catholic statists, like his opponent Brunetière, he might not have been able to appeal, as he did, to the fact of “the liberalism of the eighteenth century.” Such political arrangements might never have come into being. Political arrangements, such as the existence of certain rights, are by nature contingent, and thus might never have been put into place or might potentially no longer be in force. For Durkheim, it was enough that such respect for the individual had, in fact, been created and codified by the French state.107 As he says, this ideal of the sacredness of the individual “is, after all, what is basically at issue” in the matter of Dreyfus. It “is not simply an armchair theory, a philosophical construction. It has entered into the facts, it has penetrated our institutions and our customs, has become part of our whole life, and, if we really must rid ourselves of it, it is our entire moral organization that must be rebuilt at the same time.”108 Because of all these concrete, historical and contingent arrangements, it is unthinkable for Durkheim that Dreyfus should be sacrificed for “reasons of state.” Yet, by this very logic, had history taken a different turn in the eighteenth century, the sacredness of Dreyfus’ individuality might never have been realized. In such a case, it would not at all be unthinkable to sacrifice his individuality to the collectivity for “reasons of state.” So, the sacredness of Dreyfus as an individual rests on relative historical grounds
106 Ibidem, ch. 3, and especially pp. 53–4. There Pickering cites Durkheim’s Leçons de sociologie: pbysique des moeurs et du droit, preface by H. N. Kubali, introduction by G. Davy, (Paris: PUF, 1950), 63, 80 and Durkheim’s “The Determination of Moral Facts” (1906) in Sociology and Philosophy, D. F. Pocock, trans., (New York: Free Press, 1974), 72. 107 W. S. F. Pickering, “Human Rights and the Cult of Individual: an Unholy Alliance Created by Durkheim?” ch. 3, p. 56. 108 Émile Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” (1898) in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Durkheim on Religion, 62.
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in Durkheim’s view, and not on a theory of a priori God-given or natural rights. Given Durkheim’s historical conception of the sacredness of the individual, we are then far from the pantheism of a Saint-Simon, or the various collectivisms of left and right on the scene in the France of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But, as one might expect from a thinker as “eclectic”109 as Durkheim, we are also far from the natural rights theorists like John Stuart Mill, the American declaration and its “inalienable rights” of individuals, the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to which last document, Durkheim himself appeals.110 We are even a longer way from the theologically-based ideal of human individual sacredness at the center of French liberal Protestant thought. It is then this very eclecticism which makes it hard to call Durkheim a ‘theologian,’ as Milbank does. What we find instead is an attempt to formulate a practical solution to what seems an insoluble antinomy of modern politics. Before drawing conclusions about the supposed ‘theological’ nature of Durkheimian thought about sacrifice, then, one might want to take a second look at differences between Durkheimian theory as a public discourse and the confessional nature of French liberal Protestant theology. Of course, Durkheimian theory—like all thought—rests on assumptions and axioms, but those are not ones that disqualify Durkheimian theory of sacrifice as fit to be public discourse. On the other hand, French liberal Protestant ‘theology’ is confined by its theistic commitments to a community of Christian theists alone. This one fact alone disqualifies the Protestant theology of sacrifice of this study from being acceptable public discourse, at least, in the France of the turn-of-the-century.
109 John I. Brooks, III, The Eclectic Legacy: Academic Philosophy and the Human Sciences in Nineteenth Century France (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 18–9. 110 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 27 August 1789,” Western Liberalism: A History in Documents from Locke to Croce, E. K. Bramsted and K. J. Melhuish, eds., (London and New York: Longman, 1978), 227– 9.
CHAPTER SIX
IMAGINING SACRIFICE A power is supposed in sacrifice . . . . it is not at all created.1 (Alfred Loisy) We do not propose here to trace the history and genesis of sacrifice, and if we speak of priority, we mean it in a logical and not historical sense.2 (Hubert and Mauss)
1. Familiarity and Contempt: Loisy and the Durkheimians In the last chapter, I tried to show how and why Hubert and Mauss’ theory of sacrifice was formed in part by the struggle to overturn the theological approach to religion and sacrifice of the Fifth Section’s Liberal Protestants. This involved showing how the Durkheimian theory of sacrifice was coordinated with a political and institutional strategy. Earlier, I had also argued that the relation of the Liberal Protestants to theory of religion and sacrifice was not only conditioned by their determination to do theology, but also by their commitments to ‘scientific’ history, also described by some as ‘positivist’ or ‘historicist’ history. In this chapter, I shall show how the Durkheimians tried to maintain their commitment to a public, and thus scientific, discourse about sacrifice, while at the same time refusing to accept the limits upon ‘science’ placed upon them by the positivist historians. Not only did the Durkheimians try to hammer out their theory of sacrifice against confessional theologizing, but also specifically against the ‘anvil’ of historicism—against the positivist historicism, prevalent in the Fifth Section’s program for studying religion.
1
Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice (Paris: Nourry, 1920), 8 (my emphasis). Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (1899), W. D. Halls, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 8. See also p. 13. 2
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The key question arising here about sacrifice turns on the degree to which a ‘theory’ should reflect commonsense or ordinary usage over against the degree to which a theory should reform the way people think. This is to raise the question of the imagination’s a role in theorizing. As Christian theologians, the Protestant Liberals can be said to have imagined ‘too much’ for their ideas about sacrifice to qualify as public discourse about religion. On the other hand, as ‘scientific’ historians, they can be said to have imagined too little to make such public discourse interesting and compelling. Paradoxically, the perfect exemplar of constraints laid on the study of sacrifice by this scientific history was the work of Catholic modernist, Alfred Loisy. As one can surmise from the importance of Renan, there was a great deal more to Catholic France than intransigent Roman Catholicism. This was true not only of the religious life of French Catholics, but also true of French Catholic scholarship. France had always been conspicuous for its tradition of liberal Catholicism as well as for the Catholic theological intransigence we have already met.3 It is among these liberal Catholics that we find historicist traditions of religious scholarship virtually indistinct from those of the Liberal Protestants. Indeed, with someone like Alfred Loisy, we find perhaps the most extreme form of the scientific history of the day. In speaking of liberal Catholics one needs to make some preliminary distinctions. Liberal Catholicism generally consisted of a diverse group of innovative thinkers, some intellectual liberals, others primarily political ones.4 In treating Alfred Loisy, I am concerned only
3 Emmanuel Barbier, Histoire du catholicisme liberale et du catholicisme social en France, 4 vols. (Bordeaux: Y. Cadoret, 1924). 4 Then, in the political sphere, we should remember Catholic liberals like Montalembert, Lacordaire and Félicité de La Mennais (later to become Lamennais). Their teachings on individual human rights, religious coexistence and tolerant acceptance of religious pluralism fell mostly upon deaf ears in the time, yet would inspire later generations of liberal Catholics. And before Pius X drew down the curtain of condemnation on the theological modernists, Pope Leo XIII encouraged Catholic political liberals by legitimizing Catholic participation in republican politics with his conciliatory policies of “ralliement.” Late in the nineteenth century these liberal political forces grew despite the chilling absolutist policies of the Vatican. Despite the fact that the historic precedents set by De Maistre, not Lammenais, dominated our times, liberalism persisted in Catholic circles. On the intellectual front, groups of Catholic lay intellectuals like Marc Sangnier and his journal, Le Sillon, were not uncommon. So too did one find clergy, like the Frères Pontifes, who sought, as
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with that intellectual or academic program of Catholic liberalism, which has come to be known as Catholic Modernism. Among the intellectuals, we may distinguish philosophers and theologians, on the, one hand, from the historians and biblical exegetes on the other. The philosophers and theologians basically wished to be free to interpret Catholic tradition outside the narrow prescriptions laid down in 1879, especially that the official church philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.5 Such men of the Second Empire as the Sorbonne’s Abbé Maret and the École Normale Supérieure’s Abbé Gratry can be named here among the liberal thinking theologians. Later came the influential philosopher and theologian Ollé-Laprune, and the so-called “modernists” such as Laberthonnière, Le Roy, Maurice Blondel as well as lesser known thinkers, such as Marcel Hébert. On the side of the historians and biblical exegetes, were such figures as Renan, Monseigneur Louis Duchesne and the Collège de France’s, Alfred Loisy.6 Most prominent of all was Alfred Loisy. He trained as an historian under Abbé Louis Duchesne and Renan, working in history of Christianity and religions of the ancient Near East. As professor of Hebrew at the Institut Catholique (1882–1893) and Religions of Israel and the Western Semites alongside the philosemitic Hubert at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Fifth Section, Loisy drew fire from the Church fairly early in his career as unfashionable defender of the integrity of Judaism. The suppression of his
their name indicates, to build intellectual “bridges” between the church and the modern world. (Paul Sabatier, France To-day, trans. H. B. Binns (London: J. M. Dent, 1913), 175.) Still other energetic, open and inquisitive young clergy such as the “abbés démocrates” questioned received political opinion, while their scholarly brethren flocked to the sources of secular knowledge at the state universities and institutes in the same years until stopped by order of the French bishops and the Vatican in 1908 (Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siécle France (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989), 278, citing Maurice Montuclard, Conscience réligieuse et démocratie (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 7, 13.). Catholic liberals were stirred therefore by many of the same liberal political, moral and religious ambitions that motivated the work of Durkheim and his group, even if they often clung to sacrifice in its expiatory and annihilationist modes as much as did the reactionaries. (Paul Sabatier, France To-day, Ch. 11.) 5 J. A. Gunn, Modern French Philosophy (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1922), 313. 6 Alfred Loisy, the Catholic Modernist, traced his own liberal intellectual lineage within the ‘Catholic’ traditions of Erasmus, Descartes, Richard Simon, Lamennais and Renan. (Alfred Loisy, “Chronique bibliographique,” Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuses (1910): 582–6. Reprinted as “La Généalogie du modernisme selon Loisy,” in Émile Poulat, Critique et mystique: autour de Loisy ou la conscience catholique et l’ésprit moderne (Paris: Le Centurion, 1984), 314.
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Religion of Israel (1900) by Paris’ Cardinal Richard was an omen of worse to come.7 Loisy and other Catholic Modernists had tried, with little success, to reconcile ecclesiastical authority with the ideals of free intellectual inquiry that their engagement in the critical historical sciences signaled. By the turn of the century, their situation became perilous, and in 1907, the Vatican condemned the entire movement. Cut off from all official positions in the Church,8 Loisy sought to make a career for himself in the state institutions of higher learning. It was in one of his early unsuccessful attempts for a chair in the Fifth Section that his candidacy came into conflict with the Durkheimians—in fact, Hubert’s narrow election to the Fifth Section which we reviewed earlier. Eventually, with the patronage of Jewish scholar, Salomon Reinach, Loisy succeeded in establishing himself institutionally.9 Upon the untimely death of Jean Réville in 1908, Loisy was invited to apply for the chair of history of religions at the Collège de France. In the same year, he was unanimously elected to the Fifth Section. In political terms, unlike the caution and prudence typifying the relationship between the Liberal Protestants and the Durkheimians, a frank and lively intellectual relationship prevailed between Loisy and the Durkheimians.10 In fact, there is even evidence of Durkheimian
7 Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1960), 164. 8 Paul Sabatier, France To-day, 178. Isaac Benrubi, Contemporary Thought in France, Ernest B. Dicker, trans. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1926), 201. For convenience sake, I too shall include some of these thinkers under the general rubric of “modernism.” 9 Alfred Loisy, Memoires. Volume 3 (Paris: Nourry, 1930), 29–34. 10 Loisy makes an excellent contrast with the Durkheimians because his career and nurture in many ways shadow Hubert’s. They represent two quite opposite resolutions of similar intellectual and personal odysseys. Both men were, for example, Catholic-born, although there is no evidence that Hubert was an observant Catholic. He like other cosmopolitan liberals of his day moved easily across religious boundaries. He was however close to certain Catholic clergy, partly as a result of his education at an institution such as the lycée Louis Le Grand. Both Henri Hubert and Loisy began their studies in religion with the ancient Near East. Hubert eventually to become agrégée in history not many years after Loisy too had been trained in the related fields of Hebrew and Assyriology. Less well known, but still in all an influential figure both for Hubert and Loisy was Abbé Louis Duchesne, confidant and teacher of both Loisy and Hubert, and leading historian of the Catholic ritual of his day. But from this point on, the Durkheimians and Loisy fell out not only over theological issues (something even Loisy’s excommunication did not prevent), but also over method and epistemology.
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sympathy for Loisy’s struggles with the Vatican.11 Even though Loisy competed with both Hubert and Mauss for prestigious academic appointments in Paris, the Durkheimians never seemed as eager to do battle with Loisy as with the liberal Protestants. After all, it was the French liberal Protestants who potentially could have prevented their entry into the École Pratique, Fifth Section, not a somewhat isolated excommunicated priest, Alfred Loisy. The Durkheimians further had no need to be secretive, disingenuous or even prudent in contesting Loisy’s viewpoints on religion and the study of religion, since as a marginalized Catholic scholar, Loisy was short of official patrons. He lacked even the kind of institutional and community support enjoyed by the Liberal Protestants or French Jewish scholars. Indeed, a certain sympathy for Loisy’s plight seemed to infect Durkheimian attitudes toward Loisy. Reportedly, Hubert wrote the official letter inviting Loisy to succeed Réville at the École Pratique des Hautes Études.12 2. Loisy’s Historicism Loisy’s account of doing history of religions faithfully captures the scientific spirit of those liberal Protestant historians, Gabriel Monod, Maurice Vernes and others. In potential competition with ecclesiastical authority, Loisy promoted the authority of science and experience— “direct observation of facts, without preconceived theory.”13 Accordingly, by the time Loisy moved outside the Catholic milieu and had assumed the chair in history of religions at the Collège de France, he articulated a plan of historical research every bit as positivist as that of his formerly Catholic teacher, Ernest Renan, and the other Protestant scientific historians we have met in previous discussions. Writing history of religions in Loisy’s way was simplicity itself. One just looks, reads, comprehends and writes; above all one keeps clear of theories, as Loisy tells us: “My originality . . . was in thinking that the true method in history is one of seeing aright, of penetrating as com11 See, for example, Henri Hubert’s review of Alfred Loisy’s Evangile et eglise (Annee sociologique 8 (1905): 290–1). There Hubert evinces some sympathy for Loisy’s struggles with authoritarianism, but he notes, doubtless not wanting to stir up the Church against them, that the Durkheimians “did not want to take sides” (290–1). 12 Alfred Loisy, Memoires. Volume 3, 33f. 13 Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son oeuvre, 195.
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pletely and as intimately as possible into the meaning of testimony and of data; and . . . in not propounding any theory. . . .” Indeed, Loisy gives the impression of being utterly innocent of theory, since he says that his program was not in the least sensational, or constructed for the sake of impressing my hearers. Its apparent simplicity might even lead to its being though a trifle commonplace, and perhaps not quite worthy of the illustrious spot to which I was bringing it.14
If ever there was an exemplary anti-theoretical thinker, it was Loisy. Moreover, since Loisy wrote perhaps the most dedicated, albeit descriptive, book on sacrifice, the case of Loisy illustrates perfectly the real issues arising in theorizing a religious subject like sacrifice. He developed his anti-theoretical attitudes about sacrifice from a great many years of scholarship on the subject, culminating in his major descriptive effort in the history of religions, Essai historique sur le sacrifice (1920).15 Loisy’s wide-ranging, worldly, Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses, featured articles on the Durkheimians as well as on the new ethnography, totemism, primitive mentality and, significantly, sacrifice—all subjects, as one knows, that were vital to the Durkheimians.16 Loisy wrote one of the most substantial critical review articles on The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in its time. He even wrote and sponsored extensive criticisms of the theory of sacrifice of Hubert and Mauss.17 Loisy freely acknowledged owing Durkheim
14 Alfred Loisy, My Duel with the Vatican [1924] (New York City: Greenwood, 1968), 330. 15 Yet although, as one may imagine, Loisy’s intellectual position will be important to consider on the question of sacrifice, there remained always a certain distance between Loisy and the Durkheimians. There is no evidence, for example, that beyond there mutual regard as scholars that Loisy and Hubert knew each other very well so that they might have had the kind of relationship likely to make lasting intellectual impressions. 16 Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuses was published in two series: Series 1, volumes 1–12 (1896–1907), Series 2 (volumes 1–8) (1910–14, 1920–22). See also Lester R. Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California, 1986), 64, 130, 133. 17 Key excerpts from two reviews of Hubert and Mauss’s theory of sacrifice make the following points: “This is a kind of philosophy of sacrificial ritual—considered in itself, insofar as it is abstracted from actual historic rituals.” (Paul Legay, Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuses 7 (1902): 281 (my emphasis)) “It pretended to be “the theory of sacrifice, but is [only] one of the theories which explain certain aspects of sacrifices in certain circumstances of time and place.” (Marcel Hebert, Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuses ns 1 (1909): 71.) See also Alfred Loisy’s review
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his social conception of religion, although he naturally disapproved of Durkheim’s sociologism.18 Loisy and the Durkheimians also shared a generally liberal evolutionist view of religion, together agreeing that doctrines ought to be interpreted symbolically, in contrast to the reactionary Catholic and orthodox Jewish view that the religion was fixed from its beginning and absolute in its demands.19 Loisy and the Durkheimians also concluded that the idea of the sacré was central to religion, although Loisy, as in other domains which we will discuss in this chapter, insisted upon mystifying it.20 And, what really distinguished Loisy from his equally ‘historicist’ Liberal Protestant historian colleagues, and thus what makes him an absolute point of reference for this study, was his whole-hearted absorption in the study of sacrifice. Lacking the Protestant theological prejudices against sacrifice which we discussed in chapter 3, but retaining much of the theological commitment to sacrifice from his Catholic past, which we discussed in chapter 2, Loisy made sacrifice a major focus of his scholarship. In doing so, however, he and the Durkheimians set themselves on a collision course. 3. Loisy’s Theology and Public Discourse Agree as they did on many things, the disagreements between Durkheimians and Catholic historicists like Loisy were nonetheless as sharp as those with the liberal Protestants. These points of controversy had to do with the clash between Loisy’s lingering theologizing and his methodological commitment to historicism, on the one side, and Durkheimian naturalism and theoretical constructivism, on the other. Consider first the clash with theology in Loisy’s writing on sacrifice and the Durkheimian reaction to it. Loisy and the Durkheimians disagreed, for example, about the fundamental nature of religion, a difference which inevitably led to differences about sacrifice. To wit, Hubert and Mauss contrasted their naturalistic view to a theistic one.
of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, “Sociologie et religion,” Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuse ns 4 (1913): 45–76. 18 Alfred Loisy, Memoires. Volume 3, 333. See also Loisy’s La Religion (Paris: Nourry, 1917), chapter 3. 19 Henri Hubert, review of Alfred Loisy, L’Evangile et l’Église, 292. 20 Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son oeuvre, 251.
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The unbeliever sees in these rites only vain and costly illusions, and is astounded that all mankind has so eagerly dissipated its strength for phantom gods. But there are perhaps true realities to which it is possible to attach the institution in its entirety. Religious ideas, because they are believed, exist; they exist objectively, as social facts. The sacred things in relation to which sacrifice functions, are social things. And this is enough to explain sacrifice.21
In reply, Loisy initially complimented the Durkheimians for putting “into relief the power of sacrifice.” Yet, since he well knew that Hubert and Mauss wanted to change the very concept of the rite in a radical way, he accused them of “exclusively interpreting this power as a social idea—as an expression of social force.” Complaining vehemently, he noted: “its meaning has changed.” In answer, Loisy then reverted to theological form and insisted upon the divine sources of this “power.” At least from an empirical look at the documents of sacrificial literature, the “power of sacrifice,” said Loisy, does not seem at all to pertain to the purely social order of things— even if such an order should exist! The magical and religious power (of sacrifice) has to do with the physical and moral powers which religious thought postulates in the universe. . . . (It implies) a transcendental action upon the world by means of invisible forces.22
Directing his aim now at Durkheim himself, Loisy scolds Hubert and Mauss’ master for putting the “natural function (of sacrifice),” such as the “direct expression of social sentiments” in place of what the believers and their religious documents say about the rite— namely “with the proper and original object of the sanctifying action.”23 This is, of course, for a theologian like Loisy a taste of transcendence, since for him sacrifice is “a mystical action, of unverifiable efficacy.”24 Loisy’s reaction was entirely predictable. He had been excommunicated at the time of his critical writing against the Durkheimians, and was edging slowly toward a kind of Deism. Still, Loisy seemed to cling to the broadly Catholic theological conception of the nature of religion and sacrifice, which I outlined in the second chapter of this book. By this definition, Loisy insisted on seeing sacrifice mediating divine power—a “transcendental action by invisible forces upon
21 22 23 24
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 101. Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice, 8. Ibidem, 69. Ibidem, 9.
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the world.”25 As such, for Loisy, ‘sacrifice’ is again a magical action. It is a a ritual action—the destruction of a tangible object, endowed with life or which is thought to contain life, thanks to which we believe we influence invisible forces, whether to elude their reach when they are feared to be injurious or dangerous, or in order to promote their works, to win them satisfaction or homage, or to enter into communication as well as communion with them.26
Now, besides generally ‘sociologizing’ sacrifice, so to speak, Hubert and Mauss sociologized sacrifice specifically by endowing ritual with extraordinary causal powers. In their hands, sacrifice becomes a “mechanism” for producing changes in society. Sacrificial ritual to them was a technology, literally causing experiences of sacredness in believers, much the way group effervescence produced in believers a sense of transcendence, as Durkheim had argued.27 Loisy naturally enough rejected such ideas. There is no question of ritual producing sacredness since it was a transcendent substance, and besides, the sacred is already there before rituals are performed. “A power,” as it were, is already “supposed in the matter of sacrifice—a power which the rite has as its object to liberate, to intensify, to direct, to apply to its special ends and not really to produce . . . it is not at all created.”28 The Durkheimians had got it all backwards.29 Thus, Loisy
25
Ibidem, 8. Ibidem, 5. 27 Loisy took special delight in ridiculing Durkheim’s original formulation of this notion in his review of The Elementary Forms as nothing more than the “paroxysms of delirium,” adding further that even the disagreeable Durkheimian theory of the social origins of religion had become more disagreeable still: no longer does society cause religion, but “the full derangement of the brain and nerves” has taken over the task for Durkheim. Alfred Loisy, “Sociologie et religion,” Ibidem, 57. For references to the idea of sacrifice as a “mechanism” see Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice Its Nature and Function, 2, 18. See also Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Karen E. Fields, ed. and trans. (New York: Free Press, 1995), 397–9. Regarding “effervescence,” see also W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), especially chapters 21 and 22 on aspects of “The Effervescent Assembly.” Perhaps justifying Loisy’s sarcasm, it is interesting to note that one of Hubert’s students, Philippe de Felice, extended this theory of the techniques of manufacturing the experience of the holy by exploring the then novel idea of the role of drugs to induce experiences of the sacred. (Philippe de Félice, Poisons sacrés. Ivresses divines: Essais sur quelques formes inférieures de la mystique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1936) and Foules en delire. Exstases collectives (Paris: Albin Michel, 1947). 28 Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice, 8 (my emphasis). 29 Pages 171–3. 26
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held firmly to a classic Christian theology of the pre-existent divine logos, and hence believed that the “power of sacrifice exists radically” that is to say essentially and a priori “in the victim.” While Loisy conceded that “the rite excites” feelings of the holy,30 sacrifice does not really ‘create’ the holy, nor the feeling of the holy. That is something beyond what people can do.31 Loisy’s problems with Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice were thus occasioned by his theological starting point about sacrifice. By the same token, Hubert and Mauss’ problems with Loisy and his Protestant colleagues sprang from their assumption of naturalist theorizing about sacrifice. Hubert and Mauss assumed that public discourse about religion could not require a test of theistic faith. Public discourse about religion in a pluralist liberal state should be able to include all citizens in that conversation—atheists as well as theists. Loisy did not seem at all persuaded by these assumptions, although we are not entirely sure why. Although it has become a virtual dogma that all constructions are equal, when we actually observe the details of a case like Loisy’s theological approach to sacrifice, proposed as it was in a religiously pluralistic society, we may begin to see that, at least for the purposes of fitting the conditions of a religiously pluralistic society, theological constructions are not the equal of so-called social scientific ones. Loisy’s concept of sacrifice seems disqualified as public discourse, because only the Catholics preserve the fullness of the meaning of sacrifice in Loisy’s sense.32 Echoing Catholic orthodoxy as articulated by the masters of the “French School,” Loisy believed that the sacrifices of those other than Catholics are merely “imitations of true sacrifice . . . an image, more or less exact, a memory, a recollection . . . a derivation of true sacrifice.”33 As such, while the higher religions 30
Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice, 8. Hubert and Mauss’ answer to this is to observe that even a victim typically considered holy in himself, like Jesus, might be understood against the backdrop of ritual efficacy. For example, does Jesus not in fact come to his ‘sacrificial’ death on Calvary already bearing the marks of englobement in, and therefore being made sacred by, ritual? Is he not the “lamb of God”? And, is this not evidence that already in the minds of the evangelists Jesus is to be assimilated to the Passover sacrifice of the lamb? For Hubert and Mauss, Jesus may already well be holy on Calvary, but only because he assumes the holiness produced in the Paschal lamb’s by being sacrificed at Passover. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice Its Nature and Function, 81. 32 Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice, 16. 33 Abbé Kerné, Le Sacrifice en général et le sacrifice de la messe en particulier (Landerneau: J. Desmoulins, 1902), 18. 31
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and civilizations do have sacrifice (because unlike the so-called ‘primitives,’ they have a belief in god), they and their ‘sacrifices’ only have value in being linked by imitation to Catholic sacrifice. As for sacrifice among so-called ‘primitive’ folk, it does not really exist. They are not, strictly speaking in Loisy’s view, theists and thus cannot conceive sacrifice as a mediation of a “divine power.”34 Such theological moves basically disqualify Loisy’s ideas about sacrifice as public discourse.35 The Durkheimians should be seen, on the other hand, as trying to expand the definition of religion beyond theism in the interests of providing a public discourse about religion. As such, instead of starting from the idea of God, the Durkheimians employed the more capacious—if admittedly watered-down—idea of the sacred to define religion. Religion was for the Durkheimians essentially and at a minimum, a “unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things.”36 Critically as far as public discourse goes, while this definition does not exclude the idea of a God, it does not, as in the case of Loisy, require belief in God. Therefore, sacrifice was for them something which could be defined in more inclusive terms than those made available by Loisy or Christian theology. Sacrifice was thus, at a minimum, a social mechanism, a ritual technique by which things became sacred—“a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is concerned.”37 4. Inventing Sacrifice or Finding It? 38 Just as serious as first-order theological or religious differences between the Durkheimians and Loisy, they found themselves at logger-heads about the epistemological or methodological rules for studying sacrifice.
34
Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice, 17. Ibidem, 17. 36 Émile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Durkheim on Religion (London: Routledge, 1975), 123. 37 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 13. 38 My attention was recently brought Jonathan Z. Smith’s use of this same phrase, indicating therefore how very apt a characterization it is! (Robert G. HammertonKelly, ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 179. Smith refers at this point to his Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982). 35
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Satisfied with the standard of historical practice embodied in the “histoire historisante,” Loisy never strayed from those ideals of scientific or positivist history in the study of sacrifice—so long, at any rate, as they did not collide with his supernaturalist theological suppositions. As should be already evident from their rejection of Robertson Smith’s inductivism, Hubert and Mauss at least made the effort to depart in large part from the epistemology of an inductivist history or the so-called “histoire historisante.” They attempted a naturalistic theoretical construction of the concept of sacrifice instead. Loisy and his historicist collaborators well understood the implications of the initiatives taken by the Durkheimians. They undermined much of the way that he and his positivist historian colleagues took on religion. Loisy took note of this in his extensive review of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Loisy’s criticisms of Durkheim may be read as applying equally well to Hubert and Mauss’ theory, in part because of the unanimity about religion that prevailed among the Durkheimians of the late 19th and early 20th century, and also because Durkheim had adopted Hubert and Mauss’ theory of sacrifice in his great masterpiece.39 Therefore, in his review, Loisy accused Durkheim of things that applied equally well to Hubert and Mauss, as later documents also independently confirm. Thus to Loisy’s close collaborators on his journal, Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuses, Hubert and Mauss’ theory of sacrifice was odious because it was abstract and unhistorical—too ‘philosophical’—to borrow a libelous label from the discourse of ‘scientific’ history. Writing in Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuses, Loisy’s coworker, Paul Legay, characterized Hubert and Mauss’s theory of sacrifice as “a kind of philosophy of sacrificial ritual—considered in itself, insofar as it is abstracted from historic rituals.”40 Some years later in the same periodical, one of Loisy’s co-workers, Marcel Hébert, chastised Hubert and Mauss for riding roughshod over the facts of sacrifice, just as Loisy had accused Durkheim of imposing his theory on religion. The Durkheimians, said Marcel Hébert pretended to encompass the host of facts making up the data of sacrifice, but in reality their theory only covered a narrow range of the data. Their theory pretends to 39 Ivan Strenski, “Durkheim’s Bourgeois Theory of Sacrifice,” Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering, W. Watts Miller, eds. (London: Routledge, 1998), 116–26. 40 Paul Legay, Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuses 7, 281 (my emphasis).
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be “the theory of sacrifice,” said Hébert, “but is [only] one of the theories which explains certain aspects of sacrifices in certain circumstances of time and place.”41 Thus, the work of Durkheim (but also of his team members, Hubert and Mauss) smacks of “dogmatism,”42 and a sense of “having been too pressed to construct a system where he keeps captive the truth that he has discovered.”43 Durkheim locks the data in “a narrow framework of an abstract idea,”44 and simply “puts himself in full contradiction with the facts.”45 Loisy finally contrasted his approach to the history of religions—“direct observation of facts”—with what we know of the epistemological road map explicitly laid out by Hubert and Mauss in their introduction to Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function— one dominated by “preconceived theory.”46 (How Loisy squares this with his claims about sacrifice as a “transcendental action by invisible forces upon the world,”47 we never discover.) Thus, because the Durkheimians, especially in Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice, failed to adhere to the standards of so-called scientific or positivist historical writing and concept formation, the Catholic modernist historians of religion consigned the Durkheimian effort to the realm of metaphysics. Facts for them should speak for themselves and let theory
41
Marcel Hébert, Revue d’histoire et de litterature religieuses ns 1 (1909): 71. Hébert was the model Catholic modernist, the “pretre symboliste,” immortalized in Roger Martin du Gard’s novel of the period, Jean Barois, Abbé Schertz, the “pretre symboliste”, holds forth in typical fashion. “True religion,” says Schertz, “knows that these [anthropomorphic] representations are only finally symbols. . . .” Roger Martin du Gard, Jean Barois (Paris: Gallimard, 1921), 58. 42 Alfred Loisy, “Sociologie et religion,” 71. Note as well much the same charge is made against Durkheim by his articulate Protestant critic, Gaston Richard in his review of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, “Dogmatic Atheism in the Sociology of Religion,” [1923], in Durkheim on Religion, W. S. F. Pickering, ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 257. 43 Alfred Loisy, “Sociologie et religion,” 45. 44 Ibidem, 71. 45 Ibidem, 71. 46 Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son oeuvre, 195. See also Loisy’s extended critique of the Durkheimians, under the cover of the title, the “methodologist”: In recent years, the outstanding problem had been assumed to be that of the method to pursue in treating the history of religions; as if the method of historical investigation and critical observation remained to be discovered. Any self-respecting historian of religion felt compelled to excogitate some new method, and the idea seemed to prevail that the method itself, apart from its results, sufficed to recommend the author. Alfred Loisy, My Duel with the Vatican, 329. 47 Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice, 8.
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follow. History comes with its meaning written on it, because history is the “concrete” foundation of “fact” which tells us what sacrifice is. We must therefore understand, declares Loisy, this “concrete notion and the fact of sanctifying action which is historically [what is] sacrifice in all the religions.”48 In effect, then, what offended Loisy about the Durkheimian approach to sacrifice was their will to theorize, as well as to theorize in a way that revived all the old fears of the Durkheimians trying to impose their own brand of civic ideology on the nation. The Durkheimian will to theorize was, it must be emphasized, certainly nothing short of a decision to interpret religion in potentially new ways. For one thing, we already know that Durkheimian reinterpretations of religion would read the data of the religious life in ways which would decenter Christianity and indeed any theism. They would conflict with that odd combination of historicist and supernaturalist theological approaches characteristic of Loisy, and for that matter the Révilles as well. Like the French liberal Protestants, what Loisy may have feared most about such challenges was their potential for disqualifying his ideas about sacrifice from the arena of public discourse. For better or for ill, it is not our fashion to believe that the data speak for themselves. Current-day post-positivist attitudes to reading data involve being critical of the reader as well as of what is read. Everything turns on how the data are read. So, it is not just an accident that for a theologian like Loisy, the data should sincerely speak to him theologically. On the phenomenological level, alone, Loisy doubtless felt that the theistic import of sacrificial literature was plain for all to see. The same data, however, spoke sociologically to the Durkheimians. We rightly suspect that Hubert and Mauss did not innocently focus on the functions for the human sacrifier either, even if they might plead innocence. Why should we believe Loisy read sacrifice any less naively? Loisy in fact constructed his category of sacrifice—as a theological category—even if he might have vigorously denied doing so and indeed been totally unaware of such efforts on his part. We know this because Loisy cannot assure us that a divinity-humanity relation is always paramount in the world religions. Merely consider non-theistic religions like Buddhism, as Durkheim himself did.49 Are there, as well, no “ritual actions,” to 48 49
Ibidem, 8. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 28–31.
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use Loisy’s language, which conform to the pattern claimed by Hubert and Mauss—one in which the changing the condition of the sacrificer is foremost—especially in the mind of the sacrificer? We cannot therefore conclude with Loisy that the “data” simply speak in his voice, since the “data” are open to several interpretations. Loisy has, in effect and without perhaps being conscious of it, simply chosen to structure the data in a way more favorable to his theism. Thus, the debate between Loisy and the Durkheimians about the merits of theorizing sacrifice becomes one resting ultimately upon competing models of how historical narrative actually comes to be. Loisy believed in an anti-theorizing inductivism, historicism, or positivism in which independent ‘facts’ dictate our thinking about things; the Durkheimians felt that a theorizing constructivism, one which admitted the role of the historian in shaping the resultant narrative, was the more honest and powerful method of incorporating the ‘facts’ of history into a compelling theory.50 It is not then a matter of whether or not Loisy or Durkheim did in fact ‘construct’ their historical narratives, since the role of the historian cannot be eliminated. It is a matter of admitting the role of the investigator into the mix which results. It is ironic, though understandable, that the very strength of Loisy’s historical skepticism of traditional church teaching, or of a literal reading of biblical texts, should become a liability when turned to the history of religions. In the spirit of his teachers, Duchesne and Renan, Loisy brought to bear the demythologizing power of the “higher criticism” to pious legends. But such practical critical scientific history becomes useless when fundamental questions of basic categories were at stake. Categories like “religion,” or “sacrifice” are not always given in the data of the texts. But they are needed for fuller discussion of the data, and thus frequently applied to or imported
50 In this, the Durkheimians doubtless followed the lead of one of Durkheim’s great teachers at the École Normale Supérieure, the historian, Numa Fustel de Coulanges. By the turn-of-the-century considered passé and superceded by the new scientific historians, Fustel de Coulanges nevertheless was responsible for teaching Durkheim that doing history required “ideés directrices”—guiding notions, leading questions around which to organize historical narrative. (William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 113). See also Jones’ discussion of Fustel’s role in Durkheim’s thinking in his The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 57, 161f.
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into them. It will hardly, then, do to appeal to the historical “facts” lying behind the biblical narrative to tell us what, for example, “religion” or “sacrifice” ought to mean, because it is precisely the proper naming and interpretation of the “facts” which is at issue. We do not need to excuse Durkheim of conceptual imperialism in imposing his theoretical vision of religion to absolve Loisy and the historicists of hiding their own theoretical visions behind the fig leaf of devotion to facts. There’s guilt aplenty to go around. 5. Both Finding and Inventing Sacrifice? This conflict between Loisy and the Durkheimians thus exposes a perennial problem facing anyone wishing to theorize sacrifice, or for that matter, many other subjects in the domain of religion. Is it possible to theorize inadvertently as well as deliberately? In theorizing, to what degree does one take responsibility for the categories of inquiry? In the anti-theorizing mode of inquiry, typified by Loisy, such responsibility is refused, and we make out that we innocently find “sacrifice.” In a theorizing mode of inquiry, where I have argued that the Durkheimians took a lead, we would rather need to own our part in inventing sacrifice.51 Loisy’s approach essentially denies the role of human imagination and conceptualization in the act of knowing, while the Durkheimians embrace them. Loisy believes that there is no need to theorize the facts, since whatever ‘theory’ there may be will simply emerge after a while from the facts—as indeed it might seem to do for him. But, whatever the timing, it will still be a ‘theory’ apprehended as such by the investigator, and thus a theory for which the investigator must remain responsible. In a way which makes them our contemporaries, the Durkheimians accept their responsibility for theorizing. In any study, we can do no other than choose among facts for their salience and decide which facts are pertinent to our larger theoretical projects. We have no choice but to theorize; the facts cannot do that for us—all along remembering that theorizing done here is being prepared for public discourse. 51 It is the view of Louis Dumont that Durkheim was responsible for the antipositivism of the theoretical thrust of the Durkheimian project. In Dumont’s mind, Durkheim always remained a “philosopher”. See his “Marcel Mauss: A Science in Becoming,” Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 184.
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Am I perhaps reading too much of present-day sophistication about theorizing back into the work of the Durkheimians? I think readers will find that I am not, and that the Durkheimians were remarkably more like us in embracing the constructive role of thought, than might be imagined from their reputations as late nineteenth and early twentieth century ‘positivists’ or ‘scientists.’ Describing his life’s work, for example, Hubert affirms the priority of concepts over ‘facts.’ “In the analysis of religious facts,” says Hubert, “it is representations which preside over their development, and which regulate logic. . . . Our originality consists in this study of the categories of collective thought.”52 Marcel Mauss makes much the same play for the creative and active role of conceptualization or theory in the Année sociologique under a rubric called “Nomenclature.” There, Mauss discusses the conditions under which the term “taboo” might be added to a scientific vocabulary. Whatever else may be the case, says Mauss, it “is . . . important never more—except in a case of absolute necessity—to use terms from the ‘savages’ such as ‘totem’ or ‘taboo’; they have caused sufficient harm to science.”53 So, Mauss says that we must be active in accepting responsibility for constructing categories; we must deal responsibly with our conceptual choices by correcting the “faulty construction of nomenclature,” by seeing to it that terms are “well constructed or named.”54 We cannot expect the facts to dictate their own theory of themselves because, as Mauss says, “chronological and geographical classification”—the essence of conceptual order in the minds of the ‘scientific’ historians of the Fifth Section is not the only kind of classification possible.55 It is worth noting that Durkheimian constructivist attitudes were appreciated in their day by at least a small group of dissident intellectuals. Their embrace of the theoretical imagination was greeted with enthusiasm by others also trying to reform the epistemology of historical research in the France of the turn-of-the-century. That
52 Henri Hubert, “Text autobiographique de Henri Hubert,” (posth.) Revue française de sociologie 20 (1979), 206. 53 Marcel Mauss, “Nomenclature,” Année sociologique 9 (1906), 41–2. 54 Marcel Mauss, “Nomenclature,” Année sociologique 9 (1906), 41; Louis Dumont, “Marcel Mauss: A Science in Becoming,” in Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism, 189 on the same point in comments on Mauss 1896. 55 Marcel Mauss, review of Henri Hubert, “Introduction à la traduction française,” Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manuel de l’histoire des religions, Notes critiques 5 (1904), 177.
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eccentric rebel against scientific history, Henri Berr, led the way in celebrating the arrival of new allies to his cause from the Durkheimian camp, such as Hubert.56 We might recall that Jean Réville sketched out his plan for a new post-positivist history of religions under Berr’s auspices as well—even though Réville used the occasion to promote a new theologizing of the study of religion along Christian lines.57 For his great series on civilizations of the world, showcasing his new history of ‘synthesis,’ Berr invited Hubert to contribute a series of three volumes on the peoples of old Europe, the Celts and Germans. In Berr’s forward to one of Hubert’s contributions, he applauded Hubert’s ability to balance erudite ‘scientific’ history and constructive theorizing: Imagination is dangerous when it acts upon insufficient evidence; but . . . it plays a legitimate role when it crowns a lengthy analysis, when it is inspired by erudition, when it puts the vital finishing touch on a synthesis by some spontaneous generation of images arising in the mind’s eye. Here indeed the historian re-creates; he is . . . “the seer of the past”. . . . Hubert sees and makes you see.58
Thus, when Hubert and Mauss echo Durkheim’s 1898 critique of “histoire historisante”—namely that sociology “in no way implies a disdain for facts, . . . it does not recoil from particulars, but . . . phenomena are intellectually significant only when grouped according to types and to laws,”59 they and many others were sounding a call of rebellion against the ‘old school’ scientific history we know so well.
56 Thus Hubert anticipates Jonathan Z. Smith’s view about the importance of imagination in the study of religion. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion. 57 Jean Réville, “Congrès d’histoire des religions,” Revue de synthèse historique 1 (1900): 211–3. Jean Réville, “Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire des religions au Collège de France,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 55 (1907): 202. Jean Réville was also calling for a “scientific theology” on the pages of Maurice Vernes’ showpiece for a positivist history of religions, Revue d’histoire des religions. Jean Réville, “La Théologie partie integrante du cycle de l’enseignement universitaire et fondement indispensable de la Réformation,” reported in “Chronique,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 39 (1899), 412. 58 Henri Berr, “Foreword: The Expansion of the Celts,” Henri Hubert, The Rise of the Celts (English translation of Les Celts) (New York: Knopf, 1934), xvi. Berr is perhaps also associating Hubert with another of Durkheim’s important philosophical teachers, Émile Boutroux. He was a fierce critic of the scientism of the “histoire historisante,” typically denouncing it for its lack of the use of imagination to “penetrate the minds of men in the past.” William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession, 128. 59 Émile Durkheim, “Preface,” L’Année sociologique 1 (1898) in Emile Durkheim:
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6. Wobbly Theory Meets Wavering Positivism
Would, however, that such conversions were as clean and unproblematic as I have made out! In the real world of theorizing, some theorists even waver about theorizing. In point of fact, they sometimes became confused about whether indeed they ‘find’ or ‘invent’ their categories. The Durkheimians, for example, can be quite frustratingly inconsistent about their commitment to theorizing. From time to time they talked out of both positivist and constructivist sides of their mouths—regrettably at the same time. Hubert and Mauss, for example, began boldly enough, as we have just seen, by echoing Durkheim’s 1898 constructivist critique of “histoire historisante.” For them, as for Durkheim in sociology “phenomena are intellectually significant only when grouped according to types and to laws.” But, then the Durkheimians assure us in the same sentence that “in no way” does Durkheimian sociology imply “a disdain for facts, . . . it does not recoil from particulars.”60 Is this is not simply wanting to have things both ways? We revere objective ‘facts,’ they affirm, but we want the liberty as intelligent subjects to decide which facts count and which do not! Of this sort of maneuver, W. Paul Vogt wittily observed that such inconsistency was occasionally costly: “At least, the Durkheimians’ tendency to say that they based themselves solely on the facts, while basing themselves mostly on good reasoning about the facts, led now and then to some embarrassing slips.”61 Quite so. The Durkheimians reflect this uncertainty by wavering about the relation of theory of sacrifice to the data of sacrifice. In their moments as ‘discoverers’ of sacrifice, we find Hubert saying that the classification of “religious systems” is “demanded by the nature of things,”62 or, for instance, that the “unity” of sacrifice is “real,” and of “entities
Contributions to “L’Année Sociologique”, Yash Nandan, ed. (New York City: Free Press, 1980), 49. On Henri Hubert’s anti-historicism see Durkheim’s assurances of the fact to Ernest Lavisse in a letter of recommendation during Henri Hubert’s campaign for a chair in the Fifth Section. Durkheim assured Lavisse that Hubert was “one of those rare historians who, without losing anything of the care for precision and exactness, has already surpassed the narrowly historical approach and now tries to clear new paths.” [1901] Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 183. 60 Émile Durkheim, “Preface,” L’Année sociologique 1 (1898) in Emile Durkheim: Contributions to “L’Année Sociologique”, 49. 61 W. Paul Vogt, “Obligation and Right: the Durkheimians and the Sociology of Law,” The Sociological Domain, Philippe Besnard, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 189. 62 Henri Hubert , “Systèmes religieuses,” L’Année sociologique 7 (1904), 219.
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already determined and natural systems of rites that command attention.”63, 64 Such language belongs to the discourse of concept formation proper to realism or empiricism, and taken for granted by a practice of history writing where we seek to ‘discover’ sacrifice objectively ‘out there.’ The human mind simply takes in what is already there in nature. Facts are objective, independent of our perceptions, interests and strategies. No need for the human imagination to play a role in deciding or constructing what is ‘out there.’ On the other hand, Hubert and Mauss were concerned instead with an attempt “to disentangle the simple and elementary forms of an institution”65—with questions of “sacrifice’s logical derivation” and “simplicity,”66 its “logical” priority to other institutions, not the “historical” evolutionist sequence in which it might be found in a chronicle of rites. They cared about so-called “typical facts”67—not ‘brute’ facts—and thus actively constructed them. Hubert and Mauss were, in part at least, embarked on a constructivist project of saying what ought to be meant by “sacrifice,” rather than with some rough-andready survey of ordinary usage of the term.68 For this reason, Hubert and Mauss labor over several pages arguing how they believe the term, “sacrifice,” should be used, to what sort of phenomena it should be applied,69 about what the term “must designate,” for what the “name must be reserved,” and so on.70 In this connection, they berated William Robertson Smith for failure to do more than be “concerned above all with collecting and classifying documents . . . to build up an encyclopedic survey. . . .”71 Not for them the naive epistemological passivity of the old inductivism, and its philosophical kin, “histoire historisante.” In a review of Hubert and Mauss’s 1909 republication of Sacrifice in Mélanges d’histoire des religions,72 Durkheimian Robert Hertz catches the spirit of what is either Hubert and Mauss’ rank confusion or an 63
Henri Hubert, “Text autobiographique de Henri Hubert,” 13. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice Its Nature and Function, 8. 65 Ibidem, 7. 66 Ibidem, 6. 67 Ibidem, 6. 68 Frits Staal, Rules without Meaning: Ritual, Mantras and the Human Sciences (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 255–7. 69 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice Its Nature and Function, 9. 70 Ibidem, 12 (my emphases). 71 Ibidem, 6. 72 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Mélanges d’histoire des religions (Paris: Travaux de l’Année sociologique, 1909). 64
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eclectic balance of approaches known to be at odds with each other. Celebrating their active conceptualizing and creative theorizing, Hertz says of Hubert and Mauss’ effort that for “the first time a religious institution is studied as a unity, with the exclusive aim of constituting its type. . . .” But then Hertz continues in the same sentence by lapsing into the very passive empiricist or positivist descriptions of Hubert and Mauss’ efforts regarding the study of sacrifice, for which they had reproached William Robertson Smith. Thus, Hertz notes that Hubert and Mauss are to be credited for “discovering in it (sacrifice) its mechanism and function.” But, then, Hertz follows up this remark with one indicating either that he had forgotten Hubert and Mauss’ withering attack on Robertson Smith’s inductive approach to sacrifice, or as if he did not comprehend the intellectual risks of theorizing which their book required. There, Hertz says of Hubert and Mauss’s work on sacrifice that “this sound inductive method, equally removed from pure erudition and speculation, has led to results increasingly more definitive.”73 With ‘friends’ like Hertz—a genuine one in human terms, to be sure—perhaps Hubert and Mauss’ efforts at constructivist approaches to sacrifice do not need any ‘enemies’? Amidst talk about the revolutionary character of Durkheimian thought, then, we must not forget that the Durkheimians had great respect for the discipline of ‘history’—even the historicist history of the Liberal Protestants. Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, for example, owed much to the Indologist historian, Sylvain Lévi.74 His example did a great deal to compel the Durkheimians to rein in their ambitious theoretical instincts and seriously to engage concrete and detailed historical data. Marcel Mauss, for example, will tell us in the next chapter how as a student, his teacher, Sylvain Lévi, made him “plunge into a sea of facts” instead of indulging the theoretical ‘surfing’ over the surface of facts which up to that point in his education with Durkheim and Octave Hamelin, Mauss had practiced with apparent ease. After two years immersed in this sea of facts with Sylvain Lévi, Mauss tells “I kept on collecting and sifting facts.”75 73 Robert Hertz, review of Hubert and Mauss, Mélanges d’histoire des religions, Revue d’histoire des religions 60 (1909), 219. 74 Marcel Mauss, “Sylvain Lévi” (1935) in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 3. Cohesion sociale et divisions de la sociologie. Victor Karady, ed. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 537. 75 Marcel Mauss, “Sylvain Lévi” (1935) in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 3. Cohesion sociale et divisions de la sociologie, 537.
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Yet, despite this real commitment to the rigors of a history committed to a factual detailing of cases, the Durkheimians remained attached to a style of discourse drawn from the discipline of philosophy, typified by Hamelin, Renouvier and others. Because that brand of philosophy had a distinctly rationalist quality to it, they were not as bound by the descriptivist or positivist methodological conventions of “histoire historisante” as were their Liberal Protestant colleagues in the Fifth Section and their intellectual ally, Alfred Loisy. And so, despite their assumption of much of the historicist program, the Durkheimians were natural theorists as well. But, Hubert and Mauss are not alone in seeming to lose nerve and ‘wobbling’ in the face of their own intellectual daring-do. Even as confirmed a ‘scientific’ historian like Loisy ‘wavered’ and shifted his ground from the theory-hating historicism of his critical writing against Durkheimianism. As his career progressed, Loisy loosened the positivist strictures shaping his thought about sacrifice, and permitted himself freer, more imaginative, thinking about it. Loisy too, like his opposites, shifted ground between his anti-theoretical historicist approach to sacrifice to one more closely resembling the Durkheimian constructivism he had earlier rejected.76 This innovation occurred later in Loisy’s life, after his excommunication by the Vatican. There, Loisy began to loosen the meaning of sacrifice from its earlier exclusively monotheistic definition to one closer to the social sense introduced by the Durkheimians. For this later Loisy, ‘sacrifice’ covered more ground than he had earlier allowed. It now encompassed what we may call ‘civic’ sacrifice. Commentators have observed that the Loisy of later books like La Religion or La Morale humaine differs from the cautious ‘historicist’ author of Essai historique sur le sacrifice.77 Where the historicist Loisy confined his usage to the ‘letter’ of sacrifice as a particular kind of ritual, the later Loisy seemed eager to liberate the ‘spirit’ of sacrifice to range beyond the narrow ritual meaning he had given it in his Essai historique sur le sacrifice. In effect, because he let go of the literal standard of theistic ritual sacrifice, and stretched what had been for
76 Loisy’s religious humanism emerged after his excommunication, although Bernard Reardon claims Loisy had actually moved to this position from theism years before. Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 278. 77 Albert Houtin and Felix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy: sa vie, son oeuvre, 239.
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him the ‘ordinary’ sense of word, Loisy began to create and, thus, to construct a new notion of sacrifice—with, it seems only a modicum of awareness of what this move entailed. The intervening trauma of the First World War seems to have had something to do with freeing Loisy’s mind to think more actively about the idea of sacrifice, much as we have seen it do in the case of Raoul Allier. In this, he seems to have followed the flow of the forces of French patriotism driving thinkers to elevate the deaths in battle to the level of sanctity. As a strong patriot, Loisy wanted the full rhetorical force of the classic monotheistic idea of sacrifice to enhance the value of civic sacrifice in the service of one’s country. What better way to do this than to construct a notion of sacrifice which included both the ancient ritual deeds of our ancestors along with death in battle for the nation under one conceptual umbrella? Under Loisy’s new construction, dying heroically or generously for the nation, stands alongside the “sacrifice” of the Mass, Jesus Christ crucified, and the length and breadth of Jewish tradition beginning with Abraham. Perhaps, Loisy was so moved to redefine sacrifice because the passions of nationalism do not easily tolerate the logic-chopping prissiness of historicism? When people are rallied to die for their country, nationalists want them to know their deeds are solemnized as holy, and thus sacrificial—no matter how such usages may ‘extend’ meaning beyond their literal and factual historical contexts. Erudite positivist historicism seems to have yielded in the face of these pressures. Analogies are thrown across previously unbridgeable gaps in our thinking, and theorizing ‘extensions’ of the meaning of ritual sacrifice come into being. Retracing Loisy’s steps, we know he began seeing sacrifice both as a narrowly Christian, even Catholic, ritual act, and that he also held to the irreducibility and facticity of such religious ritual sacrifice. In his The Gospel and the Church (1903), for example, Loisy insisted on the qualitative distinction between ritual and civic sacrifices as two different categories or classes of ‘sacrifice,’ as it were. Despite their analogous spirit, analogy did not count for much with Loisy at this point. Accordingly, says Loisy, while some thinkers (the French liberal Protestants in point of fact, although Loisy does not name them here) argue that “the moral idea underlying sacrifice ought finally to eliminate the reality” of actual ritual sacrifice, “it is not strictly true to say that the moral idea replaced the reality” of actual
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ritual sacrifice. The two cannot be reduced to one, argued Loisy, because “it is playing a little on the double sense of the word ‘sacrifice’” so to do. Thus, Loisy concludes that between the man who dies, the victim of his destiny, or rather of the resistance opposed by the force of inertia to the force of progress, and the lamb, the goat, or even the human being immolated to a Divinity to win His favour, there is only the analogy that explains the use of the same word, but should not be able to deceive the historian.78
And, as a good ‘historian’ of the (scientific) stripe well known to us, the early Loisy is not to be deceived into mistaking creations or ‘constructions’ of the human imagination, such as analogies, for ‘facts’— for the real grounds of ‘scientific’ history. Only later and somewhat reluctantly did Loisy change his mind about the status of analogy, and thus about the value of the constructive nature of human imagination in writing history. This would mean that he then considered ritual sacrifice and civic sacrifice as members of the same category. So, when we reach the war year of 1917 and the publication of his La Religion, Loisy the “historian” seems “deceived” sufficiently (sic) to write quite differently than he had before the war. Despite the surface differences between ritual and moral sacrifice, Loisy says “there exists between the two a relation much stricter than that of simple analogy.”79 Loisy thus shifts the sense of ‘sacrifice’ from a strictly formal ritual one to one embracing such ‘analogous’ (sic) kinds of sacrifice as civic sacrifice. He posits a common categorial denominator, and in effect ‘constructs’ ritual and civic sacrifices under the same categorial rubric—namely a moral act of renunciation. Not satisfied to let facts speak for themselves, Loisy actively chooses which facts are, in effect, ‘typical,’ in the Durkheimian sense. Almost replicating the conclusions of Hubert and Mauss, Loisy tells us that it is “devotion which is the true sanctifying action . . . and this sacrifice is never abrogated because it is the essential form of social duty, the condition without which any human society can subsist.”80
78 Alfred Loisy, The Gospel and the Church. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976 (original French, 1903), 128. 79 Alfred Loisy, La Religion (Paris: Nourry, 1917), 62. 80 Alfred Loisy, La Religion, 64, my emphases.
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Ordinary sacrifice—indispensable to common life and running of society—consists in renunciations which day after day, human discipline imposes on whomever wants fully to play his human role in the family and city . . . daily sacrifices will always be the daily bread of social life. . . .81
For Loisy, ‘sacrifice’ now becomes something new—a category extending well beyond the narrow range of his earlier historicist thinking about the subject.82 What Loisy’s new openness to conceptual change shows is that for him too, a willingness to loosen the reference and definition of ‘sacrifice’ has political overtones in the broadest of senses. What may have just ‘happened’ to Loisy as his thinking evolved was, I suggest, something done deliberately by Hubert and Mauss in writing Sacrifice as they did. They seemed to know that certainly one way they could change society in the ways they wanted was to change the way one looked on it, on its beliefs and practices. With talk of ‘sacrifice’ so thick in the air of their time, command over the meaning of this term would mean much. Now, although the Durkheimians were limited in their abilities to control the use of the term, their prestige could be brought to bear to influence its use. In writing Sacrifice, they entered a domain of discourse that was at once academic, but at the same time political in a broad sense. Overcoming the limitations of positivist historiography was one route to the overcoming of the limits about what they could say with the word “sacrifice.” 7. Comparison and the Key to Theory Despite their wobbling back and forth between whether they had “found” sacrifice or “invented” it, both Loisy and the Durkheimians confirm Terry Eagleton’s view that theory “often seeks to provide us with new rationales for what we do.”83 Loisy’s theoretical move to embrace ritual and civic sacrifice within a single category was, 81
Alfred Loisy, La Morale humaine (Paris: Nourry, 1923), 292. Seeming to cover his tracks in retreat from his original historicist principles, Loisy tells us that even in the ancient ritual sacrifices the divine share in the sacrifice was already marked by moral qualities, such as renunciation as in the case of a human victim’s being offered for the good of the community. Alfred Loisy, La Religion, 63. 83 Terry Eagleton, “The Significance of Theory,” in The Significance of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 27. 82
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for example, part of his justification for patriotism, and a French ‘religion of humanity.’84 Sacrifice for the nation in war was not only like the ritual sacrifices of the Jewish and Christian traditions so much part of Western identity, it was its equal, as we have seen in Loisy’s writings after the war. Thinking about categories like sacrifice then often commits one to determining identity, rather than naively reflecting it. Having an identity demands coming to terms with fundamental relationships. Two such relationships—who or what is like us, and who or what is not—figure elementally in fixing identity. Part of what a ‘theory’ does, then, is either to affirm or to deny the identity of our categories by deciding either which other categories are like or identical to ours and which are not. To take up with Loisy again, is ritual sacrifice really like or the same as civic sacrifice? Or are they not? Are they only limping analogies with one another? Are the ‘sacrificial’ deaths of soldiers in modern warfare categorically the same as the bloody ‘sacrificial’ offerings of the religion of Israel or the death of Jesus on Calvary? Is indeed the execution of Jesus on Calvary a ‘sacrifice,’ and thus potentially the same as the sacrifice of the Passover lamb as the Christian evangelists thought? In answering that these apparently different kinds of so-called ‘facts’ were in reality the same, Loisy was reaching well beyond the facts and declaring the existence of a theoretical reality encompassing both. Any theorist does this, and the Durkheimians were just as eager to link social or civic sacrifices with those of the religious history of humanity. Hubert and Mauss argued, as one will recall, that the Roman Eucharist is built upon ancient pagan “models.”85 It shares the same sacrificial mechanism, the same ‘nature,’ as found in religions around the world and is therefore essentially identical to them.86 In concluding this chapter, I want to generalize beyond this case and argue that the theoretical crisis exemplified by Loisy was provoked by his acceptance of comparison, by a kind of fertile encounter with the Other. As long as, Loisy held certain things incomparable, he could resist having to theorize. But, once he accepted the comparability of certain things, he was committed to conceptual change, which is to say, to theorizing. Let us look then first at how the 84 85 86
See my Contesting Sacrifice, chapter 3. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 94. Ibidem, 93–4.
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Durkheimians became paragons of theorizing by virtue of their willingness to entertain comparison. To whatever degree then that Durkheimians broke with positivism and actively theorized sacrifice, it was achieved largely by the way they articulated their commitment to comparison. There is no ‘theory’ without comparison, because the two are internally related. Mauss, for instance, described his life’s ambition as “always” being “the comparative history of societies and religions.”87 Durkheim made his commitment to comparison abundantly clear from the beginning of his career and Hubert and Mauss say nothing different in their own publications. For them, everything turns on the Durkheimian ambition to do science. Aimed directly at the “historiens historisants,” Durkheim argued that even this science-obsessed positivistic history could not be a true science unless it sought to explain things. And, history can only explain things if it makes comparisons. History can only give accounts of historical change if it shows that particulars can be brought under a covering law, where particulars can be placed alongside one another as members of a class. But comparison is precisely what the “historiens historisants,” with their narrow specialized studies, refused to do, and as a result they did not theorize—at least intentionally. In approaching the Roman “sacer,” for example, they could do no more with it than Maurice Vernes did with the particulars he collected and put into encyclopedic arrangement. They could not argue, for example. that it was an ‘instance’ or a special ‘case’ of a more widespread phenomenon of, say, “sacred” things, such as emerges when one compares “sacer” to “taboo” or “mana” etc. They could not do this because on positivist grounds there is no justification for saying two or more such historically different things are similar or the same things. To speak of ‘an instance of ’ or ‘a special case of ’ would be to posit the existence of classes of things which are themselves not ‘facts,’ but purely theoretical realities. As positivists, the “historiens historisants” were thus dissuaded from studying history comparatively, because this would have taken them beyond the facts.88
87 Marcel Mauss, “An Intellectual Self-Portrait,” in Philippe Besnard, ed. The Sociological Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 142. My emphasis. 88 William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession, ch. 8.
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Comparison is, as Durkheim rightly indicated, a matter of making “analogies”89—a matter of going beyond the ‘facts’ to suggest the existence of deeper relationships than evident on the face of things. Durkheim argued that history should not limit itself to conscious data,90 or to the testimony of participants, because “consciousness is full of ‘illusions.’ ” Rather, historians should seek the “inner motives” determining causes which will often prove to be “other than conscious causes.”91 One discovers these causes by resorting to “methodical comparisons.”92 Regarding the Roman “sacer,” its “true nature . . . is very difficult to perceive and understand, if we do not compare it with the Polynesian ‘taboo.’”93 But historical positivism cannot justify likening these to one another. It cannot justify saying that two such radically different historical realities are the same or analogous to one another in any serious way. Historical positivism cannot, as Durkheim does, appeal to a common theoretical “substructure” beneath things, by appeal to which we explain them.94 After all, historical positivism is dedicated to documenting the facts, not, in a way, positing theoretical realities behind the facts of sacer and taboo—realities such as the “sacred.” 8. Duchesne, the ‘Primitives’ and Sacrifice Keeping true to my original plan of seeing how theorizing actually happens in situ, I wish in conclusion to show how this polemic about theory and comparison actually emerged in the instructive exchanges 89 Émile Durkheim, “Preface,” L’Année sociologique 1 (1898) in Emile Durkheim: Contributions to “L’Année Sociologique”, 49. 90 It is well to recall that in Durkheim’s view, sociology (and thus a sociology of sacrifice) necessarily involves the strategy of trying to discover unconscious structures behind the conscious avowals of the participants in social arrangements. “(A)ll who engage in the study of the past know full well that the immediately perceptible motives and apparent causes are by far the least important. We must penetrate much more deeply into reality in order to understand it.” Emile Durkheim, “Debate regarding Explanation in History and Sociology,” [1908] in The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, Steven Lukes, ed., W. D. Halls, trans. (London: Macmillan, 1982), 215. See also 212, 213, 217, 220, 225–7. 91 Emile Durkheim, “Debate regarding Explanation in History and Sociology,” 212, 213. 92 Ibidem, 218. 93 Émile Durkheim, “Preface,” L’Année sociologique 1 (1898) in Emile Durkheim: Contributions to “L’Année Sociologique”, 48. 94 Ibidem, 55.
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between the Durkheimians and one of their great interlocutors, Hubert’s teacher of history of religions, as well was a great friend and colleague of Loisy’s.95 I refer to the great Roman Catholic church historian, Abbé Louis Duchesne (1843–1922). Understanding how the Durkheimians engaged Duchesne could help us understand further how Hubert himself went over from the ‘scientific’ history of the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section to Durkheimian comparative and constructive sociology. And, because of Duchesne’s close affiliation with Alfred Loisy, we can round out our treatment of him at one go. Duchesne gained particular academic fame as a demythologizing critical historian of the popular and pious lives of the saints which had received circulation by Second Empire publishing houses.96 Likewise, he published important books on the history of Catholic liturgical and ecclesiastical traditions,97 preparing the way for some of the liturgical reforms not seen until after the Second Vatican Council.98 Studying under Renan, but also under Gabriel Monod, the leading “scientific” historian of his day and founder of that stan-
95 Although trained at first in the traditional seminary system of Catholic France, Duchesne went on to study at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1868. There he was trained in history under the hellenist, Édouard Tournier. (Henri-Irénée Marrou, “Mgr Duchesne et l’histoire ancienne du christianisme,” Monseigneur Louis Duchesne et son temps: actes du colloque organisé par l’École Française de Rome. 23–25 Mai 1973 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1975), 11, 13.) Appointed Mâitre de Conferences at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fourth Section—“sciences philologiques et historiques,” Duchesne moved easily through the highest levels of secular learning and culture. Elevated to the Academie Française in 1913, he was honored thrice by the Third Republic’s Legion d’Honneur in 1895, 1900, and 1905. At the same time, he was also for many years professor at Paris’s Institut Catholique (1876–96), and then at the French Ecole de Rome until his death in 1922. As editor of the wide-ranging Catholic review periodical, Bulletin critique de littérature, d’histoire et de théologie, Duchesne kept pace with the exciting intellectual developments of the times. ( Jean-Marie Mayeur, “Monseigneur Duchesne et l’Univerisité,” Monseigneur Duchesne et son temps: actes du colloque organisé par L’École Française de Rome (23–5 Mai 1973) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1975), 329, 330.) Successive volumes of the then new L’Année sociologique were listed and reviewed by Duchesne’s journal (See especially Bulletin Critique 6 (1900): 701–3; 7 (1901): 613–4; 9 (1903): 39–40; 11 (1905): 281–4 for reviews of current volumes of L’Année sociologique). 96 Claude Savart, Les Catholiques en France au XIX e siècle. Le témoinage du livre religieusex (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985). 97 Louis Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l’Eglise, 3 vols. (Paris, 1906, 1907, 1910) and Les origines du culte chrétien 5th ed. (Paris, 1920). 98 Alec Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 24–5. See also Salomon Reinach, Orpheus, Florence Simmonds, trans. (New York: Liveright, 1930), 431.
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dard bearer of historicism, the Revue historique, Duchesne became a faithful proponent of ‘scientific’ history.99 It was Monod’s “ésprit positif ” which Duchesne tells us he admired so much in his teacher.100 Like Alfred Loisy, Duchesne practiced a critical demythologizing sort of ecclesiastical history. When the Vatican came down hard on Loisy, Duchesne was also swept up, for a while at any rate, in the accusations of ‘modernism.’ But while it is controversial whether he actually was a modernist like Loisy, he has been widely regarded as a “precurseur.”101 Many believed that Duchesne harbored serious doubts about orthodoxy in private, while he maintained conformity in public for the sake of church discipline and unity. He was rumored to have resorted to intense periodic retreats in pious Brittany to boost his flagging faith.102 Mauss poked at these tender spots in Duchesne’s character by noting how Duchesne tried to reconcile the results of “historical critique with ecclesiastical necessities,”103 and how he completely avoided the delicate issue of the historical foundation of the doctrine of Petrine primacy, much at issue after the First Vatican Council.104 Loisy was less kind to Duchesne’s memory, and expressed an embittered sense of betrayal. Loisy felt that Duchesne simply lacked the courage to make common cause against the Vatican. Because of his “eternal fidelity to the church,”105 Duchesne, like a good “sailor” always trimmed his “sails when the tempest arose.”106 A nonetheless highly respected scholar, Duchesne shaped the historical consciousness of a wide range of scholars in the spirit of Monod’s example. These included the Catholic clergy especially, whom Duchesne wished to be as imbued with the spirit of the “methods of scientific work” as he was.107 Jewish modernist, Salomon 99 For an account of the relation of Monod’s historiography and Protestantism see Charles-Olivier Carbonell, “Les historiens protestants dans le renouveau de l’historiographie française,” in Actes du colloque: Les protestants dans les débuts de la Troisième République (1871–1885) (Paris, 3–6 Octobre 1978), André Encrevé et Michel Richard, eds. (Paris: Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français, 1979), 59–75. 100 Jean-Marie Mayeur, “Monseigneur Duchesne et l’Univerisité,” 319. 101 Émile Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste (Paris: Casterman, 1979), 19. 102 Alec Vidler, A Variety of Catholic Modernists, 71. 103 Marcel Mauss, review of Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l’Eglise. L’Année sociologique 12 (1913): 310. 104 Marcel Mauss, review of Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l’Eglise. L’Année sociologique 12, 311. 105 Alfred Loisy, Mémoires. Vol. 3 (Paris: Nourry, 1930), 478. 106 Alfred Loisy, Mémoires. Vol. 1 (Paris: Nourry, 1930), 106. 107 Jean-Marie Mayeur, “Monseigneur Duchesne et l’Univerisité,” 326.
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Reinach, similarly celebrated the way Duchesne “inculcated a severe scientific method among his pupils”108—one of them being, of course, Henri Hubert. Hubert’s first major publication in the history of religion, his 1899 “Étude sur la formation des états de Église,” appeared in Monod’s journal.109 Not surprisingly, the article followed the Duchesne’s historicist lead.110 So obvious was Hubert’s dedication to “histoire historisante,” and so remarkable Hubert’s subsequent turn toward Durkheimian theory111 that a fellow Durkheimian contemporary of Hubert’s, François Simiand, aptly described Hubert in those early days as an “historien historisant.”112 Although we do not know the exact reasons for Hubert’s defection from the historicist camp of Duchesne, it seems to have had something to do with the attraction of comparative work. Subsequent to his joining the Durkheimian ‘team,’ Hubert’s intellectual interests expanded into the general history of religions, with an emphasis on the so-called “primitive” or “barbarian” religions of Europe. This move is significant, since many in the camp of the “histoire historisante” believed these were not comparable to the so-called ‘real’ religions, such as Christianity, Judaism and such. In all likelihood, the main figure helping Hubert to break into comparative work and out of the narrow confines of “histoire historisante” was his life-long friend and collaborator, Marcel Mauss. He and Hubert first met at the École Pratique, Fifth Section where both were students of religion.113
108
Salomon Reinach, Orpheus, 431. Henri Hubert, “Étude sur la formation des états de église,” Revue historique 69 (1899), 1–40, 241–72. Regarding Monod’s “scientific history,” see William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession, 52. 110 Hubert’s relation to Duchesne becomes all the more salient when we take into account the fact that Hubert was thus rigorously trained in part in history by the cream of Catholic liberalism. Even before studying under Duchesne, Hubert worked under the liberal historian of the Near Eastern religions, Abbé Aurèle Quentin at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (46). From there Hubert went on to work under the Duchesne at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (48). (Marcel Drouin “Hubert (Henri),” Annuaire. Association des Secours des Anciens Élèves de l’École Normale Supérieure (1929).) 111 Hubert deviated from his teacher’s positivist historiography along with other leaders of his younger generation of scholars. But, Hubert does not however do so explicitly or with any vigor. Compare his noncommital and gentle review of Duchesne’s Les premiers temps de l’état pontifical (1911), (L’Année sociologique 12 (1913), 319–20) with Mauss’s polemical treatments (L’Année sociologique 2 (1899), 269–70 and L’Année sociologique 12 (1913), 310–3. 112 Marcel Drouin “Hubert (Henri),” 46. 113 On Mauss and philosophy see Ivan Strenski, “Durkheim, Hamelin and the 109
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Mauss is the prime suspect in prying Hubert loose from the kind of history done by Duchesne in large part because of Mauss’ avant gardiste and (philosophical) idealist orientations. Mauss likewise was quite critical of Hubert’s mentor, Duchesne, and published some rather critical reviews of this master of ecclesiastical history. In these reviews, Mauss shows us the side of him many have come to glamorize—his heady and revolutionary ambitions. Speaking from the youthful side of the generational divide, Mauss said of Duchesne that he had “almost all the qualities of the old school of French historians.”114 For Mauss’ tastes, Duchesne (like the early Hubert) paid too much attention to documentation and the facticity of “persons and events.” Taking his potshots at this ‘old’ “histoire historisante,” Mauss said that Duchesne wrote something of a ‘flat’ history, and never strayed from the literal words of his documents. Duchesne would, for instance, not take seriously structural matters—what Mauss called certain (logically) ‘primitive’ elements in religious life. These were never mentioned in the documents, but Mauss believed they could be deduced from the documents, because they actually lay beneath the surface ‘facts’ recorded in the historical documents. Failing to entertain ‘primitive’ features in this way, and failure to attend to possible “origins” lying beneath surface facts, would prove fatal to an explanation of religion, if those ‘primitive’ features actually happened to have formed the religion of today. Says Mauss We regret . . . that everything having to do with origins has only been studied summarily. . . . Now although the period that Monseigneur Duchesne has selected does not oblige him to deal with origins, they are only treated summarily. . . . Yet can we not say that this decision itself is open to debate . . .? By the fourth century, the organization of the cult is already accomplished—and that’s why the texts date to this epoch. Thus while Monseigneur Duchesne neglects the very interesting process of the formation of ritual, he would still need to study its [formation] in order to understand what follow.115
‘French Hegel’,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 16 (1989): 135–70. On Mauss and the avant garde see James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 122–8. 114 Marcel Mauss, review of Louis Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l’Eglise. L’Année sociologique 12, 311. 115 Marcel Mauss, review of Louis Duchesne, Origines du culte chretien, 2nd ed., (1898) L’Année sociologique 12 (1913): 271. Collected in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré. Victor Karady, ed. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 345.
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Thus, unlike Duchesne and his kind, Mauss tells us the Durkheimians (like the Annales later on)116 sought to study “the slow cleavages . . . prepared by centuries of underground work, to which modern geology has accustomed us.”117 Mauss thus regrets, for example, that although Duchesne’s researches point to the importance of the religious history of pre-Christian Gaul, ‘lying beneath the surface’ of the later documented ‘facts’ of the history of French Christianity, Duchesne made absolutely nothing of it. He showed no interest in the territory of the ‘primitive,’ the domain of “origins” lurking beneath the facts. Indeed, the reviews Duchesne commissioned on the work of the L’Année sociologique in his journal, Bulletin critique de littérature, d’histoire et de théologie show considerable irritation with Durkheimian interests in the ‘primitive,’ now rendered as their interest in the data of ethnography. Recapitulating historicist complaints about comparison, Duchesne’s reviewer sarcastically twits the Durkheimians for paying insufficient attention to the documented ‘facts’ of the history of western religions, while the “least (historically remote) particularities of the beliefs of Polynesian savages are tenderly related.”118 For the Durkheimians, Duchesne’s refusal to think beyond the documented facts—and thus his failure to ‘theorize’—excluded certain potentially critical subjects with his historical work. Duchesne neglected a whole range of subjects, typical of so-called ‘primitive’ religions, in dealing with supposedly ‘civilized’ Christianity. For example, “rites of initiation, lustrations, unctions, laying on of hands” and sacrifice received no mention by Duchesne.119 The omission of sacrifice especially troubled Mauss. “In the end,” adds Mauss, Duchesne “has not taken note of the relations of Christian sacrifice to the sacrifice of the Jewish Passover, and to the various sanctifications of the meal.”120 Here, again, Duchesne shows how the anti-comparative ethos of “histoire historisante” dominated his inquiries and thwarted any effort
116 Ivan Strenski, “L’apport des élèves de Durkheim,” La tradition française en sciences religieuses, Michel Despland, ed. (Québec: Université Laval, 1991), 109–27. 117 Marcel Mauss, review of Louis Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l’Eglise. L’Année sociologique 12, 311. 118 “J. A.”, “Chronique,” review of L’Année sociologique 5 (1900–1), Bulletin critique de littérature, d’histoire et de théologie 9 (1903), 40. 119 Marcel Mauss, review of Louis Duchesne, Origines du culte chretien, 2nd ed., (1898) L’Année sociologique 12 (1913): 271. Collected in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré, 345. 120 Ibidem, 345.
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at theorizing sacrifice—even in an historian of the Catholic Eucharist, agreed by all at the time to be sacrificial in nature. For Duchesne, it seems that pre-Christian or non-Christian ritual sacrifice was incomparable to the Catholic Eucharist. As if rebuffing the likes of Frazer in the same way as we saw with the French liberal Protestants, ‘pagan’ sacrifice did not lie within the specialized, narrow ambit of documented evidence on the history of Christianity and its liturgy. Christian exclusivism ruled out even entertaining the possible comparative links between Christianity and pre-Christian religions from the start. Such things could not be ‘thought,’ and thus were never theorized. The case of the early Loisy—the Loisy predating his consideration of wider notions of sacrifice—shows the same resistance to comparison and thus to theorizing. In its parochial exclusion of other religions from comparison with privileged cases like Christianity, it also showed how the “histoire historisante” had disqualified itself from participation in public discourse about religion. Loisy flat out refused, for example, to compare Christianity with “religions” like “totemism” in Australia or even Buddhism.121 Unthinkable to us today, Loisy, like Chantepie de la Saussaye, felt Christianity was incomparable, and thus was neither analogous nor certainly essentially identical to many of the things we easily call ‘religion’ today. This, I hasten to add, was not because Loisy was not fully aware of the many surface similarities between Christianity, Buddhism, totemism and the like. It was that for him such similarities could never in principle be even counted as “analogies,” as weighing enough to place them into the same class as Christianity. The category of “religion” was closed in advance to their entry. It is thus the Durkheimians who were among the first to theorize seriously and break with the religious commonsense of their day, and in beginning to ‘explain’ religious reality to give religion a language in which to enter public discussion. Sensitive to the criticisms hailing from sources like the early, historicist Loisy, Durkheim noted that he was closer to the ideal of a science than the so-called ‘scientific’ historians. He at least sought to ‘explain’ things. 121 Alfred Loisy, “Sociologie et religion,” 49f. See also Loisy’s criticism directed against the comparative method employed by Salomon Reinach, in his “Remarques sur une definition de la religion,” [1909] in A Propos d’histoire des religions (Paris: Nourry, 1911), 78–84.
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The overgeneralized nature and inadequate documentation of our theories cause them to be regarded as negligible; they are credited with having little more than a philosophical importance. And, yet history can be a science only insofar as it explains, and it can only explain when making comparisons. Otherwise even simple description is all but impossible.122
Certainly the Durkheimians realized what they were doing in disrupting the notions of religion and sacrifice prevailing at the time. This is not to deny that they were often, as we have seen, tentative and half-hearted in their attempts to establish a constructivist theoretical approach, just as they were cautious about their politics and social policies. Still, within the context of available options—such as that provided by theist theorists of sacrifice, like Loisy—the Durkheimians scandalized their theologian colleagues and broke from standard usage in ways that even a liberal Catholic like Loisy would not. Consider first, prima facie implausibility and oddity of the Durkheimian claims—how they ran against the accepted usage of the times—and still do.123 Is ‘religion’ still not widely thought of as ‘a belief in God’? Loisy’s theistic definition of religion and everything which went along with it, like sacrifice, was the ‘commonsense’ of the age, as it still is now. But, the Durkheimian definition of religion and sacrifice in terms of the sacred and the social took off in another direction, offensive to ordinary Western theistic usage.124 The Durkheimians disturbed the commonsense facts of the study of religion’s Western biases as to what is normal and normative about religion and sacrifice. Disruption happens when anyone, like the Durkheimians, sets out deliberately to try to expand usage or to recommend new usage— to theorize. In this sense, the trajectory of Hubert’s career showed how much he put aside such attitudes typical of the “histoire historisante” of his old teacher and patron, and gone over to Durkheimianism. He devoted his academic maturity to ‘primitive religions,’ archeology, 122 Émile Durkheim, “Préface,” L’Année sociologique 1 (1898) in Emile Durkheim: Contributions to “L’Année Sociologique”, 48. 123 See Durkheim’s attempts to persuade religious liberals and liberal anti-clericals of his positions Émile Durkheim, “Contribution to a Discussion: ‘Religious Sentiment at the Present Time,’” 181–9. 124 Compare this to Luc de Heusch’s claim that the Durkheimians produced an altogether too thoroughly occidental notion of sacrifice in Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Luc de Heusch, Sacrifice in Africa, Linda O’Brien and Alice Morton, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 4.
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Indo-European and Celtic studies.125 His research and teaching responsibility at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Fifth Section went under the title of “Pre-historic Ethnography of Europe,” or the “Primitive Religions of Europe”—chiefly the Celts and Germans. This meant that unlike Duchesne and his group, Hubert would also press the interests of James Frazer, William Robertson Smith and Israël Lévi in the primitive and folkloric aspects of ancient Hebrew religion to radical depths beyond what the documents showed us on their faces.126 These changes in the Fifth Section, signified by Hubert’s appointment there, conforms well with what theorists of theory, such as Terry Eagleton, tell us about the disruptive force of theoretical innovations. They are more or less reactions to the failure of traditional rationales for certain activities. Theory happens, says Eagleton when it is both possible and necessary for it to do so—when the traditional rationales which have silently underpinned our daily practices stand in danger of being discredited, and need either to be revised or discarded.127
I believe that the example of the way in which the Durkheimians theorized religion and sacrifice proves Eagleton correct. As scientists, they clearly found the theistic rationales for religious behavior unsatisfactory, and consequently sought to provide new underpinnings in the form of Durkheimian sociological theory. But, having said this, I do wish to re-enter, so to speak, one caveat. The Durkheimians were deliberately provocative in launching their theorizing in the face of both the theological and anti-theoretical fronts of the Liberal Protestants and Catholic modernists like Alfred Loisy. The Durkheimians did not wait for things to dawn on what they called “these good, but badly informed, souls.” They set out deliberately to be “treacherous” and “to make trouble” for their theologian and ‘scientific’ historian colleagues, and they did so by launching their theories of religion and sacrifice.128
125 Ivan Strenski, “Henri Hubert, Racial Science and Political Myth,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23 (1987), 353–67. 126 François-A. Isambert, “At the Frontier of Folklore and Sociology: Hubert, Hertz and Czarnowski, Founders of a Sociology of Folk Religion,” in P. Besnard, The Sociological Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 152–76. 127 Terry Eagleton, “The Significance of Theory,” 26. 128 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier
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Thus, it is also important to see that the Durkheimians were picking a fight; they were exerting their own power over the meaning of scientific terminology against forces then in command of the confessional common sense of their time. And, they did so in the interests of a public discourse about religion. Theory was one of their weapons in this policy. The Durkheimians were saying that the phenomena called “religious” by theists, like sacrifice, were not most fruitfully theorized or accounted for in theistic terms. Theism was not therefore the norm of religious behavior, standing in a privileged position from which all other religious practices could be judged. It could not therefore be the norm of public discourse about religion. In place of theistic notions of religion, the Durkheimians argued that an analysis of sacrifice in terms of the “sacred” was free of these cultural biases, since at one level all it asserted was that sacrifice makes things sacred. On top of this, by virtue of its rooting in broad cross-cultural comparative data and analysis, the Durkheimian idea of the “sacred” was, in the bargain, etiologically more powerful. In cutting across sectarian boundaries, across traditional contemporary religions, as well as world-views and moral systems, or modern religions, such as the religion of humanity, from “primitive” to “modern,” the study of religion could include more data than a notion like “god.” The idea of the “sacred” included more and explained more that fit the traditional theistic definition than the theistic definition of religion itself. The trick was however to convince scholars to shift their intellectual ground, to persuade them that things thought categorically different up to that point were in fact members of the same category. And, this meant persuading scholars to agree that it was legitimate to compare some things with certain other things, for example Christianity with totemism, or indeed the Catholic Eucharist to primitive ritual sacrifice, and that again to civic sacrifice. I am suggesting then that we need to see the Durkheimian conceptual shift in defining sacrifice within the context of their simultaneous desires to shift the moral and ideological grounds beneath the Third Republic. Their will to define sacrifice as an essentially human process for creating the sense of the sacred was cut from the same cloth as their humanist and bourgeois civic morality. for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” Études durkheimiennes/Durkheim Studies 3 (1991), 2–9.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION 1. Power and Principle This book has tried to give an account of how the “first theory” of sacrifice came into being within the context of an intellectual, institutional and religious rivalry. At times, the story has not been particularly edifying. Conspiracy and deceit played considerable roles in the way opposing positions were arrayed for combat. We know more here about the Durkheimian side of this, and their delicious anticipation of making “trouble for these good, but badly informed, souls,” thanks to newly available correspondence.1 But, having noted this, does not mean we should take particular delight in seeing the ‘blood’ flow in competitions where antagonists like Hubert and Mauss promise to be “clear about our aims so that they are pointed, sharp like razors, and so that they are treacherous.”2 To be sure, in this game of power, the French liberal Protestants played an analogous role to the Durkheimians. We literally ‘read the minutes’ of the French liberal Protestant attempts to maintain a Christian theological bias within the École Pratique, Fifth Section by thwarting Hubert’s candidacy for the “Succession Sabatier.” Marcel Mauss was right when he suspected that the French liberal Protestants acted as a political bloc, and one against whom it would be wise to take precautions.3 Having registered the role of power in theory-making, however, we need not indulge our own tendencies to be cynical about the ‘bare-knuckles’ “Let’s go! I love a fight!”4 attitude of the young
1 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” Études durkheimiennes/Durkheim Studies 3 (1991), 2–9. 2 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” 2–9. 3 Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 182f. 4 Letter of Henri Hubert to Marcel Mauss, n.d. 1898. I thank Marcel Fournier
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Durkheimians.5 While the Durkheimians were not fools, and while I have tried to bring out the underlying political dynamic of events lurking beneath the facts to show this, there is not much point in salivating over the rivalry which existed between the Durkheimians and the French liberal Protestants. So, as we need to recognize that theories are often worked out within the context of the politics of certain social institutions, and that these politics are as real as in any other domain of life in the ‘real world,’ we also do not want to absolutize politics. We want, at the very least, to be open to the possibility of other considerations than power and self-aggrandizement. As I have argued as well, there are certain ‘principles’ pressed upon the Durkheimians by the exigencies of a religiously plural, ‘secular’ condition of life in the Third Republic. I fully realize that speaking of ‘principles’ may seem quaint and anachronistic.6 But I am not appealing to some sort of abstract world of universal values. Rather, what I mean by ‘principles’ in the world of ‘theory’ are the rules of thinking which are believed to function for fundamental social comity. In the religiously plural world of the Third Republic, it would therefore be ‘principled’ to respect religious diversity, rather than to ignore or offend against it—no matter whose interests are served thereby. In basing their theory of sacrifice upon rules of thinking open to all, rather than just to Christians, the Durkheimians took what I would call a ‘principled’ approach to the subject. One can observe the same style of dealing with moral issues on the national level, for example, in Durkheim’s defence of individualism in his “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1898).7 There, Durkheim basically argued that respect for the sacredness of the individual had entered the French moral conscience as an historical fact. To offend against it or to attempt overturn it, as the right-wing Catholics sought to do in insisting on the continued persecution of Dreyfus for “reasons of state,”
for this citation. See also Marcel Fournier and Christine De Langle, “Autour du sacrifice: lettres d’Emile Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, M. Mauss et E. B. Tylor,” 2–9. 5 Ivan Strenski, “Religion, Power and Final Foucault,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 66/2 (1998), 345–67 and “Respecting Power, Worshiping Power, and Knowing the Difference: Rejoinder to David Chidester and Gary Lease,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 66/2 (1998), 381–83. 6 Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7 Émile Durkheim, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” (1898) in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Durkheim on Religion (London: Routledge, 1975), ch. 4.
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would lead to a social calamity. Individualism was too deeply written into the make-up of French values to abrogate.8 Therefore, an appreciation of the role of power in theory-making does not commit us to a kind of depressing cynicism bred by the belief that ‘might makes right.’ It is not necessarily the case that the ‘right’ theory—the theory which succeeds in the long term—will always be the one held by those monopolizing ‘might’—the balance of political power in institutions of knowledge, such as the École Pratique, Fifth Section. The Durkheimian theory of sacrifice, for example, has long outlived the theologized accounts of sacrifice in academic circles, even though the Durkheimians were never really able succeed in their ambitions to dominate the Fifth Section. It remains indeed something of a puzzle why the theory of sacrifice articulated by Hubert and Mauss has had such a long run, given their relative marginality in French academic institutions. So, the Durkheimian theory of sacrifice can be said to have ‘won,’ even though the Protestants likewise also never ‘lost’ the Fifth Section to the Durkheimians. For reasons such as this, I have argued elsewhere that while it is reasonable to ‘respect’ power, it is all too easy and self-indulgent to ‘worship’ it and its operations.9 It would therefore be naive in the extreme to ignore the power relations and strategies in the life of a theory, even though it seems not to be a sufficient condition of the ‘success’ of a theory that it be well placed in a powerful institution. Besides struggles for power, then there were also arguments and principles. As we have seen, the Durkheimians measured their pursuit of power over theory of sacrifice and religion against the ‘external’ conditions dictated by the existence of a religiously plural nation-state. In this sense, they can be said to have transcended their narrow class self-interests. They were not just guided by a Machiavellian desire to do in their enemies, and to win at whatever cost and for whatever purpose. For the Durkheimians, there were real principles
8 For a complete discussion of Durkheim’s role in the Dreyfus case, and its implications for religion, see my Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), ch. 4, “The Dreyfus ‘Mystique’ and the Conservation of the Sacred.” 9 Ivan Strenski, “Religion, Power and Final Foucault,” 345–67 and “Respecting Power, Worshiping Power, and Knowing the Difference: Rejoinder to David Chidester and Gary Lease,” 381–83.
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at stake—even if they were principles conforming to their larger interests as well. Both parties used what weapons they had to hand in order to prevail in causes they sincerely believed served their country. Real rivalry dominated relations between the French liberal Protestants and the Durkheimians over public discourse about religion, and in particular, about the conception and study of sacrifice in the Fifth Section. That’s just ‘life.’ I think we can attain a balanced sense of the place of power in theory-making and the success or failures of theory by reference to the larger intellectual contexts in which academic power politics occur. Here, I think that beyond the struggle to position themselves for influence in the intellectual world, both the Durkheimians and the French liberal Protestants were faced with the question of the adequacy of their viewpoints to the need for a public discourse about sacrifice in the Third Republic. Thus, all along, for the Durkheimians and for me, the critical perennial issue in this rivalry has been the question of whether theological discourse—and a Protestant Christian one at that—can qualify as public discourse—especially in the domain of religion. It seems to me the Durkheimians represent the view that it cannot, while the French liberal Protestants are, in effect, undeterred in trying to employ what I (and the Durkheimians) argue is a confessional theological discourse inserted into the public realm. Although the case we have considered does not solve the general problem, it does, I believe, show what happens when one particular ‘theology’ attempts to pass as public discourse in a ‘secular’ society and is contested by a ‘theory.’ Other ‘theologies,’ or other theologies at other times, might fare differently in their ambition to serve as public discourse. But, we will have to see what happens when they do, and when different conditions prevail than those of the Durkheimians and the French liberal Protestants of the turn-of-the-century.10 10 Already, in the United States, we are beginning to see attempts to refine theology and redefine the relation of ‘church and state’ for service as public discourse. Here, I refer not only to the well known work of Stephen Carter, but also to the lesser known, but equally thoughtful ferment in the academy, typified by the likes of Delwin Brown, John Milbank, Linell Cady, Sheila Davaney and others. (Delwin Brown, “Constructive Theology and the Academy,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 22/1 (February 1993), 8. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief (New York City: Doubleday, 1993), Linell E. Cady, Religion, Theology and American Public Life (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993), Sheila Davaney and Dwight N. Hopkins, eds., Changing Conversations: Religious Reflections and Cultural Analysis (London: Routledge, 1996).
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Thus, even after they had positioned themselves by their various maneuvers to influence social policy about intellectual discourse about sacrifice, the Durkheimians still needed to produce a ‘theory’ which could conceivably play in the arena of public discourse. In a sense, what the Durkheimians did besides playing a shrewd political game, was to expose the intellectual bankruptcy of the French liberal Protestant program of a theological public discourse. On its other side, this meant that the Durkheimians needed to escape the pitfalls awaiting liberal Protestant theological attempts to account for sacrifice by not participating in a kind of discourse which would have disqualified them in advance. Friendly at times as they may have been with members of the liberal Jewish community, for example, they never identified with its theological efforts in the Third Republic. These, it is not widely known, consisted in part of arguing that Judaism ought to be the national religion of France, since it so well, at least in its ‘prophetic’ form, embodied the liberal and ethical essence of the French Revolution’s vision of a universal humanity! These Jewish liberals held that the old faiths like Judaism could inspire radical change and provide a moral basis for national revival. Judaism, in their eyes, would become for France the “soul of its democracy,”11 a “‘religion de la patrie.’”12 From what one can gather, the Durkheimians were, however, as contemptuous of Jewish religious liberalism as they were of its Catholic and Protestant variants.13 Instead, then of theologizing about sacrifice, and expecting that theological discourse could qualify as public discourse about religion, they resorted to ‘theory.’ While not denying the constructed character of Durkheimian theoretical discourse, and thus while not denying its assumption of specific, often contested, values, I have argued that the Durkheimians felt that they were essentially right then in taking the theoretical, rather than the theological, route. Their behavior was not just an exercise in bloody power-mongering. They ‘respected’ power without, I believe,
11 Dom Besse, Les religions laiques: un romanticisme religieux (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1913), 198. 12 The humanist, Paul Doumer, explicitly spoke of creating such a religion (Eugen Weber, The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Publications in History, #60, 1959), 36. 13 Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997), 55f. and chapter 3.
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‘worshiping’ it. Given the kind of religiously plural and diverse society in which they lived, the Durkheimians acted as much out of principle as they did out of political calculation. In such a society, theology—and certainly not a Protestant Christian theology—could not, in principle, qualify as public discourse. If any religious tradition could make a plausible claim for establishment in France, or further for an integral conforming of French political norms to religious ones, it would have been French Roman Catholicism, the religion of the vast majority of the French. Indeed, this is what the movement known as Catholic ‘integral nationalism’ sought to achieve.14 The Durkheimians felt that they were ‘right,’ not just because they had ‘might’—which they in truth they did not have in great supply—but because, however ‘ideological’ Durkheimian discourse might be, the liberal Protestant theological discourse in the time and place in question was even less fitting as public discourse. It was indeed incorrigible and thus impervious to argument because of its ultimate resort to a private “inner God,” essentially inaccessible to scrutiny. As Marcel Mauss said of that great Dutch comrade-in-arms of the French liberal Protestants, Cornelis P. Tiele, when Tiele spoke of his “interior God, he truly seems to be teaching a theology.”15 Another way of illustrating this difference between theology and theory would be to consider certain differences in criteria or possibilities for testing the accounts offered of sacrifice. Some may accuse the Durkheimians of ‘theologizing,’ for instance, because the core of their theoretical account of sacrifice’s ‘functioning’ is that sacrifice makes the victim sacrificed ‘sacred.’ If the Durkheimian claim is ‘scientific’ in any conventional sense, then we should be able to test this claim by ordinary human means. Can this be done? I believe it can simply by the ordinary methods of social research of interview, survey, and observation. Put concretely, if we take the example of certain army recruits having been ‘sacrificed’ in battle for the sake of the nation, we would not be surprised that social attitudes towards them as ‘victims’ differed from those attitudes towards them
14 Norman Ravitch, The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589–1989 (London: Routledge, 1990), 96–119. Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought in France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 14. 15 Marcel Mauss, (1900) review of Cornelis P. Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion. Part II: Ontological in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres. Volume 1. Les Fonctions sociales du sacré. Victor Karady, ed. (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 547.
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as ordinary citizens or as newly recruited troops. The closer these citizens get to becoming soldiers, and the closer those soldiers come to having sacrificed themselves for the nation, or at least having offered themselves as sacrifices for the nation, the more and more they are regarded as ‘holy’ or ‘sacred.’ They are no longer ordinary citizens, they are ‘heroes.’ They have transcended or surpassed the qualitative character of the everyday citizen and become something more, something that passes beyond the profane. Their passage through the rite of civic sacrifice has, as Hubert and Mauss argue, made them ‘sacred.’ Summing up their perspective Hubert and Mauss contrast their naturalistic view to a theological one. To wit, while those disparaging religious beliefs see in sacrificial “rites only vain and costly illusions,” the Durkheimians do not. While not admitting transcendental agency in sacrificial rites, they feel that “there are perhaps true realities to which it is possible to attach the institution in its entirety. Religious ideas, because they are believed, exist; they exist objectively, as social facts. The sacred things in relation to which sacrifice functions, are social things.” Significantly, from the viewpoint of theorizing, Hubert and Mauss conclude by saying that grasping the social referent of sacrificial rites should be “enough to explain sacrifice.”16 By contrast, if we take a model of a theologizing account of sacrifice, such as that supplied by Alfred Loisy, we run into something quite different. Recall Loisy’s claim about the nature of sacrifice that he claims that, presumably in the minds of religious believers “power of sacrifice does not seem at all to pertain to the purely social order of things—even if such an order should exist!” And, indeed from the viewpoint of religious believers, it is not. For them and for Loisy, “The magical and religious power (of sacrifice) has to do with the physical and moral powers which religious thought postulates in the universe. . . . (It implies) a transcendental action upon the world by means of invisible forces.”17 For him sacrifice is “a mystical action, of unverifiable efficacy.”18 Well, unverifiability has its merits, but also its costs. One of those costs is the disqualification
16 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, (1899) W. D. Halls, trans., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 101. 17 Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice (Paris: Nourry, 1920), 8. 18 Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice, 9.
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of any discourse that might be called public in a religiously diverse (including the a-religious) and plural society. Loisy’s theological account of sacrifice, even by his own admission, cannot be tested, other than, one might suppose, by religious faith itself, and thus the particular viewpoint of a particular part of the human community. That is to say, not by public norms of knowledge. 2. Theology, Theory and Post-Modernity Yet, despite the differences in idiom employed by the likes of theologians like Alfred Loisy and theoreticians like the Durkheimians, those of us taken by the post-modern turn might be quick to comment that the battle between so-called ‘science’ and ‘theology’ has been decided against the pretensions of ‘science.’ Is not science’s ‘myth of objectivity,’ presumed by the Durkheimians, long and well dead? And, who would be foolish or bold enough, the script goes, to claim anything epistemologically distinctive, foundational or superior about so-called ‘science’ and its ‘theories’? All viewpoints are grounded in relative positions, and no such thing as objectivity exists— not in theology, to be sure, but also not in the so-called ‘sciences.’ Some in the theological camp, but not only there,19 have argued that the kind of knowledge and intellectual activity demanded of public discourse in the university must be more than the mere ‘analysis’ and blessedly ‘less’ than the ideal of ‘explanation’ that a naturalistic or scientific viewpoint dictates. This, they feel, opens the door to theology, and puts the pretensions of ‘theory,’ such as Durkheimian theory of sacrifice, in its place—alongside theology and all other socially constructed discourses. They believe this because the kind of knowledge that they believe the university should stand is knowledge as understanding or interpretation. Further, since all interpretive activity is “constructive” and transformative, the investigator is never free from the subject of investigation. Investigators inevitably bring to the subject their own subjectivities. Now, since ‘theology’ is interpretive as well, there is nothing much objectionable in theology—at least non-“confessional” theology20—bringing its presuppositions to
19 Charles Taylor, “Understanding and Ethnocentricity”, Philosophical Papers, volume 2 Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 20 Delwin Brown, “Constructive Theology and the Academy,” 8. “Confessio-
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the subject under study. It should be free to go about its constructive and transformative tasks in the public university, just like any other practitioner of interpretive methods in the humanities.21 Defending theologizing in the secular university along lines like these, Catholic theologian, John Milbank, claims that Durkheim’s sociology stands on the same epistemological footing as a theology: “theology encounters, in effect, in sociology only a theology, and indeed a church in disguise, but a theology and a church dedicated to promoting a certain secular consensus.”22 There would therefore be no essential difference between a theology of sacrifice like Loisy’s or a theory of the sacrifice, like Hubert and Mauss’. Such claims would ring remarkably true to those in our turn-ofthe-century French context. There we find the great Roman Catholic intellectual, Charles Péguy, reproaching the Durkheimians and their ilk with much the same grievances as our theologian contemporaries do the so-called scientific or naturalistic study of religion. Says Charles Péguy, When will Frenchmen demand that the State concern itself solely with the administration of temporal values? When will they refuse to allow the State to overstep its prerogatives? . . . When will our State, which plies so many trades—which manufactures matches and which manufactures laws—when will our State recognize that it has no business manufacturing metaphysical doctrines for us?. . . . We have witnessed the disestablishment of the churches. When shall we see the disestablishment of metaphysics?23
Has anything changed? 3. Theology and Epistemology in Their Places Does post-modern critique then render Durkheimian discourse about sacrifice hopelessly irrelevant and outmoded? Or, is there more relevance to it, as I have maintained from the beginning? Are the Durkheimians then both ‘nos ancêtres et nos contemporains’?
nal theology” is one bound to the “conceptual symbols of particular traditions of inheritance.” 21 Ibidem, 8. 22 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 4. 23 Charles Péguy, “De la situation faite au parti intellectuel” in Oeuvres en prose complètes Vol. III (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 166.
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A final look at the Durkheimian arguments against the liberal Protestants over sacrifice from an epistemological angle may provide an excellent basis for a thoroughgoing critique of the theologizing of the study of religion represented by the work of Milbank and other Christian theologians. Implicit in Durkheimian polemics against the liberal Protestants is a heretofore undeveloped methodological stance which I call “relative objectivity.” The Durkheimian critique of the liberal Protestant theologians serves not only then to foreshadow a critique of the post-modern epistemology taken up by some of today’s theologians to thwart the progress of a scientific study of religion, it yields a new epistemology of its own, and comes in two parts.24 First, it is precisely to head off post-modern critiques of naturalistic theories of religion, that, I have made theory-ladenness of certain discourses an empirical and historical matter. Whether or not, a particular discourse is laden with a particular theoretical construction is, in my view, a matter waiting to be either discovered or dismissed. It is not a matter of seeing camels in clouds, where the clever trump the faithful and true. The quest for theory-ladenness becomes a matter of ferreting out the real, hidden agendas, the actual undisclosed determinants of discourses. To have it otherwise, would be ironic indeed for post-modernists, since by insisting on the significant theoryladenness of discourse as absolute principle, they would fall back into the very dogmatism that post-modernism seeks to escape. Theoryladenness ought thus to be seen as an empirical matter, a subject for history of science more than for philosophy of science. In Four Theories of Myth, I thus sought to move well past the insinuations about
24 The first, and quite telling, point to be made at least about Milbank is his putatively generic, but actually parochial, use of the term ‘theology.’ Contrary to what his usage implies, there simply is no such thing as ‘theology’ pure and simple. There are ‘theologies’ of many apparently different and perhaps incompatible sorts, but no such beast as ‘theology.’ Thus, one speaks of Thomist, Calvinist, liberal and such Christian theologies or Asharite, Mutazila, various Shi’a Muslim theologies, and so on. At least Milbank eventually comes clean on this point in the final chapter of his massive 443 pages tome with a frank assertion of the Christian nature of what had gone before for 379 pages under the generic term, ‘theology,’ simpliciter. But by that time, one might well complain that Milbank has misled us about the putative generality of his claims. So, to be candid about the rivalry between Durkheim and the theologians, we should say what kinds of theologians we have in mind. This is why I have carefully stipulated that it is the French liberal Protestants and their theology who are in the spotlight.
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the relation of Eliade’s right-wing politics to his way of doing history of religions. Was there or was there not factual evidence of Eliade’s membership in right-wing politics in Romania? And, if there was, how, in fact, could this be said to have been mirrored in his fundamental theoretical assumptions about studying religion? Real commitment to uncovering the theories embedded in Eliade’s way of studying religion demanded ‘getting down and getting dirty’ in the stuff of history. Second, it is also not enough that one show that a particular discourse presupposes theoretical structuring or marches to a hidden agenda. Theory-ladenness must as well be consequential in order to have any intrinsic interest. That a discourse is shaped by a particular theoretical structure ought to make a difference to the discourse. But does it? We therefore need constantly to ask what the point of asserting the theory-ladenness of some particular discourse is? How would the discourse have been different in the absence of the theory ‘laden’ therein? Claims about the theory-ladenness of discourse need to pass the “So what?” test. Resorting to the example of Eliade again, pointing out the right-wing affiliations of Eliade’s youth would be irrelevant to an understanding of his mature history of religions unless it could be shown how it mattered—how Eliade’s political thought significantly shaped his thought in the study of religion. On this basis, then, it is false for theological opponents of the social sciences to assume that just because all viewpoints rest on assumptions, principles, axioms, or that they have an interpretive aspect, that therefore all views are equally ‘conditioned’, ‘partial’ and the like. While from an absolute or Gods’-eye or Buddhist Sunyata view, it may be correct that every human effort at knowledge looks partial and inadequate, not many of us can successfully make the claim to be able to speak from so lofty a height or so profound a depth. We live in a world where we must at least assume as a first approximation that anything we say might in theory be reasonably contradicted or contested. To say we ‘know’ in a strong sense would itself be to take the God’s-eye view of absolute knowledge. But, living in this world where we can expect ideas to be contested and changed is not the same as living in a world in which views have no value, or in which every view has the same value in every context as any other view. Living in the world is not really served by in effect delegitimizing or relativizing all viewpoints. It may just be the case that some views in some contexts are to be preferred over others. Ptolemaic
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astronomy will not get a NASA space craft safely to the moon and back, although modern astronomy will. Relativizing all views or delegitimizing all views also leaves us spinning our wheels in the nihilistic mud. Except in rare circumstances, we are not generally nihilistic. We want to do things, to enlist people in common efforts to preserve, and even (creatively) destroy states of affairs. It is hard to see how human society could be possible were such positive and constructive values not in some way on the whole in the ascendent—at least as working principles. In this everyday world, different communities make, often sheerly practical, decisions to value certain viewpoints. Indeed, part of what defines and constitutes communities at all are decisions about the givens of knowledge about the world. Bible-based churches, for example, are what they are because they take the bible as axiomatic, as given, as ‘revelation’—criticisms of it not withstanding. Some other text might occupy the place of the bible instead—say the Vedas or Koran— and there may well be mutual knowledge of these different foundational literatures. So, the matter is relative and not absolute. But it still remains necessary if life is to go on. Likewise, Euclidian geometry rests on certain axioms—treated for all intents and purposes as if they were absolute and incontestable. Of course, we do have geometries in which parallel lines, for example, meet, and thus in which Euclidian axioms are violated. But the assumptions or axioms grounding such a new geometry are in a way still as (relatively) absolute within that world as the Euclidian axioms were in their world, given their circumscription of things. Now these practical considerations about getting on with life are of the highest importance to the existence of civilized life. They are to be found in the epistemological principles undergirding our judicial and legal systems. Our judicial system, and thus Western culture, for example, assumes the foundational or axiomatic status of the priority of sense perception or empirical knowledge. Eye witness testimony, material evidence, even down to rarified DNA samples, all presume the foundational nature of empirical evidence, of knowledge through the senses. Extra-sensory perception, retro-cognition of past lives, so called ‘spectral evidence,’ the otherwise authoritative declarations of popes, gurus, buddhas or psychics—all are literally ‘ruled out of court.’ This does not, however, mean that popes, gurus, buddhas or psychics may not get to the truth, or that they might not someday become part of what we accept as ‘knowledge.’ Not at
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all. At the very least, however, their words are neither as ‘accepted’ nor as foundational as, for example, the epistemological foundation of our legal and judicial systems. Drawing the line at the empirical, as we do in our legal and judicial systems, is our practical way of getting on with having a civilized society. There was a time, of course, in the history of the West when ‘spectral evidence’—literally the testimony of spirits or of those claiming to see or hear spirits— was acceptable in courts of law. The witch trials of county Essex and Salem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all relied on such ‘evidence.’25 We no longer do so. This decision to draw the line this side of the spirit world for such foundational parts of our civic life is our way of saying that we get along better in enabling life to prosper by doing so. Such a decision does not in itself mean that spirits do not exist. It only means that we have rejected everyday dependence upon a system which assumes that they exist. We reject basing a legal system on evidence which would include the testimony of spirits or the testimony of those in communion with them—at the very least out of strictly practical considerations. Namely, we are in effect betting that it is not possible to have an orderly system of justice if we accepted ‘spectral evidence’ into ‘evidence,’ as the development of a witch ‘crazes’ attested. Given who we are, there are simply no reliable ways in which to check ‘spectral evidence.’ We are not confident in being able to assess it. For much the same reasons, our so called ‘secular’ political systems in the West in a way rest on the wager that civilized society stands a better chance of success if we remove religion, or better yet, any single religion, from a foundational role in our society. We learned from the various wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the social consensus necessary for a civilized society could not be based upon the kinds of transcendental beliefs over which people had been so fiercely divided. Such beliefs had to be declared neutral to the maintenance of our social life. Social peace was not possible, the wager stipulated, if religion was a matter of public civic contest. Such beliefs mattered far too much, and divided our populations too sharply to make them the measure of citizenship. Settling the score in favor of one or the other risked endless
25 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), chapters 14–18.
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social unrest and violence. Being Protestant in a state insisting upon Catholic principles of citizenship, for example, created a situation ultimately intolerable for Protestants. Social harmony is better served— again in a practical way—by eliminating religious tests or preferences as standards of citizenship. Better, again we reasoned, as it were, to tolerate all religions, than to risk the potential for social disruption by privileging one. Of course, social peace and a civilized society may not finally be preferable to living by the ‘true’ religion— especially if there is one! These tensions are still with us. Everything from Operation Rescue to the Civil Rights Movement rests on the preference for ‘truth’ over social peace. Even civilization’s defining property—the rule of law—is flaunted in pursuit of a truth which offends existing social consensus and harmony, typical of these movements of reform and resistance. But, at least, as our societal ‘default,’ we have opted for the rule of law and social peace over the continuous revolution promised by religious movements, marching as it were to the sound of an often distant and different drummer. Likewise, what we call ‘science’ too rests on certain axioms or assumptions about what counts as knowledge. But this does not make it indistinguishable in this respect from other schemes of knowledge— including ‘theology.’ Given certain purposes and contexts, some assumptions are just better than others; some axioms are simply more defensible than others. Thus, for example, when it comes to comparing the axioms of Durkheimian approaches to religion to those of ‘theology,’ it may at first seem, if we follow Milbank, Charles Péguy and other theologians, that we really have to do with one kind of theology pitted against another. Sociology operates from a presumptive atheism, a reification of ‘society’ at the expense of the human individual, not to mention transcendence; ‘theology’ starts from a presumptive theism. But let us look closer at how Durkheimian thought really functioned in the world of the study of religion. The key Durkheimian idea of the sacred, I submit, far from seeking to establish a new god at the center of a neo-Comtean religion of humanity, sought to provide a kind of common denominator notion of religion, which would make the study of religion open to all religious and non-religious folk alike. The Durkheimians did so by defining the sacred neutrally with respect to the range of kinds of religions of which they were aware. This displacement of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob by the sacred as the defining feature of religion is not then so much
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a religious act itself, as Milbank would have us believe, as it is an intensely civic act. It was Durkheim’s way of talking about religion without being compelled or compelling others to talk in terms privileging any one religion. Thus, the Durkheimians were loyal to French traditions of public religious scholarship dating from the July Monarchy, the so-called literature of “vulgarisation.”26 In this spirit, scholars of religion imagined their work directed not only for members of their own confession, but also for the general public. This meant that much of what they wrote had to be grounded upon the common soil of religious pluralism and disaffection from religion as well. Their discourse would then have to be ‘theoretical’ rather than ‘theological,’ in the confessional sense. Now, my critics might finally complain that there are other sorts of theological accounts of sacrifice which are not subject to the same critique. Or they may complain that falsifiability or testability are inadequate or outmoded forms of delineating scientific discourse. My only reply is that I await their counter proposals. What I have tried to show is how and why the Durkheimians thought that they were right in distinguishing their theorizing from the theologizing of their religious colleagues and critics. Now, it may someday be shown that the Durkheimians drew the line enclosing public discourse too close to their own prejudices. In those days, we may come to see that the likes of Loisy, Tiele and the others have accounted for sacrifice proves to be perfectly at home within the domain of public discourse. That day had not dawned when the Durkheimians created their theory of sacrifice.
26 Michel Despland, L’émergence des sciences de la religion: La Monarchie de Juillet: un moment fondateur (Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1999), ch. 23.
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INDEX Abraham’s ‘sacrifice’ of Isaac, 2, 148–9, 242 Allier, Raoul, 145–51, 214 Année sociologique, L’, 10, 19, 22, 25, 208, 210, 220, 224 Arminianism, Remonstrant Calvinism, 130, 138, 155 Aztecs, 2, 6, 101 Bataille, Georges, 16, 18, 24, 33, 53–60, 67, 68, 77 Berr, Henri, 125, 140–2, ‘6’, 209 Bérulle, Cardinal Pierre de, 36, 38 Bésnard, Philippe, 24 Besse, Dom, 233 Bossy, John, 38, 173 Brutus, 187 Buddhism, 12, 26, 32, 58, 205, 225, 239, 240 Buisson, Ferdinand, 82, 93 Cady, Linell, 232 Caillois, Roger, 53 Calvary, 38–40, 52, 70, 91, 177, 201, 217 Calvin, Jean, Calvinism, (see Arminianism, Remonstrants), 10, 75, 81, 83, 139, 147, 155, 158–9, 238 cannibalism, 6, 88 capitalism, 65 Carrasco, David, 2 Carter, Stephen, 232 Catholicism, Chs. 2, 6. passim Chantepie de la Saussaye, Pierre Daniel, 26, 98, 155, 160–5, 208, 225 Clifford, James, 137, 151, 223 cliteridtomy, 86 comparative study of religion, 71, 91, 97–8, 124–31, 136–7, 140, 153, 160–3, 216–228 Comte, Auguste, Condren, Charles de, 37, 55 Cordray, Charlotte, 187 Cortez, Hernan, 101 cuisine, 6
Darmesteter, James, 118–9 Deism, 81–3, 128, 131, 144, 160, 199 Despland, Michel, 75, 243 Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant, 6 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 141 Doumer, Paul, 233 Driver, Tom F., 4, 5, 6 Duchesne, Monseigneur Louis, 80, 115, 118, 194–5, 206, 219–27 Dumont, Louis, 20, 207–8 Durkheim, Émile, 9–11, 19, 22–6, 50–1, 61, 67, 98, 102–3, 107–8, 135, 140–1, 151, 155, 158, 167, 171, 173, 176, 178–86, 188–91, 193, 199–200, 202–7, 209–12, 218–9, 226, 230, 239 Eagleton, Terry, 13–6, 18, 20, 122, 144–5, 216, 227 Eclaircissment sur les sacrifices (De Maistre) École Normale Supérieure, 194, 206 École Pratique des Hautes Études, Fifth Section (Paris), 6, 9–10, 20, 26, 29–30, 69, 71, 72, 78–80, 84, 89, 93, 97, 99, 101–2, 106, 108–9, 116, 118, 120, 122–3, 142, 154–71, 163–7, 192, 194–6, 208, 210, 213, 220, 222, 227, 229, 231 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim), 23–5, 98, 161, 176, 181, 197–8, 200, 202, 204–5 Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses (Lichtenberger), 69, 124 Eucharist, 34–43, 47, 49, 55, 72–4, 79, 89–90, 95, 99, 146, 176–7, 180, 188, 217, 225, 228 evolution, 22, 70–1, 73, 86, 91–2, 95–7, 101–2, 108, 126–8, 133, 156, 162, 167–9, 178–82, 198, 211 expiation, 15, 35–6, 41, 43–6, 50–1, 69–71, 99, 145, 148 Extremists, liberal, 60, 79, 80–5 Felice, Dominique de, 200 Ferry, Jules, 84, 118 Fish, Stanley, 230
246
Foucault, Michel, 16, 27, 230–1 Fournier, Marcel, 24, 155 foxes and lions, 12, 165 Frazer, Sir James George, 20, 28, 78, 93–4, 97, 106–7, 117, 225 Free Thinkers (see laïcs), 82, 117–8, 120 French Revolution, 33, 34, 40–4, 183, 187–91, 233 French School of Spirituality (École Française de Spiritualité) Furet, François, 42 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 206 Gellner, Ernest, 186 Girard, René, 4–6, 16, 17, 18, 19, 24, 28 giving up/giving of oneself, 3, 8, 48, 51, 60, 148 Goblet d’Alviella, Comte Eugène, 71, 91, 113, 119, 124–8, 135, 141, 144, 161–2, 164 Golden Bough (Frazer), 20 Grasserie, Raoul de la, 101–2 Hamelin, Octave, 50, 103, 212, 22–3 Hertz, Robert, 25, 70, 145, 211–2 Heusch, Luc de, 6, 7, 15, 19, 21, 28, 226 “histoire historisante”, 103, 140–1, 203, 209, 223–6 historicism, 20, 26, 78, 104, 106, 122–6, 134–7, 143, 152, 163, 192–8, 203, 205–7, 210, 212–6, 220–2, 224, 226 Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss, 12, 19–21, 25–7, 38, 50–3, 61–4, 67, 76, 101, 108–9, 118, 155–65, 169, 174–6, 186, 189, 196, 202, 203–4, 209–13, 217–8, 229, 231, 235, 237 Hubert, Henri, 20, 22, 26, 29, 95, 98, 111–2, 140, 154, 156, 161–71, 195–8, 200, 208–11, 220, 222–3, 226–7, 229, 231 humanism, 10–12, 21, 23, 25, 56, 89–1, 114, 117, 128, 131, 147, 213, 228, 233 imagination, 7–9, 192, 207–9, 211 integrism, integral Catholic nationalism, 34–5, 44–7, 49, 188, 235 Jansenism, Jansenists, 36, 40–1 Jastrow, Jr., Morris, 86–7 Jay, Nancy, 5, 19, 35
Jesuits, Society of Jesus, 34, 40–2, 58, 180 Jesus, Christ, 11, 34–42, 46, 50–2, 59, 69–70, 73, 74, 81, 83–5, 90, 93, 94, 110, 117, 135, 151, 177, 181, 201, 214 Jews, 2, 10, 25, 29, 73, 76, 86–7, 95, 98, 103, 107, 116, 118–9, 166, 170, 176, 222, 133 Jones, Robert Alun, 9, 22, 23, 24, 25, 98, 107–8, 158, 178, 181, 206 Kant, Immanuel, 22 Kerné, Abbé, 39–40, 177, 201 Klossowski, Pierre, 53 Kojève, Alexandre, 53 Lacordaire, Le Père, 193 laïcs (see Free Thinkers), 42 Lamennais, Félicité de, 193, 194 Lavisse, Ernest, 210 Lease, Gary, 230, 231 Leiris, Michel, 33, 53 Lévi, Sylvain, 29, 76, 80, 103, 118–9, 134, 166–70, 212 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 6–8, 17, 18 Lévy, Isidore, 161 liberalism, 75, 110, 115, 129, 190–1, 193, 213, 222, 233 Liberation theology, 65–8 Lichtenberger, Fréderic, 69, 124 Loisy, Alfred, 5, 10, 18–9, 28–9, 30, 33, 47–9, 76, 103–5, 117, 118–9, 162, 192–207, 213–19, 221, 225–8, 235–7, 243 Lukes, Steven, 24, 188 Luther, Martin, Lutheranism, 10, 144 Maistre, Joseph de, 35, 43–7, 50–1, 55–7, 69, 71, 148, 183, 193 Masada, 3 mass, Catholic, 15, 38–40, 90, 169, 177 massacre, 6, 48, 150 materialism, religious, 86–7 Mauss, Marcel, 20, 26, 29, 53–5, 57, 103–4, 106, 116, 135–8, 154–9, 163–70, 207–10, 212–3, 218, 221–4, 228, 229, 234 May, Bill, 79 Methodism, “methodological”, 142–3 Michelet, Jules, 42–3, 45, 187 Milbank, John, 183–9, 191, 232, 237–8, 242
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Mizruchi, Susan, 8, 19 Modernism, Catholic (see Loisy) Monod, Gabriel, 110, 112, 115–6, 155, 164, 196, 220–1 Müller, Friedrich Max, 9, 94, 97, 134
Roman Catholicism (see Catholic, Catholicism), Chs. 2, 6 passim Rougemont, Denis de, 53 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12, 75, 81, 92 97, 133
NASA, 240 nationalism, 183–7, 214, 231, 234 naturalism, naturalistic study of religion, 10–2, 75, 138, 170, 198, 201, 203, 235, 236, 237, 238 Neilson, Donald, 25, 70, 145, 156 neo-kantianism, 25, 82 ‘new right’, 187 Nisbet, Robert, 188 Nizan, Paul, 61–2
parti dévot, 40–1, 145–6 Pécaut, Félix, 82, 84 Péguy, Charles, 47, 175, 185, 189, 237, 243 Pickering, William S. F., 8, 23–5, 108, 171–2, 188–90, 200 Protestants, French Liberal, Chs. 3–5, passim public discourse, 1–7, 33, 51, 52, 69–70, 72, 74–6, 153, 159, 162, 170–7, 193, 198–202, 205, 207, 225, 228, 232–4, 236, 243
Sabatier, Auguste, 9, 70, 104, 145, 147, 156, 165, 229 Sabatier, Paul, 194, 195 Sacred Heart, 34, 40–3, 87 sacrifice, passim, as a religious notion, 27–8 Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions (Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss), 19–25, 76–7, 101, 109, 116, 119, 135, 152, 171, 179–80, 186, 197, 199, 200–1, 206, 211, 216 scapegoat, 8, 62, 72 Schama, Simon, 42, 187 Schérer, Edmond, 82, 84 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 125 Scholten, J. H., 129, 131–2 Smart, Ninian, 83 Smith, William Robertson, 18, 23–5, 28–9, 77, 86, 93–101, 104, 105–9, 113, 174, 202, 211, 227 “soft societism”, 183, 185 Staal, Frits, 6, 17, 18, 19, 28 Storne, Frank, 129–30 Strenski, Ivan, 3, 10, 17, 23, 32, 33, 34, 49, 50, 79, 98, 134, 168, 176–7, 203, 222–3, 224, 230, 231, 233, 234
Ranulf, S., 183 Ravitch, Norman, 182, 183, 234 Reinach, Salomon, 80, 97–8, 104, 107, 118, 164, 195, 220 222, 225 religion, “natural,” 40, 81, 85, 92–3, 97, 131, 171 Remonstrants, Arminians, 130, 138, 155 Renan, Ernest, 103, 111, 113, 115, 116–21, 129–30, 132, 134–6, 183, 193, 196, 206, 220 Renouvier, Charles, 50, 82, 131, 147, 213 Réville, Jean, 9, 72–3, 89–90, 95, 97–101, 109, 113, 116, 119, 124–6, 128, 140–7, 149, 151, 155–8, 163–9, 178, 195–6, 205, 209 Réville, Albert, 9, 29, 47, 81–3, 86–93, 97–101, 105, 113–4, 116, 118–21, 123–7, 128–38, 140, 144–5, 147, 149, 151, 157, 166–8, 170, 173–4, 176, 178, 182, 205
theology, theologizing, 8–12, 14–7, 19, 21, 27, 33, 34–43, 45, 48–9, 52, 58, 60, 64–6, 70–2, 74, 76–7, 80, 90–1, 94–105, 111, 113, 125, 126–8, 131–47, 149–51, 152, 155–9, 162, 164–7, 169, 171, 173–4, 175–6, 179–83, 185, 189, 191, 192, 198–202, 205, 209, 226, 227–8, ch 7. passim theory, theorizing, 3, 7, 9, 10, 12–31, 32, 34, 37, 44, 50, 53–5, 61, 64, 65, 67–8, 69–78, 80, 85–6, 890, 91, 93–4, 95, 96–109, 111, 113–4, 118–21, 122–4, 128–31, 134–44, 146–51, 152–7, 161, 164–6, 171–83, 186, 188–91, 193, 196–8, 200–14, 216–9, 224–8, 229, 31, 237–43 theory-ladenness, 238–9 Third Republic, 35, 82, 84, 115, 117, 120, 122, 138, 178, 187, 220, 228, 230, 232–3
O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 185–6 Olier, Jean-Jacques, 37, 41, 82
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Tiele, Cornelis P., 9, 71, 97, 127–47, 155, 157–62, 170, 174–5, 182, 234, 243 Todorov, Tzvetan, 2, 6 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 50, 184 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 78, 93–101, 1–4, 135 unitarian, 10, 80–2, 93, 129 van Kley, Dale, 40–1 Vernes, Maurice, 9, 69, 71, 82–3, 91, 105, 110–11, 113, 114–6, 122–8, 133–4, 136, 143–4, 166–9, 196, 209, 218
victim, 1, 4–5, 17, 33, 35, 39, 43–4, 47, 52, 55–7, 60, 62–6, 69–70, 73, 88, 188, 201–2, 215–6, 234 victimization, 1, 4–5, 33, 60–8, 89 Wars of Religion, French, 113, 121, 241 Wellhausen, Julius, 17, 95–6, 105, 113 Wiebe, Donald, 127, 152 Winter, Jay, 48 witches, 241 Wollheim, Richard, 1 World War, First, 41–2, 45, 48, 122, 144–51, 184–5, 214 World War, Second, 33
