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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Durkheim and Dialog10/17/2006 21:35:43In my seminars we've been getting back to the basics, so far as religious studies has defined its basics and established them into a requisite canon of dead white people. Not men entirely, of course, because Mary Douglas is allowed in. This week we read Emile Durkheim, the turn of the century French scholar whose earlier works were foundational for sociology and whose later Elementary Forms of Religious Life is certainly foundational for the study of religion. Since I first read him two years ago, I have felt that there is a lot in his thinking that has rammifications for theology, and particularly ecclesiology, the study of the sacred community. For Durkheim, religion is reducible to society, and indeed religious forms are the primary symbolic expression of society's mechanisms. I have wondered how this might lead to a radically embedded theological (rather than scientific) notion of the sacred community, which took account of the possibility that the way they see God is expressive of the way they see their community. One thing that struck me anew this time around is the possibility of his language for pluralistic dialog. It comes in Durkheim's geneology of what he would consider "advanced" religion from more "primitive" forms. That is, how tribal totemic religion develops ("evolves"?) into the complex monotheisms most of us are familiar with today. From a long paragraph from the conclusion of the Elementary Forms, I've condensed a little synopsis in his language of what is occurring. Tribes that neighbor one another and are of the same civilization cannot help but have ongoing relationships with one another. ... The effect of mutual borrowings or agreements is to consolidate the spontaneous similarities. The gods to which such obviously identical institutions were attached could hardly remain distinct in people's minds. Everything brought them together; and in consequence, even supposing that each tribe had worked out its own notion of them independently they must as a matter of course have had a tendency to amalgamate. ... The very special social life that emerges tends to spread over an area without clear limits. Quite naturally, the corresponding mythological personages are of the same character; their sphere of influence is not definite; they hover above the individual tribes and above the land. These are the great international gods. (Free Press 1995, p. 428) In itself of course this is a pretty wild and controversial geneology, loaded with assumptions about the atomic status of primitive societies, but for the sake of the argument he creates there is a certain elegance to it. Most of all, though, he contends here that the actual symbolic content of religion changes with the relationships among the communities of believers and how they relate to other communities around them. It has pretty impressive consequences when we return to the complicated diversity of the present and the project of dialog, or even mere coexistence. If we accept parts of Durkheim's social mechanics (if not his narrative as necessarily historical), we should be taken aback by the forces working around us. The mere presence and interaction with communities around us mean not only changes in our own orientations toward our gods but a change in the nature, and even kind, of the gods themselves. I guess Durkheim's thinking strikes me as so theologically pertinent because of the way it takes "society" as an autonomous thing, scientifically measurable and so on. After Karl Popper et al, we now draw a pretty hard line between social sciences and physical sciences. Now, I think he'd have to explain more fully how these projections of deities occur, on a cognitive, and perhaps biological level. But for him, the organism of the society alone was enough, and to my ears there is a definite mysticism about this: an imagination and a symbolism. Anyhow, it is an idea to contend with, the (theological) possibility that god is malleable through the mechanistic fact of the Other. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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