Ritual and the Sacred (Rethinking Classical Sociology)

RITUAL AND THE SACrED

Rethinking Classical Sociology Series Editor: David Chalcraft, University of Derby, UK This series is designed to capture, reflect and promote the major changes that are occurring in the burgeoning field of classical sociology. The series publishes monographs, texts and reference volumes that critically engage with the established figures in classical sociology as well as encouraging examination of thinkers and texts from within the ever-widening canon of classical sociology. Engagement derives from theoretical and substantive advances within sociology and involves critical dialogue between contemporary and classical positions. The series reflects new interests and concerns including feminist perspectives, linguistic and cultural turns, the history of the discipline, the biographical and cultural milieux of texts, authors and interpreters, and the interfaces between the sociological imagination and other discourses including science, anthropology, history, theology and literature. The series offers fresh readings and insights that will ensure the continued relevance of the classical sociological imagination in contemporary work and maintain the highest standards of scholarship and enquiry in this developing area of research. Also in the series: For Durkheim Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology Edward A. Tiryakian ISBN 978-0-7546-7155-8 Max Weber Matters Interweaving Past and Present Edited by David Chalcraft, Fanon Howell, Marisol Lopez Menendez and Hector Vera ISBN 978-0-7546-7340-8 Karl Mannheim and the Legacy of Max Weber Retrieving a Research Programme David Kettler, Colin Loader and Volker Meja ISBN 978-0-7546-7224-1 For more information on this series, please visit www.ashgate.com

Ritual and the Sacred

A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self

MAssImO ROsATI University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy

© Massimo Rosati 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Massimo Rosati has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rosati, Massimo, 1969 Ritual and the sacred : a neo-Durkheimian analysis of politics, religion and the self. -- (Rethinking classical sociology) 1. Durkheim, Emile, 1858-1917. Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse. 2. Religion and sociology. 3. Religion and politics. 4. Introspection--Religious aspects. 5. Ritual- History. 6. Civilization, Modern--Ancient influences. I. Title II. Series 306.6-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosati, Massimo, 1969 Ritual and the sacred : a neo-Durkheimian analysis of politics, religion and the self / by Massimo Rosati. p. cm. -- (Rethinking classical sociology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7640-9 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-7641-6 (ebook) 1. Religion and sociology. 2. Sociology--Philosophy. 3. Durkheim, Emile, 1858-1917. I. Title. BL60.R67 2009 306.6-dc22  2009005398 ISBN: 978-0-7546-7640-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-7546-7641-6 (ebk.V)

Contents

List of Figures and Illustration Series Editor’s Preface    Acknowledgments   About the Author

Introduction: Thorny Issues  

vii ix xi xiii 1

1

Frame Analysis: The Lesson of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life   1.0  The ‘tragic competition’ and the winner   1.2  A ‘look from far-away’ on modernity  

11 11 12

2

Modernity and the Rise of the Introspective Conscience   2.0  Fragments of a diagnosis   2.1  A short history of the introspective conscience   2.2  The person: An alternative narrative of the same story    2.3  Sociological consequences   2.4  Modernity’s wager: Boundaries and contemporary strains   2.5  Alternative stories: Ritual and the sacred, past and present  

21 21 24 28 34 36 39

3

Society: Rituals and Traditions   3.0  Sociological normativity   3.1  Forms of social performances: Postmodern-mystical practices and liturgical ritualism   3.2  The sacred ‘then and now’: Religious evolution and the ‘spiritual unity of mankind’   3.3  Beyond ‘our comfortable village’   3.4  Liturgical ritualism and traditions  

41 41

4

Self-cultivation: The Individual as a Ceremonial Being   4.0  Self-cultivation and social norms from a Durkheimian perspective 4.1  The Self, constitutive groups and willed subjection    4.2  Ritual reflectivity and autonomy   4.3  Comparative perspectives: Rabbinic ethics and Confucianism  

41 50 56 60 71 71 75 79 84

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5

Politics: An Anthropological Gaze   5.0  Not only liberal   5.1  Politics and the cybernetics of the sacred    5.2  The many faces of the sacred: Society as a ‘union of traditions’ and post-liberal democracies  5.3  Non-Atlantic democracies   5.4  Political arrangements for a post-post-protestant understanding of religions  

6

Religions: New Routes to Pluralism   6.0  Laïcité: The European exception    6.1  The (particularistic) socio-philosophical presuppositions of the European exception    6.2  New routes to pluralism: Laïcité as a cooperative practice   6.3  The mark of particularity: Post-liberal approaches to religious pluralism  

89 89 90 97 101 112 117 117 119 120 131

Conclusion: Durkheim debut du siècle  

135

Bibliography   Index  

143 159

List of Figures and Illustration

Illustration Jacques Lipchitz, Mother and Child, 1949  

xv

Figures 3.1 5.1

An analytical interaction ritual   The cybernetics of the holy  

48 92

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Series Editor’s Preface We are indeed privileged to be able to publish this volume by Massimo Rosati. We now have three fine studies of Durkheim in the series: we began with Jonathan Fish’s Defending the Durkheimian Tradition and recently followed with Edward Tiryakian’s For Durkheim. Rosati cites Fish’s observation that ‘rumours that the Durkheimian tradition has exhausted itself are … greatly exaggerated’ with obvious approval. Clearly the work of Durkheim is alive and well in contemporary social theorizing and his writings are frequently being rethought from a variety of perspectives as scholars grapple with the legacy whilst they grapple with the pressing political, cultural and ethical questions that a multi-cultural, multifaith, post-secular global world constantly bring to our everyday collective and individual lives. It is not unusual, of course, for Durkheimian scholars to be concerned, much more than their Weberian counterparts, for example, with ritual, religion and society. Yet, this concern has not brought uniform results and there is more than one tradition of Durkheimian approaches. If one considers for example the socalled classic analysis of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 by Edward Shils and Michael Young (The Sociological Review, Vol. 1, 1953, pp. 63-82) at least two things become clear. First, that scholars then as well as today were fascinated by questions of order and disorder and looked to the Durkheimian legacy to understand the sources of cohesion and their moral force. Hence there is a continuity of purpose and interest that unites Durkheimian sociology. Yet, second, and far more significant, it soon becomes obvious that the world Shils and Young were describing is long past, and in some ways seems even more distant than the pre Great War world of Emile Durkheim. For sure, a certain naivety on the part of Shils and Young colours their account, attributable in part no doubt to their being ‘carried away’ on the tide of good feeling by which they were so impressed in their encounters with ‘a post-rationing’ Britain. For even Shils and Young should have been aware of at least some of the factors that are necessary to a successful performance of ritual, even if they were unable to learn from a contemporary Durkheimian, Jeffrey Alexander, who has recently theorized to great effect what those elements might be (e.g. ‘Cultural Pragmatics. Social performance between ritual and strategy’ in Alexander et al, (eds) Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 29-90). They all too readily assumed a united Britain, as if all social inequalities and social differences were swept away over night, ‘in the great nationwide communion’ or, in a more domestic setting, by sharing in that ancient British healing ritual: having a cup of tea!



Ritual and the Sacred

This element of wishful thinking was quickly pointed out in a response article penned almost immediately by Norman Birnbaum in the same journal, The Sociological Review, Vol. 3 (‘Monarchs and Sociologists’, 1955). However, it is certainly the case that the UK Shils and Young were more or less familiar is vastly different to the plural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith and diverse society to be celebrated today. Here in brief is the context, of just one European country, from which a scholar must be fully aware when looking to the Durkheimian legacy today. We shudder at Shils and Young’s claims that even in 1953 the Bible – one of the central symbols in the ritual of the coronation singled out for comment by them in their article – carried a universal message to all observers, from monarch and politicians to all members of society top to bottom and from region and region. If we shudder when we read that the Bible held a sacred place in the hearts and minds of all citizens in 1953, how much more must their interpretation and the very prospect of sharing meaning around this one set of canonical texts be placed in question and appear almost laughable at the beginning of the 21st century? Rosati does not make these kinds of errors in his thoroughly contemporary encounter with diverse societies and with the legacy of Durkheim. Rosati’s text is a very important, lively and challenging work and will be of interest to those working in social theory as well as intellectual history, religious studies and cultural studies. I think we will be discussing it for some time to come. It seems to me to engage with the issues on a scholarly level at the same time as being humanely, honestly and personally concerned with the analysis and the conclusions it might reach. It is not difficult therefore for Rosati, to cite one example, to construct for the reader a fictional character, Davita, a modern female Jewess living in multicultural Rome, owing much to Chaim Potok’s literary creations, with whom we travel on a Christmas Eve. For here, we see the sociological vocation lived out in the author’s writing, life and imagination such that he can sympathetically, emphatically and accurately place himself in the position of contemporary persons looking for a meaningful way to forge consistent links between faith and life, politics and personhood, ritual and the secular. I am quite sure that readers will learn much from this work and this includes learning how to creatively rethink Durkheim but also how to rethink where we might want ritual and religion to be in our individual and collective lives, even whilst recognizing that there is a sui generis quality to ritual and religion such that we cannot control its sources and cannot direct, or even dam, its currents. Professor David J. Chalcraft Cumbria, 2009

Acknowledgments First of all I wish to thank Maureen Galvin, who revised the entire manuscript for me, rendering my English more agreeable to an English readership: I have never met a colleague of her generosity. Like every book (and every life), this book is the outcome of a series of intellectual interaction ritual chains. Crucial links in the chain were people connected to the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies, above all Bill Pickering, Nick Allen, Willie Watts Miller, Susan Stedman, Mike Gane, Robert Parkin, and all the other participants in the Durkheim Study-Days during which, over the years, I presented sections of this book; Nick Allen, Matteo Bortolini, Valeria Fabretti, Karen Fields, Vincenzo Pace and Adam B. Seligman read the whole manuscript, some of them more than once: my debt to them, their criticisms and their warm friendship is something I hope to be capable of repaying (at least in part) in daily conversations, debates, joint research, common readings, and friendship. Many thanks also to: Jeffrey C. Alexander, with whom I discussed part of the materials of this book, both in private and on the occasion of public seminars, and who gave me the opportunity of spending a period of time at the Centre for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, where this book mainly took shape; Mark Cladis and his students, for discussing the first chapter with me at Brown University; Bill Ramp, whose warm reaction to the first chapter and to a summary of the book encouraged me to go ahead; Johnathan Fish, for his precious suggestions; Seyla Benhabib and the other participants in the seminar organized by the Association ‘Reset dialogue on civilizations’ in Istanbul, in June 2008, for their questions and criticism; peer reviewers who read the manuscript and gave significant contributions to its amelioration; Marina Calloni, Leonardo Ceppa, Franco Crespi, Dimitri D’Andrea, Alessandro Ferrara, Virginio Marzocchi, Stefano Petrucciani, Walter Privitera, Elena Pulcini, Ambrogio Santambrogio, and many other friends and colleagues from the Italian Seminar of ‘Teoria Critica’: I know their critical attitudes, I can well imagine their reactions to this book, and I envisage our different perspectives, while we continue to share a feeling of intellectual friendship. Many thanks to Massimiliano Boni, for the book he wrote. A warm thanks also to all those friends who are a part of my everyday journey, commuting, studies, reading and writing. Last but not least, a special thought for my wife Barbara, who shares with me the most precious thing, daily-life, with all its joys and worries. This book is dedicated to my daughter Anna.

xii

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Sections of the book have already been published, in different versions: parts of Chapters 3 and 4 have been published in the journal Durkheimian Studies, Vol. 10 (n.s.), 2004, pp. 10–18, and Vol. 13 (n.s.), 2007, pp. 105–21; part of Chapter 1 has been published in the Journal of Classical Sociology, Vol. 8, issue 2, May 2008, pp. 233-61, entitled ‘Inhabiting no-Man’s Land: Durkheim and Modernity’, http:// jcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/8/2/233, by Sage Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. Many thanks to Sage and the Durkheimian Studies for permitting reproduction.

About the Author

Massimo Rosati is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, where he teaches Sociology. His last book in Italian is Solidarietà e sacro (2002). He published articles on Durkheim and contemporary social theory in the Journal of Classical Sociology and in the Durkheimian Studies. He is the editor of the new Italian edition of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (2005). He co-edited with W. S. F. Pickering Suffering and Evil. The Durkheimian Legacy (2008).

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Jacques Lipchitz, Mother and Child, 1949 Estate of Jacques Lipchitz, courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York.

For Anna, who more than anyone else has taught me how love is the common ritualistic shaping and daily nurturing of a shared ‘as if’

Introduction

Thorny Issues

On 7 February 2008 the Archbishop of Canterbury and Head of the Anglican Church, Dr Rowan Williams, during his foundation lecture at the Royal Court of Justice, maintained that the ‘universal vision of post-Enlightenment politics’ – based on an unqualified secular legal monopoly by the State – ‘is not adequate to deal with the realities of complex societies’ (Williams 2008, 3). In fact, proper to complex societies is an ethnic, cultural and religious pluralism, that cannot be dealt with in abstract principles of citizenship, but on the contrary urges us to ‘think a little harder about the rule of law in a plural society of overlapping identities’, where people have ‘multiple affiliations’, so as to avoid the ultimatum ‘either your culture or your rights’ (2008, 1). Otherwise, the danger is acting as if the authority that managed the abstract level of equal citizenship represented a sovereign order which then allowed other levels to exist. But if the reality of society is plural – as many political theorists have pointed out – this is a damagingly inadequate account of common life, in which certain kinds of affiliations are marginalised or privatised to the extent that what is produced is a ghettoised pattern of social life, in which particular sorts of interest and reasoning are tolerated as private matters but never granted legitimacy in public as part of continuing debate about shared goods and priorities (Ib).

The danger in other words, is that if ‘the law of the land takes no account of what might be for certain agents a proper rationale for behaviour … it fails in a significant way to communicate with someone involved in the legal process’ (2008, 2), a particularly dangerous risk, at least from the point of view of inclusive and deliberative theories of law. Implicit in Dr Williams’ discourse seems to be the repudiation of privatizing conceptions of law and politics, and consequently of contractualist views of political order proper to liberal approaches, even the most à la page among normative thinkers – such as John Rawls – advocating some multicultural institutional design, as his reference to Ayelet Shachar’s book on Multicultural Jurisdictions seems to testify (on this, see Chapter 5 below). In the days following Dr Williams’ speech, there was somewhat harsh debate. Before more meditated and nuanced points of view emerged, for example the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, legal scholars and political   For a ‘Rawlsian’ reading of Dr Williams’ lecture, see Jones 2008. My own nonRawlsian interpretation is much more in tune with Cooke 2008.



Ritual and the Sacred

philosophers, in the UK mass media and political panorama very defensive reactions were witnessed. Some of these were grounded on ‘communitarian’ arguments (English Law must reflect British values, as the Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated soon after Dr Williams’ lecture), some on liberal perspectives (the principle of the equality of law), and others on the widespread worry that enforcing Muslim religious principles by law automatically implies undermining individual rights, and strengthening social injustice, if not social violence (as against women in family law). It is worthwhile noting that such reactions and criticisms had been anticipated by Rowan Williams himself, whose arguments were not at all naïve and were, on the contrary, aimed at combining the defence of individual rights, on the one hand, and recognition of religious differences on the other. Quite often opinion-makers appeared to be involved in a sort of clash of civilizations, in a prejudicial defence of the Western legal tradition; even when judgments on Dr Williams’ thoughts were more nuanced, it was not easy to drive away the impression that behind an apparent rhetorical respect, there was still the tenacious conviction that ‘our’ form of life was far superior to the Muslim (and/or to any other religious, depending on the commentator) way of life. Fortunately, the quality of the UK public debate was such that different kinds of comments could be heard, even in the heat of the moment. Some commentators, for example, recognized Dr Williams’ intentions and good reasons: privatization of religious beliefs and practices, ‘the risk of ghettoisation, disengagement and disaffection to which this gives rise’ (Cooke 2008, 14) are risky pathologies of contemporary democracies, so that crude ‘functionalist’ reasons would have to push every reasonable person to think of the most appropriate ways to avoid them. Furthermore, other commentators noticed at least implicitly, that loyalty to the most precious legacy of Enlightened modernity – the capability of selfcriticism – should urge us to think of religious and secular visions of life in terms of a ‘productive tension insofar as each side feeds into the other in a way that contributes constructively to its further development’ (2008, 8); functionalists reasons are not the only ones involved in the so called ‘Sharia controversy’, as in every other controversy related to the place of religions in contemporary societies; what is at stake is also truth, different and competing conceptions of truth, and every part would have to be ready, if not in principle eager, to learn from the others involved in the controversy. This is basically what the Enlightenment taught, and what we should retain from its teachings. The so called Sharia controversy is just one among many possible examples of public ‘thorny’ issues involving the place and role of religions in contemporary societies. The ‘veil affair’ in France and elsewhere, debates on crucifixes in public spaces in Italy, harsh discussions on Islam and secularization in Turkish politics and civil societies, are all issues of the same kind. Common to all of them is that they become thorny issues against the backdrop of a secularized understanding of society, and of a post-Protestant, individualist view of religion, proper above all to the European conceptual landscape and experience. At the time of the Dreyfus affair it was easy to understand who were the progressives and who, on

Introduction



the contrary, were the reactionaries. Nowadays, however, sometimes it seems that the roles are reversed, and that the liberal lay majority has turned into an uncritical force. To anticipate a judgment expressed by the sociologist José Casanova (see Chapter 6 below), that which makes the intolerant tyranny of the liberal lay majority unjustifiable is not only the democratic principle of majority rule, but rather the teleological and secularised assumption of modernisation establishing that a series of norms is reactionary, fundamentalist and anti-modern, while another is progressive, liberal and modern (Casanova 2005, 83).

The ‘Sharia controversy’ is just an example of the need to revisit our understanding of religion, secularization and the place of religions in the democratic public sphere, in order to avoid transforming religions into a ‘thorny’ issue. Let’s imagine another, completely different situation, in a sense, another ‘thorny’ situation, involving the Self and experience of the world in hard times. Take, for example, the personal feelings of loss after the death of a much loved person, let’s say a parent or relative. What one experiences in such a situation is of course a deep feeling of loss, but also the feeling of the fragility and finite nature of one’s own personal existence; a situation in which, from different angles and for different reasons, one experiences and feels deep down the tragic and fragmented nature of existence. One experiences of course pain for the lost parent, but also fear for the future, anguish for one’s own children’s destinies, compassion for others in a similar tragic state: nothing less than the awareness of our – as human beings – contingency. But what about our memory of the lost beloved, let’s say years after a parent’s death? What about the ways of dealing with the feeling of our contingency that the memory of the loss brings to the fore even years after? Out of experience and specialist literature – that, in principle, is nothing more than a reflexive inquiry on our intuitions and experiences – our personal memories – if they have to last for years – are always entangled with collective, group-memories, and the ways of dealing with feelings of contingency are quite often ritualistic. What remains of our memories, of a mother, a father, a brother or sister, independently from often ritualized recollections of family events, independently from the framework of a re-enacted – through pictures, stories and so on – family memory? A given scene which took place in our home, in which our parents were the principal actors, and which has been fixed in our memory therefore does not reappear as the depiction of a day such as we experienced it in the past. We compose it anew and introduce elements borrowed from several periods which preceded or followed the scene in question. The notion we have at this moment of recreation of the moral nature of our parents and of the events itself – now judged from a distance – imposes itself on our mind with so much power that we cannot



Ritual and the Sacred escape being inspired by it … So it is within the framework of family memory many figures and facts do indeed serve as landmarks (Halbwachs 1992, 61).

This is why independently from the family memory, namely a group, collective memory, remembrance of people and events ends by vanishing. Memory has a performative nature: we ‘do’ memory together with other people, time after time, doing and re-doing year after year the same things, looking at the same pictures, telling the same stories, reciting the same prayers. This is why even the most intimate memories are frequently entangled with collective memories, and they are nurtured in a ritualistic way. Furthermore, re-enacting memories in this ritualistic and not solipsistic manner – even if sometimes bored, by means of gestures, behaviours and words not encoded by ourselves, as happens in prayers – we can deal with the feelings of anguish, loneliness, finiteness. We have to face our feelings of loss, contingency, of course; true, we cannot escape our loneliness, but at the same time we are not completely alone: we have words, symbols, traditions in a sense, to call for help. Think of the feeling of confusion people usually experience in a lay funeral, when no liturgy at all (it is not easy to find a functional equivalent of a religious liturgy in this kind of situation) helps to give a shape to feelings of pain, consternation, misplacement (and sometimes rituals do much more: they transform and even create inner feelings). As Peter Berger describes it in A Rumor of Angels: A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream, and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred or invisible, and in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, at this moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order. It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and to restore the benign shape of the world. And, of course, any good mother would do just that. She will take the child and cradle him in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater who became our Madonna. She will turn on a lamp, perhaps, which will encircle the scene with a warm glow of reassuring light. She will speak or sing to the child, and the content of this communication will invariably be the same – ‘don’t be afraid, everything is in order, everything is alright’. If all goes well, the child will be reassured, his trust in reality recovered, and in this trust he will return to sleep (Berger 1969, 67-8).

Here, ritual behaviour is a barrier against cognitive chaos, it is a way of building a common world in which everything appears to be fine, that common ‘as if’ that is the world we live together. One could mention hundreds of similar examples, from secular and religious life (see Driver 1997). But what is the relation between the Sharia controversy and our memories or our ways of dealing with the fragmented world we inhabit? The relation is a counter-intuitive way, for the secular mind, to think of ritual and the sacred.

Introduction



As individuals in our daily life, inside the walls of our homes, in our everyday relationships, and I suspect even as scholars, we, modern Western people, live as if almost everything was clear and uncontroversial. It could not be different. No one can sustain eternal wondering. We live as if ritual and the sacred were stuff for pious people, that we can respect from our tolerant stance; as if religion were something people think of as a consequence if not of ignorance, then certainly of weakness, as for example when we have to face suffering and death: experiences that the weakest among us cannot sustain without external support; we live as if in politics religion means our (or more often others’) political party, an intrusion within public life that makes us furious or, on the contrary, that we judge healthy and necessary for the good of public life; we live as if raising our children means having to decide, amongst other things, whether or not to keep them in their classroom during the Religion Instruction (RI) period (this is the case at least in Italy, where Religious Instruction refers to instruction of the Catholic religion). Usually, we share all these ‘as ifs’. We shift every day, back and forth through them all. Ritual and the Sacred suggests that the ‘as ifs’ we share, namely our life in common, perhaps would not exist without the work of ritual and the sacred. Society can be considered a union of traditions; raising our children means ritualistically building a common world, and above all ritualistically making our children capable of living their own lives; politics can be considered as part of those mechanisms that regulate social life, and may be read in terms of cybernetics of the sacred; religions are not only the cause of contemporary plagues, but could and should be a source amongst others to repair our common world. I know all this could be judged as one-sided, but every idea has to run this risk. Ritual and the Sacred maintains that if we are unaware, in our daily lives, of the role that ritual and the sacred play in all these spheres, it is because we take for granted a particular understanding (Protestant-like) of religion, and a particular understanding (secularized) of social life, of the Self, of politics and so on. However, it does not help us to comprehend our fellow citizens who have different visions of life. Admittedly, Ritual and the Sacred suggests something more, namely that if we sometimes feel uncomfortable with our own taken for granted visions of life, we can at least take a fleeting look at those strange practices, proper to all those pious people so alien to us (in terms of outlook), but so close in terms of space (next door, on the next block): one never knows what there is to learn from them. In other words, there is a twofold reason why looking at traditional religions is key: on the one hand, we can learn about the ways ritual and the sacred work within society at large, how critical their contribution to shape social solidarity is, both in ‘secular’ and religious spheres; on the other hand, if it is true that traditional religions play a part in the problems that plague contemporary societies, it is more than reasonable, at least in my view, to look at them as an essential part of the solution (see Sacks 2002). Two different reasons, two different ways of looking at religions: socio-anthropological on the one hand, and historical-religious on the other. Even if they should not be conflated, I think there is notwithstanding some



Ritual and the Sacred

recursive relationship between the two. In the following chapters, I consider ritual and the sacred both as universal elements of religion understood as a particular sphere of social life – as exemplified by the ‘Sharia controversy’ –, and more radically as building blocks of the social in itself – as exemplified in Berger’s A Rumor of Angels. This is why Ritual and Sacred calls on religious studies, anthropological viewpoints and above all, on the Durkheimian categories for help. I want to make it clear that mine is not a systematic, critical interpretation of the great French sociologist, nor is it a historicist approach to his period and thought. At the same time, there is no doubt that Durkheim is, in a sense, the main hero of this book. His presence emerges frequently, at times intrusive and explicit, at others more discreet and implicit. Despite the fact that this is not a book on Durkheim, it is an attempt at a critical reading of modernity, a constellation of key issues of modern and contemporary life from a Durkheimian point of view, not only in terms of a personal interpretation of modernity, but an interpretation based both on my understanding of Durkheim and, in turn, of Durkheim’s interpretation of modernity. In short, having worked for many years on Durkheim, I have reached the conclusion that ritual and the sacred are key concepts for the understanding of modernity. Given the historical perspective of the concepts, I felt it was imperative to recover Durkheim’s project, above all Durkheim’s sociology of religion – what Philippe Steiner calls ‘Durkheim’s second program of research’ (Steiner 2005). A milestone reached by that project was the dialogue between sociology and religious studies, history and science of religions. This is why Ritual and the Sacred aims at suggesting (kindly prompted by an anonymous reviewer), among other things, a ‘marriage of cultural sociology and religious studies’. This seems to me to be a very urgent task in the field of sociological studies. Furthermore, appreciating that ritual and the sacred are – even if in a counterintuitive way – among the most appropriate tools for interpreting modernity, I soon became convinced that their scope was much broader than I had originally thought. In other words, understanding dawned on me concerning Durkheim’s obsession for religion, the essence of which for William S. F. Pickering lies to Durkheim’s mind in the key ‘that opens virtually every sociological door’ (Pickering 1984, 74); ritual and the sacred have to be understood as the deep grammar of society (Rosati 2000, 2003) or, to borrow from Scubla’s expression, the ‘infrastructure of social life’ (Scubla 2003a and 2003b), the skeleton on which every social phenomenon rests, the building blocks of society. In this sense, it is quite evident that sociology has a lot to learn from the anthropology of religion.

  Actually, I began to understand the central role of ritual only at a later stage. It is not just by chance that the title of a book of mine published in Italian in 2002 was Solidarietà e sacro (Solidarity and the sacred), the emphasis being on the sacred whereas ritual played only an ancillary role.

Introduction



If this is the case, as I believe, recovering the Durkheimian project has to be a lifelong endeavour. From art to ecology, from human cognitive development to the ongoing debates between natural and social sciences it would appear that almost everything might conveniently be approached from the conceptual label perspective of the ‘ritual and the sacred’. However, Ritual and the Sacred has a more modest ambition, as the subtitle suggests. It is just the first step in an endeavour to recover the Durkheimian project. As such, it focuses on a circumscribed constellation of topics, mainly in the socio-political domain, linked to the highly debated issues of the modern Self, democracy, and religion. Ritual and the Sacred aims at offering a Durkheimian reading of modernity and related socio-political issues by tracing a specific path within the Durkheimian studies. It goes without saying that my attempt is obviously not the only one. Other more authoritative paths have been traced. Jeffrey C. Alexander, certainly one of the most eminent interpreters of Durkheim’s thought, and the main protagonist of the recent development of cultural sociology, writes – together with Philip Smith – about the two moieties of ‘Durkheim’s cultural field’ (Alexander and Smith 2005b, 20): the semiotic and interactive or pragmatic. Recently, Ivan Strenski mapped the area of the Durkheimian scholars extremely accurately (see Strenski 2006, 3-9). However, besides the issue of the differences between historicist and theoretical approaches, my feeling is that within Durkheim’s cultural field a difference exists between those who offer, all things considered, a modernist reading of Durkheim, and those who, like myself, are more sceptical and doubtful as concerns such a reading. To borrow Habermas’ well known expression, according to most of the interpreters Durkheim thought of modernity as an ‘unfinished project’, in need of coherence in terms of moral individualism, liberal democratic values and so on. In the first chapter of the book, this interpretation is questioned, and in the following chapters I build my own sceptical reading of modernity on that basis. On truth, my own attitude towards Western modernity, developed as I pondered over Durkheim’s doubts, does not envisage replacing it with ancient or archaic societies, as the vocabulary of ritual and the sacred might suggest. I am not developing a program of the ‘right Durkheimism’, as some might believe. On the contrary. I believe that the articulation of specific traditional cultural values and practices could help to mitigate some of modernity’s excesses, so as to find a better balance between instrumental rationality and the other spheres of modern rationality. This is the vocation proper to critical social theory.

  On the radical vs. conservative stand of this approach, see T. F. Driver: ‘During the first part of my life, “ritual” seemed a dready subject. That this has recently changed, that it has turned around at the very time when my social and religious ideas have become not more conservative but more radical, is for me a source of amazement; … I realize today that I grew up in a milieu that did not encourage such thought, being too Protestant, too middleclass American, too much involved with having the right ideas, and too little interested in, even wary of, the things we learn through performance’ (1997, 6).



Ritual and the Sacred

I am well aware that each chapter could have been better developed, comprising in principle a whole book, even a library. But the challenge (and the promise?) of this book is simply that of pointing out the crucial role of ritual and the sacred in the range of socio-political issues considered here. Specialists of Durkheim, religious scholars in different subfields, political philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists of religion (just to list a few significant interlocutors with whom I have tried to interact) even social theorists (in principle, my family, together with Durkheimian scholars), each one of them will find what I wrote disappointing, or lacking from their specific perspectives. However, I hope that Ritual and the Sacred will help them to look at their own disciplines from a slightly different angle. Chapter 1, Frame Analysis: The Lesson of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, sets the frame within which I depict my own reading of modernity and its relationship with ritual and the sacred. It is a frame explicitly Durkheimian, grounded on my reading of Durkheim’s 1912 masterpiece. Chapter 2, Modernity and the Rise of the Introspective Conscience, reconstructs the religious sources (basically Protestant) of the Western ideas of the Self and introspective conscience, and looks at the parallel de-ritualization of social life. The chapter focuses on the transformations of the idea of the Self during the history of Western culture. The history of the Western idea of the Self is recounted through the works of Kristen Stendhal, Marcel Mauss, Louis Dumont and Talcott Parsons. The outcome of the story they narrate, frequently from a skeptical point of view, marks a break from the past, traditions, religion, heteronomous authorities, ascribing ties. Modernity’s wager, as it has been called (Adam B. Seligman), is that of substituting transcendence with transcendental reason. However, the final outcome is that modernization and secularization imply the loss of cultural meaning, the emergence of free-floating institutions, the creation of purely self-referential individuals ‘in the world’, and of a new kind of conformism and uncritical acceptance of the world. In keeping with the views of other authors, I maintain that contemporary difficulties in dealing with religious collective identities may be understood as paradoxical consequences of the expulsion of ritual and the sacred from the modern horizon. Chapter 3, Society: Rituals and Traditions, attempts to build an alternative conceptual framework. It shows the importance of ritual and dramatic performances in and for individual and collective agency; it stresses, in other words, the enduring importance of ritual and the sacred, not only for traditional societies but also ‘now’, for modern societies, as Durkheimian sociological approaches – such as those of Robert Bellah, Jeffrey C. Alexander, Randall Collins and Victor Turner – show. I argue that rituals and the sacred are or ought to be, in secular and religious contexts, in similar but different ways, the most important threads for weaving both the social fabric and the mainstream frame of our experience. They are what we regularly and unwittingly use, or should use, in order to transcend and share a meaningful social life, traditions and chains of memories. At the same time, the chapter criticizes mainstream sociological approaches to ritual and the sacred, maintaining that academic sociology is more familiar with those social performances (here called postmodern or mystical social practices) that do not imply the reference to

Introduction



heteronomous sources, rather than with those (here called liturgical ritualism) that imply the reference to some idea of heteronomy. However, from the point of view here advocated, they are liturgical rituals that in principle open up to a different understanding of individual and collective life. Chapter 4, Self-cultivation: The Individual as a Ceremonial Being, is an attempt to clarify the relevance of traditions – and consequently of the sacred (defined as the normative core of a tradition) and of those ritualistic practices necessary to reproduce and sometimes change the practices and virtues embedded in traditions – for individual identity. Here rituals and the sacred are shown to constitute conditions of the good life. As Seligman and others show, ritual has a particularly relevant role in shaping an idea of autonomy different from the Kantian idea, and in fostering individual judgment by means of a ritual training. After discussing the relationship between traditions, individual good life, ritual, and judgment in theory, I examine two examples of ethical traditions, rabbinic ethics and Confucianism, particularly relevant in the present context precisely because they foster the shaping of individual judgment, and in so doing, foster autonomy by means of a ritualistic self-cultivation. Against the backdrop of contemporary political challenges, Chapter 5, Politics: An Anthropological Gaze, is an attempt to rethink politics in a sense quite unfamiliar to our liberal way of thinking. The chapter opens by expanding our Western conception of politics in anthropological terms, and aims at rethinking democracy in post-liberal terms, more coherent with the cultures of non-Atlantic societies. The two examples discussed are Muslim and Confucian understandings of politics. Once again, in these contexts politics and democracy have to be thought of not independently from ritual and the sacred. Drawing on Roy Rappaport’s conception of ritual, and of the so-called cybernetics of the sacred, I maintain that politics should be considered as a specific mechanism of regulation of social life, as a part (not necessarily the apex) of a hierarchy of regulatory mechanisms of social life. Being part of this hierarchy, politics should not to be sacralized, or given any particularly special status. Taking for granted Max Weber’s thesis of differentiation of the social spheres of modern life in every culture, it is perfectly legitimate to consider politics subordinated to Ultimate Sacred Postulates (Roy Rappaport), immanent or transcendent (Constitutional essentials in the Rawlsian vocabulary, or divine in nature) on the basis of different societies. Particularly relevant in this understanding of politics is Gunther Teubner’s idea of polycontextuality and civil constitutions, that accords to multiple social spheres the autonomous capacity of constitutionalizing particular rights, coherently with their idea of the good life. The outcome is a post-liberal understanding of democracy (Daniel Bell). My view is that for some people, within and outside the borders of Western democracies, politics is more comprehensible if encompassed within the cybernetics of the sacred, and that, in turn, their understanding of democracy can be better grasped from a post-liberal perspective rather than from a liberal one. Finally, I defend the idea that a post-liberal conception of democracy is more coherent with the sociological fact of contemporary poly-contextualizing, increasingly stateless global societies, and necessarily multicultural institutional

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designs, including multicultural jurisdictions. Chapter 6, Religions: New Routes to Pluralism, is aimed at testing both the empirical and the normative usefulness of categories such as ritual and the sacred with reference to one of the most pressing issues of our time, namely the problem of the coexistence of religious differences (including non religious visions of the good) within a common public sphere. After criticizing the European mainstream idea of ‘laicité’, and its non universalizable socio-philosophical presuppositions, the chapter – making the most of existing intellectual and practical experiences – explores post-liberal paths to tolerance and pluralism, with an emphasis on the search for a religious basis of ‘principled tolerance’. One empirical example of a post-liberal project devolved to find new bases for tolerance is taken into consideration, the so called ‘Scriptural Reasoning’. The Conclusion, Durkheim debut du siècle, comes back to the Durkheimian frame, briefly showing how Ritual and the Sacred wants to add its voice to the choir of recent studies on Durkheim and the Durkheimian tradition that aim at bringing the French founding father of sociology into the new century.

Chapter 1

Frame Analysis: The Lesson of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 1.0 The ‘tragic competition’ and the winner If we look at the history of sociology from our privileged position of heirs, our heroes, above all the classics, look like ‘tragic’ figures. There is no need to talk about the tragic and mythical-before-he-became-a-myth life of Karl Marx, or about the tragic-Nietzschean life and sensibility of Max Weber, who was capable as none other of describing the nightmares of modernity; there is no need to talk about Georg Simmel, who explicitly, once again in a Nietzschean manner, wrote about the ‘tragedy of life’. They all had serious biographical troubles, more or less as everyone of us, and they all managed to reflect and express their extraordinary sensibility in their works (and here lies the difference between them and most of us). However, it would seem that to have a sensibility consistent with the widespread postmodernist Zeitgeist, one necessarily has to be a Nietzschean. David Émile Durkheim, not being a Nietzschean, appears a naïve figure, a deaf and blind positivist, a rationalist (as if this were an insult), a modernist, and so on. However, it is my suggestion that David Émile Durkheim can aspire if not to being the winner, at least to taking part in this strange competition for being acclaimed the most troubled, tragic and unlucky man! In other words, I maintain in this chapter that toward the end of his life, Durkheim was becoming more and more doubtful about modernity and its selfcomprehension, and that his sociology of religion, basically The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, has an important lesson to teach us. Roughly speaking, the lesson is the following: if modern societies want to survive and deal with their contingency, they must be open to self-reassessment and self-revision, as it is, at least in principle, in the DNA of modernity; they must be ready to learn something significant from ‘primitive’ societies, something that implies skepticism about answers given by mainstream modernity, and in a sense stammered out by Durkheim’s previous works too – the cult of the individual, loyalty towards democratic political values –, understood for sure as the best available to us, but insufficient for avoiding new forms of pathology. Durkheim’s sensibility was much more complex than is usually understood; he was not unaware of the ‘tragedy of life’, or of the dimensions of suffering in social life. This is, among other things, what makes Durkheim’s sociology – above all his sociology of religion – precious for us. He was capable of offering a reading of modernity sensitive towards strains and pathologies, and at the same time he saw in some elemental components of

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religion a possible way of facing these strains and pathologies. He was neither a naïve optimist, nor a desperate thinker; this is what makes it important to learn the lesson of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, recovering the Durkheimian program, and looking at ritual and the sacred as elemental and necessary building blocks of individual and social life. In my understanding, this opening with Durkheim is a crucial premise, given that I will build my own skeptical reading of modernity on Durkheim’s 1912 masterpiece. 1.2 A ‘look from far-away’ on modernity Durkheim’s central issue, before and after The division of labour in society, was based on the following question: “What explains the fact that, while becoming more autonomous, the individual becomes more closely dependent on society? How can he simultaneously be more personally developed and more seriously dependent?” (Durkheim 1902b, xliii-xliv). Durkheim sought different solutions to this question, which remained a constant over the years, in his various works. First, in The division of labour in society, he provided an answer which was against the limits of ‘hypermodernism’: individual freedom and social solidarity can coexist in modern societies through the division of labour that binds autonomous individuals thanks to a mechanism of functional interdependence on strong moral values. If the stress laid by Durkheim on the moral aspect of the division of labour distinguished his answer from Spencer’s and the utilitarians’, it was not sufficient to make a clear-cut difference. It emerges, in the same book, how Durkheim’s own anti-utilitarian assumptions urged him to seek pre-contractual grounds on which to base the merely contractual relations, thus establishing a balance which would otherwise be impossible to reach on purely utilitarian grounds. This basis was identified, with a degree of doubtfulness, in the content of the collective conscience of modernity, that is, in the cult of the individual, progressively replacing the religious contents of collective conscience of pre-modern societies. At a later stage, through a series of intermediate passages that I do not intend to reconstruct here, Durkheim resolved the question in the wake of mainstream modernity, with an answer noticeably reviewed and corrected, influenced by Kant and not too dangerously mechanical. In this phase, clarified in his essay on Individualism and the intellectuals, the freedom of the individual, its universal character rather than what identifies it as individual, becomes unquestionably ‘the only system of beliefs which can ensure the moral unity of the country’ (Durkheim 1898c, 10). It is a secular religion as in Kant, of which ‘man is, at the same time, both believer and God’ (1898c, 8), that is an individualistic religion which is the exact opposite of the anarchy defended by utilitarians and feared by conservatives. Contrary to the hyper-modernist answer he provided before, Durkheim – following his encounter with ethnographic literature and after the ‘revelation’ he had had reading Robertson Smith, after realizing that it was possible to study religion through sociological lenses – clearly underlines the religious character of the cult

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of the individual. However, the contradiction and the challenge that motivated him not to stop his reflection here, but instead to explore it profoundly, is that this cult is more a set of beliefs (concerning the moral aspect of the individual as an end and not a means) than of collective practices. It is, therefore, a religion that ‘does not necessarily imply symbols and rites in the full sense’ (1898c, 10), a religion without ‘temples’ or ‘priests’. ‘Symbols’ and ‘rituals’, ‘temples and priests’ are still viewed by Durkheim as an ‘external apparatus’ ‘the superficial side of religion’. In the years that followed the writing of Individualism and the intellectuals, Durkheim would conclude instead, through a deeper study of primitive religions, that only such an apparatus and such collective practices can, at particular moments of effervescence, generate the feeling of a power superior to the individual, leading him beyond profane life and into the collective realm of the sacred. Rituals, symbols and practices in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life are no longer an ‘external apparatus’, ‘the superficial aspect of religion’, but its fundamental element, without which there cannot be any religion or any social life at all. The cult of the individual was essentially a form of interiorized religion that Durkheim conceived in a way that would not antagonize Christian morality as the conservatives maintained it would. On the contrary, it was a more elaborate expression of such morality, perfectly consistent with modernity and the spiritualizing and interiorizing trajectory adopted by Christian morality from St. Paul to Kant; in other words, its more mature inheritance (see Durkheim 1898c). Durkheim therefore sought to answer the basic question animating his sociological reflection by drawing on the cultural resources of modernity itself (if not the only, arguably the most important ones). However, as his system of thought gradually became more subtle, it acquired certain aspects that, from an exquisitely theoretical point of view, appear to rely more on Jewish tradition than on Christianity, and are undoubtedly distant from Protestant spiritualization and interiorization (see Strenski 2006; Nielsen 1987). Generally, Durkheim’s refusal to link religion to a supernatural dimension, or to the idea of a divinity, choosing to refer it instead primarily to the life of a moral community, seems consistent with the importance the community has in Jewish tradition. Traditionally, according to Moore, a Jew – as opposed to a Protestant – cannot be a Jew ‘alone’ (Moore 1986, 295); it is the group that gives meaning to beliefs and ritual practices. Moreover, the emphasis on the ritual dimension and importance of practices and their priority over beliefs (1986, 296) is also quintessentially Jewish. The history of the Judaism in France during Durkheim’s time shows how the adaptation of Judaism to modernity involved a gradual process of disbelief in the truth of the revelation of mount Sinai concurrent with a defense, on the same basis, of the retention of ritual practices (see Eisen 1998). Durkheim’s notion of the sacred and of its main characteristics (contagiousness, duality and ambiguity, see Bloom 1995), also conformed perfectly to the Jewish concept of the quadosh, as did his analysis of the sacrificial (see Moore 1986, 296; Strenski 1997 and 1998). In conclusion, the emphasis given in The Elementary Forms of

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Religious Life to the relation between religion and action, and the significance reserved to moments of collective effervescence, is also Jewish (see Moore 1996). My purpose is not to claim a generic ‘Jewish essence’ for the conception of religion as expressed in 1912, in the way that some commentators do (see Schoenfeld and Mestrovic 1989), nor to advance a ‘persistent influence’ (Cladis 2001, x) of the Jewish education Durkheim had received, proposed to act on his thought even at unconscious levels (Fields 1995, xix-xxxi; Lacroix 1981). My goal is not even to point out how The Elementary Forms of Religious Life affected the redefinition of modern Jewish conceptions, such as those outlined by Mordecai Kaplan (Kaplan 1981; see Fields 1995, n. 21). Both more generally and more specifically, my goal is to establish how Durkheim’s answer to modernity in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is reminiscent of the Jewish answer (at least one answer) to modernity itself (see Moore 1986). How, in other words, there is a sort of elective affinity between the idea of religion expressed in Durkheim’s masterpiece, on the one hand, and Talmudic Judaism, on the other. On a broader scale, in the context of the present book, my intention is that of showing the theoretical consequences on our understanding of modernity of this elective affinity. A more detailed analysis of some parts of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life may help to clarify this point. Usually, it goes without saying that, for Durkheim, the fundamental value of religion is to be found in practical virtues, in the power to elevate the individual, in the context of collective rituals, above the miseries of human life. This is also what preserves the future of religion. Religion no longer has a primarily cognitive function – even if it had one in the past (every religion has always been a cosmology too) it is today overpowered by science. Now its function is primarily practical: ‘The first article of any faith is belief in salvation by faith’ (Durkheim 1912a, 419). Whichever way the worshipper conceives of evil, he believes that faith will save him from it. Durkheim immediately clarifies that this salvation is not so much an issue of beliefs, but of communion of the believer with his God. Thus, given Durkheim’s idea that God is the symbolic, idealized representation of society itself, salvation is – beyond the self-deception the believer falls victim to – communion with other individuals, self-transcendence by way of sharing a community of faith. In Durkheim’s eyes, salvation is, like evil a social thing (see Rosati 2005 and 2008). It does not pertain to the individual soul, it is not a personal issue of good and bad intentions, of grace or of its secularized version. From Durkheim’s analysis of the ritual, we know that ‘generally there is no relationship between the feelings felt and the actions done by those who take part in the rite’ (Durkheim 1912a, 400). This is true not only for Arunta piacular rites (see 1912a, Chapter V, Book III), but also for the Jews and the Christians, that is for more complex religions: If the Christian fasts and mortifies himself during the commemorative feasts of the Passion as does the Jew on the anniversary of Jerusalem’s fall, it is not to give

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way to sadness spontaneously felt. In those circumstances, the believer’s inward state is in disproportion to the harsh abstinences to which he submits himself. If he is sad, it is first and foremost because he forces and disciplines himself to be so; and he disciplines himself in order to affirm his faith (1912a, 403).

Here sincerity, intended as perfect correspondence between the inner states of the believer and ritual behavior, is not of the utmost importance. What is more important, for the sake of salvation, is being part of a community of doers. Salvation from evil is a collective drama, something that involves mutual responsibilities, something that implies a sense of shared destiny, a common past, common memories and plans for the future. In order to attain salvation it is not sufficient for the believer to feel remorse and to sincerely repent; what he needs most is to participate in a collective and public ritual. This, according to Durkheim, seems to require acceptance more than sincere adherence (see Rappaport 1999). If modernity and its Christian roots embrace the ideals of sincerity and interiority (see Seligman et al. 2008, and Chapters 3 and 5 below), Durkheim, by contrast, now seems to insist on the ritual and on its performative effects, contrary to his own assumptions as expressed in the essay on Individualism and the intellectuals. Religion no longer appears as something that can attain existence in the form of beliefs without the ritual ‘external apparatus’, but as something which necessitates a practical dimension for inner reasons. If the interiorized cult of the individual positioned Durkheim in the wake of Christian inheritance, the emphasis he subsequently gave to the external and public dimension of ritual seems to derive from other cultural resources, consistent with his Jewish education. If, for the anti-ritualism of modern sensitivity, home-made cakes and prayers are always best (Douglas 1997, 112; see also Douglas 1996), for the Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life a purely individual religion, or one that is experienced in private, remains in the nature of a conceptual parasite on one hand, and self-contradictory, on the other. What is suggested here is that The Elementary Forms of Religious Life must also be viewed as Durkheim’s bitter reflection on modernity. In fact, in the last years of his life, he felt an increasing sense of estrangement from modern life (Poggi 2000, 167), as if his conceptual paths and the development of modernity were taking different directions. We have clear autobiographical evidence of this feeling of isolation, particularly after the death of his son, André (see Durkheim 1998). What is in question here, however, are not only the biographical and psychological dimensions of this divergence, but also the theoretical one. We can try to imagine this man in his fifties bending over pictures of the Haida, reproduced in one of the ethnographic sources, or contemplating ‘scenes of the wildest excitement’ described by Howitt, Strehlow, Spencer and Gillen, or imagining the collective effervescence of the Arunta’s Intichiuma rite, and reflecting by contrast on the ‘peaceful monotony’ of modern ritual-less societies, on the ‘monotonous, slack, and humdrum’ character of modern profane life. If modern societies are ritual-less, as Durkheim writes, it is ‘because we are going through a period of transition and moral mediocrity. The great things of the past that excited our fathers no longer

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arouse the same zeal among us … meanwhile, no replacement for them has been yet created … In short, the former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born’ (Durkheim 1912a, 429). These statements are not to be read as an expression of a nostalgic or conservative mentality. They are directly associated with the scientific results Durkheim thought himself to have achieved in the course of his research. A ritual-less society is not a society lacking in something superficial and unnecessary, but a society whose future is in danger of obliteration. In this respect, Durkheim’s analysis of sacrifice is another cardinal point that helps to grasp the message of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In discussing nature and role of the institution of sacrifice in Chapter II, Book III, Durkheim criticizes Robertson Smith, to whom he felt otherwise indebted (on Robertson Smith, see Beidelman 1974). According to the latter, sacrifice is an alimentary communion through which the worshipper communicates with the sacred principle that inhabits the sacrificial victim (see Smith 1894). Thus, it is not a mere act of tribute such as that of the servant to his king. Durkheim agrees with Robertson Smith on this points, but makes a substantially different point which recurs elsewhere in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: that sacrifice also creates the divinity and therefore the sacred; consequently, the ritual of sacrifice is prior to the belief in the existence of a sacred principle. Without ritual the sacred would not exist. This ritual causality, which Durkheim perhaps borrowed from Mauss and Hubert, who were, in turn, influenced by Silvain Lévi’s study of the Vedas (see Strenski 1998 and 2006), is perfectly consistent with Durkheim’s more explicit criticism of Robertson Smith. Durkheim reacted to his inability to find a reason for the circle that links believers to their god, as in mutatis mutandis, individuals to society: If, as I have tried to establish, the sacred principle is nothing other than society hypostatized and transfigured, it should be possible to interpret ritual life in secular and social terms. Like ritual life, social life in fact moves in a circle. On the one hand, the individual gets the best part of himself from society – all that gives him a distinctive character and a place among other beings, his intellectual and moral culture … On the other hand, however, society exists and lives only in and through individuals. Let the idea of society be extinguished in individual minds, let the beliefs, and aspirations of the collectivity be felt and shared by individuals no longer, and the society will die. Thus we can repeat about society what was previously said about the deity: it has reality only to the extent that it has a place in human consciousnesses, and that place is made for society by us. We now glimpse the profound reason why the gods can no more do without their faithful than the faithful can do without their gods. It is that society, of which the gods are only the symbolic expression, can no more do without individuals than individuals can do without society (Durkheim 1912a, 351).

This page is of crucial importance in the framework of the Durkheim’s book. Contrary to many vulgar interpretations of Durkheim’s thought, it shows that

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society is not a sort of Leviathan against the individual, but a fragile, contingent reality (see Poggi 2000, Chapter 5), dependent on individuals for its existence as they themselves depend on it, and in the same way as gods are in relation to the faithful (for a contemporary Jewish variation of this theme, see Heschel 1976). Durkheim was well aware of this contingency, finitude and fragility of collective life; from his pages emanate at times what Gianfranco Poggi called a real pathos. It is the fragility inherent in society that makes the ritual dimension necessary. As we have said, without rituals there is no sacredness, and without the symbolic dimension that represents it and constitutes it, there is no society. Ultimately, without society the individual is deprived of everything that makes him a human being. What is at stake in defending the ritual and public aspect of religion is the existence of society itself and of individuals and moral life with it. Durkheim’s ideas were taking different directions from the development of modernity, as modernity tends to privatize, spiritualize and interiorize religion, thus threatening its very own foundations and conditions of being. The last time that modern society had come close to creating its own symbols and its own expression of the sacred, even if only artificially and in a brief period of time; the last time it had achieved a resumption of ritual life (which otherwise occurred only occasionally), and had led individuals on to a sacred space and time – a time that promises, for Durkheim, ‘less tense, more at ease, and freer’ life – was during the French Revolution. But the Durkheimian pathos, as Poggi affectively points out, never turns into an expression of regret for ‘Western decline’. Every society needs, from time to time, to re-create itself through collective assemblies and spaces devoted to public life. Hence Durkheim’s vibrant prophecy: A day will come when our societies once again will know hours of creative effervescence during which new ideals will again spring forth and new formulas emerge to guide humanity for a time. And when those hours have been lived through, men will spontaneously feel the need to relive them in thought from time to time – that is, to preserve their memory by means of celebrations that regularly recreate their fruits (Durkheim 1912a, 429-30).

So the thought of someone who has been called the ‘Moses of sociology’ – a thought defined by some as a secularized form of rabbinical Judaism, or a real Talmudic sociology (see Derczanski 1990; Strenski 1997) – takes direction and gathers, along the way, cultural resources that can aid in achieving a ‘look from far-away’ on modernity. This look may generate an experience both estranging and radical, because it incites a substantial reassessment of ourselves as modern. The direction taken is Durkheim’s ethnographic detour, and the cultural resource is Judaism. The latter, in fact, offers a perspective that is ‘close, yet distant; similar, yet strange; Occidental, yet Oriental; commonplace, yet exotic’ (Smith 1982, xii); in other words, a combination that suggests a different answer to modernity and its pathologies.

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One might ask why, right at the time when one of the greatest tragedies in the last century was looming on the horizon, a man who had spent his entire life studying modern societies and establishing a science that could grasp their nature would decide to devote a monumental piece of work to the study of Australian totemic systems? For Durkheim as for other great figures in sociology, modern societies are painted in black and white. While freeing the individual from ascribed ties, allowing the creation of identities that can be forged autonomously according to their own individual rules, modern societies are also of a type in which social connection falls apart, disintegrates and takes a twisted course, and in which the resources of the senses multiply to the point at which eventually they become indistinct. Throughout his career, Durkheim recognized the pathologies of modernity, scrutinizing the pathological forms in the division of labour in his first great work; the passion for the infinite that carries individual on irresistible suicidal tides in Suicide; the loss of power to produce words, images and symbols through which collective beliefs can be produced and expressed in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. All of these are elements of a gloomy picture. Durkheim was convinced, in contrast to many contemporary thinkers, that the paths of individual and of social morals could not be radically separated if the conquests of modernity were to be defended. He continued to attribute the possibility of moral life to the existence of social norms even though he could see – along the same lines as Freud in Civilization and its discontents (see Durkheim 1914a) – all their coercive character and the suffering caused by repression of the instincts (see Rosati 2004). His hope for a modernity capable of keeping its promises was not to be found solely in the individual capacity to resist and oppose to an often brutalizing social morality – as many believe, above all after Auschwitz (such as Hannah Arendt) – but in an ever-renewed social morality. Durkheim saw in religion, as a collective practice producing shared ideals, a resource to which men and women should continue to entrust their future. This is why it was necessary to keep a distance from modern society and to look at it not from an immaterial ‘nowhere’ but from a far removed ‘somewhere’ available in the ethnographic materials he studied and in cultural resources familiar to him and yet strange to mainstream modernity, such as those existing in Judaism. Durkheim spoke to modernity in a voice that could be understood; he suggested its radical reinvention, and did so with the tools of science. This is the greatness of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. It brings us face to face with the possibility, if not the necessity, to think of ourselves differently, to explore new roads, to find new ways. When Durkheim’s thought is reduced to an expression of sophisticated theoretical elaboration of modernity’s trust in science, democratic politics or in illuminist values, then its decentralizing power is lost and so is the radicalism of self-reassessment it proposes to modernity. Durkheim was an illuminist and a rationalist, but not ‘not too troubled’ (see Hughes 1958) to have the courage to look at very different societies with the disposition to learn something from them. Durkheim was suggesting, at least in my opinion, that modernity must be open to self-reassessment, without self-betrayal but with

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courage and humility, instead of pretentiously displaying its values, as if bringing them down from the sky in the shape of bombs or in a brandishing of weapons. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life does not provide the necessary symbols or suggest how the experience of the sacred could be publicly achieved by citizens of modern democracies. But for this effort, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life can serve as ‘a fountain from which one continually gains academic refreshment and insight’ (Pickering 1984, XIX). One can find in it one’s own incentives, or questions which one finds most intellectually stimulating. Hence, today, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is still a classic ‘with its own power to communicate with more than one voice and with more than one generation’ (Cladis 2001, ix). Durkheim’s project can be recovered in one’s own way. So now we have to go it alone. But if the reader is attentive, she will realize that the issues considered in the following chapters have all been brilliantly described by Durkheim in his masterpiece: the dangers of a ritual-less modernity, with reference to society as a whole, and to the well-being and identity of the individual; the inadequacy of a de-ritualized cult of the individual, heir of the Christian tradition, in facing the new challenges of a fragmented world. In the following chapters I will attempt to deconstruct these suggestions one by one, to re-formulate them on the basis of Durkheim’s intuitions, using new tools and together with new companions, to achieve a precious guide for the future.

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Chapter 2

Modernity and the Rise of the Introspective Conscience

2.0 Fragments of a diagnosis A philosophical narrative that comes to the fore again and again throughout modernity, is that of the introspective conscience. The predecessors of this narrative, Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Luther, Calvin, to quote just a few, laid the foundations for several distinctive features of early and contemporary modernity: the autonomy of the individual, the distinction between public and private space, the priority of the right over the good, the expressive silent revolution would not have come into being if the history of modernity had not been entwined with the history of a cultural movement projected towards inwardness that is religious in its nature. Modern social imaginaries cannot be conceived independently from the evolution of collective religious imagination (see Taylor 2007). In other words, even if I reject the idea that religious roots are the only roots of modernity, I take for granted that were modernity independent of the history of Christianity and of the Reformation, it would not exist as such. Among the distinctive features of modernity many – including those mentioned above – are not only for most of us, the effective outcome of an evolutionary process, but also values that we cannot, or at least can no longer, renounce. They are values for which many battles have been fought, many lives have been sacrificed, and which many of us would still be prepared to defend today. At the same time, we do not live in the best possible world. Our public and private lives are becoming increasingly impoverished (Cladis 2003, 17). Our public life appears to be more and more impersonal, detached and weighed down by red tape. Politics is losing its ability to generate collective visions, hopes, dreams, identities, even genuine conflicts around visions of the future, and seems on the contrary, merely administrative business. Private life, at the beginning of modernity considered in bourgeois terms as the realm opposed to the impersonal dimension of social life (see Taylor 1992, Part III), no longer exists, being as it is, more and more reified (see Hochschild 2003). Even if an apocalyptical stance is currently out of fashion, critical analyses of modern societies abound. Solitude is frequently tied to individual experience in modern, Western societies. Social and intellectual conformism are only the flip side of solitude. It would seem that Tocqueville is our contemporary: social atomism, solitude and conformism are parallel phenomena. There are many different narratives that we can use as lenses to diagnose our time. During the 1950s and the 1960s, above all in the venerable Western

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Weber-Marxist tradition, the narrative of modern societies was the unfolding of the dominion of logic of instrumental rationality. According to the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, simply to mention Horkheimer and Adorno (but Foucault’s analysis could equally be considered a good example from this perspective), modernity coincides, almost perfectly, with instrumental rationality, the effect of which is the domination of both the external and inner nature of human beings. One could say, without fear of exaggeration, that according to such interpretations where modernity is considered equal to instrumental rationality, it is perfectly legitimate to envisage Auschwitz as a climax to the development of modernity itself. Bauman’s celebrated book on Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) draws precisely this conclusion. Later, at the end of the 1970s, a new critical approach began to describe modernity in terms of the development of a new category of human being, which Christopher Lasch called the ‘narcisistic Self’, and Robert Bellah the ‘expressive Self’, an almost completely introvert personality, focused on the Self, in terms of needs and desires, and basically disinterested in public life, mutual obligations and responsibilities (see also Bell 1976; Rieff 1973). Nowadays, the key critical attributes, lexically speaking, have changed again. Our condition is envisaged in terms of insecurity, anxiety, risk (see Bauman 2001; Beck 1992 and 1999), part of the new individualism and the emotional costs of globalization (see Elliott and Lemert 2006). As different as all these diagnoses may be, in terms of cultural and political sensibilities, they all have a common denominator: they all describe a progressive process of individualization that not only does not coincide with the full independence of the subject that modernity promised initially, but that implies, on the contrary, a return to a ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish’ life. The modern lack of close community, strong social ties, traditions, not only has not found compensation in a well-balanced empowerment of the Self, but it has led in recent years, ironically, to forms of social and political pathologies. It is as though the loss of every heteronomous source of meaning and authority (see Seligman 2000) renders the Self not the master as modernity had promised, but even more subject to primordial forces. Resurgent ties of blood and ethnicity seem to be the flip side of a naïve modernity that, at least at its beginning, did not understand the social and psychological role of heteronomy, electing Prometheus as its hero. Religion plays a significant role in this process, in many different ways. First, the full secularization of society was considered by the Enlightenment as a state of independence and maturity. Secondly, today, as in the case of resurgent ethnic conflicts, religious fundamentalism appears to be the other side of the coin of secularization: both are inventions of modernity (Eisenstadt 2000). Even if dogmatic minds continue to think of religious fundamentalism as a kind of eruption of the Middle Ages into our Enlightened world, many studies underline the genealogical relation between fundamentalism and the modern dream of a society wholly released from heteronomous ties. Thirdly, ironically, religion in

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the West has played a crucial role in the past both in the process of secularization and individualization (see Gauchet 1985), as at the same time, it plays a key role today in the resurgent forms of fundamentalism, i.e. evangelicalism in the US (see Casanova 1994). Besides, religion – not only in its fundamentalist expressions – is a major critical voice in opposition to the secularized and liberal political and social order that it contributed so strongly to shape. Therefore, religion is a crucial sociological element both per se and in trying to understand the paradoxes of modernity. But there is still another way to narrate modernity in critical terms. The key word is ‘immunity’. This concept, within our socio-philosophical context, means the total self-proclaimed self-sufficiency of the subject, his separation from the notion of community. The idea of an immunized subject – a subject who does not need heteronomous sources or support, neither God nor the community – appears to be the ideology of (Western) modernity (cfr. Bortolini 2005). Norbert Elias illustrated this very clearly when he concisely defined the main traits of the socalled homo clausus: Whether we are dealing with human beings in their role as ‘subject’ confronting the ‘object’, or in their role as ‘individual’ confronting ‘society’, in both cases the problem is presented as if an adult human being, completely isolated and self-sufficient – that is, in a form reflecting the prevalent self-perception of people in the modern age crystallized in an objectifying concept – constitutes the frame of reference (Elias 1978, 252).

As again Elias makes clear, the prevalent self-perception of people in the modern age is that of a sharp dividing line between what men feel and the outside world (1978, 252), as if the true identity were something ‘locked away inside’ (1978, 253). At the roots of every other critical narrative, expressed sometimes in terms of instrumental rationality, sometimes in terms of narcissism, and sometimes in terms of immunity, there is always the idea of a subject deeply engaged in the Self, deeply introverted in the Self. A subject not only capable of reflecting on the Self, but who also strongly prizes his capacity of entering into resonance with the Self, pathologically erecting a barrier against the outside, the rest of society, or who simply considers the rest of society from an instrumental perspective. This   Needless to say, a key problem is the definition of religion. In a classic work, W. Cantwell Smith (1991) showed how the understanding of religions as alternative systems of beliefs is a modern invention exported by the West during more or less the last two centuries. Cantwell Smith’s suggestion was that we abandon the idea of religions, and talk about faith or piety, on the one hand, and about cumulative traditions, on the other. Even nowadays, a systematic study on the idea of religion would be worth undertaking. However, in this context I do not intend to undertake a study on the definition of religion, nor on the origin of religious beliefs and practices. For a relevant example of the latter, from within the Durkheimian tradition, see Swanson 1966.

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kind of implosion into oneself renders the idea of an introspective conscience. Consequently, the ‘introspective conscience’ is the key notion that every (critical) narrative of modernity presupposes. Jürgen Habermas, in his masterpiece The Theory of Communicative Action (1984), developed his criticism of the pathologies of modernity in parallel to the criticism of the ‘philosophy of the subject’, and its Cartesian characteristics. His seminal analysis was basically philosophical. Indeed, it is possible, more or less, to follow Habermas’ path from a sociological point of view, as in fact Robert Bellah and his fellow authors did (Bellah et al. 1985 and 1991). For my part, I will attempt to narrate a similar story, even if here and there some parts differ slightly. 2.1 A short history of the introspective conscience Our history has a beginning and an end. The end is the contemporary individual, engaged in continual exercises of self-introspection, self-analysis and selfclarification, at the end of which often nothing but solitude or emptiness is discovered (Lash 1979). However, the beginning of the history is ponderous, since the narrative of the introspective conscience largely overlaps with that of Christianity and its champions. At the beginning of his polemical essay on Paul, Krister Stendahl summarizes the mainstream representation of the starting point of Christian history: ‘in the history of Western Christianity – and hence, to a large extent, in the history of Western culture – the Apostle Paul has been hailed a hero of the introspective conscience’ (Stendahl 1976, 78). Drawing on Jesus the Saviour as depicted by Mark in the Gospel, Paul – perhaps against his will – gave origin to the shift from Law to Love, ‘substituting faith for law, internal states for external action, and the individual for the collective as the locus of salvation drama’ (Seligman 2000, 94). His distinction between sub lege and sub gratia was a powerful tool for the rebirth and strengthening (since parallel traces of the birth of an introspective conscience were also present in various Jewish movements and, more generally, proper to the Axial Age, see Seligman 2000, 97; Stroumsa 2005; Jaspers 1953; Voegelin 1952) of the internal realm of individual conscience. If for Paul man is not an autonomous being, given that he needs God to shape his identity, the only place where he can find it is in his own ‘inner man’, and not in laws and external traditions (see Destro and Pesce 1998, 190-1; see also Assman and Stroumsa 1999). With Paul’s criticism of the Law as a heteronomous constraint on individual behaviour and locus of collective identity, the disdain of the ritual component of social life also had its beginning. Hence, in the common sense, ‘pharisaic’ became equal to hypocritical, and conversely sincerity – understood as the perfect correspondence   Needless to say, Paul’s thought and its relationship with Judaism are much more complex than the above characterization seems to imply. A nuanced account of both Paul’s break and continuity with Judaism, is Sanders 1983.

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of inner states with external behaviour (see Trilling 1972) – became a religious and socially appreciated value. Before Paul, and his shift towards the inner conscience, the Law was understood as ‘a grid for action’, and not something that had to be seen in the light of ‘intentions’: ‘it makes sense of and organizes activities in the world, not states of being or intentions that are hidden and internal to conscience …’ (Seligman 2000, 93). After Paul, the move away from the reality of that heteronomous constraint, mode of salvation, source of collective and individual identity that the Law represented for the Jews, was expressed by the shift from Paul to Augustine. Once again, Stendahl paradigmatically traces the entire trajectory of the introspective conscience after Paul: Augustine, who has perhaps rightly been called the first truly Western man, was the first person in Antiquity or in Christianity to write something so self-centered as his own spiritual autobiography, his Confessions. It was he who applied Paul’s doctrine of justification to the problem of the introspective conscience, to the question: ‘On what basis does a person find salvation?’. And with Augustine, Western Christianity with its stress on introspective achievements started. It developed in the Middle Ages – with penitential practice and guidance for selfexamination coming increasingly to characterize both monastic and secular life – and men became more and more clever in analyzing his ego. Man turned in on himself, infatuated and absorbed by the question not of when God will send deliverance in the history of salvation, but how God is working in the innermost individual soul (Stendahl 1976, 16-17).

However, the history of the introspective conscience is not only a development of Western history, it is also a Western ‘plague’: Once the introspective conscience came into the theological bloodstream of Western culture, it tended to dominate the scene far beyond its original function. It reached its theological climax and explosion in the Reformation, and its secular climax and explosion in Sigmund Freud (1976, 17).

One could also say that its religious climax was reached in some specific sects of the Protestant Reformation, and today in some specific forms of Evangelicalism, whereas its secular climax was reached in present day ‘therapeutic’ culture (Furedi 2004), and in the immunized individual. The theoretical and historical-genealogical nexus between these accounts of the narrative of the introspective conscience is very complex and controversial. One way of proceeding, with caution, but at the same time without renouncing meaning and cohesion, is by classifying profile types. This is the approach Ernest Troeltsch chooses for his own work on Protestantism and the modern world, Protestantism and Progress. At the beginning of this concise, invaluable study, Troeltsch envisages an ideal-type of modern world, where the following

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characteristics are emphasized: individual judgment versus (above all religious) authority, rationalism, positive assessment of the world, and finally optimism. It is more difficult, according to Troeltsch, to sketch out an ideal-type of Protestantism, given its inner pluralism: personalization of religion and constant reference to the Bible are considered common denominators. However, in the case of Protestantism, the differences among sects are greater than the similarities, and consequently Troeltsch invites us to be constantly aware of this in our search for the possible influence of Protestantism on the modern world. After outlining the main characteristics of the two terms of comparison, Troeltsch undertakes a more detailed analysis of the possible influence of different types of Protestantism on various spheres of modern life. Here the debate takes on Weberian tones. The spheres considered by Troeltsch are the family, law, economy, science, state, the rise of individualism, and religion. His general theory veers on the impossibility of tracing the immediate and direct effects of Protestantism in each of these spheres of modern life, maintaining, rather, that only indirect, unconscious, sometimes random or unintentional influences can be detected. Troeltsch indicates only two exceptions: the first regards the economy, the second, religious life. As far as the economy is concerned, he maintains that Weber’s thesis on the relationship between Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism is fundamentally correct. As regards religious life, he suggests that the present situation (and we could say ‘present’ also from our own perspective) is a direct consequence of the Protestant Reformation. The present religious situation is characterized in a way, according to Troeltsch, by the loss of any heteronomous source, so that religion has to do only with a matter of personal choice, experience and delving into one’s own conscience: All stress was now laid on the intuitive certainty of faith, on the inward movement and impulsion, on the inwardly necessary attainment of the idea of God in general, on the winning of a purely personal conviction of His real existence … Thus Protestantism became the religion of the search for God in one’s own feelings, experience, thought, and will, the seeking of an assurance of this supreme centre of all knowledge by the concentration of all personal convictions on this one point, while trustfully leaving open all the further obscure problems about which the Dogmatics had so much to say … Individual personal seeking, personal experience of pain of conscience and pain of doubt, a grasping of the hand of God which is held out in the historic revelation, in order, having done so, to proceed further along the pathway of personal responsibility and decision to the winning of ultimate conviction, with a calm acceptance of all enigmas which lie unsolved along this path – such is the character of modern religious feeling (1958, 197-9).

Typical of modern religiosity is, according to Troeltsch, the move towards inwardness, a never-ending self-inquiry on God and personal faith. On this form of religiosity, the neo-Protestantism of the most radical post-Calvinist sects plays

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a direct and decisive role. However, the idea in itself of the individual is, once again, only an indirect outcome of Protestantism, being instead the result of many different sources, first of all of the Enlightenment. Thus, if religious individualism can be considered a direct consequence of Protestantism, matters are more complex regarding individualism per se. In his most significant and well known work, The Social Teaching of Christian Churches, Troeltsch draws on Weber for a typology of religious organizational forms, namely ‘church’ and ‘sect’, but he adds a third ideal-type, the ‘mystic’. The mystic according to Troeltsch, has had a prominent place throughout the history of Protestantism, since it represents the most radical expression of specific characteristics of Protestantism. From our perspective, the most important point is, at least at the present time, that mystics dismiss any kind of collective cult, and consider the cult itself a matter of mere interiority, something purely individual, or something that expresses individual feelings. If as in the case of the sect, the idea of the individual is still related to a community of believers, in the case of the mystic ideal-type the believer is virtually alone with his god. Troeltsch analyzes the three ideal-types in terms of the two dimensions of interiority and externality, pointing out how the mystic type signifies complete withdrawal into inwardness (see also Séguy 1980). Among contemporary scholars and historians of the Reformation, one of the most well known, Alister McGrath, tells us more or less the same story. The Reformation had a strong spirituality, too often forgotten according to McGrath, centred on the basic idea that no action can be good that is not such in the eyes of faith. It is the light of faith that makes an action good; it is sincerity, the strong inner conviction of faith that makes sense of religious life, not a purely external dimension. Obedience springs from faith (see McGrath 1991, Chapter 9; see also Mehl 1970; for an opposing point of view, according to which faith springs from obedience, see Chapter 3). Once again, the central category is that of interiority, and its correlative one of sincerity, and the journey that comes to an end with Calvin (see McGrath 1990) had its starting point in St. Paul, its main hero in St. Augustine and one of its main turning points in Erasmus of Rotterdam (see McGrath 1988, 1990, 1991; on Calvin and Augustine, see Warfield 1956). McGrath points out that Erasmus’ Manuel of the Christian Soldier is significant evidence of this pathway towards religious interiority, since it stresses the necessity of interiorizing the understanding of the Christian faith. Faith and praxis must no longer be defined in purely external terms, but faith must become relevant for the private life of the believer. According to Erasmus, private faith has to be understood, paradoxically, as something crucial for the general interest, since the entire (humanist) society would have to be organized around the principles of interiority and sincerity of the faith (see McGrath 1991). Seen from the cultural point of view, this emphasis on interiority, personal faith and sincerity of the beliefs ends with an idea of religiosity as a completely existential experience (see Crespi 1997), as a hermeneutical exercise of charity, solidarity and irony (see Vattimo 1996, 2002; Rorty and Vattimo 2005).

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2.2 The person: An alternative narrative of the same story The shaping of a new form of religiosity, more individualized and spiritualized than before the Protestant Reformation, as well as the transformation of the idea of the individual during the history of Western culture, are extremely relevant issues (Taylor 1992 and Seigel 2005). As I have said above, religion is interesting not only per se, but also because the study of religion is just another way, probably the best, to study society and its transformations. So, the history of religious individualism is not unrelated to the history of individualism tout court, even if one cannot ignore other sources of modern individualism. The works of three authors who followed Durkheimian paths clarify understanding on this point. The first is the essay by Marcel Mauss, A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self (hereafter The person). In his 1938 essay, Durkheim’s nephew wanted to show, from the point of view of social history, ‘how recent the word “self” (moi), used philosophically was; how recent “the category of the Self” (moi); the cult of the self (moi) (its aberration) was; and how recent even the “respect for self” (moi), in particular the respect for others (its normal state)’ was (Mauss 1985, 3). The category of the Self, erroneously considered innate, is the outcome of a long process (and ‘part of Mauss’ thinking for more than three decades’, see Allen 1985, 34; see Celtel 2005). The first phase was represented by ‘primitive societies’, the kind of societies that Durkheim thought of characterized by mechanic solidarity, and that Mauss, criticizing his uncle’s reductionism (see Allen 2000, Chapter 4), defined as ‘bounded societ(ies) consisting of totemic clans, each clan having a fixed stock of names transmitted by recognized procedures, the bearers of a name being reincarnations of their predecessors back to mythical times and dancing out of the fact at rituals’ (Allen 1985, 33). In this kind of social context, the notion of the ‘person’ is almost completely ‘absorbed in his clan’ (Mauss 1985, 6), is equal to a mask, a ritual mask, an ancestral mask, a role played in a social and sacred drama, which is like a ‘huge masquerade’ (1985, 9-13). It lacks depth, width, a moral character, a metaphysical substance, exactly those traits, in other words, that modern societies attribute to the notion of the Self (moi). The second phase of the process of individualization of the person has to do with the Roman world. Here, according to Mauss, ‘from the very outset we are transported into the same systems of facts as those mentioned above, but already in a new form: the “person” (personne) is more than an organizational fact, more than a name or a right to assume a role and a ritual mask. It is a basic fact of law’ (1985, 14). In the Roman world, the person becomes one of the groundings of law: personae, res, and actiones are the principles around which the law is organized. Throughout this transformation, namely rendering the person someone

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who is entitled by rights, the Latins gave the world ‘the original meaning which has become our own’ (1985, 15). However, the process is not yet complete. Our own notion of the person, Mauss maintains, needs another element (that in ancient civilizations appeared first in India), namely the awareness of the individual consciousness, the idea of the moi. This idea is basically Christian in its origins, and this is why, in Mauss’ words, ‘our own notion of the human person is still basically the Christian one’ (1985, 19). Throughout the history of the Church, the idea of the unity of the person has been discussed in parallel with the issue of the unity of the Church itself, and that of the unity of God. The Council of Nicea, reaffirming the unity of the person of God, and the unity of the two natures of Christ, gave a fundamental impulse to the shaping of the notion of the person: ‘it is from the notion of “one” that the notion of person (personne) was created’, and consequently the idea of the person as a ‘rational substance, indivisible and individual’ (1985, 20). Even if the Cartesian philosophy gave a further contribution to this process, the identification of person with consciousness found its full recognition in another context, i.e. the sectarian Protestant religious environment described above: We cannot exaggerate the importance of sectarian movements throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the formation of political and philosophical thought. There were posed the questions regarding individual liberty, the individual conscience and the right to communicate directly with God, to be one’s own priest, to have an inner God. The ideas of the Moravian Brothers, the Puritans, the Wesleyans and the Pietists are those on which the notion is based: ‘person’ (personne) equals ‘self’ (moi); ‘self’ (moi) equals consciousness, and is its primordial category (1985, 21).

Kant and Fichte, Mauss concludes, are only the secularized versions of this Christian/modern equation between person, the Self, moi, and consciousness. Throughout this long and complex process, individualism – respect for the Self – became what Dumont called the ‘ideology of modernity’. As in the case of Mauss, whose inspiration for his own work Dumont fully recognized, Dumont studied the history, the nature and the characteristics of modern ideology against the backdrop of ethnological data, in his case against the backdrop of a form of life, such as that typical of India, quite different from modern Western civilization . Dumont (see Celtel 2005; Parkin 2003) calling this technique ‘radical comparativism’, aimed at understanding us through the same ethnological detour typical of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and, more generally, of the Année group. What the comparative method allows is the understanding of the ‘exceptional’ nature of modern individualism. According to Dumont, its exceptional status is due to the fact that our own is a form of in-worldly, rather than out-worldly individualism, as in the case of the all-renouncing Indian, a person ‘selfsufficient, concerned only with himself’, outside-the-world (Dumont 1985, 95). In comparison, Dumont maintains, we are individuals-in-the-world, and this is our

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Western specificity. However, at the beginning of its history, Western individualism originated as a form of out-worldly individualism, and only later became a form of in-worldly individualism. In both cases, the nature and the transformations of Western individualism is related to the history of Christianity. Dumont’s thesis is that Something of modern individualism is present with the first Christians and in the surrounding world, but that it is not exactly individualism as we know it. Actually, the old form and the new are separated by a transformation so radical and so complex that it took at least seventeen centuries of Christian history to be completed, if indeed it is not still continuing in our times. In the generalisation of the pattern in the first place, religion has been the cardinal element. Within our chronological limits, the pedigree of modern individualism is, so to speak, twofold: an origin or accession of one kind and a slow transformation into another (1985, 94).

The dilemma Dumont poses is that of explaining how from the original individual-outside-the-world Western individualism became a form of individual-in-the-world. While the former is common of holistic societies, such as India, the latter is typical only of Western modernity: ‘how has the transition been possible, how can we conceive a transition between these two antithetic universes of thought, these two mutually irreconcilable ideologies?’ (1985, 94). Dumont’s solution, articulated, so to speak, in three steps, can basically be summarized as follows. At the beginning of the history of Christianity the idea of the individual draws its consistency from his relation with God. Man, Dumont maintains following Troeltsch, is an individual-in-relation-to-God, namely he is basically an outworldly individual, who draws his meaning from a heteronomous source: It follows from Christ’s and then Paul’s teaching that the Christian is an individual-in-relation-to-God. There is, Troeltsch says, ‘absolute individualism and absolute universalism’ in relation to God. The individual soul receives eternal value from its filial relationship to God, in which relationship is also grounded human fellowship. Christians meet in Christ, of whom they are members. This profound affirmation takes place on a level that transcends the world of man and of social institutions, although these are also from God. The infinite worth of the individual is at the same time the disparagement, the negation in terms of value, of the world as it is: a dualism is posited, a tension is established that is constitutive of Christianity and will endure throughout history (1985, 98).

However, the subsequent history of Christianity – not to mention individualism – is the history of a progressive erosion of this tension, of the dualism – typical of the Axial Age – between the world and Transcendence (for this involution of Christianity, see Bellah 2002). If the message of the Sermon of the Mount had to

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be brought to the world, a link was necessary between this world and the Reign of God. The Church had this function and was the institutional link, and this led to the second phase. At the beginning, the Church ‘may be seen as a sort of foothold or bridgehead of the divine’ (Dumont 1985, 101), without eliminating the difference and the space between the world and Transcendence. In time, however, the Church began to reduce this space, claiming a stronger control over the world, forcing reason to serve faith and in so doing acknowledging their common (divine) nature. According to Dumont, Augustine had a significant role in this process bridging the enormous gap between the divine and the earthly: as the divine claims to rule the world by means of the Church, the Church becomes in-worldly in a sense it was not heretofore: ‘The Church now pretends to rule, directly or indirectly, the world, which means that the Christian individual is now committed to the world to an unprecedented degree’ (1985, 113). The terminal stage of the process was represented by Calvin: With Calvin, the hierarchical dichotomy that characterized our field of considerations comes to an end: the antagonistic worldly element that individualism had hitherto accommodated disappears entirely in Calvin’s theocracy. The field is absolutely united. The individual is now in the world, and the individualist value rules without restrictions or limitations. The in-worldly individual is before us (1985, 113-4; italics indicate original emphasis ).

Dumont justifies his thesis in two ways. From a historical point of view, Calvin ruled Geneva ‘as a skilled statesman’, given his personal disposition to action more than to contemplative attitudes (1985, 114). However, from a theological point of view, by far the most interesting, Calvin’s emphasis on God as Will is in sharp contrast to Luther’s removal of God from the world (as a consequence of his rejection of institutionalized mediation in the Catholic Church). If Luther’s God was accessible to individual consciousness through love and faith, on the contrary for Calvin – Dumont maintains – love ‘falls into the background and reason applies only to this world’ (1985, 114). At the same time, Calvin’s God is the archetype of the Will, or the affirmation by proxy of man himself as will, or finally the strongest affirmation of individual as opposed to, or superior to, reason. Of course, the stress on the will is central in the history of Christianity civilization as a whole (from Augustine to modern German philosophy) (1985, 114-5).

Accordingly, as for Mauss, the idea of the person, the modern in-worldly individual, is the outcome of a specific ‘evolution’ that starts with Paul, goes on with Augustine and comes to a provisional end with Calvin. Calvin’s paramount revolution was that of internalizing the original Christian out-worldliness, that ‘is now concentrated in the individual’s will’ (1985, 116). The individual will becomes the locus of

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transcendence, the focus of subjective – and social – experience. Individual will, consciousness, becomes the internalized border (see Seligman 1994) from which every social design is encompassed; the place from which voices flow that none can hear or share. Another feasible narrative of the genesis of modern individualism stressing the constitutive relation with Christianity, and the Protestant Reformation in particular, is that narrated by Talcott Parsons. The Harvard sociologist reconstructs a process in four (Parsons’ ‘magic number’ according to Bortolini 2005) phases – early Christianity, The Middle Ages, The Protestant Reformation and American Denominationalism – during which there is a progressive differentiation of religion from society but, at the same time, a molecular generalization of Christian values within modern societies: differentiation and generalization are considered by Parsons, in coherence with his general theory of social change, as two sides of the same coin. In the first phase – early Christianity – we have a dual process of differentiation: the individual is freed from the ascribed legacy to a community (the People of Israel), and the new community of believers differentiates itself from the society as a whole. In theoretical terms this may be expressed by saying that the conception of the church, which implied the fundamental break with the Jewish law which Paul made final, constituted the differentiation of Christianity as a religious system (a cultural system) from the conception of a ‘people’ as a social system. Given the Roman ascendancy in the secular society of the time, this differentiation was expressed in the famous formula ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ – i.e., the church did not claim jurisdiction over secular society as such (Parsons 1999, 28).

However, this differentiation is not opposed to social solidarity. The new church is a supportive community, a unity of ‘brothers in Christ’. The crucial point, for Parsons, is that as a community made up of ‘brothers in Christ’, Christianity shows from the very beginning a normative core characterized by its individualism. Christianity was a ‘radically individualist doctrine’, but ‘it was not anarchical, but rather what we have come to call an “institutionalized” individualism’ (1999, 28). The entire history of Christianity, and of its mirror image modernity, is the story of a progressive, perfected institutionalization of non-anarchical individualism. The second phase is the Middle Ages. Even if the Middle Ages are commonly understood as the time when Christianity colonized secular society, what really occurred in those centuries was the growth of the autonomy of the secular state – the Empire – relative to the Church, but, Parsons maintains, ‘within a Christian framework’. So, once again, differentiation and generalization of the individualist   Parsons’ reference is to the USA, considered however as the leading society of modernity. For Parsons and religion, see Sociological Analysis Vol. 43, N. 4, 1982.

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values of Christianity go hand in hand: ‘The Christianity of the secular society was guaranteed, not by the subjection of secular life to religious laws, but by the common commitment of ecclesiastical and temporal personnel to Christian faith’ (1999, 35). The third phase was perhaps the most important one. During the Protestant Reformation, in fact, individualism acquired its contemporary form. The Reformation gave an essential impulse to the process of ‘enfranchisement’ of the individual which had started during early Christianity: The Catholic Church had emancipated the individual, as part of its own corporate entity, from the Jewish Law and its special social community, and had given him a notable autonomy within the secular sphere. But within its own definition of the religious sphere it had kept him under a strict tutelage by a set of mechanisms of which the sacraments were the core. By Catholic doctrine the only access to Divine grace was through the sacraments administered by a duly ordained priest. Luther broke through this tutelage to make an individual a religiously autonomous entity, responsible for his own religious concerns, not only in the sense of accepting the ministrations and discipline of the church but also through making his own fundamental religious commitments (1999, 35).

The fourth phase of the process is the one relative to ‘denominationalism’, the peculiar forms that Reformation takes in the USA. The cardinal point here is, according to Parsons, that the religious organization becomes a purely voluntary association, and that the morally acceptable denominations can be, in principle, indefinite in number. So, the believer is completely freed from all kinds of ascribed ties, and religion is just another sphere of freedom of choice. Religion, this is the point, becomes not only a matter of private choice, but also privatized with respect to the social differentiated social system. Religious individualism reaches its climax in a strong individualist society. However, as in the previous phases, this further individualization is just another sign of the diffusion of Christian values in modern society: This (religious pluralism) does not, however, mean that Christian ethics have become a matter of indifference in the society. It means rather that the differentiation between religious and secular spheres has gone further than before and with it the extension of the individualist principle inherent in Christianity to the point of the ‘privatizing’ of formal, external religious commitment, as the Reformation made internal religious faith a matter of the individual alone. This general trend has of course coincided with an enormously proliferated process of differentiation in the structure of the society itself (1999, 47).

At the end of this history, religious denominationalism – the form that religion takes in the leading society of modernity, in other words, religious pluralism – is perfectly compatible with a civil religion (see Bellah 1970 and 1975) which

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represents the common frame of an individualist society. What occurred during this process, however, was a marked re-definition of the forms and the characteristics of concepts such as identity (individual and collective), boundaries and borders. I shall now attempt an analysis of these significant changes. 2.3 Sociological consequences One of the first outcomes of this process of progressive disclosure and focus on the introspective conscience is, from the religious point of view, the loss of relevance of ritual as a dimension of religious life itself. Now that introspective conscience is to the fore, what is relevant is the genuineness of beliefs, and while the mystical type gains historical importance, belonging and collective ritualistic practices lose relevance. Similar consequences occur if the history of the sacraments after the Reformation is taken seriously (see Seligman 1994; Seguy 1980, 158; Bossy 1985). The cult, when not completely eliminated, is purely internalized, or – at most – purely individual (see Mehl 1970; see also Taylor 2007, 70 ff). The collective community of believers denominated church becomes an ‘invisible church’ that cannot recognize itself in flesh and blood individuals; the Parusia will be only an interior one, and the visible church will appear only in the ‘Age of the Spirit’. According to Seguy, the focus of this process is that, from the religious point of view, the dimension of interiority completely prevails over that of exteriority. From the sociological point of view, the consequence of the predominance of interiority over exteriority is that ‘groups become fluid and borders uncertain’ (Seguy 1980, 160), and that the boundaries are internalized (Seligman 1994, 169). If the transformations of the religious-sacred are considered in terms of development, contemporary forms of ‘believing without belonging’ (see HervieuLéger 1999) are no source of surprise. Perfectly coherent with the main line of development of the religious experience, so to speak, from Paul and Augustine to Calvin and Kant, these forms of believing are just the flip side of the process of secularization as described by Parsons, and vice versa. From this point of view, our Western world is not a de-secularized world (see Berger 1999) simply because it has never been completely secularized, if with this expression we intend a world where religion has lost its importance. What has been observed by the most sensitive sociologists of religion was what Luckmann called ‘mini-transcendences’ (Luckmann 1967), rather than the loss of relevance of religion per se; in other   Nowadays, a trend of self-critical reflection on the part of Protestant theologians, engaged in a process of re-evaluation of ritual and symbols within the Protestant liturgy can be evidenced. See Genre 2004, Chapters 9-10.   The history of this process can be reconstructed, from the empirical perspective, by means of a close analysis of the history of the different Prayer Books sponsored by Reformed Churches over the centuries. This history of liturgies would indicate the identical trend I am reconstructing from a different angle.

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words, the end of heteronomous sources of religious life rather than the end of individual religious experience(s). The so-called new-religious movements, and contemporary forms of evangelicalism, can be taken as paradigms of this transformation of the religioussacred. McGrath, although he conceives of contemporary evangelicalism as a kind of degeneration of Calvin’s and other Reformers’ thought, stresses how in contemporary evangelicalism religion becomes simply a matter of psychology, something that has to do with the personal well-being, with narcissistic trends and with adapting to the world, and how it loses every connection with the collective dimension (see McGrath 1991, Chapter 2), and with the critical awareness of the division between the world (is) and the Kingdom of God (ought), typical of religions in the Axial Age (see Bellah 2002; Arnason et al. 2005). The outcome is total integration in the secular world. Even if contemporary evangelicalism does represent a degeneration of the Reformation, its seeds were already planted in Calvin’s thought. De-sacralizing the Eucharist as a means of grace, for example, Calvinism paved the way for ‘a breakdown of the existing solidarities of Christian society and posited a new set of ties between people’ (Seligman 1994, 26; Bossy 1985). The rites of the sacraments in fact, specifically that of the Eucharist, even in Augustine, provided ‘that arena in which the communicant could establish contact with the sacred dimension of existence. The sacraments thus became that arena where sacred and profane meet’ (Seligman 1994, 21), and where, as Durkheim well knew, the boundaries of collective identities were designed. From the sociological point of view, attention should be addressed to the consequences of this new role of the sacraments. If the sacraments are the way of designing the boundaries of a collective identity in relation to a set of beliefs, the internalization of the cult also means the internalization of the boundaries; where the sacred ‘becomes less an objective manifestation than a pure attitude of the kind, less a ceremony than a profound sensation’ (Callois, in Seligman 1994, 169), then the boundaries of the collective are no longer ‘homologous to those between the profane and the sacred’, and the normative order becomes to be seen within each individual (1994, 171). With reference to the evolution of the Reformation, Seligman summarizes the sociological consequences of the institutionalization of charisma in society – another consequence of the development of the introspective conscience – as follows: Integrating all communal members in one collective definition (though an emerging referent of a common past), the boundaries between insider and outsider no longer ran through the community, but rather through each individual member. As a result, the crossing of a boundary in the move from profane to sacred and from outsider to insider – to membership in the collective – became less a public ceremony and more a private rite (1994, 169).

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The reason why this process transcends the religious dimension and becomes decisive for modernity is thus established as follows: The dynamics, which involved transposing the boundaries of the moral order from ‘out there’ to inside, has important sociological implications, not solely in the development of new individual identities (based on internalized conscience) but on the terms of collective membership as well. For the sources of communal identity and authority no longer rested on a shared experience of grace but, in the first case, on a shared past, and in the second, on a ‘Lockean’ understanding of natural rights based on the moral, what Kant would later term transcendental individual (that is to say, that individual endowed with conscience and moral agency who would become constitutive of the nascent political community) (1994, 189).

What happens, finally, is that the Church is no longer the locus of membership, and political discourse is now centred on the constitutional level (1994, 186). As is obvious, the shift, seen here from the religious point of view, describes the transition from pre-modern to modern societies. As such, it is a shift that most of us – as moderns – welcome. However, a self-critical attitude – the most important heritage of the Enlightenment – encourages us to look at the so-called heterogenesis of purposes, namely at the unintentional consequences of the process. 2.4 Modernity’s wager: Boundaries and contemporary strains The shift from pre-modern to modern societies has been rightly described several times as a change that involves the criticism of heteronomous sources of legitimacy of normative order, and the establishing of a new normative order based on the independent, individual will. The social contract can be understood as the consensus of independent individual wills. Modern culture and politics evades heteronomous sources of meaning and consensus and relies upon transcendental foundations. Modernity’s wager stands on a transfer of the sacred from heteronomous sources to immanent ones, capable of keeping a sacred (and consequently normative) aura: For modernity as a civilization project is predicated on the wager that transcendence can be represented as no more than transcendental reason yet still maintain its authoritative nature and sacred aura: Immanuel Kant’s ‘starry heavens above and moral law within’ or the ‘self-evident’ truths of the Declaration of Independence being this benchmark of modernity (Seligman 2000, 29).

Or, similarly,

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Modernity … turns on precisely this wager, that an internalized authority in the form of a morality governed by transcendental and hence reasonable rules is sufficient to constitute the self and sacralisation (2000, 66);

the self, sacralization and – given the nexus between sacred and collective identities – normative order, that is to say society. However, if we want to preserve the heritage of Enlightenment, namely our capacity for self-criticism, we have to recognize that modernity’s wager has only been won in part. Modernity’s wager – that of transferring and keeping the normative aura of the sacred within the limits of reason – gave origin both to the idea of independent Self and voluntary social life. However, from our standpoint, we see that mainstream modernity embodied in collective representations in the everyday behaviour of ordinary people and also reflected in major social theories and philosophies, has turned the idea of Self in an instrumental direction and into Elias’ homo clausus, while the idea of the sacred has been dissolved into mere preference. Even if other conceptions of modernity exist, and even if other practical behaviours exist, what we have to take as our critical point of reference are the instrumental and the psychologized conceptions of social life and of the Self. Taken together, they shape the mainstream idea and practice of modernity and its therapeutic culture. Mainstream modernity can also be described as a process of institutionalization of the charisma, and/or of sacralization of the political (constitutional) dimension of social life. While this process meant an increase of democratic inclusion since it brought people into relation with the centre of society (see Shils 1975), its parallel consequence was a progressive dissolution of the boundaries within society itself, so that the cultural differences within society ended by vanishing. The vanishing of cultural differences was the price paid in exchange for democratic inclusion. The paradigm tout court of this dissolution of the social borders – whose margins used to be designed in ritualistic ways, that is to say through the ritualistic fixing of the frontier between the sacred and the profane – is to be found in the Count Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre declaration in 1879 before the French National assembly: ‘we must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and accord everything to the Jews as individuals’. Or, respecting ‘par condicio’, ‘let there be neither Jews nor Christians, except at the hour of prayer for those who pray! That is what France proclaimed on 26 August 1789, by the Declaration of the Rights of Men. From that day on France recognized only citizens’ (Marrus 1971, 87). What these declarations clearly show is that modernity could deal with social and cultural differences only by neutralizing them, and by means of a process of immunization of differences themselves. This kind of adapting of cultural differences, or rather, immunization of differences, has been institutionalized through ‘the privatization of religion, a politics of rights over a politics of the good, and, in the broadest sense of the term, was the triumph of a secular liberal-protestant vision of selfhood (the sort of Kantian self-actualized moral agent) together with a secularized public sphere’ (Seligman 2000, 130). We have to be ready to recognize that on this basis

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modernity’s wager cannot be won. If we observe the world situation from an empirical point of view, what we see is that the process of secularization (taking religious differences once again as the paradigm) – in different respects – is ‘called into doubt’ (2000, 130) everywhere, and the risk is an uncontrolled development of intolerant versions of religions. Accordingly, on an empirical scale, the crux of the issue is that: If the only source of tolerance is a secular liberal political order, we may all be in for some difficult times, for secularism seems to be in retreat, and liberal assumptions of self and society are under attack in many places (2000, 131).

With this premise, the reasonable answer to the attack cannot be a counter (or preventive!) attack, but rather a serious, and not merely prudential, self-reflective and self-critical discourse on our way of life and on the categories of modernity. The explicit normative assumption of my argument is that if Western modernity is under siege, as it seems to be, we cannot respond by merely asserting that no one can force us to change our values and way of life, but that, on the contrary, we must engage in a self-critical discourse on our own way of life and values, modernity must be open to self-reassessment, not seen in terms of self-betrayal but in terms of courage and humility, instead of pretentiously ostentating modernity’s values, dropping them down from the sky in the shape of bombs; as is clear from Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. As a normative social theorist, I believe that we have to rethink our categories of the Self, our ideas of authority and legitimacy, our conceptions of the social legacy. The violent reactions to the Western way of life, values and interests, are sometimes declined in primordial terms, namely in finding the sources of authority, community and sacralization in primordial ties. On the contrary, modernity’s wager, as is evident, is that of finding sources of authority, community and sacrality in civic ties. But here the issue is that ironically, individual and collective identities lose their consistency, their quidditas, their difference, as a consequence of the opposing logic. Consequently, the theory we need to examine, even if apparently unacceptable to modern ears, is that the sources of authority, Self and sacrality – the sources of normative order – need to be looked for in external loci, and not internally as outlined by the logic of the introspective conscience; external in the sense that they can be external to the introspective conscience, that they can be at least partially heteronomous, not fully available to the individual will (see Rosati 2003). As in the logic of the Axial religions, readapted to the modern context, the tension towards heteronomous sources of legitimacy can be the basis – according to the theory – of an autonomous and not narcissistic subject, and of reflective but not instrumental social ties: Not the autonomous will but fully heteronomous obligation forms the basis of the self – as moral evaluator and not simply as one empowered to work the system and so maximize preferences. The particular in its very particularity

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[read: not immunized, M. R.] is here constituted by the general in its generality (Seligman 2000, 58).

In other words, the route we want to follow – for the sake of sociological normativity – is that of the analysis of the inner logic of tradition(s) – considered, as we will see in the next chapters, as heteronomous conditions of collective and individual life – where the entire constellation of concepts and practices such as tolerance, the Self, transcendence/authority, coexistence and so on, takes on a different profile compared to that in modern societies (see Mahmutćehajić 2005). We must begin to recognize the ‘dignity of difference’ (Sacks 2002). 2.5 Alternative stories: Ritual and the sacred, past and present The second chapter of our ‘narration’ relates the history of the introspective conscience. It is the history of mainstream modernity. It is a history that overlaps the familiar history of modernity understood in terms of a new beginning, a radical discontinuity, an almost complete break from the past, from traditions, religion, heteronomous authorities of every kind, ascribing ties. Here, modernization and secularization imply, from a pessimistic perspective, the loss of cultural meanings, ‘the emergence of free-floating institutions, or the creation of purely self-referential individual actors’ (Alexander 2006a, 8). However, Durkheim’s later sociology, and recent sociologists and anthropologists inspired by Durkheim (see Scubla 2003a and 2003b), tells a slightly different story that shows the importance of ritual and dramatic performances in and for individual and collective agency; in other words, they stress the enduring importance of ritual and the sacred, not only ‘then’, but also ‘now’, not only in religion, but as elemental building blocks of individual agency and society, elemental building blocks in our shaping of meanings, institutions, and perhaps all social spheres. Consequently, according to this viewpoint, we would have to be capable of finding within modernity itself traces of those resources necessary to counterbalance the complete introversion of the homo clausus. I do not maintain that differences between modern and early societies are merely residual, however, I concord with this later period Durkheimian position. In Chapter 3 I will discuss theories of society that stress and focus on this enduring and elemental importance of ritual and the sacred in contemporary, Western societies.

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Chapter 3

Society: Rituals and Traditions

3.0 Sociological normativity In Chapter 2 I tried to tell a quite controversial yet not unfamiliar tale about modern, Western people, and what we hold most precious, namely our conscience, our inward sanctuary, our sacrosanct Self; a tale about our loneliness, our floating in a meaningless sea, in a social space with no boundaries or, on the contrary, with borders too sharply defined. A tale about independence that becomes solitude, freedom declining to stumbling laissez faire; our sacrosanct Self that becomes an iron cage, narcissism, a vacuum often filled with despair. This chapter has to do with resources, immanent to our social horizon but seldom recognized, for dealing with the above described undesirable state. As frequently happens in social theory, sociological and philosophical normativity merge. In other words, my argument, in keeping with that of other social theorists, is that the resources we need to cope with our condition are, at least in part, already immanent in our social life. They need to be nourished, handled with care – we need to be well aware of their negative side – but they are not completely absent from our everyday social experience. If this were the case, social life would be literally impossible. In this Chapter I point out how rituals and the sacred are and/or ought to be, in secular and religious contexts, in similar but different ways, the most important thread in uniting the social fabric, and the mainstream frame of our experience. They are what we regularly and unwittingly use, and/or should use, to transcend and share a meaningful social life, necessary – even though not sufficient – conditions to have ‘healthy’ and meaningful individual identities; elemental building blocks of individual and social life. 3.1 Forms of social performances: Postmodern-mystical practices and liturgical ritualism To see the relevance of ritual and the sacred for our social life, we have to turn first of all to those social thinkers who devoted their work to this typically Durkheimian topic. In contemporary social theory and sociology, Jeffrey C. Alexander is perhaps one of the most dedicated in his attempt to rediscover Durkheim’s theories. It goes without saying that Alexander’s interpretation of ‘Durkheim’s intellectual   In this sense, the present chapter is an exercise of immanent social criticism (see Walzer 1989).

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development’ (Alexander 1982), one of the most influential in the sociological field in recent decades, owes its significance, above all, to the interpretation of Durkheim’s thought per se; but secondly, to the fact that his reading of Durkheim was the springboard for the development of Alexander’s own project of cultural sociology and one of the most influential current paradigms in sociology (see Smith 2001). However, my interest, in this context, is neither Alexander’s interpretation of Durkheim’s thought in itself, nor Alexander’s cultural sociology in itself. Rather, my concern is addressed to Alexander’s cultural sociology as a means of developing a ritual-centred sociology, heir to Durkheim’s second program of research (see Steiner 2005). Consequently, the following premises are particularly pertinent in this respect. First of all, Alexander’s cultural sociology can be understood as being the heritage of Durkheim’s later sociology – particularly of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life – as the nature of his intellectual enterprise is the same. The aim of cultural sociology is to bring out ‘the unconscious cultural structures that regulate society into the light’ (Alexander 2003, 3-4). In other words, a sort of ‘social psychoanalysis’ – which, according to Robert Bellah, the task of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life effectively was (Bellah 1990) – making visible the invisible, revealing ‘to men and women the myths that think them so that they can make new myths in turn’ (Alexander 2003, 4). Alexander, theoretically and by means of a plethora of empirical studies, defends the Durkheimian intuition according to which ritual and the sacred are the ‘infrastructure of social life’ (Scubla 2003a and 2003b), and he maintains that ‘love for the sacred, the fear of pollution, and the need for purification have continued to mark modern as much as traditional life’, so that ‘we can find how and why only by following a cultural-sociological path’ (Alexander 2003, 9). In the light of this approach, modern linguistic practices can be considered as embedded with ‘religious’ meanings, and their performative nature still depends, important differences notwithstanding, on ritual interaction. Alexander’s theoretical aim seems to be the reconciliation between the two moieties of ‘Durkheim’s cultural field’. As he and Philip Smith maintain in the Introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, the new Durkheim cultural approach forks out into two slightly different kinds of approach: on the one hand that drawing on pragmatist and network traditions – maintaining connection with rational choice theories – exemplified by Randall Collins (2004), but also despite his totally different background, by Robert Bellah (2005), and, on the other hand, the kind deriving from semiotics and hermeneutics: ‘whereas the former stress how practical action and patterns of human association give rise to group norms, beliefs and solidarities, the latter perspective looks more strongly to cultural systems as motivating and constraining behaviour’ (Alexander 2006a, 16). However, as Alexander stresses in the Introduction to Social Performance,   As we will see in this section, it would be more appropriate, in Alexander’s case, to say a ‘practice-centered’ sociology.

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‘pragmatics and semantics are analytical, not concrete distinctions’ (Alexander 2006b, 5). From this theoretical standpoint, Alexander reflects on modernity and its differences from traditional societies, prospecting three different positions: those who believe that modernization and secularization imply the loss of cultural meanings; those, like Durkheim, who by studying traditional societies show the importance of ritual and dramatic performances in and for individual and collective agency; and finally those who, shifting from Durkheim’s traditional societies to modern ones, maintain that differences between the former and the latter are minimal. Among postmodernists, rational choice theorists, disenchanted cynical realists, on the one hand, and ‘old fashioned Durkheimians’ (2006b, 9), on the other, Alexander collocates his sociological theory of performance – constructed first of all on Durkheim, not to mention Turner, Geertz, Goffman amongst others – right in the centre (2006b, 9-16; Giesen 2006, 324-8; see also Smith 2001). According to this sociological theory of performance, individual and/or collective social performance can be analyzed on the basis of the theatre model (Alexander 2006b, 29-90). Social life, material practices included, can be read as a web of social practices. Every social practice needs a set of elements: (a) a system of collective representations, namely a background of symbols and foreground scripts, (b) actors, individual or collective, (c) an audience, (d) standardized expressive equipment (Goffman), namely what Alexander calls means of symbolic production, (e) a mise-en-scène, and, finally, (f) social power, the distribution of which affects social performance. Alexander’s central thesis is that what distinguishes traditional and modern societies respectively is not the in itself performative nature of social life, the universal key role of social performance, but the dynamics of the relationship between the elements of social performance within traditional and modern societies. In less differentiated and less complex social organizations, these elements are fused together, and ritual is – according to Alexander – the kind of performance that fuses the components of performance further. Performance in unsophisticated societies frequently becomes rituals essentially because this kind of fusion is still possible. On the other hand, ‘fused performance creating ritual-like effects remains important in more complex societies’ too (2006b, 42). This is true, according to Alexander, in a twofold sense. First of all, ritual-like performance is still possible in relatively simple and homogenous contexts, such as primary groups, i.e. families, inter-generation stable ethnic groups, enclaves of life style; secondly, fusion remains the goal of performance even in more complex environments, but here it is a much more difficult goal to achieve. Proper to complex organizations, in fact, is the de-fusion of the elements of performance, and particularly ‘1) the separation of written foreground texts from background collective representations; 2) the estrangement of the means of symbolic production from the mass of social actors; 3) the separation of the elites who carried out central symbolic actions from their audiences’ (2006b, 45). Social segmentation, the fragmentation of citizenry, is the main barrier to re-fusing social drama and audience (2006b, 75).

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However, even if our contemporary social milieu seems to be particularly unfavourable, re-fusion continues to be the aim of social practice. The possibility of making sense of our lives, individually and as societies, depends on our capacity to refuse performance (2006b, 55). Given the above, in complex societies, the success (or failure) of performance seems to be related to the audience’s perception of the actors’ authenticity. Re-fusion is reached when a performance appears authentic, sincere: the attribution of authenticity, is awarded therefore and depends on an actor’s ability to tuck the disparate elements of performance back into a seamless and convincing whole. If authenticity marks success, then failure suggests that a performance will seem insincere and faked: the actor will seem outside his role, merely reading from an impersonal script, pushed and pulled by the forces of society, acting not from sincere motivation but just to manipulate the audience (ibid.).

For example: the non-authentic nature of social performances is the key to understand disaffection with politics in democratic societies (see Giesen 2006; Apter 2006). If complete authenticity is not possible, the actor, a good actor, should be able to ‘adopt an “as if” attitude, pretending that the scripted situation is the actor’s own in real life’ (Alexander 2006b, 71). Accordingly, our societies’ pathologies can be read as the consequence of defective social performances. Re-fusion is a crucial ingredient of social life, rational bias notwithstanding. As Alexander explains, from the normative point of view, performative fusion must be unmasked, and rational deliberation provides the means. From a cultural-sociological perspective, however, embracing rationality as a norm does not mean seeing social action as rational in an empirical way. Culture is less toolkit than storybook … Re-fusion remains critically important to complex societies. One has to insist that social power be justified and that authority be accountable, but one also has to acknowledge that even the most democratic and individual societies depend on the ability to sustain collective belief. Myths are generated by ritual-like social performance (2006b, 80).

The main barrier to refusing social drama and performance, given contemporary undesirable conditions of social performance, seems, in Alexander’s view, to be the non-authentic nature of current performance. Here an apt slogan might be ‘no authenticity, no success in social performance; no successful social performance (ritual-like practices), no meaningful social and individual life, no collective belief and, at the end of the story, no social life at all’. In my view, the whole story, with a single, but crucial, ‘exception’, is extremely characteristic of Durkheim. The ‘exception’ has to do with the requirement of sincerity/authenticity (that, I feel, Alexander wrongly conflates, see Trilling 1972; Ferrara 1998). From Alexander’s analysis it is not completely clear whether actors must be sincere/authentic or, as Goffman would have put it, must appear sincere/ authentic to their audience, in order to make the social performance successful. But

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more than this, it seems that Alexander envisages ritual within a horizon shaped by Christian categories. From the Christian point of view, ritual is acceptable only insofar as it is the expression of inner subjective feelings. In other words, just as it is for a large part of anthropological tradition too, ritual is the external shape of inner feelings. In this context, a discrepancy between inner feelings and external behaviour can be understood as ‘hypocritical’ or something similar. For Alexander, it is not primarily a normative (ought), but a sociological (is) matter. Ritual, or ritual-like social performance does not work in the absence of sincerity. However, another analysis of the structure of ritual (Rappaport 1999) shows how, contrary to modernist beliefs, moral obligation does not necessarily demand sincerity and belief in moral norms. Moral obligations are the outcome of external actions, publicly performed independently from the depth of subjective adherence. Ritual can be performed without belief and full knowledge, precisely because ritual creates an ‘as if’ state. Meaning is the by-product of ritual performance. In my view, this is a crucial theoretical juncture. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, I maintain that the relation between ritual, (sincere) belief and acceptance is fundamental because it has a deep impact on the reading of modernity and the role of ritual in modern Western societies, namely in a culture factually and normatively imbued with the values of sincerity and authenticity (see Seligman et al. 2008). Incidentally, as already stated before, I believe that The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is closer to a de-subjectivized analysis of ritual than to the ‘modernist’ reading of Alexander. My view is that Alexander’s analysis of ritual is prejudiced by a hypermodernist interpretation. The relation between ritual, beliefs, inner feelings, individual and collective identity is not the same, I suspect, for – let’s say – a Liberal Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, an Orthodox Christian, an Evangelist, a New Age Spiritualist or a Communist militant. Alexander’s model of ritual and of successful social performance seems to be tailored on mystical forms of social practices, proper to the so called new religious movements, whose nature is basically hyper-modernist. Crucial ideal-typical elements of mystical social practices are a) the invented and chosen nature of the community; b) the showy, expressive but at the same time weak kind of ritualism; and, above all c) the narcissistic aim of ritual itself, more a technique of the Self than a selftranscending experience. Fusion with the divinity, rediscovery of the ‘Holon’, is a way towards introspective conscience. Mystical social practices are in search   In a sense, this is also Humphrey and Laidlaw’s point of view, defining ritual as a quality of actions ‘composed of discrete acts which are detached from the agent’s intentions’ (1994, 117). Humphrey and Laidlaw’s book, very critical in certain aspects of Rappaport’s idea of ritual, is notwithstanding an ethnographical proof of how ritual is not denied even in a religious tradition, such as Jainism, considered an equivalent of Protestantism within Hinduism. Criticisms of Rappaport notwithstanding, their idea of ritual as a series of discrete acts that depends on stipulation much more than on individuals’ intentions, not presuming shared meanings but enacted by individuals who give them a multiplicity of meanings, is basically not totally inconsistent with Rappaport’s view.

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of fusion, con-fusion of margins and identities, because they cannot coexist with ambiguity and the unknown; they have to make social and individual experience as visible as possible. On the other hand, the movements of liturgical ritualism are more inclined towards exteriority than interiority, even if this is not insignificant for individual experience and intimacy. Liturgical ritualism realizes intimacy as ‘being among others’, ‘in others’ (or The Other’s) hands’, more than being with oneself and with an indistinct whole. Intimacy is understood in liturgical ritualism as the outcome of an outward (external, material, visible) movement/ effort. Mystical performance is in search of fusion, and so cannot conceive of performance except as the external expression of inner feelings; one must perform even ‘ritual-like behaviour’ using one’s own voice. On the other hand, in liturgical ritualism, ritual is not encoded by the performer, and it must not be encoded by the performer if it has to connect the performer to canonical orders. The aim of liturgical ritualism is not individual, but collective authenticity, the sense of belonging to a tradition, of being part of something broader (and deeper) than one’s own introspective conscience. Something that implies curbing one’s own feelings, passions, desires; something that implies an ordinary, almost existential form of suffering (see Rosati 2008). The performer of liturgical ritualism cannot be the hyper-modern authentic Self, nor the fully modern, independent Self, but a Self who acknowledges a h/Heteronomous legislation, who is ready to ‘lose’ itself in the ritual performance, to willingly subjugate itself to heteronomous authority. On the contrary, the case of mystical postmodern social practice is much closer to the rehearsals of an avant-garde actor described by Richard Schechner: ‘During rehearsals the performer searches his personal experiences and associations, selects those elements which reveal him and also make an autonomous narrative and/or action structure, strips away irrelevances and cop-outs, hones what remains until everything is necessary and sufficient’ (Schechner 2005, 54). In these social performances, the performer is not respecting a canonical script, not encoded by himself, but he is trying to invent a script in his own voice. Let me try to clarify this point. In conformity with Schechner, I consider performance an inclusive term (2005, xviii), and liturgical ritualism, on the one hand, and mystical postmodern social practices, on the other, as opposite ideal-type social performances, that must be kept separate. In between, there is of course a wide range of social performances, sometimes closer to liturgical polarity, such as etiquette, various religious rituals (based on different traditions), and sometimes, closer to the mystical postmodern, such as play, theatre, sport events.   I want to thank Adam B. Seligman who urged me to clarify the difference between mystical social practices and liturgical ritualism, and the related terminology.   Play can be considered closer to postmodern social practices if understood first of all as a free and spontaneous activity (see Huizinga’s classical study, Huizinga 1970), or as vertigo (see Caillois 2001). Considered as game, however, it could be thought of as framed by ‘canonical’ meanings (rules of the game). For a recent discussion of the relationship between play and ritual, see Seligman et al. 2008.

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Consequently, considering ritualism and social performances as always closer to mystical practices than to liturgical behaviour is an error originating from our hyper-modernist observation standpoint. An error, in my opinion, for two reasons. Firstly, because, from a factual point of view, not every form of performance in contemporary Western societies is mystical (postmodern): how could we take pluralism seriously and, at the same time, not recognize the liturgical ritualism of millions of believers? And furthermore, how could we reach a full understanding of part of our everyday social performances – such as etiquette – that have a canonical, heteronomous source, if we consider them as postmodern mystical practices? Secondly, I consider this merging as an error, because mystic ritualism runs in the same direction as hyper-modernity, and only liturgical ritualism runs against that flow, thus only the latter is a source opposing the pathologies of a modernity centred on the idea of introspective conscience. It seems, however, that mystic forms of social performances are easier to grasp for the contemporary sociological mind. Take for example Randall Collins’ analysis of ritual. As in Alexander’s case, it is a fully informed development of Durkheim’s intuitions; his most structured book on ritual ‘argues for a continuity of a key theoretical pathway from classical sociology to the present’ (Collins 2004, xi), and in particular he makes his ‘own intellectual construction out of Durkheim and Goffman’ (2004, 8 and counter-intuitively in my opinion, out of microsociological theories of rational choice). Collins’ analysis of interaction ritual chains is significant for several reasons. Chapter 9 of Interaction ritual chains, for example, provides a history of the genesis of individualism and inwardness similar to that presented in Chapter 2 of this book, a history that in coherence with the Durkheimian legacy considers them social products. Collins shows how the introspective conscience is in itself the outcome of interaction ritual chains, instead of a sort of primary datum as in Christian and Western perspectives. But more specifically, Collins presents us with an analytical interaction ritual (IR) key to isolate both ritual ingredients and ritual outcomes. Figure 3.1 illustrates interaction ritual. On the basis of this figure, interaction ritual has four main ingredients: two or more people physically associated; boundaries that keep non participants separate; a common focus of attention; a common mood or emotional experience. On the other hand, the main outcomes of interaction rituals are: group solidarity; emotional energy in the individual; symbols; feelings of morality, the sense of right or wrong. Here, the relevant points are two. First: symbols, collective representations that keep solidarity alive once collective effervescence has vanished, are the outcome of interaction rituals. In other words, Collins describes empirically the so called ritual semiogenesis. Secondly, moral ideals, even nowadays, after the ‘religious evolution’ and Enlightenment, are the outcome of ritual-like social practices. Moral beliefs – for a religious believer for example the belief in God – are usually the outcome of shared practices and rituals, instead of being the rationale for shared practices:

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Common action or event (including stereotyped formalities) transient emotional stimulus

group assembly (bodily co-presence)

group solidarity

barrier to outsiders

emotional energy in individual

mutual focus of a�en�on

symbols of social relationship (sacred objects)

shared mood

collective effervescence

feedback intensifica�on through rhythmic entrainment

standards of morality righteous anger for violation

Figure 3.1  An analytical interaction ritual

Source: Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004, 48, with permission. Interaction ritual is a full scale social psychology, not only of emotions and situational behaviour, but of cognition. Rituals generate symbols; experience in rituals inculcates those symbols in individual minds and memories. IR provides an explanation of variations in beliefs. Beliefs are not necessarily constant, but situationally fluctuate … What IR theory adds to contemporary cultural theory in this regard is that what people think they believe at a given moment is dependent upon the kind of interaction ritual taking place in that situation: people may genuinely and sincerely feel the beliefs they express at the moment they express them, especially when the conversational situation calls out a higher degree of emotional emphasis; but this does not mean that they act on these beliefs, or that they have a sincere feeling about them in other everyday interactions where the ritual focus is different (2004, 44).

In other words, IR does not negate either people’s beliefs or their sincerity. However, Collins maintains that people sincerely believe what they believe at a specific moment (that can be different from what they believe on other occasions) as a consequence of the ritual situations they take part in. Figure 3.1 also helps us to understand when and why rituals can fail. Rituals fail when they are not capable of producing solidarity within the group, or when they do not produce shared symbols and, above all, emotional energy in individuals. But why do rituals fail? According to Collins, they cannot work without the physical co-presence of participants, without an enclosed space and, above all, when people do not have a mutual focus of shared attention, that per se produces a

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shared mood, that is then transformed into emotional energy by ritual itself (2004, 49-64); however, ‘empty’ rituals or forced rituals can fail too. These characteristics, ingredients and outcomes, conditions of success and reasons of failure, are the same for two different kinds of rituals, that Collins calls natural and formal rituals. Natural, here, means ‘spontaneous’, so that basically the difference between the two is the presence or the absence of ‘formally stereotyped procedures’. Formal rituals are characterized by levels of formality unknown to natural rituals, but formality, Collins seems to maintain, is only a characteristic adjunct of rituals, not an integral part of them. In Collins’ view: We may refer to those interactions as ‘natural rituals’ that build up mutual focus and emotional entrainment without formally stereotyped procedures; and to those that are initiated by a commonly recognized apparatus of ceremonial procedures as ‘formal rituals’. From the point of view of what makes an interaction ritual work, the core ingredients, processes, and outcomes are the same. Both natural and formal rituals can generate symbols and feelings of membership, and both can reach high degrees of intensity. Beyond this commonality, not all symbolic memberships are of the same kind, and the details of how rituals are put together will affect the kind of membership categories that result … Rituals initiated by formal procedures have a stronger effect on broadcasting and affirming a rigid sense of group boundaries than do rituals that begin spontaneously by a naturally occurring focus of attention and shared emotion. The latter give a more fluid sense of membership, unless they become crystallized and prolonged in symbols, which thereby tend to make subsequent IRs more formal (2004, 50).

Leaving aside the sociological virtues of the IR approach (interpreting, for example, social stratification – well illustrated by Collins – but with which I am not concerned here) the above reference suggests that natural rituals are those more consistent with the fluid borders of contemporary identities and those more in tune with the Western allergy for formality. Furthermore, it also seems to suggest the possibility of non formal, totally spontaneous rituals, as if formality were simply a superstructure of rituals. However, anthropological research shows that the issue is far more complex. First (and here Collins would undoubtedly agree) ‘it would be a mistake to impose a simple dichotomy upon all behaviour in an attempt to distinguish the formal, stylized or stereotypical from the “informal” or “spontaneous”’ (Rappaport 1999, 34). If the distinction is useful from an analytical point of view, it has to be considered as a continuum ranging from a maximum of formal, stylized (usually religious) liturgical rituals, to a minimum, proper to mystical postmodern social practices. Secondly, however, ritual form ‘adds something to the substance of ritual, something that the symbolically   In this sense, Collin’s position seems to echo Radcliffe-Brown’s, according to whom ritual creates new mental and emotional states, instead of simply expressing them (see Bell 1997, 28).

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encoded substance by itself cannot express’ (1999, 31). Ritual (performativity) form (invariance, formality and ‘decorum’, encoding by other than the performers) is an integral part of the communicative virtues of rituals (1999, 51 ff.). Above all, without formality, liturgical orders (namely, orders not encoded by the performers) would be unconceivable. Spontaneous practices can communicate basically selfreferential messages (see Rivière 1995, Chapter 4), but canonical messages need punctilious invariant behaviour. Formality means that not always in rituals is everything available to the performers; something is often heteronomous, out of our hands. It is formality that introduces a tension between us, our hic et nunc, and tradition. So, it is not surprising that formality can be considered nowadays, even in social sciences, a redundant characteristic of rituals. 3.2 The sacred ‘then and now’: Religious evolution and the ‘spiritual unity of mankind’ The counter approach I am advocating stresses the role of ritual and the sacred in contemporary societies, in secular as in religious spheres. The following chapters will deal with the role of rituals and the sacred in particular spheres of contemporary societies such as self-education, politics, and religion. The emphasis on ritual and the sacred is not surprising from a Durkheimian point of view. However, jumping from ‘primitive’, traditional societies to complex and contemporary ones, as if differences were only residual, would be a mistake. If the standpoint taken in this book is that of an ‘old Durkheimian’, it is certainly not in Alexander’s sense. Jumping from traditional societies to contemporary ones, erasing differences, would mean not taking into consideration what Donald Nielsen called ‘the structural transformations of the sacred’ (Nielsen 2001), and it would be a mistake for many different reasons. We have to avoid more than one error at the same time: first of all, thinking of ourselves as too different from traditional societies – modernity as a complete restart, as a totally new invention – on the one hand, but at the same time undermining breaks and discontinuities, on the other; secondly, we also have to avoid a naïve idea of traditional (‘indigenous’ and so on) societies, too often communicated by anthropological studies unaware of their ideological dimensions. What is needed is a well balanced, multidimensional conception of principles of integration in contemporary societies. Rationality doesn’t need to be dismissed for the role of ritual and the sacred, and vice versa, to be recognized. Acknowledging the ritual semiogenesis of modern beliefs means, in my view, seeing the ‘mythic dimension in a constant dialectic with the theoretic one’ (Bellah 2006, 17). As Robert Bellah showed in a by now classic essay, even if ‘modernity seems to signal the final triumph of theoretic consciousness … we humans remain inexorably mimetic and mythic creatures’ (Bellah and Tipton 2006, 11). As the Durkheimians strongly maintained, and as phenomenologically inspired historians of religions keep affirming nowadays (see Eliade 1981, Vol. I; Ries 1986, 84),

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breaks in social (and religious) evolution do not break the ‘spiritual unity of mankind’. A nuanced and multidimensional picture of social and religious evolution is that offered by Bellah in his well-known 1964 article (now reprinted in Bellah and Timpton 2006). Recognizing, in the shadow of the classics (see Bellah and Tipton 2006, 1-6; Bellah 2002), the crucial role of religious evolution for social evolution, Bellah distinguishes five stages of religious evolution – primitive, archaic, historic, early modern, and modern – with, in between, the dramatic break of the so called Axial Age religions. Evolution, in Bellah’s understanding, has to be conceived ‘flexibly as contingent, multi-lineal, and leading to no fixed outcome’ (Bellah 2006, 18); more precisely, it has to be thought of as ‘a process of increasing differentiation and complexity of organization that endows the organism, social system, or whatever the unit in question with greater capacity to adapt to its environment than were its less complex ancestors’ (2006, 24). There are four dimensions of religious life Bellah is interested in detecting at every stage of evolution: the religious symbol system, the kind of religious action, the type of religious organization, and the social implications of religion. The religious symbol system at the primitive level is characterized by what Lévy-Bruhl called ‘le monde mythique’ (see Fimiani 2000), and Stanner ‘the Dreaming’. It is a stage in which ‘virtually every mountain, rock, and tree is explained in terms of actions of mythical beings’ and ancestors (Bellah 2006, 31). In this context, religious action is not yet worship, sacrifice, prayer, but, again in Lévy-Bruhl’s terms, ‘participation’, identification, acting out; primitive religions are mimetic and ritualistic par excellence: In the ritual the participants become identified with the mythical beings they represent. The mythical beings are not addressed or propitiated or beseeched. The distance between man and mythical being, which was at the best slight, disappears altogether in the moment of ritual when every when becomes now (2006, 32).

As participation and identification are the key to religious action at the primitive level, likewise they are the key to its religious organization. There is no social differentiation: no priests and congregations (all are involved in ritual in the same way, specific taboos notwithstanding), no separation between ‘church’ and society. It is the kind of religious symbol system, religious action and religious organization described by Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Consequently, social implications of primitive religions are, according to Bellah, those described by Durkheim himself: ritual life reinforces social solidarity. However, even at this stage Bellah invites us not to ‘forget the innovative aspects of primitive religion, that particular myths and ceremonies are in a process of constant revision and alteration, and that in the face of severe historic crisis rather

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remarkable reformulations of primitive material can be made’ (2006, 33). In other words, even at this stage ritual has not to be understood as a static way of reproduction of invariant cultural and social structures. On the contrary, ritual has always been a crucial ingredient of social evolution (see Deacon 1997). Archaic religions – the religious systems of Africa and Polynesia, and partly of the New World – are in a sense the outcome (and the propellant) of a process of emerging of the sacred figures proper to primitive religions. Now, sacred figures, ancestors for example, figures invested with mana, are becoming gods. As Bellah writes, ‘the characteristic feature of archaic religions is the emergence of true cult with the complex of gods, priests, worship, sacrifice, and in some cases divine or priestly kinship’ (2006, 34). Now religious action is not simply acting out, identification, but worship, because gods and believers being differentiated, worship is the way they communicate. Religious organization is more complex too, with ‘hierarchically differentiated groups’ (even though ‘religious organization is still by and large merged with other social structures’). However, social implications of archaic religions are still similar to those of primitive religions. Not only are the individual and society conceived as part of a still enchanted cosmos (nature included), but above all ‘there is little tension between religious demand and social conformity’ (2006, 36). The divide between religious demands and social life occurs with the arrival of Axial religions, with their discovery of transcendence and their consequent rejection of the world (2006, 25). The discovery of transcendence, ‘an entirely different realm of religious reality’ (2006, 36-7), is the main feature of historic religions. The break of the so called Axial Age is one of the most dramatic in religious and social evolution (see Arnason et al. 2005). Dualism enters religious symbol systems for the first time, expressed basically in the difference between this world and life after death, so that religious action is oriented towards an ‘economy of salvation’. Religious action is action necessary for salvation. As Bellah writes, primitive man can only accept the world in its manifold given-ness. Archaic man can through sacrifice fulfil his religious obligations and attain peace with the gods. But the historic religions promise man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it. The opportunity is greater than before but so is the risk of failure. Perhaps partly because of the profound risks involved, the ideal of the religious life in the historic religions tends to be one of separation from the world (Bellah 2006, 38).

The by now marked dualism consequent to the invention of the idea of transcendence is reflected also in religious organization. The latter tends to be more differentiated from secular spheres, and legitimation ‘rests upon a delicate balance of forces between the political and the religious leadership’ (2006, 39).   See, i.e. Eliade 1981; Ries 1989, Vol. 1-3.

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The social implications of historic religions have to do with a new tension between religious ideals and the inner world, expressed by the prophets. Religious criticism becomes the flip side of social solidarity. With early modern religions there is a link with Chapter 2. Protestantism, in Bellah’s view, is the paradigm of this stage. The ‘collapse of the hierarchical structuring of both this and the other world’ (2006, 40) being the main feature of every early modern religion, only the Protestant Reformation was successful in institutionalizing the consequences of the collapse. Even if similar tendencies were present in Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism and so on, they were brought to fruition at the beginning only in the Protestant world. From the point of view of the system of religious symbols, the collapse of the hierarchical structuring means that the relation between the individual and the transcendent reality becomes direct. As Bellah writes A great deal of cosmological baggage of medieval Christianity is dropped as superstition. The fundamentally ritualistic interpretation of the sacrament of the Eucharist as a re-enactment of the paradigmatic sacrifice is replaced within the anti-ritualistic interpretation of the Eucharist as a commemoration of a onceand-for-all historical event (2006, 41).

Religious action is de-sacramentalized, de-ritualized, and ‘the stress is on faith, an inner quality of the person, rather than on particular acts clearly marked “religious’’’(2006, 42). The introspective conscience, in other words, enters the scene as the main character only at this stage of religious evolution. Religious organization implies the transformation of the Church to an ‘invisible’ community, and the social implications of the evolution have to do with the reshaping of the idea of identity and social space as outlined in Chapter 2. Finally, modern religions, for example the so called new religious movements, bring to fruition the individualizing trend of Protestantism, with deliberately intentional ironical consequences, namely the collapse of dualism so central to historical religions. As in Kant, religion is grounded in the structure of ethical life, and any metaphysical structure, any idea of heteronomy, is misrecognized. The Self is the only reference, the beginning and the end of any system of religious symbols, social action or religious organization: The historic religions discovered the Self; the early modern religion found a doctrinal basis on which to accept the Self in all its empirical ambiguity; modern religion is beginning to understand the laws of the Self’s own existence and so to help man take responsibility for his own fate (2006, 47).

Religious action becomes a technique in the search for personal maturity; the borders of religious organizations are those of personal identity: Thomas Paine’s saying ‘my mind is my church’, or Thomas Jefferson’s ‘I am a sect myself’, are just the predecessors of contemporary American ‘Sheilaism’ (see Bellah et al.

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1985) or European ‘believing without belonging’. The social implications of this evolution have been dealt with before. The contemporary post-Axial civilization implies a new form of immanence (see Bellah 2002), the consequence of which could also be a new kind of conformism, as in primitive and archaic religions. However, this new kind of immanence is not to be interpreted as a return to primitive monism: it is not that a single world has replaced a double one but that an infinitely multiplex one has replaced the simpler duplex structure. It is not that life has become again a ‘one-possibility thing’ but that it has become an infinite possibility thing (Bellah 2006, 45).

What however seems weakened in this new multiple immanence is the attitude to world rejection, or to social criticism: the typical attitude towards the world, in other words, seems to be nowadays closer to the acceptance of the world than to a critical rejection of it. At this point reflection is needed. What is crucial, in fact, after briefly describing the five stages of religious evolution, is to understand fully the relationships between them. A simplistic and deviant interpretation would be that according to which, since we ‘moderns’ live in a ‘scientific world’, we have ‘left behind such primitive things as ritual’ (Bellah and Tipton 2006, 9). However, this is exactly the opposite of what Bellah maintains. If we believe on the contrary, that it is ‘because we have not observed, as people such as Goffman, Collins, and Dreyfus have, how much of our lives is lived in embodied rituals and practices. Our embodiment and its rhythms are inescapable’ (ibid.). The five stages of religious evolution mark an evolution from mimetic to mythic and, finally, to theoretical culture. However, the point is that the great proliferation of theory in modern societies notwithstanding, Modernity has been no more able than the axial cultures to abolish myths, in the sense of socially charged narrative, as basic in the spheres not only of religion but also of ethics and politics. All the energy spent on rational criticism in these realms has not succeeded in creating politics or ethics within the bounds of reason alone, much less a religion within such bounds – at least no politics, ethics, or religion that could actually be lived, rather than merely contemplated by intellectuals (Bellah and Tipton 2006, 11).

In other words, the mimetic, mythical and theoretical dimensions are in constant dialectic tension even in modernity: If I am right that not only religious but also ethical and political thought can never be simply theoretical but are always indelibly mythical and mimetic too, then it is not only ‘opaque features’ and ‘bizarre expressions of alien cultures’ that we need to understand, but our own modern, partially disguised, mythical and mimetic practice. And we must not only be aware of what we have unlearned, but, in many instances, of the necessity consciously to relearn it (2006, 13).

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So, religious evolution, and social evolution in general, implies breaks and discontinuities (see Nielsen 2001), but also essential continuities. If we contrast Bellah’s view of religious evolution with Habermas’ idea of the development of modernity, we can fully understand what, in the context of our debate, makes the difference. In Habermas’ view, above all at the time of The Theory of Communicative Action, the development of communicative rationality and communicative action meant the overcoming, once and for all, of ritual and myth. Communicative action was understood by Habermas as the linguistic heir of the sacred (see Rosati 2000 and 2002), and modernity as a cognitive process of learning and differentiation (see Bellah) at the end of which (as opposed to Bellah) myth and ritual were left behind. In contrast, Bellah’s lesson is that of reminding us of the role and importance of the sacred not only ‘then’ but also ‘now’, even once we have taken religious evolution into account. The value of Bellah’s reasoning is twofold. From the empirical point of view, it shows how the account according to which the modern theoretical culture overcome once for all mimesis and myth is not a completely accurate one, given the persisting mimetic an mythical dimensions within the theoretical, scientific modern mind; from the normative point view, Bellah’s reasoning stresses how contemporary post-Axial civilization in the West implies, at least in principle but frequently in practice too, new forms of acceptance of the world, new forms of idolatry. Nielsen for instance, reading Durkheim as a fully-modernist thinker wrote that structural transformations of the sacred in modern and contemporary societies mean that the transcendent and otherworldly conceptions of God and salvation, as well as their ancillary ethical ideas, so dear to the West, must be reconceived as immanent in society. The transcendent, all-powerful God, the creation and fall of humankind, the incarnation and dual nature of Christ, the right path of moral conduct, the notions of sin, expiation, sacrifice, salvation itself – all the inherited categories – need to be recast in terms of the notion of social immanence (Nielsen 2001, 131).

This is an accurate account of ‘modernity’s wager’, the success of which I am questioning in this book. As sociological analyses of contemporary societies show (see Elliott and Lemert 2006), contemporary (distorting?) developments of that wager seem to imply more new forms of idolatrical acceptance of the world as it is, rather than what Habermas called transcendence ‘from within’ resources immanent to, i.e., linguistic validity claims (see Mendieta and Habermas 2002), so that rethinking heteronomous sources might be necessary in order to rethink the possibility of a critical rejection of the world too.

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3.3 Beyond ‘our comfortable village’ Drawing on Bellah’s work, we learn how it is possible to talk about ritual and the sacred nowadays, even after considering the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’. If we consider the role of ritual and the sacred then and now – in other words, the spiritual unity of mankind – these concepts, as Victor Turner maintains, remain ‘open to us as the basis for a new trans-cultural communicative synthesis’ (Turner 1982, 19). The terms ritual and the sacred are part of a more appropriate lexicon compared to that of the hyper-modernists for bridging cultural differences between civilizations and for pushing modernity towards humility and self-critical reconsideration. Turner’s point of view is similar: This may be a humble step for mankind away from the destruction that surely awaits our species if we continue to cultivate deliberate mutual misunderstanding in the interest of power and profit. We can learn from experience – from the enactment and performance of the culturally transmitted experiences of others – peoples of the Hearth as well as of the Book (ibid.).

In this sense, history might help; the knowledge of social (religious) evolution might help. Knowing that ‘the performative genres of complex, industrial societies, as well as many of their forensic and judicial institutions, the stage and the law court, have their deep roots in the enduring human social drama’ (1982, 110) might help. Knowing that religion is not only the first of social institutions, the matrix of all institutions as Durkheim maintained, but also that rituals and ritual-like performances keep their role in our secular and religious ongoing practices, might help too. In this journey beyond ‘our comfortable village of the sociologically known, proven, tried and tested’ (1982, 55), Turner is another precious guide. Drawing freely on Turner’s works, two main functions of performances are discerned. First, they allow us to ‘tickle’ boundaries (see Seligman et al. 2008, Chapter 3) (a), second, they nurture, even if in different ways, a peculiar form of reflexivity (b). (a) The essence here is to distinguish between rituals and ceremonies. Needless to say, both have a performative nature. However, ceremonies tend to strengthen structured social reality, whereas rituals very often have an anti-structural force (see, i.e. Turner 1982, 83), so that they challenge given social realities, borders included. Rituals are part of ‘social dramas’ explained by Turner in four successive phases of social actions. If Van Gennep distinguished between three phases proper to all rituals of passage – separation, transition and incorporation – Turner describes the following phases: 1) breach of regular norm-governed social relations; 2) crisis; 3) application of redressive or remedial procedure; 4) reintegration (see Turner   I wish to leave aside the distinction between the different kinds of social performances outlined above. The two functions of performances discussed in the text are proper both to rituals stricto sensu (liturgical, religious and secular), and mystical postmodern practices.

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1987, 34-5). These four phases are an analytical improvement of Durkheim’s idea of collective effervescence, the condition produced in ritual where an old social reality collapses and a new one takes its place. When a given reality collapses, borders of a collective identity change to include the previously misrecognized social groups, thus challenging common social reality. Consequently, social dramas, typical according to Turner in times of crisis, are a way of trespassing and crossing, in ritualistic terms, borders and boundaries. Social dramas of this kind have an anti-structural nature, given that they give life to a social condition that Turner calls ‘communitas’ (see also Turner 1969). By communitas Turner does not mean either a structural reversal of profane, routine socioeconomic structures, or that fusion between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ that annihilates the ‘I’, a sort of regression to infancy (Turner 1982, 44-5). On the contrary, he means the liberation of human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc., from the normative constraints incumbent upon occupying a sequence of social statuses, enacting a multiplicity of social roles, and being acutely conscious of membership in some corporate group such as a family, lineage, clan, tribe, nation etc. or affiliation with some pervasive social categories such as a class, caste, sex or age-division (1982, 44).

It is a period in which a community and its members change their own self-image in reflective terms. If this anti-structural social phase is, according to Turner, part of the universal features of social dramas, we find throughout history and societies both crucial similarities and differences. Turner calls this collective effervescence phase of social life liminal when referred to tribal and early agrarian societies, and liminoid when referred to complex societies. In other words, liminal phenomena are proper to societies with a prevalently mechanical solidarity, and liminoid to societies with a prevalently organic solidarity (1982, 53), a distinction still not made in the well known The Ritual Process. The liminal/liminoid distinction element is particularly significant in the context of our reflection, for several reasons. First of all, it is an alternative way of talking about the role of ritual ‘then’ and ‘now’. Liminal situations are, according to Turner, ritualistically produced; liminoid situations, on the other hand, are proper to those modern contexts that are ritual-like but not fully ritualistic. In From Ritual to Theatre Turner maintains that social performances such as theatre, leisure time, play, sports, are the contemporary heirs of old rituals. As in Alexander, rituals and   As is well known, the idea of communitas has its roots first in the Durkheimian notion of collective effervescence, and then in the notion of ‘left’ or transgressive sacred proper to Mauss’ and Hertz’s thought above all (see Riley 2005). Perhaps the most well known discussion of the ‘negative’ side of the sacred is Caillois’ Man and the Sacred (1959) a fully Durkheimian understanding of the ‘dialectic of the sacred’ (as ordo rerum and tremendum).

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performances are both social dramas, which are similar but not identical. Key differences, for example, are the following: i) the most significant is the relation between social performance and obligation. In the case of liminal situations, i.e. fully ritualistic ones, obligation is involved even in transgressive behaviour. Initiation rituals, thus, command the breaking of conventional rules. On the other hand, in the case of liminoid phenomena, i.e. modern social dramas, option is the only rule. As Turner explains, Making options pervades the liminoid phenomenon, obligation the liminal. One is all play and choice, entertainment, the other is a matter of deep seriousness, even dread, it is demanding, compulsory … (1982, 42).

Liminal rituals have a stricter nature than liminoid performances; ii) the second relevant difference is that liminal phenomena ‘tend to be collective’, whereas liminoid ‘may be collective (and when they are so, are often directly derived from liminal antecedents) but are more characteristically individual products’, even if their consequences are always collective (1982, 54). A correlative difference (iii) is that liminal situations involve collective representations; symbols have a common intellectual and emotional meaning for all the members of a group, whereas the liminoid are more idiosyncratic; iv) finally, the liminal are, according to Turner, more often ‘eufunctional’ – even when they appear ‘inversive’ for a given social structure – whereas the liminoid are more often part of social critiques ‘or even revolutionary manifestos – books, plays, paintings, films, etc.’ (1982, 55). In conclusion, the difference between the liminal and the liminoid is that: in complex, modern societies both types coexist in a sort of cultural pluralism. But the liminal – found in the activities of churches, sects, and movements, in the initiation rites of clubs, fraternities, Masonic orders, and other secret societies, etc. – is no longer world-wide. Nor are the liminoid which tend to be the leisure genres of art, sport, pastimes, games, etc., practised by and for particular groups, categories, segments and sectors of large-scale industrial societies of all types. But for most people the liminoid is still felt to be freer than the liminal, a matter of choice, not obligation. The liminoid is more like a commodity – indeed, often is a commodity, which one selects and plays for – compared to the liminal, which elicits loyalty and is bound up with one’s membership or desired membership in some highly corporate group. One works at the liminal, one plays with the liminoid (ibid.).

Leaving aside Turner’s confidence in the subversive character of liminoid commodities – questionable already to my mind in 1982 – the difference between liminal and liminoid is, in this context, relevant also because it parallels the above mentioned distinction between liturgical rituals and mystical (postmodern) forms of social practices. As Turner recognizes, the emphasis on the liminoid is part of a ‘postmodernist way of thinking’ (Turner 1987, 79). The liminoid involves

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obligation only slightly.10 Take postmodernist theatre, one of Turner’s favourite instances: there ‘the text is sometimes composed – or playwrights’ texts are decomposed, then recomposed – during rehearsals’ (Turner 1982, 16). The actor – namely the performer of that paradigmatic social drama – has a direct experience (1982, 15-16) of the text. In other words, there is no script, ‘the role develops along with the actor’ (1982, 93), there is nothing unavailable as in liturgical/ liminal rituals, nothing ‘not entirely encoded’ by the performer (see Rappaport 1999); nothing that can be considered heteronomous, out of the performers’ hands, free will, choice and expressive skills. (b) However, both liminal/liturgical rituals and liminoid/mystical postmodernist social practices, have a form of reflexivity in common, and both of them are capable of tickling boundaries as a consequence of this kind of reflexivity. Every kind of performative genre, in fact, is a way of ‘representing’ collective traditions, they ‘hold the mirror up to nature’, and ‘they do this with magic mirrors’ (Turner 1987, 22. On this point, see more in Chapter 4). Performative reflexivity does not simply re.ect , it ‘is not mere reflex, a quick, automatic or habitual response to some stimulus’ (1987, 24). It reflects with ‘magic mirrors’, it reflects as a ‘deliberate and voluntary work of art’ (ibid.):

10  In A Secular Age Taylor maintains that modernity is characterized by a sort of ‘eclipse of anti-structure’ (2007, 51), even if ‘the call of anti-structure is still strong in our highly interdependent, technological, super-bureactratised world. In some ways, more powerful than ever. A stream of protests, against central control, regimentation, the tyranny of instrumental reason, the rape of nature, the euthanasia of the imagination, have accompanied the development of this society over the last two centuries’ (2007, 53). However, according to Taylor, this call frequently took on in the West the ironical shape of an anti-structure whose aim was the ‘end of all anti-structure’, and did not recognize the ‘dialectic of limits’ or ‘tragedy of life’ inherent in all social life (a very Durkheimian dialectic, as we will see in the next Chapter): ‘all structures need to be limited, if not suspended. Yet we can’t do without structure altogether. We need to tack back and forth between codes and their limitation, seeking the better society, without ever falling into the illusion that we might leap out of this tension of opposites into pure anti-structure, which could reign alone, a purified non-code, forever’ (2007, 54). However, according to Taylor modernity is not only characterized by this eclipse of the anti-structure, but above all by the retreat of this call into the sphere of leisure (art, music, literature), and beyond this from the fact that we, moderns, can not think of anti-structure ‘by means of ritual’ (2007, 53): ‘this is something that is beyond our capacity in the modern age’ (ibid.). We no longer have anything like the rituals of reversal, or the rites of obscenity in African societies, and even religious life is simply a private matter. Here I think is Taylor’s mistake. He conflates anti-structure with postmodern mystical practices, more or less like Turner, and at the same time underestimates the capacity of liturgical rituals (religious and secular) of suspending ordinary time and bringing the sacred into the mundane, even if just for a short moment, getting a glimpse of eternity, throwing a different light on profane days and everyday individual and collective life, and urging people to regulate them in different ways.

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Ritual and the Sacred Genres of cultural performance are not simple mirrors but magical mirrors of social reality: they exaggerate, invert, re-form, magnify, minimize, dis-color, recolor, even deliberately falsify, chronicled events … But, as Barbara Myerhoff remarks, they nevertheless together constitute the plural ‘self-knowledge’ of a group; … ‘cultural performances are reflective in the sense of showing ourselves to ourselves’ (1987, 42).

Consequently, if the Homo performans and his performances can reflect social reality in this way, it is because social performances are not conjugated in the ‘indicative mood’, as actual facts, but in the ‘subjunctive mood’: Just as the subjunctive mood of a verb is used to express supposition, desire, hypothesis, or possibility, rather than stating actual facts, so do liminality and the phenomena of liminality dissolve all factual and commonsense systems into their components and ‘play’ with them in ways never found in nature or in custom, at least at the level of direct participation (1987, 25).

Durkheim had already written in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life that ritual and the sacred do not express either society as it is, nor as it should be, i.e. the ideal society, but rather real society ‘at its best’. The space of ritual is the one in between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, it is the ‘might be’. If rituals can tickle boundaries it is because they and their performative reflexivity open this ‘cut’ and the horizons of the subjunctive. As psychoanalytic studies show (see Seligman et al. 2008, Chapter 2), ritual is the realm of the subjunctive, of the as if within which individuals live their experiences. Rituals, borrowing from the phenomenological lexicon, give life to finite provinces of meaning (see Schutz and Luckman 1989). Ritual is the way people enter but also leave every single finite province of meaning, showing individuals the socially constructed and temporary nature of their experiences, life contexts, and groups to which they belong. 3.4 Liturgical ritualism and traditions Boarding social theory, we are travelling throughout the ‘obscure … regions which lie around our comfortable village of the sociologically known, proven, tried and tested’ (Turner), regions where social performances and rituals are the main threads of the social fabric. Regions of everyday life, where the secular sacred is produced and protected (the dignity of the Self in the Goffmanian sense), but also regions of the religious sacred. Even if we are distinguishing between secular and religious, postmodern and mystical practices on the one hand and liturgical rituals on the other, both kinds of performances share certain features. Both classes of performances have a pre-theoretical dimension, and both of them have a proper form of performative reflexivity (even though of a different type, see Chapter 4 below). However, differences between liturgical ritualism and mystical

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postmodern social practices are very important. In this section my perspective is that only liturgical rituals are capable of cementing non-instrumental social ties and are capable of shaping constitutive social selves. In order to clarify this point, the nexus between liturgical rituals, memory, traditions and the sacred needs to be understood. Let’s start from considering the relationship between religion and memory. Accepting Tarot’s and Willaime’s suggestion, and in line with Marcel Mauss, we can consider religion as a social legacy ‘articulated on gift’ (Willaime 2003, 264). More precisely, there are three dimensions of the legacies cemented together by religion. In Tarot’s words Tous les grands systèmes du religieux semblent bien articuler, plus ou moins étroitement, trois systèmes du don. Un système du don et de la circulation vertical, entre le monde-autre ou l’autre-monde et celui-ci, qui va de l’inquiétante étrangeté des altérité immanentes au Sapiens, aux recherches de transcendance pure. Un système du don horizontal, entre pairs, frères, contrubules ou coreligionnaires, oscillant du clan à l’humanité, car le religieux joue dans la création de l’identité du groupe; un système du don longitudinal enfin – ou d’abord – selon le principe de transmission aux descendants ou de dette aux ancêtres du groupe ou de la foi, bref d’echanges entre les vivant set les mortes. C’est dans la manière dont chaque système religieux déploie ou limite tel axe et surtout les entretisse, dans les dimensions et dans l’importance relative qu’il attribut à chacun, que les systèmes religieux se distinguent sans doute le plus les uns des autre (Tarot 2000, 146).

Mauss’ concept of gift and ritual gifts is very useful for understanding the concept of religion as a radical kind of donation of self to the Other (vertical dimension) or the others (horizontal and longitudinal dimensions). Once again, here social legacy – in the horizontal and in the longitudinal dimension – has to do with a primary and ‘dispossessing’ gift, an anti-utilitarian self-surrender to heteronomous authority. From the sociological point of view, perhaps the most important, in the light of the vertical, is the longitudinal dimension. Religion can also be interpreted as a ‘chain of beliefs’ – and I would add ‘practices’ – that connects generations. As Danièl Hervieu-Leger maintains, within every religious tradition, the saying ‘as our fathers believed, and because they believed, we too believe …’ has an authoritative force (Hervieu-Leger 2000, 81). Religions are chains of memory, traditions in other words, in which what matters is not continuity in itself, ‘but the fact of its being the visible expression of a lineage which the believer expressly lays claim to and which confers membership of a spiritual community that gathers past, present and future believers’ (ibid.). As will be clear later, tradition is different from traditionalism. Even if continuity is important, traditions are not unchangeable. Sometimes, breaking continuity can be understood as the only way to preserve the essential link with a chain of beliefs and practices. But what matters

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is that lineage functions as ‘a principle of social identification, ad intra (through incorporation into a believing community) and ad extra (through differentiation from those who are not of this lineage)’ (ibid.). Chains of memory, memory of beliefs and practices, design borders and margins, identities. Religious memory is, in an important sense and for every religion, a performative memory. If embodied practices are crucial for every kind of social memory (see Connerton 1989), this is true above all for religious memory. As Hervieu-Leger writes The practice of anamnesis, i.e. the recalling to memory of the past, is most often observed as a rite. And what characterizes a religious rite in relation to all other forms of social ritualization is that the regular repetition of a ritually set pattern of word and gesture exists in order to mark the passage of time … with the recall of the foundational events that enabled the chain to form and or affirm its power to persist through whatever vicissitudes have come, and will still come, to threaten it (Hervieu-Leger 2000, 125).

This account is true not only for ritualistic religions such as Judaism or Islam, or for Christians festivals, but also for less ritualized religions – as Baha’I for example – in which the practice of anamnesis is necessary to form religious groups (ibid.). Anamnesis, ritualized practices and religious memory, are the way traditions are shaped and reshaped; the way individuals transcend themselves and connect themselves to a living, future-shaping and orienting past. Rituals, in particular, are the way not only a sense of the past is preserved, but also the past re-enacted (see Yerushalmi 1982, 44). Religions, rituals, and performative memory are constitutive elements of those chains of memory called traditions. But, what really are traditions and are they still relevant nowadays? At the present time, the sociological literature seems to be in two different minds about traditions. On the one hand, there are authors – e.g. Giddens – for whom globalization implies another step towards the death of traditions, or at least implies an ever more reflective attitude towards them; on the other hand, authors such as Robertson point out how globalization goes hand in hand with a rediscovery of local traditions, a reaction against territorial and symbolic uprooting. However, none explains what traditions are (see Thompson 1995, Chapter 6). Edward Shils, perhaps one of the few sociological authors who take traditions seriously, points out how tradition and traditional are terms commonly used within the sociological lexicon, but to indicate substantive traditions. None, except Shils himself, has tried to illustrate the formal properties of traditions (see Shils 1975). What is needed here is a formal analysis of traditional ethos. I suggest we can discuss traditions, from a formal point of view, attributing them two different but related meanings: first, as parts of the morphology of a collective identity, and, secondly, as conditions of the self-fulfilment of individual identities; in other words, formal conditions of the good life (and of our capabilities of dealing with fragmented lives). In this part of the book I am concerned with

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traditions in the former sense; traditions as conditions of self-fulfilment will be dealt with in Chapter 4. The morphology of every society, according to Shils, is structured in centre and periphery (Shils 1975, Chapter 1). The centre represents the core of shared symbols, values and beliefs of a given society. The centre, in other words, is the sacred core of a collective identity. Given that the centre is part of the nature of the sacred, every society, even a secular one, has its ‘official’ religion, and relative rituals. The centre is also the lieu of authority, order, the centre of legitimacy. It is where Ultimate Sacred Postulates are symbolically kept (see Chapter 5 below).11 However, between the centre and periphery there is always a dialectic relationship, so that even if the centre is the expression of social consensus on certain values, the latter are not uncontested and unchangeable. Their authority rests, among other things, upon the traditional nature of shared beliefs. Traditional beliefs are those that are part of uninterrupted chains, those that come from the past. The longer the chain, the stronger the legitimacy of the beliefs. Every belief consequently, can be traditional; progressive and/or conservative beliefs can be equally traditional (see Shils 1981). They can be beliefs about science or everything else (the sacred, according to Durkheim, is notoriously surajouté, superimposed, it does not depend on the nature of the sacred thing in itself). What matters is the formal property of length. Length is the first formal property of every tradition. Here, before discussing the second main characteristic of tradition, I would like to suggest that Shils’ scheme of centre and periphery needs to be significantly revised. Contemporary societies are centre-less societies; societies without a unique apex. Consequently, it is as though we had to replicate Shils’ scheme on the basis of the number of social groups that shape social morphology. Every group, whose beliefs satisfy the double requirement of length and a ‘given character’ (which will be discussed subsequently) may be defined a traditional group, with its own centre, its own Ultimate Sacred Postulates, and a periphery. Consequently, contemporary societies might be defined as unions of traditions. The second property is its given character. A tradition can be shaped by uninterrupted and/or sometimes discontinuous chains of beliefs, chains that can be longer or shorter (the way beliefs are transmitted is obviously relevant, see Assmann 2006; for the Jewish case, see Yerushalmi 1982); however, every tradition must be in a sense already ‘given’; it is, in Durkheimian terms, a social thing, with a sui generis nature; like the language we speak: not something we create by ourselves, but the outcome of the work of generations. As a given, tradition has a heteronomous dimension; it is outside us, it can constrain. Tradition cannot simply be promulgated by reason or experiments. Its authority depends on a long and slow process of transmission. The past is not necessarily seen as the golden age, it can be seen as such (as for Kongzi), but it can be also seen as the time of slavery (as for Israel before the Exodus); however, the past has to be recalled, 11  For a classical account of the urban translation of this social morphology, see Caillois 1959, Chapter 2.

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usually by means of rituals. The authority of a tradition and its beliefs depends on this ritualized recalling of the past. The point is that, given the heteronomous character of traditions, rituals called to actualize them must be liturgical rituals, not fully encoded by the performer, and not mystical postmodern social practices, where the script has to be tailored on individual authenticity. Authority and deference, given the ambiguous nature of the sacred (see Durkheim 1912a), go hand in hand with rebellion and criticism. Innovation is the flip side of tradition.12 What matters is that true innovation stems from given authoritative beliefs. New beliefs, usually, transform old ones, but rarely invent anything ex nihil. Even the most radical innovation – in religions, politics, arts, sciences – rarely occurs ex nihil. Creativity, as Adam Seligman and his colleagues put it, is always in tension with tradition (Seligman et al. 2008, 37). Tradition is a shared world, an ‘as if’ ritually produced, whose main formal characteristics are the length of transmitted meanings, on the one hand, and its given nature, on the other hand. On the contrary, absence of criticism and immutability are not necessarily part of the formal definition of what makes a tradition a tradition (see also Stout 2004).13 Being part of a tradition, and struggling to innovate – keeping up the tension between heteronomy and autonomy –, also means being within a narrative, and cultivating practices framed by that narrative. Tradition, as MacIntyre showed (1984), is ‘a moral starting point’, an inheritance received from the past, rationally criticisable from within and in tension with rival traditions (see MacIntyre 1988), whose key ingredients are specific relevant virtues embedded in social performances like rituals (secular and/or religious). Traditions have an inner rationality, related basically to their inherited nature. As Durkheim maintained in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, ‘when a native is asked why he follows his rites, he replies that ancestors have always done so and that he must follow their example’ (1912a, 192). ‘Must’ means that he feels a heteronomous force that obliges him, a force that calls for respect: ‘he feels he is obeying a sort of imperative, fulfilling a duty. He not only fears but also respects the sacred beings’ (ibid.). What is implied in these traditional (but not blind) actions is respect for inherited practices and virtues inner to one’s own tradition; it is the feeling of being part of a collective identity, the rational appreciation of the authenticity of a collective identity. Here we touch upon another crucial point of our discussion, namely the relation within canonical orders – traditions – between acceptance of inherited meanings and practices, sincere individual adhesion (belief), and collective authenticity. In the first Chapter I attempted to illustrate how in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Durkheim distances himself somewhat from the Christian tradition, explaining 12  For a sociological analysis of the factors, endogenous and exogenous, of change of traditions, see Shils 1981. 13  If one looks at the history of liturgy, i.e. Protestant or Catholic, it is clear that liturgy is a bridge between tradition and innovation, it is a ‘traffic-light’ between them; see Genre 2004, 11, 38, 48.

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how rituals imply public outward acts that are not simply the expression of inner feelings. Rituals, according to Durkheim, do not imply sincerity. Mauss stressed the same concept several times, pointing out that ritual actions are ‘marqués éminemment du sign de la non-spontaneité, et de l’obligation la plus parfaite’ (Mauss 1969, Vol. 3, 269-79). The genesis and the survival of a tradition, whose central core is understood as sacred, contingent upon the performative nature of embedded practices, virtues and rituals, implies acceptance, and not belief. Roy Rappaport, whose Religion and Ritual in the Making of Humanity has been considered the heir to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, helps to clarify the point. He maintains: belief is an inward state, knowable subjectively if at all, whereas acceptance is not a private state, but a public act visible both to witnesses and to the performers themselves. People may accept because they believe, but acceptance not only is not itself belief; it does not even imply belief. Ritual performance often possesses perlocutionary force, and the private processes of individuals may often be persuaded by their ritual participation to come into conformity with their public acts, but this is not always the case. Belief is a cogent reason, but far from the only reason, for acceptance (Rappaport 1999, 120).

From the point of view of the individual, ritual is important in shaping a performative identity: the subject in ritual is what he is doing (see Seligman et al. 2008). From the social point of view, ritual is essential because it defines boundaries, margins of collective identities: ‘participation in ritual demarcates a boundary, so to speak, between private and public processes. Liturgical orders, even those performed in solitude, are public orders and participation in them constitutes an acceptance of a public order regardless of the private state of belief of the performer’ (Rappaport 1999, 121). Ritual, in other words, is a social compass, but it is also essential in order to maintain public order because it creates and strengthens moral obligations. Once again, contrary to modernist beliefs, moral obligation does not necessarily demand sincerity and belief in moral norms. Moral obligations are the outcome of external actions, publicly performed independently from the depth of subjective adherence. Rappaport goes on to say: acceptance in, or through, liturgical performance may reflect an inward state of conviction; it may also encourage ‘the mind’, ‘the heart’, ‘the spirit’ into agreement with itself. It does not necessarily do either, however, and therefore it does not eliminate all of the shenanigans of which the mind, the heart, the spirit, and other ‘backstage artistes’ may be capable, but my argument, based on Austin’s, proposes that although liturgical performance does not eliminate insincerity, it renders it publicly impotent. It is the visible, explicit, public act of acceptance, and not the invisible, ambiguous, private sentiment, which is socially and morally binding (1999, 122).

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We cannot trust the backstage artistes, society cannot ask for a full lining up of our inner states with social norms, and at the same time society cannot rely upon the ‘shenanigans of which the mind, the heart, the spirit, and other ‘backstage artistes’ may be capable’. This is true not only for modern and complex societies, but even for less complex, more ancient societies, as anthropological research shows. Even mechanical solidarity cannot rest only upon common beliefs,14 but organic solidarity, complex and pluralistic societies, cannot be grounded on common beliefs.15 ‘Common belief’ cannot in itself provide a sufficiently firm ground upon which to establish public orders … we cannot know if a belief is common, for one thing, and whereas belief is vexed by ambivalence and clouded by ambiguity, acceptance is not. Liturgical orders are public, and participation in them constitutes a public acceptance of a public order, regardless of the private state of belief. Acceptance is not only public but clear … While ritual participation may not transform the private state of the performer from one of ‘disbelief’ to ‘belief’, our argument is that in it the ambiguity, ambivalence and volatility of the private processes are subordinated to a simple and unambiguous public act, sensitive both to the performers themselves and to witnesses (1999, 122).

14  As Mauss understood, vs. Durkheim (see Allen 2000, Chapter 3). 15  Anne W. Rawls has shown how the priority of practices-over-beliefs is a central point of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, but she also attempts to show how the emphasis on practices over beliefs involves both The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and The Division of Labour in Society, where she maintains Durkheim had argued that in modern societies ‘orders of practice replace shared beliefs as the foundation of solidarity’ (Rawls 2004, 4). Consequently, on the basis of her practices-over-beliefs argument, Rawls can criticize the thesis of ‘the two Durkheims’. The same argument permits her to establish extremely interesting and illuminating comparisons between not only Durkheim and Marx, but above all between Durkheim and Weber, considering the different weight that Durkheim and Weber gave to the role of beliefs and practices in their accounts of religion. But there are still broader consequences. Rawls’ work deals only apparently with The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, since it contains a programme for general sociology – related to its philosophical basis – of practices based on a socio-constructivist epistemological approach capable of analyzing contemporary issues – such as solidarity in a global and multicultural world (practices provide the possibility of communication across boundaries of beliefs) – better than rival contemporary sociological approaches, all of them based at least implicitly on the prominence of concepts, norms, values. So, through a re-interpretation strictly focalized on The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the author shows us a potential and extremely interesting way of rendering Durkheim’s viewpoint useful for contemporary social theory. What is challenging and thought-provoking, is that the usefulness of Durkheim’s philosophy emerges from its contradicting the principal philosophical and culturally dominant tendencies of modern Western thought and the consolidated image of Durkheim as the sociologist of order, values and shared norms.

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In other words, there is a performative morality intrinsic to ritual’s structure: ‘ritual establishes morality as it establishes convention. The establishment of a convention and the establishment of its morality are inextricable, if they are not, in fact, one and the same’ (1999, 132). Commemorative rituals, for example, are not a matter of intellection (and consequently, of sincere belief in the cognitive content of the words pronounced again and again). Take the case of the Jewish Passover Seder. When the devout Jew says When I left Egypt, when I left Jerusalem, it is legitimate to doubt that he (every individual Jew in mourning) knows exactly the year when the Second Temple was destroyed. However, while he says ‘I’, he is re-enacting a collective memory, and the ritual implies more evocation and identification than cognition (see Yerushalmi 1982, 44). He is taking part in a canonical order, a chain of memory, a tradition. He is obeying a mitzvah, performing an external action, and only one who obeys, externally, can ‘believe’, can become a faithful. Indeed, it is highly significant that the Hebrew word for ‘faith’ is emunah, that also means ‘fidelity’, ‘loyalty’. Here, to ‘believe’ means to be free to think whatever you want, but at the same time called to act coherently with the Torah, to observe the mitzvoth. Faith, in the Christian sense, is not a pre-condition for being a good Jew, but rather the outcome of correct behaviour. This is the magic of ritual, it changes the situation, it produces meanings, beliefs. Faith is the work of law; ritual is the first step, the path to be followed to change the ‘definition of the situation’. No one believes before obeying, as no one is forced to enter into a ritual. This is the space of individual freedom (see Rappaport 1999). But one ‘has to enter into the situation [external obedience, ritual M. R. ] in order to believe’. Ironically, it was a Protestant – the most Catholic among Protestant theologians – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who taught this lesson (see Bonhoeffer 1963).16 At the same time, the fact the acceptance of canonical orders (traditions) for the good of collective authenticity does not necessarily imply sincere adhesion and belief prior to external acceptance does not mean that sincerity and inner feelings do not play any role at all. In fact, ritual and sincerity are ideal-types of attitudes towards social life, ‘that must be continually mediated by the other’ more than being mutually exclusive (see Seligman 2009). In other words, even if stressing ritual over belief is insightful to discover some counter-intuitive pathologies of modernity, one must not forget they are complementary: Numinous conviction and formal acceptance are complementary rather than alternative … We have stressed that because belief is both volatile and hidden it cannot serve, as can formal, visible acceptance, as the foundation of public social orders. It now may be added that, conversely, in the absence of belief, formal acceptance alone provides unreliable grounds for such orders in the long run. Formal acceptance, it is true, establishes obligation and it may by itself be 16  With a degree of doubtfulness, the same can be said about Islam (at least sunnism), with the exception of the most radical tendencies within sufism (see Goldziher 1981, 147).

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Ritual and the Sacred sufficient to support, for protracted durations, the conventions to which it has bound men and women by obligation. But a liturgical order that is not supported by the conviction of at least some of the members of the congregations realizing it is in danger of gradually falling into desuetude, of sooner or later becoming a dead letter or, as contemporary usage would have it, ‘mere ritual’. Whereas belief, being volatile, hidden and unpredictable, is not in itself sufficiently reliable to serve as the foundation of convention, it is, in the long run, indispensable to the perpetuation of the liturgical orders in which conventions are accepted. If liturgical orders are to remain vital they must receive the numinous support of at least some of those who participate in them at least from time to time (Rappaport 1999, 396).

In other words, strengthening beliefs and sincere acceptance becomes necessary above all when traditions and canonical orders are under attack from the external world. But, once again, as we have seen with Collins, ritual is the dynamo of the process of shaping and strengthening of beliefs. Inner feelings, what RadcliffeBrown showed years ago, are the outcome of rituals. The length and the frequency of ritual performances are the key variables of this process. They can be combined in different ways, and their combination gives life to different religious experiences and different inner feelings.17 As Rappaport shows with reference to Judaism: frequent performance of brief rituals, like the round of daily prayers of Orthodox Jews and their continued observance of mitzvoth (commandments) in the details of daily life may penetrate to the cognitive and affective bases of the behaviour, and thus strengthen the ground upon which the order realized stands. The length and frequency of rituals have some similar cognitive, affective and social consequences, but they may also be eschatological inversions of each other. The lengthy but infrequent ritual, in profoundly altering the consciousness of the participants, lifts them out of the mundane time and the mundane world to assimilate them, for the time being, into what may be represented as a never changing divine order, returning them transformed to the mundane world as the rituals end. Brief but frequent rituals, in contrast, do not transport participants to a divine world but attempt an opposite movement; they attempt to realize a divine order in mundane time. This is explicit in the Orthodox Jewish conception of Halakha.18 Finally, when a liturgical order is composed of rituals that are both lengthy and frequent, participants are maintained more or less continuously outside the mundane experience, permanently in the case of religious specialists spending their lives in cloistered communities, and for limited seasons in the 17  On the cognitive effects of frequent repetition of routinized ritual performances, see Whithouse 2004, 68. 18  See Soloveitch 1944, 28-9: ‘The present time is only a historical anomaly in the ongoing process of the actualization of the ideal Halakhah in the real world … Halakhic man’s ideal is to subject reality to the yoke of the Halakhah.’ Note added [M. R.].

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case of groups which, like Australians aboriginal hunters and gatherers, assemble from time to time for such events as initiation (1999, 209).

Rappaport explains both the existence and relevance of inner feelings such as conviction, intention and sincerity of adhesion in rituals, and at the same time their being outcomes of specific variables of ritual performances. Intention is an important word. In Hebrew, for example, the word kavanà means the intention needed, in some cases, to perform a ritual, and to recite a prayer (the intention of the hearth, the intention towards God, sincerity). As Heschel reminds us, scholars of Jewish law disagree on the role of kavanà, and whether kavanà is always necessary to make mitzvoth valid (Heschel 1976, Part III, Chapter 4). Even if disagreement is the rule, on Maimonides’ authority the only prayer that demands absolute sincerity and a firm kavanà is the Shema, whereas the other daily obligations can be fulfilled without it (see Hayoun 1994; Soloveitich 1979). Intention is extremely important in the case of Islam too. The believers’ intention has to be voiced every time before the ritual can begin (see Goldziher 1981, 18-20). At the same time, the Five Pillars are pragmatic rituals, and the Sharia is meant to regulate only external actions, and has little to do with inner spirituality. Islamic law, it has been written, ‘is concerned with the external (zahir) nature of faith: it is quantitative’ (Aslan 2006, 202). Between public acts and inner feelings, in other words, there is obviously a dialectic tension, and every religion, in different times of its history, emphasizes one or the other. However, it is important to remember that even intention, belief and inner feelings are the outcome of ritual actions. All these considerations aim at indicating the core features of traditions, considered from a formal point of view. The length of the chains of transmitted memory and their given character are at the basis of their authoritative force. At the same time, I have tried to show how traditions are not unchangeable or static entities, and how they can be considered canonical orders that require firstly, acceptance, and secondly, in order to keep their authenticity and vitality in the long run, inner conviction by the performers; they require, in other words, liturgical rituals. Finally, with Rappaport’s assistance, I have attempted to show how inner feelings of conviction and sincere adhesion are themselves the outcome of specific variables (basically length and frequency) of those ritual performances at the centre of practices embedded in traditions. In the next chapter I will discuss another formal feature of traditions, namely their key role in the pursuit of a good life and individual self-fulfilment.

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Chapter 4

Self-cultivation: The Individual as a Ceremonial Being 4.0 Self-cultivation and social norms from a Durkheimian perspective My formal analysis of traditional ethos has established that traditions have to be understood as part of social morphology, an indicator of narratives relevant for individuals and social groups. Besides this, they have to be understood as formal conditions of a good life. Now, I shall attempt to clarify this point, namely what the relevance of traditions – and consequently of the sacred and ritualistic practices that are necessary to reproduce and sometimes change the practices and virtues embedded in traditions – means for individual identity. I want to begin with my sociological muse, Durkheim, whose intellectual radicalism consisted, in my view, in his capacity to grasp the roots of the relationship between this constellation of concepts. The radical dimension of Durkheim’s thought has, in the first place, to do with the understanding of the nature of social norms, and with the understanding of their effects on the ways individuals are related to society and to each other. The practical implications of this intellectual radicalism lie in understanding how we have to inhabit society and handle social norms. Basically, I attempt here to follow a pathway traced by Robert Bellah more than 30 years ago: Chaque grand penseur a sa vision propre et ses pans obscurs. Il est à la mode de lire Durkheim pour découvrir ce fait qu’il n’est ni Marx, ni Weber. Une telle lecture est de peu d’enseignement. Ce qu’il faut trouver chez Durkheim, c’est une vision morale et un retour aux profondeurs de l’existence sociale, plus radicaux, d’un certain façon, que l’approche de ses deux rivaux. Il y a un parallèle intéressant à tenter avec Freud. Durkheim tentait de comprendre les sources inconscientes de la vie personnelle. Le long séjour imaginaire de Durkheim parmi les primitifs australiens est peut-être l’équivalent du travail sur les rêves des Freud (Bellah 1990, 21).

Critical social theorists are (or were) used to considering theories of modern societies in terms of social roles, reciprocity of expectations, status and so on, as good descriptions. Functional theories, for example, were considered by the authors of the first generation of Critical Theory as a good account of Western modernity. However, acknowledgement stopped there. In actual fact, they thought that these theories were accurate descriptions of a reality of oppression and domination. And

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it was precisely this form of domination shaped by reason equated – perhaps too soon – with instrumental reason that functionalist theories refused to acknowledge (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). As regards Durkheim, he had a keen awareness of the dual nature of social norms. Never denying the ‘repressive’ role of social norms, in a certain sense, he also closely embraced the Freudian inspired ideas, later proper to the authors of the Frankfurt School too. The last lines of The Dualism of Human Nature are the paradigmatic expression of the Durkheimian awareness of the suffering inflicted by social norms on individual nature, a point sharply stressed, as is well known, also in the Suicide, or in some passages of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, in the Moral Education and in many other loci: Therefore, society cannot be formed or maintained without our being required to make perpetual and costly sacrifices … We must … do violence to certain of our strongest inclinations. Therefore, since the role of social being in our single selves will grow ever more important as history moves ahead, it is wholly improbable that there will ever be an era in which man is required to resist himself to a lesser degree, an era in which he can leave a life that is easier and less full of tensions. To the contrary, all evidence compels us to expect our efforts in the struggle between the two beings within us to increase with the growth of civilization (Durkheim 1914a, 338-9).

As is clear, he was not unaware at all of the suffering caused by social norms. On the other hand, we also know that for Durkheim social norms were the only defence against an even worse evil. The passion for infinity, an unrestrained tendency to comply with one’s own temporary desires, can destroy both society and the individual. Not only society, but also men begin where ‘instincts’ and unrestrained passions end. Social and individual integrity are, in modern societies, the outcome of a balanced between the rendering absolute of the limits imposed by social norms, on the one hand, and the weakening of their regulatory force, on the other. Radicalism does not consist in escaping social norms or social roles; it does not consist in an opposition to every norm and every rule or in simply criticizing their repressive and coercing role, but in being able to dance on the razor’s edge between the two extremes of this dialectic. Durkheim stressed the need for rules and norms; however, he never denied the importance of distancing the Self from specific rules and norms. As the examples of Socrates and Christ in the Moral Education show, the point has to do with the legitimacy of the social norms. Adorno maintained that we cannot escape social roles, we can only try to transform them from within, and Robert Alun Jones referring to Durkheim, wrote that morality, discipline, social norms are ‘conditions of happiness’ (Alun Jones 1999, 268). In other words, that we have to accept social norms without criticizing them if necessary, is not implied. Social criticism (and consequently judgment and reflectivity) has to do with the criticism (from a normative point of view) of social

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norms which are too structured, too crystallized or simply unjust, whereas radical social thinking recognizes the dual meaning of the notion of ‘limit’. The concept of limit has a long, complex philosophical history, from Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. It seems to me that the Kantian idea of limit, Grenze as opposed to Schranke, namely ‘threshold’ as opposed to ‘border’ – something that implies a positive element, something beyond and not simply a pure negation – is particularly consonant with the Durkheimian idea of limiting social norms. From this point of view, limits are not only restrictive but also constitutive of morality and identity, in the Wittgensteinian sense of constitutive rules. Radical thinking is a form of thinking that recognizes limit as Grenze, and the pathos related to its dialectic (see Costa 2005). Durkheim was against moral anarchy, not against critical reflection. He was seeking a new equilibrium between power and desires, beneficial for modernity and in line with Rousseau’s teaching (Cladis 2003) and as, perhaps, he had learnt from the role of Law within the Jewish tradition. The space for radicalism and social criticism is collocated between these two extremes. And the exercise is, undoubtedly, a never-ending effort. The role of religion seems to me to reflect this dialectic. In the context of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, for example, religious practices have a regulatory function and, at the same time, a transformative effect on previous forms of regulation (Steiner 2000, 59-63). The regulatory function has more to do with the performative effects of rituals than with the content of beliefs. The performative effect of rituals is that of attaching people to social groups (constitutive social groups), and that of making the majesté of society closer to the eyes and hearts of the people. Religious practices constrict people by bringing them to partake in a collective identity, a community of faith. I do not want to make an ‘essentialist’ position, as Strenski would call it (Strenski 1997), but this is the function of religion that we can find in one of the greatest contemporary writers, Isaac B. Singer, for example in the novels Shadows on the Hudson and The Family Moskat. For Singer, being a Jew – above all after what happened in Europe – is not a matter of faith, but a matter of practices: You ask me about my faith. What shall I say to you? Whoever has ever read the modern Bibles critics, archaeologists, historians, and all the rest of them, can never again be whole in his faith … At the very moment that I wind the leather strap of my phylacteries around my arm and I kiss the little boxes which enclose the sacred words, it occurs to me that the Torah is a work of the imagination and that Moses did not stand on Mount Sinai – in short, that as Rashi famously observed about the biblical story of Elisha: ‘There are no woods and no bears’, that it’s all a fabrication. But then I tell myself that since my phylacteries bind the tiger within me, I have no choice but to put them on … What difference does it make who gave us the Torah? The Torah is the only effective teaching we have on how to bridle the human beast. No one has better tamed that beast than the Jew – I mean the true Jew, the Jew of the Scriptures, of the Gemara,

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Ritual and the Sacred of the Shulhan Arukh, of the book of ethical instructions. The Christians have a handful of monks and nuns. We created an entire nation that served God. We were once a holy nation. Thank God, a remnant of that nation has remained (Singer 1998, 347). ‘What is one to do? Reb Moshe Gabriel, teach me how to be a Jew’ ‘I should teach the Rabbi?’ ‘Don’t be so modest. Where shall I find faith?’ Moshe Gabriel paled. ‘It’s not faith that is needed’ ‘What, then?’ ‘It’s sufficient to say over one of the Psalms’ (Singer 2000, 358).

The idea of the crucial role of rituals and practices in the process of Self-cultivation of a constitutive Self within a constitutive group, or tradition, here is clearly expressed, as is the crucial role rituals play in the shaping of a well balanced identity. The above quotations show the same relationship between belief, sincerity and ritual investigated in Chapter 3 of this work. The idea of Law as something that gives life while it constrains people, and vice versa, is deeply rooted, I believe, in the religious tradition in which Durkheim was raised. The meaning of ritual there is that of making people part of the Jewish identity, and this is the only way ‘to tame the tiger that is in each of us’. As in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, religious practices are a way to escape evil, even if they cause suffering. Like Weber, Durkheim knew that the modern individual can die unhappy, unsatisfied, perhaps tired of life, but he can’t die full of life, satiated with life (Weber 1975a). Attending to one’s daily work, as Weber again said (Weber 1975b), meant for Durkheim taming this – characteristically modern – overabundant and at the same time overwhelming thirst for life. Pickering suggested that Durkheim’s sociology can be read as just another theodicy (Pickering 1984, 129): from the standpoint I am attempting to illustrate, Pickering’s is a striking judgment (see Rosati 2005 and 2008). On the other hand, in the context of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim stressed also the ‘anomic’, anti-structural, function of the effervescent assembly (Steiner 2000). Here, social norms are weakened and broken, and sometimes new forms of regulation (and integration) are established. The life of society is a contingent and always precarious balance between these two extremes (Turner 1969). Gianfranco Poggi stressed the character of the contingency of society, and the fact that such contingency accounts for what he called Durkheim’s pathos (Poggi 2000, Chapter V). Society gives and society takes away all that we have as human beings. But the life of society is dependent on our capacity for self-transcendence; and the capacity for self-transcendence is a matter of suffering imposed and made possible by social norms. Self-transcendence is, in conclusion, a religious issue (see Joas 2008). The parallel with the contingent existence of divinities is typical of Durkheimian pathos and of the dialectic of limits (Durkheim 1912a, 351).

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What I would like to add to Poggi’s thesis on the Durkheimian pathos for the contingent character of society, is simply that this is related to pathos linked to the notion of Grenze. There is pathos inherent in all Durkheimian social theory and in Durkheim’s sociology of religion particularly because there is pathos in the dialectic of the limits, due to the dual nature of social norms: they limit passions and desires and at the same time constitute identity and shape morality; thus they ask self-transcendence to make society and a moral life possible. Beyond the limits imposed by social norms there is not only violence, but also morality. Radical thinking has to comprehend this inextricable and counterintuitive nexus, it has to work on the pathological forms of this nexus, as in all those cases in which limits are limitless. 4.1 The Self, constitutive groups and willed subjection A Durkheimian perspective facilitates understanding the work of social norms in the process of creating a well balanced identity. Durkheim’s idea of the Self cannot be conceived but as a person integrated within social groups, and whose passions are regulated by non limitless social norms. From a Durkheimian perspective, consequently, the investigation of the person’s dependence on groups and traditions is key. The idea of social groups and traditions implied in this context, however, is key. Tradition has to be considered, from a formal point of view, the centre of a collective identity or the nucleus of a social group, expressing its sacred, normative core. Arguably, traditions are related to a very particular kind of social group, i.e. constitutive groups, as opposed to instrumental groups. The difference has to do with the type of membership they ask for. In the case of instrumental groups, membership is ‘predicated on assumptions of agency and power’ (Seligman 2000, 76), whereas in the case of constitutive groups ‘membership is not instrumental, not voluntary, and not easily dissociated from the way one views the core values of Selfhood’ (ibid.). As Seligman writes, quoting Hannah Arendt, A constitutive group of necessity rules out the very idea that an individual can enter and exit as one does a supermarket. Moreover, and as Arendt made clear, the only way any attempt to ‘escape’ this collective responsibility is ‘by leaving the community and since no man can live without belonging to some community, this would simply mean to exchange one community for another and hence one kind of responsibility for another’ (ibid.).

Full appreciation of the difference between instrumental and constitutive groups is crucial. The difference has to do with the role played by the sacred that shapes a different model of membership. Seligman’s definition of this difference illustrates clearly what is at stake:

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Ritual and the Sacred Can the term ‘sacred’ have any meaning for instrumental selves, whose modes of group membership are solely participatory, contingent on the play of interests and the calculus of exchange? A world of methodological individualism cannot support the armature of the sacred, for it is a world that in principle does not support the idea of any meaning beyond the play of human negotiation, barter, and exchange (and, of course, violent struggle as well). If the sacred means anything at all, it is that place where negotiation ends. Like authority (but unlike power), the sacred is a realm defined by what cannot be bartered or bargained. Especially when posited in transcendent and absolute terms, the sacred becomes a point at which all contestation over meaning ceases. As the foundation of meaning-giving order, the sacred is beyond the play of forces whose negotiation and exchange parse out prestige, status, and wealth to particular roles within the division of labor. A sacred that is seen to be constructed by the division of labor is no more sacred than is a community constituted by allegiances tied to discernable interests alone (2000, 39).

Here the point is not that in order to define the sacred one must consider it irrefutable or unquestionable. In the previous Chapter this was quite evident. The point, rather, is that it must be considered as something not fully available; more or less transcendent, more or less absolute, but in order to be sacred it has to keep a heteronomous dimension, and must be a source of deontological obligation; the heteronomous (or quasi-heteronomous) status of the sacred means that it stands in a relation of at least partial unavailability, since it does not reflect a contractual and utilitarian logic (see Rosati 2003). Constitutive groups, in other words, are those, as opposed to instrumental groups, which share some idea of the sacred. At the same time, members of constitutive groups are not instrumental selves, but connected selves (even if they can be instrumental with reference to other – instrumental – groups and relationships). We have seen before how the modern Self is centred around the idea of introspective conscience, and how a post-protestant idea of the Self is tied up with a notion of collective identity the borders and margins of which have been interiorized. On the contrary, the connected Self is a member of those constitutive groups whose identity is shaped by shared narratives, practices and virtues. The connected Self is an idea of the Self alternative to the one described in Chapter 2, and assumed by mainstream social theory. On the basis of this thesis, the Self is a ‘position’ ‘just as within a sentence the subject is collocated in a position where a pronoun may also be collocated, i.e. the subject is a position or a standpoint that the Self may take for itself or in which it may find itself through its relations with others’ (Schofer 2005, 17). This idea fits in particularly well with Collins’ understanding of the making of the Self within ritualistically shaped social situations. From this point of view, Selfhood cannot be conceived as ‘bound, individual and autonomous’ as in the Enlightenment tradition and as in Elias’ homo clausus, but rather it asks for a comparative perspective that ‘strives not to impose such a view upon other cultures but to show the contingent

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and constructed nature of all selves and to examine the range of possibilities for understanding the Self and its vicissitudes’ (2005, 15). From a comparative point of view, the Enlightenment vision of the Self cannot be universalized. From an ethical point of view, the Enlightenment idea of the Self strives to answer moral questions such as ‘What should I do?’, whereas the idea of connected Self is much more coherent with the ethical questions ‘How ought I to live, what kind of person should I be?’. The connected Self can be understood within the frame of character and virtues ethics (see MacIntyre 1984), more than within that of procedural morals, in all their possible variants. The discriminating point of differentiation between the Enlightenment idea of the Self – in all its variants, from the instrumental to the Kantian (again, in all its varieties) – and that of the connected Self, is how the idea (and the value) of moral autonomy is understood. From my perspective, the central core of autonomy is judgment, namely the capacity of the Self in judging different courses of actions, situations. However, this faculty does not imply the liberal and Enlightenment metaphysics of the introspective conscience, with its conceptual constellation. In a comparative perspective, judgment – and consequently autonomy – is perfectly consistent with the idea of willed subjection to an external authority. The idea itself of authority has always been in the interest of social theory. Classical readings of Durkheim, for example, emphasize the importance of the moral authority of society over individuals, just as standard reconstructions of the sociological tradition emphasize the importance of authority in other classical sociologists (see Nisbet 1966). Furthermore, social theory has been interested throughout the decades in the twilight (Nisbet 1975) and transformations of authority (Sennet 1980). More particularly, recently authority has been investigated both within the context of specific religious traditions (see Walzer et al. 2000), and more broadly in the context of modernity (Seligman 2000). In this context, authority has to be understood as the heteronomous source at the centre of the ‘cultivation process’ of a connected Self. Needless to say, it is an accepted authority, that has its legitimacy in canonical orders. Subordination and submission to authority are central features of virtue ethics, and are part and parcel of that self-cultivation process during which a connected Self learns to master the practices and virtues that shape its identity. By means of the selfcultivation process, the external authority becomes interiorized, i.e. internalized. A recognized canonical authority is the yardstick against which the self-cultivation process makes sense: Self-cultivation through subjection is both widespread and very important, and … comparative study could be extremely productive. Recent studies of medieval Christian monasticism, contemporary Muslim women, modern Christian theology and ancient Manichean ritual present phenomena that could be explained in these terms, and I believe that the categories can also illuminate important aspects of many Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist ethical outlooks. Such calls for subordination tend to be linked with an extremely hopeful sense that the

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Self can expand in fundamental ways though engagement with powers external to it, along with the sober observation that this process is not easy and may be not pleasant (Schofer 2005, 20).

Even if the process might not be easy and pleasant, it does not compare to the manipulation and/or annihilation of individual judgment. On the contrary, within the above mentioned traditions, willed subjection is understood as a path to expand the Self, to shape it coherently. The Western process of de-ritualizing education, and mainstream Kantian ethics, make it hard to understand the relationship between the authority of canonical orders (traditions as sources of authority), ritual and judgment. Take for example the role of rituals in education. According to Basil Bernstein and his colleagues, ritual is a form of ‘restricted code’, appropriate for transmitting expressive values (by means of consensual and differentiating rituals) in highly stratified educational systems and schools. However, the expressive culture of modern differentiated, pluralist and more egalitarian contemporary schools (above all after the 1960s) is likely to be transmitted ‘not through ritual and its restricted code, but through a communication system where the meaning are verbally elaborated, less predictable and therefore more individualized’ (Bernstein et al. 1966, 434; on Bernstein and the concept of restricted code, see Sadovnik 2001). The shift from a ritualistic to verbal transmission of expressive values, is also a shift from domination to cooperation. Within this frame, it is evident that ritual is conceived of as a hopefully once and for all overcome vestige of the past, not appropriate to democratic schools. If rituals play any role in democratic educational systems and schools, they are only ‘youth-generated and regulated rituals which will tend to replace adult-imposed and regulated rituals as the source of shared values and sentiments’ (Bernstein et al. 1966, 436). As frequently happens, ritual is understood within this frame as inherently anti-egalitarian, proper to stratified societies and/or uneducated social classes, that are forced by an unjust system to express themselves by means of a restricted (ritualistic, stereotyped) code. However, one could say that Bernstein’s description of the end of ‘heteronomous’ rituals in contemporary schools is not the end of the story. Children’s everyday life at school is full of small rituals. Vander Gucht (1992), for example, distinguished between: •

• •

les rites d’accueil et d’adieu: déshabillage et/ou port d’un uniforme, entrée en classe, salut des enfant à l’instituteur/institutrice et de celui/celle aux premiers suivi de l’appel des présents, etc.; Les rites d’ordre: formation des rangs et respect du silence, demande/ annonce des prises de parole, etc.; Le rites d’activité et de collocation: les activités proposées aux enfants se schématisent et se ritualisent très rapidement : les petits connaissent les gestes codés correspondant aux divers moment de ces activité et en reproduisent invariablement la séquence (1992, 51).

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As this example clearly shows, the point here is not a desire for authoritarian educational systems or schools. However, one cannot throw out the baby together with the bathwater. Throughout the course of a complex system of rituals children shape their common ‘as if’, social environment, and learn how to live in it. Ritual has a fundamental function, namely the symbolic one. Ritual shapes shared meanings, over and even beyond the situational meaning. That is why, as I will try to show, ritual is fundamental to nurture individual capability of judgment and thus, the capacity of autonomy. That is why, Kantian ethics and de-ritualized pedagogical systems notwithstanding, it is fundamental in moral education. 4.2 Ritual re.ectivity and autonom y It is worthwhile pausing on this point – and drawing on the wisdom of non-scientific sources. Traditions, and the practices embedded in them, are necessary to keep identities balanced. That is why a subject can pay willed respect to heteronomous authorities. That is why some traditions meticulously regulate almost every aspect of individual and collective life: A fiddler on the roof, sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka you might say everyone of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. You may ask, why do we stay up there if it’s so dangerous? We stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? Then I can tell you in a simple word – tradition! Because of our traditions, we’ve kept our balance for many, many years. Here in Anatevka we have traditions for everything: how to eat, how to sleep, how to wear clothes … You may ask, how did these traditions start? I’ll tell you – I don’t know! But it’s a tradition and because of our traditions, everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do (Fiddler on the Roof).

Here I consider Anatevka as a metaphor. It is not only the name of a small Jewish village destroyed by the tsar, just as in the famous musical of the Seventies; it is not the nostalgic idea of a small ancient world. It is, on the contrary, a metaphor for the human condition, lived within groups with borders, relationships mainly in conflict inside and outside groups. It is a metaphor of a complex, rather than a simple life; complex, rather than simple society; it is a metaphor for a tragic, rather than irenic or pacified vision of life; it is a metaphor for a non ‘pretty’ world. Even though generally theories depict rituals in terms of harmony, the emphasis on rituals makes sense only in the context of a tragic vision of life and world, seen as ‘fragmented and fractured’: Ritual actions involving order and harmony are only necessary among actors who see the world as inherently fractured and fragmented. If ritual participants

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Ritual and the Sacred thought the world was inherently harmonious, why bother with rituals? (Seligman et al. 2008, 31)

Ritual is the way to pattern and order a fragmented world. It is also the way of dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. In this sense, it is the way first of patterning courses of actions (traditions are, according to Shils, guiding patterns), and then of learning to act without patterns, autonomously, ‘without ritual precedent’ (Ibid). The point I want to stress, in other words, is that judgment, the capability of responding appropriately to specific situations, stems from a ritualistic training. As Seligman and colleagues write, A contemporary example will help to make the point. When a child asks for butter at the dining table, one tells the child to say ‘please’. When one then gives the butter, one tells the child to say ‘thank you’. For the first few years of this, it is just by rote: one simply tries to get the child to repeat the words. And, if it stops at just this, then one has, to a minimal degree, created a subjunctive world of politeness. But the hope is clearly that it will not stop there: the hope is that the child, as she grows, will be able to express equivalent forms of making requests and expressing gratitude in situations where a simple ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ would be appropriate (2008, 35).

This is possible because of the symbolic function of ritual, that constructs a web of meaning over and well beyond the specific situational meanings (Bernstein et al. 1966, 429). Returning to our previous discussion of the relationship between ritual and sincerity, … the crucial point is that this is not necessarily a sincerity mode … Instead, it is perhaps best understood as simply the way that one acts ritually when there is no ritual to tell one what to do: if one spends one’s life doing rituals properly, then one gains a sense of how the subjunctive world constructed out of those rituals could be constructed in situations without a ritual precedent, or in situations where ritual obligations conflict (2008, 35).

One learns, in other words, the faculty of judgement, and the virtue of autonomy. However, here autonomy is not understood either in the context of early liberalism, or in the Kantian sense, two meanings compromised by the history of introspective conscience, but in a ritual sense. Judgment, in this scenario, is an ‘internal faculty generated by traditional formation’ (Schofer 2005, 88). Seen in a Durkheimian perspective, the process of self-cultivation implies curbing negative impulses, being transformed in order to ‘become human’ (see Cladis 2008). If ‘the task of focusing attention on the responses of one’s innate moral sprouts and the effort of extending these feelings by discovering them in other appropriate situations is the ongoing work of moral Self cultivation’ (Ivanhoe 1990, 90), rituals – namely

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practices not entirely encoded by the performers but by traditions – are the way of nurturing and conducting this ongoing, difficult, and frequently painful process (as children know very well, see Cladis 2008). The Western idea of free-choosing autonomous individuals, expressed in such writings as those of John Locke, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, is strictly interspersed with the idea of the Self as right-bearing. Within this frame, ritual is considered mainly as a ‘restricted code’ necessarily related to hierarchical societies, where individuals have no rights to protect their autonomy. However, as sometimes it is (rightly) observed, modern ethical, social and political philosophies, so dependent on the idea of rights, are shared by no more than the 25 per cent of the human consortium. From the empirical point of view, this simple statement of fact leads to assume that ‘if there are other rational ethical and political philosophies which more or less reflect the presuppositions and assumptions of the other 75 per cent, then those assumptions and presuppositions should be incorporated, if at all humanly possible, into any ethical and/or political philosophy which claims to be universal’ (Rosemont 1991, 75). The other 75 per cent of the human consortium, Western virtues ethics included, share the idea of the human being as role-bearing person. They understand neither the idea of a disembodied mind, nor that of an autonomous individual (as right-bearing). On the contrary, it is much more likely that they insist ‘on the altogether social nature of human life, for the qualities of persons, the kind of persons they are, and the knowledge and attitudes they have are not exhibited in actions, but only in interactions, human interactions’ (1991, 89). Within this new (pre-modern for some?) frame, ‘I am the totalities of roles I live in relation to specific others’, I do not simply ‘play’ or perform those roles, I am those roles (1991, 90). Needles to say, roles have a heteronomous dimension, given from the sui generis nature of society or from the transcendent character of a divinity. However, this heteronomous dimension is just that which makes it possible to transcend the specific spatial-temporal circumstances in which a life happens to be lived, and to connect it to ‘a strong sense of continuity with what has gone before and what will come later’ (1991, 91-2). So, counter-intuitive as it may seem, heteronomy is the key to understand the possibility of an attitude of transcending the hic et nunc; heteronomy is not the opposite of autonomy from the is, but on the contrary a condition of its possibility. At the same time, thinking of autonomy within the new frame of the human being as role-bearing, we have to think of a different kind of autonomy, as we said before ritually nurtured. An essential feature of rituals is symbolism. Ritual shapes shared meanings over and beyond the situational meaning. In this sense, ritual training is essential to nurture the reflective attitude of a connected Self, a Self understood as role-bearing; in fact, ritual is necessary for judging how to interact with others in the absence of clear or explicit ritualistic prescriptions, precisely because in previous ritualistic situations a shared as if has been experienced. However, as we have to think of autonomy in a different perspective from the

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Kantian tradition, so we have to think of reflectivity in a different way. Ritual is not the contrary of reflectivity. Ritual does not require automaton and robots. Simply, we have to think in terms of different kinds of reflectivity (see Stausberg 2008). Here I distinguish between three ideal-type models of reflectivity, two of them performative, one cognitive. The cognitive model is associated with the introspective conscience. It is so to speak, a why-type of reflectivity, in which justification (of courses of action, linguistic acts and so on) must be preventive and fully intentional. In this case, the actor judges reflectively, justifying a course of action and/or a linguistic act only if beforehand they are judged consistent with beliefs strongly (sincerely) felt, deeply scrutinized and recognized as universal, or authentic. Consequently, the main characteristics of a why-type reflectivity are a) its cognitive character, b) its intentional and preventive justification, and c) sincere adhesion to specific reasons, values and/or beliefs. At the other extreme of an ideal-type continuum, we have a very different model of reflectivity, a how-type model of reflectivity, more proper to those specific social performances that are liturgical rituals: what I call liturgical reflectivity. This is a performative and procedural model of justification, focusing on how to justify specific actions rather than on why they are performed. The full justification of the reasons why they are performed depends on regressive justification, that sometimes – as in the case of doctrinal modes of religiosity (see Whithouse 2004, Chapter 5) – takes the form of internally systematic and highly rationalized theories, theologies, and so on. Here the performer is not an automaton at all. His reflectivity has four main characteristics: first, he reflects on how to perform certain actions (even when highly frequent repetitions makes such actions almost ‘spontaneous’); secondly he reflects, even if regressively, on why to perform those actions in that way, within an ongoing hermeneutical debate on the indexical and canonical meaning those ritualized actions have (a debate that takes a stronger theological form, i.e. as in the case of Catholicism, and a weaker doctrinal form, i.e. as in Judaism); thirdly, as we observed in Chapter 3, here reflectivity is related to the subjunctive dimension of liturgical rituals, that subjunctive as if that allows us to look at the world around us as a conjunctural, namely not necessary, matter of facts, as an is criticisable in the light of a subjunctive might be; liturgical reflectivity, in other words, allows us to nurture a sort of inner-worldly asceticism that aims to bring the divine order (hopefully in a asymptotical way) within the world (as is proper to frequent but brief liturgical rituals), thus avoiding a fatalistic and unreflective acceptance of the actual world. Finally, reflectivity here is related to doubtfulness, scepticism. As we have seen before, the performer of liturgical rituals, above all when the sacred has a totally transcendent dimension, accepts canonical meanings in the absence of full belief. Liturgical rituals might imply obedience and conformism in the realm of action (as according to Durkheim, sociologically speaking, society necessarily requires, see 1912a, 16-7), and freedom in the domain of thought. Inner freedom is related to the unknowable character of the sacred (i.e. of revelation), so that no one can be judged (other than by the Lord of the Universe) because of their thoughts and

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beliefs, but only because of their actions. In this case, precisely the heteronomous nature of the sacred allows me both to protect my sacrosanct inner sanctuary and at the same time, to distance myself from my actions, considering them as a part of a play, as something to be almost ironically seen from a perspective of epistemic humility (see Chapter 6). The third model of reflectivity shares elements both of the why-type and of the liturgical models. It is the kind of reflectivity proper to those social performances I have called postmodern, or mystical social practices. Here, as in the case of liturgical reflectivity, reflectivity is embedded within actions, it is performative. However, since postmodern social practices have no fixed or rigid scripts, here the search for performative meanings encoded by certain practices is not regressive/ backward and doctrinal, but spontaneous, closer to the intentional and sincere model of the introspective (non performative) kind of reflectivity than to the liturgical. At the same time, postmodern reflectivity shares with the liturgical the subjunctive dimension, as found, with reference to Turner’s idea of the subjunctive, in the case of liminoid social practices. Empirically, postmodern reflectivity seems to be in accordance with the so-called imagistic modes of religiosity (Whithouse 2004, Chapter 6). The point I am trying to make is, in other words, that one may think of reflectivity and autonomy as coherent with the idea of the human being as role-bearing, in a way coherent with the ritualistic self-cultivation of a connected Self. Within this frame, moral education is not necessarily (logically speaking) a conservative, antimodern, and reactionary means for transmitting traditional values and norms; it may be that, of course, but this is an empirical issue. Moral education is an integral part of a process of self-cultivation, perhaps even more necessary at the present time, when globalization, understood as runaway world, promotes individualist uniformity (see Helgesen 2003). Self-cultivation presupposes full awareness on the person’s involved of being one link in a chain of memory, of being a person embedded in a web of ritual interactions; it presupposes, most of all, the sometimes bitter feeling of dependence on heteronomous sources. Already in 1904-1905, Durkheim pointed out how education and heteronomy are related terms, and how the feeling of moral dependence is an integral part of the shaping of an individual identity: Cette piété, ce sentiment de la grandeur de la divinité, n’est donc qu’une autre forme du sentiment de la dépendance où nous sommes vis-à-vis de ce grand tout qui nous entoure, qui nous enveloppe, qui nous domine, mais qui est en même temps la source où nous puisons et alimentons notre vie. Nous voilà donc incontestablement bien loin de la frivole vanité de l’humaniste tout occupé à plaire et à se fait applaudir. Ce sentiment de dépendance morale, de quelque manière qu’il s’exprime dans la conscience, est un solide rempart contre l’égoïsme (Durkheim 1938a, 247).

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4.3 Comparative perspectives: Rabbinic ethics and Confucianism In this section I want briefly to consider two examples of ethical traditions that foster the shaping of individual judgment by means of ritualistic education. Let me begin with rabbinic ethics. Strictly speaking, rabbis did not develop ‘ethics’ in the modern sense of the world. As Schofer writes, ‘early rabbis had a large vocabulary through which they set out norms for action and character: ideals that sages (hakhamim) prescribe for students (talmidim), the ways that the tradition (torah) is to interact with basic impulses (yetzerim), and the motivations and emotions that a person should maintain in relation to God, particularly love (`ahabah) and fear of reverence (yir’ah). However, they did not employ a concept that draws these elements together’ (2005, viii). This premise notwithstanding, we can imagine rabbinic norms for action as a form of virtue and character ‘ethics’, more than as a rigorously procedural morality. Schofer shows how Rabbi Nathan, a very influential anthology within the rabbinic tradition, has a complex relationship with modernity: its ‘intense traditionalism’, at the same time radically innovative, is at odds with modern and postmodern sensibility, and the ‘striking differences between rabbinic worldviews and those of modernity’ are exactly what make them fruitful (2005, 178). Schofer’s core argument is that Significant portions of Rabbi Nathan instruct a student to become a sage through chosen and cultivated relations of subordination to the sage and community, the tradition of Torah, and God, along with internalization of discourse connected with the three authorities (2005, 7).

To become a sage means to develop the faculty of judgment. According to Rabbi Nathan, and this is the point, the ‘making of a sage’ is a process constantly in tension with heteronomous sources, legitimate external authorities, such as mentors, the community, God and, ultimately, tradition, given that in the rabbinic world the divine presence is always mediated through tradition (2005, 103). Here the notion of subordination, or better, willed subjection, is crucial, since ‘the tensions implicit in a notion of chosen or willed subjection captures, as well as contemporary categories can, the tension between choice and creativity and subordination to authority present in such an ethic’ (2005, 19). To modern Western minds these are deep waters. Individual judgment has to be counter-intuitively understood as the outcome of tension with something partially unavoidable, that transcends and even constrains the individual. According to Rabbi Nathan the making of a sage implies a process of self-cultivation and self-transformation throughout which negative impulses are transformed and curbed, by means of the study and practice of the Torah. Ritual, namely the practice of the Torah, is consequently the way of carrying on the process; ritual, in other words, is the way of shaping judgment

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(i.e. of giving life to a Self capable of decision making) within a set of practices embedded in an authoritative tradition. To understand this kind of logics we have to focus on the starting point of the process of self-cultivation. In other words a ‘psychological dualism’ that ‘contrasts not body and soul, but innate tendencies to transgress the guidance of the traditional discourse’ (2005, 87). The bad yetzerim, namely Self destructive inclinations, internal aggressors, and the shenanigans of the heart, that bring people to violate rabbinic law, must be transformed and curbed. Life is understood as a ‘struggle with the bad yetzerim’, that is distinctive of human life. The Self is internally divided, and at war with itself. How distant from Durkheim? How distant from Singer? According to Schofer, ‘the overarching trope of ethical transformation through Torah is that of a movement from inner division to unity’ (2005, 98). The starting point is not an irenical conception of life, but on the contrary the tragic idea of a Self (and a world) fractured and fragmented, capable notwithstanding of transforming itself, leaving itself and embracing something out there, the Torah. The Torah, in turn, as a tradition, is not ‘a fixed or static entity’ (2005, 69), but a hermeneutical collective enterprise that shows signs of development over time, in tension between past, present and future. The internalization of the Torah (2005, 21-2; 116; 161) has to transform a heteronomous source into inner motivations to legitimate individual voluntaristic actions. Something the sociological mind would easily understand. So, according to Schofer, those in agreement with Rabbi Nathan see the Torah, and consequently mitzvoth and rituals, as ‘a restraint for transgression’. However, the Torah is part of a fragmented world and a contingent life, so that in Rabbi Nathan even the Torah is understood as ‘vulnerable’. In fact, to make things even more complicated, one has to remember that ‘aspects of tradition may incite wrong action rather than restrain it’ (2005, 71), and the Written Torah needs to be corrected sometimes by the Oral Torah (2005, 71-83): ‘for this reason, one should be patient in judging these passages and follow the oral tradition of interpretation. However, interpretation has its own dangers … , and risks are present at all points of the hermeneutical circle’ (2005, 82). The vulnerability of the Torah notwithstanding, it is by means of the Torah that bad yetzerim can be transformed. Rabbinic ethics, like Confucian ethics (see Ivanhoe 1990 and 2000), know a wide range of metaphors to express tropes for transforming the Torah’s effects as a remedy for bad yetzerim. According to Schofer, there are three groups of metaphors: The first group, metaphors of training and disciplines, depicts farm animals. The student is a calf, lamb or ox, and Torah maybe a yoke that controls or a goad that urges from behind. The second depicts rubbing, wearing away, or shaping of a hard substance such as stone or metal. Torah, as the active force, may be soft water, hard iron, or a hot flame. The third type of development metaphor centres upon agricultural imagery – the Self is a field that needs cultivation (2005, 92).

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In any case, the harder the Torah, the harder subjection, subordination, the better the process of Self transformation and making of the Self. Up to this point, I have depicted the Torah as an external constraint, as an outer – even if trans-generationally hermeneutically debated – and heteronomous remedy for bad yetzerim. At the same time, I said it has to be internalized. In this sense, Torah cannot be only externally accepted. Mitzvoth are external performative actions, in a complex relationship with ‘internal states’. According to Rabbi Nathan, a sage must ‘attend the multiple levels of action and internal states’ (2005, 148), reproducing the dialectic between acceptance and sincerity discussed in previous sections. The same kind of considerations can be advanced with reference to Confucian ethics (for a general introduction to Confucianism, see Yao 2000). In a sense, Confucianism is still more exemplary than rabbinic ethics. Take for example the idea of the human being as a ceremonial being. In Kongzi’s (Confucius) view, ‘the substance of … existence is the ceremony’: Promises, commitments, excuses, pleas, compliments, pacts – these and so much more are ceremonies or they are nothing. It is thus in the medium of ceremony that the peculiar human part our life is lived. The ceremonial act is the primary, irreducible event (Fingarette 1972, 14).

Still more radically, in Kongzi’s mind it is not only the humans that are ceremonial beings. The work of ceremony is constitutive of social life as such, in all its dimensions: moral, religious, and so on. Even if this kind of approach would sound familiar to sociologists trained in Goffman’s and Austin’s thought, from Confucianism they could find an interesting way of looking at the relationships between the individual and society. Confucianism, in fact, not only rejects any naïve – and sociologically untenable – contractualist approach (1972, 7), or the idea of the individual as right-bearing, it also rejects both the idea of the individual as an ultimate atom, and the idea of society as an organism (1972, 76). Differently from the Western tradition, it is not the individual per se who is sacred; the individual is not conceived, as in the Christian view, i.e., as a part of the divinity, an immortal soul with an inner dignity; the individual is a special being with ‘a unique dignity and power’, but derives from and is embedded in li, namely the holy ritual, the sacred ceremony. In Kongzi’s vocabulary li is conceived As a medium within which to talk about the entire body of the mores, or more precisely, of the authentic tradition and reasonable conventions of society. Confucius taught that the ability to act according to li and the will to submit to li are essential to that perfect and particularly human virtue or power which can be man’s (1972, 6-7).   On the notion of li in Confucianism after Kongzi, see Ivanhoe 1990 and 2000.

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So, once again, submission to li is not the opposite of a respectful attitude towards what is sacred in the individual, but it is, on the contrary, a condition of selfrealization, self-integrity, self-flowering (1972, 72). Submission to li transforms man in a sage shaping his instincts: Men are by no means conceived as being mere standardized units mechanically carrying out prescribed routines in the service of social or cosmic law. Nor are they Self-sufficient, individual souls who happen to consent to a social contract. Men become truly human as their raw impulse is shaped by li. And li is the fulfilment of human impulse, the civilized expression of it – not a formalistic dehumanization. Li is the specifically humanizing form of the dynamic relation of man-to-man (1972, 7).

Particularly relevant in the contest of the present reflections, is Kongzi’s idea of the individual. Here we can see all the differences with the Western and Christian tradition. Instead of being an ‘introspective conscience’, an inward oriented will, the Confucian individual looks ‘outward’, not ‘inward’ (1972, 30), conceived in relation with his status and role as defined by the li. The vocabulary of ‘inner life’ might be taken in Confucianism basically only in a metaphorical sense, given that Kongzi’s vision ‘provides no basis for seeing a man as a being of tragedy, of inner crisis and guilt; but it does provide a socially oriented, action-oriented view which provides for personal dignity’ (1972, 36). Differently from our Western mind, Confucianism does not understand psychological categories, given that the introspective conscience is a Western invention. As Fingarette writes, The point at issue is whether he (Kongzi) systematically located this spiritual dimension ‘inside’ the individual. Since we of the West can hardly conceive of it except in the language and imagery of the ‘inner’, the first important step in learning what Confucius can teach us on this topic is at least to notice that, although occasion for use of such a language is ever present in the Analects, its absence is (from our standpoint) glaring … For Confucius, the spiritual is public, ‘outer’ … What is more, his references to the ‘inside’ and to the ‘private’ are always by way of locating here one source of sickness, lack of moral development (1972, 46).

So, once again, we are dealing with action-oriented ethics, in which following the right path, the Way, means to respect the traditional corpus of li, whose promise is the making of a sage, self-realization within the outer, public space. Here the   In a sense, the idea of the human being as a ‘ceremonial being’, is proper not only to Confucianism or, in different terms, to rabbinic Judaism. Orthodoxy could be taken as another example, given that ‘Orthodoxy sees human beings above all as liturgical creatures’ (Ware 1997, 266).

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person is role-bearing, rites-bearing (Chaihark 2003, 44 note 40), instead of rightsbearing as in the common representation of Western liberalism. Once again, I am not simply opposing traditional ethics to a completely rationalized modern world, praising them to the skies against modern ethical and educational practices. I am not an ‘old fashioned Durkheimian’. As already mentioned, by reflecting on the relationship between ritual, judgment and autonomy, I want to underline what we have forgotten in our daily educational practices (as parents, for example), what we already do, usually unwittingly, and what we should rediscover, and balance better with our de-ritualized educational practices and ethics. The kind of normativity implied in the above reflection is, once again, immanent. Even if it is beyond the aims of this book, my point is that one could still hear the ‘rumour of angels’, if only one were capable of thinking of one’s life as a link in a chain of memory. At the same time, in our modern Western societies we need particularly well-tuned and acute hearing. If it is true that every process of civilizing that occurs at every generation shares some common features, i.e. with Confucian li – basically the ritualist and heteronomous dimension of etiquette rules (see Ahern 2007, Chapters 3 and 5) – it is as true that Western civilizing process described by Elias ended with the shaping of a homo clausus. Western rules of etiquette imply a disciplinary dimension as much as Confucian li (see Chaihark 2003, 44, and Taylor 2007, Chapter 2), and as much as the Jewish curbing of bad yetzerim through ritualistic obedience to the Torah’s mitzvoth; but the ultimate aim of the Western civilizing process seems to be both the shaping of instrumental reason, as Adorno and Horkheimer showed in the memorable pages of the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, and that of an individual understood as right-bearing; on the contrary, in the case of ritualistic ethics such as Rabbinic and the Confucian, the ultimate aim is the shaping of a connected Self, a person as role-bearing, within a holistic frame.

Chapter 5

Politics: An Anthropological Gaze 5.0 Not only liberal One of the aims of this book is to prospect horizons beyond familiar ways of thinking about society, individuals, politics and religion. In this chapter I intend to analyse both ritual and the sacred with reference to their relative place in contemporary politics. Here, I mean politics in a sense quite unfamiliar to liberal way of thinking. In any event, starting by expanding the conception of politics through an anthropological gaze (see Swartz et al. 2006), and attempting to look at politics from an anthropological perspective, my view is that our concept of politics definitely needs to be rethought. Firstly, as liberal political categories are not easily understood outside the Western world, they are not a universalistic basis for global politics. In addition, liberal categories are not even understood by everybody even within our own societies. As Seyla Benhabib observes critically in reference to John Rawls, the champion of normative contemporary liberalism, it is odd that Rawls does not acknowledge the fact that within Western democratic societies themselves there will be many groups and individuals who bear affinity with and share the value system of decent hierarchical peoples [The values of holistic societies, in Dumont’s terms, or of segmental societies, in Durkheim’s now old fashioned expression, M. R.]. Put sharply, observant Muslims and observant Jews are not ‘elsewhere’, they are our neighbors, citizens, and ourselves in liberal democratic societies (see Benhabib 2004, 85-6).

I hope that the perspective on politics here advocated will help to throw light on possible ways of thinking of modern, multicultural politics, usually underestimated by rationalistic conceptions. The challenge I have set myself here is to look at politics in a way that is much more feasible for those among us who cannot identify themselves in the (non universalizing) social, philosophical and anthropological presuppositions of liberalism and, at the same time, in a perspective that is sociologically more realistic. One way of facing this challenge, is to put politics ‘in context’, namely, by examining politics against the backdrop of ritual and the sacred.

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5.1 Politics and the cybernetics of the sacred First of all I will attempt to find an explanation of politics, coherent, in my view, with the Durkheimian tradition, which is focused on the relationship between politics and the need for social regulation. In this section, I will encompass politics within the cybernetics of the sacred. Secondly, I will consider the various consequences that this new (old?) vision of politics imply in terms of the understanding of democracy and political lexicon, my inspiration coming from Roy Rappaport, in his work on ritual and the sacred. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Roy Rappaport’s (†1997) most significant book, posthumously published in 1999 and the result of more than three decades of research on the relationships between religion, society and ecology, has been judged a ‘milestone in the anthropology of religion comparable in scope to the work of his great predecessor (Durkheim)’. Rappaport’s book is considered the ‘first systematic attempt to address the question which Durkheim himself left unanswered’ (Hart 1999, xiv). This viewpoint, expressed by Keith Hart, one of Rappaport’s colleagues at the University of Michigan, is also shared for example by Robert Bellah (1999, 569). If the later Durkheim was a radical thinker, as I myself believe, given his obsession that religion was the key to the study of (every) society and every aspect of social life, Rappaport’s investigation of the role of rituals and religion in the making of humanity can be considered in keeping with Durkheim’s theoretical radicalism. Consequently, Hart’s and Bellah’s views find myself in full agreement (on Rappaport see also Messer and Lambeck 2001). Again, in Hart’s view, Rappaport ‘acknowledges Durkheim as a founder’ (Hart 1999, xvi). I would speculate that he acknowledges Durkheim as a predecessor well beyond the number of pages he explicitly dedicates to the French sociologist – in his 500 page volume, Rappaport deals with Durkheim directly in more or less 8 pages – in part with reference to the ‘categories’, particularly time, and in part to the idea of the sacred. However, besides complex epistemological problems that might differentiate Rappaport from Durkheim, Durkheim is, in my view, the central core of Rappaport’s project. Like or perhaps even more so than The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity is a highly complex book, with its many offshoots. However, Rappaport suggests we read it as ‘a treatise on ritual: first on the internal logics of ritual, next on the products (like sanctity) that its logics entail, and on the nature of their truth, and finally, on the place of ritual and its products in humanity’s evolution’ (Rappaport 1999, 3). Here we find a slight but significant difference compared to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life which, in my opinion, is above all a treatise on the sacred, subsequently becoming page by page a treatise on ritual, in the end acknowledged by Durkheim as the dynamo   See also Humphrey and Laidlaw, who talk about ‘Rappaport neo-Durkheimian view’ (1994, 69).

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of religion, its most enduring element. On the contrary, Rappaport starts from ritual, right from the beginning acknowledging it as the core element of religion, moral obligation and social contract, as I will shortly attempt to show. Ritual is the dynamo of a hierarchy of regulative elements of social life. The centrality of regulation – another key similarity with Durkheim – and its relationship with ritual, can be considered the most suitable strand to thread the complex tissue of Rappaport’s book with our reflection on politics. According to Rappaport, social life is regulated by a hierarchy of structures, which he defines as the cybernetics of the Holy, encompassed by ritual. It is a topdown process, the towering elements of which are the so called Ultimate Sacred Postulates, i.e. linguistic and more rational components of the Holy, namely the sacred (in comparison to the numinous). Figure 5.1 represents in an oversimplified form the cybernetics of the Holy, the logics of which can also be expressed as follows: 1. USP sanctify authorities, institutions, and the various forms of directives constituting regulatory hierarchies; 2. The operations of the regulatory hierarchy affect, to say the least, prevailing material and social conditions; 3. Material and social conditions determine to a greater degree, or even define, the well-being of those subjects to the sanctified regulatory hierarchy; 4. Those subordinate to the regulatory hierarchy, the members of the community, are themselves the congregations participating in the rituals accepting, and thus establishing, the USP which, in turn, sanctify the regulatory hierarchy and, often, explicitly accepting the connection of elements of such hierarchies to the USP. Thus, the validity of the USP and the connection of elements of the regulatory hierarchies (such as monarchs) to those postulates, is ultimately contingent upon their acceptance by those presumably subject to them … Prophets not only may challenge the connections of incumbent authorities to the sources of sanctity but may also claim sanctified status for their own injunctions and even may proclaim new USP. 5. In sum, if authorities wish to maintain their sanctity, which is to say their legitimacy, and to maintain the sanctity of the regulatory structures over which they preside, they must be sure that those regulatory structures remain in reasonable working order and are reasonably responsive to those subject to them (1999, 429-30). Here it is worthwhile indicating elements that echo The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: firstly, politics – the main function of which is the regulation of social life – is only one element of the regulatory system, and has to be encompassed in a much broader perspective of cybernetics, the key of which is religion. That is why Durkheim at a certain stage stopped writing about politics, and shifted

Ultimate sacred postulate

Formal acceptance Numinous belief

Prophetic movements

Desantification of elements of regulatory hierarchy

Cosmological axioms Ritual withdrawal

Ritual participation

Corollaries

Ritual prescriptions

Sanctifies

Taboos

Commandments

Performatives

Directives

Authorities

Pledges, Testimony

Etc

Lower authorities Directives

Community well-being

Figure 5.1  The cybernetics of the holy

Social and economic conditions

Source: Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, 431, with permission.

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to religion; secondly, the sacred, the Ultimate Sacred Postulates that have a predominant position in the regulatory hierarchy, are eventually contingent upon the ritual legitimization on the part of the subject, exactly as in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Durkheim recognized and could explain, as opposed to Robertson Smith, God’s dependence upon practitioners and society’s dependence upon individuals. In Figure 5.1, the cybernetics of the Holy should be read clockwise. Ritual, as already noted, is the dynamo of the cybernetics of the Holy, and Rappaport’s analysis of the formal and structural logics of ritual is the most important contribution he gives, in my opinion, to the depth of Durkheim’s pioneering investigation. The most significant elements of Rappaport’s analysis are outlined as follows: 1. The definition of ritual. Ritual can be taken to denote ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’ (Rappaport 1999, 24). The crucial elements of this very ‘terse’ definition, all of them examined analytically by Rappaport, are ‘performance’ – and the different kinds of performances similar to ritual, such as theatre, drama, play, athletic contexts –, ‘formality’, ‘invariance’, ‘inclusion of both acts and utterances’, and, last but not least, ‘encoded by other than the performers’. 2. Ritual, among other things, is a tool that communicates messages and meanings. Rappaport distinguishes between three levels of meanings that have specific importance in ritual: low-order, middle-order and high-order meaning (1999, 70-2). Low-order meaning is grounded in distinction, as when we say that the meaning of the word ‘dog’ is dog, dog being distinct from cat. Taxonomies are the usual way to structure low-order meanings; middle-order meaning, on the other hand, is when we find similarities hidden beneath the surface of distinctions, and when we judge these similarities to be more important than distinctions. Metaphor is the paradigmatic household of middle-order meanings. Finally, highorder meaning is grounded in identity or unity, ‘the radical identification or unification of self with others’. With reference to high-order meaning, Rappaport writes that it is not so much, or even at all, intellectual but is, rather, experiential. It may be experienced through art, or in the acts of love, but is, perhaps, most often felt in ritual and other religious devotions. High order meaning seems to be experienced in intensity ranging from the mere intimation of being emotionally moved in, for instance, the course of ritual to those deep numinous experiences known as ‘mystical’ (1999, 71).   For a psychoanalytical explanation of Durkheim’s shift from politics to religion, see Lacroix 1981.   On the performative nature of rituals, see also Tambiah 1985.

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In other words, even if ritual as a tool communicates the whole complex of meanings, it is specifically connected with high-order meanings, those related to the less rational component of the Holy, namely the numinous. 3. As in Durkheim and some of his followers, ritual is conceived as the dynamo of the cybernetics of the sacred. The sacred is renewed but also produced ex novo by means of ritual, just as Durkheim maintained in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life echoing Bergaigne (Durkheim 1912a, 32). Consequently, the survival of the Sacred (or of the Ultimate Sacred Postulates) is contingent upon the individual’s willingness to participate in ritual. In short: by means of Rappaport’s analysis of the cybernetics of the sacred one might posit that politics can be understood anthropologically as an integral part of a regulatory chain of social life, the dynamo of which is ritual, and whose towering elements – that legitimate/sanctify the whole chain – are the Ultimate Sacred Postulates. As Rappaport shows, this kind of vision is relatively unproblematic in ‘segmental’ societies, namely societies where the social and politics are merged relatively speaking (because politics does not have an autonomous space, as for example in state-less societies) (see Swartz et al. 2006). The critical point is that this understanding of politics, encompassed within the cybernetics of the sacred, might appear inappropriate for modern Western societies. As I said at the beginning of this section, I am attempting to look at politics from a broader, in part unfamiliar, perspective. However, if this vision of politics is to involve us, it has to maintain a somewhat familiar look. What apparently prevents us from feeling intensely this idea of politics for modernity are different elements, including – as an illustration of their non-definitive nature – the following: •

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First of all, with the so called ‘end of ideologies’, modern politics, like modernity generally speaking, tends to become more and more de-ritualized. From a rationalistic point of view, longing for ritual in politics simply appears regressive. However, rituals continue to have a role in politics, as sociological studies show. For example, the rituals of reconciliation are a case in point; they have a significant role in bridging divided memories (see Alexander et al. 2004), i.e. in South Africa, or in Germany and in Italy at the end of World War II. Furthermore, politics, from a sociological point of view, can still be studied ‘as theatre’ (see Apter 2006). Politics has to do with differences, with low order meanings, not with high order meanings as ritual. However, as we have seen before, ritual also communicates self-referential – low order – meanings. Furthermore, this objection depends on a rationalistic bias, incapable of seeing how symbols

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and passions, and ritualistic semiogenesis, are constitutive of politics, even modern politics (see Kertzer 1988; Walzer 2006). Modern pluralistic politics does not imply any loyalty to ‘ultimate goals’, and as a consequence cannot be an expression of the Ultimate Sacred Postulates. However, what the cybernetics of the sacred maintains is not that politics expresses USPs, that would be idolatry (see Rappaport 1999, 446 ff.), but simply that it is legitimized by highly-ordered principles, such as for example juridical principles, particularly – in liberal democracies – constitutional principles, that can be understood as secular USPs. These kind of principles have a semisacred nature (on the idea of the semi-sacred, see Watts Miller 2002), that retain the non-negotiable authority of the sacred (see Seligman 2000). If one looks at politics as the space of reasons, i.e. as in the deliberative and liberal approaches, the greatest barrier to a serious consideration of politics as encompassed within the cybernetics of the sacred is the supposed unreflective and dogmatic nature of the sacred itself. From this angle, Girard’s nexus between violence and the sacred (see Girard 1972) effectively depends on the unreflective and dogmatic nature of the sacred. The sacred, so rationalist reductionism asserts, is unchangeable because it rests upon claims of authority, that cannot – contrary to Habermas’ hopes – be linguistificated into validity claims (see Habermas 2006b). The sacred, maintain the critics, is unchangeable and unreflective. However, the defence of a ‘liturgical approach to politics’ can be outlined as follows: a) The sacred is not unchangeable because its rational component, the Ultimate Sacred Postulates – the other component being the Numinous (see Otto 1926) – is ritually produced, and ritual communicates both canonical and self-referential messages. Given the self-referential nature of every message transmitted ritually, canonical messages included, there is no USP outside time and space. So variance is part of every ritual. No ritual can be completely equal to another, none can be a simple reproduction of a model (see Rappaport 1999, 36 ff.). b) Given that USPs are produced ritually, ritual is also the catalyst of USPs developments. We have seen in Chapter 3, section 3.3, that liminal conditions are an integral part of ritual practices, consequently order and chaos are both part of the effects of rituals. In other words, the sacred is

  Kertzer’s well known book on Ritual, Politics, and Power expresses a very Durkheimian point of view, and it is also perfectly coherent with Rappaport’s view of ritual. It is Kertzer, for example, who recognizes that ‘the common reading of Durkheim, that he identified solidarity with value consensus in his interpretation of ritual, misses the strength of his argument. His genius lies in having recognized that rituals builds solidarity without requiring the sharing of beliefs. Solidarity is produced by people acting together, not by people thinking together’ (1988, 76).   On the Constitution as the Western fetish, see Kertzer 1988.

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not unchangeable because rituals, that are at the basis of the cybernetic of the sacred, are powerful means of social and cultural change. c) The sacred is not unreflective (i) because doubt, scepticism, is an integral part both of faith and ritual. Rappaport, for example, writes that even the most devout, indeed especially the most devout, sometimes harbour doubts or even voice scepticism concerning propositions expressed in liturgies to which they scrupulously conform, and acceptance in this deep sense has much in common with certain Christian notions of faith. Fehean O’Doherty, a Catholic priest, writes: ‘faith is neither subjective conviction nor experienced certitude, but may be at its best where doubt exists’, and Paul Tillich claims that faith necessarily includes an element of uncertainty or doubt (Rappaport 1999, 120).

•

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Furthermore, Chapter 4 illustrates how reflectivity, different kinds of reflectivity, are an integral part of ritualized actions, both liturgical and postmodern social practices. (ii) Rituals are not all the same. When the sacred is conceived as completely heteronomous, space for critical judgment is limited. What is challenged here is the very idea of an autonomous Self; however, when the sacred is at least partially immanent, as in the case of the semi-sacred, room for critical reflectivity is greater. The relation between beliefs, sincerity, and acceptance of liturgical orders, on the one hand, and the kind of reflectivity, on the other, is different for example in liturgical rituals and postmodern, mystical social practices. (iii) Once again, as Chapter 3 clarifies, ritual is a self-critical concept, because it shows how reflectivity is a modern fetish, and is the outcome of interactional ritual chains. In other words, the sacred does not seem to be considered necessarily unchangeable and/or unreflective. Most of the time, the dogmatic and violent nature of the sacred seems to be connected more to a political instrumental use of the sacred, than to the sacred in itself. One could say ironically that it is a loss of heteronomy, and not heteronomy per se, that

  Reason, doubt and even scepticism are the mark of Mu’tazilites in Islam. Some of them used to say that ‘the first, necessary condition of knowledge is doubt’, and that ‘fifty doubts are better than one certainty’. This point of view was shared even by Ghazalī, notoriously so far from Mutazilism (see Goldziher 1981, 87-8). Here another interesting parallel between ritual and play emerges. As Huizinga stresses in his classic work on play, children and adults involved in play ‘play up to the role’ (1970, 28), their behaviours being a mix of ‘belief and irony’, seriousness and awareness of the constructed nature of the reality they are living; the same kind of behaviour proper to people involved in religious rituals as they are described by ethnologists.

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causes violence. The sacred order is internally pluralistic and not ‘absolute’ (see Mahmutćehajic 2005). In conclusion, a frequent objection is that according to which the sacred, in the Durkheimian horizon, would be coextensive of the whole society, so that it is, once again, in contrast to modern pluralism (see Taylor 2002). Leaving aside the philological correctness of this objection moved against Durkheim (one I would reject), the cybernetics of the Holy can be applied to every group within a society capable of producing a particular idea of the sacred, so that from a sociological point of view a plurality of cybernetics of the Holy in modern societies can easily be imagined. If society can be conceived as a ‘union of traditions’, the logic of the cybernetics of the sacred might be reiterated within each of them. This is a particularly relevant point. The idea of the cybernetics of the sacred implies a polycentric idea of society, democracy and jurisgenesis.

5.2 The many faces of the sacred: Society as a ‘union of traditions’ and post-liberal democracies A frequent objection to the Durkheimian idea of the sacred is that it is incompatible with modern pluralism. As Taylor and others believe, a Durkheimian position implies total overlapping between the sacred and the institutional, political arrangements of a given society. In other words, it implies the coincidence of sacredness and statehood, sacredness and nationhood, coherently with early-modernity. I do not consider the objection to be well grounded. Durkheim’s emphasis on the internal structure of society in different groups, and his emphasis on intermediate groups and corporations as distinct sources of solidarity (see Greve 1998, Watts Miller 1996), might be considered coherent, at least theoretically if not from a historicist point of view, with a polycentric systemic idea of contemporary societies (on the contrary, for a more ‘traditional’ view, see Dingley 2008). In turn, this concept is coherent with that of the reiterated and plural cybernetics of the sacred. The modern idea of society resembles a triangle with political institutions, i.e. the State, as the apex. In modern democratic States, parliaments are the legitimate source of binding laws, the expression of popular sovereignty. However,   Religiously speaking, the sacred order is internally (namely for religious reasons) aware of its contingent nature; at least in the religions of salvation, the sacred but mundane order is not yet the salvation; on the contrary, it is necessary precisely because salvation and the Reign of God are always postponed; the sacred order is necessary for people who live outside salvation; in this sense, the work of ritual is always never-ending, and ritual knows that is built on impurity. Such an awareness can be lost, and prophets may be necessary to remind us that the logic of ritual is sacrifice (necessary to purify from impurity, weakness, pain, and sufferance that are the rule in human life), but it means simply that ritual is a task for human beings. On the contingent character of the sacred order, see Quinzio 1991.

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contemporary societies can no longer be considered along these lines. Globalization and processes of differentiation have changed social morphology. If we think of our contemporary global world society, we cannot think of it as an inter-national community, but as a summit-less and centre-less society, a collage of multiple global and differentiated subsystems (economy, health, education, intellectual research, professionals, politics, religions, arts and so on). Each of these subsystems has its own operative code – its own medium in Luhmannian terms – its own inner crossboundary rules in the global civil society, rules in search of a distinct constitutional process (see Teubner 1997). What is difficult to understand for scholars of modern constitutional law, is that these global civil constitutions are not the outcome of state-centred parliament legislation, but the outcome of autonomous subsystems of self-legislation. Civil constitutions are the expression of a law without State. Moreover, these new constitutional rights have not only to protect individuals against the State, as in classical constitutional law, but they have to protect non individual liberties, such as the differentiation and autonomy of each subsystem, against the colonization of other subsystems (see Teubner and Graber 1997). The new constitutional rights developed within global subsystems are the outcome of a difficult balance between spontaneous forces of civil spheres, on the one hand, and their formal and institutional disciplining on the other. The purpose of this logic is that a) it is sociologically realistic, and b) it strengthens the autonomy of civil societies, coherently with part of the left-wing Western tradition, above all with a Gramsci-inspired idea of post-liberal democracy (see Golding 1992, Chapter 6; Cohen and Arato 1992, 142-59; Cohen 1999). As Gunther Teubner emphasizes, bringing up an old theological discussion, Is there an implicit message for legal policies as opposed to ‘De-constitutionalize formal organizations!’ or ‘Strengthen communal norms!’? If any, it is: ‘Strengthen the networks’ poly-contextualising!’ This is a neologism for an old idea. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had developed the idea in the connection between theodicy and the reform of the church. Collisions between incompatible norms require new institutional forms. He requested ‘... une certaine nouvelle Logique’ according to which unity becomes thinkable as multiplicity in such a way that individual manifestations of one principle are coordinated without at the same time being dissolved into a higher generality. Leibniz searched for harmony not by homogenization but by constructive interweaving of diversities and contradictions. This is network logic. If God’s word is expressed as a double bind to the believers, if they are exposed simultaneously to bona opera and to solo gratia, if the contradictory command is ‘Obey the hierarchy!’ and ‘Obey your conscience!’, then the alternative between inter-confessional war or submission to the repressive church hierarchy seems inevitable. Poly-contextualising which combines hierarchy with an overarching unity would represent the new institutional logic in ecclesia semper reformanda (Teubner 2002, 331).

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Poly-contextualizing is exactly what allows any tradition or subsystem – each of which is capable of generating its own logics, codes, ideas of embedded practices, sacred principles and so on – to keep its autonomy, to remain loyal to its principles, to respect its integrity and its collective conscience, even in the context of continuous exchanges with the environment; it is what explains how, as I have claimed and how the next chapter will show, with reference to religious traditions, loyalty to particular traditions and the integrity of specific subsystems logics do not necessarily mean complete closure and clash or conflict of segments which compose contemporary world society. In political terms, the concepts of poly-contextualizing and constitutionalism without State seem to be coherent with a pragmatist idea of democracy as a set of practices shared by groups that have different ideas of the sacred. Democracy here is a form of public organization to protect its interests. As Seligman illustrates: The public can … be characterized by black-hatted Hassidim, long-bearded mullahs, Christian evangelicals, motorcycle racing lesbian electricians or any other grouping you may come up with. To live together there are sets of formal mechanisms that may be put in place to protect their interests from either excessive political power on the part of the State or market-generated externalities with broad social effects. These mechanisms may be conceptualized along the lines of those institutional complements of Dahl’s Polyarchy, i.e. 1) elected officials; 2) free and fair elections; 3) inclusive suffrage; 4) the right to run for office; 5) freedom of expression; 6) alternative information; and 7) associational autonomy. These, to refer back to the invocation of Max Weber’s typologies of actions, may all be conceived of as purposive-rational modes of action and need not wear the halo of an independent and discreet ideology. One can be a sincere hippy or an obsessively driven parish priest – each can enact the orders of political democracy without sharing an overarching ideological commitment to the orders of creation. That many who advocate for democracy also advocate for a certain type of ‘sincere’ model of selfhood is a different matter and one I would warn against, had De Tocqueville not done so over a century and half ago.

The reference to Dahl, however, should not be misleading. Again as Seligman argues, I wish to note however that unlike Dahl, I am not claiming that these mechanisms can exist over time simply as ‘contractual mechanisms’. The argument here is not rooted in Spencer’s visions of contracts. Rather, and this is the crucial element, different communities can legitimize these mechanisms, in different ways, on different bases. In Durkheim’s terms, different communities sharing their own pre-contractual understandings, their own separate and unique collective conscience, can nevertheless share practices arising out of that pre-contracting without sharing the legitimizing framework. Moslems, Jews, Christians and secular humanists can all share a practice of multi-party democracy, while each roots them in a very different system of meaning and legitimacy and ideas of

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Different communities share their own pre-contractual understandings, their own collective conscience, their own codes, ideas of the sacred (immanent or transcendent). At the same time, they share a practice of multi-party democracy, rooted in different ways in their traditions. This is the language of polycontextualizing pluralism and plural cybernetics of the sacred. This is a language I want to retain, respectful of the ‘dignity of difference’ (Sacks 2002) both within the borders of Western democracies (see Benhabib 2004) and outside those borders. Take the debate on the so-called Asian values (see Bauer and Bell 1999). With specific reference to the East Asian context, Daniel Bell recently advanced convincingly, argument against the simple implementation of Western-style models, and proposed ‘alternative justifications and practices’ more appropriate for that context: If human rights, democracy and capitalism are to take root and produce beneficial outcomes in East Asia, they must be adjusted to contemporary East Asian political and economical realities and to the values of non-liberal East Asian political traditions such as Confucianism and Legalism … Local knowledge is therefore essential for realistic and morally informed contributions to debates on political reform in the region, as well as for mutual learning … (Bell 2006, 9).

With reference to Muslim democracies, and above all to the role played by religion in Muslim civil society, Hefner stressed other differences from Western Atlantic democracies: Muslim democrats, like those in Indonesia, tend to be more civil democratic or Tocquevillian than they are (Atlantic) liberal in spirit. They deny the need for an Islamic State. But they insist that society involves more than autonomous individuals, and democracy more than markets and state. Democracy requires a non-coercive culture that encourages citizens to respect the rights of others as well as to cherish their own. The public culture depends on mediating institutions in which citizens develop habits of free speech, participation, and toleration.

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In all this, they say, there is nothing undemocratic about Muslim voluntary associations (as well as those of other religions) playing a role in the public life as well as in personal ethics (Hefner 2000, 13).

My view is that a) for some people, within and outside the borders of Western democracies, politics is more comprehensible if encompassed within the cybernetics of the sacred, and that, in turn b) their understandings of democracy can be better grasped from a post-liberal perspective rather than from a liberal one. Finally, c) that a post-liberal idea of democracy is more coherent with the sociological fact of contemporary poly-contextualizing, increasingly stateless global societies. This is how the idea of society as a union of traditions, the vocabulary of traditions, ritual and the sacred can fit a political and sociological future-oriented theoretical perspective. 5.3 Non-Atlantic democracies Encompassing politics as a regulatory mechanism of social life within a cybernetics of the sacred implies, as I have already pointed out, several consequences. The most important, roughly speaking, is scepticism toward the universal value of the liberal idea of democracy. However, this does not mean scepticism towards democracy in itself. If one accepts that democracy implies at least some idea of the government of the people by the people, and some idea of freedom, equality and plurality, from the critique of the universal value of the liberal idea of democracy it does not necessarily follow that democracy is narrowly circumscribed, as the advocates of the clash of civilizations maintain. On the contrary, empirical studies on democratization in different areas of the world show that ‘the key to the possibility of democracy is not singular but multiple’, and that ‘there is no one-size-fits-all democracy but a variety of forms linked by family resemblances. Democracy’s values of freedom, equality and tolerance-in-pluralism do not come with unbending instructions for all places and times’ (2000, 215-6). At least from a sociological point of view, assuming that in order to work democracy needs to be resonant with local cultures and contexts is like stating the obvious. Being not only a procedural matter, democracy needs a proper anthropology, namely a set of civic virtues, and they must, in turn, be resonant with a certain form of life. Consequently, the most promising way to deal with democracy at the present time, intellectually speaking, is not, in my opinion, an abstract and formal way of reasoning, but a historically-minded hermeneutics of traditions, capable of finding inner resources to deal with a democratic political regulation of social life from within different cultures. In the present context, I simply want to consider two examples of such hermeneutics of political traditions (the next chapter will be devoted to a hermeneutics of religious traditions): Islam and Confucianism. The reasons are quite obvious. On the one hand, they are particularly relevant in the present global scenario, both within and outside the borders of Western democracies; on the other, the Islamic case enables us to take

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into consideration a good example of an idea of politics encompassed within a cybernetic of the sacred, and Confucianism a very good example of a ritualistic idea of politics. In other words, ritual and the sacred play a central role both in Muslim and Confucian understandings of politics. Two other preliminary observations are key. Firstly, Islam and Confucianism have to be considered here as valid ideal-type concepts, even taking into consideration crucial regional differences; secondly, taking for granted what empirical studies seem to suggest, namely that if it is true that religion can sometimes be a kind of ‘smoked glass concealing the nature of power from those subject to it’, as the Enlightenment has always suggested (and there is no need in my opinion, to dwell on this point), it is as true that ritual and religion in general ‘can be regarded as a challenge to existing hierarchies’ (Ahern 2007, 78), a point on the contrary, quite frequently forgotten. 5.3.1 Islam: politics and the sacred Discussions on the compatibility and/or incompatibility of Islam and democracy are commonplace nowadays. It is well known that these debates cross the Western intellectual and political world as well as the Muslim world, dividing participants in many different factions. In the present context, I want briefly to take Islam into consideration as a good example of an understanding of politics encompassed within a cybernetic of the sacred. Let me begin by calling on semantic studies on the concept of the sacred for help. From them, we learn that Harâm, from the source hrm, means basically ‘to set apart’ (Arnaldez 1993, 351). In this sense, sacred means places, such as the Ka’ba of Mecca, but also God’s positive commandment, and any divine property. At the same time, Harâm also forbids by virtue of the impurity of things, such as that of not eating pork and other foods, and not drinking fermented drinks. In each case, Allah is the source of the sacred, and Harâm means to put oneself under God’s will (Ries 2007, 10). As in the case of Judaism, the entire existence of the Muslim observant is shaped by his obedience to God’s will. It is not easy to find a more radical and consequent example of willed subjection to a heteronomous will than Islam. So, it would not be surprising that politics is understood within the same frame. However, one has to try to make the effort of understanding the complex ideal-type Muslim attitude toward politics. On the Christian horizon, politics has long been understood as a kind of evil, sometimes necessary but nevertheless evil. According to Augustine, the political body is a human creation, and it is the realm of evil, or a remedy against original sin. From the Muslim perspective, on the contrary, political authority is, or should be, according to Lewis, neither evil nor a necessary remedy, but the expression of God’s will, a way of keeping and extending His will (Lewis 1988, Chapter 2). Nevertheless, this statement should not be understood as the   From an anthropological point of view, see Gluckman 1963 and 1965.

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proof of a way of making politics sacred; on the contrary, it means that politics and political authority are subject to Ultimate Sacred Postulates. Politics and political authority are not sacred in themselves; they are not the ultimate source of authority, but are dependent on a heteronomous source. In this sense, if it is a big mistake to understand Islam as a theocracy – given that there is neither Church nor priesthood – it would be correct to understand it as theocentric (Campanini 2005). In the context of Axial Civilizations, the radical subjection to God’s will means disenchantment of the world, the first step toward its de-sacralizing. It is not the actual world that is sacred, but Transcendence. The actual world has to be seen, in the Muslim horizon, constantly in the light of God’s will, but this doesn’t mean, or not necessarily, that the actual world is fully consistent with His will. According to Eliade, every act – physiological, mental, social, historical – being made thanks to God is under His jurisdiction (Eliade 1981, Vol. III, Cap. XXXIII). However, only God is Transcendent; human things, politics included, are part of the immanent realm. Consequently, fiqh, Coranic jurisprudence, and the sharī’a, positive law, let God’s slip into history and praxis. The outcome, according to Hasan Hanafi, is not that history becomes sacred, but that faith is ‘secularized’ (Campanini 2005, 62). Consequently, human understanding of God’s will is always incomplete and fallible, so that positive law must include a quota of humility. In principle, one can think of politics as both encompassed within a cybernetic of the sacred, as legitimated by Ultimate Sacred Postulates, and not sacred in itself. What is very difficult, if not impossible, is understanding politics and religion as two completely separate issues, and articulating the relationships between them along liberal lines. It is not just a coincidence that the Muslim vocabulary has nothing like Western concepts of laicité or secularization (Lewis 1988; Campanini 2005). Nor would it appear surprising that Muslims look to their religion in order to give a shape both to social order and their personal life, and cannot easily accept the idea (and the praxis) of the privatization of religion. Islam has a holistic mind, a full communitarian understanding of the relationship between individual and community, and perspectives that want to make Islam coherent with (Western) democracy by turning Islam into Protestantism (in Europe, i.e., Bassam Tibi) do not really work with inner resources. In order to think of Islam and politics as coherent with a broad idea of democracy – implying the idea of government of the people by the people, equality, freedom and pluralism – drawn from within, only a few presuppositions are necessary. The most important is the possibility of a hermeneutics of the sacred book, namely that the gateway of religious interpretation (ijtihad) be re-opened. Now, it is well known that there are different attitudes towards the hermeneutics of the Qur’an and   See Akthar 2008, 35 ‘Buried beneath the rubble of endless Christian-Muslim polemics is an intractable difference over the meaning of religion. We may define religion in Protestant Christian terms as private, individual and voluntary although it is unlikely that any religion exists thus abstracted from social and political reality. Islam is explicitly public, communal and politicized, that is, coercive if and whenever empowered.’

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its commentaries, different perspectives between Sunnites and Shiites, intellectual and religious schools, political movements. However, this is already part of the answer to the problem. It is highly significant that there is an enormous range of opinion among Muslims on exactly this point, as on many others. The Qur’an and its commentaries are rich with pluralistic interpretations. As it is well known, and as we will see in the next Chapter, the Qur’an abhors compulsion in religion, and has a clear divine justification for the existence of different communities among human beings (5, 48). Furthermore, according to many authors and Muslim intellectuals, pluralism is inherent in the nature of Islam (see Aslan 2006, 262). This is because Islam, like Judaism and differently from Christianity, is more an orthopraxis than an orthodoxy. Islam is a religion without mysteries and sacraments, and consequently without priesthood and Church. In order to gain salvation, it is necessary to act in conformity with legal prescription. It is behaviour that really matters. Inner feelings and thoughts are, according to this perspective, something that nobody but God should judge, and this, according to Muslims, enables broader subjective opinion and a wider debate. When orthopraxis prevails over orthodoxy, it is much more difficult to say what heresy actually is. In this sense, again, Islam considers practices prior to beliefs and itself as an anti-dogmatic religion (Campanini 2005, IX-XII). Before going on, let’s pause just for a moment. I have been drawing a portrait of Islam as a holistic religion and culture, according to which the sacred is an integral part of every act, public and private, of the Muslim observant. Politics, within this frame, is subject to God’s will as is everything else. It is inscribed within a cybernetic of the sacred. At the same time, as I mentioned, politics is not sacred per se, it is merely a limited way of slipping God’s will down into the praxis of created and consequently limited human beings; further, I recalled how in principle, Islam is pluralistic in nature, and how Qur’an and its commentaries are rich in different interpretations. So it seems we are kept in between: we cannot look at Islam according to the Western Protestant-like lines of privatization of religion and secularization (ideas not consistent with the Muslim mind), but it is at the same time a mistake to look at Islam as a theocratic political body. Needless to say, above all at the present time – and for very complex reasons that include Western responsibilities – the dream of an Islamic State is not beyond some Islamist political movements. But this is a platitude. What is not a platitude is to keep the political and the social separated. As already mentioned, many Muslims still look to their religion for principles of public order as well as personal life (Hefner 2000, 10), whereas they – including pious Muslims – deny the wisdom of a monolithic ‘Islamic’ State (see An-na’im 2008). In between, there is the idea of ‘civil precedence’, i.e. Tocqueville and Habermas’ conviction according to which democratic life depends not just on governments but also on resources and habits widespread in society. Confronting Western modernity, Islam may try to make modernity Islamic, or to make Islam like Western modernity. Dealing with contemporary politics, religion may try to use politics (even if most frequently the opposite happens) to ‘launch a holy

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war for society as a whole’ (2000, 219), or may opt for separatist sectarianism. However, there is also a third option, more consistent with the civic association tradition, and more consistent in my opinion with the cybernetic of the sacred and poly-contextualist politics described above. It is an already proven point of view in many democratization processes in the Islamic world: Rather than state conquest or separatist isolation, this approach accepts the diversity of public voices, acknowledging that this is, in some sense, the nature of modern things. What follows after this varies widely, but the underlying pluralist premise remains. The civil option may promote public religion, but distanced from the coercive machinery of state. It strides proudly into the public arena but insists that this message is clearest when its bearers guard their independence. Religious voices must be ready to balance and critique the state and the market, rather than give both a greater measure of social power. Here is a religious reformation that works with, rather than against, the pluralizing realities of our age (2000, 219-20).

From these considerations it consequently has to follow that principles of democratic self-government are to be found within the above outlined ‘Islamic’ cybernetics of the sacred. Usually, political philosophers and theorists sensitive to the fact that one size (the liberal) doesn’t fit all, and consequently sensitive to the importance of particular contexts, stress above all principles that seem to fit Islam political culture. The principles in point are the Shūrà, namely the old principle of consultation, established by the Qur’an itself, and the old millet system (see Moussalli 2008; An-na’im 2008). The Qur’an prescribes (i.e. III, XLII, 38) consultations as the right way to make decisions concerning public affairs. This is why, according to some Muslim intellectuals, Islam does not need Western liberal ideas. According to Al-Jābrī, for example, In our contemporary era it cannot be said that models of democracy exist which are the patrimony of the entire human race. Should Shūrà followers be guided back along the route of democratic elections; should the extent of power Heads of State exercise in a Republican regime be determined, and at the same time, should executive power be confined to governments which are obliged to answer to parliament, both in democratic and republican regimes; should we determine the specific responsibilities heads of state, prime ministers and the representative of the people (parliament) have to discharge, so that only the latter is the unique source of power, well the basic truth is Shūrà followers in our contemporary age cannot do other than accept and put these three principles into practice (Al-Jābrī, cit. in Campanini 2005, 53).

What Islam cannot accept, is that religion and politics should be entirely separated, and that democracy rests on a secularized understanding of society. Political secularization implies that political and religious power are not in the same hands. Secularism is a world view, a metaphysical conception implying that religion is

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eradicated from public life (Aslan 2006, 261). So democracy – expressed in terms of Shūrà as popular representation, ijma as political participation, bayh’ah as universal suffrage (2006, 258) – can be translated into indigenous terms; what is not necessary, however, is that secularism be the foundation of a democratic society. 5.3.2 Confucianism: politics and ritual Local knowledge is essential, and the hermeneutics of local political cultures is the most appropriate argumentative style in political philosophy. On the contrary, it is only an exception. With reference to the East Asian context, Daniel Bell recently denounced the ignorance of Confucianism on the part of Western political thinkers, and the attitude of applying their own general and abstract normative arguments on liberal democracy to that context, as if they do not doubt at all that ‘West is best’ (Bell 2006, 1-6). Compared to what occurs in other domains of Western culture – such as art, psychology, and medicine – political theorists do not seem to take into consideration even the eventuality of a mutual learning from the Confucian tradition. However, Confucianism is a great resource, both from a normative and analytical point of view. In our context, I want to consider above all the analytical aspect, but I endorse Bell’s and Chaibong’s normative attitude.10 From our perspective, Confucianism is a favourable standpoint from which to investigate the place of ritual in politics (see Ahern 2007). Our point of departure must be li. In the previous chapter (section 4.3) we have seen the key role that li plays in the process of self-cultivation. Now, we are about to enter – if only for a moment – the domain of Confucian political thought, and li will be, once again, our Virgil. This is because, as Chaihark writes, ‘the Confucian notion of li lies at the intersection of politics and education. It is a marvellous combination of education, self-cultivation, training, discipline, restraint, authority, and legitimacy’ (Chaihark 2003, 43). As we will see, discipline acquired by means of li is one of the best ways of submitting politics and authorities to those restraints which, in the Western context, are represented by constitutional principles. Li provides for many political virtues, such as openness towards others, transparency, accountability, that liberal political culture highly appreciates: A political leader who is disciplined by li is completely open to others; his actions are transparent; and he works through non coercive measures based on public, shared understandings. The virtue of transparency in politics, especially

10  ‘Confucian values may have universal appeal and they may be feasible and desirable even in societies without a Confucian heritage (although defenders of Confucianism face more of an uphill struggle in such contexts). Our aim is not to replace Western (liberal) modernity with an Eastern Asian version but rather to articulate some Confucian values and practices that could shape modern political, economic, and legal institutions in desirable ways, mitigating some of their more obvious excesses’ (Bell and Chaibong 2003, 27-8).

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democratic politics, needs no explanation. Thus, a government disciplined through li would be regarded as legitimate by East Asians (2003, 50).

The virtues of li are many, from the political point of view too. Without rites, according to Kongzi, ‘we would not be able to differentiate between the ruler and the minister, the superior and the inferior, old and young, man and woman, father and son, elder brother and younger brother; and without rites we would not be able to determine the intimate and distant in social interaction’ (Chan 2008, 116). Li, in other words, is essential and preliminary to the understanding of the basic dimensions of politics: hierarchical differences, and discipline above all. However, ritual is not only external constraint, and superimposed discipline. As Fingarette maintains, by means of education it becomes second nature. A well trained sage experiences rites as his own identity. Rites discipline is mitigated by a peculiar human quality, ren, that is an ‘expression of humanity’ (2008, 117). Ren is the ability to sympathetically understand the needs of others and to take care for others. A political leader disciplined by li must also have this humane quality, that has to ‘instil a strong humanistic spirit into rites, providing the ethics of sympathy, reciprocity, and care into an otherwise essentially hierarchical system of social relationships’ (2008, 117). Harmony (a widely appreciated value), in the Confucian horizon, coexists with hierarchical differences by means of ren. So, ‘the marriage of ren and rites helps contain an unequal relationship in harmony’ (2008, 118). The centrality of li in the Confucian understanding of politics is not the only difference compared with the Western mainstream self-understanding of politics. Confucian and liberal democratic politics differ in other respects too. Let me briefly mention three main differences. Firstly, Confucianism – and consequently the Confucian understanding of politics – is holistic. Secondly, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Confucianism does not share with liberalism the idea of an autonomous, free individual. Rather, in the Confucian horizon, the person is its social roles (rather than simply playing them), starting with the family. Thirdly, ‘if they are free, independent individuals who come together in voluntary associations – and thus form civil society – it follows that there will not be any voluntary associations of this kind in early Confucian thought’ (Rosemont 2008, 47). Consequently, one of the main differences compared with liberal democracy is that, within the Confucian horizon, we cannot draw a clear boundary between voluntary associations – namely civil society in the Western horizon – and the sphere of the State. It is not easy to find a well-defined open space between the individual and the State. Since classical Confucianism, but also in other variants of Confucianism (see Nosco 2008, 21-3), boundaries are not so well defined and relationships between the individual, the family, and the state have to be conceived more in terms of concentric circles: ‘social and political order was conceived in terms of mutually implicating radial circles, so that strong people, family, community, state and cosmos are coterminous and mutually entailing. As such, the notion of “public

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contrasted with the distinct sphere of private life” has little relevance for Chinese society’ (Hall and Ames 2003, 137). In effect, not only the political but also the social order are not clearly distinguishable, but they are in a sense thought of in terms of the private sphere. A good political leader, accordingly, presents himself as a good paterfamilias. The point is not that social spheres are not differentiated. Confucianism’s five relationships – ruler/subject, parent/child, husband/wife, elder brother/younger brother, friend/friend – help us to think of differentiated social roles (see Yao 2000, 217). The point is that loyalties are graduated, family in first place and, last but not least in our context, they are all ritualistically shaped, and the entire community is ritually organized, without significant differences between social spheres. In this sense, lì is the organizational principle, the key to understanding the working mechanism of both ‘private’ and ‘public’ life, whereas lì itself allows the grasping and shaping of different relationships, and accordingly, mobility from one sphere to another. Beyond differences between schools, and different ways of reacting to modernity (Nosco 2008), the central message of Confucianism is univocal. According to Joseph Chan more simply put, Confucianism holds that people should cultivate their minds and virtues through lifelong learning and participation in rituals; they should treat their family members according to the norms of filial piety and fatherly love, respect their superiors and rulers, and show a graded concern and care for all; learned intellectuals above all, should devote themselves in politics and education to promoting the Way and helping to build a good society (Chan 2008, 114).

Confucianism, in other words, is a form of ethical, social, and political perfectionism (2008, 115). The perfectionist structure of Confucianism raises the problem of the ‘proper role of society and the state in dealing with disagreements over ethical judgment’(ibid.). We know the liberal responses to the modern fact of pluralism: the rule of law, constitutional limits to power, checks and balances, the principle of state neutrality. We also know that, in conformity with our favoured strategies, we need to look for functional equivalents within the Confucian tradition. The perfectionist structure of Confucianism and the above mentioned differences with liberal democracy do not imply that it cannot deal with pluralism. Once again, we must begin with lì. As mentioned above, li lies at the junction of politics and education. When applied to Confucian scholars, li has to prepare disciplined political leaders, but when applied to political leaders, li functions, in principle and historically in the past, as a constitutional principle. According to Chaihark,

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Observance to the prescriptions of li was of the utmost importance for each ruler because that was what secured the legitimacy of the Confucian ruler. Because their political legitimacy depended on correctly regulating their conduct according to li, rulers had to pay the utmost attention to the detailed specifications and correct observance of li, and this meant that they had to surround themselves with experts on matters of ritual propriety (2003, 45).

Li is a way to restrain and curb rulers’ unlimited passions, perfectly coherent with the Confucian ideal of self-cultivation. It works as a way to prevent abuses of power.11 Another key feature of Western liberal democracy is the central role given to law. Not only because the rule of law is one of the two main characteristics of a liberal democracy – not immediately coherent with the other, namely popular sovereignty – but also because law is the key way to cope with conflicts stirred by personal disputes. Law, in other words, is the most important way to make justice. However, as Jerold S. Auerbach reminds us, justice is possible also without law (Auerbach 1983, 3). In the Confucian context, i.e., ‘mediation rather than litigation was the preferred means of dispute settlement in ordinary civil disputes among the people’ (Chen 2003, 257). Litigation, in fact, is perceived and criticized – even in an increasingly rationalized East Asia – because of its negative effects on the disruption of harmonious social relationships, whereas the realization of this ideal is a common denominator for Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. Despite liberal criticisms of mediation (see Chen 2003, 282-5), one has to remember that mediation is now conceived of as a valid alternative principle even in the Western countries (presently open to Confucian legal/political principles): In the last two decades, some major legal systems in the West, particularly in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Britain [and I would add: Italy, M. R.], have been promoting the use of mediation as a means of ‘alternative dispute settlement’. Mediation is seen as much cheaper and usually less time-consuming than litigation. It also has the advantage of being able to preserve the social relationships between the parties concerned or even to achieve reconciliation between them (2003, 258).

Preference accorded to mediation vs. litigation is not the only proof of Confucian antagonism to legalism. There is also another feature of old traditional Confucian society not completely obsolete even in rationalized urban contexts, that is to say ‘personalism’. Personalism is the core of an ethics of mutual help that ‘developed originally as a neighbourhood or communal ethical code of conduct among a group of selected persons who are closely related to each other through blood relationships or a long period of acquaintance. It becomes a network ethic’ 11  Another way, historically, was the censoring system, the function of which was that of making power accountable. On the censoring system, see Mo 2003, 54-68.

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(Yun-Shik 2003, 98); a network ethic proper to pro-democracy movements, characterized by diffuse specific relationships: Commitment to a radical political ideology and action is usually a group decision arrived at by mutual consultation, persuasion, encouragement and criticism within a circle of close friends. They become more united when they take political action such as engaging in street demonstrations and occupation of targeted buildings … and joining factory workers or farm workers in their protest actions … They feel strongly obliged to help, support, encourage, and protect each other in order to promote their political goal. A sense of obligation to one’s friends becomes an affective driving force within student circles. The same mutual help ethic facilitates and sustains the political actions of those dissident church leaders who carry out ‘the democracy struggle’ under a despotic regime (2003, 110-1).

A mutual help ethics proper to constitutive selves emerging within constitutive groups is shaped by means of interactive ritual chains. According to Yun-Shik, personalists disagree with Western individualists – those who believe that their own conscience is the ultimate source of decision (2003, 121) – in three respects: firstly, they encourage consultation, considering that group decisions are better than individual decision making. As a subordinate, one has to consider that the emphasis on mutuality, rather than on individual autonomy per se, might be a way to include as many people as possible in the political process, whereas Western societies have to face an increasing exclusion from it. Secondly, while individualist democrats stress legalism, personalist democrats follow Kongzi’s admonition according to which ‘if you lead the people by regulations and order them by punishments, the people will evade these and have no sense of shame in doing so. If you lead them by virtue and order them through the rites, they will have a sense of shame and will correct themselves’ (quoted in Yun-Shik 2003, 122). Personalist democracts, in other words, prefer mediation to litigation. Finally, individualist democrats believe that a liberal democracy has to protect, first of all, individual rights and interests, whereas personalist democrats conceive of democracy as a collective effort to realize collective goals (2003, 123). Personalism, within a network ethic of mutual help, is the ritualist Confucian way to a constrained democratic engagement. However, even if now we know that there are alternative ways to thinking in terms of central Western ideas of constitutional democracy, within the Confucian horizon, our enquiry on pluralism remains. Given the perfectionist structure of Confucianism, is there any room for pluralism and disagreement within such an ethic and politics? Joseph Chan distinguishes three possible different kinds of disagreements and parallel Confucians attitudes. Disagreement 1 and 2, so to speak, are within the bounds of the Confucian understanding of ren and li, and are consequently, in a sense, a matter of family quarrels (Chan 2008, 121-4). Disagreement 1 ‘concerns the application of rites and the importance of moral discretion. … There may be

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novel situations, borderline cases, and hard cases (where some rites are in conflict with each other) that call for interpretative judgment and moral discretion’ (2008, 121). As a result, Confucians often emphasize the importance of discretion, flexibility and – one could add – ritualistically shaped autonomy of judgment, but also admit the possibility that people well trained in ritual terms and well equipped with ren, hold different judgments and take different courses of action. In other words, they can coexist with pluralism. Disagreement 2 ‘concerns revision and selective use of rites’ (ibid.). Some rites may appear out-of-date in the light of new circumstances, or they may take a new form. In these cases, Confucians have no difficulty in acknowledging that rites may change, or that old norms may be expressed in new ways. In conclusion, The ideal society in Confucianism is one of a high degree of ethical uniformity. The uniformity is based on the ethical ideal of ren and rites, which sets the boundaries for morally permissible behaviours. However, the application of the ideal of ren and rites often requires individual moral judgment and discretion. Also, some rites may change, and should change, if social circumstances change. Confucians would allow a plurality of judgments on concrete interpretation and application of the ideal in situations where the ideal does not have clear, determinate implications (2008, 122).

Different are cases of fundamental moral disagreement (disagreement 3), where the entire system of rites and ren is at stake. Here, according to Chan, there is no substantial middle ground in between and no space for reasonable disagreement. However, given the perfectionist structure of Confucianism, there are still two different possible attitudes. The first pushes for governmental banning, worried by the eventual negative effects of ethical ‘heresies’ on social harmony. The second prefers a non coercive approach, and relies upon moral education and persuasion, as indicated in several writings by Kongzi and Mengzi (Mencius) (see Chan 2008, 124-6). Chan summarizes these two attitudes and the difference with the liberal approach to moral disagreement as follows: We have seen two tendencies of thought in Confucianism. The first tendency is to favour governmental regulation and control of ethical beliefs or deeds that violate the basic bounds of ren and rites. This tendency is based on the special nature of Confucian perfectionism that stresses moral uniformity, social harmony, and political stability. Confucianism does not accept a liberal separation of morality in the public and private spheres … Unlike the anti moralistic and neutralist strands in liberalism, Confucianism regards the ethical content, or the morality or immorality, of an action as one relevant reason for the state to promote or prohibit it. But this reason has to compete with other reasons, which may or may not outweigh the first … The second tendency favours non coercive means (education and rites) to deal with this problem. It is based on the Confucian belief on the proper way to moral cultivation, on the importance of moral thinking and

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At the beginning of this chapter I stressed the importance of an anthropological opening up of our Western idea of politics. The previous sections aimed at showing the importance of ritual and the sacred in non liberal understandings of politics. Islam and Confucianism have been considered as two particularly relevant cases in point. In this sense, I want to maintain that ritual and the sacred are key notions in the context of the dialogue between civilizations, for example in international relationships. At the same time, ritual and the sacred, seen from the political point of view, are key notions even in the context of domestic policies, above all in the context of multicultural politics. Let’s linger for a moment on this issue. 5.4 Political arrangements for a post-post-protestant understanding of religions As I recalled at the beginning of this chapter, quoting Seyla Benhabib, ‘observant Muslims and observant Jews are not ‘elsewhere’, they are our neighbors, citizens, and ourselves in liberal democratic societies’ (see Benhabib 2004, 85-6). In other words, the problem of opening up our understanding of politics, making room for a different conception of the relationship between politics, ritual and the sacred, does not call into question only the sphere of international relationships, but also domestic policy. Here the problem is how to deal with those people (and social groups) who think of the sources of juridical authority and legitimation as different from the power of a secularized State, and who believe – against the backdrop of a non-Protestant understanding of religion, the Self, public and private space and so on – in religious-sacred sources of authority. To deal with this issue, I want to suggest that we need to ponder over possible institutional arrangements consistent with a post-liberal approach, and above all with a post-post-protestant understanding of religions within the public sphere. Ayelet Shachar’s work on the ‘paradox of multicultural vulnerability’ seems to me the best way to face this problem. In short, the paradox of multicultural vulnerability is the consequence of those multicultural politics that while trying to accommodate cultural (and religious) differences leave the members of minority groups vulnerable to severe injustice within the groups, and reinforce some of the most hierarchical elements of a culture (Shachar 2001, 3). Consequently, solving this paradox would mean balancing the twin goals of accommodating differences on the one hand and respecting rights on the other. After criticizing ‘secularist absolutist’ approaches for their Christian underpinnings and false neutrality; after criticizing perspectives of ‘reuniversalized citizenship’ – such as that of Susan Moller Okin – because of their

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blindness to differences; and after criticizing also the so called ‘unavoidable costs’ models of Kukathas and McDonald – the former from a libertarian, the latter from a communitarian starting point – and the ‘religious particularistic model’, because of their insufficient care of individual rights within parochial groups, Shachar criticizes also ‘week multiculturalism’ approaches such as those of Kymlicka and Taylor, unable to solve the deficit of empowerment of the most vulnerable people, who cannot actually exercise their right of exit and their freedom from domination (here Shachar makes a reference to the republican notion of freedom from domination, see Pettit 1997). In order to solve the paradox of multicultural vulnerability, the author suggests a ‘paradigm shift’, a way out from the aporetic choice between loyalty to groupculture or loyalty to a shared, State-centred citizenship. We need a new approach capable of fostering ‘more institutional imagination that can appreciate the situational complexity faced by individuals who are culturally and legally tied to both the group and the state’ (2001, 87). The starting point of this new approach is the pluralizing of the sources of legitimate norms and law, the idea of multicultural jurisdictions, that takes the form of the joint governance model: Joint governance considers the challenge of multiculturalism by recognizing that some persons will belong to more than one political community, and will bear rights and obligations that derive from more than one source of legal authority. More specifically, joint governance promises to foster ongoing interaction between different sources of authority, as a means of improving the situation of traditionally vulnerable insiders without forcing them to adhere to an either/or choice between their culture and their rights (2001, 88).

Shachar proposes five different schemes for the division of jurisdictions stressing her preference for the last. They are federal-style accommodation, temporal accommodation, consensual accommodation, contingent accommodation, and – finally – transformative accommodation. All of them take jurisdiction per se as the central factor, namely the jurisgenerative capabilities of local communities independently from their territorial grounding, and try to balance groups nomoi and individual rights, establishing new forms of division of powers. The federal-style accommodation is the most well known, and in a sense the less interesting. Here power is ‘allocated between several sub-units and among different branches and levels of government. Nomoi groups, like other sub-units, can enjoy potentially considerable autonomy under a federal scheme. But like other sub-units, they are also subject to certain overarching constraints applicable to all government levels within the system, such as compliance with basic constitutional principles’ (2001, 92). Canada and the US are the most obvious examples of such a scheme, whose main limit is that it is basically region or nation based, and is less appealing for those communities such as the religious ones that are basically disinterested in regional or national self-government.

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Far more interesting, in my view, is temporal accomodation. Here accommodation is ‘time bound’ and ‘issue specific’. According to this temporal accommodation approach, certain life events crucial to the continuation of the group’s collective identity (such as the creation of a family or the early education of children) are governed by the group tradition as the sole and definitive source of authority. Outside of these crucial moments, individuals must turn to the state law (2001, 97).

According to this model, affiliations, loyalties and obligation can and will shift across time. Groups feel accommodated their aspiration to preserve crucial conditions of their own reproduction over the time, and the state does not give up the opportunity of balancing group particularity. However, institutional instability is a severe limit of this scheme, as it is within the latter the difficulty of preventing or correcting intangible damages done by groups practices, for example in early education or in marriage laws (2001, 102-3). The third scheme of joint governance is consensual accomodation. ‘Here the idea is to permit individuals with multiple affiliations to exercise choice and make their own determinations about which legal authority – the state or the group, for example – will have jurisdiction over their personal affairs’ (2001, 103). The advantages of this approach are at least two: first, it is a one-time choice of legal framework, so that institutional stability is assured; second, it is a scheme that emphasizes individual choice. However, it is in principle insensitive to direct or indirect social pressures to conform with a group’s nomos, and, above all, it is an irreversible model of choice. The fourth scheme is contingent accomodation. ‘Here the state yields jurisdictional autonomy to nomoi groups in certain well-defined legal arenas, but only so long as their exercise of this authority meets certain minimal state-defined standards. If a group fails to meet these minimal standards, the state may intervene in the group’s affairs and override its jurisdiction by applying the state’s residual powers’ (2001, 109). It is a dynamic division of powers, that avoids the risk of irreversibility, that allows powerful control by the state, but that leaves the state and the groups alone in the social setting, marginalizing individual choices. Shachar’s preference is for the last scheme of joint governance, the one that she calls transformative accommodation. It rests upon three core principles: a) the ‘sub-matter allocation of power’ b) the ‘no-monopoly’ rule and c) the ‘establishment of clearly delineated choice options’ (2001, 118). The first principle observes that ‘contested social arenas (such as education, family law, criminal justice, immigration, resource development, and environmental protection) are internally divisible into ‘sub-matters’: multiple, separable, yet complementary legal components’ (2001, 119). Power, consequently, can be divided along submatter lines within every single social arena. A good example is family law, where the demarcating functions related to status and criteria of belonging could be regulated by the groups’ nomoi, while the distributive functions related to matters

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of property, inheritance and so on (matters crucial for the actual empowerment of vulnerable individuals, women above of all) could be regulated by the statelaw. On the basis of the second principle, no-monopoly rule, neither the state nor any group can acquire exclusive control over a contested social arena, and have on the contrary, to recognize potential rivalries between jurisdictions over legal matters, by considering the intersections of multiple affiliations among individuals to constitutive (and not merely instrumental) social groups (2001, 121). In short, clear options are essential to render individual decisions-making among different legal affiliations aware and well-informed. This fifth scheme of joint governance has a great advantage, namely the possibility, at least in principle, of triggering a virtuous circle and transformative mechanism between secular law and religious cultures, coherent with Habermas’ principle of ‘complementary learning process’ (see Habermas 2006a, 258). If it is true, as it is, that no religious form of life can expect to remain unaffected, either in the West or elsewhere, by modernity, it is also true that the principle of equal respect requires that the dialogue with the religions deals not only with functional issues (as the sociological mind is oriented to do), but also with their content of truth. Now, disregarding technicalities and details of institutional arrangement, that I would leave to political philosophers and legal scholars,12 it seems to me that Shachar’s perspective encounters the kind of considerations I am developing in this book. It reflects a decentred view of society, without a unique apex in legislative power and capable of releasing the energies of communities for self-government; it reflects a view of religions as relevant not only for individual souls, but also for groups and collective identities; it reflects a view of the Self with multiple affiliations, but also deeply engaged in constitutive and not merely instrumental groups; it reflects a view of laicité understood more as a local and cooperative practice than as a laicité de combat.13

12  For a sympathetic but also severe criticism of Shachar’s perspective, see Benhabib 2002, 122-9. 13  My formula ‘laicité as a cooperative practice’ echoes in some extent Böckenförde’s of ‘open neutrality’, see Böckenförde 2007 and 2008.

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Chapter 6

Religions: New Routes to Pluralism 6.0 Laïcité: The European exception After sketching a reading of the self-comprehension of modernity and its analytical categories, coherent, in my view, with Durkheim’s unfinished work on the interpretation of modernity; after presenting a potentially alternative strategy of analysis, that accords primacy to the (traditional) notions of ritual and the sacred, and after dealing with a crucial issue of social life, namely individual identity, to illustrate the working out of ritual in processes of self-cultivation, in traditional cultures and in democratized societies, we saw how the categories of ritual and the sacred can work to offer a reading of politics maybe unfamiliar to Western ears but hopefully less alien to non liberal political cultures. In the current chapter, my aim is to test both the empirical and normative usefulness of categories such as ritual and the sacred with reference to one of the most pressing issues of our time, namely the problem of the coexistence of religious (and non religious) differences within a common public space. At least in Europe, the perspective from where I speak, this debate is known as the issue of laïcité. My criticism of mainstream ways of understanding laïcité in Europe traces a path towards new ways to pluralism and tolerance, less dependent on (or, if possible, independent from) liberal presuppositions. During a by now well-known debate on reason and faith with the former Cardinal Ratzinger, Jürgen Habermas reminded us how, seen from Teheran, secularization in Europe, if compared with other socio-cultural contexts, appears an exception in need of correction (Habermas 2006a, 256). Criticism of this exception recalls to mind, Habermas maintains, the climax of the Republic of Weimar, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger or Leo Strauss, in other words that ‘critique of reason’ that preceded the tragedy of World War II and the Holocaust (2006a, 256). This judgment notwithstanding, Habermas, the heir of the Enlightenment, has been in recent years one of the most sensitive intellectuals in the face of the challenges that religion and faith represent for philosophy and rational discourse. Well before 11 September, Habermas had stressed the need for thinking about a non selfdestructive secularization, a new dialogue between faith and reason, and the role of religion in the public sphere (see Habermas 2006b; Cooke 2007, Lafont 2007).   The use of the French word emphasizes the complexity of the issue at stake. The English word secularization is far more circumscribed. Naturally enough, Catholic Southern Europe – for example Spain and Italy – represents a different scenario, where religion has never been really privatized (see Thiebaut 2008).

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Joseph Ratzinger had emphasized, on the one hand, how secularized Europe cannot reasonably think of herself as a model for other countries, how her particularistic self-representation cannot aspire to being an exemplary value and, on the other, how this self-representation is not truly authentic even with reference to European history and culture. In a world that is becoming less and less secularized (if ever it were secularized, see Berger 1999), the progressive thought patchy secularization of Europe is an undeniable social fact (see Davie 1999; Davie 2002; Berger 2005; Casanova 2006; Martin 2005, Part III; Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008). However, given the increasing multicultural and multi-religious character of contemporary Europe, European uniqueness risks, as Ratzinger maintains, not being exemplary even with reference to herself (Ratzinger 2006). This exceptional perspective of Europe can be summed up in two formulae familiar in literature on the sociology of religion: ‘believing without belonging’, on the one hand, and ‘belonging without believing’, on the other (see Davie 1994; Hervieu-Lèger 2005; Casanova 2006). The individualization of religious beliefs in Europe goes hand in hand with a persistent self-representation in terms of Christian cultural identity that maintains its strength even beyond the factual de-sacralizing of the European people (Casanova 2006, 65). However, as Casanova observes, ‘The most interesting issue sociologically is not the fact of progressive religious decline among the European population, but that this decline is interpreted through the lenses of the secularization paradigm and is therefore accompanied by a “secularist” self-understanding that interprets the decline as “normal” and “progressive”, in other words, as a quasi-normative consequence of being a “modern” and “enlightened” European’ (2006, 66). Casanova continues, it is this secular identity shared by European elites and ordinary people alike that paradoxically turns ‘religion’ and the barely submerged Christian European identity into a thorny and perplexing issue when it comes to delimiting the external geographic boundaries and to defining the internal cultural identity of a European Union in the process of being constituted (Ibid).

Religious issues – issues related for example to the exposition of religious symbols in public spaces – become thorny issues within Europe if one takes as the starting point a secularizing self-representation of Europe, difficult to harmonize with crucial developments in European identity, including at least five worthy of mention: a) the role of Catholic Poland; the process of inclusion of Turkey; c) the increasing numbers of Eastern countries and consequently the growing role of Orthodoxy; d) the growing number of non-European immigrants; e) the potential role assigned to God and Christianity in the (still hypothetical) European Constitution. Seen   As several times the Catholic Church did, stressing the constitutive role of Christianity for the European identity, and consequently the self-contradiction in the idea of a secularized Europe (see Bortolini 2007; see also essays in Byrnes and Katzenstein 2006).

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from an empirical point of view and taking into account these developments, the secularized and exceptional self-representation of Europe risks becoming a barrier against greater inclusive, social, cultural, and political integration. The secularized self-representation of Europe, incomprehensible outside Christian and Liberal Protestant categories, risks excluding Turkey from the European identity as well as the areas of the Balkans with a Muslim culture, and many Orthodox Christians. From a normative point of view, as again Casanova stresses, that which makes the intolerant tyranny of the liberal lay majority unjustifiable is not only the democratic principle of majority rule, but rather the teleological and secularised assumption of modernisation establishing that a series of norms is reactionary, fundamentalist and anti-modern, while another is progressive, liberal and modern (Casanova 2005, 83).

In other words, both from an empirical-prudential and from a normative perspective, the dogmatic defence of European exceptionality albeit exemplary is, effectively speaking, a barrier against inclusion and integration. 6.1 The (particularistic) socio-philosophical presuppositions of the European exception The European mainstream social representation of laïcité depends on a particularistic idea of religion. An idea centred on the individual religious experience rather than on religion understood as a genuinely shared tradition. However, considering religion as something that has to do primarily with the individual soul, interiority, conscience thus makes the collective dimension of religious life harder to grasp and, as a result, underlines all those challenges that religion poses to contemporary societies nowadays. One of the best examples of this particularistic and distorting understanding of religion is William James’ Varieties of religious experience (1902) at the present time defended, even though in a slightly milder key, by Charles Taylor (2002 and 2007). Contemporary liberalism, above all in the context of normative political philosophy (in other words, liberalism in the Rawlsian sense), tries to maintain the validity of its political understanding of the individual, i.e., independently both from the cultural history of liberalism and independently from the comprehensive conceptions of the good related to 19th century liberalism. However, my thesis is that, at least in this case, genesis and validity are strictly related, and furthermore, cannot be separated one from the other. In other words, the mainstream social representation of laïcité in Europe depends upon a specific conception of religion and secularization. A representation that could not exist independently from a Protestant-like image of religion, which implies among other things:

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a. the history of introspective conscience; b. the privatization of religious beliefs and the idea of the neutrality of public institutions towards different conceptions of the good; c. the idea of a sharp divide between public and private realms, so that the public realm is rendered immune from the substantive religious ideas of the good; d. the progressive de-ritualizing of religion, so that ritual and practices are placed in opposition to sincere, individual adherence to beliefs. The final consequence of this process of transformation of religion is believing without belonging. The above implications are exactly what is challenged by the so-called deprivatization of religion (Casanova 1994), by the return of religion to the public sphere. The point is that often religions (and not only fundamentalism) do not conceive the liberal language of rights, individualism, public and private, the right and the good, and so on. This is unfamiliar language to them, and moreover, constitutively incomprehensible to them. However, these implications are the premises whereby the European mainstream social representation of laïcité have to be considered constitutive of the mainstream European social representation of laïcité and unfortunately comprehensible only within a Liberal Protestant horizon. The consequence is that this social representation cannot be considered an exemplary model for Orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, whose idea of religion does not follow the same liberal path. The mainstream European social representation of laïcité has to be taken as a constellation of concepts – the Self understood in a specific way, public and private, rights, neutrality and so on – so that questioning one of the terms of this constellation means challenging the whole conceptual framework, and the historical institutional arrangements built on it. 6.2 New routes to pluralism: Laïcité as a cooperative practice Following the wars of religion, liberalism and laïcité have been the main paths to tolerance in Europe. Contemporary societies, in Europe as in the US, deal with the so called ‘fact of pluralism’ (John Rawls) throughout (supposedly) neutral institutions, and laïcité has been understood as neutrality. Historically, laïcité has also been understood, above all in the French tradition (see Bauberot 2004), as a value in itself, or better as a set of values as opposed to fundamentalism, tradition and heteronomy. Laïcité, in other words, has been considered both ‘pacified neutrality’ and ‘combative’ laïcité. In the liberal tradition it takes on both these meanings. In the democratic tradition, above all in its deliberative contemporary versions, laïcité and tolerance are conceived of as formal preconditions to performing communicative freedom on the part of the people (on different ideas

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of tolerance within the Enlightenment tradition, see, i.e. Ratio Juris, Vol. 10, N. 2 June 1997). Even if democratic deliberative approaches are, in my view, more sympathetic to religious differences (and to differences in general) than liberal ones (see above all Benhabib 2002), I would suggest the opportunity of a complete change of strategy and perspective, in order to look for new foundations for pluralism within different religious traditions. What I mean is some kind of hermeneutics of traditions anthropologically, sociologically and religiously oriented, the ambition being to ‘provincialize Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2000), our understanding of politics, public space, difference and religion. In Chapter 4, for example, I attempted to bring to the reader’s notice that in the context of the cybernetics of the Holy reconstructed by Rappaport, politics is only one element of a regulatory hierarchy, instead of being, as in Western secularized countries, the productive centre of an immanent idea of the sacred expressed by means of civic values (see Seligman 2000 and Rosati 2002). In our contemporary global society we lack a comparative anthropological perspective gaze, and above all the capacity to question our categories. In this case, I question the constellation of categories related to the European idea of laïcité and, by consequence, the narrative of modernity described in Chapter 2. In so doing, I am suggesting a radical path, as I believe radical would have to be a neo-Durkheimian approach: the point is not only that of finding comprehensible vocabularies from other traditions and contextual lexicons to support Western values, ‘indigenous’ translations of our values (individualism, toleration, rights and so on), but – in more radical terms – being receptive (if not eager) towards the opportunity of learning from cultures, religions, civilizations, that did not follow the path of Enlightenment, and that in principle or in practice arrange their institutions and values in very different ways, i.e. the so called ‘segmental societies’. 6.2.1 Religions and epistemic humility This is not an entirely new approach. No one ever walks on totally new and unexplored ground. My agenda, as would appear right from Chapter 2, seems not unlike Adam B. Seligman’s, even if Seligman would probably not encompass it within a neo-Durkheimian frame and project. Seligman’s reflection on the conditions of tolerance in the contemporary world starts from a) the empirical consideration of the fact that ‘a rights-based foundation of tolerance … has met with opposition in many parts of the world where ideas of selfhood do not correspond to Western models and democratic imperatives’ (Seligman 2003, 6), and, b) from the aim of ‘articulating a position of universal and absolute human rights and, at the same time, of respect and positive valuation of local cultures, mores and religious identities’ (ibid.). In other words, Seligman’s aim is that of rooting tolerance ‘not in liberal, Enlightenment ideas of Self and society, but in more traditional, religious formulations’ (2003, 12). Sharing Seligman’s agenda and reading modernity as a post-Protestant world, Suzanne Last Stone reminds us that ‘the argument for tolerance based on a greater commitment to value of choosing

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autonomously, on the right to live a freely chosen life or adopt a freely chosen opinion, remains deeply problematic in a tradition [Judaism in the case in point, but her judgment can be generalized to other traditions, M. R.] that conceives of the Self as a heteronomous, not autonomous, subject to divine legislation and not self-legislation’ (Last Stone 2003, 107). She also points out how liberal ideas ‘rest on a framework of assumptions traceable to Christian conceptions of individual, the community and political order’ (ibid.). As opposed to the Enlightenment and the modernist world-view, what we need to do is root tolerance – or better, as will be seen, pluralism – within religious and traditional ideas, that challenge the ideas of autonomous Self, public and private sharp divisions, the existence of separate legal and ethical realms, the discontinuity between the good and the right, and above all the solution of boundaries and borders of collective identities. Traditions, in other words, challenge the modern denial – but also postmodern process of aestheticism – of differences, and instead make claim for what Seligman calls a principled tolerance. Traditions, like the sacred, are expected to be taken seriously. Taking traditions seriously means beginning with traditions, working from within their boundaries, histories, practices, beliefs. What we need to investigate is how they deal with pluralism, how they deal with (tolerate, in the liberal vocabulary) deviancy among their members (apostasy), and deviancy from outside. Here I will attempt a short, and certainly incomplete, survey of how some traditions – basically Judaism, Islam, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity – have faced these problems. I will also attempt to suggest three different but complementary strategies (ideally: principles and practices) to deal with pluralism from within traditions, ‘religiously embedded’ paths to acceptance (and/or appreciation) of pluralism; in other words, scepticism, judgment and free debate. Let’s begin with epistemic humility. Judaism and epistemic humility  Epistemic humility seems to be rooted, in every religion, in the awareness of the weaknesses of human reason. Frequently it has been in relation with the apophatic moment proper to every traditional religion, and it has given expression to negative theologies. Further, it has taken different forms. In the Jewish tradition, epistemic humility is proper both to rabbinic and mystic currents. Take for example the Halakic system: contradiction and pluralism are part and parcel of it and at the epistemological level one can see the tensional coexistence of ‘an epistemology of toleration based on scepticism toward its truthclaims while still maintaining a belief in revealed truth’ (Last Stone 2003, 112). The Halakic system is the ongoing effort of reaching truth by means of interpretation, but ‘diverse opinions illuminate the search for truth’ within ‘scepticism about the possibility of human certitude’ (ibid.). Doubts on the possibility of human   In this section I draw the following considerations basically from two sources: the collection of essays in the Journal of Human Rights Vol. 2 N.1, 2003 – edited by A. B. Seligman –, and the volume Modest Claims (Seligman 2004).

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certitude about truth are rooted in two reasons. According to the rabbinic tradition, certitude is not possible because of the ‘extremely limited scope of revealed law, breaks in the history chain of transmission of revelation and individual differences in intellectual prowess and temperament’, and also because we are far from revelation. Even in the most orthodox contemporary movements in Israel, the ones against Religious Zionism, ‘when the ways of Providence are hidden, that is, during ordinary history, uncertainty about ultimate truth is part of the human condition’, and the relevant political consequence is that ‘a deep Exilic sense of the hiddenness of God means that the Covenantal society cannot in any way be enforced’ (Fisch 2003, 72). According to the mystic tradition, it is revelation in itself to be a fragmented process, and as a consequence ‘each individual opinion reflects a partial understanding of the divine truth’ (Last Stone 2003, 112). As Last Stone reminds us, ‘the Talmud, in one passage, describes the revelation as itself a series of decisional options – providing an equal basis for prohibiting or permitting conduct. Thus, multiplicity and contrast are features of the divine revelation itself’ (ibid.). It is one of the central teachings of Jewish mysticism that ‘the friendship of the Lord is for those who fear him’ (Psalms, 25, 14), and even if knowledge is a way of celebrating God, the person who is not timorous of God as an unknown entity has to be considered impious (see Busi 2006; Dan 2006). In a sense, Luria’s mystic could be taken as the paradigm of a negative theology that stresses God’s weakness, suffering (as for example in Jonas’ reading, see Jonas 1987), and human daily efforts, by means of the scrupulous respect of mitzvoth, to repair the weaknesses of creation, and to help a suffering God. In other words, Talmudic Judaism has different models that provide grounds for dealing with pluralism. In Menachem Fisch’s synthesis, the first is that God has a view, but we don’t know it. In other words, the act of interpretation is fallible and open – this is where religious epistemic modesty kicks in for the first time. The second notion is that God doesn’t have a view. In other words, he wrote a text, gave it to us, and there is no divine sanctioned interpretation to it and all God knows is that this Rabbi thinks it means so and so and the other such and such (Fisch 2004, 24).

All these religious sources, mystical and more rationalist as in the rabbinic tradition, are a principled reason to endorse a Popperian idea of tolerance, that does not require the a-priori endorsement of liberal assumptions on the nature of man. According to Menachem Fisch, ‘Popperian tolerance, if I may call it so, entails such liberal presuppositions of individual autonomy … while deriving ultimately from epistemological, rather than moral or metaphysical arguments’ (Fisch 2003,   Epistemic humility is grounded in the space between belief in ‘the singularity of truth’, on the one hand, and the awareness of its ‘excessive, transcending character’, on the other. It is precisely this gap that, according to Maeve Cooke, ‘opens up the possibility of rational contestation’ even within religious discourses. See Cooke 2008.

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55; see also Fisch 1997), namely for the awareness that we are ‘poor critics of our plans and strategies, that things are best done piecemeal, and that other viewpoints are not merely to be tolerated but to be highly valued … ’ (2003, 56). The great advantage of such a perspective is that Pluralism is achieved without fundamental rights having to be even premised. This in itself renders it an exceptionally attractive option for religious systems whose capacity for accommodating a rights-based liberalism is severely limited. Arguments from rights compel us to take seriously a person’s freedom of choice but, of themselves, attach no intrinsic value to the choices themselves. Arguments from epistemic modesty, by contrast, attach great value to the outcome of their choosing but, of themselves, care little about their liberty to do so (2003, 57-8).

In this way, pluralism can be understood and even strengthened for principled epistemological reasons, without being forced to endorse the conceptual constellation linked to the liberal idea of toleration. Islam and epistemic humility  As in the case of Judaism, Islam seems to offer more than one model to endorse pluralism. Recently, scholars committed to a search for Islamic ways to democracy tried to take a close look at the millet system, or at the tradition of Sufi mysticism and its idea of the ‘plurality’ of divinity. However, in this section I want simply to stress the Muslim concept of hilm, namely the equivalent of the Jewish idea of humility, anva. According to Seligman The concept of hilm, combines qualities of moderation, forbearance and leniency with self-mastery and dignity. In some ways it is surprisingly akin to the idea of civility among the eighteenth century Scottish Moralists. According to the great Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldzhier, hilm combined moral integrity with mildness of manners and is juxtaposed to al-Jahiliyya, that the pre-Islamic period of Arab tribal warfare where emotions governed actions and where ‘haughtiness, arrogance and insolence’ ruled, rather than humble submission of Islam. Furthermore, Toshihiko Izutsu’s study of Jajilyya and of hilm provides us with an idea of how central these terms are to appreciating the inner phenomenology of Islam. How the ‘haughtiness’ of the jahaliyya is contrasted with the forbearance of the halim in defining the idea of Islamic behaviour. In the prophet’s transvaluation of values wrought on Arab society, the practice of forgiveness and leniency were considered halim – an attribute of the Patriarch Abraham, and ultimately of Allah. In this move the prophet replaced the values of tribal vengeance with that of forgiveness (Seligman 2004, 167).

Toshihiko Izutsu (2002) maintains that Islam stresses the importance of keeping to the virtue of hilm. The point would have not to be surprising, if only one recalls that ‘Islam means nothing but “humble submission”’, and in effect, as Izutsu reiterates, ‘there is in the Qur’ān constant denunciation of those who “walk about

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haughtily in the hearth”, puffed with unreasonable pride, bellowing in the most disagreeable voice, and oppressing poor and weak in their blind contumely’ (2002, 142). What is important, is that such an attitude is judged wrong not only when taken towards God and His Apostole, but also in the domain of man-to man relationships (ibid.). But on what would this ‘practice of forgiveness and leniency’ rely? If the Islamic idea of hilm is equal to the Jewish anva, and both designate an attitude to humility, are there in the Islamic tradition(s) precise textual sources of such epistemic modesty? According to the Islamic scholar Sohail H. Hashmi epistemic modesty is rooted within the Qur’anic message, and above all in Q. 5, 48, whose message is a ‘humbling one’ (Hashmi 2003). Q. 5, 48 – whose coherence with the whole Qur’anic message Hashmi defends on a textual and exegetic basis – establishes a) a plurality of paths to reach a single truth, and b) the wrongness of compulsion, given that ‘belief by compulsion is no belief at all’ (2003, 99): To you We sent the scripture in truth, confirming the scripture that came before it, and guarding it in safety; so judge between them by what God has revealed, and follow not their vain desires, diverging from the truth that has come to you. To each among you have We prescribed a law and an open way. If God has so willed, He would have made you a single people, but [His plan is] to test you in what He has given you: so strive as in a race in all the virtues. The goal of you all is to God; it is He that will show you the truth of the matters in which you differ (Q. 5, 48).

According to Hashmi there are two possible interpretations of this ‘hymn’ to pluralism. The first is minimalist in nature: Q. 5, 48 affirms that the truth is one, but that there are multiple paths converging to it, i.e. a plurality of rituals in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It is enough to justify a ‘minimalist conception of religious cooperation’. However, there is also another possible interpretation: something more inclusive is obviously intended here. Though each community advances along its own path toward a common goal, it is not the goal but the journey that is the real focus of this verse. The journey is the test, and this test is not one of conflict among rival and competing faiths struggling for hegemony. Nor it is a religious cold war, a journey of the deaf and the mute. In this verse, the Qur’an affirms that the problem of religious and moral diversity is not a hindrance to be overcome, but an advantage to be embraced – a necessary facet of God’s unknown plan for humanity. The journey can be meaningful only if there are a number of travellers, for just as human beings urge each other toward evil, so human beings urge each other toward the good. To the Muslims, the message of Qur’ān 5, 48 is … a humbling one. They cannot claim any exclusive righteousness in this life, just as they cannot claim exclusive salvation in the next (2003, 100-1).   On Hilm, see also Encyclopaedia of Islam (1971), Vol. III (Leiden: Brill).

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The epistemological reasons to embrace humility are echoed today in Abdolkarim Soroush, and in his distinction between religion and human religious knowledge: ‘… it is true that sacred scriptures are (in the judgment of followers) flawless; however, it is just as true that human beings’ understanding of religion is flawed. Religion is sacred and heavenly, but the understanding of religion is human and earthly’ (Sorousch 2000, 31); or, again, in the devout aphorism according to which ‘God alone knows his own intentions’. In other words, for traditional religions, submission to heteronomy is the best guarantee against haughtiness, and religion becomes ideology in the modern period as a consequence of loss of heteronomy and the connection between religion and secular forces such as nationalism (see Mahmutćehajić 2005). Catholicism and epistemic humility  As will be seen in the next section, in the context of Roman Catholicism the perspective shifts immediately from the single believer or the community, to that community of faith that is the Catholic Church. The Church, the body of Christ on earth, is the most important subject to take into consideration when discussing Catholicism. Consequently, even the sources of epistemic humility have to be found, if at all, there. Catholicism is a very interesting case in point. Differently from Protestantism, it is naturally reluctant to follow some of the modern trends in the ‘religious evolution’, such as the privatization of religion, or the modern religious feeling with relativism. Above all, after the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholicism seems to be characterized by an instructive tension between the evaluation of religious liberty – rooted in the value of human dignity – and the defence of the principle of authority. Theological arguments for liberty are constantly in conflict with the fear of the threat to unity and authority. The Catholic Church openly recognizes one of the main characteristics of modernity and secularization, namely the (Weberian) differentiation of spheres of values (see Casanova 1994), and this was recognized right from the traditional Christian rejection of monism, expressed by the Gelasian principle (in AD 494, Pope Gelasius I wrote to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I: ‘Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is ruled on title of original and sovereign right – the consecrated authority of the priesthood and the royal power’). But even within its own domain, the sacred, the power of the Church is not limitless. Like the body of Christ on earth, as a sacramental reality, the Church is invested with an ‘incredible holiness’, however – above all after the Second Vatican Council – the Church also acknowledges its human limitations. The writings of Catholic theologians and the Second Vatican Council contain this sense of modesty about the Church as a clear witness to truth: The Church does not always point to the truth; in fact, the practice of the faithful may actually witness to human error and sin. Hence, the Church shares   Here the reference is above all to Islam and Judaism, that share a similar attitude towards the Law. See Neusner and Sonn 1999.

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responsibility for the unbelief present in the world and must be humble in its conversation with others … The ecclesiological modesty stems from the conflicted, sinful nature of the human person, who both wants to live rightly and inevitably practices wrong. This is deeper than epistemological modesty, for it is not simply a question of knowing what is right and true. Rather, even when human beings know the truth, they do not always practice truth (Wolfteich 2003, 42-3).

Error, in other words, has rights, and is recognized. As will be seen later, this is enough to push the Church to practice ecclesiological modesty and the virtue of phronesis. 6.2.2 Religions and judgment The second strategy for dealing with pluralism I outline has to do with the fundamental role of judgment. Judgment is essential at least for two reasons. First, because epistemic modesty stems from judgment. It is as a consequence of judgment that one can restrain oneself, curb passions such as haughtiness, and practise anva, hilm or ecclesiological humility. But still more important, judgment is crucial because it is by means of judgment that people decide when to be merciful and when on the contrary justice is all that is required. And it is by means of judgment that one decides with whom to be merciful and with whom to be inflexible. As Suzanne Last Stone writes, when is one supposed to be merciful? When is one supposed to be just? That is the critical moment, and it relates to the moment of actually creating a judgment … In fact, it relates very much to the verses … ‘Love the stranger’ because, of course, the process is to constantly narrow down and try to understand who exactly is the stranger. It cannot mean the whole world; if it means the whole world, it means that you are not exercising critical judgment. There must be something out there that is the mark of who is not yet human, who is morally corrupt and not able to achieve a posture of civilization, of whom it is forbidden to be tolerant. So that the stranger is the other, but yet not everyone; it is another who is in some position of instantiating a level of morality that actually does trigger that commandment (2004, 60).

Unless one imagines a social space without borders and margins, something that modernity dreamt of but that is sociologically naïve and also – in my view – normatively unwelcome, the same existence of borders and margins – namely identities – requires critical judgment to decide who is inside and who is outside (not absolutely objective criteria are possible, as interpretative controversies around the racist law against-Jews in Fascist Italy and Germany testify). In the case of religions, and above all of religions of salvation, critical judgment is essential for dealing with the scandal of the divide – a true abyss – between the

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principles of salvation, the divine commandments, on the one hand, and sinfulness of human beings, both member of other religions, non believers and – still worse – apostates, on the other. There is no religion that does not have to deal with this kind of unavoidable and unwelcome pluralism. Judgment is the faculty that decides when and who, in which particular circumstances, can be judged pious, sinful but worthy of mercy, or otherwise sinful and worthy of punishment (not to mention the kind of punishment to be meted out). Judgment decides, but it decides with reference to what? On the basis of what? What is the ‘criterion’ of judgement? Judgement decides with reference to the authenticity of a tradition (see Ferrara 1998). In the case of religions, judgement has to decide how to treat the scandal of non believers, believers in other faiths and above all of apostates, on the basis of the loyalty (or better disloyalty) to a corpus of beliefs, practices, memories, cultural traditions. Needless to say, there is no a-contextual criterion to decide (see Ferrara 1998, Chapter 3), no fixed rules, but almost always local decisions. Every religion will accord more importance to loyalty to beliefs, or on the contrary, to practices or to cultural memories and traditions, or to all these elements, on the basis of the kind of religion. But the differences between religions are also in the ‘organ’ of judgement. For example: •

Protestantism is most familiar to the modern mind. It has given a fundamental contribution to shaping the modern idea of the autonomous individual, and of introspective conscience. Introspective conscience, consequently, is the organ of judgment within the Protestant horizon. Judging how to deal with pluralism is something remitted to the individual conscience, an individual burden. However, at least among the religions of salvation, or, if one prefers, among the three Abrahamic religions, Protestantism is the only one to trust, and also to burden, the single individual in this way. In different forms, Judaism, Islam, not to mention Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, place the organ of judgement in collective organisms. Take the example of Catholicism, where the Church is entrusted with the hard task of judging how to handle the ‘sinful nature of the human person, who both wants to live rightly and inevitably practices wrong’; the Church is perfectly aware of this gap, and Christianity thinks of itself as the religion of love and grace because Jesus Christ’s grace – within the sæculum throughout his body on the earth, the Church – absolves sin. Orthodox Christianity established a principle, the one of akribeia, starting – case by case – from the severity of orthodoxy, the so called oikonomia (see Morini 2002; on the Orthodox Church, se Ware 1997). Here, above all in the case of Orthodoxy but also with reference to Roman Catholicism, the ‘criterion’ of judgement

  Once again, in the case of Orthodox Christianity the possibility of error is grounded in the apophatic moment and in a negative theology, according to which ‘God is infinite and incomprehensible’, so that emphasis is on divine unknowingness. See Ware 1997, 63 and ff.

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is loyalty to a corpus of beliefs, and the scrupulous respect of rituals (very important in both examples) depends on the orthodoxy of beliefs. On the contrary, leaving Christianity to consider Judaism and Islam, the ‘tolerance’ (in the case of sins tolerance is the right concept) of pluralism has more to do with loyalty to practices than beliefs. Judaism and Islam, as it is well known, are orthopraxies more than orthodoxies. However, in both cases, once again judgment is the outcome of a collective praxis of reasoning and interpretation of the Sacred Texts, and consensus among experts (the rabbinic college, i.e.) is the most important way to reach out a decision. Consider again Judaism. Toleration – once again, in the proper sense – of sinful people is intrinsic to the Jewish tradition. Last Stone mention at least three reasons why Judaism ‘tolerate’, and three reasons that leave room for judgment: First, it recognizes that a multiplicity of forces and social frameworks shape the self. Tolerance of persons responds to the actual, socially situated self, and not to the liberal ideal, freely choosing self – that is, to the model of the self contemplated by the Jewish religious tradition itself. Second, the appeal to ‘bear’ the sinner can be placed then within the Jewish tradition’s overall approach to the ideas of repentance, mercy and imitatio dei. As God bears sinners, restrains his anger and is patient, in order to maintain his relationship with Israel, so humans must emulate the divine virtues, exercise restrain and patience, and preserve the sinner’s relationship with the community, in the hope of eventual return and reconciliation. Bearing the sinner is not a legal duty; it is, like forgiveness and mercy, an act of loving kindness outside the sphere of justice. Third, when extended toward deviant Jews, such toleration is not only motivated by ethical concern for the tolerated person, or by an ideal picture of the ethical qualities of the tolerant. In the context of Judaism, such toleration is also stimulated by social concerns – by the felt need to preserve the national historical community, which overlaps with the theological community (Last Stone 2003, 113).

In this powerful synthesis, one can see how judgement is an act of love required also by one of the most legalistic religious traditions (see Seligman et al. 2008, Chapters 4 and 5). At the same time, one can see how mercy can be motivated by many different reasons: by ‘realistic’ considerations, by imitation dei, but also by the strong desire to preserve the community. The same need to temper the severity of the Law and Justice by means of mercy and benevolence is proper not only to the rabbinic tradition, but also to the mystical tradition (see Busi 1995,

  Even if one could say that, as in Judaism, Love is already encompassed within the Law.   See Chaim Grade’s novel Laybe-Layzar’s Courtyard, in The Sacred and the Profane. Three Novellas.

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XLVII-XLVIII). And, more generally, it is proper to every religion, and is another powerful principled argument for pluralism (toleration in this case).10 6.2.3 Religions and the practice of dialogue The third strategy possible has to do with the value of public discussion and those virtues necessary to nurture public discussions. Once again, let’s consider a few examples that perhaps are replicable within every tradition. Amartya Sen showed how public debate had a prominent role throughout the whole history of India. Even though it is possible to find traditions of public debate in every culture – Greek and Roman above all – according to Sen, India should be proud of maintaining a special primacy (see Sen 2005). The value of public debate is an integral part of Indian religions, and particularly of the Buddhist heritage. Some of the first open general assemblies of history were, according to Sen, the Buddhist councils: the first immediately after Gautama Buddha’s death, the second a century later, and the third in the III century B.C. Furthermore, constitutive of this tradition was the importance accorded to particular virtues necessary to nurture public debate, such as modesty and self-restraint in speaking, not to exalt one’s own followers too much and not to show contempt for other parties. In a sense, what Sen seems to suggest is that Buddhism taught the value of dialogue and the ethic of virtues fundamental to understanding public debate in non empty and procedural terms. The second example could be taken once again from Judaism. As we have seen, and as Menachem Fisch maintains, in Judaism different models of toleration can be detected. In the section dedicated to epistemic modesty we mentioned two. The third has to do with the value of debate, even arguing, that in Judaism has nothing less than a canonical justification. An even more startling view, which I think lies at the very heart of the covenant, is that God does have a view and we know what it is and we must wrestle with it. Now this is a very, very different notion of man up against it, as it were, wrestling with the Angel. It’s Abraham standing on his hind legs … if you will excuse the expression, saying ‘how can you do such a thing?’ and God changing his mind as a result of that confrontation. This is an even more startling notion of wrestling with the text, wrestling with the tradition, interpretation as an act of getting away from what you know the text means but you won’t allow it to mean what it means, which is even more startling (Fisch 2004, 24).

10  Once again with reference to Judaism: ‘right hand represent God’s mercy, Chesed, left hand his strictness, Middath Haddin. Using mostly the right hand, the Jew wants to express his wish to see Chesed ruling victoriously on the universe, and transforming Middath Haddin itself into Chesed’, Gugenheim 1978, 19.

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Here debate takes the radical form of quarrelling with God, as later Job will do in another paradigmatic manner. So discussion is necessary not only to try to understand God’s plans, but also to engage oneself in an ongoing discussion with God, as if God needed to test his own point of view in the light of his creatures’ objections. However, debate is a value not only within the borders of Judaism, as the hermeneutic nature of Talmudic Judaism testifies. Judaism has a tradition – too often forgotten – of discussion even with outside identities. The difficulty of accepting the existence of others as idolaters, was faced in two ways at least (see Last Stone 2003, 107-9). First, with ‘the command to pursue paths of social peace, darkhei shalom’, that command dialogue with others for prudential or principled reasons. Second, pointing out an intermediate category between Jews and pagans, namely a group of people (at least Christians and Muslims) that can be considered children of Noah, with whom God stipulated a pact before the berith on the Sinai. The so called Noachide laws, consisting of universal prohibitions (against idolatry, bloodshed, robbery, incest, blasphemy, eating a limb torn from a live animal) and the positive command to establish systems of justice, are the basis of an ethos of humanity (see Küng 1992) still today central to dialogue among religions (on this, see also Sacks 2002). 6.3 The mark of particularity: Post-liberal approaches to religious pluralism If the above considerations appear too abstract or just speculative, my final considerations are dedicated to a practical example of a post-liberal project of dialogue between civilizations that places a strong emphasis on traditions. The example in point is the so called ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ (SR). Needless to say, it is just one among the many possible. Other important experiences are widespread in the world; I want to mention above all the International Summer School on Religion and Public Life, directed by Adam B. Seligman. SR and the ISSRPL share several important characteristics, and at the same time, obviously, have significant differences. However, in this context I will briefly discuss only SR. The experience of SR starts in the early 1990s, as a post-liberal hermeneutics, that had its beginnings in the practice of ‘textual reasoning’ among a group of academic Jewish text scholars, philosophers and theologians (see the web site of the Scriptural Reasoning Society, and Ford and Pecknold 2006). Progressively, it was transformed into a ‘group of reading of the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam’ (Kepnes 2006, 23). Since its beginnings there has been a prevalence of academics; however, SR groups are made up of representatives of academic institutions (conceived as part of the public sphere), and members of particular ‘houses’, churches, mosques, synagogues. All the members of SR groups are deeply committed to their houses, and well versed in their tradition, and often each of them is capable of mastering Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. SR is marked by a

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specific particularity, given that all the members take their own traditions seriously, and speak from that particular perspective: ‘as far as SR is concerned, there is no reason to apologise for speaking from a particular place’ (Quash 2006, 60). On the contrary, ‘Muslims, Christians and Jews in SR insist that responsible thought only ever proves itself by the quality of attention it is able to pay to the concrete and particular’ (ibid.). At the same time, SR is marked by sociality, since it is a practice of dialogue encounter, and by the provisional nature of ongoing conversations. It involves only representatives of the three monotheisms, partly because the SR community derives from the traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and partly ‘because some of the most serious problems that plague today’s world are generated by tensions between Jews, Muslims and Christians’ (Kepnes 2006, 25). Differently from other practices of inter-religious dialogue, SR is not interested first of all in agreement and consensus, but in the ‘quality of disagreement’. SR ‘attempts to articulate and preserve the separate identities of each of the three religions as it builds a dialogue that is tuned to the pressing ethic issues of the contemporary world’ (2006, 28). Obviously, SR is not against agreement and consensus, but it ‘values friendship above consensus’ (Adams 2006, 53). One could also say that for SR nurturing mutual trust is the most important aim (and sociologically speaking trust is notoriously a pre-contractual basis of very social legacy, see Seligman 1997). In other words, SR ‘is a model for making deep reasoning public because it fosters discussion between members of different religious traditions with respect to their most important sacred text’ (Adams 2006, 55), against the over-dramatization of rival claims made by mass media. Furthermore, SR is a practice before it is a theory (Kepnes 2006, 26). Or, better, it is ‘a practice that can be theorized, not a theory that can be practised’. In one of its representative’s words, ‘SR is a practice which displays examples of … understanding. In the study of scriptural texts from three traditions … participants come to the table with different narratives, different philosophical practices, different presuppositions, and even different scriptures. In the course of the study there are disagreements and agreements over a wide range of issues, from the plain sense of the text to the practical implications of certain interpretations’ (Adams 2006, 43). In practical terms, SR implies the following: first, a text is chosen. Its focus might be on a common figures, i.e. Abraham, or on an issue: hospitality, creation, sacrifice, land, purity laws and so on. Then a place is chosen. Everything is prepared with care: from the kind of place – in one of the houses, in an academic institution of one of the three religions, more often than not in a ‘neutral place’ – to how the tables are placed. To set aside adequate time is also important, to leave time for plenary sessions and sub-groups discussions (see Kepnes 2006, 38). Then texts are discussed. The cardinal rule is ‘an egalitarian speech situation’, with no differences among members. Usually, a representative of one house reads and then interprets the chosen texts, and then it is discussed from the point of view of the other traditions too. This is understood by its practitioners as a quasi-liturgical practice. This is, in my understanding, a very important point, because it indicates one of the

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main features of rituals, even in the context of the dialogue between religions, i.e. the capability of rituals of ‘tickling boundaries’, reframing and reconstituting boundaries and frames of experiences, by means of a de-centering of the Self.11 This is a characteristic that SR shares for example with the experience of the ISSRPL. Even if the word liturgy must be used with caution, given that SR aim is not that of shaping a ‘new syncretism of monotheistic religions’, there is indeed A ritual and liturgical aspect to SR in the sense that SR practitioners adhere to a reverential attitude toward the scriptures they study and the persons they engage with in study. Also, SR practice follows a series of ideological and practical rules and SR sessions are often started and ended with a formal reading of scripture. SR members often take meals in common before and following SR sessions. Finally, the liturgical aspect of SR can be seen in the belief that many SR members have that an ideal future time, a time of inter-religious peace, is anticipated, ‘glimpsed’ and even ‘participated in’ through SR practice (Kepnes 2006, 37).

I want to stress once again the relevance of this point. The liturgical nature of SR practice opens up, in principle and in practice, to a reshaping of boundaries and identities. In its present practice, it implies a mutual conversation among traditions that fosters trust and friendship – friendship understood as a public, not a private feeling –, but it has also an eschatological dimension. A time of inter-religious peace is glimpsed in the present time, but – another crucial point – ‘a new type of end-time, in which universal peace is won through preserving the particularity of the others instead of obliterating it’ (ibid. emphasis added). Thus we are back to our point of departure. SR ‘seeks a third space’ between anti-modern religious fundamentalism and modern liberalism (2006, 25). It shares some of the post-modern epistemological premises, such as the criticism of every search for foundation, without accepting its deconstructivist conclusions. It seeks a ‘mutual ground’, not a ‘neutral ground’. It is very critical of the secularized privatizing of religious traditions, and fosters a deep reasoning on religious premises, within the public square. Neutral ground is what a secular society or institution often claims to provide in matters of religion. A problem is that the conditions for entering it are usually secular in the sense of requiring particular religious identities to be left behind: norms, concepts and methods have to be justifiable in non-religious terms. Contested ground is where there is no agreement about how to constitute it. 11  By the way, de-centering and dispossessing the Self is one of the main characteristic of every religious experience, pointed out in different ways for example by Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, by William James in Varieties of Religious Experience, and today by Hans Joas in Do We Need Religion? (Joas 2008). For the experience of the dispossessing of the Self in SR, see Ticciati 2006.

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SR is certainly a post-liberal project, coherent with a hermeneutics of religious traditions that moves beyond the Protestant-like premises set up by the narrative of introspective conscience. However, it is also a good example of a post-conservative approach. Aiming not, in fact, at reaffirming crystallized traditions, but at finding – with humility – a mutual ground of coexistence between differences reduced neither to a matter of taste nor to assimilated visions of the good.

Conclusion

Durkheim debut du siècle Saturday, early in the morning. Davita walks over Tiber Island bridge and crosses the street to the Jewish Temple. The city is still sleeping. But the Sabbath service is long and so when Davita comes out the city is in a flurry of activity. It is Christmas Eve and people have only one day left to buy presents. Tomorrow Rome, even more than on the other days of the year, will be the ‘centre of Christianity’. Davita feels slightly out of place: she is experiencing a different sense of time: it is the Sabbath, and while her coreligionists in the synagogue or around the world are taking a rest from mundane affairs, the people in the city are running here and there to buy presents, a secular ritual and the homage one has to pay to a consumer society, no less demanding – one might observe bitterly – than a religious ritual. The following day, when a new week will be starting for Davita, the Pope in St. Peter’s and Christians everywhere in the globe will be celebrating the birth of Christ. From the point of view of a religious minority, Davita is experiencing the co-presence of a different – secular and religious – atmosphere in the same city. Davita goes on her way, then decides to rest for a while; after her quite tiring walk she looks around. Of course, what she sees is not exactly the same as what Ayelet Shachar describes about Jerusalem: Schoolgirls wearing the hijab, the Muezzin’s calls for prayer in the mosque, the bells of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the personal law tribunals of various Christian sects, the ancient ruins of the City of David, and debates over women’s prayers at the Western Wall – these disparate sounds and images combine to form the richly complex cultural mosaic known as Jerusalem (Shachar 2001, xi).

There are no doubts as to the uniqueness of Jerusalem, as, in a sense, of every other magic city in the world. However, Shachar is also right in stressing how, differences notwithstanding, the tensions, collective identity markers – and, let me add, beauty – that comes to the fore with the progressive unfolding of that social landscape ‘are prevalent in many other parts of the world as well’ (ibid.). Travellers who arrive at a train station or at an airport in New York, Boston, Paris, Madrid share similar feelings, take in similar mixed images; people, just like Davita, who go about their business in Rome hear the bells of thousands of Catholic churches ringing and the call for prayer in the big Mosque, more or less as people in Istanbul hear the thousands of muezzins’ voices and the bells of Christian churches ring; St. Peter’s dome and that of the Jewish Temple overlook each another along the banks of the Tiber; in Rome, where the number of immigrants is steadily growing although not to the same extent as in other big cities around the world, there are – just for

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immigrants – 201 places of worship; and religious differences, with their identity markers, are obviously not the only ones to dot our cities. Davita is not merely a young Jewish woman in Rome, who happens to live quite near the big Mosque; she is also a political activist, one of the few left, deeply committed and involved in a left-wing party. Davita, an imaginary character so similar to many other flesh and blood creatures in Rome as in New York, Boston, Paris, London, Istanbul, Madrid and so on, is in my view, an exemplary figure. She expresses the ‘force of the example’ (see Ferrara 2008). She is a young woman, sometimes in troubles within her own community because of different interpretations of the tradition; however, she feels so deeply entwined within her tradition that she cannot conceive of giving it up in any way; more than this, she feels and interprets her religion, her tradition, as a condition of freedom, not despite of mitzvoth, but thanks to them. On deep reflection, after night-long discussions with other people, and after a lot of reflection, she has started to think of the Torah’s commandments as powerful and delicate barriers against idolatry; she wants to live in her time and in her world, she wants to live in Rome, in 2008, but she doesn’t want to be enslaved by false idols. She is a modern woman, not least because she has freely decided to come back to the Judaism of her family, after generations of losing contact with the community, but at the same time she is unwilling to accept Western modernity as the best possible civilizations project, either for the future as for the time being. That is why Davita is eager to examine every nook and cranny of her society, to pay attention to the many folds of a pluralistic society such as the one she lives in. Her deep knowledge of her own tradition and the meaning and value that heteronomy has there, helps her to understand and respect people of similar persuasions in terms of other traditions of faith. That is why she, in principle, would be ready to take a journey to Rome’s 201 places of worship, before returning to her house, and to her political party’s almost deserted quarters. Admittedly, she has problems with people who feel perfectly at ease without traditions at all, and above all who feel at ease with the idols of the market, realpolitik, and with the easy panacea of the compensating therapeutic cultures (see Furedi 2004); and she has even more problems with those who hate variegated social spaces, and who think of ‘one land one people’. Davita is not equally well-disposed towards everybody. Davita is a symbolic character, but she does not belong to the majority. She prays to a heteronomous God, and the rituals she performs communicate of course self-referential, but also canonical messages, while most of the people around her ‘bow and pray to the neon god they made’. Davita is the exemplification of a Self who joins constitutive – religious and political – groups. She thinks of herself as a link in a chain of memory, part of a tradition by means of which she experiences   To be honest, she is my last homage to the characters in Chaim Potok’s novels, characters – deeply inspiring for me – who secretly dance in the twilight in and out of the pages and between the lines of this book.

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the sacred as something beyond the reign of mere preferences. She is accustomed to looking at the world from a specific point of view, and her gaze is marked, in a sense, by particularity. The mark of particularity makes her sensitive toward differences. Preserving particularity in others as her own is Davita’s aim: she envisages a social space not immune from differences and particularities, and policies that recognize and regulate them, urging at the same time every vision of life to look at itself and the others as part of ‘a complementary learning process’. Sometime she has difficulty in trying to remind her companions that politics should mean marching together, as people and not as atomized individuals, out of the Egypt, that ‘the strength of the Exodus story lies in its end, the divine promise’, and that it is ‘God’s promise (that) generates a sense of possibility …: the world is not all Egypt’ (Walzer 1985, 21); in other words, to remind her companions that a religious vocabulary and even an idea of ‘transcendence’ might still inform pluralistic progressive visions of politics, against the common vision of politics as an administrative business. If Davita were a social thinker, she would have a difficult time in finding the appropriate social theory for translating into concepts the image of society she envisages, and sometimes experiences in very special moments. Mainstream social theories express instrumental conceptions of the Self and social groups, whereas mainstream sociological approaches to politics and political theories look at politics from the cynical point of view of realpolitik. As far as normative political theories are concerned, they reject cynicism, but quite often also reject the ‘mark of particularity’ and differences, as being judged incompatible with universalism and equality, with Enlightenment values. Ritual and the Sacred suggests that Durkheim’s sociology of religion offers the right theoretical frame to Davita’s image of society, Self, politics and religion. Needless to say, I agree completely with the last sentence in Johnathan Fish’s book, according to which ‘rumors that the Durkheimian tradition has exhausted itself are … much exaggerated’ (Fish 2005, 189). There is plenty of evidence that studies on Durkheim and the Durkheimian tradition are thriving and experiencing a spate of renewed interest (see, i.e. Ramp 2008 and the entire issue of the Journal of Classical Sociology 2-2008). Durkheim’s thought has recently been investigated both from an historicist point of view (see Fournier 2007), and from ‘presentist’ perspectives sensitive to a close relationship with the original texts (see, i.e. Watts Miller forthcoming); new topics, almost neglected up to the present, are being discussed, such as emotions and evil (see Fish 2005; Pickering and Rosati 2008); specialist applications to the interpretation of specific religious phenomena and traditions are being developed (see Child 2007 for Durkheim’s sociology of religion and Tantric Buddhism). It is not uncommon within sociological debates the argument according to which the rise of sociology was a response to the need for social cohesion of new social communities after the French Revolution, and the passing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other words, the thoughts of the sociological classics seem to be tailored, from the point of view of critics of classical sociology, on

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the experience of ‘Enlightened nationalism’. The idea of society in itself was, at the beginning, implicitly or explicitly shaped on that of nation-state. Durkheim’s thought makes no exception, according to recent analysis. On the contrary, in Durkheim’s works ‘the individual was a social reality, the product of a society that was itself a reality, and for Durkheim the implicit reality of society was the nation, particularly the French nation, with the German model as the ideal form. Durkheim rarely explicitly addressed the concept of the nation; but it is clear from most of his works, from the influences upon him, and from his commitment to the French Republic that for him society was the nation’ (Dingley 2008, 42). Quoting Hamilton in support, Dingley stresses that ‘for all practical purposes Durkheim used the terms “people”, “nation”, “state”, “la patrie”, “society”, synonymously, to denote a collective being with a personality distinct from and superior to that of its individual members’ (Hamilton in Dingley 2008, 43). The relevant consequence of this reading of Durkheim’s thought, from a ‘presentist’ and theoretical point of view, is that From this Durkheim would have proceeded to a very strong anti-multiculturalism and anti-pluralism stance, for whilst he argued that organic societies were based on toleration of differences, he also drew a strong distinction between complementary and non-complementary differences. This is often lost in contemporary debates in the area; … it was for this reason that Durkheim advocated so strongly the idea of a secular education in France – to overcome religious divisions and to ensure the knowledge passed on was requisite to both socio-political integration (shared national identity) and economic and social skills for a modern industrial society …. And this is precisely the reason why today the French state does not allow Muslim to wear headscarves in schools, or Jews to display stars of David or Catholics to display crucifixes, they confine individuals to narrow religious identities that prevent the formation of a shared French one that provides greater individual liberty (2008, 219).

This is not a book on Durkheim, as I stated in the Introduction, but certainly – as I attempted to explain in Chapter 1 – this is a book built on the conviction that there is ‘so much more Durkheim’ (see Strenski 2006) than merely the modernist supporter of nation-state homogeneity, industrial society, positivistic science, privatization of religions for the sake of a secularized public space, and so on. I fear that Dingley’s position is still mainstream in the sociological field, and maybe even within the Durkheimian studies. From my perspective, however, the point is not that of questioning Durkheim’s relationship with the nation state, or the Third Republic. No doubts arise, in this sense, on the excellence of Dingley’s contextsensitive analysis. The point is that there is ‘so much more Durkheim’ that we can bring into the new century. Reading some of the most relevant phenomena of the new century with Durkheimian categories is perfectly legitimate if we recognize at least two main assumptions: a) that he was far from being an ‘impenitent Jacobin’ whose aim was that of ‘hastening republican assimilation’ ‘and establishing a

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new form of collective identity distinct from past traditions, habits, and ways of thinking’ (Birnbaum 2008, 85); and b) that his idea of the semi-sacred (see Watts Miller 2002), namely his partial immanent translation of the sacred into sociological categories coherent with modernity’s wager, does not imply the disappearing of the idea and experience of heteronomy, that on the contrary, in Durkheim’s thought still plays a crucial role. Let me add, in conclusion, a few words on these two points, in order to persuade Davita that Durkheim’s perspective can satisfy her ideas of the Self, society, religion, and politics. As concerns the first point, it is extremely important to ‘unpack’ and ‘unroll’ Durkheim’s idea of society. If one does so, what one may see is a pluralistic society, articulated internally in intermediate groups, capable of developing their own collective conscience and morals from a bottom up perspective, a point Durkheim never abandoned throughout all his intellectual development; so important in Durkheim’s view, that he never thought of society in the abstract, but always in terms of social groups, and the Self in terms of attachment to social groups in the plural (see Watts Miller 1996 and Cladis 1992). If for many interpreters ‘Durkheim sociology would omit any reference to particular allegiances and would be radically incapable of accounting for the forms of engagement and solidarity that pervade citizenship, even in modern society with its clear division of labour, including the public space’, others (and I would side with them) see Durkheim as ‘a precursor of an Anglo-Saxon style of multiculturalism, respectful of all forms of identitarian adherence’ (Birnbaum 2008, 86). Birnbaum’s close reading of Durkheim’s relationship with Judaism – a reading in my understanding more and more accurate over the years and in its most recent form clearly refusing an assimilation perspective (see Birnbaum 2008, and before Birnbaum 1996) –, and Strenski’s criticism of any assimilation of Durkheim’s thought to a Kemalist ideology (see Strenski 2006, 303-36), are two extremely interesting and revealing empirical tests that show the complexity of Durkheim’s idea of society, not at all reducible to a homogeneous national community where particular traditions, habits and identities are doomed to be resolved. As Strenski rightly stresses, actually talking about Gökalp and Turkey, but with an indirect reference to the Durkheimian source, even traditional religions are to be considered social ‘pillars of organic solidarity’, that ‘should occupy a place in public life, (but) where public means something other than political’ (2006, 328), just as I tried to stress in Chapter 5. But there is still one element of reflection, again with reference to point a). It is not only national culture that is not homogeneous and unarticulated; it is not only the fact that the nation is not the last horizon of Durkheim’s political gaze, as everyone who read Durkheim’s 1908 contribution to the discussion of ‘Pacifism et patriotism’ knows perfectly well. The point is also that there is a relevant Durkheim, actually quite neglected within the Durkheimian studies and with a few exception within the field of sociology of civilizations, even after 1912. Here I am referring to his and Marcel Mauss’ note ‘Sur la notion the civilization’ (1913). The importance of this document is that it clearly affirms that a life

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exists which is in some way supra-national, a life with its sui generis nature. The Durkheim and Mauss perspective implies a ‘civilization chrétienne’, a ‘civilization méditerraéenne’, ‘une civilization de l’Amerique nord-occidentale’ (Mauss and Durkheim 1974, 453). They define civilizations as social phenomena qui ne son pas strictement attachés a un organisme sociale déterminé ils s’étendent sur des aires qui dépassent un territoire national ou bine ils se développent sur des périodes de temps qui dépassent l’histoire d’une seul société. Ils vivent d’une vie en quelque sort supra-nationale (1974, 452).

They are … non pas simplement des faites isolés, mais de systèmes complexes et solidaires qui, sans être limités a un organisme politique déterminé, sont pourtant localisables dans les temps et dans l’espace (1974, 453).

As Arnason acutely recognizes, the 1913 note ‘has mostly been overlooked by those who criticize the Durkheimian school for modelling its idea of society on the nation-state and thus imposing a reductionist frame of reference on the whole subsequent sociological tradition’, whereas for Durkheim and Mauss ‘the civilization perspective was clearly relevant to modern no less that premodern societies’ (Arnason 2003, 70-1). Clearly overlooked in comparison with the Weberian tradition, the Durkheimian tradition, on the contrary, offers a perspective for profitably analyzing the complex articulation of multiple civilizations and supranational political arrangements taking shape within the contemporary scenario; a research study, from the Durkheimian perspective, yet to be undertaken. The second issue that needs addressing, albeit briefly, if we want to bring Durkheim sociology into the new century is the place and role of heteronomy in individual, social and political life – a subject that has continuously crosscut the previous chapters. As I recalled in Chapter 3, Donald A. Nielsen, amongst others (from a critical point of view, in different ways, see also Seligman 2000 and Milbank 1990), maintains that ‘Durkheim’s religious sociology provides the basis for a distinctive theology of social immanence’ (Nielsen 2001, 130), substituting God with society, making the sacred immanent to transcendental reason and democratic values (Seligman 2000, 12-13), and transforming it into semi-sacred (Watts Miller 2002, 159 ff.). One could respond that Durkheim did not consider that society and God were merged but rather that they were dovetailed. As Pickering maintains, if ‘critics of Durkheim all too readily say that Durkheim states that God is society … meaning identity’ (Pickering 1984, 222), what in fact Durkheim always stressed was a ‘a strong symbolic relationship’ (1984, 223). Let me quote in length Pickering’s considerations (needless to say, for a full analysis see Pickering 1984, Chapter 12):

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What Durkheim is stating is little more than there exist an important interconnection between the two (God and society), that they are not separate realities so isolated from each other that they are unable to be close related. They are in fact dovetailed … Durkheim does not make a metaphysical assertion that concepts are the same or that realities behind them are identical … it should be made quite explicit that nowhere, so far as we can find, does Durkheim use the phrase ‘deification of society’, which is so often used in connection with his close association of God and society, and which is frequently attributed to him by his critics … The danger always is to jump the parallel and make the two concepts or realities identical, or at least to suggest that the one is the other. Critics claim that Durkheim made such a step, but they disregard all caution. To the contrary, as we have shown, Durkheim is much more careful, and nowhere he takes the final and irrevocable step of crossing the parallel, although he does go as near as he can without actually making the jump (1984, 234-5).

Making that jump would mean idolatry, as Durkheim was accused of in his time, and again later as it is well known, by Aron and others. However, given that he did not take that final and irrevocable step, one can read the parallel between God and society in two other ways: firstly, as I have already stressed in Chapter 1, as a weakening of God’s omnipotence, as a way of underlining the common contingent, fragile ad fragmented nature both of God and society, their being involved in the same story of finitude and suffering, as at least several Christian and Jewish perspectives strongly suggest – albeit in different ways (see, i.e. Quinzio 1991, Bonhoeffer 1972, Jonas 1987, Rubenstein 1966). Secondly, as a way to push the secular mind to reflect on the role that God, transcendence and heteronomy have in society, not only in terms of ‘then’, but also in terms of ‘now’, as we have seen again and again in the previous chapters, in the shape of God’s will or that of constraining external social things. I hope this is enough to make Davita feel at home within the Durkheimian household. In my understanding, the latter (even thus interpreted) would have to be comfortable for secular humanists too, provided that they open up themselves up to the awareness of the role played by ritual and the sacred in social life at large. I started off saying that ritual is the way we shape shared ‘as ifs’, shared portions of life in common, and that the sacred is that part of our common life we cannot bargain or consider as a mere preference. I started off saying that in this sense, like building blocks of social life at large, ritual and the sacred ought to be considered an un-surmountable horizon, preceding every distinction between secular and religious life. That is why, in my view, Durkheim’s social theory is fully entitled to enter the new century and millennium. As stated before in Chapter 3, ritual is the way we enter and leave finite provinces of meaning, the way we build and reshape the borders and margins of our common life. As Schutz taught us, we enter and leave in each finite province of meaning experiencing, each time, a certain ‘shock’. Ritual would have to teach us to enter and leave those finite

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provinces of meaning we inhabit together with a ‘Calvino-type lightness’. In his first lecture of the famous Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a particularly apt title to a conclusion dedicated to Durkheim debut du siècle, Italo Calvino described lightness, the ‘lightness of thought-fulness’ and not that ‘of frivolity’ (Calvino 1992, 16), as ‘a value rather than a defect’ (1992, 11), a value worth projecting into the future. It is the lightness proper to people who know ‘the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world’ (ibid.), the external and coercive power of social things, the weigh imposed by social norms, ‘the weight of living’ that is ‘chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely’ (1992, 14), as Durkheim prophesized in his 1914 essay on the future of human nature. But lightness is rightly the attitude of those who knowing all this, and without ‘escaping into dreams or into the irrational’ (ibid.) learn to change perspective, learn to ‘remove weight’ from a sometime unbearable social life. To ritual and the sacred, eventually, lies the task of teaching (even to moderns) the virtue of the ‘lightness of thought-fulness’.

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Index Acceptance/adherence see also ritual and sincerity 15, 45, 64-9 Adams, Nicholas 132 Adorno, Theodor W. 22, 72, 88 Ahern, Emily M. 88, 102, 106 Akthar, Shabbir 103 Alexander, Jeffrey C. 7, 8, 39, 41-7, 57, 94 Allen, N.J. 28, 66n. Ames, Roger T. 108 An-na’im, Abdullhai A. 104 Apter, David E. 44, 94 Arato, Andrew 98 Arendt, Hannah 18, 75 Aristotle 73 Arnaldez, Roger 102 Arnason, Jhoann P. 35, 140 Aron, Raymond 140 Aslan, Reza 69, 104 Assman, Jan 24, 63 Augustine, St 21, 25, 27, 31, 34-5 Austin, John 86 autonomy see also heteronomy and ritual reflexivity and judgment 77-8, 80-83, 88 Kantian 9 ritualistic 9 Axial Age, 30, 34, 38, 51-2, 54, 103 Baubérot, Jean 120 Bauman, Zygmunt 22 Beck, Ulrich 22 Bell, Catherine 49n. Bell, D. 22 Bell, Daniel A. 9, 100, 106 Bellah, Robert 8, 22, 24, 30, 33, 34, 42, 50-56, 71, 90 Benhabib Seyla 89, 100, 112, 115n., 121 Berger, Peter 4, 6, 34, 118 Bernstein, Basil 78, 80 Birnbaum, Pierre 139 Bloom, Elisabeth 13

Böckenforde, Ernst-Wolfgang 115n. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 67, 141 Bortolini, Matteo 23, 32, 118n. Bossy, John 34-5 Busi, Giulio, 123, 129 Byrnes, Timoty A. 118n. Caillois, Roger 35, 46n., 57n., 63n. Calvin John 21, 27, 31, 34-5 Calvino, Italo 142 Campanini, Massimo 103, 104-5 Casanova, José 3, 23, 118-20, 126 Celtel, André 28, 29 Chaibong, Hahm 106 Chaihark, Hahm 88, 106, 108 Chakrabarty, Dipesch 121 Chan, Joseph 107-8, 111 Chen, Albert H.Y. 109 Child, Louise 137 Cladis, Mark 14, 19, 21, 73, 80-81, 139 Cohen Jean L. 98 Collins, Randall 8, 42, 47-50, 54, 68, 76 conformism and atomism 21 new forms of 8, 54 Connerton, Paul 62 Cooke, Maeve 1n., 2, 117, 123n. Costa, P. 73 Crespi, Franco 27 critical social theory 7, 21-22, 24, 47, 71-3, 88 cult of the individual (moral individualism) 7, 11-13, 15, 19 Dahl, Robert 99 Dan, Jospeh 123 Davie, Grace 118, 145 Deacon, Terrence W. 52 democracy and Confucianism 106-112 and Islam 101-06

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post-liberal 9, 100-101, 105 Derczanski, Alexander 17 Dingley, James 97, 138 Douglas, Mary 15 Dreyfus affair 2 Driver, Tom F. 4, 7n. Dumont, Louis 8, 29-31 Durkheim, Émile and anti-utilitarianism 12 and collective identity/conscience 35, 99 and contemporary social theory 10, 4142, 47, 137-142 and evil/suffering see also salvation and suffering 14, 71-74, 85 and Judaism 13 see also the sacred 14, 17, 73, 139 and mainstream modernity 12 and mechanical solidarity 28, 51 and multiculturalism/civilizations 138-140 and the pathologies of modernity 18 and pathos 17 and Protestantism 13, 64 and social groups 97 and the idea of sincerity 14, 44 beliefs and practices 13, 16, 63-5, 66n., 94 politics and regulation 90-97, reluctant modernism 6-8, 11-19, 55, 117

Fish, Johnathan 137 Fokas, Effie 118, 145 Ford, David D. 131, 134 Foucault, Michel 22 Fournier, Marcel 137 freedom from domination 113 Freud, Sigmund 18, 25, 71 Furedi, Frank 25 Gauchet, Marcel 23 Geertz, Clifford 43 Genre, Ermanno 34n., 64n. Giesen, Bernhard 43, 44 Girard, René 95 Gluckman, Max 102n. Goffman, Erving 43, 44, 47, 54, 60, 86 Gokälp, Ziya 139 Golding, Sue 98 Goldziher, Ignaz 67n., 69, 96n., 124 Grade, Chaim 129 Gramsci, Antonio 98 Greve, Anni 97 Gugenheim, Ernest 130

Eisen, Arnold M. 13 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 22 Eliade, M. 50, 52n., 103 Elias, Norbert 23, 37, 88 Elliot, Anthony 22, 55 Enlightenment see also modernity and religion 117, 121-122 and self-criticism, 2, 36-7 epistemic humility 122-7 Erasmus of Rotterdam 27

Habermas, Jürgen 7, 55, 95, 115, 117 Halbwachs, Maurice 4 Hall, David L. 108 Hart, Keith 90 Hashmi, Sohail H. 125 Hayoun, Maurice-Ruben 69 Hefner, Robert W. 100, 104 Hegel, Georg W. 73 Hertz, Robert 57n. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle 34, 61-62, 118 Heschel, Abraham J. 17, 69 heteronomy 9, 22, 25, 36, 38, 46, 59, 61, 64, 76, 77, 80 Hochschild, Arlie R. 21 Horkheimer, Max 22, 72, 88, 143 Hubert, Henri 16 Huizinga, Johan 46n., 96n. Humphrey, Carolin 45n., 90n.

Ferrara, Alessandro 128, 136 Fields, Karen 14 Fimiani, Mariapaola 51 Fingarette Herbert 86-7 Fisch, Menachem 123-24, 130

introspective conscience and modernity 24-39, 76, 87 and ritual 45, 47 Ivanhoe, Philip J. 80, 85-87 Izutsu, Toshihiko 124

Index James, William 119, 133n. Jaspers, Karl 24 Joas, Hans 74, 133n. Jonas, Hans 123, 141 Jones, Robert Alun 72 Jones, Stephen H. 1n. Kant, Immanuel 12, 13, 29, 34, 36, 53, 73, 77, 78, 80 Kaplan, Mordecai 14 Katzenstein, Peter J. 118n. Kepnes, Steven 131-133 Kertzer, David 95 Kongzi 63, 86-88, 111 Kukathas, Chandran 113 Küng, Hans 131 Kymlicka, Will 113 Lacroix, Bernard 14, 93n. Lafont, Cristina 117 laïcité 10, 103, 117-134 Laidlaw, James 45n., 90n. Lasch, Christopher 24 Last Stone, Suzanne 121-123, 127, 129, 131 Lemert, Charles 22, 55 Lévi, Silvain 16 Lévi-Bruhl, Lucien 51 Lewis, Bernard 102, 103 Luckman, Thomas 34, 60 Luria, Yishaq 123 Luther, Martin 21, 31 Mahmutcehajic, Rusmir 39, 97, 126 Marrus, Michael 37 Martin, David 118 Marx, K. 11, 66n., 71 Mauss, Marcel 8, 16, 28-31, 57n., 61, 65, 66n., 139-140 MacIntyre, Alasdair 64, 77 McDonald, Michael 113 McGrath, Alister 27, 34 Mehl, Roger 27, 34 Mengzi 111 Mestrovic , Stepan 14 Milbank, John 140 Mo, Jongryn 109 modernity

161

Durkheimian reading of 6-7, 11-19, 38, 117 and Christianity 21-39 and collective identities 35-37 and fundamentalism 22 and instrumental rationality 22, 72 and Protestantism 25-27, 28-34 and self-criticism 18, 38 and therapeutic culture 25, 37 and tolerance 38 and traditional societies 7, 11, 36 modernity’s wager 8, 36-8, 55 Moore, Deborah D. 13, 14 Morini, Enrico 128 multicultural jurisdictions 1, 10, 112-115 Myerhoff, Barbara 59 Neusner, Jacob 126n. Nielsen, Donald A. 13, 50, 55, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 10 Nisbet, Robert 77 Nosco, Peter 107, 108 Okin, Susan 113 Otto, Rudolf 95 Parkin, Robert 29 Parsons, Talcott 8, 31-4 Paul, St 13, 21, 24-5, 27, 30-31, 34 Pecknold, C.C. 131 Pettit, Philip 113 Pickering, William S.F. 6, 19, 74, 137, 140 Poggi, Gianfranco 15, 17, 74 poly-contextuality 9, 98-101 Potok, Chaim 136n. Quash, Ben 132 Quinzio, Sergio 97n., 141 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 49n., 68 Ramp, William S.F. 137 Rappaport, Roy 9, 15, 45, 49, 59, 65, 68-9, 90-7, 121 Rashi 73 Ratzinger, Joseph 117-118 Rawls, Anne W. 66n. Rawls, John 1, 89, 119-120 religion

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and dialogue 130-34 and fundamentalism 23 and interiorization of beliefs 13, 17, 34 and judgment 127-130 and modernity 23, 28, 37 and practical virtues 14 and secularization 23 historical 5 primitive religions 13, 51 Protestant conception 2-3, 5, 26, 28, 33, 53, 103-104, 112, 119-121, 128, 134 socio-anthropological conception 5 religious evolution 51-5 individualism 27, 28, 29, 33 new movements 35 pluralism and legal pluralism 1 responsibility 15 Ries, Julien 50, 52n., 102 Rieff, Philippe 22 Riley, Alexander T. 57n. ritual and beliefs 13, 16 (ritual causality), 47-8, 50, 65-9, 94 and Christian conception of 45 and collective effervescence 13, 14 and communication 93-4 and Confucian ethics 9, 86-8, 106-112 and education 5, 78-9, 84-8 and formality 49-50 and fragmentation 79-80 and fusion 43-6 and individual judgment 9 and memory 3-4, 61-62 and modern de-ritualization of social life 8, 15, 34, 49, 88 and modernity 6 and performative affects 15, 43-4, 50 and pluralism/tolerance 10 and politics 89-115 and postmodern mystical social practices 8, 45-9, 56n., 59-60, 64, 83 and rabbinic ethics 9 and radical vs. conservative polarity 7 and sincerity 15 see also acceptance, 44-5, 48, 64-9, 80

and symbols 13, 48, 79 and the subjunctive 5, 60 see also tradition, 81 as building block of society 6, 8, 12, 39, 41-69, 117 as condition of the good life 9 liturgical 9, 46-9, 56n., 59-69, 82 reflexivity, 59-60, 79-83, 88 ritual-less society 16 Rivière, Claude, 50 Rorty, Richard 27 Rosati, Massimo 6, 14, 18, 38, 46, 55, 74, 121, 137 Rosemont, Henry Jr. 80, 107 Rousseau, Jean J. 73 Rubenstein, Richard L. 141 Sacks, Jonathan 5, 39, 100, 131 sacred (the) and collective identity 35, 71, 76 and modernity 6 and pluralism 10, 97-101 and politics 89-115 and the subjunctive 5 as building block of society 6, 8, 12, 39, 41-69, 117 as condition of the good life 9 cybernetics of the sacred and politics 9 Jewish idea of quadosh 13 traditional and modern societies 39-69 transformations of 50-55 Sadovnik, Alan R. 78 salvation and collective rituals 15 and evil 14-15 Sanders, E.P. 24 Schechner, Richard 46 Schoefer, Jonathan W. 76, 78, 80, 84-5 Schoenfeld, Eugen 14 Schutz, Alfred 60 Scubla, Lucien 6, 42 secularization and heteronomy 22 and Protestantism 8 as differentiation of social spheres 9, 126 in Europe 118 political and social 105-6

Index Séguy, Jean 27, 34 Seigel, Jerrold 28 self and immunity 23, 25 and narcissism 22 and the person 28-30 and self-cultivation 9, 71-88 and self-trascendence 14, 133 and Western culture 8, 29-34, 37, 76, 80 as a role-bearing 81, 83, 87n., 88 connected 76-77, 83, 88 Seligman, Adam B. 8, 9, 15, 22, 24, 25, 32, 34, 35-9, 45, 46n., 58, 60, 64, 65, 67, 75, 80, 95, 98-100, 121-2, 124, 129, 131-2, 140 Sen, Amartya 130 Sennet, Richard 77 Shachar, Ayelet 1, 111-5, 135 Shils, Edward 37, 62-3, 64n., 80 Simmel, Georg 10 sincerity see also ritual Christianity 14-15 Judaism 14-15 Singer, Isaac B. 73-4, 85 Smith, Cantwell 23n. Smith, Jonathan Z. 17 Smith, Philip 7, 42, 43, 143 Smith, Robertson 12, 1 sociological normativity 41 Soloveitich, Joseph B. 68n., 69 Sonn, Tamara 126 Sorush, Abdolkarim 126 Spencer, Herbert 12 Steiner, Philippe 6, 42, 73, 74 Stendhal, Kristen 8, 24, 25 Strenski, Ivan 7, 13, 14, 17, 73, 138-9 Stroumsa, Guy G. 24, 144 Stout, Jeffrey 64 suffering and passions 46, 71-9, 84-8 and social norms 71-5 God’s suffering 123, 141 Swanson, Guy E. 23n.

163

Swartz, Marc J. 94 Tambiah, Stanley J. 93n. Tarot, Camille 61 Taylor, Charles 21, 28, 34, 59n., 88, 97, 119 Teubner, Gunther 9, 98 Thiebaut, Carlos 117n. Thompson, John B. 62 Tibi, Bassam 103 Ticciati, Susannah 133n. Tipton, Steven, M. 50, 51, 54 Tocqueville, Alexis de 99, 100, 104 tradition and collective identity 39, 62-9 and constitutive groups 75-6 and individual identity 9, 39, 62, 71-88 and the subjunctive 64 and tolerance 122-134 ethical 84-88 society as a union of traditions 5, 97101 Trilling, Lionel 25, 44 Troeltsch, Ernest 25-27, 30 Turner, Victor 8, 43, 56-60, 74 Van Gennep, Arnold 56 Vattimo, Gianni 27 Voegelin, Heric 24 Walzer, M. 41n., 77, 95, 137 Ware, Timothy 87, 128 Warfield, Benjamin B. 27 Watts-Miller, William 95, 97, 139-140 Weber, Max 9, 11, 71, 74, 99, 140 Whitehouse, Harvey 68n., 82, 83 Willaime, Jean-Paul 61 Williams, Rowan and the Sharia controversy 1-4, 6 Wolfteich, Claire 127 Yao, Xinzhong 86, 108 Yerushalmi, Yosef H. 63, 67 Yu-Shik, Chang 110