Theory:Max Weber

“Senseless death has seemed only to put the stamp upon the senselessness

of life itself.”(Sociology 156)

Psychological Experience of Religion

• Religious ‘virtuosos’ and the ‘unmusical’– Virtuosos: Prophets, saints, founders, reformers– Unmusical: everyone else

• Tension between religious institutions and virtuosos• Apocalypse Island

– “The church, being the holder of institutionalized grace, seeks to organize the religiosity of the masses and to put its own officially monopolized and mediated sacred values in the place of the autonomous and religious status qualifications of the religious virtuosos. By its nature, that is, according to the interest-situation of its officeholders, the church must be ‘democratic’ in the sense of making the sacred values generally accessible.” (288)• Routinization (297)

2

Types of Religious• Intellectuals– “The rationalism of hierocracy grew out of the

professional preoccupation with cult and myth or—to a far higher degree—out of the cure of souls, that is, the confession of sin and counsel to sinners. Everywhere hierocracy has sought to monopolize the administration of religious values. They have sought to bring and to temper the bestowal of religious goods into the form of ‘sacramental’ or ‘corporate’ grace,’ which could be ritually bestowed only by the priesthood and could not be attained by the individual.” (283)• Monopolizing the means of the production of salvation

3

Types of Religious

• Rulers– “Political officials have distrusted the competing priestly

corporation of grace and, above all, at bottom they have despised the very quest for these impractical values lying beyond utilitarian and worldly ends.” (286)

• Chivalrous warriors– Characteristic of them to “pursue absolutely worldly ends

and to be remote from all ‘mysticism.’ Such strata, however, have lacked—and this is characteristic of heroism in general—the desire as well as the capacity for a rational mastery of reality.” (283)• Subject to the whims fate or the service of destiny

4

Types of Religious• Peasants

– “inclined toward magic. Their whole economic existence has been specifically bound to nature and has made them dependent upon elemental forces. They readily believe in a compelling sorcery directed against spirits who rule over or through natural forces, or they believe in simply buying divine benevolence.” (283)• However, they can be swept up in rationalized religious movements

• The ‘civic’ classes– A “tendency towards a practical rationalism in conduct [...]

conditioned by the nature of their way of life, which is greatly detached from economic bonds to nature. Their whole existence has been based upon technological or economic calculations and upon the mastery of nature and of man” • Thus, “precisely for these, there has always existed the possibility—even

though in greatly varying measure—of letting an ethical and rational regulation of life arise.” (284)

• Active asceticism and God-willed action

5

Rationalism

• “‘Rationalism’ may mean very different things.” (293)– Systematic thought & ‘world picture’• Theology, philosophy, science

– Methodical and calculated attainment of a practical end• Politics & economy

– ‘Systematic arrangement’• Ritual

6

Rationalism• “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s

conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. ‘From what’ and ‘for what’ one wished to be redeemed and, let us not forget, ‘could be’ redeemed, depended upon one’s image of the world.” (280)– Defilement Purity– Flesh Spirit– Being Peace– Sin Benevolence– Fate Freedom– Finitude Infinity– Cycle of rebirth Peace– Toil Sleep

7

Rationalism

• “Behind them always lies a stand towards something in the actual world which is experienced as specifically ‘senseless.’ Thus, the demand has been implied: that the world order in its entirety is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful ‘cosmos.’” (281)– Meaning– Rationalization• The task of a religion’s intellectuals (281)

8

Rationalism• Modern rationalization (science) has so

disenchanted the world that religion has moved increasingly into the space of the irrational (281)– Mystic experiences: the limits of language (282)

• Even so, as practical life has been rationalized, there remains the negative space where the irrationality of religion once was (281)– “Wherever the direction of whole way of life has been

methodically rationalized, it has been profoundly determined by the ultimate values toward which this rationalization has been directed. These values and positions were thus religiously determined.” (287)

9

Two Forms of Rejection of the World

• Active asceticism– “God-willed action of the devout who are God’s tools” (325)– “Operates within the world; rationally active asceticism, in mastering the

world, seeks to tame what is creatural and wicked through work in a worldly ‘vocation’ (inner-worldly asceticism).” (325)

– “Proves itself through action,” rejects contemplative flight as “indolent enjoyment of self” (326)

• Mysticism (passive asceticism)– “Intends a state of ‘possession,’ not action, and the individual is not a tool but

a ‘vessel’ of the divine. Action in the world must thus appear as endangering the absolutely irrational and other-worldly religious state.” (325)

– “contemplative flight from the world” (325)– “He proves himself against the world, against his action in the world” (326)– Views active asceticism as “an entanglement in the godless ways of the world

combined with complacent self-righteousness” (326)

10

Religion vs. the Natural Community• Organic communal & family ethic

– In-group morality vs. out-group morality• Example: no haggling with insiders; right to expect assistance from insiders,

but no obligation to provide it to outsiders– Reciprocity

• Religious ethic– Extends in-group ethic into universality– Neighborliness and brotherhood– It is “taken for granted that the faithful should ultimately stand closer

to the savior, the prophet, the priest, the father confessor, the brother confessor, the brother in the faith than to natural relations and to the matrimonial community.” (329-330)• Example: Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own

father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

11

The Economic Sphere• “Money is the most abstract and ‘impersonal’ element that exists in

human life. The more the world of the modern capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness.” (331)– Active ascetic response: Puritan ethic of vocation, rejecting

universalism of love and accepting “the routinization of the economic cosmos, which, with the whole world, it devalued as creatural and depraved. This state of affairs appeared as God-willed, and as material and given for fulfilling one’s duty.”

– Mystic response: rejection of the importance of economic goods. However, the ethic of universal love is impersonal: “the benevolent mystic gives his shirt when he is asked for his coat, by anybody who accidentally happens to come his way”• “Mysticism is a unique escape from this world in the form of an objectless

devotion to anybody, not for man’s sake but purely for devotion’s sake, or, in Baudelaire’s words, for the sake of ‘the soul’s sacred prostitution.’” (333)

12

The Political Sphere• A tension between universalist religion, (especially under a

god of love) and the necessities of the political order– “The state is an association that claims the monopoly on the

legitimate use of violence, and it cannot be conceived in any other manner.” (334)

• “The mutual strangeness of religion and politics, when they are both completely rationalized, is all the more the case because, in contrast to economics, politics may come into direct competition with a religious ethics at decisive points.” (335)– “Resist no evil” vs. “You shall help right to triumph by the use of

force” (334)– Identity, meaning, & death (335)

13

The Political Sphere• Active asceticism: “It interprets God’s [incomprehensible] will to

mean that these commandments should be imposed upon the creatural world by the means of this world, namely, violence—for the world is subject to violence and ethical barbarism.” (336)– Crusading orientation toward the world, sacrificing universal

brotherhood (340)• Mysticism: a radically “anti-political attitude, his quest for

redemption with its acosmic benevolence and brotherliness. With its ‘resist no evil’ and its maxim ‘then turn the other cheek,’ mysticism is necessarily vulgar and lacking in dignity in the eyes of every self-assured worldly ethic of heroism.” (336)– “It withdraws from the pragma of violence which no political action

can escape.” Otherworldly orientation.

14

The Political Sphere

• Absolutism or pragmatism?– To what degree do consequences matter?• “‘The Christian does right and leaves success to God.’”

(339)• Rational in principle, but irrational in effects

15

The Aesthetic Sphere• “Since its beginnings, religion has been an inexhaustible fountain of

opportunities for artistic creation, on the one hand, and of stylizing through traditionalization, on the other.” (341)– The relationship between art & religion will remain harmonious “for so long as

the creative artist experiences his ability as resulting either from a ‘charisma of ‘ability’ (originally magic) or from spontaneous play.” (341)

• But the development of intellectualism and rationalization means that art becomes a sphere of life separate from religion, as “art takes over the function of a this-worldly salvation” from “the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalization.” (342)– From the point of view of religion, “art becomes an ‘idolatry,’ a competing

power• Iconoclasm

– But historically, “the psychological affinity between art and religion has led to ever-renewed alliances” (343)

16

The Erotic Sphere• “The extraordinary quality of eroticism has consisted

precisely in a gradual turning away from the naive naturalism of sex. The reason and significance of this evolution, however, involve the rationalization and intellectualization of culture.” – “Eroticism was raised into the sphere of conscious

enjoyment (in the most sublime sense of the term). Nevertheless, and indeed because of this elevation, eroticism appeared to be like a gate into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life, as compared with the mechanisms of rationalization.” (344-345)• The more rationalization has progressed, the greater tension

between the erotic and religious spheres

17

The Erotic Sphere• “A tremendous value emphasis on the specific sensation of an

inner-worldly salvation from rationalization thus resulted. A joyous triumph over rationality corresponded in its radicalism with the unavoidable and equal rejection by an ethics of any kind of other- or supra-worldly salvation.” (346-347)– But it is exactly this rejection that makes the sexual sphere

“systematically prepared for a highly valued erotic sensation.”– “Under these conditions, the erotic relation seems to offer the

unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other.”

– This “rests upon the possibility of a communion which is felt as a direct unification, as a fading of the ‘thou.’ [...] The lover realizes himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living, which is eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavor.” (347)

18

The Erotic Sphere• “This experience is by no means communicable and is in

this respect it is equivalent to the ‘having’ of the mystic.” (347)

• “A principled ethic of religious brotherhood is radically and antagonistically opposed to all this.”– From the religious perspective, the “inner, earthly sensation of

salvation by mature love competes in the sharpest possible way with the devotion of a supra-mundane God, with the devotion of an ethically rational order of God, or with the devotion of a mystical bursting of individuation, which alone appear ‘genuine’ to the ethic of brotherhood.” (348)• Active asceticism is “felt by eroticism to be a powerful and deadly

enemy”• Mysticism sees erotic union as a substitute for the mystic’s union with

God” (348)

19

The Erotic Sphere• From the religious perspective, “eroticism is the

counter-pole of all religiously oriented brotherliness, in these aspects: it must be exclusive in its inner core; it must be subjective in the highest imaginable sense; and it must be absolutely incommunicable.” (349)– Thus, ceremonies of marriage to transform the erotic:

“only the linkage of marriage with the thought of ethical responsibility for one another—hence a category heterogeneous to the purely erotic sphere—can carry the sentiment that something unique and supreme might be embodied in marriage [...] a mutual granting of oneself to another. [...] Rarely does life grant such value in pure form. He to whom it is given may speak of fate’s fortune and grace—not to his own ‘merit.’ (350)

20

The Intellectual Sphere

• “The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism.” (350)– “Every increase of rationalism in empirical science

increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power.” (351)

– Yet, “the less magic or merely contemplative mysticism and the more ‘doctrine’ a religion contains, the greater its need of rational apologetics.” (351)

21

The Intellectual Sphere• “There is absolutely no ‘unbroken’ religion working as a

vital force which is not compelled at some point to demand the credo non quod, sed quia absurdum—the ‘sacrifice of the intellect.’”– “Redemptory religion defends itself against the attack of the

self-sufficient intellect. It does so, of course, in the most principles fashion, by raising the claim that religious knowledge moves in a different sphere and that the nature and meaning of religious knowledge is entirely different from the accomplishments of the intellect.”• “Religion claims to offer an ultimate stand toward the world by virtue

of a direct grasp of the world’s ‘meaning.’ It does not claim to offer intellectual knowledge concerning what it is or what should be. It claims to unlock the meaning of the world not by means of the intellect but by virtue of a charisma of illumination.” (352)

22

The Intellectual Sphere

• “At all times and in all places, the need for salvation—consciously cultivated as the substance of religiosity—has resulted from the endeavor of a systematic and practical rationalization of life’s realities.”– “All religions have demanded as a specific presupposition

that the course of the world be somehow meaningful, at least in so far as it touches upon the interests of men. As we have seen, this claim naturally emerged first as the customary problem of unjust suffering, and hence as the postulate of a just compensation for the unequal distribution of individual happiness in the world.” (353)

23

The Intellectual Sphere

• “The absolute imperfection of this world had been firmly established as an ethical postulate. And the futility of worldly things has seemed to be meaningful and justified only in terms of this imperfection.”– “For it was not only, or even primarily, the worthless

which proved to be transitory. The fact that death and ruin, with their leveling effects, overtake good men and good works, as well as evil ones, could appear to be a depreciation of precisely the supreme values of this world—once the idea of a perpetual duration of time, of an eternal God and an eternal order had been conceived.” (354)

24

The Intellectual Sphere

• “The more intensely rational thought has seized upon the problem of a just and retributive compensation, the less an entirely inner-worldly solution could seem possible, and the less an other-worldly solution could appear probable or even meaningful.” (353)– “Rational knowledge has had to reject [the claim of a

meaningful cosmos] in principle. The cosmos of natural causality and the postulated cosmos of ethical, compensatory causality have stood in irreconcilable opposition.” (355)• ‘Religious’ ideals have been replaced by ‘cultural’ ideals (354)

25

The Intellectual Sphere• “The peasant, like Abraham, could die ‘satiated with life.’ The

feudal landlord and the warrior hero could do likewise. For both fulfilled the cycle of their existence beyond which they did not reach. Each in his way could attain an inner-worldly perfection as a result of the naive unambiguity of the substance of his life.”– “But the ‘cultivated’ man who strives for self-perfection, in the sense

of acquiring or creating ‘cultural values,’ cannot do this. He can become weary of life,’ but he cannot become ‘satiated with life’ in the sense of completing a cycle. For the perfectibility of the man of culture in principle progresses infinitely, as do the cultural values.”

• “Senseless death has seemed only to put the stamp upon the senselessness of life itself.” (356)– Life “seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless,

moreover self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends.” (357)

26

Rationalization• The devaluation of the world “results from the conflict

between the rational claim and the reality, between the rational ethic and the partly rational, and partly irrational values.”– “The need for ‘salvation’ responds to this devaluation by

becoming ever more other-worldly, more alienated from all structured forms of life, and, in exact parallel, by confining itself to the specific religious essence.”• “This reaction is the stronger the more systematic the thinking about

the ‘meaning’ of the universe becomes, the more the external organization of the world is rationalized, and the more the conscious experience of the world’s irrational content is sublimated.”

– “And not only theoretical thought, disenchanting the world, led to this course, but also the very attempt of religious ethics practically and ethically to rationalize the world.” (357)

27