Some works of Jean Bodin

 Jean Bodin, who is this these days perhaps best known for his musings on Historiography, engaged in problems of religion and tolerance as well. His only posthumously published Conference of the Seven Wise Men on the Hidden Secrets of Sublime Things (Colloquium heptaplomeres de rerum sublimium arcanis abditis) clearly belongs into this category. It's seven speakers represent the views that Bodin was familiar with (summary by ChatGPT 3.5):

Coronaeus - Represents traditional Catholicism.

Fridericus - A Lutheran who defends Protestantism.

Curtius - A Calvinist, representing the Reformed tradition.

Torres - A Jew, offering a Jewish perspective.

Senamus - A skeptic, embodying the voice of doubt and questioning.

Salomon Barcassius - A Muslim, representing Islamic thought.

Octavius Fagnola - A Deist, who argues for a natural religion devoid of specific dogma.

Aventinus on why God lets the Turks defeat the Christians -- Part 1 and 2

Among his smaller writings is a pamphlet in which Johannes Aventinus (Turmeyr) reports on his musing about why God allows for the Turks to defeat the Christians and what the Christians can do in the face of so much suffering.

Aventinus notes that his thinking began with the death of Ludwig, King of Hungary and Bohemia, on the battlefield of Mohacs (though he cites the event, not the locale) [172] but that the context of publication is the Turkish emperor besieging Vienna in 1529. Aventinus complains that he had warned people in high places of the impending dangers but had been ignored due to the unpopularity of his message (depicting the truth as a coarse farmer's wife that cannot bribe and speak after people's wishes) [172]. Similarly, the emperors, Friedrich II, Henry VII, Sigismund and Maximillian had written against the problems with the estates and the popes, but no one seems to read them [173]. Aventinus could have ignored these warnings as well, but his friends E.W. (Ernst and Wilhelm, the dukes of Bavaria?) pressed him, given how the present danger of the Turks in Austria makes the matter urgent ("the water is reaching the mouth"), and so he composed the pamphlet in four parts [173]. The first will explain the causes, the second the indicators for worst parts to come, the third what the Ancients---Christians, Jews and Pagans had done---and the fourth proposes reforms that will prevent this from happening in the future [174].

Christ alone is the throne of grace, powerful, self-ruling lord in heaven, hell and on earth, the eternal, just, natural pope and emperor, our doctor, salvation and justice; .... [174]

Part I 

Aventinus [175] discusses the great abuses of the masters, of the Church and of the world, that lead to this calamity. Because God is merciful, He would not be punishing Christianity if there was not a reason [175]. Concilia and Diets have not figured out why the Turks have grown so strong [175];  the Knights of St-John wrote to the emperor when Rhodos was under attack, that the Turkish Sultan was not afraid of the Empire, much less the Germans, because they are divide, focused on physical pleasures, cannot tell top from bottom and practice no justice [176]. And since, as Aristotle argued, all things in nature are naturally good [177], it must be the government that is the problem. Aventinus reminds his readers that even the pagans know that the love of money, avarice and the own advantage is a source of injustice [177]. The rapacity of the bureaucracies and the knavery of the judges amplifies this and was the death of the Roman empire [177]. Even worse than the unfair and impatient prince is the money fool ("geltnarr"), who only focuses on increasing his profit while showing neither mercy nor understanding for the lower orders [178]. Even the pagans handle this situation of the poor being oppressed by the rich better [179], how the office holders steal from the rulers even:

The office holders grow rich; the rulers rot away together with the lands and their people. [180]

Vox populi vox Dei is here taken to mean that the protest of the poor is the accusation of God [180]. Aventinus includes the hanseatic organizations in these, and how the money-fools press the last bit of bloods from everyone else [180], worse than any tyrant in the history of the world. They think themselves to be good Christians but are not even good pagans [181]. Since bringing life is the hard part, not bringing death, God cannot be react or He would stop being God [181].

If you punish the heretics, why do you not punish the bishops, pastors and the monks? [181]

Aventinus now refers to Maximillian's pamphlet against the German estates, calling himself a king of kings, because all of the rules of Germany want to be their own master and do not suffer the emperor [182]; the money fools take it from everyone and no one pursues unity. This is the core of the problem (though coin, toll and customs association could be mentioned as well, since they weigh down the people and anger God) [182].

But the Christian and the Jewish authors teach, that such abuse has its root in the wrong worship of and service to God [183]. God is infuriated and he uses one people to punish another:

Always one people has to punish another, eliminate and exterminate them [183]

The one form of this blasphemy is to exhibit outwardly proper religious behavior and long prayers while stealing from the widows and stiffing the poor [183]. This is especially galling in the case of the barfeeted monks [183], who sell their prayers and will end up like the stupid virgins, without any [184]. Aventinus sees the mendicant orders as the source of much of this, and compares the light of their churches to the darkness of their hearts [184]. Mendicant orders are like whore houses and equally forbidden by God [184]. They take and never give and the preaching orders are no better [185]. And the female orders are worse than the Amazons attacking the Greeks ever were; did StPaul and StJerome not say that the women should be quiet in church and not sing loudly? [186] And the auxiliary bishops (Weihbischof) the same, who pay for the bishopric of a far-off land that the Turk now controls, swear to go there and preach but never mean that, perjuring themselves? [187] This was the kind of thing that the reformation of Emperor Sigismund was planning to fix [187]. Aventinus compares the pastors unfavorably to the Good Shepherd, who are unwilling to sacrifice anything for their sheep.

They take leave of absence, eat the sin and drink the evil of mankind, preach nothing, do not earn a farthing, place vicars like themselves over the poor, don't inquire into the salvation of the poor people. [187]

The religious lords were supposed to be poor but now they are rich:

It was forbidden that bishops, prelates and clergy own any worldly good, no churches nor feudal estates, to pull toward them, had to get by on the Tenth. ... Now they own cities, markets and castles, and do not want to do anything for it. [188]

The once who have to support this are the poor, and Aventinus again points to Emperor Sigismund's reformation [188]. Now, with the Turks near Vienna again and threatening Bavaria, people still refuse to see the signs and recognize that God is getting ready to punish them for their sins [188].

The other blasphemy [189] is the way in which both clergy and laymen live openly in violation of the laws of God [189]---but especially the clergy, who will not marry but practice whoring, will not be honorable but are traitors and knaves. Again Aventinus refers to Emperor Sigismund's attempts of reform in the face of such simony that put them into imperial banishment in the empire of God [189]. For anyone who wants to live in agreement with the word of God, they are the worst traitors [190]. If their deeds happen without intent, they lack diligence, if they happen on purpose, they are knaves of the worst kind [191]. Adultery, weakening the virgins and abusing the widows, those are worse crimes than thievery in the eyes of God, but the only thieving that is punished is that of the poor, and the highers ones simply add it to their pile [191]. David was punished for his adultery, and Troy destroyed over adultery [192]. It would be better to have no order at all than one that is not enforced [192]. Even if by now all have fallen short, the only way to remedy the matter is to start at the head, because once the head is cured, the whole body will already be doing better [193]. A concilium needs to take place [193], as Pope Hadrian allowed at the last Diet, and as Emperor Maximilian I had demanded in his writings against Pope Julian [193].

 But the Pope fears a free concilium of the church like the devil fears holy water .... [194]

And Constanz and Basel have shown them that this is where popes are removed from office [194]. In the face of all these pointless consultations, the Turks say [195]:

The Christians consult much and have many diets, in the mean time I conquer land and people. [195]  

When they meet in Hungary, the Turk invades Friaul and beats the Venetians; they meet in Worms and the Turk wins Greek-Weissenburg; they meet in Nuremberg and the Turks take Rhodos; they meet in Speyer and the Turk invades Hungary and kills the king [195].

Nobody wanted to come and help [the King of Hungary, RCK], however much he kept writing for help; they [Herzog Ernst of Bavaria, RCK] had to help the Bishop of Salzburg against his own poor people at the same time instead. [195]

That year, they met in Speyer again, and the Turk invaded Austria and besieged Vienna, an no one knows how the story will end [195].

Part II

Aventinus now turns to other signs of coming disaster [196]. Aventinus now enumerate learned men who have prophesied that the Turks would come up to Cologne, that the Papacy will suffer and eventually be destroy, and that the Roman Empire before the Judgement Day will return to Asia [196],

The sundown will be suppressed again, the sunrise will rule again. [197]

Equally, Ezechiel had prophesied that the peoples Gog and Magog would come and cover the faithful [197]. 

Now many interpret Gog and Magog as meaning the Turks and the Saracene Belief [i.e. Islam, RCK]. [197]

Aventinus reminds them that at the Diet of Speyer, Philip Melanchthon had published a book that warns about how the Turks will fulfill the prophecies of Daniel, and things would have been better if the powerful had listened to him [197]. Also there were many signs in the heavens, but people only make fun of them [197]. As King David warned in his psalms, the godless do not recognize the anger of God [198]. Did God not embarrass the pope and have him called the antichrist in the streets? [198] Does anyone still fear his banishments?

I see no one who still fears him or gives much [for his opinion, RCK], except for those, that benefit from it, if they did not anymore either, they'd be his worst enemies. [198]

But Rome was sacked by the German Landsknechts [198], and the powerful French king embarrassed [1525 at Pavia, RCK], and now they write stupid pamphlets [199].

If the heads do this, there is no need to ask nor wonder, why the Turks are coming: they must punish the evil, as the scourge and rod commanded by God. [199]

The Franks and the Suebians have been attacked by their own farmers [199]. Even CharlesV, the powerful emperor, sees his siblings in danger, and the death of his brother-in-law Ludwig, king of Bohemia and Hungary [during the battle of Mohacs, 1526, RCK] [200]. Aventinus sides with Luther against Georg of Saxony and the Emser Testament, complains, that the lords do not understand Greek but want to help the clergy with their knavery [201]. God is ready to punish them, after several century of difficulties with the Turks [the crusades? RCK] [201].

(continued in next post)

Explanation in the Golden Bough

In describing the Arician Grove, Frazer writes--all quotes from the two-volume Golden Bough (Vol 1, Vol 2) edition of 1894:

Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he held office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier. 

This strange rule has no parallel in classical antiquity, and cannot be explained from it. (GB-1894, v1, p.2) 

And then Frazer goes on to spell out what his concept of explanation is.

It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches into the early history of man have revealed the essential similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Accordingly if we can show that a barbarous custom, like that of the priesthood of Nemi, has existed elsewhere; if we can detect the motives which led to its institution; if we can prove that these motives have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike; if we can show, lastly, that these very motives, with some of their derivative institutions, were actually at work in classical antiquity, then we may fairly infer that at a remoter age the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi. (p.3)

Frazer assumes a structural equivalence across the human race for the "first crude philosophy of life", which is the origin of the "custom" we wish to explain. This assumption allows us to go wide and search other times and places (i.e. "elsewhere") and discover the structural similarities of the customs practiced in other places and at other times. Frazer sees the customs or "institutions" as responses to "motives".  [RCK: it is quite possible that Frazer does not distinguish between institutions and customs much, as one of the meanings of the Latin word "institutiones" is "custom", e.g. Cicero, Attic Nights.]

Thus if the motives so isolated led to comparable customs and institutions across time and space, and these motives can be shown to be present in classical antiquity, it is probable to assume that they led to similar outcomes, i.e. "the same motives gave birth to the priesthood of Nemi".

In order to understand the Frazerian notion of motives, we need to look to this Paragraph 2 (pp.7-), titled Primitive Man and the Supernatural, where Frazer expounds his theory of the relationship between primitive man, the supernatural and causality, especially with reference to the task of influencing the agricultural necessities of rain and sunshine (cf. (p.13) below).

A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the supernatural. To him the world is mostly worked by supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings || acting on impulses and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to their pity, their fears and their hopes. In a world so conceived he sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to his own advantage ... [his tools being, RCK] prayers, promises, or threats [which, RCK] may secure him fine weather and an abundant crop from the gods .... (pp.8-9)

In the limit, this similarity ends in the notion of incarnation:

... and if a good should happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own person, then he need appeal to no higher power; he, the savage, possesses in himself all the supernatural powers necessary to further his own well-being and that of his fellow man. (p.9)

But this is not the sum-total of Frazer's conceptual tools; for side-by-side with it is that precursor, the "germ of the modern notion of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency" (p.9), as Frazer sees it, namely sympathetic magic.

One of the principles of sympathetic magic is that any effect may be produced by imitating it. (p.9)

To choose two agricultural examples that Frazer cites.

In Thüringen the man who sows flax carries the seed, in a long bag which reaches from his shoulders to his knees, and he walks with long strides, so that the bag sways to and fro on his back. It is believed that this will cause the flax crop to wave in the wind. (p.10)

In the interior of Sumatra the rice is sown by women who, in sowing, let their hair hang loose down their back, in order that the rice may grow luxuriantly and have long stalks. (p.10)

These illustrations also provide the general pattern of explanation that Frazer has in mind. The activity alludes via symbolism to a property of the object under consideration, and understanding the example means understanding the relationship between the activity and the intended property.

But Frazer is quite right that this use of symbolism in sympathetic magic is fundamentally instrumental; it is not itself pointing to a separate agency.

Thus we see that in sympathetic magic one event is supposed to be followed necessarily and invariably by another, without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. This is, in fact, the modern conception of physical causation; the conception, indeed, is misapplied, but it is there none the less [sic RCK]. Here, then, we have another mode in which primitive man seeks to bend nature to his wishes. (p.12)

This also elucidates that Frazer considers the motives to be primarily influence over social--e.g. enemies; cf (pp.11f)---and especially natural phenomena:

 Of all natural phenomena there are perhaps none which civilised man feels himself more powerless to influence than the rain, the sun, and the wind. Yet all these are commonly supposed by savages to be in some degree under their control. (p.13)

Frazer of course knows his examples too well to make the mistake of drawing the lines too clearly between sympathetic magic and supernatural agency (p.12), and will comment on this problem when looking at specific examples:

The Fountain of Baranton ... in the forest of Brecilien, used to be resorted to by peasants when they needed rain; they caught some of the water in a tankard and threw it on a slab near the spring [i.e. sympathetic magic]. (p.15)

In a Samoan village a certain stone was carefully housed as the representative of the rain-making god [i.e. supernatural agency RCK];  and in time of drought his priests carried the stone in procession, and dipped it in a stream. (p.14)

There is a lonely tarn on Snowdon called Dulyn or the Black Lake, lying "in a dismal dingle surrounded by high and dangerous rocks." A row of stepping stones runs out into the lake; and if any one steps on the stones and throws water so as to wet the farthest stone, which is called the Red Altar, "it is but a chance that you do not get rain before night, even when it is hot weather." In these cases it is probable that, as in Samoa, the stone is regarded as in some sort divine. (p.15)

In Navarre the image of St Peter was taken to a river, where some prayed for him to rain, but others called out to duck him in the water. Here the dipping in || the water is used as a threat; but originally it was probably a sympathetic charm .... (pp.15f)

Thus, explanation needs not only pay attention to the action as such, but also to the intended form of influence being exerted: is there a supernatural agency involved, which is threatened, propitiated, or merely leveraged---compare the New Caledonian ancestor represented through a dug-up skeleton, who functions as a conduit to the sky, i.e. "They [the New Caledonian rain makers, RCK] supposed that the soul of the departed took up the water, made rain of it, and showered it down again." (p.16)
Or is a non-agentive entity leveraged as part of the symbolism. The Servian girl turned into the Dodola--a fertility goddess dressed in grass, herbs and flowers only--does not herself become divine in the process (p.16), though she represents the "spirit of vegetation" and the drenching with water is imitative of rain. In a lurch, a passing stranger will do as a visiting god or spirit (p.17) and be treated as such (p.16).

The problem of explanation remains that not all aspects of a ceremony may be elucidated in this fashion in all cases. Consider the scenario of the floating harrow.

In the district of Transylvania, when the ground is parched with drought, some girls strip themselves naked, and, led by an older woman, who is also naked, they steal a harrow and carry it across the field to a brook, where they set it afloat. Next they sit on the harrow and keep a tiny flame burning on each corner of it for an hour. Then they leave the harrow in the water and go home. (p.17)

We already have some of the infrastructure to suggest pieces for the interpretation. Naked women symbolize spirits, and the cultural implement put into the water expresses the need of the parched ground for rain. However, it is unclear what the flames burning on the corners (they have to be tiny because the harrow is most likely wooden) and the hour of floating in the brook is supposed to accomplish. Is the carrying of the harrow over the field from the to the brook part of the ritual or part of the description? Is the age difference between the leadership and the performers ritually relevant (wisdom vs fertility) or pragmatic (someone needs to know what to do, but is too old to do it themselves)? Thus, there are different levels of matching quality that need to be kept in mind. (The rainmaking ceremony of the Diyerie of South Australia, with its bleeding and large stones and putting the stones into the trees fifteen miles or more away is another case with oddities; cf. (p.20).)

Sometimes even the experts cannot agree.

A peculiar mode of making rain was adopted by the heathen Arabs. They tied two sorts of bushes to the tails and hind-legs of their cattle, and setting fire to the bushes drove the cattle to the top of a mountain, praying for rain. This may be, as Wellhausen suggests, an imitation of lightning on the horizon. But it may also be a way of threatening the sky .... (p.20) 

Frazer gives the example of West-African rain-makers threatening the sky with fire (p.20).

Keeping tabs on Frazer

I have begun putting together the bits and pieces for my next research undertaking. I want to see if the inductive argument in Sir Frazer's Golden Bough (Vol 1, Vol 2 from 1894) is plausible.

Specifically, we want to verify Frazer's argument by encoding all of the ethnographic literature that he piles up and then seeing

• if the model selection algorithm that he uses can find the argument that he makes from the cases that he presents (internal validity)
• if the model selection algorithm that he uses finds other arguments as well, using the same case material (internal decisiveness)
• in the case of model ambiguity, whether Frazer selected the best model, most likely in the minimal-message reformulated sense of Ockham's Razor (internal conciseness)

More on what we mean by model selection in a future post.

This is distinct from showing that Frazer's argument is consistent with current or even past research agendas (communal validity). In fact, few today will share his assumptions about the uniformity of religious belief of an Aryan Race, which entails

... every inquiry into the primitive religion of the Aryans should either start from the superstitious beliefs and observances of the peasantry, or should at least be constantly checked and controlled by reference to them. (Preface, p.viii, ed. 1894)

Frazer himself uses this stance to downplay the reports in the old literature vis-a-vis the cultural context in which the non-literate peasantry has been reared.

... and so it has come about that in Europe at the present day the superstitious beliefs and practices which have been handed | down by word of mouth are generally of a far more archaic type than the religion depicted in the most ancient literature of the Aryan race. (p.viiif)

The idea for the title so far has been "The Logic of Sympathetic Magic: Taking a Leaf from Frazer's Golden Bough". I think it's funny, too.

Berger on the Sacred Canopy -- I.4 Alienation

(<< Chapter 3 -- Theodicy || Chapter 5 -- Secularization >>)

Religion and Alienation

Berger now re-iterates the difference between a physical event and an event with social meaning, taking the example of an accident versus an execution (pp.81f).

The individual may "co-operate" in the execution in a way in which he never can in the accident---namely, by apprehending it in terms of those objective meanings he shares, .... Thus the victim of an execution can die "correctly" in a way that would be more difficult for the victim of an accident. (p.82) 

Giving an example involving polygamy and monogamy (pp.82f), Berger reiterates that the fantasies are lesser realities because of the objective social reality is internalized; even the individual feels real only in his internalized role.

What concerns us here is simply the important fact that the social world retains its character of objective reality as it is internalized. It is there in consciousness too. (p.83)

This consciousness will decompose, analytically speaking, into a socialized and a non-socialized component (p.83).

... the duplication of consciousness [t.t., RCK] brought about by the internalization of the social world has the consequence of setting aside, congealing or estranging one part of consciousness as against the rest. (p.83)

In other words, the duplication of consciousness results in an internal confrontation between socialized and non-socialized components of self, reiterating within consciousness itself the external confrontation between society and the individual. (p.84)

Just as some of the things that man does become part of the objective reality of society and "escape" him (p.85), so even part of his own self escapes, the part shaped by socialization.

As a result, it becomes a possibility not only that the social world seems strange to the individual, but that he becomes strange to himself in certain aspects of his socialized self. (p.85) 

There are time when the externalized self can be reappropriated; but wherever that fails, and the "socialized self confronts the individual as inexorable facticities analogous to the facticities of nature", we can call this process "alienation" (p.85).

... alienation is the process whereby the dialectical relationship between the individual and his world is lost to consciousness. The individual "forgets" that this world was and continues to be co-produced by him. (p.85)

The effect is that social world and natural world merge, because the constructed character of the social world is lost in the alienated, undialectical and false consciousness (p.85). This leads to an inversion of the relationship between man and world and to a loss of meaning.

The actor becomes only that which is acted upon. The producer is apprehended only as product. In this loss of societal dialectic, activity itself comes to appear as something other---namely, as process, destiny, or fate. (p.86)

Berger emphasizes that such alienation is a state of consciousness, a typical stage in onto- and phylogenetic development (p.86), but is different from anomy (p.87), because if anything at all the world as opus alienum is "seemingly everlasting" (p.87).

Berger now observes that the success of religion as "the most effective bulwark against anomy throughout human history" lies in its "alienating propensity" (p.87) due to the numinous presenting itself as the totaliter aliter (p.87).

... the ultimate epistemological status of these reports [of an other reality somehow impinging or bordering upon the empirical world, RCK] of religious men will have to be rigorously bracketed. (p.88)

... whatever else the constellations of the sacred may be "ultimately", empirically they are products of human activity and human signification---that is, they are human projections. (p.89)

Thus because these produced projections of meaning are experienced as external to the individuals, they are alienated projection (p.89).

The fundamental "recipe" of religious legitimation is the transformation of human products into supra- or non-human facticities. (p.89) 

The humanly made world is explained in terms that deny its human production. (p.89)

The human nomos becomes a divine cosmos, or at any rate a reality that derives its meanings from beyond the human sphere. (p.89)

Berger believes that "simply equating religion with alienation"  is too much, as that would "entail an epistemological assumption inadmissible within a scientific frame of reference" (p.89), but is prepared to contend that

the historical part of religion in the world-building and world-maintaining enterprises of man is in large measure due to the alienating power inherent in religion. (p.89)

Again Berger insists that "the presence in reality of beings and forces that are alien to the human world" is an assertion that "in all its forms, is not amenable to empirical inquiry" (p.89).  [[RCK: My philosopher friends would assert that the onus is on the side of religion to provide the empirical proof, not on the side of modern agnostic science. In general, we should eschew entities that are not amenable to empirical inquiry in our theories, even if some entities are very a]]

What is amenable, though, is the very strong tendency of religion to alienate the human world in the process. (p.89)

Thus, religion has contributed to the mystification of the world by allowing man to live with a false consciousness (p.90).

The socio-cultural world, which is an edifice of human meanings, is overlaid with mysteries posited as non-human in their origin. All human productions are, at least potentially, comprehensible in human terms. (p.90)

Berger then turns to the example of marriage and kinship, noting that all societies have worked out "more or less restrictive `programs` for the sexual activity of its members" (p.90). One way to accomplish faithful adherence

is to mystify the institution in religious terms. (p.90)

(to be continued)

Bibliographic Record

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY (Double Day) 1967.

Andersson on Alternative archaeology

Alternative archaeology: many pasts in our present by Pia Andersson distinguishes the two approaches that archeologists have taken to the alternative interpretations of the past provided or demanded. She contrasts the derogatory vocabulary [bogus, pseudo, ...] from the vocabulary that focuses on the different stances [cult, fantasy, popular], and gives the following themes to distinguishing the academic from the non-academic world (p.127).

William Stiebing has been influential in his attempts to single out three defining criteria: 1) an absence of scientific methodology and proof, 2) a tendency to seek simple answers to complex problems, and 3) an ambivalent and often hostile attitude toward the scientific establishment (Stiebing 1984). (p.127)

Andersson categorizes the approaches using the following image (p.128):

Andersson then points out (p.131) the classical topics of alternative archeology, ranging from Giza and Stonehenge to Chichen Itza and Carnac in France. Equally there is range of artefacts, so called "OOPAs", i.e. "out-of-place artefacts" (p.133) that hold the attention of alternative archeology, such as the Antikythera Mechanism.

Much of alternative archaeology is based on presuppositions not shared by conventional archaeologists. (p.134) 

Bibliographic Record

Andersson, P. (2012). Alternative archaeology: many pasts in our present. Numen, 59(2-3), 125-137. doi:10.1163/156852712X630743 (UB Wien link)

Cusack on LDS Archeology

Carole M. Cusack (University of Sydney) points out that there are odd dynamics at play within the archeological community.

It is also important to note two further complicating factors: first, new religions may embrace a postmodern openness to interpretation when archaeological confirmation of their position fails to emerge, effectively mirroring the “multivocal” position of Post-Processualist archaeology; and second, scientific archaeology decries alternative archaeology with comparable ferocity to that observed in the repudiation of new religions by established religious traditions, thus creating a “feedback loop” in the interactions between archaeology and new religions.

Cusack reminds us of the early relationship between archeology and religious studies as something to give historical understanding of the many religions discovered.

As the comparative study of religion developed, archaeology became important due to its role in verifying the pasts of many religions: Alexander Cunningham published the facsimile Inscriptions of Asoka (1879) which confirmed the Indian origins of Buddhism; Leopoldo Batres excavated Teotihuacan in 1905, enhancing knowledge of pre-Columbian religion; and in 1921-2 Sir John Marshall excavated Harappa in the Indus Valley, a city that might be evidence of the “forts” destroyed by Indra, the god of the invading Aryans, referred to in the Rig Veda (Breton 1908, pp.34-37; Insoll 2004, passim).

During the twentieth century, there was both a de-coupling of archeology from the religions as well as a flourishing of religious formations and traditions. As a result, religious studies had to abandon its old approach of focusing on the few influential faiths and attend to the vast plurality of religious movements.

Further, the“world religions” approach has been exposed as an Enlightenment construct, implying a false comparativism (Jackson 1995, 276-278).

This is the situation in which present-day archeology finds itself.

Before considering specific case studies, it is necessary to investigate scientific archaeology’s relationship with “pseudoarchaeology” or “cult archaeology”(Fagan 2006; Stiebing 1995). 

Though the delineation is not trivial, there are themes that separate academic archeology from its pseudo or cult forms.

Schadla-Hall argues that, although there is no hard line that can be drawn between “mainstream” and “alternative” archaeology, the core themes of the latter area focus on origins, hyper-diffusionism, ancient knowledge and power, astro-archaeology, and the truth of religion and mythology (Schadla-Hall 2004, pp. 257-258)  

Further, the claims regarding each of these themes are always dramatic and propose revolutionary new understandings, rather than the gradual accretion of information that slowly advances knowledge.

Cusack sees this taking place in the general context of the "buffet of identities" offered by modernity.

[I]n the contemporary West personal identity has undergone significant modification, with the consumption of products and the “trying-on” of roles displacing religion, family and community as the prime factors in how people determine who they are. This plastic sense of self is flexible and experimental, and identity is “amenable to infinite reshaping according to mood, whim, desire and imagination” (Lyon 2002, p. 92). 

This has two effects with regard to the status of information; the individual can choose the explanation that suits him or herself, without concern for whether it is “objectively true,” and is free to discard it when it no longer satisfies. When this realisation is combined with the dense and non-user friendly nature of scientific publications and the degree of specialisation required to understand them, Pascale Boyer’s argument that humans have an evolutionary biological tendency to accept and trust narratives that operate through inference and attribute personal agency as the cause of events ... rather than explanations that posit impersonal forces or complex interrelated factors, receives additional support (Boyer 2001, passim).

Thus, the conventions of science are often perceived by non-scientists to be arcane and restrictive, and the attitudes of its practitioners are experienced as patronising and elitist. Other explanations of scientific phenomena are readily available and the modern individual is empowered to choose them. 

Cusack then gives a reasonable summary of early Mormonism and shows how it was a contribution to Indian origin discussions. [[RCK: She does not emphasis the antiquarian aspects of early Mormonism enough, for my taste.]]

Joseph Smith actively promoted the Book of Mormon as the missing link in the history of America, and revelations and diary entries from Smith’s followers indicate that by the 1830s he was claiming North America as the territory of the Lamanites and identifying archaeological finds at specific sites (Givens 2002, pp. 94-95). 

Citing (Givens 2002, p.112), Cusack points out that 1928 Elder Levi Edgar Young hoped that the successful validation of the Biblical texts in Palestine through archeology might be replicated in the Americas for the Book of Mormon.

During the 1950s, Wells Jakeman interpreted Izapa Stele 5 as a representation of the Tree of Life from the vision in 1 Nephi 8. In the 1960s, a latex cast was taken to BYU and became the origin of a little following of replicas. The interest in archeology waned in the 1970s as the first translations of the Egyptian papyri showed that these were fragments of the Book of the Dead, not a new Book of Abraham. Thereafter, as Armand Mauss had observed (Mauss 1994), the LDS church withdrew "from an increasingly liberal mainstream American society" which reduced interest in science.

At the same time, under Gordon B. Hinckley, the disdain for historical "shrines" turned into an appreciation for historic sites as "sacred ground" (Masden 2006, 58, 62),

This has implications for identity formation among Mormons: authentic experience of their faith may be attained by visiting historic sites, in a form of religious tourism which combines consumerism and the past being manifested through a specific place (Holtorf 2005b, p. 127).

This has clear consequences within the framework of modernity, as the validation function has turned ego-centric.

That the Nauvoo Temple was destroyed in 1850 is unimportant; Gordon B. Hinckley’s $30 million reconstruction is experienced as “genuine”. This parallels a broader social shift, affecting all Western manifestations of religion, where the experience of the self has greater authority and reality than institutional pronouncements, and where affective rather than intellectual proofs are persuasive (Lyon 2002). 

[[RCK: Cusack does not realize how modern Joseph Smith Jr was in the regard to emotive validation.]]

For Mormons, there is no conflict between true religion and true science, and “when it comes to learning gospel truths, Mormons think with their hearts. The scripture conveys the idea that the final word on truth comes via feelings. This is now a fundamental tenet of Mormonism” (Southerton 2004, p. 44). 

Bibliographic Records

Cusack, Carole. 2011. “New Religions and the Science of Archaeology: Mormons, the Goddess, and Atlantis.” In James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (eds.), Religion and the Authority of Science, Leiden: Brill, 765-796 (Academia.edu pre-print; eBrill link).

• Boyer, Pascale. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
• Holtorf, Cornelius. Archaeology is a Brand! The Meaning of Archaeology in Contemporary Popular Culture. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press Inc, 2007.
• Levitt, Norman. “The colonization of the past and the pedagogy of the future.” pp.259-284 in: Archaeological Fantasies: How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public, edited by G. G. Fagan. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
• Lyon, David. Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times. Oxford: Polity, 2002.
• Mauss, Armand. The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation.Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
• Nuckolls, Charles W. 2008. “Archaeology, Mormonism, and the Claims of History.” Marburg Journal of Religion 13,1.
• Southerton, Simon G. Losing a Lost Tribe: Native American DNA and the Mormon Church. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004.

Alternative Archaeology and Religious Legitimation

[[RCK: Excavating tradition: alternative archaeologies mentions LDS in its abstract at least and points out how people come to archeology, and often with alternative strategies to professional academic archeology, with their religious legitimation needs.]]

Lewis (p.203) points out how Mircea Eliade's in illud tempore has been replaced as the target of the rear projections by a historical time in the twenty-first century.

However, rather than an explicitly mythological past (Eliades illud tempus), modern human beings tend to project their idealizations onto a “real,” historical past. Archaeology enters into this pattern by providing the scientific “facts” that are supposed to legitimate these idealized reconstructions. (p.203)

Lewis in 2011 commented on this fact in his chapter contributed to Religion and the Authority of Science [[RCK: does he mean this 2010 Brill handbook?]]  which captures the need of religions to find their claims substantiated by an independent authority, science, given the market place of conflicting religious ideas (p.204).

Part of Lewis' description is based on his 2003 monograph Legitimating New Religions, where he discusses Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft scheme of charismatic, traditional, legal and rational (which are sometimes lumped together, as Lewis notes, already by Weber, cf. (p.204)) legitimation. [[RCK: Lewis also has written on the invention of sacred traditions in a 2007 monograph coauthored with Olav Hammer (p.207), conceptualized as an extension of Hobsbawm and Ranger's classic 1983 The Invention of Tradition] (kindle edition)]]

Lewis sees this rethinking necessary (p.205) because in practice legitimations mix and match; charismatic leaders appeal to traditions when founding new religion, even though it is at least a reinterpreted and sometimes even a recreated tradition in many cases. Thus, the founders of new religious movements will appeal (p.206) to charismatic, rational and traditional arguments for supporting their claims (p.206f), and Lewis gives a few examples not meant to be exhaustive.

Lewis now addresses a fundamental gap in Weber and his own work, namely understanding that the charisma is at the core of the appeal. In that sense, Lewis can talk about the charisma of science and technology.

It has even been said by some observers that science is viewed quasi-religiously, as the ultimate authority in matters of “Truth.״ Thus any religion claiming that it is in some way scientific draws on the prestige and perceived legitimacy of natural science. (p.208)

Lewis cited biblical archeology as an endeavor where the a priori assumption of the correctness of the Biblical record is to receive further validation for archeological investigation (p.209). This is contrasted from the a posteriori archeology of modern Pagans, who want to know how to perform rituals and turn to science for answers (p.209, p.204).

Lewis then (p.209) turns to a discussion of Carole Cusack's 2011 paper on the use of archeology in the LDS church, for Atlantis believers, and in support of the Goddess.  Lewis points out that a claim to the validity of the BoM entails an interest in archeological validation (pp.211f). As far as the relationship between religious movements and archeology is concerned, Lewis distinguishes (p.212) between full immersion (as in LDS), shallow (as in the case of Atlantis believers not interested in funding Bahamas excavations), and half-full/half-empty strategies such as the worshippers of the Goddess, who can either engage with the Çatalhôyük archeology or let it be. The product of full immersion and half-full is a distinctly partisan archeology, akin to the old Biblical archeology or "creation science" (p.213) [[RCK: that is, an archeology looking for support, not for problematization]].


Lewis points out how this approach to the past has the structure of a "pick 'n' mix" (p.213), where modern druids would accept white robes and golden sickles if archeology documented them, but not human sacrifices, if archeology could document those (p.213).

[N]ew religions often justify their innovations by attributing them to the authority of tradition, though it is often only through a reinterpretation of the past that they are able to portray themselves as embodiments of tradition. (p.217)

Bibliographic Record

Lewis, J. R. (2012). Excavating tradition: alternative archaeologies as legitimation strategies. Numen, 59(2-3), 202-221. doi:10.1163/156852712X630789 (UB Wien)

Berger on the Sacred Canopy -- Part I Chapter 3 -- Theodicee

(<< Chapter 2 -- World Maintenance || Chapter 4 -- Religion and Alienation >>)

The Problem of Theodicy

Every nomos is established, over and over again, against the threat of destruction by the anomic forces endemic to the human condition. In religious terms, the sacred order of the cosmos is reaffirmed, over and over again in the face of chaos. (p.53)

Nevertheless, human society is faced with anomic and destabilizing phenomena, such as "suffering, evil and, above all, death" (p.53). 

An explanation of these phenomena in terms of religious legitimations, of whatever degree of theoretical sophistication, may be called a theodicy. (p.53)

Berger is especially insistent that theodicies per se need not be theoretically sophisticated (p.53), though he admits that they will vary in rationality (p.54). Fundamentally, theodicy is an attitude that surrenders the self to a social transcendence.

[E]very nomos entails a transcendence of individuality and thus, ipso facto, implies a theodicy. (p.54)

The nomos locates the individual's life in an all-embracing fabric of meanings that, by its very nature, transcends that life. (p.54)

Berger illustrates this insight with reference to social rites of passage.

The social ritual transforms the individual event into a typical case, just as it transform individual biography into an episode in the history of the society. (p.54)

In other words, he may "lose himself" in the meaning-giving nomos of his society. (p.55)

In consequence, the pain becomes more tolerable, the terror less overwhelming, as the sheltering canopy of the nomos extends to cover even those experiences that may reduce the individual to howling animality. (p.55)

This means that the basic theodicy precedes all individual societies.

Theodicy proper, then, as the religious legitimation of anomic phenomena, is rooted in certain crucial characteristics of human sociation as such. (p.55)

Berger analysis this situation through the interplay of masochism and sadism, where the one individual erases themselves to make the other the only reality. Berger correctly points out that this must fail

... the self cannot be annihilated this side of death and ... the other can only be absolutized in illusion .... (p.56)

Berger uses this as an analogy to describe the self-loss of totalitarian submission.

... the self-denying submission to the power of the collective nomos can be liberating in the same way. Here, the concrete other of social experience is vastly magnified in the personifications of collective order. (p.57)

Berger then widens the view to the religious self-abnegation, whose other is properly transcendental and makes no mistakes.

The sadistic god is not handicapped by ... empirical imperfections. He remains invulnerable, infinite, immortal by definition. The surrender to him is ipso facto protected from the contingencies and uncertainties of merely social masochism---for ever. (p.57)

In short

... the masochistic attitude is one of the persistent factors of irrationality in the problem of  theodicy, no matter what degree of rationality may be attained .... (p.57)

Berger reminds us that theodicy does not preserve "happiness", "but meaning" (p.58).

These experiences, however painful they may be, at least make sense now [under "an appropriate plausibility structure", (p.58), RCK] in terms that are both socially and subjectively convincing. (p.58)

The suffering believer desires "to know why these misfortunes have come to him in the first place"  as badly as "relief from these misfortunes" (p.58). This reconstruction allows Berger to distance any claims that all theodicies have to necessarily be coupled to redemption (p.58).

Because societal collectives are made up of individuals, the benefits scale to the social in predictable ways.

Entire collectivities are thus permitted to integrated [sic RCK] anomic events, acute or || chronic, into the nomos established in their society. (pp.58f)

And these anomies need not be external to the social order.

One of the very important social functions of theodicies is, indeed, their  explanation of the socially prevailing inequalities of power and privilege. In this function ... theodicies directly legitimate the particular institutional order in question. (p.59)

[T]heodicies provide the poor with a meaning for their poverty, but may also provide the rich with a meaning for their wealth. (p.59)

And if the same theodicy can serve both groups, Berger argues, it "constitutes an essentially sado-masochistic collusion, on the level of meaning" (p.59). There are cases of multiple theodicies as well, historically speaking (p.59). Berger cannot provide a full classification of theodicies, but observes that the more irrational ones claim that the individual is defined through their group membership.

The individual's innermost being is considered to be the fact of his belonging to the collectivity---the clan, the tribe, the nation, or what no. (p.60)

This identification is typically apprehended as being congenital and thus inevitable for the individual. It is carried in his blood, and he cannot deny it unless he denies his own being. (p.60)

Biographical anomies become episodes in the larger and continuing narrative of the collectivity (p.60). This is helpful because "the collectivity" unlike the individual "can usually be conceived of as immortal" (p.61).

This approach is often found in primitive religions, where mana or some mythological speculative version thereof allows society and nature to be embedded in the same totality of meaning (p.61).  And Berger is adamant about such theodicies not needing any particular story of hopeful afterlife or immortality, as "the ultimately meaning-giving fact" is simply "the eternal eurhythmy of the cosmos" (p.62).  Such religions tend toward "ontological continuity between the generations" (p.62), providing immortality to the line of descent.

The entire collectivity ... carries with it through time the same fundamental life that is incarnate in each of its members. (p.62)

The flip-side of this belief is that enemies must work the much harder to interrupt this flow of life.

To destroy this immortality, an enemy must eradicate every last living soul belonging to the collectivity---a far from uncommon practice in history, it may be added. (p.62)

This solution also has clear answers for the imbalance in resources and power.

The same participation of all in the life of all ... legitimates whatever social inequalities may exist within the collectivity. The power and privilege held by the few is held, as it were, vicariously for the many, who participate in it by virtue of their identification with the collective totality. (p.62)

Berger then points to the Chinese conceptions of ancestors and descendants to show that there are more complex models of the same basic theodicy (p.63).

Another flavoring of the same strategy is any form of mysticism that seeks to become one with the ultimate being.

We can define mysticism, for our present purposes, as the religious attitude in which man seeks union with the sacred forces or beings. ... all individuality vanishes and is absorbed in the all-pervasive ocean of divinity. (p.63) 

[[RCK: Notice how this is also the claim of monophysitism, which perhaps not incidentally came from a country with a strong monastic tradition.]]

Berger underscores how mysticism across cultures tends toward masochism

... as evidenced by the cross-cultural recurrence of ascetic self-mortification and self-torture in connection with mystical phenomena. (p.64)

Because:

Where the perfect union is achieved, the annihilation of the self and its absorption by the divine realissimum constitute the highest bliss imaginable, the culmination of the mystical quest in ineffable ecstasy. (p.64)

Berger then cites a mystical poem of Jalalu'l-Din Rumi, a Muslim mystic (p.64), to show that the sophistication and complexity of mystical speculation cannot mask their origin in a "prototypical theodicy of self-transcendence" (p.65).

A different position on the spectrum of irrationality and rationality of theodicies is taken by the Indian thought of the combination of karma and samsara, that is, cosmic causal law and eternal rebirth (p.65).

[T]he life of the individual is only an ephemeral link in a causal chain that extends infinitely into both past and future. (p.65)

It follows that the individual has no one to blame for his misfortunes except himself---and, conversely, he may ascribe his good fortune to nothing but his own merits. (p.65)

The karma-samsara complex thus affords an example of complete symmetry between the theodicies of suffering and of happiness. It legitimates the conditions of all social strata simultaneously and, in its linkage with the conception of dharma (social duty, particularly cast duty), constitutes the most thoroughly conservative religious system devised in history. (p.65)

Berger reminds us that the system spread, via the Brahmins qua "social engineers", from princely house to princely house in the Indian subcontinent. And the advantages to the upper strata of society are in Berger's view documented in the Code of Manu (p.65). [[RCK: E.g. Manu 5:96ff, on the ritual purity of the king as incarnation of the eight guardian deities; Manu 5:147-169, on controlling women and their duties.]]

Berger argues that folk religion---magic and mystical exercises and divinities intervening---managed to soften the blow of such a harsh symmetry (p.66), as well as

the simple faith that obedience to one's dharma will improve one's lot in future reincarnations. (p.66)

The harshness was also dealt with by escaping back to the irrational form of the theodicy, as the mystical union between the individual soul and the divine unity, in the atman-brahman complex (p.66).

Here [in the atman-brahman, RCK] ... the perfect rationality of the karma-samsara, having extended itself to its ultimate limit, overreaches itself and falls back into the irrational prototype of self-transcendent participation characteristic of all mysticism. (p.67)

Buddhism is in Berger's interpretation a radicalization of that rational thought, especially in the Pali tradition (p.67). [[RCK: Berger's dismissiveness of the folk religion of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity can be defended as an expression of the fact that this is the rational pole of the theodicic expression, thus requiring special attention to speculation of the experts.]] After purging all gods, demons and magic (p.67), only man remains and the three fundamental insights, "anichcha or impermanence, dukkha or sorrow, anatta or non-selfhood" (p.68), from which man constructs his own salvation to reach "nibbana (or nirvana)" (p.68).

There is no place here for any religious attitudes except the coolness of rational understanding and rational action to attain the goal of understanding. (p.68)

[T]he problem of theodicy is solved in the most rational manner conceivable, namely by eliminating any and all intermediaries between man and the rational order of the universe. (p.68)

As the anomic issues are revealed to be illusionary, they disappear and with them theodicy, now devoid of a problem to solve (p.68). The individual is dispenses with through anatta, the insight of non-selfhood (p.68).

Between these two poles of irrationality and rationality lie multiple rationalizations of theodicy that form Berger's next focus of investigation (p.68). Into this bucket belong all forms of "messianism, millenarianism, and eschatology" (p.68), who promise a resolution of the present anomic state by recourse to a future nomic state (p.68).

For example, the sufferings of the Black Death gave birth to a number of violent millennarian movements, but so did the social displacements brought on by the Industrial Revolution. (p.68)

Though this strategy is prevalent in the Jewish-Christian-Muslim orbit, it also found "[w]ith greater modifications" "in such movements as the Taiping Rebellion, the Ghost Dance, or the Cargo Cults" (p.69).

[T]he anomic phenomena are legitimated by reference to a future nomization, thus reintegrating them within an over-all [sic RCK] meaningful order. (p.69)

Berger correctly points out that the need to have a present and a future requires historiographical capabilities.

[The messianic-millennarian, RCK] theodicy will be rational to the extent that it involves a coherent theory of history (a condition ... that is generally fulfilled in the case of messianic-millenarian movements within the Biblical orbit.) (p.69)

It [i.e. the messianic-millennarian complex, RCK] will be actually or potentially revolutionary to the extent that the divine action about to intervene in the course of events requires or allows human co-operation. (p.69) 

Of course this approach "is highly vulnerable to empirical disconfirmation" (p.70)---and parousia delay is just one case thereof. Thus, a common refinement is to transpose the nomic state into another reality, where "compensation is promised in other-worldly terms" (p.70)---a strategy that suggests itself in settings where "notions of immortality" were entertained (p.70). [[RCK: That this theodicy was "needed" in "the origins" (p.70) of such notions seems to overplay Berger's hand.]]

One now looks for it [i.e. divine compensation, RCK] beyond the grave. There, at last, the sufferer will be comforted, the good man rewarded, and the wicked punished. In other words, the afterlife becomes the locale of nomization. (p.70)

Both Egypt and China worked out such theodicies, and Berger reminds us that there is no revolutionary spirit to be had from these strategies (p.70); the "suffering servant" in DtrJs is another example (p.71). The key contribution of this theodicy is that the empirical verification [[RCK: and typically falsification]] is blocked (p.71).

An alternate solution is the dualistic theodicy (p.71).

In these formations [e.g. Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, RCK] all anomic phenomena are, of course, ascribed to the evil or negative forces, while all nomization is understood as the progressive victory of their good or positive antagonist. (p.71)

Here, redemption becomes participation on the right side (p.71).  Theodicies such as the Gnostic one solve the problem by "transposing its terms" (p.72), making the world not part of the cosmos, but either the arena or the realm of chaos (p.72). The effects of negating the world are clear:

... dualistic theodicies tend to be acosmic, ascetic and ahistorical. (p.72)

Theodicy becomes a big problem for monotheistic religions (p.73).

If all rival or minor divinities are radically eliminated, and if not only all power but all ethical values are ascribed to the one God who created all things in this or any other world, then the problem of theodicy becomes a pointed question directed to this very conception. (p.73)

[[RCK: It is in this sense interesting that both the NT and the early Christian Erbauungsliteratur such as the Acta Petri, maintain the dualistic touch of a divine antagonist, the Devil, but project his defeat as having begun and being completed soon.]]

Berger emphasizes not only the soteriological solution of pushing the anomic resolution into an unverifiable future (p.73), but also the Masochistic tendencies that remain in Christian theology (p.73), caused by the "totally powerful and totally righteous God" (p.73), a problem whose locus classicus is the Book of Job (p.74). Berger argues that the rejection of the right of man to question God in this fashion, as Job resolves the issue---Berger calls this an argumentum contra hominem--- leads directly to the iustificatio of man (p.74).

The question of human sin replaces the question of divine justice. (p.74)

Berger then draws out the trajectories of this theodicy to the radical submission of Islam on the one side, and the predestination discussions in Protestantism on the other (p.75).

The Calvinistic glorying in the inexorable counsel of God, who from all eternity has elected a few men for salvation and relegated most men to a destiny in hell, is probably the culmination of the masochistic attitude in the history of religion. (p.75)

Berger reminds us that in early Calvinism, there was no way to tell whether oneself belonged to the elect or not, so one could spend an entire life as a worshipping Calvinist---a dangerous life in the Spanish-occupied Netherlands (p.75)---devoted to a God who "had already condemned the worshiper to damnation from the beginning of time" (p.75). [[RCK: Spoken like a true Lutheran, Berger.]]

The sovereignty of God and the negation of man reach a terrifying climax here in a vision of the damned themselves joining in the glorification of that same God who has sentenced them to damnation. (p.75)

That this theodicy was only for the religious specialist is indicated by the fact that in practice its tenets were quickly softened by positing a future state where the punishing would cease (p.76), or at least knowledge of the certainty of election (p.76).

Berger now turns to christology as the fundamental motif of solving the theodicy problem for Christianity (p.76).

... it is crucial that the incarnate God is also the God who suffers. Without this suffering, without the agony of the cross, the incarnation would not provide that solution of the problem of theodicy to which, we would contend, it owes its immense religious potency. (p.76)

[[RCK: Thus, docetism is not Christian.]]

Only if both the full divinity and the full humanity of the incarnate Christ could be simultaneously maintained, could the theodicy provided by the incarnation be fully plausible. (p.77)

From this point of view Berger rejects the origin of the great Christological controversies in "some obscure metaphysical speculations" (p.77).

However, the solution comes with a barb.

This condition is the affirmation that, after all, Christ suffered not for man's innocence, but for his sin. It follows that the prerequisite for man's sharing in the redemptive power of Christ's sacrifice is the acknowledgement of sin. (p.77) 

Berger discusses the potency of this shift by noting that the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II led to questions of anthropodicy, other than the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755.

[E]ven the nightmares of Nazism [were, RCK] being taken not as a terrible question about the credibility of the Christian God but as a confirmation of the Christian view of human sin. (p.79)

With the ongoing collapse of the plausibility of Christian theodicy, the call for "replacing the reign of grace by the reign of justice", as Berger quotes Camus, has become the revolutionary goal:

History and human actions in history have become the dominant instrumentalities by which the nomization of suffering and evil is to be sought. (p.79)

Berger there departs from explaining religions and points to the theodicy as the central problem of all Weltanschauungen (p.80).

Our purpose has been accomplished if we have indicated the centrality of the problem of theodicy for any religious effort at world-maintenance, and indeed also for any effort at the latter on the basis of a non-religious Weltanschauung. (p.80)

Unless anomy, chaos and death can be integrated within the nomos of human life, this nomos will be incapable of prevailing through the exigencies of both collective history and individual biography. (p.80)

Bibliographic Record

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY (Double Day) 1967.

Berger on the Sacred Canopy -- Part I Chapter 2 -- World Maintenance

(<< Chapter 1 -- World Construction || Chapter 3 -- Theodicy >>)

Religion and World-Maintenance

Supported by human activity, ... [all socially constructed worlds, RCK] are constantly threatened by the human facts of self-interest and stupidity. (p.29)

The institutional programs are sabotaged by individuals with conflicting interests. (p.29)

The role of keeping everyone with the program and in line is delegated to the process of legitimation.

By legitimation is meant socially objectivated "knowledge" that serves to explain and justify the social order. ... legitimations are answers to any questions about the "why" of social arrangements. (p.29)

At the basis of legitimation is pure ontology, the "what's what" that distinguishes the categories that the rules then utilize (p.30) --- Berger illustrates that with an incest example. These categories should not be confused with ideas.

There are always some people with an interest in "ideas", but they have never yet constituted more than a rather small minority.  (p.30)

Clearly o some extent, all social knowledge is legitimating (p.30).

... the socially constructed world legitimates itself by virtue of its objective facticity. (p.30)

The need for legitimation beyond that is to address the "why?" questions of the new members of society as well as to help all, including the adults, remember (pp.30f). In the face of any challenge, the legitimacy of the social world order must be defended (p.31). Berger divides up the forms of legitimization, which range from the maxims (p.31) to the Weltanschauung (p.32), which Berger glosses as the level where "the nomos of society attains theoretical self-consciousness" (p.32).

The essential purpose of all forms of legitimation may thus be described as reality-maintenance, both on the objective and the subjective levels. (p.32)

Though there is no congruence between legitimation and religion, there is significant overlap.

... religion has been the historically most widespread and effective instrumentality of legitimation. (p.32)

Religion is so good at this because it has access to the category of the "ultimate reality" (p.32).

The tenuous realities of the social world are grounded in the sacred realissimum, which by definition is beyond the contingencies of human meanings and activities. (p.32)

Because of its need to appear just like nature, which is unchanging and from the beginning, society is best served by a legitimization that obfuscates its origin ex nihilo.

Let the institutional order be so interpreted as to hide, as much as possible, its constructed character. Let that which has been stamped out of the ground ex nihilo appear as the manifestation of something that has been existent from the beginning of time, or at least from the beginning of this group. (p.33)

Thus, Berger can recap

Religion legitimates social institutions by bestowing upon them an ultimately valid ontological status that is, by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame of reference. (p.33) 

There are multiple ways to implement this: The mode of direct reflection means that the down here mirrors the up there (p.34)---Berger calls this the "microcosm/macrocosm scheme" of legitimization (p.34). Berger points out that later civilizations would transform this obvious scheme into something more subtle.

Israel legitimized its institutions in terms of the divinely revealed law throughout its existence as an autonomous society. (p.35)

Thus, in religion,

... the humanly constructed nomoi are given a cosmic status. (p.36)

This is beneficial for institutions and for individuals.

 [Through religious legitimations, RCK] institutions are ... given a semblance of inevitability, firmness and durability that is analogous to these qualities as ascribed to gods themselves. Empirically, institutions are always changing as the exigencies of human activity upon which they are based change. (p.36) 

Looked at from the viewpoint of individual subjective consciousness, the cosmization of the institutions permits the individual to have an ultimate sense of rightness, both cognitively and normatively, in the roles he is expected to play in society. (p.37)

He is whatever society has identified him as by virtue of a cosmic truth, as it were, and his social being becomes rooted in the sacred reality of the universe. (p.37)

Even if society were not to withdraw the identifications, e.g. because the others forget or change the identification (p.37), threatening his own recollections of identity (p.38). The godhead is above such fickleness, becoming "the most reliable and ultimately significant other" (p.38). Such roles are then even stable against the foibles of the individual (p.38). Berger illustrates this with the example of fatherhood (pp.38f).

If social legitimation is tied to the cosmic order, then rebellion is a compact with the dark forces of chaos and the realm of demonic monstrosities (p.39).

Because men forget, religion must remind, and it does so through ritual re-enactment (p.40).

Both religious acts and religious legitimations, ritual and mythology, dromena [i.e. "the things that have to be done", RCK] and legoumena [i.e. "the things that have to be said", RCK], together serve to "recall" the traditional meanings embodied in the  culture and its major institutions. (p.40)

This reconnects the moment to the transcendental history.

It has been rightly said [by Maurice Halbwachs in Les cadres sociaux de la memoire, Paris 1925, RCK] that society, in its essence, is a memory. It may be added that, through most of human history, this memory has been a religious one. (p.41)

This insight implies

the rootedness of religion in the practical concerns of everyday life. (p.41)

Religion thus serves to maintain the reality of that socially constructed world within which men exist in their everyday lives. (p.42)

That reality is challenged by marginal experiences, some of which such as sleep occur very regularly and frequently (p.42).

The reality of everyday life, therefore, is continuously surrounded by a penumbra of vastly different realities. (p.42)

Death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality---of the world, of others, and of self. (p.43)

Religion, then, maintains the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of an all-encompassing sacred reality. (p.44)

Because the meaning of the marginal situation has been preserved,

[it RCK] is thus possible to have a "good death", that is, to die  while retaining to the end a meaningful relationship with the nomos of one's society---subjectively meaningful to oneself and objectively meaningful in the minds of others. (p.44)

Berger points out that such effects are not limited to individuals, but might affect larger groups or the entirety of a society.

... in other words, there are events affecting entire societies or social groups that provide massive threats to the reality previously taken for granted. Such situations may occur as the result of natural catastrophe, war, or social upheaval. (p.44)

Berger also reminds us that the need for religious legitimation is especially high when a marginal situation is induced, e.g. through killing in war or through execution in the case of capital punishment (p.44).

The ongoing maintenance of the socially constructed world generates a plausibility structure that can be subverted---Berger gives the example of Pizarro killing the Inca Atahualpa (p.45)---which effectively destroys the world of those participating in that society (p.46). The plausibility structure is therefore related to the specific community for which this structure is meaningful (p.46).

The reality of the Christian world depends upon the presence of social structures within which this reality is taken for granted and within which successive generations of individuals are socialized in such a way that this world will be real to them. (p.46)

This means that a world under threat will ratchet up its legitimization effort.

The less firm the plausibility structure becomes, the more acute will be the need for world-maintaining legitimations. (p.47)

Berger points to the mutual pressure generated by Christendom and Islam to legitimate and vindicate one's own stance with respect to the other (p.47).

This example is particularly instructive because the antagonistic theoreticians employed an essentially similar intellectual apparatus for their contradictory purposes. (p.47)

Berger however wants to guard against being misunderstood in one crucial way.

The implication of the rootage of religion in human activity is not that religion is always a dependent variable in the history of a society, but rather that it derives its objective and subjective reality from human beings, who produce and reproduce it in their ongoing lives. (p.48)

Religious ideation can cause social processes and social processes can cause religious ideation (p.48); that is their dialectic, as Berger insists repeatedly.

The opportunity for such "social engineering" to maintain the plausibility structure of a particular religion, however, is tied to the reach of the group. In a situation of little competition, such as the Christian Middle Ages, other moves are possible (p.48) than in the situation of religious plurality (p.49), where competing interpretations exist. Extermination and segregation are less successful in this case (p.49).

The problem of "social engineering" is then transformed into one of constructing and maintaining subsocieties that may serve as plausibility structures for the demonopolized religious systems. (p.49)

The plurality of solutions reveals the precarious nature of the individual solution and undercuts the inevitability effect.

Since every religious world is "based" on a plausibility structure that is itself the product of human activity, every religious world is inherently precarious in its reality. (p.50)

This means that conversions remains a possibility, and the de-ghettoized Jews of the Modern era are more prone to it than their Medieval ancestors, as Berger illustrates (p.50). There are modes of conversion control---apologetics (p.50) on the one hand, and other forms of defense

education, and sociability, voluntary restrictions of social contacts that are dangerous to reality-maintenance, voluntary group endogamy (p.50)

to name but a few,  yet the co-existence makes these more difficult to implement.

At the same time, once the migration from one plausibility structure to another has taken place, the individual has to work hard to maintain his new attachment (p.51). "Evangelism" and "care of souls" are two sides of the same coin (p.51).

Every human society is, in the last resort, men banded together in the face of death. The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men ... as they walk, inevitably, toward it [i.e. death, RCK]. (p.51)

Bibliographic Record

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY (Double Day) 1967.

Berger on the Sacred Canopy -- Part I Chapter 1 -- World Construction

Religion and World-Construction

Berger locates the role of religion in the fundamental dialectical process of world creation, where man creates the world and the world creates man.

The fundamental dialectic process of society consists of three moments, or steps. These are externalization, objectivation and internalization. (p.4)

Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world, both in the physical and mental activity of men. (p.4)

Objectivation is the attainment by the products of this activity [i.e. objectivation, RCK] (again both physical and mental) of a reality that confronts its original producers as a facticity external to and other than themselves. (p.4)

Internalization is the reappropriation by men of the same reality, transforming it once again from structures of the objective world into structures of the subjective consciousness. (p.4)

In short:

It is through externalization that society is a human product. It is through objectivation that society becomes a reality sui generis. It is through internalization that man is a product of society. (p.4)

The need for externalization is coupled to the "unfinished" (p.4f) character of man.

... man's instinctual structure at birth is both underspecialized and undirected toward a species-specific environment. (p.5)

The world-building activity of man, therefore, is not a biologically extraneous phenomenon, but the direct consequence of man's biological constitution. (p.5)

[Man, RCK] ... produces himself in a world. (p.6)

World here designates "culture" (p.6).

[Culture's, RCK] ... fundamental purpose is to provide the firm structures for human life that are lacking biologically. (p.6)

However, because they are man-constructed and not backed by natural laws like the physical world, culture is more fragile.

Culture must be continuously produced and reproduced by man. Its structures are, therefore, inherently precarious and predestined to change. (p.6)

Worlds must be built, yet it remains difficult to keep them going. This ongoing activity produces what we often call society.

Society is constituted and maintained by acting human beings. It has no being, no reality, apart from this activity. (p.7)

Berger rejects any more natural foundation than that man is a world builder; all the other specifics of culture are not founded in the natural world. The reason society is privileged has to do with the fact of man as a social animal.

Homo sapiens is the social animal. This means very much more than the surface fact that man always lives in collectivities and, indeed, loses his humanity when he is thrust into isolation from other man. (p.7)

... the world-building activity of man is always and inevitably a collective enterprise. (p.7)

Men together shape tools, invent languages, adhere to values, devise institutions, and so on. (p.7)

Society structures, distributes, and co-ordinates the world-building activities of men. And only in society can the products of those activities persist over time. (p.7) 

Berger sees in the identification of these external entities, such as the family or society or the economy, one of the key contributions of the sociological point of view: it strips them of their hypostasized status (p.8).

Berger now turns to the problem of internalization, the fact that the collective products of men acquire a reality of their own.

Once produced, this world cannot simply be wished away. (p.9)

The material case is easy to illustrate: once plows have been constructed, they are physical objects that are in the way, can hurt people falling over them, and begin to impact the agricultural logic [[RCK: e.g. through activities such as a proper time for plowing]]. The argument is then extended to the non-material objects.

Man invents a language and then finds that both his thinking and his speaking are dominated by its grammar. (p.9)

Man produces values and discovers that he feels guilty when he contravenes them. (p.9)

At the same time, the objectivity also has the connotation of being shared.

Culture is there for everybody. (p.10) 

... the cultural world is not only collectively produced, but it remains real by virtue of collective recognition. (p.10)

Thus

... society is a product of human activity that has attained the status of objective reality. (p.11)

Society confronts man as external, subjectively opaque and coercive facticity. (p.11)

Thus the appropriate moniker of culture as our "second nature" (p.11).

... society manifests itself by its coercive power. The final test of its objective reality is its capacity to impose itself upon the reluctance of individuals. (p.11)

Society directs, sanctions, controls and punishes individual conduct. In its most powerful apotheoses (not a loosely chosen term, as we shall see later), society may even destroy the individual. (p.11)

This compelling force is a key constituent for something being a social reality.

... no human construction can be accurately called a social phenomenon unless it has achieved the measure of objectivity that compels the individual to recognize it as real. (p.12)

Berger illustrates this with reference to the English language.

The objective reality of culture thus makes for a box in which an individual's biography can take place.

... the individual's own biography is objectively real only insofar as it may be comprehended within the significant structure of the social world. (p.13)

... the individual's own life appears as objectively real, to himself as well as to others, only as it is located within a social world that itself has the character of objective reality. (p.13) 

... the objectivation of human activity means that man becomes capable of objectivating a part of himself within his own consciousness, confronting himself within himself in figures that are generally available as objective elements of the social world. (p.14)

It is only when these objectivated structures begin to influence man's own consciousness (p.15) that internalization has taken place. This comes to the fore especially in socialization,

... the processes by which a new generation is taught to live in accordance with the institutional programs of the society (p.15).

This is not just learning, but shaping, acceptance of the precepts as one's own. The measurement of success of this undertaking is the degree of symmetry between objective reality and subjective internalization (p.15). This is the origin of meaning for the individual (p.16) [[RCK: see also (p.21)]].

The processes that internalize the socially objectivated world are the same processes that internalize the socially assigned identities. (p.16)

... the individual appropriates the world in conversation with others, and, furthermore, that both identity and world remain real to himself only as long as he can continue the conversation. (p.16)

That need to continue the conversation expresses the precarious nature of the construction.

The difficulty of keeping a world going expresses itself psychologically in the difficulty of keeping this world subjectively plausible. (p.16)

The vital role of the conversation follows from the fact what happens when the conversation ceases.

If such conversation is disrupted (the spouse dies, the friends disappear, or one comes to leave one's original social milieu), the world begins to totter, to lose its subjective plausibility. (p.17)

Berger illustrates this with the role of the uncle in matrilineal society, and how the internalized man will act avuncular and be an uncle (p.17).

Berger disavows a deterministic or mechanistic interpretation of that dialectic; the fact that the individual is a participant in the conversations that shape his stance indicates this and speaks of active appropriation rather than passive absorption (p.18).

... the individual continues to be a co-producer of the social world, and thus of himself. (p.18)

Berger illustrates this in the language (p.18) and its change over time through use (p.19).

Thus,

... the socially constructed world is, above all, an ordering of experience. A meaningful order, or nomos, is imposed upon the discrete experiences and meanings of individuals.  (p.19)

Though that ordering capability never terminates and becomes total, it tends toward that and is thus better described as totalizing (p.20). The parts that are difficult to relate to, the marginal experiences, have their own logic in the setup (p.20).

In what it `knows`, every society imposes a common order of interpretation upon experience that becomes `objective knowledge` by means of the process of objectivation discussed before. (p.20)

Though some of that knowledge is theoretical and rule-like (often the socially most important parts) (p.20), the majority is pretheoretical [[RCK: heuristic]] (p.21).

 Most socially objectivated `knowledge` ... consists of interpretative schemas, moral maxims and collections of traditional wisdom that the man in the street frequently shares with the theoreticians. (p.21)

It is by virtue of this appropriation [of the nomos of the social ordering of experience, RCK] that the individual can come to "make sense" of his own biography. (P.21) 

The future attains a meaningful shape by virtue of the same order being projected onto it. ... to live in the social world is to live an ordered and meaningful life. (p.21)

Society is the guardian of order and meaning not only objectively, in its institutional structures, but subjectively as well, in its structuring of individual consciousness. (p.21)

Thus the anomic disruptions are immensely powerful, as they can bring about a loss of any "sense reality and identity" (p.21) for the individuals, Such disruptions can occur at the social or the individual level.

They might involve large collective forces, such as the loss of status of the entire social group to which the individual belongs. They might be more narrowly biographical, such as the loss of significant others by death, .... (p.21) 

This psychological and moral threat justifies considering the socially established nomos "a shield against terror" (p.22).

... the most important function of society is nomization. The anthropological presupposition for this is a human craving for meaning that appears to have the force of instinct. (p.22)

Men are congenitally compelled to impose a meaningful order upon reality. This order, however, presupposes the social enterprise of ordering world-construction. (p.22)

... the danger of meaninglessness ... is the nightmare par excellence, i which the individual is submerged in a world of disorder, senselessness and madness.  (p.22)

Thus the despair of suicide, as well as the amounts of sacrifice people are willing to undertake to return to a nomically satisfying state.

... existence within a nomic world may be sought at the cost of all sorts of sacrifices and suffering---and even at the cost of life itself, if the individual believes that this ultimate sacrifice has nomic significance (p.22).

The most acute marginal threat is death (p.23).

Death presents society with a formidable problem not only because of its obvious threat to the continuity of human relationships, but because it threatens the basic assumptions of order on which society rests. (p.23)

... the marginal situations of human existence reveal the innate precariousness of all social worlds. (p.23)

See in the perspective of society, every nomos is an area of meaning carved out of a vast mass of meaninglessness, a small clearing of lucidity in a formless, dark, always ominous jungle. (p.23)

[The "alien forces of chaos", RCK] ... must be kept at bay at all cost. (p.24)

If socialization was successful, then the social world can be taken for granted. The more inevitable the social construction appears, the better for society at large.

... institutional programs are endowed with an ontological status to the point where to deny them is to deny being itself---the being of the universal order of things and, consequently, one's own being in this order. (p.24)

The result of this is that the social construction merges with the natural universe.

Nomos and cosmos appear to be co-extensive. (p.25) 

 This is the point where religion enters into the argument.

Religion is the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Put differently, religion is cosmization in a sacred mode. (p.25)

By sacred is meant here a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience. (p.25)

Berger admits that the forms of the religious have a bewildering variety, but posits some underlying uniformity, which he refuses to attribute to either diffusion or an internal logic of man.

Although the sacred is apprehended as other than man, yet it refers to man, relating to him in a away in which other non-human phenomena (specifically, the phenomena of non-sacred nature) do not. The cosmos posited by religion thus both transcends and includes man. (p.26)

Because the sacred cosmos is fundamentally antagonistic to chaos, it is also a fundamental shield.

The sacred cosmos emerges out of chaos and continues to confront the latter as its terrible contrary. ... The sacred cosmos, which transcends and includes man it its ordering of reality, thus provides man's ultimate shield against the terror of anomy.  (p.26)

Berger then draws a differentiation between how cosmization can play out; specifically, they need not all be religious (though historically they have been for the majority of man's existence).

Cosmization implies the identification of this humanly meaningful world with the world as such, the former now being grounded in the latter, reflecting it or being derived from it in its fundamental structures. (p.27)

Particularly in modern times there have been thoroughly secular attempts at cosmization, among which modern science is by far the most important. (p.27)

But religion has been the standard mode of maximizing man's externalization.

... religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant. (p.28)

Bibliographic Record

Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, Garden City, NY (Double Day) 1967.