Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Rappaport, Roy A. 1979 Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999 Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Ricoeur, Paul 1967 The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan. New York: Harper & Row. Segal, Robert A., ed. 1998 The Myth and Ritual Theory. Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Segal, Robert A. 1999 Theorizing about Myth. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Segal, Robert A. 2004 Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Segal, Robert A., ed. 2008 The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion. Oxford, UK, and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Smith, William Robertson. 1894 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. 2nd edn (1st edn 1889). London: Black.

Sorel, Georges A. 1961 [1950] Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth. New York: Collier Books; London: Collier-Macmillan.

Turner, Victor W. 1967 The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Turner, Victor W. 1968 The Drums of Affliction. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Turner, Victor W. 1969 The Ritual Process. Chicago: Aldine.

Tylor, E. B. (Edward Burnett) 1871 Primitive Culture. 2 vols. London: Murray. 5th edn 1913.

Van Hendy, Andrew 2001 The Modern Construction of Myth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Vernant, Jean-Pierre 1983 Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. not given. London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul.

Wheelwright, Philip 1968 The Burning Fountain. Rev. edn (1st edn 1954). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Suggested reading

For a short overview of modern theories of myth, see Robert A. Segal, ‘Myth,’ in The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. Segal, 337–55. For a book-length but still short overview, see Segal, Myth: A Very Short Introduction. For a much fuller presentation, see Andrew van Hendy, The Modern Construction of Myth. For a bibliography on theories of myth, see Thomas J. Sinekewicz, Theories of Myth: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997). For a short overview of the myth-ritualist theory, see Segal, introduction to The Myth and Ritual Theory, ed. Segal, 1–13. This anthology provides selections from the leading exponents and critics of the theory. For a short overview of theories of ritual, see Catherine Bell, ‘Ritual,’ in The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. Segal, 397–411. For fuller overviews and assessments, see Bell’s two books: Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice and Ritual. By far the fullest presentation of theories of ritual is to be found in Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg, eds., Theorizing Rituals, volume 1. Volume 2 contains what is by far the fullest bibliography on theories of ritual.

Chapter 23

Religious authority

Scripture, tradition, charisma

Paul Gifford

Introduction

All human groups need some authority, some generally accepted means of resolving at least the major questions, merely to persist without disintegrating. However, authority is not a simple concept. It is not necessarily linked with power in any hard sense, although there are cases where the religious and secular realms may be so intertwined that the religion may take on some form of secular coercive power. Good analogues of religious authority are provided in the medical or academic fields. A doctor, for example, has authority: he is authorised by his training and professional expertise. With true authority he can say ‘you must’ or ‘you must not’. Likewise an academic may have authority: her authority arises from her superior knowledge of the subject, which enables her to say ‘this is so’ or ‘this is not so’. To maintain her credibility, she must continually vindicate this authority by evidence of competence, her ability to formulate new ideas, her capacity to stimulate students to new insights. Before clarifying further the kinds of authority influential in religious communities, some preparatory remarks are in order.

Religions are not all the same. There are distinct categories like ‘primal’ religions; the archaic religions of Egypt or Mesopotamia or Greece; and the founded (‘world’) religions like Islam. Furthermore, different religions within a single one of these categories can have surprisingly diverse internal dynamics; the role played by theology in Christianity, for example, is played within Judaism by law. Further, it is a mistake to presume any particular religion is a monolithic entity. Christianity has its divisions into Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox branches, to name just three, and in each of them authority is exercised significantly differently. Islam embraces Sunni, Shi’ite, Ahmadiyya, Ismaili – these branches all have different understandings of precisely where authority lies. But most importantly, religions are not static; they exist in living communities enduring through time, and thus continually change. Some of these changes can be profound. For example, we now think of Judaism as a religion centred on a book, but it was not always so. Judaism was for centuries centred on a sacrificial cult in the temple; it was the destruction of the first temple (587 bce) that heightened its emphasis on its scriptures, and the definitive destruction of the third (70 ce) that carried this process to its ultimate conclusion. Other religions have undergone transformations just as profound. Zoroastrianism has been in turn the state religion of the Persian Empire, the religion of an oppressed and marginalised (and largely uneducated) minority under Muslim domination, the religion of a wealthy sector of modern India, and now increasingly the religion of influential professionals of a diaspora scattered throughout the West. The religion – its expression, its embodiment, its self-understanding – has not

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remained unaffected by these changing contexts. And the elements of authority within a religion, the way they are balanced, perceived, experienced, are among the things that have changed. This may be so, even if formal appearances mask this. Bishops have been authority figures within Christianity from its early years. Now, they would most naturally be perceived as part of the administrative bureaucracy. But they were not always best understood in that way. Medieval Europe was not a bureaucratically governed society; effective authority was exercised through the personal presence of an itinerant ruler, the exercise of patronage, the bonds established with dependents, the power to work miracles, the ceremonial projection of sacrality. In the last resort, a medieval bishop’s authority may have more closely approximated the charismatic power of holy men (Mayr-Harting 1990: 124). Thus the office has persisted, but the kind of authority exercised has changed greatly.

These are some of the complications we will have to bear in mind in what follows. These factors will prevent us distinguishing neat categories of religious authority, or making any simple identification of certain forms of authority with particular religions. They will also prevent us from reaching much in the way of hard conclusions. However, even after this disclaimer, we can still raise many questions and shed some light in the general area of religious authority. In this chapter, we will focus on the three significant elements of scripture, tradition and charisma. We will ask in what way they are authoritative, how they are perceived to exert their influence, how their power is experienced and whether they function independently or in combination.

Scripture

We have already observed that different religions may have different internal dynamics. This is crucially so in the matter of sacred texts. Scripture (with cognates like ‘écriture’, ‘scrittura’, ‘escritura’) is a Western term (etymologically, from the Latin scribere ‘to write’) with its roots in the Christian West, and with its original reference to the Christian Bible. Initially, as ‘Holy Scripture’, the reference was exclusively to the Christian Bible, carrying connotations of inspiration, revelation, perhaps inerrancy. It is only in the last 150 years that the term has come to be applied in a less metaphysical and more descriptive sense to the sacred books of other religious traditions. (Max Müller’s fifty-volume edition (1879–94) of The Sacred Books of the East was a milestone in this development.) Sometimes the connotations of the word as traditionally used in the West have been much less fitting when applied to other traditions. If the term is not unduly distorting when applied to the other founded religions of the Near East, to Judaism and Islam, its suitability to Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism is less obvious. It is only in recent decades that serious efforts have been made to allow for the subtle distortions likely when a concept taken from one tradition is applied to others.

Nevertheless it is obviously characteristic of many religions to have sacred texts – which we will follow current convention and indiscriminately call ‘scripture’. If we ask what it is that constitutes these particular texts scripture or sacred, we quickly see that it is not a matter of form or content. There is no essence, or intrinsic formal quality, or even set of family resemblances, that characterise all these diverse texts. As regards content, the diversity is enormous – from the hymns (gathas) of Zoroaster to the letters of Paul, the law codes of Deuteronomy and the sacrificial rituals of the Vedas. Even beauty or profundity is not an essential characteristic. Undoubtedly many have this sublimity – taken to its ultimate in Islam with its doctrine of the inimitability of the Qur’an (i’jaz al-Qur’an) – but alongside the sublime we can find other parts which may be genealogies, crude hagiography or fairly

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banal chronicles. It would be hard to list any criteria of form or content that could isolate precisely these texts and not others.

Likewise, authorship does not provide a criterion for elevating a text to the status of scripture, for here too there is enormous diversity. Although some (like the Qur’an) are intimately linked to the founder, others are by subsequent leaders (as is much of the Sikhs’ Adi Granth), others have authors who are completely unknown (the case for a large part of the Jewish scriptures). In the case of the Hindu religion, with no individual founder, the scriptures are believed to have no author at all, not even God.

No, to label a text ‘scripture’ essentially involves none of these things. What makes a text or texts scripture is something of another register altogether, namely the text’s relationship to a community. It is this relationship that is constitutive. Scripture is a relational term, like husband or mother; it has meaning only in relation to another. It is the community’s persistence in according it an authoritative position in its life that constitutes a text scripture. Hence, as Smith well puts it, scripture is not an attribute of texts, but a ‘human activity’. And it is an ongoing activity. ‘No doubt, their scripture to a mighty degree makes a people what they are. Yet one must not lose sight of the point that it is the people who make it, keep making it, scripture’ (Smith 1993: 18–19).

Thus authority over a community is built into the idea of scripture. Yet the various scriptures may exert their authority in many diverse ways. Scriptures (or parts of them) may provide the main prayers that adherents utilise throughout the day. In some forms of worship, the scriptures may become a sacred object; thus Jews may dance with the Torah in the synagogue. Most traditions have all kinds of significant popular uses – many Muslims use the Qur’an as a protective device against evil, even using a potion made from mixing water with the ink used to write a Qur’anic charm. Some religions regard scripture as the supreme source of their ‘doctrine’ or ‘morals’ or ‘law’. However, a scripture’s influence can be much more subtly pervasive; it is not always conscious or direct. Anyone familiar with medieval Europe will understand the role of the Bible in providing the source material for most European art; in this way the biblical narratives provided the images that fed the imagination and moulded cultural life. Within Islam, although pictorial representation is generally shunned, Qur’anic calligraphy has played a similar role. In such various ways, focused and diffuse, explicit and implicit, hard and soft, scriptures mould and direct their particular communities. The ability to guide and influence is there by definition, from the mere fact of being scripture.

However, for any living community the context changes over time. We have already drawn attention to the changes Zoroastrianism and Judaism have undergone in history, but change is universal. Islam has changed from a desert religion to the religion of the Abbasids and the Umayyads and the Ottomans. Christianity has Âtransformed itself from a Jewish sect to the Byzantine state religion, to the cultural soul of Europe, to the religion of Latin American peasants. Continuity through change is a problem for any religion, and scripture is often one of the key things enabling the community to negotiate major transformations, providing the means of rendering changes explicable and manageable, thus ensuring some experience of identity over time.

Historical consciousness

The complexity of this process has become obvious only in relatively recent years. What has disclosed the complexity is the rise of a radical new perspective, historical consciousness. At its heart is the awareness that everything is relative, or related to the context in which

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it arose or in which it exists. Nothing human is supra-temporal, supra-cultural or suprahistorical. Everything human is culturally conditioned. Where such a consciousness has taken root (notably in the West, especially Western academia), it has had important effects on the understanding of the past in general, and in particular has affected our attitude to historical texts.

It has altered our attitude to past ‘authorities’. By and large, previous ages were incredibly respectful of past authorities. C.S. Lewis says of the European Middle Ages that they were ‘ages of authority’.

If their culture is regarded as a response to environment, then the elements in that environment to which they responded most vigorously were manuscripts. Every writer if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour, preferably a Latin one. This is one of the things that differentiates that period … from our modern civilisation.

He remarks later of medieval people: ‘They find it hard to believe that anything an old auctour has said is simply untrue’ (cited in Nineham 1976: 45). The traditional Christian attitude to the Bible must be seen in this light, as part of a cultural disposition. That it is broadly cultural rather than narrowly religious is obvious from the fact that the same attitude was shown to classical authors. Indeed the Roman poet Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 bce) is an example of someone in the past whose work became almost mystically revered. It was repeated, commented on, embellished, used as an oracle, put into catenae and all sorts of legends grew up around the author. Virgil’s writings, or (more correctly) what Virgil is supposed to have written, became part of the mental furniture of the European Middle Ages. Another example of an auctour given unquestioned status is Galen (131–201 ce), one of the founders of the Western medical tradition. He had described an organ in the human body called the rete mirabile. It is recorded that when medical dissection began, and this organ was not found, it seemed far more probable to those first clinical anatomists that there had occurred an organic change in the human body since his time than that Galen had made a mistake (see Nineham 1976: 268).

In the West, that attitude to the past has now changed radically. We can conveniently date the stirrings of change to about the time of the founding of the Royal Society, which received its charter in 1662 (Newton was to be its president from 1703 to 1727). The Royal Society’s motto was: ‘Nullius in verba’; in other words, ‘We refuse to be bound by the words of any authority, however venerable or sacred’ (Nineham 1976: 61). This change in mentality was linked to the rise of science, but came to be accepted far more widely. The newer understanding is succinctly encapsulated in Marx and Engels’ reference in the 1848 Communist Manifesto to ‘the burden of all the dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the mind of the living’, and equally in Thomas Paine’s claim that ‘the vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies’ (Paine 1798: 9).

An understanding of this change of mentality is crucial for the modern academic study of religion, and for understanding the role of scripture in particular. The ‘clash of science and religion’ arose not because Darwin had discovered a truth that ‘disproved’ some ‘biblical’ truth. The clash arose because the rise of science depended on a new view of truth; no longer as something revealed back there and enshrined in a text to which those coming after must continually refer. Now truth was seen as out there ahead, to be discovered by