Can History decipher religious practices from the past? Discuss

In the process of investigating the changing ways in which religious meaning has been imagined and disseminated among generations, and then either assimilated, negotiated or resisted, historical analysis is elemental. However, it is only one component of an analytical complex, which in co-ordinating a variety of social scientific perspectives can decode past ritual and practice.
Religion is governed by historical social and cultural factors that define and shape systems of belief, meaning and personal well-being. As well as being shaped by social, cultural and political contexts, religion acts as an agent providing social structure and control. By integrating the individual into a supportive psychological and sociological network it helps to overcome individual and societal stresses. Popular religion is therefore a critical vector in an economically determined Marxist vision of history. Religion acts as a unifying, harmonising social infrastructure helping to dissipate the pressures of socio-economic (and psychological) tensions.
The ways in which personal meaning and well-being are identified through religious practice is pivotal to this socio-cultural infrastructure. As recent sociological research indicates, religious participation is key to the psychosocial states that handle these pressures:
“religious involvement promotes mental and physical well-being in at least four distinct ways: (1) by shaping behaviour patterns and lifestyles in ways that reduce exposure to certain social stressors (e.g., illness and serious accidents, marital disruption); (2) by generating social resources and social support; (3) by enhancing psychological resources, particularly positive self-regard (i.e., self-esteem); and (4) by providing specific cognitive frameworks for coping with stress.”
Consequently, there has been an increasing emphasis on social scientific research techniques, such as sociology, psychology and anthropology, to enable scholars to decipher spiritual texts, symbols, and practices. This new hermeneutics has concentrated itself in locating salient symbols that have popular religious significance, calculating how these signs are infused with ‘universal’ spiritual meaning and the real nature of their spiritual influence.
“A gesture, a building, a landscape, an artefact, a human body or a melody can all qualify as texts in so far as they can be shown to disclose meaning that derives from their particular spatial, social, cultural or temporal settings.”
Caroline Walker Bynum’s work has made particular progress here. She has conditioned her research in the acknowledgement that history, in its very nature, “precludes wholeness.” Rather, “historians, like the fishes of the sea, regurgitate fragments. Only supernatural power can reassemble fragments so completely…or miraculously empower the part to be the whole.” To apply a generalised history is not only impractical and inappropriate for the analysis of religious practice; it ignores the unique benefits of history as a discipline. History is necessarily fragmentary and is most constructive in focused, theoretically or contextually specific source-based analyses. This methodology is perfectly suited to the semantic demands of analysing religious practises and their meaning.
Bynum emphasises the “obvious point that sociological theory and historical research are mutually fructifying.” This approach is reflected in her recent work, incorporating the methods of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch in her essay on ‘the Mysticism and Asceticism of Medieval Women.’ This sociological exploration has produced significant results in revealing the personal psycho-social dimensions of female piety.
Principally, she examines several key areas. First, the emotional sentimentality of a ‘women’s movement’ in medieval religion, prone to mystical devotion (the prevalence of cases of stigmata, levitation and trances, for example). Religious conviction was not only tied to social strata and cultural experience, but also to personal and gendered identity. Male spirituality was uniform and disciplined, subordinated to the strict order and control of the clergy. Female mysticism, asceticism and monasticism were instead personal and “a-institutional.” In its private, devotional nature it rejected clerical mediation, and was unfettered by the regulations of conventional religious authority. Even in the female monastic orders, rules, vows and proscribed hierarchies were absent. Female mysticism was individualistic, incorporating values of pleasure and penitential ascetic discipline in “the insistence upon a direct inward and present religious experience.”
Religion was therefore bound to feminine identity. Women sought to advance the equality and increased role they felt before God by increased presence in marginal or heretical organisations, with its increased scope for participation. As Bynum has shown, the changing nature of religious involvement in this period is linked to its cultural construction: a faith and commitment negotiated and (re)invented through its symbolic meaning to individual participants.
This reflects Clifford Geertz’s identification with man “as a symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal.” His sociological description of culture as “a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life” is critical to our understanding of religious practice. Fundamentally, this practice is imbued with social and cultural identities that mould systems of interpretation and meaning around those ‘inherited conceptions.’ Bynum’s research therefore supports and advances the co-ordinated role that historical research and sociological theory can play in deciphering past religious practice.
Jacques Le Goff’s work further confirms the possibilities of this approach. In ‘Your Money or Your Life’ Le Goff explores the economic and cultural dimensions to spiritual identity. The symbolic point of entry here is the role of ‘usury’: an economic practice of loan-sharking that was highly influential in sculpting canon literature, law and eventually custom. ‘Usury’ was just one element of the economic practices of credit loans that permeated religious organisations (for example, in the original mort-gage credit loans made available by various ecclesiastical orders), and shaped the feudal-religious social networks that structured medieval society.
Moral opposition to the practice of ‘usury,’ since profiting by interest on loans was considered avaritia by the Church and a mortal sin, had far-ranging implications for religious life. Money was conceived merely as a static element in the reciprocal exchange of commodities for production. Money was not in itself a means of generating revenue. Excessive interest not only upset the balance of economic exchange by appreciating monetary value, but by attracting landowners or peasants to the profits of usury it could destabilise a finely balanced network of feudal economic relations. Since “all conscience was a religious conscience,” these political fears were inseparable from the religious. ‘Usury’ therefore transgressed Christian moral law:
“It was unnatural because it made something infertile fertile; it was an act against God because it stole time and time belonged only to God; it was slothful because the usurer did not work for his gains; it was greedy; and it was theft. In every conceivable way it was wrong.”
Accordingly, this dramatically affected perceptions of the confessional and Canon law, with the Church’s changing interpretations of sin and penance. In doing so, it radically transformed views of life, death, the soul and the afterlife in Christian tradition. The very personality of the usurer, who sought (and to an extent managed) to enjoy both earthly profit and heavenly paradise, through the halfway house offered by purgatory, is representative of the individualised self-management of religious belief. Religion is again negotiated to accommodate psychological, social, economic or cultural needs and concerns, such as those identified above.
Whilst Le Goff and Bynum have proved influential in stressing the role of the individual, R I Moore (2007), may provide us with an alternative view regarding the consensus needed to popularise these systems of belief and meaning. Sustained persecution in the middle ages should be seen as a general social development, rooted once again in the social and cultural configurations of medieval feudal society. Manifestations of these configurations were displayed in the various socio-religiously (or politically) influenced persecutions. Such discrimination was a “permanent and omnipresent feature of the social fabric,” directed through “a rhetoric and a set of assumptions and procedures” that informed society.
Religion, as the prime location of medieval identity, sought (unconsciously, perhaps) to strengthen its popular cohesion by displacement of an ‘Other’ through cathartic violence and discrimination. Much akin to the processes described by Edward Said’s contemporary analyses of cultural discrimination. The key victims of this process were characteristically polarised against the most powerful traits of public religious identity that, notionally, needed defending. In Jewish discrimination, we can see a defence of socio-economic cohesion and control against rising Jewish sectarian influence. In persecution against the heretics, we witness a struggle to suppress the heterodoxy that aggravated latent insecurities of spiritual identity. And finally, in the moral persecution of leprosy, a “divine retribution for breaches of the moral law,” a defence is waged against perceived amoral, secular infringements and the perceived weakening of moral and religious bonds.
As we can see from these key works, religion was inevitably embedded to the social and cultural institutions, customs and conventions of the period. In order to accurately recover the nature, meaning and significance of these practices, the work of focused historical enquiry is vital. However, this approach must have a sociological and anthropological armoury to fully realise the hopes of such enquiries. Principally, to help strengthen our understanding of the patterns of meaning which shape culture, and by implication, “the concrete religious experiences embedded in all great cultural phenomena.” The fusion of theology, history and sociology, in analysing religious markets and identity through quasi-scientific deconstruction, will ultimately provide greater insight into the ‘symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animal’ that defines mankind.