This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.

Subscribe to the Grand Strategy Newsletter for regular updates on work in progress.

Discord Invitation

18th October 2014

Post with 2 notes

Transitions in Forms of Religious Experience

image

This is another addendum to my series of posts on religious experience through human history, which included:

To analyze changing human religious experience in the light of the large-scale changes in civilization is to implicitly acknowledge that, like civilizations, forms of religious experience emerge, flourish, decay, and die. All of these stages in the life cycle of a form of religious experience invite inquiry. Today, however, I will only consider the end of a form of religious experience, which takes the form of a transition to another form of religious experience.

How can a religious tradition be said to fail? A religious tradition fails, or is at least compromised, if it fails to integrate its functions or leaves functions unserved (and therefore leaves human needs unmet). And here when I speak of the “functions” of religious experience I am once again speaking of those four functions of mythology identified by Joseph Campbell: the mystical, the cosmological, the sociological, and the psychology. 

During the epoch of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, the ability of a religious tradition to serve and to integrate all the functions of a mythology reflected the existential viability of this civilization. Anything that threatened this narrowly defined viability constituted an existential threat. 

When civilization made the transition from agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization to industrial-technological civilization, the ability of the mythology of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization to remain intact fell apart as its constitutive role in society collapsed. Yet the social institutions of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization did not collapse suddenly or across the board.

Forged as these traditions were in the context of the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the religiously-conceived institutions of agrarian-ecclesiastical have proved to be extremely robust, perhaps even anti-fragile. Surviving institutions of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, even in damaged and compromised form, continued, and even today still continue, to respond to perceived existential threats.   

The religious institutions of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, which represent the formalization of the religious experience of this civilization, integrated the functions of mythology so effectively that, even deprived of its living connection with immediate human experience, the institutions have continued to function, in some cases almost unhindered. 

As a counter-factual thought experiment, one could imagine a body of religious experience that was so perfectly integrated with immediate human experience that the experiences would remain even when the institutions had vanished. Indeed, one could make this claim for the shamanistic practices of hunter-gatherer peoples. Still today, after the ten thousand year interpolation of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, shamanistic practices continue to crop up, being, as they are, an expression of a perennial aspect of the human condition. 

If some future civilization were to achieve both the integration with human experience characteristic of hunter-gatherer shamanism, and the institutional integration of mythological functions of agrarian-ecclesiastical universal churches, such a novel synthesis would be rooted in the human condition even more solidly than these past, now partially extinct, forms of religious experience.

This movement suggests a dialectical interpretation: hunter-gatherer shamanism is the historical thesis, unstructured, unhierarchical, earthy, deeply embedded in the life of a people; agrarian-ecclesiastical universal churches are the historical antithesis, disciplined, hierarchical, otherworldly, separating the human and the divine as a matter of principle and doctrine. The historical synthesis would rise above the thetic and antithetic moments of history, subsuming and transcending both.

image

Tagged: mythologyreligionreligious experienceJoseph Campbellagrarian-ecclesiastical civilizationindustrial-technological civilizationcivilizationshamanism

  1. geopolicraticus posted this