Language and Religion

I am in the process of reading a short book (long article?) by an archaeologist, David Petts, Pagan and Christian:  Religious Change in Early Medieval Europe.

He raises the idea that liturgical language needs to be viewed differently than has been the usual way it is interpreted. For example, the use of Latin by the Church in western Europe up to the Reformation, despite most people, including priests, not understanding the language. I recall reading somewhere a few years back that the last place where Latin was a commonly used language was in a part of northern Italy in the 9th century. I would assume this was not the classical Latin I was taught in High School or university (most of which I have forgotten). Probably it was a vulgar Latin where much of the complex grammar of Cicero was flattened out and made more easily used in conversation. The last evidence of even this form of Latin dates from the 9th century.

David Petts's thesis is that holy or sacred languages such as Latin in the medieval church did not have the purpose of communication in the sense we use language today. This Latin was not used to communicate facts or ideas. Rather this Latin communicated the sense that listeners were now in the presence of the divine rather than the ordinary or secular world.  In one of the courses I teach, I have students read a description of the emotional impact of the Mass on late medieval hearers. Students almost universally are surprised that people attending could not understand the language, yet still seemed eager and even passionate about attending. The thesis that David Petts advances explains this passion for hearing an incomprehensible language. The language is not incomprehensible, but communicates on a deeper and emotional and spiritual level.

Beauty

Years ago Richard Dawkins, while debating the Archbishop of Canterbury, was asked what he would miss if religion had not existed. His reply was Buddhist and Hindu temples because of their beauty.

I meditated long on this and believe that religious architecture in general comprises the most beautiful architecture humanity has ever produced: no matter the religion.

Secularization Revisited

I came to my often neglected blogger blog because yesterday I watched a short, 15 minute TEDx talk on secularism and why religion will not recover. I began thinking about the place of religion in society back when there seemed no threat to religion as a functioning, normal aspect of society (1964). The fellow who gave the talk is an English Sociologist who taught for a time at the University of Essex, although he lives in the United States now. He presented as cool, soft spoken reason personified. His talk was carefully organized, with points on a screen, built logically and using evidence, (well, if statistics can be considered evidence when presented alone).  A brief bit of research into his background reveals a scholar who has focussed his career on the sociological study of religion through the lens of statistical analysis.

I posted a few comments to the effect that what has replaced religion as a societal basis was chaos not order. I mentioned particularly the culture of entitlement which I hypothesize as being the new foundation of modern society - if that can be considered a foundation upon which to place our common house. I mentioned also the collapse of reasoned discourse as a norm and its replacement with a 'the loudest win the debate' ethos. Most of the other comments were of the celebratory, 'religion is dying at last' sort, with a few Christians citing scripture. There seemed to be no reasoned critique of his talk.

For those who accept the arguments of the New Atheists, the debate is over, or to borrow from Climate Science, 'the science is settled'. My thoughts posted on that TEDx talk and here in my own blog are at no such complete and dogmatic state. I am at the stage of  early hypothesis. What surprised me about the talk was the underlying implication that the victory of secularism in the western world is a case of 'the science is settled' amongst sociologists. Yet I know from my preliminary reading that there is no such consensus. At present I am reading slowly and carefully through a book entitled, Rethinking Secularism, a collection of essays on this topic edited by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan Antwerpen. The introductory essay, written by the three editors, shows no such unity of analysis on the state of the 'science'. The essays that follow are by historians, philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and one expert in International Relations. They come from a variety of backgrounds. Most teach in U.S. universities although not always American born and trained. One writes from India, one from the Netherlands and there is one Canadian (whatever we are these days!). I read the book quickly a while back and recall the chapter on India as the most interesting for its very different view of the role of religion in society and its critique of the very term 'religion'. This was one lacuna I noticed immediately in the TEDx talk:  there was a very loose use of the term 'religion' as though those listening would know immediately what that is. He implied that 'religion' is the institutional church with its buildings, and rituals and preaching. I found that very curious indeed. I insist from my students that they define the terms they are using and not expect that every reader will know what is meant by a term as though there were no debate on its use.

The speaker, David Voas, has excellent credentials and a highly successful career in the statistical analysis of religion. I was surprised that he seemed unaware of equally erudite critiques of the secularization thesis.

Here is the talk:  Why there is no way back....by David Voas

Dreams

I am nearly finished grading a student assignment in one of the history of religion courses I teach. I came across the idea of dreams as inspirations, in this case a bishop named Aubert had a dream in the year 708 that Michael the Archangel told him he should build a church. The small church that resulted was the foundation of Mont St-Michel Abbey.

I wonder at dreams as inspiration.

The literature on dreaming is vast, encompassing scientific research, philosophical thought and religious beliefs.

Dreams as in the tale I opened this post with are the typical asleep dreaming ... usually I forget mine, but many people have vivid well-remembered dreams on a regular basis. I don't. This could be because my dreams happen while I am awake. This was an elementary school sin..."Stop day dreaming!"  I day dream as much as I live in whatever this place called the 'real' world is; my mind is always going off in directions alternate to the physical space. I might be standing in line at a supermarket or walking my dog Toby and my mind is floating off to the side or up and back or living in an alternate universe while my body continues on its linear trajectory.

Perhaps mystics are those who live more in this dreamscape than in the physical landscape.

Definitions

Something occurred to me just now: our Western propensity to define things, religion in this case. To define means at root, to draw a boundary around something so one knows not only what it is, but what it is not. I wonder why we need this? Perhaps to impose order on chaos (one element of a definition of religion). Somehow i doubt this reflects reality.

Can religion be considered something apart? Or is it an element of entanglement? There seems to me to be a degree of artificiality in Western Civilizations need to assign definitions of categories, rather than view reality holistically.

Religion the Foundation Stone?

Originally I planned two blog posts here, but as my brain kicked into gear, I realized these are part of the same thought. I was going to write about an hypothesis that Christianity is the foundation stone of Western civilization. I have heard this discussed and the idea interests me but I haven't thought deeply about it, or looked for evidence pro and con. I was going to write a second post about the closure of a single church near my home. The essence of this second post was to be the decline of Christianity in the West. Further thought on this made me toss around the idea that we are seeing a change in Christianity rather than a decline. I decided that these thoughts are connected.

Is the decline of Christianity in the West merely part of the ages old dance of religion within society? Will the product of this dance, once the music stops, be an entirely different civilization? This lead to the further thought, was there ever a single 'Western' civilization?  And if so, when and how did it begin? Historians have delighted in dividing history into eras. Apparently we are entering or are already in 'post-modernity'. Modernity is held to have got going in the 15th century, so is about 500 years old (give or take a century or so). Prior to that was the mediaeval period and prior to that the 'ancient' world, or 'classical' civilization. All these periods belong to what is called Western civilization. This overarching theme (if I may call it that) is accorded a start with ancient Greece and the ideas of philosophers there and a form of early democracy, especially as found in the city state of Athens. Rome conquered the Mediterranean world and what is now western Europe (from which comes the label 'Western') and in its organized commercial and legal world spread these Greek ideas and thus was the midwife of 'Western civilization'. Western ideas died for a time when the Roman empire collapsed in western Europe and the western Mediterranean but revived in another sub-period labelled 'The Renaissance', the rebirth. The technology of movable type added a volatile fuel to this movement, et voilà Western Civ.

Where does religion lie in all this?  Both the ancient Greeks and Romans were pagans of similar hue. The Greek gods and goddesses were more petty and human than the more powerful Roman versions, perhaps reflecting the differences in political power of the two cultures. Religion both reflected and supported the overall culture. But Christianity, a very different idea about the nature of existence was born and nurtured, albeit often violently in the Roman world. This is a mystery despite the number of studies done on this topic. History is mostly a story of gradual, glacial change, but every so often an event occurs that is seismic rather than organic. Christianity survived its first three centuries as an outsider faith where it was periodically and violently attacked by both state and populace. Yet it emerged as the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Nietzsche once famously pronounced the death of God. A fourth or even fifth century Nietzsche would have proclaimed the death of gods as Christianity gradually supplanted the old gods even among the general populace.

I don't really know what Nietzsche meant and I am not alone in that,  but the image below of pews being sold off in a Presbyterian church in Canada in 2018 gives a hard face to the surface meaning of his comment. This congregation was formed in 1905 and they built a very plain, serviceable building for their worship and for the community that is at the core of all Christian groupings. Dare I say, community is at the core of most religions, though not all. Certainly it is for the 'peoples of the Book' (to borrow from Islam): Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Even those religions where community is not emphasized by their religious professionals, the ordinary followers organize themselves into small communities: the Buddhists, Taoists, neopagans and so on. Christianity too has a foundation stone called the equality of the individual person before God, regardless of social status.  Yet people are social animals and we need fellowship. As this blog post is about Western Civilization and thus Christianity, I will reel my thoughts into focus here. As I started this paragraph, this church community began in 1905. In 1921, they expanded and renovated their building, then in 1967 built a new place beside the old. It is the new  you see being disassembled in the photo below.

I mentioned that history usually changes organically but sometimes with an earthquake. This congregation had the money and the optimism to build an entirely new church in 1967. At that time in Canada, the generation who had fought the second world war were at the apex of their earning. The economy was booming with low unemployment and low inflation. Wages were going up at a greater rate than costs. This congregation used their old building as a Sunday School and for meetings and communal activities such as pot luck dinners and scouts and guides. This was also the era of the baby boom. Churches were filled with adults and even more so with their children.  Families often had three, four, five or more children. Yet just over fifty years later, there were only a few adults remaining and even fewer children. One generation is all it took for Christianity to collapse into insignificance in Canada. This congregation has moved in with another and sold their buildings to a developer. For three hundred years Christianity grew slowly from a breakaway sect of Jews in the ancient world, to becoming the officially sanctioned religion of the entire Western world. Over the next five to six hundred years it came to encompass the tribal societies that had displaced the Roman empire in the west. There it consolidated for another five hundred years. Then for four hundred years Christianity expanded with European commerce and military might based on technology to all parts of the world.

In fifty years, this all dissolved. And here is a picture of a small part of that dissolution.

Renewal

Currently I am re-reading Thomas Merton's Ways of the Christian Mystics. For those unfamiliar with Thomas Merton, he was in the last part of his life a Trappist monk, who became a modernized eremitic. I say modernized because he remained connected to the world through extensive correspondence and writing, while living a solitary life on the grounds of his abbey. He died, in fact, on a trip to Thailand for an ecumenical  conference on the spiritual life. One of his main interests and focuses of correspondence were with Buddhist monks.

In this little (and it is little: truly pocket sized) book he surveys English (Catholic), Russian and  Protestant spirituality and monasticism. The point of this brief post was prompted by this latter chapter. In it he discusses the surprising revival of Protestant monasticism in the post world war 2 period. He places Anglican monasticism outside of this, noting in an unexplained sentence that it is 'catholic'.

What interested me, however, were his comments on the revival and renewal of Christianity in the first two decades after the end of the second world war. He saw this Protestant style monasticism, exemplified by the Taizé community as evidence for a revival and rejection of arid formalism. In the changes in liturgy, the moves towards a simpler Christianity focused on worship and charitable action in the world, he saw a pan-Christian revivalism and renewal.  Thomas Merton died in 1968, so he could not predict nor see the collapse of Christianity in the western world that began to be evident in the 1970s. Sociologists working in the last decades of the 20th century crunched the numbers and saw slippage as early as the 1950s. The Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby, for example noted that despite the exponential growth in church construction and membership in the 1950s, churches were actually growing slower than the rate of population increase. Vitality hid an inner crumbling it seems. Sociologists have since begun to posit a change to another type of Christianity replacing institutions with individual or even online realities. But this is not a theory accepted by all such. Steve Bruce, the English sociologist sees decline, not change. Historians have joined the debate, attempting to find the time where decline began and reasons why.  Callum Brown the British historian of religion places the collapse as beginning in the 1960s and assigns the reason to the disappearance of women from the institutional church.  Debate rages among scholars of all sorts over whether the United States is the lone hold out or not in this western collapse of Christianity. So, soon after Thomas Merton's death churches emptied, the western world changed laws to root out Christian foundations, atheists began their boldest attacks on Christianity (claiming they were attacking 'religion' but Christianity was their target).

Of course, only time will tell but at this point the future does not look good for Christianity, and I would argue for western civilization as a project. Despite what that curious bunch called 'the new atheists' might argue, western civilization rested on a foundation of Christianity.