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The Politics of Disenchantment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt
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What is it that makes us “modern”? When we think of ourselves as “modern people” —and thus distinguished from medieval or ancient or primitive peoples what are we in fact saying about ourselves? I wish to explore the suggestion of Max Weber that an important element in our being denizens of modernity is the “disenchantment” of our world. Further, I wish to explore some of the connections between Weber’s notion of disenchantment and his understanding of mysticism as a response to this disenchantment, in order to argue that the relegation of religion to “the mystical” is not so much a response to disenchantment as it is the condition for the very possibility of disenchantment. In Weber’s sociology, mysticism becomes the irrational “other” of the rational, bureaucratic use of coercive force that we, in our disenchanted world, call “politics.” In his work we can see clearly a process whereby the categories of the mystical and the political mutually create each other in such a way that mysticism—a private and irrational religious experience—becomes the only viable future for religion, and politics—the rational administration of territory through violence—becomes statecraft. In this respect, Weber seems a paradigmatic modern interpreter of religion and politics, one whose interpretive categories continue to shape our discourse. Finally, I will argue that the power of Weber’s story of disenchantment can be seen in current political and liberation theologies, even when they explicitly seek to reunite the “mystical” and the “political.”

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 82 , Issue 965-966 , July 2001 , pp. 313 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 The fact is that “modernity” is a term that is much used but seldom defined, and any definition offered is subject to controversy and refutation. Because it appears to refer to a time period, what modernity is, is intrinsically related to when modernity is; whole academic careers have been built on pushing back the dating of the advent of “modernity.” Did it begin with the Reformation? the Enlightenment? Immanuel Kant? Marcel Proust? Are we still in the modern period, or have we now moved into something called “postmodernity?”

2 See Turner, Charles, Modernity and Politics in the Work of Max Weber (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 On “modernity” and “disenchantment,” see Kolakowski, Leszek, “Modernity on Endless Trial” in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, IW), 3–13Google Scholar.

4 See Weber, Max, Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 24–25Google Scholar

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6 On the rationality of magic see Economy and Society, 400.

7 “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” 293.

8 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 154.

9 Cited in Turner, Bryan, Weber, Max: From History to Modernity (London: Routledge, 1992). 42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 91. For a fuller discussion of this issue see Turner, 41‐47.

11 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 181.

12 bid.

13 Ibid., 30.

14 Weber, Economy and Society, 450.

15 “Science as a Vocation.” 139.

16 Weber, Economy and Society, 506.

17 Ibid., 60.

18 “Politics as a Vocation,” 95.

19 Ibid., 123.

20 Economy and Society, 54.

21 “Politics as a Vocation,” 78.

22 Here is a place where the separation, for purpose of discussion, of “economy” from “society” raises some difficulties. Most bureaucrats do their jobs not because they lust after the administration of violence, but because they have a mortgage and a car payment.

23 In making this claim that rationalization is a dialectical process of overcoming, I am aware that rational authority and charismatic authority do not stand in a simple relationship of thesis and antithesis, since they are supplemented by a that type of authority, “traditional authority” (see Weber, Economy and Society, 215). However, it seems to me that traditional authority is in fact a mediating type in which rational procedures (“routinization”) are developed on an irrationally founded authority. In Weber's terms, traditional authority represents technical rationalization without theoretical rationalization, and thus simply is an incomplete moment in the dialectic of disenchantment.

24 Weber, Economy and Society. 241,244,246.

25 Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” 281.

26 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” in From Mar Weber; 126.

21 Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Mar Weber, 336.

28 Weber, 'The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” 282.

29 Weber, Economy and Society, 601.

30 Weber first develops this dichotomy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but there it is largely subordinated to the distinction between inner‐worldly and other‐worldly. It is only later, under the influence of his friend Ernst Troeltsch, that the ascetic‐mystic distinction assumes an important place in Weber's sociology of religion.

31 Weber, Economy and Society, 545.

32 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 233, n. 66.

33 Weber, Ibid. See a similar comment by Friedrich Heiler: “Mysticism does not value moral action as a thing good in itself, an absolute aim, that is, as the realization of values in personal and social life, but as a means to deaden the senses and suppress the emotions”(Prayer: A Study in the History and Psychology of Religion [1918], S. trans, McComb,. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932)Google Scholar. 157‐158).

34 MacIntyre, Alasdair, “God and the Theologians,” in Against the Self images of the Age. Essays on Ideology and Philosophy London: Duckworth, 1971), 26Google Scholar.

35 One might argue that in a liberal polity like the U.S. religion has not been relegated to the inwardness of private belief, but has simply been excluded from the realm of the state. Religious belief is free to organize forms of social existence in that middle realm between the state and the individual: civil society. Thus civil society is the proper place for religious societies such as churches. This claim deserves more serious attention than I can give it here, but let me note briefly that political liberalism has tended to foster increasingly individualistic notions of religious belief, even among traditions, such as Roman Catholicism, which are thought to place a great emphasis on authority and community. Most U.S. Roman Catholics are indistinguishable from their Protestant or Jewish or agnostic neighbours. One might recall Hilaire Belloc's comment that American Roman Catholics were Protestants who went to Mass on Sunday.

36 Roland Robertson, “On the Analysis of Mysticism: Pre‐Weberian, Weberian and Post‐Weberian Perspectives”, Sociological Analysis 1975,36/3,245‐248. The Marcuse quotation is from Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory. Robertson also notes that this “Lutheran epistemology” has in turn been transmitted through Weber to much American sociology of religion. Robertson writes: “the easy, undialectical acceptance among many American sociologists of the idea that religiosity is primarily a private, internal matter, a stance strongly facilitated by methodologies which commit the individualist fallacy, testifies further to the amorphous impact of traditional Lutheranism.”

37 William of St. Thierry. The Golden Epistle. Book I, 1 [Berkeley, Theodore O.C.S.O., trans. (Kalamazoo, MI Cistercian Publications, 1980), 9]Google Scholar.

38 Certeau, Michel de. The Mystic Fable, Smith, Michael B., trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 102Google Scholar.

39 See Dumoulin, Heinrich S.J., A History of Zen Buddhism. Preachy, Paul, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). 204‐210Google Scholar.

40 Stillingfleet, Edward, An Answer to MI: Cressy's Epistle Apologetical (London, 1675). 81–83Google Scholar.

41 For the History of Religions School, mysticism was commonly taken to be Oriental in its essence: an importation from Greek mystery cults or from neoplatonic philosophy, and ultimately rooted in Indian religion. This often played into the apologetical interests of Protestant scholars who wished to see in Christian mysticism an alien “hellenization” and corruption of pure biblical faith. For example, Adolph von Harnack presents mysticism as the wholesale importation of Neoplatonism into Christian thought, primarily through its influence on Augustine and Pseudo‐Dionysius (History of Dogma, Vol. I, 360–61. See also Vol. VI, 97–108). One finds this same view expressed a generation later by Friedrich Heiler, for whom mysticism could be traced from Pseudo‐Dionysius back through Plotinus and Plato, to Orphic‐Dionysiac mysteries. These in turn could, in his view, probably be connected with a strand of Indian mysticism stretching back to the Upanishads (Heiler, Prayer, 116–117). For both Heiler and Hamack, this essentially Oriental mysticism was set in stark contrast with prophetic, biblical religion which was active and vigorous and masculine. Mysticism was a kind of passive, feminine corruption within Christianity which could be isolated, if not excised. For the characterization of mysticism as feminine, see Heiler, Prayer, 146.

42 Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York Pantheon Books, 1978). 71Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., 38–40.

44 Mary M. Lago, Introduction to Imperfect Encounter Letters of William Rothenstein and Rabindranath Tagore, 1911‐1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). 19Google Scholar.

45 One wonders how Tagore would been received if he had written the Indian equivalent of Homeric epics.

46 Regarding the relationship between Orientalism and colonialism, one should note Said's comment: 'To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule is to ignore. the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact”(Orientalism, 39).

47 Translated as the Introduction in Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Parsons, Talcott, trans. (New York Scribners, 1976). 13‐31Google Scholar.

48 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 238, n. 97.

49 Ibid., 164.

50 Weber, Economy and Society. 551.

51 Weber expressed some hesitation on this point. See his general introduction to his Gesammelte Aufsäize zur Religionssoziologie in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 30.

52 See particularly his remarks about Russian mysticism in “Max Weber on Church, Sect and Mysticism,”Sociological Analysis 1973, 3412, 140‐149.

53 Recounted by Baumgarten, Eduard, Max Weber, Werk und Person (Tübingen, 1964). 677Google Scholar, and quoted in Mitzman, Arthur, The Iron Cage. An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 218Google Scholar.

54 For a discussion of Weber's personal attitude toward mysticism, see Mitzman, The Iron Cage, 190–230, Robertson, “On the Analysis of Mysticism,” 248–253; and Ganea, William R.. “Maligned Mysticism: The Maledicted Career of Troeltsch's Third ripe,”Sociological/Analysis 1975, 36/3, 209Google Scholar.

55 See, for example, Gustavo, Claude and Gutiérrez, Gustavo, eds., The Mystical and Political Dimensions of the Christian Faith. Concilium 96 (New York Herder and Herder, 1974)Google Scholar; Metz, Johannes B., Followers of Christ: Perspectives on the Religious & Life, Linton, Thomas, trans. New York Paulist Press. 1978)Google Scholar; and Tracy, David, Dialogue with the Other The Inter‐religious Dialogue (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990)Google Scholar. These authors have all obviously been influenced by each &her in their choice of this formulation. However (coming out of left—or right?—field), see Michael Novak's early work, A Theology for Radical Politics (New York Herder and Herder, 1969)Google Scholar, which comes complete with a back cover photo of the author in his turtleneck and groovy love beads.

56 Thus David Tracy writes: “Without the prophetic core, the struggle for justice and freedom in the historical‐political world can too soon be lost in mere privacy. Without the mystical insistence on love, the spiritual power of the righteous struggle is always in danger of lapsing into mere self‐righteousness and spiritual exhaustion”(Dialogue with the Other. 118). It is interesting in this particular quotation to see the mystical‐political dialectic read through Reinhold Niebuhr's love‐justice dialectic. See Niebuhr, Reinhold, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper Brothers, 1935)Google Scholar.

57 See, for example, Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, Bowden, John. trans. (New York: Crossroad, 1983)Google Scholar: “It is precisely this break with an ‘immediate’ relationship with God in faith which has opened the doors of our churches to political theology, to the origin of critical communities and to a better, and above all a happy, world” (809).

58 Schillebeeckx, Edward, Church: The Human Story of God, Bowden, John, trans. (New York Crossroad, 1990). 68–69Google Scholar.

59 Ibid., 90.

60 Ibid., 40–45.

61 Ibid., 70.

62 Schillebeeckx, Edward, On Christian Faith: The Spiritual, Ethical, and Political Dimensions, Bowden, John, trans. (New York. Crossroad, 1987), 71–72Google Scholar.

63 Portier, William, “Mysticism and Politics and Integral Salvation: Two Approaches to Theology in a Suffering World” in Pluralism and Oppression: Theology in World Perspective, Knitter, Paul F., ed. (New York: University Press of America, 1988). 268Google Scholar.

64 Schillebeeckx, Church. 46.

65 Ibid., 47.

66 In some ways, such a view can be seen to underlie his whole project in the books Jesus and Christ whereby, in the former, historical‐critical scholarship is used to reconstruct the original Abba experience of the charismatic figure Jesus and, in the latter, the story is recounted of how this original experience came to be routinized by the early Church.

67 Schillebeeckx, Church, 59–60.

68 Ibid., 48.

69 Ibid., 59. It is tempting to give a biographical explanation of this tension between interior experience and exterior institution, given that Schillebeeckx is a theologian who has suffered much at the hands of “the institutional Church” (see in particular his remarks in Church, xiii‐xv). His positive remarks in Christ about the “community‐centered” approach of Latin American liberation theology, in which theology becomes “the theory of living church communities” (759) indicate that his assessment of the “institutionalization of belief” might be different given different institutions. However 1 believe that, even given this, one must also see how Schillebeeckx's work reflects a fundamental theme of modernity: the opposition of subjective interior and objective exterior.

70 Schillebeeckx. On Christian Faith, 71.

71 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 655.

72 Schillebeeckx, Church, 30–31.

73 Schillebeeckx, Christ, 790–791: cf. Church, 232.

74 Schillebeeckx, On Christian Faith, 82.

75 Schillebeeckx, Church, 99–101.

76 Schillebeeckx, Christ. 776‐119.

77 Schillebeeckx, Church. 100.

78 Ibid., 10.

79 Schillebeeckx, Edward, “Eager to Spread the Gospel of Peace,” Smith, David, trans., in Church and Peace, Concilium 164 (New York Seabury, 1983). 80Google Scholar.

80 Ibid.

81 See Lessing, G.E.. “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Lessing k Theological Writings, Chadwick, Henry, trans. (Stanford, 1956). 54–55Google Scholar.

82 See Schillebeeckx, On Christian Faith, 74.

83 Armstrong, Karen. visions of God. Four Medieval Mystics and Their Writings (New York Bantam Books, 1994), xxvGoogle Scholar.

84 Schillebeeckx, On Christian Faith, 76. Michael Novak expressed a similar sentiment in the late sixties: “Politics and mysticism. mysticism and politics. Be wily as serpents, innocent as robins”(A Theology for Radical Politics, 126).

85 I have attempted to argue this in more detail in Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ (Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1999). 3–12 and 'Theo‐drama and Political Theology.”Communio: International Catholic Review, XXV/3 (Fall, 1998). 532–552.

86 Gramsci, Antonio. “The Modern Prince' in The Modern Prince and Other Writings, Marks, Louis, trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1957), 187Google Scholar.

87 “This point is powerfully argued, using the example of the Catholic Church in Chile prior to and during the Pinochet regime. by William Cavanaugh in Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell. 1998)Google Scholar.