Theory: Max Weber

1
TheoryMax Weber

• Senseless death has seemed only to put the stamp
  upon the senselessness of life itself.
• (Sociology 156)

2
Psychological Experience of Religion

• Religious virtuosos and the unmusical
• Virtuosos Prophets, saints, founders, reformers
• Unmusical everyone else
• Tension between religious institutions and
  virtuosos
• Apocalypse Island
• The church, being the holder of
  institutionalized grace, seeks to organize the
  religiosity of the masses and to put its own
  officially monopolized and mediated sacred values
  in the place of the autonomous and religious
  status qualifications of the religious virtuosos.
  By its nature, that is, according to the
  interest-situation of its officeholders, the
  church must be democratic in the sense of
  making the sacred values generally accessible.
  (288)
• Routinization (297)

3
Types of Religious

• Intellectuals
• The rationalism of hierocracy grew out of the
  professional preoccupation with cult and myth
  orto a far higher degreeout of the cure of
  souls, that is, the confession of sin and counsel
  to sinners. Everywhere hierocracy has sought to
  monopolize the administration of religious
  values. They have sought to bring and to temper
  the bestowal of religious goods into the form of
  sacramental or corporate grace, which could
  be ritually bestowed only by the priesthood and
  could not be attained by the individual. (283)
• Monopolizing the means of the production of
  salvation

4
Types of Religious

• Rulers
• Political officials have distrusted the
  competing priestly corporation of grace and,
  above all, at bottom they have despised the very
  quest for these impractical values lying beyond
  utilitarian and worldly ends. (286)
• Chivalrous warriors
• Characteristic of them to pursue absolutely
  worldly ends and to be remote from all
  mysticism. Such strata, however, have
  lackedand this is characteristic of heroism in
  generalthe desire as well as the capacity for a
  rational mastery of reality. (283)
• Subject to the whims fate or the service of
  destiny

5
Types of Religious

• Peasants
• inclined toward magic. Their whole economic
  existence has been specifically bound to nature
  and has made them dependent upon elemental
  forces. They readily believe in a compelling
  sorcery directed against spirits who rule over or
  through natural forces, or they believe in simply
  buying divine benevolence. (283)
• However, they can be swept up in rationalized
  religious movements
• The civic classes
• A tendency towards a practical rationalism in
  conduct ... conditioned by the nature of their
  way of life, which is greatly detached from
  economic bonds to nature. Their whole existence
  has been based upon technological or economic
  calculations and upon the mastery of nature and
  of man
• Thus, precisely for these, there has always
  existed the possibilityeven though in greatly
  varying measureof letting an ethical and
  rational regulation of life arise. (284)
• Active asceticism and God-willed action

6
Rationalism

• Rationalism may mean very different things.
  (293)
• Systematic thought world picture
• Theology, philosophy, science
• Methodical and calculated attainment of a
  practical end
• Politics economy
• Systematic arrangement
• Ritual

7
Rationalism

• Not ideas, but material and ideal interests,
  directly govern mens conduct. Yet very
  frequently the world images that have been
  created by ideas have, like switchmen,
  determined the tracks along which action has been
  pushed by the dynamic of interest. From what
  and for what one wished to be redeemed and, let
  us not forget, could be redeemed, depended upon
  ones image of the world. (280)
• Defilement ? Purity
• Flesh ? Spirit
• Being ? Peace
• Sin ? Benevolence
• Fate ? Freedom
• Finitude ? Infinity
• Cycle of rebirth ? Peace
• Toil ? Sleep

8
Rationalism

• Behind them always lies a stand towards
  something in the actual world which is
  experienced as specifically senseless. Thus,
  the demand has been implied that the world order
  in its entirety is, could, and should somehow be
  a meaningful cosmos. (281)
• Meaning
• Rationalization
• The task of a religions intellectuals (281)

9
Rationalism

• Modern rationalization (science) has so
  disenchanted the world that religion has moved
  increasingly into the space of the irrational
  (281)
• Mystic experiences the limits of language (282)
• Even so, as practical life has been rationalized,
  there remains the negative space where the
  irrationality of religion once was (281)
• Wherever the direction of whole way of life has
  been methodically rationalized, it has been
  profoundly determined by the ultimate values
  toward which this rationalization has been
  directed. These values and positions were thus
  religiously determined. (287)

10
Two Forms of Rejection of the World

• Active asceticism
• God-willed action of the devout who are Gods
  tools (325)
• Operates within the world rationally active
  asceticism, in mastering the world, seeks to tame
  what is creatural and wicked through work in a
  worldly vocation (inner-worldly asceticism).
  (325)
• Proves itself through action, rejects
  contemplative flight as indolent enjoyment of
  self (326)
• Mysticism (passive asceticism)
• Intends a state of possession, not action, and
  the individual is not a tool but a vessel of
  the divine. Action in the world must thus appear
  as endangering the absolutely irrational and
  other-worldly religious state. (325)
• contemplative flight from the world (325)
• He proves himself against the world, against his
  action in the world (326)
• Views active asceticism as an entanglement in
  the godless ways of the world combined with
  complacent self-righteousness (326)

11
Religion vs. the Natural Community

• Organic communal family ethic
• In-group morality vs. out-group morality
• Example no haggling with insiders right to
  expect assistance from insiders, but no
  obligation to provide it to outsiders
• Reciprocity
• Religious ethic
• Extends in-group ethic into universality
• Neighborliness and brotherhood
• It is taken for granted that the faithful should
  ultimately stand closer to the savior, the
  prophet, the priest, the father confessor, the
  brother confessor, the brother in the faith than
  to natural relations and to the matrimonial
  community. (329-330)
• Example Luke 1426 If anyone comes to me and
  does not hate his own father and mother and wife
  and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and
  even his own life, he cannot be my disciple."

12
The Economic Sphere

• Money is the most abstract and impersonal
  element that exists in human life. The more the
  world of the modern capitalist economy follows
  its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is
  to any imaginable relationship with a religious
  ethic of brotherliness. (331)
• Active ascetic response Puritan ethic of
  vocation, rejecting universalism of love and
  accepting the routinization of the economic
  cosmos, which, with the whole world, it devalued
  as creatural and depraved. This state of affairs
  appeared as God-willed, and as material and given
  for fulfilling ones duty.
• Mystic response rejection of the importance of
  economic goods. However, the ethic of universal
  love is impersonal the benevolent mystic gives
  his shirt when he is asked for his coat, by
  anybody who accidentally happens to come his way
• Mysticism is a unique escape from this world in
  the form of an objectless devotion to anybody,
  not for mans sake but purely for devotions
  sake, or, in Baudelaires words, for the sake of
  the souls sacred prostitution. (333)

13
The Political Sphere

• A tension between universalist religion,
  (especially under a god of love) and the
  necessities of the political order
• The state is an association that claims the
  monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, and
  it cannot be conceived in any other manner.
  (334)
• The mutual strangeness of religion and politics,
  when they are both completely rationalized, is
  all the more the case because, in contrast to
  economics, politics may come into direct
  competition with a religious ethics at decisive
  points. (335)
• Resist no evil vs. You shall help right to
  triumph by the use of force (334)
• Identity, meaning, death (335)

14
The Political Sphere

• Active asceticism It interprets Gods
  incomprehensible will to mean that these
  commandments should be imposed upon the creatural
  world by the means of this world, namely,
  violencefor the world is subject to violence and
  ethical barbarism. (336)
• Crusading orientation toward the world,
  sacrificing universal brotherhood (340)
• Mysticism a radically anti-political attitude,
  his quest for redemption with its acosmic
  benevolence and brotherliness. With its resist
  no evil and its maxim then turn the other
  cheek, mysticism is necessarily vulgar and
  lacking in dignity in the eyes of every
  self-assured worldly ethic of heroism. (336)
• It withdraws from the pragma of violence which
  no political action can escape. Otherworldly
  orientation.

15
The Political Sphere

• Absolutism or pragmatism?
• To what degree do consequences matter?
• The Christian does right and leaves success to
  God. (339)
• Rational in principle, but irrational in effects

16
The Aesthetic Sphere

• Since its beginnings, religion has been an
  inexhaustible fountain of opportunities for
  artistic creation, on the one hand, and of
  stylizing through traditionalization, on the
  other. (341)
• The relationship between art religion will
  remain harmonious for so long as the creative
  artist experiences his ability as resulting
  either from a charisma of ability (originally
  magic) or from spontaneous play. (341)
• But the development of intellectualism and
  rationalization means that art becomes a sphere
  of life separate from religion, as art takes
  over the function of a this-worldly salvation
  from the routines of everyday life, and
  especially from the increasing pressures of
  theoretical and practical rationalization. (342)
• From the point of view of religion, art becomes
  an idolatry, a competing power
• Iconoclasm
• But historically, the psychological affinity
  between art and religion has led to ever-renewed
  alliances (343)

17
The Erotic Sphere

• The extraordinary quality of eroticism has
  consisted precisely in a gradual turning away
  from the naive naturalism of sex. The reason and
  significance of this evolution, however, involve
  the rationalization and intellectualization of
  culture.
• Eroticism was raised into the sphere of
  conscious enjoyment (in the most sublime sense of
  the term). Nevertheless, and indeed because of
  this elevation, eroticism appeared to be like a
  gate into the most irrational and thereby real
  kernel of life, as compared with the mechanisms
  of rationalization. (344-345)
• The more rationalization has progressed, the
  greater tension between the erotic and religious
  spheres

18
The Erotic Sphere

• A tremendous value emphasis on the specific
  sensation of an inner-worldly salvation from
  rationalization thus resulted. A joyous triumph
  over rationality corresponded in its radicalism
  with the unavoidable and equal rejection by an
  ethics of any kind of other- or supra-worldly
  salvation. (346-347)
• But it is exactly this rejection that makes the
  sexual sphere systematically prepared for a
  highly valued erotic sensation.
• Under these conditions, the erotic relation
  seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the
  fulfillment of the request for love in the direct
  fusion of the souls of one to the other.
• This rests upon the possibility of a communion
  which is felt as a direct unification, as a
  fading of the thou. ... The lover realizes
  himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly
  living, which is eternally inaccessible to any
  rational endeavor. (347)

19
The Erotic Sphere

• This experience is by no means communicable and
  is in this respect it is equivalent to the
  having of the mystic. (347)
• A principled ethic of religious brotherhood is
  radically and antagonistically opposed to all
  this.
• From the religious perspective, the inner,
  earthly sensation of salvation by mature love
  competes in the sharpest possible way with the
  devotion of a supra-mundane God, with the
  devotion of an ethically rational order of God,
  or with the devotion of a mystical bursting of
  individuation, which alone appear genuine to
  the ethic of brotherhood. (348)
• Active asceticism is felt by eroticism to be a
  powerful and deadly enemy
• Mysticism sees erotic union as a substitute for
  the mystics union with God (348)

20
The Erotic Sphere

• From the religious perspective, eroticism is the
  counter-pole of all religiously oriented
  brotherliness, in these aspects it must be
  exclusive in its inner core it must be
  subjective in the highest imaginable sense and
  it must be absolutely incommunicable. (349)
• Thus, ceremonies of marriage to transform the
  erotic only the linkage of marriage with the
  thought of ethical responsibility for one
  anotherhence a category heterogeneous to the
  purely erotic spherecan carry the sentiment that
  something unique and supreme might be embodied in
  marriage ... a mutual granting of oneself to
  another. ... Rarely does life grant such value
  in pure form. He to whom it is given may speak
  of fates fortune and gracenot to his own
  merit. (350)

21
The Intellectual Sphere

• The tension between religion and intellectual
  knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever
  rational, empirical knowledge has consistently
  worked through the disenchantment of the world
  and its transformation into a causal mechanism.
  (350)
• Every increase of rationalism in empirical
  science increasingly pushes religion from the
  rational into the irrational realm but only
  today does religion become the irrational or
  anti-rational supra-human power. (351)
• Yet, the less magic or merely contemplative
  mysticism and the more doctrine a religion
  contains, the greater its need of rational
  apologetics. (351)

22
The Intellectual Sphere

• There is absolutely no unbroken religion
  working as a vital force which is not compelled
  at some point to demand the credo non quod, sed
  quia absurdumthe sacrifice of the intellect.
• Redemptory religion defends itself against the
  attack of the self-sufficient intellect. It does
  so, of course, in the most principles fashion, by
  raising the claim that religious knowledge moves
  in a different sphere and that the nature and
  meaning of religious knowledge is entirely
  different from the accomplishments of the
  intellect.
• Religion claims to offer an ultimate stand
  toward the world by virtue of a direct grasp of
  the worlds meaning. It does not claim to
  offer intellectual knowledge concerning what it
  is or what should be. It claims to unlock the
  meaning of the world not by means of the
  intellect but by virtue of a charisma of
  illumination. (352)

23
The Intellectual Sphere

• At all times and in all places, the need for
  salvationconsciously cultivated as the
  substance of religiosityhas resulted from the
  endeavor of a systematic and practical
  rationalization of lifes realities.
• All religions have demanded as a specific
  presupposition that the course of the world be
  somehow meaningful, at least in so far as it
  touches upon the interests of men. As we have
  seen, this claim naturally emerged first as the
  customary problem of unjust suffering, and hence
  as the postulate of a just compensation for the
  unequal distribution of individual happiness in
  the world. (353)

24
The Intellectual Sphere

• The absolute imperfection of this world had been
  firmly established as an ethical postulate. And
  the futility of worldly things has seemed to be
  meaningful and justified only in terms of this
  imperfection.
• For it was not only, or even primarily, the
  worthless which proved to be transitory. The
  fact that death and ruin, with their leveling
  effects, overtake good men and good works, as
  well as evil ones, could appear to be a
  depreciation of precisely the supreme values of
  this worldonce the idea of a perpetual duration
  of time, of an eternal God and an eternal order
  had been conceived. (354)

25
The Intellectual Sphere

• The more intensely rational thought has seized
  upon the problem of a just and retributive
  compensation, the less an entirely inner-worldly
  solution could seem possible, and the less an
  other-worldly solution could appear probable or
  even meaningful. (353)
• Rational knowledge has had to reject the claim
  of a meaningful cosmos in principle. The cosmos
  of natural causality and the postulated cosmos of
  ethical, compensatory causality have stood in
  irreconcilable opposition. (355)
• Religious ideals have been replaced by
  cultural ideals (354)

26
The Intellectual Sphere

• The peasant, like Abraham, could die satiated
  with life. The feudal landlord and the warrior
  hero could do likewise. For both fulfilled the
  cycle of their existence beyond which they did
  not reach. Each in his way could attain an
  inner-worldly perfection as a result of the naive
  unambiguity of the substance of his life.
• But the cultivated man who strives for
  self-perfection, in the sense of acquiring or
  creating cultural values, cannot do this. He
  can become weary of life, but he cannot become
  satiated with life in the sense of completing a
  cycle. For the perfectibility of the man of
  culture in principle progresses infinitely, as do
  the cultural values.
• Senseless death has seemed only to put the stamp
  upon the senselessness of life itself. (356)
• Life seems to become a senseless hustle in the
  service of worthless, moreover self-contradictory,
  and mutually antagonistic ends. (357)

27
Rationalization

• The devaluation of the world results from the
  conflict between the rational claim and the
  reality, between the rational ethic and the
  partly rational, and partly irrational values.
• The need for salvation responds to this
  devaluation by becoming ever more other-worldly,
  more alienated from all structured forms of life,
  and, in exact parallel, by confining itself to
  the specific religious essence.
• This reaction is the stronger the more
  systematic the thinking about the meaning of
  the universe becomes, the more the external
  organization of the world is rationalized, and
  the more the conscious experience of the worlds
  irrational content is sublimated.
• And not only theoretical thought, disenchanting
  the world, led to this course, but also the very
  attempt of religious ethics practically and
  ethically to rationalize the world. (357)