Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages 9042925531, 9789042925533

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CHANGING MINDS

Religion and Cognition Through the Ages

GRONINGEN STUDIES IN CULTURAL CHANGE GENERAL EDITOR H.W. Hoen EDITORIAL BOARD J.N. Bremmer, J.J.H. Dekker, G.J. Dorleijn, A.A. MacDonald, B.H. Stolte, A.J. Vanderjagt Volume XLII

CHANGING MINDS

Religion and Cognition Through the Ages

EDITED BY

István Czachesz and Tamás Biró

PEETERS LEUVEN - PARIS - WALPOLE, MA 2011

Illustration on cover: Firewalkers, photo courtesy of Dimitris Xygalatas; Malaysian figurine, photo courtesy of Harvey Whitehouse; Neural activity disclosed using a combination of fMRI and MEG/EEG, courtesy of Mikko Sams; Giotto di Bondone, Bust of an Angel, after 1304, Vatican.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. D/2011/0602/XX ISBN: 978-90-429-2553-3 © Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, 3000 Leuven No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means without permission from the publisher.

CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgements

vii

Introduction István Czachesz and Tamás Biró

ix

Contributors

xvii

Part I: From Religion to Mind

1

Religious Universals and Religious Variation Harvey Whitehouse

3

Reduction and Explanatory Pluralism in the Cognitive Science of Religion Ilkka Pyysiänen 15

Part II: From Mind to Religion

31

Cognitive and Cultural Perspectives on Language John Nerbonne

33

Meaningful Meaning: Changing Relations between Science and Religion Fred Keijzer 53 The Wondering Brain: Dreaming, Religion and Cognitive Science Kelly Bulkeley

75

Part III: Mind and Religion Through the Ages

87

Cognitive Analysis of Faith and Christological Change: Contribution to a Psychology of Early Christian Religion Gerd Theissen

89

Towards a Cognitive History of Early Christian Rituals Risto Uro

109

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CONTENTS

Women, Charity and Mobility in Early Christianity: Weak Links and the Historical Transformation of Religions István Czachesz

129

Optimal Religion: Optimality Theory Accounts for Ritual Dynamics Tamás Biró

155

Firewalking in the Balkans: High Arousal Rituals and Memory Dimitris Xygalatas

193

Bibliography

211

Index

231

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In 1999, the local Groningen Research School for the Study of the Humanities, and the Groningen members of the national Netherlands Research School for Medieval Studies succeeded in obtaining a grant for an innovative, large-scale, collective research programme entitled Cultural Change: Dynamics and Diagnosis. Supported by the faculties of Arts, Philosophy and Theology and financed by the Board of the University of Groningen, the Cultural Change programme constitutes an excellent opportunity to promote multidisciplinary approaches to phenomena characteristic of transformation processes in the fields of politics, literature and history, philosophy and theology. In order to enhance programmatic cohesion, three crucial ‘moments’ in European history were selected: 1) Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (c.200–c.600), 2) Late Medieval to the Early Modern period (c.1450–c.1650), and 3) the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’ (1789–c.1918). In 2000 and 2002 further grants were obtained for Cultural Change: Impact and Integration and Cultural Change: Perception and Representation respectively. Several international conferences and workshops have already been organised and more are planned before the end of 2011. This volume addresses the problem of change and continuity in religious traditions from the perspective of cognitive science. Relying on the rapidly growing body of scientific knowledge about the human mind, the authors examine cross-culturally recurrent religious phenomena and specific religious traditions, in an attempt to explain why religions change dynamically whilst still exhibiting high degrees of continuity. The volume contributes to our understanding of how social and cultural phenomena emerge from mental processes taking place in the brains of many individuals. The cognitive turn in the humanities entails not only a new, biologically grounded view of human phenomena, but also novel questions and methods. Some of the chapters, written by philosophers and linguists, discuss what the study of religion can learn from other disciplines that have already undertaken the cognitive turn. Anthropologists and psychologists of religion build bridges from different areas within the cognitive sciences to very specific issues of religion; they thus pave the way for Biblical scholars and theologians who are embracing the new cognitive method. This volume is the result of the International Workshop on Religion and Cognition, co-organised by the Cultural Change programme and the Centre for Religion and Cognition at the University of Groningen in 2006. We thank the Board of the University of Groningen for the financial support given to the Cultural Change programme and the Groningen University Fund for supporting the workshop.

viii The editors are particularly grateful to Marijke Wubbolts for helping to organise the workshop, Gorus van Oordt for preparing the texts for publication, and Svetlana Kirichenko at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies for her assistance in preparing the Bibliography and the Index. Herman W. Hoen, General Editor

INTRODUCTION István Czachesz and Tamás Biró The history of religions is replete with spectacular changes and transformations. The rise of Christianity in Late Antiquity, the powerful growth and local adaptations of the world religions, the decline of institutional religiosity in Europe in the twentieth century, as well as the never-ending cultural innovation that produces several new religions every day demonstrate the dynamic change and development religions undergo. At the same time, however, we can also observe an impressive continuity over time, both in and across religious traditions. A closer look at the constitutive elements of various religions reveals an abundance of recurrent patterns of belief, myth, ritual and social organisation. Since the nineteenth century, various research traditions have focused on diversity or recurrent patterns in religion, typically in the framework of historical, phenomenological or sociological approaches. This volume represents an attempt to address the problem of change and continuity in religious traditions from a new, twenty-first century perspective. Coming from a variety of academic fields, the contributors to this volume assess the potential of using insights from cognitive science in the study of religion and its change. In other words, we attempt to capture some of the underlying mechanisms of both change and stability in the history of religions, relying on the rapidly growing body of scientific knowledge about the human mind. However, can there be any connection at all between cognitive science and religious studies? The authors of this volume, like a growing number of scholars in the field of the cognitive science of religion, argue that such a connection can prove extremely fruitful. The same research line, however, also demonstrates the difficulties posed by the coupling of two fields, each of which is extremely broad, as gauged by either their research questions or methodologies. Notwithstanding the advances in the cognitive science of religion in the last decade or two, the uncertainty of the initial search can still be felt.1 A better understanding of each other’s work, however, will certainly open new paths for research. The multidisciplinary field of cognitive science emerged in the 1950s. While in B.F. Skinner’s behavioural psychology, dominating the field at the time, the mind was viewed as a ‘black box’, and understanding the internal 1

Geertz, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion’.

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organisation of the mind was not considered a legitimate or viable scientific enterprise, the early cognitivists attempted to peek into the box and study the mechanisms that underlie the mind’s complex functioning. These mechanisms were approached from two different directions: psychological experiments and computational models which followed a top-down disassembling of the black box, and a neurological approach which undertook a bottom-up reassembling of the biological structures. Cognitive science is not exclusively concerned with human beings: according to the traditional cognitive approach, minds can be human, animal, or even artificial. Moreover, it would be a mistake to identify cognitive science exclusively with the rational or computational aspects of the mind. In fact, the work of cognitive scientists today extends to areas such as emotion, imitation, empathy, social and moral intuitions, and the cognitive underpinnings of cooperation. During the past decades, cognitive science has influenced various academic disciplines, interacting with them in complex ways that have shaped cognitive science itself. Today cognitive science represents a cross-section of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, anthropology, primatology, artificial intelligence and other disciplines. A key feature in all the disciplines that have undergone the ‘cognitive turn’ is the biological approach to the phenomena: behaviour is seen as the product of the mind/brain. Furthermore, collective behaviour is seen as an emergent product of many individual minds. Note that this approach does not deny the existence of social phenomena, but it aims at an explanation that is based on the cognitive structure of the many individuals that make it up – in a similar way as a physicist who explains temperature as a macrolevel fact emerging from the micro-level motion of a huge number of particles. To sum up, the cognitive scientist considers the behaviour observed at both the individual and the social levels as the product of the extremely complex cognitive structures in minds/brains. In the last couple of years, a ‘cognitive turn’ has also started in religious studies. Its roots reach back to the 1990s, when a few exciting new hypotheses were proposed to explain the phenomenon of religious thought and behaviour. At that time, E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley put forward a model inspired by linguistic competence theory to explain the structure of religious rituals.2 Anthropologist Pascal Boyer proposed that religious ideas are attention-grabbing, and therefore persistent in cultural transmission because they are minimally counterintuitive concepts, in the sense that they violate cross-culturally attested ontological expectations.3 In 2

Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture; McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind. 3 Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion;

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addition, Harvey Whitehouse, whose article opens this volume, drew on memory studies and his own ethnographic fieldwork in Papua New Guinea to develop a model of two modes of religiosity.4 In recent years, scholars in religious studies, including Ilkka Pyysiäinen, another contributor to this book, have started to elaborate on these new insights.5 The Centre for Religion and Cognition at the University of Groningen was established in February 2005 by the editors of this volume with the purpose of applying insights from cognitive science primarily to the study of historical religions and religious texts.6 The new field that is now identified as the cognitive science of religion is united by the distinct purpose of providing explanations for religious thought and behaviour using insights about human cognition. However, scholars engaged in this work do not simply apply the results of cognitive science and neuroscience to religious phenomena. Researchers rather build on various branches and traditions of scholarship, including linguistics, memory studies, experimental and evolutionary psychology, and various cultural theories. Indeed, a number of divergent approaches can be detected in the cognitive science of religion with respect to both research questions and methodology. Psychological hypotheses pertaining to religion are put to the test using techniques well-known to experimental psychology. Neuroimaging technology has been increasingly employed to detect the neurological basis of behaviour related to religion. Anthropological fieldwork is being conducted to collect additional data corroborating or refuting existing theories. Formal models parallel those in contemporary theoretical linguistics, while computational simulations connect religion to the study of social networks. This plurality – reflecting the diversity of the cognitive sciences – is also represented in this volume. Yet, all of these extremely divergent research lines agree in their ultimate aim: to explain the diffuse set of phenomena classified under ‘religion’, on the basis of what is known about the human mind in general. It is notable that those who are scholars of religion by training and now work with the new approaches have been outnumbered thus far by experts Idem, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Whitehouse, Inside the Cult: Religious Innovation and Transmission in Papua New Guinea; Idem, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity; Idem, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. 5 Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works: Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion; Idem, Magic, Miracles and Religion: A Scientist’s Perspective; Idem, Supernatural Agents: Why we Believe in Souls, Gods, and Buddhas. 6 Czachesz, ‘The Gospels and Cognitive Science’; Idem, ‘The Promise of the Cognitive Science of Religion for Biblical Studies’; cf. Whitehouse and Martin, Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition. 4

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with a primary expertise in other fields, such as anthropology and experimental psychology.7 In 2005, the Centre for Religion and Cognition accepted the invitation of the Groningen Research School for the Study of the Humanities to organise a workshop in the framework of the Cultural Change programme, with the purpose of exploring the use of cognitive approaches in the study of historical religions, focusing especially on the mechanisms underlying change and transformation in biblical literature and ancient religions, as well as seeking new ways of applying hitherto neglected cognitive perspectives in these areas. We also wanted to discuss what a cognitive approach means in other academic disciplines, especially those having a long-standing alliance with cognitive science, and to see whether we could draw conclusions from such examples that would be of benefit to the methodology employed in religious studies. In order to obtain answers to these questions, we organised the workshop in such a way that it would initiate an intellectual exchange among scholars who have already contributed to the cognitive study of religion, scholars in religious studies, including experts on some historical religious traditions and texts, and scholars from other academic fields that have experienced a cognitive turn in the past decades. The International Workshop on Religion and Cognition took place on April 6-7, 2006 at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, and yielded an unexpectedly vivid and inspiring exchange among scholars from sometimes very distant fields, generating a wealth of new insights concerning our core questions. The chapters of this volume are revised versions of the papers that were discussed at the workshop. The book is structured as follows. The first part of the book, entitled ‘From Religion to Mind’, consists of two articles that introduce earlier cognitive research on religion. One of the theories that initiated the cognitive science of religion and largely influenced subsequent work in the field, is Harvey Whitehouse’s modes theory. This theory captures the dynamic interaction between two modes of religiosity, the doctrinal and imagistic, which determine the evolution of religious movements and predict waves of innovation in the form of ‘imagistic outbursts’. In his article, Whitehouse considers the recurrent variables that one finds across religious traditions worldwide and considers how they form combinations that centre around two typical configurations called attractor positions, a term borrowed from system theory and introduced to cultural studies by the anthropologist Dan Sperber.8 Proceeding from his theory of religion, Whitehouse proposes how we can account for variation and change across time in religious traditions. 7 8

Geertz, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Religion’, pp. 347-399. Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.

INTRODUCTION

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After E. Thomas Lawson, Ilkka Pyysiäinen was among the first scholars in religious studies to recognise the potential of the cognitive approach. Pyysiäinen has both elaborated insights from previous research (such as Pascal Boyer’s theory of minimally counterintuitive concepts) and proposed new cognitive perspectives to explain ‘how religion works’.9 In his contribution to this volume, he reconsiders the problem of explanation and reduction in cultural studies, answering the philosophical criticism so often formulated by those rejecting the cognitive science of religion enterprise in general. In the second part of the volume, entitled ‘From Mind to Religion’, scholars from different academic fields review how the cognitive turn influenced their respective disciplines and consider possible implications for a ‘cognitive turn’ in religious studies. Linguistics is the academic field that perhaps has been influenced most thoroughly by the cognitive turn. In his contribution, John Nerbonne explains the significance of the cognitive paradigm in linguistics, explaining through a few straightforward examples what ‘cognitive’ means in this context: research on how mental processes manipulate information, abstracted from their physical realisation. In the final part of his contribution, he also identifies some aspects of religion that could be studied using a cognitive approach. Fred Keijzer’s academic fields, psychology and philosophy, were also among the first disciplines to undergo a cognitive turn. Since its beginnings in the 1950s, cognitive science has changed considerably, and the different subfields and approaches that have emerged in the past decades are also represented in some contributions to this volume. The initial models of cognitive science were inspired by the computer, and even today it is still common to view the mind as a ‘computer’ that manipulates mental representations. Exciting new approaches that have emerged in the past decade include embodied and embedded cognition, directions that consider the role of the body and the role of the environment in cognition respectively, partially rejecting the computer metaphor as too simplistic. In his contribution, Keijzer outlines an explanation of religion from the perspective of embedded cognition, arguing that organisms need a preference structure that they can use to organise their motivations. Instead of emphasising its ‘supernatural’ aspects, religion should be understood as a mechanism that provides such a preference structure. Kelly Bulkeley’s article introduces a third perspective, that of dream research. His contribution shows how recent advances in brain-imaging technology and the growing body of neuroscientific knowledge about the brain can revolutionise a traditional field. Bulkeley argues that cognitive 9

See note 5 above.

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science provides both a wealth of new information about topics of central concern for religious studies and empirically grounded methods to deal with such data. In his article, he shows how the rhythms of mind/brain activity during the sleep cycle provoke experiences of wonder, and that such dreams function as sources of religious and spiritual experience. The third, most extensive part of the book is entitled ‘Mind and Religion Through the Ages’. It starts with an article by Gerd Theissen, who was among the first scholars to introduce insights from the social sciences into biblical studies in the 1970s. Theissen now considers how Pascal Boyer’s theory of minimally counterintuitive ideas can be used to understand the theology of earliest Christianity. He argues that counterintuitive ideas incorporated in collective memory legitimise basic cultural values by grounding them at a different ontological level. Religions combine counterintuitive elements with intuitive ones, resulting in extreme and moderate forms of religiosity. Extreme religious forms, on the one hand, use transcendental concepts to provide causal attributions; moderate religious forms, on the other hand, connect transcendent and immanent explanations. Theissen exemplifies his theory by analysing the famous hymn of Christ in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. In his contribution, Risto Uro uses cognitively oriented ritual theories to explain a series of transformations in the ritual systems of Judaism and Early Christianity. With reference to Lawson and McCauley’s ritual form theory, Uro suggests that John the Baptist introduced a special agent ritual to Judaism, that is, a ritual in which the performer (agent) of the ritual is more closely related to God than any other participant. First-century Judaism was lacking such a ritual and therefore represented (in terms of ritual form theory) an unbalanced ritual system. This explains the success of John’s movement, which prepared the way for the Jesus movement and Early Christianity. Uro suggests that Early Christianity mainly operated in the doctrinal mode (in terms of Whitehouse’s modes theory). Remarkably, however, Christians had a low-frequency ritual that does not seem to fit into either Lawson and McCauley’s or Whitehouse’s theories. From the perspective of the individual believer, baptism was performed only once in a lifetime and should therefore involve great sensory pageantry and generate high emotional arousal in the participants. There is, however, no indication that Christian baptism would have involved any such sensory pageantry as did the initiatory rites of the mystery cults. This provided room, Uro argues, for the introduction of more arousing elements, such as those found in Valentinian Gnosticism. István Czachesz explains the long-term success of Early Christianity with the help of network theory. It was sociologist Mark Granovetter who first demonstrated that weak social ties (such as connections among ac-

INTRODUCTION

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quaintances) are crucial for the spread of information in society. In Early Christianity, a number of pro-social attitudes helped the formation of such ties, including the participation of women, the practice of charity and the entertainment of visitors from other congregations (and probably of itinerant Christians) – as primarily attested to by the relevant sections of the Pauline epistles and the Didache. Due to these factors, Early Christianity developed a social network structure that enabled the successful cooperation of quite diverse social and ethnic groups, facilitated the emergence and circulation of competing theological views (eventually leading to the selection of cognitively optimal variants), and strengthened the resistance of the Church against external attacks. Tamás Biró introduces Optimality Theory, a new paradigm in linguistics, to the study of rituals. He formulates a model that predicts the ritual dynamics based on the believer’s intuitive theology, which is a kind of ‘mental grammar’ predicting the reaction of divine agents as a function of the resources spent by humans on rituals. In addition to personal experience, random events and social influence also play important roles in the willingness of believers to invest in the performance of rituals. The model is capable of reproducing the predictions of modes theory and ritual form theory in a highly formalised manner, as well as offering explanations for some of the data that do not readily fit into earlier theories. Biró’s contribution also illustrates that the study of historical religions can both profit from existing cognitive approaches and inspire new solutions to hitherto unsolved problems. Finally, anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas presents fieldwork which he carried out in northern Greece in the framework of his PhD (successfully completed in the meantime). Firewalking, a peculiar local ritual, is analysed within the framework of Whitehouse’s modes theory. This ritual involves high emotional arousal and physical pain and is connected, somewhat surprisingly, to the mainstream Greek Orthodox Church. Xygalatas’ article demonstrates that the anthropology of religion can benefit from the cognitive sciences and provides an eminent example of how to put general cognitive theories to the test. In putting together this volume, we hope to have demonstrated that a cognitive approach to the study of culture, religion and their historical change is both legitimate and fruitful. The same theories which describe early Christianity in its Hellenistic-Roman context can also be used to explain twenty-first century rituals in modern Greece – not surprisingly, since both religious phenomena build on the brain of Homo sapiens. The same models work for language and for rituals – again unsurprisingly, since both are products of the human mind. The successful spread of a religious movement 2000 years ago can be analysed in terms of twenty-first century

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social network models – once more in no way astonishing, since social networks of the time were composed of people whose social cognition functioned just like ours does now. In other words, the biological setup of the human brain has not changed in the last millennia; what has changed is the information encoded in the same hardware. What is this hardware like, and how does the information contained therein become transformed over the course of centuries? These are precisely the questions that a cognitive approach to cultural dynamics and the history of religion attempts to address.

CONTRIBUTORS Tamás Biró is currently postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC), University of Amsterdam (UvA), The Netherlands. Kelly Bulkeley is Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, USA. István Czachesz is Privatdozent at the Theological Faculty, University of Heidelberg, Germany and Fellow of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. Fred Keijzer is Associate Professor in philosophy of mind and cognition at the Department of Theoretical Philosophy, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. John Nerbonne is professor of computational linguistics and holds a secondary appointment in computer science. He is also director of the Centre for Language and Cognition, all at the University of Groningen. Ilkka Pyysiänen is Academy Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and Docent in the Study of Religion at Helsinki University. Gerd Theissen is Professor emeritus of New Testament Theology at the Theological Faculty, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Risto Uro is Senior Lecturer of New Testament Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Harvey Whitehouse is Professor of Social Anthropology and Fellow of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford. Dimitris Xygalatas is Research Fellow at Aarhus University, affiliated with the Religion, Cognition and Culture Project at the Department for the Study of Religion and the MindLab at Aarhus University Hospital.

PART I FROM RELIGION TO MIND

RELIGIOUS UNIVERSALS AND RELIGIOUS VARIATION Harvey Whitehouse A major focus in the cognitive science of religion has been the shaping and constraining effects of universal cognitive mechanisms, resulting in crossculturally recurrent religious traits. Nevertheless, humans also display an extraordinary capacity for innovation and storage of cumulative bodies of culturally particular information. The aim of this chapter is to introduce a new approach to explaining religious variation by building on existing attempts to explain religious universals. Explaining the universal religious repertoire The following ideas appear to be cross-culturally recurrent and may turn out to be universal traits of human thinking: (i) Life persists after death. As far as we can tell, there are no communities of humans anywhere in the world (nor have there ever been such communities in the past) who are unfamiliar with the idea that feelings, desires and other kinds of psychological states survive the expiration of the physical body at death. (ii) Agents without standard bodies. Notions of humanlike beings (such as spirits, gods and ancestors) that dispense with bodies or assume nonstandard physical forms appear to be universal. 1 (iii) Creationism and intelligent design. People everywhere recognise the idea that various features of the natural world (ranging from mountains and caves to the myriad forms of life that inhabit the earth) were ‘put’ there for a reason. (iv) Divine reciprocity. When misfortune strikes or when some happy coincidence touches their lives, people tend to assume that some kind of agent should be blamed (and perhaps appeased) or thanked (and perhaps repaid in 1 Although such beings may be construed as taking a physical form (e.g. ethereal, fluid, penetrable, etc.) they are thought to lack the standard biological properties of normal bodies and in that sense are ‘bodiless’ or ‘disembodied’.

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some way). Gifts and sacrificial offerings would be typical examples of these sorts of reciprocal relations. (v) Some otherwise ordinary people have non-natural powers. Such persons might acquire those special capacities by undergoing dedicated training or by taking special medicines or by performing distinctive rituals. Alternatively, they might be born with those special capacities or endowed with them, whether as a blessing or a curse (or a mixture of both). Examples would include shamans, diviners, sorcerers, witches, psychics, fortunetellers, wizards and soothsayers. (vi) People’s bodies can be taken over by the minds of other agents. Notions of out-of-the-body experience, spirit possession, mediumship, and apotheosis are widely recurrent cross-culturally. Moreover, all human communities recognise, in some shape or form, the idea that the body acts as a vessel for the person’s psychological attributes (their distinctive personalities and their memories, desires, fears, etc.) and that the two (body and ‘soul’) can be separated temporarily (which, of course, is not the same thing as being permanently separated by death). (vii) The performance of ritual procedures can effect changes in the world. Human communities everywhere recognise the idea that there are special types of actions (called ‘rituals’ in everyday parlance) that differ from other kinds of actions by virtue of being irreducible to a set of technical and intentional motivations. By performing those special actions one can effect changes such as: changes of social status (for example, through rites of baptism, circumcision, initiation, marriage, installation), changes in physical wellbeing and health (for example, whether positively in the case of healing rituals or negatively in the case of black magic), and changes in material conditions (ranging from harvest rituals and hunting magic to the rites performed in cargo cults and apocalyptic movements). (viii) Rituals can have symbolic properties. People everywhere appreciate that ritual actions often ‘stand for’ other ideas: a particular feature of ritual choreography, for instance, might refer to some natural process such as the waxing and waning of the moon or to some narrative about the life of a deity or ancestor. In other words, ritual actions are not necessarily construed as randomly selected procedural rules or conventions but may be interpreted as more or less coded references to things, processes, or events of special salience.

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(ix) Certain objects, creatures (including people) and places must be treated with particular care (such as reverence, fear and caution). We can refer to this as the idea that certain things are ‘sacred’, which means (perhaps among other things) that they should be shielded from coming into contact with non-sacred things or that such contact should be carefully regulated (for example, though processes such as cleaning, separating and boundarymaintenance). (x) Certain kinds of testimony (whether verbal or inscribed) cannot be challenged or contradicted. One is expected to adopt a special attitude of deference towards that sort of knowledge and, accordingly, to those persons responsible for upholding it. (xi) Certain kinds of behaviours are obligatory while other kinds of behaviours are proscribed. These obligations and proscriptions are not a matter simply of habit or convention but are thought to encapsulate immutable principles associated with strong emotional valence. (xii) Common knowledge is only superficial (and possibly false or at least misleading); deeper truths exist and can be at least partially grasped through (typically arduous or miraculous) processes of revelation. The above traits (and we could no doubt add to the list) constitute more or less elaborated themes in religious traditions around the world. Whether these kinds of thinking are explicitly condoned or suppressed by the authoritative religious canon, they are recurrent features of they way ordinary people reason ‘on the ground’. Following McCauley (forthcoming) we might refer to such ideas as examples of ‘religion on-the-hoof’, that is to say, ways of thinking that we might conveniently label ‘religious’ but which are not necessarily integrated into culturally elaborated religious systems at particular times and places (even if they often are). If we accept that these traits are widely recurrent, then the question is why. A number of recent hypotheses propose that these traits arise from the way normal human minds develop. Consider the following examples of ways in which cognitive scientists have been seeking to explain beliefs in spiritual entities and the afterlife. Barring particular pathologies, all normal children develop a distinctive set of tools for drawing inferences and reasoning about the mental states of other agents. This remarkable capacity, often referred to as ‘Theory of Mind’ (or ToM), provides us with a wealth of intuitions about other peo-

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ple’s intentions, desires, beliefs and other psychological states.2 ToM only computes information about the minds of other agents rather than information about their physical attributes. The fact that we naturally think about minds as ‘disembodied’ phenomena may help to explain our apparent readiness to imagine that minds can exist independently of bodies (as in spirit and ghost concepts) or that minds can migrate between bodies (as in spirit possession concepts).3 Furthermore, given the way ToM operates in normal adults, the absence of mental states in oneself and others is difficult (if not impossible) to simulate mentally. This may help to explain the seemingly panhuman intuition that minds are immortal.4 There is some recent evidence that even very young children reason that dead agents continue to have thoughts, beliefs and desires even after their bodily capacities (such as mobility, perception) have ceased to function.5 If these findings are widely replicated it might lend credence to the view that the notion of psychological persistence postmortem is a spontaneous and cognitively natural inference rather than a culturally transmitted idea (even though specific ideas about the afterlife may be culturally elaborated in different ways). At least some of the supernatural powers attributed to spirits and deities, however, might be explained in terms of the memorability and salience of concepts that violate intuitive ontological expectations. Such expectations emerge naturally according to a somewhat fixed developmental schedule that varies little across cultural contexts. So for instance, in the domain of intuitive physics, infants and young children develop predictably convergent expectations about the properties of solid objects (for example, applying such principles as gravity, solidity and balance) that are in certain respects underdetermined by experience (thus newborn babies pay special attention to objects that violate the expectations of intuitive physics). Different but complementary expectations emerge in other domains, for instance concerning living things, artefacts, minds and so on. Notions of supernatural agency can violate these sorts of panhuman expectations either by breaching the rules of a particular ontological category (for example, no2

Carey, Conceptual Change in Childhood; Wellman, The Child’s Theory of Mind; Bloom, How Children Learn the Meanings of Words. 3 See for instance Atran, In Gods We Trust; Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God; Bloom, Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes us Human; Cohen, The Mind Possessed. 4 Bering, ‘The folk psychology of souls’, refers to this as the ‘simulation constraint hypothesis’. 5 Bering, Hernández-Blasi and Bjorklund, ‘The development of “afterlife” beliefs in secularly and religiously schooled children’ (for an alternative view see Astuti, ‘Ancestors and the Afterlife’).

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tions of ghosts that can pass through solid walls breach the expectations of intuitive physics) or by transferring rules across domains (for example, notions of bleeding or weeping statues transfer intuitive properties of persons to the domain of artefact). There is some experimental evidence to suggest that breaches and transfers are especially attention-grabbing and memorable, at least if the intuitive violations are simple (for example, concepts involving just one simple breach or transfer appear to be more memorable than concepts entailing multiple violations).6 The cultural recurrence of such ‘minimally counterintuitive’ concepts may be at least partly attributable to their strategic value socially. For instance, the ability of spirits to pass through solid walls might mean that they can eavesdrop on private conversations or witness events that would otherwise remain hidden. Of course, ideas about spiritual entities are only some of the features appearing on our provisional list of putatively universal religious concepts. Other features have attracted explanations that appeal to a range of quite different types of cognitive mechanisms. For example, there is some reason to think that creationist thinking results from a tendency to apply cognitive machinery dedicated to reasoning about artefacts to a much wider range of phenomena. Thus, the forms of teleological reasoning that would enable us to speculate on the functions of a tool or mechanical device may also be readily applied to natural phenomena, such that we intuitively infer that mountains or natural species were fabricated with particular functions in mind.7 Meanwhile, other bodies of research in the cognitive science of religion have sought to account for the panhuman recurrence of ritualised behaviour, for instance in terms of the operations of domain-specific systems dedicated to protection against contaminants,8 or have tried to explain why rituals take only a finite variety of forms because of the limited number of ways in which we are able to represent agents acting on patients by means of instruments.9 In short, universal or widely cross-culturally recurrent features of religious thinking and behaviour may result from various natural biases in our 6 See Boyer’s catalogue of the supernatural in his ‘What makes anthropomorphism natural: intuitive ontology and cultural representations’. See also evidence cross culturally, e.g. Boyer and Ramble, ‘Cognitive templates for religious concepts: cross-cultural evidence for recall of counter-intuitive representations’. 7 Evans, ‘Cognitive and contextual factors in the emergence of diverse belief systems: Creation versus evolution’; Kelemen, ‘Are children “intuitive theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature’. 8 Boyer and Lienard, ‘Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action Parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals’. 9 Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture; McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind.

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psychological make-up. According to one leading figure in the cognitive science of religion, Robert N. McCauley,10 cultural representations, including religious ones, can be ‘natural’ in two rather different senses. They can become natural as a result of frequent exposure and use. For instance, it is natural for many Catholics to cross themselves when entering a church, insofar as they do it without even necessarily being conscious of doing so but rather out of entrenched habit. This kind of practised naturalness, McCauley observes, has to be culturally transmitted, for instance by copying other people. By contrast, the intuition that a dead relative is still in some sense present, even though her body has been buried, may well turn out to be a spontaneous deliverance of standard cognitive development, without any need for culturally particular inputs or learning.11 In that case, such an intuition would be the result not of practice but of ordinary maturation, or what McCauley calls ‘maturationally natural’ cognition. The distinction between maturational and practised naturalness requires some unpacking, however. Naturalness, for McCauley’s purposes, implies automaticity, the ability to deploy knowledge ‘on the hoof’, without need for explicit reflection. Some knowledge deployed in this way is ‘maturationally natural’ in the sense that it displays recurrent properties in all normal humans irrespective of varying ecological (including cultural) context and typically emerges early in childhood according to a somewhat fixed developmental schedule. However, much knowledge of this kind, such as the ability to walk upright, cannot get off the ground without a certain amount of practice, in much the same way that, even though feline techniques of stalking prey are maturationally natural, cats become successful hunters only through considerable rehearsal and learning. For McCauley, the decisive diagnostic features of maturationally natural systems are the things they do not require in order to develop successfully – principally the fact that they do not require explicit instruction or culturally specific environments in order to emerge naturally as part of normal human development. Even though such systems can be ‘tuned’ by varying environmental conditions (as evidenced for example by styles of walking that vary significantly across human populations),12 they retain underlying features that are cross-culturally invariable. In humans, some maturationally natural competences are extended through learning to a rather extraordinary degree. For instance, the ability to 10

McCauley, The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science. For two versions of this argument compare Bering, ‘The folk psychology of souls’ and Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. 12 McCauley and Henrich, ‘Susceptibility to the Muller-Lyer Illusion, Theory Neutral Observation, and the Diachronic Cognitive Penetrability of the Visual Input System’. 11

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play a piano concerto depends on highly specialised forms of learning, even though (once learned by heart) the concerto can be performed with astonishing procedural fluency (an example, of course, of practised naturalness). By contrast, no such specialised learning is required in learning to run (even to run across uneven surfaces that are unfamiliar). Both piano playing and running depend on maturationally natural systems, but whereas the former requires both maturationally natural (universal) competences and specialised honing of such competences – in this case with the aid of special artefacts and institutional arrangements such as pianos, musical notation, and explicit teaching by experts – the ability to run is acquired without any culturally specialised artefacts or pedagogic supports. Explaining Religious Variation In light of the above discussion we could envisage at least three distinct ways in which religious traditions could differ from each other or could change internally over time. First, although we would expect features of the religion that are the expressions of maturationally natural cognition to be found in all human populations, those expressions might be accorded different status from one religious tradition to the next and, at least partly as a consequence, be more or less highly elaborated culturally. This seems to accord with the findings of comparative religion and ethnography. For instance, some religious traditions in Africa, Oceania, Latin America and elsewhere place a heavy emphasis on notions of ancestors and rather less on ethical and soteriological matters. By contrast, most Protestant churches pay very little heed to ancestors per se but generally place great emphasis on the effects of behaviour in this world on the quality of one’s afterlife. Thus, while both ancestor worship and concerns about the afterlife may depend substantially on maturationally natural thinking (such as basic features of mind-body dualism and continuity judgements with regard to higher-level cognitive functions following the expiry of the physical body)13 they might nevertheless come to be more extensively developed in one cultural tradition compared with the next. Second, we might find religious beliefs and practices that are only partly supported by maturationally natural systems; rather they may have become ‘second nature’ through familiarity. For instance, while the notion that there are invisible agents in the world capable of observing our behaviour undetected may depend heavily on spontaneous intuitions, the idea that all our actions are subjected to moral evaluation and judgement by invisible 13

Bering, ‘The folk psychology of souls’.

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beings probably has to be explicitly taught if it is to gain general currency. That is, the intuition that there are supernatural agents ‘around’ is probably insufficient in itself to build the idea of an omnipresent and judgemental deity. The latter conception must be acquired from others. Having encountered such a conception and having learned to deploy it in everyday life, one might ‘naturally’ be conscious of being watched when behaving in ways that have moral consequences (whether negative in the case of illicit or proscribed deeds or more positively when acting piously or prosocially), but this is a kind of ‘practised naturalness’. Although the sensation of being watched and judged depends substantially on maturationally natural systems it incorporates features that have to be culturally transmitted through repeated exposure and rehearsal. We can say, then, that these features of religious thinking and behaviour entail variable elaboration of habitually natural religion. Third, there may be religious ideas that find very little support from our maturationally natural systems. For instance, mystery cults and scholarly traditions of theological enquiry give rise to concepts and interpretative frameworks that are very difficult to learn and in some cases require extensive pedagogic scaffolding to be transmitted intact. In Christianity, for instance, the mystery of the Holy Trinity is substantially at odds with our intuitive ideas about agency. Intuitive agents are unitary beings, and so reasoning about a being that is also simultaneously three types of agent is inherently challenging to our cognitive systems and requires substantial training if it is to feature in discourse along shared or standardised lines. Such features result from variable elaboration of unnatural religion. These three kinds of variability in religious traditions arguably have rather different causes and consequences. In the case of maturationally natural features of religious thinking and behaviour, these may be triggered by a range of somewhat generalised priming effects. For instance, the maturationally natural intuition that mental properties survive death might be primed by high mortality rates or environments in which agency-detection systems are in general highly calibrated. By contrast, features of religion that are merely habitually natural depend at least partly on patterns of learning and transmission that are the distinctive outcomes of socioculturally unique environments (or perhaps types of environment). For instance, although the notion of ‘witch’ probably depends upon at least some maturationally natural inferences (for example, concerning natural kinds applied to the domain of the social),14 it also requires cultural input concerning the specific properties of witches (for example, the ability to take the form of a bat or other flying creature). Those culturally specific inputs tend to become 14

Cohen, ‘Witchcraft and Sorcery’.

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widely established under very specific sociopolitical conditions, most notably where social tensions are high but where secular mechanisms for ameliorating their effects are limited. Anthropological studies suggest that witchcraft accusations, far from being targeted at antisocial individuals in general, tend to be made only among disputing parties whose grievances are too complex to be resolved either in court or by informal negotiation.15 On this view, although witchcraft accusations exploit maturationally natural cognition, they become widespread only when they function to solve sociopolitically distinctive problems, thus accounting for variable (but predictably patterned) cultural distributions. Cross-cultural variability associated with both maturationally and habitually natural features of religion, though significant, consists mainly of variations on a theme. By contrast, unnatural religious concepts differ radically from one tradition to the next. The concepts and clusters of concepts associated with cognitively unnatural religious beliefs must depend heavily for their survival on explicit teaching and learning. Even if some features of these unnatural concepts can become, through practise and the development of expertise, capable of being deployed automatically, below the level of conscious awareness and verbal report, there would remain appreciable features of expert doctrine that could only be fully formed and articulated with the aid of highly explicit modes of representation and reasoning. The invention of unnatural religious concepts requires substantial explicit reflection and creativity. Although this kind of innovation may be triggered by a wide range of factors (from financial incentives to psychopathy) a particularly ancient and effective way of generating explicit novel revelations is to undergo special kinds of rituals. Ritualised action is an inherently puzzling phenomenon in that its component procedures are never entirely reducible to a set of plausible technical motivations. This opens the way for a great diversity of possible interpretations or ‘exegetical’ commentaries. However, people do not always seek meanings in their rituals. They are most likely to do so only when those rituals leave an enduring impact.16 Rituals that are rarely experienced, highly arousing and personally consequential have a particularly long-lasting effect on participants at least in part because they trigger vivid episodic memories.17 Insofar as these memories pertain to baffling experiences (for example, particularly bizarre forms of torture carried out according to carefully stipulated but technically quite un15

See for instance Marwick, Witchcraft and Sorcery; Middleton, Magic, Witchcraft and Curing; Middleton and Winter, Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa. 16 Cf. D. Xygalatas, this volume. 17 Episodic memory is the ability to recollect encoded features of a singular experience or sequence of experiences.

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necessary rules) participants may continue to puzzle over the significance of what took place even years afterwards. This pattern of exegetical rumination is a widespread feature of ritual traditions of this kind and typically results in the elaboration of cosmological mysteries.18 Given the painstaking nature of this process of knowledge-production, expertise tends to be concentrated in the hands of more experienced members of the ritual community (for example, elders). The type of expert knowledge generated in this way within esoteric cults tends to incorporate highly counterintuitive ideas and connections between idea-clusters. This pattern of exegetical innovation forms part of the ‘imagistic mode of religiosity’,19 so-called because it is inspired by ritual imagery rather than testimony-based transmission. However, are the ‘unnatural’ ideas generated by the imagistic mode capable of being transmitted more widely among communities of religious adherents? The spread of cognitively unnatural religious concepts, of the kind generated for instance by ritual experts, is far from being a straightforward business. It usually entails a range of pedagogic and mnemonic supports, ranging from texts and elaborated iconography to dedicated educational institutions run by professionalised religious guilds. However, arguably the most ancient and recurrent requirement is a regime of regular doctrinal rehearsal, a socially regulated forum (or set of fora) for verbal recitation of the creed. This minimum requirement, the routinisation of doctrinal transmission, seems to be found in all religious traditions where orthodoxies have become established. Typically incorporating highly developed forms of authoritative ritual exegesis as well, this type of religious transmission forms part of a ‘doctrinal mode of religiosity’.20 Not only does religion organised in this way incorporate highly counterintuitive concepts, it also organises those concepts into highly distinctive systems that require considerable labour and artifice to be reproduced intact. 18 Whitehouse, ‘Memorable Religions: transmission, codification, and change in divergent Melanesian contexts’; Idem, Inside the Cult: religious innovation and transmission in Papua New Guinea; idem, Arguments and Icons: divergent modes of religiosity; idem, Modes of Religiosity: A cognitive theory of religious transmission. 19 The imagistic mode comprises a constellation of mutually reinforcing features: low-frequency, highly arousing ritual experiences that are remembered as distinctive episodes triggering long-lasting exegetical reflection but also establishing enduring bonds between co-participants in the rituals and thus a somewhat small-scale, exclusivist pattern of political association. 20 Key features of the doctrinal mode broadly contrast with those of the imagistic mode: high-frequency, low-arousal rituals and their symbolic properties being remembered in procedural and semantic (rather than episodic) memory, giving rise to more diffuse forms of solidarity and spreading to larger and more inclusive (‘imagined’) communities under the leadership of skilled orators in conformity with more or less elaborately sanctioned doctrinal orthodoxies.

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Largely (if not exclusively) as a result of the emergence and spread of these two modes of religiosity, religious traditions have come to develop considerable variability across time and space. While imagistic practices constitute a particularly important (and ancient) motor driving religious innovation, doctrinal practices provide an exemplary method of transmission and storage. In many religious traditions we find both modes operating in tandem in this way. Nevertheless, the development of professionalised and centralised ecclesiastical hierarchies in the doctrinal mode has also introduced incentives for further innovative elaboration of cognitively unnatural religious systems, both in ways that are authorised by the status quo and through processes of sectarian splintering and reform. Under such circumstances, imagistic practices are clearly not the only means to exegetical speculation and revelatory innovation. Concluding remarks The search for universal features of religious thinking and behaviour, and their causes, has received much attention within the new and growing ‘cognitive science of religion’ field. Those interested in human nature may well regard this as a discrete challenge, to be pursued somewhat independently from the study of religious variation. However, for anthropologists, historians and others eager to account for the particularities of religious traditions – those features that make one religion distinct from another – explaining cross-cultural recurrence could only ever be a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. For them (and for me) understanding the panhuman cognitive constraints and biases that shape religious life everywhere is only a first step in explaining why systems of belief, practice and social morphology diversify in the ways that they do. The challenge, as I see it, is to account for patterns of innovation (how new ideas, behaviours and organisational forms are created) and storage (how these innovations are transmitted across space and time). The theory of modes of religiosity is one of only very few attempts to address these issues in a precise and testable fashion.21 However, even if broadly correct, the ‘modes’ theory only explains certain very specific aspects of religious variation (namely, distinctive patterns of innovation, transmission, transformation, expansion and fragmentation). It does not explain, for instance, why specific ideas or sets of ideas emerge 21

So far efforts to test this theory have focused mainly on evidence from ethnography (Whitehouse and Laidlaw, Ritual and Memory: toward a comparative anthropology of religion), historiography and archaeology (Whitehouse and Martin, Theorizing Religions Past: archaeology, history, and cognition) and experimental psychology (Whitehouse and McCauley, Mind and Religion: psychological and cognitive foundations of religiosity).

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and spread in one location rather than another, why one kind of religious vision is preferred over another, why individuals vary in their susceptibility to different kinds of ideas, or why women and men differ at a population level in their religious sensibilities and susceptibilities. To truly explain religious variation we must tackle the problem at many different (often interrelated and overlapping) levels.22

22

A major new project entitled ‘Explaining Religion’ builds on the foundations summarised in this chapter: http://www.cam.ox.ac.uk/research/explaining-religion/.

REDUCTION AND EXPLANATORY PLURALISM IN THE COGNITIVE SCIENCE OF RELIGION Ilkka Pyysiäinen1 The introduction of the so-called cognitive science of religion in the 1990s brought an important cultural change to the study of religion. In what follows, I wish to contribute to this change by outlining a philosophical justification for a kind of reductive explanation of religion as a cultural phenomenon. My view is based on the ideas of explanatory pluralism and the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation. ‘Reductionism’ is considered a bad word in religious studies; for decades it has deterred unwanted approaches from the field.2 While antireductionists claim that reductionist approaches lead to a misrepresentation of religion as a phenomenon, reductionists argue that anti-reductionists are only trying to defend religion, not to study it scientifically.3 Much confusion has been generated by not distinguishing between two different views: 1) reduction in the sense that religion is explained without a commitment to religious truth claims (‘naturalist reductionism’) and 2) reduction in the sense of intra and inter-level theory reduction (‘theory reductionism’). In this paper, I will attempt to show that naturalist reductionism has a legitimate place in the academic study of religion, and that theory reductionism is a complex problem best solved by a non-eliminative explanatory pluralism combined with a contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation.4 This implies a co-evolution of theories at such differing levels as neural processes, cognitive mechanisms and culture. The recent cognitive theories of religion, for example, could be seen as extending the more traditional social scientific explanations rather than eliminating and replacing them.

1

I would like to thank Tamás Bíró, István Czachesz, Kari Enqvist, Tom Lawson, Bob McCauley and Petri Ylikoski for very helpful comments on earlier drafts. 2 See Idinopulos and Yonan, Religion and Reductionism. 3 See Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies; Idem, ‘Beyond Thick Descriptions and Interpretive Sciences: Explaining Religious Meaning’. 4 McCauley, ‘Intertheoretic Relations and the Future of Psychology’; Idem, ‘Explanatory Pluralism and the Co-Evolution of Theories in Science’; McCauley and Bechtel, ‘Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory’. See also Garfinkel, Forms of Explanation, pp. 21-74; Ylikoski, Understanding Interests and Causal Explanation, pp. 18-46.

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Religion and naturalist reductionism In the study of religion, both reductionists and anti-reductionists have often been satisfied with rather abstract claims about how religion should be studied in principle. This is understandable because, for one thing, the word ‘religion’ names a very heterogeneous category which can be approached from many different angles.5 Some scholars of religion, however, argue that religion is a phenomenon sui generis and therefore irreducible to anything outside of itself.6 As the philosopher Sami Pihlström puts it: ‘External, naturalised treatments of religious belief (…) are essentially irrelevant from the point of view of the individual religious believer’.7 Mircea Eliade, for his part, has argued that the historian of religion can only make valid statements about religious phenomena as religious phenomena, not as psychological, social, or other types of phenomena.8 The scholar does not have the right to reduce the religious creations of the human mind ‘to something other than what they are, namely spiritual creations’.9 Religion ‘must be looked at first of all in itself, in that which belongs to it alone and can be explained in no other terms’.10 Thus, scientific explanations of religious phenomena are often judged to be impossible or at least without any real value.11 Kelly Bulkeley, for example, writes in a book review that ‘Boyer finds cause to dismiss religious understandings and replace them with cognitive scientific ones’, as if religious beliefs and scientific theories were commensurate alternatives from which we must choose.12 It is as if the scientific explanations of religious thought and behaviour should nevertheless remain within the confines of religion. Religion should only be studied from inside and with a healthy dose of sympathy. A good historical example of this kind of attitude is the old Lutheran advice to let the Scripture explain itself (Scriptura sui ipsius interpres).13 This, however, leads to the very problematic view that scientific explanations should be formulated only in religious terms. The first problem with this is that the boundaries of the category of ‘religious language’ are by no 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Saler, Conceptualizing Religion; Day, ‘The Undiscovered Essence’. See Pyysiäinen, ‘Religion – Sui Generis’. Pihlström, ‘Pragmatic Arguments’, pp. 199, 210, n. 20. Eliade, Shamanism, p. xv. Eliade, Quest, pp. 132-133. Eliade, Patterns, pp. xiii, 6. E.g. Gothóni, ‘Introduction’; ‘Understanding the Other’. Bulkeley, ’Review’. Luther, ‘Assertio’, WA 7: 97; Bengel, Gnomon, p. 33.

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means clear. It is possible to find examples of religious discourse that seem more or less mutually incompatible, although both discourses can be equally regarded as members of the category of ‘religious language’. Thus, variation between different kinds of religious beliefs may in some cases be greater than the variation between religious and non-religious beliefs. Secondly, the question of whether it is acceptable to use explanatory concepts that are not known to the people studied has been much discussed in the philosophy of science; there are good reasons to dismiss the idea of the priority of folk concepts.14 If explanations may only employ concepts known to the people studied, there is not much to be explained and no possibility of theoretical depth. Fields such as cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as much of sociology, would become completely impossible, as they often postulate structures and processes not known to the people studied. Whereas these disciplines look for underlying structures that help explain the behaviour of both individuals and societies, those who prioritise folk concepts are mostly interested in interpreting meanings. As all research is expected to contribute something that was not previously known, meanings are also often interpreted in terms that are not directly known to the people studied. They are then said to be ‘symbolic’ representations of things that are familiar to the people studied.15 An anthropologist might, for instance, argue that the curious custom of penis-bleeding, as practised by the Gnau people in New Guinea, symbolically stands for menstruation. However, the scholar must then explain why the Gnau themselves do not say this, or even explicitly deny it. This could be done by evoking psychoanalytical theories, for example.16 Meaning and structure can also be combined by arguing that human beings across cultures tend to experience the body in similar ways; this, then, provides ‘natural symbolism’ by which people mark important social functions. It can be argued that the Gnau practise penis-bleeding because they think it fulfils the same or a similar social function to menstruation.17 Here the anti-reductionist encounters the problem of how to interpret cultural meanings in cases where only extremely vague and idiosyncratic attributions of meaning are available. Rather than being satisfied with this bleak fact, the scholar attempts to uncover unconscious, hidden meanings. A reductionist, however, can admit that the Gnau as a group do not know why they practise penis-bleeding because it never occurred to them to think 14

See Bhaskar, Possibility of Naturalism; Martin, Verstehen; cf. Winch, Idea of a Social Science; ‘Understanding a Primitive’. 15 Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism. 16 See Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, pp. 34-47. 17 Lewis, Day of Red, pp. 106-120.

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about a reason for it. This fact actually typifies all ritual behaviour.18 A reductionist can, for example, ask interesting questions about the mental representation of ritual behaviours, leaving the question of meanings aside. ‘Humanistic significance’ can be sacrificed in order to gain causal relevance, as Boyer puts it.19 This view can be supported by elaborating a counterargument I have elsewhere presented against anti-reductionism.20 Anti-reductionists typically claim that as long as a scientific explanation does not embody in itself what is subjectively and religiously important in religion, it is somehow incomplete as a scientific explanation. As long as scientific descriptions and explanations are made from the third-person perspective, they do not grasp the richness of subjective experience and thus are incomplete. The inescapable incompleteness of scientific explanations of religion is thus taken to mean that religion always escapes scientific analysis. This line of reasoning is well illustrated by an example from the philosophy of mind. Frank Jackson presents the following ‘Knowledge argument’ against physicalism.21 He invites us to imagine Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist who has lived all her life in a black and white room, watching a black and white television, and reading books without colour illustrations. By these means she has acquired all the physical information there is about vision and colours. However, the moment she is released from the room, she is supposed to learn something new about the world and visual experience (if we ignore the fact that by that time her neural pathways would have atrophied for good). Jackson concludes that physical information offers only incomplete access to subjective experience and that physicalism is thus false. The point here is that Mary is supposed to gain new factual knowledge about seeing colours in general, not just that she acquires a new kind of subjective experience.22 While subjective experience thus seems to bring with it new knowledge, the argument fails to show why this knowledge should be something extraphysical.23 It might just as easily be only a matter of new neural activations. Anti-reductionist arguments in the study of religion are implicitly based on the same kind of reasoning. We could imagine a completely nonreligious scholar, Muriel, who has never had any religious feelings, al18

Boyer and Lienard, ‘Why Ritualized Behavior’. Boyer, Naturalness of Religious Ideas, p. 295. 20 Pyysiäinen, Magic and Miracles, pp. 71-74. 21 Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, p. 130. 22 Jackson, ‘Epiphenomenal Qualia’, p. 132; ‘What Mary Didn’t Know’. 23 Churchland, Engine of Reason, pp. 200-202, makes this point but also unduly conflates Jackson’s argument with Thomas Nagel’s similar argument on ‘what it is like to be a bat’. 19

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though she knows everything there is to be known about religion. If God then kindled a religious feeling in her heart, she would, for the first time, have a subjective experience of what it is like to be a believer.24 It thus seems safe to conclude that Muriel learns something new about religion and that her previous third-person knowledge had been incomplete. However, three problems remain. First, although the new subjective experience may add something to Muriel’s previous knowledge about religion, the scientific implications of this knowledge are not clear. It is not legitimate to use an ineffable personal experience to argue that one knows something. What this experience might do is to help create new kinds of hypotheses. Their formulation and testing, however, should follow the standard third-person procedures. Second, ‘religion’ and ‘religious experience’ are wide and nebulous categories. The analogy to colour vision may well be misleading. It is very difficult to say what one actually lacks in not having religious experience and feeling. Opinions differ widely among philosophers of religion as well as among religious ‘believers’. Would it really be easier to understand Theravada Buddhism if one were a Calvinist? Does being a Shaman help one understand Judaism? I doubt it. Or, if the claim is that some kind of general religiosity (whatever it might be) helps one understand whatever religion, then we are no longer talking about seeing things simply from the ‘believer’s’ point of view. Third, it is not clear whether the anti-reductionist claim is that (a) the scholar as a person should be religious or that (b) (also) the explanations provided should be religious. If the claim concerns the person of the scholar, we have two options. Either the scholar’s religiosity has nothing to do with her or his science, or it somehow extends its influence to the explanations put forward by them. In the first case, religiosity is obviously inconsequential from the scholarly point of view. The second option brings us to claim (b), that explanations of religion are incomplete as long as they do not somehow embody religiosity. This, however, means that the explanation should somehow replace the explanandum. This, then, leads to a difficult situation. Claiming that explanations of religious behaviour should also serve as a substitute or surrogate for religious practice25 implies that the scholar should provide religiously relevant scientific answers to religious questions. This may turn out to be a difficult combination. Although it is possible to have a religious motivation for one’s scholarly work and gain religious rewards from it, it is difficult to say how this should actually change the scientific 24 25

Cf. Pyysiäinen, Magic and Miracles, pp. 1-27. See Griffiths, Religious Reading; cf. Lawson, ‘New Look’.

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practice and in what sense such religious science would be superior as science. Not only is there a legitimate place for a non-religious study of religious behaviour but mixing religion and science also introduces problems that will be discussed on the pages to follow. Theory reductionism and its problems In the study of religion, anti-reductionists often understand reduction as elimination: naturalist explanations are substituted for religious explanations. Reduction thus works analogously to ontological reduction, which argues that certain types of objects (such as molecules) actually consist of objects of other types (such as atoms), or that one kind of property (such as heat) can be reduced to other kinds of properties (such as the mean kinetic energy of molecules). In such cases we are dealing with different ontological levels. Reality can be considered to present itself as hierarchically ordered in such levels as micro-physics, macro-physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and culture. It is usually thought that all macro-level causal powers are ‘inherited’ from lower levels in some non-causal manner.26 Some physicists argue that these layers depend on the fact that what is perceived always relies on the energies with which we probe phenomena. The higher the energy, the smaller spatial and temporal distances we are able to observe. Objects appear as solid and impenetrable only at low enough energies. Visible light, for example, cannot go through walls, but electromagnetic radiation with higher energy (‘light’), such as gamma-rays, can. This fact explains why the resolution of our image of reality varies such that the various descriptions of reality are always more or less coarse grained.27 This view seems to work at levels from quarks up to middle-sized objects but not in the case of mental processes and culture. We do not see mind or culture. Therefore, the levels might better be differentiated on the basis of their relative complexity. The higher levels are more organised and involve more complex causal mechanisms, which requires that we include more variables in our explanations. The level of analysis is directly proportional to the complexity of the systems with which it deals. The level is also inversely proportional to the size of the domain of events in question: psychology, for example, is on a higher level than biology, and it deals with only some of the phenomena within the realm of biology. In addition, the

26

McCauley, ‘Intertheoretic Relations’; Ylikoski, Understanding Interests, pp. 78-

82. 27

Gell-Mann, Quark; Enqvist, ‘Time and Causality’, pp. 133-135.

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age of the relevant phenomena decreases from the bottom up: the lower the level, the longer its phenomena have been around in the world.28 In addition to ontological levels, scientific theories can also, in principle, be reduced. The difference between ontological and theoretical reduction becomes especially clear when one recognises that there are competing theories operating at the same ontological level. We should therefore distinguish between intra and inter-level theory reductions. Nagel’s classic model includes both the reduction of theories and of whole sciences. In both, it is a question of deriving a reduced theory’s laws from the laws of a reducing theory with the help of some bridging principles. The idea, thus, is not one of elimination of an upper-level theory but of its deduction from a lowerlevel theory of which it is a special case. Reduction is a kind of explanation, the object of which is not a phenomenon but another explanation or a theory. Later, it is realised that as the reducing theory also corrects the reduced theory the laws of the latter cannot deductively follow from the former. It has been argued, for example, that neuroscientific theories simply displace folk psychology.29 This is a case of historical theory succession rather than of reduction.30 There are powerful arguments against various forms of reduction. In his now classic paper, Hilary Putnam first invites us to imagine a square peg and a board with two holes in it, a square one and a round one. The square peg does not fit into the round hole, and we have to explain why this is so. A reductionist now might claim that ultimately the correct explanation would have to be formulated in terms of quantum physics. Putnam, however, argues that the microstructure of the board and the peg are irrelevant to the explanation needed. A complete explanation can be formulated in terms of classical physics. With infinite computing capacity we might be able to deduce this explanation from a quantum-level description of the objects in question, but this description is irrelevant from the point of view of the original question. Deducing a phenomenon from a lower-level description is not the same as explaining it. ‘[C]ertain systems can have behaviours to which their microstructure is largely irrelevant’.31 28

McCauley, ‘Intertheoretic Relations’, pp. 189-190; ‘Explanatory Pluralism’; ‘Reduction’. 29 E.g. Churchland, Neurophilosophy; Churchland, Neurocomputational Perspective. 30 McCauley, ‘Reduction’. 31 Putnam, ‘Reductionism’, p. 208. Suppose we deduce a given fact F from G and H. Here G is a genuine explanation and H something irrelevant. Do G and H now constitute an explanation of F? No, only G is an explanation. However, now imagine a statement K that is mathematically equivalent to G and H, and that G is virtually impossible to recover from K. In such a case, K is not an explanation of F, although F is deducible from K (ibid.)

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Things become more complicated when we are dealing with social phenomena. Marx’s analysis of capitalism, for example, is based on certain facts about human beings: we need to eat in order to survive and to produce in order to be able to eat, and so on. The specifics of the microstructure of human beings as organisms are irrelevant here. Nothing can be deduced from this, let alone explained by it. The higher levels, from biology upwards, are relatively autonomous with regard to the lower levels: the laws governing the evolutionary process are not deducible from physics alone. First, higher levels manifest new kinds of structures; second, lower-level entities and processes can always give rise to more than one kind of higherlevel phenomena.32 This point of macro-level explanations being irreducible to lower-level explanations is well illustrated by Alan Garfinkel’s imaginary example of explaining an increase or decrease in populations of rabbits and foxes.33 Let the frequency with which foxes encounter rabbits (and eat them) be the main influence on the population levels. Both the fox level and the rabbit level have an effect on the frequency of encounters. When there are many foxes around, there is great pressure on rabbits. Imagine now that we want to explain the death of a rabbit. We might say: The cause of the death of the rabbit was that the fox population was high.

As this is an explanation of a micro-state by a macro-state, it should – from a reductionist’s point of view – be reducible to a micro-explanation. We could say: Rabbit r was eaten because it passed through the capture space of fox f.

However, here the explanandum is no longer ‘the death of the rabbit’ but rather something like: ‘the death of the rabbit r at the hands of fox f, at place p, at time t, (and so on and so forth)’. This seems to include unnecessary details, considering that the original question was ‘why was the rabbit eaten [rather than not eaten]?’. A rabbit, for example, might want to know why rabbits are eaten, not why they are eaten by specific foxes. A microexplanation, however, says: ‘the rabbit r was eaten [by fox f at time t …] [rather than by some other fox …]’. Yet, it does not follow that ‘if the rabbit had not been at place p, at time t, (and so on and so forth), it would not have been eaten’.34 Thus, the problem with micro-explanations is that they bring 32 33 34

Putnam, ‘Reductionism’, pp. 208-211. Garfinkel, Explanation, pp. 49-74. Garfinkel, Explanation, p. 163.

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certain instability to the conditions under which they work: they change the explanandum. Philosophers have argued that micro-explanations answer howquestions by providing a mechanism for the operation of macroexplanations answering why-questions. As a particular mechanism is not necessary for the effect, it is not a good explanation. As Garfinkel puts it: it is ‘too true to be good’. Something materially being something else does not mean that the relevant explanation could be reduced: square pegs consist of sub-atomic particles but their behaviour cannot be explained in terms of quantum physics.35 Therefore, upper-level explanations are often needed. This may seem to imply that psychological reductionism is incorrect and that religious behaviour should be explained at the levels of culture and society (and not only of psychology), just as it has often been argued.36 Actually, things are more complicated. Towards an explanatory pluralism Neither eliminative reductionism nor its antithesis can provide a satisfactory model for explaining religion. If we accept eliminative micro-explanations as the ideal, it seems to follow that ultimately everything should be explained by quantum physics. Putnam and Garfinkel, however, have provided good arguments to the effect that, although some macro-level phenomena might in principle be deduced from micro-level causal processes, they are not thereby explained. Some macro-level phenomena are not even deducible in this sense.37 This raises the question of the proper level of explanation. Unless we want to regard all levels as autonomous or to consider some level to be a priori the proper level for explaining religion, we need to find some way of always determining the proper level of explanation. I suggest that this can be achieved if we combine explanatory pluralism and the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation. Such a view of explanation enables us to specify optimal questioninformation relationships: explanations are always answers to contrastive questions. Only some of the available information is relevant for any given explanation. Adding details to the explanation of why the rabbit was eaten, for example, does not make the explanation better or more accurate, rather it changes the explanandum. In order to be able to specify the explanandum properly, we need first to contrast the question asked with something else: 35 36 37

Garfinkel, Explanation, pp. 58-59. Cf. Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works, pp. 25-74. See also Ylikoski, Understanding Interests, pp. 77-96.

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why did f occur instead of c? Second, it is necessary to specify a mechanism that ensures that f occurs instead of c. ‘Mechanism’ here does not refer to mechanical apparatuses; the concept is used in a general sense and can mean many different kinds of things which need not always be specified in detail. DNA replication, protein synthesis and the transmission of neurochemicals are all mechanisms.38 A mechanism is a system that consists of parts, each of which is responsible for its own operation, so that the general goal of that mechanism is attained.39 Consider the case of the prison chaplain asking a bank robber: ‘Why do you rob banks?’. When the robber replies: ‘That’s where the money is’, he makes the erroneous contrast ‘Why do you rob banks [instead of, say, churches]?’. The correct answer thus depends on how we conceive of the question; a contrast is an economical way of fixing the causal field, as it delivers us from the burden of listing all the components of the field.40 The counterfactual theory of causal explanation says that: a causally explains f if and only if (1) a was part of the causal history of f, and (2) f would not have taken place if a had not taken place.41

Note that this is a theory of causal explanation, not of causation. It helps solve problems of explanatory selection and overgeneral description.42 Such problems are manifest in explanations that refer to entities without clear physical boundaries such as cultures, traditions and world-views.43 In these, it is first observed that group A and group B differ from each other in some respects. As a result, some x in A and some y in B are postulated to account for the difference, where x and y can be cultures, world-views, belief systems, or some other form of entity-like abstractions. Moreover, x also explains why there is similarity among the members of group A, while y explains why there is similarity among the members of group B. What is suspicious about this is that x and y are first inferred from observed differences between A and B and then used to explain these differences. Thus, the explanandum is always manipulated to fit the explanans.44

38 39 40

Ylikoski, Understanding Interests, pp. 8, 19-27, 41-43. Bechtel and Richardson, Discovering Complexity. Garfinkel, Explanation, pp. 21-22; Ylikoski, Understanding Interests, pp. 22, 27,

36. 41 42 43 44

Ylikoski, Understanding Interests, p. 35. Cf. Garfinkel, Explanation, p. 163. Ylikoski, Understanding Interests, pp. 36-37. Boyer, Tradition as Truth; Naturalness of Religious Ideas. Ylikoski, ‘Explaining Practices’, pp. 322-323; Turner, Social Theory; ‘Tradition’.

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This leads to problems because x and y can explain differences between groups only insofar as they can also explain similarities within the group.45 Yet the similarities depend on a contrast.46 Finnish culture, for example, may be defined in contrast to Swedish, Russian and other cultures. What separates Finns from the Swedes is also what unifies Finns as Finns. Let us call it x. However, what separates Finns from Russians is something different from x. Let us call it y. Now both x and y must at once unify Finns as Finns (i.e. constitute Finnish culture); however, because they are different things, Finnish culture receives two different identities. As such, contrasting can be continued ad nauseam, Finnish culture is continuously redefined. Consequently, it does not have any of the unity that was originally presupposed. For Finnish culture to be homogeneous, the within-group similarities should be identifiable and explainable without any reference to outside comparison. However, this is not the case, and the idea of unifying entities such as cultures, world-views and so on becomes suspect.47 This now seems to lead to a micro-reduction of cultural explanations and to a disposal of the whole concept of culture.48 However, only the explanatory use of concepts such as ‘culture’ is problematic. Explaining stability and change with reference to culture is especially difficult. Nonetheless, these concepts may have some other uses.49 We are now back at the problem of finding the proper level at which answers to questions about religion should be formulated. If the level of the fox population explains the death of the rabbit, why can concepts such as ‘culture’ not explain human behaviour? The heart of the problem lies in the fact that the explanandum and explanans are too close, as it were; they are not independent from each other. If Finnish culture is whatever Finns do, then some behaviour x that is characteristic of Finns cannot be explained as being caused by Finnish culture (‘Finns do x because it is part of Finnish culture’). Concepts such as ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ and so on are causally impotent in the sense that they include nothing over and above them nor more than the various facts that are grouped under them. Yet they cannot be reduced into these contents or facts. While ‘culture’ and its equivalents name a comparative property, the properties that constitute it are not comparative. ‘Finnish culture’ is always understood in some such contrastive sense, as ‘Finnish [not Swedish] cul45

See Hannerz, Cultural Complexity; Lincoln, ‘Culture’; cf. Pyysiäinen, Magic and Miracles, pp. 220-221. 46 Ylikoski, ‘Explaining Practices’, p. 324. 47 Ylikoski, ‘Explaining Practices’, p. 324. 48 As suggested in Boyer, Naturalness of Religious Ideas; see Schaller and Crandall, Psychological Foundations. 49 Ylikoski, ‘Explaining Practices’.

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ture’. ‘Going to the sauna’ is not intrinsically contrastive in the same sense. This means that theories employing the concept of culture cannot be reduced to theories explaining culture.50 This is because ‘culture’ and its equivalents are supervenient on their bases, in the sense that if two groups of people have identical (in a strong sense) customs, beliefs and infrastructure, they have the same culture. Yet the reverse is not true. That two groups have the same culture does not necessarily mean that their customs, habits and infrastructure are the same (in the strong sense), because cultures are ‘multiply realized’. They are upperlevel phenomena that can be realised on different lower-level bases. Many kinds of small changes in customs, beliefs and infrastructure will not necessarily change the culture. Having lunch half an hour earlier on the average and building houses one inch higher will not deprive Finnish culture of its Finnishness. Thus, concepts such as ‘culture’ have explanatory use if they are properly detached from the explanandum: being part of Finnish culture is a meaningful property if not everything Finns do is defined as part of Finnish culture. The explanans must be independent from what is to be explained. ‘Culture’ can be thought of as a ‘placeholder’ for the effects of the cultural selection of concepts, beliefs and customs. The claim that ‘Finnish culture underwent a change in the 1960s’ is a generalisation over many lower-level changes that can be identified separately. It is, however, often useful to also have the higher-level explanation.51 Thus, Putnam is partly correct in his claim that the macro-physical facts about the square peg and the round hole cannot be explained by microphysics. Although they could be so explained, this would change the explanandum and provide information that is unnecessary from the point of view of the original question. However, we need the contrastive counterfactual theory of explanation to show this. Thus, reductionism seems to lead to an impoverishment of explanation, as the functionalists within cognitive science have argued.52 The cognitive scientific argument about so-called ‘multiple realizability’ says that higherlevel phenomena such as mental states can be realised on different kinds of lower-level basis. There is no type identity between the mental and the material.53 It is quite implausible that, for example, a well-specified brain state 50

See Ylikoski’s treatment of the concept of biological fitness along these lines, Understanding Interests, pp. 82-87. 51 See Ylikoski, Understanding Interests, p. 87. On selectionism, cultural selection and nature-culture co-evolution, see Boyer, Naturalness of Religious Ideas, and Richerson and Boyd, Not by Genes Alone. 52 See McCauley, ‘Reduction’. 53 Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality, pp. 291-303, 429-440.

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corresponds to the belief that Helsinki is the capital of Finland. This criticism soon led to the view that a neurophysiological state was a particular mental state in virtue of its function. Two different brain-state tokens are tokens of the same type of mental states when the two brain states have the same causal relation to the inputs and outputs of a cognitive system. More recently, this view has been challenged on the grounds that, while scholars such as Putnam have identified brain states using fine-grained criteria, they assume relatively non-intuitively that different individuals, even of different species, can be in the same psychological state (which is thus identified only very loosely). Psychological states have therefore been identified by coarse-grained criteria either at the folk-psychological level or at the level of information processing, whereas brain states have been identified by overly fine-grained criteria. Neuroscientists do not identify brain states by appealing to fine-grained physics and chemistry but by referring to activity in the same part of the brain. The structure of the brain is also studied comparatively, across species. For ‘multiple realizability’ to be true, brain taxonomy would have to be described independently of psychological functions, and without comparison across species. Otherwise it would become obvious that there is a correlation between the brain and cognitive structures.54 There is, for example, a common realisation of mechanisms for processing visual information across species.55 There may, however, be a difference between automatic intuitions and reflective thoughts with respect to their neural realisation. In the latter case, there may be more room for ‘multiple realizability’.56 Although Bechtel and Mundale do argue that ‘multiple realizability’ is unjustified, they also claim to be arguing primarily against the view that information about the brain is of little or no relevance to understanding psychological processes.57 This latter formulation is easier to accept. Especially higher cognition, such as is engaged in mathematics, may still leave room for a distinction between content and its processing and thus for ‘multiple realizability’.58 McCauley’s explanatory pluralism seems to be precisely to the point. Presupposing that type-identity theory has fostered progress both at the level of cognition and of neural processes,59 I would now like to suggest that 54

Bechtel and Mundale, ‘Multiple Realizability’, pp. 175-177; Brown ‘What is a Brain State?’. 55 Bechtel and Mundale, ‘Multiple Realizability’, p. 210. 56 Pyysiäinen, ‘Dual-Process Theories’; ‘Intuitive and Explicit’. 57 Bechtel and Mundale, ‘Multiple Realizability’, p. 176. 58 See Pyysiäinen, ‘Dual-Process Theories’; ‘Intuitive and Explicit’; Grush, ‘Cognitive Science’. 59 McCauley, ‘Intertheoretic Relations’; ‘Explanatory Pluralism’; McCauley and Bechtel, ‘Explanatory Pluralism’.

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the same holds for the psychology-culture interface: psychological knowledge is of much relevance in understanding cultural processes, although culture cannot be reduced to individual psychology. Culture can be understood as an ecological pattern in mental representations: it is ‘the precipitate of cognition and communication in a human population’.60 Therefore, variation in transmission at the individual level does not necessarily lead to cultural change at the macro-level.61 I now suggest that any given culture X consists of concepts, beliefs and customs, of which various individuals entertain roughly similar versions and which last for a certain amount of time. It is not necessary to define precisely how long a tradition must last, or how many agents must represent it in their minds.62 Let us say that a cultural trait must last approximately two years or longer (time ≥ ∆ 2) and that it must be shared by several persons (persons ≥ ∆ 2).63 Let us now mark ‘precisely how long’ by p and ‘how many’ by x. A set of ideas and practices now forms a cultural pattern when p ≥ ∆ 2 & x ≥ ∆ 2. It is thus not possible to say exactly what counts or what does not count as a cultural pattern. Once culture is understood in this way, explanatory pluralism means that a better understanding of psychological mechanisms will also help advance macro-level explanations of sociocultural processes. This is because what are identified as ‘cultural models’, ‘traditions’ and so on can only be transmitted within and between generations in populations by means of communication. Again, communication requires some psychological mechanisms.64 Conversely, studying macro-level phenomena can also advance our understanding of psychological processes. Thus, religion can be studied by focusing, for example, on the serotonin system in the brain and spiritual experiences, memory and counterintuitive representations, or social structure and religious belief.65 It does not make much sense to argue that in reality ‘religion’ can only be found at the level of neurobiology, cognitive processes or sociocultural systems. Religion is a hybrid formation and can be approached at any of these levels. Clearly, an advance at any level can in principle also benefit scholarship at other levels by, for example, helping formulate new research questions and testable hy60

Sperber, Explaining Culture, p. 97. See Henrich and Boyd, ‘Modeling Cognition’, for a formal model demonstrating this. 62 See Pyysiäinen, ‘Forestilling’; ‘Intuition and Reflection’. 63 Here ∆ means that we are only talking about approximately 2 (2 plus or minus something). 64 See Sperber and Wilson, Relevance; Boyer, Naturalness of Religious Ideas. 65 Borg, Andrée, Soderstrom and Farde, ‘Serotonin System’; Boyer and Ramble, ‘Cognitive Templates’; Bruce, God is Dead. 61

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potheses. There is no religion without neural activity, but neuroscientists often do not have expertise in the study of religion. Religion cannot be identified at the neural level alone but scholars of religion do not have expertise in studying the neural processes involved. Therefore, interdisciplinary cooperation is needed and religion should be explored from different angles, developing theories at different ontological levels.66 Although individual scholars may work on specific levels, the general understanding of religion develops simultaneously at different levels. By contrasting explanations with counterfactual scenarios, it is possible to specify the explanandum properly. In studying the serotonin system, for example, the research question is not: ‘Does serotonin 5-HT1A receptor density (rather than social factors) serve as the basis for spiritual experience?’. It is rather: ‘Does individual variation in serotonin 5-HT1A receptor density correlate with self-transcendence (rather than with some other personality traits)?’. Likewise, it might be asked: ‘Does urbanization increase (rather than decrease) secularization?’. It is not meaningful to ask: ‘Does urbanization (rather than cognitive constraints) make the concept of an omniscient God difficult?’. Religion requires multiple levels to exist; thus, multiple levels should be studied in order to explain religious thought and behaviour. The possibility of using lower-level explanations also helps connect the study of religion to other sciences across the board. Restricting explanation to the cultural level alone insulates religion from important processes and mechanisms that support it and make it possible. Religion can be regarded as somehow sui generis only if it is hypostasised into a unitary entity and no attention is paid to its lower-level bases. This, however, effectively blocks new development in the scientific study of religion.

66

See Boyer, ‘Ten Problems’.

PART II FROM MIND TO RELIGION

COGNITIVE AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE John Nerbonne 1. Introduction1 Cognitive science normally defines itself as the ‘science of the mind’, meaning in particular the science of mental processes abstracted from the concrete realisation of such processes in brains or computer circuitry. A mental process manipulates information in a broad sense, including perceiving, recalling, organising, calculating, presenting and communicating information. There is no anti-materialism (or anti-physicalism) necessary in this position, only an agreement that such processes can be studied in abstraction from their physical realisation. The ‘cognitive revolution’ involved freeing analyses from the burden of identifying the physical basis in which information processing took place, and concentrating rather on abstract information-processing characteristics. From the earliest days of cognitive science, the key contributing disciplines have been psychology, linguistics, computer science (in particular, artificial intelligence), philosophy and neuroscience. Thus, linguistics has been involved from the very beginning. As the involvement of neuroscience suggests, due attention was paid to the physical basis of the mind by at least parts of the cognitive science community, but there has been a consensus that progress is possible even without specifying the details of the physical substrate in which cognition is realised. It may be difficult to determine with certainty how profound the effects of this cognitive perspective have been on the study in language – at least in the sense that we cannot know what future generations of scholars will make of this development. However, both the conduct and conclusions of innumerable individual studies and the careers and aspirations of many of the researchers involved have been influenced a great deal. Personally, I find that it has been stimulating, useful and insightful to adopt the cognitive perspective.

1 I am indebted to the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for support (‘Determinants of Dialect Variation’, 360-70-120, P.I., J. Nerbonne), and I would like to thank the referees and especially the editors for many helpful remarks.

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1.1 Goals This paper aims to give a sense of this development and its consequences, as well as the increasing interest in aspects of language that point to the importance of cultural factors, especially the importance of communities of language users and their shared experience. Since this is an audience interested in developing a cognitive perspective on religion, a very different discipline, I will try to sketch especially why the cognitive revolution largely succeeded in linguistics, and suggest some avenues that might be pursued in seeking similar success elsewhere. I will also sketch recent developments that seem to call for a broader perspective, since I suspect that these might be important in studying religion as well. 1.2 Background Stillings, Feinstein, Garfield, Rissland, Rosenbaum, Weisler and BakerWard provide an excellent introductory text on cognitive science, touching on all component fields,2 while Chierchia offers a more detailed exposition of the importance of language studies to cognitive science,3 and Gleitman and Liberman an excellent collection of introductory, but challenging articles written by leading scientists in various subareas of linguistics, all of whom aim at presenting the ‘cognitive’ turn in their subdisciplines.4 2. Linguistics as a Cognitive Science Linguistics has also been a very willing partner in the cognitive venture, drawing on a history of fascination with human language complexity and the implications this has for the mental make-up of human beings. Leonard Bloomfield did not participate in the cognitive revolution, but nonetheless devoted the second chapter of his very influential introduction to linguistics, Language to the psychology of language use.5 The basic justification for including linguistics as a core cognitive science is very simple: languages are extremely complex systems that people learn and use nearly effortlessly. (It is clear that second languages are not always learned and used easily, but let’s not focus on that.) The ease with which people learn and use their first languages makes the study of the psy2 3 4 5

Stillings et al., Cognitive Science: An Introduction. Chierchia, ‘Linguistics and Language’. Gleitman and Liberman, An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Language. Bloomfield, Language.

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chology of language use immediately interesting, and inversely, challenges linguists to seek (perspectives on) linguistic regularities which might enable a language processor to deal with complexity efficiently. However, there are other, more interesting reasons why linguistics has been so prominent in cognitive science. Once we have agreed that we want and can have a science of the mental in abstraction from its concrete physical realisation, we may attempt analyses of information processes without commitment to how that information is stored or manipulated, and this was received as a liberating and sensible move throughout linguistics. 2.1 A Non-Linguistic Example For an example from another domain, we might attempt to model how people recall faces by recording features of faces such as their proportions, colour, hairline, deviations from a standard, relative prominence of subparts, etc. We might then propose an index for faces that would predict which faces were confusable, which easy or difficult to remember, etc., and we could test these predictions, and compare alternative formulations as to which accords better with the facts. All this may be done in abstraction from the details of the physiology of human sight and the neural basis of visual memory. The point is that we can analyse a cognitive process scientifically and insightfully without building it up, brick by brick, on the foundation of physical evidence. Note that in taking this step I have implicitly agreed to work, not on the physical events of sight and recognition in processing the faces physically encountered, but rather on an abstract representation, in this case the set of features I use to describe faces. This is the step of abstraction inherent in cognitive science. From this it is a short step to become aware that different abstract representations may be associated with different processing characteristics. For example, I might structure my facial representations as a simple list and then compute an overall similarity to other faces I have encountered. Alternatively, however, I might wish to organise my information into something like a decision tree, where the processing of each new bit of information successively decreases the number of plausible candidates. To take yet another example, the feature representation might be structured like the index of a book, providing a direct pointer to the relevant information in case of matches. The similarity-based match and the index structure suggest that processing time should be the same for all lists of features, the decision tree that it is variable. The similarity-based match sounds like it might be better equipped to model the successful processing of incorrect input, something humans are quite capable of.

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In all of these examples we still need to make our definitions precise and to spell out the processing more exactly, moving ultimately to fullfledged algorithmic specifications, but we are gradually on our way to hypotheses about the mind and how it works – without, however, delving into the neural ‘wetware’ on which it presumably all runs. It is easy to see why linguists greeted this perspective as an enormous liberation. Many of the issues dealt with in linguistics involve a level of abstraction that is difficult to tie to a physical substrate, and at the very least, practicing linguists – people documenting unwritten languages, compiling dictionaries, advising on language instruction – had never concerned themselves directly with psychology or physiology, nor did they feel a need to. Perhaps they reasoned that it required more training than they had in the neighbouring disciplines, or perhaps they simply found it distracted them too much from language analysis, but in any case they identified with the cognitive perspective wholeheartedly. The example above likewise suggests that a computational model of the mind was important in cognitive science, and this suggestion is absolutely on the mark. Psychologists, linguists and others interacted enthusiastically and extensively with computer scientists. Computational implementations of alternative representations and algorithms operationalised competing hypotheses in cognitive science and reassured the sceptical that it was proceeding beyond ‘armchair psychology’. 2.2 An Example from Morphology To give a sense of how this works in linguistics, we will consider morphology, the study of word structure, something everyone is familiar with. In learning English, German, Latin or any of a large number of other languages, we need to learn that words appear in different forms, for example, sometimes walk, walks, or walking but at other times walked. These are often described in large tables in grammars, referred to in the linguistic literature as paradigms: infinitive walk talk
do
be

3rd-p, sg walks talks
does
is

progressive walking talking
doing
being

past walked talked
did
was, were

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However, there is an alternative view, propounded vigorously by the Harvard Slavicist Roman Jakobson in 1948, in which one views the separate forms as the products of a set of rules.6 Note that Jakobson predated the cognitive turn. do be else V

+ +

[3rd-sg] [3rd-sg]

→ →

does is

+

[3rd-sg]

→

Vs

Finally, there were proponents of a rule-based view who would prefer not to attribute so much status to the inflectional ending, pointing out the morphological processes which do not rely on the addition of material, but rather changes in the base form. These alternative models of description were well known before the advent of cognitive science.7 f3rd-sg (do) f3rd-sg (be) else f3rd-sg (V)

= =

does is

=

Vs

The advent of the cognitive science perspective changed this debate radically, from one in which descriptive adequacy and elegance were primary criteria to another where fidelity to psychological facts played a primary role. In addition to the question of whether a given model might be capable of describing the facts, psycholinguists adduce arguments from the speed of word recognition, the correctness of recognition, as well as the path eyes take across the page and reactions to made-up stimuli (E.g. ‘She wugs all the time’).8 Elaborate computational models reify these theoretical notions and lend empirical credibility.9 It has become quite common to find linguistic papers in which analyses are evaluated not only on the basis of their conformity with linguistic criteria such as predictions about well-formedness, but also on the basis of their ‘psychological reality’.

6

Jakobson, ‘Russian Conjugation’. Hockett, ‘Two Models of Grammatical Description’. 8 Baayen, ‘The Morphological Complexity in Simplex Nouns’; Schreuder and Baayen, ‘How Complex Simplex Words Can Be’. 9 Moscoso del Prado Martín, Paradigmatic Structures in Morphological Processing: Computational and Cross-Linguistic Experimental Studies. 7

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Figure 1. Two ways to realise the fortis-lenis distinction in ‘stop’ consonants such as /p/ vs. /b/ (see text). On the one hand the lenis element (b) may release the oral obstruction simultaneously as the vocal cords begin vibrating, while the fortis element (p) first releases the oral obstruction and only later initiates vocal cord activity (above). This is the aspirating pattern found in standard English and German and in the Dutch Low Saxon dialects. On the other hand, the lenis element (b) may involve the vocal cords becoming active before the release of the oral obstructions, while the fortis element release the obstruction and initiates vocal cord activity simultaneously (below). This non-aspirating pattern is found in French, Russian and standard Dutch.

This sort of example highlights another attractive aspect of cognitive science. At its best the science which is produced genuinely engages experts in very different disciplines; fairly heady material but not always out of the ordinary in contemporary cognitive science. 2.3 A Sound Example Let us examine a second example of a linguistic generalisation to give some flavour to what we mean, and how different disciplines may vie for explanatory honours. Many languages distinguish consonants such as /p/ vs /b/, /t/ vs /d/ or /k/ vs /g/; the first of the pairs is known as voiceless or, alternatively, as fortis, and the second as voiced or lenis. It turns out that in languages that make this distinction there are exactly two ways of articulating the difference, illustrated in Fig. 1. Naturally, I am omitting some details (concerning, for example, the position of the consonant with respect to stress or other consonants).

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The restriction to no more than two sorts of realisation for the fortislenis distinction appears to be quite general, even though languages might be considerably less restrictive.10 For example, there appears to be no language in which the distinction is realised one way concerning the /p/ vs. /b/ distinction and another in the /t/ vs. /d/ distinction, even though this might be functional and involve only a minimum of additional memory (to store the distinction). As a further example, note that it would likewise be straightforward for different words to code the distinction differently, even if this might require a good deal more memory to note this for each word in a large vocabulary. Linguists have noted not only that there appear to be only these two ways of realising the fortis-lenis distinction and that they are applied constantly throughout the system of consonants and throughout the vocabulary, but also that other aspects of pronunciation depend on this, in particular the tendency of a consonant to allow its pronunciation to be ‘infected’ by the pronunciation of an immediately following consonant, so-called ‘regressive voicing assimilation’.11 The point of introducing this example here is to note, once again, that we may formulate general laws at a level of generalisation that appears appropriate. At this point, other areas may of course vie for the honours of providing the best explanation, perhaps adducing evidence about the difficulty of maintaining vocal cord vibration with a blocked oral passage. In general, cognitive scientists enjoy this debate and find it adds to the field. 2.4 Language Acquisition The study of how children learn their first language has even changed its name in the wake of the cognitive revolution in linguistics. It is now referred to as ‘language acquisition’ in order to emphasise how different it is from other learning, and how much first language learning resembles shifts in behaviour that occur almost automatically as a person matures. The study of language acquisition, just as other areas of linguistics, has benefited from the cognitive turn and, in particular, from the freedom to view the learning of a first language as an information-processing problem. Miller has pointed out that children learn about 60,000 word stems by the time they graduate from high school.12 This estimate does not count the different forms of inflected words (the example of walk, walks, walking, etc., 10

Jansen, Laryngeal Contrast and Phonetic Voicing: A Laboratory Phonology Approach to English, Hungarian, and Dutch. 11 Ibidem. 12 Miller, The Science of Words, p. 238.

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discussed above) as different. This translates into 3,300 words/year, or roughly nine word stems every day. Moreover, the child is by no means done with learning once the word stems are known – there is still a need to learn the pronunciation, the various forms of words and the means of combining words into sentences. Just as in other areas, the characterisation of the problem in information-processing terms provides insight, in this case, into the magnitude of the problem. Probably the single most famous thesis in contemporary linguistics is Chomsky’s hypothesis that some linguistic structures must be innate, given the difficulty of language learning. According to this hypothesis some aspects of language need not be learned at all, but rather are part of the innate cognitive constitution of human beings.13 Chomsky reasoned that the quality and quantity of linguistic experience could never be sufficient to characterise a system as complex as a natural language. He further hypothesised that if there is innate linguistic structure then this must be reflected in universal properties of natural languages – a daring and challenging consequence of the innateness hypothesis. This thesis has spawned an enormous number of reactions, but it would take us too far afield to examine them.14 I would like to guard against the misconception that the cognitive turn in linguistics stands or falls with the innateness hypothesis, because this simply is not true. One may very well hold that language learning may be accounted for in terms of general learning mechanisms and that no innate linguistic structure is needed in a complete account, without yielding the conception of linguistics as a cognitive science, characterised in terms of information processes. At the same time, it seems likely that we might have waited a long time for the innateness hypothesis and for the large body of excellent linguistic work it has inspired, if we had not been willing to take the cognitive step. 3. Convincing Details Naturally, a brief overview can do no more than provide us with a taste of such a large-scale development in science. For a group of scientists and scholars interested in pursuing a cognitive perspective in another field, however, it might be useful to note some of the reasons, both scientific and extra-scientific that may have played a role in the rapid rise of the cognitive perspective.

13

Chomsky, Reflections on Language, pp. 9-11. See Pinker, The Language Instinct, for a clear, informative and entertaining presentation of the ideas behind the notion of language as an instinct.

14

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I have tried to sketch the scientific reasons for the cognitive turn, in particular that it allowed scientific inquiry into areas that had been viewed as ‘inaccessible’ earlier. The message here is simple: if you can provide novel and interesting explanations, the scholarly community is likely to take notice – even if you idealise ‘objects’ of information. Moreover, cognitive science is exciting because it involves several disciplines – the fresh perspectives from other areas can lead to genuinely new ideas and in any case a feeling that one’s intellectual remit is large. However, the cognitive revolution may have helped itself in other ways as well. A common tactic in popularising cognitive science has been to focus on everyday phenomena and to show how they, too, are subject to unexpectedly abstract laws. A fairly standard element in introductory linguistics classes has been the demonstration that even ‘outlaw’ language is governed by rules. English has only one ‘infixing’ process, that is, a morphological attachment that is inserted into the middle of a word rather than attached to the beginning (such as un-) or end (such as -ly). We demonstrate the process with some unobscene examples, noting well-formed examples on the left and similar, but ill-formed material on the right (with the linguist’s asterisk * added to note those ill-formed): abso-flipping-lutely un-flipping-godly fan-flipping-tastic

* ab-flipping-solutely * ungod-flipping-ly * fantas-flipping-tic

For anyone who thinks of linguistic rules as things you learn in school, such as the avoidance of split infinitives or the use of commas in non-restrictive relative clauses, it can be an eye-opener to note that a deliberately iconoclastic bit of language is nonetheless governed by strict rules. The illformed examples (with the ‘*’) are examples where the infix is not immediately before a stressed syllable, and speakers are quite unanimous in finding them infelicitous.15 The point is obvious from a cognitive science perspective: speakers have internalised the rule on the basis of their experience and they recognise how it is applied automatically. The rule has become psychologically real. Another striking demonstration of the psychological reality of linguistic rules comes from the analysis of speech errors. These involve some violation of linguistic rules, or they would not count as errors, but strikingly, speech errors do not abandon rules, rather they occur in speech which respects linguistic structure for the most part. Fromkin notes that pronuncia15

The details of the rules are a bit more complicated (McCarthy, ‘Prosodic Structure and Expletive Infixation’).

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tion errors such ‘squeaky floor’ expressed as ‘fleaky squoor’ or ‘heap of junk’ pronounced as ‘hunk of jeep’ produce mostly native-like sequences.16 Most frequently, basic sounds (phonemes) or sequences of basic sounds are displaced, removed or inserted. However, the result of an error in English is emphatically not Russian, Chinese or Quechua – it remains English. Finally, Reuland generalises this point, noting that linguistics has made a great deal of progress because it insists on looking at not only the empirically attested events of natural speech, but also at ill-formed expressions that are not experienced in natural speech much at all.17 He uses the example of someone trying to form a question from just any word in a sentence, with no regard for its position: Whom did you accuse of cowardice after Mary hit Bill? * Whom did you accuse Tom of cowardice after Mary hit? Reuland’s sorts of very simple examples have been extremely convincing in demonstrating the importance of linguistic structure to non-professionals and even in attracting students to the field. There is a shock of surprise in noting that such familiar material is worth careful observation and analysis. Reuland calls them ‘cognitively dysfunctional products’, suggesting that it might be worthwhile keeping an eye out for analogous phenomena elsewhere, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. 4. Some Demurring Voices It would be mistaken to suggest that the cognitive revolution in linguistics has been without cost, or even that everyone involved has found it successful. Putnam has long argued that questions of meaning are ultimately social, so that questions of the ‘psychological reality’ of accounts of some aspects of meaning are ill put.18 4.1 The Direction of Influence A more vexing problem has been the relationship between linguistics and psycholinguistics. Chomsky has famously suggested that one define linguistics as ‘a branch of cognitive psychology’,19 but at the same time, linguists 16

Fromkin, ‘Introduction’. Reuland, ‘Linguistics and the Humanities: The Study of Language and the Investigation of the Mind’. 18 Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences. 19 Chomsky, Language and Mind. 17

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are loathe to regard psychological evidence as on a par with evidence of what structures are found in language and in which combinations: Evidence from language acquisition (...) along with evidence derived from psycholinguistic experimentation, the study of language use (e.g. processing), language deficit, and other sources should be relevant, in principle, to determining the properties of UG [universal grammar] and of particular grammars. But, such evidence is, for the moment, insufficient to provide much insight concerning these problems.20

Some researchers have reacted to this as an important retreat from cognitivism. Harald Clahsen, a noted expert on language acquisition, formulates the question quite sharply, ‘Has any theoretical linguist ever changed his/her theory in the face of psycholinguistic evidence?’21 The feeling among many researchers in language acquisition, processing and aphasiology is that linguistic theory would like to set the agenda for research with little attention to the psychological issues. The dispute is actually quite old. Victor Yngve noted long ago that some constructions are quite difficult for humans to process.22 He studied structures such as the following: The mouse escaped The mouse the cat chased escaped The mouse the cat the dog bit chased escaped The mouse [the cat [the dog bit] chased] escaped As the bracketing in the last examples is intended to suggest, the more complicated examples are constructed in analogy with the first. What makes the issue quite interesting is that such centre-embedding structures are a crucial bit of evidence in the linguistic reasoning which shows that languages are inherently complex.23 The consensus view in linguistics is that the evidence for how the structures combine is convincing, and that limitations on working memory cause the apparent infelicity in the longer sentences. The tension arises in the cognitive paradigm: what is the point of postulating linguistic structure which is, in principle, inaccessible to human cognitive processing? Would a theory of visual cognition speculate about the struc20

Chomsky, Lectures on Government and Binding, p. 9. Clahsen, ‘Psycholinguistic Perspectives on Grammatical Representations’. 22 Yngve, ‘A Model and a Hypothesis for Language Structure’. 23 The issues cannot be presented here in full detail, but may be found in Gross, Mathematical Models in Linguistics, Chapter 8. 21

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tures in the infrared parts of the spectrum – or any other phenomena beyond the affordances of the information-processing animal? 5. Cultural Influences We regard as culture all information – knowledge and skills – that is socially transmitted. Let’s carefully note that cognitive and cultural perspectives often compete in explanations, but also that they are not ultimately incompatible. On the one hand, there may be cognitive structure within linguistic variants which are nonetheless socially transmitted. On the other hand, some traits may be socially transmitted, that is, they are cultural, but might nonetheless have cognitive preconditions. Most linguists would assume that most details of language acquisition are examples of the latter sort. The cognitive revolution has not impeded work on cultural aspects of language – for example, on the social correlates of linguistic variation – which have extended earlier work on dialectology to the study of how some variation signals differences of class, sex and/or gender, etc. Furthermore, there is growing recognition that there are law-like regularities in linguistic variation examined from a cultural perspective. 5.1 Linguistic Variation By way of example, we will examine lexical distance (percentage of differing vocabulary) as a function of geographical distance in the graph on the upper part of Figure 2. We see firstly that the data is quite noisy, reflected in the wide cloud of points. Thus, the cultural differences we encounter are not extremely orderly, at least not with respect to geography. Secondly, there is a clear positive slope, reflecting the increasing number of lexical differences between increasingly distant settlements, as expected. We can explain lexical distance as a function of geography (r ≈ 0.66), which means that geography plays a major role. Naturally, a large role for geography is not incompatible with there being other important forces, but it will clearly be difficult to compete with the strength of geography. Finally, the linear/sublinear form of the dependence of lexical distance on geography (there is no significant difference in linear and logarithmic models of this data set) suggests a fairly gentle dynamic behind the diffusion of lexical variation. Strongly differentiating forces would suggest a steeper rise in the regression curve.

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Figure 2. Lexical distance as a function of geography (above), and the correlation of lexical distance as a function of geography (below). Note that we regard the negative correlations as evidence of little cultural influence, and the zero as (roughly) the extent of influence.

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The second graph complements the first. To obtain it, we first calculated, for each site s, the degree of correlation rs(d,l) between geographic distance d and lexical distance l for all of the other sites in the data set. We then plotted rs(d,l) as a function of d for all sites s. Finally, we performed a regression analysis, which was used to draw the slope of the curve shown on this graph. The negative slope of the regression line is naturally expected, since lexical distances will vary more as distance increases. We note in particular that the regression line reaches zero at approximately 400 km, meaning that we can no longer predict the lexical distance between a pair of sites simply by knowing the lexical distance of other sites separated by the same physical distance. The interesting supplementary information we obtain in the autocorrelation graph is thus an estimation of the geographic extent of the influence exerted by one site on another. Because the regression line is drawn on the basis of these sites as well, we do not report the r resulting from the regression line – these are mathematically influential, but as we have argued, linguistically irrelevant. These sorts of studies confirm the view that there are law-like relationships between culture and language, just as there are law-like linguistic generalisations based on cognition. They are not intended to suggest an alternative basis for linguistics, only the need to find a basis that is more comprehensive than individual cognition. 5.2 Cognitive-Cultural Interfaces Finally it is worth noting that there has been criticism of the adoption of a strict view that identifies grammar with cognitive mechanisms uninfluenced by culture. Koster notes that whatever one might think of the cognitive mechanisms underlying grammar, these mechanisms operate on culturally mediated entities, namely words.24 This brief synopsis does not do justice to his careful argument, but the basic observation is clear, and suggests that the view of grammar as an innate system of rules merely triggered by environmental evidence is unsatisfactory: how could such a cognitive module develop, except in a cultural context? This work on cultural influences constitutes in no sense a rejection of a cognitive perspective, merely the recognition that there are many aspects of language which seem to require an appeal to culture as well as to cognition. These aspects suggest that the search for a more comprehensive perspective might be rewarding.

24

Koster, ‘Hebben Dieren Concepten?’.

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6. Religious Speculation In our day of specialisation it is presumptuous for a scholar or scientist in one field to attempt to contribute much of anything in another, and if such an attempt is made, it is only sensible to qualify it extensively. I will not attempt a scholarly contribution to religion below, and I will in addition explicitly qualify my remarks. I have no scholarly familiarity with religious studies, so I reject any claim of novelty in the substance of the ideas below. I suggest only the sorts of issues that come to a linguist’s mind when considering how to approach religion from the point of view of cognitive science. While I might have skipped this speculation, I have included it in the hope that it illustrates my line of thought more concretely. To begin with I will attempt to think of general cognitive tendencies that seem particularly prominent in religion, and where nonetheless exceptions are possible and interpretable. The point of what follows is to suggest the way a cognitive scientist might approach issues in religious studies, what sorts of questions might be asked, and what sorts of evidence might be adduced in seeking answers. 6.1 Respecting the Dead One hint at a religious dimension which is very generally recognised is the respect human beings in general pay to the dead. While it is clear that the dead are physically different from the living, which means that the basis for respect is not physical or material, and also that the dead share no political rights or status with the living, still we are reluctant to discount the dead completely and we are repelled by disrespect. This is simply a very general fact, but one which religions have been especially attuned to with the many elaborate ceremonies honouring and commemorating the dead. We almost universally respect the dead and attribute to them a dignity which justifies that respect, as De Baets recently discusses.25 ‘There exists probably no society which does not treat its dead with respect’, noted LeviStrauss,26 and archaeologists have come to expect evidence of funeral rites,

25 De Baets, ‘A Declaration of the Responsibilities of Present Generations toward Past Generations’, marshals all of the evidence I reproduce in this section without, however, exploring a religious perspective. Since De Baets’s motive is the proposal of a declaration of responsibilities, it is clearly preferable for him to avoid any hint of dependence on particular religious beliefs. Assumptions on which responsibilities depended would naturally weaken those responsibilities to conditional ones, i.e. responsibilities under the assumed conditions. 26 Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques.

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often including burial sites, wherever there has been human settlement. Respect for the dead seems a criterion of human society. In fact, this attitude of respecting the dead is not limited to primitive peoples, or to those of a small number of religions, or even to people professing allegiance to some religion or other. Contemporary legal doctrine eschews the advocacy of laws with a specifically religious basis, since laws need to function in secular societies. However, modern, well-considered legal doctrine has been developed which requires that the dead be respected. For example, many, if not most countries allow that the last testaments of the dead determine the division of their property. This division might be determined by law, without regard to the last wishes of the dead, as is the case in strict communist systems. More generally accepted strictures requiring respect for the dead are encoded in Protocol I Art. 34 of the Geneva Conventions, which, concerning the war dead, requires that ‘the remains of persons (...) be respected, and the grave sites of all such persons (...) respected, maintained and marked’.27 This view is law in all 190 countries which have ratified the Geneva Conventions. Thus, we may conclude that respect for the dead is very generally expected in human societies. Are there no exceptions? I ask this question to understand the sort of generalisation we are dealing with. Linguists have long noted that the sorts of rules they find in language admit exception, and therefore do not have the status of natural law. We examine exceptions to the rule to check that conformance or otherwise lends a status to an action. We may indeed witness cases where the dignity we have agreed should accrue to the dead is not, in fact, respected. We know that corpses are sometimes disfigured and that their parts may be used as trophies in times of war, but we are (increasingly and fortunately) agreed that this rare behaviour is atrocious. Naturally, the Geneva Conventions would not be needed if respect for the dead was without exception. Nonetheless, these sorts of violations of generalisations need not confound a cognitive hypothesis, provided the violation of a rule does not have the same status as behaviour in accordance with it, which it certainly does not. Disrespecting the corpse of an enemy breaks a taboo, which is why it shocks friend and foe alike. The shock associated with breaking the taboo would not be possible if the rule did not exist. Put differently, the taboo consists of the common knowledge that both one’s own tribe and the tribe of the enemy prohibit flagrant disrespect for

27

Gen. 1977, ‘Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949 and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I)’, quoted by De Baets, ‘A Declaration of the Responsibilities of Present Generations toward Past Generations’ and available at www.icrc.org.

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the dead. Breaking a rule that is not universal would not be shocking to the same respect. If we are convinced that respect for the dead is general among human beings, in the sense that it is expected and its absence is striking, we may go on to ask why this is so, and also what other sorts of cognition support this attitude or disposition. At this point the undertaking becomes decidedly more ambitious as we are no longer attempting to establish a generalisation but rather trying to explain it. Why do we respect the dead? De Baets suggests that ‘the dead have dignity as former human beings’, which I agree is a sound foundation on which to base reasoning about the responsibilities of the living towards the dead, which is De Baets’s purpose. However, someone with a critical interest in religious issues can nonetheless push further, not disputing that the dead have dignity but asking why people are so ready to attribute such dignity to them. Why do people recoil at disrespect for dead? Why is it repellent to simply refuse to accord the dead the dignity others do? There are many answers which would not suggest a spiritual or religious dimension; for example that we are merely acting in accordance with the wishes of the living. As noted above, we expect to encounter various alternative attempts at an explanation in cognitive science, and suspect that the comparison of explanations may be interesting and rewarding. This brief chapter cannot explore and refute all such potential explanations, but it is nonetheless striking that the dead are so often honoured or commemorated in religious ceremonies. This suggests that an attempt to link the widespread respect for the dead to religious cognition is promising. Many further cognitive questions suggest themselves. What are the necessary conditions under which this respect is expressed and when, conversely, are people willing to suppress it? The fact that respect for the dead is found almost universally in human societies suggest that it need not rely on cultural transmission. Bering explores the conceptualisations religious people have of the dead, including the psychology attributed to the dead, but it would be interesting to explore the attitudes of the non-religious as well.28 Naturally we do not expect the non-religious to attribute personality to the dead, but what do they respect? Are there indications that respect is rooted even more deeply than culture, perhaps in individual cognition? Is there any indication that respect for the dead might be found in lesser animals? This is a point at which this non-specialist will relinquish the floor, asking the more knowledgeable to take over. In summary, the reason that I brought up the example was because it concerns a very generally accepted 28

Bering, ‘Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents’ Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary’.

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value, which is normally associated with religion and religious ritual. I see no immediate political or ethical problems in simply denying dignity to the dead – as admittedly repugnant as we all would find this. It is easy to imagine a society functioning politically and ethically in which the moment of death ended all the responsibilities of the living toward the dead. Why do we not live in such a society? What does this tell us about our beliefs? 6.2 Other areas? An earlier draft of this chapter suggested that the examination of altruism might also be an area where a cognitive perspective could be rewarding, but the ensuing discussion quickly convinced me that there were already too many competing accounts of altruism for me to review and compare, even superficially.29 I note here only that if one is prepared to affirm that people are at times altruistic, as many religions advocate, then a cognitive perspective might further the understanding of altruism as a religious disposition, including for example the elaborate communication required if altruism is to be encouraged.30 Warneken and Tomasello investigated the psychology of altruism further,31 demonstrating that human infants and young chimps act altruistically, and noting in particular that this presupposes an elaborate understanding of other cognitive agents, in particular, understanding that they may have goals. This sort of cognitive investigation sounds quite promising. 6.3 Comparison Barrett has surveyed work on religion from a cognitive perspective, which I have found useful,32 identifying three topics as central: how supernatural concepts are represented cognitively, how they are acquired and how they are dealt with, for example in ritual. I have tried to cast the net a bit wider in this piece, written from the perspective of linguistics. Rather than focus on supernatural concepts per se, I sought areas within natural phenomena which I believe many religions hold sacred, in particular, respect for the dead. The potential advantage of focusing on these more profane areas is the chance to address issues about which a great deal of consensus might be found. I suspect that this is more difficult for the supernatural. 29

Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral; Sosis and Alcorta, ‘Signaling, Solidarity and the Sacred: The Evolution of Sacred Behavior’. 30 Sosis and Alcorta, ‘Signaling, Solidarity and the Sacred: The Evolution of Sacred Behavior’, p. 267. 31 Warneken and Tomasello, ‘Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees’. 32 Barrett, ‘Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion’.

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7. Discussion The purpose of this chapter was to sketch, for scholars of religion, why the cognitive perspective has been rewarding in another field of the humanities, namely linguistics. The cognitive perspective within linguistics has resulted in a substantial, serious and valuable interaction between linguists, psychologists, computer scientists and neuroscientists. New developments emphasise the social aspects of cognition. I have been cautious about suggesting religious areas within which a cognitive perspective might be interesting, venturing only to advise that general attitudes and dispositions such as respect for the dead might be explored from the point of view of religious cognition. I suspect that such investigations may ultimately prove more fruitful than investigations of specifically religious experiences such as prayer or worship. In this same connection I noted that it may be interesting to pursue cognitive religious perspectives even where other perspectives may appear to be sufficient. I am convinced that researchers can profitably venture into new areas of investigation even where alternative, nonreligious accounts appear to be available. The experience in the field of linguistics confirms the value of examining and contrasting competing explanations.

MEANINGFUL MEANING CHANGING RELATIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Fred Keijzer Introduction The rise of science has made life difficult for the intellectual standing of religion. We now know that the Universe started with the Big Bang, that life evolved on earth through a very long process which started over 3.5 billion years ago, and that humans have a recognisable evolutionary history of about 4 to 5 million years, where our recorded history only touches the thinnest outer layer of this extended period. In this picture, there is no place for anything supernatural such as a creating God, a holy trinity, miracles, or a life after death – ideas that are typically related to religious belief. As there is no scientific basis for the supernatural, from a scientific perspective one would have expected all such ‘nonsense’ to have been discarded. As we all know, this is not the case. Worldwide, the number of outspoken atheists remains extremely small, and though European churches are in decline, worldwide, religion and religious beliefs remain widespread and extremely influential. The current rise and impact of fundamentalism is a clear example of the tendency of religion to not disappear quietly from the scene. As another example, consider the efforts now being made by Christian fundamentalists and evangelists to promote the idea of Intelligent Design (ID) as a scientific theory. From a scientific perspective, ID is clearly a non-explanation that should not be taken seriously given the availability of other, much better explanations for the same phenomena. Nevertheless, scientists now have to wage defensive battles to ward off such religious beliefs that try to pose as scientific theory. How is it possible that the rise of science, which seemingly ought to have led to the universal discrediting of these religious beliefs, did not have this effect? Currently, a number of related explanations are being developed in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion.1 The general argument here is 1

For example, Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion; Atran and Norenzayan, ‘Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion’; Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?; Bloom, ‘Religion is natural’; Boyer, ‘Religious thought and behaviour as

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that our evolutionarily developed cognitive make-up predisposes us to certain religious beliefs. For example, the finding that we incorporate a triggerhappy agency detection system, which makes us prone to perceive agents even when they are not there, is brought forward as part of an explanation for the widespread belief in supernatural agents.2 Despite the differences between the various authors, there is a common tendency to interpret religion as a by-product of the human cognitive system,3 a malfunction that arises from the cognitive system’s particular make-up. In this view, the case of religion could be compared to the current epidemic of obesity in the richer parts of the world. For evolutionary reasons we are much better equipped to deal with food scarcity than food abundance, leaving us ill-equipped to deal with the current situation. Similarly, it is argued that specific characteristics of our minds which have generally had a beneficial evolutionary function make us susceptible to particular religious thoughts and behaviours even in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary. Thus, the general aim of these explanations is to address the issue of why so many people have the particular religious beliefs that they happen to have – such as a belief in God as a supernatural agent – while being neutral or negative concerning the possible positive role that religion may play in our cognitive functioning. In this chapter, I will formulate the outlines of a different and complementary analysis that provides an account in which religion – admittedly more broadly conceived than is often the case – happens to have a beneficial role to play in our cognitive and behavioural functioning. In this view, religion is not a counterproductive cultural phenomenon – a glitch that we just cannot get rid of. Religious beliefs and behaviours perform a cognitively important motivational function which adds to rather than competes with the cognitive function of factual beliefs provided by science. The analysis that I will present in this chapter derives from developments in both embedded cognition and evolutionary studies of cognition. At heart it is a simple and straightforward idea: science and religion are cultural phenomena that tend to serve two different cognitive functions. Science has developed into a cultural practice aimed to develop and articulate beliefs in the sense of factual descriptions of the world. Religion, in contrast, is a long-standing cultural practice which, at least in both modern Western and Eastern societies, has developed to articulate desires, in the sense of providing motivational handholds which allows us to give longby-products of brain function’; and Kelemen, ‘Are children “Intuitive Theists”? Reasoning about purpose and design in nature’. 2 Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God? 3 Boyer, ‘Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function’.

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term direction to our lives and enables us to make decisions concerning how to act. Knowledge is needed to guide one’s actions, but desires are also needed to specify goals that make this knowledge relevant. Hence a very general analysis can be made according to which science has now become primarily a provider of what are considered to be factual beliefs, but leaving ample space for the ongoing existence of religion as primarily a source of values and motivation.4 On this basis, the problem that I want to stress when it comes to the relationship between science and religion is not why religious beliefs are still so common, given the existence of science. The particular religious beliefs with which we are familiar are deeply entrenched and connected to the motivations of many individuals in a way that mere factual science-based beliefs are not. Of course, these religious beliefs will not just disappear. In addition, when it comes to the current content of the religious ‘belief and behaviour box’, it seems to me that the evolutionary by-product theories are plausible enough, considering the evidence provided. However, the particular characteristics of these beliefs – such as a belief in the supernatural and gods or God – should not be taken as defining the religious domain. There is no intrinsic reason why the religious belief and behaviour box must be filled with ideas concerning the supernatural, or depend on claims that do not square with the basic facts as taught by science.5 On the contrary, in the following I will develop the claim that the two ought to be reconciled in order to perform their different cognitive functions in a mutually beneficial way. Humans require a religious belief box – which can of course be filled with atheistic practices and ideas – as a part of the functioning of their motivational cognitive make-up. In this view, working on and changing religious beliefs and practices is an important cultural project, helping us deal with humanity’s vastly increased scientific knowledge and the possibility of action on a global scale. It would be unsafe and unsound to treat religion as a relic from the past rather than a part of our ongoing lives. 4

This is a fairly common idea. See for example Von Weizsäcker, Zum Weltbild der Physik; idem, Der Garten des Menschlichen; and Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, discussed below. 5 Of course, one can simply define religion in these terms, but in the present analysis this would mean an arbitrary division of the religious domain. It might turn out that the requirements for the generation and transmission of religious beliefs and behaviour do make humans prone to incorporate supernatural or other specific entities (see Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission), but by itself this does not lead to the conclusion that this is necessary. Science was once prone to the same tendency but this has now been overcome to a significant degree.

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As said, the reasons for stressing the necessity and complementarity of both factual belief and motivating desire come from embodied and embedded, as well as evolutionary notions of cognition as currently developed within the cognitive sciences. In contrast to so-called classic cognitive science, which focused primarily on knowledge representation, it is now increasingly acknowledged that humans, as embodied and environmentally embedded cognitive systems, not only require a knowledge base – a set of beliefs – to guide their actions, but also a set of motivations – desires – as well as values that specify which acts are worthwhile undertaking. The crucial point here is that it is essential to link knowledge to an agent and to the use it might have with respect to future action.6 In this embodied and embedded view, beliefs and desires are closely intertwined cognitive functions that should operate in smooth conjunction. A lot of work in the field of embedded cognition stresses the importance of direct hands-on action for cognition. In this chapter, I want to make a leap from this work on basic cognitive processes to the cultural acquisition of beliefs and desires, and the role played by science and religion in this respect. The background assumption will be that we, as individuals, acquire many and perhaps most of our beliefs and desires from particular cultural sources such as science and religion. Science plays a clear role in generating the content of our factual beliefs concerning what is out there in the world, such as the idea that matter is made up of atoms, that we live on planet Earth, or any of the other facts that we have learned at school. One might quibble about whether science really discovers what is out there, and there are definite philosophical problems with a straightforward realistic interpretation of science,7 but science definitely remains our major source of knowledge concerning the world. However, while science is well suited to deliver a sound set of beliefs, it is not well equipped to deal with our set of desires. While factual beliefs are intended to reflect a domain in a way which is not tied to any particular agent, desires are strictly tied to particular agents. The latter are not only mere preferences but also involve deeply felt, personal motivating states that help one choose what to do during the course of life. Desires are intrinsically value-laden while science deals in factual beliefs which are meant to be intrinsically value-free. Science is not only ill-equipped to deliver articulated desires, it is emphatically refused any role as a source of culturally articulated desires. That 6 E.g. Merker, ‘The liabilities of mobility’, argues that consciousness arose comparatively early in the process of evolution as part of a mechanism that relates factual knowledge to motivational factors. 7 See for example Devitt, Realism and Truth; Feyerabend, Against Method; Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking; Latour, Science in Action; Van Fraassen, The Scientific Image.

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is, science is denied the opportunity to play any role in formulating motivations, meaning or values. There are sound reasons for this prohibition, coming from both within and beyond science. On the one hand, it is argued that science itself should be kept pure and not be used for purposes external to it, as for example often occurs in New Age thinking.8 On the other hand, philosophical warnings that science should not become scientism abound, which would mean trespassing beyond its factual domain and entering a domain of values where it does not belong.9 The mistaken use of IQ tests for questionable racial policies comes to mind here. The upshot is clear, science deals and should deal in factual beliefs, rather than in what we do with these beliefs. In this context, it becomes possible to position religion in a way that gives credence to its ongoing existence and influence. Given that the human cognitive system needs both suitable beliefs and desires, it seems that there is a clear and distinct niche for cultural domains that help individual human beings to articulate meaning and develop their personal motivations. While science is emphatically precluded from fulfilling this role, religion clearly is not. On the contrary, the latter is precisely in the business of articulating and developing coherent cultural sets of desires, or motivational beliefs. In this view, religion is not a bad form of science but is tied to a different cognitive function altogether. Religion aims above all to do justice to our need to make choices and initiate one action rather than another. To do so, religious thinking interprets the world in specific ways and makes specific claims concerning its nature and origins. Over the course of historical development, this motivational enterprise has resulted worldwide in several different cultural sets of factual belief claims concerning the state of the world and the existence of supernatural deities or forces. However, in terms of the present interpretation, the core issue of religion is not those particular beliefs but rather the motivational context they provide. The proper function of religion is to make the world meaningful, which is something that we cannot do without. In this chapter, I will only provide a very rough sketch of the general idea and its possible implications. First, I will describe how embedded and evolutionary approaches to the study of cognition make it plausible to draw the analysis sketched above. I will in particular build on Sterelny’s notion of a preference structure,10 which provides the basis for a key development in 8

Vanheste, Copernicus is ziek: Een geschiedenis van het New-Agedenken over natuurwetenschap. 9 Midgley, Evolution as a Religion. 10 Sterelny, The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays; idem, Thought in a Hostile World.

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my argument. Second, I will sketch how Sterelny’s preference structures can be brought to bear on religion, casting religion as a source of high-level, culturally determined preference structures. Third and finally, I will present some implications of this analysis of scientific belief versus religious desire. From syntax to meaning to meaningfulness Cognitive science has now been around for fifty years or so. During this period there have been a number of changes to the outlook on cognition. Initially, cognitive science envisioned cognition and intelligence as a process of manipulating internal representations. These representations provided the cognitive system with a knowledge base which could be used to make predictions concerning possible behavioural outcomes and thus enabled the system to choose the best course of action. It did not really matter whether this cognitive processing occurred within a computer or a human or animal brain, as long as it involved the systematic manipulation of representational entities. In this computational paradigm, the means that enabled the manipulation of these representations were purely syntactic. Roughly speaking, it was the physical form and not the semantic meaning which guided the processing of these representations. This led to the issue of how these syntactic symbols acquired meaning in the first place. The best known phrasing of this problem is by Steven Harnad, who baptised this lack of a proper semantics as the symbol grounding problem.11 The problem was thought to be solved by linking a cognitive system to the world by means of perceptual relations in which neural networks could play an important role. Starting in the late 1980s, however, an even stronger criticism of the classic cognitive paradigm gave rise to a field that I will here refer to as embedded cognition.12 Embedded cognition has roots in robotics,13 developmental psychology,14 self-organisation15 and dynamical systems,16 and is now a serious component of cognitive research as a whole.17 Generally speaking, embedded cognition is not best exemplified by inner thought but by dealing with an environment. A cognitive system is paradigmatically an 11

Harnad, ‘The symbol grounding problem’. Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again; Keijzer, Representation and Behavior. 13 Brooks, Cambrian Intelligence. 14 Thelen and Smith, A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. 15 Kelso, Dynamic Patterns: The Self-organization of Brain and Behavior. 16 Beer, ‘A dynamical systems perspective on agent-environment interaction’; Port and Van Gelder, Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition. 17 Anderson, ‘Embodied Cognition: A field’. 12

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agent with a particular kind of body that is embedded in an environment. Perception and action become central, and inner thought turns into an additional capacity that enables human agents to deal with more distal and abstract features of their environment. In terms of the embedded view, a key issue becomes: What exactly are representations for? Classic cognitive science focused on knowledge in an abstract sense; knowledge which could be articulated independently of a particular agent. Embedded cognition stresses that representations must be useful for an acting agent. Rather than simply having meaning in the sense of being a truthful reflection of the external world, such representations must be foremost meaningful. They must enable an agent to guide its actions. While it is meaningful knowledge for most of us to have access to the address of the nearest food shops, it is much less relevant, and in this sense less meaningful, for most of us to have access to all of the astronomical data sent to Earth over the years by the Pioneer probe. In addition, it is not necessarily the case that a more truthful representation of certain aspects of the environment is also the most useful one. If a crude representational scheme does the trick, there is no need for a more complex and costly representational scheme with lots of unnecessary, although veridical, details. In this context, work on the evolution of cognition by Godfrey-Smith18 and Sterelny19 becomes relevant. They both respond to the embedded cognition claim that agents can operate with minimal cognitive, that is, representational, resources. Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis stresses that such minimal resources would leave agents extremely vulnerable to biological threats such as predators and parasites. Both GodfreySmith and Sterelny claim that the evolutionary reason for the development of cognition or intelligence lies in the need to overcome the dangers and difficulties of dealing with a natural environment, which includes all kinds of threats. Within complex environments, organisms with more complex cognitive abilities are at an advantage because they are less easily fooled. Such organisms rely on multiple environmental cues to guide their behaviour. For example, a deer may be visually fooled by the tiger’s stripes, but still be sufficiently warned by its smell. I do not think that there is necessarily a tension between embedded cognition and the environmental complexity thesis. The first can be cast as giving an indication of what the foundation of cognition might look like, while the second provides an evolutionary account of why cognition did not remain so simple. I will not go into these 18

Godfrey-Smith, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature; idem, ‘Environmental complexity and the evolution of cognition’. 19 Sterelny, The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays; idem, Thought in a Hostile World.

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matters here, but rather turn to a key idea that I draw from Sterelny’s discussion of these issues and which allows a fruitful combination of the two. Sterelny argues that animals with more complex cognitive abilities are not only sensitive to multiple environmental cues but would also benefit from what he calls a preference structure,20 which represents their needs rather than having a fixed set of internal drives.21 Agents with a relatively limited set of behavioural options can manage with a standard set of primary motivations or drives (for example, pain, thirst, hunger or fear), which are triggered by a fairly specific set of stimuli. Such agents make their behavioural choices on the basis of the current urgency of the available set of drives. However, decision problems become increasingly difficult when the animal can discriminate between many different situations. ‘For only then does the problem “What do I do now?” get tough’.22 For such agents it would be beneficial to bring their motivational drives under cognitive control. That is: It brings motivation under the control of representations of the external world, representations of the way the world would be, if the goal were achieved. Moreover, the evolution of preference liberates motivation from its dependence on immediate affect, and hence frees the animal from phylogenetic constraints on its menu of distinct sensations and drives.23

According to Sterelny, a rat can learn to associate new stimuli with internal rewards but the internal rewards themselves can only be assembled in evolutionary time. However: [an] animal that forms and acts on goals can build new motivators in ontogenetic time; to learn new things to want, rather than just new ways of getting things the animal has always wanted. We can want, and act on wanting, an extraordinary wide range of states of affairs. In doing so, many of our actions are no longer under immediate affective control.24

20

The notion of preference structure is used more widely within decision theory and economics as a way of ordering behavioural options, e.g. Bufardi, ‘On the fuzzification of the classical definition of preference structures’; Weber, ‘Decision making with incomplete information’. I will use it here only in Sterelny’s more specific motivational interpretation. 21 Sterelny, The Evolution of Agency and Other Essays, p. 248 ff.; idem, Thought in a Hostile World, p. 92 ff. 22 Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World, p. 93. 23 Ibidem, p. 92. 24 Ibidem.

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To conclude, by becoming representational, motivation can wrestle free from basic drives and itself be formulated in terms of relating to the world. Sterelny’s notion of a preference structure is helpful to further articulate a key idea from the field of embedded cognition mentioned above – to be of use, representations must be foremost meaningful and enable an agent to guide its actions. At the same time, the meaning of representations is generally considered to involve an objective reflection on external states of affairs, irrespective of any particular agent or its use of those representations. It may seem that the point is that knowledge should not remain pure but should also be turned to use, a distinction that plays, for example, between the pure and applied sciences. However, a different issue is involved, which is not how to apply abstract knowledge and develop suitable subgoals to instantiate a chosen policy, but rather how to develop new supergoals, as they might be called, that build upon a new knowledge situation and relate the latter to possible actions by the individual. To repeat Sterelny, it is about developing new wants, not new means. The notion of a preference structure brings to the fore the need to think about how high-level, meaningless meaning can become meaningful to an agent. A representationally articulated preference state links – either positively or negatively – those semantic states to motivational states of the animal or agent. Of course, this is not a recipe for how this link is accomplished, merely a claim that it is highly plausible that it must occur given the make-up of cognitive agents. To summarise, the notion of a preference structure stresses the cognitive need to provide bridges between general semantic meaning – which can be seen as a general cognitive resource – and motivational states, thereby making a subset of the semantic domain meaningful to the agent. Religion as a cultural source of preference structures25 The discussion of embedded cognition and preference structures has now set the stage for a discussion of science and religion from this perspective. Below, I will work with the assumption that there is an evolutionary and cognitive need for well-developed and cognitively articulated preference structures in complex agents such as human beings. In addition, I will hold that such preference structures can be developed and changed in cultural as well as ontogenetic time – new wants can be introduced and developed as a 25

I will argue that religion can be interpreted as a source of higher level preference structures. This does of course not imply that all preference structures derive from religion. I will take it for granted that the preference structures talked about are merely a subset, even when this is not stated explicitly.

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part of cultural changes (in addition to genetic changes), and these changes can be incorporated within individuals during their lifetime.26 The core idea is that religious belief – desire – can be cast as the cultural articulation of high-level preference structures for human groups or societies. Generally, it is self-evident that culturally determined preference structures are important for human groups. Fashion, trends and music are highly visible examples of culturally determined preferences. They strongly influence what we value at a certain time and do so in a way that is extremely fleeting, thus clearly showing their dependence on similarly fleeting cultural conditions. It seems also evident that at a deeper level societies and groups shape the preferences of their members in ways that are both pervasive and relatively difficult to pin down. It seems indisputable that the society we belong to determines to a large extent the things that we value at a level that goes beyond basic drives and strict individual preferences. Obtaining a good education, becoming wealthy, being honest or patriotic are all possible examples of components within culturally determined preference structures. However, the point to focus on here is whether it is plausible to cast religion as a cultural enterprise which has the effect of modifying or developing preference structures that allow human beings to deal with new, extended knowledge structures. The first question to ask is: What is religion? More specifically, which aspects of religion would provide or constitute such structures? In their recent evolutionary study of religion, Scott Atran and Ara Norenzayan refer to religion as ‘passionate communal displays of costly commitments to counterintuitive worlds governed by supernatural agents’.27 They take this description to be the convergence of four different aspects present in all societies: a widespread belief in supernatural agents, such as gods and spirits; costly actions and offerings to such supernatural agents; the mastery of people’s existential anxieties, such as death, disease and pain by supernatural agents; the ritualised sensory coordination of these three aspects within groups.28 As will become apparent, I have serious doubts about this stress on the ‘supernatural’ as a key factor in characterising religion. I see at least four reasons for questioning the claim that religion is intrinsically tied up with a belief in supernatural entities. First, it is unclear what ‘supernatural’ might mean. Second, even when accepting some notion of ‘supernatural’, the link 26

I will not develop this point here but merely refer to work by Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition; see also Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World, as a good illustration of the importance of cultural learning. 27 Atran and Norenzayan, ‘Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion’, p. 713. 28 Ibidem.

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between religion and supernatural entities is not reciprocal, which detracts from the idea of an intrinsic connection. Third, it seems perfectly possible to have religions that do not posit anything supernatural but remain within the bounds of our scientific knowledge. Marxism may be a case in point, and will be discussed below; certain forms of Buddhism may also be interpreted in this way, and so would any religion that explicitly aims to avoid supernatural claims. Fourth, this last possibility means that even if the connection between religion and the supernatural is descriptively adequate at present, this should not be used in a prescriptive sense, limiting the possible ways in which religions may naturally develop in the future. Initially, I will briefly remark on the first two points, before turning to the last two points, which will be the main issues dealt with in the remainder of this chapter. What does it mean when one speaks about the supernatural? Within the cognitive science of religion, the supernatural is often interpreted in terms of being counterintuitive.29 The notion of being counterintuitive in turn is interpreted as a violation of very general assumptions concerning ‘domain concepts’ such as ‘person’, ‘living thing’ or ‘man-made object’.30 For example, the concept of a supernatural entity such as a ghost violates our expectations, as it means a person with the counterintuitive physical property of being able to move through walls, as well as the counterintuitive biological property of being alive without a living body. However, it is possible that these counterintuitive properties are found precisely in a perfectly natural context. Just think of the fairly standard science-fiction scenario in which virtual persons do without physical bodies and walk through walls without mishap. Being counterintuitive in this specific way is not sufficient to be considered supernatural, at least today. Einstein’s insights into what happens to time when one travels extremely fast is definitely counterintuitive but also perfectly natural. We should keep in mind science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s famous and often repeated saying that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’.31 Rather than making claims that explicitly go beyond the natural – as currently conceived – the point seems to be that religion often relates to powers or beings which have options way beyond those available to the believer. However, thinking 29

E.g. Atran and Norenzayan, ‘Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Counterintuition, commitment, compassion, communion’; Barrett, ‘Exploring the natural foundations of religion’; Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe in God?; and Boyer, ‘Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function’. 30 Boyer, ‘Religious thought and behaviour as by-products of brain function’. 31 Clarke formulated his ‘three laws’, of which this is the third, in his non-fiction book, Profiles of the Future, published in 1962. Since then this saying has gained a life of its own, being often repeated as well as paraphrased in slightly different ways (Wikipedia contributors, ‘Clarke’s three laws’).

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about the cartoon and movie character Superman, it will be evident that the line between beings with supernatural powers and beings with natural superpowers is extremely hazy. This lack of clarity provides a good reason to question adherence to the supernatural as an intrinsic aspect of religion. Second, even when one accepts that there must be supernatural entities, the so-called ‘Micky Mouse problem’ questions their religious signification.32 Many supernatural or fantasy beings such as ghosts, Micky Mouse and Santa Claus have no clear connection with religion. It is plausible on this account that there is a more general human tendency to accept and use supernatural characters or entities – regularly used within religion – without it being constitutive of, or necessary for religion. The Micky Mouse problem is solved when the link between the supernatural and religion is cast as a mere correlation rather than part of what defines religion. Thus, while it goes without saying that many religious beliefs involve a commitment to supernatural entities, their being supernatural cannot be used to explain what makes them part of the religious domain. The claim that religion must involve a commitment to supernatural events or entities is a source of problems and confusion, rather than providing clarification. The question of whether religion must involve a supernatural component is a major issue for the present analysis. A commitment to non-natural entities as a prerequisite would preclude a possible reconciliation with science, but also sets severe limits on what religion could be. Considering the claim made here, that religion constitutes a cultural practice that aims to articulate suitable relations between our knowledge of the world and the appropriate preference structures or wants, this stress on the supernatural would imply that no religion that performs this function in a fully satisfactory way could ever evolve given a scientific world-view which denies supernatural entities. Atran and Norenzayan’s characterisation, with its stress on the supernatural and the cost of commitment, seems typical for an evolutionary psychological approach. However, even though existential anxieties are mentioned, this account remains rather short on the experiential and motivational side of religion, which would be the primary issue for casting religion as a source of preference structures.33 Mary Midgley provides more direct assistance for present purposes. She cites the biologist Dobzhansky as 32

E.g. Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, p. 14; Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission, pp. 49-50. 33 Atran and Norenzayan, ‘Religion’s evolutionary landscape: Author’s response’, p. 746, become more forceful on this point when challenged by Pyysiäinen, ‘Religion is neither costly nor beneficial’, who suggests that religion does not serve a clear cognitive function, even calling it ‘a parasite of natural cognitive mechanisms’.

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follows: ‘science and religion deal with different aspects of existence. If one dares to overschematize for the sake of clarity, one may say that these are the aspect of fact and the aspect of meaning’.34 This meaning, or what I call here meaningfulness to distinguish it from factual meaning, she further states, ‘is best thought of as the way in which facts connect to form what I have called world-pictures – that is the underlying systems of thought by which we order our experience’.35 Midgley further acknowledges that people can find plenty of meaning in their day-to-day lives, but in addition: ‘If we ask for a wider context – which many of us do – we begin to build wider intellectual systems, either for greater completeness or to reconcile clashing elements within the system which we have already’.36 She then brings the notion of faith to the fore: A faith is not primarily a factual belief, the acceptance of a few extra propositions like ‘God exists’ or ‘there will be a revolution’. It is rather the sense of having one’s place within a whole greater than oneself, one whose larger aims so enclose one’s own and give them point that sacrifice for it may be proper. This sense need not involve any extra factual beliefs at all. Marxism does not, nor does Taoism. Both call centrally for changes in attitude to the facts that one already accepts. (…) This kind of faith is plainly something widespread and very important in our lives.37

Midgley further claims that such faith provides the seedbed of religion, which can be fully secular in her view, such as Marxism or what she calls evolutionism. The point is that such intellectual systems rest ‘on their power to make sense of a threatening and chaotic world by dramatizing it’.38 In her short history of myth, Karen Armstrong brings very similar ideas to the fore, considering myths as intellectual systems that enable us to make sense of the world at a general level: Mythology was therefore designed to help us to cope with the problematic human predicament. It helped people to find their place in the world and their true orientation. We all want to know where we came from, but because our earliest beginnings are lost in the mists of prehistory, we have created myths about our forefathers that are not historical but help to explain current attitudes about our

34 35 36 37 38

Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, p. 15. Ibidem, p. 15. Ibidem, p. 16. Ibidem. Ibidem, p. 17.

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environment, neighbours and customs. We also want to know where we are going, so we devised stories that speak of a posthumous existence.39

The general story in which Armstrong discusses this view of myth is the long history of the human species, which has seen huge changes in its daily living circumstances over the last 20,000 years.40 Over this period, some groups changed from hunting to shepherding, to farming and ultimately urban life and even empire building. Such developments brought about huge changes in the range of facts that these people were familiar with. According to Armstrong, religion and, in particular, myths, enabled people to deal with these changes. Over this period, the increasingly sophisticated knowledge base and accompanying lifestyles, which resulted from cultural learning, created new kinds of problems. Different ways of presenting the environment and one’s own position in it changed the perceived relationship between the individual and their environment. Existential issues such as becoming aware that we are going to die, that the world will go on without us, and that within this huge world the actions of most of us are insignificant and will pass away without leaving a trace, make us uncomfortable. One might shrink away from them, but at the same time they cannot be denied, as they follow necessarily from practical knowledge, which does not follow our wishes but reflects the world, and which is useful for that very reason. Such major changes in the factual circumstances pose problems for making this expanding domain meaningful: How does all this relate to me, or to us, the group that I belong to? According to Armstrong, myths provide guides that enable people to live with their factual circumstances: ‘A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information’. For example, Armstrong discusses how in many different mythologies an initially all-powerful Sky God became too exalted and far removed from human concerns, with the result that he ultimately turned into ‘a shadowy, powerless figure, marginal to the divine pantheon’.41 The upshot of all this, it seems to me, is that religion can definitely be cast in the role of making the world meaningful to humans in a way that goes beyond the necessities of daily life. Religion provides a way to connect the factual world in a meaningful way to the aims and motivations of the individual and group, thereby providing a specific understanding of this factual world. More specifically, from a historical perspective, religion has 39

Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, p. 6; see also Armstrong, A History of God. In talking about a mere 20,000 years, the word ‘short’ would also have been appropriate when compared to the 4 million years of human evolutionary history. 41 Ibidem, p. 21. 40

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been in the business of repeatedly generating new interpretations of the factual world – with new gods or claims – to accommodate and deal with changing ways of living, such as the shift from shepherding to farming and ultimately urban life. Religions of all times can be cast as cultural projects that aim to give a meaning to life that goes beyond immediate practicalities, responding to the question: What is the purpose of it all and what are the values by which anyone wants or rather should guide his or her life? The general characteristics of religion as laid out by Atran and Norenzayan and discussed above can be cast as generally supporting a primarily existential and motivational view of religion. Linking a factual world-view to motivation in new ways does not merely add new factual beliefs but entails finding ways of integrating such knowledge into one’s motivational and emotional system. Rituals and costly shows of commitment are both techniques that help to develop connections between arbitrary facts and motivational and emotional states. Even the stress on supernatural agents makes at least intuitive sense here. The idea that such agents are much more powerful and wise than any human individual is a natural way for humans to imbue meaning where a mere mortal sees none. In line with the argument above, the supernaturalness of any such agent would be instrumental to religion’s purpose rather than constitutive of the phenomenon of religion itself. Much more needs to be said here to make a solid case for these claims and interpretations, but for now my main aim is to develop the idea itself and explain how these other characteristics could be used and even come to support the story developed here. As a tentative conclusion then, religion can be considered an important and even necessary component of human cultures, including modern Western society. Religion’s aim is to link the factual knowledge and understanding that such a culture has acquired to the inner motivational states of the individuals who are part of this culture, thus making the world meaningful to them. However, several points seem to contest this conclusion. First and foremost, has science not shown that there is no purpose in nature, that we live in a deterministic universe in which it makes no sense to introduce phrases such as purpose and meaningfulness? Second, it seems that religion is facultative, it is something which we can choose, but also something we can reject and do without. In this view, myths may be effective for some people, but ultimately they are mere stories which are factually false and will have to be abandoned. Thus religion may serve this function of making meaning meaningful, but not for everyone. This last issue leads to a third point, namely that religion has to work on an individual basis and connect with each individual’s motivational structure. Armstrong states that a myth is true as long as it is effective, that is, it connects with someone’s sense of meaningfulness. However, this of course implies that there can be huge dif-

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ferences between people. One person may be deeply motivated and moved by the celebration of Mass, a neighbour may be merely bored, another may find it daft, and for yet another it is a sign of oppression. This situation is very different from the world of natural facts, which are – cutting all philosophical niceties short – the same for everyone. It is thus natural to think of such religious beliefs as arbitrary and something that one may, or even must, do without. However, the point that follows from an embedded perspective on cognition and in particular this notion of preference structures is that there is not much choice in the matter. As the scientific belief versus religious desire slogan indicates, as human cognitive systems we require not only facts but also ways to integrate such otherwise meaningless facts with our values and motivation. We may balk at the label ‘religion’ and think that it does not apply to us, but the function that, historically at least, is performed by cultural practices under this label remains the same whether we change the label or not. One way or another, every human being must make sense of his or her environment and his or her own position in the larger scale of things. The fact that one may choose to do so in a strictly secular and naturalistic way, such as in Marxism, evolutionism or humanism, does not matter in this view. Thus, one may discard many religious images or myths as unreal or hollow, but this only means that one uses others, even if only implicitly and in a secular form, to guide one’s behaviour and make sense of ‘it all’. The point then is not whether to choose a religion or not but rather: how does each individual build up his or her preference structure, and with what world-view, and which cultural practices support and structure this process in each individual? A functional interpretation of religion as proposed here is not generally accepted. Instead, and as discussed above, religion tends to be interpreted in terms of those specific contents and practices that are labelled ‘religious’ because they are the forms by means of which this function has been fulfilled in the past. For this reason also, it seems, many would hesitate to agree with Midgley and call Marxism or evolutionism squarely a religion. At the same time, it is also because of the equation of religion with particular kinds of ideas and practices – such as a stress on supernatural agents – that the whole notion of religion itself is often dismissed from a scientific or modern perspective. As a result, our current scientific world-view does not readily support or even easily acknowledge the need for systematic cultural practices that enable individuals or groups to develop new and different world-views and preference structures that give us a meaningful place in the larger world as described by science. To summarise, the claim made here firstly entails a rephrasing of a generally held view, as exemplified by Armstrong and Midgley, which can

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easily stand on its own legs. Secondly, what is added is the injection of this line of thinking into a scientific perspective, where the aspect of value becomes tied to our embedded cognitive systems. Thus, rather than the two main traditions of scientific facts and religious values being opposed, they become united within a single scientific context from which the invocation of values is not to be dislodged or discredited. Scientific belief and religious desire The major point of the present analysis is that science and religion are two cultural projects that cater for different cognitive functions. Science articulates what the world is like, while religion acts as a source of high-level preference structures that link this world-view to the motivational states of each individual, enabling the articulation of new and fitting high-level wants. Both projects make specific claims concerning the external world; that is, both articulate particular sets of beliefs concerning the world. Ideally there would be a harmonious relationship between the two, but alas, in practice this is not so. In the West, Christianity has a long history of providing meaningful meaning, giving clear answers about who we are, why we are on Earth and what will happen when we die. All this was achieved without disrupting practical knowledge concerning the world. A belief that God created the world did not impinge on practical crafts but was part of a story that gave meaning to the here and now. Many things have changed over the last 500 years or so, with the developments that have now led to modern science. Many beliefs held by the Church were shown to be literally false, for example, the Earth is not at the centre of the Universe, nor did a deity create the Earth or the life on it. Christianity has since been on the defensive when it comes to providing factual stories about ourselves and our place in this world. Eventually, these developments led to the notion of pure science, the aim of which is pure knowledge, that is, describing the world as it is, independent of our own preconceptions and wishes. In comparison, religious thought seems impure, committed to unwarranted claims concerning supernatural entities, and involving a good deal of wishful thinking rather than taking the world as it is. From this perspective, religion is merely bad science that we ought and will outgrow with time. When religion is interpreted as the project of articulating preference structures, the image just provided changes in a number of ways. First, religion remains bad science, but this is hardly relevant when its proper function as a motivational structure is brought forward. One can also observe here that in earlier times, religion had much more freedom for its own ‘factual’ claims and there was then little opposition if it threw in a supernatural

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agent or two to accomplish its motivational function. Another point is that the commitment to any particular belief (such as the existence of God or a life after death) is not the kernel of this enterprise. Religion consists of building beliefs that allow one to handle and cope with knowledge that is not only meaningless in itself – in being distinct from our individual motivational states – but which can even actively threaten our basic motivational states. The image of ourselves as mere chemical factories, cobbled together by a blind process of evolution is not a cheerful one, at first glance. To quote from a paper on the homeless: ‘We are all fucking enzymes anyway’. Under the current interpretation, the proper function of religion is to ward off such unwanted consequences: the kernel of religion is to develop ideas and practices that give meaning to the world as we find it. Its core is not the particular set of ideas by means of which this has been achieved in the past. Thus, as argued above, I would hold that the stress on supernatural entities in traditional religious thought more readily reflects its particular and long history rather than any intrinsic connection or limitation to what religion can be. In addition, and thirdly, religion does require a strong connection with the world as we take it to be. Religion is about making factual meaning meaningful to us. Therefore, it cannot function properly when it is relegated to the sidelines of society as a kind of feel-good thing, with its own set of beliefs disconnected from what we hold to be physically true. Religion is not only for those who cannot stomach the austerity of the modern world. Religion’s proper function is to act as a bridge between what we deem genuine knowledge and our own personal lives. To do so, it ought to make close contact with any current best description of the world, science, and provide ideas and insights into how we can live meaningful lives given that the world is as it is. One can interpret work on Intelligent Design as an attempt to acquire such congruency by working the other way round, fiddling with the facts until they fit some specific religious beliefs. Finally, religion, in some form or other, is here to stay. It is not something childish that we should outgrow or even a genetically entailed aberration, clouding our thoughts. Religion serves a clear function within our general cognitive make-up and will not disappear now that we have science. At most it will go underground and resurface in new forms at unexpected places. However, the current discussion about Intelligent Design suggests a darker scenario: one can envision a possible future where strong religious beliefs could again create problems for the scientific enterprise itself. All this follows fairly straightforwardly from casting religion as the articulation of culturally determined preference structures. Within this analysis, the laudable development of pure science has also had a flip side. By systematically undercutting the validity of the factual claims of our own and

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other societies’ preference structures it detracts from the plausibility and strength of these preference structures, thereby sapping strength from preexisting religious efforts to link our knowledge to ourselves and to make meaning meaningful. In itself this cannot be helped of course as it is a necessary consequence of the scientific enterprise. Factual claims that are mistaken must be criticised as such. However, the problem seems to be an insensitivity or even a denial of the function of religion, which hampers definite and specific attempts to develop alternative, new and suitable religious ideas that incorporate the new factual situation. In particular, the stress on knowledge as something which ought to remain independent of our needs and motivation, actively discourages attempts to draw new links between the hugely expanded knowledge domain and human motivation. The fact-value distinction which operates here, sets up a wall between the two domains that must not be crossed. ‘Is’ and ‘ought’ are separate domains. The problem here is that this distinction makes a lot of sense when it comes to differentiating between beliefs and desires. However, the aim currently envisioned for religious thinking is the very formulation of a domain of values, and this would be better done in general congruence with the facts as we know them. When discussing the ways in which facts and values are connected in ideologies, roughly equivalent to religion as used here, Midgley states: ‘What is wrong with bad ideologies is not that they are trying to do something of this kind, but that they are doing it wrong’.42 In other words, it is not wrong to make connections between facts and values, but one should do this the right way. Of course, the difficulty here lies with deciding what is wrong as opposed to right, but this is exactly an issue that requires a lot of attention rather than a dismissive attitude. In any case, the claim remains that such a project, one might call it ‘desire revision’ in analogy to ‘belief revision’,43 ought to be seen as a legitimate even necessary project of initiating changes in preference structures that allow us to deal with the new facts of life. It is unclear who or what instance could initiate a project of desire revision, but it seems safe to say that it would be the task of everyone and no one in particular to come up with good workable ideas. My aim here is limited to drawing attention to this issue. Thinking again about the discussion on Intelligent Design, some urgency seems to be required when it comes to investigating the option of a 42

Midgley, Evolution as a Religion, p. 22. Belief revision is a common notion in epistemology and philosophy of science, referring to the systematic and, ideally, rational change of scientific belief (cf. Levi, The Enterprise of Knowledge). Desire revision would be a very different enterprise, and it is very difficult to envision what it might amount to. 43

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project of desire revision. Today, a situation has arisen in which science proceeds at its own pace, but without a clear or deep anchoring of these newly developing scientific ideas in accompanying preference structures – the domain of religion. What is happening instead is a divergence between scientific knowledge and the sources of what gives meaning to our lives. The twentieth century did not bring us any coherent way to think about ourselves and the place we occupy within the world at large. The promise of progress has proven hollow in the eyes of many, where Auschwitz still remains an open wound. Increasing material wellbeing – for those who have it – cushions the effect, but at the same time it makes science increasingly a facilitator of practical goals such as an increase in wealth and health. At the same time, science and material progress are held responsible for the increasing environmental problems and the bleak future that life on Earth now seems to face. All in all the scientific project seems to result in something that threatens to overwhelm us as human beings. However, science ought to remain a project by means of which we – individually and as a species – fast expand our knowledge about ourselves and how we might redefine ourselves to face the future. Unfortunately, today it seems that the ways in which we cast ourselves come from anywhere but science. Examples are traditional forms of religion, New Age, rock and roll, sheer hedonism, literature, art, or anything else that enables us to formulate a meaningful existence in these modern times. To use Sterelny’s phrasing once more, the role that science is now increasingly pushed into is not so much that of an initiator of new wants, but at most that of getting the things that we already want in new ways. An appropriate illustration might be the religious leader who thought that modern technology was a good thing because it enabled people to spend more time in prayer. In addition, Armstrong’s case of the abandoned Sky God might also be recalled here. If science really develops into a cultural practice that becomes remote from our lives, it might be diminished, becoming a merely practical way of dealing with technical, military and medical problems, rather than a progressive project with the potential to transform and transcend our current existence in unexpected ways. Ironically, many of the current attempts to bring science closer to our lives are exactly of this practical and applied form. For example, in the teaching of science at school the stress is now on the practical problems that can be solved by scientific approaches, rather than scientific fields being considered as having value in themselves. This is precisely the kind of science which is merely servile, a solicitor of new means to accomplish old wants. This role is a far cry from the image of science as the very project that has taught us more about the world and ourselves in the last 200 years than everything put together before that. It is interest in science itself that

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brought about the vast changes in our views of the Universe and our origins. It is also this big picture which would provide the source for new preference structures and new wants. To conclude, while current science has become very good at developing knowledge, it has neglected the accompanying religious enterprise, linking these new facts to new, inspiring and appropriate beliefs about ourselves. This neglect has the consequence that this cultural niche is now being filled by various other sources, and there is a potential risk that in the long run science may undercut its own cultural backing. In Summary This chapter aimed to highlight certain implications of embedded cognition and evolutionary studies of cognition for religion. In particular, it raised the question of why science has not brought an end to religion. The explanation proposed here derives from a general distinction between knowledge and motivation: in addition to knowledge, cognitive systems also require preference structures which organise motivations in a way which uses and builds on available knowledge. As a consequence, religion can be cast as a cultural phenomenon which serves a clear cognitive function: we not only need the knowledge provided by science, but our cognitive system also needs ways to relate and bind such knowledge to our motivations. Meaning must be made meaningful to the cognitive system, and religion seems to be the way in which this is achieved at a very general, existential level. In this view, religion becomes something that we cannot do without. At the same time, religion might take forms that are very different from historical religious traditions and may not necessarily involve any reference to the supernatural. Thus, science and religion not only complement rather than mutually exclude one another, but they also ought to remain closely connected if they are to fulfil their respective roles. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Tanny Dobbelaar, Theo Kuipers, Allard Tamminga, the members of the Groningen Theoretical Philosophy Colloquium and the participants of the International Workshop on Religion and Cognition for their helpful comments. This paper was written with support from NWO grant 016.038.301.

THE WONDERING BRAIN DREAMING, RELIGION AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Kelly Bulkeley Introduction My approach to the emerging dialogue between religion and cognitive science is coloured in part by my concern for the uncertain future of the academic field in which I was trained, namely religion and psychological studies. This field was originally fuelled by the early twentieth-century depth psychologies of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and William James, but in recent years it seems to have lost its intellectual steam. In an effort to rekindle the creative fires, some of my colleagues have argued that a revised version of Freudian, Jungian and/or Jamesian psychology is the best conceptual tool for new research. Others have turned to anthropology and cultural psychology as the most promising paths to follow. Still others advocate greater use of poststructuralist critique in rethinking what we mean by Western academic categories such as ‘religion’ and ‘psychology’. Much as I appreciate each of these approaches, I do not believe they are sufficient to rejuvenate the field of religion and psychology and lead it towards a more fruitful and prosperous future. The problem is certainly not lack of data. We are swimming in data regarding both human religiosity and the nature and functioning of the human mind, and more information is pouring in all the time. No, the challenge is not just gathering more facts. Instead, the challenge is to develop conceptually clear, pragmatically useful frameworks that are adequate to the facts in all their complexity. The future prosperity of religion and psychology depends on researchers expanding their disciplinary perspectives, integrating the widest possible range of data, and creating conceptual models that are open and flexible towards new findings and phenomena. In that context, I find cognitive science to be a promising resource. The remarkable discoveries made in recent years regarding the evolved functioning of the brain-mind system make two potentially huge contributions to the study of religion. First, cognitive science provides a wealth of new information about the dynamic processes involved in memory, language, perception, rationality and imagination – all topics of central concern to almost anyone interested in religion. Second, cognitive science

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provides a variety of systematic, empirically grounded methods of analysis that can and should be more broadly applied in the study of religion. By incorporating (after due reflection and critique) both the conceptual knowledge and methodological practices of cognitive science, those of us who study religion from a psychological perspective may find a new way forward. Freud, Jung and James would, I suspect, heartily approve. Wonder Most of the research so far in applying cognitive science to religion has focused on topics such as ritual performances, positive emotions, beliefs about the soul and the afterlife, categorisations of sacred and profane, contemplative practices and the cultural epidemiology of how religious beliefs are transmitted from person to person. The work I will share in this chapter is relevant to several of these topics but synonymous with none. My theme here is wonder. Wonder as a positive emotion, wonder as a religious or spiritual experience generated by contemplative practice, wonder as a natural product of certain patterns of brain-mind activation – this is a phenomenon that is ideally suited for exploration using the twin resources of religious studies and cognitive science. Wonder, as I understand the term, is the emotion excited by an encounter with something novel and unexpected, something that strikes a person as intensely powerful, real, true and/or beautiful.1 As discussed in my book on the subject, experiences of wonder have had a significant impact on many of the world’s religious, spiritual and philosophical traditions.2 Wonder occurs with remarkable regularity in the realms of dreaming and visionary experience, sexual desire, aesthetic experience, both visual and auditory, and contemplative practice. To feel wonder in any of these arenas is to experience a sudden decentring of the self. Facing something surprisingly new and unexpectedly powerful, one’s ordinary sense of personal identity (the psychoanalytic ego) is dramatically altered, leading to new knowledge and understanding that ultimately recentres the self. An appreciation of this de1

My usage derives from The Oxford English Dictionary, which gives as the first major definition of wonder ‘something that causes astonishment’, and the second as ‘the emotion excited by the perception of something novel and unexpected, or inexplicable; astonishment mingled with perplexity or bewildered curiosity. Also, the state of mind in which this emotion exists’. According to John Ayto’s Dictionary of World Origins, ‘Wonder is something of a mystery word. It is widespread in the Germanic languages (German wunder, Dutch wonder, Swedish undran, and Danish undren), but its ultimate ancestry is unknown’. 2 K. Bulkeley, The Wondering Brain: Thinking About Religion With and Beyond Cognitive Neuroscience.

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centring and recentring process led Socrates to make the famous claim in the Theatetus that a ‘sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin’.3 The psychospiritual impact of wonder is evident in both the intense memorability of the experiences and the strong bodily sensations that often accompany them. People speak of being stunned, dazed, breathtaken, overwhelmed, consumed, astonished – all gesturing towards a mode of experience that exceeds ordinary language and thought and yet inspires a yearning to explore, understand and learn. This is where the noun ‘wonder’ transforms into the verb ‘to wonder’, when the powerful emotional experience stimulates curiosity and knowledge-seeking behaviour. If we grant the connection between wonder and various aspects of human religiosity, an opening immediately presents itself to cognitive science, because wonder as an emotion may be understood in terms of distinctive, unusually intensified modes of brain-mind activation. This is the opening I wish to explore. Based on current cognitive scientific research, what can we say about the activity of the brain-mind system during experiences of wonder? Wonder and Dreaming A particularly good source of evidence for exploring wonder comes from research on dreaming.4 Dreaming is a naturally occurring, species-wide phenomenon that has much to recommend it as a resource for comparative research. In this chapter I want to argue two related points: first, that dreaming provokes experiences of wonder as a natural consequence of the rhythms of brain-mind activity during the sleep cycle; and second, that these wonder-filled dreams are a primal wellspring of religious and spiritual experience. Let me begin by outlining three key findings of sleep and dream research over the past several decades. 1. REM does not equal dreaming. From the earliest investigations of REM sleep, the widespread assumption has been that REM is dreaming. Initial results, gathered from subjects sleeping in a laboratory setting while attached to an EEG, indicated that people awakened during REM usually remembered a dream, while awakenings from NREM produced little or no dream recall. Later research muddied the picture somewhat, with evidence that a) REM is not always accompanied by the recall of a dream and 3 4

Plato, Theaetetus, p. 860. K. Bulkeley, The Wilderness of Dreams and Dreaming in the World’s Religions.

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b) dreamlike mental activity may be recalled from many stages of sleep other than REM, especially from NREM stage 2 towards the end of the sleep cycle. Current estimates put recall from REM awakenings at 80 percent, and recall from NREM awakenings at 43 percent.5 At present, the best we can say is that REM seems to be the part of the sleep cycle most reliably connected to dream recall, even though the human brain-mind system seems to be dreaming in some way or other throughout the sleep cycle. In a very real sense we are dreaming all night long.6 2. Dreaming-Waking Continuity. Despite the common assumption that dream content is bizarre and unintelligible, numerous studies have shown that dreams are in fact meaningfully structured by the thoughts, feelings and activities of the individual in waking life.7 Humans generally dream about people they know, in familiar places, engaged in ordinary activities. Dream content is in many ways continuous with waking life, providing an accurate reflection of people’s primary social relationships and emotional concerns. This research is significant because it refutes the idea (fashionable in some scientific circles) that dreams are simply random neural nonsense, the products of deficient mental functioning with no meaningful structure whatsoever. It also refutes a simplistic Freudian notion that the manifest content of dreams is a useless shell, and it undercuts any simplistic Jungian claim that all dreams are compensations for the imbalances of the waking psyche. Now that we have a more systematic and detailed knowledge of actual dream content than was possessed by Freud or Jung, we can see how thoroughly dreaming is intertwined with a person’s thoughts, feelings and activities in waking life. Dreaming is poorly understood if it is regarded as deficient or degraded as compared to waking consciousness. It is better to view dreaming simply as a different but related mode of brain-mind activation, with its own characteristic properties, constraints and functionality.8 3. The Impact of ‘Big Dreams’. Some of the best insights into the distinctive qualities of dreaming consciousness come from the study of so-called ‘big 5

T. Nielsen, ‘Cognition in REM and NREM Sleep: A Review and Possible Reconciliation of Two Models of Sleep Mentation’. 6 See E. Aserinsky and N. Kleitman, ‘Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena, during Sleep’ and ‘Two Types of Ocular Motility Occurring During Sleep’; M. H. Kryger, Th. Roth and W. C. Dement, Principles and Practices of Sleep Medicine. 7 G. W. Domhoff, Finding Meaning in Dreams and The Scientific Study of Dreams; C. Hall and R. Van de Castle, The Content Analysis of Dreams; C. Hall, The Meaning of Dreams. 8 A. Moffitt, M. Kramer and R. Hoffmann, The Functions of Dreaming.

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dreams’. Combining unusually vivid imagery, extreme emotional arousal and strong physiological carry-over effects, such dreams are widely reported in both historical and contemporary contexts. In recent years a handful of psychological researchers have done important investigative work on what they variously term ‘intensified dreams’,9 ‘impactful dreams’,10 ‘highly significant dreams’,11 ‘apex dreaming’,12 and ‘extraordinary dreams’,13 all in some way following the ‘big dreams’ of Jung.14 These studies, while different in focus and approach, point in the same basic direction, showing that highly memorable dreams offer a promising means of discovering the deeper functionality and purposefulness of dreaming as a whole. Two widely reported types of ‘big dream’ have to do with flying and visitations from the dead. The former involve flying or floating under one’s own power, defying the laws of gravity. The latter involve someone who is dead appearing alive, defying the laws of biology. Flying and visitation dreams are regularly described in terms of wonder – a mingling of surprise, amazement, intense mindfulness and hyperrealism, with a strong and lasting impression on waking awareness. Such dreams tend to be rare in the general nature of dream content, but they are unusually intense and exceptionably memorable when they do occur. Large numbers of people have experienced one or the other at some point in their lives and can still remember the dream quite clearly whenever prompted. Other types of big dreaming (perhaps we should consider calling them prototypical dreams, in Eleanor Rosch’s sense of that term)15 also elicit feelings of wonder with notable frequency. Dreams of tremendous beauty, dreams of a mystical encounter with a god, spirit, or angel, dreams of ‘lucidity’ or metacognitive awareness – these too are rare in frequency of occurrence, yet they have an extraordinary impact on people’s minds and they naturally occur to large portions of every population that Western researchers have studied. Whatever influence the cultural environment may have on the content and frequency of people’s dream recall, the evidence from cognitive science is showing very clearly an innate human predisposition to generate certain prototypical dream forms, which in turn become spontaneous occasions for deeply felt, longremembered feelings of wonder. 9

H. Hunt, The Multiplicity of Dreams. D. Kuiken and Sh. Sikora, ‘The Impact of Dreams on Waking Thoughts and Feelings’. 11 R. Knudson, ‘Significant Dreams: Bizarre or Beautiful?’. 12 Nielsen, ‘Cognition in REM and NREM Sleep’. 13 S. Krippner, F. Bogzaran and A. P. de Carvalho, Extraordinary Dreams and How to Work with Them. 14 C. G. Jung, Dreams. 15 E. H. Rosch, ‘Natural Categories’. 10

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Wonder, Dreaming and Religion If anything deserves to be considered a universal feature of religion, it should probably be dreaming. This is not the place to document the full extent of the multiple roles of dreaming in the world’s religions, but two highlights can be mentioned to illuminate several important aspects of the phenomenology of dreaming wonder. First, there is the dream as theophany. Jacob’s dream of the heavenly ladder is the classic Biblical example. It comes in Genesis 28, after Jacob has tricked his blind father Isaac into giving him the blessing that should have gone to his older brother, Esau. Enraged at this trickery, Esau makes a vow to kill Jacob. However, their mother, Rebekah, overhears Esau, and she arranges for Jacob to visit relatives in a distant village, giving him the opportunity to escape before his brother can find and murder him. So away Jacob goes, away from his home in Beersheeba, out into the wilderness. One night during his solitary journey through the deserts of ancient Canaan, Jacob lay down, placed a stone under his head for a pillow, and went to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your descendents; and your descendents shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and by you and your descendents shall all the families of the earth bless themselves. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done that of which I have spoken to you.16

Jacob awoke from the dream filled with wonder, surprise and fear. ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I did not know it’, he says to himself. ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven’. At a time of deep personal uncertainty, with his life in danger and his future totally unknown, an overwhelming dream vision appears to him, with the reassuring words of God to soothe his fears and rouse his procreative energies. Whether or not there was really a man named Jacob who actually had this dream, we can recognise in this text an early awareness of the wonder-working power of dreaming.17 16 17

Genesis 28:12-15. Revised Standard Version. For more on the interpretation of dreams in literary texts, see C. Schreier Rup-

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Second, there is dreaming itself as an occasion for metaphysical wonder. The classic Chinese example of this is the early Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s playful, multilayered poetic text known as the ‘Inner Chapters’, in which the experience of dreaming is discussed as a natural means of realising one’s innate spiritual freedom: Long ago, a certain Zhuangzi dreamt he was a butterfly—a butterfly fluttering here and there on a whim, happy and carefree, knowing nothing of Zhuangzi. Then all of a sudden he woke up to find that he was, beyond all doubt, Zhuangzi. Who knows if it was Zhuangzi dreaming a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming Zhuangzi? Zhuangzi and butterfly: clearly there’s a difference. This is called the transformation of things.18

To dream of a butterfly is, of course, to imagine a life of flying, a life of freedom from gravity and blissful ignorance of all things human. Zhuangzi’s evocation of such a happy dream feeling grows out of his intuitive recognition of the experiential power of people’s actual dreams of flying. To this widely experienced and deeply felt dream theme, Zhuangzi adds the specific figure of the butterfly, a creature whose life cycle involves a radical transformation of physical structure, from larva to chrysalis to butterfly. Dreaming of this particular creature not only means the power to fly, it means the experience of transformation itself, life moving effortlessly from one mode of being to another, the Dao made manifest. The ultimate awakening leads beyond the question human-or-butterfly to a joyful surrender to the eternal flow of dreaming and waking, reality and unreality, living and dying. Such historical and cross-cultural references could be multiplied many times over, but those are enough, I hope, for readers to accept the basic idea that a capacity for intensified, wonder-provoking dreaming is a widespread religious and spiritual phenomenon. Wonder, Dreaming and Neuroscience A great deal of work has been done recently on the neuroscience of sleep and dreaming. Although many mysteries remain about their ultimate nature, we now have a better understanding than ever before of what happens in the brain-mind system when humans go to sleep and dream. This new scientific knowledge indicates that the reports of wonder-provoking dreams from various religious traditions are plausibly real (though never finally verifiable) precht, The Dream and the Text. C. Tzu, The Inner Chapters, pp. 34-35.

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experiences grounded in well-understood neuropsychological processes. The details become somewhat technical, but I believe it is crucial for religious studies scholars to recognise the significance of the latest findings in this area. Perhaps the most surprising finding in the early years of research on REM and NREM sleep was the intensity of activation in the brain during REM. Contrary to expectations that sleep was a time of quiescence, researchers found that in fact the brain is designed to engage in a cyclical pattern of highly complex and dynamic activities, whose intensity is often greater than that of brain functioning during wakefulness. ‘If we were not able to observe that a subject is behaviourally awake in the first case and sleeping in the second, the EEG alone would not be capable of indicating whether the subject is awake or [in REM sleep]’.19 Much of this intense neural activity can be attributed to the phasic discharge of PGO (pontogeniculo-occipatal) waves that spread throughout the brain. ‘PGO waves represent unbridled brain-cell electricity. “Brain-stem lightning bolts” is hyperbolic but to the point’.20 One of the most influential neuroscientific theories regarding the relationship between REM sleep and dreaming comes from J. Allan Hobson, whose Activation-Synthesis model portrays an essentially unidirectional, bottom-up process of dream formation.21 In this view dreaming is ‘activated’ by the neurochemical processes of REM sleep originating in the brainstem (a relatively primitive part of the brain) that, as an accidental byproduct, lead to the activation of random sensations, images and memories in the sleeping mind. These arbitrary bits of mental content are ‘synthesised’ by higher mental functions in the forebrain (a relatively new part of the brain) that struggle to make sense of them, leading to the imposition of meaning on what is fundamentally nonsensical material. As Hobson and McCarley say in their 1977 paper, ‘[T]he forebrain may be making the best of a bad job in producing even partially coherent dream imagery from the relatively noisy signals sent up to it from the brain stem’.22 We have already noted research on the occurrence of dreaming in NREM sleep, so there is good reason to be suspicious of Hobson’s strong physicalist reductionism on that score alone. More recently, the ActivationSynthesis model has been challenged by Mark Solms, a psychoanalytically trained clinical neurologist at London Hospital Medical College who stud19

J. A. Hobson, The Dreaming Brain: How the Brain Creates both the Sense and Nonsense of Dreams. 20 J. A. Hobson, Dreaming and Delirium: How The Brain Goes Out of Its Mind. 21 First articulated in J. A. Hobson and R. McCarley, ‘The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process’. 22 Hobson and McCarley, p. 1347.

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ied the dreams of 361 patients suffering a variety of brain lesions.23 Solms found that almost all of the patients suffered one of four distinct ‘syndromes’ or patterns of disrupted dreaming.24 Based on his analysis of these syndromes in relation to localisation of brain damage, Solms proposed a model of the normal dream process in which several particular brain regions make functional contributions: basal forebrain pathways, which contribute ‘a factor of appetitive interest’ in terms of curiosity, exploration and expectation; the medial occipito-temporal structures, which contribute visual representability; the inferior parietal region, which contributes spatial cognition; the frontal-limbic region, which adds ‘a factor of mental selectivity’ in separating dreaming from waking (damage to this region leads to realitymonitoring problems in waking); and temporal-limbic structures, which contribute ‘a factor of affective arousal’ and may, in their seizure-like behaviour during sleep, be the ultimate source of dream generation.25 Solms claims his neuropsychological findings refute Hobson’s ActivationSynthesis theory: [T]he neural mechanisms that produce REM are neither necessary nor sufficient for the conscious experience of dreaming. (...) [N]ormal dreaming is impossible without the active contribution of some of the highest regulatory and inhibitory mechanisms of the mind. These conclusions cast doubt on the prevalent notion – based on simple generalizations from the mechanism of REM sleep – that ‘the primary motivating force for dreaming is not psychological but physiological’. If psychological forces are equated with higher cortical functions, it is difficult to reconcile the notion that dreams are random physiological events generated by primitive brainstem mechanisms, with our observation that global anoneira [total loss of dreaming] is associated not with brainstem lesions resulting in basic arousal disorders, but rather with parietal and frontal lesions resulting in spatial-symbolic and motivational-inhibitory disorders. These observations suggest that dreams are both generated and represented by some of the highest mental mechanisms.26

Solms’ findings are significant not just for dreaming, but for the study of the human imagination more generally. Solms has identified a double disso23

Mark Solms, The Neuropsychology of Dreams. These are ‘global anoneira’, a total loss of dreaming; ‘visual anoneira’, cessation or restriction of visual dream imagery; ‘anoneirgnosis’, increased frequency and vivacity of dreaming, with confusion between dreaming and reality; and ‘recurring nightmares’, an increase in the frequency and intensity of emotionally disturbing dreams. 25 Solms, The Neuropsychology of Dreams, pp. 239-244. 26 Ibid., pp. 153, 241-242, italics in original. 24

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ciation between primary visual processing in the brain (i.e., the neural systems that receive the initial perceptual signals from the eyes) and the experience of visual dreaming. People with damage to the primary visual processing area of the brain continue to have dreams with normal visual imagery, while people with damage to other brain areas can lose all visual dreaming, even though their primary visual processing area remains healthy. Thus blind people regularly experience visual dreams, while people whose external eyesight is fine may have no visual experience in their dreams. Although Solms (a diehard psychoanalyst) does not put it in these terms, his findings suggest that imagery is not the same as imagination. He also found that normal visual dreaming is relatively independent from the executive systems of the prefrontal cortex (suspending our ordinary sense of volition and conscious identity) and is also independent from the REMgenerating processes of the brainstem. The key neural regions, he found, were those involved in secondary visual processing and multi-sensory association, along with limbic systems responsible for emotional arousal and instinctual responses. Autonomous Visionary Capacity Drawing all these findings together, we begin to understand that humans are born not only with tremendous powers of external visual perception, but also with an autonomous visionary capacity capable of creating a seemingly limitless variety of vividly realistic scenarios. This visionary capacity is part and parcel of the dreaming process, and it enables the kind of wonderprovoking experiences so widely reported in the world’s religious traditions in both sleeping and waking. According to the research of Solms and others,27 the capacity for spontaneous emergences of intense imaginal experience appears to be a natural feature of the human brain-mind system. This insight opens up a vast realm of inquiry. Visual experience is a central feature in nearly all religious and spiritual traditions – think of neolithic cave paintings, Tibetan Buddhist mandalas, Christian stained-glass windows, Native American vision quests. Each case displays an effort to stimulate a visually mediated religious experience of wonder, which correlates with the intensified activation of what I have been calling the autonomous visionary capacity. When other sensory perceptions are filtered out, and when the mind is focused on specific patterns, images and colours, what seems to happen is that the neural system responsible for the imagina-

27

A. R. Braun et al., ‘Regional Cerebral Blood Flow Throughout the Sleep-Wake Cycle’.

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tion comes to life and begins to generate a wonder-working stream of spontaneous visionary experience. Of course, religious traditions always have their ideological interests that influence what should and should not be seen in such experiences. However, critical attention to those interests should not obscure our appreciation for the unpredictable, surprising and sometimes frightening independence of this visionary capacity. Even in traditions that advocate transcending all visual perception (e.g., Buddhism), the experience of spontaneous dreams and visions continues to be a vibrant source of wonder in people’s actual religious lives.28 Conclusion This chapter has advanced two arguments: 1) dreaming provokes experiences of wonder as a natural consequence of the rhythms of brain-mind activity during the sleep cycle, and 2) these wonder-filled dreams are a primal wellspring of religious and spiritual experience. I believe the empirical evidence from cognitive science and religious studies is overwhelmingly in favour of both these claims, even if we still do not have a satisfactory explanation for the ultimate cause of human dreaming. Although many religious traditions teach that dreams are sent by divine beings, I see more scientific merit in approaching dreaming as a self-organising process in which complex meanings spontaneously emerge without the involvement of any external, supernatural agent.29 Such a view prompts the testable hypothesis that experiences of dreaming wonder represent signals of this self-organising process in motion, that is, the consciously felt components of a healthily functioning brain-mind system. Much more research needs to be done to clarify and validate this hypothesis, particularly its implications for understanding religious experience, and my hope is that investigators from both cognitive science and religious studies will contribute their insights towards that goal.

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Serinity Young, Dreaming in the Lotus: Buddhist Dream Narrative, Imagery, and Practice. 29 David Kahn, ‘From Chaos to Self-Organization: The Brain, Dreaming, and Religious Experience’.

PART III MIND AND RELIGION THROUGH THE AGES

COGNITIVE ANALYSIS OF FAITH AND CHRISTOLOGICAL CHANGE CONTRIBUTION TO A PSYCHOLOGY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN RELIGION

Gerd Theissen In relation to the plausibility of religious beliefs, we find two opposing traditions in European Christian theology: credo ut intelligam, the motto of all who have attempted to develop a rational hermeneutics of faith, and credo quia absurdum est, the motto of those who have advocated the paradoxicality of faith.1 These contradictory positions are perhaps not strict alternatives. Religious faith is both plausible and paradoxical. The contemporary cognitive approach in religious studies leads to such a possibility.2 According to this approach, at the centre of religion there are ‘counterintuitive ideas’ which violate ontological domains. These ontological domains correspond to categories represented in the human mind such as persons, artefacts, animals, inanimate objects and plants. These categories are universal ‘innate’ ideas within our minds and corresponding physiological processes in our brains and result from a long evolution.3 Religious concepts violate this ontology. In our innate ontology, the category of ‘person’ creates expectations about human beings. However, many religions speak of persons who are not human beings at all, but angels with wings like birds, or devils with tails like animals – both also having qualities that mean they can act independently of a material body. They are present at different places and can cross borders between heaven and earth, earth and underworld. These 1

‘I believe so that I can understand’ and ‘I believe because it is absurd’, respectively. The second statement is often attributed to Tertullian, but there is no evidence for this attribution. Cf. Mühling-Schlapkohl, ‘Paradox’. 2 A survey is given by Geertz, ‘Cognitive Approaches to the study of Religion’. The first attempts to introduce a cognitive approach to New Testament studies were: Czachesz, ‘The Transmission of Early Christian Thought, Toward a Cognitive Psychological Model’; Idem, ‘The Gospels and Cognitive Science’; Theissen, ‘Theory of Primitive Christian Religion and New Testament Theology’. 3 Boyer, Religion Explained. The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought; Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works. Towards a New Cognitive Science of Religion.

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very strange representations of angels and devils are at the same time intuitively plausible for those who believe in them. If we apply the category ‘person’ to such ‘culturally postulated superhuman agents’, we spontaneously attribute certain characteristics to them, such as intentionality or the ability to move from one place to another or to notice something and to feel emotions. If, for example, angels and demons exist, we can be certain that angels are able to speak and there is also no doubt that devils are able to curse. Religious ideas mix violations of our intuitive ontology with traits derived from this very ontology. Both parts of this mixture have specific functions. Counterintuitive ideas attract much more attention than plausible phenomena and have a much greater chance of being transmitted and thus surviving. Similarly to certain biological traits in the evolution of a species, counterintuitiveness is an evolutionary advantage in the evolution of cultural ideas; in the struggle for survival which also takes place among ideas. Those ideas survive that attract attention, invade our long-term memory and are able to be transmitted to other people and future generations. The attractiveness of ideas depends on a general rule: a story about a dog that bites a postman does not arouse attention, while a story about a postman who bites a dog does. Nevertheless, the latter story is not yet counterintuitive, unless we attribute anthropomorphic characteristics to the dog, for example the ability to speak or laugh. The story becomes counterintuitive in a technical sense, for example, if we explain the human emotions of the dog and the dog-like behaviour of the postman in terms of a ‘myth’ that the soul of a dog is reincarnated in the body of a postman. A postman biting a dog is, in itself, only an improbable story, because it does not contradict our intuitive ontology, which allows that human beings bite something or somebody. However, a postman with the soul of a dog is certainly a counterintuitive story, crossing the border between the ontological categories ‘animal’ and ‘human person’. Only in such a case does the story violate the ontological border between persons and animals. Therefore we must distinguish between paradoxicality and counterintuiveness. Both increase attention and facilitate the transmission of an idea from one person to another or from one generation to the next. The story is retold. The logic of credo quia absurdum – be it based on paradoxicality or counterintuitiveness – has an attractive and propagandistic function. Intuitiveness, in turn, supports the internalisation and appropriation of an idea by an individual. Something is intuitive because it corresponds to the inferential system in our minds that enables us to structure our experience according to our ontology. There is no doubt that we apply our ‘theory of mind’ to angels and demons. However, we must also supplement the theory of spirits as counterin-

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tuitive persons. Concepts of angels, demons and gods are not exclusively based on counterintuitive violations of our ontology; they correspond to our intuitive convictions in two respects. First, they correspond to a category of mind that we can call ‘eternity’. Inanimate objects and plants, persons, artefacts and animals perish. Transitoriness belongs to our a priori expectations. This implies that eternity, the opposite category to transitoriness, also belongs to our universal categories. Even if we say that angels, demons and gods once originated in primordial times, we do not say that they will eventually perish. Insofar as we apply the innate category of eternity to them and attribute eternal life to them, they correspond to an intuitive ontology. Second, people also derive evidence for the belief in angels and demons from experience. The light phenomena in near-death experiences are interpreted as angels.4 The same is true of appearances comparable to such light phenomena in life crises.5 The belief in demons also has empirical points of reference: pathological disturbances and negative near-death experiences. Anthropomorphic perception provides an ‘empirical basis’ for the belief in transhuman persons: we interpret ambiguities in the world as expressions of a personal intention, we see shadows as people and hear sounds as signals. If these interpretations are right, they are crucial for coping with the situation, and if not, they are relatively harmless.6 Some representatives of the cognitive approach to religion underrate the foundations that religion gains from such experiences and other kinds of encounter with our environment. According to these scholars, the intuitiveness that surrounds religious ideas with an aura of plausibility is primarily due to the correspondence of these ideas to our internal cognitive system. At all events, plausibility, whether based on innate cognitive structures or on religious experience, is the basis of the credo ut intelligam perspective. Can this cognitive approach be applied to Early Christian faith? We will discuss Early Christian Christology as a test case in this article. One of the many enigmas of the New Testament is a change in the image of Jesus from the outset. The two main figures who shaped Early Christianity, Jesus and Paul, represent quite different thoughts and ideas on God, human beings and on Jesus’ person. Jesus preached in parables and his central message was that God would soon become God in his kingdom, which brings about a reversal of fate. The weak, the poor and the morally deficient would enter 4 Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys. Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times. 5 Cf. the vision of an angel analysed in the Habilitationsschrift of Nestler, Pneuma. Außeralltägliche religiöse Erlebnisse und ihre biographischen Kontexte. 6 Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion; Idem, ‘Why Gods? A Cognitive Theory’.

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God’s kingdom. Paul proclaimed a kerygma (or message) of a divine being, the ‘myth of Christ’, as it used to be called in earlier scholarship. The incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is for Paul the basis of a transformation of human beings and of a more spiritual reversal of fate, in which the sinners are justified, human existence is renewed and the despised are elected. It is true that there is continuity from Jesus to Paul concerning the conviction that a reversal of life and values takes place, but there is also a remarkable discontinuity, consisting of an increase in paradoxicality and counterintuitiveness, as I will show in this article, something of which Paul is quite aware. He states that his proclamation of the Cross is provocative foolishness, but that God decided to save the world by this very foolishness (1 Cor 1:18ff). It was precisely this foolish proclamation that was a success in the Gentile world. Paul’s mission among Gentiles attracted more people to the new religion than the mission within Judaism (as he emphasises in Rom 11:11-12), and it prepared the conversion of the Roman world to Christianity three centuries later. Our problem is therefore: is there a connection between the increased paradoxicality of Paul’s proclamation and the success of his message? Could the specific Pauline Christology be explained by the fact that religious ideas contain a mixture of ‘counterintuitiveness’ and ‘intuitiveness’? If counterintuitiveness improves the dissemination of religious (and other) ideas, it would be an understandable paradox that the increase in paradoxicality in Paul’s message correlates with an increase in his missionary success. Or are there other psychological factors and functions that explain this increase in paradoxicality and counterintuitiveness? Such a psychological discussion of basic theological change and historical development at the beginning of Early Christianity goes against the grain of historical and exegetical traditions in New Testament studies. The reluctance of scholarship vis-à-vis psychology is understandable. Psychological interpretations of biblical literature have not yet become established in the academic community. However, rejecting them is no more satisfying.7 It is the cognitive turn in psychology that has provided the opportunity to pursue a solid historical psychology of religion. There have been two cognitive turns in psychology in the last decades, the first occurring in the 1970s. Behavioural psychology discovered that ‘internal behaviour’ such as judgements, convictions and ideas were crucial factors in human behaviour. At the same time, psychodynamic approaches emphasised that cognitive 7

Berger, Historische Psychologie des Neuen Testaments; Leiner, Psychologie und Exegese; Ellens and Rollins, Psychology and the Bible; Von Gemünden, ‘Methodische Überlegungen zur historischen Psychologie exemplifiziert am Themenkomplex Trauer’.

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interpretations and symbolic representations shape our drives and motivation. Both developments converged and supported the idea that the interpretations we give to our psychic life are not only referential, but also constitutive for these psychic processes, that is, they form part of them. This cognitive turn was a development within psychology and did not involve neurobiology or neurophysiology. In the wake of this first cognitive turn, I developed the idea that the cognitive interpretations of our psychic processes are preserved in religious (and other) texts. These texts give no immediate access to the psychic processes occurring within the human beings behind or before the text; however, within the texts, we encounter the interpretations that they applied to their emotions, drives and behaviour. Therefore it is possible to interpret religious texts in psychological terms and explore these texts as a gateway to the psychic life of former generations. This was one of the methodological ideas in my book Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology, first published in 1983.8 This book also introduced the idea that the basic interpretative patterns in religion are adaptive patterns which develop by trial and error in a long process of cultural evolution.9 The second cognitive turn in psychology occurred around the turn of the century and was inspired by neurobiology and evolutionary psychology. This new turn supported the idea that the cognitive inferential system within our minds is the result of a long biological evolutionary process. Insofar as religion entails an activation of inferential systems in our mind, it is based on a universal biopsychic heritage. This new cognitive turn also provides a new opportunity for a historical psychology. Psychological interpretations of past texts are always suspected to be anachronistic, running the risk of projecting our own psychic life and psychology onto a distant historical world. However, if religious behaviour and experience is rooted in universal interpretative or inferential systems in our minds,10 we may say that our brains have not changed as rapidly as our culture in the last two or three thousand years. The remoteness of past history therefore does not imply an absolute otherness, but rather an understandable otherness. We are justified in expecting to find analogies to our contemporary experience and behav8

Theissen, Psychologische Aspekte Paulinischer Theologie; Mitternacht, ‘Theissen’s Integration of Psychology and New Testament Studies’. 9 This was my leading idea in another book on biblical faith from an evolutionary perspective. Theissen, Biblischer Glaube in evolutionärer Sicht = Biblical Faith: An Evolutionary Approach. 10 ‘Universality’ has a spatial and a temporal dimension. They belong together. If certain mental features are recurrent across cultures (including very remote native cultures), then we can safely argue that the same features were also present in the ancient Mediterranean cultures 2000 or 3000 years ago.

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iour in the past and are therefore allowed to interpret the past on the basis of analogical understanding. Such understanding does not apply modern theories to premodern texts in a deductive way, but rather uses premodern texts to correct modern theories by applying them to historical phenomena. Yet, one can modify a theory based on what has been learnt from its application to some text only if the text meets the criteria set by the theory, at least in an analogical way. Otherwise one cannot correct the theory by such empirical tests. Therefore we can develop a new historical psychology of religion which aims to describe, classify, understand and explain Early Christian religiosity, as far as possible, in four fields: (1) religious experience, (2) myth and doctrine, (3) rituals and community, (4) ethics and praxis.11 Within these four fields, religious phenomena can be classified as polarities with moderate and extreme variants. Moderate religious phenomena make our everyday world transparent to transcendence; in extreme religious phenomena transcendence breaks into our everyday world.12 The limits of our everyday world are like a curtain hiding another reality. As a rule we can only see the curtain, but by changing our subjective awareness and consciousness13 we may see through the curtain in two complementary ways. Sometimes the curtain seems to be like a transparent haze through which we can look into another world; sometimes the curtain is torn apart and we encounter another reality through these tears and holes. Both kinds of experience deviate from normal consciousness. The religious experience of transparency deviates less from it than the experience of a breakthrough. There is a continuum of different states of consciousness – with everyday experience and deviating experiences at either end of the scale. Of course, different cultures draw the border between moderate and extreme religiosity in different ways. What is normal and moderate religiosity in one culture may be extreme religiosity in another culture or another period. Some examples may illustrate the suggested differentiation within Early Christianity:

11

Theißen, Das Erleben und Verhalten der ersten Christen. Eine Psychologie des Urchristentums. 12 The term ‘extreme’ religiosity is perhaps one-sided. Extreme religiosity is not extremist religiosity. In addition to the polarity ‘moderate–extreme’ one may also use the polarity ‘normal–border-like’ religiosity. 13 This change of attitude was analysed in the Swedish psychology of religion. Cf. Holm, ‘Role theory and religious experiences’.

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Moderate religiosity

Extreme religiosity

Religious Experience

Symbolic perception of the world as God’s creation in parables

Apparitions and visions as the breakthrough of a transcendent reality

Myth and Doctrine

Wisdom which makes the everyday Kerygma (message) which world transparent contradicts the everyday world

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Ritual and Meals sanctified by prayer within Eucharist with symbolic anCommunity the everyday world of a community thropophagi surrounded by mystery Ethics and Praxis

Family life with children and viable norms for average ‘sinners’

Radical asceticism and martyrdom for ‘saints’

This article concentrates on myths and doctrine as cognitive interpretations of religious experience and as presuppositions for such experiences. Therefore myths and other religious concepts can be analysed with the tools of cognitive psychology. I have developed three hypotheses: (1) The kerygma (message) of Paul as it is contained in the hymn in the letter to the Philippians (Phil 2:5-11) is a mixture of counterintuitive ideas and intuitive wisdom. The counterintuitiveness is due to a crossing of ontological borders. Divine beings belong to the sphere of eternity, human beings to the transient world. Insofar as ‘eternity’ and ‘transience’ are ontological categories, incarnation and exaltation are counterintuitive ideas in the technical sense. A divine being becomes a human being and is crucified, and a human being is exalted by God and participates in his divine position. Crossing the border from divinity to the Cross of Golgotha (top-down) above all offends Gentile mentality, because for the Greeks, the gods lived far from the world of mortality, and the Cross was therefore a foolishness to them.14 Crossing the border from the Cross to divinity (bottom-up) above all violates the Jewish mentality. Almighty God could not suffer a defeat, making the cruci14

Universal ontological categories are more or less expressed in cultural systems of thought. The difference between animals and humans was stressed much more in Hellenistic than in Oriental cultures. Cf. Keel, ‘Die Tiere und der Mensch in Daniel 7’.

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fied Messiah a scandal (Greek skandalon) for Jews. However, at the same time both transitions cross universal expectations related to the ontological categories of human beings, eternity and transitoriness, and therefore contain counterintuitive elements. Nevertheless, in this hymn we encounter an intuitive wisdom connected with these counterintuitive elements that I call the axiom of a ‘change of positions’. The idea of a ‘change of positions’ was self-evident for Jewish culture – and potentially also for non-Jews. (2) The range of functions that counterintuitive ideas fulfil is not exhausted by their propagandistic effects. Paradoxical ideas already attract attention. Counterintuitive ideas, which intensify the paradoxicality by crossing ontological borders such as eternity and mortality, have a foundational and legitimising function. Only counterintuitive concepts can describe the divine figures who create the basic structure of life and not merely something within the order of this world and life. I call this the ‘transcendental-poetic’ function of myth – understanding transcendental in a narrow sense, as something that in our minds constitutes ‘the condition of the possibility of something’. (3) As a missionary Paul emphasises the foolishness or paradoxicality of his preaching for the sake of its propagandistic effects. Paul is indeed interested almost exclusively in the counterintuitive aspects of Christology. In spite of the fact that he knows much more about the earthly Jesus, he selects above all those characteristics that demand extreme attention: the paradox of incarnation, ‘the scandal of the Cross’ (Galatians 5:11) and the miracle of resurrection. However, this choice is not only due to the propagandistic effect of his Christology. These counterintuitive events legitimise a new way of life as the beginning of a new world. 1. The myth of Christ: a mixture of plausible wisdom and counterintuitive kerygma In 1 Cor 1:18ff Paul introduces a sharp distinction between wisdom and kerygma. Wisdom is considered a plausible means of interpreting the world in a religious way; the kerygma of the Cross is, by contrast, considered to be a skandalon that contradicts the wisdom of this world. In this way Paul conceptualises the difference between moderate and extreme religiosity. He states that moderate religiosity (that is, wisdom) fails when it is confronted with the actual state of the world and the Cross. Only extreme religiosity

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(that is, the kerygma of the Cross and the Resurrection) can save life and reveal God.15 Furthermore, Paul distinguishes two forms of worldly wisdom. Both Greeks and Jews look for wisdom. Both interpret the cosmos in a way that makes it transparent to God. However, Paul writes, ‘in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom’ (1 Cor 1:21). This may be understood in the following way: the world is enclosed and embedded in wisdom as though in a fabric, because God’s wisdom has created its order and structure. In spite of being surrounded by the wisdom of God, human beings fail to recognise God. Paul rejects such a cosmic piety, which is destroyed by the Cross of Golgotha. The second form of this worldly wisdom concerns Jews only, who demand signs and miracles. Rather than the cosmos and its structure, the history of Israel is the object of their piety. Jews look for and desire the powerful intervention of God in history as well as his final victory. The Crucifixion contradicts these expectations: the Cross is not a victory but a defeat. It is a sign of powerlessness rather than power. The difference between moderate and extreme religiosity is not due to a modern (etic) anachronism, but corresponds to ancient (emic) categories. The difference appears already in the Pauline contradiction between wisdom and kerygma. Paul offers a good summary of his kerygma, the Christ myth, in the Philippians hymn (Phil 2:5ff):16 Jesus Christ, who though he was in the form of God Did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited But emptied himself Taking the form of a slave Being born in human likeness And being found in human form He humbled himself And became obedient to the point of death – even death on a Cross. 15 The Pauline theology of the Cross is interpreted controversially. For some, the centre of this theology is the atoning death of Jesus, for others it is the scandal or the provocative message of the Cross. Both approaches are right. The Cross is both a reduction of disturbances (an abolition of sin which separates God and humanity) and a provocation of disturbances (a radical change of values). Cf. Theissen, ‘Der Tod Jesu als Sühne und Ärgernis. Zwei Deutungen des Todes Jesu bei Paulus’. 16 The literature on this wonderful piece of Early Christian poetry is abundant. A comprehensive survey of the research can be found in Martin, Carmen Christi, Philippians 2:5-11 in Recent Interpretation and in the Setting of Christian Worship. A balanced interpretation is given by Müller, Der Brief des Paulus an die Philipper. The translation of biblical passages follows the New Revised Standard Version.

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Therefore God also highly exalted him And gave him the name that is above every name So that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend In heaven and on earth and under the earth And every tongue should confess That Jesus Christ is Lord – to the glory of God the Father.

We have to ask why paradoxical messages such as the Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection are accepted. What is their function? As I see it, such a myth is a corpus mixtum, or combination of paradoxical kerygma (that is, counterintuitive ideas) and plausible wisdom (that is, intuitive ideas). Counterintuitive ideas in the kerygma of the Cross What is the counterintuitive kerygma in Phil 2:5ff? To begin with, the events which are praised in the hymn violate innate ontological intuitions. Expectations related to the category of human beings are contradicted: a supernatural agent (according to the prevalent view, a counterintuitive concept in itself) experiences a metamorphosis from one kind of being to another, that is, from God to a human being and from a human being to God. Moreover, a human being does not exist before birth and does not live after death. This contradicts our experience and is again counterintuitive. Finally, the idea that personified agents outside the human sphere can make a cosmic confession is also counterintuitive. Language is limited to living human beings. However, here all beings, even those under the earth and in heaven, confess that Jesus is the Lord. The events in Phil 2:5ff clearly violate everyday ontology and at the same time violate basic convictions of both Gentile mentality and Jewish religion. Gentile mentality is provoked by the crucifixion of a god. Gods live beyond the realm of suffering and mortality. They may appear in our world, but they cannot renounce their status as gods. Seneca expresses this idea in his writing on rulership. He tells the young emperor Nero that he cannot renounce his status and that in this regard he resembles the gods: ‘In this lies the servitude of supreme greatness – that it cannot become less great, but you share with the gods that inevitable condition. For even they are held in bondage by heaven, and it is no more lawful for them to leave the heights than it is safe for you; you are nailed to your pinnacle’.17 It seems that 17

Seneca De Clementia 1, 8.3 = III, 6.3. We must distinguish between the appearance of the gods on earth, on the one hand, and incarnation on the other. When Zeus

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Christology provides a counter image to such convictions: God leaves heaven, comes down to the earth and gives up his divine status. The Christology of Phil 2:5ff also violates Jewish monotheism. The name and status of God is transferred to a second being accompanying God, who is adored in a confession. It is true that the idea of a divine being other than God was tolerable in ancient Judaism. ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Logos’ are divine beings that accompany God at the beginning of time, while somebody such as a ‘Son of Man’ was supposed to take over God’s function at the end of time (Dan 7). What actually violated basic Jewish beliefs was the fact that Christians adored a former human being, Jesus of Nazareth, as a divine being alongside God. What was offensive was the fact that a human being was inaugurated as God and adored in a cultic manner.18 In this way the border between God and humanity was transcended in an intolerable way. The wisdom in this kerygma of the Cross However, what is the hidden wisdom within this myth? The hymn corresponds to the scheme of humiliation and exaltation. It is part of general Jewish and Early Christian wisdom to claim: ‘For all who exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted’ (Luke 14:11). Such ideas belonged to Jewish wisdom and to the range of insights that were evident for all inhabitants of Jewish culture. The topic is very well documented.19 Already in the Old Testament we read that God acts according to this axiom: The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Shê'ōl and raises up. The Lord makes poor and makes rich; He brings low, he also exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust. (1 Sam 2:6-8)

This idea of a change of positions contradicts the general code of honour and shame in antiquity. Jews and Christians introduced a new pattern of life appears in human shape, he is not a human being, but remains a god. He is not mortal. When God is incarnated in Jesus Christ he becomes a mortal human being. Moreover, Seneca seems to represent progressive religious convictions that are even sceptical of the appearance of a god on earth. 18 Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism; Idem, Lord Jesus Christ. Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. 19 Guttenberger, Status und Statusverzicht im Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt; Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion [US edition: The Religion of the Earliest Churches: Creating a Symbolic World].

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into the world of antiquity.20 Above all, the idea of humility as a virtue was a Jewish idea. Jews would agree that God humiliates and exalts human beings. However, Jews would reject the idea that God humiliates a second divine being by incarnation and exalts this being after his death in raising him to become a second God in heaven. Only the general basic structure of the events in Phil 2:5ff corresponds to Jewish everyday rules. The application of this basic structure to Christology is specific to the Christian faith. We may generalise these considerations: a myth combines an evident depth structure (a hidden wisdom in the Tiefenstruktur) with a paradoxical surface structure (a manifest kerygma in the Oberflächenstruktur). Counterintuitive events and supernatural agents provide the axiom of a ‘change of position’ with an ultimate foundation. However, this axiom itself is plausible and intuitive. In spite of his condemnation of worldly wisdom, Paul himself says in 1 Cor 1:18ff that there is a higher wisdom of God hidden in the kerygma of the Cross. However, what is the function of this combination of kerygma and hidden wisdom? 2. The function of kerygma and wisdom in the myth of Christ To speak of ‘function’ is to speak of more than the effects of religious phenomena on life. Such effects may be dysfunctional or neither functional nor dysfunctional. A phenomenon is only ‘functional’ in this narrow sense of the term insofar as it contributes to the maintenance of individual or social systems of life. In this regard we should distinguish a cognitive and a social function. The cognitive function concerns the contribution of religious ideas to the interpretation of the world; their social function concerns their effects on interpersonal relationships within a community. I suggest that both intuitive wisdom and counterintuitive kerygma must have had a special function in Early Christianity, but above all the mixture of these contradictory aspects must have been functional for individuals and groups. The function of wisdom in the myth of Christ What is the function of the hidden wisdom in the myth of Christ? To begin with the cognitive function, the axiom of a change of positions interprets world and history. People who have internalised such an axiom are encouraged to maintain hope even in dangerous situations, if they trust in God or in the gods. We come across this idea even in non-Jewish writings. In Xenophon’s Anabasis, the Greeks, who are numerically inferior to their enemy, are encouraged by their general, who claims that the gods are on their side, 20

Dihle, ‘Ethik’, pp. 681-689.

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‘especially since they are in a position quickly to make the great small and to deliver the small, even in a difficult situation, if they so will’.21 The same ‘wisdom’ may guide human behaviour: in contrast to the rulers and the great in the world, the disciples of Jesus are told: ‘But whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all’ (Mark 10:43f). In Christian ethics, social relationships are interpreted in the light of this axiom, which creates a sensitivity to hierarchical structures and an opposition to the hidden inhumanity within repressive hierarchies. The social function is also quite evident: the hymn of Christ in Phil 2 confirms a shared value of Early Christians and Jews, that is, the change of positions within a community. People at the top of the hierarchy must serve those who are weak and low in the hierarchy. The weak and lowly, by contrast, should be exalted. The traditional term ‘humility’ does not cover such a change of positions bottom-up and top-down. Jews and Christians introduced the change of positions as a new value in the ancient world; as part of their identity. However, this axiom is potentially a universal axiom concerning behaviour and interpretation, with there already being some analogies to the idea of a change of positions in the ancient pagan world. The axiom has even survived secularisation and lives on in modern anti-authoritarian traditions, which continue biblical traditions or similar ideas on different grounds. At all events, it is now a basic value within modern European societies. We may generalise that myths express values and axioms that are evident for a community, otherwise they would not be accepted. Myths can portray paradoxical and fantastic events, for as long as they confirm shared values at a deep level they can be extravagant on the surface. However, this does not yet explain why myths base such evident axioms in counterintuitive realities. The function of the paradoxical kerygma of Christ The cognitive approach to religion has developed the hypothesis that counterintuitiveness has the function of disseminating ideas. This is an excellent theory. However, this function of counterintuitiveness does not yet explain everything. It is one thing to listen to a paradoxical story with curiosity and another thing to accept it as part of one’s identity. Remember the story of the postman and the dog! It attracts attention even if it is only a paradoxical event that does not violate a domain of reality. Attracting attention does not 21

Xenophon, Anabasis III, 2.10. We also find a human ideal of a king who limits his power. Cf. Seely, ‘Rulership and Service in Mark 10:41-45’; Wischmeyer, ‘Macht, Herrschaft und Gewalt in den frühjüdischen Schriften’.

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necessarily presuppose a counterintuitive idea. We must therefore look for the special function that counterintuitive ideas have in addition to this limited function which they share with all paradoxical and sensational ideas and stories, though here we should also distinguish the cognitive from the social function. The cognitive function of myths such as Phil 2:5ff is that the axioms of everyday life are legitimised with reference to the divine world. In all cultures there are paradoxical actions that only a god can perform: walking on water, resurrection from death, or changing one’s form through metamorphosis. These paradoxical actions are socially accepted markers of gods, and therefore they create ultimate legitimacy. In this way, the rules of everyday life are founded by agents who do not behave according to these rules but who have the power to create these rules and to change them. Myths have a transcendental-poetic (transzendentalpoetische) function. In the shape of a fantastic story they tell us how the world (that is, the valid rules of our everyday life) was founded by agents who transcended this world and its rules but who had the power to shape its basic structure. Such myths are not stories about events within this world, but foundational stories of creation which provide a framework for all possible events and actions. They are a narrative attempt to communicate the conditions of the possibility of this world. The hymn in Phil 2:5ff tells the story of a god who introduces and legitimises a new basic value: the axiom of changing positions. This becomes important if we compare this myth with our story of the postman. The paradoxical story of a postman attracts attention, but it has no chance of becoming one of the basic stories of a community. Only the ‘mythical’ interpretation of the postman as having the soul of a former dog perhaps provides a sign that something is happening here that concerns human belief about the basic structure of life: the survival of the soul in other bodies. Therefore we must distinguish between the paradoxicality of a story remaining within the same domain of reality – which draws attention to the story for a moment – and the counterintuitiveness of a story, which crosses domains and gives the story a legitimising function. Only this foundational function places a story within the collective memory of a group in the long term. Therefore myths also have a socialpoetic (sozialpoetische) function which concerns both the internal and external relationships of a group. Those people who recount myths claim to have cognitive access to the world of the gods. The shamanistic charismatics legitimised themselves by the excursion of their souls into the realm of gods and demons. The apostle legitimises himself by a narrative excursion into the divine world. He acts as a mediator between two worlds. The myth also concerns external relationships: it expresses the social identity of the

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group. On the one hand, the hymn of Phil 2:5-11 marks the boundary with the world of pagan antiquity, expressing the contradiction between the code of honour and shame in antiquity and the Early Christian kerygma of the Cross and humility. On the other hand, the hymn marks the boundary with Judaism: Christ is a second divine being on the right-hand side of God, who violates strict monotheism. The function of the mixture of wisdom and kerygma Thus far we have discovered both a paradoxical kerygma and a plausible wisdom within the hymn of Phil 2:5ff. Here both are combined in the same text. However, wisdom and myth are often separated to a greater extent: we have sapiential writings and traditions, on the one hand, and mythical and prophetic traditions on the other. Yet we frequently find a mythical background in sapiential writings. The proverbs of Solomon, for example, introduce wisdom as a preexistent figure creating the world (Prov 8). Jesus son of Sirach recounts the myth of wisdom which looks for a home on earth (Sir 23). The books of the prophets not only convey a message from God, but also rationalise and justify their prophet’s message through sapiential reflections. Even Amos inserted such sapiential traditions into his prophetic utterances.22 Here wisdom entails, in my view, a moderate religious interpretation of the world, whereas myth offers an extreme religious interpretation. However, why does this mixture occur in most texts? To understand this we must recognise that there are other counterintuitive ideas besides religious thoughts. A comparison between the two kinds of religious representation will clarify their specific functions:23 (1) Scientific explanations are also counterintuitive ideas. It is counterintuitive to explain biotic life in terms of abiotic processes, or human culture in terms of a precultural evolution. All our experience says that life is generated by former life and that cultural processes depend on cultural learning. Reductionist explanations shift from one domain of ontology to another, and because of this they offer a ‘strong’ explanation, whereas an explanation within the same sphere only provides a ‘weak’ explanation which looks more or less like a description which reduplicates the phenomenon.24 Vitalism explains life in terms of life – and thus ex22

Wolff, Amos geistige Heimat. Pyssiäinen, How Religion Works, pp. 217-225, ‘Distinguishing between religion and other forms of counter-intuitiveness’. 24 Cf. I. Pyssiäinen’s contribution to this volume: within the study of religion, a reductionism that crosses the borders of ontological domains and explains religious phenomena by reducing them to natural factors has much greater explanatory 23

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plains nothing, while expressing a deep reverence for life. Modern biology by contrast explains life in terms of autopoetic processes, as a self-organisation of abiotic matter. The phenomenology of religion explains religion in terms of religion, expressing a deep respect for religion, but it can be argued that the explanations are in fact closer to descriptions. What distinguishes religious ‘explanations’ from scientific is the fact that, for the former, the explanatory causal factors are personal agents. Personal agents have a proprium: they create conceptions of social obligation and value, which no apersonal causal factor can do. Personal agents demand reverence and respect. Mere causal explanations are value free. If we attribute life to a personal agent we feel obliged to maintain and enhance life. This is also true the other way round: if we feel an obligation to maintain and enhance life we spontaneously interpret such an obligation as an encounter with a personal reality which says: You shall not kill! (2) Fictional representations in poetic texts are undoubtedly counterintuitive. All metaphors cross the borders between the various domains (or subdomains) of ontology. Think of poetic statements such as ‘the moon is dreaming’, ‘the heaven desires to embrace the earth’, or ‘nature is complaining’. What is the basis for the difference between such fictional metaphors and religious counterintuitive ideas? To begin with, poetry need not be true, whereas religion claims to be true. Yet poetry is also true in a certain sense. Poetry opens our eyes and hearts to the charm and spell of the world and life. Certainly this truth is a subjective truth. There is no social obligation to share this emotion with others, although we may do so. We are free to accept such experiences or to ignore them. Therefore we should say that fictional texts contain a nonobligatory truth, whereas religious texts convey a committing truth for a social group. Poetry is part of religion, as exemplified by the psalms, the dialogues of Job, the narrative book of Ruth or the parables of Jesus. Fictional metaphors express the emotional and motivational value of a phenomenon – precisely those aspects which scientific explanations neglect. Therefore no religion is without fictional and metaphorical texts. The feeling of obligation and commitment demands a poetic language in religion. (3) Representations of disturbed people are also counterintuitive and more radically counterintuitive than religious and poetic representations. Psychotic people hear the voices of gods and demons. They identify themselves with animals. They often live in a world that looks like a validity than phenomenological approaches that confine themselves to describing religious phenomena, explaining religion in terms of religion.

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private religion, and this is precisely what makes a difference: disturbed representations are idiosyncratic. Others do not share them. They create no social group. However, insofar as such representations are embedded in a religious framework, controlled by this framework and shared by a group, we should be reluctant to say that they are ‘disturbed’. Shamanistic experiences resemble psychotic experiences.25 The soul of the shaman enters into a world inhabited by demons and the shaman suffers all possible demonic attacks and dangers, but they are able to control their experiences and re-enter the common world that they share with others. The controlled ‘alternative state of consciousness’ in shamanism and in other religions is not a pathological phenomenon at all. Religious counterintuitive representations are able to trigger such exceptional states of consciousness,26 and as long as religion enables human beings to control this altered state of consciousness it is not a pathological phenomenon. We can summarise this section as follows: the function of the combination of intuitive wisdom and counterintuitive myth in religious texts such as Phil 2:5ff is that they provide the foundational power of religion. Founding the rules of the world and life in another domain beyond everyday reality is a way of giving a strong ‘explanation’ for them; attributing them to superhuman persons is a way of expressing ultimate motivational commitment; speaking of them in metaphors is a way of doing justice to their emotional value; accepting that religious ideas may be judged as ‘foolishness’ (similar to representations of disturbed persons) is unavoidable because religious representations actually presuppose a deviating ‘altered state of consciousness’. 3. The development of kerygma and wisdom in the myth of Christ Let us now consider whether such an analysis contributes something to the historical problems of early Christology. Jesus and Paul represent different thoughts and ideas on God and human beings. Both sets of ideas are counterintuitive. The pronouncement of the kingdom of God is a counterintuitive idea. In everyday reality, kingdoms are ruled by kings who are human beings. However, Jesus expects a kingdom where God himself rules. This kingdom crosses the border between the human and divine domains. Paul’s message is even more radically counterintuitive: a human being had pos25

Hesse, ‘Schamanismus’. Vollenweider, ‘Außergewöhnliche Bewusstseinszustände und die urchristliche Religion’. 26

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sessed a God-like status, became a human being, but was then exalted again to assume divine status. The pronouncement of Jesus is embedded in the sapiential tradition. His parables and aphorisms are understandable. They are part of wisdom – often providing a moderate religious interpretation of the world. Jesus himself probably interpreted his own person in terms of being a messenger of wisdom, without identifying himself with the personified wisdom. However, Paul presupposes this identification: Jesus himself was the pre-existent wisdom who created the world, who came into this world and was rejected.27 There is no doubt that the degree of counterintuitiveness has increased in Paul. Also, Paul is indeed interested almost exclusively in the counterintuitive aspects of Christology. He knows much more of the earthly Jesus than it seems at first glance. However, he selects above all those characteristics of the Jesus tradition that are counterintuitive: the paradox of Incarnation, the scandal of the Cross and the miracle of Resurrection. It is very tempting to say that this great missionary knows that counterintuitive ideas attract attention. However, a paradoxical story may also attract attention. The story of a Jewish prophet who was crucified because his proclamation created political expectations and unrest is interesting enough, yet this story would not be foundational for non-Jews. However, the story of the incarnate God who has been crucified and is considered the salvation of the world, despite his rejection by the world, says something that may also be understood by the Gentiles as foundational. As I have argued earlier, the propagandistic effects of an idea or a story cannot sufficiently explain their counterintuitiveness. Paradoxicality explains their attractiveness, but many sensational and paradoxical stories disappear and do not enter the collective memory as a foundational story. Only counterintuitiveness explains the validity of a story in the long term, provided that it is combined with intuitiveness. Foundational stories must explain something which we all agree with. The foundational aspect is crucial: the first Christians surrounded the figure of Jesus with a mythical aura because they were convinced that with Jesus a new world had begun – as basic and legitimate as the creation which occurred at the beginning of the world. Jesus had the authority to establish new rules of behaviour, legitimise a new way of life, and found a new world in the midst of the old. We may compare the story of Jesus with the biographies of Plutarch. All these lives of great Greek and Roman figures attract attention, which is why Plutarch records their lives and contrasts Greek figures with comparable Roman figures. However, in only a few cases does he surround his he27

A comprehensive book on wisdom in the Bible is: Von Lips, Weisheitliche Traditionen im Neuen Testament.

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roes with a myth of a miraculous birth. These exceptions are Romulus, the founder of the Roman State, and Alexander, the founder of the Greek Empire (the beginning of the life of Caesar is lost). Romulus and Alexander changed the structure of the world. Therefore we find in their biographies the counterintuitive idea that they are descendants of gods and that their mothers conceived through a god. Plutarch does not say this in order to attract more attention, but in order to explain the extraordinary effects of their lives. They founded new social and political worlds. As we have seen, in Early Christian tradition, myths are blended with wisdom, and extreme religious interpretation with moderate religious thought. In order to understand this mixture we must take into account a difference between moderate and extreme religious interpretations, which operate with different patterns of causal attribution. Extreme religious explanations provide exclusive causal attributions whereas moderate religious explanations provide inclusive causal attributions.28 There are some events, states and phenomena that in a given religion are exclusively attributed to gods or demons: visions and apparitions, near-death experiences, glossolalia, miraculous healings, resurrection and creation ex nihilo. Paul is interested above all in such phenomena when speaking of Christ, his incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection. A secular world may explain even these counterintuitive events in a non-religious way or may not even accept them as existing phenomena, distrusting them as forgeries and confabulations. However, in a religious world they are attributed spontaneously and exclusively to non-human and divine beings. Wisdom, and other phenomena of a moderate religion, on the contrary, may be attributed both to God and to the world of human beings, having a double or a shifting attribution. If a pious man rises in the morning and praises God that the morning is coming with its bright light, he will surely accept that all this can be explained ‘naturally’ within our everyday world. Yet for him the morning is transparent to God’s reality. These moderate religious phenomena with a twofold causal attribution are more important for average religiosity than extreme religious phenomena. However, imagine that we ask people which of the following two sentences is a religious statement: ‘I am grateful that the world is wonderful this morning’ (a statement which may or may not include the thought that the person is grateful to God) or ‘I met in a vision a human-like being with a radiance who seemed not to touch the earth’. All would probably answer that only the second sentence is undoubtedly a religious statement. Yet our 28 For the importance of attribution-theory for the psychology of religion, cf. Spilka,. Shaver and Kilpatrick, ‘A General Attribution Theory for the Psychology of Religion’.

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previous discussion shows that such a conclusion is very one-sided. Therefore I think it is not satisfying to build a theory of religion only on counterintuitive ideas. Religion is thus a mixed entity (corpus mixtum) made up of counterintuitive ideas (or myths) that have an exclusive causal attribution and plausible wisdom that has a changing and double causal attribution. Typical for many religious texts is precisely this changing of conflicting causal attributions. They are not consistent with regard to their logic. However, they have a function: changing causal attributions make a broader spectrum of response and interpretation possible. The famous hymn in the letter to the Philippians is an exemplary religious text which blends both radical counterintuitive representations and an anti-hierarchical ‘wisdom’. Its interpretation must do justice to both aspects. It is not hermeneutically satisfying to say that the mythical framework is only a vehicle for self-evident thoughts about a hierarchical reversal, nor is it satisfying to say that the counterintuitive Christology of humiliation and exaltation is the only content of this hymn. Such texts convey evident rules for life, ascribing them ultimate validity by giving them a foundation in a world which transcends our own.

TOWARDS A COGNITIVE HISTORY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN RITUALS Risto Uro Why rituals? What role did rituals play in the emergence of Early Christian religion?1 How can the history of Early Christianity be explained from the perspective of ritual behaviour? These questions have seldom been raised in New Testament or Early Christian studies,2 although in recent years there has been considerable interest in the social aspects of Early Christianity. It is true that some initial efforts have been made to apply ritual studies to the study of biblical texts.3 These do not, however, change the general picture: scholars do not usually give rituals a significant place in their reconstructions or descriptions of Christian origins.4 1

It does not seem necessary to me to start with a definition of ritual in general or religious ritual in particular. Like many other anthropological terms, ‘ritual’ is not really an analytical category but rather what is usually called a family-resemblance category. It is possible to list general properties of ‘ritualised behaviour’ (e.g., it has no empirical goals and shows compulsion, rigidity, repetition, orderly environment, concern with contamination and cleansing; this list is from Liénard and Boyer, ‘Whence Collective Rituals? A Cultural Selection Model of Ritualized Behavior’; for other lists, see Lewis, Day of Shining Red: An Essay on Understanding Ritual; Grimes, Ritual Criticism, p. 14 and Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, pp. 32-50. One should note, however, that not all these features are shared by all actions that religious people and scholars usually recognise as rituals. Moreover, although important theoretically, the distinction between cultural and religious rituals is not particularly relevant in the world of Early Christianity since most ancient rituals were somehow connected with the activity or presence of superhuman beings. For a strict definition of ‘religious ritual’, see McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind, pp. 13-16. See also the discussion of McCauley and Lawson’s theory below. 2 I am bracketing here the whole field of Early Christian liturgical study since it has had little influence on other branches of Early Christian studies or interaction with ritual studies in general. 3 McVann, ed., Transformations, Passages and Processes: Ritual Approaches to Biblical Texts; DeMaris, ‘Funerals and Baptisms, Ordinary and Otherwise: Ritual Criticism and Corinthian Rites’; Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion. 4 Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, could be seen as one important exception. However, while Hurtado wishes to embrace both

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One may list several reasons for the fact that rituals have been a neglected and underestimated topic. One obvious reason is that the New Testament authors do not very often refer to rituals,5 and whenever they do, they are not very specific. We know precious little about the actual performance of Early Christian rituals, at least when it comes to the New Testament period of Christian history. The evidence needed to undertake a ritual analysis of Early Christian religion seems to be sparse, although not insufficient, as I hope to be able to demonstrate in this article. Moreover, a long and persistent anti-ritualistic tradition, rooted in the Reformation’s emphasis on inner experience and polemics against Judaism and Catholicism, has influenced Protestant biblical scholars.6 Certainly, recent developments in religious studies have created a strong opinion against this tradition and the study of ritual has established itself as an important field with rich theoretical discussions and detailed ethnographic data.7 However, in spite of the few attempts to bring ritual into focus, the major part of biblical scholarship has focused on aspects of Early Christian religion other than ritual, such as myth, history, ethics, doctrines and, more recently, politics. The dismissal of ritual could furthermore be justified by the Early Christian writers’ emphasis on ‘belief’. It has been noted that in the context of the religious cults of antiquity Early Christian rituals were not particularly impressive.8 For one thing, the first Christians did not engage in sacrifice, which was one of the most conspicuous features of both Jewish and Greco-Roman religions.9 Thus, it can be argued that when Early Christian teachers such as Paul placed belief in Christ at the centre of religious identity, they championed a type of religiosity that was rather different from other religious traditions in the Greco-Roman world. Although pistis had been a term for religious piety since Plato, most people thought of religio as

beliefs and practices in his term ‘Christ-devotion’, his focus is more on the development of ideas of Jesus than on the function that rituals themselves played in the formation of Early Christian religion. 5 Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion, p. 119. 6 Gorman, ‘Ritual Studies and Biblical Studies: Assessment of the Past, Prospects for the Future’, pp. 13-36. 7 Grimes, Research in Ritual Studies: A Programmatic Essay and Bibliography; Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions; Salamone, ed., Encyclopedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals. 8 Hurtado, At the Origins of Christian Worship, pp. 40, 54. 9 Stowers, ‘Greeks Who Sacrifice and Those Who Do Not: Toward an Anthropology of Greek Religion’, pp. 293-333.

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the observation of established rites, rather than as a belief in a certain deity.10 Perhaps ritual was not a big thing for Early Christians, after all? I do not think this claim captures the situation of the earliest Christians in general. What matters here, however, is the question of whether ritual behaviour can be used as an analytical tool for understanding and explaining the rise, survival and evolution of the Early Christian movement. At this point I would like to discuss three general considerations which motivate me to pursue the significance of ritual behaviour in the formation of Early Christianity. First, it is largely acknowledged that the Jesus movement somehow emerged out of the movement created by John the Baptist.11 The most established historical fact of John’s activity was his performance of baptisms, which gave rise to his epithet ‘Baptist’ or ‘Immerser’ (Gr. baptistês or baptizôn).12 Ritual washing for the ‘forgiveness of sins’ (Mark 1:4) or ‘consecration of the body’ (Josephus, Ant. 18.117) was a distinctive mark of his ministry. Much has been written about the cultural background of John’s act of baptism.13 Various forms of ritual bathing and washing were widely practised in Second Temple Judaism, and it is clear that John’s rite should be seen in the context of these practices.14 Since the evidence is slight, we should be cautious not to emphasise the uniqueness of John’s act of baptism to a degree that separates it completely from all other Jewish practices.15 Most scholars, however, would agree that there was a great deal of innovation in the ritual immersion performed by John (which of course does not mean that other Jewish groups, such as the Essenes and the Qumran com-

10

Brooten, ‘Is Belief the Center of Religion?’, pp. 471-479. For a classic statement of this view, see Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander Great to Augustine of Hippo, pp. 1-16, esp. 10 (I owe this reference to István Czachesz). 11 Theissen, The First Followers of Jesus, p. 114; Hollenbach, ‘The Conversion of Jesus: From Jesus the Baptizer to Jesus the Healer’, pp. 196-219; Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2, pp. 100-129. 12 Taylor, The Immerser, pp. 49-50. 13 Scobie, John the Baptist; Ernst, Johannes der Täufer; H. Lichtenberger, ‘Täufergemeinden und frühchristliche Täuferpolemik’; Idem, ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and John the Baptist: Reflections on Josephus’ Account of John the Baptist’; Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet; Taylor, The Immerser. 14 Lawrence, Washing in Water. 15 Taylor argues that John’s baptism must be considered ‘in line with other Jewish immersions rather than something wholly unique and distinct’. Taylor, The Immerser, 57. However, she, too, admits that ‘there is no clear parallel in any current Jewish immersion rite for someone acting as an immerser alongside the person who is being immersed in the water’ (ibidem, p. 50).

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munity, were not ritually innovative).16 Jesus probably did not become an active baptiser,17 but his followers quickly adopted John’s baptism rite and turned it into an initiatory rite of their own movement. This development includes a number of historical conundrums that cannot be discussed within the limits of this article. What is important here is that the emergence of these closely intertwined movements was accompanied by a ritual innovation – I will return to this novelty of John’s and the Early Christians’ baptismal practices a little later. The second point that motivates me to pursue the significance of Early Christian rituals is related to the first. Very soon after the death of Jesus, Early Christians performed rites which made their cultic life distinguishable from other cults and religions in the Greco-Roman world. The most important were, of course, baptism and the Eucharist. As for the latter, it must be emphasised again that the historical development from the ‘table fellowship’ of Jesus, shared with his disciples and friends, to the Early Christian Eucharistic meal is in many ways shrouded in uncertainty.18 In any case, Paul’s letters, written two decades after Jesus’ death, clearly indicate that the rites were there, almost from the beginning. People became attached to the movement by means of these rituals, and it is tempting to take ritual as a lens through which to scrutinise the evolution of Early Christian religion. Thirdly, some recent theories of ritual seek to do exactly this, that is, they focus on the role of rituals in the formation and social dynamics of religious movements. I am speaking of the theories developed in the cognitive science of religion. This is a new, multidisciplinary field that emerged during the 1990s, drawing on such fields as cognitive science, cognitive and developmental psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology and anthropology.19 Basically, the cognitive science of religion uses knowledge about the human mind to understand religion. Thanks to the progress made in the above-mentioned fields in the last couple of decades, our knowledge about 16

Although poignant and simplified, Morton Smith’s view of John’s baptism seems basically right: ‘To introduce (...) a new, inexpensive, generally available, divinely authorised rite, effective for the remission of all sins, was John’s great innovation’. Smith, Jesus the Magician, p. 208. 17 Cf., however, the arguments for Jesus’ baptising activity in Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 2, pp. 116-130. 18 See the discussion in Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, pp. 424-444; Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist; Bradshaw, Eucharistic Origins. 19 Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works; Pyysiäinen and Anttonen, eds., Current Approaches in the Cognitive Science of Religion; Boyer, Religion Explained; Tremlin, Minds and Gods; Luomanen, Pyysiäinen and Uro, ‘Introduction: Social and Cognitive Perspectives in the Study of Early Judaism and Christianity’; Barrett, ‘Cognitive Science of Religion.

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the mechanisms or ‘architecture’ of the human mind has grown dramatically. The cognitive science of religion brings together theories from these various fields to explain why many patterns of human thought and behaviour that might be deemed ‘religious’ are cross-culturally recurrent. Religious rituals are, of course, salient examples of such behavioural patterns that tend to have similar forms in cultures from different times and places. Cognitive theories of ritual seek to explain how certain cognitive constraints, such as memory and action representation system, exert selection pressures on all religious systems.20 As will be shown below, cognitive theorists have made the case that these constraints influence the social dynamics and sociopolitical features of religious movements. Later in this study I will provide examples of how cognitive theories of ritual could be used in the analysis of Early Christianity, however, first I will briefly mention some earlier approaches to Early Christian rituals. Approaches to Ritual: Genealogical, Functionalist, Symbolist I have divided the earlier studies into three groups: genealogical, functionalist and symbolist approaches. This division is sketchy and does not do full justice to the approaches of biblical scholars, who often freely combine different research traditions; however, it demonstrates some important trends and interpretative moves in the study of Early Christian rituals. Genealogical approaches. Biblical scholars have always been keen on origin. Source criticism and form criticism concentrate on the issues of literary influence or original form. A good example of the source-critical approach to Early Christian rituals is Hans Lietzmann’s Mass and Lord’s Supper, in which he traces the later Eucharistic liturgies back to two basic archetypes, the agape meal and the Eucharist.21 The members of the history of religions school were fascinated by the influence of Hellenistic-Roman religions and particularly of the mystery cults on Early Christian myth and ritual.22 A preoccupation with issues of ‘borrowing from’ and ‘independence of’ non-Christian religious traditions has exerted a deep influence on the study of the New Testament and Early Christianity.23 Many of the studies carried out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were groundbreaking in the study of Early Christian rituals. The history of religions school did not underestimate the influence of rituals 20

McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind, p. 179. Lietzmann, Mass and Lord’s Supper. 22 See e.g., Reitzenstein, Hellenistic Mystery Religions. 23 Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. 21

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on the formation of Early Christian religion. Wilhelm Bousset, for example, in his Kyrios Christos, emphasised the significance of ritual in the emergence of the ‘Christ cult’ among the early Greek-speaking Christians. 24 For him, this cult was crucial to all later forms of Christianity, although he saw it as a secondary development compared to the primitive Palestinian Christology. Genealogical and source-critical approaches are indispensable aspects of historical investigation. Tracing historical influences, compositions, trajectories and developmental stages is also part and parcel of my own project on Early Christian rituals. One should not, however, overlook the theological undercurrents to the works of the history of religions school of thought, which can be recognised in retrospect.25 The underlying assumption in many of these classic studies is that by tracing a tradition back to its original source or earliest root (literary or oral) one has access to the true meaning of that tradition. Since many of the representatives of the school were philologists, they relied heavily on linguistic details and treated religious traditions as if they were manuscripts deriving from a single ‘autograph’. This autograph could be seen as a kind of pure or uncontaminated beginning (or, vice versa, as a foreign or bad influence). Such genealogical practices run counter to a truly historical understanding of Christian beginnings. Today, scholars of religion increasingly realise that ‘all religions have composite origins and are continually reconstructed through ongoing processes of synthesis and erasure’.26 To cite Karen King, ‘hybridity, not purity, characterises historical processes’.27 Moreover, even if one were able to the trace something like an original source of a tradition/ritual, this source would not explain why it became a tradition/ritual in the first place. Why did it spread among people? Why did 24

Bousset, Kyrios Christos: Geschichte des Christusglaubes von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus, esp. pp. 84-89. The idea of the ‘Christ cult’ was further elaborated by Burton Mack, who sharply distinguished the Christ cult from the Galilean Cynic-type Jesus movement. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins. 25 Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, pp. 206-225, 245-280; Johnson, Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity, pp. 12-26; King, What Is Gnosticism?, pp. 71-109. 26 Stewart and Shaw, ‘Introduction: Problematizing Syncretism’, p. 7. Cited in Martin, ‘Of Religious Syncretism, Comparative Religion and Spiritual Quests’, p. 281. Such criticism is not novel, however. As early as 1913, Johannes Strauss noted that ‘there is no such thing as an “origin” in the sense of an entirely new creation’, but rather ‘the “new” (…) is always in large measure a “regrouping” of older elements’. See Strauss, ‘Das Problem des Enstehung des Christentums’, p. 425-426. English translation from Kümmel, The New Testament, p. 276. 27 King, What Is Gnosticism?, p. 230.

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people keep on repeating it?28 As we will see, these questions are crucial to cognitive approaches to religious traditions, but at this point we will concentrate on answers that come from traditional social-scientific approaches. In recent years, many New Testament scholars have turned to questions concerning the social function of Early Christian traditions. Functionalist approaches. Social-scientific methods, which entered biblical studies in the 1970s, seemed to provide theories and concepts which could deal with issues of social context and function. Many scholars were convinced that ‘the sort of questions to be asked about the Early Christian movement are those about how it worked’.29 New Testament scholars began to read such renowned anthropologists as Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner. However, as noted at the beginning of this article, ritual did not become an important topic in these social-scientific studies on the New Testament and Early Christianity. There are, of course, notable exceptions. Wayne Meeks’ ground-breaking study The First Urban Christians is one of them. Meeks’ book includes a chapter on ritual in Pauline Churches, which discusses baptism and the Lord’s Supper as well as what he calls ‘minor rituals’ (such as prayer, hymns and readings from the Scriptures).30 Not surprisingly, early social-scientific studies on Early Christian ritual often had a clear functionalist orientation or at least a functionalist dimension. Thus, for example, Meeks argues that Paul uses the symbolism of the supper ‘to enhance both internal coherence, unity, and equality of the Christian group’ and ‘to protect its boundaries vis-à-vis other kinds of cultic association’.31 It has been argued that functionalism as a grand theory creates a kind of impasse: if every social phenomenon must serve some positive function to survive and nothing without such a function survives, how can we argue against a functionalist explanation?32 Few, however, would hold such a strong functionalist position. As a matter of fact, Meeks’ statement about Paul’s use of Eucharistic symbolism does not suggest that the ritual always had the same function in real life as Paul wished it to have. In many cases, nevertheless, it makes sense to ask questions about issues such as how a given belief or practice contributes to the group’s functioning.33 It is hardly contestable that communal rituals often provide a kind of glue that keeps 28

Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach; Czachesz, ‘The Transmission of Early Christian Thought’. 29 Meeks, The First Urban Christians, p. 7. 30 Ibidem, pp. 140-163; see also MacDonald, The Pauline Churches. 31 Meeks, The First Urban Christians, p. 160. 32 Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works, p. 67; see also Penner, ‘The Poverty of Functionalism’. 33 Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 29-30.

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the social group together.34 They can do this, according to one recent explanation, by generating common knowledge.35 Moreover, collective rituals are particularly appropriate for demonstrating commitment.36 Symbolist interpretations should not be strictly separated from the functionalist approaches. There is, however, a difference between the traditional functionalism, focusing on social organisation, and more recent symbolist (or symbolist-culturalist) approaches which search for meanings and systems of meanings.37 For scholars looking for meanings, symbols and rituals form a language-like system to be decoded by the interpreter. Victor Turner’s tripartite processual scheme (separation/liminality/reintegration) adapted from Arnold van Gennep,38 has been especially influential in the study of Early Christian ritual.39 This approach owes a great deal to the structuralist tradition as well. An example of both functionalist and symbolist interpretation is Gerd Theissen’s rich discussion of ritual in A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion.40 Similar to Meeks, Theissen sees the Eucharist as a rite of integration, renewing the cohesion of the group. At the same time, in Theissen’s ‘semiotic’ interpretation, both baptism and the Eucharist form a ‘ritual sign language’ loaded with heavy symbolic meanings. In contrast to the ritual sacrifices of antiquity, Christian rituals contain ‘a consistent reduction of violence’. This reduction happens through a kind of sublimation. ‘The rites express in an unacknowledged way the hidden anti-social nature of human beings’.41 To put it in symbolic terms, according to Theissen, baptism is ‘a symbolic suicide’ and the Eucharist a ‘symbolic cannibalism’. Theissen’s interpretation of baptism and the Eucharist is based partly on the explicit exegesis of Paul and other Early Christian authors (e.g., Rom 6:3-5; 1 Cor 10:16; John 6:51) and partly on the assumption that there are ‘hidden’ anti-social or ‘taboo-crossing’ elements in Early Christian rituals. Symbolist interpretations of ritual generally rely on combinations of participants’ explanations, observations of other culturally relevant information,

34

Ibidem, p. 30. Chwe, Rational Ritual; Pyysiäinen, Magic, Miracles, and Religion, pp. 135-146. 36 Gintis, Smith and Bowles, ‘Costly Signaling and Cooperation’; Liénard and Boyer, ‘Whence Collective Rituals?’. 37 Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, p. 61. 38 Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage. 39 Turner, The Ritual Process; see e.g., McVann, ‘Reading Mark Ritually’; Strecker, Die liminale Theologie des Paulus; Draper, ‘Ritual Process and Ritual Symbol in Didache 7-10’. 40 Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion, pp. 119-160. 41 Ibidem, p. 135 (my emphasis). 35

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and of some decoded meanings that the observer finds behind the explicit knowledge. The symbolist approach must address at least two challenges. First, as symbolist anthropologists themselves have emphasised, religious symbols are multivocal and open-ended. Symbols can evoke many kinds of feelings and ideas for those who use them or perform religious rituals. No interpretation of symbols can eschew this property of symbolism. One may argue with Dan Sperber that ‘all keys to symbols are part of symbolism itself’.42 The second challenge is that, if we assume that rituals convey profound meanings which are, at least partially, unacknowledged by and independent of the participants themselves, there must be some controlled way of revealing this implicit religious knowledge. As far as I understand, Theissen’s interpretation draws on the psychoanalytic tradition in this regard. Recent cognitive approaches provide another alternative for looking for psychological or cognitive capacities that produce religious rituals. Cognitive Models of Ritual The cognitive science of religion seems a promising way to obtain testable hypotheses about the ‘hidden elements’ behind people’s explicit motivations for engaging in ritual practices and their interpretations of these practices. Thus, for example, Pascal Boyer argues that the explanation for the cultural success of rituals is to be found in processes that are not transparent to practitioners.43 According to Boyer, rituals are compulsive for humans because they are ‘snares for thought’ that produce highly salient effects by activating special mechanisms in our mental basement. These mechanisms are systems for unseen danger, notions of counterintuitive agents, and weak social concepts. Boyer argues that our social concepts are ‘weak’ because they cannot fully explain the complex aspects of social interaction and generate an aura of magic around social life, which then creates a need to explain social changes by means of rituals. More recently, Boyer, in collaboration with Pierre Liénard, has developed his views into a more ambitious model for explaining both individual (pathological and normal) and collective ritualised behaviour. According to Boyer and Liénard, ‘ritualisation’ is explained as an occasional by-product of specific human precaution systems, including the detection of and reaction to inferred threats to fitness (distinct from systems of manifest dan-

42 43

Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, p. 50. Boyer, Religion Explained, pp. 262-302.

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ger).44 It should be noted that Boyer and Liénard do not provide a general theory of ‘ritual’, which they do not regard as an analytical concept but rather as a commonsense notion. Ritualised behaviour may not be found in all of the ceremonies that are usually called ‘ritual’ and it may appear in many contexts outside ‘ritual’. Boyer and Liénard’s model may be helpful in explaining why ritualised behaviour is widespread among human groups and cultures,45 but it does not provide ready-made tools for dealing with specific cultural situations and developments, such as the emergence of Early Christianity. Two recent theories of ritual seek to combine cultural and cognitive aspects in a manner that makes them a useful starting point for a cognitive analysis of Early Christian rituals. The modes of religiosity theory. On the basis of his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, the anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse has advanced a theory of two modes of religion, imagistic and doctrinal.46 He suggests that religions are centred around two ‘basins of attraction’, or tendencies towards two kinds of patterns of codification, transmission, cognitive processing and political organisation. At the heart of the theory is the observation that low frequency, often painful or dramatic rituals, such as initiatory rites in many tribal cultures, are codified in what psychologists call ‘episodic memory’, whereas frequently repeated, routinised rituals are codified in ‘semantic memory’ (‘semantic memory’ is assumed to encode facts and general scripts – such as what you normally do each morning – while ‘episodic memory’ is supposed to contain information about specific events in one’s own life).47 The key features of doctrinal and imagistic modes of religion are illustrated in Table 1. What is essential here is that, according to Whitehouse, the type of cognitive processing influences people’s political and ideological systems. Social science approaches normally assume it is the other way around: po44

Boyer and Liénard, ‘Why Ritualized Behavior?’; see also Liénard and Boyer, ‘Whence Collective Rituals?’. The parsing of action is another system explaining ritualised behaviour in Boyer and Liénard’s model, although it receives much less attention in their explanation. Action parsing means that people tend to divide the flow of behaviour into meaningful units (such as ‘gestures’, ‘episodes’ and ‘scripts’). The model requires that people who perform goal-demoted (ritualised) actions parse them with low-level minimal action-units (gestures) rather than goalassociated macro-units (episodes and scripts). 45 See the discussion in Pyysiäinen, Magic, Miracles, and Religion, pp. 135-146. 46 Whitehouse, Inside the Cult; Idem, Arguments and Icons; Idem, Modes of Religiosity; cf. his contribution in this volume. 47 The distinction between ‘episodic’ and ‘semantic’ memory was first made by E. Tulving, ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory’.

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litical and ideological systems influence how people think and behave. I am not saying that it has to be an either/or situation. However, if both perspectives are legitimate, cognitive processes must be taken into consideration in the analysis of Early Christian rituals. Whitehouse’s theory focuses on memory and on the transmission of religious knowledge through rituals. Variable

Doctrinal

Imagistic

Psychological Features 1.

Transmissive frequency

High

Low

2.

Level of arousal

Low

High

3.

Principal memory system

Semantic schemas and implicit scripts

Episodic/flashbulb memory

4.

Ritual meaning

Learned/acquired

Internally generated

5.

Techniques of revelation

Rhetoric/logical Iconicity, multivocality, integration, narrative multivalence

6.

Social Cohesion

Diffuse

Intense

7.

Leadership

Dynamic

Passive/absent

8.

Inclusivity/exclusivity

Inclusive

Exclusive

9.

Spread

Rapid/efficient

Slow/inefficient

10. 11.

Scale Degree of uniformity

Large scale High

Small scale Low

12.

Structure

Centralized

Noncentralized

Sociopolitical Features

Table 1. Contrasting Modes of Religiosity. Source: Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity, p. 74.

Ritual form theory by Robert McCauley and Thomas Lawson concentrates on the formal structure of ritual behaviour.48 Emphasis on ritual form (vs. function or symbolism) is not a novelty in ritual studies. Roy Rappaport, for example, has pointed out that ‘meanings and effects [of ritual] follow from ritual’s universal form’.49 Lawson and McCauley’s view is based on what 48

E. T. Lawson and R. N. McCauley, Rethinking Religion; McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind. 49 Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, p. 30. See also idem, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion. To be sure, Rappaport does not refer to the ‘argument structure’ of the action but to what he calls ritual’s ‘surface’ or ‘perceptible features’, such as encoding by other than performers, decorum, invariance, performance and the lack of material

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they call the ‘competence approach’, inspired by Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories. In analogy to Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’, Lawson and McCauley argue that people have some form of intuitive competence to judge whether the ‘grammar’ of ritual is correct or incorrect. ‘With little, if any, explicit instruction, religious ritual participants are able to make judgements about various properties concerning both individual rituals and their ritual systems’.50 Furthermore, McCauley and Lawson’s theory is based on the observation that the action representation system of ritual follows the general pattern of any other action (vs. something just happening). The basic categories of action are agent, action, patient and instrument: someone does something to someone by means of something. The difference is that in religious rituals, ‘culturally postulated superhuman agents’ (CPS-agents) are associated with one of these categories; for example, in baptism with an agent and in the Eucharist (at least eventually) with an act/instrument. McCauley and Lawson divide religious rituals into two groups: 1) special agent rituals, and 2) special patient/instrument rituals, depending on which slot a CPS-agent is associated with. A balanced ritual system includes rituals from both of these groups. The basic structure of the ritual form theory is illustrated in Figure 1.51 In addition to this structure, the model includes another factor, the structural depth of any given ritual. By this they mean the number of enabling rituals that need to be performed before the given ritual can be correctly performed. Just as any performance of actions presupposes certain earlier actions, rituals also normally presuppose the prior performance of another ritual action. A priest can baptise a child because he has been ordained by a bishop, the bishop can ordain the priest because he himself has received ordination, etc. With their model, McCauley and Lawson believe that they can provide fairly accurate predictions about the properties of a ritual in any religious tradition. They claim that they can predict whether a ritual is reversible, whether the ritual is repeatable, and how much ‘sensory pageantry’ or sensory stimulation is associated with any given ritual. The model, for example, predicts that elevated levels of sensory arousal become associated with special agent rituals. efficacy (see Ritual and Religion, pp. 29-50). Frits Staal’s purely syntactic approach to ritual bears some resemblance to Lawson and McCauley’s theory, but the latter does not exclude cultural meanings as Staal does. F. Staal, Rules without Meaning. Staal’s approach has been applied in a modified form to Near Eastern ritual traditions by R. E. Gane, Ritual Dynamic Structure. 50 Lawson and McCauley, Bringing Ritual to Mind, p. 5. 51 See also Tamás Bíró’s discussion in this volume.

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PSA = Principle of Superhuman Agency. CPS = Culturally postulated superhuman agents. Figure 1. Action Representation System. Source: McCauley & Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind, p. 27.

Originally, these two theories were developed independently and could be seen as competitors, but recent discussion and testing have tended to treat them as at least partially complementary.52 Serious criticisms have been raised against both and certainly new modifications of these theories will appear in the near future.53 It is not clear whether either ritual frequency or ritual form alone should take the causative role in the explanation of religious systems. Moreover, it is highly doubtful that any of these ritual theories could be used as a single grand narrative to explain the essence of, in this case, Early Christian religion.54 They are, however, helpful in highlighting some significant dimensions of Early Christian rituals that would otherwise be lost if we approached the rituals from the angle of the traditional ritual theories only. Applications to Early Christian Rituals In conclusion I would like to explore the potential ways in which cognitive theories of ritual could be applied to the evolution of Early Christian religion. Although Boyer and Liénard’s model is not without relevance in the study of Early Christianity,55 I will concentrate here on Whitehouse’s and 52

Ketola, ‘Cognitive Approach to Ritual Systems in First-Century Judaism’. Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works, pp. 78-97; Idem, ‘Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission’; Atran, In Gods We Trust, pp. 149-173; McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind; Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity. 54 Cf. Pyysiäinen, ‘Memories: Religion and Cultural Transmission’. 55 See my analysis of the pollution of the dead and relic veneration in Early Christianity. Uro, ‘Pure Mind: Ritual, Purity, and Early Christian Taboos’. 53

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Lawson and McCauley’s theories, which are the two most widely discussed cognitive approaches to ritual. As noted above, Whitehouse’s theory focuses on memory and the transmission of religious traditions. It is widely assumed that rituals play an important role in the transmission of religious knowledge in general. But how should their place in the transmission and consolidation of Early Christian traditions be defined? Scholars of Early Christianity have not paid much attention to this question.56 Most cognitive theorists agree that transmission can be achieved in two ways: either through frequent, routinised repetition or through intense emotional experience. Moreover, both Whitehouse and McCauley and Lawson argue that religious rituals/traditions tend to evolve around one of these attractor positions. In addition, Whitehouse suggests that the coalescing around one of the two codification systems (based on semantic or episodic memory) produce either doctrinal or imagistic modes of religiosity. Although Whitehouse states quite explicitly that the two modes are ‘alternative’,57 he also makes the case that interaction between the modes contributes to the survival of the doctrinal variant.58 It is this latter argument that is of special interest for the analysis of Early Christianity. Early Christianity certainly included imagistic practices and promoted a low-frequency ritual – that is, baptism – which could generate long-lasting memories in ritual recipients. Yet, the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper became a frequently performed ritual early on (see 1 Cor 11:17-34), and the overall picture of Early Christian religiosity is that it represents Whitehouse’s doctrinal mode. Basically, the transmission of Christian beliefs happened through such events as regular gatherings, Eucharistic meals, recitations of texts and sermons rather than through a dramatic initiatory rite. Repeated and explicit teaching about the supernatural change the members of the movement had undergone in baptism can be contrasted with ‘spontaneous exegetical reflection’, which, according to Whitehouse, characterises the imagistic mode of transmission. In the long run, this repetition brought about a tedium effect (a key concept in Whitehouse’s theory), which could produce more or less regular outbursts of imagistic practices and splinter groups. I have argued elsewhere that the Valentinian movement can be seen as an example of such imagistic splinter groups within late second and early third-century Christianity.59 The 56 See, however, Keightley, ‘Christian Collective Memory and Paul’s Knowledge of Jesus’; I. Czachesz, ‘The Transmission of Early Christian Thought’. 57 Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity, p. 8. 58 Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons, pp. 125-146. See also his response article, ‘Theorizing Religions Past’. 59 Uro, ‘Gnostic Rituals from a Cognitive Perspective’.

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Valentinians strongly intensified the Early Christian initiation and modified it in the direction of the imagistic mode. It can, therefore, be argued that the interaction between doctrinal and imagistic practices within the Early Christian movements was an important factor in relieving tedium and consolidating Christian beliefs and traditions. Lawson and McCauley’s ritual form theory is particularly helpful in conceptualising the ritual innovation that occurred in the Jesus movement. As already noted, John’s act of baptism clearly contained ritually innovative elements as compared to other ritual ablutions in first-century Judaism, and Christian baptism can be seen, at least in terms of its formal structure, as a continuation of John’s ritual activity. Now, Lawson and McCauley’s theory helps us to see precisely what was new in John’s and the Early Christians’ baptism rite: it can be construed as a special agent ritual, in other words, its ritual form assumes God or his representative as an agent. Although we do not know in detail how John performed his baptism,60 it seems clear enough that he was understood to be the agent of the immersion (cf. Mark 1:8: ‘I baptise/immerse you with [or in] water …’). John’s epithet, ‘Immerser’, probably also supports this assumption.61 It requires little imagination to assume that John was understood as a divine agent, a holy man or prophet, and that he was realising this divine agency through his ritual. As far as we can tell, the rest of the first-century Jewish ritual system did not have special agent rituals (it is uncertain whether the circumcision of the male Israelite child would qualify as such, since God is not understood as the agent of circumcision; see Gen 17:10-14; Lev 12:3).62 Therefore, in the light of 60

For example, there is no conclusive evidence for whether John’s baptism rite was an act to be repeated or a single, unrepeatable rite. If it was repeated, this may contradict McCauley and Lawson’s predictions about special agent rituals. They argue that special agent rituals are unrepeatable (‘when the gods do things, they are done once and for all’; ibidem, pp. 30-31). However, I am inclined to think that undergoing John’s act of baptism was a once-in-a-lifetime ritual, simply because there is no evidence for the opposite and all the evidence we have in our sources can be explained by this assumption. It should be noted, for example, that in Acts 19:1-7 Luke imagines that being baptised ‘into John’s baptism’ is an alternative to being baptised ‘in the name of the Lord Jesus’. Luke, therefore, seems to think in terms of a single, unrepeatable rite. On the issue of whether John’s baptism rite was performed only once for each person, see Scobie, John the Baptist, pp. 91-92; Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet, pp. 183, 216; Taylor, The Immerser, pp. 69-72 61 It is likely that baptistês refers to someone who immerses and not to someone who immerses himself often (see Taylor, The Immerser, p. 50). The Greek word is found only in Christian writings and Josephus, Ant. 18.116, but compare parabaptistês ‘false dyer’, ‘imposter’ in Arrian, Epict. 2.19.21. 62 The passive verb form in Gen. 17:24 is generally understood as referring to Abraham circumcising himself, notwithstanding some late midrashim (e.g.

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Lawson and McCauley’s model, the Jewish ritual system was generally an unbalanced system (it is crucial to note that this is only a formal description, not a theological judgement).63 Being unbalanced does not necessarily mean that the Jewish ritual system was unstable,64 but it left, as it were, the door open to splinter groups that could create special agent rituals. Another central Early Christian ritual, the common meal, gradually developed into a special patient ritual in which someone (agent) eats something (patient) associated with a superhuman being (see, e.g., 1 Cor 10:16). This means that Early Christians were able to create a ritual system that included rituals of both major groups defined by Lawson and McCauley’s theory.65 This creation of a balanced ritual system should be taken as one reason for the survival of the Early Christian movement. It is not clear if Lawson and McCauley’s prediction concerning sensory pageantry is fulfilled in Early Christianity. According to the model, the introduction of a special agent ritual would increase sensory pageantry in a given ritual system.66 However, the rituals of first-century Judaism certainly did not lack the ability to arouse emotion; just think of large and crowded festivals such as Passover, with thousands of lambs sacrificed in the temple of Jerusalem.67 At least outwardly, the ritual innovations of the Jesus movement did not add much in terms of sensory stimulation or pageantry. According to McCauley and Lawson, there is a difference between repeatable calendar feasts and other special patient rituals in which participants were ‘doing things to satisfy the CPS-agents time and time again’, on Tanhuma), which state that during his conversation with God Abraham miraculously discovered that he had been circumcised. In the early midrash, Genesis Rabbah 49:2, God commands Abraham to circumcise himself, but then helps him perform the act. Note also that non-circumcised people, women for example, could also perform a circumcision (see e.g., Exodus 4:25, where Moses’ wife performs it). In sum, the agent of the circumcision need not be a CPS-agent, or related to a CPS-agent any more than the patient of the circumcision. Note also that for similar reasons circumcision is neither a special patient or special instrument ritual (Tamás Biró, oral communication). 63 Ketola, ‘Cognitive Approach’, would argue instead that first-century Judaism was a deflated balanced system, which developed rudimentary ritual innovations recognisable in Qumran and the Jesus movement’s meal practices. 64 See also McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind, p. 181. 65 For another brief assessment of Early Christian rituals in the framework of cognitive theory, see Czachesz ‘Transmission’, pp. 78-79. 66 For a criticism of McCauley and Lawson in this regard, see Ketola, ‘Cognitive Approach’. 67 Sanders estimates that 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinian Jews attended the festival (plus tens of thousands of pilgrims from the Diaspora) and approximately 30,000 lambs were slaughtered. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief 63 BCE-66 CE, pp. 127, 136.

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the one hand, and rituals which bring about ‘a superpermanent change in each specific ritual patient’, on the other.68 Early Christian baptism can be seen as a special agent ritual which was believed to produce such a superpermanent change. In the New Testament much is made of the reward of baptism and the superpermanent change it brings about. The baptised person is dedicated to the heavenly Jesus (Acts 8:16; 19:5; Gal 3:27; Rom 6:3). Baptism bestows the forgiveness of sins, freedom from the power of sin, sanctification, new life, gifts of the spirit, etc. (e.g., Rom 6:4,7; 1 Cor 6:11; 12:13). All this is seen to be in sharp contrast to the darkness in which Christians lived before their conversion (Rom 6:6; 1 Cor 6:9-11). It is somewhat unclear, however, whether only special agent rituals can effect a permanent change. Circumcision is also a non-repeated ritual, although probably not, as argued above, as a special agent ritual. In contrast, initiations into the mystery cults, although providing closer analogies to Christian baptism than most Jewish rituals, could be repeated.69 Observations like these cast some doubt on McCauley and Lawson’s prediction that special agent rituals are non-repeated and that agentive properties determine the degree of sensory pageantry associated with rituals.70 Ilkka Pyysiäinen may be right in arguing that ‘it is not only the ritual form that provokes emotion (…). With regard to emotional experience, the important thing seems to be whether the participant(s) experience an intimate relationship with the counterintuitive being(s)’.71 But even so, it is hardly contestable that the ritual form introduced by Early Christians, that is, special agent ritual, supported the idea that ritual patients go through a superpermanent change. The claim that the action of CPS-agents are more permanent than human agents is probably quite intuitive. However, what is also noticeable is that Early Christian baptism, at least outwardly, involved less sensory pageantry than was the case with many other Greco-Roman initiations.72 Perhaps one could suggest a kind of optimality principle for rituals that turn out to be successful across cultures and become widespread. Rituals that 68

McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind, pp. 193, 191. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 8. Burkert refers, for example, to Lucius Apuleius’ repeated initiations (see Metamorphoses, 11.21.5; 11.28.5) and to Plato, Phaedrus, 249C. See also Johnson, Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity, pp. 69-103. 70 It would also be an overgeneralisation to argue that all sacrificial practices in the ancient world were special patient rituals. A sacrificial meal, for example, could be conceived of as provided and therefore hosted by the god. See Smith, From Symposium to Eucharist, p. 78. 71 Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works, p. 94. 72 The most spectacular was, of course, taurobolium, but this comparison holds for many other mystery rites as well. See Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults. 69

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evoke overly strong emotional reactions or involve too much physical pain cannot spread effectively. This would be in agreement with Whitehouse’s suggestion that the imagistic rituals prevail in small-scale and noncentralised communities (see Table 1 above). In contrast, rituals that contain a low level of arousal and evoke little or no emotional reaction are in danger of falling into oblivion unless supported by constant repetition and rehearsal. Summary In the above I sought to demonstrate that cognitive theories can contribute to the analysis of Early Christian rituals in at least two ways. Firstly, they can help in conceptualising the ritual innovations that occurred in the Jesus movement, especially the introduction of baptism as a special agent ritual. Secondly, cognitive theories can bring into focus important aspects of ritual that traditional approaches have often failed to take into account, such as the degree of sensory stimulation involved in a ritual action and the frequency of ritual behaviour. These aspects constrain and limit ritual systems in various significant ways. The cognitive theorists do not, however, agree on how these aspects should be organised into an overall theory, and the predictions of their theories compete to some extent. Some of the predictions do not hold for Early Christianity. For example, the introduction of a special agent ritual does not seem to increase sensory pageantry associated with ritual activities. More theoretical work is needed to create a practical synthesis of the cognitive theories of ritual which can be applied to Early Christianity. The cognitive models approach rituals from a selectionist perspective – hence the words ‘survival’ and ‘consolidating’ in my presentation. They do not focus on origin, social function, or symbolic meanings of rituals as explanations of their spread and transmission. However, these cognitive models were not introduced to replace the more traditional approaches to Early Christian rituals. In fact, I think the best result can be achieved by combining the traditional source-critical and functional approaches with contributions from the cognitive science of religion. It is such a combined approach, taking into account both cognitive mechanisms and cultural environment,73 that has the prospect of producing answers to our initial question about the role of rituals in the emergence of Early Christian religion.

73

Cf. the ‘explanatory pluralism’ advocated by Ilkka Pyysiäinen in this volume.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank several colleagues for helpful and encouraging comments on various versions of this article: István Czachesz, Richard DeMaris, Raimo Hakola, Jutta Jokiranta, Petri Luomanen, Ilkka Pyysiäinen and Timo Vanhoja. I am especially grateful to Tamás Biró, whose careful and thorough reading compelled me to rethink and develop many of my ideas.

WOMEN, CHARITY AND MOBILITY IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY WEAK LINKS AND THE HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATION OF RELIGIONS

István Czachesz In this chapter we will use the example of Early Christianity to examine how the cognitive aspects of religion are connected to the social structures that religion creates or uses. Religious ideas not only affect the cognition of individuals (for example, by planting memorable ideas into their heads), but many also directly influence people’s social attitudes and behaviour. Social structures, in turn, influence how ideas, including religious ones, are transmitted within a human population. The connection between religious ideas and social structures is thus bi-directional: religious ideas affect social structures and social structures influence the success of religious ideas. Every day, two or three new religions are started somewhere in the world.1 This is an incredibly high number, implying that a thousand new religions will be born this year alone and that half a million have been founded since the time of the Reformation. If we make an inventory of the existing religions in the world,2 however, the total number will amount to about a couple of thousand, which is more than what one might expect intuitively, but definitely far less than the figures presented above would suggest. This observation begs the questions of what happens to most new religions, what makes some of them successful while most others fail, and why some of them grow into world religions such as Buddhism or Christianity. One possible answer is that successful religions have especially insightful founders (such as Moses, Jesus, Muhammad or Buddha), who are able and/or were chosen to receive exclusive divine revelation about matters of ultimate truth. This is, at least, what the great foundational narratives and other traditions of the respective religions claim. Tradition also recounts the great deeds and exceptional authority of the immediate followers and suc-

1

Dennett, Breaking the Spell, pp. 101, 396; Barrett et al., World Christian Encyclopedia, vol. 2. 2 Barrett et al., World Christian Encyclopedia; Robinson, ‘Religions of the World.

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cessors of the great founders, such as in the vast literature concerning Jesus’ apostles. A closer look at the circumstances in which Early Christianity emerged can be used as a test case. The historical setting in which Christianity was born can be characterised as an era of a religious free market. Starting from the late fourth century BC, the Hellenistic empires of Alexander the Great and his successors, as well as the Roman Empire, created ideal circumstances for large-scale cultural exchange across the Mediterranean. Several factors, including military service, imperial administration, trade, the relative ease of travel (by ancient standards), and the use of Latin and Greek as the languages of communication, facilitated the circulation of cultural elements. A great degree of cultural tolerance (again, by ancient standards) was another significant factor. For religious life, this meant, in particular, that the practice of a variety of different cults was tolerated as long as they did not question the political status quo or participation in the official cults and festivals of the empire.3 Under these circumstances, most religions in the Roman Empire can be seen as competitors in a free market. Christianity was one of these competitors, a latecomer that ultimately won the competition and became the State religion of the declining empire in the fourth century AD. Attributing the ultimate success of Christianity merely to political will, however, would be a mistake. Constantine the Great (who accepted Christianity in the edict of Milan in 313 AD) and Emperor Theodosius (who made it a State religion in 380 AD) merely gave official recognition to the already evident power and future potential of the cult, which by that time had clearly won out over many of its great rivals, such as the cult of Mithras.4 How Christianity achieved such power and potential is a more challenging question. What makes some religions spread more successfully than their competitors? We can break this question down into the following more concrete problems. First, what makes some religions spread faster than others? A faster growth of adherents obviously means an advantage in outcompeting other religious movements. Second, what makes them spread more broadly than others? Fast growth is not enough: a rapidly spreading movement can be locally successful yet still limited in its geographical or social diffusion. For a religious innovation to become a world religion, or at least to gain regional significance, it has to cross geographical and social divisions. Third, a religion has to maintain some degree of homogeneity among its adherents, otherwise it would not be recognised as a unitary religion. Note that institu3

Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults; Martin, Hellenistic Religions. Martin, ‘Performativity, Narrative, and Cognition’; Beck, The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire.

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tional unity might be a concern for the movement itself, yet it is not an obvious criterion for its success. Different branches of Christianity, for example, have been institutionally independent from each other throughout their history. Finally, what makes some religions last longer than others? Rapid growth, wide diffusion and homogeneity are not enough: if a movement aspires to the position of a successful religion, it has to sustain itself in the long run. In this sense, the exceptional attractiveness of some religious ideas (which could be based, for example, on their minimally counterintuitive features, see below) does not yet explain the long-term success of a religion. Arguably, fads are driven by attractive cultural elements, yet they disappear as quickly as they started. Rather than turning to the great founders and their successors for an explanation, or asking about the attractive features of religious beliefs, in this chapter, I will test the hypothesis that the long-term success of Early Christianity was due to its stimulating the formation of particular types of social networks. I will especially deal with the importance of developing a great number of weak links in Early Christianity. It will be argued that network formation was particularly influenced by some social attitudes, as well as playing an important role in the development of cognitively optimal or closely optimal religious beliefs. I will first introduce graph theory and provide some clarifications with regard to its use in this chapter. Second, I will review some recently evolved insights about networks, with special attention to the role of weak links. Third, I will suggest how Early Christianity promoted the development of weak links – probably as a side effect of its moral attitudes, rather than in any conscious way. Fourth, I will examine how weak links and related network structures influenced the long-term development of Christianity. 1. Graphs, networks and some clarifications Networks are models consisting of nodes and links. The dots in Figure 1 stand for the nodes of a network connected by lines that represent links between them. The physical arrangement of the dots and the physical length of the lines are determined by the convenience of graphical representation and do not bear any significance for the structure of the underlying network. Mathematicians tend to talk about graphs rather than networks: graphs are mathematical objects consisting of vertices (rather than nodes) and edges or arcs (rather than links). For our purposes, the two models and their terminologies are interchangeable. Classic graph theory goes back at least to Leonhard Euler’s problem (1736) of the bridges of Königsberg (present-day

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Kaliningrad).5 Thorough mathematical investigation of graphs started in the 1950s, with important contributions by Paul Erdős and others.6 Mathematical models in this period especially focused on random graphs, ones in which links are randomly distributed among nodes. A renewed interest in networks started in the last decade of the twentieth century, which at this time arose especially in various fields applying network models rather than in mathematical theory proper. Scholars representing these fields include Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz,7 as well as Albert-László Barabási and his collaborators.8 In particular, these researchers examined networks with a non-random distribution of links, which results in similar structures to those mentioned in this study in relation to Early Christian networks. node (vertex) link (edge, arc)

Figure 1. The components of a network (graph).

Networks have been used as models in various scientific domains: here we will especially refer to applications in sociology and ecology. The study of sociological networks started in the first half of the twentieth century, when Jacob Moreno created so-called sociograms to map out the social structure of school classes or work communities.9 In sociological networks, nodes stand for people or institutions and links stand for social relationships among them. However intuitive such an approach may seem to be, there are a few important problems to be mentioned before going into any detail about social network theory. First, social links among people can be measured in different ways.10 The standard procedure for making sociograms is to design questions asking subjects to indicate which other member of the

5

Euler, ‘Solutio problematis ad geometriam situs pertinentis’. Erdős and Rényi, ‘On Random Graphs, I.’. 7 Watts and Strogatz, ‘Collective Dynamics of “Small-World” Networks’. 8 Barabási and Albert, ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’. 9 Moreno and Jennings, Who Shall Survive? A New Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations. 10 Krackhardt, ‘Cognitive Social Structures’; Pittinsky and Carolan, ‘Behavioral Versus Cognitive Classroom Friendship Networks’. 6

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group they would choose as a partner in some joint activity (for example, with whom in the class a child would like to play). Another way to map out social networks is to observe with whom people actually interact. Social networks of choices and social networks of interactions are not necessarily identical. Another question to be decided when using network models in any domain is whether one intends to examine networks of instances or networks of types.11 For example, the sociogram of a class takes individuals as nodes of the network, whereas in an ecological network, nodes typically stand for animal species (that is, types), rather than individual animals (that is, instances). In this chapter, we will examine networks of instances, that is, social connections among individuals who belonged to the earliest Christian groups. However, most of the time these individuals will remain idealised instances, such as apostles, itinerants, women, poor and so forth, since we do not possess enough data to identify many of them as historical characters. The network model outlined in this chapter has the potential to be used later to analyse historical data about people and their social connections in the sources. In biblical studies, we should mention the contribution of Dennis C. Duling, who used graph theory to analyse the geographical background of Jesus’ activity in the gospels,12 as well as the social networks of his environment,13 in an attempt to ‘reconfigure’ Gerd Theissen’s model of ‘itinerant charismatics’ and ‘community sympathizers’.14 We need to note that this careful analysis of literary and archaeological sources blends physical and narrative worlds in a problematic way. It is questionable whether the resulting networks ultimately represent the kind of sociological information with which Theissen’s model is concerned. Information about various important people and their social relationships (such as information about the families of Jesus or John the Evangelist) has certainly been shaped by tradition and might often reflect real-world phenomena in the communities that transmitted the texts rather than the social reality of the historical Jesus and his social environment. Theissen, on the one hand, works with types of agents in his model (describing the relationship between wandering charismatics and settled sympathisers), as well 11

Santos, Bersini and Lenaerts, ‘Networks Regulating Networks: The Effects of Constraints on Topological Evolution’. 12 Duling, ‘The Jesus Movement and Social Network Analysis (Part II: The Social Network)’. 13 Duling, ‘The Jesus Movement and Social Network Analysis (Part I: The Spatial Network)’. 14 Theissen, Soziologie Der Jesusbewegung; Idem, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity; Idem, Die Jesusbewegung: Sozialgeschichte einer Revolution der Werte.

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as social connections among idealised instances (an approach that is similar to the one used in this chapter). Duling, on the other hand, attempts to analyse networks at the level of instances, as concrete geographical objects, artifacts and individuals with a personal identity. The success of the latter attempt largely depends on the historical accuracy of the sources, which is at best highly questionable, especially with respect to the kind of biographical data needed for Duling’s study. 2. Weak links in social and ecological networks The theory of weak links was formulated by Mark S. Granovetter in his 1973 article ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’.15 Here Granovetter argues that ‘the degree of overlap of two individual’s friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to each other’.16 Let us unpack this argument in some detail. The strength of an interpersonal tie is defined as the (linear) sum of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding) and the reciprocal services that characterise the tie.17 Granovetter’s hypothesis states that given a group of persons to whom either A or B is connected with a social tie, the stronger the tie between A and B, the larger the proportion of individuals in the group to whom both of them will be tied, on average. Granovetter cites three underlying causes for this regularity.18 First, the stronger the tie between two people, the more time they will commit to this relationship. If A is connected to both B and C with strong ties, the chance is great that B and C will also meet and have a social tie of some strength at some point. Second, there is empirical evidence that the stronger the tie connecting two individuals, the more similar they will be in various ways, again increasing the likelihood of one’s two friends developing a social tie once they meet. Third, cognitive balance theory predicts that if A has a friend B who expresses a positive opinion about a friend C, A will want to have feelings about C congruent with the feelings of B, resulting in a social tie between A and C once they meet. In a simple formulation of the weak links hypothesis, Granovetter argues that the triadic relation in Figure 2 is an unlikely one (forbidden triad): if A has strong social ties to both B and C, there will also be some kind of social tie (weak or strong) between B and C (see Fig. 2)19. 15 16 17 18 19

Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, p. 1360. Ibidem, p. 1361. Ibidem, p. 1362. Ibidem, p. 1363.

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B

strong tie

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strong tie

C

Figure 2. The ‘forbidden’ triad.

The major significance of weak ties, Granovetter argues, is that they can serve as bridges, that is, as the only links between two nodes of the network.20 At this point, it is useful to introduce the notion of a path in a network. Imagine that the nodes of a network are cities, and starting out from one city you can reach another by driving along a particular road. If there is a road from A to B as well as from B to C, you can be sure that there is a path between A and C. Returning to social networks, in terms of the argument outlined above, if two individuals A and B are connected by a strong tie, they will have common friends, and there will be several paths from A to B via these common friendship links. For example, a piece of information, known to A, can reach B either directly or via one of several paths connecting them. If A and B are connected by a weak tie, in contrast, it is possible that they have no friends or acquaintances in common, and even their friends do not have any friends or acquaintances in common, and so forth. In such a case, the weak tie between A and B serves as a bridge, the only path connecting two subnets of a social network, and any path between two individuals who belong to different subnets must include the bridge, that is, the weak link between A and B. In any real society, there is usually more than one path between two individuals. Granovetter therefore extends the notion of a bridge to a link that provides the shortest path between two individuals, or even subnets, which would otherwise only be connected by very long paths. Such bridges will also be weak links. Bridges in this general sense gain significance in cases where the path length matters. For example, there may be a distance beyond which communication is not viable due to the high costs involved and the distortion of information during transmission. 20

Ibidem, pp. 1364-1365.

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Granovetter’s hypothesis of weak links and variants of the original hypothesis have been tested in a number of empirical studies. An important domain of application has been the advantage of weak links in the job market. In his original study, Granovetter suggested that people find new jobs with the help of individuals to whom they are connected by weak links (acquaintances), because they provide new information more often than close friends and relatives, who tend to be in possession of the same information as the jobseeker.21 Granovetter initially found supporting evidence for this hypothesis in his own fieldwork. Later empirical studies nuanced the picture in several respects.22 First, it has been found that jobseekers in a desperate situation, such as unemployed people or graduates looking for their first position, tend to find jobs through strong rather than weak ties. This can be explained by the fact that people to whom we are connected with strong ties are more easily accessible and have greater motivation to help us when in need. At the same time, weak ties are of little use in acquiring new information and to advance if they are not bridges. One should keep in mind that whereas all bridges are weak ties, not all weak ties function as bridges. People in lower socioeconomic groups, Granovetter suggests, often have weak ties that connect them to the acquaintances of friends or relatives who do not constitute a real broadening of opportunity. For such people, the use of weak ties brings little advantage, in contrast to people of higher socioeconomic status. Empirical research has also shown that people in lower socioeconomic groups tend to rely on strong rather than weak ties, which results in the formation of encapsulated networks, actually perpetuating the low socioeconomic status of these people.23 Another group of studies has focused on innovations. Although the question of innovation is sometimes blurred with the problem of diffusion (discussed below), it clearly constitutes a separate issue. Granovetter’s original study already referred to the empirical finding that people connected by strong ties tend to be more similar to each other than people connected by weak ties.24 Relying on Rose Coser’s work on individual autonomy,25 in his 21

Ibidem, pp. 1369-1373. Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited’, p. 201; Brown and Konrad, ‘Granovetter was Right: The Importance of Weak Ties to a Contemporary Job Search’; Harvey, ‘Strong Or Weak Ties? British and Indian Expatriate Scientists Finding Jobs in Boston’. 23 Stack, All our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community; Lomnitz, Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexican Shantytown. 24 Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, p. 1362. 25 Coser, ‘The Complexity of Roles as a Seedbed of Individual Autonomy’; cf. Idem, In Defense of Modernity. 22

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second study Granovetter proposed that weak ties bridging different groups provide people with complex sets of roles (complex role sets) that require them to develop cognitive flexibility.26 Complex voluntary organisations, for example, depend on the presence of such cognitive abilities that enable people ‘to assess the needs, motives, and actions of a great variety of different people simultaneously’.27 The impact of weak ties on innovation has been empirically tested by other researchers. In a study of the emergence of innovations in management, Ronald Burt examined what he calls ‘structural holes’ in social networks.28 Since behaviour, opinion and information within groups tend to be more homogeneous than between groups, holes in the information flow are created between groups. Burt shows that between-group brokers, that is, individuals connected to several social clusters by bridging weak links have a ‘vision advantage’.29 Moreover, due to their position in the social network, they are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable. Hauser and colleagues have demonstrated that associational activity (activity in clubs and associations) contributes more to innovation in firms than other aspects of social capital (such as political interests, friendship ties and trust).30 Associational activity is precisely the kind of social capital that depends on the presence of weak links. These studies prompt the question of whether the great innovators in the history of religion were between-group brokers rather than visionaries or geniuses in a psychological sense, as well as the problem of how far associational activities contribute to innovations in religious groups. An area that is related to both of the above-mentioned domains of application (social status and innovativeness) and is particularly relevant for the study of Early Christianity is the diffusion of ideas and other cultural bits. By their very nature, weak links are likely to provide bridges between isolated or distant parts of social networks and thereby facilitate the flow of information in the network. Relying on previous research on diffusion, including Everett Rogers’ important study from 1962 that highlighted the role of ‘early adopters’ for the success of innovations,31 Granovetter proposed that the successful diffusion of high-risk innovations particularly needs the 26 Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: a Network Theory Revisited’, pp. 203205. 27 Ibidem, p. 205. 28 Burt, ‘Structural Holes and Good Ideas’. 29 Ibidem, p. 386. 30 Hauser et al., ‘The Learning Region: The Impact of Social Capital and Weak Ties on Innovation’, pp. 75-88. 31 Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York, 1962).

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involvement of individuals with many weak ties. If innovations are risky or deviant, Rogers’ ‘opinion leaders’ – whose early involvement is supposed to guarantee the success of innovations, by pushing the spread of innovations beyond the ‘tipping point’ – might be too reluctant (precisely due to their social position) to be among the early adopters. Case studies include the surprisingly rapid diffusion of cultural elements in youth culture,32 which relies on the use of weak ties rather than on the use of the adultcontrolled mass media. One can add that today the internet creates tremendous opportunities for the creation of weak ties. In a number of diffusion studies, people had to forward an item to a social contact until it reached an addressee designated by the experimenter.33 The importance of weak social ties for the successful completion of the chain has been demonstrated by these experiments. One of these studies, Stanley Milgram’s empirical investigation of the ‘small-world’ phenomenon,34 touched on a problem that has been widely discussed in network theory recently. In his experiment, Milgram tested the popular idea that all people in the world are separated only by a few social contacts – the first-known formulation of the idea coming from the writer Frigyes Karinthy.35 Much recent work in network theory has been dedicated to the small-world nature of some networks, which exhibit both high clustering and a short typical path length.36 High clustering means that a node in the network has many neighbours that are also connected with each other. A short typical path length means that one can reach most nodes from most other nodes by only visiting a few intermediate connections. Although both features could be realised simply by connecting each node with each other node in the network (a complete, or globally coupled network), this is hardly viable in most social and other real-world networks. Random networks, in turn, where each node has a random number of connections, have a short average path length but show no clustering. Starshaped networks (Figure 3) have a central node to which all nodes connect and each node has no other connection than the one to the centre (consider 32

Fine and Kleinman, ‘Rethinking Subculture: An Interactionist Analysis’. Milgram, ‘The Small-World Problem’; Travers and Milgram, ‘An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem’; Korte and Milgram, ‘Acquaintance Networks between Racial Groups’. 34 Milgram, ‘The Small-World Problem’, pp. 60-67. 35 Karinthy, ‘Láncszemek’. 36 Watts and Strogatz, ‘Collective dynamics of “small-world” networks’; Barabási and Albert, ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’; Dorogovtsev and Mendes, Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW; Wang and Chen, ‘Complex Networks: Small-World, Scale-Free and Beyond’; Solé et al., ‘Selection, Tinkering, and Emergence in Complex Networks’. 33

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all the roads in the former example starting from the capital city and running only to one particular city without any roads directly connecting two cities, and thereby requiring all travellers to pass through the capital). While this is an extremely parsimonious network, fulfilling both criteria, such a scenario is rather unusual in social networks, where individuals always have more than one social tie. A star-shaped network could model an organisation in which some sort of information flows in a strictly hierarchical manner (see Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Star-like network.

Another sort of network fulfilling the criteria of a small world can be realised based on a regular network, or more precisely a nearest-neighbour network, where each node is connected to an equal number of nearest neighbours.37 Of course, being a neighbour in a network does not mean physical proximity: neighbouring nodes are ones that share most of their contacts with each other. In its simplest form, such a network can be imagined as a ring of nodes, where we connect, for example, each node with its first and second neighbour (Figure 4). The network will be highly clustered (most of a node’s neighbours will also be each other’s neighbours) but the typical path length will be long. If this network modelled the roads in our example, we would have to drive through every second or third city on our way to a city in another part of the country. This could be avoided by building some roads across the country that directly connected distant cities. This is indeed what Watts and Strogatz did in their model, removing one end of some existing links and attaching them to a distant node (which in our example would mean that we close a road to build a new one).

37

Watts and Strogatz, ‘Collective dynamics of “small-world” networks’.

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P

A

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Figure 4. Nearest-neighbour network.

The resulting network (Figure 5) became a small-world network, with nodes both densely connected to their neighbourhoods (forming clusters) as well as having quick access to any other node in the network.38 If we apply the model to social networks, the resulting long-distance connections will be weak ties. This can be seen from the fact that they are bridges, connecting individuals who do not share any friends or acquaintances, and who are therefore unlikely to be friends themselves; in terms of Granovetter’s theory, in turn, bridges can only be weak ties. A real-life application that comes close to this model was suggested much earlier in the context of biracial school settings in the United States.39 It was proposed that rather than 38 In Figure 5, for example, the AB, DE and FG distances slightly increased, yet most other path lengths decreased, in many cases, from three to just one intermediate stop. In large networks (Watts and Strogatz tested networks with 1000 nodes), the effect of long-distance connections on the typical path length is even more significant. 39 Karweit et al., The Conditions for Peer Associations in Schools.

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attempt to make white and black children become friends, classrooms should be arranged in ways that produce weak contacts among black and white cliques (see Figs. 4 and 5).

P

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Figure 5. Rewired nearest-neighbour network (deleted links shown as dotted lines).

Many real-life networks come into being by gradual growth.40 Small-world qualities emerge in networks if they grow by preferential attachment, which means that new nodes in the network tend to attach themselves to existing nodes that already have a large number of connections. The phenomenon called ‘the rich get richer’ in the vernacular thus results in the formation of small-world networks. According to a more precise mathematical formulation, these networks are ‘scale-free’, which refers to the distribution of links among the nodes: the majority of links are connected to a few nodes, whereas numerous nodes only have a small number of links. The function that describes the distribution of links in such a network is scale-free, both in the sense that it does not have a typical value (there is no typical number 40

Barabási and Albert, ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks’.

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of links that a node is expected to have) and that the resulting network is self-identical on any scale (that is, it looks the same if we magnify and observe increasingly smaller fragments of it: in other words, it has a fractal structure). An important feature of scale-free networks is that they are quite resistant to the random removal of links, that is, most nodes in the network remain connected after such changes. Insights into weak links in social networks have been applied to networks in other domains as well,41 including ecological systems.42 In ecological networks (networks that model the interaction of biological species in a habitat), a link is defined as weak, if removing a species from the network does not result in a significant change in the abundance of the target species (that is, a species with which the species to be removed interacts).43 Various studies have shown that the presence of weak links in ecological networks stabilises the ecosystem.44 Experiments with small-scale ecological systems have shown another important effect of weak links. Some weak links in ecological networks have been found to show great variability of interaction strength, resulting in an increased variety across time and space of ways in which the same species can compose an ecosystem. Furthermore, simulations indicate that such ecosystems play an important role in largescale ecological stability, especially when species can migrate across neighbouring ecosystems.45 3. Weak links in Early Christianity For a study of social networks in Early Christianity, we have to extrapolate observations from a limited set of data. In this section, I will argue that various social attitudes and activities in the early Church facilitated the proliferation of weak interactions in ways that were less typical of other religions. It is in this indirect way that I argue that there were more weak links in Early Christianity than in other religious groups. A possible pitfall of such an approach is that it might overlook important ways of generating and maintaining weak social interactions in other religions. Future studies that examine weak links in other ancient religions are therefore needed to complete the picture provided in this chapter. 41

Csermely, Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. 42 Berlow, ‘Strong Effects of Weak Interactions’. 43 Berlow, ‘Strong Effects of Weak Interactions’, p. 331. 44 Bengtsson et al., ‘The Value of Biodiversity’; McGrady-Steed and Harris, ‘Biodiversity Regulates Ecosystems Predictability’. 45 Maser et al., ‘Weak Trophic Interactions and the Balance of Enriched Metacommunities’.

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In his book, The Mission and Expansion of Early Christianity, Adolf von Harnack provided an extensive list of different types of ‘missionaries’ in Early Christianity, recording important journeys known from different sources and correspondence among churches.46 A very influential socialscientific model of mobility in Early Christianity has been established by Gerd Theissen, who described the interaction of itinerant charismatics and their settled sympathisers in the earliest Christian community.47 Both of these previous studies called attention to the significance of mobility in the success of Early Christianity. Whereas they emphasised the institutional (Von Harnack) and sociopsychological (Theissen) aspects of such mobility, I will examine the influence of mobility on the creation of weak social links. Among the writings of the New Testament, the apostle Paul’s epistles provide the earliest concrete evidence of mobility in Early Christianity. From this correspondence, a picture of the apostle as an itinerant emerges, who tirelessly founded and visited Christian communities throughout Greece and Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). He maintained regular contact with Christians in Antioch (in ancient Syria), which probably served as his home base (Galatians 2), and at least occasionally visited Jerusalem (Galatians 1-2), the centre of Palestinian Christianity. Many of his epistles end with a list of greetings (Romans 16; 1 Corinthians 16), in which Paul and members of the community where the letter was written send their greetings to individuals in the community to which the letter is addressed. Since Paul moved about so much, he was prevented from maintaining many strong social links, but it enabled him to develop a great number of weak ties with individuals in a variety of geographical and social locations. Such a position could be best described as that of a between-group broker. The recurring pattern of greetings in the epistles is remarkable because it suggests that as a result of Paul’s brokering activity, weak links were shaped among members of various communities who possibly never met each other. In his epistles, Paul also refers to other visitors and itinerants. He had a number of deputies, among whom we know Silas, Timothy and Titus by name, who also travelled, carried messages and delivered (possibly also coauthored) his letters. Other apostles also travelled, some of them even taking their spouses with them (1 Corinthians 9:5). Yet another group of travel46

Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, pp. 319-378. 47 Theissen, Soziologie der Jesusbewegung; Idem, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity; Idem, Die Jesusbewegung: Sozialgeschichte einer Revolution der Werte.

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lers are identified as Paul’s adversaries or ‘false apostles’ (Galatians 1:6; 2:4; 3:1; 2 Corinthians 11). These other missionaries probably also had helpers and built social networks similar to Paul’s. For example, in 2 Corinthians, Paul denounces some of his adversaries for carrying ‘letters of recommendation’ (2 Corinthians 3:1), which could actually contain the same kind of reference that Paul himself gives to Titus in the very same epistle (2 Corinthians 8:16-24). From these documents, we gain the impression that the earliest Christian communities were frequently visited by itinerants, who often presented quite different points of view and assiduously attempted to undermine each other’s authority. Whereas Paul’s epistles, to the best of our knowledge, show us the state of early Christianity around the middle of the first century AD, an important document allows us a glimpse into the problem of itinerancy towards the end of the same century. In the communities where the ‘Teaching of the Apostles’ or Didache circulated, regular visits by a variety of different itinerants caused confusion. As a rule of the thumb, Didache 11 prescribes that only guests whose teaching agrees with the contents of that document (allegedly summarising the teaching of the twelve apostles) should be received by the communities. What is more surprising is the serious restrictions concerning the entertainment of visitors. Guests recognised as ‘apostles’ and ‘prophets’ were expected to stay for only one day (!), which could be extended by another day, if necessary. Someone who remained for three days was identified as a false prophet. Apostles and prophets could take bread with them as needed until they found new accommodation, but one who took money was regarded as a false prophet. Ordinary travellers were permitted to stay for up to three days. There were also rules for officials and travellers who wished to settle in a community, but there was no medium-term visiting status. Apostles could not settle at all in the community: ‘a settled-down apostle is an exapostle’, as John Dominic Crossan put it.48 The system described by the Didache kept itinerants on the move, continuously pumping them, as it were, through the social network of Christian communities. They were not able to stay in any community for more than two or three days, but were forced to proceed to another community, taking some food, but no money to sustain them for a longer period of time. Again, it seems that itinerants formed weak social ties, perhaps returning to the same community once in a while, but building no strong ties due to the temporal limits of their stay. If they settled in a community, they developed strong ties there and through weak ties connected the community to other communities.

48

Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 376.

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The gospels of the New Testament also contain a great number of references to the itinerant lifestyle of Jesus and many of his followers. The evidence was systematically studied by Theissen and since then in various other publications. In several passages, Jesus says he has no home (Matthew 8:20), commands his followers to renounce family bonds (Matthew 10:37; 12:50; Mark 10:29-30), and his apostles to wander from town to town (Matthew 10:5-15; Luke 9:1-6; 10:1-12), carrying not even a minimum of provisions (Matthew 10:9-10; Luke 9:3; 10:4). A major problem with this evidence is that it is difficult to judge whether it provides a reliable description of the actual way of life of Jesus and his disciples, or rather reflects the lifestyle of Christians who created and transmitted these sayings and stories. The texts might also reflect unrealised ideals or completely fictional accounts rather than any actual practice.49 Since we cannot solve this problem here, we can only come to the cautious conclusion that itinerant behaviour was practised or promoted from the very beginnings of Christianity, which allows for the assumption that weak links (potentially serving as bridges) were abundant in the social networks of the earliest Christians. It is also difficult to separate historical truth from fiction in the descriptions of travels in the canonical Book of Acts and the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Minimally, these accounts give the impression that travelling apostles were a widely known and popular type of Christian figure well into the second century AD. Finally, a less favourable image of itinerants is drawn by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD, whose hero, Peregrinus Proteus (a Cynic philosopher who actually lived in the same century and spectacularly cremated himself at the Olympic games of 165 AD), spent some time in his career as a member of a Christian community, quickly achieving several of the highest positions among them. Another means of maintaining weak links in Early Christian communities was the widespread practice of charity. Again, Paul’s epistles provide the earliest concrete evidence on this matter. In the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’, made in Antioch between Paul and the apostles Peter, James and John (Galatians 2:6-10), the apostles ask Paul ‘to remember the poor’, which he is ‘eager to do’. Collecting money for the poor of Jerusalem remains an important concern during his work in other congregations (1 Corinthians 16:1; 2 Corinthians 9; Galatians 2:10). In the famous passage about the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11), Paul expresses his concern about the poor going hungry while the rich get drunk at community meals. A historically less reliable but nevertheless quite informative passage in Book of Acts 6 describes the election of ‘deacons’, whose task is to assist at 49

Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes.

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the table, that is, to provide food for the poor of the Jerusalem community. Evidence about Christian charity is also abundant in the second century AD. A particular form of charity involved fasting to save money, which was then spent on charity (Hermas, Similitudes 5.3; Aristides, Apology 15). The importance of charity for the development of Christianity has already been noted by various scholars, who assume that it was an attractive feature for potential sympathisers and converts.50 Rodney Stark specifically emphasised the significance of Christian charity towards outsiders, considering it as a revolutionary step in the ancient world.51 However, none of these authors have assessed the impact of charity on social networks. This effect might seem negligible at first sight, since people who came for a free lunch could hardly contribute social ties that would promote the success of Christianity in any significant way. Whereas ties shaped by charity within the communities could be either strong or weak, charity towards outsiders or across communities (such as the collection in Greece and Asia Minor for the poor in Jerusalem) facilitated the formation of numerous weak ties within Christianity, as well as between Christianity and its social environment. We have to mention a third important source of weak ties in Early Christianity, that is, the inclusion of women. It is conventional wisdom that most Early Christian sources were written from the perspective of male authors representing the values of a patriarchal society. Efforts to unearth the role of women in Early Christianity have yielded important observations about women’s roles as apostles, patronesses and deaconesses in the early Church.52 Whereas the data is often too sparse to allow for more than speculative reconstructions, it is beyond dispute that women, in general, were present in more significant, emancipated and diverse roles in Christianity than in most contemporary religions. For example, the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles regularly mention women as the first followers of the apostles in different places, portraying many women from the upper class as influential patronesses of Christian communities.53 Both the ‘Gnostic’ Mary (not always clearly identifiable with one of the women by that name in the New Testament) in the Gospel of Philip, the 50

Riquet, Christian Charity in Action; Thraede, ‘Soziales Verhalten und Wohlfahrtspflege in Der Griechisch-Römischen Antike (Späte Republik und Frühe Kaiserzeit)’. 51 Stark, The Rise of Christianity, p. 212. 52 King, The Gospel of Mary of Magdala; Brock, Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle; Madigan and Osiek, Ordained Women in the Early Church; Reid, ‘Leading Ladies of the Early Church’. 53 Davies, The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts; Bremmer, ‘Pauper or Patroness: The Widow in the Early Christian Church’; Czachesz, ‘Wordt vervolgd: Apocriefe handelingen van de apostelen’.

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Gospel of Mary, and other writings, as well as Thecla in the Acts of Paul and Thecla are represented as female apostles. It is, however, not so much the prominent position, but rather the massive participation of women in the movement that carries more weight for my argument. In this respect, the repeated mention of a great number of widows in the earliest documents deserves special attention. The widows of ‘the Hellenists’ and ‘the Hebrews’ (the first term referring to either non-Israelites or Greek-speaking Jews) are mentioned in Book of Acts 6 in the passage cited in connection with the election of deacons (where it is not certain whether the widows are performing charitable acts or are the recipients of such acts), and something like a class or office of widows is described in the First Epistle to Timothy (chapt. 5), a pseudo-Pauline text from the second century AD. We know about the existence of an ‘order of widows’ in Carthage around 200 AD from the writings of Tertullian.54 Widows are also mentioned in a favourable light in the gospels of Mark (12:40-44) and Luke (2:36-38; 4:26; 18:1-8). Lucian of Samosata in the Life of Peregrinus Proteus (chapt. 12, see above) notes with surprise the active participation of widows in Christianity. Various sources, including the gospels, the Book of Acts, Hermas’ Shepherd, and the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (Acts of Peter 8, 21; Acts of John 30-36), indicate that widows were taken good care of in Christian communities. It is quite remarkable that Christianity paid such great attention to widows, since in Greek and Jewish societies they had rather limited rights.55 The participation of women in Early Christianity is especially relevant for the study of social networks because there are significant differences in the ways men and women use their social contacts. Studies of community websites show that men and women follow different strategies when building social networks. For example, while men seek serious relationships and dates on My Space, female members are more interested in friendships (most of which translate as ‘acquaintances’ in terms of weak-link theory).56 Women also have more friends (male and female) on the network, log on more often, and typically interact with females. Another study examined the use of text messages on mobile phones and found that women expand their networks more dynamically than men.57 Since the time, emotion, intimacy and reciprocal services (defining the strength of a social tie, see above) that 54

Bremmer, ‘Pauper or Patroness: The Widow in the Early Christian Church’. For a cognitive analysis of Jewish laws protecting widows, see Kazen, ‘Empathy and Ethics: Bodily Emotion as Basis for Moral Admonition’. 56 Thelwall, ‘Social Networks, Gender, and Friending’. 57 Igarashi et al., ‘Gender Differences in Social Network Development via Mobile Phone Text Messages. 55

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one can invest in a social relationship are limited, having a large number of social ties necessarily means that most of them will be weak. One may object that these observations rely on empirical data from modern societies, and might not be conclusive about the social networks of women in antiquity. However, cross-species research seems to support the idea that neurological variation between the sexes underlies some important differences in their respective styles of social behaviour.58 Coping with stress (including attacks by predators, assaults by conspecifics, and dangerous conditions such as fire or flooding) is crucial for the survival of organisms. The standard view of the stress response has been that of ‘fight-orflight’: individuals tend to fight danger when it seems manageable and flee when it is overwhelming. This kind of stress response, however, has not been adaptive for females with children in ancestral environments, as suggested by Shelley E. Taylor and her colleagues.59 Women invest more than men in bearing and rearing offspring, particularly during pregnancy, birth and the early period of a child’s life. Protecting their offspring is therefore a high priority for evolutionary reasons: a huge investment in transmitting their genes comes to nothing if their offspring dies. It is argued that mothers therefore developed the behavioural pattern of caring for their offspring as well as grouping with other women when faced with danger, which Taylor and colleagues label the ‘tend-and-befriend’ pattern. Reacting to stress by reinforcing social ties has also been found in female rats, rodents and primates, and is supported by the secretion of oxytocin (a hormone enhancing relaxation) as part of female stress response. In a number of studies, mothers were found to show ‘tend-and-befriend’ patterns in response to everyday stress, whereas fathers typically reacted by separation and confrontational behaviour.60 In addition to reacting to stress differently, men and women also respond to different stressors: stressors that are largely unique to men include legal and financial situations, while stressors that mainly affect women include losses in more distant networks and events such as relocation.61

58

Taylor et al., ‘Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-Befriend, Not Fight-Or-Flight’. 59 Ibidem. 60 Repetti, ‘Effects of Daily Workload on Subsequent Behavior during Marital Interaction; Taylor et al., ‘Biobehavioral responses to stress in females’; Story and Repetti, ‘Daily Occupational Stressors and Marital Behavior’; Smeets et al., ‘Social Cognition Under Stress: Differential Effects of Stress-Induced Cortisol Elevations in Healthy Young Men and Women’. 61 Mazure and Maciejewski, ‘The Interplay of Stress, Gender and Cognitive Style in Depressive Onset’.

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An important question arising from the above-mentioned line of research is whether women’s use of social ties has implications for tie strength, followed by the question of whether such implications can be extended to ancient society. Women who have access to social networking websites or mobile phones can use their networking talents to generate many social ties, an increasing portion of which will have to be weak ones. However, what about women without such opportunities? In lower socioeconomic classes of contemporary societies, women have been found to rely on kin networks, fictive kin networks, friends and neighbours.62 These kinds of networks, however, typically consist of strong ties, and even weak ties in such networks are unlikely to be bridging weak ties, as Granovetter’s studies have shown. What can we expect of women in the patriarchal societies of antiquity, whom we normally think of as being confined to their households?63 The point can be made that, independently of the status of women in ancient society (which certainly also differed across socioeconomic groups), their inclusion in Early Christian communities provided them with opportunities (something of an ancient My Space) to form social ties beyond those they would have had otherwise. The involvement of higher class women was crucial, since they were likely to be in a position of between-group brokerage. As a rule, women show more affiliative behaviour in social contacts than men, whose groups tend to be more goal-oriented, competitive and hierarchical.64 In sum, the ability of Early Christianity to create weak bridging links that connected social classes was at least partly due to its ability to mobilise the networking power of women. 4. The impact of weak links on the development of Christianity In the previous sections we reviewed three phenomena in Early Christianity that were unusual among ancient religions: an institutional framework of mobility and itinerancy, high investment in charity, and the active participation of women, in combination with an unusual degree of attention paid to widows. All three phenomena enhanced the development of weak social ties in Christianity. In this section, I will outline how the presence of weak links influenced the development of Early Christian religion.

62

Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, pp. 1373-1375; Idem, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited’, pp. 212-214. 63 Malina, The New Testament World, pp. 46-48. 64 Taylor et al., ‘Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females’.

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First, the earliest documents already show an exciting diversity in Early Christian religion.65 Weak links facilitated the interconnection of diverse cultural and socioeconomic groups, without forcing a uniform set of values, beliefs and attitudes on them. The lack of a uniform mould for every believer helped the spread of the movement tremendously, yet weak connections of several kinds generated bridging links that connected distant groups and phenomena with each other. If we compare Christianity with other widespread religions of the same era, the differences are evident. Participation in classical Greek and Roman religions focused on the correct performance of rituals, which sometimes (such as in the cult of the Emperor) meant little more than a few formal gestures.66 Christianity, in contrast, aimed to control the entire life, thought world and emotions of its members. Another religion that had a similar, total claim on its adherents was Judaism. Judaism, however, in spite of all its diversity, imposed requirements on people that were overly tied to ethnicity and seemed difficult or undesirable for most outsiders in most social and cultural settings to fulfil. Other successful religions were typically tailored to particular socioeconomic classes. The cult of Mithras, for example, spread quite well in the army, the administration and the urban population, but was neither appealing nor accessible to rural people, at least until its late period.67 From a very early stage, Christianity was able to posit high requirements, yet aspire to a universal appeal: it was able to win the full loyalty of a Jewish peasant in Galilee and a Greek city treasurer in Corinth (Romans 16:23) simultaneously. Second, given the presence of weak links within communities, diversity could develop even without substantial differences in cultural and socioeconomic settings. This can be compared to the formation of different ecosystems in Berlow’s experiment (see above), where the existence of weak ties between some species allowed for the formation of different ecological networks under identical circumstances. In complex systems, slight differences in the initial conditions can lead to very different developments over time, a phenomenon that is well known in systems research in various domains such as physics, biology and sociology.68 Elsewhere I have suggested how system theory can be used to describe religion and that it should be used to take into consideration the results of the study of complex sys65

Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, De veelvormigheid van het vroegste christendom. Nock, Conversion, pp. 1-16. 67 Laeuchli, ‘Urban Mithraism’; Martin, ‘Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction’, p. 123; Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, pp. 33-41. 68 Nicolis and Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction; Mainzer, Thinking in Complexity: The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind. 66

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tems.69 In this scenario, for example, different versions of Christianity could develop even in essentially similar socioeconomic settings. Third, as a consequence of its socioeconomic and cultural diversity, and the use of weak links rather than a general mould to maintain such a diverse conglomerate, Christianity was able to incorporate various points of view. In the New Testament we can already find an unprecedented variety of socioeconomic and cultural perspectives, including that of rural society and the wisdom tradition in the synoptic gospels, urban social milieus and popular philosophy in the epistles of Paul and the Gospel of John, and contributions by aspiring intellectuals such as the author of the Book of Acts (possibly identical with the author of the Gospel of Luke), not to mention the Gnostic, ascetic, apocalyptic, millenarian, charismatic and many other branches of Early Christianity. Such diversity of backgrounds and visions allowed Christianity to conquer almost every social and cultural niche found in late antiquity. More importantly, a social network in which diverse groups are connected by weak links fosters the improvement of cognitive abilities that make it possible for people to assume and appreciate different points of view. This was a hard process, which is evident from the fierce ideological struggles already attested to in the earliest sources. Apostles and teachers did not refrain from slandering each other and eagerly undermining each other’s moral positions with aggressive rhetoric and malignant gossip (Romans 16:17-19; 2 Corinthians 3:1-4 and 11:1-15; Galatians 2:11-14 and 5:12; Revelation 2-3). Heresiology emerged as one of the most important genres of theological literature from the end of the second century. Much of this verbal warfare was not unusual in the agonistic cultural milieu of antiquity.70 Due to the rather flexible structure of weak links, however, claims to hegemony were difficult to realise and a great variety of traditions and views were constantly in circulation, providing material and inspiration for the creation of complex and intriguing Early Christian texts such as the apocryphal Acts of John, the works of Origen, or various writings in the Nag Hammadi library, to mention only a few random examples from the first two centuries of Christian history. Fourth, the variety of experiences and visions, as well as the range of theological and moral points of view as documented in literary traditions, enabled Christianity to adapt itself to new circumstances across space and time. An analogy can be taken from biological species, where the presence 69

Czachesz, ‘The Emergence of Early Christian Religion: A Naturalistic Approach’; Idem, ‘The Evolution of Religious Systems: Laying the Foundations of a Network Model’. 70 Opelt, Die Lateinischen Schimpfwoerter und Verwandte Sprachliche Erscheinungen; Lampe, ‘Gewaltige Worte Werden Gewalttätig.

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of diversity in the gene pool allows for accommodation to new circumstances.71 It is precisely weak interactions in the living cell that make the accumulation of genetic diversity possible, without a corresponding diversity in the phenotypes (the characteristics of individuals). Without pressing the biological analogy too far, we can hypothesise that the accumulation of diversity in earliest Christianity, due to the presence of weak links already in Late Antiquity facilitated the accommodation of the new religion to a variety of new cultural settings, as far as Armenia and India in the east and Ethiopia in the south. In spite of the cultural changes that undermined the Christian world-view in several ways and the constant appearance of religious competitors, Christianity has remained dominant in the modern West. An important counterargument against the perceived vitality of Christianity since antiquity refers to the obvious role of political power in maintaining the dominance of the Church. Whereas Christianity was born in an era of a kind of cultural and religious free market, that period came to a close when Christianity was adopted as the State religion of the Roman Empire, and it was not until very recently that a comparable free competition of religions re-emerged in Western history. Discussing such an overarching historical perspective is not the task of this chapter. It has to be noted, however, that the very adoption of Christianity as a State religion was due to its vitality, inasmuch as it was better able to appeal to a wide range of socioeconomic and cultural groups than many of its competitors. Without this potential, it would have hardly been a likely candidate for such status. Fifth, the social network structure of Early Christianity facilitated the emergence of cognitively optimal beliefs. A shortcoming of traditional weak-link theory has been the lack of content, that is, the absence of explanations about the kind of information that flows through weak ties in a social network.72 In this final section, I suggest that weak links in Early Christianity particularly served the flow of new ideas that ultimately resulted in the formation of cognitively optimal beliefs. In cultural transmission, some ideas fare better than others due to their memorability and their power to motivate people to transmit them. A good joke is memorable and motivates people to share it with other people as a way of gaining attention and appreciation. A popular tune is memorable and motivates people to sing, whistle or play it. This aspect of cultural transmission has been explained by different models, including memetics (R. Dawkins) and epidemiology (D. Sperber).73 71

Csermely, ‘Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks’, pp. 139-150. 72 Granovetter, ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, p. 1378. 73 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Sperber, Explaining Culture.

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Religious ideas are especially successful because they incorporate an optimal number of counterintuitive elements, that is, details that violate expectations about cross-culturally attested ontological categories.74 Elsewhere I have shown how the mainstream version of Jesus’ death and resurrection can be explained by its emergence as a cognitively optimal, minimally counterintuitive version of the Jesus story.75 The emergence of this idea, and others which are similar, such as the talking or otherwise human-like animals in a range of Early Christian texts,76 requires innovations that create new concepts, as well as repeated transmission that helps the selection of the most successful ones. The presence of weak links helped Early Christianity to realise both of these preconditions and thereby develop cognitively optimal ideas. On the one hand, the presence of weak ties among groups with different views and traditions helped individuals who can be characterised as between-group brokers to come up with new insights; on the other hand, the rapid circulation of such innovations was enabled by the existence of weak links, which in turn facilitated the selection (in the sense of memetics) or formation (in the sense of epidemiology) of cognitively optimal variants. The difference between minimally counterintuitive ideas (discussed in this section) and adaptations to changing sociocultural environments (discussed in the previous section) is that whereas the latter require the modification of beliefs, institutions and norms, the former will be privileged in virtually any sociocultural setting. In summary, the success of Early Christianity was due to the combination of some cognitively optimal, culture-independent traits and the ability of the new religion to adapt itself to changing socioeconomic and cultural environments. The emergence of both features was made possible by the presence of bridging, weak social ties, which in turn evolved due to the social attitudes of Early Christians towards women, charity and mobility.

74

Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion; Idem, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought; Boyer and Ramble, ‘Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-Cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-Intuitive Representations’, p. 535. 75 Czachesz, ‘Kontraintuitive Ideen im urchristlichen Denken’; Idem, ‘Early Christian Views on Jesus’ Resurrection: Toward a Cognitive Psychological Interpretation’. 76 Matthews, ‘Articulate Animals; Czachesz, ‘The Eagle on the Tree: A Homeric Motif in Early Christian and Jewish Literature’; Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans; Czachesz, ‘Speaking Asses in the Acts of Thomas’; Spittler, Animals in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank Tamás Biró, Joseph Bulbulia, Ilkka Pyysiäinen, Gerd Theissen, Risto Uro and Harvey Whitehouse for commenting on previous versions of this chapter. I am indebted to the support of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Resaerch (VENI 275-25-003), the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.

OPTIMAL RELIGION OPTIMALITY THEORY ACCOUNTS FOR RITUAL DYNAMICS

Tamás Biró 1. Introduction: possible cognitive approaches to religion 1.1 How do linguists do cognitive science? Researchers in the cognitive sciences have in mind two very different realisations of a cognitive system:1 the human brain and the intelligent computer. While the first dominates psychology, neurology or anthropology, the second plays a central role in industrially oriented artificial intelligence, such as robotics. Linguistics exhibits an interesting trichotomy. Psycholinguists and neurolinguists focus on the brain’s linguistic skills, while language technology develops industrial products. However, the third branch of linguistics does not aim at either of those realisations: mainstream theoretical linguistic research follows its own historically determined methodology with only very specific, often quite indirect connections to developments in other cognitive fields.2 Rather than learning from other cognitive sciences, it developed into a quite peculiar cognitive discipline. This task-sharing allows for scholars with very diverse educational backgrounds and different institutional affiliations to work together efficiently. Notwithstanding frequent complaints about the lack of communication between different subfields, linguistics – despite its upbringing in the humanities – has become a cutting-edge discipline among the cognitive sciences. Nevertheless, the ‘cognitive’ nature of modern theoretical linguistics is a complex issue. The path launched by Noam Chomsky is cognitive in the sense that it considers language as a biological phenomenon that is best described by some mathematical formalism and not so much as an arbitrary symbol system based on social conventions, as used to be seen by the structuralists in the first half of the twentieth century. Thanks to Chomsky’s hypothesis about the independence of the language faculty, linguists have been 1 Cf. the notion of ‘multiple realisation’ in Ilkka Pyysiäinen’s article in the present volume. 2 For more details, see John Nerbonne’s article in the present volume.

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and still are pursuing their own methodologies, including those adopted from pre-Chomskyan linguistics,3 those borrowed from other cognitive sciences (and then significantly transformed),4 and those newly developed in a cognitive scientific style.5 Most contemporary linguists, even if not taking a theoretical stance on the question of the independence of the linguistic faculty, follow this methodology in practice. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that an ‘anti-Chomskyan’ functionalist approach – featuring figures such as Charles Fillmore and George Lakoff – called cognitive linguistics emerged, which aimed at deriving linguistic phenomena directly from general cognitive capacities and from language use, without stipulating an abstract grammar in the brain.6 Note that even these linguists are ‘Chomskyan’ in a broad sense: they view language as a cognitive function and employ cognitive (though, different) methodologies, as is reflected in the label of this school. The cognitive science of religion (CSR), another field growing out of the traditional sphere of humanities, I conjecture, will also develop a similar trichotomy. This trichotomy may consist of a neurological-psychological line, a social engineering line (for example, CSR models supporting decisions on policies about fundamentalism), and an autonomous research line based on a combination of traditional methodologies used in religious studies (for example, anthropology, sociology of religion, textual criticism) with cognitive approaches. As the example of linguistics shows, this trichotomy best fits the educational background and the institutional embedding of the scholars involved. Each scholar has to find the methodology most suited to his or her personality, and therefore the wider the methodological scope, the more successful the cognitive science of religion will be in the near future. In this paper, I am advocating a Chomskyan approach – even if the model I will introduce is based on a linguistic architecture that is independ3 For example, the hierarchical constituents (e.g., phrases in a sentence) or the distinctive phonological features (such as [± voiced], [± nasal], [± rounded]) originate in the structuralist schools of the early twentieth century. 4 Optimality Theory, the topic of the present contribution, originates in the field of neural networks, though linguists use it in a way that completely conceals its connectionist roots. It is important to note that neural networks left most of mainstream linguistics (and much of computational linguistics) absolutely untouched, despite important episodes such as the past tense debate. 5 Most of the linguistic models belong to this category: Chomsky’s Government and Binding, his Minimalist Program, or alternatives to Chomsky, such as LFG, HPSG, Lexical Phonology, Autosegmental Phonology, Government Phonology, and many, many others. 6 For an introduction to this approach, which is not by coincidence very popular among scholars of the cognitive science of religion, see Croft and Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics.

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ent of Noam Chomsky’s oeuvre – in the sense that I consider religious phenomena in themselves in order to develop a formal model to describe them. The primary question is whether the model is able to account for the observed phenomena and – as with mainstream theoretical linguistics – the cognitive underpinning is only secondary.7 This approach is different from much of the contemporary work in the cognitive science of religion which follows the anti-Chomskyan cognitive linguists in searching for direct connections between the domain of research and general cognitive capacities.8 However, the fact that I consider religious phenomena to be autonomous and make broader cognitive connections only secondarily is only a methodological or epistemological issue. Unlike Chomsky himself,9 and like many other linguists, I do not postulate ontologically the existence of an independent brain faculty for the domain I am describing. For religion, E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley demonstrate how one can develop formalisms specifically for rituals while still arguing that this proposal is embedded in the general cognitive capacities of human beings.10 Similarly, the specific formalism I shall adapt to religion has been developed for language but is asserted to be a general cognitive architecture.11 To summarise, the approach proposed in the present article follows the methodology of contemporary mainstream theoretical linguistics. The goal is to build a formal model that is able to describe empirical observations, namely, the dynamics of religious rituals. No connection to general cognitive capacities will be made; suffice it to say that we adopt an architecture that has proven to be very efficient in linguistics, another cognitive domain, and whose connectionist underpinning – creating a possible bridge to brain structures – has been developed by Paul Smolensky and his colleagues.12

7 Actually, in much mainstream linguistic research, cognitive adequacy is even less important and remains only relevant at the rhetorical level. Scholars base their theories exclusively on grammaticality judgements of well-designed sentences. Only few theoretical linguists (not including neurolinguists and psycholinguists) allow themselves to be influenced by non-linguistic considerations, or even by neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic experiments. 8 For a quick overview, see, for example, the papers and squibs submitted to the online Archive for Religion & Cognition (http://www.csr-arc.com). 9 Even Noam Chomsky has recently partially withdrawn his strong claim on the autonomy of the language faculty; see Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch, ‘The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?’ 10 Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion. 11 Smolensky and Legendre, eds., The Harmonic Mind: From Neural Computation to Optimality-Theoretic Grammar. 12 Smolensky and Legendre, The Harmonic Mind.

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1.2 Formal models should really be formal Formal models – at times making more use of mathematics than at others, and frequently leading to computer simulations – usually become the link between the different aspects of cognitive sciences. These models form the bases of practical applications in robotics or language engineering, even if concrete applications often simplify certain aspects of the theories while having to solve practical issues. At the same time, these models can also guide psychological and neurological research. Many research questions are formulated in terms of these models, and the goal of an experiment is often to supply evidence for them. Without these models, one would be lost in the jungle of neural structures. In linguistics, these models are often formulated as the result of work using traditional methodologies. Thus, for example, a structuralist analysis of a high number of languages and the subsequent setting up of language typologies – a pre-Chomskyan methodology – is the starting point for the creation of a linguistic model. The Chomskyan or generative turn in its broadest sense, as I view it, was nothing but the introduction of more formal, mathematically more elaborate models, as well as the introduction of a rhetoric supporting these models that sees language not so much as an arbitrary social convention but as a biological phenomenon (hence issues such as innateness, universal grammar, and so forth). Once such a model is proposed, its adequacy is challenged from all directions. The major questions being: Does it really describe the relevant phenomena in all languages, or are there counter-examples? Is it a convincing cognitive model (whatever ‘convincing’ means), or is it ad hoc? Does it also match results in psychological and neurological research? Can it also describe language acquisition data (for example, child language phenomena)? Can the grammar be learned with an efficient algorithm? Can it be used in language technology? Note that even though all these questions can be posed theoretically, not all of them affect the fate of a model. In the cognitive science of religion, the model of religious rituals by McCauley and Lawson is probably one of the earliest and best examples of a model whose development followed the same path.13 It was developed on the basis of traditional anthropological methodologies, namely, ethnographic data such as that collected by Harvey Whitehouse in Dadul.14 How13

McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind. H. Whitehouse, Inside the Cult. Harvey Whitehouse also provides a cognitive account of his observations, but the structure of his argumentation is closer to explanations found in traditional anthropological literature than to models in linguistics. 14

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ever, the other eye of the developers of the model remained continuously focused on cognitive science, for example, memory research. These two fields have been combined into a novel abstract formalism referring to mathematical concepts. The McCauley-Lawson model has been tested against an increasing amount of empirical data, both anthropological15 and psychological, which will certainly lead to substantial refinements in the model in the coming years. The neurological foundations of the theory should also be constantly revised in the light of the most recent research on memory. In turn, the model will hopefully prove to be adequate both on a descriptive level (correctly describing empirical data) and on a cognitive level (consistent with what we know about the human brain/mind). However, to the best of my knowledge, the formal details of the theory have not yet been worked out. This situation is a problem if the cognitive science of religion aims to meet the highest standards of the cognitive sciences. The model represents religious rituals in a three-dimensional space: ritual form, ritual frequency, and arousal associated with the performance of the ritual. In this space a certain dynamics applies force to the rituals, due to which only some positions are stable. McCauley and Lawson speak of attractor positions, that is, positions in the space towards which rituals converge in time. Now, the problem is that unless the intention is to use these heavy mathematical concepts only as metaphors, a real scientific model employing notions of dynamical systems is expected to define the dynamics precisely and to demonstrate that the suggested positions are indeed attractors. It would probably be easy enough to suggest some simple, illustrative mathematical models that yield the expected positions as attractors. It would suffice to choose one of the paradigmatic examples in complex system theory, and somehow to interpret its parameters as the parameters of religion. However, I doubt that the result would go beyond a very superficial parallelism between the behaviour of certain complex systems and religious phenomena, and that this model could quantitatively explain the real dynamics of the parameters involved in rituals. The proponent of such a model should justify why the specific equations of the dynamical system apply to religion. Nonetheless, I invite fellow scholars to refute my intuition and to come up with such models, even if they are initially too simplistic, as they may have the potential to develop into convincing theories over the longer term. Consequently, we move back one step. Instead of directly tackling the dynamics, we will first tackle the mental model, and turn to a cognitive architecture borrowed from linguistics. It will be argued that this ‘grammar’ can describe the way a congregant’s mind works, and the dynamics of the 15

Cf. Dimitris Xygalatas in the present volume.

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ritual system will subsequently be derived from this architecture. By applying Optimality Theory16 to rituals, I do not want to claim to have found the solution, but rather to show what I mean by a formal model in CSR. Again, in this way, I would like to call fellow researchers to pursue something better, more convincing, and more adequate on a descriptive and a cognitive level. 1.3 Do not be afraid of formal models! Many readers might find the following sections more difficult to read than some other contributions to this volume. Indeed, one may find it useful to stop reading here and there, and just reproduce the argumentation using paper and pen in order to understand (and ‘digest’) the formalism. Yet, I argue, this is unavoidable in hard-core cognitive sciences. Many readers will probably ask what the advantage is of introducing such a complex formalism. It may often be useful to translate the formalism into simple terms, but there is a risk that the entire formal enterprise will thus appear to be unnecessarily complicated, an abracadabra just to say something very simple. In fact, while the formalisation actually says something very simple, it also has the potential to reveal much more, and it is only this potential that motivates the enterprise. An analogy is offered by the history of science. What did physics gain by introducing Newton’s laws and the heavy mathematics needed for classical mechanics? Would it not have been simpler to say that the apple fell from the tree? Newton’s mechanics had at least three advantages. Firstly, it produced more exact (quantitative), and therefore more verifiable or refutable predictions. Secondly, it created connections between topics that earlier were considered to be unrelated, such as between the falling apple and celestial motion. Finally, it had unexpected consequences: the motion of a space probe can be calculated using mechanics, but it is neither a terrestrial object, nor a star or planet. Newton’s mechanics, unlike earlier physics, could correctly predict precisely what would happen to an object dropped by an astronaut on the surface of the Moon. It also contributed to the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, whose position could be derived from perturbations in the motion of Uranus. I believe that the approach presented in this paper has all three of these potentials. Namely, by introducing exact models describing ritual dynamics, which can be tested on computers, the cognitive science of religion becomes a discipline with stronger predictions to be faced with empirical data. Furthermore, the approach is related to cognitive architectures developed in 16

Prince and Smolensky, Optimality Theory.

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linguistics, and thereby helps build bridges between understanding religion and understanding other cognitive phenomena. Finally, a full-fledged version and the computer implementation of the model might exhibit surprising features and explain more phenomena which one would not discover by just speculating with paper and pen about the model. 2. A quick introduction to Optimality Theory The reasons for choosing Optimality Theory (OT) are manifold. First, Optimality Theory has proved to be successful in many fields of linguistics for more than a decade, including issues related to thematic roles,17 the source of Lawson and McCauley’s analysis of ritual form.18 More importantly, Optimality Theory has its roots in a general cognitive architecture developed by the PDP (Parallel Distributed Processing) Group led by Jay McClelland and David Rumelhart in the mid-1980s. As a member of this group, Paul Smolensky developed his connectionist Harmony Grammar, the precursor to Optimality Theory.19 Later on, in the early 1990s, collaboration with the fervent anti-connectionist, Alan Prince, resulted in Optimality Theory (OT).20 Indeed, OT is meant to form the bridge between the low-level connectionist network present in the brain and the high-level symbol-manipulative processes, such as language – and religion, as I suggest.21 Most linguists use it as a symbol-manipulative architecture for a grammar, while a cognitive scientist and a connectionist can translate it at any time into a neural network. Moreover, it can also be related to ex17

See: Legendre, Raymond and Smolensky, Analytic Typology of Case Marking and Grammatical Voice. See also: Smolensky and Legendre, The Harmonic Mind, vol. II, 161-181. Thematic roles – such as agent, patient and instrument – form the bridge between semantics and syntax. For example, the patient of a verb is expressed in an active English sentence by the object, but in a passive one by the subject. The idea was introduced in the 1970s, and became widely used in Chomsky’s Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky, Lectures on Government and Binding; idem, Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding). 18 Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion. 19 See Smolensky’s ‘Information processing in dynamical systems: Foundations of Harmony Theory’ in the famous Parallel Distributed Processing volume of 1986. 20 Prince and Smolensky, Optimality Theory. The Optimality Theory-Harmony Grammar connection, as well as several theoretical and computational points are elaborated in Smolensky and Legendre, The Harmonic Mind. 21 The authors of The Harmonic Mind, vol. I, p. 45, summarise their contribution to what they call the ‘cognitive science of language’: ‘At a more general level than that of any particular results, we hope that, taken as a whole, the book provides some evidence for the value of an approach to cognitive science that is grounded in neural computation, yet centred on formally articulated general cognitive principles’.

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isting heuristic approaches to non-linguistic domains.22 In summary, Optimality Theory is a promising candidate for a formal model of religious rituals in the cognitive science of religion.23 To understand the idea of Optimality Theory, suppose that the languages of the world can be organised into the following three types according to their stress pattern: 1. 2. 3.

Main stress on the first syllable (e.g., Hungarian, Central Norwegian Lappish, Czech, Ono in New Guinea, Debu on Loyalty Islands). Main stress on the last syllable (e.g., Uzbek, Yavapai, Moghol, Atayal, Guarani). Main stress on the penultimate syllable (e.g., Polish, Piro, Djingili, Mohawk, Albanian, Mussau).

This is only a simple example for educative purposes, and a high number of languages – including Latin, English and Dutch – with more complex (for example, syllable weight dependent) stress systems have been ignored. Nevertheless, it seems to be true that there are but few languages where the rule is to always put the stress on the second syllable. However, the second syllable of a word in other language types may be stressed: the last syllable of two-syllable words in the second type, and the second-last syllable of three-syllable words in the third type. Yet, no language would stress the second syllable of a four-syllable word in this language typology. Data on a large number of languages have been collected, so the lack of languages with the stress always on the second syllable is most probably not simply a random gap. Thus, if a model could describe this typology – that is, predict the existence of the existing types and the non-existence of the non-existing types – we could argue that this model has ‘grasped’ something about the essence of human language. 22

Gigerenzer, Todd and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, p. 91. For the connection of the ABC Research Group’s ‘fast and frugal heuristics’ to Optimality Theory, see also: Bíró, Finding the Right Words. A recent study comparing an OT-like model (called the ‘lexicographic decision rule’) to alternatives in order to account for empirical data of human ethical decisions is presented by Coenen and Marewski, ‘Predicting Moral Judgments of Corporate Responsibility with Formal Decision Heuristics’. 23 An early attempt to combine Optimality Theory with ethical decision-making in a religious context is presented by Parker and Parker, ‘Optimality Theory and Ethical Decision Making’. Although Parker and Parker present a useful introduction to Optimality Theory with a fair example from religious ethics, their constraints are too ad hoc and too specific to a certain culture. Therefore, these constraints cannot be seen as belonging to a ‘universal ethical grammar’, which would be required if one wished to adapt the OT philosophy to a cognitive study of ethics and religion.

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Figure 1. The basic architecture of an Optimality Theoretic grammar. The GEN (Generator) module maps the input, the underlying representation (UR) onto the set of candidates. Subsequently, the EVAL (Evaluator) module chooses the optimal member of this set, which is the output of the system, called the surface representation (SR). EVAL consists of a hierarchy of constraints, which act as filters. On this figure, Con3 >> Con2 >> Con1, that is, constraint Con3 is ranked the highest (is applied first), while Con1 is the lowest (is applied last).

Optimality Theory proposes such a model (Figure 1), postulating a set of candidates and a ranked set of constraints. The candidates are all of the imaginable possibilities, all of the potential forms that could be used in theory to express a given word or sentence in any language of the world. OT introduces two modules to compute the grammatical form of a certain word or sentence in a given language. First, the set of all candidates is generated by the GEN (Generator) module. Next, the best member of this set is chosen by the EVAL (Evaluator) module. Within EVAL, the relative ‘goodness’ of the candidates depends on the constraint ranking (constraint hierarchy), which is the source of why different languages produce different forms. According to the original philosophy of OT, the set of candidates and the set of constraints are universal, and only the ranking of the constraints is language specific. Consequently, it is the hierarchy that accounts for language types; thus, in OT, a grammar is in fact the constraint ranking. To see how all this works in detail, let us build a model of word stress assignment. You can stress the first syllable, the second, or the third, and so on. One and only one syllable must be stressed.24 If the input (underlying form, UR) is a four-syllable word (say, American), then the set of candidates is the set {suuu, usuu, uusu, uuus}, where s represents a stressed syllable and u stands for an unstressed syllable. For example, suuu is the foursyllable candidate whose first syllable is stressed (Ámerican), while uusu corresponds to stressing the penultimate syllable (Amerícan). 24 We presently ignore secondary stress and focus exclusively on primary stress. Real phonological models aspire to account for both, and also for languages with more complex stress systems.

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In the next step, we introduce the constraints, requirements such as:25 (1) EARLY: the stress must occur as early as possible in the word.26 LATE: the stress must occur as late as possible in the word.27 NONFINAL: the last syllable must not be stressed.28

These constraints are ordered and act as filters. The highest ranked constraint evaluates each candidate first and selects the best subset of its input.29 Only those candidates that are not worse than some other candidates survive the first constraint. Then comes the second constraint, which similarly filters out some of the candidates that have survived the first constraint, and so on. If a candidate loses at some point, it can never come back into the game, even if it was very good with respect to lower ranked constraints. The output is the candidate (rarely, the candidates) that has survived all of the filters. In other words, Optimality Theory postulates that the grammatical form, or the form produced by the human brain,30 is the best (optimal) element of the candidate set with respect to all the constraints ranked by the given hierarchy. 25

The convention is to spell their names with small capitals. The term constraint originally denoted hard constraints: requirements that a grammatical form must satisfy. Optimality Theory’s innovation was the introduction of soft constraints: requirements that a grammatical form should satisfy as much as possible. As we will soon see, constraints are often violated even by the grammatical form, which fact has resulted in serious criticism from the part of Chomskyan linguists. In order to avoid this criticism (or misunderstanding), the constraints should rather be called basic evaluator functions. This term would also reflect the fact that most constraints do not simply accept or reject a candidate, but assign a number of violations to the candidate. The more violations a candidate is assigned, the worse it is with respect to that constraint. 26 More precisely, this function returns the number of syllables between the beginning of the word and the stressed syllable (one violation mark per syllable between the beginning of the word and the stressed syllable). 27 This function returns the number of syllables intervening between the stressed syllable and the end of the word. 28 It returns 1, if the last syllable is stressed, otherwise 0. 29 It assigns a number to each candidate and selects the candidates that are assigned the lowest value. The constraint filters out any candidate that is assigned a higher number than some other candidate. 30 For a more precise formulation, as well as for a distinction between what is grammatical according to the static knowledge of language in one’s brain and what is produced dynamically by the brain, see Bíró, Finding the Right Words. A similar idea is also hinted at in the discussion by Smolensky and Legendre, The Harmonic Mind, vol. 1. p. 226-228, on linguistic competence and performance.

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The following tableau, as it is called in OT literature, summarises the behaviour of the four candidates for a four-syllable word with respect to the constraints mentioned above. Remember, s refers to a stressed syllable and u to an unstressed one. (2) suuu usuu uusu uuus

EARLY good (0) medium (1) bad (2) worst (3)

LATE worst (3) bad (2) medium (1) good (0)

NONFINAL good (0) good (0) good (0) bad (1)

Ranking the constraint EARLY the highest will make candidate suuu the winner: the other three candidates are worse with respect to EARLY, and are therefore immediately eliminated by this constraint, before the other two constraints could enter the game. Likewise, ranking the constraint LATE the highest will return candidate uuus as the single best candidate for constraint LATE, hence as the output of the whole grammar. Furthermore, the hierarchy NONFINAL >> LATE >> EARLY yields candidate uusu as optimal. Namely, first it is candidate uuus that meets its Waterloo when the highest ranked constraint is NONFINAL; and then uusu is relatively the best among the surviving three candidates with respect to the second highest ranked constraint, LATE. The following tableau visualises this competition: (3) suuu usuu
uusu uuus

NONFINAL good (0) good (0) good (0) bad (1) !

LATE worst (3)! bad (2)! medium (1) good (0)

EARLY good (0) medium (1) bad (2) worst (3)

Here, the order of the constraints reflects the hierarchy: the highest ranked, NONFINAL, is leftmost, followed by the second highest, LATE, while the lowest ranked, EARLY, is rightmost. The OT tradition is to use the ! symbol to mark the point where a candidate loses the battle. The cells on the right to this point do not play any role in the computation of the winner, so they are marked by shading. Candidate uuus leaves the battlefield in the first round, since it is worse for the constraint NONFINAL than its competitors. Consequently, only three cells are white in the next column, and clearly candidate uusu is relatively the best. Since it is the only surviving candidate, that is,

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there is only one white cell in the last column, the last constraint does not influence the computation. The famous hand symbol
points to the winner candidate uusu. Importantly, the Optimality Theoretic constraints are violable (or soft): it is possible that the winner candidate violates certain constraints. For example, candidate uusu won the competition in (3) despite its violation of the constraints LATE and EARLY. The best candidate nevertheless wins because other candidates also violate these constraints, and/or these constraints are ranked relatively low. The violability of the constraints is an innovation in OT, while in previous and alternative theories the winner must satisfy all constraints. To sum up, this model is able to account for the observed linguistic typology, as each observed language type corresponds to some constraint hierarchy (constraint ranking). The model is further corroborated by the fact that it correctly predicts even the significant gap in language typology mentioned earlier: none of the six possible constraint rankings return candidate usuu, that is, no OT grammar with these constraints puts the stress on the second syllable as a rule.31 A further issue in contemporary linguistics is the learnability of a grammar framework, that is, working out algorithms that can automatically learn a language.32 Suppose that the learner (a child learning a mother tongue, an adult learning a second language or a software in language technology) knows that the set of possible grammars is {G1, G2, G3,…}. Then, the learner is given certain learning data, that is, utterances produced by the target grammar Gt, a member of the set of possible grammars. The task of the learner is to find (or at least to approximate) this target grammar Gt based on the learning data. The existence of such a learning algorithm is necessary for the suggested grammar framework to be a cognitively adequate model of the human linguistic competence. The same requirement also applies to any model of learnt cultural phenomena, including religion. For Optimality Theory, a number of learning algorithms have been proposed. Now the task is to find the hierarchy of the (universal) constraints that returns the observed forms as the optimal ones. Suppose, for example, that the learner first hears that the initial syllable is stressed in a twosyllable word (su). This fact establishes that the constraint LATE cannot be ranked the highest, otherwise the last syllable would be stressed. However, 31

The reader is invited to check this statement with pen and paper at this point. It will facilitate the understanding of the forthcoming argument. 32 For a formal introduction to language learning (and to the effect of learning on language change), including ample bibliographical references, a recommended starting point is Niyogi, The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution.

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the rule can still be that the first syllable is stressed, or that the second last syllable is stressed. A further piece of learning data, such as usu, might subsequently lead the learner to the correct conclusion that the grammar of the language to be learned is NONFINAL >> LATE >> EARLY. A formal learning algorithm describes how this could be done by a dull computer or by a mechanically working set of brain neurons, without reference to the human intuition I have just expected the reader to use in the three previous sentences. As we will see, learning processes will become the main driving forces behind the ritual dynamics in our account. In what follows, we will introduce an Optimality Theoretic system to describe religious rituals, and then suppose that humans attempt to learn the ‘grammar’ of superhuman agents. The dynamics in the three-dimensional space of rituals suggested by McCauley and Lawson should follow from the learning procedure. 3. Optimality Theory and human behaviour 3.1 Eating optimally: a first example As a first step towards the application of OT to religious rituals, let us analyse a non-religious form of human behaviour, namely, food consumption. A person entering a restaurant at dinnertime faces a set of possibilities, including eating vegetables, fish, chicken, beef, pork, dog and horse. However, importantly, not eating anything is also an option; let us call this option the null candidate. These possible forms of behaviour generated by the input ‘entering a restaurant’ define the candidate set analogous to the candidate sets presented in the previous, linguistic example. Subsequently, a number of constraints driving one’s choice can also easily be identified.33 The constraint DONTSTARVE is unquestionably a universal constraint, but it might be useful to differentiate between two versions of it: DONTDIE and DONTSTARVE. The first constraint is very highly ranked, as proven by the fact that an average European will most probably even eat dog if the only other option would be to die of hunger. However, if the situation were not so extreme, the same person would probably rather stay hungry than eat dog. Moreover, if you are offered something that you do not really like but are used to eating, say, spinach, you still might consume it if you have no better option: if otherwise you may stay hungry or run into unpleasant social situations, such as offend the host, for example. 33 These constraints can also be seen as a formalisation of the ‘preference structures’ that Fred Keijzer, in his contribution to the present volume, suggests employing to understand the role of religion.

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To account for an aversion to dog and spinach, we introduce further constraints prohibiting the consumption of culturally forbidden and personally disfavoured food: CULTURALLYFORBIDDEN and PERSONALTASTE. The situations described can be summarised by the following Optimality Theoretic tableau, where the violation mark * means that choosing that candidate would violate that constraint: (4) DONTDIE die of hunger stay hungry dog spinach chicken

CULTURALLY DONTSTARVE PERSONAL FORBIDDEN TASTE

* * *

* *

For example, the candidate die of hunger violates the constraint DONTDIE; but it satisfies the two constraints prohibiting certain types of foods, as well as the constraint DONTSTARVE (after having died, one cannot starve). Eating dog is forbidden in European culture and also happens to violate personal taste. We also suppose for the sake of the example that the person in question does not like spinach. While introducing the constraints, we have also argued for the constraint ranking to be: (5) DONTDIE >> CULTFORBIDDEN >> DONTSTARVE >> PERSONALTASTE The central part of an Optimality Theoretic analysis of some phenomenon is the argument for a certain constraint hierarchy. Techniques, algorithms and computer packages exist to support the linguist in doing so. In our case, one can simply check that a different ranking would not yield the expected behaviour. It is true that candidate chicken will win for any ranking (because it violates no constraint), provided that the candidate set includes chicken. Nevertheless, we can find restricted candidate sets (scenarios where chicken is not on the menu) that will help refute alternative hierarchies. For example, a model that places the constraint CULTURALLYFORBIDDEN above DONTDIE makes the wrong prediction that most people will prefer dying to eating dog in the case where only these two options are present. This prediction can be checked using the following tableau, which employs the ! and
symbols, as well as shading in a similar sense to tableau (3):

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(6a)


die of hunger dog

CULT DONTDIE FORBIDDEN * *!

DONTSTARVE

PERSONAL TASTE *

Note that ranking CULTURALLYFORBIDDEN >> DONTDIE describes the case of the religiously fanatic person or the martyr, who would rather die than eat prohibited food. Another alternative hierarchy to (5), PERSONALTASTE >> DONTSTARVE is the ranking that depicts those few who prefer starving to eating spinach, if no chicken is offered: (6b) DONTDIE die of hunger
stay hungry dog spinach

CULT PERSONAL FORBIDDEN TASTE

DONTSTARVE

*! * *!

* *!

However, even this person would most probably not choose death to eating spinach, hence constraint PERSONALTASTE cannot dominate DONTDIE. Likewise, most Europeans would prefer to remain hungry rather than eat dog, which proves that CULTURALLYFORBIDDEN >> DONTSTARVE. To sum up, we have shown that if we ignore the case of the martyr and of the extremist spinach hater, the behaviour of an average Westerner is described by constraint hierarchy (5). At the same time, the remarks regarding the martyr and the spinach hater demonstrate how different hierarchies formed by the same cultural constraints can explain different types of people or different types of behaviour, similarly to the different rankings of linguistic constraints accounting for different language types. On a more general level, the background philosophy of Optimality Theory postulates that:

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The set of inputs are unrestricted and universal (the ‘Richness of the Base’ principle). The set of candidates generated for a certain input is universal (the Generator function, also called GEN, is universal). The constraints are universal; the set of constraints is universal. The only variable parameter, that is, the only source of cross-linguistic variation, is the constraint hierarchy.

Does our proposed model of cultural behaviour meet these criteria? In theory, each individual from any culture can face any situation. Hence, the ‘Richness of the Base’ holds, despite the fact that many people in several cultures will never in their life enter a restaurant that offers dog (or pork, for that matter). (Note that a similar restriction is also present in linguistics: even though theoretically any string could be a possible underlying form in any language, the lexicons of the languages are restricted to a finite number of words.) Furthermore, it is also true that any person will generate the same set of candidates in the same situation. The only parameter accounting for differences in behaviour is the constraint ranking, as we have just seen in the case of fanatics or martyrs. However, in the model presented, the third criterion seems to be false, because the constraint CULTURALLYFORBIDDEN is culturally defined, whereas PERSONALTASTE varies for each individual. Every person has such constraints, but they are not the same – they do not assign the same violation marks – across the entire human race. Yet, a large body of recent work in OT linguistics suggests the introduction of language-specific constraint families: constraints whose general idea is universal, but whose precise content is language-specific. Correspondingly, in our case the general idea of specific types of culturally forbidden and personally disliked food is universal, even if the particular content is culturally or individually defined. 3.2 Eating even more optimally: a second approach An alternative approach is to replace these two constraints – CULTURALLYFORBIDDEN and PERSONALTASTE – with universal constraints such as DONTEATDOG, DONTEATPORK, DONTEATCHICKEN, DONTEATSPINACH and so forth. For each substance X, our cognitive system automatically generates a constraint DONTEATX. We then derive notions such as personal taste and culturally forbidden foods from the ranking of these constraints. If constraint DONTEATDOG is very highly ranked across the members of a group, then we can speak of a cultural prohibition. Ranking DONTEATCHICKEN above DONTEATBEEF, even if both are ranked low, means that the person prefers beef to chicken, but has no problem eating the latter if the

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former is not an option. If DONTEATSPINACH is ranked relatively high by an individual, then he or she has a very strong aversion to spinach. This second approach can thus explain several levels of aversion; but also several levels between the individual and the larger group. For example, an aversion to broccoli can be present at a family level. Hence, there is no need to define a priori what a culture is for the purpose of a constraint such as CULTURALLYFORBIDDEN. Culture can be defined secondarily as a tendency towards a particular constraint ranking shared by the members of the group. For different purposes we can allow larger and narrower groups at the same time. This second option has further advantages. It can also account for cross-individual variation. Take two individuals, both of whom often eat beef and chicken, but where one prefers beef and the other prefers chicken if given the choice. Applying our model requires ranking both the constraint DONTEATBEEF and the constraint DONTEATCHICKEN very low (relative to other constraints such as DONTEATDOG or DONTSTARVE) for both individuals. However, their relative rank is different: one ranks the constraint DONTEATCHICKEN higher than DONTEATBEEF, and the other vice versa: (7a) Prefers beef: ... chicken
beef

DONTEATCHICKEN *!

DONTEATBEEF *

(7b) Prefers chicken: ...
chicken beef

DONTEATBEEF

DONTEATCHICKEN *

*!

Even individuals can display certain variability: one day choosing beef, but the next day preferring chicken. We can therefore stipulate a temporal reordering of the constraints close to each other, due to reasons such as ‘I did not like the beef yesterday’ (so I slightly promote DONTEATBEEF in the hierarchy), or ‘now I miss chicken’ (that is, demoting DONTEATCHICKEN). These random minor temporal promotions and demotions of constraints – sometimes resulting in the reordering of neighbouring ones – are realised in a principled way in Paul Boersma’s Stochastic Optimality Theory.34 In the 34

Boersma and Hayes, ‘Empirical Tests of the Gradual Learning Algorithm’.

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next section our model will also require such shifts in the ranking of constraints. The last advantage of the second model is its simplicity and naturalness. The constraints used are directly related to the elements of the candidate set, that is, to the reality of the world, whereas more complex notions, such as individual and cultural preferences, become derived concepts. Furthermore, the constraints can be seen as basic, very much physiologically motivated cognitive factors: ‘don’t die!’, ‘don’t starve!’, ‘don’t eat X!’. Remember that in linguistics constraints originally meant non-violable constraints, and OT’s innovation was to allow violable constraints. Similarly, the factor ‘don’t eat X’ is hard, non-violable (ranked very high) if X is really poisonous, whereas soft, violable (ranked relatively low) if X is not very healthy or should be avoided in too great a quantity. Perhaps it is in order to avoid substances that are edible but dangerous in high quantities that our cognitive system temporarily promotes constraint DONTEATX after having consumed X (hence, we would like to eat something different the next day), even if X did not cause nausea. In turn, if Middle Eastern cultures have ranked DONTEATPORK very high (and this hierarchy is stable across the population and in time), then I propose that this phenomenon uses (or misuses, is parasitic on) the same cognitive mechanisms that are employed by a human or animal population to avoid highly poisonous food. What mechanisms are they? We are speaking of two intertwined learning mechanisms: (1) individuals learn from experience to promote certain constraints above others, and then (2) pass on this knowledge to other individuals through cultural learning. The first learning procedure arises from the interaction between an individual and their environment, and translates personal experience into culture. For example, a good or bad physiological experience following the consumption of substance X is translated into a piece of cultural knowledge; in our model, into the promotion of the constraint DONTEATX, if substance X was unpleasant, and into the demotion of the same constraint in the opposite case. The second learning process, however, takes place within the population and within the given ‘domain’ (culture, in our case). The second individual learns from the first without actually experiencing, for example, the consequences of eating substance X. This learning requires the usual mechanisms by which the next generation acquires their mother tongue or their culture. Similar learning mechanisms are also responsible for spreading new linguistic or cultural features (memes, if you wish) among members of the same age group. The advantage of this secondary learning is obvious: you do not have to experience the bad taste of X yourself to learn to avoid it. However, not all pieces of cultural knowledge – not all of the details of constraint ranking, in our model – can be derived from direct biological ex-

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perience. The peer-to-peer learning mechanism, or even the architecture itself, can very easily create unexpected consequences.35 At this point the cognitive mechanism starts to have its own life and opens the door to byproducts. Even though many rationalist minds have tried to connect the Jewish and Islamic aversion to pork to hygienic and climatic explanations, much more complex mechanisms must be present, otherwise one could not explain its stability over time and geographical location, and even less so its traditional native justifications. According to the native justification, namely, it is not the interaction with nature but the interaction with the superhuman agent that caused the promotion of the constraint DONTEATPORK to the position equivalent to pork being highly poisonous. Whatever occurred historically, we probably indeed require an interaction with the superhuman agent to explain why this constraint is still ranked extremely high among Jews and Muslims. The natural context explains the biological evolution of the architecture, whereas the social context may explain the historical evolution of the by-products.36 The following section therefore employs the social context rather than the natural context when explaining the dynamics of rituals. 4. Optimality Theory and rituals 4.1 Ritual dynamics: (selected) observations to be explained In this section we not only seek to model the rituals themselves, but also to explain their dynamics, their diachronic changes. Partly following and partly critically reformulating the list of possible religious developments in McCauley and Lawson,37 our starting point will be the following set of observations: 1.

35

When one performs a religious ritual for the first time, emotional arousal is relatively high.38

See Bíró, Finding the Right Words, for examples of the erroneous functioning of the language production system. 36 A different cognitive explanation for food taboos – following a helpful overview of earlier rationales – is presented by Fessler and Navarrete, ‘Meat is good to taboo’. 37 McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind. 38 This applies not only to the person performing a ritual for the first time in their life (first communion, first Torah reading, etc.), but also to someone performing a ritual to invoke rain for the fist time in that year, for example. In the case of a first communion, a bar mitzvah or a wedding ceremony, a number of non-religious factors also influence the levels of excitement: stage fright, fear of entering a new

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3.

4.

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Repetition leads to a decrease in emotional arousal if the ritual is a human-action-only ritual. This decrease converges towards a low arousal attractor position, around which fluctuations are possible. Repetition leads to an increase in emotional arousal if the ritual is a superhuman-reaction ritual, and the reason for repetition is the failure of the previous ritual (measured as the lack of observable superhuman reaction). Due to serial repetitions, the level of arousal reaches a ceiling, followed by a breakdown. A ritual system that has only human-action-only rituals fluctuating around the low-arousal attractor position(s?) will generate outbursts of high-arousal rituals at random moments in time. In the most extreme case, this outburst creates a splinter group; in milder cases, the system itself increases the arousal of some rituals – or introduces higher arousal rituals – in order to avoid the tedium effect.

Here, we differentiate between human-action-only rituals and superhumanreaction rituals, corresponding more or less to McCauley and Lawson’s special patient/instrument rituals and special agent rituals respectively.39 The reason for the new terminology is that we are not so much concerned with the inner structure of the rituals, but rather their function. In the case of a superhuman-reaction ritual the congregant performs a ritual in order to coerce the superhuman agent to act, for example, to bring rain or a good crop, to validate the status of two people as married, or to bring along the period of the companies. In the case of human-action-only rituals, however, no such immediate response is expected. The only goal is to maintain good contact with the superhuman agents (or fellow congregants). Our long-term aim is to quantitatively account for the differences between these two types of rituals, to describe the nature of the low-arousal attractor (including the fluctuations around it), the maximal arousal ceiling and the outbursts, but also to analyse the factors influencing this dynamics. In what follows we will try to establish the first qualitative steps in this research programme, leaving computer simulations and mathematical analysis to the future.

form of life, the long preparation process, etc. It is an essential question whether these factors (present also in similar, but non-religious situations) should be accounted for by a theory of religious rituals. 39 For an introduction to McCauley and Lawson’s model, see Risto Uro’s article in the present volume.

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4.2 Theology as a behavioural grammar Our starting point – which in many respects resembles that of Stark and Bainbridge40 but does not aim at deriving a socioeconomic system – is that humans not only have their own behavioural grammar driving their own actions (modelled as an Optimality Theoretic system described in the previous section); but they also have a hypothesis about the behavioural grammar driving fellow agents in society (supposing healthy adults with a Theory of Mind). As the fellow agents include gods, spirits and ancestors, humans should also have a theory of the superhuman agents’ minds. Thus, in addition to the OT behavioural grammar driving my own behaviour, and the OT grammars that my mind assumes for each fellow human, I also retain a set of additional OT grammars for each superhuman agent that I and my culture postulates. Let us call this latter theory or grammar of a superhuman (counterintuitive) agent’s mind an intuitive theology. A congregant predicts using this theology how the superhuman agents would react to a human behaviour b. To each b the theology assigns a value r, the reaction of that particular god to human action b. In other words, the theology grammar is a mapping from possible values b to the corresponding values r, or a set of possible (b, r) pairs. Let us call this set a theological language.41 Human actions that do not entail the reaction of a counterintuitive agent do not belong to the realm of religion, whereas divine actions that have no influence on present society are purely mythological. What concerns us here is the interaction between the two spheres, and more specifically, the superhuman actions that are direct or indirect reactions to human actions (such as rituals and other religious acts,42 or secular acts with some positive or negative religious-moral values). Even facts independent of human actions that have a direct effect on human life, such as ‘each autumn the goddess calls the rain to water the earth’, will be considered as mythology and will be omitted, unless the event is described as a function of human behaviour, such as ‘each autumn the goddess calls the rain to water the earth, providing we have presented the correct sacrifice and behaved well’. 40

Stark and Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion. In Chomsky’s terms, this set is an E-language (‘external language’): the infinite set of possible utterances that are grammatical with respect to the finite grammar, that is, to the I-language (‘internal language’). 42 The distinction between rituals and religious actions were introduced by Lawson and McCauley (Rethinking Religion, p. 127). Religious actions are actions whose structural descriptions involve at least one element of a religious conceptual system. Rituals are special religious actions: those whose structural descriptions also have a patient (object) position, in addition to the agent (subject) position. Nevertheless, we will not consistently follow this distinction in this article. 41

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Consequently, a religious person does not simply face a set of possible behaviours {b1, b2, …}, as was the case in Section 3. He or she has to optimise the elements of the theological language, that is, a set {(b1, r1), (b2, r2), …}. When planning our acts, we also take into account the possible reactions of the superhuman agents. Note that this observation applies not only to religious acts, but also to any action in society that involves a reaction from the part of other agents. In fact, the theological evaluation of actions seems to reuse the system evolved for social purposes. In our food-selection example, certain alternatives might trigger positive or negative reactions, for example, depending on whether you decide to cook the your partner’s favourite meal for dinner, or you happen to eat the last piece of their favourite cake. The possible reactions of the other agents are also features that should be evaluated by the constraints of our behavioural grammar. Such situations can be described in terms bi-directional Optimality Theory.43 Here we take into account both the speaker’s and the hearer’s perspectives (‘if I say it this way, he would understand it that way’; ‘if she had meant that, she would have formulated her utterance in another way’). However, to simplify our discussion, we will skip all the details of bidirectional Optimality Theory. What we will do is first restrict the set of all behaviour-reaction pairs (b, r) to those which conform to the theological language: for each human behaviour b we let the intuitive theology calculate what reaction r by the superhuman agent is assumed. Then, we find the best element of this restricted set. In this second evaluation process, our own behavioural grammar may include constraints on b (which behaviour I prefer myself), but also on r (what reaction I prefer or would like to avoid). Let us suppose that theology teaches that certain human behaviours bsin, such as stealing, involve a superhuman reaction rpunishment. Thus, the candidate set will be restricted to the candidates in the left column of (8a). The candidate (stealing, no punishment) is eliminated by theology teaching automatic divine punishment, and the candidate (no stealing, punishment) by the belief in divine justice. Human behaviour will then optimise for the pros and cons of the different possible action-reaction pairs (b, r): behaviours bsin will be avoided, unless some other factor outweighs the tendency for punishment avoidance. Such a model can be written simply in terms of Optimality Theory:

43

Blutner, ‘Some aspects of optimality in natural language interpretation’.

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(8a)

(stealing, punishment) (no stealing, no punishment)

NOPUNISHMENT BYGOD *

WEALTH NOJAIL * *

Here, we have introduced the following constraints, depending on either behaviour b or reaction r: NOPUNISHMENTBYGOD is violated by candidates (b, r) such that the divine reaction r involves punishment. The constraint WEALTH is violated if the human behaviour b does not guarantee material wealth. Finally, NOJAIL is violated if the reaction of society or other nonsuperhuman agents (not shown in the tableau) is a jail sentence. Different hierarchies will account for different behaviours in society. The reader is invited to check – following the techniques used to compute earlier tableaux – that if the highest ranked constraint is WEALTH, the individual in question becomes a thief; but not otherwise.44 The relative rank of the two other constraints in different individuals in society reflects the efficacy of religious education and the secular legal system. A person influenced by religious values will not steal because of the highly ranked constraint NOPUNISHMENTBYGOD, while in other cases the practical principle of jail avoidance will dominate. Further constraints might also be added, such as stealing can be a behaviour considered as ‘cool’ or as ‘bad’ by peers, or divine reward and punishment in this life or after death can be discerned as having different weights, etc. – as you wish. Constraints may differentiate between different levels of reward. So the constraints EARN$1000 and EARN$10 are satisfied only if the behaviour earns at least $1000 and $10 respectively; not stealing or stealing less violates the constraint, resulting in a star in the tableau. Imagine that the constraint EARN$1000 is ranked much higher than constraint EARN$10, and that the constraint NOPUNISHMENTBYGOD is ranked between them in the behavioural grammar of a person. Tableaux (8b) and (8c) prove that this person will steal if there is a possibility that they will earn $1000, but not if the sum is much lower. The first column in (8b) is the interesting 44

If the reader is encountering Optimality Theory for the first time, it might really be worth stopping here for a while. Please take a piece of paper and pencil, and write down the six possible tableaux corresponding to the constraints in (8a). Make sure you understand which constraints assign a violation mark to the two candidates. Then, in each case, find the highest ranked constraint that makes a difference between the candidates. Mark this violation by an exclamation mark. Finally, add the shading to the cells behind the exclamation mark. This little exercise should illuminate much of the paper!

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case of both candidates violating the highest ranked constraint and therefore neither of them losing. (8b) A chance to steal $10 /$10 in front of you/ (stealing, punishment)
(no stealing, no punishment)

EARN$1000 NOPUNISH BYGOD * *! *

EARN$10

EARN$1000 NOPUNISH BYGOD * *!

EARN$10

*

(8c) A chance to steal $1000 /$1000 in front of you/
(stealing, punishment) (no stealing, no punishment)

*

Nevertheless, if you would like to argue for a model that is more than a mere play with OT tableaux, you should propose well-founded constraints, which are universal, which can account for a number of behavioural types, and which might be deduced from basic biological, ethological or psychological observations. This last example (8) does not aspire to be such a model; it is rather an illustration. 4.3 The grammar of transactions After these simpler models, let us focus on a more abstract one that should bring us closer to understanding the dynamics of religious ritual systems. Note that the abstract constraints below can always be replaced with specific constraints such as those just described. In what follows, we focus on the grammar of positive transactions. In such transactions, people engage in some form of self-sacrifice (such as spending time on prayer, suffering pains, or bringing offerings) in order to coerce the divine being to act favourably towards them. This is the type of ritual we have called superhuman-reaction ritual. In the case of humanaction-only rituals, the divine reaction does not play an immediate role, even though, as we shall see, it might influence the long-term dynamics. The basic structure of such a transaction between human and superhuman agents can be described thus: the human agent invests a price p (the human behaviour is b = p), and subsequently a reaction r, ascribed to the superhuman agent, is experienced. In a simplifying way, the model sup-

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poses that the price, payable through such things as assets, money, material goods, energy, time, human suffering and pain, can be measured as a single non-negative number p. These resources have an upper limit; so let L denote this limit. The gods, in turn, either fulfil the request (the divine reaction is r = 1) or they do not (r = 0). In sum, the following scenarios are possible: (b = 0, r = 0) (b = 1, r = 0) (b = 2, r = 0) … (b = p, r = 0) … (b = L, r = 0)

(b = 0, r = 1) (b = 1, r = 1) (b = 2, r = 1) … (b = p, r = 1) … (b = L, r = 1)

For example, scenario (p = 4, r = 0) corresponds to the case of a human agent presenting a sacrifice of a price of 4 but without the superhuman agents listening to the offer. Similarly, another scenario (p = 0, r = 1) expresses a case in which gods fulfil the wish of the humans without any sacrifice on the human side. The opposite scenario is (p = L, r = 0), in which case the gods do not react at all, even though a person has done their utmost. Let us add a further scenario, which is only a theoretical one, but which will become important: (p = L+1, r = 1) will describe the breakdown of the system. Namely, this scenario will be the winner when humans assume (when their intuitive theology predicts) that they should do more than they can (that is, more than their limit L) in order to have the gods fulfil their wish. The set of scenarios described – the candidate set of our OT-like model – is of course a simplification. Human investment might be more complex than what can be modelled as a single number. Imagine that different kinds of assets, time and pain are involved at the same time. Furthermore, the perceived reaction of the superhuman agents can also be of several kinds: it may be perceivable over a short or long term, be perceivable by all agents or only by priests, be dependent upon the interpretation of the events, and so forth. Nevertheless, simplifying the problem to a one-dimensional price paid by humans and to a yes-or-no reaction by the superhuman agents will be useful in a first approximation, and at a later stage the model can be made more complex. It has long been supposed that humans are driven by a series of laziness constraints, euphemistically called ECONOMY, widely used in linguistic literature: (9)

ECONOMYz (ECOz, *p > z): do not pay more than z!

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This constraint is satisfied only by candidates (p, r) such that p ≤ z, that is, by scenarios in which human agents pay a price not higher than z. If p > z then the candidate (p, r) violates the constraint ECOz. The abbreviation *p > z refers to this property: a violation mark * is assigned to all candidates whose p is greater than z. ECONOMY is a constraint family because it includes a number of constraints for different z values. By their very nature, these constraints must be ranked as follows: (10)

Human behavioural grammar: ECONOMYL >> ECONOMYL-1 >> … >> ECONOMY2 >> ECONOMY1

In other words, the idea of not being willing to pay more than a high price is always more influential on one’s decisions than the idea of not being willing to pay more than a low price. A different ranking would render some of the constraints superfluous. Given these constraints, the winning candidate is always the one with the lowest price. For example, if L = 4: (11)

(b = 5, r) (b = 4, r) (b = 3, r) (b = 2, r)
(b = 1, r)

ECONOMY4 *!

ECONOMY3 * *!

ECONOMY2 * * *!

ECONOMY1 * * * *!

In other words, if no other factor is present, humans will always choose the cheapest possible option. Why then are we investing in interactions at all? Notwithstanding cases of altruism, the motivation is that we would like to reach our goals through the interaction, that is, we would like our partner to react. Consequently, we need a theory of the partner’s mind, which is what we have called an intuitive theology in the case of a superhuman partner. The intuitive theology consists of a family of constraints called DONTGIVE, similar to ECONOMY, as well as the additional constraint REACT that describes the wish of the superhuman to also engage in the interaction. (12)

DONTGIVEz (DGz, *p < z): do not react to a proposal lower than z! REACT (R, *r = 0): react to any proposal!

The constraint DONTGIVEz is violated by scenarios (p, r) in which p < z and simultaneously r = 1. However, candidate scenarios in which either the

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price paid is high enough (p ≥ z) or the superhuman does not react to the human sacrifice (r = 0) satisfy this constraint. The idea is that the vendor should not sell (i.e., r = 1) for a too low a price (i.e., p < z). The constraint REACT penalises interactions in which the superhuman does not react to the offer: it is satisfied by candidates (p, r) such that r = 1, and violated if r = 0. In the intuitive theology – describing the mind of the superhuman agent, and maintained in the mind of the human agent – members of the DONTGIVE family are ranked by their nature in decreasing order. This is because any vendor would avoid a transaction whose price is less than a low value z, but it is much less of an issue to avoid a transaction whose price is less than a high z. The constraint REACT is ranked somewhere between two constraints of this family, say, between DONTGIVEn and DONTGIVEn+1: (13)

Grammar of intuitive theology: DONTGIVE0 >> DONTGIVE 1 >> … >> DONTGIVE n >> REACT >> >> DONTGIVE n+1 >> … >> DONTGIVE L >> DONTGIVE L+1

The value n in theology (13) will become central: different theologies differ in terms of where they rank the constraint REACT, that is, what value the parameter n (the index of the DG constraint just preceding REACT) takes. How does an intuitive theology work? The superhuman agent is offered a sacrifice of price p, and has two options: either to react or not to react. Hence, according to the human agent’s theory of the superhuman agent’s mind, the latter will judge between two options. Candidate (b = p, r = 0) stands for the option with no superhuman reaction and candidate (b = p, r = 1) describes the case of a positive reaction. Will the superhuman agent accept the offer? The crucial point in determining the answer is which of p (the price of the offer) and n (the place of the constraint REACT in hierarchy (13) describing the intuitive theology) is larger. Consider the following two examples: (14)

Intuitive theology n = 2: DG0 >> DG1 >> DG2 >> REACT >> DG3 >> DG4

(14a)

n = 2, p = 2: DG0 (b = 2, r = 0)
(b = 2, r = 1)

DG1

DG2

REACT DG3 *! *

DG4 *

182 (14b)

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n = 2, p = 1: DG0
(b = 1, r = 0) (b = 1, r = 1)

DG1

DG2 *!

REACT DG3 * *

DG4 *

In the cases of both tableaux, the n used to rank REACT is n = 2 (the constraint REACT is ranked between the constraints DONTGIVE2 and DONTGIVE3). If the human agent offers a price of p = 2 or higher, as in (14a), the superhuman should accept it, because the constraint REACT will eliminate the other option (not reacting). If, however, the price of the sacrifice presented is lower than n, namely p = 1, in tableau (14b), then the superhuman is expected not to react, because some highly ranked DONTGIVE constraints – DG2 in (14b) – prevent the reaction before the evaluation of the two candidates reaches the constraint REACT. Therefore, if a human agent presupposes the intuitive theology (13), he or she must bear in mind only the options of paying a price not lower than n, since otherwise it can be expected that the sacrifice will be rejected by the superhuman partner. However, the ECONOMY constraints in his or her own behavioural grammar (10) force the payment to be as little as possible, as shown by tableau (11). The candidate set evaluated according to the behavioural grammar thus includes only the candidates in relation to which it is expected – based on the intuitive theology – that there will be a positive reaction from the superhuman: (15) Behavioural grammar (10) employed to the candidates whose r = 1 and which are winners for theology (14).

(b = 5, r = 1) (b = 4, r = 1) (b = 3, r = 1)
(b = 2, r = 1)

ECONOMY4 *!

ECONOMY3 * *!

ECONOMY2 * * *!

ECONOMY1 * * * *

In this set – the positive reaction subset of the theological language, {(b = n, r = 1), (b = n + 1, r = 1), … (b = L, r = 1)} – the optimal candidate is (b = n, r = 1). Consequently, the human agent performs a ritual investing a price n, and not a penny more. Remember that this value depends on the human agent’s intuitive theology, that is, at what lowest price the agent believes the superhuman would react.

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4.4 Deriving the dynamics Having reached this point, let us return to the four observations made at the beginning of Section 4. In what follows, I propose a preliminary explanation of these observations using the transaction grammar introduced in the previous subsection. When a ritual is presented for the first time, the person’s theology assumes a more or less random position for the constraint REACT in theology (13), which translates into a medium-large value for n. In turn, the ritual is presented for the first time with a medium level of emotional energy invested. As it is the first time ever (such as in the case of a first communion or a first call to the Torah), or the first time after a long period (first prayers for rain in that year), there is no personal experience as yet, and this medium value of n is defined by ‘general intuitive theological knowledge’ in the semantic memory.45 The constraint family ECONOMY is probably derived from experience held in the episodic memory, whereas the intuitive theology is a combination of elements from the semantic and the episodic memory (compare this to Whitehouse’s two modes of religiosity).46 Before one performs the ritual for the first time, only semantic information is present, which is learnt culturally from older co-religionists and which does not contradict personal experiences. This is probably why the leaders of many initiation rituals can easily convince novices to endure so much pain: the novice simply postulates a high n if told to do so. Subsequently, as this is the first time the novice’s behaviour violates the highly ranked constraint ECONOMYn, the event remains memorable because it provides precious autobiographical information (experience) on this important constraint. Namely, the novice learns that even this constraint is violable: one can survive such pain and endure it for the sake of fellow group members. Therefore, constraints such as those ensuring group solidarity must be ranked even above ECONOMYn. The developments following the first performance depend on the superhuman agent’s ‘feedback’, as experienced by our human congregant. If the latter feels or believes that the superhuman agent has reacted, then there is no reason to alter the intuitive theology. If, however, the congregant has the impression that the gods have not accepted the sacrifice, then there is a need to revise the theory concerning 45

A ritual not performed for a year might be an intermediate category. Only traces of the experience accumulated in the past remain in the episodic memory. Therefore, its first repetition involves more emotions than the repetition of a ritual performed the previous day, but fewer emotions than the performance of a ritual for the very first time. 46 Whitehouse, Inside the Cult; Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity.

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the superhuman agent’s mind. A learning process commences based on the following piece of information: from the options (b = n, r = 0) and (b = n, r = 1), the superhuman agent has actually chosen the former (not to react to the sacrifice of price n). The constraint REACT must be demoted in the hierarchy (13), because this is how the congregant can only explain the rejection of the sacrifice by the superhuman agent.47 In other words, the constraint REACT moves more to the right in the hierarchy. The value of n, the threshold measuring the place of the constraint REACT within the hierarchy, is increased. The revised theology will predict that gods only accept more expensive sacrifices, and the congregant entertaining this revised theology will repeat the ritual with a higher emotional arousal. In the example of hierarchy (14), repeated here as (16a), the human agent wrongly expected the superhuman agent to react positively to an offer of price 2. The lack of reaction to an actual sacrifice is seen as a piece of learning data, based on which the human agent modifies their mental model of the superhuman agent’s mind, resulting in the new hierarchy (16b). This adjusted theology correctly accounts for the lack of a reaction to an offer of price 2, but at the same time predicts a reaction to a higher price in (16c). (16a)

Intuitive theology (n = 2): DG0 >> DG1 >> DG2 >> REACT >> DG3 >> DG4 DG0

DG1

DG2

(b = 2, r = 0)
(b = 2, r = 1) (16b)

DG4 *

Intuitive theology (n = 3): DG0 >> DG1 >> DG2 >> DG3 >> REACT >> DG4 DG0
(b = 2, r = 0) (b = 2, r = 1)

47

REACT DG3 *! *

DG1

DG2

DG3 *!

REACT DG4 * *

The most basic learning algorithms for Optimality Theory – Error Driven Constraint Demotion (EDCD) and Recursive Constraint Demotion (RCD) – are summarised in: Tesar and Smolensky, Learnability in Optimality Theory. Another widespread approach is Boersma’s Gradual Learning Algorithm (GLA; cf. Boersma and Hayes, ‘Empirical Tests…’). Note that the bibliographical references point to the most comprehensive and accessible publications, but earlier versions can be also found in the Rutgers Optimality Archive (http://roa.rutgers.edu).

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(16c)

Intuitive theology (n = 3): DG0 >> DG1 >> DG2 >> DG3 >> REACT >> DG4 DG0

DG1

DG2

(b = 3, r = 0)
(b = 3, r = 1)

DG3

REACT DG4 *! *

If the congregant experiences failure for the second time, the candidate set will be further restricted, because a second learning process takes place based on this new piece of evidence. He will then repeat the ritual with an even higher price. This procedure goes on as long as the annual rainfall or the period of the companies does not arrive. One can easily see that this model results in what McCauley and Lawson48 intuitively predicted: a superhuman-reaction ritual (a special-agent ritual) is performed usually only once with a relatively high level of arousal; but if it has to be repeated several times due to the failures experienced, then it will be repeated with an increasing level of investment (emotional arousal), and it will sooner or later reach a breaking point (a ceiling).49 We expect the breaking point to arrive when the only option is candidate (b = L + 1). This happens after the ritual has been performed by paying the highest possible price L. Since it has been rejected, our poor congregant must conclude that the correct theology prefers (b = L, r = 0) to (b = L, r = 1), that is, the constraint REACT must be further demoted below the constraint DONTGIVEL+1. Then, however, the only price to which the superhuman agent is supposed to react positively is candidate (b = L + 1), but such a price surpasses human capabilities. What happens in cases of rituals where no direct superhuman reaction is expected (human-action-only rituals, more or less the special patient/special instrument rituals in the terminology of McCauley and Lawson)? In such cases no positive or negative feedback – no information on success or failure – influences the intuitive theology. As the agents of the action are the congregants, their behaviour directly determines success or failure. It is like a one-directional communication towards the superhuman agents with a repeated r = 1 positive reaction from the divine. Starting with a medium level n, the agent’s mind will slightly alter theology (13) due to random fluctuations. Whenever the constraint REACT happens to be slightly promoted, n decreases, and the congregant decreases the price or arousal invested in the ritual. Such a constraint promotion may occur, for example, as the consequence of a learning process following that the congregant has 48 49

McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind. McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind.

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witnessed somebody else performing the ritual ‘successfully’ with less investment. As no failure will bring evidence against this new theology, which is more convenient to the lazy human being, the latter will deduce that the gods are content even with this lower price. In turn, slowly but surely the theology will be altered so that less and less effort will be required on the part of the congregant in the ritual. Hence, we have accounted for the low level of arousal (or other price) typical to human-action-only rituals. Additionally, we predict that the more often they are performed without any superhuman reaction, the lower the price people invest in them. What prevents the congregant from becoming maximally lazy? How can this person maintain an amount of ritual investment (for example, a level of emotional arousal) that might fluctuate, but is constant on average over the longer term? We argue that accidental events which restore the theology – that is, personal experiences that demote the constraint REACT in hierarchy (13) – are crucial. Several factors are imaginable, including social influences and pressures, random private events and high-arousal outbursts, including those undergone in splinter groups. A balanced ritual system also contains rituals involving the ‘measurable’ reaction of superhuman agents, and these rituals will help restore the theology through the mechanism described earlier. The balance of a balanced ritual system lies between superhuman-reaction rituals, which increase the n value of the intuitive theology, and between human-action-only rituals, which decrease the same value. Note that the current proposal also explains why the arousal levels of different rituals are interconnected at all: the ‘glue’ of the ritual system is the intuitive theology, which is independent of the particular rituals, but influences all of them. In fact, the notion of an intuitive theology is unrelated to any theory of rituals: it emerges automatically from the psychological observation that children and adults have a representation of other agents’ mind and from the view in CSR that gods and ancestors are culturally postulated (counterintuitive) agents. If there are no superhuman-reaction rituals, splinter group outbursts might serve the same purpose. (Note that our theory explains the role and the importance of these outbursts, but not their source: that is, why certain individuals suddenly begin to increase the ritual price paid whenever the price has reached a low level, that is, in a situation of tedium.) Often, observing the high-arousal ritual performed by another congregant is in itself sufficient, probably due to an empathy mechanism. Communication is a similar phenomenon: listening to the personal testimony or to the teaching of another individual will influence one’s intuitive theology.50 50

At least in Judaism, intensive study of the laws of rituals can have the effect of

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Social pressure to invest more in rituals is another, external way to exclude low-price candidates from the candidate set in (15). In this case, it is not theology but the theory of other, human agents’ minds that excludes unpleasant candidates from the candidate set. Finally, I conjecture, an important role is played by random events that are interpreted as positive reactions r of the superhuman agents to an action b of the human agent with a relatively higher investment p. It randomly occurs that the congregant experiences something good and this event coincides more or less with a ritual that is remembered as being performed with a higher price. The increased investment can be the result of social pressure, or one might just subjectively recall this particular performance as being more intense. Stochastic variants of Optimality Theory, corresponding to a stochastic behaviour of the mind, also enable us to add random fluctuations in performance intensity to the model. In all of these cases, the congregant will interpret the positive event as a reaction to that ritual performance with increased investment, even though the ritual was originally not performed in order to achieve that specific goal. This self-observation becomes an important piece of learning data: namely, the information that so much investment is successful in coercing such a divine reaction (in general). Moreover, suddenly the other performances of the ritual with a lower level of p are retrospectively reinterpreted as being unsuccessful in bringing about this reaction. In turn, the usual learning algorithm starts working and will restore the intuitive theology to a higher n value. In summary, the intuitive theology maintained by the congregant will fluctuate due to a number of factors. The equilibrium or attractor position (or positions) of these low-arousal rituals depend on, among other elements, the frequency of these random reinterpretations of events. The more often they occur, the higher the n of the attractor position – as future computer simulations should also demonstrate. 5. Conclusion In this paper, religious rituals, or religious actions in general, were seen as transactions between a human agent and a culturally postulated superhuman agent. We have hypothesised that the human agent maintains a behavioural grammar driving their own actions, as well as a theory of mind for each of ‘revitalising’ the ‘automated’ ritual practice. See: Naccache, Quatre exercices de pensée juive pour cerveaux réfléchis, Chapter 2, especially p. 74 and p. 86. Related techniques to overcome the tedium effect in Judaism were discussed in my lecture ‘Is Judaism Boring? The role of symbols in “imagistic” Jewish movements in the nineteenth century’ (http://www.csr-arc.com/view.php?arc=17).

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their transaction partners, which also has similar form as a grammar. In the case of a superhuman transaction partner, this second grammar was called the intuitive theology. I have argued that the cognitive science of religion should develop formal models of these grammars in order to run simulations that will subsequently be able to account for the observable dynamics of religious rituals. However, before arriving at this stage, an adequate model of behavioural grammar and intuitive theology must be found. The word grammar in the expression behavioural grammar (such as one’s own behavioural grammar and intuitive theology) does not mean that behaviour in general and religious practices in particular are reduced to language, or that we argue for a close connection between language and religion. The word simply refers to the source of the idea in the history of the discipline, the only hypothesis being that both language and religious behaviour are driven by higher cognition. As language was the first element of higher cognition that was approached from a cognitive perspective, the methodologies employed and the theories developed can serve as starting points in the cognitive science of religion. The same applies to universal moral grammars, recently argued for in a similar vein, a proposal that follows Chomsky’s path very closely, both in its formalism and argumentation.51 Hence, we developed a model of behavioural grammar, and considered that the model of intuitive theology – a special type of behavioural grammar – would be very similar. The model had to be formal enough to be implemented on a computer, because computational implementations of cognitive architectures have been successfully applied to demonstrate the role of cognitive processes in social phenomena.52 In this contribution we have chosen a cognitive model barely employed beyond linguistics, namely, Optimality Theory (OT), for several reasons. First, following the argument of Lawson and McCauley53 concerning the parallels in language and religion, we argue that a successful language model has the potential to also be useful in the cognitive science of religion. Since Optimality Theory is certainly an adequate model to describe lan-

51

Mikhail, ‘Universal moral grammar’. For a criticism, see Dupoux and Jacob, ‘Universal moral grammar: a critical appraisal’. I have been recently referred to the work of Shweder et al., who introduced OT-like universal constraints more than ten years ago to account for sleeping arrangements in different cultures. The reference, which I could not check, may be Shweder, Jensen, Goldstein, ‘Who sleeps by whom revisited’, in: Goodnow et al., eds., Cultural Practices as Contexts for Development. 52 See for instance the articles in Sun, ed., Cognition and Multi-Agent Interaction: From Cognitive Modeling to Social Simulation. 53 Lawson and McCauley, Rethinking Religion.

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guage,54 as demonstrated by the several hundred papers accumulated in the online Rutgers Optimality Archive in the last decade and half,55 OT is a natural choice to describe behavioural grammars and intuitive theologies. Yet, it has to be emphasised that only the mathematical framework of OT has been borrowed, not its language-specific elements, such as the concrete constraints mentioned in Section 2. Second, Optimality Theory is one of the linguistic architectures with most research having been carried out on its formal – mathematical and computational – properties, and especially on its learnability. Therefore, future work with OT in the cognitive science of religion can also rely on all these results concerning the framework itself, although of course, not the linguistic content. Finally, Smolensky and Legendre (2006) convincingly argued that Optimality Theory is a model that is interpretable both on the lower levels of neuronal (connectionist) computations and on the symbol-manipulating higher levels used in complex tasks, such as language. At present, OT is probably the best model that can bridge the gap between the neurons of the brain and the manipulation of symbols by higher cognition. Therefore, if one is able to formulate a model of religion using Optimality Theory, then its realisation in a neurologically credible connectionist way is straightforward. Moreover, a uniform handling of different cultural phenomena such as language and religion reinforces the cognitive plausibility of the models of both. This uniform handling might indeed adequately describe the way our mind/brain works in general, while details of the model can remain domain specific. Even if coming from a different tradition, Optimality Theory can also be seen as a special variant of Rational Choice Theory, developed mainly in economics, which was introduced to the sociology of religion by Stark, Iannoccone and Bainbridge, among others. However, an important difference is that Rational Choice Theory is concerned with the group, and therefore 54

Coincidentally, the term used by Smolensky and Legendre to describe their language model which combines OT with a connectionist implementation is the cognitive science of language. This expression should, however, not be confused with cognitive linguistics, the anti-Chomskyan approach mentioned in the introduction. 55 The Rutgers Optimality Archive (ROA) and the related Optimality List can be found at http://roa.rutgers.edu. As an extremely useful research tool with respect to finding papers, but also in the dissemination of drafts and increasing the visibility of articles, ROA probably had an important role in popularising Optimality Theory in the 1990s. The Archive for Religion and Cognition (ARC), available at http://www.csr-arc.com, was modelled on ROA.

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defines an initially oversimplified, then gradually improved model of the individual’s choice, whereas Optimality Theory aims primarily at the cognitive bases of the behaviour of the individual. Hence, Optimality Theory needs a more complex model: crucially, its target function that is to be optimised is not real-valued.56 Even if not presented as such in this article (for the sake of clarity), the target function to be optimised in Optimality Theory is generally much more abstract than the utility of Rational Choice Theory. The former, rooted in connectionism and describing fast, automatic and unconscious ‘decisions’, is believed to be a function of the physical state of the brain (its energy in a physical sense, if taking connectionism to the extreme). The utility function in Rational Choice Theory, accounting for more explicit personal decisions, is usually based on human concepts such as monetary value, social position or other interests. Unquestionably, the latter can also be reduced to states of the brain, and then the two theories may be combined. After having introduced Optimality Theory in Section 2, we illustrated how to employ it as behavioural grammars. In particular, we demonstrated in Section 3 how to introduce constraints related to eating taboos and how to account for different traditions by establishing the permutations of the ranking of these constraints. Two kinds of learning must be distinguished: the constraint prohibiting the consumption of a certain substance can be promoted either after personal empirical experience or as a consequence of social learning. The second kind of learning provides knowledge without the individual having to experience negative situations themselves, but it also explains how food taboos can develop as by-products of the mechanism. Subsequently, Section 4 aimed at explaining ritual dynamics by introducing a transaction grammar between human and superhuman agents. The key to ritual dynamics was that the congregant alters their intuitive theology based on experience: a perceived reaction of the superhuman agent to a specific human action, or the lack of such a reaction. Here, we have exploited the fact that Optimality Theory comes with an elaborate model of learnability. Most of the models described could have been formulated using a simpler formalism. For example, the essence of tableaux (14) was that the intuitive theology maintained by a human agent about the postulated mind of the superhuman agent is simply an integer n: an offer is expected to be accepted if and only if its value is at least n. Why then introduce so many con56

Bíró, Finding the Right Words. Note that Harmonic Grammar, the precursor of Optimality Theory, which is becoming popular once again, is closer to Rational Choice Theory in this respect.

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straints? Why is the threshold n not an adequate grammar in itself? Thus far, it seems it is. However, the complex formalism in Optimality Theory has the advantage of being able to combine very different types of (nonquantifiable) factors in a non-trivial way. A more elaborate OT model can describe how one balances different types of pain, emotion, sacrifice of goods or the investment of energy and time in order to achieve different types of goals. This latter scenario cannot be described simply by introducing a single integer as the model of the intuitive theology in the congregant’s mind. In summary, we argue that Optimality Theory is a promising framework to explain religious rituals, or even human behaviour in general. The explanation should also cover the observable variations and dynamics. We have seen that Optimality Theory accounts for different types of language or human behaviour by showing that these types are produced by different constraint hierarchies (factorial typology). Likewise, the dynamics emerge from learning processes, that is, from re-ranking the same constraints based on experience. This contribution only attempts to make a start in this field. Some technical details could not be explained due to lack of space, and at some points we could only indicate new directions. Future research should develop the model further. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Joseph Bulbulia, István Czachesz and Thomas Lawson for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

FIREWALKING IN THE BALKANS HIGH-AROUSAL RITUALS AND MEMORY

Dimitris Xygalatas This paper presents work in progress and, specifically, certain ideas I wish to explore on the basis of fieldwork that I am presently conducting in certain villages of northern Greece and southeastern Bulgaria, where the firewalking rituals of the Anastenaria are performed. Everybody who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork will know how difficult it is to prepare a paper in the middle of the process, while data are constantly flowing in and demanding interpretation, and before all sorts of ideas have settled and become meaningful. This situation, as we will see, is somewhat similar to that of the firewalkers who have just undergone their first ordeal and need some time to gather their thoughts and develop an explanation for what has just happened. The religious communities I am working with are called Anastenaria.1 The religious beliefs of the members of these communities appear to be no different from those of the average Greek. The group consists of people of all ages and educational backgrounds. They participate fully in Orthodox Christian religious life and rituals. Their dogmatic beliefs are no different from those of the average Orthodox Greek layperson, and they go to church regularly. What sets them apart, however, is that in addition to the Church rituals, they observe a unique annual ritual cycle, which begins on October 1

The word ‘Anastenaria’ is a plural noun (in the singular ‘Anastenari’), and is used to describe both the tradition as well as the participants. The participants are also called ‘Anastenarides’ (male form) and ‘Anastenarisses’ (female form), and in the singular ‘Anastenaris’ (male) and ‘Anastenarissa’ (female). There are various possible etymologies of the term. According to one etymology, it is derived from the verb αναστενάζω, ‘to sigh, moan’, due to the groaning of the ecstatic dancers on the fire (See Christodoulou, Continuity and Change among the Anastenaria; Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing, pp. 4, 65). Others say that the term comes from the word ανασταίνοµαι, ‘to rise, and jump in the fire’. Danforth considers it more likely that the word derives from the noun ασθενής, which means ‘sick, patient’, preceded by the pleonastic privative αν- (this interpretation may be biased, however, by the fact that Danforth views the Anastenaria as a healing ritual). Some folk etymologies consider the word Anastenaria to derive from the verb ανεβάζω (‘to raise, elevate’), or from the adjective ανίσχυρος (‘powerless, weak’).

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26 and ends on August 15 of the following year. The central figures of this tradition are saints Constantine and Helen, but all the significant events in this cycle coincide with important days in the Greek Orthodox calendar and are related to various Christian saints. The most dramatic moment of this ritual cycle is the firewalking ritual itself, where the participants, carrying the icons of the two saints, dance over the burning-hot coals. The festival lasts three days. However, the preparations start on October 27, when the Anastenaria go around the village collecting money for the purchase of a goat or a calf that will be sacrificed on May 21. The animal, which must be black, unpaired, and of an odd number of years in age, is then bought on January 18. Finally, the festival begins on May 20, the eve of the saints’ day. In charge of the ritual is the arhianastenaris, the leader of the group. The preparation takes place in the konaki, a special room built specifically for this purpose, inside which candles and incense are burned. The icons of Saints Constantine and Helen,2 wooden rectangular gold or silver-plated emblems of portable dimensions (usually 30 by 40 cm), picturing the two saints, are placed in an eminent position. They are partly covered with a red cloth and decorated with flowers, scarves, ribbons, money and various offerings (simadia). These offerings are made by or on behalf of people who are severely ill, as an appeal to the saints for a cure. They are usually made from silver or gold, and they often depict some part of the body that needs to be healed, for example, a hand or a heart. Within the konaki, the Anastenaria stay up all night, dancing to the sound of the lyre and the drum, praying and meditating. On the morning of May 21, the Anastenaria go to church. Afterwards, the animal bought five months earlier is taken from its pen, decorated with red ribbons and flowers, and led in a procession to the sacred well (agiasma), followed by musicians and candle bearers. In earlier times, a priest would bless both the animal and the crowd with incense and holy water. Today, however, the Church forbids local priests to take part in the Anastenaria, and so the blessing is performed by the arhianastenaris. Subsequently, the animal is sacrificed and its meat is distributed to the villagers, followed by dancing and the worship of the icons inside the konaki. In the evening, the fire is lit, and once the flames have died down the coals are spread to form a ‘burning carpet’. The procession begins from the konaki and it includes the Anastenaria, children holding candles, musicians, as well as various spectators and visitors. When they arrive at the fire, they begin dancing around it, spinning and moaning, until they reach a state of trance. 2

In the village of Agia Eleni, which is the main focus of my research, there are two such ‘dancing icons’, as they are often referred to.

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Then, holding the icons of the saints, they start walking on the burning coals until the fire has been completely put out. After the firewalk, the icons are returned to the konaki and the dancing continues until late into the night, and the day ends with a feast at the arhianastenaris’ house, where a meal is offered to all present. Over the following two days, the Anastenaria proceed around the village, carrying the icons, visiting every house. The festival concludes with another firewalk on the evening of May 23. The Anastenaria claim to be guided by saints Constantine and Helen, especially the former, who often appears in their dreams and gives them advice or orders. They draw their inspiration from the icons of the saints. According to one legend, at some indefinable mythical time the church of the two saints in Kosti, the alleged birthplace of the cult, caught fire. As the church burned, the villagers heard the icons crying for help. The bravest rushed into the burning church to save them, and neither they nor the icons were harmed. To commemorate this miracle, the citizens of Kosti organised an annual firewalking ritual. The firewalkers consider this ritual tradition to be very ancient, as have Greek ethnographers in their vast majority. Most of them have linked the Anastenaria to the ancient orgiastic cults of Dionysus.3 However, this claim is entirely unsupported and was the product of a deliberate intention to serve a specific political agenda. During the 1830s, the Austrian historian Philipp Fallmerayer put forward the theory that the contemporary inhabitants of Greece had no racial relationship to the ancient Greeks,4 and that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the inhabitants of Greece were mostly of Albanian origin. He further argued that modern Greeks, having been ‘corrupted’ by Slavic blood, were not worthy of Europe’s help and sympathy, as he had ‘reached the conclusion that God has chosen the Greek race as the par excellence object of His wrath, and has imposed every punishment on it’.5 Fallmerayer’s ideas caused a fierce reaction from various scholars in the newly established Greek State, and triggered a search for continuity within Greek historiography,6 in an attempt to prove that there were links between modern Greeks and ancient Greek civilisation.

3

Χουρµουζιάδης, Περί των Αναστεναρίων; Κουρτίδης, ‘Τα Αναστενάρια και η Σκυλοδευτέρα’, Diamantoglou, ‘Pyrovassie et Incombustibilité’; idem, ‘La pyrobatie en Grèce’; Κακούρη, ∆ιονυσιακά. 4 Fallmerayer, Περί της Καταγωγής των Σηµερινών Ελλήνων (original title: Welchen Einfluss hatte die Besetzung Griechenlands durch die Slawen auf das Schicksal der Stadt Athen und der Landschaft Attika?). 5 Fallmerayer, Περί της Καταγωγής των Σηµερινών Ελλήνων, p. 60. 6 Danforth, ‘The Ideological Context of the Search for Continuities in Greek Culture’.

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It was within this context that the first account of the Anastenaria in the Greek language was written by Anastasios Hourmouziadis in 1873. As the author admits, it was the purpose of his essay ‘to disprove those Western European scholars who have falsely contradicted our descent from the ancient Greeks’.7 Towards this purpose, Hourmouziadis claimed that the Anastenaria were derived from the ancient orgiastic Dionysian rites, basing his claim on vague superficial similarities between the two practices. For example, the oreivasia (mountain climbing), practised by the ecstatic worshippers of Dionysus, is compared to the visit paid by the Anastenaria to neighbouring villages, which happened to lie on the mountainside.8 The omofagia (devouring of the raw flesh of live animals), practised by the ancient Bacchae, is paralleled to the distribution of raw meat among the Anastenaria after the sacrifice.9 What Hourmouziadis does not mention, however, is that the Anastenaria always cook this meat before eating it (in this respect, it is no different from purchasing raw meat from a butcher). Although Hourmouziadis stressed the importance of the Anastenaria for the demonstration of the continuity of Greek culture, he opposed the practice, deeming it a pagan rite, involving primitive relics and acts of ignorance that were not ‘in line with the practices of the Mother Church’.10 To resolve the conflict, he concluded that the Anastenaria, although descended from idolatrous practices, had been Christianised and associated with the worship of saints Constantine and Helen, and thus finally become ‘very Christian’. He maintains, however, that the Anastenaria should be educated by the Church, in order to become enlightened and cease the performance of the ritual. Hourmouziadis never actually saw the Anastenaria, nor did he visit the villages in which they were performed, and by his own admission his reports were based on information that he received from two priests who had served in those villages.11 Thus, his work established a theory of the origin of the Anastenaria based on inaccurate facts and far-fetched assumptions, but it had a profound effect on the study, as well as the performance of the Anastenaria. His theory of the orgiastic origin of the ritual provided the Greek Church with a casus belli, triggering a persecution that is still ongoing, while at the same time being widely influential in Greek ethnology, serving very specific nationalistic agendas. The Anastenaria were originally performed by Greeks who lived in the area of Strantza, near the Black Sea coast. This area was part of the Otto7 8 9 10 11

Χουρµουζιάδης, Περί των Αναστεναρίων, p 144. Χουρµουζιάδης, Περί των Αναστεναρίων, p 149. Χουρµουζιάδης, Περί των Αναστεναρίων, p 159. Χουρµουζιάδης, Περί των Αναστεναρίων, p. 144. Χουρµουζιάδης, Περί των Αναστεναρίων, p 157.

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man Empire until 1885. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and the Congress of Berlin, the northern part of Thrace became an autonomous district under Turkish government, called Eastern Rumelia. With the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, the area fell under Bulgarian control and, finally, after the Conference of London and the Treaty of Bucharest (1913), Eastern Rumelia officially became part of Bulgaria. Shortly afterwards, Greek schools and churches were shut and the Greek language banned. Finally, Greek properties were confiscated and in 1914 the Greek population of the area had to leave their homes and move southwest into Greek territory. They brought with them the icons of saints Constantine and Helen. After the First World War, when Greece regained eastern Thrace from Turkey under the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), many Kostilides (the people of Kosti) moved to this region to be as close as possible to their old homes, which were now across the Bulgarian border. However, with the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which handed control of eastern Thrace back to Turkey and imposed the exchange of Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish populations, they were forced to flee once more. In 1924, the majority of them settled in Greek Macedonia. Again, they brought their icons with them and continued to perform their rituals. The Patriarchate of Constantinople had not approved of the Anastenaria, and had actively opposed their practices. While held in Strantza, the clergy had persecuted the Anastenaria, and the bishops had very often threatened and beaten them and thrown their icons into the fire.12 As a result, when they arrived in Greece the Anastenaria performed their rituals in secret, out of fear of the reaction of the Greek Church and the local population. It was only about twenty years later that the Anastenaria was again performed in public. In 1928, an Athenian doctor and president of the Greek Society of Psychic Research, Angelos Tanagras, who had an ethnographic interest in the ritual, had gone to Bulgaria in search of the Anastenaria, discovering that they had moved to northern Greece. He finally managed to find a group of firewalkers in Mavrolefki and around 194013 persuaded them to perform the ceremony in public. The Orthodox Church indeed opposed the performance of the ritual. In 1947, the bishop of Serres sent a letter to the Holy Synod of the Greek Church, asking what position he should take towards the Anastenaria. To this letter, the Synod answered that ‘this pagan custom, originating from the orgiastic feasts of Dionysus, should be abolished, with the use of any spiritual means that the Church has at Her disposal’.14 A similar circular was 12 13 14

Χουρµουζιάδης, Περί των Αναστεναρίων, p. 152, 157-158. Christodoulou, Continuity and Change among the Anastenaria, p. 148. Ευαγγέλου, Πυροβασία και Αναστενάρηδες, pp. 55-56.

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distributed to various churches in 1952 by the bishop of Thessaloniki, and the Faculty of Theology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki supported this view and published a letter condemning the practice of the Anastenaria. This initiated a public debate between the clergy and theologians, on the one hand, and various anthropologists on the other, with both sides using theological arguments. One group, based on the ideas of Hourmouziadis and his followers, condemned the Anastenaria as idolatrous, while others considered them satanic or anti-Christian.15 Church officials were also concerned about the financial aspects of the issue. They insisted that only the Church had the right to make a profit from religious relics. They claimed that the monopoly of the Greek Church was legally established in Greek public law, enacted in 1940, which stated that ‘any private icon producing income must be confiscated and taken to the nearest church’.16 Many anthropologists, however, claimed that the Anastenaria now constituted a Christianised ritual, performed by pious Christians, and one of the many pagan elements that the Christian Church had incorporated into its worship.17 Others also pointed out the importance of the Anastenaria as evidence of the continuity of Greek civilisation. Despite the protests, the bishop of Serres confiscated the icons used by the Anastenaria in Agia Eleni in 1954, thus cutting off their source of inspiration and power. A villager of Agia Eleni narrates the following anecdote: Back then, the priests didn’t really have any problem with the Anastenaria. Even the bishop would often visit us. One day he attended the feast at the arhianastenaris’ house. The bishop was a very clever man. He saw the people bringing money to the icon. And he asked the arhianastenaris: ‘Are these icons private, or villager icons?’ The old man didn’t really realise the difference between the two, and he naively answered that they were villager icons. The bishop then replied: ‘Villager icons, villager church, you should therefore take the icons to the church’.

Finally, the firewalkers reached an agreement with the bishop, who allowed the Anastenaria to take place as long as the icons remained in the local church for the rest of the year. Furthermore, all the money collected during the ritual would have to be given to the church. However, the bishop broke this agreement in May 1970, informing the Anastenaria one week before the festival that they would not be allowed to have the icons. The Anastenaria 15 16 17

Christodoulou, Continuity and Change among the Anastenaria, pp. 143-149. Εφηµερίς των νόµων (Φεβρουάριος 1940, Αθήνα), p. 516. Λουκάτος, Τα Καλοκαιρινά.

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agreed to perform the ritual without the icons, as long as they at least remained in the village church. On the day of May 21, the icons ‘mysteriously’ disappeared, while the bishop denied any involvement. Consequently, the festival did not take place that year. The Anastenaria instituted legal proceedings and the dispute was finally settled in court. In May 1971, the Lower Court of Serres convened on the case and ruled that the icons were the private property of the Anastenaria. The icons were returned to them and the Church was ordered to pay the court expenses. Similar opposition has been observed in other villages. In Lagkadas, the local bishop threatened to excommunicate all the firewalkers. Their children were even refused marriage licences unless they signed a statement declaring that they would not firewalk in the future. In Mavrolefki, the bishop of Drama confiscated the icons and has kept them in the cathedral since 1972. He even threatened to excommunicate anyone who lit a fire and jumped over it.18 After that, the festival was suspended for many years, and those who wanted to firewalk went to another community that held the festival. Presently, the Anastenaria are performed in five small villages of northern Greece, and also by a few Bulgarians in the original location. Even today, the Greek Church is very hostile towards the Anastenaria, who often face contempt even within their own villages. Due to such difficulties, in the twentieth century, Greek anthropologists constantly predicted the extinction of the Anastenaria within the next generation. Despite this, their rituals continues to be performed by youths and elders alike. This only makes one wonder why people continue to perform this ritual, as well as others that are similar. High-arousal rituals often appear to be stressful, unpleasant, or even dangerous. In many cases, such as many initiation rituals, the subjects are forced to participate by the community. There are other rituals, however, such as the Anastenaria, which people perform voluntarily, without any, or even in spite of, social pressure. The question that arises then is: Why are many individuals willing to participate in ritual activities that would normally intimidate or seem appalling to most people? I will argue that the answer to this question partly lies in the nature of the ritual and its effects on the participants’ memory. Ritual and memory One important element for the survival of rituals is the role of memory in the process of their transmission, as well as the motivational factors that lie behind this process. Based on evidence from psychology, Harvey

18

Christodoulou, Continuity and Change among the Anastenaria, p. 159.

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Whitehouse has developed a theory of ritual transmission19 to explain these processes. According to Whitehouse, learning and memory depend on two different strategies: rehearsal and emotional arousal.20 Driven by these two strategies, ritual systems tend to congregate around two mainstream attractor positions. Repetitive mainstream rituals are encoded as schemas in semantic memory, whereas infrequent, highly arousing rituals are encoded as special events in episodic memory.21 His theory encompasses two whole sets of dynamics or ‘modes of religiosity’, the ‘doctrinal’ and the ‘imagistic’. Firstly, what he terms the ‘doctrinal mode’ refers to religious knowledge transmitted through frequently repeated rituals and teachings. The often complex doctrines that this mode involves are codified in language, widely transmitted by authoritative texts and religious leaders, controlled by a centralised authority and maintained through routine review and frequent repetition. This results in a set of common, explicitly held and reflectively expressed uniform beliefs and teachings that have been encoded in the semantic memory system. Secondly, the ‘imagistic mode of religiosity’ involves rarely performed, personally significant, particularly intense and often traumatic ritual episodes, which create episodic memories for the participants. The violation of existing semantic knowledge, the lack of an existing schema or doctrine into which the ritual could be assimilated, and the extreme emotional and sensory stimulation, as well as the importance of the ritual for the participants in their cultural context, causes them to produce their own, spontaneous and idiosyncratic interpretations of those events, based on principles of analogical reasoning. Based on Karmiloff Smith’s theory of Representational Redescription,22 Whitehouse claims that through subsequent recollections of the ritual experience (which may be 19

See Whitehouse, Inside the Cult; idem, ‘Modes of Religiosity: Towards a Cognitive Explanation of the Sociopolitical Dynamics of Religion’; and especially idem, Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Cf. Whitehouse, in this volume. 20 Whitehouse, ‘The Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity’, p. 211. 21 The distinction between semantic and episodic memory was first introduced by Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory. Semantic memory refers to an abstract, general, schematic knowledge about our world, while episodic (or autobiographical) memory is the explicit memory of specific events. Although there is no universally accepted typology of memory, as different aspects of memory are processually connected and often interact (see Atran, In Gods We Trust), the distinction between episodic and semantic memory is generally clear. Cf. Eichbaum, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory, pp. 85-104; Eysenck and Keane, Cognitive Psychology, pp. 233-239. 22 Karmiloff-Smith, Beyond Modularity; eadem, ‘Précis of Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science’.

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triggered by, among other things, further experiences of participation in it), analogical reflections on exegetical topics are shaped into a body of quite idiosyncratic semantic knowledge. Although exegetical knowledge formed in this way may be largely unique to each participant, memories of the ritual procedures themselves – including the identities of co-participants – are shaped in this process. This contributes to the cohesive effects of such rituals, and helps to explain why such practices give rise to small-scale, localised and exclusive communities or groups. Whitehouse’s model was formulated on the basis of his research in New Guinea; however, numerous scholars have discussed its usefulness for ethnographic research.23 The modes theory can also be employed in the study of Western religious communities such as the Anastenaria, which revolve around high-arousal rituals, and can help explain some key aspects of the cognitive and social dynamics involved in the transmission of this ritual. The implicit psychological and mnemonic mechanisms involved in the reproduction of the Anastenaria are the same as those identified in Whitehouse’s theory of the ‘imagistic’ mode, and would seem to result in the predicted social morphology. Religious transmission in a Greek Orthodox framework Greek Orthodox rituals are certainly not characterised by high degrees of arousal. Most Christian rituals – at least in Europe – are not very arousing, but Greek Orthodox rituals seem to be particularly and invariably monotonous. For example, there is no dancing or singing by the congregation, no music and no kneeling at a Greek church. The congregation simply sits down and listens to the priest read a predetermined passage from the Bible. A Greek Orthodox service looks like a minimalist version of a Catholic mass. Furthermore, participation for the believer is almost exclusively through observation. The believer rarely does anything in an Orthodox ritual – at the most, participants will stand in line to receive Holy Communion. Devout participants may observe these same ritual actions hundreds of times over the course of a lifetime. Nevertheless, Orthodox rituals have proved fairly successful in surviving, and in fact Greece has one of the highest rates of religiosity in the Western world.24 Certainly, this is not due

23

For some examples, see: Whitehouse, ed., The Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology versus Ethnography; Whitehouse and Laidlaw, eds., Ritual and Memory. Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion; Whitehouse and McCauley, eds., Mind and Religion. 24 Καρανάση, ‘Έλληνες’.

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to the exciting character of Church rituals. So what can account for this success? The Greek Church and State employ systematic, repetitive and intense religious training and policing. In Greece there is no separation between State and Church, and the latter often influences the decisions of the government and the law. The line between Church and State is often blurred: Orthodox priests are paid from the State budget, and the Greek Church is amply funded by the State (e.g. for the building of churches). The Greek Church also effectively monopolises religious education. The ministry that is in charge of educational matters in Greece is officially called the Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs, and educational law states that one of the goals of education is to ‘transmit the authentic elements of the Orthodox Christian tradition’.25 Theology is a compulsory subject at public schools at both the primary and secondary levels, being taught to children from the age of eight to eighteen. Church attendance is also mandatory once a month for students. On the first day of every school year there is no actual teaching, but instead a sacrament and sermon by a priest, and Morning Prayer is mandatory. Furthermore, there are various ecclesiastical schools, publicly funded and run by the Church. In tertiary education there are no academic departments for the study of religion in Greece, and all such study takes place in the two Faculties of Theology in Athens and Thessaloniki, each one having a department of theology and a department of pastoral theology. Even outside formal education, the Church manages to dominate religious discourse. The presence of the clergy in the media is prominent. Public television stations provide live transmission of a Mass every Sunday and on holidays; moreover, there is an ecclesiastical television station and a newspaper, and all television channels regularly feature priests on live programmes. Even today, books that are considered blasphemous are sometimes confiscated in Greece. A few years ago priests and right-wing politicians were seen on live television burning such books in a central square in Thessaloniki. More often, fundamentalist groups demonstrate outside theatres, demanding that some play be banned, or barge into conference rooms to condemn liberal versions of science or history. In recent times, the Church has circulated brochures warning against the Da Vinci Code and the Gospel of Judas. In this way Orthodox doctrines are maintained through an elaborate mechanism of transmission and policing, based on intensive preaching and repetition, review and safeguarding by the Church, and – officially and unofficially – by the State. Such a system efficiently detects, censors and often 25

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bans religious innovation or divergence. Although its doctrines are complicated and its rituals tedious, repetition ensures effective learning. According to Harvey Whitehouse’s theory of ‘Modes of Religiosity’,26 these processes are likely to cause Orthodox rituals to be encoded as schemas in semantic memory, while at the same time discouraging personal reflection on the meaning of the ritual actions involved, as a meaning is normally provided by the religious authorities. According to the modes theory, this would result in a set of common, explicitly held and reflectively expressed uniform beliefs and teachings that have been encoded in the semantic memory system, which Whitehouse terms the ‘doctrinal mode of religiosity’. Religious transmission in high-arousal rituals It is within this context that the rituals of the Anastenaria are practised. Most of the ritual actions in the Anastenaria are rather repetitive – and usually tedious – themselves. Indeed the festival includes an overwhelming degree of extremely repetitive ritual action. For example, during one single festival there were nine hours of dancing, always to the same rhythm, and ten ritual processions around the village, followed by candle bearers and musicians, the music again always playing to the same tune. The icons were blessed with an censer 81 times. Finally, procedures such as kissing the icons or the elders’ hands, standing up and crossing oneself, were repeated hundreds of times. Most of these actions are also part of normal liturgical Church life, and are frequently repeated throughout the year. However, there is one major exception to this repetitiveness, and it is none other than the firewalk. Firewalkers always point out that being an Anastenari entails a lot more than walking on hot coals; It involves an entire religious system. ‘Firewalking is just the icing on the cake’, they often say. However, I argue that firewalking plays a crucial role in the survival of this religious tradition, which would probably collapse in its absence. Robert McCauley and Thomas Lawson’s ‘cognitive alarm hypothesis’27 states that ‘when current circumstances are the cause of our emotional arousal, we will increase the attention and cognitive resources we devote to them, which, in turn, will increase the probability of their subsequent recollection. However, this sort of memory consolidation can only arise if the initial, heightened alertness receives ongoing vindication in subsequent experience concerning our sense of the event’s significance’. Firewalking is a very intense experience for the participant. In fact, all of the firewalkers I interviewed claimed that it is by far the most stimulating and emotional rit26 27

See Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity. McCauley and Lawson, Bringing Ritual to Mind, pp. 77-79.

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ual experience of their lives. Empirical research conducted in 197928 found firewalkers to be extremely emotionally aroused, their heart rates reaching 120 to 140 beats per minute, sometimes maintaining this level of arousal for up to four hours (before and during the firewalk). High-arousal rituals employ a variety of stimuli to enhance attention and emotional arousal.29 Motor hyperactivity, emotional hyper-arousal, stress, dehydration, sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme temperatures are all elements that can result in altered states of consciousness.30 All of these elements are involved in the practice of firewalking and may contribute to the release of endogenous substances in the human body.31 The stress involved in the preparation for the firewalk, the intense physical activity involved in dancing for hours on the day of the ritual and the night before, the sleep deprivation, the sensory stimulation (at all levels caused by the suggestive music, the sighs of the Anastenaria and the cheers of the crowd, the smell and the burning sensation of the coals, the presence of so many people running and dancing), and the dehydration caused by sweating while dancing for many hours, are all factors that can be directly related to the release of of endogenous opioids, such as the endorphins.32 Endorphins are picked up by opiate receptors, which are especially prevalent in the limbic system, and affect emotion and motivation. ‘Mock hyperstress’ involved in certain rituals can stimulate endorphin production and have short-term analgesic and euphoric effects, as well as produce a feeling of tranquillity after the ritual. Research has shown that opioid substances can also have significant (though temporary) psychotropic effects, which can be ‘antidysphoric, antidepressant, anxiolytic, analgesic, and disinhibiting’.33 Thus, endorphins can have therapeutic effects in cases of depression, dysphoria and other psycho-physiological symptoms. Endorphins can produce a feeling of euphoria or tranquillity – which follows a state of stress or terror induced by some rituals – for no apparent reason. Subjects commonly attribute this sudden shift and the relief that it brings to supernatural intervention.34 The Anastenaria very often claim to have been cured 28

Μπαλλής, Beaumanoir, and Ξενάκης, ‘Αναστενάρια. Νευροφυσιολογικές Παρατηρήσεις’, pp. 245-250. 29 Deeley, ‘The Religious Brain. Turning Ideas into Convictions’. 30 Ludwig, ‘Altered States of Consciousness’. 31 Prince, ‘Shamans and Endorphins’; idem, ‘The endorphins: a review for psychological anthropologists’; Henry, ‘Possible Involvement of Endorphins in Altered States of Consciousness’. 32 Prince, ‘The endorphins’. 33 Jilek, ‘Altered states of consciousness in North American Indian ceremonials’. 34 Henry, ‘Possible Involvement of Endorphins in Altered States of Consciousness’; Prince, ‘Shamans and Endorphins’. The same often happens in cases of near-death

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of a serious psychological condition after the performance of the ritual, thanks to the beneficial intervention of Saint Constantine.35 Emotional and physiological stimulation is also related to the regulation of monoamines, such as dopamine, increased levels of dopamine can elevate attention and emotion and can provide motivation, triggering reward mechanisms in the brain.36 According to the ‘motivational salience hypothesis’,37 ‘dopamine mediates the representation of an external stimulus as an attractive or aversive reality, assigning salience and motivational importance to an experience’. Thus, a dopaminergic brain state leads to ‘an aberrant assignment of salience to the elements of one’s experience, at a “mind” level’.38 The sensory and emotional extravagance involved in high-arousal rituals requires interpretation, and dopamine can produce a feeling of heightened personal significance and a sense of utter reality of the event in hand. Participants feel that a special role has been divinely assigned to them. Characteristically, one Anastenaris told me: I came to realise that the whole universe was conspiring to bring me here to perform the ritual.

This feeling of uniqueness and salience provides a motivation for the participants to maintain and transmit the ritual. If I take part in a group activity in the context of which I feel and am considered by others to be special, then it is in my interest to help preserve and disseminate this activity. The more people view this ritual as important and meaningful, the more my own status rises. This does not have to be a conscious process. In addition, these events are considered to have serious consequences for the participant. For example, a woman described to me how she was cured of a psychological condition due to the performance of firewalking: experiences, which produce extremely high levels of arousal. See Potts, ‘The Evidential Value of Near-Death Experiences for Belief in Life After Death’; Noyes, ‘Attitude Changes Following Near-Death Experiences’. 35 Danforth, Firewalking and Religious Healing. 36 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, p. 60; Bressan and Crippa, ‘The Role of Dopamine in Reward and Pleasure Behaviour – Review of Data from Preclinical Research’; Schultz, ‘Dopamine Neurons and their Role in Reward Mechanisms’; Martin-Soelch et al., ‘Reward Mechanisms in the Brain and their Role in Dependence’; Horvitz, ‘Mesolimbocortical and Nigrostriatal Dopamine Responses to Salient Non-Reward Events’. 37 Kapur, ‘Psychosis as a State of Aberrant Salience: A Framework Linking Biology, Phenomenology, and Pharmacology in Schizophrenia’; Deeley, ‘The Religious Brain’. 38 Kapur, ‘Psychosis as a State of Aberrant Salience’, p. 13.

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- Why did you become a firewalker? - Because I got sick. I was suffering. I was sitting in a chair, staring at the window for two years. I was depressed. If it hadn’t been for the Anastenaria, they would have locked me up [in a psychiatric clinic]. My husband was a good man, and he allowed me to go to the Anastenaria and ask them for help. He didn’t forbid me to walk on the fire. I danced on the fire and all went well. I was saved.

The extreme emotional and sensory stimulation, as well as the importance of the ritual for the participants in their cultural context, causes them to produce their own, spontaneous and idiosyncratic interpretations of those events. Whitehouse calls this process ‘spontaneous exegetical reflection’.39 Since there is no official doctrine or theological justification attributed to the ritual, ‘whatever meaning people find in ritual actions consists in interpretations of these actions rather than content transmitted by these actions’.40 Empirical evidence During the course of my fieldwork, I interviewed sixteen Anastenaria of various ages with various degrees of experience in firewalking. When asked whether the icons, the incense, music, candles, dancing, or performing the animal sacrifice are necessary for the performance of the ritual, the participants invariably answered affirmatively. They also claimed that it would not be possible to perform the ritual if any of those elements were missing. However, when asked about the purpose of their actions, only one person attempted to provide some account of some of those elements, drawing analogies to passages from the Bible,41 although everyone was convinced that there must be a meaning; they just did not know what it was. However, when I asked them about firewalking, things were very different. More than half of the participants offered some reflection on the purpose of the ritual. Sometimes they provided a causal explanation (‘we do it for the crops to grow’, ‘I did it to be cured of an illness’); sometimes an analogy or a myth. These reflections are idiosyncratic, and there is no official or commonly held doctrine about the meaning of firewalking. Note that the ritual act of sacrifice, which can be rather emotional and is only performed once a year during the May festival, did not elicit any more reflec39

Whitehouse, Modes of Religiosity, pp. 113-117. Boyer, ‘A Reductionistic Model of Distinct Modes of Religious Transmission’. 41 It is worth noting that this person was the only participant interviewed who was not an Anastenaris. He was a local man who performed firewalking only once. 40

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tion than the other, extremely repetitive ritual actions that are also performed throughout the year in church. The reason for this could be that the sacrifice has no personal consequences for the participants, unlike firewalking, which is considered a life-changing event. I divided the participants into two groups. The first group consisted of ten experienced participants (those who had more than ten years of experience), the second consisted of six who were inexperienced (had been participating for no more than three years). This distinction came quite naturally, as there were no participants who had experience in the range between four and nine years. Only one out of six inexperienced participants was able to provide a justification for the performance of firewalking, while for the experienced firewalkers the rate was eight out of ten (Table 1). Why is firewalking performed? Experienced Participants

Inexperienced Participants

Concrete

8

1

Vague42/No Answer

2

5

Table 1. Why is firewalking performed?

As mentioned above, the answers sometimes involved a myth. In fact, half of the experienced firewalkers offered an aetiological myth as a justification for the performance of the ritual. The myth was not always the same, and there were various myths, each with different versions. What is most interesting is that all of the inexperienced participants who had been unable to provide a justification for firewalking, later admitted knowing of the same myths that had been offered as justifications by the elders. In fact, they usually knew all of the versions that were circulating. These were the same participants who had earlier told me: ‘We don’t know about these things. You’d better ask the elders’. A study of the ethnographic record also showed results consistent with this pattern: Greek ethnographers very often used their subjects’ original names in their writings; but even when they did not, in some cases I was able to identify the persons with great certainty, thanks to the presentation of their life-stories or family trees, and due to the limited number of firewalkers in the village. This analysis revealed not only that elders in those texts consistently showed a much higher degree of explicit reflection on the 42

A vague answer was usually a tautology (e.g. ‘because it’s tradition’ or ‘because it’s always been done like this’) or a very indefinite answer (e.g. ‘for the Saint’).

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meaning and purpose of firewalking, but also that some of the people who had expressed ignorance of exegetical matters had often provided me with confident insights on such matters several years later, including their own reasons for performing the ritual for the first time. Firewalkers also display a tendency to search retrospectively for connections between their experience and any kind of subsequent strange event. There appear to be people who perform the ritual for no specific reason, and then begin to find a special meaning for it. An illustration of this is provided by a young Anastenaris who told me: I realised that it was my destiny to become a firewalker. Things were happening to me. Things that were not accidental. There was a whole set of what seemed to be coincidences, which I later realised were simply part of my life’s nexus. In my village, in the mountains of Arkadia, there is a custom, where the participants run to the mountain and climb barefoot on very harsh ground full of sharp stones and thorns, and when they come back their feet are intact. Just like the firewalkers go through the fire without getting burned. This was happening at MY village, you see (…) Another thing is that I used to go climbing on the mountain, and I would always set my tent up and sleep at this place. Later, they told me that at that specific spot there used to be an ancient chapel to Constantine and Helen (…) In this way, I was naturally led to firewalking through a process that I came to realise was my destiny. At the beginning I was thinking about it all the time, trying to find explanations. Now, even my personal reflections have stopped. I have stopped wondering.

Similarly, people attribute dreams, illness, recovery, death and all sorts of ‘signs’ to their experience of firewalking and their permanent connection to the saints that this brings about. Sometimes they seem to be desperately seeking those connections. One woman once narrated various dreams that she had had to me, and attributed a meaning related to the saints to each one of them. Finally, she described another dream and told me: This dream I had 20 years ago, and I still haven’t been able to find a meaning for it. But I am sure that one day something will happen to me, and the dream will make sense.

Conclusion In conclusion, the following features might help explain why firewalking is still successfully transmitted and is indeed the cornerstone of the tradition. Firstly, the sensory and emotional arousal and the tremendous levels of

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stress and their specific somatic effects, coupled with the extreme significance attributed to the event by the participants, ensure its long-term recollection and trigger a need for interpretation and continuous reflection. Secondly, the sense of significance and reality produced by those same somatic effects and the absence of any theoretical schema in the participant’s mind into which it would fit, lead to personal, idiosyncratic interpretations that are gradually reinforced through subsequent participation in and narration of those events. Thirdly, the feeling that a special role has been assigned to them provides participants with the necessary motivation to maintain and transmit the practice. The Anastenaria also include a series of low-arousal practices and, according to the firewalkers, they are the ‘essence’ of the cult. The practices lack any kind of official exegesis and/or authorisation, and as they are actually opposed by the authorities, we would normally expect them to die out. Firewalking also lacks an official interpretation, but due to its highly arousing nature it manages to generate its own idiosyncratic exegetical justifications, and this contributes to motivating the ongoing transmission of the low-arousal practices within the same ritual system. Finally, the juxtaposition of the doctrinal nature of the general mainstream Orthodox framework and the highly arousing practice of firewalking amplifies the effects of the latter for the participants and further contributes to the survival of the tradition of the Anastenaria.

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INDEX

1 Corinthians, 92 (1:18ff), 96 (1:18), 97 (1:21), 100 (1:18), 116 (10:16), 122 (11:17-34), 124 (10:16), 125 (6:11; 6:9-11, 12:13), 143 (16; 9:5), 145 (16:1; 11) 1 Timothy, 147 (5) 2 Corinthians, 144 (11; 3:1; 8:1624), 145 (9), 151 (3:1-4; 11:1-15)

artificial intelligence, x, 33, 155 Aserinsky, E., 78, 211 Astuti, R., 6, 211 Atran, S., 4, 53, 62-64, 67, 121, 200, 211 attractor position, xii, 122, 159, 174, 187, 200 autonomous visionary capacity, 84 Ayto, J., 76, 211

A

B

action representation system, 113, 120 Acts of John, 147 (30-36), 151 Acts of Paul and Thecla, 147 Acts of Peter, 147 (8; 21) Acts of the Apostles (Book of Acts), 123 (19:1-7), 125 (8:16), 145 (6), 146, 147 (6), 151, 222 Agia Eleni, 194, 198 Albert, R., 132, 138, 141, 211 Alcorta, C., 50, 226 Alexander the Great, 130 altruism, 50, 180 Anastenaria, 193-199, 201, 203, 204, 206, 209 Anderson, M. L., 58, 211, 224 Andrée, B., 28, 212 angels, 79, 80, 89-91 Anttonen, V., 112, 211 Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, 145-147, 151, 153 apostles, 102, 130, 133, 143-147 ‘false’, 144 Aristides, 146 Armstrong, K., 65-68, 72, 211 Arnal, W. E., 145, 211 arousal, xiv, xv, 12, 79, 83, 84, 119, 120, 126, 159, 173, 174, 184-187, 193, 199-201, 203-205, 208, 209 Arrian, Epict. 2.19.21, 123

Baayen, H., 37, 211, 226 Bainbridge, W. S., 175, 189, 211 Baker-Ward, L., 34, 226 balanced ritual system, 120, 124, 186 Baldwin, P., 84, 213 Balkin, T. J., 84, 213 baptism, xiv, 4, 111, 112, 115, 116, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126 Barabási, A.-L., 132, 138, 141, 211 Barrett, D. B., 129, 211 Barrett, J. L., 6, 50, 53, 54, 63, 112, 211 Beaumanoir, A., 204, 223 Bechtel, W., 15, 24, 27, 211, 222 Beer, R., 58, 212 behaviourism, ix Belenky, G., 84, 213 beliefs, 5, 6, 9, 11, 16, 17, 26, 28, 47, 50, 53-57, 64, 65, 67-71, 73, 76, 89, 99, 110, 122, 123, 131, 150, 152, 153, 193, 200, 203 Bell, C., 110, 116, 212 Bengel, J. A., 16, 212 Bengtsson, J., 142, 212 Berger, K., 92, 212 Bering, J. M., 6, 8, 9, 49, 212 Berlow, E. L., 142, 150, 212 Bersini, H., 133, 212 between-group brokers, 137, 143, 149, 153

232 Bhaskar, R., 17, 212 Biró, T., ix, xv, 15, 120, 124, 127, 154, 155, 162, 164, 173, 190, 212 Bjorklund, D. F., 6, 212 black box, ix Bloom, P., 6, 53, 212 Bloomfield, L., 34, 212 Blutner, R., 176, 212 Boersma, P., 171, 184, 212 Borg, J., 28, 212 Bousset, W., 114, 212 Bowles, S., 116, 212 Boyd, R., 26, 28, 218, 225 Boyer, P., x, xiii, xiv, 7, 8, 16, 18, 24-26, 28, 29, 53, 54, 63, 89, 109, 112, 115-118, 121, 153, 206, 213, 214 Bradshaw, P. F., 112, 213 brain, x, xiii, xv, 26-28, 33, 54, 58, 63, 75-78, 81-85, 89, 93, 155157, 159, 161, 164, 167, 189, 190, 205 Braun, A. R., 84, 213 Bremmer, J. N., 146, 147, 213 Bressan, R. A., 205, 213 Brock, A. G., 146, 213, 222 Brooks, R. A., 58, 213 Brooten, B. J., 111, 213 Brown, D. W., 136, 214 Brown, R., 27, 214 Bruce, S., 28, 214 Buddha, 129 Buddhism, 19, 63, 85, 129 Bufardi, A., 60, 214 Bulkeley, K., xiii, 16, 75-77, 214, 219 Burkert, W., 125, 130, 214 Burt, R. S., 137, 214 C Carey, S., 6, 214 Carolan, B. V., 132, 224 Carson, R. E., 84, 213 Centre for Religion and Cognition, xi, xii change, ix, xii, xv, 4, 9, 12, 15, 19, 23, 25, 26, 37, 58, 62, 65, 66, 68,

INDEX

69, 71, 73, 89, 91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 99-102, 109, 117, 122, 125, 142, 166, 173 change of positions, 96, 99-101 charity, xv, 129, 145-147, 149, 154 Chen, G., 138, 228 Chevalley, A. F., 205, 222 Chierchia, G., 34, 214 Chomsky, N., 40, 42, 43, 120, 155157, 161, 175, 188, 214 Christodoulou, S. P., 193, 197-199, 214 Churchland, P. M., 18, 21, 214 Churchland, P. S., 21, 214 Chwe, M. S.-Y., 116, 214 circumcision, 4, 123, 124 Clahsen, H., 43, 214 Clark, A., 58, 214 Clarke, A. C., 63, 229 Clauss, M., 150, 215 Coenen, A., 162, 215 cognition, passim embedded, xiii, 54, 56-59, 61, 68, 69, 73, 97, 105, 106, 157 embodied, xiii, 56 cognitive, passim approaches, xii, xv, 115, 117, 122, 155, 156 revolution, 33, 34, 39, 41, 42, 44 theories, xv, 15, 113, 121, 126 turn, x, xii, xiii, 37, 39-41, 92, 93 cognitive alarm hypothesis, 203 cognitive science, ix, xi-xv, 3, 7, 8, 13, 15, 26, 33-38, 40, 41, 47, 49, 56, 58, 59, 63, 75-77, 79, 85, 112, 117, 126, 155-162, 188, 189 cognitive science of religion, ix, xixiii, 3, 7, 8, 13, 15, 63, 112, 117, 126, 156-160, 162, 188, 189 cognitively optimal, xv, 131, 152, 153 Cohen, E., 6, 10, 215 common meal, 124 computer science, ix, 33 cooperation, x, xv, 29 Coser, R. L., 136, 215 counterintuiveness, counterintuitive, xiv, 12, 28, 62, 63, 89-91, 95, 96,

233

INDEX

98, 100-108, 117, 125, 153, 175, 186 minimally counterintuitive, x, xiii, xiv, 7, 131, 153 Crandall, C., 25, 225 Crippa, J. A., 205, 213 Croft, W., 156, 215 Crossan, J. D., 112, 144, 215 Cruse, D. A., 156, 215 Csermely, P., 142, 152, 215 cultural change, 15, 28, 62, 152 culturally postulated superhuman agent (CPS-agent), 90, 120, 124, 125, 187 culture, xv, 15, 17, 20, 23-26, 28, 44, 46, 49, 67, 93-96, 99, 102, 103, 113, 118, 125, 138, 153, 162, 168, 170-172, 175, 188, 196 Cynics, 114, 145 Czachesz, I., ix, xi, xiv, 15, 89, 111, 115, 122, 124, 127, 129, 146, 151, 153, 191, 215, 220 D Damasio, A., 205, 216 Danforth, L. M., 193, 195, 205, 216 Daniel, 95 (7), 99 (7) Davies, S. L., 146, 216 Dawkins R., 153, 216 Day, M., 16, 17, 109, 216, 221 De Baets, A., 47-49, 216, 224 deacons, deaconesses, 145-147 death, 3, 4, 10, 22, 25, 50, 53, 62, 70, 91, 97, 98, 100, 102, 107, 112, 153, 169, 177, 204, 208 Deeley, P. Q., 204, 205, 216 DeMaris, R. E., 109, 127, 216 Dement, W. C., 78, 220 demons, 90, 91, 102, 104, 107 Dennett, D. C., 129, 216 desires, 3, 4, 6, 54, 56, 57, 71, 104 Devitt, M., 56, 216 Diamantoglou, M. J., 195, 216 Didache, xv, 116, 144 (11) Dihle, A., 100, 216 Dionysus, 195-197 Dobzhansky, Th., 64

Domhoff, G. W., 78, 216 dopamine, 205 Dorogovtsev, S. N., 138, 216 dream, xiii, 77-85, 195, 208 Duling, D. C., 133, 134, 216 Dupoux, E., 188, 216 Dziobek, I., 148, 226 E early adopters, 137 Early Christianity, xiv, 91, 92, 94, 100, 109, 111, 113, 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 126, 129-131, 137, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 151-153 Eichbaum, H., 200, 216 Eliade, M., 16, 216 Ellens, J. H., 92, 216, 223 emergence, x, xv, 7, 13, 109, 112, 114, 118, 126, 137, 152, 153 endorphins, 204 Enqvist, K., 15, 20, 216 Erdős, P., 132, 216 Ernst, J., 111, 217 Essenes, 111 Eucharist, Eucharistic, 95, 112, 113, 115, 116, 120, 122, 125 Euler, L., 131, 132, 217 Evans, M. E., 7, 217 evolution, evolutionary, xi, xii, 7, 15, 22, 26, 53-57, 59-64, 66, 70, 73, 89, 90, 93, 103, 111, 112, 121, 148, 173 evolutionary studies of cognition, 54, 73 explanation, x, xi, xiii-xv, 7, 15-26, 28, 29, 39, 41, 44, 49, 51, 53, 54, 73, 85, 103-105, 107, 115-118, 121, 126, 131, 152, 158, 173, 183, 191, 193, 206, 208 extreme religiosity, 94, 96, 97 Ευαγγέλου, I., 197, 217 Eysenck, M. W., 200, 217 F Fallmerayer, J. P., 195, 217 Farde, L., 28, 212

234 Feinstein, M., 34, 226 Ferrer-Cancho, R., 138, 226 Fessler, D. M. T., 173, 217 Feyerabend, P., 56, 217 fight-or-flight, 148 Fillmore, Charles, 156 Fine, G. A., 138, 217 Fitch, W. T., 157, 214 forbidden triad, 134 Freud, S., 75, 76, 78 Fromkin, V., 41, 42, 217 function, functionalism, 7, 11, 17, 26-27, 39, 54, 57, 64, 67-71, 73, 83, 90, 92, 96, 98-103, 105, 108, 113-116, 119, 126, 156, 174 G Galatians, 96 (5:11), 125 (3:27), 143 (1-2; 2), 144 (1:6; 2:4; 3:1), 145 (2:6-10; 2:10), 151 (2:11-14; 5:12) Garfield, J., 34, 226 Garfinkel, A., 15, 22-24, 217 Geertz, A. W., ix, xii, 89, 115, 215, 217 Gell-Mann, M., 20, 217 genealogy, genealogical, 113, 114 Genesis, 123 (17:10-14) Gigerenzer, G., 162, 217 Gilhus, I. S., 153, 217 Gintis, H., 116, 212 Gleitman, L. R., 34, 217 Godfrey-Smith, P., 59, 217 Goldstein, W. M, 188, 217 Goodman, N., 56, 217 Gorman, F. H., 110, 217 Gospel of Mary, 146, 147 Gospel of Philip, 147 Gothóni, R., 16, 217, 218, 229 Granovetter, M. S., xiv, 134-137, 140, 149, 152, 214, 218 graphs (see also networks), 131-133 Greece, xv, 143, 146, 193, 195, 197, 199, 201, 202 Griffiths, P. J., 19, 218 Grimes, R. L., 109, 110, 218 Gross, M., 43, 218 Gruenewald, T. L., 148, 149, 227

INDEX

Grush, R., 27, 218 Guichard, F., 142, 222 Gurung, R. A., 148, 149, 227 Guthrie, S., 91, 218 Guttenberger, G., 99, 218 H Hall, C., 78, 218 Hannerz, U., 25, 218 Hansell, S., 140, 219 Harnad, S., 58, 218 Harris, P. M., 142, 223 Harvey, W. S., xi, xii, ix, 3, 118, 136, 154, 158, 199, 203, 218 Hauser, C., 137, 218 Hauser, M. D., 157, 214 Hayes, B., 171, 184, 212 Henrich, J., 8, 28, 218, 222 Henry, J. L., 204, 218 Hermas, Shepherd, 146, 147 (Similitudes 5.3) Hernández-Blasi, C., 6, 212 Herscovitch, P., 84, 213 Hesse, K., 105, 218 historical psychology, 92-94 history of religions school, 113, 114 Hobson, J. A., 82, 218 Hockett, C., 37, 219 Hoffman, R., 78, 220, 223 Hollenbach, P. W., 111, 219 Holm, N. G., 94, 219 Horvitz, J. C., 205, 219 Hourmouziadis, A., 195-198, 230 humility, 100, 101, 103 Hunt, H., 79, 219 Hurtado, L. W., 99, 109, 110, 219 I icons, 194, 195, 197-199, 203, 206 Idinopulos, T. A., 15, 219 Igarashi, T., 147, 219 imagistic mode (see also Modes Theory), 12, 118, 122, 123, 200 information processing, 27, 33, 35, 39, 40, 44 initiatory rite (see also rituals,

235

INDEX

initiation), xiv, 112, 118, 122 innateness hypothesis, 40 innovations, ix, xii, 3, 11-13, 111, 112, 123, 124, 126, 130, 136, 137, 153, 164, 166, 172, 203 Intelligent Design, 53, 70, 71 intuitive theology, xv, 175, 176, 179183, 185-188, 190 Islam, 173, 215 itinerants, xv, 133, 143-145 J Jackson, F., 18, 219 Jacob, P., 80, 132, 188, 216 Jakobson, R., 37, 219 James (apostle), 145 James, W., 75, 76 Jansen, W., 39, 219 Jennings, H. H., 132, 223 Jensen, L. A., 188, 215, 217 Jesus, xiv, 91, 92, 96-99, 101, 103106, 109, 111, 112, 114, 122-126, 129, 133, 145, 153 Jewish, Judaism, xiv, 19, 92, 95, 98100, 103, 106, 110-112, 121, 123-125, 147, 150, 153, 173, 186 Jilek, W. G., 204, 219 John (evangelist), 133 John (apostle), 145 John the Baptist, 111, 112, 123 John (Gospel), 116 (6:51), 133, 151 Johnson, L. T., 114, 125, 219 Johnson, T. M., 129, 211 Jones, H., 142, 212 Josephus, 111 Jewish Antiquities, 111 (18.117), 123 (18.116) Jung, C. G., 75, 76, 78, 79, 219 K Kahn, D., 85, 219 Κακούρη, K., 195, 219 Kapur, S., 205, 219 Καρανάση, E., 201, 219 Karinthy, F., 138, 219 Karmiloff-Smith, A., 200, 219

Karweit N. L., 140, 219 Kazen, T., 147, 220 Keane, M. T., 200, 217 Keel, O., 95, 220 Keijzer, F. A., xiii, ix, 53, 58, 167, 220 Kelemen, D., 7, 54, 220 Kelso, J. A. S., 58, 220 kerygma, 92, 95-101, 103, 105 Kilpatrick, L. A., 107, 220 King, K. L., 114, 146, 220 Klein, L. C., 148, 149, 227 Kleinman, S., 138, 217 Kleitman, N., 78, 211 Knudson, R., 79, 220 Konrad, A. M., 136, 214 Korte, C., 138, 220 Kosslyn, S. M., 220 Koster, J., 46, 220 Κουρτίδης, K., 195, 220 Krackhardt, D., 132, 220 Kramer, M., 78, 220, 223 Krippner, S., 79, 220 Kryger, M. H., 78, 220 Kuiken, D., 79, 220 Kümmel, W. G., 114, 220 Künig, G., 205, 222 Kurian, G., 129, 211 L Laeuchli, S., 150, 220 Laidlaw, J. A., 13, 201, 211, 215, 229 Lakoff, G., 156 Lampe, P., 151, 220 language (see linguistics) acquisition of (see also learning), 39, 43, 44, 158 Latour, B., 56, 220 Lawrence, J. D., 111, 220 Lawson, E. Th., x, xiii, xiv, 7, 15, 19, 109, 113, 119-125, 157-159, 161, 167, 173-175, 185, 188, 191, 203, 221, 223 learning, 137, 172-173, 190-191 learning algorithms, 166-167, 171, 184-187

236 Leenders, K. L., 205, 222 Legendre, G., 157, 161, 164, 189, 221 Leiner, M., 92, 221 Lenaerts, T., 133, 212 Levi, I., 71, 221 Levi-Strauss, C., 47, 221 Leviticus, 123 (12:3) Lewis, B. P., 148, 149, 227 Lewis, G. D., 17, 109, 221 Liberman, M., 34, 217 Lichtenberger, H., 111, 221 Liénard, P., 109, 116-118, 121, 213 Lietzmann, H., 113, 221 Lincoln, B.,, 25, 221 linguistics, x, xi, xiii, xv, 33-46, 50, 51, 120, 155-158, 161, 163-166, 170, 172, 188, 189 Lomnitz, L. A. de, 136, 221 Λουκάτος, ∆., 198, 221 Lucian of Samosata, 145 Life of Peregrinus Proteus, 145, 147 (12) Ludwig, A. M., 204, 221 Luke (Gospel), 99 (14:11), 145 (9:16; 9:3; 10:1-12; 10:4), 147 (2:3638; 4:26; 18:1-8), 151 Luomanen, P., 112, 127, 215, 221, 228 Luther, M., 16, 221 Luttikhuizen, G. P., 150, 215, 221 M MacDonald, M. Y., 115, 215, 221 Maciejewski, P. K., 148, 221 Mack, B. L., 114, 222 Madigan, K., 146, 222 Magyar, S., 205, 222 Mainzer, K., 150, 222 Malina, B. J., 149, 222 Marewski, J. N., 162, 215 Mark (Gospel), 101 (10:43), 111 (1:4), 114, 116, 123 (1:8), 145 (10:29-30), 147 (12:40-44) Martin, L. H., xi, 13, 114, 130, 150, 222, 229 Martin, M., 17, 222

INDEX

Martin, R. P., 97, 222 Martin-Soelch, C., 205, 222 Marwick, M., 11, 222 Marx, K., 22 Marxism, 63, 65, 68 Mary (‘Gnostic’), 146 Maser, G. L., 142, 222 Matthew (Gospel), 145 (8:20; 10:515; 10:9-10; 10:37; 12:50) Matthews, C. R., 153, 222 Mazure, C. M., 148, 221 McCann, K. S., 142, 222 McCarley, R., 82, 219 McCarthy, J., 41, 222 McCauley, R. N., x, xiv, 5, 7, 8, 13, 15, 20, 21, 26, 27, 109, 113, 119125, 157-159, 161, 167, 173-175, 185, 188, 201, 203, 213, 221-223, 229 McClelland, J., 161 McGrady-Steed, J., 142, 223 McVann, M., 109, 116, 218, 223 meaning, 17, 42, 53, 57-59, 61, 6573, 82, 85, 114, 116,-117, 119, 126, 203, 206-208 meaningful, 26, 29, 53, 57-59, 61, 66-73, 78, 193, 205 Meeks, W. A., 115, 116, 223, 227 Meier, J. P., 111, 112, 223 memory, xi, xiv, 12, 28, 35, 39, 75, 82, 102, 106, 113, 119, 122, 159, 193, 199-201, 203 episodic, 11, 12, 118-119, 122, 183, 200 explicit, 200 flashbulb, 119 long-term, 90 semantic, 12, 118, 119, 122, 183, 200, 203 working, 43 Mendes, J. F. F., 138, 216 Merker, B., 56, 223 Micky Mouse problem, 64 Middleton, M., 11, 223 Midgley, M., 55, 57, 64, 65, 68, 71, 223 Mikhail, J., 188, 223 Milgram, S., 138, 220, 223

237

INDEX

Miller, G., 39, 217, 223 mind, ix-xi, xiii-xv, 4-6, 9, 16, 18, 20, 28, 33, 36, 54, 75-79, 81-85, 89-91, 93, 96, 112-113, 159, 175, 180-182, 184-187, 189-191, 205, 209 Mino, A., 205, 222 Missimer, J., 205, 222 mission, 92 missionaries, 92, 96, 106, 143, 144 Mithras cult of, 130, 150, 211, 215, 222 Mitternacht, D., 93, 223 mobility, 6, 56, 129, 143, 149, 154 model computational, x, 36, 37 formal, xi, 157-160, 188 moderate religiosity, 94, 96 Modes Theory, xi, xii, xiv, xv, 12, 13, 118, 183, 200, 201, 203 doctrinal mode, xiv, 12, 13, 122, 200, 203 imagistic mode, 12, 118, 122, 123, 200 Moffitt, A., 78, 220, 223 Montoya, J. M., 138, 226 moral grammar, 188 Moreno, J. L., 132, 223 morphology, 13, 36, 201 Moscoso del Prado Martín, F., 37, 223 Moses, 124, 129 Μπαλλής, Θ., 204, 223 Muhammad, 129 Mühling-Schlapkohl, M., 89, 223 Müller, U. B., 97, 223 multiple realizability, 26, 27, 155 Mundale, J., 27, 211 mystery cults, xiv, 10, 113, 125 myth, mythical, ix, 65-67, 90, 92, 94, 96-100, 102, 103, 105-108, 110, 113, 195, 206, 207 N Naccache, L., 187, 223 Navarrete, C. D., 173, 217 Nerbonne, J., xiii, ix, 33, 155

Nestler, E., 91, 223 networks, xiv, xvi, 131-142, 147149, 152, 156, 161 arcs, 131, 133, 157 bridges, 131, 135-137, 140, 145 ecological, 133, 134, 142, 150 edges, 131 links, 131, 132, 134-137, 139, 141-143, 147, 149-153 nodes, 131-133, 135, 138-141 of instances, 133, 134 of types, 133 path, 135, 138-140 path length, 135, 138-140 random, 132 scale-free, 141 small-world, 138-141 social, xi, xv, xvi, 131-133, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 144-149, 151, 152 star-shaped, 139 ties, xiv, 134-140, 144, 146, 148150, 154 weak ties/links, 129, 131, 134137, 140, 142-146, 149-153 neural networks, 58, 156, 161 neurology, neuroscience, x, xi, 17, 33, 81, 112, 148, 155, 158, 189 Nicolis, G., 150, 223 Nielsen, T., 78, 79, 224 Niyogi, P., 166, 224 Nock, A. D., 150, 224 Norenzayan, A., 53, 62-64, 67, 211 Noyes, R., 205, 224 ontological categories, x, 6, 90, 95, 153 O Opelt, I., 151, 224 Optimality Theory, xv, 156, 160164, 166, 167, 169, 173, 176, 177, 184, 187-191 stochastic, 171 Orthodox Church, xv, 197 Osiek, C., 146, 222 oxytocin, 148

238

INDEX

P

R

paradoxicality, 89-92, 96, 102, 106 Parker, M., 162, 224 Parker, S., 162, 224 patrons, patronesses, 146 Paul (apostle), xiv-xv, 91-93, 95-97, 100, 105-107, 110, 112, 115, 116, 122, 143-145, 151 Pauline, xv, 92, 93, 97, 115, 147 Penner, H. H., 115, 224, 225 Peregrinus Proteus, 145, 147 Peter (apostle), 145 Philippians, 223 Hymn of Christ (Phil 2:5-11), xiv, 95, 97-103, 105, 108 philosophy, x, xiii, ix, 17, 18, 33, 71, 151, 162, 163, 169 physics, 6, 20-23, 26, 27, 150, 160 Pihlström, S., 16, 224 Pinker, S., 40, 224 Pittinsky, M., 132, 224 Plato, 77, 110, 125, 224 poor, 91, 99, 133, 145-146 Port, R. F., 58, 224 Potts, M., 205, 224 precaution system, 117 preference structure, xiii, 57, 60-62, 64, 68-73, 167 preferential attachment, 141 Prigogine, I., 150, 223 Prince, A., 160, 161, 224 Prince, R., 204, 224 prophets, 103, 106, 123, 144 Proverbs, 103 (8) psychological reality, 37, 41, 42 psychology, x-xiii, 6, 8-9, 13, 17, 20, 21, 23, 28, 33-36, 42, 49, 50, 58, 75, 89, 92-95, 107, 112, 155, 199 Putnam, H., 21-23, 26, 27, 42, 224 Pyysiäinen, I., xi, xiii, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 25, 27, 28, 64, 89, 112, 115, 116, 118, 121, 125-127, 154, 155, 211, 212, 214, 215, 221, 225, 228

Ramble, C., 7, 28, 153, 213 Rappaport, R. A., 109, 119, 221, 225 Rational Choice Theory, 189, 190 Raymond, W., 161, 221 reductionism, 15-23, 26, 82, 103 Reid, B., 146, 225 Reitzenstein, R., 113, 225 Rényi, A., 132, 216 Repetti, R. L., 148, 225 representations, xiii, 7, 8, 17, 28, 35, 36, 58-61, 90, 93, 104, 105, 108 respect for the dead, 48-51 Reuland, E., 42, 225 Revelation, 151 (2-3) Richardson, R. C., 24, 211, 221 Richerson, P., 26, 225 Ricks, M. A., 140, 219 Riquet, M., 146, 225 Rissland, E., 34, 226 rituals, ix, x, xiv, xv, 4, 7, 11, 12, 18, 50, 76, 94, 109-126, 150, 155162, 167, 173-175, 178, 182-187, 190, 191, 193-201, 203-209 ablution, washing, 123 collective, 116 dynamics, xv, 155, 160, 167, 190 high-frequency, 12 imagistic, 126 initiation, 4, 123, 183, 199 Jewish, 125 low-frequency, xiv, 12, 118, 122 procedures, 4, 201 sacrifice, 4, 18, 65, 110, 124, 125, 175, 178, 179, 181-184, 191, 194, 196, 206 special agent, xiv, 120, 123-126, 174 special instrument, 120, 124, 174, 185 special patient, 120, 124, 125, 174, 185 Robinson, B. A., 129, 225 Rogers, E. M., 137, 225 Rollins, W. G., 92, 216, 223

Q Qumran, 111, 124

239

INDEX

Romans, 92 (11:11-12), 116 (6:3-5), 125 (6:4,7; 6:6), 143 (16), 150 (16:23), 151 (16:17-19) Rosch, E. H., 79, 225 Rosenbaum, R., 34, 226 Roth, Th., 78, 220 Rumelhart, D., 161, 226 Rupprecht, C. S., 81, 226 S Salamone, F. A., 110, 226 Saler, B., 16, 226 Santos, F., 133, 212 Schaller, M., 25, 226 Schreuder, R., 37, 226 Schultz, W., 205, 222, 226 Schweder, R. A., 188, 217 science, ix-xi, xiii, 17, 19, 20, 33-36, 38, 40, 53, 54-58, 61, 63-65, 6773, 75, 76, 85, 112, 118, 156, 159-161, 202 Scobie, C. H. H., 111, 123, 226 Seely, D., 101, 226 Selbie, S., 84, 213 semantics, 58, 61, 161 Seneca, De Clementia 1.8.3, 98 sensory pageantry, xiv, 120, 124-126 Setälä, H., 142, 212 Shaver, P., 107, 220 Shaw, R., 114, 226 Sikora, S., 79, 220 Silas, 143 skandalon, scandal, 96, 97, 106 sleep, xiv, 77, 80-83, 85, 204, 208 Smeets, T, 148, 226 Smith E. A., 116, 212 Smith, D. E., 112, 125, 226 Smith, J. Z., 113, 226 Smith, L. B., 58, 227 Smith, M., 112, 226 Smolensky, P., 157, 160, 161, 164, 184, 189, 221, 224, 226 socioeconomic status, 136, 149-153 sociograms, 132, 133 Soderstrom, H., 28, 212 Solé, R. V., 138, 226 Solms, M., 82-84, 226

Sosis, R., 50, 226 speech error, 41 Sperber, D., xii, 17, 28, 115, 117, 153, 226 Spilka, B., 107, 220 Spittler, J. E., 153, 226 splinter group outburst, 186 Stack, C. B., 136, 226 Stark, R., 146, 175, 189, 211, 227 Sterelny, K., 57, 59-62, 72, 227 Stewart, C., 114, 227 Stillings, N., 34, 227 Story, L. B., 148, 225 Stowers, S., 110, 227 Strauss, J., 114, 227 stress, 38, 55, 62, 64, 67, 68, 70-72, 148, 162-164, 166, 204, 208, 209 Strogatz, S. H., 132, 138-140, 228 structure biological, x cognitive, x, 27, 44, 91 linguistic, 40-44 Sun, R., 188, 227 superhuman agent, 121, 167, 173179, 181, 183-187, 190 supernatural, xiii, 6, 7, 10, 50, 53-55, 57, 62-64, 67-69, 73, 85, 98, 100, 122, 204 agents, 10, 54, 62, 67, 68, 70, 85, 98, 100 symbolism, symbolist, 17, 113, 115117, 119 sympathisers, 133, 143, 146 syntactic, 58, 120 T Takai, J., 147, 219 Tappeiner, G., 137, 218 Taylor, J. E., 111, 123, 148, 149, 227 Taylor, S. E., 111, 123, 148, 149, 227 tedium effect, 122, 174, 187 tend-and-befriend, 148 Tertullian, 89, 147 Tesar, B., 184, 226 Thecla, 147

240 Theissen, G., xiv, ix, 89, 93, 94, 97, 99, 109-111, 116, 117, 133, 143, 145, 154, 215, 220, 223, 227 Thelen, E., 58, 227 Thelwall, M., 147, 228 Theory of Mind (ToM), 5, 6, 90, 175, 187 Thraede, K., 146, 228 Timothy, 143 Titus, 143 Todd, P.M., 162, 217 Tomasello, M., 50, 62, 228 transformation, ix, xii, xiv, 13, 81, 92, 129 transitoriness, 91, 96 Travers, J., 138, 223 Tremlin, T., 112, 228 Tulving, E., 118, 200, 228 Turner, S., 24, 228 Turner, V., 115, 116 Tzu, C., 81, 228 U universals linguistic, 40 religious, 3, 47-49 universal grammar (UG), 43, 120 158, 170, 188 Updegraff, J. A., 148, 149, 227 Uro, R., xiv, ix, 109, 112, 121, 122, 154, 174, 215, 220, 221, 228 V Valentinian movement, xiv, 122, 123 Valverde, S., 138, 226 Van de Castle, R., 78, 218 Van Fraassen, B., 56, 228 Van Gelder, T., 58, 224 Van Gennep, A., 116, 228 Vanheste, T., 57, 228 Varga, M., 84, 213 variation linguistic, 44, 170 religious, 3, 13 ‘vision advantage’, 137 Vollenweider, S., 105, 228

INDEX

Von Gemünden, P., 92, 215, 220, 228 Von Harnack, A., 143, 228 Von Lips, H., 106, 228 Von Weizsäcker, C.F., 55, 228 W Walde, J., 137, 218 Wang, X. F., 138, 228 Warneken, F., 50, 228 Watts, D. J., 132, 138-140, 228 Webb, R. L., 111, 123, 228 Weber, M., 60, 229 Weisler, S., 34, 226 Wellman, H., 6, 229 Wesensten, N. J., 84, 213 Whitehouse, H., xi, xii, xiv, xv, ix, 3, 12, 13, 55, 64, 118, 119, 121, 122, 126, 154, 158, 183, 200, 201, 203, 206, 211, 213, 215, 229 widows, 147, 149 Wiebe, D., 15, 229 Wilson, D. S., 28, 50, 214, 222, 226, 229 Winch, P., 17, 229 Winter, E. H., 11, 223 Wischmeyer, O., 101, 229 wisdom, 95-100, 103, 105-108, 146, 151 Wolf, O. T., 148, 226 women, xv, 14, 124, 129, 133, 146149, 154, 193, 205, 208 wonder, xiv, 76, 77, 79-82, 84, 85 X Ξενάκης, Χ., 204, 223 Xygalatas, D., xv, 11, 159, 193 Y Ylikoski, P., 15, 20, 23-26, 229 Yngve, V., 43, 230 Yonan, E. A., 15, 219 Yoshida, T., 147, 219 Young, S., 50, 85, 148, 226, 228, 230

241

INDEX

Z Zaleski, C., 91, 230

Χουρµουζιάδης, A., see Hourmouziadis, A.