The Faith Instinct

by Wade, Nicholas

  Montanus was declared a heretic around A.D. 170 and his sect was suppressed by the church. His doctrines were not heretical, but too much enthusiasm—the original Greek word enthousiasmos means to be possessed by a god—was regarded with suspicion by the church authorities. “As the early Christian community became the institution of the Church,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich in her history of ritual dancing, “all forms of enthusiasm ... came under fire. And when the community of believers could no longer access the deity on their own, through ecstatic forms of worship, the community itself was reduced to a state of dependency on central ecclesiastical authorities. ‘Prophesying’ became the business of the priest; singing was relegated to a special choir; and that characteristic feature of early Christian worship—the communal meal or feast—shriveled to a morsel that could only tantalize the hungry. But it was to take many centuries before large numbers of Christians came to accept this diminished form of Christianity.”145

  Like other structured religions, the Christian church found itself in a running tactical competition with its ecstatic rivals in terms of just how much dance, music and trance to allow. If it gave the congregation too much leeway, people would think they could communicate directly with the supernatural and might come to regard the priesthood as a mere obstruction. But if the church outlawed dance and music altogether, its priests would be unable to stir the necessary emotions and the flock would drift away to the rival cults of Cybele and Attis, Isis, Adonis or Dionysus.

  Lacking an ideal solution, the church tacked and trimmed as seemed best in the circumstances. Basil, a fourth-century saint who succeeded the church historian Eusebius as bishop of Caesarea, approved dancing in circles in imitation of the dance of the angels. Ambrose, who became bishop of Milan in A.D. 373, made major innovations in church music and dance, largely to combat the Arians who held a different theological position on the nature of the Trinity. Ambrose introduced antiphonal singing, employed professional choristers, and even trained the congregation. He was of the opinion that celestial harmony drove out demons.146 He also encouraged dancing, which he said would help carry souls to heaven.

  But his protégé, the church father Augustine, looked askance at dancing. “In time, Augustine’s views prevailed,” writes the historian William McNeill. “Busy ecclesiastical administrators feared popular excitement of every kind, and since congregational dancing did indeed excite warm and even ecstatic emotions, it fell under increasing suspicion when, after 312, Christianity ceased to be a persecuted sect and, before the end of the century, became the established religion of the Roman empire.” Bishops ceased to lead sacred dances. Participation by the congregation in services was discouraged. The new alliance between throne and altar “had the effect of gradually throttling enthusiastic forms of dance and song in Christian worship, and banished popular dancing to the churchyard and other public spaces.”147

  The Catholic church had relatively few challenges to its authority during the Dark Ages but was troubled by numerous Montanist-style heresies during the period of the crusades. From one perspective, the crusades did not spring from the pope’s sudden desire to conquer the Holy Land but rather from the need to manage large bodies of people seized with religious frenzy. By unleashing them on the Near East, where almost all eventually perished, they became someone else’s problem. “The central problem of the institutional church,” writes Paul Johnson in his history of Christianity, “was always how to control the manifestations of religious enthusiasm, and divert them into orthodox and constructive channels. At what point did mass piety become unmanageable, and therefore heresy? It was a problem as old as the Montanists.... Naturally, where antinomian mobs were liable to sweep away church institutions, established authority was anxious to get them out of Christendom—preferably to the East, whence few would return.”148

  Ecstatic religion has continued to threaten established churches, but usually with more fortunate outcomes than that of the crusades. Movements like those of the Shakers, the Quakers and, in the twentieth century, the Pentecostalists, all challenged the established order, emphasizing physical movement or ecstatic outbreaks as their points of difference. The Shakers would dance together all night in ecstatic agitation, with trembling, shouting, and speaking in tongues. But rules requiring more decorous behavior were instituted in 1845 and the sect, which favored celibacy, soon dwindled. Among the early Mormons too, frenetic dancing was practiced until the church authorities brought it under control.

  The Quaker movement, founded in seventeenth-century England, was built on George Fox’s idea that people should be able to experience God directly. But enthusiasm can be hard to sustain. Even within Fox’s lifetime, the Quakers had curtailed individual expression and begun to resemble a structured church.

  In almost any church that seeks to return to its religious roots, music seems likely to play a prominent role. Music is a particular feature of African American religious practice. “When white Christians attend black worship services,” writes the historian Frank Lambert, “they often comment on the power of the music and the ‘mystical, ecstatic experience’ that transports the singers to the very throne of God.”149

  Solid evidence of established churches’ fear of ecstatic religion and people’s innate desire to communicate directly with the deity is visible in a form too familiar to excite much comment: the pew. Providing somewhere to sit through the parson’s sermon is only the secondary purpose of pews. They were placed in European churches from the sixteenth century onward to stop people dancing. The introduction of pews, McNeill writes, “restrained spontaneous muscular responses to the most fiery of preachers and, by isolating one person from another with wooden barriers, introduced a new quiescence into public worship.”150

  Music combined with communal dance or bodily movements is the recipe that leads groups toward the dangerous experience of ecstasy. Once the church had restricted bodily movements, it had less fear of music, which was allowed to develop, though in a form not conducive to dance. The Western tradition of sacred music has been one of Christianity’s finest cultural contributions.

  In Islam, the situation is somewhat the reverse. Music, especially instrumental music, is looked on with suspicion. In the strictest forms of Islam, only unaccompanied singing is allowed. But rhythmic bodily movement by the congregation is allowed. Rhythmic bowing in unison may have created the same emotional solidarity brought about by military drill and perhaps contributed, McNeill suggests, to the early success of Islam.

  An outgrowth from the rhythmic movement of the mosque was that of the dervish orders, which attained mystic union with the deity by chanting sacred formulas to music, or by dancing until they fell into trance. The dervishes believed their path to mystic union superior to reason and words. The ideas that flowed from this form of piety spurred the military expansion of the Islamic world but later handicapped it in dealing with the rise of Europe. The words of the Qur’an were only part of what united Muslims. “Keeping together in time,” McNeill writes, “along with music, song, and chant, also played its part, arousing primitive, inchoate, and powerful sentiments of solidarity that allowed them to act more energetically and effectively than words and doctrine by themselves could have done.”151

  Interpreting the Supernatural

  The religions of settled societies may have managed ecstasy, with varying degrees of success, but they have had greater trouble with the other legacy of hunter gatherer religion, that of presumed access to the supernatural world.

  The window that hunter gatherers believed they had gained into the supernatural world, in the form of trance dances or the dream journeys of their shamans, would have provided only a reflection of their own images, a kind of Rorschach test in which people could see whatever their imaginations might suggest to them. But these assumed communications with the other world would not have been without constraints. First, to make sense, they had to be compatible with the society’s existing religious beliefs. One couldn’t just invent a new god
who had appeared in a trance; to be credible, a trance dancer needed to report on the doings of gods with whom the community was already familiar.

  Community agreement would have been a second constraint on the shaping of religious beliefs. In hunter gatherer societies, religion couldn’t be captured by a small group who reinterpreted the gods’ will for their own benefit. There was no church or priesthood, just all the members of a small community.

  But in settled societies the hunter gatherer religion became progressively more exclusive as society became more hierarchical. Religion came to belong to the priests who controlled it. And without democratic restraint, the priests would have had a much freer hand in interpreting communications with the supernatural world.

  These interpretations could easily run to excess because there was no readily available mechanism to counteract extremism. The idea of sacrifice, for instance, is common to many religions. Among the Nuer, a cattle-herding people of the southern Sudan, it was often necessary to sacrifice a cow, but if none were available, it was OK to sacrifice a small plant called a cow cucumber as a temporary expedient.152 Such moderation was by no means the rule. Priests conferring with the supernatural world evidently decided that much larger sacrifices were expected. A hecatomb is the name for a sacrifice in which 100 oxen are killed at the same time. But soon word came that cattle were not sufficient; the gods desired human blood. The Carthaginians sacrificed children. Abraham was fully prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. The chief purpose of the Aztec state was to capture and sacrifice as many captives as possible to keep their sun god nourished with rivers of human blood.

  These horrific practices were based on fantastical interpretations of what the gods required. A hunter gatherer community could ensure that the messages from the supernatural world were interpreted in a way generally acceptable to the community; a priesthood had fewer restraints in imposing alleged demands from the supernatural side on the congregation.

  Communication with the supernatural world emerged as a problem of increasing difficulty as people in settled societies became more sophisticated and, with the invention of writing some 5,000 years ago, more literate. Dreams and trances were still consulted, especially on an individual basis, but became less convincing as the basis for state religions. Instead, whole systems of divination were developed as a means of reading the intentions of the beings in the supernatural world.

  In the Shang dynasty in China, which lasted from 1570 to 1045 B.C., diviners prepared oracle bones by applying intense heat to the shoulder bones of cattle or to turtle shells. The king would then make a divination about the intentions of Di, the Shang dynasty’s high god. But the later kings seem to have given up on worrying about Di’s intentions, according to the tens of thousands of Shang oracle bones that have been preserved. “Di’s virtual disappearance from the record,” writes the historian David Keightley, “suggests either the increasing confidence with which the Shang kings relied on the power of their ancestors, their increasing indifference to Di’s existence, or their increasing realization that Di’s will was so inscrutable that it was fruitless to divine about his intentions.”153

  Divination in the West was focused more on entrails than on bones. The Babylonians believed the will of the gods could be discerned from examining sheep’s livers, each portion of which represented a different deity. The Etruscans carried this system to Italy where it was adopted by the Romans. The haruspices, the priests who did the divining, were still practicing their trade in A.D. 410 when the Goths under Alaric besieged Rome. They are said to have offered their services to Pope Innocent I, who accepted them by one account, rejected them by others. In either event, Rome fell.

  Divination clearly had limitations as a means of communicating with the supernatural. What replaced it in serious religions was a throwback to the hunter gatherer shamans and their direct communings with the supernatural. The prophets and patriarchs of Israel spoke directly with their deity and recorded his words. With the advent of literacy, religious narratives could now be written down and studied. The sacred text became an increasingly prominent part of religious practice, matching the shift in emphasis from ritual to belief.

  Direct revelation became the accepted form of communication with the supernatural world. But in an increasingly educated world, this channel had to be used sparingly. At the initiation of a new religion, such as in the case of Christianity, Islam or Mormonism, the founding prophet would receive the sacred message or text from the supernatural world and the channel would then fall silent. This made possible a period of stability during which followers could shape the sacred texts in various ways and then declare them closed to further revision.

  The new religions were very different from the old and, perhaps, less satisfying. Among hunter gatherers, religious behavior called for the full mental and physical involvement of all members of the community, in intensive rituals that could last through the night. The religions of settled societies were much more cerebral, with an emphasis on points of doctrine spelled out by the priests, often with threats of coercion against dissidents or heretics. The priesthood also tried to suppress ecstatic forms of religion, recognizing their threat to the established system. They usually succeeded, but each failure was the seed of a new religion. Because of this process of continual change, there is not a single religion in the world but many different branches. It is time to consider the tree from which they spring.

  7

  THE TREE OF RELIGION

  Suddenly, from the island of Paxi was heard the voice of someone loudly calling ... and the caller, raising his voice, said, “When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that the great god Pan is dead.”

  PLUTARCH, The Obsolescence of Oracles

  The former gods are growing old or dying, and others have not been born.... It is life itself, and not a dead past, that can produce a living cult. But that state of uncertainty and confused anxiety cannot last forever. A day will come when our societies will once again know hours of creative effervescence during which new ideals wil again spring forth and new formulas emerge to guide humanity for a time.

  ÉMILE DURKHEIM154

  There is, in a sense, only one religion. Or, to put it more exactly, all religions are related to one another because all belong to the same family. This is not a widely held perspective, because people are much attached to the particular features of their own faith and are more likely to dwell on its differences with other creeds than with its commonalities. The focus on differences is evident in the significance attached to the mere word filioque in the Nicene Creed, which ultimately split the Orthodox church from Rome, or the furious contests in fourth-century Christendom between the homoousians and the homoiousians, who differed as to whether Jesus was made of the same or a similar substance as God.

  But a glance at the history of religions suggests that, as cultural forms, they bear several significant similarities with languages. And just as present-day languages probably all stem from the same tree of descent, so too may religions.

  The ancestral human population at one time dwindled through some disaster to perhaps a mere 5,000 people,155 who may have spoken a single language. Since everyone in the world today is a descendant of that village-sized population, all today’s languages are very possibly derived from a single language spoken by these early people.

  If so, one could, at least in principle, draw up a tree of descent that included all the world’s living languages. Its trunk would be the mother tongue of more than 50,000 years ago. Its major branches would be the 14 or so language super-families now in existence, like Indo-European, Altaic or Afro-Asiatic. The twigs on these branches would be the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today.

  Such a tree is generated by the fact that languages keep changing, but each is derived from a predecessor. It should be possible, again in principle, to draw up a similar tree for all the world’s religions, because religions too emerge by slow degrees from their predecessors. A totally novel religion has lit
tle chance of success. The easiest way for a new religion to start is as a sect of an existing one. Converts are most easily found among the members of the church from which the sect is seceding. The leader of the sect may evoke ecstatic aspects of religion and fault the established priesthood for having strayed from its founding precepts. He may base his teaching on a new revelation from the vantage point of which he offers a reinterpretation of the sacred texts. This is the approach taken by the followers of Jesus, by Montanus, by Muhammad and by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith.

  Such challengers, unless co-opted by the guardians of religious orthodoxy, either will be suppressed or will break away from the founding church and survive as a new sect. And if this is the general mechanism by which new sects arise, then every sect is derived from a predecessor, and all religions are branches of the same tree.

  But religions are shaped not just by their path of descent; like languages, religions may borrow material from others, often quite heavily. The most important religious ritual of the Christian church is Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. How surprising, therefore, that the word Easter should derive from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of the dawn. The Anglo-Saxon word for April was Eostur-monath, a month which probably then started on March 25, a date that falls close to the vernal equinox. Spring festivals are ancient rituals, probably observed in all religions that have existed since the birth of agriculture. These festivals have been co-opted both into Judaism—Passover, or Pesach, marked the beginning of the barley harvest—and into Christianity.156 It is striking that these pagan festivals are not just minor items in the ritual calendars of Judaism and Christianity but in fact mark the date of their central rites, almost as if the two monotheisms had been constructed around them but with the imposition of different sacred texts to explain their importance. Judaism, it seems, seized the agricultural year’s spring festival and adapted it to a central religious tenet, the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt, while the Christians linked it to the principal focus of their religion, the resurrection.