(Re-)modelling religious experience: some experiments with hymnic form in the imperial period

Religious experience has been the topic of many different theoretical approaches. This paper starts from the premise that subjective individual experience is communicable only in terms of locally-available schemes, primarily linguistic, and thus ignores somatic signs such as ecstasy or frenzy. In the case of GrecoRoman Antiquity, this involves recourse to literary sources. The paper uses three Greek hymns of the imperial period, all of them experimental by comparison with “classical”models, to infer what we may call requisite rather than subjective experiences on the part of audiences. The hymns chosen are Mesomedes’ Hymn to Isis (no. 6 Regenauer), the Orphic hymn to the Nymphs (no. 51 Ricciardelli) and the hymn to “Apollo” in PGrMag VI 30–38. The suggestion is that rhetorical analysis enables us to gain a mediated idea of the contrasting responses ideally evoked in the course of ritualized performance. 1 Religious experience Until the 1980s, the dominant terms in which religious experience was discussed were subjectivist and attributivist/attributional. At any rate in the field of religious studies, this was largely due to the dual influence of Schleiermacher’s evangelical Protestant intuitionism and William James’ asymmetrical opposition between institutional and personal religion (cf. Proudfoot 1985, 9–40; 155–189); more recently, however, to social psychology (e.g. Hood 1995) and the various forms of phenomenology (Martin 2016, 526–528). Thanks to its simplicity, Rodney Stark’s fourfold typology of religious experience, confirming, responsive, ecstatic and revelational, has been, and continues to be, influential (Stark 1965, cf. 1999). Resistance arose from two sides, cultural anthropology and the linguistic turn. Already in 1961 Godfrey Lienhardt, a pupil of Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, entitled his account of Dinka religion Divinity and Experience, which among other things tackled the issue 1 For a highly critical account of the influence of phenomenology on religious studies, particularly Rudolf Otto, G. van der Leeuw, Wach and Eliade, see Murphy 2010. Rappaport 1999, 391–395 (on Ultimate Sacred Postulates) reads to me like an attempt to save this sort of evaluative intuitionism. Open Access. ©2020 Richard L. Gordon, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110557596-003 of how to represent the self-knowledge of a culture that not only had no conception of “mind” but no very clear ontology of divinity (1961, 147–170). Nevertheless, he argued persuasively that the Dinkas’ “Powers” can be understood as images of complex experiences within their specific life-world. “With this knowledge, this separation of a subject and an object in experience, there arises for them also the possibility of creating a form of experience they desire, and of freeing themselves symbolically from what they must otherwise passively endure” (Lienhardt 1961, 170). It was, however, mainly Victor Turner’s later work that spawned an entire movement in US cultural anthropology, the “anthropology of (mainly bodily) experience” (Turner and Bruner 1986). Despite the enormous success of this trend over the past three decades, it has not proved particularly interested in specifically religious experience (cf. James 2003, 181–210). Where this was attempted, it tended, at any rate early on, to produce efforts at intuitionist “insights”, such as Turner’s communitas (1974, 166–299), a reversion to Durkheimian collectivist apriorism, or the anti-rationalism of Bruce Kapferer’s analysis of performance in major Sinhalese exorcisms (Kapferer 1986; cf. 1997), which, despite its impressive notation of ritual, often reads like the projections of a novelist. In the present context, therefore, I am more interested in the other form of resistance to authenticity-discourse, which was largely inspired by the linguistic turn (Martin 2016, 532–536). Within religious studies, Wayne Proudfoot, without denying the possibility of Jamesian “experiences”, emphasized the logical priority of the concepts and interpretative frames available for the very identification and formulation of experiences claimed as “religious”, thus re-stating the most obvious socio-cultural conditions for the articulation of supposed mental events of this kind (1985, 190–227). A year or two later, Joan Scott, an historian critical of mainstream historical writing, emphasized historical discontinuities and the variety of local discourses that produce subjects and their experiences: “Experience is at once already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation” (1992, 37; cf. Fitzgerald 2000). Equally pertinent is the radical skepticism of an anthropologist such as Robert Sharf, who was inclined to doubt the referentiality of all reports of supposedly religious experiences, comparing such reports to the thousands of detailed “subjective” accounts of abduction by alien beings in the US in the 1950s and 60s (1998, 108–109; cf. 2000). Perhaps the most important recent discussion of religious experience, by Ann Taves, attempts to outflank pure constructivism by developing an analytical framework that includes special experiences both religious and non-religious (2009, 120–160). Here the framing of all experience is taken as read; it is rather the category “religion” that is questioned, moving away from theological or formal conceptions towards acceptance of what “interacting subjects viewed as emerging 24 Richard L. Gordon