Notes (and Thoughts) on Religion as a Chain of Memory by Daniele Hervieu-Leger

Religion is the means by which the sacred is given form; sacredness is the raw material of religion. Beliefs, rites, etc. serve to organize, commemorate, and transmit an elemental experience, ineffable, to render it durable and universal in time and space. And religion is a form of belief that specifically implies reference to the authority of a tradition.

Tradition

Tradition actualizes the past in the present, to restore to people the living memory. And it modifies it as it passes it along – imaginatively projecting a lineage of belief. Tradition is at the center of religion. (And presumably we know about tradition because of our collective memory.)

Collective memory

Collective memory forms and endures through processes of selective forgetting, sifting and inventing. At the core of all religious belief there is belief in the continuity of the lineage of believers.

The framework of collective memory provides everyone with the possibility of a link between what came before and their experience, and the ability to extend the chain of memory into the future, as long as they are able to see themselves belonging to it.

What happened

The rational imperative and the assertion of the autonomy of the individual has delegitimized the “figures of transcendence” by which traditional societies ensured the stability and coherence of beliefs and practices. The growth of secularization and the loss of memory in societies goes hand in hand. The complexity of the world shown in the vast incoherent mass of available information can’t be ordered in the way collective memory used to order it, so collective memory morphs into a plurality of specialized circles of memory. Science made the world more intelligible but it couldn’t create a meaningful whole. (We’re on our own for the big picture.) Collective memory is fragmented infinitely because of specialization and all the unique groups that people belong to. (However, many other institutions that depend on different chains of memory survive, like corporations and political parties and sports and cultural institutions. Yet the church has spectacularly tanked.)

A symbolic vacuum results from the loss in depth and in unity of collective memory. Reference to the past no longer supplies a system of meaning which affords an explanation for the imperfections of the world or its incoherence, nor does it provide a scenario for the future.

This uncertainty is reflected in the search for identify to which modern society is ill-equipped to respond (amen), lacking as it does the essential resource for identity of a memory held in common. Without an integrated social memory, reconstruction takes place in an entirely fragmented way. What’s missing is a body of meaning which no tradition operating in modernity can claim to incarnate. We have lost the language of belief.

The result of the breakdown of the chain of memory

Religion in modernity focuses on the personal experience of the sacred because revelation and dogmatic authority have been made irrelevant. A good example of this is the evangelicals. They are still going strong because of the personal experience they have.

Religion in modernity also copes by trying to “metaphorize” belief. Belief is not what it used to be; it is some pale, logical analog. This is a transitional phase between a cultural world where the supernatural is self-evident to one where it is impossible. Making religions “symbolic” is the only way we can keep them in the modern world. She says as a result, religion is “metaphorically eroded.”

What to do

The key in all of this is determining who gets to produce the collective memory. Ordinary people are bound to the “authorized producers” of collective memory. The controlled mobilization of memory by a priesthood who are so ordained by a religious establishment differs from the charismatic mobilization of memory initiated by a prophet. But in all instances it is the recognized ability to expound the true memory of the group that constitutes the core of religious power. (That’s why doctors of the church tend to be either mystics or battlers of heretics.) But now the intellectual motherload of the tradition is open to scholars and anyone else actually to make of it what we will and participate in “Tradition in the act of becoming itself.”

Then she says that for religions to survive, they have to basically 1) free up control of the re-creation of collective memory – the propagating and reprocessing of religious signs – and 2) reform their own system of authority.

But then she says even that might not be enough because people don’t see them having any legitimacy anyway – the repository of the truth of belief has passed from the institution to the believer. Not the prophet, mind you, but the individual believer, giving us what she calls “subjective fundamentalism.” And this is enabled in Christianity because of the primacy of conscience.

(So maybe now individuals need to connect with their tradition on their own and rebuild their understanding among themselves. Just because it’s not authoritarian doesn’t mean it has to go away. We need to build a new understanding of our collective memory that rings true in the modern world, “imaginatively projecting the lineage of belief.” And the scholars and lay people need to do it, which solves the problem of the irrelevancy of the institution. It is renewed not because it is an irrelevant institution renewing itself, but because it has been reconstituted from the outside.)

(The question is whether people have the ability to organize information by relating it to a lineage to which they can see themselves belonging. The intellectual content of the faith has to be such that it can hold both points of view – that of the traditional believer and that of the modern believer. The trick is to say something like: “I know I can’t think of these things in the literal way you thought of them, but I can think of them in a way that both makes sense to me and captures the essence of the phenomenon; in that way I can consider you and I in the same lineage of belief.” For example, a traditional person could think of grace as power/light coming down like a beam from on high; a modern person could think of grace as healing and commitment to improve. Of course there has to be some basic coherence in the understanding of what’s going on. We can look at traditional belief and modern belief as just different takes on the same external and at least partially mysterious reality, as long as we’re both reasonably seeing the same thing.)

Tags: church, loss of the sacred